Tonight we are doing a refuge ceremony and I'll explain more about it.

We like to start the new year this way and it's a beautiful, very living kind of ritual.

You can totally make your own. How many of you made New Year's resolutions this year?

To set a curiosity. How many people do that? It's a valuable thing even though it's

kind of arbitrary. Okay, here it is, January 1st or whatever, just to sense the

shape of our lives and what matters. And I sometimes do these kind of casual

interviews and say, well, what kind of resolution did you make? And I find that

more and more, the resolutions have to do with one of two things and one of them

is being kinder, just being kinder to ourselves to others. And the other that I

see a lot is getting simpler, just simplifying life, not being quite so busy.

How many of you found yourself falling into either those categories on some

level? Just help me with my survey here. Yeah, thank you. We had a New Year's retreat

as many of you know and a number of you, I'm looking around and seeing a lot of you

that were there. And one of the themes that came up was that of spiritual life

being really about forgetting and remembering that we are conditioned to forget

what matters, to forget presents, to forget. And we also have this capacity to

pay attention and to wake up. And in Buddhism, there are three related

gateways that support us in remembering, that support us in homecoming. And they're

actually very archetypal. In fact, as I've started looking into this because I'm

writing now on the three refuges, I'm finding expressions of them in many

faith groups. And the three refuges, these interrelated gateways, are called

Buddha Dharma Sangha. And what those polywords mean, and I'm going to reverse the

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