So some of you may be old enough to have seen this film
But I will describe it just generally. One of my favorite comedians, Peter Sellers
Starred in a movie called Being There many years ago.
And basically the story is that in being there Peter Sellers plays a few bricks shy of the wall and
He's the gardener
for this old man who eventually dies and he's lived at this old man's house since he was a little boy taking care of the garden because that's all he can actually be trusted to do.
And there's a cook there who always makes sure that he's fed. And the thing that he loves the most
is watching TV
And so in every room of this old house, there's a TV. And when he is not gardening, that is what he is doing is he's and he's got a remote and he flips the channels over and over and over.
So at some point, the master of the house dies.
And he doesn't have any clue. He goes and he sees them and it's not registering because
He's not all there.
The cook is leaving, and she's like, you you have to leave now
He doesn't know what that means
And she's like, I don't know what's going to happen to you
So eventually what happens is he goes to his master's room
He finds one of his suits very fancy suit that fits him. He finds his suitcase. He packs a few belongings, which, by the way, includes one of the small televisions
And
He walks out
And on the way, it turns out that this house
has gone from being in a really nice neighborhood to being
in a really bad neighborhood, but that because he lived inside with his master all the time, and his master was getting older and older, he never went outside in the front, so he didn't know
So he's walking through this terrible neighborhood wearing this very fancy outfit.
With a briefcase that's made out of leather. So he looks like someone of real wealth and authority.
So there's a gang on the street and they immediately start to chivvy him and you know hey man, what's going on? What are you doing here? Oh, what's in the bag? And he's like a babe in the woods.
And then they start to say, oh, are you here for Carlos? And Carlos, did he send you and put you in all and put you up to this
Like, you tell Carlos for me that, you know, if he wants to speak to me, he should come and speak to me.
Meanwhile, the Peter Sellers character is just like
He walks along until he starts coming into the larger city.
And what ends up happening is he walks between two cars that are parked on the street
One of his very fancy limousine, and the driver is talking to a woman who gets in the back and he starts forward
And the Peter Sellers carry character gets caught in between
The driver, of course, is like, oh my God.
gets out the woman in the car gets out. What's going on? Oh my god! And of course, again, she sees how he is dressed
She sees the briefcase
Oh my god, are you hurt? Are you okay? Oh, we need to get him to a doctor right now.
And then, because of the way he responds, he seems a little out of it.
She says
Yeah, what is your name
Chance the gardener
Throughout the entire film, everybody misunderstands and they think he's saying Chauncey
gardener
So they think, you know, Chauncey, very old-fashioned name and really it's just chance the gardener. He's been named Chance because he showed up by chance.
But he's now Chauncey the gardener to this woman, Chauncey Gardner. And she thinks, oh my God, I have just hurt a really important person.
She says, forget it, we're not going to the hospital. It doesn't appear that anything… we're taking him directly to my house.
The whole rest of the film is about how everybody makes this mistake based on these
Really simplistic statements that he makes
The statements about
The garden
I work the garden
And they're all thinking he's
Oh, the garden, right? I take care of
The gardens
And he starts saying, I mean, it turns out that the house is the home of a senator who has the ear of the president
All of these people end up meeting Chance the gardener as Chauncey Gardner
And everything he says becomes a statement of wisdom.
He says
Just till the garden.
And all will be well.
Or
A garden takes time
And has its seasons fall and winter.
which are times to replenish and rest
spring and summer are times of growth
Weeding and pruning the dead wood must be done
To make way for new growth
The president is listening to all this. He's in deep dew in his presidency. And he's thinking that this guy is saying you got to get rid of the dead wood
In your government
And things look not so great right now, but give it some time. Spring will come and everything will be well.
So it just goes from bad to worse. A doctor has been brought in and he's like a little suspicious.
But at the very end, after
the senator is also very ill, and he dies
Finally, the doctor turns to him and says
So
You really are
A gardener, aren't you?
Oh, yes
But in the meantime, the entire government has changed because of this
I tell you this because in some sense the metaphor is true
We are all gardeners
We are all seeding ourselves. We are planting. We are watering, we are weeding
You know, if you take a look up above, there's a whole new beautiful little tiny field of clover that got seeded and got watered
And now it's grown and it looks beautiful
But that's us
But what are we seeding
What are we putting in this good earth that is our life?
Are we taking the time to see
What's actually thriving in our life and what is not
What are we doing
Maybe, you know, there are plants in my garden that I have noticed you're not doing so well here. I need to move you
And then there are other plants that when they have found their spot
My Matillion Poppy is bigger than it has ever been
It loves where it is and I would never move it.
But I have a fuchsia that is extremely unhappy
And this is the case for us
Maybe we're in a job where we are not thriving. We're in the corner wilting
Because someone is not watering us or the soil is not deep enough
or the seeds we planted of what we wanted from that job
Are not happening.
So
I was talking to a student
Who was saying that
She was looking, she, she was weeding something.
And only discovered after digging out what she thought was the mother root
But there were all these other routes going in different places.
And that she might need
a bigger shovel
And I said, you know
When I first started planting my 40-year-old garden
There were so many different kinds of weeds
And they came up every year with alarming regularity.
Half the summer was just spent weeding
I finally realized that I needed to weed before these plants went to seed rather than afterwards. That helped a lot
Some weeds still ended up coming, but over time I pulled them out
And then the amount of weeding
started to decrease until finally last year I began to notice that the areas, the walking areas between the planted areas
There were no weeds coming up at all
I was
It took me a while to notice, oh, wow
There used to be weeds here all the time
What has changed?
Well
The only remaining weeds
are a species of broom
and false brome that are unfortunately all over these hills that have come from other places, and we are all fighting those
But
I can keep them off my own property at least
And on the property next to me, which is sort of uninhabited, I can work on it a little bit
But
They're always these invasive species of our lives. They're always sort of lurking around the edges
Rather than getting out your shovel
Hand trowel sometimes is a very useful thing for the little daily weeds
Of one of the poisons that Buddhism talks about
Desire
Thirsting desire
The poison of craving
Of wanting
We want something all the time.
And some of those wants are fine. The desire, for instance, to come here and practice. That's healthy.
But some of the desires in our life are not so much. And they're harmful, first of all to us, but then they might start being harmful to the people around us.
So for the cravings in your life that are invasive
And then really harmful
Those are the ones
that we sometimes indulge in
Or we suffer from
And the only thing that you can do in that case
is to be your own Chauncey gardener
You keep your own garden clear
And you don't worry about getting all the way to the bottom of it because you're probably going to be working on it the rest of your life.
So I've talked about this before in my case, I'm in the poison of the middle one of aversion.
So anger arises for me. Irritation, annoyance, and I dig away. I do
But the root goes very deep
And sometimes I think I've gotten the root and actually all I've gotten is the upper part of it, but there's still something down there that I have to keep going to, and I'm probably going to be doing that
the rest of my life, and that's okay.
It's a good way to spend the rest of your life getting to the bottom of your craving and your delusion and your aversion
So here's the thing though, what I really wanted to talk about today is rather than concentrating
on your craving, which is about what we don't have
Right.
All the things I want
are the things I actually feel like I don't have right now
Can we instead turn our attention
To what we do have
Could we grow a garden in our life
of abundance
And reciprocity
Relationships
And
Interconnection
We talked about it this morning in the Methasuta, you know
Even as a mother at the risk of her own life
We'll take care of her child
We'll give up anything in herself to take care of that child. For us to have that attitude
for others is amazing
There is a saying
In Zen practice that the best gifts
are the ones given in stealth
I have enjoyed this many years. I love this one. I love leaving ovasive flowers for someone with no note just on their doorstep, a neighbor
Or some food that I made an extra container of that I know would make their life simpler, or just actually sending a birthday card once a year
I have a birthday list that's over 300 people long
So you can imagine I'm making a lot because I make my cards. I make a lot of cards. But this is my way. Once
Once a year to say
I'm thinking about you.
And I love you
And I want you to know that.
It's a small thing, but it's something that I can do.
So the writer Margaret Atwood said
Every time a gift is given, it is enlivened and regenerated through the new spiritual life it engenders, both in the giver
And the recipient
It's a double gift
First of all, I get the gift of the joy of, oh boy, I make a whole bunch of cards.
And then I sit there and think, I have a list of all the August birthdays
So-and-so should get this one. Oh, and this one's definitely I get to choose which of the cards. I don't think about it in advance, but it just sort of happens. Oh, that's the perfect card for this person
So I get the joy of creation.
And of choosing
What am I going to send?
And then they get the joy of receiving
And everybody's always surprised. How do you do this? I get this card from you every year. It's like, I have a list
It's not that complicated.
So I started thinking about abundance
Versus scarcity
We have a culture that encourages a model of scarcity
What we don't have
But this little book
The service, Barry
This is written by the same person who wrote it, wrote Braiding Sweetgrass. She's an indigenous woman
Who writes about simplicity
And in this book, The Economics of abundance
It's a wonderful book. I'm only going to quote a few small parts. I highly recommend it.
So in thinking about this giving and receiving, this reciprocity
Which is actually about abundance and scarcity.
We have to consider
Economics
And I'm not just talking about money
Or even bartering, although she talks a lot about that in here.
The economics of life
The economics of relationship
So at some point near the beginning, Robin, the author says
What is economics for anyway?
The American Economic Association says
It's the study of scarcity
The study of how people use resources and respond to incentives
Which means that anything and everything in a market is implicitly defined as
Scarce
Think about this for a second.
With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on a commodification of all goods and services.
It's the same problem that we have with the economics of jobs
In Burma in the old days
Before it got changed to Myanmar
It was
Considered absolutely essential that everyone
have a job.
Everyone
There was no unemployment
Because there were jobs at all levels of society
and the job of the soil night cleaner and the job of the king
We're equal in dignity
It was more important to have dignity in the country than it was to have unemployment which pushes other jobs up
The thing about capitalism
is that you absolutely need to have unemployment so that you have competition for jobs.
It's a fundamental point
Very different. One is all about people
And dignity and honor and the ability to do something
And the other is completely about money and the bottom line.
Oh, you don't have a job? Oh, too bad
Oh, you can't buy food then? Oh, gee, that's a pity.
You have no dignity because work. We have a funny way with work. We think work is kind of a bad thing
Work is what gives you us purpose. It gives honor. We can do any kind of work beautifully.
If we come to it with that attitude
So unfortunately, this
The economics of scarcity
There's a mindset
Of separation
Rather than this
It is about getting mind first. Oh, too bad for the rest of you.
This is not our practice, by the way
But then there's another person, Dr. Valerie Lusatas, who is for the US Society for Ecological Economics.
Don't you love that ecological economics? I grid. And she defines economics as
How we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality.
It is a way of considering how we provide for ourselves
It's about relationship
She goes on to say, Robin
Gift economies
are another way of organizing ourselves to sustain life.
In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share
And the practice for dealing with abundance
Is to give it away
In fact
Status is actually determined not by how much you accumulate
But by how much you can give away
The currency in a gift economy
Is relationship
Which is expressed as gratitude
An interdependence
and the ongoing cycle
of reciprocity
When I went to Japan and stayed there for six weeks in a monastery, at the end, I had been advised by my teacher here, you need to leave in a nice envelope a hundred yen note on the altar
You don't tell anybody, you don't… you just leave it on the altar, make a bow
I was down to my last 100 yen
thinking to myself.
How am I getting home from here?
I had a bank card
I didn't know if the train station was going to accept it, but
You know, my teacher had said I needed to leave that 100 yen note, so I did
The teacher at this center decided that rather than send me off by bus to the Shinkansen, the train, the bullet train, he would drive me himself
And then I get to the train station.
And he orders a bento box for me for my lunch on the train, and hands me an envelope
Inside the envelope is 100 yen.
It was not the same envelope, by the way. He hadn't seen that yet.
I was blown away
This is it
It's just cyclical. You give, you take, you give, you take
Or receive actually better word
She goes on to say, if we think of the earth
As a big warehouse of commodities
As mere objects
I'm talking about the trees, the rocks, the land
The wheat that grows on it if we just think of that as the big warehouse of commodities, we claim a kind of privilege to exploit what we believe that we own.
So I recently read a story where I think it's SpaceX is going to send
A rocket to crash into the moon
We don't own the moon
Who gave SpaceX permission to
fascia bracket into it. It's just, it's bizarre thinking.
And it's probably going to happen
Anyway, she says, in that property mindset
How we consume doesn't really matter because it's just stuff
And the stuff all belongs to us.
There's no moral constraint on consumption.
And so we find ourselves in a time of ecological and spiritual depletion
We go to other countries and we say, you have a source of lithium. Great. We're going to
Buy all this land up, and we're going to hire your people, but we're going to make this big hole in the ground, and when we've taken all your lithium, well, bye, have a nice life
And did we pay the price, the actual price of the lithium? Probably not
Did we actually pay the price of the human labor? Probably not.
It's all just stuff and stuff belongs to us.
the mountains, the rivers, the redwoods, whoever gets there first and has the might to do it
Takes it
Without constraint on consumption. Moral or legal.
There is nothing to stop us from depleting this world
And when we deplete this world
We deplete ourselves
This world is a gift that we were given
We don't know who the giver was
But we need to honor it
And instead we just we use it like
It belonged to us from the very beginning, and nothing belongs to us.
I live 20 minutes down the road in the middle of Redwoods
When I bought that house
I bought a house
I didn't buy the redwoods on that property.
It's three and a half acres of redwoods
They don't belong to me
I've never felt that way
A couple times some have come down and I've had to branch them or things like that, but
They don't belong to me. I am merely the steward for as long as I'm on that land.
And I trust and hope that others
Believe that too. I know that's the way it is viewed here at Jikoji.
This land doesn't belong to us
It didn't even belong to the original indigenous people. And they understood that. And so they took care of it as we are taking care of it.
She goes on to say, she asks, what would it be like to consume with the full awareness that we are the recipients of earthly gifts
which we have not earned
To consume with some kind of humility.
To harvest honorably with restraint, with respect, with reverence
with reciprocity
Abundance thinking
Is ultimately about what we call in Buddhism
emptiness
It is not just empty like a wastebasket
But it is empty of something
Everything is empty of something. And what is it empty of
A permanent, abiding, unchanging nature
There is not a thing you can think of
That qualifies
As permanent abiding and unchanging, except possibly impermanence
From the moment you walked in today
You are different
Then when you woke up this morning
You're different from many reasons. You're different because of what you had for breakfast, right? You're different because of how long you had to drive and how stressful it was or not
You're different from just sharing the same air in this room because, believe it or not, the air that you're breathing in, someone else is breathing out. When did it become yours
When did it stop being somebody else's?
The understanding that everything is connected and relies on everything else. You can't be in this world.
Without trees
Because the trees take your CO2 that you're breathing out
And convert it into something that you actually need
Oxygen
And yet, what are we doing in the rainforest
There will come a time when the balance
Between how much the rainforest can put oxygen into the world and the amount that the population increases needing
It's getting close. We're getting out of balance.
Everything is connected and relies on everything else
That
Understanding is the opposite of scarcity thinking
Which is about falling into the delusion
of separation, and I'm here, I'm doing my thing, and the rest of you are on your own
Getting mine first.
Without realizing.
That the very people that you're saying, well, you're on your own
Are you
Some of you might not know each other in this room. I don't know a lot of you
Doesn't matter
We are fundamentally connected.
And the longer you do this practice
The more you begin to feel that and experience it and know it deep inside
So
A master in our lineage, Dogan Zenji
wrote a whole thesis
called The Eight Awakenings of Human Beings
The 1st 2 of the eight
The first one is
Have few desires
We talked about that in the Meta Sutta this morning too. Live a frugal life
We can all do this.
But the second one I love
Know how much
is enough
I'm in the process of moving
And other people I know are also in the process of moving.
And some of my very elder friends moved even though they didn't want to.
What is absolutely stunning
Is that even though I'm somebody, I walk around my house at least once a year and go
Have I looked at that? Have I used that? Have I read that? Have I needed that? Have I appreciated it? Because if the answer is no.
Out it goes. I either give it away or I take it to one of the donation centers to let someone else have the value of it.
Even so, it is stunning
How much stuff we all have
My husband has a box in the attic that he hasn't looked at probably 15 or 20 years when it first got shipped to him
of his Lionel train set
From when he was eight
And his mother, 20 years ago, finally said, I need to send this to you, or you need to take it with you.
And I keep saying, honey
What are you going to do about the Lionel train set? Because we are not taking it with us. Oh, yeah, I said, look, I have the perfect kid right now who is trained crazy
And we could give it, this is the grandson of one of my dearest friends. We could give them to him. Oh, I don't know. They're really valuable, you know, they should be sold. Fine, then sell them.
But it's a box this big. When was the last time you even opened it
How many of you have a Lionel train set in your attic somewhere of some kind?
If you're honest, you know you've got something that you haven't looked at
That you really, you're keeping it for what sentimental reasons. Someday I'm going to have a Christmas tree and I'm going to lay the Lionel train out and run it. No, you aren't
A few years ago, I had to clear out the house a three story condominium
the townhouse, I guess of a friend who it turned out was a hoarder
I spent a year
Clearing that house
The books all went one place.
We're two places
The Ikebana equipment. I had to find someone who did Ikebana
I cannot tell you, floor to ceiling, every room. You couldn't move into some rooms. You had to pull things out by the door first.
And I said to myself
No one needs this much stuff, but I understood it
This was a person who had been a refugee from the war in Vietnam
Her whole model and the model of many Vietnamese refugees was scarcity.
Of course it was.
Because they came from a land in war
Most of us are not that way
And yet, in this country
Every time I open my mailbox, there's a catalog
You want this
Oh, you know oh do you need anything? This catalog has all the stuff you might want
Or you're driving down the freeway. Big billboard. If you would only buy our software or you would buy this new car, or you would, you know, go to Costco or what
You will be happy
No, you won't because you're going to bring it home and you're going to say to yourself, oh no, why did I bring this? I've already got three of them
Have few or fewer desires. You will find the less desires you have for things, actually the less cluttered your life is and the happier you become.
But you have to do number 2 of knowing how much is enough
So there's a wonderful Tibetan Buddhist that I follow online
named David Michi. He wrote a great book called the Dalai Lama's Cat
It's a fiction. It's hilarious, but a lot of wonderful Buddhist teachings in it. I read it to the kids in my Dharma school for years
Anyway, he says, you know, in Buddhism, we often speak about realization.
A realization isn't simply understanding an idea
It's when an insight becomes so vivid
that it changes how we naturally behave.
Much of the Buddhist path isn't about accumulating knowledge.
It's about allowing truths
to sink deeply enough into our hearts
To transform them
It makes us wonder then
What is the point of being rich?
If we never actually feel
Rich
What is the point of having leisure?
If we experience only stress
and busyness
And exhaustion.
Which is from my place
What so many young people are experiencing
in the work environment
They are really stressed out and I think they have good reason to be
You know, I thought it was a big deal during COVID as the pandemic coordinator for my school
That I was working 70 to 80 hours a week trying to keep everyone safe
But what I'm hearing is that young people and jobs are being expected to work 70 hours a week now.
They're expected to work on Saturday and or Sunday
This is not good for you
You know, the Industrial Revolution scared the, you know what out of everybody
Partly because there were all these machines that were hacking off hands and people were getting caught in them. But partly because of the expectations that everything had to start going much faster, more efficiently.
It's much worse now
I am so glad that I am retired from that stuff.
And that the job I had of teaching young children was a lot less stressful.
than working in the computer industry or the retail industry or government
Just for those of you who can remember even 10 years ago
The amount of information we are taking in now every single day has exploded. It's overwhelming.
That's not good for us
Our work
The work we're doing here, the work we do on our cushion
Is to come from a place of abundance
Shifting our needs away from whatever is in short supply.
And instead, thinking, well, if there's not enough out there of what I want, then maybe
Maybe I could want something else
What an idea.
The real outcome
of abundance thinking rather than scarcity thinking
Is exactly what we long for
But can never purchase
Which is
Being valued
For our unique gifts
Earning the regard of our friends, our family, our neighbors
For the quality
of our character
Not the quantity of our possessions or the size of our bank account or the beautiful car we own.
It's what you give.
Not what you have.
That makes you
A delightful, happy human being
Because remember.
We do not practice for enlightenment
We practice
As an expression
of our actual true nature
And that nature is filled
with abundance
And gratitude
I am very grateful you are all here today. Thank you.
And I have no clock. You have one minute. One minute.
Anybody got a one minute question? Anything doesn't have to be about what I was talking about.
Yes
Here
Akbar, yes
Yes, thank you very much for the insightful talk. I really enjoyed it. I have a couple of quick comments and a question. One is that the SpaceX thing already crashed into the moon, so
That was a few
Too late for that
Well, that was a few days ago. And also I remember one scene. I'm old enough to have seen that movie being there, and one of the scenes on the street
That's right
when it was being harassed by that gang, he thought that he was watching a TV channel and started changing the… trying to change the
He had his remote
Yes, right. He was just clicking it and it wasn't changing.
I'd forgotten that. Thank you. That's a great little detail because he couldn't distinguish reality from the TV.
Exactly. And the question is that you were talking about the weeds in your garden.
My question is that, is there any way that we can coexist with the weeds because they are part of our environment, and they probably have been here before us
They've been here a long, long time ago. Is there a way to
You know, coexist peacefully with them. How do we deal with it
So it's a great question both in reality and in metaphor
I'll deal with the reality first, which is that if I allow the weeds
The same amount of space as the plants I'm trying to cultivate. The plants I'm trying to cultivate will lose
Because invasive species, the one that's down here now, the false brome, sits at the base of redwoods and sucks up all the moisture from them.
So there are some weeds that are not supposed to be here. They come from other places
Those are the ones that we need to work with
Metaphorically, though, of course, we all have weeds
My weed is anger
Right
I'm always working on it, but at some point, you're right. I have to accept I came by this anger
You know, honestly, because I had angry parents
And I have angry siblings. And I don't know that my siblings are working on it, but one day my brother
He thought he was being funny in an email, kind of baiting me
And I didn't rise to it at all. And he wrote back, he said, Wow, this meditation thing must be working. And I was like, what do you mean? I didn't even get it. And he says, well, normally you would have gotten upset. And I said, well
Why would you want to do something like that then? Oh, because it's so much fun to see people get upset.
So, some people actually, and hopefully all of us
would like to work with those internal weeds
And the way to do that is to accept that they're there without feeling badly about them. Right
But that doesn't… if Suzuki Roshi once said famously, you are already perfect, and there is still room for self-improvement
So we have all of these things
And we work on them
But we don't
We don't real… we realize we don't need a shovel, right? We're not trying to
change ourselves overnight
A little trowel will do a little bit at a time
And we'll probably be working on it for the rest of our gardening life.
Thank you. Great question.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much
I just wanted to point out that we actually have Jikoji's basic garden person online, and I wondered if she wanted to add response. Jackie's here. She was just here weeding for, like, 8 h in the hot sun yesterday. Tell us why you did that.
Oh, I've been thinking a lot about the, um,
the land and the plants that are growing on it.
Yeah, invasive species, we generally humans brought them with us and upset the balance of nature wherever we go.
And it's a huge conundrum.
Um, but no, I'm dealing with this other problem.
As many people are in my home, because I, like you, live on a property.
It's about three acres.
I have chaparral on one side, redwoods on another side.
And I'm living on a road with 22 other houses on it.
We're now a firewise community, which means that we keep our.
Vegetation down so that in the event of a wildfire, we might be able to get out.
Some people in my neighborhood.
They scalp everything. They scalp everything up to their house, and this disturbs me a lot.
However, I don't do much of anything, and I feel bad about that too. It's like, I don't know that there's any balance here.
Hmm.
Because, you know, chaparral is a wonderful ecosystem. There are little creatures that live in my piece of chaparral.
Their whole lives. And I have to thin it.
You can't really send Chaparral, it turns into something else, it turns into oak woodland.
You know, so I sit constantly.
With these conundrums and I cannot really find peace.
Or a place to rest.
Um, if I leave, someone else will turn this place into a vineyard, probably.
Um, and also I have family that lives with me here, um.
So I have a hard time finding a place to rest.
So I come to Jacoji.
Well, I
Completely empathize because when PG&E comes to our neighborhood
They want to create a scalped
Environment
About 10 feet square around every pole.
So they take it down to bare earth
in places where it's going to cause a slide
And I keep talking, you know, can't we just have something very low? No, they come in, completely raise it to the ground.
So
I deal with that too, and all I can say is from the point of view of practice
We're always, we're always walking that tightrope
Mm-hmm.
Right? Of
Too much or too little
Right? Either too much self concern or too much not taking care of yourself while you're busy taking care of others, right? There's always this
conundrum of
trying to find that middle way
I mean, I really do believe that the Buddha understood that that was the biggest problem. He called it the middle way for that reason, right? How do we find that place?
And you know between self and other, between scalping and knowing that you have creatures that live in these. I mean, I have two cypress trees that got planted before I ever bought this house, and there's hundreds of birds that live in it. The cypress is not
a native tree, but I'm not going to cut it down either, right
So
We have to make choices and we hope one of the reasons that we sit
is that we hope with some clarity that comes from the sitting
Eventually we come to some good decision
Thank you for sharing that.
And thank you all for being here again.