Welcome to Green Gulch. I am astonished at the number of people here today. And it's wonderful to have you here, to feel your energy. Actually, I take that little moment to get in touch with my imaginary playmate, Dharma mate, that has in the past whispered into my ear what to say, what is coming up. There was a time where I would prepare myself with all sorts of books and quotations and material to be sure that I had something to present to you. But as of late, that is to say, as of the last few, well, the last couple of years in particular, I have decided that this is not a class.

[01:14]

This is supposedly a Dharma talk, and a Dharma talk is that which arises spontaneously between the speaker and the... or the people who come to hear. And so I do rely on that, but I have told people in the past that the metaphor for this is the swimming pool that one runs toward blindly and leaps. And the result will either be splash or splat. We don't know. I don't know. The fact is, even if there is nothing to say, and actually there isn't anything new to say, but since we have to say something, it's all right if we fall into, can you hear me back there? Yeah. We can fall into silence, and in that silence, what is most articulate in our lives can often come forward.

[02:24]

This week I am privileged to be part of a welcoming, not committee, but welcoming a group of people that come every year for our annual holiday retreat. This year we have almost 30 people that are here. They're sitting amongst us today. They started the day before yesterday, Christmas, day after Christmas, and they will stay here until through the Christmas, New Year's Eve, and our celebration of sitting that evening and other forms that we practiced. And on Christmas, New Year's morning, they will they will leave and we will then go into our own little holiday here, three days in which the doors are closed and we can kind of hang loose for a while before the next round of practice begins around the fifth of the new year.

[03:35]

And it's always an important time of the year, I think, because it is the dark of the year, it is that time in which the light is now about to return and many of the traditional rituals that recognize that, such as Christmas, Hanukkah, and others, the return of the light. Important time. Difficult time for people, actually, not having the light in our lives. We can imagine, maybe we can imagine what it must have been for our forebearers before the dawn of recorded history to have in the northern hemispheres gone through this time in which the sun seems to disappear, everything gets cold, everything begins to die, and then it comes back. The light returns. So this whole question of the light in our lives, you see, the enlightenment, the lighting up, the bringing back of the warmth and so on, is very important to us.

[04:38]

It's part of our, I think we're hardwired in a sense for that. One of the things I talked about yesterday in my class with this group of fine people who are here has something to do with desire.

[04:59]

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