Sara Tashker, Farm Manager, Green Gulch Zen Center

“My faith and tending to the earth and finding my place in the larger world, in the natural world, are completely inseparable for me.”

I'd like to introduce Sarah Tashker. She is a priest in the Soto Zen lineage of Buddhism. She’s been practicing Zen for about 20 years and was first introduced to Zen practice as a farming apprentice at Green Gulch Farm, part of the San Francisco Zen center. “My faith and tending to the earth and finding my place in the larger world, in the natural world, are completely inseparable for me.”

*Audio file coming soon.

Transcription:

Cami Flake:

When I was thinking about this conversation with you today, I was flooded with the idea of you witnessing Earth's aliveness every day in what you do. And I was wondering if you would mind speaking to that and how healing that is to be a part of that every day and protecting our planet.

Sara Tashker:

I think part of being with plants and with soil and with animals is that we're connected to something larger than ourselves. You know, this is why I think so many people appreciate just being outside, being in nature. There's some sense that there's something bigger that's holding us, that is very calming, right? To not be so focused on the self or in the illusion that we're in control. It's always there, but when we're walking outside, we're hearing things other than our thoughts, we're hearing the birds, we're seeing the plants we are tuned into life in a different way. So farming, getting to be part of, getting to witness up close the unfolding of life and how, even when we are intimate with it, we are definitely not in control of it. You know, for me, it's like love. I love going into the greenhouse and seeing all those little plants. I'm amazed every time they come up from the seeds, it's like, wow.

It's really hopeful. It's really hopeful to witness life and the resilience of it. And that it's actually not dependent on our own human, misunderstanding, you know?

That's so beautiful because when you look at soil, maybe we see it as inanimate, that it's not alive, but then you put the seed and the water and all of a sudden there's a dynamic process that's happening. I've been thinking a lot about that and how, if we could start to see the aliveness in all of our earth, maybe we would start looking for different ways to find our energy, perhaps, less extraction and more tending to. So I'm wondering how your faith, how Buddhism informs your choice of work and how you go about your life as an earthling in our planet.

Well, one of our core precepts in the practice of Zen which some people use the word to mean seated meditation, a particular kind of seated meditation, where we are open to everything and include everything, everything that appears to be inside and everything that appears to be outside without discriminating, without holding onto or pushing away. So just sitting, pure presence and that then Zazen is also used to refer to the way things are, which in reality is interdependent. It is: everything is supporting everything else. Nothing is separate, right. Or whether it's inside or outside, there is no inside or outside, right? Despite appearances like this is actually reality functioning. This is the whole of reality working and how it works is Zazen. So our practice is to sit quietly in order to have this understanding, to be connected to that truth of reality, to be it in our body, to not be separate. And then to extend that effort into our daily life, in all of the work we do. This is the way everything's equal. Everything is equally life. Every single thing in the universe is equally contributing to reality as it unfolds. Although as a human being, we have relativity, right? We live in the relative truth. So that is soil. And I am me over here and you are you over there? And we relate to this relative truth.

Part of our practice is to always study, always open, to always be aware of the other side, which is the way everything is connected moment by moment, which means that everything we do matters. Because everything we do affects the entire universe. There is this mutual, co-created reality. And when we understand this, and we, Zen practitioners, we study this for years and years and years. And when you actually understand it in your body, as reality, there is nothing but to take care of everything as your own body, so part of meditating is being quiet enough and still enough to allow, to see, to receive, to understand what's happening. Normally our minds are just going, didididididi and our little selves are saying, I want this, I don't want this, trying to protect the self thinking that everything is separate, right?

So to quiet that enough, to open to the truth of non-separation so that when we're outside, we hear the birds and we see the snake. And we actually are interested in and curious about all the life in the soil, we don't miss it. This is what we're doing, what we're cultivating with our practice, with our Buddhist practice and our study. And as you probably know, where I started was when we're outside, when we're hiking around, most people have had this experience just quite naturally of forgetting the self and opening to this larger reality to life outside and themselves. So it is quite natural. It's nothing special, but to make the effort to quiet down the ego, to quiet down the self, to not chase after our desires or our aversions and to open, really open, that's the practice, that's the discipline, that's the study.

And I will just say, farming for me, organic farming and Buddhist practice are not separate. Ecology is like this, understanding interconnection, right? So organic farming is all about the living soil. It's not about the plant, it's about the soil. And there's a whole body of knowledge and literature, scientific literature about the life in the soil, right? It's all biology, it's fungi, bacteria, insects, arthropods. It's actually the bacteria and the fungi that feed the plants, without this relationship they have, the plants would not be able to extract nutrients from the ground in the same they do to make these robust, healthy plants. So this is a living system and we're actually part of it. So this idea that like you're out in nature, or you're not, isn't quite true. It's like, it's all one thing. We are part of it, but to quiet down enough to really understand that and to honor it through our body speech and mind, that is the moral basis of our practice of Buddhism, you know, is like to taking care of our karmic actions of body, speech, and mind so that they are supporting life in all its forms?

That's really true. And, really beautiful to think about. A lot of people perhaps feel like they are not gonna be around so it doesn't matter if we stay on this trajectory, where the planet's going and in my understanding of evolution, we are in a closed system, you know, we're all connected and working together. I'm just wondering if you would mind talking a little bit about your beliefs around what happens when we die and how that fits into this story, this bigger picture.

Yeah. I don't know what happens when we die. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, to be perfectly honest, being an American Buddhist, I cannot separate from my own cultural understanding of birth and death and I think there's a lot of discussion about the karma and reincarnation and what that means. And I think a modern interpretation is you can't kill life. Life continues. So life continues over and over and over, but I would say there's, it's not this particular configuration of life. This consciousness does not continue because this consciousness is conditioned on this body, for example, is one of the conditions of this consciousness. So, but the continuity of consciousness is definitely not the continuity of a particular consciousness, but consciousness as life conscious life is part of Buddhism. I will say my good friend, Amigo Bob Cantisano, who was one of the pioneers of organic farming in this country and in California died just last December and he was composted.

He was composted in the first human composting facility in the country up in Washington state. And I have some of his, some of him, he's soil. Right. And he will be part of this place. And this earth, literally. Right. So that feeling of reincarnation of his death is not fixed. His death is life. So this feels more accurate to me. That understanding just as you say, this is this matter, this is from space, right? How many billions of years ago. So the idea that there's a separate me, you know, that appears and disappears and is finite in one way, it makes sense, right. Because this is a conditioned existence and it's not gonna happen again. Right. Exactly this way.

And there is something that continues or is eternal or gets recycled or however you want to talk about it. And I, I think of course, you know, I mean, part of the human experience is being separate. You know, we can't not have that appearance with these bodies and minds. It doesn't work. Right. Because it looks like I have this separate body and you have that separate body. And we relate to reality in that way. Um, and then with that, we call it a delusion that there's something separate over here comes all of these mechanisms of protection of aversion or grasping.

And this happens, we do this with our life and our death. We want to avert from the difficulty of death, the suffering, right. That was the sickness, old age and death. What the Buddha saw that nobody wanted to talk about and he wanted to understand it. So part of it, for me being part of why I have no choice, but to be a spiritual person in this lifetime for me is the pain of that delusion, that pain of that misunderstanding and the fear that comes from feeling separate and from the, then the idea that we are going to lose everything that we love, including the earth, the whole earth. Right? And we see this, we see deforestation, I see houses being built on farmland. You know it's very painful and there's nothing for me, but to turn to some other understanding of what's happening to be able to function as a human being and you know, and the larger understanding is the way things are all connected, which sometimes for shorthand, I just talk about as love. I love the soil, I love the earth.

I love the trees. You know, that feeling of loving things is the feeling of connection and to be really still and quiet enough to just be grounded in that love without our usual chatter of, well, then I have to hold onto it or then I need to stop something or I need to control the situation. But just to be grounded in love and to move from there, you can actually move from that place of love and connection. You can base your entire life in that and to be open enough to that means also we are open to our suffering and the pain of the fact that people are deluded and don't take care of things. Right. But to feel that, and to turn toward connection for me is the way that I can get up every day actually. Yeah.

We had this wonderful speaker recently in the Deeptime Network program I was telling you a little about, and one of the practices they had us do was to go outside every day for 20 minutes and commune with a non-human. And like you were saying earlier to get really quiet and notice. And start to notice. It's so powerful. I started thinking too there might be a little plot of earth that we could tend to and care for and maybe start there, a smaller way to start because that little plot is also connected to the bigger, right? So we can start where we are right here, right now.

We actually can't start anywhere else, right?

Yes. We have some soil in our backyard it looks like it's not alive and definitely needs some love and revitalization but I wouldn't even know where to start to bring it back to health. Where would you start if you were presented with a dirt plot. When you know there's life there.

Well, life the biological life in the soil needs the same thing that we need. It needs air, water and food. And the bacteria and fungi, they like different things, fungi like more woody things. So you start with that. They like, humus, the living part of the soil, that's where they get their nutrients. So you can put compost, that's the food, right? Compost. It also helps with soil structure so that the air and water can get into that soil. Then you need water, it's amazing what water can do to a garden or plot of soil. It helps open up the soil. So there's air in there, which supports the biological life. And then the plants will get what they need and the plant roots will move into that soil and create space as well as the insects and little tiny arthropods that make channels in the soil and open it up.

I'm turning toward no-till farming which is where you don't actually turn the soil. You leave those soil ecosystems intact because every time you dig into the soil, right, you're cutting off the fungal hyphae, the long chains of fungal pathways that transport nutrients around bacteria really like it, the aerobic bacteria, which is why you get kind of this flush of life when you turn the soil that annual plants really like but what I've, I mean, so part of our practice, Buddhist practice is confession and repentance. So confessing our unskillful actions, the things that reinforce separation that do harm and the repentance is the wish to act in a different way. So a lot of the last 20 years of my life as a, or the last, maybe five years of my life as a farmer and as someone who's been stewarding this land, we're doing this Creek restoration project,

A lot of it has been confession. Repentance has really been having to turn toward the practices that I was taught or that I was given that I was conditioned to understand as beneficial and really having to turn toward the fact that they also cause harm and having to admit it, that I have been doing things that have been causing harm and opening to that pain as kind of the compost for changing, taking responsibility and changing our behavior, you know, with the Creek really investing in this Creek restoration, seeing how, even though we're benefiting from the infrastructure that was put in50 years ago, it's actually causing harm to other species, to the fish in particular, the coho salmon and the steelhead. So it's painful to admit that to myself.

I'm part of the problem I am benefiting from this. This is not okay. I need to change something and I need to make the effort to change it. And again with the soil practices so turning toward more no-till methods. I was just, I don't know if this is too wonky for you, but I'm still in the middle of trying to figure out how to transition the whole farming system we have here to a no-till system, and there's a lot of ways that the infrastructure just doesn't support it. But that's a longer term change or investment that we're working on. But so I tilled one of the fields. It was in cover crop in the winter and I mowed, I mowed it with bell beans and oats and that so nice green, manure mowed it, and then disced it.

So turned it under so that the particularly the aerobic bacteria could digest it. And those nutrients could be available to the plants, the crops this summer. So that's just standard organic agriculture, tillage agriculture. And when I first opened up that soil, you have to do it when the moisture is just right. If you do it, when it's too dry, you destroy the crumb of the soil or the ways that the articles aggregate together. And if you do it, when it's too wet, you smush 'em together. And then there's no space for water or air to come in. So when I opened up the soil, it was so incredibly beautiful, the way that the soil was falling, the color of the soil, I could just see how healthy it was with all those plant roots in it and all the life that was in it.

And it was so beautiful. I just spent all day on the tractor, watching it and then I re-disked it to incorporate the plant material that was sitting on the surface that hadn't gotten turned under. So I waited about a week and a half and it had rained some, and then I turned it under and I could already see that it was different. There weren't those living roots in there anymore. And so the soil was, although it was still, falling apart and seemed to have okay structure, it was different. And I realized that's why I think no-till is really important is that, you know, in a way I thought, oh, we're not supposed to see that. That's like the magic, that's like the life of the soil that happens in the dark.

And once you try to see it and get it, it changes. So appreciating in our practice too, there are things that we can't get a hold of. Actually, we can't get a hold of anything, right? Actually, it's more like I've found that allowing life to pass through, to feel it in this body and allow it to move whatever that is, life, energy, experience feels more accurate. Because you can't hold on to anything. It's totally unsatisfying, right? So I just felt like, oh the soil too, to really respect that, to really allow it, to care for it, to give it compost and to give it water and to give it, keep the living plant roots in there, but to respect the truth of it, which is that it is a whole intact system that I do not get to grasp. I just get to love. I don't get to see it. And it was so interesting seeing it and feeling how much I loved it and how helpful that is for me. It's so inspiring. Right. And encouraging, but it's not quite it.

That's so interesting too, because I wonder how you would, do you think you would've understood it the same way if you hadn't gone through that, the tilling and seeing it change?

No, you understand it in a different way. So when I had some really accomplished wonderful, no-till organic farmers up from Sonoma, come down to look at the green Gulch and talk about no-till and our farm system and what they did was they stuck their fingers in the soil. So they were feeling, that's how they understood it. That's how they connected with it. Right. Wow.

Yeah. And, you know, it's hard to be compassionate with yourself and understand you're not going to know all of the things. You're going to make mistakes but just to keep going. Right? Because that you had that experience. I mean, maybe that was part of your journey and then to help share what that experience was.

Yeah. I think that this is another anchor, that religion or spiritual life gives people, right? Is that vow. So in our tradition, we take the The Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts and these are specific precepts. The understanding is that you are vowing to live and be lived for the benefit of all. So having a vow to come home to, right? We take refuge or we return to, Buddha, our teacher, our dharma, the teaching, and Sangha, the community of practitioners, to have a vow when we make mistakes, to have somewhere to return to. That's the only ground I have. And, you know, some people call it God, some there's many different ways that people understand it, but to have something to come back to that isn't just about me. Right? Cause when I make a mistake, what I'm concerned about is me, my reputation or the little me and so to return to vow and reorient toward the bigger me and have the precepts, which remind me how to relate to reality through my body, speech and mind in a way that's beneficial.

We can just spin off in our mind. We can spin off about how horrible everything is and get really confused or depressed or have no energy. We can spin off into how terrible we are. Get really self focused. And I think this returning and putting everything back into perspective and scale, which is the whole thing. To be benefit, of benefit, to be connected, you know? And it occurred to me when you started talking, one thing that I have, I don't know if you've read this book, Braiding Sweet Grass?

I'm in the middle of it. Yes. Oh, it's so good. I love that book.

So good. Yeah. And part of what I really started grieving as I was reading that book, I felt so sad because part of what she talks about a lot is the language, right? Her native language and how it’s through language, we learn relationship and in her language, it's everything's alive and everything is relational.

And that is the basis of their understanding of reality. It could still be problematic in some way from a Buddhist perspective, but our language, modern English, and many languages is totally objectifying. And when we objectify, it's easy to separate. We teach children, this is reality. And then we act from that reality and we create reality from that. So just reading her book and realizing, oh my gosh, this goes way, way back and how we're passing it on and recreating this culture, which is what has created the world we're in today, which is why people can destroy the planet actually. It's deep, you know? And I think you're right, you're onto this, which is the only thing deeper or the thing that's the deepest is this kind of ungraspable relationship, with what could you say? With God, with everything, with something bigger than ourselves, with the mystery, with something we are not in control of but that we know intuitively and intimately, when we can quiet down enough to feel it. It is actually the basis of our life and with this connection with everything, right?

And when we can reconnect with that, it's like we right ourselves and can be upright. And that's where I have hope. I mean, I do believe that because everything is conditioned because reality is nothing but conditions. What we do matters. What we do is a condition for reality. So learning to care for life, learning to notice life. And I have found that yes, relating to animals and plants are so much easier than relating to people because we don't project all of our stuff onto plants and animals. Right? Well, we project less of it. And we can open more. But you can do the same thing with people. I mean it's not different actually, when you really wake up, you can be curious about people, you can be interested, you can, you know, love them and be kind of fearless in that way. And that, that also changes things.

Yes. I've really taken to this idea about looking at humans as perhaps Earth's consciousness, reflecting back on itself. And so sometimes I will imagine myself as that. Imagine a brain and how we connect, but each of us are one of those connectors bouncing off of each other. And then when I think about it that way too, I feel more connected, less competition. Right. Because we're really just, we're all one, we're all trying to work on this one thing.

Yeah. I also think just like the really, really basic thing for me of realizing when someone's kind to me, I feel good. Yes. And I actually have the capacity to be kind to myself or someone else. And when somebody, it, it hurts me when I get hurt when somebody is rude or short or doesn't notice me or whatever it affects how I am. So in that very basic way of understanding how we're all connected and we affect one another and like, what are the conditions we understand? What are the conditions under which, uh, life thrives. And it, of course it's different for everybody, but there's some basic, you know, there's some basic commonality. So to like further that project, right. To like further that way that we're all connected and working together rather than competing. Right. I mean, yeah. Competition. It depends. Right. Sometimes it's motivating, but like friendly competition where we're actually working together. Yeah. Right.

Cooperation.

Exactly, exactly. Right.

So what you need to do is you need to get some compost. You need to give it some water. Right. And you need to do some compost. You could turn it a little bit or fork it open, right? Like you wanna open up the soil a little bit, especially if nothing's been growing there for a while and then you put plants in and you water them and their roots are going to open up that soil and the bacteria feed the plant because the plant feeds the bacteria. I mean, the plant has carbohydrates that it gives the bacteria that the bacteria like, which is why they're doing this little exchange. I also just wanna tell you, oh, what you called? It's totally an aside, but it’s so amazing. So all the bacteria, the aerobic bacteria, so they're breathing, they're breathing in oxygen and they breathe out carbon dioxide. And so there's all this carbon dioxide gas in the soil. So when we water the soil or when it rains, the water takes up the same space. The gas takes up in the soil and it pushes the carbon dioxide out

Do you know what I mean? It's like the water is helping the soil to breathe the soil exhales because the water displaces that gas and then as the soil dries out, more oxygen goes in. So, I mean, it's just so amazing.

A different kind of lung, right?

Yes.

That's amazing.

And we think the plants are doing the opposite. Right. They're breathing in the carbon dioxide and breathing out the oxygen. Right, but it’s the soil, yeah. Just the soil life and the way the water works with it or the rain, it just that gas exchange. I had not thought of it that way.

That's beautiful.

It makes watering so much more exciting.

Like breathe.

This is doing so many things.

That's fascinating. Thank you so much. This has been so rich.

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