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

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Hello, everyone. Welcome.

And for this morning, I'd like to begin with a parts of a poem by Walt Whitman, wonderful poem for that has a lot of speaks.

I think in many ways parts of it to our practice.

The song is called Song of the Open Road.

The part that I'll read to introduce our sitting is he writes,

I inhale droughts of space.

The east and the west are mine.

The north and the south are mine.

I am larger, better than I thought.

I did not know I held so much goodness.

All seems beautiful to me.

So to inhale space, all around us is the sense infinite space.

And to bring that into ourselves as we sit.

And as we exhale, to let it all expand outwards, to fill all of space.

The awareness, spacious awareness inside, spacious awareness outside.

He writes just before in the long poem about loosening up all that holds him.

All the ways that were held are cling or crave.

Let it loosen, and then he talks about space.

And we'll see later that this context of also talking about listening to others,

listening well, letting go.

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