Meeting Wendy Johnson

When Young Urban Zen spent a weekend at Green Gulch last month, I spoke with Sukey about volunteering to show elementary and middle school students around the garden twice a month.  I spent yesterday morning training with a handful of others on the basic routine - everything from showing kids the zendo to helping them build their own compost piles (with a little chemistry thrown in for the adults).   

I also had the incredible pleasure of meeting Wendy Johnson, who began the Green Gulch farm in the1970's and ran it for thirty years.  Her book, Gardening at the Dragons Gate, made her a hero of mine when I read portions of it at Green Gulch two years ago.  She writes of the ancient and recent history of the land and geology on which she farmed, of the chemistry involved, and of humankind's relationship to plants with great and grounded spiritual insight.  Wendy makes interconnectedness and interdependence utterly visceral, which for me, is the condition for understanding their place in the realm of love.

I feel that I could not have met Wendy, and began to engage in this project, at a better time.  I have been thinking a great deal, for the past two weeks in particular, about nurturing life, and about nurturing my own energy so that I can nurture the energy of other beings.  This is a bigger story that has to do with cleansing and reassessing my energy and my relationship to Buddhism - but if I tried to write about that now, I'd be up until the wee hours. 

Just one quick story before I get some much needed sleep:  Wendy was telling us that some of the students would be recent immigrants, and that many of them would be excited about farming - she told stories of students who had been raised as farmers racing ahead and excitedly filling boxes with vegetables, only to become embarrassed when they realized no other students had done so.  "By the time these students have been here for a couple of years, they'll have completely forsaken their history, and even scorn farming.  Talk about how important farming is for all cultures, how much we depend on them, how heroic it is!"

It made me think of many of my old students.  I had one Latino boy that never spoke to the other Latino's in an English Language Learner US history class I once taught.  It took me three weeks to realize that he only spoke a little Spanish - he spoke an indigenous language, and had been raised in the mountains far away from Spanish speakers.  When I discovered he had ridden horses all his life, I built the theme of horses into the US history class, which always got his attention and sometimes prompted him to speak up.  I had another Latino student who had been a taxi driver since he was twelve, and had hitchhiked and ridden on top of trains, by himself, all the way from Colombia to the border.  He was an illegal immigrant - a phrase I can't help but despise because it dehumanizes many people whom I care for.  I asked him if he had told anybody else, and he said that the school knew, but that he hadn't told many people his story.

So many students with so many stories - one of my Yemenis students was from a scholarly family and had lived in the capital of Sinaa.  Two other Yemenis had lived lives that would have put them directly at odds with him back home - they had grown up as nomadic traders, leaving before sunrise each morning to ride across long stretches of desert with their fathers, AK 47's slung over their shoulders.  They told me stories about how desert people have an understanding for one another, no matter what the culture is.  If a ship came into port, they always could tell if the guy unloading was a desert man or not.  I had a few African American students who would engage in "gun play" - they would pretend to be using guns, holding their hand up in the air and shouting "bapbapbap!"   When my Yemenis students from the desert saw this, their faces would grow stone cold.  I talked with them about it over tea at lunch and they blew up: "They know nothing!  Nothing!  They have everything they need to make a good life!  Why do they destroy themselves?"  The racial feelings at this school, composed almost entirely of poor students of color, were incredibly complex.  Whether from the city or nomadic, wealthy (back home at least) or poor, the Yemenis took on a tough, urban style.  However, their singing and dancing, a major part of their life and spirit, is highly emotional and even sensual, sometimes putting them at odds with the hard edges they tried to portray.

In the classroom, I watch students embrace parts of their culture, and leave much of it behind.  However, what is left behind is replaced by re-imagining and re-creating culture.  It's a natural process of acclimating, but it takes a great deal of their mental and emotional energy.  All students - white local students certainly not excluded! - are acclimating and exploring the shifting energy of adolescence.  They all live in a complex world, and need spaces of quiet, spaces that are about feeling themselves, spaces that are beautiful and settling - spaces like Green Gulch, even for just an afternoon.  They are all spiritual beings, deep down, and benefit from becoming closer to the processes of life, and understanding how to care for those processes.    

For the past couple of months my energy has been scattered, and the time has come for me to honestly sit and feel that scattered energy, feel where it comes from, and feel what heals it.  And as I begin to sit and cleanse, I increasingly understand that nurturing life, be it the life of plants or of students, may well be the most healing action I can take for myself.  Working with kids on the farm feels like one of many actions I can take that allow me to more fully understand, connect with, and honor life in its many forms.  It is so very healing to help children learn to nurture life, to honor it, to be in awe of this wonderful existence.  Even though I will only be with each group of students for a few hours, it is very meaningful, and representative of the direction I want my life to take. 

Journaling: My first memory of Paul

The past month has been a busy one.  While that is true, the busyness of this month has also been a major story I've been telling myself.  It is more the story than the busyness that has led to me feeling more stressed than I have in been in a while, and that has led to my practice slipping and the awareness of my mind and heart been somewhat cloudy.  So this is what I have to practice with right now: life, right? 

In the midst of this especially busy week, I felt a real need to do some journaling - I've been thinking and writing constantly, but none of that has been about myself and how I'm doing - a recipe for feeling out of sorts.  I opened up some of the old journals on my computer and found my notes from the first lecture I heard Paul give.  I think they're from August 2010, and thought they would be fun to share.

First talk I ever heard Paul, the abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, give: he speaks of sila, ‘the deliberate engagement with the internal,’ and of cultivating the supportive structures for Samadhi. 

-          “The disposition of zazen is non-doing”.  (Shikantaza, the practice of ‘justness,’ is non-doing.) 

-          “Stop, pause, and breath: then you notice what you are actually feeling”.  (A good way for me to think about it.  I often think, ‘breath, and create that space of calm from which awareness can arise.’) 

-          Stopping and breathing is an action that that takes no effort.  It may take effort to convince oneself to stop and breath, but actually stopping and breathing is effortless. 

-          “Attending to the moment as its own event” and not just a method to achieve something higher.  Stop and breath simply in order to stop and breath. 

-          “When we settle our perceptions become more subtle”.

-          Bringing your awareness back to the self thousands of times enhances the neural pathways that enable you to do that.

-          “Let the request for awareness be granted”.  “On the inhale, let the natural request of the body be granted”.

                      - “When you let go of language, you let go of conceptualization.  The practice of silence is                     the practice of letting go of conceptualization”.

And, from that same journal entry, a funny little note to myself:

  

           "Story about the sound of Buddha's heartbeat".  

         

Cross-post: yoga, tantrism, colonialism

Think some of you might enjoy the post I left on my other blog - debunking a NYT article riddled with serious (and common) misconceptions of yoga and tantrism.