The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit our website at audiodder. Here we go, great.

Hey.

So hello and welcome everyone to this edition of Happy Hour. So I wanted to offer a poem today and for us to sit with peace to practice peace with every breath

wishing peace, both for ourselves, our own minds, our own hearts, these minds that get entangled,

get entangled, and also for the world, and also for the world.

So I got this poem actually, I was teaching a retreat last week at Spirit Rock with Sylvia Borstain, who was a dear friend and it's been a teacher for many years.

Lovely Sylvia, and she shared this poem with me. And the name of the poem is Taking Sides, and it's by Erwin Keller.

In fact, I'm going to put a pointer to this poem in Chad so that if some of you are visual and would like to follow the poem you are able to do that there we go and I will read it out loud. So here we go.

Okay. So here we go, okay. Taking sides.

Today I am taking sides, also to say the person who wrote the poem,

Ewing Keller is a, what he says on his website is that he's a

rabbi teacher, writer, and hope manager.

I love that, hope manager. may we all be hope managers

taking sides

Today I am taking sides

I am taking the side of peace, peace which I will not abandon even when its voice is

drowned out by hurt and hatred, bitterness of loss, cries of right and wrong.

I am taking the side of peace, whose name has barely been spoken in this winnerless war.

I will hold peace in my arms and share my body's breath, lest peace be added to the body's count. I will call for the

escalation even when I want nothing more than to get even. I will do it in the service of peace.

I will make a clearing in the overgrown thicket of cause and effect so peace can

breathe for a minute and reach for the sky.

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