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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Okay, folks.

Yeah, so a few questions and inquiries around kind of political moment, fear, love, maybe start there.

So it's a kind of very active question for me, and it's not something that I at all have a sense of like, okay, this is how to do it.

And certainly have no sense of that I know something that you must know and tell you

how to do it. It's more a kind of living with the question of what what's the appropriate response

and kind of what does love entail? And that question,

what does love entail? What is love? What does it ask of me? What does it offer me?

That's not a question we answer. That's a kind of co-on that we live with. And it's heightened in this time, but that's not a

question ever meant to be answered, because to answer it is to short circuit our ethical evolution.

So I want to be balanced.

I want to live a balanced life, but at the same time I don't want to fetishize balance.

And so maybe I begin by just saying that, yeah, some of my moral heroes are not living balanced lives.

They're like really going.

And sometimes it almost looks like this bourgeois preoccupation for me to care about balance.

And yeah, they burn out that does happen they become nihilistic or they suffer a lot

or they fall off the horse and have to get back that's true but they live impactful lives and there's a lot to be said for that.

But as Buddhist practitioners, it's like, okay, in a sense where the path is founded on the sense that like it's possible to live a life of love and also take good care of our heart and stay balanced in some way.

And given that, one of my impulses like if we're going to suffer it better be for a good reason

it better be consolidating our love it better be sponsoring our service it better be consolidating our love. It better be sponsoring our service. It better be moving us

into engagement of some kind. If we're suffering and it just has a cyclical, spinny kind of feel,

...