From SGI USA, I'm Cassidy Bradford, and this is Budability, the weekly series where I talk with Buddhists from all walks of life about the power we each have to change our lives and the world around us.

And are you recording on your end? Oh, we're recording. We're live. We're live. We're ready to go. All right. I started my voice memo as well. So I'll just send you the whole thing. Yeah, perfect. Okay, I'm recording on my end too. So I think let me going to take take take.

Do you want me to lead you in, give you the like introduce yourself?

Okay, yeah.

All right.

So to get started, I really start.

So every episode we always open with, you know, just somebody introducing themselves.

So you can share your name, where you live,

what you do for work, and your age. Okay, cool. My name is Joshua Thomas. My pronouns are he and his.

This year was filled with firsts for me. This time last year, we were just launching the new season,

and I was doing my very first interviews for the show.

This year looked like living in a new city, planning a wedding, making new friends, and of course

speaking with an unbelievably diverse group of people for the show.

Together we all learned from the lived experiences of some really incredible people.

We learned about the grieving process from people who lost close family.

I revisited those conversations several times as I deepened my understanding of the Buddhist

perspective of life and death when my grandparents passed away.

You know, it's been a little over a year since my mom passed, and I won't call myself like a grief expert or anything.

I'm still very new to like what this experience is like.

But what I can say is that grief is not something that you can expect to get over, right?

Like it's now a part of like my DNA grief, like this loss.

But it's something that I've learned to live with and coexist with.

...