Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host Thomas Mconki. Thank you so much for listening today.

I want to explore the theme of groundlessness in this episode.

I came across a really lovely interview that touches on this theme and I want to kind of read some of those excerpts from the interview.

If you haven't heard of it, NPR hosts a tiny desk concert and contest.

And recently, a song called Wonder Eye by the band Little Moon won the 2023 competition.

It's a lovely song with like a lot of dynamism, beautiful instrumentals, vocals.

I recommend the song.

Hopefully we can get a link for you in the show notes. This is also, I'll say, a band that comes,

you know, from close to my stomping grounds back in Utah. This is a band based in Provo, Utah.

And my wife told me about this song. I checked it out. I listened to it. I loved it. And what I loved even more was the interview. And I want to just read a few quotes from the lead singer Emma Hardiman when they were asking her about this song.

And she says that when they wrote this song in early 2021, the song Wonder Eye, her husband and bandmate Nathan's mother was in hospice care.

And at that time, this couple was actually leaving. They were raised in the Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they were in the process of leaving that religion. People leaving

formal religion is a commonplace nowadays, I think,

particularly in the millennial Gen Z kind of generations. And I was really struck by Hardiman's

really balanced and gracious tone in the interview. She said about her mother-in-law's death and her

leaving institutional religion that there is beauty and comfort in our former beliefs of certainty,

light, and life. We honor and respect such teachings, but we also find deep beauty and uncertainty, darkness, chaos, and death.

Perhaps it's all one and the same.

So I love, you know, I've worked in a community that engages millennial spirituality, post-institutional spirituality, all that stuff.

What I hear more commonly in this new wave of spirituality is a kind of irritation towards

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