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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org

for this next practice period, I'll start by reading a short poem.

Something to maybe carry with you as you're practicing this morning.

This poem is by Rosemary Trauma.

I'm laughing because I so often in reading some of her poems. She's a fantastic poet. I just think she's great.

And this poem is called On a Day when Stillness seems possible.

And again, this is by Rosemary Trauma.

And I'd like how the title of this poem just leads right into the first line.

On a day when stillness seems possible,

and the river is a long white stroke of roiling and continuous surge.

And the grass gone to seed wavers in the wind, then stills,

waivers, then stills,

and the swallows spiral,

and the leaf shadows spingle, the ants sprayed a path across the stones.

But I rhyme today with the cottonwood trunks, my own body unmoving in the breeze. It feels

good in this moment to be more tree than cloud, more silence than song.

So easily the stillness opens me, softens me.

How simple, really, to do nothing.

How is it I so often resist?

If there is no in me now, I do not notice it. Stillness has made a home in me and there seems to be

nothing that stillness refuses. Come it seems to say There is room here for everything. It opens me wider. The world rushes in. It opens me wider. The world rushes in. A big part of why we practice our meditation is to cultivate this sense of stillness.

...