Peeking into the windows of my past.

I walked up and down Page Street looking for the Zen Center at 300 Page Street, the first safe place I could find refuge for my first night in this Big City. I took my first bart ride that took me to Burkley, it was because the Korean Monk was headed that way according to the brochure I was given and it was a t Tibetan Center or Temple.; a good place to ask for help. Then I saw a sign for a Zen Center right near where I stopped, it was the SF Zen Center in Burkley. I approached them and was turned away without any second thought. I was disappointed and as I walked passed a shop window on it was a small poster with the image of Lord Ganesha on it. It said that there would a celebration in the Golden Gate Park to commemorate some Hindu Day, like Thaipusam over here in Malaysia. Perhaps the hare Krishna People would be more helpful and so I found my way to the Park by asking directions and what to ride to where I wanted to go, it was nnot hard at all, everyone I met was helpful. They looked at me perhaps feeling sorry after listening to my tale of how I had got there all the way from Green Bay, Wisconsin; I allow myself to be at the Mercy of whatever arose for there was not running back. 

Hoping it to be like the Hindu celeberations in my country, there would always be free food for the needy like me, but no such luck. Safron baggy pants abd bald headed devotees were dancing around all happy and joyful. Big tents under which huge posters of the Guru and his story, more Indian than Indian so I walked back to the road and stood at a corner wondering where Page Street could be, Before i was about to ask someone I looked up the road sign above my head and there it said Page Street! As I walked down the street after a few sores I noticed a lady dressed in a long black dress with her black curly hair spreading around her hed like a halo was looking at me. I smiled, what else is one to do and she waved me to her store. I went up to her and saw that she owned a Curio Store that all kinds of spiritual items with even a white huma skull inside when I entered at her invitation. Let me read your cards she said and I asked how it would cost me and she said 25 dollars. Wow1! Can I afford this? I asked myself and she was saying, it is worth much more than you can imagine. So I sat and she read my Tarot for me. The card I pulled out the Devil and it shocked me. She asked why I was so surprised and I told her the Devil was not exactly what I had in mind.

She went on to explain to me how on this journey I was embarking the Devil was my companion, my aid. She explained and it made sense but I was still shaken and not totally convinced. I left her twenty five dollar short and a heavy heart and headed down the street looking for 300 Page Street. I came upon what looked like a huge Georgian style Mansion and it said 300, Page Street and I walked in with great hopes. I saw a pot bellied bald headed with large and thick spectacles reading a News Paper at the reception table and I approached him timidly. He wa firm as I had expected giving me the, you got to be kidding look. Aplace for the night, which caravan did you drift into the City, Boy?! As I was talking to him I glanced at what look like the meditation hall and a huge painting of the Bodhidharma staring down at me from the distance and I thought to myself that one day I wll sit in that meditation hall and I walked out. I would like to mention here that the gentleman whoose name If I am not mistaken, came to my family farewell party when we were leaving for Sendai, Japan in 1995. 

Later during my stay at Green Gulch Zen Center we had a few seven day Seshins at the City Center and I sat in the meditation hall as I had promised myself and stared back up at the Bodhidharma painting. I even helped my Instructor who is a master japanese carpenter at the Gulch, to build a rostrum from where the Abbot delivered his first sermon upon being ordained as the Abbot of SF Zen Center.
Tenshin Zenki Reb Anderson is a Zen teacher and lineage holder in the Sōtō Zen tradition of Shunryu Suzuki. He is a Senior Dharma teacher at the San Francisco Zen Center and at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, California, where he lives. Wikipedia 
My encounter with reb Anderson was when he came over where I was sitting on my cushions for seven day Seshin  and whispered agressively to stop breathing so loudly or he was going to throw me out of the Zendo. From then on I practiced mindfulness breathing more diligently. In all the time I was at green Gulch Reb and I steered clear of each other but e always smiled and bowed to each other when we passed. I know that if it had not been for my Instructor and Teacher and friend Paul Discoe I would not have lasted too long at The Gulch. Paul ran the Gulch Community, he brought it back to life while I was there as the lace was still in a mourning state trying to recover from the First Abbot, Baker Roshi's scandal. I was fortunate to have been one oh his student during those recovery years and I was all out being myself fighting the demons in my mind.

Paul Discoe was in on the ground floor of Zen architecture in the United States. In the 1960s he became a student of Zen Buddhism, studying and building at the Tassajara complex in northern California. His own wood-based Zen-Buddhism architectural structures and renovations in the United States and Europe are the focus of this book. With passionate prose, Discoe identifies the elements of Buddhism that are represented in his buildings and describes the trials and triumphs of blending current building methods and codes of the United States with ancient Japanese joinery techniques. Zen-Inspired Architecture has delightful photography of his structures, and the illustrations show just how a Zen structure has its beginnings. 

I just sent a fb friendship request to my Teacher and I hope he accepts it, We used to sit around the small stove and do our meditation pracie in the form of pulling out nodules from the rice straw which later was used as the mortar for the Japanese Tea House at Green Gulch. We sat ten to fifteen of us huddled into our cloaths heads bowed and fingers busy sorting straw from nodules. Not a word uttered sometimes for two hours straight because we enjoyed it despite the cold. That was the Zen practice that i experienced and began to get deeper into as I was willingly able to accept and endure the pain the pain becomes your teacher of letting go. To let go of the past and not expecting anything of the future, to be absorbed in the moment lost in space and time, this was what I finally learne from the practice. ..I drifted way out into the vast ocean hoping that she would swallow me but she did not, she kept me alive and allowed me to swim back to shore, where the fields of suffering are still in bloom and ...and this too will pass.