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Namaste and welcome. It's lovely to be with you all.

I'd like to begin this talk with a favorite story.

Its protagonist is Mullen Azardine who's a sufi wise man and a jokester.

And in this story, he's resting under the shade of a tall, luscious walnut tree.

And as he sits daydreaming, he notices that there's these huge pumpkins growing on delicate

vine, snaking across the ground. And then he looks up and he squints to see these tiny

walnuts growing on high up on the magnificent tree.

And he says, how strange mother nature is, you know, to make pumpkins grow on spindly

little vines or little walnuts have their own impressive tree.

And just in that moment, all nut falls from above and lands, you know, on Mullen Azardine's

head. And the muller rubs his sore head and he picks up the fallen walnut and looks high

up into the branches of the trees. And then he looks over, thankfully, at the swollen

pumpkins growing safely on the ground, you know, oh mother nature, you are so wise.

So there's a wisdom in our natural world. And it really brings us back home to our inner

wisdom. And there's a elemental aliveness in the natural world that reconnects us with

our own vitality. And there's a purity. In nature, we seem to come home to the truth

of our nature to a wider sense of being, to our belonging to life. And I say this because

when we sense our natural world being defiled, our own awakened awareness knows it's happening

to us. A friend shared with me her granddaughter's letter. It was this poignant beautiful letter

in this, this grander's 12 years old. And she's saying how no one in her school is teaching

...