Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host Thomas McConkey. Thanks so much for listening today. Oh, my friends, I smile.

This is the last official episode of season four. I think I got a little bonus material coming up for you later in the fall.

So you might see another bonus number 25 like we did in season three, but today

is the last one. And I'm just smiling because here we are in Salt Lake City. Hurricane force winds

doing untold damage in the city.

I'm in a blackout in my neighborhood,

and I happen to have just enough battery power on my phone and a battery pack to power my audio recorder

to bring you this session.

So, yeah, ain't that been season four for us.

I think we started with, you know, a pandemic and earthquake.

Yeah, it's only fitting that we should close it out this way.

So make what meaning of that, you will.

I've had this thought.

Like Robert Frost talks about a poem starting as a lump in his throat.

This is more like a ripple through my heart.

At any rate, it's not a fully formed idea. It's a deep impression and feeling, and I

thought I would just share it with my friends here on the podcast and the intimacy of the darkness

that I'm in at the moment. And it has to do with parenting. A lot of people have asked me what it feels like to become a father.

So if you're tuning into this episode, if it's your first mindfulness plus episode,

I became a dad for the first time about 10 weeks ago.

And, you know, it's extraordinary.

And people ask me about it, and I don't totally have words for it,

...