Sure it's a regularly Sunday dharma service, but you think that maybe this service is really held to see who among us is still among the living after the tremendous amount of work that went into last week's festival. But the festival was a success. We don't know how much money we made (how crass). We measure success one sushi roll at a time. We sold out of ALL the food BOTH days and were left with happy participants, tired and happy sushi makers, and a couple of old hotdogs rolling around sad and lonely and unsold. They were all that was left unsold.
The day BEFORE the Sunday after O-Bon is "all temple cleaning", also known as toban. This year we got rid of our monthly toban team amateur cleaning services in favor of professional cleaning. But the only way the vote was successful through the board for that change was leaving the all temple cleaning after both festivals. A lot of us don't really believe the part about working together and ownership of our beautiful temple that is the side benefit of toban, but now that it's not a monthly burden, we get the chance to test the theory.
In fact a bunch of us show up. People look at the list of jobs to be done and deliberately pick the one they know nobody will want. (Cleaning the floors downstairs where all the sushi was made is a top job nobody will want.) I clean toilets (ditto), dust half the hondo before other willing volunteers join in and dust the other half. Okay, I take a broom and begin sweeping out the front entrance of the temple. You can't get more Buddhist than that, I think.
As I am sweeping, I am not being mindful of sweeping for its own sake. I am not enjoying a sense of ownership at maintaining our beautiful temple or about the experience of being together as a sangha working this morning. In fact the rest of the sangha is either inside cleaning or outside on the other end of the temple washing big rubber mats we stand on when we are preparing food. Alone in front of the temple, sweeping as vigorously as somebody my age can, I am preparing tomorrow's short message that the chairperson would open the service with.
Good morning and welcome to Vista Buddhist Temple's annual O-Bon festival--nope. Wrong card. That's what I was saying LAST weekend every fifteen minutes into the microphone to quiet the crowd before I made an announcement. As you know very well, last week was our Obon Festival. Thank you all very much for your hard work to make the festival the success it was. Everybody works hard at multiple tasks to succeed together in such a big task, but I have to say I have the best festival job. My job is the publicity and selecting the entertainers and educators who make up the schedule and hopefully act as the lure to bring the crowds in to learn a little about Buddhism and Japanese culture -- and then buy the sushi. Or the teriyaki.
To do this, I have the longest lead times of anybody working the festivals, and this suits my personality well. I like to say my mindfulness is deeply centered in next year. If you want somebody who will worry incessantly about next year today, I'm your person. So when I was asked to worry about scheduling performers and publicity, it was a match. I started the Hanamatsuri publicity no later than October 1 the year before and I'm working on Obon two months before Hanamatsuri starts. By the time everybody was cranking into high gear to make Obon happen, I was pretty much done with my work for the year, other than showing up and handing out meal tickets to performers the day of the event, although I do try to at least LOOK busy. And I enjoy amusing myself by walking around the week before Obon and saying, "You mean you haven't thought about Hanamastsuri yet?" Hanamatsuri is ten months away from Obon, and yes I am starting to think about the coming year.
It's proof of the kindness of our sangha that nobody has killed me for that one yet.
So being asked to chair today's service is a bit of a stretch for me because I was only asked yesterday when I was at toban. And like everything else I do, I need long lead times. I need to be asked to chair a month ahead of time. I need to think about my opening remarks and then select the readings to go with them. I can't think on my feet, and if you saw my six page script of those "Good afternoon and welcome to Obon" announcements, you would know this is true to a very deep level. Then I need to practice my opening remarks and readings every single day for a minimum of two weeks before I can get up here and go "live". It isn't you. You aren't a demanding audience. In fact, you are wonderfully supportive as well as grateful it isn't YOU who was asked to chair the service today. It's me. I'm wound tight.
So by asking me to chair the service with no preparation, Sandy was giving me a wonderful Buddhist teaching on being present and being in the moment because otherwise I wouldn't be able to chair the service at all. Thank you, Sandy, for that dharma yesterday, and I plan to listen to today's dharma just as attentively. We'll begin today's service with.....
--except nobody asked me to chair the service the next day, and this was my brain on post- O-bon toban, sweeping out the front of the temple on a hot summer morning.
