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

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So since the recording is on, hello and welcome again, formally hello and welcome.

It's more official now that's being recorded for audio drama.

So I wanted to set the tone for our practice

together tonight with this poem that is from this book, Good Poems by

Garrison Keeler. It's an anthology. I'm really liking the many of the poems in here.

And this one, it's called Bess. And it's by Linda Paston P A S T A N. And it's quite beautiful when I was reading this from I'll tell you what touched me and maybe I'll read it and then I'll lead a poem inspired I'll lead up I will lead a guided meditation inspired by the poem.

It's been a long day, so.

So when Bess, the landlord's black-eyed daughter,

waited for her highway man in the poem I learned by

breathless heart at 12. It occurred to me for the first time that my mild-eyed mother Bess might have a life all her own, a secret

past I couldn't enter except in dreams.

That single sigh of a syllable has passed like a keepsake

to this newest child wrapped now in the silence of sleep.

And in the dream I enter, I could be holding my infant mother in my arms the same wide cheekbones the name indelible as a birthmark.

So many aspects of this of this poem I had to read it twice for it to really sink in for me

maybe I'll share a couple of things and why I want to use it as a basis for our practice tonight.

So as the author, Linda Paston, talking,

it was talking about when she was 12, and in a poem she read about someone else named Bess, landlords, black-eyed

daughter, etc. and it occurred to her that, oh, her mother who shared the same name, Bess,

her mother could have a past, could have a life all her own, because we think of our mothers, our parents just as fitting a role.

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