The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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So, hello everyone on this solstice winter day and I'm recalling how my son and when he was in third grade there was a teacher who gave all the

students in the class each of them their own poem to memorize in the course of the year, once a week

each student would recite their poem for the whole class. And my son was happiest with his poem because it was so

short and it went something like this is short, that nothing is born without darkness.

Nothing grows without light. So you certainly can question if that's universally true.

But I was inspired by that. My son doesn't remember having that poem, but I do, that that has tremendous value of what gets born out of the darkness that whether it's a seed buried in the

ground in the so-called dark in a human being who develops in the so-called darkness of the womb and comes into the

light. What it does for me is to appreciate everything has its

season everything has a potential in the darkest days of our lives when things are very difficult are maybe

the seeds, within it there's contained the seeds for something new to be born.

And what wants to be born out of the darkness?

What wants to be born out of our difficulties and challenges? And I found that this mindfulness practice has been

invaluable in making space for this deeper, kind of an organic, natural process to unfold in the midst of our challenges.

Rather than thinking we have to fix all our challenges and solve them,

we create the conditions within ourselves that makes room for something profound, something right to be born out of the challenges,

out of whatever is

So now in the darkest day of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere

that maybe we can think of that this is, you know, a time for birth, something new, it's coming for all of us. So part of that condition is to be simple.

To be simple enough or not crowding the space of awareness with distracting thoughts, crowding it with

commentary and judgments and planning and analysis and reviewing and

...