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Namaste. Welcome, my friends.

So I'm glad you're joining us for part two of an interview with the beloved poet,

teacher, Zen practitioner, Jane Hershfield.

I found our time together in this interview, so deeply moving,

listening to a read, several poems and exploring ways that they really come alive in our lives.

So I hope that you'll enjoy and feel touched and inspired as I have by Jane, the poetry, and our conversation.

Okay, blessings.

Your poems, Jane, you know, there's a lot of conceptual stuff in Buddhism, you know, that no self and interdependence.

Your poems have a transmission that actually you experience, what has often been conceptual.

And I'm thinking, you know, that you've got so many poems, but I almost wanted to invite you to move into another poem right now, read another poem.

I'm thinking of my proteins right now, because it just like reading it just went beyond my mind into the realness of interdependence.

Well, that is exactly the reading of the poem that that I would hope it would it would lead to.

So I'm going to give people a tiny bit of background, which is this poem, like, like many poems in American poetry these days, or a certain number of them.

I came from an article I read in the Tuesday science time section about discovering quite recently, I think, was 2013, how protein works in the body.

And so I read this and I just immediately went, oh, I have to explore that and began writing, but it changed over over time and moved on to the then new discovery of the microbiome.

Which is the, you know, 10 billion beings having enjoying their own lives inside of our bodies that are in fact creating our own lives to a great extent our moods our intelligence are well being our exhaustion.

And so, yeah, this poem is one of exploring, you know, where does the self begin and where does the self.

And the one thing which is useful to know for getting one one line in it is the word protein comes from the Greek God proteus who is the God who changed shapes.

And so proteins when they are doing their work in our bodies, they do that by folding and unfolding. So kind of helps to know that my proteins.

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