[Introduction by host]
I'd like to welcome Reverend Carolyn Atkinson tonight. She is the teacher at Everyday Dharma Zen Center, downtown Santa Cruz, our neighbor Zen Center. It's been a long time since she spoke here, but she was very involved in Santa Cruz Zen Center in the early years, which we might hear some about tonight. I am a long-term student of Kobun Chino Roshi, the founder of Santa Cruz Zen Center. So we thank you so much for coming.
[Carolyn Atkinson begins]
Thank you, everyone, and thank you for helping me learn how to use this. It's wonderful to see Ellen. Ellen sat in the early years, and of course, to have Catherine here, what a treat. Thank you, Catherine.
And I thought what I would talk about tonight is to tell you some of the history of the Zen Center here, the very early years, which probably are not talked about very much. There aren't many of us around who remember this time.
Ellen, when did you come? The end of 1974. '74. Had we moved in here? Oh, yes. Yes, okay. So, it was a long time ago then.
I first came here in November of '73, so one year ahead of Ellen. And apparently, the Zen Center, the Zendo, as we called it then, had just moved here a year or so before that from a place on Swift Street. '72, yes. [Audience: "Forty-two."] Forty-two. [The address on Swift Street.]
So I came the year after that. The Zendo was a hard place to find in those years. It was not listed anywhere. There was no official sense of Zen, of a Zen Center. In fact, you had to kind of ask in the right places to find the Zen Center. Like, you know, finding the back room at Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca. It was a little bit like that. You had to be sure you asked in the right places.
But I was here to attend classes at the University of California on the hill. And that was a good place to ask. So I said, is there a Zen group here? And finally, someone said, well, if you go to School Street and ask for Chino Roshi, you might find something.
So one day after school, after my classes were over, I came here. And the street at that time was all run-down, old kind of tar-paper shacks in a way. They called them historical landmarks. But you know what that really means is they were all fit to be condemned. Lots of tar paper, lots of sagging roofs and old, old wood.
So I was told to look for two houses that seemed to be connected. And as I walked down the street, the second and the third house obviously were on the same land because the plants grew from one side to the other. And when I looked at the buildings, I noticed there was a little piece of paper on the door of the place next door. So I crept very carefully up to read what it said. And it said, "For sitting, go to the back door."
Okay, so this was obviously the place. And there was only one way to get to the back door, and that was between the two houses. There was no pavement. There was no walkway. There were stepping stones that went through a kind of jungle-like overgrowth of plants. Everything was lush and tropical. And it was kind of strange, you know, because this is not a tropical setting. But the plants here seemed enormously powerful and wonderful. There was a very large pink pearl rhododendron right here. And when you walked in on the stepping stones, you had to kind of come through a rose arbor. It was all covered over. And when we got into the back area, there was a huge stand of bamboo swaying in the breeze. And there was a little tiny Buddha down at the foot. So I knew I had found the right place.
At that time, we were told to go to this building. And it turned out that this was a piece of property, both buildings owned by a man named Jim Goodhue. So I knocked cautiously at the door. And a young man told me — when I gave the secret word, "Chino Sensei" — he told me to come back in the evening and that I would have a chance to hear him and meet him.
So I came back that evening at seven o'clock. It was dark at that time. And I walked in and was greeted at the door by the tallest, longest man I think I'd ever seen. This was Jim Goodhue. He seemed enormously tall. Everything about him was long. Long face, long hands, long arms. And his hair stood out kind of straight from his head. And he had the kindest face and the most welcoming manner of anyone I'd been around for years. Jim really was a man of good hue. And we were fortunate that he opened his house to a few people who found the right message to come and hear this young man who taught.
So Jim invited me in and showed me how to sit. It was the first time — I'd been sitting for a year on my own, but it was the first time I'd sat with a group. And forty minutes seemed forever. I thought the bell would never ring. Finally it did. And I moved slowly and turned around.
We were sitting in the living room over there, which is a very small L-shaped space. Probably there — I was thinking our only room, maybe if we crowded, could get twelve or so people in there, twelve or fourteen. It was small.
And when I turned around and stood up and looked across the room to a similar door as this, there was an altar. And standing in front of it was the most exotic-looking foreign man I had ever seen. I think if I were to say what he looked like, it was like he was a deer at the edge of a clearing. And all of his senses seemed open. And he checked around. His eyes were huge and dark. And his hair had a short kind of black pelt of fur on it. And he looked around at each of us all around the room and didn't say anything.
Finally, after looking at us all for a long time, he turned to the altar and they began — the people there began — this very strange chanting and bowing and all the things that I didn't understand. And as I listened to it, gradually I could hear this voice which was carrying the whole chanting. And it was this kind of deep rumbling from a belly. And I realized later that it was Kobun, that it was Kobun's chanting voice, which was a very important part of his practice.
So that was the first night I was there. He gave a talk and answered some questions. And I felt like I'd really come home to a place where I could begin to learn about myself and my life. Most of the time I would say I didn't understand what Kobun said. But what I did understand was how kind he was. How kind he was to us. And how present he allowed himself to be. Very present with us. And those were such important qualities for me. Very healing for me in my life.
So I came regularly and became a part of a very motley group of practitioners here. We called ourselves the Zendo. We never used a word like "Zen Center." That was way too — I don't know — official for us. We just said we were the Zendo. And we weren't listed anywhere.
So the next summer — I think it would have been the summer because it was before Ellen came — one of the reasons, just to back up for a minute to say, that one of the reasons our Zendo was there and Jim opened his living room to us was that he lived there. And he owned these two buildings. And in this building, there was a very elderly woman in her nineties whom Jim was taking care of. I don't think they were related. But as I said, and I continue to think always, Jim was one of the kindest people I've ever known. And he took care of this woman for years here, getting her up every morning, bringing her meals, and putting her to bed at night. I never saw her. In fact, I don't know anybody who actually got to meet her. She stayed really in this house.
But then we heard that summer, I think, that she had died. She was in her nineties. And what that meant was that Jim, all of a sudden, did not have the responsibility that he had had in taking care of her. And so he realized that this was an opportunity to think about what he wanted to do.
Over time, he decided, and he called us together as a group — we who were the people who came here to sit. And he said, "I'm planning to go to Japan to further my practice. And I would like to give these buildings to you to be a Zendo. And all you have to do is assume the mortgage payments. You don't have to give me anything."
Now, Jim had been paying on this place for a number of years and obviously had made the down payment. But he said, "I would like to give it to you for a Zen center, if you can just step in and take responsibility." The mortgage payments were $9,000 — that was what was left to pay. The monthly mortgage was $139.
There was no way we thought we could do that. It was overwhelming for us. You have to understand that we were a group of hippies, graduate students, short-order cooks, carpenters, and I think a teacher or two. But none of us had any money. None of us owned a house. We certainly had no credit rating, any of us. And here we were being asked to take on this huge responsibility.
So we had meetings and meetings and meetings. And one of the people, Susan Townsend, had a father who was a lawyer. And he came and met with us and said, well, you need to do this and this and this. And we gulped and we said, okay, we'll do it.
So what we had to do first was incorporate with the state of California. We had to come up with a board of directors and officers. And then we had to prove to the mortgage company that we could actually manage this. So we had, I think, four rooms at the time to rent out. And they were rented for $35 a month, except for the large one which rented for $39 a month. I think there were five. [Audience: "There were five."] The garage didn't count, though. I was going to say the garage was illegal, but we rented that, too. [Laughter] Right.
And doing various other things, we actually managed to pull together proof that we could take over. And we assumed the mortgage.
We had to fundraise over the years. And I'll just tell you very briefly, we got better and better at that as the years went along. We started out by doing a booth at the Spring Fair, a food booth. And we sold — you know, we were all hippies and back to the land — and we sold sprout sandwiches with wheatgrass juice. And we made very little money and worked very hard for the Spring Fair.
Finally, somebody said, let's check into the county fair. And so we did. We ended up doing a booth at the county fair once a year, only once a year. But it's a whole week long, or six days anyway. And we had to staff this booth with people all week long. We had to arrange for everything ahead of time and truck it down there and set it up and take it apart. And we decided to undertake this very big project. And so we did.
And we said, what are we going to sell? And clearly sprout sandwiches were not the way to go. And so we said, I know what we'll do. And we did a very successful booth selling coffee and donuts. And it was a hit. It was a total hit at the county fair. We had coffee from the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company. It was Steve's Special Blend. I think they still sell that mix down there. I think Steve was a member of our group. And we had donuts from a donut shop on Seabright Avenue at Murray, a special local donut shop. And they made the best apple fritters. And anyway, it was a big success. A lot of work. But then we could coast for the next nine months until we had to begin again with fundraising.
We were very much — we were young. All of us were young people. I think there was one man in his forties. But most of us were in our thirties and twenties. We were very, I think, kind of identified with the values of the time, the post-Vietnam era, the post-flower-power in San Francisco. But this was the center of the laid-back life. And we were part of it.
We did not lock our doors ever. And what that meant was that often when we would come in in the morning, there would be people here who had heard that this was a place you could crash at night. And they would have to be asked to leave. Sometimes it was difficult. Finally, in the eighties, we began to lock the door when we weren't here. And everybody knew where the key was. It was right out on the roof in that shoe area. But still, it was the end of an era. It was the end of the freedom, love, and peace era of the seventies. But we needed to do that. We needed to change. And we did change gradually as time went by.
Just to finish this part of the story a little bit, I would say that the reason we were here, the absolute profound reason we were here, was because of Kobun. Because Kobun came once a week and taught and was with us and shared his life with us. Had he not been here, I'm sure we wouldn't have had the nerve and the courage to organize and actually take on this kind of project of a whole Zen center. It was quite unusual at that time for a meditation group to have its own place.
So in the eighties, at a certain point — maybe '82 or '83, something like that, I'm not quite sure when — Kobun moved away. As many of you know, he moved to New Mexico. He was not here teaching as he had been. And I think we all hoped that if we simply kept our place going long enough, Kobun would come back.
I remember when we had meetings during those years. As I look back, I see how much we wanted him to come back. And one of the things that we did unconsciously was we adopted his speech patterns for our discussions. And we, who were native English speakers, would speak in this halting kind of foreign expression about our practice with each other. At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable and normal. But I look back on it now, and I can see how much we were holding on to wanting him to come back. And we loved him so much and missed him so much and thought that perhaps he would come back.
But one of the things that happened is that our group dwindled down and down in size. And I think what I can see about that in looking back is that what the teacher does is keep people energized and new people coming and willing to be engaged. We, who were the old students, were completely committed. But lives change, and people moved away, and people had children, and things weren't the same. But there was no teacher to draw in new blood and to keep it going.
So we did dwindle down and down, I would say, to six or seven people, finally, in the later eighties. It became clear that it was harder and harder for us — meaning those who were on the board of the Santa Cruz Zen Center — for us to keep this place going without a teacher.
So we talked at that time, and finally, my memory is that we came to a choice. We had two ways to go — well, three ways to go. One was to just turn it over to some teacher we didn't know. The second was to give it to the Quakers, and I think the Quakers had been looking for a place to meet for a long time, for years, and I attended Quaker meeting also, so that seemed like a viable option. And the third one was to invite a teacher to come.
And I just happened to know Catherine. Catherine, she was my friend, and I knew you were looking for a change in your life, something different, and you were leading the Monterey group. So we talked about it on the board, and it seemed like a really good idea. Catherine, you and I talked about it, and you moved here.
And it became a new place over time. It became the Santa Cruz Zen Center, not the Santa Cruz Zendo, which was what I would say was the way we couched it to ourselves. And this is the way places go, and events go — that they change. Things move, and Kobun moved, and Catherine came, and people who came here in the early years were no longer young, and, you know, things began to change. [Audience: "For a long time you were."]
So the Zendo changed, and it is a vital place. What I would say to you is this building, of course, is not the Zendo that I knew. When we were here, it was a little ramshackle, run-down building with no foundation, sinking slowly into the mud. And the same with the building next door. They're completely new. This is a completely new place. And it is the same place. It is the same place for sitting that it has been for almost forty years, as Patrick said — that there's going to be a forty-year celebration this fall.
So these are some of the stories from the very early years, the very beginning — how we came to have this place, how Jim gave it to us, and how it has been passed on.
The other thing I would just like to talk about a little bit with you before I open up for questions is about Kobun.
As I said, Kobun is the reason we were all sitting here. Kobun is the reason that I stayed in Santa Cruz — that Chuck, my husband at that time, and I said, shall we move somewhere else when graduate school was finished, or shall we stay here? And this was, I think, 1981. And we said, let's stay here. Kobun is here. And then one or two years later, of course, Kobun moved. That's the way life is. We make the best-laid plans. We hope that everything is stable. And then something changes.
But I was fortunate to have almost ten years of sitting regularly with Kobun. And it was a wonderful gift for me to learn from this man about Zen practice and about being alive.
I think for me, when I began Zen practice and I began sitting with Kobun, it was because I so much hoped that I could be different than I was. I wanted to be special. I didn't want to be the ordinary person that I knew myself to be, who grew up in Nebraska and, you know, all of the stuff that goes with that.
And Kobun was the — he was the embodiment of exotic and foreign. You know, he looked very special. He rustled when he walked. Only his robes made a sound. He wore white tabi socks and he carried a teaching stick and he chanted in this deep, sonorous voice in this strange, foreign language. And I think that I at least thought that if I spent time with him, if I spent enough time with him, I would almost absorb that very special and extraordinary quality that he had.
The greatest gift to me, I think, from Kobun was his willingness to let us discover that he was ordinary, not extraordinary. When we sat with him over the years and paid close attention, what we could see was the — yes, he was exotic and special. And yes, also, sometimes his life fell apart. Sometimes he had pain in his life. Sometimes things didn't go well. And he began sitting before he was six years old. And he grew up in a Zen family in Japan. And still, he couldn't keep it all together.
This was his gift to me. This was his great gift. Because what I could see was: don't wait until another time, until a better incarnation, until you are extraordinary. Don't wait until then to begin living your life. There is nothing to wait for. This is it. That's what I learned from Kobun. And I learned it because he was kind enough to share it — who was kind enough to be present with us and to share his life with us, day after week after month after year.
As a young man, when Kobun came here, as I said, I didn't understand anything he said. He spoke in very scholarly English that he had acquired by studying in college. He spoke in very abstract terms. And for a long time, I struggled simply to be able to concentrate from the beginning of a sentence to the end. He had long, complicated, as I say, scholarly sentences, but I couldn't understand him.
As he moved into his prime teaching years, his language became clearer and clearer, I would say. And you may have heard this quotation before, but more than anything, I think we as a group of students kept asking Kobun, "Why do we practice? Why do we do this?" We'd ask it in one way and then we'd ask it in another way. But the question over and over was: why do we do this? How do we make sense out of our lives?
And in the middle years of his teaching, this is one thing that he said, which is really clear, I think. He said: "The main subject is how to become a transmitter of actual light, life light. Practice takes place to shape your whole ability to reflect the light coming through you and to regenerate your system so the light increases its power."
It's a wonderful image. It's sort of like Moss Landing in a person, you know — we're creating more and more and more light by practicing. Or it's like setting up a magnifying glass and the light becomes clearer.
And I think at that time in Kobun's life he was really working on becoming clearer and more of a powerful light. And certainly for us, for me, his student, I felt this power from Kobun. Still, he had problems in his life, and I had problems in my life, and everybody I knew did.
So he moved away. He would come back about once a year. It was a wonderful event for me when he came back. Perhaps I would get to talk with him an hour, once a year. I treasured that time. I remembered what he said for months and months.
And then somewhere in the nineties the most amazing thing happened. Kobun quietly moved back to Santa Cruz. And probably you know this — he lived the last few years of his life up on Bonny Doon Road, only about five minutes from the house where I live. So it was amazing to have him come back. He was not teaching in a regular way, but he was back, raising his second family of young children.
So after he'd been here for a while, I asked him if it would be alright for the old-timers — those of us who were still around — to get together. And he said yes, it would be. So we began to meet about once a month at my house. There were ten of us, I think, who came from different places but who wanted to sit with Kobun.
At the very last meeting with Kobun — and we didn't know, of course, that he was going to die. We didn't know it was the last meeting. But now, of course, I know it was our last meeting with him. At this meeting we asked him again: why do we practice? Why do we do this?
And that's what I'd like to share with you — the last teaching I heard from Kobun about why we practice. So if you think — this is the wave of his whole life — growing up during World War II as a young child in Japan, coming here, becoming this teacher, and then finally retiring, raising his children. He was in his sixties when he said this to us.
"Why do we sit, Kobun? Why do we sit?"
He said: "We sit to make life meaningful. The significance of our life is not experienced by striving to create some perfect thing. We must simply start with accepting ourselves. Sitting brings us back to actually who and where we are. This can be very painful. Self-acceptance is the hardest thing to do. If we can't accept ourselves, we are living in ignorance, this darkest night. We may still be awake, but we don't know where we are. We cannot see. The mind has no light. Practice is this candle in our very darkest room."
Why do we sit? To light the candle within our minds. Not Moss Landing, not a huge wonderful city of lights, but one small candle. One small candle.
I felt so touched by Kobun being willing to share his whole life with us — the span, the arc of his life. And I can really relate to what he was saying: "Practice is this candle in our very darkest room."
Thank you for listening to all this history, but it is your history too. So I hope it is in some way helpful.
We have just a few minutes. Are there questions that you have? Or confusions? Things you would like to know?
[Q&A]
Q: I'm wondering how his last teaching helped you when you heard of his passage.
A: Oh, it's a good question to ask. You know, when I heard that Kobun had died, I'm not sure anything helped me for a while. I was devastated. The first thought I had was, "How can this happen to Kobun?" And the second thought, I must confess, was, "What about me?" That was my second thought. "But Kobun, how could you do this to me?" Very selfish response. I'm sure no one else had that response, but I did.
And it took me a long time — it took me a long time to adjust to the news, to realize what it meant to live without Kobun here. Because I totally counted on him. Not because he was literally here, but because he was available. He was present when I needed him.
You know, I had a diagnosis of breast cancer in the early nineties. And the first time I had breast cancer, I was completely shattered by it and terrified. And someone got the word to Kobun, who was in New Mexico, and two days later he was at my front door. He was a wonderful being for me. Now, what he said to me wasn't that helpful — he said, "Don't worry, don't worry." And I thought, "That's not helpful, Kobun! I'm worried!" But it was his presence. It was his kindness that mattered hugely. I felt safer in this world with Kobun here.
So it took me a long time to adjust. I think the importance of his last teaching for me was that he was saying quite literally what it seemed to me I had seen with him in his life — which is that although we may want to be extraordinary, this is it. This ordinary life is it. Not a huge power station, but a single candle. And I think that has stood me in good stead — very good stead — since he died ten years ago. But at the time it seemed like nothing was going to help.
Thank you for asking.
Q [Patrick]: [Question about Kobun's involvement in running the Zendo.]
A: No, he had nothing to do with running our Zendo. He wanted nothing to do with it. He never asked, and we never told him anything. We didn't ask him anything. We ran completely independently. And he came to teach once a week.
But unlike Kannon-do, and also Haiku Zendo — which, you know, became Kannon-do — and actually I think also unlike the place up north whose name I've forgotten now... well, no, Jikoji for sure, but the place up in Ukiah — Spring Mountain — I think every other place he had more involvement. And I think what he loved was not having to be involved here. One time he said to me, "Oh, this is my favorite place to come and teach." And I think it's because he had only to teach. He didn't have to help hold us together. We did hold ourselves together with bubblegum and, you know, bailing wire for many years. But he had no involvement in that. I think it was a gift to him.
And we stayed really independent of Bodhi, of the whole umbrella organization. We just did our own little thing here. No, we had zero ambition. It was really wonderful — lack of ambition is so good. So good for a Zen center.
Q [Catherine Thanas]: You just said a while ago, "We knew he was going to die," and that surprised me when he left...
A: Did I say that? We didn't know he was going to die. What I mean is, the last meeting we had with him — we met about once a month — but then he moved to Boulder to teach. So we had a meeting, but we thought he would surely come back. We didn't know that that was the last time we would see him.
And that was in November, when we had that last meeting. And then at the end of December he moved to Boulder, and then that next summer he went to Europe, and that's where he died. So most of us, I think, didn't see him after that last meeting. Unexpectedly. Yeah.
Q: What did bring you to practice? And would you say now, after all these years, that what you came with —
A: What brought me to practice, in a very short form, was that one of my very good friends, who was twenty-seven, died within six months with leukemia. And I was completely terrified. Absolutely unprepared. I didn't know what to do with that. And I was not in any way able to look at my own mortality — reality. And I think that began a search for me to find some way to deal with it.
And I had moved to Europe for a year. A person had put one book in my hand, and that was Three Pillars of Zen. And I read the book cover to cover several times. I followed the instructions for how to sit, and I began sitting with that. And then when I came here to Santa Cruz, there was this little tiny place to sit.
So in some ways, you know, it's almost a matter of what happens — what book is in your hand at a certain time, what group do you find to sit with. And it could be Vipassana — Vipassana was very beginning to be very strong in this country. But I had happened to find that particular path, and then I found this place. And Kobun was the perfect fit for me. Not for everybody, but for me it was a perfect fit.
Wow. I still ask myself on a daily basis, "What am I doing with my one wild and precious life?" But I'm not as frightened as I used to be. I don't think I could have survived this life without my practice. I have to tell you that. I could not have survived this life. I would have been someone else. I would have been something different. But there were times when the only thing that got me through was knowing how to sit down and be quiet and be with my life. Thank you for asking.
Q: Is there one last one, and then we'll close? Or shall we close here?
Catherine Thanas: One of the things that I keep hearing from students of Kobun is how much he left you to make up — he let you make up your practice here. Yes, he didn't bring forms so much when I arrived. And thank you for the gift of this evening. I ask people, "What did he tell you? How did you do walking meditation? What did you do in this situation?" And I got different answers from different people. Right. And so, at the same time that it was true, I think, that he let you make decisions, you're describing a kind of personal dependency upon him — which maybe goes together in some way. Right. Because we're never really prepared to lose [a teacher?].
A: That's right. Although in San Francisco — my sister died, you know — it's a huge organization. Right. Right. We're not so isolated by ourselves.
I think there's a different way to look at that. What you're saying is exactly right, and the experience can be one way or it can be the other way. And my experience was that because I had long enough with Kobun — ten years — that I began to know how he thought. When he died, when he left us, when he moved away — all of these things — one of the most important factors with me was that I knew that he told us we had to make it up. That's what I had learned from him: you figure it out. "I'm not going to tell you how to do it. You get to figure it out."
Now, the fact is, those of us who were his students watched him like a hawk. And we did everything that we thought he did, that we could absorb. As I said, we even talked like Kobun and we walked like Kobun and we did the ceremonies and services that we thought he did — that we noticed. Each of us noticed something different. So that each of us picked up — exactly as you're saying — picked up different elements.
But I think what was essential for me, and actually what made it possible to survive his death, was that he said: "There's nothing to rely upon. You figure it out. You figure it out, Carolyn. You figure it out, Ellen. There's no answer here."
So that was our answer. That was Kobun's answer. It's like Gertrude Stein: "There's no answer. There ain't gonna be no answer. There never has been an answer. And that's the answer." And that was what we learned from Kobun.
It was a different kind of teaching than learning a whole form on which we could rely. And that's why I say it's just — you know — it just depends on how you look at it, one way or the other. It's sort of like taking a sock: you pull it one way and then you stuff it in the other way, and you've got a sock in the other direction. And that was what he gave us. More than anything, if we were with him long enough, we learned to rely on ourselves.
Catherine: It's always seemed to me a wonderful teacher. Yeah. That he actually left you —
A: Put — and it's hard also. Yes. And we did. And it's hard too. I think life is hard. Yeah. So it's just, you know, you do one thing or you do another.
And I really would just say: I think much of teaching is a question of temperament — how we fit with a teacher, how we learn, how we resonate. And those of us who stayed here for a long time resonated with Kobun in our own particular Santa Cruz way.
Catherine: And how about with each other?
A: I think we did really well. It was amazing. Right. Right. That's right. That's exactly right. And nobody was struggling for power. So if somebody volunteered to be president — great, you know. And if somebody volunteered to be ino — absolutely, you know. And when Dick was ino, we had no services at all. And when I was ino, we had more services. And we're grateful — anybody who wants to take responsibility, great. The rest of us are here. Yeah. It worked incredibly well. Incredibly well.
Q: Do you have a teacher now, or have you found another teacher? Or how — I just wonder, you know, how have you —
A: You know, I have learned from so many good teachers. I spent probably ten to twelve years really practicing strongly in the Vipassana tradition at Spirit Rock. I did Community Dharma Leaders Training. I did a lot of work there. And there were some wonderful teachers there I learned from. Kobun is my teacher. It's a little bit like: is there another parent after you have a parent? Not that, but there are other people who matter enormously in your life. So I've been fortunate to be around a number of really good teachers. But Kobun was my teacher — italicized, you know. That particular — that particular slot. Yeah.
Well, I think we definitely need to stop. But thank you so much, everyone. Thank you for coming and for listening and for sharing. Thank you, Ellen, and Catherine.
[Closing dedication]