Practicing in a Body
Roots of Mindfulness 2024 | Four Talks by Tim Burnett & Carolyn McCarthy

Good morning. Hello bodies! Welcome. And please welcome yourself and always we’re curious to see if we can welcome the parts of us body, mind, and heart that aren’t welcome. And the circumstances and situation we’re in.

[Jaye: camp working on your heat; small groups; tenting adventure]

Welcoming the rain is an obvious and interesting practice and challenge – especially for those of us tenting – I do hope you’re finding you tent is keeping you dry enough! The way this rain is an ENORMOUS blessing for the earth and especially for the wildfires in the North Cascades which hopefully they will put out and not what any of us expected when we signed up for a late August retreat. I remember many a dry hot day here during this retreat which I’ve done regularly for quite a few years. Not this time. So welcome rain. Clean, pure water from the sky quenching the thirst of the earth and easing the demons of fire in the mountains.

The practice of welcoming is so deep. One aspect that arose strongly for me the other day was trying to welcome back an estranged friendship. I have a little story to share.

I was at work cleaning up some old files and I found a workshop proposal I had written with an early Mindfulness Northwest teacher in 2014. Just 10 years but that feels like an eon ago somehow. A workshop on mindful leadership we pitched to a training institute they had at King County at the time.  The teacher I wrote with was named Lisa Hardmeyer Gray.

Mindfulness Northwest kind of started with a lurch when early on we got a large contract to offer MBSR classes for King County employees. I figured it would be just me teaching a class or two in Bellingham where I live with maybe the occasional workshop in Seattle if I was lucky. At the time I had one staff person as my admin support – she worked all of 4 hours a week with me. And suddenly there was this offer to do a lot of teaching and all of it in downtown Seattle! 

It was more than I could do so I was soon asking mindfulness friends who they knew who could help teach and Lisa was a friend, I think, of Kurt Hoelting who was the one who originally encouraged me into this space one time while we were chatting after a Zen retreat. Soon I had Kurt and Lisa and a couple of other teachers on board and we were off to help King County’s thousands of employees have a deep experience with mindfulness.

I remember Lisa as a bright energetic woman. Tall, strong, and outspoken. She’d been a documentary filmmaker who worked a lot with the Seattle public television station. Also a committed student of Zen but in a different lineage than me so I’d not met her through that. She’d recently done the MBSR teacher training and was trying to think about what was next after taking some time off after having kids. She actually had twins at the age of 44 believe it or not. So I think they were 6 or 7 by then, in public school, and she needed to get back to work but wanted something flexible and close to her heart to do. She was just THRILLED to invited to teach MBSR and joined Mindfulness Northwest with a lot of passion.

They were exciting and also turbulent all-involving years. I was very much still trying to find my feet as a mindfulness teacher and especially as the Director of a non-profit (work I knew very little about how to do really). And I was very nervous about having given up a steady income in technology – was this really going to work?

And we had some wonderful times working together Lisa and I and the other early teachers. It was exciting and kind of amazing to hauling our yoga mats into County office buildings and teaching MBSR to them after work. Lots of logistics and things to figure out but we were doing it and people in class really appreciated it. Deep heart felt work.

And we had challenging times. I wasn’t very good then at being clear about my boundaries and what I needed for myself. I tended to say yes to all requests and then kind of wiffle waffle if I realized that I shouldn’t have said yes. I wasn’t good at saying anything at all if my boundaries were transgressed – actually I was pretty good at simply not noticing that something wasn’t working for me and telling myself everything was fine, fine fine. And my answer to pretty much all stress or doubt was just to work harder.

I still have these tendencies now for sure but much less so.

But yeah it got messy. We had long tangled meetings as a staff. There were heated emails. There we strong opinions about just about every detail of how we were doing things as Mindfulness Northwest. There were even doubts expressed about the legitimacy of Mindfulness Northwest as an organization with me as the E.D.

And eventually there was a big break. I stayed a little bit in touch with a few of the others. Even tried to still work with them a bit in other ways (mistake!) but Lisa and I were completely estranged.

I’ve thought about her from time to time over the years. Heard a little about her maybe 5 years ago. I knew she’d gone back to school to be a therapist. I heard she’d given presentations with a doctor friend of mine who’s into mindfulness. But not much else.

And I’ve thought about reaching out. I had a very nice email all planned. The subject line would be “water under the bridge?” with a question mark hoping that that was true for her as it was for me. And she and the others had done a very mean and cruel thing to me in the course of that split so I’d had a lot to process but years go by and you can soften and let go.

Do you have people like this in your life. That you cared about but it all went south. I bet you do. Do you also think of them from time to time with sadness? with anger? with regret? with a little hope that one day you’ll reconnect?

And so last week finding on this old proposal I was remembering the energy and vigor Lisa and I put into writing it and teaching it and soon I was watching a little movie of other positive times together in my mind. Teaching, hanging out, sharing notes about each other’s lives – we both had some challenges in our marriages and young kids, Zen practice. We had a lot of connections. And my heart just felt full and I felt a deep trust that now was the time.

And so I wrote that email. It was a lovely message. Hoping we could reconnect. Apologizing for any harm I’d caused and asking for her forgiveness. Catching her up on my divorce and re-marriage and my now trans daughter, how MNW was doing, hoping she was doing well. Hoping we could see each other again.

I hit send and then wondered if the email address I hard for her was current and decided to Google her just to see if I could find out anything that would me with this project of reconnecting.

First I found a lovely profile of her working as a therapist at a medical center – as a Care Connector at a place called Health Point. Lovely photo of her and a short interview about how happy she is to support patients and listen deeply and learn from them. I noticed it was dated 2017.

Then I found a website about her health education business that was clearly super busy – there was a long list of presentations on wellness and mindfulness in healthcare she’d given all over the country. Really impressive. She was a real go getter.

And then the next page I found was her obituary.

I started to cry a bit as a I read about the sudden case of cancer that took her life in 2020 leaving behind her twins – a boy and a girl and husband and a large family or origin. I’d forgotten she was from a family of 10 kids in Bismark, North Dakota and there was a very long list of siblings and nieces and nephews who survived her.

But she hadn’t been alive for four years. This was sinking in. She was already gone when I had most of those “I wonder if we can reconnect” thoughts.

I even found, this was so odd, an image of her grave in Seattle. Nothing you can’t find on the internet I guess. I intend to go visit and say goodbye there, and that I loved her, which I now see that I did.

So I was ready to welcome her back into my life, and deeply hoping and praying she would welcome me back into hers, and instead the welcome is to welcome loss. To welcome sorrow. To welcome compassion for her immediate and large extended family and friends and patients and mindfulness students. We each have a big footprint of connections in this life.

Why do I share all of this? I’m not entirely sure. Something about welcoming. Something about the complexity of being a person in relationship with other complex people. Something about love, and something about sorrow I guess.

And something about bodies. About how tender and fragile they are. About how miraculous and complex the many many factors are the animate this lump of watery flesh into a living person. And how easily it all releases back into being just matter again. Calcium, iron, carbon and nitrogen as the poem reminded us.

We all know how brief and uncertain a human life is but still we assume.

Someone I last saw in her early 50’s about 10 years ago is now cruising along just fine in her early 60’s. I assume that. We usually assume that. And it’s an assumption.

The way we were thinking about the theme of this retreat ahead of time was all about embodiment – being a body, returning the body, studying our complex relationship with the body, can we accept the body more fully? What is the body anyway – is it our idea of it? Our image of it when we imagine it. When you look at it with your eyes are you really seeing the body in it’s fullness?

And then this morning we realized that yes it’s about the body but what it’s really about is welcoming the life lived through and in a body.

That there’s not really a thing we can exactly do or practice called “embodiment” – but there is a deep deep deep practice of welcoming we can do. And that welcoming absolutely is felt and experienced and deeply grounded in the body.

As I was saying this morning to study and practice welcoming is also to see and feel un-welcoming. The parts of ourselves and this world that we do NOT welcome.

And that these two tie together so very deeply. We welcome or unwelcome through our bodies, in our bodies and towards our bodies.

As you know I like to bring up some of the underlying Buddhist teachings and also some bits of science and so on that these mindfulness practices are rooted in at these retreats. The title of this retreat is the Roots of Mindfulness.

And Buddha did have a thing or two to say about impermanence, about welcoming what is, and about bodies.

I’d like to share with you a helpful essay by a Buddhist teacher named Jenna Hollenstein on navigating in aging bodies. Some of our enculturated attitudes and views of a body seem to be quite gendered and we are most of us here I think identifying as women so I’m glad to share her words here and later in the week we’ll hear some words on bodies from Carolyn as well.

Here’s Jenna Hollenstein on “How to Make Friends with Your Aging Body”:

If you have a negative body image, says Jenna Hollenstein, contemplating the five skandhas can help.

Whether you’re looking at your first gray hair, another stray eyebrow (aka chin hair), early whispers of crow’s feet, or the new belly you’ve acquired, you might feel unprepared for your body to age. When the face looking back at you in the mirror becomes momentarily unrecognizable, there’s no doubt that you, as all things, are impermanent. That can lead to fear, make you feel exposed, and cause you to cling to the past.

Given our culture’s narrow ideals of beauty, youth, and desirability, it can feel as though the relationship with your body—your body image—will inevitably and naturally get worse with age. However, an authentically positive body image doesn’t arise with proximity to the supposed ideal. Quite the contrary, the development of a positive relationship with your body is very much a practice of intentionally noticing narratives, assumptions, and internalized biases and then tracing them back to their source.

“When it comes to our bodies, it’s almost always preferable to navigate life by staying embodied.”

Suffering, impermanence, and egolessness are not new to us as meditators. Yet, perhaps because the relationship with our bodies can feel so fraught and vulnerable, it’s often difficult to remember these basic truths when it comes to the way we look. Peeling back the layers of perception of our bodies can help us make sense of them. Rather than relating to our bodies in a way that’s critical, objectifying, and largely unexamined, we can instead contact something deeper and, as it turns out, more real: the raw perception of embodiment.

Buddhism teaches us that the individual or illusory self has no permanent soul or essence and is merely an aggregate, or “heap,” of different parts that inevitably disintegrate. The components that make up the human experience and the illusory nature of a self are called the five skandhas in Buddhism, and they provide a perfect framework for compassionate contemplation. Looking deeply at the skandhas, we can uncover the origin of our negative body image and the unreality of that image—and in so doing we can unravel some of our misperception. The five skandhas are form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. Let’s go through their progression.

How we experience our lives begins with form: the material body and the sense organs. Our experience then advances through to an initial interpretation of sensation as feeling good, bad, or neutral. As we experience sensations and initial pleasure, pain, or neither, perception begins to create meaning through concept and categorization. Then mental formations include all our mental activity—our grasping and aversion through how we think, emote, believe, and behave habitually. Finally, with consciousness, we integrate the skandhas into what is known by the knower. This is subjective knowledge that arises in recognition of the previous four skandhas.

Interestingly, the way many of us experience our very own bodies—and even our ideas about what body image is or should be—begins with a familiar, fixed, and largely negative picture. For example: “I feel terrible about my body. It’s too big. I’ve gained weight over the years, and that’s bad. If I wanted to feel good about my body, I’d need to change many things about it.” Frequently this is where the exploration ends because spending time on it feels too painful.

But if we were to dig deeper, we might discover something like the following:

• Consciousness: “I feel terrible about my body. It’s too big. I’ve gained weight over the years, and that’s bad. If I wanted to feel good about my body, I’d need to change many things about it.”

• Mental formations: “I used to like my body. If it were how it used to be, then I wouldn’t suffer like this.”

• Perception: “Good bodies are thin, young, fit, and able. I exist toward the bottom of the understood hierarchy of bodily goodness.”

• Feeling: negative interpretations of daily experiences such as eating, getting dressed, seeing oneself in pictures, and being intimate with a partner.

• Form: a tight waistband; feeling of constriction; inability to take a full breath; tensing in other parts of the body.

There’s nothing in life toward which we feel only one way all the time. Our physical appearance is of course no exception. But given the unnuanced discourse about body image—in which having a good body image means loving everything about your body, all the time—it’s not surprising that we struggle. A realistic characterization of body image needs to leave room for what we know to be true for all phenomena: that suffering—or, at the least, an irritating sense of unsatisfactoriness—is inevitable; that impermanence is real because, honey, none of us is getting any younger; and, as basically good people possessing buddhanature, we deserve gentleness regardless of fleeting changes in how we feel about our bodies.

With this in mind, we can start at the beginning of the skandhas. By prioritizing an ongoing exploration of body image, we can intentionally bring awareness to our physical bodies, our embodied experiences, and specifically the sense perceptions of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. Any experience in our bodies—emotional or cognitive, good or bad, or otherwise—can serve as our cue to pause, drop into the present-moment body, and connect with form.

Moving our experience of body image from form up through to consciousness might then be experienced like this:

• Form: a tight waistband; feeling of constriction; inability to take a full breath; tensing in other parts of the body.

• Feeling: negative, unpleasant, dislike!

• Perception: “I feel uncomfortable in my body. It’s normal to not like discomfort.”

• Mental formations: “I notice myself wanting to turn on my body, to hate it, to change it. When I’ve acted on those impulses in the past, I’ve only hurt myself more. Even though these pants used to fit me comfortably, they just don’t anymore. It’s not inherently good or bad that I’m no longer a certain size.”

• Consciousness: “It’s challenging to have a body, and it’s inevitable that we will all face suffering and impermanence with our bodies. The arbitrary whims of what this era considers desirable don’t define me, and my worth isn’t determined by my appearance. What I need right now is gentleness.”

When it comes to our bodies, it’s almost always preferable to navigate life by staying embodied. Any time we find ourselves struggling with body image, enacting internalized biases, or longing for the safety and security we know to be an illusion, it’s an invitation to come back to what’s real: “Right now, it’s like this, and that’s hard. My job as a practitioner is to stay, soften, and keep an open heart even (especially) for myself.”

And about the author says:

Jenna Hollenstein, MS, RDN, is a nutrition therapist, speaker, and best-selling author of Eat to Love, Intuitive Eating for Life, and Mommysattva. She is passionate about helping busy people incorporate mindfulness into nutrition and life. Contact Jenna at www.jennahollenstein.com

On her website she identifies as an “intuitive eating dietician and meditation teacher”

I and I do want to temper what she says just a little from what I’ve learned from my wife and other women around how deeply implanted body image conditioning can be. It’s absolutely not like you can’t be well aware of what’s happening, of how you’ve internalized harsh messages from your mother for example, and still be subject to the suffering that comes from that. Still be beating yourself up for looking the wrong way even while knowing it’s all a distorted messed up illusion. Just figuring this out and trying to remap it isn’t a quick fix by any means. I’m sure Jenna Hollenstein would agree with that but I’m sure her essay could only be so long for publication. These are slow processes with lots of ups and downs and bumps in the road.

This is a wonderful application of a Buddhist teaching to be sure and of course it’s no so easy. Nothing about us is a quick fix.

Also if signs of aging aren’t what trigger that unwelcoming spirit in you – or maybe not yet – there is plenty here for all of us to consider the way our minds can construct an attitude towards our bodies that leads to unwelcoming and suffering and alternate pathways where might construct an attitude, an understanding, of our bodies that leads to welcoming, acceptance and even joy and gratitude. That we are each privileged – so privileged – to be here, to be alive and there is absolutely only possible way to do that – like Carolyn said last night as far as I can tell everyone here is alive because they are in a body – or even more clear that they are a body.

That it all starts with form. With some felt experience. Then so quicky we are leaning one way or the other in our attitude, often not very consciously: that’s a good feeling or that’s a bad feeling. Pleasant or unpleasant. And then we’re cooking up the judgement about why. And then having all kinds of thoughts and impulses and attitudes and emotions about it all.

Can we be more aware – what we’re up to this week, what a rich opportunity we have here on retreat to watch these chains of feeling – leaning – perception – thoughts & emotions & stories spool up again and again. And we see them more closely sometimes we can write a different story. A more welcoming story. A more accepting story.

Other times maybe we can let go of the story all together. That belly shape is just a shape. The gray hair is a hair with a color. That’s it. Next moment please!

So let see what we notice – you don’t have go looking for trouble – let’s see what we notice 

I want to open with a poem:

Pádraig Ó Tuama – How To Belong Be Alone

It all begins with knowing
nothing lasts forever,
so you might as well start packing now.
In the meantime,
practice being alive.

There will be a party
where you’ll feel like
nobody’s paying you attention.
And there will be a party
where attention’s all you’ll get.
What you need to do
is to remember
to talk to yourself
between these parties.

And,
again,
there will be a day,
— a decade —
where you won’t
fit in with your body
even though you’re in
the only body you’re in.

You need to control
your habit of forgetting
to breathe.

Remember when you were younger
and you practiced kissing on your arm?
You were on to something then.
Sometimes harm knows its own healing
Comfort knows its own intelligence.
Kindness too.
It needs no reason.

There is a you
telling you another story of you.
Listen to her.

Where do you feel
anxiety in your body?
The chest? The fist? The dream before waking?
The head that feels like it’s at the top of the swing
or the clutch of gut like falling
& falling & falling and falling
It knows something: you’re dying.
Try to stay alive.

For now, touch yourself.
I’m serious.

Touch your
self.
Take your hand
and place your hand
some place
upon your body.
And listen
to the community of madness
that
you are.
You are
such an
interesting conversation.

You belong
here.

Apostle’s arrival – Monday night? Just keep doing dishes until you hear otherwise. (and how needing to know things ahead is a way of burdening our consciousness extra more)

Blue tarp over tent – impressive! please take down now that we’re safe from rain, passage way to the church where other group will be meeting.

That was a wonderful little teaching on not making a racket from Carolyn this morning! Be mindful of the wondrous objects we manipulate like doors and bathroom stalls – and don’t forget the bathroom paper towel dispense – CA-CHUNK. I’ve carefully studies these doors as they’ve gradually gotten more and more worn out over the decades and there are ways of reliably opening and closing them quietly. Sometimes it involves opening the pair of doors together a little bit as one can get stuck under another – CREAUNK – then letting the one close and opening the other the rest of the way. It’s an interesting little challenge you could take up.

And then in the inevitable case that you forget all about it assuming that all you have to do is pull the darn door handle if you want to open a door and – CREAUNK – well at least you noticed the noise you just caused and I hope you won’t feel badly about it. It happens. The doors are like a little “are you mindful?” exam that we will all fail regularly.

But the really interesting practice that arises from bringing this up – and sometimes I hesitate to even bring it up because goodness we all have enough to worry about now we have to be perfect in opening doors quietly?! – but the practice that arises from this which gets more intense when the teachers point it out is: JUDGEMENT.

“What a RACKET? Who just opened that door? Oh it was you! Again! Didn’t you hear Carolyn and Tim’s teaching about being quiet and mindful? I can’t believe I have to practice with someone as mindful as you.”

That’s the extreme version for effect of course but watch out for the quieter versions. More like CREAUNK -> grrr, tension in the jaw, slight scrunching in the eyes, no I’m too mature to turn and see who just made that racket but I wish they’d pay more attention. Kind of annoying. We’re trying to meditate in here.

So what to do?

Well the usual answer seems to be hope that everyone gets it together and that everyone every single time is very careful and the doors are always opened quietly. If we’re honest that’s what we want right? No more CREAUNKs!

And isn’t it funny how we commit ourselves to a plan that is doomed to failure. Carolyn talked about the body being pretty amusing sometimes….how about the mind? It’s hilarious in it’s utterly unrealistic ideas.

And we get pretty committed too. I have gotten notes asking me to announce again about opening the doors more quietly. What’s that about? “Oh I know I’ll get the teachers to fix the dopes that aren’t paying attention.”

Okay though given that there are absolutely going to be many more CREAUNKs who do we practice with this?

One option is to note judgement and reactivity as what they are: judgement and reactivity. You can label them as that. You can notice how they link up with constrictions in the body in various place for sure. I used to have the practice of trying to quickly and directly note “judgement” and do my best not to then start rolling the story of why they shouldn’t be doing this or that or how I should talk to them about it and what I should say to get them to change their behavior to suit my desires. These thoughts spin up very quickly and are also a good illustration of the Buddhist teaching of the 5 skandha we were exploring yesterday:

Form – experiencing a sound

Feeling – unpleasant, don’t like it

Perception – someone just opened the door and it made that sound

Mental Formations – they should know better, who did that? what can I do to stop this from happening?

Consciousness – people aren’t very careful

To apply the label judgement is to try to exit out of that process somewhere in the middle. To stop reinforcing that perception and those mental formations and the conclusions they are reinforcing in my consciousness. Just an experience of sound followed quickly by a judgement.

SO that’s a really interesting and important thing to practice actually. The noisy door is a gift of practice. Is a teacher. It’s especially wonderful because it really doesn’t matter that much. It’s a noise, yes most of find it an unpleasant noise, but by the time you’ve even identified it it’s gone anyway. Then the one making the noise isn’t the klutz at the door but you in your own mind. You’re the one disturbing the silence from that point on.

And little by little it’s really and truly possible to be less reactive working patiently with experiences we categorize as annoying. It takes patience and persistence but you will absolutely see a change over time. Trust me on this. No you will probably never learn to love CREAUNKs but you can absolutely not make them into a problem.

Just: noise.

Just: judgement.

Just: releasing and dropping fully into the wonderful next moment as it arises.

But here’s an more positive response that really helps with this kind of mind state: practice gratitude.

Whenever you notice you’re receiving something or appreciating something or supported by something – which is pretty much all the time – make a mental note, say a silent thank you!, tune into your gratefulness.

This was really easy for me to practice this morning getting my coffee. I know that doesn’t appear there by magic. Sue P. got up early and carefully made it. And it was delicious. I was fortunate to know Sue and be able to picture her kindness and her smile as I said to myself, “thank you Sue!” but even if you don’t know who made the coffee it’s just as important: “thank you!”.

And goodness: the food, this place, the sun, the clean air, our friends practicing along side us, whatever you might appreciate from Carolyn and I flapping our lips up here: “thank you” “I am grateful”.

No need to make it up for force anything. Like all mind states gratefulness isn’t always available to our consciousness. But we can invite it. We can orient towards it. We have powerful mental habits  and they form out of how we usually use our minds. We can build new ones. More helpful ones. Grateful people tend to be kinder, more patient, and happier. It’s actually powerful stuff.

Take a moment to ponder whether you can access it. What are you grateful for right now?

Another teaching to share on the body. I guess I’m kind of inviting guest teachers in because I’m not so sure myself how to talk about the practice of embodiment. Here’s an article by my own Zen teacher, Norman Fischer. It’s entitled, What Is Your Body? This is a little longer and headier than the piece I shared yesterday about unwinding our conditioning around body image suffering.

And note that in addition to sending the poems and readings after the retreat we’ll send you these talks too! We record them – I’m on video right now! – and post them on our website. We even post the notes which includes these quoted articles. And so there’s a bit of resource there if you want to do a self-study on these Roots of Mindfulness teachings: we’ve been giving these retreats for a decade and I checked there are talks going back 7 years. All of our newsletter articles are posted there too. Wow, why are you here you could just be learning all of this online at home! (But yeah: you probably wouldn’t be). All that to say: let Norman’s words just pass in and out of your heads and relax. If something really catches your attention that’s nice but more like an impression or a feeling is great too. And if you intellectual “yeah but I want to GET IT! mind is active” just remind yourself you can listen again and read it and repeat as many times as you want when you get home.

We think about our bodies all the time. How do they look? What is their state of health? Are they aging? Are they sufficiently strong, attractive, impressive? These questions churn out an almost endless stream of thinking, feeling, and spending. Consider all the clothing, beauty products, food products, accessories, books, equipment, therapists, health products, body workers, and so on that make up such a huge portion of our economy.

Everything depends on the body. Without it, we are literally nothing. Transcendent concepts such as consciousness, soul, higher self, buddhanature—are these meaningful realities or merely hopeful words? And whatever they are, how could they exist independent of a body?

The body matters. Yet what is it?

We take the body completely for granted, just as we do the sky and the Earth. Yet the body, like them, is much more than we know. What we think of as our body—what we feel, imagine, and dream about it, what we unthinkingly assume it to be—isn’t really what the body is.

The body is more than the body, and our feelings about it run deeper than we can know. The body as it actually is mysterious to us.

We assume we know what the body is. But even a few moments of examination produces more fragmentation and uncertainty than clarity.

What self is there that is not the body? Yet where is the self that possesses a body to call her own? Who, outside the body, utters the words “my body”? Without a tongue, without a brain, I can’t even utter the words.

Ask yourself: from what perspective do you look at your body? From inside, peering out from the body’s eyes? or from the outside, as if you were looking at it in a mirror? But how is it possible for the body to be external to itself? No, that can’t be. The body must be contained in the experience of looking, so what you see and call “my body” must be something else.

Is the body the flow of its sensory experiences—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, tactile sensation? A closer look reveals problems here too. Where does a smell or a taste occur? In the nose, on the tongue? In the things smelled or tasted? In the brain? In all at once?

And what about awareness, the insubstantial, apparently nonphysical process through which anything we experience comes to us? Is awareness inside the body or outside it? If it is inside, how can we say “my” body? There is no one outside to say “mine.” But if awareness is outside the body… no, that can’t be right!

Yet awareness is foundational to our experiencing ourself as a person at all. Without awareness there would be no smelling or tasting—and no body. There can be flesh without awareness, but a living human body, as we understand it, is aware of being a body.

The Buddhist teachings on the workings of mind, called Abhidharma, teach us that there isn’t a body per se, just a variety of momentary mental events. Some of them we think of as “physical,” even though these teachings say that really they’re not merely physical.

When I feel an ache in my right leg, the Abhidharma analysis goes, this sensation is a mental event produced in consciousness when an object I call a leg activates inner sensors that awaken awareness in a particular way. Likewise, seeing, hearing, and all sense perceptions are mental events stimulated by apparently physical objects.

Contemporary cognitive science agrees. All experiences arise when consciousness is activated by a sense organ meeting an internal or external object. (Here, the mind itself functions like a sixth sense organ in relation to emotion and thought.) We assume we are “experiencing” the object that gave rise to the event in our consciousness. But the truth is that the only thing we can verify is the experience itself, however we may be construing, or misconstruing, it. The idea of the body is like this. It is an idea based on unwarranted assumptions about the coherence of our conscious experience.

In Buddhist analysis, then, there is no body. What there is is form (rupa)—some kind of illusory arising that appears to be solid and that forms a basis for experience we call physical. But in actual fact it’s just a continuous flow of momentary conscious events.

[my add:] We think something is solid and physical because of a feeling of texture in the hand or of weight in the arm when we lift it or of a shape seen by the eyes that mind has a name for – or all of the above, but it’s only through an interpretation of the senses that we quickly assign one experience as being because this is a physical thing and another because that’s an idea.

Still, our idea that we have a body is powerful. Beyond our misinterpretation of our personal experiences, the idea of the body is reinforced by the social discourse we have all grown up with, which takes as an obvious fact that we “have” bodies. Our whole system of language is based on the metaphor of the body (which is more than anything else a metaphor). Most of our feelings and commonplace ideas about our lives are based on the metaphor of the body, a thought so foundational to us we can’t even begin to know how to question it.

On the night of his enlightenment, the story goes, the Buddha was visited by the forces of Mara, the Evil One, who was determined to stop the Buddha from achieving awakening. Most of Mara’s devastating and spectacular display of hopes and fears had to do with the body, either sensual allurements or threats of bodily harm. Declaring that the many threatening minions arrayed behind him were his army, Mara defiantly called out, “Where is your army, oh Buddha?” In response the Buddha touched the ground and said, “The Earth is my witness and support.”

In touching the Earth, the Buddha was not only calling on the Earth goddess to be his protector. He was saying, the Earth is my body. My body expresses Earth, is produced and supported by Earth, is made exclusively of Earth elements. Nothing on Earth, no matter how frightening, can threaten this indestructible Earth body. Even if it is broken up into a million pieces it remains, going home to its Mother who gave birth to it, who embraces it now and always will embrace it.

With this gesture of truth, belonging, and ultimate invulnerability, born of surrender to and identity with the Earth, Buddha expressed his absolute fearlessness, and in doing so defeated Mara. After this, his enlightenment unfolded.

And this is exactly true of all of us. Our bodies too are the Earth. They rise up from her, and are nurtured, fed, and illuminated by her. our bodies are in constant touch with Earth, and return to Earth, from which they have never parted.

Our human bodies are expressions of the Earth’s creative force. Everything that makes human life—breathing, eating, elimination, perception, feeling, language—occurs only in concert with Earth. no thought would ever take place without the prior existence of Earth. No thought would be thinkable without air, water, fire, space, dirt. Even our most abstract ideas, like freedom, justice, and happiness, are nothing more or less than Earth’s urge, the thought of wind, sky, water, and light. Nothing we think or do could ever be more profound or true than these natural elements, which are literally nothing more or less than our own bodies.

[SKIP THIS but important to share w/ Zen students] Mahayana Buddhism was a philosophical and emotional reaction to Buddhism’s earlier, more sober teachings, which often characterized the body as repulsive and a source of attachment. In Mahayana thought, the body as such is asserted and celebrated. It is transfigured, through art and faith, into the bodhisattva body, the buddha body, the perfect eternal beautiful body hidden in the earthly body of impermanence and decay.

[SKIP THIS] The Buddha of the Mahayana sutras has three bodies: the dharmakaya, or truth body, measureless, all-encompassing and perfect, beyond perception and concept; the sambhogakaya, or enjoyment body, the purified perceived body of perfect meditation and teaching; and finally the nirmanakaya, the transient historical body that appears in our world for the purpose of teaching worldly beings. In Zen teaching, it is axiomatic that the ordinary human body that can be accessed in meditation practice is itself beyond the human body as normally conceived. The “True Body,” as Dogen says, “is far beyond the world’s dusts.” or, as Hakuin puts it in his Song of Zazen, “This very body is the Body of Buddha.”

The actual biological human body really is (as we discover more and more every day) a marvelous and endlessly complex occurrence. Three hundred years of medical science has still only scratched the surface of its immense functioning. The brain, for instance: how does it regulate everything so perfectly, adjusting to any and all sorts of contingencies, producing thoughts, literary works, skyscrapers, cities, social systems, and so on? The heart, the lungs. Cells, DNA. The enormous knowledge and complex communication and movement that seems to occur effortlessly within every human body: walking, running, jumping, shouting, singing, playing the piano. There are 25,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. Stretched out end to end they’d reach the moon. Blood flows through them ceaselessly, nurturing every organ in the body. The actual functioning human body is a marvel. No one manufactured it. No patents exist for it. No one knows where it comes from or exactly how it is produced. And the consciousness associated with it, the consciousness capable of knowing itself? About this we haven’t a clue.

In the body scan meditation made popular in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction meditation course, practitioners lie on the floor while an instructor walks them through forty-five minutes of detailed mindfulness exercises designed to bring awareness to various parts of the body, from head to toe. Simply applying awareness to the body in detail has a healing effect. No one knows why.

Zen meditation, especially as practiced in the Soto school, is a body practice, a process of paying attention to the body’s detail. When you are taught Zen meditation, the lesson typically begins with instruction about how to walk into the hall to take your seat: you are to walk carefully, paying attention to each footfall, with your hands in a particular position, your body erect. You are then instructed to bow carefully to the meditation cushion (the form for bowing is also detailed for you), sit down, and arrange your posture carefully. Your spine should be erect, your chin tucked in, your hands folded delicately into a mudra—thumb tips just touching, palms curved. Breath should be smooth, natural, and deep in the belly.

All this physical detail is the focus for the sitting—not a teaching or a spiritual theme. Simply the experience of body itself is the focus of meditation. When the awareness wanders, as it will, this is fine as long as the practitioner is fully committed to coming back to the feeling of the body sitting and the breath moving. As with the body scan, there is an uncanny magic in this simple practice. Returning awareness to the body and the breath over and over again—over the course of one sitting, or many sittings, for years, decades, a lifetime—interrupts the usual flow of thinking profoundly based on the assumption of a discrete self inhabiting a unitary body. Once that flow is interrupted, and awareness is returned to the flow of lived experience in the present moment of being alive (a moment in which everything arises and disappears at once and seems to be both there and not there), life feels different. The body no longer appears to be the body per se. Somehow, within awareness of the process of living, the body becomes more than it is. It becomes identical with the awareness, and there isn’t a beginning or an end to it.

After sitting practice, normal daily life in the body returns. But there’s a lightness and ease that comes with the feeling of having been relieved, at least temporarily, of the confinement of your small life lived in a vulnerable body. You might feel “calmer,” but the feeling is more than calm. It’s the feeling of reality—of having left, for at least a little while, the stressful unreality of daily living and entering a larger space. This is calming. And if you practice for a lifetime, this temporary relief becomes more than temporary. The sense that the body is more than the body, and that your life is more than your life, becomes a conviction and a calm confidence in the body itself, and therefore also in the mind.

One of the deepest themes in Western philosophy, beginning with Plato, is that the world of appearance isn’t real. So the job of the intellect, its spiritual assignment, was to carry us beyond this corrupt physical world to a perfected world of nonmaterial form, purely mental or spiritual. This was seen as the task of philosophy and religion until the twentieth century, when phenomenology, perhaps in part under the influence of Buddhism, which never did have a mind/body split, began to break it down again.

In our Earth-threatened time, when we must think and care about the future well-being of the planet, it is fitting that we begin to learn and enact the truth that has always been engraved on our very skins: that body, mind, spirit, and Earth are one expression, one concern, and one delight.

Nice how Norman mentioned the body scan as well as the transformational power of embodied sitting.

We could also focus on walking meditation which we do a lot of, no? Every step is the Earth’s body reconnecting with the Earth. Like a child returning to it’s mother’s warm embrace. Can we invite that feeling – the immeasurable gratitude of that – and not limit our perceptions to some separate unit called “me” who is walking on a weedy lawn for 20 minutes because that’s the scheduled event right now but as a true celebration of Earth bodies together uniting with the earth.

Which brings me back to this classic from Derek Walcott – can you handle one more recitation? It’s such a lovely sentiment I think:

Derek Walcott – Love After Love

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you have ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

The Names of Birds
by Carolyn McCarthy

In one arm, my grandmother holds me, my tiny newborn self
Her other arm points to the air,
to the feeder outside the kitchen window,
the small black and white bird,
shiny black eye looking back,
shiny black seed in its beak

Chickadee

Bird names in my brain before language,
before any knowing but hunger and love
I grew up believing they were just Something You Know,
like colors or your name

Nuthatch, wood duck, jay

Looking out kitchen windows, walking on the beach, in the woods,
together in matching Keds and heavy binoculars
Over and over her arm flung out, focused,
The bony finger pointing, the whispered name

Merganser, myrtle, loon

That point and whisper an arrow
Electric, a connection, a directive to pay attention – there – now
To the fragile life before us, flying and singing its way to food

Twenty years she’s been dead,
but I still hear her in my ear
When I see a bird I don’t know, she whispers,
the name rises in me like a prayer

Flycatcher, sapsucker, phoebe

Since she can speak from beyond, I ask her other questions:
What should I do here? What does it mean? Am I doing it right?
Her answer:

Eagle, heron, hummingbird
Junco, chickadee, jay

[“walking isn’t a break” announcement? mixed messages! advanced silence practice to be able to hold the silence when conversation is swirling around you. Maybe watch the impulse to give Carolyn and I suggestions on how to handle the changes though – we’re professionals and we got this and there’s an opportunity there to practice feeling that impulse to help (and all the feelings embedded in that impulse – you can unpack them and explore that!) trusting that it all works out for you and for everyone as we go along]

I have one more slide for the slideshow. Maybe mine is a short video clip.

It’s a circle of people sitting in an MBSR class – maybe 8 years ago. This one 40-something woman with curly brown hair, her name tag says Carrie, is really engrossed in a small group conversation after a sitting meditation. Maybe the teacher had read Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese during the sit, too – “you don’t have to be good” – when the teacher brings us back to together to ask for highlights of the conversation for us all to consider, she turns to me, tears in her eyes, and says something like: “you mean I REALLY don’t have to be good?? I REALLY don’t have to be an A+ student all the time?!” the whole room exhales in release of long held tensions. long, long, long held tensions. It was a really beautiful moment.

So these bodies. This place. This earth. The elements of earth, of water – lots of water! – fire – the sun returns! – air, space. All of this that is what we call: this. We can add a noun if we want to: this earth. This world. This universe. This life, but it’s only this.

I have a question to pose this morning.

As David Byrne famously asked in a song, “well, how did we get here?!”

A few stories today.

Each time we’ve practice Qi Gong outside a raven has been calling.  Just calling? Calling to or at us? How knows.

But it reminds me again the deep native roots of this place. Raven is an important character in northwest stories and tales. It’s good, I think, even if in it feels like barely enough on the face of what happened here to bring this up, to learn a little, to hold it in our hearts as best we can. And I myself want to renew my intention to connect more with our local tribes and get to know people a bit. It’s not just the history: they are here now.

Here’s a raven story that I don’t have a great attribution for – Wikipedia says it’s a Coast Salish story but not which people it comes from. Some stories were the property of families and only told by them but apparently raven stories were more widely shared. Hopefully it’s reasonable for me to share this story.

The collector’s preface says: “This is an ancient story told on Puget Sound and includes how Raven helped to bring the Sun, Moon, Stars, Fresh Water, and Fire to the world.”

And this is the story:

Long ago, near the beginning of the world, Gray Eagle was the guardian of the sun and moon and stars, of fresh water, and of fire. Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden. People lived in darkness, without fire and without fresh water.

Gray Eagle had a beautiful daughter, and Raven fell in love with her. At that time Raven was a handsome young man. He changed himself into a snow-white bird, and as a snow-white bird he pleased Gray Eagles daughter. She invited him to her fathers longhouse.

When Raven saw the sun and the moon and the stars and fresh water hanging on the sides of Eagles lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and a brand of fire also, and flew out of the longhouse through the smoke hole.

As soon as Raven got outside he hung the sun up in the sky. It made so much light that he was able to fly far out to an island in the middle of the ocean. When the sun set, he fastened the moon up in the sky and hung the stars around in different places. By this new light he kept on flying, carrying with him the fresh water and the brand of fire he had stolen.

He flew back over the land. When he had reached the right place, he dropped all the water he had stolen. It fell to the ground and there became the source of all the fresh-water streams and lakes in the world.

Then Raven flew on, holding the brand of fire in his bill. The smoke from the fire blew back over his white feathers and made them black. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the firebrand. It struck rocks and went into the rocks. That is why, if you strike two stone together, fire will drop out.

Ravens feathers never became white again after they were blackened by the smoke from the firebrand. That is why Raven is now a black bird.

I grew up in California and studied Coyote stories a bit there. Like Coyote, Raven doesn’t do these things out of great altruism. It’s more like he’s just messing around and it works out well for everyone but not always so well for him. How cold and dark it must have been for the people before raven freed the sun, the moon and fire. How thirsty they must have been before he stole the water and dropped it. And I think when it says “dropped it” that’s what they mean, more of an “oops” than a great gift.

In the coyote stories Coyote ends up taking all kinds of punishment as a result of his fluid, free actions. In this one raven gets charred black. I bet he was a proud bird who loved being clean and white but now for the rest of time he’s black.

Raven and coyote, messing around, stirring things up, getting into trouble. There’s plenty of sex in these stories too. Raven and coyote live it up whenever they see the opportunity. Maybe Raven has been been chuckling at us. Such uptight meditators: geeze, loosen up. Probably he wouldn’t have said that, but maybe he’s thinking about swooping into the Hall at break time and tossing all or our meditation cushions into Samish Bay just for fun.

We’re such a careful self-conscious group of people, maybe it’d be good if we were a little looser and willing to get into more trouble. Maybe comedians and slapstick artists fill a similar role in mainstream American culture: as we laugh with them, and at them, and moan a little at their craziness it loosens us up a little and accept our own craziness. Well, Carolyn’s trying, bless her: at the end of our group walk that she led yesterday she tried to lead us in running through the rain but none of us got it.

Another story:

There was nothing, well we don’t know it was nothing but we have no knowing about it at all. There was a time before we can know anything. Then something very big happened. This is an edited down story from a article on that National Geographic website.

In the first 10^-43 seconds of its existence, the universe was very compact, less than a million billion billionth the size of a single atom. It’s thought that at such an incomprehensibly dense, energetic state, the four fundamental forces—gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces—were forged into a single force.

Then, in an unimaginably small fraction of a second, INFLATION happened: all that matter and energy expanded outward very quickly and more or less evenly. We think it was an even expansion as the universe has such an even temperature and distribution of matter.

After this initial inflation, the universe continued to expand but at a much slower rate. It’s still unclear what exactly powered inflation.

As time passed and matter cooled, more diverse kinds of particles began to form, and they eventually condensed into the stars and galaxies of our present universe. But this took a while.

When the universe was a billionth of a second old, the universe had cooled down enough for the four fundamental forces to separate from one another. The universe’s fundamental particles also formed. It was still so hot, though, that these particles hadn’t yet assembled into many of the subatomic particles we have today, such as the proton.

As the universe kept expanding, this piping-hot primordial soup—called the quark-gluon plasma—continued to cool. Some particle colliders, such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, are powerful enough to re-create tiny examples of the quark-gluon plasma.

Radiation in the early universe was so intense that colliding photons could form pairs of particles made of matter and antimatter, which is like regular matter in every way except with the opposite electrical charge. It’s thought that the early universe contained equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But as the universe cooled, photons no longer packed enough punch to make matter-antimatter pairs. So like an extreme game of musical chairs, many particles of matter and antimatter paired off and annihilated one another.

Somehow, some excess matter survived—and it’s now the stuff that people, planets, and galaxies are made of. Our existence is a clear sign that the laws of nature treat matter and antimatter slightly differently. Researchers have experimentally observed this rule imbalance, called CP violation, in action. Physicists are still trying to figure out exactly how matter won out in the early universe.

Within the universe’s first second, it was cool enough for the remaining matter to coalesce into protons and neutrons, the familiar particles that make up atoms’ nuclei. And after the first three minutes, the protons and neutrons had assembled into hydrogen and helium nuclei. By mass, hydrogen was 75 percent of the early universe’s matter, and helium was 25 percent. The abundance of helium is a key prediction of big bang theory, and it’s been confirmed by scientific observations.

Despite having atomic nuclei, the young universe was still too hot for electrons to settle in around them to form stable atoms. The universe’s matter remained a dense impenetrable electrically charged fog. It would take another 380,000 years or so for the universe to cool down enough for neutral atoms to form—a pivotal moment called recombination. The cooler universe made it transparent for the first time, which let the photons rattling around within it finally zip through unimpeded.

There wasn’t a single star in the universe until about 180 million years after the big bang. It took that long for gravity to gather clouds of hydrogen and forge them into stars. Many physicists think that vast clouds of dark matter, a still-unknown material that outweighs visible matter by more than five to one, provided a gravitational scaffold for the first galaxies and stars. There is much we still don’t know about our universe.

Once the universe’s first stars ignited, the light they unleashed packed enough punch to once again strip electrons from neutral atoms, a key chapter of the universe called reionization.

Even now the universe is expanding, and to astronomers’ surprise, the pace of expansion is accelerating. It’s thought that this acceleration is driven by a force that repels gravity called dark energy. We still don’t know what dark energy is, but it’s thought that it makes up 68 percent of the universe’s total matter and energy. Dark matter makes up another 27 percent. In essence, all the matter you’ve ever seen—from your first love to the stars overhead—makes up less than five percent of the universe.

This no less far out, don’t you think, than Raven stealing the sun from Gray Eagle, or the story of Genesis. This is the theory of the so-called big bang. It was born of the observation that other galaxies are moving away from our own at great speed in all directions, as if they had all been propelled by an ancient explosive force.

A Belgian priest named Georges Lemaître first suggested the big bang theory in the 1920s, when he theorized that the universe began from a single primordial atom. The idea received major boosts from Edwin Hubble’s observations that galaxies are speeding away from us in all directions, as well as from the 1960s discovery of cosmic microwave radiation—interpreted as echoes of the big bang—by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. It’s the theory that so far makes the best sense to scientists and it’s quite well accepted.

And it’s a theory. A theory that explained the observable situation. The biggest things it helps explain are that galaxies are speeding away from each other and all the observations agree that if you figure out the directions they’re going now and how old they are they all started at the same point. And there are tons of other technical things like a kind of cosmic background radiation that’s everywhere that the big bang explains.

But it’s interesting to think about theory and the idea of “truth.” Sometimes you hear people say, disparagingly way, “it’s that just a theory?” But actually theories are usually all we have. About everything. We just get so used to them and take them for granted as “true.” Is there any trust that isn’t a theory? There are theories that can be found not to match observable evidence though so maybe those are not true, unless we were just looking at the evidence in the wrong way and maybe it was true after all – this has also happened in the history of science.

But back when stars first formed we still only had the very simple elements of hydrogen and helium. As Nikita Gill has been reminding us we are made of other stuff too:

We have calcium in our bones,

iron in our veins,

carbon in our souls,

and nitrogen in our brains.

93 percent stardust

with souls made of flames

we are all just stars

that have people names.

Maybe you have a vague memory of the very impressive looking periodic table of the elements from high school science class. Our world is made of these building blocks called atoms. And atoms are of different types – the elements – some are more common than others. Some are actually quite rare. And the main differences between them are about many tiny protons and neutrons are in the tiny core of the atom and how many electrons are swirling and jumping around the core in a kind of energy cloud. And there are some interesting properties to them depending on the relative numbers of these things. Some atoms tend to fall apart – radioactive isotopes – but most are remarkably stable even though they aren’t really like any kind of solid thing. They are mostly space actually. Like really mostly space. More like fields of energy holding a little area of space together.

And matter – stuff – is made up of many, many, many of these tiny atoms – they sort of stick together in a certain way – it’s more like being pulled together like magnets are pulled together than like snapping legos together though. There are powerful forces between the atoms that when the balance out right make matter seem as stable as it is. This building is made of a lot of atoms in different pretty-stable configurations. Not 1000% stable. The wood in these walls is slowly decaying for example. Stable but impermanent. And remember how there’s a ton of space inside a single atom? There’s also a ton of space in between atoms in this stable kind of matrices that we call matter – stuff like wood, metal, glass, bone.

It’s just all happening at a scale too small for our eyes to see since our eyes rely on light bouncing off of things – or not bouncing off of things so we see darkness in between so it looks like a solid thing to us and we have our mental theories of what’s real and solid – physical – as Norman was talking about in this essay What is the Body? but really it’s mostly space.

Here’s a mind bending analogy just using one of those simple hydrogen atoms about how much space we’re talking about there. Hold onto your hat:

An atom is estimated to be 99.9999999999996% empty space. This means that if a hydrogen atom were the size of Earth, its nucleus would only be about 200 meters across.

So the main element of the universe is, really and truly: space. Not just space out there – outer space – but embedded in absolutely everything. Including us. Sometimes we say we’re mostly water which is true, we’re about 60% water – but if you zoom in further we’re mostly space. Wild huh?

But in our creation story from science we still just have hydrogen and some helium in the early universe. How do we get calcium and carbon and things?

Hydrogen is the simplest of elements – it has a single proton/neutron pair in the central nucleus and a single electron bouncing around it maintaining it’s “atom territory”.

And for helium just double all of those numbers two, two and two. But this little nucleii are really stable and these super energetic buzzy bees of electrons are super protective of their atoms.

You can’t just jam them together like legos to make the more complex atoms that like iron, carbon, and nitrogen. You would need ENORMOUS forces and an INCREDIBLE heat.

Well if hydrogen and helium are all we have that must be the building blocks for more complex atoms right?

And where do you think we’d find that? Yeah: you guess it: the stars.

Stars start as a big cloud of hydrogen – that simplest of atoms – and the power of gravity starts to smooSH them all together. And with the intense pressure of all of these hydogen atoms being packed closer and closer and closer together they do start smooshing so intensely that their resistance is overcome and two hydrogens becomes a helium. Somehow and here’s a somehow that’s pivotal to our existence when they finally snap together the tiny little mass of the new helium nucleus (2 protons and 2 neutrons, one from each hydrogen) is just a little tiny bit less and since nothing can just vanish, says physics trying to explain how this goes, the difference in mass during this smooshfest is released as energy. The energy OF THE SUN. The wonderful warmth we felt this August morning after our November day yesterday is from hydrogen atoms fusing together. Lots of them. Pretty far away too. Wild eh?

During their regular lifetimes the core of a sun gets more complex as the helium atoms in turn smooshh together to form more complex elements but even so that’s just enough energy to get us through the medium weight elements like carbon and iron so our suns’ creating stuff for new planets and beings to be made of later on and those elements in our earth were created by earlier suns doing this fusion – fusing – dance.

While we’re made mostly made of these lighter elements none of this works without a very key processes that depend on heavier elements. For example, iodine is a component of hormones that control brain development and metabolism and it’s a heavy hitter. Iodine has 53 protons & neutrons with a cloud of 53 electrons. Our sun doesn’t have the power in it’s core to make that.

Not to mention all of the “rare earths” which are even bigger which are needed in our fancy electronic technology. Well and even basic stuff like good steel needs a sprinkling of heavier elements – alloys they get called – mixed into the iron and carbon or it’s too soft or too brittle to be much use.

So if you’ll indulge me in what last stop for this science rant: where do these heavier elements come from if even the center of a frickin’ burning hot star isn’t enough heat and pressure to jam the atomic pieces together?

Well here’s the deal. Eventually our sun will run out of fuel. It was just a giant cloud of hydrogen to start and it’s using up hydrogen as it burns it up (into helium and then the helium packed into the core can fuse to make other stuff up to a point). When that happens, watch out: but it’s really great too.

And it turns out the heat inside our sun’s doing another important job: it’s energy that pushes out to balance the gravitational forces that a hold the entire sun together. When the fire goes out that heat goes away and – they think this takes just a few SECONDS – the ginormous amount of mass that a mature star is collapses in on itself and in that off the charts amount of pressure all kinds of crazy lego constructions happen really fast. It’s totally gnarly in there and an array of all of the heavier elements are created in those seconds and remember how jamming two hydrogens together to create a helium releases a bunch of energy – our sunlight today – well now we’re into much heavier hitters and enormous enormous amounts of energy and that’s gotta go somewhere…KABOOM the whole thing just explodes. All of that energy is released. This is a supernova. And those bits of matter are scattered all over. Eventually they collect together, new stars form, planets form, maybe life forms.

If you’re old enough you might remember the wonderful geeky astronomer Carol Sagan who has a public TV show sharing about astronomy in the early ’80s? He once famously said: “We are made of star stuff.”

I’m not sure how our poet Nikita Gill came up with 93 percent, seems like 100% to me. Trying to look it up I found her website and discovered she’s written a few more verses. So here’s the fuller piece

We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins,

carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains.

93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames,

we are all just stars that have people names.

You are not small.

You are not unworthy.

You are not insignificant.

The universe wove you from a constellation just so every atom,

every fibre in you comes from a different star.

Together, you are bound by stardust,

altogether spectacularly created from the energy of the universe itself.

And that, my darling, is the poetry of physics, the poetry of you.

And somehow a young Joni Mitchell was paying attention to the emerging science of cosmology in the 1960’s and on the weekend of the famous Woodstock festival in 1969, which she was super bummed to miss, she wrote this song. Later her friends Chris Crosby, Steven Stills, Graham Nash (well he was her boyfriend at the time) recorded a version that made it, and them, famous.

Shall we sign together on this beautiful morning? You’ve probably heard this but the second line kind of runs together on the recording:

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion-year-old carbon

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

you have to imagine the jaggy electric guitar intro…and I’m not going to attempt the guitar solo in the middle – fun stuff though – how did these guys get so good so young anyway?

Well, I cammmme up-onnnn a child of God

He was walking along the Road And I asked

him, “Tell me, where are you GOing?”

This-he-TOld me

Said, “I’m going  down  to Yasgur’s Farm

Gonna join in a rock and roll band

Got to get back to the LAND

And set my soul free”

[Chorus]

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion-year-old carbon

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

[Vere 2]

Well, then can I walk beside you?

I have come to lose the sm–og

And I feel myself a co-hg

In somethin’ turning

And maybe it’s the time of year

Yes, and maybe it’s the time of man

And I don’t know who I am

But life is for learning

[Chorus]

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion-year-old carbon

And we got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

[Verse 3]

By the time we got to Woodstock

We were half a million-strong

And everywhere was a song

And a celebration

And I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes

Riding shotgun in the sk-y

Turning into but-ter-fli-es

Above our nation

[Chorus]

We are stardust, we are golden

We are caught in the devil’s bargain

And we got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

The last chorus actually has a change in it the second line is “We are caught in the devil’s bargain” – let’s do that too to be thorough 1, 2, 3, 4….

We are stardust, we are golden

We are caught in the devil’s bargain

And we got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

Worth thinking about isn’t it? Have we as a culture given away what really matters in a devil’s bargain for more stuff and the devil’s exacting his revenge if you think about it that way: massive and quickly growing income inequality – if you don’t know about former labor secretary Robert Reich’s clear explanations of how that happened you might look him up. Mass extinction. Climate change. The inner forces of greed, hatred and confusion that seed our wars and conflicts. The price has been pretty high to say the least.

And I’m an optimist – somehow not sure why. It’s never too late. People are also incredible. Loving, resilient, smart, adaptable. There are positive signs all around us. And it’s not just dancing in the bonfire of the destruction – sometimes maybe we fear it is – there is true positive change also. And there is hope.

And I do hope this retreat has been helpful. A source of hope. A source of understanding and clarity. A source of light, and will continue to be – there’s another 24 hours of retreat left!! this just my last time on this bully pulpit – so I want to say this now and also again tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you for your practice. Your good hearts. Your patience, especially this year with the turbulence of weather and sharing the campground. Your kindness to Carolyn and I and each other. Your trust. I thought of that the other day when I was walking back here to give the first talk. Woah: somehow all of these people trust me as the organizer and teacher of this retreat – they are showing up, they are doing this vulnerable and hard and wonderful work and they wouldn’t have done any of that if they didn’t trust me at some level anyway. So thank you, I can’t say how deeply I am honored by your trust and I know for sure Carolyn feels the same.

So we continue. Thank you again. Let’s walk until it’s time to go to lunch with our new friends from the Community of Christ. I admit to being a little annoyed with a few of them in terms of how this all went down but that’s a pretty small fly in a very wonderful ointment. They chose to share this place with us, without outside groups, and at a cost way below retreat center market rates.

It was a big financial contribution from each of you to get here, yes thank you SO much for that – and thank you again if your means was such that you could choose higher on our sliding scale – but if we were at a commercial retreat center the prices would have been at least double these, probably more. So just to know that we’re here thanks to the generosity of the Community of Church and in a deeper way through the incredible fortitude of the Samish people who have been here from the beginning times.

Be well.