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

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So thank you all for coming today and meditating together. I don't take it lightly that people come together in this way.

And it sets the context for us to have meditated this during this time for this talk,

both for you to listen to it and also for me to offer this talk. And there's much more going on

here than the talk. There's the context and the

subtleness and the receptivity and also hopefully that somehow my having meditated for these

35 minutes before, that somehow I'm connected to the practice in a way that I wouldn't if I'd been running around,

you know, taking care of, I don't know, all kinds of things in a hurry and sitting down

and giving a talk.

So I'd like to first maybe dedicate the talk to Joanna Macy.

Joanna Macy died a week ago or so, and she was one of the great elders for our Buddhist

community.

I'm not sure exactly if she considered herself Buddhist, but she was deeply involved in Buddhism.

She wrote a dissertation on using kind of systems theory, kind of the idea of ecosystems,

how they all, it's not direct cause and effect, but it's how the whole systems work together in unison,

and it used that to understand Buddhist

teachings and had a conversation between this philosophy of systems theory and Buddhism. It was a profound

dissertation and became a book, and that's how I first learned about her. And then over time,

she kind of became bigger and bigger part of our kind of elder in our community. And one of the

big things she did that I think brought her international prominence was she was invited to go to Russia

after the Chernobyl explosion, to tend to the

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