The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author.

I'd like to start this class with a poem from Mary Oliver called Mysteries Yes.

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken.

How people come from delight or the scars of damage to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance always from those who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say, look and laugh in astonishment and bow their heads.

When we connect with what's most meaningful to us, whether it's being just an awe of beauty and nature,

whether it's a sense of that love with another person or the creativity in a moment that we experience our birth of a child or death.

When we're in those moments, it's so clear that it's beyond any conceptual understanding that our minds can't get around it.

It's bigger than our ideas and we're in what's often called don't know mind or the Zen Buddhist call beginners mind.

It's that openness that's bigger than thought.

And this has become very poignant to me in accompanying my mom who I've shared with many of you is in hospice now and in her final probably weeks.

The sense that there's nothing ahead. There's nothing to really plan for or talk about that's conceptual.

And there's no way that my mind can grasp this mystery of coming and going of these beings.

It can be experienced, but it can't be grasped in ideas.

So I've been reflecting on how these cognitive capacities we have are incredible. They're themselves awe inspiring.

They're this evolutionary achievement and they allow us to build skyscrapers and have these amazing breakthroughs in medicine and they allow us to communicate and they are actually a part of the support of the spiritual path.

This capacity of think about things and they're an incredibly limiting domain way more than we think they are.

And in a way perhaps most simply said our concepts about life cover over the mystery that's here.

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