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I'd like to begin this talk sharing one of the great thrills of the season for me.

We had a family of fox that set up shop right under our gazebo and there are five cubs and

they've been cavorting around wildly in these last handful of days. Of course, and I can see them right from my office window.

I have these binoculars and I watch them. And there's so much better than anything that comes on my screen. I'm mesmerized by them.

And I'm really aware that they'll be there probably for another week or two. And what fox do they? They're really tight with their little family and the father keeps bringing food and trying to get them mom back to normal size.

And feed the kids. Then they just first and then they go live alone for the rest of their lives. Go back into creating family, but they live alone most of the time.

So I'm really aware of how short lived. And of course, this is right here in the DC area where in our red bud dogwood period, which is so gorgeous.

And I'm right by the river where the blue bells are just past peak right now. So that's like all this really beautiful stuff that I love having there.

And at the same time, I have several friends and one quite young actually facing serious illness. So it's all the, you know, I'm witnessing the holding on to the good stuff and the resisting the stuff that feels hard.

And noticing when I really can open it to it all, it's just a cherishing of this life.

I took a friend of mine a few days ago, Dana Falls, who's a really dear friend and also poet some of you may have heard of her.

And I took her on a sunrise blue bell walk, right? When everything was peaking and the light was exquisite. It was perfect. And we were talking about how beautiful and short lived it was.

So she wrote me a blue bell poem. And I'm just going to read you the last her last verse.

I try to find the balance between opening to wonder and letting go as the moment passes by, allowing joy and a hint of sadness to coexist side by side.

In my own life, probably one of the most profound realizations that keeps coming back in deeper and deeper ways is that the more I open to the truth of mortality and loss that everything's going, the more my heart opens in an unconditional way to love.

And that it's absolutely hand in hand. I can't be open to love if I'm in some way resisting or holding on.

So this is really a basic teaching on the spiritual path that in permanence, like really getting it, not getting it intellectually, but in our bodies getting it, is the key to cherishing this life,

to really realizing who we are beyond these changing forms to being awake.

So this will be our theme for this talk. And we'll look at how we resist change. The invitation for each of us will be to pay closer attention to the ways that we navigate change.

Because for most of us, the deep conditioning is to try to control things rather than open to how it is.

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