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Namaste and welcome. I'd like to start this talk with a story that some of you might remember.

I've been for over the decades inspired by Jarvis Masters. Jarvis is an inmate who's been

living on death row in San Quinn prison for a number of years and he has a Buddhist practice

and he's taken his vows of compassion. So he tells a story that has just stayed with me.

He's in a prison yard, in the prison yard there, in a big young inmate next to him, picked up a rock.

He was going to throw it at a seagull that was standing in a puddle of water and Jarvis

just spontaneously instinctively raised his arm to stop the stonethroer and the young inmate was,

shout it back, what are you doing? Everyone in the yard got quiet because part of the culture is

to not mess with anybody else's business. Jarvis spontaneously responded, that bird got my wings.

Well, the guy who's going to throw the stone kind of looked at him, he was puzzled but he put the

stone down and it seemed that everybody relaxed and for days the inmates were asking him, Jarvis,

what do you mean by that? That bird got my wings. What an amazing expression and what did he mean?

In a sense, we all have the same longing to be fully alive. We have the same longing for love,

we have the same longing for freedom, we have the same longing for wings that fly.

And in a timeless way, we all arise from expressions of the same formless presence.

There's a one underlying awareness spirit living through us. So I think so often, what would the

world be like if we remembered this? If we moved through and with everyone we met on some level,

no matter how different they were, that some level that bird's got my wings.

That same deep longing for love and aliveness, if we could see this how much less violence,

racism, greed, how much more love. So the empathy or compassion of that realization,

...