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<\/a>The first part was rough. My flight was five hours late in arriving at LaGuardia (as we floated in Buddhist<\/a> purgatory circling western New York sandwiched between a vast blue sky above and mountains of pure white clouds below, waiting for the airport to reopen after a thunderstorm) and so I arrived almost 30 minutes late for my own talk. Still, Barry Magid\u2019s Ordinary Mind group seemed to take it as quite ordinary and were a delight to speak with and meet.<\/span><\/p>\nI especially liked going out for dinner and conversation afterwards \u2013 at 9pm. Zen people in the Midwest tend to go to bed at 9pm or earlier.<\/p>\n
Saturday morning I allowed two-and-a-half hours to travel what I was advised would take about one hour and arrived with just enough time to suit up before the program began. The opportunity to get lost on the New York subway system was just to much to miss and so I seized the opportunity with wholeheartedness. But for a kid from the swamps of Minnesota, I felt good having navigated my way through at all.<\/p>\n
The Brooklyn Zen Center had a strikingly large proportion of young people, perhaps more than I\u2019ve seen in any Center since about 1985. The group is connected to SFZC and an old friend Teah Stozer (who I haven\u2019t seen since about 1989). Katagiri Roshi cut his chops as a teacher at SFZC so I felt like a lineage cousin and took some liberties in really saying what I thought. It must not have offended them too much though because they were a delight to hang out with after the talk and generously paid for a car to take me to Grand Central and get out of town.<\/p>\n