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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

So welcome, welcome.

So today I'm going to continue this exploration of poetry and practice.

This has been such a rich endeavor for me.

So many of you know that I'm certainly not trained in the arts.

I'm trained as a scientist.

So I come to this appreciation of poetry late in life.

And so not as a scholar or anybody that's done in the formal training or investigation.

But I just want to share this person's understanding interpretation of them.

And I like to use poems. I have a lot of imagery because there's a way.

At least for me that this imagery.

It does it touches us differently touches me differently than just words.

Then just something very specific and explicit.

And to be sure I appreciate all these different time different ways in which we can communicate and share.

This is going on with us as individuals or ideas, opinions, views.

But poetry has this distillation of this pointing that I find really meaningful and impactful.

And today's poem has a real gritty quality to it.

Not all beautiful. And I mean, I think the poem is beautiful, but the content.

And I chose this today partly because that's the truth of the human experience.

Sometimes it feels great.

Sometimes there are ref spots.

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