And as we become wise, we step back and see the mystery of it, instead of how it's supposed to be.

Welcome to the Jack Cornfield Heart Wisdom Hour.

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So what I'd like to talk about tonight, and we'll see how it goes, I'd like to talk about the most basic truths in Buddhist teaching.

And I come to it in part because in these last months, I've been talking about the war in Ukraine and the pandemic and the collective anxiety and all these other things.

And it feels like it's time to come back to the basics.

And I'll start with a poem that answers a kind of question for us as human beings, human incarnation.

What kind of world did we incarnate into?

So this is a poem from Bridget Lowry that I often read.

In the strange early morning half light who we sit, it is by the way of meditation poem.

In the cloudiness of our questioning we sit in our madness and our clarity we sit.

In the midst of too much to do we sit.

In the warm arms of our shared sorrow we sit in community and in loneliness we sit.

In sweet exhaustion we sit in the blazing energy of being alive we sit here with the singing of the coyotes and the crickets.

Here with each electric bird song, here with the rippling of breezes and the great trees and the dry grasses.

Here with the cod webs and the clouds and the teaming masses.

And the dusty road upon us, us in the sound and the sound in us, us in the world and the world in us.

So here we are with this human incarnation given a human life.

And of course at this time maybe in all times but right now there are things that are quite difficult especially if you're here where I am in North America.

There's the growing fire season and then we look at the images and the news and there's floods and refugees and climate change.

And of course the wars you crane in Myanmar and Libyan so many other places.

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