Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

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 Drawing on twenty years of research at Palenque and recent discoveries still unpublished, Alonso traces the deep roots of a civilization shaped by maize.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 Drawing on twenty years of research at Palenque and recent discoveries still unpublished, Alonso traces the deep roots of a civilization shaped by maize.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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