Welcome to the Gathering Room podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

Today, I want to talk to you about time and language. Yes, I want to talk about time language,

specifically words, the words always, never sometimes um these are very you'd think that

there would be sort of trivial things to talk about in a in a podcast that's specifically about

awakening and spirituality but actually i think they lie right at the heart of the issue. Last week, we tried to have

Eric Zimmeron. We couldn't get the tech to work. So I did an interview with him, recorded it,

and you'll see it soon. And he's lovely. His book is called The Howl Little Becomes a Lot. It's

terrific. And we were talking about, he says in his book, if you want to start a war with someone,

just tell them that they always or never do something. And I thought about that, you know,

in relationship how often I think, you know, that person never finishes anything or that person

never like initiates contact or whatever it is and always and never

are virtually always wrong however we just love those words because we seem to love

absolutism so i was raised as you know in a very absolutist religion, and I recently saw a

Netflix special about a branch of it. So I was raised LDS, and then there's a branch of Mormonism

called F-LDS, or fundamentalist Latter-day Saints. And they practice polygamy. And the documentary,

maybe you've seen it, is about a dude who decided that he was going to anoint himself as prophet in that community. And he started doing,

he married a lot of women, some of them, and girls, children, and started his own little cult. It's a fascinating documentary. And one of the

most interesting things about it is everybody I've talked to who's seen it is like, why would

people see him as a prophet? Like he's not a particularly charismatic person. He doesn't seem to

have great ideas. I mean, one of his biggest ideas is he's

going to get, he's going to make a music video so that the queen of England will see him on it

and come and marry him. And then he'll be in charge of England. Like, it's not really

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