Well, I want to talk about liberation. I guess that's all we ever talk about in some way. I want to talk about it from the perspective of inhabiting your experience, inhabiting your life, inhabiting your breath, no gaps, completely occupying the territory. And I think about contrasting that to not inhabiting your life, which is what we do, if you think of it as en-habit. We make habits out of our lives. We get stuck in habits and lose ourselves in habits, so I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about inhabiting it, jumping into it. And I want to talk about it in terms of a movie and a sutra. The movie is called Rivers and Tides and it happened, it's still playing, or was as of yesterday, still playing at one of the landmark cinemas here in Berkeley and at the Raphael Film Center in San Rafael.

[01:16]

And it's a documentary about the work of a land artist named Andrew Goldsworthy. And it's completely Zen movie. It's completely about inhabiting change. And the sutra is something that we've been studying in Vallejo. It's one of the basics. It's called the Satipatthana Sutta. or Sutra. It's the Sutra on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, and it's one of the absolute basics of Buddha's meditation instruction, that and the Anapanasati Sutta, which is on mindfulness of breathing. Those are the two really basic, basic meditation instructions. And the sutra talks about contemplating the body in the body, the feelings in the feelings, the mind or consciousness or mood in the mind, consciousness or mood, and the dharmas in the dharmas.

[02:33]

And it starts with the body. It starts with the organic. And in the body it starts with the breath. Absolutely basic. It just sounds like I'm particularly relying on a translation that David had recommended by Ussil and Anda. And it's just like, it's Sazen instruction. I'm trying to be open to understanding it in other ways too, not just sort of making everything into Zen, but at any rate, it's just absolutely basic about contemplating from the inside, again, inhabiting your breath, inhabiting your body, not looking from the outside and commenting on it, which is what we spend so much of our time doing. I know I do, and I think I speak for more than myself. So one definition of liberation might be completely inhabiting your experience.

[03:40]

Do you understand what I'm saying? You just, you fill it completely. Or you let go of all the extra. So that there's just the experience from the inside. So you really know your breath. You're not commenting on your breath. You're not talking to yourself about your breath. You're just doing your breath and there is awareness. That kind of thing. So in that allowing the process of inhabiting your breath or inhabiting your experience, inhabiting your life, in allowing that to happen, making the effort to allow it to happen, that's liberation. That's the kind of liberation I'm talking about and it's what I've been thinking about lately. So the movie, Rivers and Tides, starts with a shot.

[04:41]

It's very quiet. It's a documentary about his work by a German filmmaker who really got it right. It's a very quiet movie. It's a meditative movie. One of the reviews says something about there are no plummy talking heads in this movie. Mostly, if there's a voice at all, it's Goldsworthy's voice. and a little tiny bit, maybe a total of five minutes of other people's voices. And of his voice, maybe, I don't know, a third of the movie or something, there's a lot of silence or there's sounds of the sea or the wind. And there is music by a man named Frith who teaches at Mills. But the music is quiet. It doesn't have swelling orchestras when you're supposed to be deeply moved or something. It's quiet. And it opens with Goldsworthy on a plane.

[05:44]

He's going to Nova Scotia, one of those places where there are huge tides, huge changes in the tide. And he's going to do work there. The narrator, who is in fact the director also of the movie, he talks about how Goldsworthy likes that shape that rivers make in deltas, you know, that kind of sinuous snake-like thing where the river channel going as it kind of slows down and is heading towards the delta. Actually, I think rivers do that all over the place, but particularly then, and it shows some of that. And he talks about how Goldsworthy really loves that pattern. And the first piece that you see him make, what ordinarily he does is he'll make something and then he'll photograph it and then there are many, I think, art books of Goldsworthy's work. And in the books sometimes he comments on them.

[06:47]

and he actually says in one of the reviews he's quoted as saying what's useful to him particularly about the books is that that's when he thinks about what he did and that's when he understands what he did he doesn't say intellectually but I'm sure that's what he that's what he means so that while he's doing it he's inhabiting it he's allowing it to emerge and he's not thinking about it. It's not an intellectual process. At any rate, the first piece that we see him make, he's on a, at the shore, and there's some rocks, and he's breaking up icicles. And then he's putting them together by dipping them in water and he's shaping them by gnawing on them and then he puts them together and he winds up making a shape, there's like a cleft in one of these rocks and he makes that sinuous kind of river shape that goes over here and then disappears under the rock and then comes out over here and disappears under the rock and like this and then like this and then

[08:03]

And then the end of it is completely visible and it comes to a very graceful curve and a point. And you see him working on it and it's hard, it's hard work. Because it's cold and he has to have bare hands because he can't really, he can't feel it otherwise he can't, he can't do the work. And then he finishes it, and he steps back, and the sun rises completely. It had been light, but the sun wasn't shining on it. And the sun hit it, and the whole thing glowed. A light had been turned on, and he didn't plan that. It just happened that the angle was just right. And then it melted. And that's it. And that's his work. Hard work, effort, but organic effort. And then chance happens, and then it goes.

[09:13]

Basic Buddhism, right? What is of the nature of arising is of the nature of passing away. Or as Suzuki Roshi said to, was it David Chadwick? When David asked for Buddhism in a nutshell? He said, things change. If I were a real teacher, I'd just go now. I don't quite have the nerve. Plus I love talking about this movie and I'm pretty interested in the sutra right at the moment too. So the icicle, I won't tell you all of it because I really would love to have you see it. I think, could you, if you've already seen it, raise your hand, as I know a bunch of you have. He makes something that he calls cones.

[10:20]

They're kind of egg-shaped, and I guess they're about probably four to six feet high, something like that. And he makes one at this same, in this same trip to Nova Scotia. I guess somebody must have, well, maybe he had a project to do a book there or something, I don't know. At any rate, he's on this beach that he didn't know to begin with, and he and some helpers are collecting flat black stone. So there's lots of stones on this. This is not a sandy beach and there are lots of stones. So maybe, you know, some of them are probably 10 inches to 2 feet or something like that. and kind of flat. And these cones, the thing is that they're not like a pyramid shape. They start out with a base that's narrow, and then they go out, and then they come up to a point at the top. So it's an engineering event to get it to balance.

[11:24]

It's an effort to get it to balance. And he has to work at it, and he has to get to know that beach. He has to get to know those stones. And he keeps failing. And he tells the cameraman that what the tide kind of window is because apparently this is a place where the tide really comes in high and he has maybe six hours, maybe four hours or something. This has to get done within that time because the tide is going to be in. And so he works on it while it keeps collapsing. And he gets frustrated and he gets angry and at some point he looks right in the camera and he says, you know, it would be better if you'd help collect stones. Why don't you do something useful? And they have to come back.

[12:26]

I guess they did it the next day. I'm not sure when exactly, but at any rate, they came back at least the next day, and eventually he succeeded in building this thing. And it's very beautiful shape. And then the tide comes in, and you watch it as it is slowly submerged. And then who knows? And then the tide goes out. And I saw one that didn't show him building it, but he built one near his home. He lives in Scotland. He built one out of ice. And he certainly built them out of sticks. I guess it's one of his, along with the rivers, this seemed to be his other favorite shape. Or maybe it was a shape he was exploring then, I don't know. He also builds things that are completely ephemeral.

[13:36]

The ice sculpture was, but I don't know that he knew it was gonna be quite so ephemeral. One thing he'll do, he'll lie on a beach and it'll rain, and then he gets up and there's like the reverse shadow of the body. where he was lying, and, you know, how long is that going to last? Five minutes? Half an hour or something? You know, whatever, if it keeps, well, if it doesn't rain, it's, the other's going to dry out. So one way or another, that ain't going to be there very long. He works sometimes with flowers. He picks a bunch of flowers and puts them in, puts them in holes in the rock near the river near his house. He works with leaves. He strung together a very long chain of leaves, maybe. It's hard to tell because you can't see, you know, exactly how big the river was that he put it in, but I would say 40 feet long, something like that.

[14:44]

Then he took it to a stream, and it didn't show him doing this, so I'm not sure how he did it, but he made it in a pool into a spiral. And that's how you see it to begin with. And then the current starts to take this chain of leaves downstream. And it's really, really beautiful. But it's also, what a metaphor. You know, the leaves, some of them get ahead of the other part of it. Some of them get, some of it gets caught and then it gets freed. You know, it's just like life, it's just like Zazen. Sometimes there's just breathing and it's simply there and then sometimes you're off to the races and you're completely stuck and bound and then something happens. Maybe sometimes your breath just kind of comes up, your breath comes up and reminds you, your body says, oh wait, there's a body here, there's breath here, come back.

[15:48]

And then he also makes walls. He makes lots of things, but he makes some things that are very, very seemingly permanent. One of the things the movie is is a meditation on permanence and impermanence, because that very ephemeral work with the leaves, that's much more in my heart and in my memory than the wall. But he made a couple walls, one of which is at a place called Storm King, right? Storm King on the Hudson. Anyway, it's a rock wall. And he had help building because he's not a rock wall builder. But at any rate, it It uses that sinuous pattern going around trees and then down to the river and ends in the river.

[16:52]

But it also goes up to the highway and ends at the highway. So I've touched on this and I just, what I want to really emphasize is the way he inhabits his experience. You know, he goes to a place and he spends some time there and he gets to know it so that he actually has a relationship with the environment, with the place, with the materials that he's going to use. And then he allows the sculpture to grow organically out of that experience and out of that material. and he doesn't stand back and comment on it just as we try in our Zazen not to stand back and comment on it and of course he fails just as we fail in Zazen or in our lives we do stand back and comment we do start to think we do go to that place, oh I'll never do this I'm such a failure they're going to all think that I shouldn't even be in the Zendo blah blah blah blah blah

[18:06]

You know, he has those moments. You know, at one point when one of the cones collapses, he says, oh, shit. You know, and also the little peevish remark to the cameraman, that kind of thing. You know, it happens. But most of the time, he seems to really inhabit his experience. and allow the thing to grow. And he also, I thought this was interesting, he sees the dark side so that what he inhabits is not just, is not la-la land. which is one of the points that Usilananda also makes in his book and many commentaries on the Satipatthana Sutta talk about that mindfulness as a way of liberation is particularly useful because it's not about going to some bliss state, some other worldly state and they contrast it with Jhana practice where you're trying to go to some formless realm and say, no, it's about being right here.

[19:27]

So it has to include, they don't use the phrase la-la land, but it has to include our experience. And he talks about, at one point, about how the land near his home in Scotland has been really shaped by the sheep farming there. and that there's a darker side and that when people look at it and they just see some sort of pretty pastoral landscape, they're excluding the fact that the sheep have had an effect and sometimes a deleterious effect on it and simply that there's been a human effect on it and so on, that it's not just, I don't know, picnics and frolicking shepherd girls or something like that. Oh, I'm so sorry. And then his comment, the next sculpture is, you know, there's lots and lots of rock walls there.

[20:35]

And he takes sheep wool and he just outlines one of these walls in sheep wool. And then you see it filmed with the light shining through it. It's very beautiful. But you could imagine that that's not going to be there very long. So there's some, certainly it's about impermanence, but also something about, there's something, it's very beautiful, it's very light, but it also evokes some notion of death. So that he inhabits the whole experience. And there's a question that I just want to point out, and I'm not going to really get into it too much, but there's a question here for me, which is, you know, I'm talking about his inhabiting his experience, no gaps, no commenting, but at the same time, is not what he is doing completely extra?

[21:38]

He's changing nature, he's adding to, nature. So is that just in itself, is that extra? Isn't that commenting on it? Isn't that a pointing at something rather than being with it? Or is that a pointing at it? And my My response right this minute is that our lives and our practice is not a passive experience. It's not about commenting on it, but it is about making an effort. We don't have a goal particularly. we try to let go of our goal-oriented thinking, but we do, we make an effort, simply the effort to sit up straight, the effort to keep coming back to the breath, the effort to hold the mudra, the effort to engage in kind speech, the effort to drop unkind speech,

[23:01]

The effort to take this finger that's so often pointing that way and turn it around this way to point inwardly at this one, to look at oneself. So we make an effort. And Mel sometimes talks about, you know, sometimes we're turned by the Dharma wheel and sometimes we turn the Dharma wheel. We live our lives and sometimes it's time for you to come forward and sometimes it's time for you to step back, right? It's not helpful when it's time for us to be a leader if we don't lead. That's not helpful to people, I think. If we won't own our own power in a situation, it's not helpful. So we make this effort, and there are times when it's time to come forward, as I say, and times when it's not.

[24:04]

Some of us are people who find it easy to share what's going on with ourselves and to talk about our lives or to talk about politics or whatever. And for people like that, often practice is about not talking about giving other people room, right? And then some of us have a very difficult time speaking in any kind of public way or putting our truth out there. And for those of us who have difficulty doing it, our practice is about coming forward. So these are all examples where it's not about commenting, it's not about separating from your experience, but it is something about some kind of practice about making an effort and making things, either making things happen or making things not happen, but either way, it's an effort.

[25:07]

But there's some way in which I think we understand intuitively whether that effort is coming from the thinking mind, you know, sometimes we say we have a committee, whether it's coming from the committee or whether it's arising organically from our practice. So I think that his work arises organically from his practice. so that it's not really a, it's not a separation from nature in some larger sense. You have to see the movie to see what you think, I think. So I've mentioned the sutra, the Satipatthana, about inhabiting your life. and your body and your breath. Talks about contemplate the body in the body, the breath in the breath.

[26:11]

So from, from inside. Not talking to yourself about it, as I said. So in the beginning, really knowing your breath. And again, you know you breathe, right? Somebody said, do you breathe? You say, yes. You wouldn't have to think about it. But how conscious are you of your breath? So often we're not. We forget where our breath is. Mel once said to me, a good Zen student always knows where their breath is. So really, really knowing it. Knowing it each breath during a period of zazen from beginning of the breath to the end of it. Beginning of the in-breath to the end of the in-breath. The beginning of the out-breath to the end of the out-breath.

[27:13]

The pauses. Is it a long breath? Is it a short breath? Is it ragged? Is it smooth? Soft? Is it in your chest and kind of shallow? Is it deep in your belly? Really knowing it. And knowing what it feels like in your body. If you could try and experiment just for a minute. Just keep your breath way up in your chest, really shallow for 30 seconds, well, for a minute. Just breathe like that. It's kind of fast, too. Okay, you can breathe now.

[28:24]

I think that for most of us, one feels anxious. Anxiety arises, so that it's true that we breathe like that when we're anxious, but it also goes the other way. When we breathe like that, we feel anxious. And then if you'll take a minute and breathe in your belly with a really long, smooth exhale, The kind of breath I imagine that Alan talked about with the Suzuki Roshi Bicycle about the breath. Just allowing the breath. Letting the next breath come in when your body's ready. So I imagine that that has a calming effect.

[29:45]

It certainly does for me. So knowing, really knowing your breath from the inside, letting it arise and letting it fall away, Ordinarily not forcing it to do anything. Just watching. So that's how I see the movie as being also about Zazen, because it's about exploring the experience without separating from it, and it's about allowing any particular experience to arise and to pass away.

[30:47]

And he doesn't control how it passes away. He builds, at one point, a really beautiful overturned cup shape out of bleached driftwood sticks. And it's pretty big, I think. It's probably like 15 feet across, something like that. And it's a really elegant half circle with a hole in the middle of the top. and he finishes it and steps away and then the camera pans back and you see that it's on a place where the tide is going to come in and then it shows the tide coming in and this obviously is much more delicate structure than the cone was and that's That's got to be okay, and it is. Well, I guess it's okay with him.

[31:50]

Doesn't show him crying over it. So he lets things go. He allows change. In a way, I guess you could say he inhabits change, and he inhabits time. You think of time as the continuation of change, which is one of many ways you could think about it. He inhabits that. And it's inspiring to us to work with inhabiting our own time, inhabiting our own experience. So the film has, I mean, the film itself has changed, right? you know, frame after frame after frame, it's about tides, it's about rivers, it's about seasons. So that change both effects his work, in other words, it makes his work, and it affects his work, it changes his work.

[32:51]

So again, back to this sort of, this notion of the rhythm of our lives, of inhabiting our lives, right, that what arises passes away. sort of this dancing with this change. And I like the image of Zazen being a dance with our breath. Can you let it lead you sometimes and then other times you lead it? It's a wonderful practice. So do you have any questions or comments? Yes. I was talking to my son Brian about this film, and he's an artist, and I was saying, can you imagine making things that blow away or melt? And he said, but mom, he takes pictures. And how to work, are the pictures extra, or how do we work with the pictures that we take of our own lives?

[33:57]

Yeah. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. Well, I think we have to work with it. I mean, it's also... He says that those pictures help him kind of integrate it, I think, but we do that. And they can be stuck places. Absolutely, and we're human beings, so... Yeah. Yes, Ann. I haven't seen the movies, but two things struck me. about the way you were talking and also what Clara was saying. First, he works with what's there. He doesn't go to the beach and haul in a whole ton of whatever from outside and impose his own view of what art is on the situation. He works with what's there. first of all.

[34:58]

And then secondly, he brings out a pattern. And when we talk about realize the Buddha way, in a way, I mean, I think part of what we're talking about is to discover internal pattern, the Tao, and then bring ourselves into harmony with it, free from hindrance. And I remember a movie about Robert Frost talking about what the artist does is to bring order out of seeming chaos. He has discovered a pattern. He has created a pattern, and then he photographs the pattern. And the photograph is not extra because it enables people, other people who weren't there at the time, to see the pattern that he's elucidated.

[35:58]

But it is organic. It's, you know, he's taking what's there and finding the pattern. I mean, it sounds absolutely wonderful. It is. But what's also wonderful about the movie is that it shows the dissolution of the pattern back to chaos, if you want to call it, which I think was great. Rebecca, and then Alan. Well, having the background that I have of raising five children I let that part out of the movie. And there is this point where there is this absolute chaos of little blonde kids running around and trying to do this. And he leaves. He not only leaves the house that day, but he obviously leaves the whole area for long periods of time. Alan?

[37:03]

I'm sort of groping, but I really like, as one of my favorite poets said, I really like the whole idea of art and of making these things, however ephemeral they are. And while you were talking, I found myself thinking of riverine cultures. I found myself thinking of the whole culture is based on the richness that's brought down by these vast Asian rivers, three really large Asian rivers. And the whole countryside is interpenetrated by those sinuous structures. And then it occurred to me that in real life, what our practice is like, you know, that you have a country that's the most densely populated country in the world, 150 million people, you know, plays the size of Wisconsin, and most of it is Delta, is alluvial land, and it's incredibly rich farming, and they live there, they live with the reality of

[38:42]

with the reality of this naturally occurring danger. This isn't the kind of stuff that occurs because, you know, we've channeled this river. It's just the way it is. And so both those things come up together, which I think, you know, I haven't seen the movie. Yeah, I think that was one of the things I was trying to talk about, this notion that he... Or at least the... I can't pronounce the director's name. It's Riedelsheimer, I guess. Anyway, maybe it's he, but at any rate, that it includes the failures, that it includes the expletives and so on. But doesn't... You know, but art generally doesn't include the dangers. and that's why we can play with it and experiment with it and find our relationship to, you know, the wild side.

[40:13]

Everything has to be included. Yeah. Yes. Yes, you. I'm sorry, I don't know your name. I really appreciated your talk a lot, and I'm a teacher for adults at Berkeley Adult School, and we spent a lot of time the last few days talking about the beach cleanup, the coastal beach cleanup today from 9 to 12, and it's going on all over the world. And so I thought your talk was really dust- But at the same time, I kind of wanted to go do that today. But I also really wanted to come here because I like coming here. It means a lot to me. And so your talk just really, I felt like it was really inspiring. And the idea of cleaning up the coast and making the environment lovely and beautiful for all of us and helping

[41:21]

I would imagine. Does everybody know what she's talking about? Do you want to explain a little bit? The Chinese government is redirecting the ancient Yangtze River by damming it up. and redirecting it from areas that it's been flowing through for hundreds and hundreds of years and in the process destroying ancient cities. So a lot of Chinese people now all over the world are going back before this happens. And, you know, it's very sad to me that this is going on. Yeah, it's like the biggest dam in the world or something like that.

[42:26]

Yeah, it's quite a contrast. And again, how can we include it? Because we have to include that too. Yes. But what you've been speaking about has caused a whole slew of thoughts, so I won't take too much notes. You've been talking about disguise R. Yes. You've been talking about how it's a neanderthal. only that include all others. And they are forward motion, which of course includes backward motion. The second kind of motion is the motion of turning upon oneself. And the third kind of motion is called spiral cycle.

[43:36]

And it's the third motion that reminded me rivers meander and follow the continent of the land itself. And that brought me to the thoughts in Lao Tzu's work, The Way. He speaks of how water always finds the lowest point and then rises. He's also talking about indicating things to art. And that made me think of something. I'm not sure where it's from. Maybe somewhere in the transmission of the lamp. There's a phrase, a finger pointing at the moon. This is perhaps... Oh, it's everywhere. It's showing how you can't believe

[44:39]

Yes, well, I think that Dogen, the Japanese founder of our school, I think that my current analysis of Dogen is that what he's about more than anything is get over it. We keep trying to find something really pure and clear and absolute and It is, as you say, another phrase we use is the hazy moon of enlightenment because it's just like what Alan was saying. It has to include everything. It has to include this marvelous work of his and it has to include that dam and it has to include a rock and the fact that Goldworthy left his kids It's also true that I noticed that he had a Viking range in his kitchen. You know, a very, very fancy stove. So, I mean, I think that it's time to stop.

[45:53]

I'm getting... Things are numberless.

[45:59]

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