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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello and I continue now the third part of my story with Buddhist practice and I had been

introduced to Zen practice and was very attracted to it. And then I went back to Norway in order to kind of come to terms with what my relationship was to my home country.

I hadn't lived there for many years growing up, but I'd gone back frequently.

So I made it back and I had various adventures.

I worked that fall in, I think it was a fall of 74 on the docks in the town of City of Bergen, a dock worker mostly loading and unloading

small cargo boats.

And I had a wonderful discussion, you know, there were very little Buddhists that I, in Norway, famous he was my girlfriend of the time knew about him

because he lived near where she grew up a Buddhist hermit high up in the mountains and the snow and the coldest part of Norway.

And I went to visit him for two weeks in the middle of January and kind of climbed a mountain.

He would live in a small cabin, but it was probably the closest thing in my life of following the kind of cartoon idea of going into the Himalayas to find high up in a cave to find a wise person.

And so I've been two weeks with him.

And that was kind of fascinating.

Spent the morning skiing in the high country

by myself in the afternoon is having long

conversations with him. And then but the important thing that happened there

in Norway was that I stayed for a year and the following six months I

lived on a small farm in southern Norway with a wonderful couple who took me in and included me in their family life,

their family life, their farming life.

And I love the life there.

I love getting up in the morning caring for the cows

and the farm and it was just a lovely lifestyle for me.

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