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

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Good evening and welcome.

It's nice to see you all.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Diana Clark and I'm always

often here on Fridays. Wow. Today's only Monday. I'm here Mondays, except when I'm off teaching retreats or something

then there's substitute teachers.

And I want to start by talking about this simile, this analogy that gets used a lot in the Buddhist tradition a way to describe practice

as a way, also as a way to describe like this whole path of practice to liberation.

I want to like tease it apart and look at it and see if there's some things that we can learn and like how we can apply it to our own lives today and way that we can

understand and appreciate some of the, maybe some of the finer elements here when we sometimes don't think about or aren't so obvious.

So when we talk about this simile in particular or also about our practice.

And I'll start with this notion of this idea of crossing the floods.

This is an expression that shows up a number of times in the early Buddhist literature. And maybe it's not surprising, ancient India, right

there in the Ganges Plains, and you know there's this monsoon season and things flood. And you have to wait till the end of the monsoon season to

cross the flood. Nowadays how many rivers do we creeks do we cross? We don't even know it, right?

Because we're on a freeway or a highway or something.

But then it was a big deal.

You'd be separated from whomever, whatever,

for months at a time, simply because you couldn't cross over the water.

And not only is it like separate you, but if you get caught in the flood, you know you get carried away to

presumably someplace he didn't want to go so this flood is something that's

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