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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So in some parts of the Insight meditation communities, there was a decision ten years ago to celebrate the first week of October as the Earth Care Week.

And so when it comes to October, so when it comes to the beginning of October, when I come and give talks, I like to give a talk on that topic today is October 1st.

And so I'd love this word, this combination, putting together in the same phrase, Earth Care.

On the surface at least, or in kind of first thoughts, associations to the word Earth, it's the planet out there.

But care is something that's in here in our hearts, or in our life. It's something that arises from us.

And so to put these two together is such a beautiful thing that we have this capacity for care, and we have this Earth that we live in, and so we can care for it.

And then you could say, well, it cares for us. Earth care could mean not that we care for the Earth, but Earth care is recognizing that we're cared for by the Earth.

But that's not maybe so popular to think that way. Both of them cannot be so popular.

That we should care for the Earth, or that we are being cared for it.

I suppose if you had the idea that it's caring for us, then we feel like, oh, you better do something in return.

But we don't, the Earth is just a hunk of rock floating in space, and we don't need to do anything for it, just for us to live our life.

But I love that you bring them together, Earth Care.

And it also, for me, raises some of the, points to some of the great spiritual questions that I think, religious people, spiritual people, are grappling with in one way or the other explicitly or implicitly.

Questions like, who are we? Who are we in relationship to the world? Who are we in relationship to the other people?

What is this world we're in it, and what relationships does the world have to me? Who are all these people who are sharing this planet with, and what's their relationship to me?

How do we fit into all this?

And they now, our particular insight meditation tradition, if people just, you know, anthropologists from Mars came to see us, you know, study what are these people doing?

They go back to Mars and say, they just close their eyes, and they tune out the world, and they just sit there, look inside, you know, and they seem to be oblivious of the world around them.

It's a very peculiar species, or subspecies.

But as we do this investigation into who we are and what it means to be living here, there's all kinds of interesting things that become clear.

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