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Namaste and blessings. Welcome.

It really is a pleasure to have you with us. Thank you for joining in.

People listening often send me different bits and pieces through the weeks,

poems and quotes and a lot of cartoons. I'm thinking that the community is trying to serve my deepest needs.

Especially in these last weeks, I'll just share one that came in basically said,

so far, 2020 is like looking both ways before crossing the street and then getting hit by an airplane.

Another was a shopper saying, I've decided to return 2020. It just didn't meet my expectations.

Of course, there's been countless takes on the restrictions of confines of being at home,

sheltering at home. One then just showed a dog on a psychiatrist's couch and the psychiatrist saying,

so when did you start seeing an invisible fence? Thank you for whatever you sent to me.

I enjoy these. The background theme, of course, of all of them is the intensity,

the trauma, the anxiety, the uncertainty of these times.

And then with that, of course, for so many of us, this continuing inquiry, which is so central,

which is really how can our hearts hold it? How can we respond to what's going on for ourselves

and for others in our world in a way that serves? So a part of looking at this, or as a way of looking

at this, I want to start with a story and it's a kind of a classical teaching myth that you find in

many different traditions, and it's one that I've always really loved. And so you might sit back and

listen. In the clouds of the distant past, there was a monastery that had fallen upon difficult times.

There were conflicts and power struggles between the monks. There was disrespect and tension

between monks and the nuns due to a drought. The vegetable garden had started going down. Now

...