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

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Hey, maybe we'll, it started here.

I wanted to say something in general about poems.

And I said this a little bit before, but there's this way in which poetry can be a

doorway and be an entry point to shifting our relationship to experience.

For me, I'm fascinated by this, by how poems, and they use the same old words we use all

the time for the most part, but it's their arrangement.

It's the way that you guys can't see this, but the way that there's line breaks,

you know, in a poem that's different than often we would do with prose.

That encourages just a different way of maybe shakes up expectations or something that there isn't a period

at the end of each line. Instead, there's a way that the lines goes to the next, that words go to

the next line and then their punctuation is there. Or in a way, and we have to kind of like lean in and pay a little bit more attention

because things aren't exactly as we expect them to be.

And it's this power of them, of us having to pay just a little bit more attention

and the words not precisely meeting our expectations that I think is part

of the power of poetry, how it can not only wait with the content, wait to practice,

but it's a way of practicing to read poetry itself independent of what the content is.

So in this way, I think poetry can be quite powerful.

Maybe it helps us to be more aware, more connected to what's actually on the page. In my case now,

right, what's actually on the screen, as I'm reading these on the screen. So I'd be an

invitation here to let the words wash over you as I drop in a poem during our guided meditation this morning.

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