In the 1st part of this closing session of Planting Life, Alonso Mendez — archaeoastronomer, artist, and farmer — opens a window into the ancient Maya wisdom of corn and cosmos. Drawing on twenty years of research at Palenque and recent discoveries still unpublished, Alonso traces the deep roots of a civilization shaped by maize. Our teeth, he observes, are corn seeds — teeth surviving centuries in caves, mistaken by ancestors for ancestral bones, gave rise to the Maya understanding of corn as ancestor; in Spanish today, peeling back a corn’s husk is still called pelando la mazorca — we are smiling. Alonso brings to this work a lifetime of listening — to the land, to the sky, to the ancestors whose knowledge is still surfacing. Among his subtly provoking revelations: a farmer resting his planting stick at noon, watching its shadow disappear as the sun centered overhead, discovering the zenith passage — the beginning of astronomical science. And the 365-day solar calendar, Alonso reveals, encodes two gestational cycles: corn’s 105-day cycle from planting to harvest, and the human gestation of 260 days — “divinely linked together.”

Roshi Joan Halifax and Wendy Johnson then gather the community around what has been given and what is now owed — carrying these seeds of awakening, Roshi urges, not just back into our gardens but into a world that urgently needs demilitarizing, in both the global and the personal sense.

And in this, the 2nd part of this closing session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax and Wendy Johnson gather the community around what has been given and what is now owed — carrying these seeds of awakening, Roshi urges, not just back into our gardens but into a world that urgently needs demilitarizing, in both the global and the personal sense.

To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here.

In the 1st part of this closing session of Planting Life, Alonso Mendez — archaeoastronomer, artist, and farmer — opens a window into the ancient Maya wisdom of corn and cosmos. Drawing on twenty years of research at Palenque and recent discoveries still unpublished, Alonso traces the deep roots of a civilization shaped by maize. Our teeth, he observes, are corn seeds — teeth surviving centuries in caves, mistaken by ancestors for ancestral bones, gave rise to the Maya understanding of corn as ancestor; in Spanish today, peeling back a corn’s husk is still called pelando la mazorca — we are smiling. Alonso brings to this work a lifetime of listening — to the land, to the sky, to the ancestors whose knowledge is still surfacing. Among his subtly provoking revelations: a farmer resting his planting stick at noon, watching its shadow disappear as the sun centered overhead, discovering the zenith passage — the beginning of astronomical science. And the 365-day solar calendar, Alonso reveals, encodes two gestational cycles: corn’s 105-day cycle from planting to harvest, and the human gestation of 260 days — “divinely linked together.”

Roshi Joan Halifax and Wendy Johnson then gather the community around what has been given and what is now owed — carrying these seeds of awakening, Roshi urges, not just back into our gardens but into a world that urgently needs demilitarizing, in both the global and the personal sense.

To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here.

In this fifth session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax gathers the community around Wendell Berry’s poem “The Person Born to Farming” — reading it aloud, line by line, drawing participants into its imagery of soil as divine drug, of entering death yearly and coming back rejoicing. The poem becomes a lens for the day’s planting, and a doorway into the concept of sympoiesis — the understanding that nothing arises alone, that an oak tree doesn’t just come from an acorn, but from the sun, water, earth, mycelium, and air making something together. Roshi walks the community through a photographic history of Upaya’s canyon from 1920 to the present — bare bean fields, denuded slopes, and the slow return of ponderosas, pollinator meadows, and wildlife — living proof that staying the course transforms a place. For Roshi, rewilding the land and rewilding ourselves are the same practice: “We can not only rewild ourselves, but we rewild the places that we live in. It is the spirit of our practice to do exactly that.”

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In this fourth session of Planting Life, Porter Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo — historian, anthropologist, and executive director of Hapo Community School — brings a thoughtful and generous account of what it means to reclaim education on indigenous terms. At the heart of his talk is a clear distinction: “Education is something we do inherently as human beings that never ends. Schooling is this Prussian business that was devised about 150 years ago.” From this foundation, Porter traces the decade-long effort to wrest control of Hapo Community School from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and rebuild it around Tewa language, culture, and a curriculum that tracks students not by grade level but by the growth stages of corn — soil, seed, growth, and maturation — each stage mirroring a stage of human development. From this philosophical foundation, the question of who counts as a teacher emerges organically — for Porter, anyone contributing to the school — custodian, cook, driver — carries that title, because “those corn plants, those kids, they’re watching you.” In the end, “All we did is remember how we educate as human beings and reconnect with those core values.”

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In this third session of Planting Life, Roxanne Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo — sculptor, farmer, and founder of Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute — offers a quiet and generous tour of Pueblo agricultural knowledge. Speaking at her first public appearance since a serious accident, Roxanne moves through the ancestral farming methods her people developed for one of the harshest growing environments in North America. Stone mulch gardens, check dams, sunken waffle gardens, and companion planting all derive from a single principle — “Nature wants to live. It wants to grow. It wants to thrive.” The farmer’s work is simply to pay attention and follow that lead. For Roxanne, farming has always been about something deeper than technique: “It’s always been about relationship. It’s always been about how we connect with each other.”

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In the second session of Planting Life, following the morning’s planting ceremony, Beata Tsosie of Santa Clara Pueblo brings her decades of environmental justice work to bear. Drawing on her work with Tewa Women United and the Food and Seed Sovereignty Alliance, Beata maps the layered environmental violence of the Greater Tewa Basin — nuclear contamination from Los Alamos, hexavalent chromium plumes migrating onto Pueblo lands, fracking fields releasing toxins into water systems — and names what connects them: “We live in a culture of allowable harm.” Against this, seed keeping and traditional farming are not nostalgic gestures but acts of survival: “It is an act of resistance to plant our foods and our seeds and keep growing them.” Community rain gardens, mycological remediation at contaminated sites, the revival of indigenous midwifery, and the protection of seed sovereignty — each project is “a little drop of love surrounded by all this environmental violence.” Beata closes by asking us to consider our own relationship to land and food: “Is it relational? Is it reciprocal?”

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In this opening session of Planting Life, Roshi Joan Halifax, Wendy Johnson, and Alonso Mendez gather the community around a single, urgent call: to put our hands into the earth and “give life to life.” Wendy brings the teaching down to its most elemental — the seed splitting, root reaching down, shoot reaching up — and names corn, rice, and barley not as crops but as relatives, carrying the code of our kinship with the living world. Alonso offers a prayer in Tzeltal, scattering maize, beans, and squash before the altar. The weekend ahead brings planting, bearing witness, and teachings from Pueblo farmers, sculptors, historians, and land protectors — all gathered around what Roshi Joan names as the heart of this work: rematriation, coming back to our mother.

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Dainin traces the Five Contemplations of Food from the Buddha’s own instructions to monks through the Chan monastery handbooks that shaped Dogen. Each contemplation asks us to receive food not as comfort or reward but as medicine, as the fruit of countless labors, as life giving itself to life. These contemplations are expressed through the meal gatha chanted at Upaya daily: “May we be nourished, that we may nourish life.” Silence and food, stillness and sustenance — each an expression of what is essential.

In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, Roshi Joan Halifax draws on her newly written essay “Mutual Belonging, Compassion, and Social Responsibility” to offer a radical reframing of compassion for a world in crisis. Too often reduced to kindness or pity, Roshi teaches compassion as something far more radical: “Compassion is not an emotion. Compassion is natural courage.” From this foundation, she draws on Francisco Varela and the Zen koan of reaching for a pillow in the night, which both point toward compassion as spontaneous, unscripted, and alive. Drawing on the concept of sympoiesis, meaning ‘making with,’ Roshi observes that in a world where nothing exists independently, “compassion is life responding to itself.” This understanding carries us inevitably outward — toward the structures and systems that generate suffering — because, as Roshi puts it, “intimacy makes indifference impossible” — inviting us to let our natural courage take form in the world.

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Monshin Nannette Overley traces an honest question back to its roots: what is determination, and what is its role in our lives? Beginning with her discomfort over the whip-and-tether imagery in the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures from the Spring Practice Period, Monshin describes the path of her earnest inquiry. She moves through the Lojong training’s instruction to “cultivate a serious attitude” and the Zen pillar of great faith, great doubt, and great determination. These teachings lead her to Diné elder Pat McCabe, who speaks of a beautiful stubbornness rooted to life itself. Monshin brings her own imagery to this deeply rooted nature:

“Determination is a life force. It’s like the seed making its way through the dark soil… because it has to do it. That’s its job.”

Monshin asks us to remember a time in which we embodied great determination. She recalls the great determination of childbirth, a time in which her personal beliefs of effort took a backseat to the raw expression of life’s own determination. Monshin identifies the near enemy of determination as the ego’s exertion of will on the world — encouraging us instead towards a genuine determination as an alignment with life, with vow, with the whole web of being.