Tomorrow will mark 7 years since Bernie died.

People ask me: What do you miss about him?  You must have had such great conversations and teachings. New suggestions for practice? How Zen practice informs our work in the world? How to face the climate crisis?

“I miss how he scratched my back,” I tell them.

One of my physical idiosyncrasies is that when I laugh hard, my back starts itching and I need someone to scratch it. Bernie would get me laughing, and then I’d turn my back and say: “Now you have to finish the job,” and the negotiation would begin:

“Here?”

“Lower down and to the left.”

“Here?”

“A little higher.”

“Here?”

There’s a gulf between the person people knew out there, and the person at home. In the car. Across the small dining table. Meeting on the staircase. Hunched over a computer next to you on the plane. Walking into the house with one 12-pack after another of Diet Coke cans that he proudly got at a great price. Expostulating with Bubale the Pit Bull to get off the bed because he has no room and losing every single time.

Tomorrow I’ll light a tall stick of incense; today, I honored him in a different way.

Most of the fall leaves are in deep layers on the ground due to the many trees around the house. Over the past years I’d call someone from the immigrant community, I’ll call him Eduard, and he’d arrive with a heavy gas-powered leaf-blower. It would take Eduard most of the day to blow the leaves down the slope. I didn’t care for the gas, but he said he needed power to blow that many leaves, and at least when he was done, the big yard was clean.

Last night I saw a post on a local e-list. A man wrote that he’s temporarily homeless, in recovery, doesn’t drink, believes in the importance of work, and what with the cuts to food benefits, he’s offering to rake leaves this month because he needs the money.

My housemate sniffed. She pointed out that, given our leaves, it would cost me more to hire him than Eduard and he’ll never finish the big job. But I could tell there was something else bothering her. He doesn’t have a home, we don’t know him, we have dogs around, etc. Can we trust someone like that? Will the house be okay? What happens if we have to leave for part of the time when he’s working?

I get it. I’ve grown comfortable with Eduard. Don’t like the gas blower, but we know him, it’s routine, self-contained, no complications. What about the other man?  Anything could happen. Will he suddenly have no place to go, and it’ll be up to us to house him when there’s no extra room? Will he want to eat and talk? Will he want to stay and not leave? Will he even do the job? The nice thing about routines is that you know they work, you know the end product, nothing disturbs the day. Why do something chancy?

But my Zen training was to go into the mess. You got money from the State to build apartments for homeless families? Most people would hire a professional contractor to bring in his people and start building. Bernie decided to hire builders from the local neighborhood, and if they didn’t know what they were doing, they’d get trained. Was it messier? You betcha.

Professional bakers to bake cakes? No, instead get unemployed folks to bake and decorate cakes through on-the-job training. How did it work out? Depends on whom you ask.

A professional bookkeeper? Not if you could get someone local, train her to do the books, and presto! you’ve got yourself a bookkeeper. Or maybe not.

If we have the money to hire, he reasoned, why not make it available to local unemployed folks? It’ll take longer, with more effort, and we won’t know till the end of it works out. If it doesn’t (which happened frequently), start again.

Is it any wonder that his board threatened to quit? It’s a mess, they told him. But he wasn’t afraid of messes.

Saving all sentient beings didn’t mean locking yourself in a zendo and sitting quietly. Zen practice wasn’t about carving out a niche for yourself where things can be under control, it was about caring for people, a chancy and messy thing. Every person has not just a story but a history, and not just a recent history but one that goes back lifetimes. You really want to deal with that?

Bernie and his then-wife Jishu needed a housekeeper. They could have had a choice of Zen practitioners who would want to do that; instead, Bernie offered the job to a local woman, an unemployed veteran. “There’s only one thing,” he told her. “My wife is a vegetarian.”

“No problem,” she assured him.

“So no turkey on Thanksgiving, okay?”

“Sure thing,” she said, and proceeded to roast a duck for their holiday dinner two weeks later.

I just want to get the big yard cleared. Depending on whom you hire, that may call for offering coffee, a meal, even a room. Who knows? You’re jumping into the river, the river of life, and you have no idea where it’ll take you. I have no time for this! I have a blog to write, a novel, a play! I have laundry to do, dogs to walk and feed, two Zoom meetings. And how do I know he’ll even get the job done?

But my training was rigorous and, in its way, disciplined, so approaching Bernie’s memorial, I dialed the number on the post and left the message that I’m interested. Who needs to light a tall stick of incense when you can honor the man this way?