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

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Okay.

So, T.S. Eliot's poem, Ash Wednesday, often not a scholar, I don't know what I'm talking about, but apparently, often often read as a kind of conversion poem, as conversion to Anglicism.

And yeah, I think from Unitarianism to Anglicanism.

So begins this way, because I do not hope to turn again, because I do not hope, because I do not hope to turn,

desiring this man's gift and that man's scope. I no longer strive to strive towards such things. Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?

Why should I mourn the vanished power of the usual reign? And twice in that poem he uses the phrase that's been quoted quite often in

Dharma talks, teach us to care and not to care, teach us to sit still.

This part doesn't get quoted so much,

but the very next line is pray, pray for us sinners now

and at the hour of our death.

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

And generally, I've understood that teach us to care and not to care in a sequential way.

There are moments of care, but then there are other moments when care is absent.

And I've described a kind of dialectic of love and rest,

love and rest, the urgency of love, and love.

And yet we know that even love, beautiful love, fatigues the heart. And so we must find ways of resting, not closing the heart, but resting. And I've been preoccupied in trying to work out my own kind of life and what kind of, what a good life entails,

working out this relationship between compassion and equanimity.

Like, what is the kind of balance point between nihilism and frenzied inefficient suffering?

And we know it doesn't take long to realize that a path devoid of compassion is kind of dismal,

pathetic, really.

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