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

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Good morning. Welcome. Welcome everybody. This is the third in this series I'm doing on the poetry of practice and something I'd like to say and some of the power of poetry, and maybe part of reason why some of us, not everybody,

appreciates it.

I certainly did not appreciate poetry

earlier in my life.

I thought it was frivolous and I didn't understand it.

But now I have this much greater appreciation.

But part of the power, excuse me here. You're going to. I had to mute myself while I was coughing.

So I wanted to say that part of the hour of poetry, like some of the impact or its beauty, I might even say, is that it lets us see things in a different way.

See things in a different way,

or maybe even just see different things

that we might ordinarily just ignore or not notice but poetry

I'm like often like princess to this way and to see things from maybe like a

different perspective and sometimes this is a surprising perspective, you know,

maybe a little bit different one and maybe there's often this very subtle sense of delight like oh, like oh, like oh, and I'm like, oh, I hadn't thought of that or oh, and

it's not interesting. And there's this way that this subtle sense of delight is not so different from that subtle sense of delight that we get when we finally kind of like align ourselves with reality and start and they're mindful and present for what's actually happening in that moment.

Even if what's being experienced is not pleasant, if it's uncomfortable, but there's a subtle sense of like,

yeah, okay, it's like this. Instead of you know trying to convince ourselves differently or

Gaslight ourselves in some kind of way

So this subtle sense of delight that poetry allows, and I would say that mindfulness, like being

present for whatever is happening, whether it's ordinary, pleasant,

...