Bright Earth - past & future

Okay, welcome everybody. Thought it was just going to be me, Casper, and Kusma and Keima, so it's lovely to have you all here. And hello if you're watching later. Um, I was interested to think today about Bright Earth, um, because we are at 3 years thereabouts of, um, we're 3 years old and I wanted to be curious about where we, how we got here, where we came from and where we are now and, and also where we will be going. And it, this is especially relevant, I guess, to the people in this room because a lot of you have been with us for a long time and hopefully will be with us far into the future. Hi Matt, welcome, good to see you.

Um, so this is the fourth poetry retreat but third anniversary.

That's right, yeah.

So I can work those things out. That's why I've been sat here just doing that.

Well done, well done. Gus would like to announce that he's— they've done a sum, and I think the first one, it might just have been me, you, and Chris on Zoom or something, because I think we're in pandemic times, weren't we? Yeah, it's very quiet. Yeah. So this morning, just to give you two some context, because everyone else was here, we had a refuge ceremony and we had about 12 people in the room. And I asked who wanted to take refuge, if they wanted to come to the front or renew their refuge. And everybody apart from Keima, the bell person, came to the front of the room. So we had a really, really moving and beautiful refuge ceremony this morning.. And in my Dharma talk this morning, I was talking about the metaphor of taking a contract out on an allotment as being similar to taking refuge, the formal refuge ceremony. You're making some kind of public declaration that you're going to invest in or hang out with or take stewardship of or start receiving from a plot of land which represents Buddhism. So we're all allotment owners in this room. We've all had our allotments for quite a long time. And the other part of this metaphor that came to me, as I said this morning, at 3:30 this morning, was how do we learn how to tend our plot of land? What are we doing here? And, and how do we know how to do it? And how do we keep getting better at it? And how do we pass it on? How do we help other people to offer what we've received? And I was thinking about gardeners that Many years ago when I was writing my, I think it was my second novel about a gardener, Leonard Much, who became embroiled in a mystery, but that's another story. You can read in the novel. Still available from the Temple or on Amazon. Small Kindnesses. So Leonard was a gardener, and at the time of writing the novel, I had no experience of gardening. I don't even know if I had a garden. So part of the research was to find out what gardeners did, and I was privileged to be able to meet with several older male gardeners who'd been doing what they'd been doing for decades and decades. And I'll never forget them, they were wonderful people, especially this man who— he basically looked after the huge garden that belonged to a private family, private family, that were actually hardly ever in the house. And this garden was stunning, and he just— that was his full-time job. He just looked after this garden, and they hardly ever saw it, but he loved his work. It was such a privilege to him. He just, um, he just took such pride showing me around all the different things that he'd made over the years. And he was naturally— he was, when I met him, this was 20 years ago, he must have been sort of 60s at least. He was totally naturally organic. He didn't like to use chemicals anywhere, and he was very conscious of waste. And he was such a wise and lovely man, and hopefully he would have passed some of that knowledge on to other people who gardened. And that's one way of looking at how we've learned how to garden here, is that we, we have learned from other gardeners. Um, and of course, the two main gardeners that we have learned from are David Brazier and Caroline Brazier, and A lot of the forms that, that still happen in this shrine room, or a lot of the— some of the words that we use have still been passed down from then, or them, or we've kept them, or we kept things from the Amida Order. Um, and we've had lots and lots of knowledge from other gardeners. So before I met Caspar and met David and Caroline, I had spent some time at the Zen temple. The abbot S there— I, I can't remember much because again, this was 30 years ago, but I can remember being in their little tiny shrine room, which was just an ordinary house, and everyone was sitting and facing the wall and doing zazen, which I'd never done before. And somebody put their service book down And I remember her just kind of picking it back up and just saying, oh, this is how we treat the service books. We just place them with, with respect onto the floor. And the way that she showed me that just stayed with me. It, it, it's something that I've seen echoed many times since from many other people, and it's something that we show people now. So when I show people how to be reverent with objects in the shrine room, or when, when I do, certainly her teaching is, is within my teaching, that, that she's the gardener that showed me how to plant that particular plant, or how to use that particular combination of plants, or to that natural way of, of killing nettles, or Um, so it's not just the Amida Order, it's also all the influences that I had and all the influences that Caspar had and all the rest of the order who we were alongside for many years. Many little teachings like Samaya's, uh, Amida accepts all bells. Hopefully I've said that probably 40 times, so hopefully, hopefully some of one of you might say that to someone else, um, when, when you're doing the bell training. And then that's something that came from Samaya. I don't know where she got it from. She might have just from Amida. She did seem to get quite a lot just from me. And also, some of the gardening information I've got has come from books, quite a lot in fact. So we can learn to garden by getting one of those yearbooks, and it tells us when to plant things and what to plant and little tips. I'll always be grateful for people like Thomas Kelly, the Quaker, who, who wrote Testament of Devotion, which is my favorite spiritual book. And I will always be grateful to Rumi, and I will always be grateful to, um, John Periskopoulos. So all of these influences have come in, and we've, we've sort of funneled them, and we've funneled them— I funneled them in a Satya-shaped way, and Caspar's funneled them in a Caspar-shaped way, and between us we funneled them in a Caspar and Satya shaped way, because we also have our own preferences, our own limitations, our own passions, our own hopes. What's been really wonderful to witness over the past year or two is, is people beginning to step forwards, or people joining us who are already experienced funnelers and have their own, uh, experience that's come in from all those different gardeners and gardening books, and then create— we had a wonderful workshop this morning, you two, run by Kusuma and Philip, which was, um, which was not the kind of thing me or Caspar would have offered. And so that it's like, it's like a, it's like a jigsaw starts forming, and different people have got different pieces. And the other thing I really wanted to say, I guess, is that something that I've become much clearer about over time is that the gardeners have a particular way of doing things, and that is really precious. And we really need to continue to be open to the good gardeners. We need to work out how to suss out the good gardeners from the not so good ones, or we need to listen to the good bits in the, in the gardeners that we do received teachings from. Do you want to— that's actually the next part of my Dharma talk. As Casper said, what we really need to test is how are our flowers growing, because the garden knows what it needs. And the gardeners are only giving us their own sort of shortcuts or, or their wisdom that, that they've been passed down from their teachers or that they've discovered for themselves. But what we really need to do is test that out for ourselves. And we need to— if somebody tells us that we should plant these two plants together and we do that and it doesn't work out, then we, we let that advice go. Or maybe we try it a few times, or maybe we check back with the teacher, but if it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. So what I would really love to see more of is the kind of discussion that happens in our book groups where we're testing out knowledge for ourselves. We're, we're reading the instructions that someone's written and then we're comparing them to our own experience, to our own garden, and we're thinking, is this true for me? Does this work? How will this— how will this help my garden? How will this help the animals in my garden or the people that come and enjoy my garden? And So, uh, this part of this talk was spurred by, um, a conversation— I'll stop talking a minute— a conversation with, um, a Tibetan teacher called Zopa who's in my Friday support group, Buddhists from America, that I talk to once a week. And he was talking about when he went to India. He's Tibetan, and the other woman who happened to be there yesterday was Theravada and Tibetans and Theravadans, and there's lots of Zen people in the group. They have pretty— especially Zen people and Theravada people have very strict lineages. So you know that if you have a teacher, that they were taught by that person and they were taught by that person and kind of back and back and back. They're not always historically accurate, but there's a lot of faith that's kind of put into those lineages as a way of testing how good the teacher is, like, is the teacher okay or not? So there's a lot of talk about what's your lineage, and there's some suspicion of people, understandably, who turn up and say, oh, I'm going to start, I'm going to become a Buddhist teacher, and without any connection with tradition, with history. And Zopa was saying that when he went to India, he spent some time in different parts in Asia and in India. What he experienced is that rather than one teacher, which is how it often happens in the West, he experienced what he called a living umbrella of lineage, that there were many different teachers and many different ways of doing things that that people can kind of hook into or be influenced by or learn from. And I really love that, and I wonder if that's something that we can continue to think about here is what— who is in our living umbrella of lineage. And, and by living, I don't think he meant alive necessarily. He meant the, the— where's the, the aliveness? It could be teachers who died a long time ago, but what's feeding us, what's feeding us here in this temple, or here as this group of, um, as this order of this, these congregations. Um, and in some ways it's quite exciting because we're in a— in some ways we're really just sort of toddling forwards. We're kind of as 3-year-olds, you know, they're just about walking and, and, um, working out who they are and, and, and what they want to do or how they can influence, or, you know, in some ways we're very young and in some ways we're centuries old because we're using some of the gardening techniques that have been around since before the Buddha's time. That wisdom has, has streamed through us, not just through, uh, teach living teachers and, and writing, but through experience, through what happens when we do practice. And we maybe tap into that sort of collective unconsciousness that Jung talks about. So in some ways we're very new, in some ways we're very old. We maybe have a bit more room to maneuver right now because once things get a bit bigger, they tend to need structures to keep them all from getting muddled. And we haven't really got so many of those yet, and then they can get a bit solidified once they're in, which is all necessary. But, but we've still we've got quite a lot of room to, to wiggle right now. Um, so which direction are we going to wiggle in? That's one of the questions I have. And of course Kasper and me have stewardship of this building and, and especially of the practice that happens here. Um, but we all have stewardship of all of it, some of us more than others. So when Kusma runs her meditation here, she has stewardship of that. And, and, and that's, that's totally up to you, you know, as long as there's, I don't know, no naked people running into the road, or I've been here, they're staying in here and there's curtains to shut, that's fine. Have I— did I hear the wrong rumor there then? So there were some projects that happened here that we have a— Charmaine's gone. Sorry. I like how quickly you went when you realized you had your slippers on. And that's a really good example, isn't it, of something that's— Very bad example. Jiame just realized he had his slippers on in the shrine room, if you're wondering what the hilarity is, and suddenly ran out to take them off. But that is something that we were told from someone that learned it in a context that was a kind of a Buddhist context, and that gets handed down. So yes, so some of the things we have stewardship of, but a lot of the things we don't, that people, all of you have stewardship over various things, and new people will arrive and they will have ideas. And, and, um, so, so all of that is still really, uh, growing and finding its way. The other thing that someone said last night— I'll, I'll finish when I've said this— but we were talking about where we receive our nourishment, or our kind of our CPD really, our continuing professional development, as especially as ministers or as people that have been doing this for quite a long time. And Kim said that the way she sees it is that the Dharma is like water and it'll kind of find any cracks it can to sort of get to us. And that in her experience, it was like the Dharma was in charge of our learning opportunities. We just have to keep our eyes open for the opportunities that suddenly present themselves. So how can we, how can we all continue to grow and send our roots down, keep sending our roots down in order to create a haven for people that come to the temple suffering? And people often, when people turn up, they're often suffering in some way. There's something that they, they need, or that there's some question, or there's they, they feel lost. The better we can tend our own garden, which goes back to the workshop, and the better we can think about what kind of garden we want to be, and then the better we can think collectively about what kind of garden we want to be, then the more that the visitors to our garden will enjoy the beauty of our garden. And different gardens are different. Not everybody will like our garden. Some people would rather go to a Zen garden or a Jodo Shinshu garden. But we can only make the garden that's ours to make, and that's our job if we want to. That's our mission if we want to accept it.

As long as it doesn't self-destruct.

As long as it doesn't self-destruct. So if I pause there, is it possible to do a sort of a segue into what you wanted to say? Sure. So I don't really know what you're going to say. The Dharma knows.

That's why we did Satya Robyn first, so she could sort of build, put some colors on the canvas and some shapes, and it's easier to start from there than from a blank canvas. Or put some plants in the garden, I suppose. It's easy to go into a garden that somebody's already been tending to. If you ask a, a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist what their practice is, they won't say— well, then it depends who you ask, but for the sake of argument, they won't say Nembutsu. They say deep listening, and they mean listening to Dharma talks But I think they also mean listening to the Buddha, listening to the Dharma in the world. And a very classic Buddhist analysis of how it is to be in the world is that I'm looking through a pair of Casper-tinted spectacles. I'm not seeing the world in an unbiased way. But apart from, apart from one strand of Buddhism, the sense is of that there is a world out there that can be seen clearly, that can be seen in an unbiased way. There is a dharma, and there is the coloring that I put onto it because of my life's history and the stories that I tell about myself and the stories that I tell about the world. And dharma is not just physical reality. It isn't just what we can measure with scientific instruments or pick up through our senses. It is the universe which includes the Buddha and the Buddha's light illuminating. Everything. So a vision of the Dharma is not like an accurate, uh, scientific measurement of the world. It is a spiritual experience. So that's one little corner of the garden that I want to plant. Those of you that came to the conference will know that I spoke about entrusting as being my practice rather than Nembutsu, or Nembutsu as entrusting. Spiritual practice is often presented as this form of like a technology, like a machine I start here and I push this button and some things happen in the machine and I come out the other end and I feel differently, or my habits have changed, I'm a different person, I become calmer or wiser. And even Nembutsu can be presented like this. I don't say the Nembutsu, then I say it, then I'm more connected to the Buddha. And that's a really useful way of thinking about spiritual practice, and it is important to think about where we are now and where we'd like to be in the future. And the Buddha taught a lot about cause and effect, and, and that's really important and not to be dismissed. But when I think about entrusting I think about entrusting to the present moment, to the Buddha in the present moment, to the whole— and the present moment encapsulating the whole of the universe and the whole of time. And there's no invitation for anything to be different in that. This is just as you are. Here we are, just as we are. Can we really accept that that is okay? But Daishonin Morgan, who I've quoted in the conference, uses the word sufficient. Can we trust that this is sufficient, that I am in the present moment and that is sufficient? And as pure land Buddhists, we trust that because we know that the present moment is infused with the loving kindness of Amida, whether we see it or not. But for me, this is what sits underneath everything that Satya Robyn has described, and it allows me to receive teachings from all sorts of places, to, to be in relationship with all sorts of gardeners and gardens. Without falling into, oh, this gardener is going to be the one that saves me. Maybe that gardener knows something about how to get rid of black flies, and that's really useful because they happen to be all over my green beans at the moment. But I'm— I have been the sort of person who would then go, oh, you, you must be the perfect gardener. Come and tell me how to do my whole garden. Come and tell me how to live my own life. What job should I be doing? Who should I be in a relationship with? Just, just sort it all out, please. Just lay the path before me. And that isn't entrusting myself to the present moment. Isn't entrusting myself to reality, it's entrusting myself to a fragment of reality. And that fragment has some wisdom in it, but it's limited. Uh, if we do that, we will tip over at some point, and probably I will do that again and tip over at at some point. And, and in that tipping over, we can find an invitation again to take refuge in the infinite, in Amitābha, if you like. And it enables The more deeply I am, I am able to trust the Buddha, reality, the Pure Land, infinity, the lighter I can hold ideas like lineage and the future. And the easier it is to be sensitive to what's occurring. And of course, I've only got a small brain compared to the size of the universe, and maybe compared to lots of other things as well, and, and a particular body. And I exist in this moment in time, so of course the actual things that I come in relationship— my local life is going to be more significant to me because that's That's the nature of how it is to be a creature. My timeline, my history, this physical space, these people, this community. So entrusting to the Buddha in the present moment means being sensitive to something that is beyond all of those local concerns, but also to those local concerns, and tuning into what does this moment require for this community. And maybe I'll put some— maybe I'll talk in specifics for a moment rather than just very generally. When I first became a Buddha— Buddhist, not a Buddha. That's a different story. When I first became a Buddhist, I was very into Zen practice, and you, you are really encouraged to have a very specific teacher, and I did not have a specific teacher. I had lots of books, and I dipped in and out of a few communities. Some of which taught me a great deal, actually, uh, sometimes in very short moments, sometimes over longer periods of time. I had this dream of going— part of me had a dream of going to Japan and finding a Japanese teacher, but I was too socially anxious and depressed and closed, uh, so I couldn't get myself there. I, I did some of the steps. I did, uh, well, that's too many details. I didn't get there, but I did get to the— eventually I got to the Buddhist house in Nara. And then I did choose a specific person to be my teacher. And, and it's parts— it's really helpful to think of parts of me, because if you'd asked me, some parts of me even then would have spoken of the Buddha being the most important thing, not the human teacher. Like the Protestant Revolution in Christianity, you know, the priest isn't between you and the divine. The priest is opening the space for you to step into relationship with the divine. Part of me would have talked about coming into relationship with the earth as being really important, but some very young parts of me were desperate for an adult human being to sort of scoop me up and sort everything out. And that got very tangled up in my relationship with David. And when we left the order, I went through several cycles of moving between entrusting to the present moment and feeling really like the world was full of possibility, and just all I needed to do was stay patient and trust the Buddha. And as Koyu says, just to keep going, put one foot in front of the other, and really trusting that, that what was occurring was both sufficient and meaningful, even though parts of me hated it. Also that that hate was in some ways sufficient and meaningful. That my despair was sufficient and meaningful. And really trusting in the process, as they say in psychotherapy. And suddenly those young parts go, it's okay, just find another— well, I'll just say, just find another daddy. How about this person? No, that doesn't quite work. How about this person? How about this person? And that sort of unraveling of those expectations, and in that unraveling, which meant actually coming into relationship with the pain that was driving that grasping. In that unraveling comes a deeper settling into trusting the Buddha, into trusting reality, into trusting that my experience, however painful or however peaceful or blissful, you know, whether I'm in like a one of the jhana states or one of the hell realms, that that is entirely appropriate for the present moment, that there is that I am in that place, uh, for almost for a reason. Maybe that goes slightly beyond, but the more deeply I'm able to trust that, the more deeply I'm taking refuge in the present moment, which includes the Buddha, or which is the Buddha, the easier it is to go back to those teachers and say 'Those were really good bits of advice. I really love how you pruned that camellia because it's got lots of flowers on this year,' or whatever it is. And this, uh, talk was, I think, titled like the future of Bright Earth, which is impossible to know. And we could have talked, you know, well, we know what— yeah, well, yeah, it's simple. In some ways it's impossible to know. In some ways we can tell you what's in the calendar for next year and what our hopes and dreams are. But what I— but what is around for me and what it feels useful to check in with is the sort of spirit of the community, which is something about this, just coming back to this point of, of directing us back to this living umbrella which includes each other in different ways, which includes these teachers, some of which Satya has named, which also includes the Earth itself, the room we're in, the sky, the birds. The cars going past, the whole universe, um, and that I really trust on a deep level. As much as I hope— other parts of me hope for particular outcomes and particular futures, I really trust on a deep level. And this, this is, in a way, it's sort of hard to put into words, there is something trustworthy about whatever is unfolding. And although it's good to pay attention to and to tend to the garden, mostly— or it's also important to trust that the garden is alive and full of its own life, and that we don't need to be in charge of it. It. Yeah, so those are the, those are the little corners of the garden that I wanted to bring to life.

Namomi to bring. Namomi to bring. I think you've probably said what I wanted to say just at the end, just like When we first met, we had a short period of being psychic.

Yeah, yeah.

And we'd play, um, Pictionary, and I'd do a line and Casper would go, "House!" I'd be like, "Yes!" And they'd do a squiggle, I'd go, "Fish!" They were like, "Yes!" That went off quite quickly then. Yeah, I just, just wanted to pull that out, and I guess that my hope, my hope for this community is that we all find our, our way of gardening, and that sometimes that way of gardening or that particular kind of group of people that we want to help or way that we want to do it will mean that we move away from each other, that if that happens, I will be sad, but I will also trust that that's what's meant to happen. Um, but I also trust that there's something in the shared space that, that will hold us together even when we're kind of making our own choices. And I hope that we can do that more, and I kind of trust more and more as I older that when I do what's right for me, then that often that ends up being right for the other person. I've been running, uh, workshops for my Substack people once a month, an hour's workshop. And actually holding a group in that particular space on Zoom with people I don't know coming takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of mental energy to get ready for it and then not know who's gonna be there. And it, it, they've been, they've gone really well, but there haven't been hundreds of people at them. And, and so I thought, okay, I just can't, I haven't got the energy to do this anymore. And I wrote to everyone and I said, look guys, this actually takes a lot of energy from me. What I'm going to do is a half-hour video instead, and then I'll post that and you can watch it when you want. I had about 7 people say to me, I'd really much prefer you to do the half-hour videos than the hour-long workshops, which was the last thing I expected because I thought that everyone would want the interaction but I think I've got lots of introverts following me and they just wanted to be able to watch the video in their own time and that suited them perfectly. So that's just a little example of sometimes when we say, this is what suits me, the other person's like, oh, that suits me too. And of course it doesn't always happen like that, but if it suits, if it doesn't suit me and then I keep doing it for a year, then I'm just gonna end up resentful anyway. So those people that I'm keeping happy, It's just doesn't, it's not sustainable or it leaks into what we're doing. So of course we have to do things we don't want to do. And when we commit to things, it's good to follow through. And, and, and all of that is true, but also how can we trust that our heart's calling or what the Buddha's calling us to do actually works out best for everyone else in the long run, even if they don't like it to start with. So I guess I wanted to say that. Maybe I'm asking everyone for permission. I'm just telling everyone I'm going to be doing that more, and I have been doing that more.

Monk in Birmingham, he was talking about a conversation he'd had with the young woman whose partner had split up. Yeah, I can't remember if he'd been having affairs or if he just split up, and, and she was distraught, and she'd come for advice from this, uh, monastic. And he said, well, would you want to be in relationship with somebody who doesn't love you, or someone who's having all the affairs? And she went, oh no. And then, you know, that was the start for being able to feel better, because actually the more congruent and authentic you are able to be like you have to start with reality and then you can, then things can grow from there. But if you're starting from pretending, uh, it won't work. Just, I wanted to belt and braces what you were saying.

Thank you. So I'm wondering about opening up for questions now.

Yeah.

And there might be questions that are about the things we've talked about, or people might have specific questions about the temple, the temple, or the future, or the past, or anything you want to ask.

We don't have the lottery numbers for next week.

No, we haven't got them. Do it anyway. Who needs the lottery when you've got the Buddha? Exactly. And that's open to you.

Do you want to stop the recording?

I might stop the recording, yeah, and then you can say anything you want.