Welcome to Let It Be Easy with Susie Moore.

I've got to tell you, my friends, there is nothing that perhaps brings you peace and consciousness and mindfulness and a sense of feeling steady in the world than reading a book from a legitimate

monk. Tick-Nhat Han is the book that I've been reading from and the lessons are so good. I can't

help but share them with you here. And each time I read a new story, I've been rereading some of

them too to choose my favorites for the podcast. I just come to this almost place in my heart, in my mind, where I'm here. Like, I'm here with you right now. I'm not thinking, gosh, you know, what's the time we're on the recording? Or what am I going to have have for lunch or, you know, this room's chilly.

I'm just, I'm here with you.

In fact, when I sit down to record my podcast, wherever I may be, I picture you.

I picture you maybe with your earbuds in or in your car, listening, hopefully gaining something soothing or encouraging, something that fits your life

for the day. And it's just, my gosh, I just feel so grateful. I just feel so overwhelmed with

appreciation sometimes that we get to live in an age where this is even possible, that we can

do this, that we can commune and have this

connection. And it's, it means so well to me that you're here as my listener. Which leads us to

today's story, which is called the joy of having toilets. How about this one for a lesson in appreciation?

Some people may ask, how can I possibly be happy cleaning the toilet? But in fact, we're lucky to have a

toilet to clean. When I was a novice monk in Vietnam, we didn't have any

toilets at all. I lived in a temple with over 100 people and not a single toilet, and yet we

managed to survive. Around the temple there were bushes and hills, so we just went up the hill.

There were no rolls of toilet paper on the hill.

You had to take dry banana leaves or hope to find some dead leaves you could use.

Even when I was a child at home, before becoming a monk, we didn't have a toilet either.

Only very few people were rich enough to have toilets. Everybody else had to go into the rice fields or up on the hill.

At that time, there were 25 million people in Vietnam,

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