Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

It’s been a packed couple of weeks, with the first highlight being my Saturday talk at Zen Center on the 1st, the first of those I have given since before the pandemic. The sun had come out the day before, and it was a lovely summer day. Since my theme had come to me early, and I had also had a chance to preview some of the material with my student group , I wasn’t worried about the content. As often happens these days, I was torn between needing my glasses on to read the notes I had made, and wanting to be able to look around the room without my glasses, so I ended up skipping a couple of points, and worried at the end of the talk that it came out a bit muddled. The feedback was positive, though, and when I had a chance to listen back to it the other day, it held together better than I had feared – even though I did notice the lack of those points, and also had a couple of ideas that could have expanded the talk a little as well.

After that, it was great to get out on a sunny and warm roam up Bayview Hill, introducing a number of people to a part of the city they had never visited.

Having been woken up at midnight on the 29th of June by a very loud firework being let off close by, I was not at all sad to be heading out of town the next day to a fireworks-free zone (like the year I went to Zanzibar in early December and was spared weeks of Christmas carols playing in all the shops). It was a slow journey down, as I took the train to San Jose to be picked up by Eli and Cat, waiting for them in the shade of the station (which I had only previously visited in very similar circumstances, waiting to be picked up by Myles’ mother who drove me in that time), with the 90 degree temperatures a foretaste of what was to come.

We arrived around dinner time, only things are a little different this year at Tassajara. There are actual weekends now, when everyone takes the same time off, and we had arrived at the beginning of the weekend, so there was open kitchen (ie, foraging for leftovers in the walk-in refrigerator) and no schedule for a couple of days. This also meant that I had missed the Full Moon Ceremony, held that morning before the previous sangha week attendees left, though we did have the Suzuki Roshi memorial on the evening of the third and the morning of the fourth, and it was wonderful to be in the kaisando for those. 

The week would have resumed on Tuesday, but being the 4th, we had a special dinner and skit night (plus a dance party I did not stay up for). The next day was given as a rest morning, and with Friday also being deemed a weekend day before the intensive started on the Saturday, it meant I only sat one morning in the zendo (I skipped the two evening sessions offered that week, though I was doshi for one afternoon service, another treat).

My mornings then, having fallen asleep to the sound of the creek still rushing behind my cabin, consisted of having a cup of coffee and sitting on the work circle bench in the early hours, with the moon waning from full, the dawn chorus and the slowly growing light. On Monday morning it was still warm from the previous day of a hundred degrees, though each morning got cooler after that.

When the light grew, and especially as the sun appeared behind Flag Rock, I was out with my camera taking pictures of the softer light – I have posted a number of those pictures on Patreon. 

My days were spent with rocks – my favourite thing to do. I had spent the “day off” on Monday looking for rocks in my usual places along the creek, and found some beautiful ones. My commission was to create a memorial for Sojun at the Suzuki Roshi memorial site. The first rock that had been chose was, as we suspected, too small for that purpose, but I spent most of my energy wrestling a large flat rock into place for the incensor and flowers in front of the the memorial rock, and then building a chamber for the ashes behind that, following the instructions that Tenshin Roshi had given me. 

On the last day I was there, then, we coralled a team to haul a second, larger rock up to the site, slung in a sheet of netting that we had found that could take the weight – there is also a ‘rock stretcher,’ but that adds a lot of weight to the process, and would be harder to carry up the narrow and steep path to the site.

I managed to manoeuvre that one into place, as well as finishing up with some work on steps to the creek at the bathhouse that had been washed away with the winter storms, and finding places for all the other pretty rocks I had wanted to feature. After returning to the city, I heard that this second rock was still not felt to be right, so it looks like I will end up going back to Tassajara later in the summer to supervise getting a larger, as yet unchosen, rock up to the site…

Even though there are few people at Tassajara for the summer, a number of families had come down, with a combination of some very cute younger kids, and some mature and well-behaved teenagers and pre-teens, who brought much energy and joy to the place. It was also a delight to meet again a couple who had been there in my first summer, as well as another summer I had been in residence (when their teenage daughter had been an infant), and a long-time resident, who had also been there in my first summer, who was making her first visit for a while. 

All of this left me feeling a bit flat when I got back to San Francisco to find it mostly grey, damp, chilly and windy. I set out for a bike ride on Saturday morning, and soon discovered how tired I felt – with the conditions, I made it a much shorter ride than I had thought of; a roam around the park was probably the highlight of a very lazy weekend.