Hello, gathering room friends. I am off gallivanting on a summer break. So while I'm doing that,

I hope you enjoy the best of the gathering room gathering pod coming right up. Welcome to the

gathering pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. Welcome, welcome to the

gathering room. We had a problem with our interweb. You'll notice I'm not in the same, the usual place.

That is because the interwebs are having a problem. Someone slashed through the cord out in a field. And you

guess which field it was? It was the field that Alexander Hamilton used as his headquarters

during the Revolutionary War. Isn't that cool? So the ghost of Alexander Hamilton canceled the gathering room until we

could like put it in this, you know, temporary space and they got the cable fixed. And so

Alexander Hamilton is haunting the gathering room and you should blame Alexander that we didn't

have a couple of sessions for a couple of weeks. But if you're listening

to this far in the future, you won't even know what I'm talking about. So let's get to the topic of the day.

Yeah. I was reading through, I like to read through my favorite special books, the ones that

comfort me and uplift me and help me get through any day. I have a little treasury of them. And sometimes it'll

just leave me cold and sometimes one book will jump out of me. You know how it is great. So I was looking

at a book today that I haven't looked at for donkey's years. I mean, a long time. And somewhere in

college, I had written in the margin of this book, Bright Spots.

I was like, what was that about?

You know, a hundred years ago.

And I remembered it.

And this is what happened.

It was the longest run I have ever taken.

I set off from my dorm in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

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