Okay, so I'd like to begin tonight with a story, as I sometimes do, and this one is about

a king and a queen, a very kind couple who had no offspring, so no one to inherit the throne,

and a wise counselor suggested that they be very egalitarian and invite anyone in the kingdom

who is interested in the job to come from an interview, and so the date was set and they opened it wide,

and it was quite an interesting setup for them because what they did to ensure that it really was

equal was that when guests would come, they'd invite them into the royal wardrobes and let them

choose whatever they wanted to wear, and so they had access to wonderful clothing and jewelry or

whatever, and they had a great banquet so that while people were waiting for their interview,

they would be fed well and entertained, and so there was music and the like. Well, the king and the

queen and their wise counselor stayed up in their chambers waiting for the people to come up for their

interviews and hours and hours when by they heard the sounds of laughter and shouting and jokes and so on,

but they were just waiting so finally, into the wee hours, the counselor went down to see what was going on,

and what he found was everybody had left, they had taken the little soap, they had completely eaten all

the food, they'd left with their clothing on, they'd all gone, and they had forgotten why they came.

And so it is with us that we move through our day and often our decades with a kind of forgetfulness

about what really matters, about what's really important, and I've noticed when I look at people that

I know now that have been practicing meditation for decades and decades, and they're a growing number

of us, and many, many people can say yes, I'm more centered, I know when I'm stressed how to kind of

work with it, there's more balance, but often there's a kind of plateau where there hasn't been a

deep kind of liberating realization or freedom of the heart, and in a way a kind of, well that's just

how it is, whereas those I know that have continued in a really creative, deep way to feel awakening,

the difference is a kind of remembering of what matters.

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