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

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Thank you for meditating together.

It's not going to meditate together.

So continuing on this theme of poetry is practice, let's say a little bit more about poetry.

There's this way that in poetry you find like this competitiveness of expression like where things get said like a lot gets said in a few words.

And maybe there's a certain amount of directness, but maybe not in the directness that we often think about in prose.

There's like a, it's pointing with some cleanness or clarity of where it's

pointing, but that's the manner of pointing is not direct, direct would maybe to say something, or label something specifically.

But this clarity, I would say maybe, is similar to this non-distracted mind like when we're

meditating there's a certain clarity of the mind and so in the same way poetry

has this clarity in the way that it points to things.

And maybe, you know, the way that poetry points is through the, we might say the magic of metaphor or use of other senses senses you know the way things

smell or how they look or or maybe there's a way in which they highlight different ways of experience things, but it's pointing towards experience so often at least the poems that I'm bringing forth for this.

And there's maybe one more thing I want to say about poetry here is that it can shine a light in some kind of way towards something that maybe

otherwise we just wouldn't see or the light helps us to see things differently with a different perspective. This is part of the, what I'm calling

the poetry of practice, is like how poetry and practice of this relationship.

Not only using poetry as a support for practice, but in ways in which

the experiences in some kind of way share some elements. So this morning and during the guide meditation I introduced

this poem called Mindful by Mary Oliver, all of her many you know, is an American poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize, like in the mid-80s.

And then this poem, she got published in 2005, when she was 70 years old. I just love this, right?

You know, she was in the later season of her life and she was still writing poetry, still offering things of beauty to the world.

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