“This house is a mess. I’m leaving.”

“What’s the problem, Auss?”

“Now we have three dogs? What do we need three dogs for?”

“Aussie, the friends you stay with when I’m gone are now in Colorado, so we’re taking care of Florence, who’s actually an old friend of yours.”

“I don’t have friends. And what kind of name is Florence? Isn’t that an old lady from 200 years ago?”

“Aussie, Florence is a lot younger than you and Henry.”

“It’s hard enough dealing with an Illegal Chihuahua. Now we have some elite purebred hotshot? How do we live in the same house?”

“I think that’s what this country is asking itself, Auss.”

“It took us a full week to work things out. Of course, I’m still the A dog. Illegal insists on still being the B dog though he’s not even American, and then there’s Mrs. Florence, who wants to lick everybody’s food bowls and still hasn’t got that she’s C. We need hierarchy! We need fixed roles! Otherwise, things turn messy.”

“Welcome to Bernieland, Aussie. You’re living in the house of the man who wasn’t afraid of messes.”

“He’s been dead for 7 years!”

 Japanese Soto Zen is known for its clear-cut forms, roles, and hierarchy. Part of one’s training is to learn how to do various roles with no separation between person and function, be they liturgical, zendo, or teaching roles. You can’t miss it when you enter most zendos. It’s fascinating and attractive to some, and intimidating to others.

In his early New York years, Bernie enforced those forms, but when we began to undertake bigger and, yes, messier projects, stretching people thin, you could see some cutting of corners. Evening sittings were sparse because people worked late hours, and those who showed up often would rush upstairs to the 3^rd floor zendo to make the sitting at the last minute. If you hit the han, the wooden board which announces that sitting is about to begin, you might just do one repetition rather than three, and do it quickly, because of your late arrival. The altar may not be cleaned every time.

Most telling, the zendo was on the top floor of the bakery. As both the scope and intensity of the work increased, we ran out of room, so a few desks moved into the zendo. Then a few more, and a few more, and suddenly, a zendo which previously accommodated some 35 meditators couldn’t accommodate more than 10 or 15.

And when you sit in a factory building, there is dirt. Even if the floor is clean, what do you do about the fumes coming in from the illegal paint factory across the street? What do you do about bakers having a smoke outside in front and laughing? What do you do when the music starts in the all-night bar right next door, with whom you share a wall?

Zen is life, he always said. That means many things, including that we are open to all phenomena and possibilities. But we can’t be available for everything. Bernie leaned into a workload that took people to the limit and at times undermined their wellbeing. In any discussion about whether to take on a new project or not, he would usually be arguing for doing more.

Not because he was a workaholic, but because he was practicing in a big mandala of activity and people, following his sense of a Zen practice that excludes nothing, and especially not people who lack homes, jobs, and medical care. This was Zen practice in action—again, again, and again. When he heard that there was no housing in Yonkers for people with HIV or AIDS, he began a project of building a housing complex, day center, and childcare for those folks, and when his own board told him it was too much to take on, he founded a new nonprofit to do this. Things were urgent for him back then.

When I come into the zendo, I’m sensitive to how things are done: the sound of the bells, the timing, the posture for walking meditation, etc. I respect the forms because they support the practice of giving undivided attention to whatever you’re doing, with no separation between person and action. From painful experience, I’m aware that when I do things mindlessly, the best intentions and noblest motivations can be defeated by carelessness, miscommunication, or simple stress.

It certainly took place in those Yonkers years. As I’ve written before, when Bernie would return from a Yonkers trip and tell me whom he took around and how impressed they were, I’d often retort: “Did you show them where the bodies are buried?” I wasn’t ready to forget the incessant pressure, his habit of trying to bring down ten birds with one stone, and the seeming dead-ends and sideways alleys we often ended up in.

And yet … When we’d visit Yonkers years after leaving and greet residents and employees whom we knew, they’d be so happy to see us. I remember one mother who lived in the housing, sent her child to the childcare center and worked there. “God, we miss you,” she’d tell me.

“You do? Why? Everything is more stable now, there’s more money so you get paid on time, no crises or folks quitting or being laid off.”

“That’s true,” she said, “but we had more fun with you guys.”

We had more fun. I think about those words when I ask myself how to integrate practice with daily situations. What did they intuit when we were all there together? True, things were more fluid and way less institutionalized, with fewer (and sometimes practically no) corporate barriers. It was chaotic and mind expanding all at the same time, for everybody. The bakery was different from other bakeries. The childcare center was different, the housing complexes were different, the AIDS day center was different. But exactly how?

I used to shake my head when other teachers said that Bernie didn’t teach Zen, he was a social worker or a businessman. They didn’t get it. It was all about Zen practice, every single day with no break.

This is not about the past but about the present. As I get maturer (Ha! says Aussie), I have a decreasing interest in the zendo forms in which I trained people (I still go to the zendo on most Saturdays) and more in the question of what it means to bring Zen practice into social and climate action. For Thich Nhat Hanh, it seemed to mean doing things slowly and very attentively. If you asked Bernie, he’d say: you just talk to the baker you’re training; you just do the books; you just do the orders; you just write the grant applications.

Thich Nhat Hanh had his mindfulness, Bernie had his Three Tenets: not-knowing, bearing witness, and out of that—do. Take action. Without gaps, without the me/them or me/it dualities. Plunge in. Don’t be afraid. Also, don’t make a thing out of it. Just like you don’t make a thing out of meditation, don’t make a thing out of anything else. Do what’s in front of you.

I work with that every single day, exploring and discovering at the same time. I often hear teachers report what they hear from students: I love sitting in the zendo, things are quiet and peaceful, and then I go out into the world and everything is a mess again. Lately I’ve been telling them: “Put up a big sign on the exit door where they leave: You are now entering the zendo.”