Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

Okay, thank you so much for joining me here on the Gathering Room.

I am Martha Beck.

Ha ha! I said it, all the things I was supposed to say.

And today we are talking about something that I stole from another author this morning.

But it's not, here's the thing about being an author.

You can steal things as long as you tell people you stole them.

This is called attribution and it makes everything okay.

Yes, I stole this from Shinzen- Zen Yang, a meditation teacher whom I quote

often, he's an incredibly articulate dude, mathematician, physicist, and Zen monk. And I was listening

to one of his tapes today and it said, he said he had a Zen master

who would start a session by smacking his fan

against something and saying,

so what are you going to do when the earthquake comes?

And then they would just go from there.

And the answer was to sort of sit and stare at a wall,

which is a whole Zen thing.

But I really liked the idea that into each life, earthquakes come.

Things shake in this world of ours, and right now things are shaking.

They're shaking in our individual lives. They're certainly shaking out there in the collective life.

I keep talking

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