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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Good morning, Cal.

Good morning.

So, yeah, so this being this closest Sunday to Earth Day, I thought it would be a good day to celebrate it with a Earth Talk day.

And this is kind of a topic, it's very dear to me because of what I feel is a very intimate and close connection

to the earth, to the natural world that I kind of grew up with

and continued to be part of in different parts of my life.

That it seems that who I am as a person is almost inseparable

from what the earth is, what the natural world is. And the representative, a small story

that I like for that is when I was going to college at Central Valley in California in town of Davis.

They had some magnificent oak trees in the courtyards of the campus, old, massive, majestic

oak trees. And somehow they had survived from being cutting down.

And I think there was a time when these massive, great, majestic oak trees were spread out across the valley,

the earliest records of Europeans coming to the peninsula,

which was Admiral Vancouver in something like 1780 or something.

No, something like that. He describes that there was like an English park along from here,

right literally where we are, with massive oak trees. I think it came in the springs, grasslands.

And so in Davis and the campus they have some of these big oak trees. And I was studying botany.

I took a botany class. And in the beginning of that quarter, they talked about the cycle of oxygen and carbon dioxide and

how we breathe out carbon dioxide that the trees breathe that in and convert it through to

oxygen and that the oxygen that we breathe is coming from the plants around us.

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