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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

So again, welcome, welcome, everybody.

It's lovely to practice together.

So this idea of poetry of practice,

and there's poems prose does as well,

but poems, there's a way in which they often use metaphor,

in a really evocative way.

And this is part of what can make poetry be so powerful,

maybe speaking directly to the heart,

because it's using metaphors of maybe not the usual concepts

or labels or language that we would use to describe something.

But instead, sometimes in poetry, there's a way in which there's a pointing to something

rather than saying it or labeling it directly.

So maybe there's a way in which the heart and the mind have to look in a particular direction

in order to understand what the poem, what the poet is pointing towards.

And we might say in some ways,

all we're ever doing when we speak about something is to point towards it.

We're not right, there's a difference between the labels and the words that we use

than the actual objects or experiences.

And there's something about poetry that doesn't try to pretend that it's not doing that.

Whereas in our usual language, we might think that the map is the territory, for example,

...