 Hey everybody, it's Amazing honor for me to be here Just want to give a shout-out to my daughters right there What do I want to talk about? Well, this is it. There is goodness in the world. How do I know this I? Do not accept within myself as a set of private Experiences that make up some working theory of life and what is that theory? It's this We are all secret solitudes Working out our philosophies of the universe based on purely personal feelings and sensations We all seek the guidance of internal compasses private illuminations That shed light on the darkness the unknowability we live in These private illuminations allow us carefully Tentatively, but sometimes with great power and purpose to move through the world if that is true I appeal to my own such experiences in the hope that they might invite your own My own personal feelings and sensations as they relate to being here at UVM To my time on this campus when I was an undergraduate between 1981 and 85 Three memories coming to me now, but never having left me either Memories that have always been there as constellations that make the space between the far stars Less meaningless for me that make me feel less alone first memory I would study up there on the fourth floor of Williams Hall and Sometimes on brilliant fall days. I would look out the window and stare across the lake To the far shore where there was a farm a red barn copper roof green field The farm must have been huge to be so clearly visible from so far away. I would look at this farm Look at the clarity of the lake between me and it at the colors the big green field the copper roof in the sparkle of the Sun and feel without reason without Explanation not in any way that my textbooks could tell that there is goodness in the world second memory I'm in this building behind me waterman on a cold winter night in a darkened classroom Watching a movie with my classmates for a Shakespeare course the movie is Henry the fifth. It's from the 1940s It's in Technicolor and moving across the screen are medieval nights in armor on horseback nights and horses in blue and yellow and red and white But what I see is not this illumination the one on the screen But the reflections of the horsemen on the windows of the classroom There they were painted on the double darkness the dark of the room and the dark of the night Floating there in that darkness as if their colorful pageantry took place outside the room Not in it horses armor and men suspended actually weightless in mid-air. I Watched these phantoms play at their separate reality and thought again without reason without rationale That and here I seem to change my terms a bit there is beauty in the world Third memory. I'm vacationing in Vermont in Middlebury out visiting from st. Louis, Missouri where I grew up the year is 1979 I'm 16 and I'm spending time with a friend a student at Middlebury Union High School who shows me his high school yearbook and I'm looking through the pages staring at a photograph of the girls track team and I Say to my friend. Who is that? Who is that girl pointing to a young woman standing and smiling in the photograph and He tells me and I said well, I'd like to meet her and I don't meet her and I forget about it and three years past So cut to me now a sophomore at UVM and I'm at a party talking to a girl and I go away to get each of us a drink and as I return to where she is standing. I suddenly realize That it's her It is the same girl from the Middlebury photo and I go back up to her and say Hello, I know who you are and I explain and I explained the story which she had heard about and We end up going out. It does not last beyond a few days We're different. She likes the Grateful Dead and I don't she Phoebe is her name is a really good person and I thought then as I think now that chance encounters like that one sometimes speak to secret Unities a quiet in the universe and a quiet in us And this feeling when it arrives is fragile like it's going to break apart at any moment Goodness beauty quiet. It's the nature of these things that they seem Impermanent Fleeting so another Vermont story this one about fragility It's a summer of 1985 just after my graduation. It rained on mine, too and I'm spending the summer in Burlington working for Domino's Delivering pizzas in my brown 1976 sob to that great pizza-loving region known as Mallets Bay And at the end of that summer in August I agree to house sit at a place not far from here at the end of a dirt road called lost nation road How sit and kids sit actually because the house is that of my friend and his wife and they're away With their two day teenage sons Luke and Eli in my care So out behind the house at the end of lost nation road is a lake and one day Seeing a little rowboat on the shore. I decided to go out in the boat alone without a life jacket Even though I could not swim And I figured to myself with some odd logic That it was a test that I needed to be brave and that the day and the lake being perfectly calm It was not such a big deal And Eli one of the boys Saw me there and asked if I wanted company or if at least I wanted to wear a life jacket But I said no In both cases and I rode out into the middle of the lake Far from the shore. I was part of the bravery the test and I stopped there letting the boat float quiet in the warmth and haze nothing happened as You may note by observing me here still in existence But what I think is this that Eli the boy who when asking me about the life jacket Kid sat me rather than me kid sitting him Who showed himself wiser and saner than me? That a few years ago this Eli died suddenly a young man still in his 40s Which made me recall the boat the lake the haze as if and maybe my memory plays tricks on me He actually did come out with me on the lake that day Even now even right at this podium. I cannot be entirely sure and I think we all float all of you me These people back here. We all float weightless on the heavy surface of the world Suspended in dreams of who we are And these moments of good of calm Which I believe all of you have had in some form are completely delicate There are moments when the world you find does not devour you does not drown you But instead raises you up keeps you afloat buoyant in some strange Awareness of the fragile balance of being alive These moments are delicate But I've also noticed that they're Indestructible and maybe they're even the most indestructible part of us So another story. I'm in California with our younger daughter In a secluded forest through which a clear stream runs It's a perfect stream 20 feet wide 20 inches deep rocks and gravel bright at the bottom Shimmering in the flow sun and shadow playing through the branches of the overhanging trees And my daughter and I spend some time there who knows how much time stops it slows down My barn my field my shadows my calm the kindness and sweetness of the world is a secluded realization of love a Balance or pause in which we sense. I don't know how to put it Joyous secret that is always there for all of us, but is only occasionally made so vivid and so real That reality Trembles and disappears. That is its nature. It lives only in moments, but yes, it is also indestructible hate and Wickedness Cannot touch it So consider later that same day the day of the clear running stream, but now back at the hotel I opened my email and received a message from a source I'd never gotten an email from before that is the US Justice Department and This email announced that after three years The first arrests had been made in the murder of my younger brother who had been killed in prison in 2014 my younger brother was a drug addict a person who started using cocaine in the 1980s when that drug was the drug of choice and Who my brother never got off it and the lying and sociopathic and self-destructive behavior that goes with it I Could say more about this, but let me just say here that it's an American tragedy of a common kind I am afraid But that day With this new news confronting me of the arrests of the men accused of beating my brother to death of yes The cruelty and depravity of the world. I noted that the clear stream still Ran that in fact it was not changed in the slightest by this poison this toxin Nothing ran through it other than that water is a custom clarity and it's a custom piece worthless I Have heard that piece called and I am sure I will continue to hear it Describe that way and you know what the haters come in two stripes to shapes One kind is made up of those who live perpetually in worlds of Facts and figures demonstrable proofs and claims most often tied to money For whom the idea of a man staring at a stream with his daughter on that or any day is truly a worthless phenomenon Worthless that is Unless some financial gain can be squeezed out of it the other kind of hater is the kind that says and Let me see if I can say this right There is no time for that and let me see if I can say it right again this time another way people are suffering Injustice goes on daily hourly by the minute you Need to do something not just sit there and stare Never mind that in this feeling I have described all mean egotism vanishes as Ralph Waldo Emerson said Did all mean as in average ordinary egotism vanishes and that all mean as in mean Nasty harsh egotism vanishes never mind too that Emerson said that it is from these moments that the qualities We all want that we all you know pay lips lip service to but in fact are very present in us the qualities of wisdom and virtue and beauty spring Never mind that these qualities come from these moments Instead in the words of this second kind of hater, and let me see again if I can paraphrase it you are a walking talking example of privilege of The gratuitous pleasures and peace that only those with money means financial social educational capital can achieve And you know what I draw the following conclusion from these kinds of hate There is something about goodness that the world does not like and I mean goodness in the sense of the calm and quiet and beauty that I'm talking about now It's threatening somehow So once I was at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC quietly reading the Gettysburg address as Lincoln's words are inscribed They're in stone in the delicious shadow of the cool within the memorial When I was startled out of my contemplation by a little boy who sneaking up behind me and in effect screaming boo Evidently thought that no such form of quiet as was my own just then was tolerable to a mind Like his already forming its estimations about what does and does not matter in life Or another time I Was on a big airplane flying back to San Francisco from New Zealand And it was at night, and I was looking out the window at the stars of the southern hemisphere I'd never seen them before And as I did so out of the corner of my eye, I saw the flight attendant motioning with her hands and I thought she was only asking if I wanted a cup of water and Anyway, I was all too enthralled by the stars which blindly in a kind of braille I was reproducing in ballpoint pen dots on a blank paper before me making my only my my homely connect the dots chart of the heavens So without turning from my window, I said to the flight attendant. No, thank you. I'm fine But after a while I sense that she was still there and in that in fact she was now mad at me Pull down your blind. She said people are Trying to sleep I Looked outside. It was dark. I Looked inside the plane. It was dark save for the hundreds of Individualized screens that made a great glare before each passengers face and I concluded that the flight attendant felt that I had violated the pact Not of darkness and not even of light But of our mutual agreement as a culture as a society that we not look outside that we not Ask big questions That we not marvel at the very fact of being alive at our smallness in the scheme of things Which we blindly like me that night try to draw to the best of our ability in a simple language such as this here I speak At that instead as compensation we politely enjoy the rich bright Entertainments placed before our individual faces the diversions as they are called to which we daily You all as much as me Outsource our imaginations It seems like Self-help doesn't it what I'm saying like a treat a gift a special form of Awareness like it's almost nothing more than a fast a cleanse But what I'm talking about here is not the yoga of a movie star This is not up here a new line of products or a corporate rollout in the latest wares of mindfulness That's not what I'm talking about But at the same time it is not some Philosophic treatise requiring us to retreat to the library or the desert or to both To suffer the great torments to mind and body that only this be especially wise acquire instead I Name a quality that all of us here possess and You know what all the time It is this quality of goodness in ourselves and the world Manifest in just these fragile, but indestructible moments. We all experience Yes, we learn to doubt this goodness to repress it as of no account even to Hate and ridicule it within ourselves Plenty of times maybe most of my life. In fact, I have been my own flight attendant My own jeering boy at the Lincoln Memorial We hardly need the world's external Sensors of our goodness since we already efficiently internalized the prohibition against this nameless weightless Utterly personal feeling in which we miraculously see the world and ourselves as we are Like on a brilliant day here in Vermont when the lake is blue or silver or gray. I Sense all the boats that have ever floated on it the schooners and sailboats and Dories and side wheelers. I feel all the times that have been and And I'm down among the fishes some hundreds of feet deep There with the blips on the fishermen's sonar screen that are the schools the living creatures that for a while remain living still And I'm in some Adirondack Valley where a fox eats a mouse The fox tilting its head back the better to bring the back teeth into play And I'm at our near shore Looking at the moonlight glinting off the leaves in the trees off the faces of the lovers as they kiss I am all of these things You are too Thank you