Tara Brach - Loving the Earth

Episode Date: September 29, 2010

2010-09-29 - Loving the Earth - How is it possible that we humans have wreaked such havoc on this planet, on the web of life that we belong to? This talk explores the ways that egoic consciousness can lead to violating life, and how evolving consciousness can move us toward healing this earth. Please donate at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Thank you!

I'd like to begin in a personal way and say that before I had any concepts or notions of spirituality, and this is probably age 11 or 12, my family took an Easter school break vacation down to the Shenandoah, down to the Blue Ridge. I was a Jersey girl, and we made the big trip. And we had our Easter egg hunt on Easter Sunday. You know, we actually, my father actually hid eggs out. outside. I don't know how many creatures ended up finding them, but we had a hunt. And then, for whatever reason, I took off by myself for a little bit and found this outcropping of rocks that kind of, you know how it is on the Blue Ridge Park where you just look out at the mountains across the Shenandoah and the sky and the turkey vultures. And I was watching a turkey vulture in the movement. I felt kind of that my body was making that soaring movement through the sky. And for the first time, I just, something in me felt like I was absolutely in love with beauty,

with nature, with aliveness of the earth. And something in me registered that I was having an experience that was beyond what I had experienced before. I didn't have any categories. I didn't add too much onto it. but through the years over and over, it's come back that in some way I woke up out of a bubble of selfness and touched some larger belonging. And nowadays, when I'm suffering, if I go to the river or go into the woods, I spend a lot of

time by the river, in time, a quietness that's just aware of the currents or aware of the sounds of the birds are in some way feeling and smelling there. Something sets in. And the suffering that was there could be there, but it's held in something larger and some larger belonging. And I'm okay. And of course, when I'm happy, I look at nature and I see in some way, spirit, the sacred, is just animating everything. And I know I'm not alone when I share this, that I'm, if you said even beyond the idea of a Buddhist or anything, I'm a worshipper of this natural world. I'm not alone. How many of you take refuge in nature?

Like it is really, really matters and is special. And for those of you that aren't here, keep your hands up, I want to really tune into this. It's almost everyone here of several hundred people. It's because we are nature. and we love the fullness of what we are. We cherish it. We're not alone. A little bit of a silly story. Elderly Italian man lives alone in New Jersey. He wants to plant his annual tomato garden, but it's very difficult work as the grounds hard. His only son Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. So the old man wrote a letter to his son described his predicament. Dear Vincent, I'm feeling pretty sad because it looks like I won't be able to. to plant my tomato garden this year, and you know what a sanctuary and pleasure that has been for me. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here, my troubles would be over. I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days. Love Papa. A few days later,

he receives a letter from his son. Dear Pop, don't dig up that garden. That's where the bodies are buried. Love Vinny. At 4 a.m. the next morning the FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day, the old man received another letter from his son. Dear Pop, go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances. Love you, Vinny. So we love this natural world. And I remember, this is another personal sharing that a month before my son Narayan was born, the reactor core at Chernobyl plant exploded one month exactly to the day.

And I've had many, many wake-ups in my life about this natural world, but I remember the shock, and this was before there was a lot out about nuclear reactors and the danger to the earth. But I had this shock about this world that he'd be inheriting. One of my greatest teachers on the spiritual path has been Joanna Macy, and I'm hoping many you have heard of her, and if not, that you do hear more. She has ridden and been a spiritual activist for the sake of this planet. And after Chernobyl, she started conducting

despair and empowerment work in one of the cities closest to the nuclear reactor and I want to read you a little bit about this workshop of hers. The area around Chernobyl was once known not for the partial meltdown of its nuclear

power plant but for being a place of beautiful forests and mountains. And for centuries the people live there walking in the mountains and picnicking and gathering mushrooms and fishing and hunting, cunning firewood. So now after the meltdown, at home and at work, their windows and doors were sealed with tape,

and they could not go outside or they would risk radiation poisoning. All they had left were pictures of the forest on the wall. In meeting with the community leaders, Joanna pointedly asked how long it would be before they could return to their forests. One man answered, Not in my great-grandchildren's lifetimes, and not in their great-grandchildren. children's lifetime. It would be centuries. So there was silence. Then a woman stood up and angrily demanded to know why Joanne and her team were rubbing their faces in this sorrow. Joanna sat quietly. Finally, one old man spoke. At least we can say to our children that we told the truth.

After further silence, another woman said, these visitors come and join together with us for a purpose to bear witness to our suffering. Now they will return to their own communities and tell our story. They can go out in the world and let others know what happened. They must never let this poisoning of the earth happen in any other place to anyone else's children. And with that comment, personal bitterness was transformed into the work of compassion. Sadly, as we know the poisoning has continued. We have such short memories here, you know, on this human brain. So it's continued in every way, and I'll name ones you know, and it's just to just bring into the room what we all collectively know, how we are injuring this earth daily, whether it's the

greenhouse gases, our addiction to oil, that's such a big one. and cutting the clear swaths through the forest, disturbing how the earth breeze, the mining, the overfishing, what we put in our air, our waterways. For those that went under the seas and looked at Carl Rees when we were younger, they're different now.

This part of the ecosystem that tells about the health of our seas. Nuclear radiation from World War II fall out all over, there's been this illegal use of depleted uranium, which doesn't get such great press, but has created amazing amounts of cancers and problems with health. And done by Israel and the United States illegally, the half-life of uranium 238 is 4.5 billion years. Now, that's how long it takes her half to decay. So I'm just naming that there's been this destruction of our body, our larger body.

And this toxic pollution, this waste and pollution, always affects those who are the most underprivileged the most. It's not so hard sometimes for those from wealthier countries or who are wealthier to insulate themselves and not be aware. I just want to name that. So here's the inquiry, and that is what stops us from. taking care of our earth, our body, our larger body, the source of our life. What stops us? There's two inquiries tonight. What stops us and what can serve healing? What can help us to connect with that reverence and act from that reverence that can really be part of the healing of this planet? So those are the two questions. The what stops us? Ticknod Han has a new book

called The World We Have, Buddhist approach to peace and ecology. And the person who does the introduction to this book describes this tribe in Ecuador that lived in a habitat that was once incredibly rich with the Amazon jungles. And it's so depleted that they've had a resort to hunting this spider monkey. It's pointedly sad because this tribe believes it descended from these monkeys. That's the belief. And there's this realization that they're eating their own ancestors. It's that kind of a pain that I speak of. Ticknodhan in this book then brings us forward in time. And he speaks and he tells this sutra, and this is a famous in the Buddhist scriptures. It's called

the sutra on son's flesh. And there's a couple and their young son crossing this vast desert. And the couple hadn't planned well, so they ran out of food. And they decided to kill and eat their child. And of course, after they did, they beat their chest with grief and tore their hair out and were wretched. And so the Buddha is in this discourse with monks, and he tells this story, this god-awful story. And he and the monks agree that there was no pleasure in it for the parents, that it was just pure sense. suffering. But then he says to them that we have to eat and we have to consume with mindfulness. And he means consume in all ways. Are we will be eating the flesh of our own children.

By consuming unmindfully, whether it's oil or the earth's resources or meats, by overproducing, by overconsuming, we destroy life for future generations. I brought this little book of Ticknut Hans with me. It's really invite you to take a look at it. So it's a horrific metaphor, this sutra on Sun's Flesh. But there's something about having a horrific metaphor to help wake us up because there's a horrific sleep going on that we're living this planet that is what we are, that there's a destruction of it in this way. This is what Ticknott-Han says very, very, It's very beautiful. He says, I've sat with the Buddha for a long time and consulted him about the issue of global warming and the teaching of the Buddha is very clear. He says, if we continue to live as we have been living, consuming without a thought of the future, destroying our forests, emitting dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide, then devastating climate change is inevitable.

Much of our ecosystem will be destroyed. it. One way of thinking about the evolution of consciousness is in three phases, and this is again just a conceptual tool, but I find it useful, and that the first phase is before we're really aware there's kind of a fusion with the earth and with our mother and with everything, and it's not a conscious fusion, it's an unconscious fusion. So there's no separation from the natural world. And then in the second phase, and this is where we fall from Eden, so to speak, conscious mind kicks in, there's the thinking mind, and we become identified with our thoughts, and we separate from our bodies, and we actually separate from each other. There's a sense of, I am separate, and we separate from the earth. And this isn't like a mistake. This is just how it happens.

And there's all sorts of wonderful developments in the second phase, like tools and science. and communications and just the development of our creative brain and intelligence. And of course, they're suffering. And gradually that suffering wakes us up into phase three, which is where we begin to recognize who we've been all along. Recognize the belonging to this earth that we are nature. Recognize our belonging to each other. Recognize our belonging to awareness.

And it's not a kind of unconsor. conscious refusion. It's a profoundly conscious sense of our oneness that then can celebrate the diverse ways that life expresses but know our intrinsic belonging. That's phase three. Out of that belonging, our actions express love for life. So this is kind of a description of the spiritual path, which is a waking up out of the sense of a separate self. In terms of a separate self, to a larger belonging. And the challenges, and the reason we're looking at this tonight, is that we're very hitched stage two.

This shift doesn't happen in a very simple, easy, clean way. Very hitched to the fear and clinging of a separate self. And in that, ignoring our belonging to the earth, disconnecting from spirit too. because if we disconnect from body and earth for living in our thoughts, we're not going to be able to feel the way love and aliveness and spirit expresses through our being. We're going to be dissociated. So phase two becomes actually very violent because in that sense of separation, we act out.

And the way the Buddha described it is that in that acting out, we cling and we grasp, by sometimes call it, we take false refuge. We think certain things will make us happy, so we start consuming and we overconsume and we get addicted. We think certain things will make us safer when we're separate, and then we land up getting these cars that, at first when they came out, these hummers, I thought it was a joke. I mean, I just couldn't believe it was real.

That that's what... We get these cars, we attack other countries because we think that's going to make us safer. are we one inch closer to being secure in our war against terrorism? Really? False refuge. So this country, the United States, is really a phase two peak society. Right?

I mean, really, we're peaking. We're so hooked on continued growth on this addiction to oil and to consuming. I was really stunned a few months ago. I got together with a very good friend of mine who works for a liberal think tank. And he was telling me about the agenda they're developing and the assumption in this agenda is the value of continued growth, of increased economic productivity

and consumption. Like growth is this good thing. Like you cannot sell a liberal agenda, to people if it doesn't include growth. We're going to grow more. We're going to produce more. We're going to take in more. It's like if we're obese, do we consume more? And if we're diabetic, do we take in more sugar? This assumption. So Joanna Macy listened to her recently. She was on a radio show that my mother, my mother had met her some years ago when we had her down here. she called me very excited.

Joanna's on, Joanna's on. And then another friend, and Kristen told me about it. Joanna said that we've been treating Earth as if it is a supply source and a sewer. A supply source and a sewer. We extract resources, and then we pour waste into it over and over. Something we wouldn't do to a true friend,

wouldn't do to our mother, but we do to our mother. This is D.H. Lawrence. He says, this is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and the sun and the stars. And of course I'm speaking to people

who are listening and have in your hearts a sensitivity that knows this. Part of the evolution of consciousness is you start paying more attention and then it starts breaking your heart because you start sensing how we're violating what is really who we are and what we love. We start sensing it.

Short-tailed albatross, whooping crane, gray wolf, woodland caroboe, hawksbill, sea turtle, rhinoceros. The list of endangered species keeps growing longer every year. Tears aren't enough anymore. Give me a song, a song for the sadness, too very vague. vast for my heart, for a rage too wild for my throat, giant, sable antelope, grizzly bear, brown bear, Nile, crocodile, snow leopard, Mexican prairie dog. Where are you? Musk deer, cheetah, Chintella, Asian elephant, African elephant. We reenact Noah's ancient drama,

but in reverse, like a film running backwards, the animals exiting, ferret, gorilla, jaguar, wolf. Your tracks are growing fainter. Wait, wait, this is a hard time. Don't leave us alone in a world we have wrecked. These species that will never see again. That was called the bestiary. So as I mentioned in this community, have been some dialogue just about what this is like for us as we wake up and realize the truth of it. Read you what one IMCW person said. This is experience after the summer's oil spill disaster in the Gulf. The sight of those lovely seabirds covered in oil evoke such a feeling of grief. It seems as though everywhere we turn there's more evidence that we are destroying our lovely planet. I feel overwhelmed by the size and pervasiveness of the problem. And for me, the most difficult challenge

will be the temptation to despair, to feel that nothing can be done, and so to do nothing. There's an old proverb to the effect that you don't have to complete the work of healing the world, but you cannot absent yourself from the task. So how do we relate, honestly? I mean for some as I mentioned there is a kind of denial there's a way of getting away with not attending to it or are acknowledging as real and we do have a painfully short attention span

the Gulf is already history in many people's minds does that do you get that but it's history it's like that like that's done it's no longer zinging us but it's not true So there's denial and then there's despair. Seeing it is too much and it brings up a kind of helplessness that I am too small. And this one I'll speak personally to that that's what comes up for me.

That I can't make a difference. I'm too small or kind of hopelessness that maybe nobody can. You know, that sense of hurling into oblivion. And I'd say that these two are related, that the truth is humans are not. not indifferent. We're not indifferent. That's not really our mood. Rather, there is a fear of huge pain. And when we begin to get close to this one, and I can say for myself, that's what happens, it's unbelievable grief. It's unbelievable grief. And so because we're afraid of that huge pain, we resist and pave over. We shut down.

And that actually is the danger. This pulling away from what's happening out of the fear of feeling it. That's the danger. If I had a name one conditioning that we have that most prevents us from just responding to what's here, it's that it feels so painful we pull away from that pain and we have to feel it to respond to it. Denise Levertoff says, To speak of sorrow works upon it, moves it from its crouched place, barring the way to and from the soul's hall. This is why Joanna began these workshops on despair and empowerment.

She says, despair is essential. If we're present with our pain, it transforms. And what happens is if we're present with the grief and the despair, it shows its other side, which is love. We fall in love in a way that is incredibly huge and powerful and empowering if we're willing to feel our sorrow about this. So let me, I've been speaking a lot. Let me just pause and invite you to just close your eyes for a moment. What in recent days about this earth and the suffering of this earth has gotten to you. What's touched you?

What is that you are paying attention to imagining or tuning into? What's the experience like for you when you let yourself acknowledge the realness of how our earth is suffering? When the animals come to us asking for our help, well, we know what they are saying? saying? When the plants speak to us using their delicate language, will we be able to answer them? When the planet herself sings to us in our dreams, will we be able to wake ourselves and act, opening your eyes when you'd like? So the inquiry really moves into what does serve healing. and just what you did these few moments is part of healing. If we can just pause, and you might have gone inside and said,

well, you know, I've been kind of busy and stressed and really not so touched. Maybe what you came to honestly was, I'm not sat available for this suffering. And that is as important as if you just now tapped into the deep well of grief. because the beginning of responding to any suffering, whether it's our own loneliness, or the suffering of someone that we're with but we're kind of in some way blocking or the earth, is paying attention. The definition of love is paying deep attention, unconditional attention. I remember Krishna-Merti's teaching that he said, if you take a rock, any old rock,

in the old rock outside and put it right in the middle of your living room and every day just for a few minutes pay attention to that rock it will become a sacred rock how come when we're present we fall in love we sense our belonging to whatever we're paying attention to have you noticed how people really think their dogs or the special dog and they like other people's dogs but they're really in their dog. Well, whatever we pay attention to our dog, our cat, a certain plant, a rock, our partner, when we pay attention, what we pay attention to, we belong to, we become a part of, we sense the who we are in those moments together. Those people that spend a lot of time in nature and pay attention to nature, it would be impossible for them to knowingly. do something to trash nature. It just, it's like, why would you cut your own arm? You know?

It's like if you really are paying attention to your body, you're not going to inhale, you know, nicotine just because you're too connected. The most, perhaps best description of enlightenment is to be intimate with all things. And meditation, this practice of pausing and deepening attention, creates that intimacy.

And if everybody paused and developed their capacity to pay attention and that means pay attention to this body and these bodies here and this earth, we would behave out of loving presence, out of kindness and compassion. We would not be able to hurt each other. You can only hurt another

if that other feels like an other because you haven't paid attention. So we train. And in the Buddhist scriptures, the story that I perhaps share the most often, and I love just speaking it because to me it has such life to it, is the story of the night of the Buddha's awakening. And through the night, the Buddha was challenged by all the shadow side that we all get challenged by. Every one of us gets these challenges of that conditioning to grasp and hold on, that condition. to be angry or mean spirited or judgmental. He got challenged through the night.

He met all the challenges with mindfulness and they turned to flowers and incense and beams of light. They just got transformed. But even when the Buddha's heart was totally liberated, Mara, the shadow side would not retreat. Final challenge that the Buddha received was the challenge of doubt. And this is the deep one for all.

of us. It's the doubt that does not trust our fundamental okayness, our fundamental belonging, our fundamental goodness. So this was the challenge. Mara said, who are you to take the seat, this royal seat of a Buddha, of an awakened one? And the Buddha did not sit and use the tool of mindfulness at that moment. I mean, he was mindful, but that wasn't all. Let's put it that way. He called upon the earth mother. He touched the earth. He took refuge in nature. Now this is a male patriarchal religion we're talking about, but they have the Buddha's moment of real awakening taking refuge in the earth. That's a big deal. That's wisdom shining through even a patriarchal male psyche. Really? Truly. I mean, I am so glad that story's there because there is such power and truth to it that we wake up by paying attention and by paying attention to what we belong to in this natural world it's a magnificent metaphor so what happens he called on the earth mother i'll just finish the story and you know the earth mother

reaffirmed his right to take the the royal seat and she produces a flood from her hair and the armies of marr washed away and as one uh uh of my friends who's a monk described it. Later they came back full of apologies, offering gifts and flowers and asking for forgiveness. Terribly sorry about that mother. I really didn't mean it. You know, that was the, you know, they came back.

But the Buddha needed the help of the earth mother. Just to say, part of our freedom is recognizing the awareness, the space, the emptiness, the openness, the stillness of being that is really the formless, this universe emanates out of. But if we don't take refuge in the preciousness of form of what emanates out of that emptiness,

our awakening is incomplete. So this touching of the earth is the completion, is the fulfillment of our potential as awakening human beings, to be mindful of what's here and to call on our belonging to this natural world. And so we do it And it's described in a way as the two wings of freedom

that we practice here and we notice in the first wing of awakening is what is going on moment to moment and the Buddha did that he said this moment they noticed with clarity with lucidity with equanimity what was happening

but the second wing has to do with the heart the heart's capacity to hold with love and cherish what's here and that's where touching the earth comes in, that in the moment that we touch the earth and sense our intimacy, there is a tenderness that informs our actions. So we train.

And as I mentioned earlier, I feel this is true for healing the Earth's environment and for peace and for social justice and for every other expression on planet Earth of what is needed. to be free, that by learning to pay attention in the present moment, we wake up a sense of our connection with each other that then informs how we move forward day by day. I'll give you a little bit of a different kind of a metaphor, which is science. And Dan Siegel described it this way. He said that, and he didn't use the language of phase two and phase three,

but since I given it to you tonight, he said in phase two, the part of the brain that is predominant are me maps. These are maps that say, this is, I am here sitting here, you're there, I need to do this to get more comfortable, I need to protect myself against you to be. So it's the me map is all the fight, flight activity that has to do with preserving the separate self. He said that we also have we maps. It's different part of the brain, but we have we maps that are really part of the more emerging stage three consciousness that really have to do with intuiting what's going on for each other and sensing a natural empathy for others. And he described it that how we respond to the pain of our earth depends in part on which part of the brain gets regularly

stimulate it. When we meditate in the moments that we become present and when we meditate either with mindfulness or our compassion practice, we're really cultivating the we maps. We're literally engaging and enlivening the parts of the brain that have dissolved a sense of separate self enough so we can sense, ah, What I am is this field of awareness, this web of aliveness, and I'm here to serve that, to love that, to cherish that. WeMAPs.

I kind of like that. So engage Buddhism and spiritual activism really is using this contemplative practices to wake us up from that sense of separateness and then to act from that place of loving presence. So just to speak a little bit about the acting, and then we're going to close this part of the evening and get together in smaller groups. There's so much going on. I don't need to list it, but I'd like to mention that at Garrison, which is a center that really sponsors a lot of very enlightened social activism. In March, they had a meeting on climate, mind and behavior. And they described that in addition to the

large interventions that are absolutely crucial, which are to do with climate and energy legislation and investment and renewable power and so on, they said in addition to that, we can create a behavioral wedge by shifts that each of us adopt if we do it on a large enough scale. In other words, and they use this language,

there's something called a gigaton, which is one billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions that can be reduced from shifts we make in our behavior if we get together and do it collectively. And these are shifts in behavior that are not like major deprivation we're talking about. These are shifts like there's a list. And if we, let's say this group said, we're going to each of us do three things on this list. And let's say other groups like us, groups that are entering this phase three consciousness recognizing the suffering and caring. Let's say groups around the country and around the world, just everybody said, I'm just going to do

three things off this list, the three that come easiest maybe. So these are the kind of things in their middle way, the Buddhist middle way kind of activities like turning off lights that we're not using, keeping our tires properly inflated, maybe eating less red meat, maybe and just to say that there's more carbon pollution from the livestock than from all forms of transportation combined. To reuse and recycle more items, to use libraries rather than new books, less paper products, more fluorescent light bulbs, that kind of thing. I'm just naming it because if we came up with a list and said, yes, I'll do three things, it actually makes a wedge. It makes a dent. Ticknat Han's communities are doing one no-car day a week,

and they're trying to get that going. For some people, that can work. So we're talking about engaged spirituality, just caring and sensing how out of that our actions can be informed by this understanding that we're not doing it to be good people. We're doing it because of a realization of our connection. This is Chief Seattle. This earth is our mother.

Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. This we know. All things are connected, like the blood which unites one family, all things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. We did not weave the web of life. We were merely a strand in it. whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. I want to close by saying we don't have to be optimistic.

We just have to be present. We don't know which way things are going to go. And one of the things that Joanna said in this interview was that when things are unstable like they are now, how we choose to invest our heart and mind has greater impact on the larger system than we can imagine. We don't have to be optimistic, but we do. need to be present. So let's just take a few moments to sit together. I'm going to do a very short reflection and the reflexional close with a simple vow. Just focus on your breathing. And don't try to breathe in any special way. Just watch the breathing as it happens in and out.

and stay passive or relaxed, really receptive and alert. I'm just watching the breath, let it happen by itself. Being breathed. It's just everyone in this room and this city and this planet now is being breathed, sustained in a vast breathing web of life. Now visualize your breath as a stream or ribbon of air passing through you. See it flow up through your nose

and down through your windpipe and into your lungs. And from your lungs, take it through your heart and picture it flowing through your heart and out through an opening there to reconnect with the larger web of life. So there's a looping. The breath comes in, comes in and through your heart and back out into the web,

in and through your heart and back out through the web, into the web. I really sense this, you're kind of, a channel. Let your awareness be open to the suffering that's present in the world and drop all your defenses and just open to the knowledge of that. And it may be the sufferings of fellow humans in pain, our images of the earth in pain, of the swaths clear cut through the forest, or the creatures losing habitats or the oil spewed into the sea, this earth, our larger body. And as you sense this, breathe in the pain of this like dark granules on the

stream of air. So you're breathing in the pain through your nose and your lungs and your heart, but then breathe it out again into the world net. Breathing in the suffering of this earth, but breathing it out. Let it pass through you. Make sure the stream flows through and out again. Don't hang on to the pain. Surrender it into the healing resources of life's vast web. So you may have an image of one of those sea creatures and caked in oil and just to breathe in the pain. Let it touch your heart but move through and out. You might see one of those mountaintops cut off for the mining. the pollution in the streams, breathing in, and yet let the breath go out.

Let your heart be a transmuter of sorrows. Even if no images arise, even if there's a blankness or gray or numb, just breathe through that. The numbness itself is part of our world. And if what surfaces for you is not the pain of the world but your own suffering, breathe that through too, because your own anguish is part of our world. of the grief of our world. Should you feel an ache in the chest,

a sense of the heart that wants to break that too, breathing in, breathing out. It said the heart that breaks open can hold the whole universe and your heart is that large. Trust it. Keep breathing.

Waking up in the morning, I vow with all beings to be ready for sparks of Dharma from the flowers, our children, or birds. This is the vow. Sitting alone in meditation, I vow with all beings to remember I'm sitting together with mountains, children, and bears. When I stroll around in the city, I vow with all beings to notice how lichen and grasses never give up in despair. Watching a spider at work, I vow with all beings to cherish the web

of the universe. When people praise me for something, I vow with all beings to return to my vegetable garden and give credit where credit is due. With tropical forests in danger, I vow with all beings to raise hell with the people responsible and slash my consumption of trees. Hearing crickets at night, I vow with all beings to keep my practice as simple, just over and over again. Falling asleep at last, I vow with all beings to enjoy the dark and the silence. and rest in the vast unknown. Verses for environmental practice, speaking our love of life.

The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much. Thank you.