 Solar radiation, but that's what we're dealing with. We've, we've seen a tremendous increase and this is coming from pretty well respected scientific journal. So I'm going to trust that we're, we're, we're taking hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight. And releasing it in the century or two. Yeah, so the thermal flux and the thermal balance of the planet are screwed on nuclear. I encourage you. If you haven't already read, and Mark Jacobson. Okay. For an alternative. Oh, I see we have already taken off into things. I need to alas bounce from the call and turn things over to Ken. I'm headed over to meet some people. I'm because it is 7pm, where I am. No, we're in Bahrain, Bahrain for a panel tomorrow and then a bit of a conference today after and both days I get to go attend the Grand Prix that's here. It's apparently the first Grand Prix of the season. Oh, wow, that'll be I've never, never been to a car race. So I'm starting at the top. Wonderful. Cool. So I, you were in Ken's trusty hands. He, whatever you want, Ken, if you want to make everybody like cosplay, go for it. Did you all bring your, your costumes? All's good. This is my costume. All right, Jerry, have a good, good time. Enjoy. Thanks. So this is the open call my call for leap day, February 29th and I am Ken Homer sitting in for Jerry McCalski. We have an open platform today, whatever you'd like to talk about. If you don't have something you'd like to talk about, I have a couple of ideas, but who's like to raise a topic that they'd like to talk about? Well, I don't know if I want to talk about it, but I will note that somebody seems to have removed the word urgency from the SCOTUS dictionary. I didn't know SCOTUS had a dictionary. Well, there's, you know, I can't think of any reason that they would have to wait two months to hear this case, the case being the, the Trump immunity claim. But Clarence Thomas isn't a good enough reason for you. It's one of nine. Actually, it's one of six. Well, there's that. Yeah, let's not talk about that. That's too depressing. Unless it'll be where we want to talk about it. Well, you want to talk about the atmosphere going on fire. Okay, that was, I did put a link to the post I wrote in the chat if you want to check that out. Actually, what I thought I would ask is, given all of the, the barrage of bad news that we are subject to every day, what do you do to stay buoyant? What do you look for sources of inspiration and sources of hope and strength and resilience? I'd love to hear from people where they, what their sources are for that and how it affects them and how they're coping with living in these crazy times. Drugs, alcohol. Says the man who's walking on air. What kind of drugs, Stuart? I had to add some humor. I had to, I had to inject some levity into the conversations. Dave, were you waving or did you want to speak to the, my question, David? I didn't hear the question. I would just wait. Oh, okay. My question is, given the daily barrage of bad news, where do you, what do you turn to? What do you look for, signs of inspiration, things, you know, resilience, hope, strength, ways to stay buoyant? What do you do in the midst of all this to keep yourself from just despairing and going crazy? Yeah. And like, I don't know, I flipped through the, you know, a bunch of news, newsletters in the morning. So I've flipped, I just finished flipping through and was like, holy cow, there's a lot of bad news in there. So I take the point, you know, I've kind of deliberately focused on this regenerative notion because of its optimism. You know, I was tired of starving polar bears. It's kind of my mindset. And, you know, I don't know why we're not spending more time thinking about how the world could be better, you know, and kind of we're kind of trapped in this doom spiral. So I look at, you know, rewilding of land and places where, you know, things didn't get flooded. I don't know, things like that are positive and optimistic and hopefully many. Thank you, Doug. So for me, it's turning to the greatest poets. I think when Dante says, boy, the course of this life, I find myself lost in a dark wood. Or Elliott says, we are the hollow man had pieces of stuff with straw leaning together. This is an incredible stuff. And if you can move the experience of how difficult things are into a few lines of good poetry. Wow. There seems to be poetry, as you might know. Doug, there seems to be a trend in literary circles. I don't know if this is academic or publishing to spend less time reading old writers and reading new writers. So that kind of goes at odds with your perspective. And like Mary Oliver, I'd add her in there, too. Yeah. Yeah. And others. One of the things I think that's important about poetry is that bad poetry is evocative. So one thing to do in reading poetry is to look at your experience as evoked by reading the poem, not to genuflect to the great poet and the great poem. Doug, how are you feeling? How's your food poisoning recovery going? Well, it's half. I don't feel terrific and I'm going to have some longer term little problems. But I'm functional. That's pretty good. And I have to have a sense of humor. I think mostly, you know, I'm right on top of my eighty seventh birthday. And I don't feel it. What date? What day? What's the date of the birthday? No, sir. April, April 27th. So it's kind of amazing. You know, I think if you like looking at experience, the experience of getting older is another really interesting thing to pay attention to. Thank you. I also like the question, Dave, White's will just raise of why aren't we spending more time thinking about the world that works? Why aren't we so caught up in the death spiral narrative? Some of us do, Karen. Some of us. Some of us do. Eleanor McCain, my friend, I don't know if you've met, has been publishing stuff for years under the topic of what's working. You know, focusing on collecting the stories of what works. I orient that way, too. Can you put her name in the chat please? Yeah, I've been really struck by a lot of stuff I encounter on LinkedIn from the Doomsters, who are, you know, understandably concerned about where we're headed, but are convinced that they know what the future will bring. Absolutely certain that there will be collapse. Now, you know, that there might be collapse, but I keep on saying there are no facts about the future. And it riles people to say that who are convinced that they know where we're going and, you know, they don't they don't have as much success betting on horses or stock markets or elections or anything else, but they're convinced where they know where civilization is going to be. I. Yeah. Hope and solar power and various things, you know, hope, not like naive hope, but radical hope that looks at what works. Ken Bolding said years ago, I'm mangling the exact phrase, but he basically said existence is proof of the possible. You know, if you can show me stuff, you can't tell me that's not possible and there's plenty of stuff going on that is very, very good and plenty of bad, but the news focuses on what the news focus because it sells eyeballs. It has to rile people for that economics to work. And yeah, it's not there. Thanks, Gil, Judy. Nice to see you. Well, I'm I'm thinking about your original question and I'm generally a fairly upbeat person, just normally. But I guess a couple of years ago when I had some issues, I found that if I focused on nature and just connected to the universe and looked at trees and watched the wind blowing the leaves and things like that. It was really rewarding and sort of shifted my mood. And I discovered accidentally it actually lowered my blood pressure as well, so it was like this is a good thing to do. And then the other piece of it was deciding back then that I only wanted to be engaged with things that I felt I could make positive contribution to the future. And so I eliminated a lot of the chaff from the things that I was engaged with. And that was also helpful. So I think actually doing something for anything that's worthy in your eyes that is positive is a way to mitigate the doom and destruction around us. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Ken. Thanks, Judy. I was I was going to say something similar to Judy, actually. I like that question. How do you stay buoyant? And a big part of it for me and my wife is being in nature. So we have a little dog that we have to take for a walk every day. My wife says she likes to tell people, take your dog for a walk every day, even if you don't have a dog. We're lucky enough to have a dog so we don't really have a choice. And we're situated part of the reason we bought the place that we did in San Diego was because it's right across the street from a wild space. San Diego has these amazing canyons and hiking trails and stuff like that. And so we've got one kind of like in our backyard. So we don't go there every day. But maybe half the time, half the time we walk kind of in the suburb, suburban area part. And then half the time we're out on the trails, watching the birds, watching the different animals, lizards and every once in a while when we're lucky, a rattlesnake, if we stay away from the rattlesnake. It's also a little bit sad sometimes because I remember we moved here four years ago, something like that. And we used to see bats once in a while at night. And now we haven't seen a bat in years, which freaks me out. I think bats are cool, so I like to see them. But the fact that there aren't any bats means there aren't any bugs for the bats to eat and that like just freaks me out. The other the other real treat we have is we can drive half a mile. Sorry, half an hour. I wish it were half a mile. We can drive half an hour and get to some amazing tide pools. So winter is tide pool season. The low tide is during the day and it gets low enough to go out on the rocks and amble around and squat down and look for tiny little animals amongst lots of water and splashing and and all kinds of algae. And that's super recharging. So I really like nature to recharge. Thinking about that's that's like a big part of it. And a big part of it, I think, is the regularity of it. We do it often. It's it's easy to to go, well, I'm going to stay home today because I'm I'm lazier because I've got something to do or whatever. Having the dog push us out, pull us out is really helpful. I learned a couple of years ago that especially during when we started getting used to the pandemic, it was hard on everybody and a thing and watching the news and being freaked out. This applies even when it's not a super emergency, but learning the the art of self care going, you know, I'm getting a little bit off balance. I'm reading too much bad news or I haven't eaten well enough or I'm not, you know, breathing in a fresh air or whatever it is that gets you a little bit off balance, learning to go, you know, everything else can wait. If I'm not kind of like centered and stable and feeling good, then that's the thing that I really need to work on because otherwise, you know, it's easy to get sucked into the other things and and forget yourself and then and then collapse. So that was a big kind of kick in the pants lesson for me, especially during the beginning of the pandemic. The other thing I've learned and keep trying to do is it's easy to feel overwhelmed with all the stuff going on and all the stuff that you need to make sure it gets done and things like that. And I like to have a lot of my plate or maybe I don't. Maybe I addicted to having a lot on my plate. But making sure that in all of the things that you're having to do, making sure that some of them actually get done, even small ones and celebrating that win is super important, going, you know, it felt really good to rake the leaves day. It felt really good to fix that little thing and the little faucet thing that's been bugging me forever, just like getting something done, even if it takes half an hour, even if it's low priority, that getting it done thing is a real lift that I think is important. Just some ideas. Thanks. Thanks, Pete. Those are lovely. It reminds me when I was going to teach positive psychology course, I had to take a positive psychology course because I hadn't been exposed to it very much and she did the signature strengths test and optimism showed up as number 17 for me at a 24. And I thought, I got to boost that up, you know, and my teacher said, don't work with your top 10. Don't don't try to raise something up. Just work with your top 10. I said, no, I got to do this. It's really important. So I interviewed a bunch of optimists and one of them is a friend of mine that is known to go friend of my friend, Gene Dunaway. And Gene had had a kidney liver cancer and had a kidney liver transplant. He said, you know, when I was in the hospital, I was there was I was helpless, you know, like I couldn't do anything. And I found that just ringing the buzzer and calling the nurse and saying, can you just fluff my pillows gave me a little moment of like I was doing even though I was asking someone for help, I was still helping me do something. And it gave me a little sense of I'm making progress. And each day I would do something a little bit more. He says, just you got it, not with the inertia takeover. Just do something. You know, it's a little tiny thing. And that's always stayed with me is how important, you know, because it's so easy to get into the I have no energy, you know, and just doing something can really shift things in a big way. Small things can shift things in a big way. So thanks for reminding us that. Dave, please. Yeah, I kind of I mean, I love the conversation around nature. It's like I'm never going to doing it. But I like the notion seems great to me. And I'm just going to highlight the Bobby Fishkin in the multitude of projects that he has, one is called Nature Counter. And he's been doing a bunch of research around like the impact of being out in nature and the positive emotions and physical impacts. And he's got an app that they're going to try to distribute that gets people to, you know, encourage them to gamify nature or something like that. But Bobby's on this one. And the other thing I still I, you know, in terms of the why, you know, why do more ism kind of thing. I mean, I do think there's a category of folks who are, you know, you believe what you're paid to believe. So kind of the what I think of as the environmental industrial complex has, you know, fundraised off of the collapse, you know, quite a bit. And then for a long time now, you know, so we've been using that line for quite a while and they're invested in it because that's where the funding comes from. When I was traveling overseas in the last year, I didn't feel the consumerism, you know, I mean, I didn't have that great contacts with local folks and, you know, Indonesia and Thailand. But it didn't seem like they were trapped by this. And so I suspect that there's also a bubble effect. And I'm a little judgy about this, but like looking at us, I mean, we've just lived like the best lives almost certainly that any group of humanity ever has in all of time, right? I mean, the last 50 or 60 years on earth in the United States, you know, as kind of privileged people, it's like it doesn't get any better than this. What do we have to complain about? And I was wondering if there's like a guilt function, you know, it's like, it's like, you know, it's like, oh, man, we've had it so good, we've got to feel bad about it now or something, but yeah, I sure don't understand it. OK, Boomer. Stuart, can I call you Stewie? Sure. OK, I want to check because the childhood names don't always work for adults. But I like Stewie. I think of you as a Stewie. So thank you, Kenny. Yeah, that doesn't work for me. OK, no, I know some of my some of my dearest friends, my oldest dearest friends call me Stewie. And I kind of I kind of love it. It's great. My sister calls me stew. Following Dave is actually perfect. OK. I think I've gotten beyond the guilt of living so well. And I think that that's kind of one of the one of the one of the keys here. And it's the it's so many of the elements that everybody has mentioned. You know, Doug mentioned a classic extraordinary literature that just grabs you and you can you can you can hang on to it. You know, Pete mentioned, you know, being in nature. You know, all of a sudden I have this wonderful partner who travels all over the world, who makes all these travel arrangements and I just show up. And it's just absolutely wonderful. And two other things, you know, a few years ago, I decided, you know, I don't want to have anything to do with helping people make more widgets. And so I decided I only want to be in the kind of conversations that we're in. OK. And it's not like I wasn't in these conversations before, but now I only want to be in these conversations. And and here we are. OK. Only talking to people who who understand have a sense of what is going on in the world and are working to create something something different. All right. That makes me feel like I'm doing something I'm contributing in some way. Yeah, every once in a while, I think, well, maybe I should really go to the border or go to Ukraine or go to Israel and volunteer and do that kind of work. And and and obviously I don't or I haven't. Years ago, I think it was. When my first wife's mother died very suddenly at a very young age, you know, she just decided that living well was the best revenge. However, you define that as an individual and it doesn't necessarily mean spending a huge amount of money. It's just whatever it is that that that works for you. And then, I don't know, years ago, one of the most useful things that I ever did in terms of mental health was taking an eight week depression course at Kaiser of all places with all of the different kinds of esoteric work we do. I learned the huge amount in that program. And it was the simple things of, you know, exercising, engaging in in social relationships, being proactive about those things, taking time to rest, to meditate, to sleep, all of the very, very simple things in some ways, if you will float, if you will float. And then, you know, I think I just I already mentioned that. Being in conversation with people who have a sense of what's going on. But I agree completely with you, Gil. No one knows what the future is going to be. You know, no one, no one, no one knows. So here we are, you know, tilting at windmills. You know, is it going to be a terrible dystopian crash? We're all in peril of our physical safety. Are we going to figure out some solutions? Are because of our age. Are we all going to die between between now and the time that things really change? You don't know. So so every day you get up and you tilt at windmills. That's my two cents. That's true. Patty. Thank you, Stuart. There are two bits to my sharing. I think if it's OK with everyone, there's the answer to Ken's initial question about, you know, what do we do to bring in lightness in times of feeling like we might be absorbed in heaviness? And then there's a second part of my share, which I would like to share, quickly share an experience I had last night that I feel might encompass the the conversation about fear that's being and perpetuation of fear that's being woven into our current conversation. But I'm aware that that might take us kind of reorient us in a slightly different direction. So if it's OK, I'd like to share my lightness piece and then maybe duck out of the queue and circle back around after Doug and share that. So thank you. So I've recently been enjoying watercolor painting. I would love to share some pieces. So this is the piece I made last night. So I've changed my view to speaker from gallery so I can see that. Oh, OK. Yeah, hold it longer, buddy. Yeah, this one. Oh, that's interesting. Thank you. Thank you. My husband and I took a watercolor class last month and oh, man, there's just been delightful. And I was recently talking with someone about this who also noted that even the medium of watercolor is so light in nature versus maybe something like an acrylic or an oil paint, which is a bit heavier and a bit more dense in them. It's just been so fun to play. So that has been a new and fun activity. I've been enjoying to help bring me out of feelings of heaviness. Thank you, Patty. I always appreciate when people share their their artwork. I know it's a it's a risk, but I think you got a very receptive audience here. Gil, please. No, excuse me. So I'm learning not to flee from heaviness. And I've had I've had two friends die in the last two days. And and it took a while. I noticed it took a while to let the grief arise. I had a kind of neutrality at first. And then actually, I remember what it was in particular, reading about it and even writing about it. I was not deeply emotionally engaged. When I started to speak to people about people that Ellen had died, which, you know, it felt like a full body and spirit experience. Joanna Macy has done a lot of work on grief as part of activism, not denial. And so it's strange maybe to say we're talking about how do we be able to find buoyancy in the heaviness? Sometimes the heaviness is part of the buoyancy things, Bob up and down. So there's that. To what to what several of you have said, that one of the one of the mantras in our household is in the event of whatever, put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others. And so that's our little mantra of self remembering to take care to do self care, remembering to take care of ourselves before getting agitated about everything else. Part of that self care for me and David, you reminded me of this, is I do not. I do my very best to not start the day with newsletters or with news or with other stuff or with other people's stuff, but to start the day with what's most important in whatever sense for me and do that first, because otherwise the most important things get knocked around by the other exorcists of the day. And I've been for the last two months or so, I've been practicing a protocol from Steven Kotler and Andrew Huberman and a few others as part of a focusing technique that says when you get up in the morning, when I get up in the morning, first thing is exposure to bright light. If it's not right outside, turn on as many lights I can in the house, just like at the eyes, endocrine system attuned to bright light. And then as soon as possible, and there may have maybe some toileting or whatever in the way, but as soon as possible, do my most creative work of the day. And the the trick is the recommendation is even if you're barely awake, in fact, even better if you're barely awake, when you're kind of liminal state before you're fully engaged with your day, engage in the most creative work. They suggest for what now 90 minutes if you can and then get on with the stuff of the day. So what I had been doing was getting up and exercising as early as possible. Now that comes second, what comes first is writing. It's really interesting because the flow is on before all the noise of the rest of the content. The other thing I'll just mention is back to the it's not just not it's not just not starting the day with news, but we have found that a news diet is really helpful. We do there have been times where we've flipped on MSNBC for Rachel Maddow and then let it run for hours after that in the redundant drum beat of the same stuff over and over again. And now we watch a bit and we turn it off or watch a movie. Watch, you know, we're watching an exposure or something else. So the whole media game is an addiction game and stepping out from that addiction is very, very helpful. Thanks. Thank you, Gil. Doug, Doug, see. Yeah, so I love the nature idea and live on the edge of the Russian river to be as close to it as possible. And I've been in. Malaysia the last month and I did this painting last week. So can we see it here? Hold on, I got to switch my view. Well, yeah. Anyway, they're really fun to do. Now, here's my question. The nature that we like to be in seems to me not nature is given by nature. It's highly sanitized. The tigers and the scorpions are gone. We live in a strange view of what nature is. Thoughts? I always have to say who's we. We're going to make that word useless. It is it's useless if it's not qualified. Who is the we I mean, if I'm living in New York City, the nature I'm exposed to is be very different than I'm living and if I'm living in the rainforest of Borneo and many of us are living in the rainforest in Borneo. Well, if I'm living in New York City versus Marin County where I can, you know, walk out my door and be in open space or drive half an hour and be in really big open space, but to Doug's point and to your and to Pete's point, I'm not seeing any bats anymore either. The insect apocalypse is very much, you know, affecting the nature I'm in. But that's not my choice of mine. And it would jump in just to this one. I feel like one of the learnings for me around the regenerative space is the notion that we are of nature, not apart from it. And I definitely raised myself in I'm apart from it kind of standing. So. The nature that, you know, it's not like you go into it. I mean, you are it and I don't I'm still trying to figure out what that means and how to live into that. But, you know, and the notion that we, you know, we've been we people broadly, historically have been managing nature for ever, you know, have been trimming it and selecting it and, you know, gardening it in the Amazon, as well as everywhere else, right? So what we've we've always been doing things to nature. And that's, you know, that's part of what we are. But, but, you know, maybe we should stop doing this many bad things. I'm I feel aware that the the topic I was thinking of sharing a few minutes ago would feel sharing now would feel kind of forced and stale because it doesn't quite feel like it's fitting into the flow of what we're where we're at now. So I might duck out of the queue. Unless we're we're in for a hard pivot, but I also don't want to derail the conversation that we've been building. So I'll hop back in if it feels like it becomes relevant again. OK, thank you. Patty, I really like your care in in topic. I wanted to say real quick the the tigers and scorpions. I like like Bill, we've actually got scorpions in the house. My wife stepped on one and we felt so bad because I hope it didn't get injured. And thank goodness she didn't get injured. But but, you know, in the large the canyon, the canyon that we have, it's a nice desert canyon. A good chunk of it is taken over by wild mustard and wild radish, which are our invasives. And when I say a huge chunk, I mean, you can walk in. There's there's one place kind of towards the entrance where you walk in. And I think it's like two acres of mostly wild mustard. And it goes to like eight feet tall and it takes over everything. Like if the mustard starts to grow, it goes up higher, it sprouts earlier than the other plants. So it gets a head start. It's it's scattered seeds all over the place. So you end up with this march of progress of invasiveness, at least, disruption that humans have caused and then let a little bit of you know, not not natural nature. And they're still wonderful to to walk through. It's super fun to walk through a forest of mustard, you know, like a couple feet above your head in the summertime. But it is also really sad when you go to the more wild parts and there's little little cactuses and these little plants kind of like struggling to thrive in the desert environment and stuff like that. And that's what's supposed to be here. We don't see tortoises at all. You know, we don't see we don't see kairu is probably as much as we should. We see a few of them. Kind of the same thing that tide pool, the tide pool, it's interesting because it's you know, it's on the coast and it's off kind of on a peninsula away from San Diego, but so it's away from San Diego, even though it's very close to to get to and it feels pretty wild and a lot of it is, you know, it has looked the same for thousands of years. But at the same time, when we go there, the the the big excitement is to look for kind of a hierarchy of animals and seeing an octopus is like the top of it because the octopuses are really shy. They're small, they hide really well. Joanne and I have been lucky enough to see a couple. And when we saw a couple of them fighting together for a while, they were distracted, so they weren't running away. And that was just, you know, that made our couple weeks. So there's the octopus and the and the eels. You see a eelface, a more eelface once in a while, once in a great while. And then like it goes down and the things that you see a lot of are these tiny little nudibanks. They're literally about this big. You have to lean down and look at them and they're amazing. And some of them are very brightly colored and stuff. But you see like, you know, a handful of those when you go out. And sometimes you don't see the ones that you want to see ever that day. Another really exciting thing is to see there's these starfish that are like this big and they're purple, they have purple bumps and stuff like that. Nobby sea stars. People tell us stories. There used to be like the the tide pools were covered in them, you know, and they caught a virus and they all died out and stuff like that. So it's it's really striking going to this natural place, which is kind of insulated from from mankind a little bit. But, you know, it's again that thing where a bunch of the big animals have died off and, you know, it's it makes me wonder, you know, what we do to the planet. And so to Doug's point, it's a tenuated nature that we live in unless you get really out in the boonies. And it's still recharging. It's still it's still fresh and wonderful, but it's not quite the same, you know, as as it was that I was in years ago. So it makes me sad. Thanks, Pete. Steward. Yeah, I just wanted to add in this conversation about nature, about being in nature. Gardening. I discovered gardening. You know, my late wife used to make fun of my what she called the green thumb. I used to laugh. You know, what do I know about gardening? I'm a Jewish kid from Brooklyn. But I just find an extraordinary level of satisfaction. You know, I never had kids. But as as I think about it, little plants, they're like they're like nurturing little kids, it's it's it's not any different. They're these live things and they're they're just kind of magical in a certain way. And that provides such a great deal of pleasure. And I love I've always loved succulents. And I'm completely surrounded by them. I have an atrium. I've got a deck out back. I've got a garden and it's just the most satisfying thing. And they're reasonably easy to take care of. That and and one amazing. I think it was a number of years ago, there were all these orchid plants laying about. And with my then girlfriend, we planted two huge pots of orchids and they bloom every January. And so January, February, I got orchids around all the time that are just amazing. And the other thing that I wanted to say was that when I get really quiet, not even in a meditation, because sometimes you don't get quiet in the meditation. But what I've come to realize is that inside of me, there's like a whimpering. And I think it's reflective of the so many things are dying. Yes, lots of stuff is being born, but there's a lot of stuff that's dying. And I feel that inside the whimpering. And I'm aware it's there. But I try not to pay too much attention to it. Not ignoring it. But I just I know it's there. It's a piece of reality check in some ways. And all of these other activities are kind of like, all right. Yeah, that's true. But let's not go there. Thank you, Stuart. I'm trying to basically call it sustaining the gaze. We cannot we cannot look away. And yet if we fix it on it, it's the abyss. We'll stare back and I'll pull us in. So how do you sustain the gaze on that? Where do you find the strength and ability to not succumb to the despair that that's a natural response to it? Thanks. Let's say first, I think your question for me is it's it's never easy to stay up. There's always days of feeling down and days of feeling despair. But the thing that takes me out is letting myself be pulled by by something that needs to be done by by this sense of, well, I can do that. So I need to do that and let myself do it. And it's sometimes you're even sort of giving up in some ways. I got to give up to that energy rather than trying to control it. And and I find that when I do that, I actually end up feeling much more hopeful about what can happen if we give ourselves that permission to do that and to speak to the nature piece. I think I I'm very much on David's camp. We are nature and we've allowed our ideology and our narratives to separate us from it. And I think most of the harm that we have done comes from those ideologies and narratives, not us. And I think when we blame humanity, we blame ourselves. I think we're blaming the wrong thing. I think all too often we say what we've done. And and I think that we applies in that context, Ken, that that we're we're, I think, deep down each and every one of us and probably most people have no intent to harm nature. Right. We're not born thinking, oh, how can I go around killing everything and destroying everything? I remember like Stuart didn't have any of my own kids, but I had lots of kids around me, nieces and nephews and stuff like that. And to look at nature through their eyes. The the the beauty of a flower, a little insect, an animal, you know, seeing things for the first time, exploring them. I think we were all that way. And then somebody said, well, we need insecticide. And we need to kill those things because they're pests and we need to kill those things because they're weeds and we need to kill those things because they're keeping us from making money. And I think when we point at ourselves in part, we're actually we're contributing to the the misunderstanding of nature. Because I don't think we're looking at our nature. I think we're looking at these ideologies that we've raised up. And that, I think, is what we need to to look at as as the the cause of much of this, rather than us as human beings. Well said. Thank you. So let's pause for a minute on that. Thank you, Ken. Thank you, Jose. This this does feel like an organic time to come back around to what I'd come up for me earlier in response to Jose's sharing. I want to preempt it feels a bit like a risk for me to share for a couple of reasons. And I think the first being that it's just a short story of something that I experienced last night. And there's an element of that sharing. It's it will be sharing a tendency that I have that I have a hard time being patient with and sharing that with a group feels like a risk. And then I also I also identify as I guess I would say that I feel like my thinking tends to be more divergent and abstract in nature. So any really sharing to a group a lot of the time feels like a risk for for that reason, I don't know if it needs to feel like a risk, but that's the felt experience I have. So I'll try to keep this short. But last night I had an experience that I feel captures a lot of what we've been speaking of and presencing. And I I might pull us into the abstract a little bit by the end of it. So if we could all handle it and we're down for that. So it was a friend of my husband and I came over last night. She's she's about seven years younger than us. So she's in her mid 20s. And she came to share an experience that she's been having without going into detail. It was I could see a lot of myself in her at that age. I could see some of the words I'll use like respectfully, lovingly, hopefully or like maybe a bit of naivety. And I really know a deep longing to see the best in everyone and a reluctance to speak up, stand up and make someone else uncomfortable, even if if her safety is in question. And I could see a lot of elements of that in her situation. And I recognize that from my own experience. And so what I ended up doing was unbeknownst to me until after my husband, you know, gently and very kindly, we we we debriefed about how it had transpired. I this is my language. I feel like I really overstepped and I took control of her experience. Those that might sound like strong language and it might not be the language that others would use, but I feel like I went into savior behavior and became the rescuer. And so I because I felt that emotional charge from recognizing elements of her experience that that seemed to reflect experiences that I've had, I opted into rescuing and saving without being aware of it until after and then, you know, I and so the that I ended, I don't think that I don't have to go into detail about that. So so that that was what happened last night and my husband and I were talking about after the fact and and my husband knows this tendency in me. And it's something that I've done a lot of work to try to I don't know if neutralize its language, at least make peace with or at least the word eradicate from my behavior comes up. I don't know that I love that either. But I think you understand what I'm trying to say. I don't I don't like that quality. And I am aware that it harms others when I step into the role. And I'm aware that I also just wrote a piece about not being married to frameworks. But I have had a lot of it feels like a productive framework. I've been trying to understand myself and power transfer in the world is through that some call it the drama triangle, the disempowerment triangle, the victim bully rescuer. And when I think of in a situation like last night where I recognize that I was feeling afraid for our friend and when my husband asked me, hey, like, what came up for you when you were hearing her share? And I've like, oh, man, you know, I thought of another instance where, you know, I had a friend who just just little pockets of things that I've experienced in my life that elicited a lot of fear within me or stories that others have shared that may have resembled my friend's story that elicited fear in me. And I guess I so this is maybe where I'm pulling us into the abstract. I think as I track my relationship to fear-laden media and really charged media, my question underneath the question is what are the I know some of you have heard me speak of something I call like emotional mechanics or power physics. It almost feels like emotional experiences tend to track with physics in some regards that there's there's certain rules they always seem to kind of follow. It seems to always spread a certain way. There seem to be just a lot of predictable ways that emotions move between between people. And something that struck me about fear, the analogy I used with my husband last night is almost like if I think of our personal power as a jar of marbles, let's say, obviously, this could become nuanced because there's things like socioeconomic factors that might influence someone's sense or lived experience of their personal power. But let's say I have a jar of 100 marbles, fear or packages of fear strike me as things that kind of carry like a negative value, like a negative five value. And so if someone shares a story that is wrapped in a lot of charge of fear and I take it and I hold it, it's almost like I lose five marbles. And in an unconscious attempt to get my marbles back, I might feel compelled to share that fearful story with someone else. And it's almost like there's something being lost and something being gained when packages of fear get moved around. And so the deeper question I'm asking around around fear and why it perpetuates and why we feel so if it's so difficult to come out of the heaviness, it's like what what are we on some level feel like we might be gaining? Is it our ability to to predict a catastrophic outcome? We feel like we have control over the situation. What is it that we are gaining when we ingest fear that keeps us coming back for it? What could be a substitute for that instead? So those are some of the questions that are coming up for me and some of the questions that I'm asking. Patty, would you like people to comment on that? Or you just want to leave that be. Yeah, thanks, Ken. Thanks for asking. I would I would love to be in conversation about if that feels like it's landing with anyone or if anyone has questions. I'm I'm definitely open. Yeah, thanks. Anybody? I'm wondering if Patty could restate the question that she posed at the end. If we unknowingly, I think about how to say it, what other influences might be informing our gravitating towards media? Or let's just use a specific example of media that hold a charge of fear that we may not be aware of on the surface. What need or itch need might be we be meeting itch might we be scratching? Is there some kind of void that we're filling or being filled with ingesting, charged, fearful, charged media? What what void might that be? And can we is there another way to find how can we explore that and what would alternatives be to filling said void? Does that does that sound close, Jose? Somehow it's not speaking to me, so I'm not sure. That's OK. Yeah. I noticed what Dave put in the chat, as you were talking, I was thinking, you know, kids love to be scared, we love scary stories, scary movies. There is definitely a part of our psyche that enjoys delving into the fear. And are you pointing at that? Is that is that what you're getting at? Is why is that or how can we how we cope with that and not swallow whole all of the terrible stuff that the media is feeding us? I'm just curious what you're shaping. I see Judy's hand and I also get the sense that Doug may have a different way of saying it. I Doug, are you tracking with what I'm sharing? Can you can you pop in and offer a can I opt over to you? And then. Thanks. So I don't know that you can. Take fear out of the context. Of it as part of a cycle. So so fear is a response. To something. And the something plus the fear response, the next immediate thing. That a human being does. Is come up with a rationalization of belief for what just happened. Because that's the enabling step to survive and live to fight another day. If I can understand it and explain it. Then at least I can, you know, know that exists in the world. Know what that feels like and know what happens when it happens again. And. At least and here I'm borrowing from a psychologist named Adler, who was sort of the curly red haired stepchild of psychology, but who I'm fond of. What he suggested was that. Fear is the reaction to an event. Which gives rise to rationalization. That rationalization belief. Is embedded. And when, you know, going around the circle, when the actions and ingredients and variables of that event start to reassemble. Unconsciously. A person will literally recreate. The event. Why? If they recreate the event. Which gives rise to the. Same response, the fear response. It ultimately validates the correctness of the rationalization. And human beings as a species. Unique among all living species. Will prioritize affirming their rationalization over even their own survival. My rationalization. You know, that the thing that this evokes from me always is that scene in that movie Full Metal Jacket. Where the the. The character literally sort of breaks. And he goes into a speech about this is my rifle. It's it's he equals his rifle. He's a marine and training. And he literally has been broken. To. Stepping into the role. He and he I am my rifle. Human beings are their rationalizations. For emotional experiences. And. So by bathing in by going to things that we affirm the fear. It's actually a self reaffirmation. And. There isn't a mechanism built into that of judgment. Like is that good or bad? Do I like that or not? It can be very much autonomic. So that's that's the best I got for you. How do you respond to that for a good key? Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I the hearing hearing these reflections, I think, helps me feel a little more clear on on the spirit of the initial question or invitation. And I think that is how does fear and the perpetuation of fear in the media? How how is that in relationship with our how is that affecting our personal power or so called jar of marbles? And maybe zooming out a bit, trying to get a sense of how power. Just just how what is the relationship between fearful media and the collective power or disempowerment? But it's a tricky thing to talk about because we don't really have ways to quantify this this very ambiguous and fluid idea of personal power. There's no I mean, to my understanding your knowledge, there's no agreed upon definition of what that means and what that is comprised of. So just a hard thing to talk about. So that's why I feel like it's an invitation to a very abstract conversation. Thanks, Ken. Are you ready? Thanks, Patty. I think maybe it's not an abstract question as much as it's a question that we have. We don't or it's a topic that we don't topic area. We don't have the right language for it. We don't have a typical way of of expressing it. And so even getting into the right conversation takes a little while of negotiating, you know, what do we mean by this, what do we mean by that? I so Patty and I have talked a little bit one on one and I think I understand a little bit what she means by power and having power and power being able to move around, you know, social situations and things like that. Not not that I'm going to get it right, but it's when Patty talks about power, she doesn't mean I think like power over something. It's a lot more about the embodied strength that you have to meet things and do things in the world. And one of the hallmark features of our society is that we've we have kind of a negotiated and inherited sense of how we apportion power and how we find our place in power. So now I'm just I was going to say power Hikers and that's switching over to power over this over somebody. So right there, I've got myself in trouble with with terminology. But to come back to Patty's question, the thing that I can I can kind of reflect on, there's there's a fear that happens. Like like Gil said in the in the chat, it's a signal that, you know, there's it's an alert mechanism and you go, oh, I'm scared of something. I think Patty was actually pointing at something a little bit deeper, which is like a sustained fear. Why would somebody get afraid of a situation and then continue to replay that and live in that fear for themselves? And I think a lot of it is being in fear suppresses your your embodied power to do things. So you withdraw from the stuff. And so so I think Patty's, you know, the question started off maybe like, why do I get scared about something, you know, tiger or scorpion, you know, you get scared and that makes sense. Why does it continue? Why do you consume that? Why do you like hold it? And then that turns into like social fear, right? So social fear, so fear and embodied fear in a social situation keeps me from from moving the situation where I think it should go and it and it lets somebody else have the power that I could be taking. So I think a big part of it probably is the way our society works. We've learned that there are people in control and there are people who encounter and in lots of different ways, you know, maybe physically, maybe emotionally, maybe in accomplishments and and I think that embodied fear is a mechanism whereby we participate in like kind of in the same way that we might participate in an empowerment economy. We have to participate in a fear economy where economy is maybe a bad way to say it, but maybe it's the best tool I have where, you know, I guess my part in life is to be this the scared little mouse and somebody else, you know, some billionaire is the one that gets to make the decisions over my life. You know, maybe that's maybe that's not what we should be living out. It's a great question, Patty. Next week, seven. Welcome. Thanks. I just wanted to add that, you know, something I haven't heard, but there are folks who want to addict you to that fear like Facebook, where you get a rush from that fear. And there's Fox News. There's other kinds of, you know, there's MSNBC that also wants you to be addicted with fear about, you know, the orange guy, etc. I mean, they're just there. People who are who's who are creating their profit through making sure fear is augmented. That's just all. Thanks, Kevin, Judy. Well, I'm just reminded of some discussions a long time ago when somebody said that fear and excitement are physiologically almost indistinguishable and part of the dynamic of interaction is internal discernment of which it is. And so that's part of it. I also think that that when you're in the fear mode, if it is indeed fear, there's sort of a fight, flight freeze phenomenon that goes on. And that can choose you, cause you to take the rebut fight approach, which may or may not be the most constructive approach to the situation that you find yourself in. And so I found that for myself, I kind of created a mental, you know, those there's sort of red flags on a spring. And if they're let go, they're going up and do this. I sort of learned for myself to identify my own symptoms of that behavior and just sort of put a red flag in front of myself so I would pause and think about what it was that I really wanted to do. And I don't know if that addresses your question, but that was a personal coping mechanism. So excuse me. I'm just noticing we've we've shifted from what keeps you buoyant in times of bad news to fear. That's really interesting to me. But Patty, please go ahead. Thanks, Ken. And I could try to tie those two together. Ken, after Judy's, thank you for your sharing, Judy. I think that that helped clarify things for me a little bit. And when we when we talk about and ask the question, like, OK, so, you know, as Pete said, I thought really clearly and really well what makes up our personal power, our embodied power, not not the power overpower that we're so accustomed to hearing about and speaking of, but like my innate power. And I'm I'm not as familiar with Antonio DiMazio's work, as I know, some here are in the in the room. But I think he fairly recently co-authored a book called The Strange Order of Things in which he dives into the importance of the how emotions have driven and shaped cultural growth and interpersonal, Jose be able to speak on this a little more clearly than I. So I haven't I haven't read the book in its entirety, but I got started on it. But so I think that when I when I asked the question, what what is our personal power made up of, I do get the sense that there is a relationship with how much we are able to feel the spectrum of emotions, joy, wonder, delight, pleasure, as well as the, you know, what tends to be referred to as like the more negative emotions like fear, anger, guilt, shame and everything in between. And I wonder if there's a correlation between our inability to feel and or orders said differently, we're just numb and are reaching or being more inclined to reach towards media or experiences that bring on that experience of that excitement, fear, physiological response in the body. And maybe we might be attracted to things like, you know, true crime podcasts and or, you know, Fox News or fill in the blank, whatever medium can provide you that sense of that embodied emotional experience of fear excitement as a surrogate to vulnerability and inability to feel things that are perhaps less activating in the body to say that differently. The question I'm asking is, what is the relationship between our ability to feel and our personal power? And does that have any connection to our relationship with fearful media? I just wanted to jump in for a moment, you know, and can you notice that we shifted the conversation and just to articulate that? I think we've shifted from what keeps us buoyant to why do we need these strategies to keep us buoyant or something something like that. We've gone to what's behind the need for taking care of self in a certain way. There's also for me a shift from personal stories of things that I do to stay buoyant into an analysis, a much more abstract conversation, which isn't as satisfying to me, but I'm not trying to control things. I'm just observing and, you know, let it flow where it wants to go. Gil. Yeah, I appreciate your absolute shift. I think we can return to the original question before the time is up. That would be good to do informed by where we've gone. And let me let me try to connect the two. Then, first of all, thank you, everybody, for what you've been saying. And Patty, it's great to hear a lot more from you than we have in other calls. I appreciate what you've been bringing to this. Thank you very much for that. For me, it's it's I've been. Cultivating different perspective on fear and on the prospect of the future. And to Judy, what you said about physiologically, fear and excitement being indistinguishable, fear is is an interpretation of a signal. It's a neurological signal of an anomaly. Something is different. Something is out of place. And we respond to that in the ways that we do. And those are condition responses. And recreating an event we're talking about can be evolutionarily disastrous because you're living in something that's not happening anymore and you're attuned to what happened in the past rather than what's happening in the present and that can be a problem at the very least, like adrenal exhaustion and other things that can come from that. On the other hand, and on the other hand, accommodating to a past signal means you lose the ability to adapt. I mean, if I'm, you know, if I'm out in the woods and I hear rustling in the brush and there's a lion there who's hungry, I need to know that. And if I become accommodated to the rustling in the bush or the most vivid in my daily life. So if I walk by a nail salon and smell the fumes coming out onto the street and realize that the people working there are living in that chemistry all the time and can't smell it anymore, lose the ability to differentiate a relevant signal. But to complicate that, we know from neurological studies of meditators that most of us will accommodate to disruption and noise. The neurological response attenuates over time. Zen meditators respond fresh every time with every signal. So there's interesting stuff to me, interesting stuff to explore there. On the future, I've been jokingly referring to myself lately as a futurist who stopped predicting the future. Because I think predictions, the wrong game to be playing here. And I'm much more interested in cultivating the capacity to navigate, to navigate the present, to have the capacity to navigate whatever the future is throwing at me and Jerry and I have talked a bunch about martial arts as a metaphor for this, I think sailing is another the ability to handle rough seas comes out of training in the body that enables people to deal with future anomalies. So navigating the present and shaping the future, which I think is what all of us talk about some of the time is what can we do now that shifts the odds of what we're sailing into some thoughts? Thanks, Gil. Mr. B, you're muted. If I could circle back to your question. Please. So I have what I've been experiencing. Is being in connection with and part of in present moment. As a full time job. I'm trying to focus on the connection part of that. And the more I do that, the more part of I feel and that feels good. Like feels like that's sort of like the right direction. And I'm doing that in. Context with others where there's a sort of organic, there's an organic flow by in between. That's balanced. There's equal portion of being acknowledged and acknowledging. Equal, equal apportionments and and appreciations of contributions. That are different, but aggregate to co-creating something, giving birth to something new. And and doing that from a felt sensed place while doing. And and I sort of, for me, that's. Intrinsically, the source of my own salvation. If if I can actually experience and live in and model the new. A difference from the prevailing order out the window. And a completely irrational center optimistic belief that. I am, you know, four or five other people in one of these conversation contexts, achieving that can become a. Center of gravity and source and ripple. That can spread. So if in micro. We do it differently, we do it better. And prove that an alternative exists. Through living and modeling it. But that intrinsically holds as much potential as any one or anything else that everybody else is doing to catch attention, to catch fire, to catch notice, to catch whatever and to spread. And with the technology and the affordances, we, you know, that exist. The potential for that spread to happen on massive scales and staggeringly short periods of time is possible. So that's that's mine. Thank you. Mr. Anderson, at least one person got that. You're muted. You're stuck in the matrix. Yes, I was just saying, I do have the long black brain code I can wear. It's classy. This has been very generative for me in a positive sense of that term. Patty, particularly for bringing this up. So one thing I'd like to. Can you mention this as being abstract? But for me, this entire conversation has become less and less abstract for me. As it really unearthed for me some of my own feelings and my own. There was it. That's the easiest way to say this. I think it took me until my mid thirties until I actually got to a point where I was so numb to my own emotional life that I. Sawed out help. And actually changed my life. I understood, you know, you could you could be like furious or it could be just a little ticked off, you know, it was like a rain chair of how angry you could be or how happy you could be or anything. And that really, for me, changed how I was able to just even start to. Live, so I think this idea. That people are unable to feel things like and I think it's one reason I that way. I think growing up. Who is this going to be very personal? So I trust you all. I was very well cared for and loved and taken care of and educated. But I never learned anything about how to manage feelings. And I was the oldest child. I have three sisters. I was the idea about how boys treat girls. It was I was basically. What's the easiest without having a long talk with all of you over and I got a coffee. I did what I had to do to get out to live to be old enough to move out of the house. Well, so I got spanked plenty of times, whatever. But the deal is I just I realized, OK, I'm going to be like this because I'm not going to push, I'm not going to poke that pig again. And that stayed with me for quite a while. So I think some of us, many of us, many people have this situation where it's not that they they have adapted to being able to sort of get through the day and our society doesn't have a lot of resources to help us learn how to make sense of our emotions. And, you know, I mean, Martha Nussbaum wrote this big fed book on emotional intelligence, which is all about emotions as being that's a way of thinking. Thank you for that. I'm like, yeah, so it's not like you have the rational thing and the emotional thing. No, actually, feelings are part of a way you can think about things. We can't separate that from what we think. So. So I just found this to be very for me, very grumpy and not abstract. As it seems to get for as others have expressed. So thank you, Patty, for. Bringing up because it's been. Oh, and I would say the original question. Um, I I'm just working to get through the day. I have decided I have tried not to get caught up in being gloomy, doomy, although I. Do not shy away from feeling that way. And I just feel like now, for me. We are we, well, all of us here in the United States in 2034, we are living in the midst of. For me, what feels like this? It's just. Complicated potatoes. Yeah, and I I'm just trying. I had his end teacher once who says, you know, well, here we are after three days of sitting day and night, our legs hurt, we're super tired. Submittedly afternoon, we're bored. He goes, we all come to this meditation retreat with great ideas and we end up with this. And so I figure in some sense, we as a society have. A lot of great ideas, but right now we're in we're in this, you know, and. I don't know, as humans, we're doing the best we can, even though we can do better. Thanks, Bill. So speak to fear first, I'm going to go back to my question. Michael Mead has been a teacher of mine for over 30 years. And Michael talks about fear having two functions. One is the fear that you get when your body senses that you're in danger. So get out of there, run, you know, facing a bear in the woods or a monitor wizard or whatever is on your path. Like, OK, I got to move. The other is a deeper fear of. There's something I'm afraid of and I'm afraid of because I know it's on my horizon, I'm headed that way. And that evokes a very different type of response. That's not an alert so much as a signpost of you going down this road. And you kind of know at the end of it, there's something, you know. The old word is you're going to meet your doom on this road. And so then you have to get smart. If that's the case, what do I need to do to prepare? And I think that's one of the fears that's out there right now that we have around, you know, quote, the end of the world or the end of this world anyway, not necessarily the world, but the one you're living in. And how can we be smart about that? How can we meet our doom effectively and with strategy and and heart? I was very fortunate when I when I moved to California in 1990, I spent I joined the Buddhist peace fellowship. And so I spent several years in the early 90s on a week or two economy retreat with Joanna Macy. I got to do a lot of her despair work. It's incredibly powerful, shifted my life. I find today it's actually even more relevant than when I experienced it 30 years ago. And so as has been mentioned on this by several people in this call, I don't shy away from the despair. You know, when I find it, I dive in. Another thing from mythology, if you want to if you want to get past a dragon, dive into its open mouth, go inside. That's the place where you can't harm you. So I use that as about a foot. And what keeps me buoyant as other people have in this call said nature, I get outside, I try to get outside every day. And I live in a place where, you know, it's a residential neighborhood that's there's plenty of open space around me. I can walk up into the hills and be around redwood trees very, very quickly. Or I could take a short drive and be up on the watershed in some really, you know, where I really don't see very much human. Created structures where it's all natural. And that nourishes me deeply. And I retell to friends. I've built a community around me of people that I love and care about. And I'm proud and pleased to say you're all part of that. You know, I come here. This is a great place to to get support and to be in conversation with. I like to say people with sharp minds and soft hearts. It's just one of my favorite combinations and backbone. Those three, you know, they make for a really great company. And I deeply appreciate that. And I very intentionally stay away from the news. I can tell when I'm getting toxic from the news, it's like, OK, I'm just going to turn it off. I subscribe to the Washington Post. I scan the headlines every day. I might click on a climate story or human interest story. But I rarely read about the politics and everything because it's all assertions. It's what we call pending assertions. This is going to happen. It's like, you have no freaking idea what's going to happen in November. You can't wait too much happening between now and then. So all these predictions are just designed to stimulate the amygdala. Oh, my God, I got to be afraid. I refuse to be afraid. That doesn't mean I don't feel fear. I feel fear, but I refuse to be afraid and act from it. You know, there's things that scare me. And so I look at them and go, what can I do? What's what's at the root here? What's going on? How do I respond to this with agency? My dog. So. Those are some of the things that I use. And to go back to Doug, see who's left us at some point. Poetry, as you know, I I read more poetry and less news. And I find it's one of the best bombs out there. And I do have a poem to close with. But let me move over to Jose. Thank you for listening. What I was going to say is going to probably take too long. So I'll just not say it and let you do your paw. Thank you, Jose. You want to give a snippet or, you know, Kevin. I like what everybody's saying. I just I'm also active in creating a new future. Teaching a class with my daughter and the stuff I do, starting in a couple of weeks. It's what it's called the act local class. And, you know, so those are other things to do. You know, you could do things and not just think about things or meditate things to, you know, you can create the thing you want. Thank you. I guess for I let loose with the poem, I'd like to thank you for really interesting and deep and lovely call. And thanks for showing up, because, you know, Jerry told you he wasn't going to be there. And you came anyway. So I appreciate that. Thanks, Patty. And yeah, thanks for everybody who's shared. So this is a poem. By Nicky Giovanni called Ego Tripping. And I love this poem. I was born in the Congo. I walked to the Fertile Crescent and built the Sphinx. I designed a pyramid so so tough that a star that only goes once every hundred years falls into the center, giving divine perfect light. I am bad. I sat on the throne drinking nectar with Allah. I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe to cool my thirst. My oldest daughter is Nefertiti. The tears of my birth pains created the Nile. I am a beautiful woman. I gazed on the forest and burned out the Sahara Desert with a packet of goats meat and a change of clothes. I crossed it in two hours. I am a gazelle so swift, so swift, you can't catch me. For a birthday present when he was three, I gave my son Hannibal an elephant. He gave me Rome for Mother's Day. My strength flows ever on. My son built new arc and I stood proudly at the helm as we sailed on a soft summer day. I turned into myself and was Jesus. Men in tone, my loving name, all praises, all praises. I am the one who would save. I sewed diamonds in my backyard. My bowels deliver uranium. The filings from my fingernails are semi precious jewels. On a trip north, I caught a cold and blew my nose, giving oil to the Arab world. I am so hip, even my errors are correct. I sailed west to reach east and had to round off the earth as I went. The hair from my head, thin gold was laid across three continents. I am so perfect, so divine, so ethereal, so surreal. I cannot be comprehended, except by my permission. I mean, I can fly like a bird in the sky. Nicky Giovanni, 1968. Egotripping, but you please please give us like wow. Yes, here it is. Thank you all have a great week. Good weekend, stay healthy, stay bold, stay buoyant. If you can't stay buoyant, dive deep and come out the other side. Very nice. And thanks for hosting. Thank you, my pleasure.