The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So I'll start this little talk by reading the poem again that I read earlier this morning and it's called On a Day when Stillness Seems Possible.

On a Day when Stillness seems possible, and the river is a long white stroke of

roiling and continuous surge, and the grass gone to seed, waivers in the wind, then stills, waivers, then stills.

And the

ants sponges spiral, the leaf shadows spangle,

and the ants braid a path across the stones.

But I rhyme. across the stones.

But I rhyme today with the cottonwood trunks,

my own body unmoving in the breeze. It feels good in this moment to be more tree than cloud, more silence than song. So easily the stillness opens me, softens me. How simple, really, to do nothing.

How is it I so often resist?

If there is no in me now, I do not notice it.

Stillness has made a home in me and there seems to be nothing that stillness refuses.

Come, it seems to say, there's room here for everything.

It opens me wider.

Wider. The world rushes in.

I love this phrase, I rhyme with cottonwood trunks you know kind of like I rhyme with the trees. It's such a nice way like there's a certain resonance there with the

solidity of the trees or the stillness of the trees.

And she's using this word stillness, but I offered this word contentment.

This way of can we be okay with whatever is arising, this

certain amount of satisfaction. Maybe it's maybe it's not perfect, maybe it's not exactly what we want.

Maybe it's not this big bubbling happiness or bliss that we were hoping for, but can it be okay?

...