So I wanted to, as the beginning of a New Year's talk, share a story that has been

drifting around. I think many traditions. And it's about a diamond thief. He's also really well-known

pickpocket. And he hangs around the diamond district in India. And he's just to see who's purchasing what.

And one day, a very well-known diamond merchant purchased one of the most beautiful valuable gems

around. And this guy followed him. And he boarded a train. And for the next three days during this

journey on the train, he tried to pick the merchant's pocket and get that jewel. And at the end of

the journey, he hadn't found it. And he was completely frustrated. So he, he was an accomplished thief.

And kind of his pride was wounded. So he finally confronted the merchant and he confessed. And,

and basically said, I've used all the skills of my art. Where did you hide it? Like, how did that happen?

And the merchant responded, well, I saw you. I suspected what was going on. So I hid the,

I hid the diamond in the place you'd be least likely to expect in your own pocket.

You know. And I share that because the, the understanding is really that the treasure we seek,

what we really long for is closer than we can possibly imagine. That the treasure we seek, the

freedom, the happiness, the love is already and always right here. It's right inside us.

And yet we move through our life as if in this, in this trance that it's somewhere else.

So we not only look in the wrong place, but we forget really what we're looking for.

That's kind of an, an opening to what we'll be exploring.

The Rose says that we spend our life fishing only to find out it wasn't fish that we were after.

So there's this deep recognition really that the spiritual path is simply a process of forgetting

and then remembering and then forgetting again and then remembering and we go back and forth.

We kind of begin to get that. And one of the very enlivening things about beginning a new year

is there's a kind of collective sense of stepping back and looking. It just happens. We do that

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