A deep bow of congratulations to Zen priest Barton Myozen Stone, who has been chosen as an honoree for the Sebastopol Living Peace Wall. The induction ceremony will be Saturday, August 27 at 11:00am at the Sebastopol Town Plaza.
Barton has had quite a journey in his life, from being born in a Christian Bible Belt family to declaring himself an atheist at age 11; discovering Buddhism and poetry and the Beats and dropping out of college; finding his way to San Francisco and sitting the first sesshin in 1960 at Sokoji temple with Suzuki Roshi. He walked halfway around the world, from San Francisco to Moscow, to protest nuclear weapons and war; attempted to sail to the Marshall Islands from Sausalito in a hand-crafted boat to stop nuclear atmospheric testing and spent 8 months in prison; moved his family to south Chicago and worked at a steel mill and car assembly line to help mobilize workers against war and racism; lived at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center with his family for four years; and worked with Japanese wood joinery with designer, builder and Zen priest Paul Discoe. Along the way he discovered an affinity for goddess religion and for decades has cultivated a sensitive awareness of interspecies life.
He seems surprised to be receiving this recognition. “I’m not a public person,” he says. But, he acknowledges, he has been part of creating community in Sonoma County for very long time.
A longer interview with Barton that shares more details about his life can be found through the link at the bottom of this page. I had a chance to sit down with him recently at Mamalanda, the magical land near Occidental where he lives with his wife Constance Miles. Below are a few gems from our conversation. – Sessei Meg Levie
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What does community mean to you right now? And how does it figure into where we are in the world and what’s needed?
Well, I have expanded what community means to me to include the nonhumans for one thing. And so I want to always reference them and bring them in, and I’ve come to consider that politically important, the same way that race, class, disability and sexual orientation issues are.
Could you talk a little bit about just how that shows up in your experience of day-to-day life?
I see many of the other beings here every day, and spend quality time with them— sitting at their trunk, pulling weeds out from around the base of them, watering them and trying to tend to their needs and trying to maintain diversity. I’ve realized there are so many contradictions in doing all this, trying to just be a collaborative participant rather than the emperor who makes decisions of life and death over one or the other. And yet, I find myself doing that anyway. It’s always a puzzle, a dilemma, like fire—if the fire comes, it’ll be disastrous for so many of the species here, but it’ll also restore the fire ecology of the area.
You encountered Zen early on, and later came back to it. How does Zen fit in for you at this point in your life?
I had a political problem with Soto Zen for a few of those decades, because it was an import. And for a while I was into natives. Zen came here in a kind of remote and intellectual form. And then I was surprised to find that in Japan, it’s very tightly interwoven with local nature spirits. But they’re Japanese nature spirits, and I wanted to know our nature spirits and how to weave them into this basically wonderful practice of introspection and self-discovery. The Japanese monastic system with its hierarchy is basically feudalistic, and it was all supported by the emperor and was part of maintaining status quo privilege. And I really didn’t want to be too closely involved with that, so it made me hold back, even though I had loved the beauty of it.
In Zen architecture there are qualities of simplicity and clarity and precision and integrity of material and purpose. And, just beauty. I see all the other beings making their place beautiful. But then I came to a time when I realized that my hold-back didn’t change anything. It was just a kind of thorn that I carried around in my shoe. And so I just determined to let it go. It took me so long to get there. It’s a regret that I have walked past so many wonderful opportunities and gifts that I just ignored because of that attitude. Suzuki Roshi loved me, but I didn’t know that, because Japanese culture is really different in how they express affection. And so I missed out on a whole lot of really good stuff.
Later, a friend told me about Jisho. And she started off talking about your life as your practice, and that that was the key for me because a lot of the teachers that I had been attracted to before that thought that your practice was only in the zendo.
How does the goddess religion or feminine fit in for you?
When I came across women’s spirituality and read Starhawk, I thought, “Wow. I don’t have to be an atheist anymore.” She said, “Of course, we know the Divine is not male or female. But to name is to invoke, and I like who comes when I say she better than who comes when I say he.” That kind of nailed it for me.
Are there elements of the feminine that get neglected in Zen?
We still haven’t figured out a way to chant the lineage that’s non-binary. We still chant the women’s lineage or the men’s lineage. The first time that I heard the women’s lineage chanted, I had gone back to Tassajara after some years and was in the zendo when they chanted it. It made me weep; it was such a relief to know that was active and happening.
What does it mean for you right now to practice as a Zen priest?
To be responsible to the beings who look to me for pulling the weeds around the bottom of their trunk, and to husband and nurture the tradition and what seems so important about the practice. Not just that self-inquiry and zazen and reflection, but the messages of impermanence and connection, and the power to live with uncertainty. I think those are the things that we really have to offer people for everybody’s great benefit—to be okay with ambiguity and uncertainty and contradiction.
How does practice relate to where we seem to be in the world right now, especially as we sense more of the pressures of the climate shifting and greater political uncertainty?
The main one for some time has been dealing with our tendency to ignore or to push away bad news, the grief and the suffering. You’ve got to have that with you. Otherwise, it’s just not grounded. We have to be in the middle way with the agony and the ecstasy. We just don’t get to have one without the other in this world.
Thinking about the weekly Thursday outdoor sittings that you offer on the land, what do you think gets touched in people when they come here?
I think it reawakens all those parts of people you hear when they say “Well, my church is the woods.” It gives people the structure and permission to go back into something of their childhood. Every child has a special place in nature that was magic to them. Not only am I surprised about how much it means to people, but how easy it is, because people come back from sitting and give each other Dharma talks—little paragraphs of just being with the fluttering of the leaves and the breeze, or the warmth and chill on their bare skin as the sun changes. Things like that that just go right to the heart of our desire.
What is the desire?
To feel and realize the community connection.
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For more on Barton’s life: http://www.cuke.com/people/barton-stone.htm
The Outdoor Sitting Group meets weekly on Thursday afternoons. More information here.
