From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto Studios with a CUBE Conversation, with a great influencer. We haven't had him on for a while. Last had him on in May, I think of 2019, mid 2019. We're excited to welcome him back to the program. He's Kevin L. Jackson. He is the CEO of GC GlobalNet. Kevin, great to see you today. Hey, how you doing, Jeff? Thanks for having me. It's been a while, but I really enjoyed theCUBE. Yeah, I really enjoyed being on theCUBE. Well, thank you for coming back. So we've got you on to talk about Citrix.  This year, obviously COVID hit, all the events have gone virtual and digital, and Citrix made an interesting move. They decided to kind of break their thing into three buckets, kind of around the main topics that people are interested in in their world. And that's Cloud, so they had a Citrix Cloud Summit, they had a Citrix Workplace Summit, and now they just had their last one of the three, which is the Citrix Security Summit. Just wrapped up. So before we jump into that, I just want to get, you take how you doing, how you getting through the kind of COVID madness from the light switch moment that we experienced in March, April to, now we're like seven, eight months into this and it's not going to end anytime soon. Well, you know, it was kind of different for me because I've been working from home and remotely since I guess 2014. Being a consultant and with all my different clients, I was doing a lot more traveling, but with respect to doing meetings and being on collaborative systems all day long, it's sort of like a old hat. And I say, welcome to my world. But I find that, you know, society is really changing.  Yeah, I used to joke, right? When we started this year that we finally got to 2020, the year that we know everything, right? With the benefit of hindsight, but it turned out to be the year that we actually find out that we don't know anything and everything that we thought we knew, in fact is not necessarily what we thought. And we got thrown into this, we got thrown into this thing. And, you know, thankfully for you and for me, we're in the tech space, we can go to digital, we're not in the hotel business or the hospitality business or, you know, so many businesses that are still suffering greatly, but we were able to make the move in IT. And Citrix is a big piece of that in terms of enabling people to support remote work. They've always been in remote work, but this really changed the game a lot. And I think as you said, before we turned on the cameras accelerated, you know, this digital transformation way faster than anybody planned on. Oh, oh yeah, absolutely. And another one of the areas that was particularly accelerated, they sort of put the rockets on is security. What I'm really happy about because of the rapid increase in the number of remote workers.  And there was a small percentage that would remote work remotely, right? But it's completely flipped now. And it flipped within a period of a week and a half. And many of these companies are really scrambling to make, you know, their entire workforce be able to communicate, collaborate, and just get access to information remotely. Right, right. Well, David talked about it in the security keynote, you know, that, you know, as you said, when this light switch moment hit in mid-March, you had to get everybody secure and take care of your people and get them set up. But, you know, he talked a little bit about, you know, maybe there were some shortcuts taken, and now that we've been into this thing in a prolonged duration, and again, it's going to be going on for a while longer, that there's really an opportunity to make sure that you put all the proper systems in place and make sure that you're protecting people, you're protecting the assets, and you're protecting, you know, the jewels of the company, which today are data, right? And data in all the systems that people are working with every single day. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. They had to rapidly rethink all of the work models and this accelerated digital transformation and the adoption of cloud. And it was just this huge demand for remote work, but it was also important to keep, to think about the user experience, the employee experience. I mean, there were learning new things, learning new technologies, trying to figure out how to do new things. And at the beginning of this transition, people were thinking that, hey, you know, after a few months, we'll be okay. But now, and it's starting to sink in that this stuff is here to stay. So you have to understand that work is not a place. And I think, actually, David said that, right? It's really, you have to look at how the worker is delivering and contributing to the mission of the organization to the business model. And you have to be able to measure the worker's level of output and their accomplishment and be able to do this remotely. The back to office is not gonna happen in reality. So the employee experience through this digital environment, this digital workspace is critical. Yeah, I think one of the quotes he had, whether I think it was either this one or one of the prior ones is like, back to work is not back to normal, right? We're not gonna go back to the way that it was before. But it's interesting, you touched on employee experience and that's a big piece of the conversation, right? How do we measure output versus, you know, just time punching the clock? How do we give people that experience that they've come to expect with the way they interact and technology in their personal lives? But there's an interesting, you know, kind of conflict and I think you've talked about it before between employee experience and security. Because those two kind of inherently are going to be always in conflict because the employee's going to want more access to more things easier to use. And yet you've got to keep security baked in throughout the stack, whether it's access to systems, whether it's the individual and so there's always this built in kind of tension between those two objectives. Well, the tension is because of history. Security has always been sort of a second thought an afterthought, you know, you said do the work. Oh, security, we'll catch up to it when we need to. But now, because of the importance of data and the inherently global connectivity that we have, the need for security has its paramount. So in order to attract that, in order to address that the existing infrastructures had this, where we just bolted security on to the existing infrastructures. This is when they win the data centers. And we said, well, as long as it's in our data center, we can control it. But then we, with this COVID thing, we'll just burst out of any data center. We have to rely on cloud. So this concept of just bolting on security just doesn't work because you no longer own or control the security. So you have to look at the entire platform and have a holistic security approach. And it has to go from being infrastructure-centric to data-centric, because that's the only way you're going to provide security to your data to those remote employees. Right, right. And there's a very significant shift we hear all the time. We've got RSA all the time to talk about security. And that's this concept of zero trust. And the idea that rather than, as you said, kind of the old school, you put a wall and a moat around the things that you're trying to protect, you kind of start from the perspective of I don't trust anybody. I don't trust where they're coming from. I don't trust their device. I don't trust that they have access to those applications. And I don't trust that they have access to that data. And then you basically enable that on kind of a need-to-know basis across all those different factors at kind of the least amount that they need to get their job done. It's a really different kind of approach to thinking about security. Right, and but it's a standardized approach. I mean, before a present time, you would customize security to the individual or to the organization or component of the organization because you knew where they were. And you would say, well, they won't accept this, so we'll do that. So everything was sort of piecemeal. Now that work is not a location, you have to be much more standardized, much more focused. And being able to track and secure that data requires things like digital rights management and secure browsers. And some of the work that Citrix has done with Google has really been amazing. They looked at it from a different point of view. They said, okay, where people are always working through the cloud in different locations from anywhere, but they all work through their browser. So we could, and I think this was something that the vice president at Google said, Sunil Padi, I believe, vice president of Google Cloud, they said, well, we can capitalize on that interface without affecting the experience. And he was talking about Chrome. So Citrix and Google have worked together to drive sort of an agentless experience to order to enhance security. So instead of making everything location-specific or organizational-specific, they set a standard and they support this intent-driven security model. Yeah, it's interesting. Sunil's a really sharp guy. We've had him on theCUBE a ton of times over the years. But there's another really interesting take on security and I want to get your feedback on it. And that's kind of this co-opetition, right? And Silicon Valley is very famous for a co-opetition. You might be competing tooth and nail with the company across the street and at the same time, you got an opportunity to partner. You might share APIs, it's a really interesting thing. And one of the items that came out of the Citrix show was this new thing called the Workspace Security Alliance. Because what's interesting in security, that even if we're competitors, if you're suddenly getting a new type of threat or you're getting a new type of attack and there's a new kind of profile, actually the industry likes to share that information to help other people in the security business is kind of us versus the bad guys, even if we're competing for purchase orders, we're competing kind of face to face. So they announced this security alliance, which is pretty interesting, to basically bring in partners to support a co-opetition around the Zero Trust framework. Yeah, absolutely. This is happening across just about every industry though. You're going away from point to point relationships to where you're operating and working within an ecosystem. And in security, just this week, it's been highlighted by the trick bot activity, this persistent malware that I guess this week is attacking healthcare facilities, the actual the US Department of Homeland Security put out an alert.  So everyone has to work together to protect everyone's data. And that improves, that is the way forward. And that's really the only way to be successful. So we have to go from this point to point mindset to understanding that we're all in the same boat together. And in this alliance, the Workspace Security Alliance is an indication that Citrix gets it, right? Everyone has workers, everyone's workers are remote, okay? And everyone has to protect their own data. So why don't we work together to do that? Yeah, that's great. That's interesting, I had not heard of that alert. But what we are hearing a lot of, in a lot of the interviews that we're doing is kind of a resurfacing of kind of old techniques that the bad guys are using to try to get remote workers because they're not necessarily surrounded with as much security or having as much baked in in their home setup as they have in the office. And apparently ransomware is really on the rise and the sophistication of the ransomware folks is very high in that they try to go after your backup and all your replication stuff before they actually hit you up for the want for the money.  Yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry. I was just saying that's indicative of the shift that most of your workers are no longer in your facilities they're now in at home where companies never really put a lot of investment into protecting that channel, that data channel they didn't think they needed to. Right, right. One of the other interesting things that came up at the Citrix event was the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to basically have a dynamic environment where you're adjusting kind of the access levels based on the behavior of the individual. So what apps are they accessing? What, are they moving stuff around or are they downloading stuff? And to actually kind of keep a monitor if you will to look for anomalies in behavior. So even if someone is trusted to do a particular type of thing if suddenly they're kind of out of band for a while then you can flag alerts to say, hey, what's going on? Is that this person did their job change? Why are they doing things that they don't normally do? Maybe there's a reason. Maybe there isn't a reason. Maybe it's not them. So I think there's so many great applications for applied machine learning and artificial intelligence and these are the types of applications where you're gonna see the huge benefits come from this type of technology. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Citrix Analytics for Security is really a security service, right? That monitors the activities of people on the internet and this machine learning gives you or gives the service this insight. No one company can monitor the entire internet and you can go anywhere on the internet. So by working together, leveraging this external service, you can actually have automated remediation of your users. You can put this specific user security risk score. So companies and organizations can be assured that they are within their risk tolerance. Right, right. And of course the other thing you've been in the business for a while that we're just kind of on the cusp of is 5G and IoT. So a lot more connected devices, a lot more data, a lot more data moving at machine speed, which is really what 5G is all about. It's not necessarily for having a better phone call. So we're just going to see kind of again this growth in terms of attack surfaces, this growth in terms of the quantity of data and a growth in terms of the rate of change that that data is coming in and the scale and the speed with the old velocity and variety and volume of the old big data means. So again. The other thing. Go ahead. The other thing is not just data. When you have 5G, the virtual machines themselves are going to be traveling over this network. So it's a whole new paradigm. Yeah, yeah. So the, once again to have kind of a platform approach to make sure you're applying intelligence to keep an eye on all these things from zero trust kind of baseline position. Right. Pretty damn important. Yeah, absolutely. With Edge computing, the internet of things, this whole infrastructure based data centric approach where you can focus on how the individual is interacting with the network is important. And another real important component of that is the software defined wide area network because people work from everywhere and you have to monitor what they're doing. Right, right. Yeah, it's really worked from anywhere not necessarily work from home anymore.  I think it's really easy to kind of get wrapped up in the technology, but I think you've said before digital transformation is a cultural issue. It's not a technology issue and getting people to change the way they work and the change the way they work with each other and to change what they're measuring. As you said, COVID kind of accelerated that whole thing but this has always been more of a cultural challenge and a technology challenge. Yeah, the technology in a relative sense of view is kind of easy, right? But it's the expectations of humans is what they're used to is what they have been told in the past is the right thing no longer is right. So you have to teach, you have to learn you have to accept change and not just change but rapid change and accelerated change and people just don't like change. They're uncomfortable in change. So another aspect of this culture is learning to be adaptable and to accept change because it's going to come whether you want it or not. Faster than you think as well for sure. Well, that's great. So Kevin, I'll give you the final word as you think about how things have changed. And again, I think the significant thing is that we went from kind of this light switch moment where it was an emergency and quick get everything squared away. But now we're in kind of this new normal. It's going to be going for a while. We'll get back to some version of a hybrid solution at some point and you and I will be seeing each other at trade shows at some point in time in the future but it's not going to go back the way that it was and people can't wait and hope that it goes back the way that it was and really need to get behind this kind of hybrid, if you will, work environment and helping people be more productive with the tools they need. It always gets back to giving the right people the right information at the right time to do what they need to do. Yes. So just kind of get your perspective as we kind of it to the end of 2020, we're going to turn the page here rapidly on 2021 and we're going to start 2021 in kind of the same place we are today. Well, to be honest, we've talked about a lot of these things but the answer to all of them is agility. Agility is the key to success. This is like not lacking into a single cloud. You're going to have multiple clouds, not lacking into a single application. You can have multiple applications, not assuming that you're always going to be working from home or working through a certain browser. You have to be agile to adapt to rapid change and the organizations that recognize that and teach their workers, teach their entire ecosystem to operate together in a rapidly changing world with agility will be successful. That's a great way to leave it. I saw Beth Comstack, the former vice chair at GE give a keynote one time and one of her great lines was, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I think you nailed it. This is about agility, it's about change. We've seen it in DevOps where you embrace change, you don't try to avoid it. You take that really at the top level and try to architect to be successful in that environment as opposed to sticking your head in the sand and praying it doesn't come. Absolutely. All right. Well, Kevin, so great to catch up. I'm sorry it's been as long as it's been but hopefully it'll be shorter before the next time we get to see each other. Yeah, it's fine. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. Absolutely. All right. He's Kevin L. Jackson. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from our political studios, CUBE Conversation. We'll see you next time.


My water looks and tastes fine, but I've read about all these things that could be in your water. Several people in my neighborhood have water filters. Should I get one too? There could be various contaminants in water that you can't see, taste or smell. Some water contaminants are not harmful to consume, but they can cause damage to your home, appliances and your fixtures. Water that is municipally supplied may meet all safety guidelines at the plant, but it could pick up contaminants as it travels through the distribution system, the ground, from there to your home.


Chinese aggression sure looks an awful lot like U.S. aggression. Punchbowl News reports that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is planning a trip to Taiwan, which would be yet another incendiary provocation against Beijing if it occurs. The previous House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sparked a significant escalation and hostilities with her visit last year, the consequences of which are still reverberating today. And Taiwan's Dave DeKamp explains, quote, Pelosi's visit to Taiwan was viewed in Beijing as a major provocation, and it sparked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around the island. The exercises included China firing missiles over Taiwan and simulating a blockade of the island, both unprecedented actions. China has kept up the military pressure on Taiwan since Pelosi's visit, and its warplanes regularly now cross the median line, an informal barrier that divides the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Before Pelosi's trip, China barely crossed the line. Now it's an almost daily occurrence. Beijing views the U.S. House Speaker visiting Taiwan as an affront to the one China policy and the understanding the U.S. and China reached in 1979 when Washington severed formal relations with Taipei, end quote. U.S.-led provocations and escalations against China are becoming a regular occurrence, both from the U.S. itself and from imperial assets like Australia and Taiwan. Yet according to the Western political media class, the urgent threat of our day is Chinese aggression. After the House of Representatives voted to approve the new Select Committee on China, a Republican initiative designed to increase internal pressure in the U.S. government to ramp up the new Cold War, the committee's chairman, Mike Gallagher, put out a statement saying that it is time to push back against the Chinese Communist Party's aggression in bipartisan fashion. Gallagher is a particularly noxious warmonger who says urgent efforts must be made to stop China from destroying the capitalist system led by the United States in order to make way for the triumph of world socialism with Chinese characteristics. He advocates the selective decoupling from specific sectors of the Chinese economy and says the U.S. is in the early stages of a new Cold War against China. He advocates pouring weapons into Taiwan in much the same way the U.S. did in the lead up to its proxy war in Ukraine and asserts that the U.S. needs to be preparing for a direct hot war with China in the near future. Gallagher's hawkishness on China is quickly becoming the mainstream consensus position in the western political media class as the U.S. centralized empire ramps up aggressions while continually complaining about Chinese aggression. The U.S. empire has been increasingly positioning its war machinery around China since the Obama administration's pivot to Asia in ways that would have led to an immediate Third World War if the roles were reversed and its aggressions have escalated with each subsequent administration. Just in the last couple of months we've had news that the U.S. is planning on returning to its Subic Bay base in the Philippines as part of its encirclement campaign against China and also intends to station missile-armed Marines along Japan's Okinawa Islands. The U.S. is also reportedly working on building a network of missile systems on a chain of islands near the Chinese mainland, explicitly for the purpose of countering China. The U.S. and its allies have dramatically increased their naval presence and disputed waters near China, viewed as acts of aggression by Beijing. None of this would be tolerated by the United States if China were openly moving its war machinery into adjacent areas with the stated goal of countering the U.S. If China were doing this it would be a near unanimous consensus throughout the western world that China was engaged in hostile provocations and was clearly the aggressor. Nobody would listen to China if it claimed it was militarily encircling the U.S. for defensive purposes. But that's exactly what happens with U.S. aggressions against China. It's just taken as matter of fact when the U.S. says it's moving more and more war machinery into the waters around China as a defensive precaution to deter Chinese aggression. Because the narrative is coming from the most effective propaganda machine ever devised, we hear, nah bro, the U.S. is militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival on the other side of the planet defensively. Because, like, what if China tries to do something aggressive? In a surprisingly decent Foreign Affairs article titled The Problem with Primacy, Van Jackson argues that the U.S. is behaving in such a transparently aggressive manner toward China that it can't possibly claim to be acting in the interests of preserving peace and stability in the region. This is not the rationale of a country that is simply balancing Chinese power or trying to stop Beijing from creating a sphere of influence, writes Jackson on the recent U.S. semiconductor export ban against China. It is not the strategy of a state trying to decouple from the Chinese economy. It is containment in all but name. The Pentagon has promised that 2023 will be the most transformative year in U.S. force posture in the region in a generation, a line likely meant to be reassuring but that comes off as ominous, Jackson writes. The Department of Defense is making good on this promise by modernizing its large traditional presence in Northeast Asia while increasing its footprint in the Pacific Islands and Australia, areas that the Chinese military cannot seriously contest. Jackson argues that Washington's efforts to halt China's rise will likely achieve nothing besides provoking China into militarizing against it, saying, There is no reason to believe that spending over a trillion dollars modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal or sending submarines to Australia will cause China to do anything but continue arming itself as quickly as possible. This aligns with the warnings of an anonymous U.S. official cited in a November article by Bloomberg who said that the hawkish tone in D.C. has contributed to a cycle where the U.S. makes the first move, interprets Chinese reactions as a provocation, and then escalates further. It's the U.S. making the first move every time. Taiwan is an odd case because empire apologists will openly tell you that Beijing must never control the island as it's a geostrategically crucial location with essential semiconductor manufacturing, and then turn around and still try to tell you that Washington's interest in Taiwan is because it wants to protect freedom and democracy. It's even more transparent than when they were pretending to yearn for the liberation of nations that just so happened to sit on a lot of oil. I don't know if Beijing will ever launch an attack on Taiwan or some other future flashpoint. But if it does, it seems a safe bet that it will be because the U.S. empire kept ramping up aggressions and provocations until it got to the point that China felt it was losing more from inaction than it would from action. And then empire apologists will spend all day shrieking at anyone who tries to talk about those provocations. Because that's the rule now if you weren't aware. As of February 22, we're all meant to pretend that the concept of provocation is not a commonplace idea that everyone understands and learns about his children, but that provocation is rather a nonsensical propaganda word that was invented by Vladimir Putin last year. It is now no longer permissible for you to talk about the aggressions that led up to a nation going to war. We must all pretend that history began the day their troops crossed the border. History is being rewritten with Ukraine, and if war erupts over Taiwan it will probably be rewritten there as well. But note to the future, the road to war was paved by mountains of U.S. aggression.


The bar is hard to do. It's not. The bar is hard to do. The bar is hard to do. Yeah, that's the same thing. Yeah, that's the same thing. Oh, my goodness. Cross. Cross. Cross. Cross. Cross. Cross. Cross. Cross. Cross. Cross. Do you want to stand in the center? I think it's almost over. That's too much to talk about. Yeah, it's kind of too much to talk about. Yeah.  Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. Let's connect musically by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you will find inside your order of service. A happy hello to everybody. Welcome to the first Sunday of June here at First Unitarian Society, where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual, and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberger, proud and very happy member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend a special welcome to any guests, visitors, or newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find this is a very interesting place, and we invite you to stick around for the fellowship hour right after the service. This will be a great time to silence those pesky electronic devices that you just will not need for the next hour, so as you're doing that, let me remind you also that if you're accompanied by a youngster, we welcome youngsters, some of us consider ourselves still to be youngsters, but if you think that your young companion would rather experience the service from a more private space, we offer a couple options for you, including our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium, and some seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you and your young companion can see and hear the service. And one of the reasons we are able to see and hear the service today is that it's brought to us by a wonderful group of volunteers, and just think, if you decide to join this team of volunteers, someday your name will be read from this podium. Starting with Mark Schultz on the sound system, thank you, Mark. Thanks to Anne Smiley for being our lay minister. Thanks to our greeters, we are greeted today by Jeanne Nussbaum and Mary Elizabeth Kunkel, our ushers, John McEvna and Smiley and Patty Becker, and handling the coffee after the service is Jeanne Hills. Just a couple of quick announcements before we begin the service, actually three announcements, and they all relate to fundraising. Cabaret was a great time. We spent the night in Ireland a few weeks ago. It's about 350 days until the next cabaret, but let me tell you about this cabaret, because we have good news for those of you who might have missed out. We have a few vacancies in some of the group events, some of the dinners and other outings and events from cabaret. And if you're interested in taking part in those, stop by the cabaret and fundraising table in the commons right after the service. The second fundraising announcement involves timing. The end of June is the end of our fiscal year. And we still have a few outstanding pledges that haven't been completely paid yet. And we need you to do that by the end of this month so that we can finish our fiscal year the way we had hoped. So if you haven't had a chance to retire your campaign pledge yet, please do so. And the third fundraising announcement involves our parish meeting held right in this room around 1230 after today's service. And anticipating that the capital campaign will be approved at this meeting, we will need help from various members of the congregation with that campaign. So please keep that in mind as you're budgeting your time and your talent and your creative energy for the next year. We could use help with that campaign. So end of the announcements, I invite you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirit and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. We're composed by the subject of today's service. You must live in the present. Launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. There is no other land, there is no other life but this or the like of this. This is no world for the penitent or the regretful. We do not live by justice, but by grace. I invite you to rise and body your in spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And if you will join me in reading the words of affirmation printed in today's program. For daylight and darkness, for sunshine and rain. For the earth and all people, we offer deep thanksgiving. For all things bright and beautiful. For all things wise and wonderful. For all creatures great and small, we offer endless praise. We kindle this light in celebration of the life we are privileged to share. And now I invite you to turn to your neighbor and exchange with them a warm greeting on this warm June morning. Please be seated. And I would invite any children who are in the congregation this morning to come forward, if you will, for the message for all ages. Don't be shy. Where there's one, there must be more. But where two or three are gathered. Ah, here we go. Good morning on this sweet June day. Anybody going to be going swimming this afternoon? Maybe, okay. All right. Well today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a very famous Unitarian named Henry David Thoreau who would be 200 years old almost if you were alive today. His parents were Unitarians and they lived in a small town about a thousand miles from here called Concord, Massachusetts. Now when he got a little older, older than you all, he didn't much care about going to church. How many of you like to go to church? Let's see if we can get all the hands up here. But one of the reasons he didn't really like going to church, even the Unitarian church is because he would rather be out swimming in the river or exploring the woods and the fields or maybe tinkering in his father's workshop kind of making things. And his father had quite a big workshop because his father manufactured something for a living. He made his living making these. Pencils. That's right, he made pencils and Henry and his brother worked with his dad to make these very simple writing tools. Any of you know how to use a pencil? OK, I thought most people just knew how to use computers these days. OK, you still know how to use a pencil. That's good. And it was said that Henry David Thoreau's father, whose name was John, made the best pencils in the United States. Well, how do we know that he made really good pencils? Because he had this very secret process for making the points of the pencils, which it's made out of graphite. He made them in a very special way so that when they were inserted into the wood and you start writing with them, the graphite wouldn't smear on the page and make everything all messy. Pencils today, you write something, you can't really kind of smear it. And that's partly because of what John Thoreau did with this new process he had. So Henry really respected what his father did, making these great pencils. And even more so when he got older because he did an awful lot of writing himself. And he used up a lot of pencils. He wrote all kinds of things in the journal that he kept, and he wrote one of the most famous books ever published by an American. And that book was entitled Walden, or Life in the Woods. Now when he was younger, he did help his father make these pencils, and when his father died later on, he took over the pencil making business. And he'd like doing that in some ways because he always had a good supply of pencils himself. But he also had kind of a funny attitude about all this writing business. And he said one time, if you learn how to write your name, how many people can write their name? Then pretty soon you're going to be writing sentences. And then after that, the next thing you know, you're going to be writing paragraphs. And then you might be writing books. And then he said, you're probably going to get into as much trouble as I've gotten into. Because he actually did get into a little trouble with some of the books that he read. But even though he appreciated how important it was to make pencils, he really loved certain kinds of other things. He really preferred being out in the natural world by himself. And he made a boat with his brother. And they rode down the Concord and Merrimack River in the boat that they had made themselves. Or he would wander in the woods around Walden Pond where, as an adult, he built this very small one room cabin. And he actually lived for two years in this very small cabin that you can see up on the screen there. And he spent those two years reading and writing in his journal and just watching how everything in the wood changes with the seasons, how the flowers change, and how the animals' behavior changes. And he wrote all this stuff down in his journals. He recorded it all. And then eventually, he put all the stuff that he had learned into this book called Walden. And today he's famous for this book, Walden. But because of that book, a lot of people think that Henry Thoreau was a kind of a hermit. You know what a hermit is? Person that lives alone and really doesn't much care to be around people. Yeah. And Henry David Thoreau, he didn't particularly like people that much. And in fact, he said as much in his journal, this is what he wrote. He said, I live best in solitude. And if I have a companion for only one day a week, I find that the value of that entire week has been seriously eroded. He says, it dissipates my days. And often it takes me another week to get over the companionship that I've had. So he's saying he would rather actually be alone in his little hut or wandering around in nature than be with people, because people kind of tire him out. Take up too much of his time. Well, he was a person. That's right. He had to get along with himself, didn't he? Yeah. But actually, he didn't dislike people as much as he said he did. Because in those two years that he lived in that little hut, he was only a 20-mile walk from the village of Concord. And he often would walk right into Concord.  And he would talk to people. And he would hear all about the news in the outside world. And he would walk over to his friend's house, a guy named Ralph Waldo Emerson. And usually he'd arrive just before dinner time. Because he knew that he would be invited in to eat with Emerson's family. So being alone, kind of a hermit, was very important to Henry Thoreau. And he said a lot of positive things about being alone, how to be happy while you're all by yourself. But he didn't write very much about other people and about how communities like this one can help to support people during their lives. He just said, I don't have much use for the company of people. He took great pride in his independence, being able to be alone. But he did have a very hard time admitting that just like all of us, he really needed to be in community. And he was, even though he wouldn't admit that much. Did you have a question? Yeah. You have a cousin named, what's his name? Oh, really? Oh, very nice. Very good. Yeah. Well, thank you for that. Yeah. He does what? Do you get along with him really well? You like each other? Very good. OK. Well, thank you all for listening to our story about Henry David Thoreau. Your folks are going to hear a little more about him later on. But in the meantime, you guys get to go to summer fun. And so we're going to sing you out with our next team, number 328. Have a good time. Please be seated. We continue with a selection from Edward Abbey's essay Down the River with Henry Thoreau, written in 1980. Edward Abbey is better known perhaps for a novel that he wrote entitled The Monkey Wrench Gang. Some of you may be familiar with that. November 4, our river is the Green River in southeast Utah. We load our boats at a place called Mineral Bottom, where prospectors once searched for gold, later for copper, still later for uranium, with very little luck in any case. With me are five friends. And I carry a worn and greasy paperback copy of a book called Walden or Life in the Woods. Not for 30 years have I looked inside this particular book. And now, for the first time since my school days, I shall. Thoreau's mind has been haunting me all the days of my life. And it seems proper now to reread him. And what better place on this golden river called the Green? November 5. Thoreau said, in wilderness is the preservation of the world. Somewhere deep in his 39 volume journal, he said, I go to my solitary woodland walks as the homesick return to their homes. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile as where I live. Thoreau once defined happiness as simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. But solitude? I never found the companion so companionable as solitude, he wrote. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. November 6. Purity, purity, he preaches. The wonder is how they or how you and I can live this slimy, beastly life eating and drinking. Like Dick Gregory, Thoreau recommended a diet of raw fruits and vegetables. Like a Pythagorean, he found even beans impure since the flatulence beans induced disturb his more ethereal meditations. He raised beans not to eat but to sell his only cash crop during his lifetime. His beans sold better than his books. When a publisher shipped back to Thoreau 706 copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau noted in his journal, I now have a library of 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself. November 7. How easy for Thoreau to preach simplicity and asceticism and voluntary poverty when, as some think, he had none but himself to take care of during his 45 years. How easy to work part-time for a living when you have neither wife nor children to support. But he was a family man, nevertheless. Thoreau lived most of his life in and upon the bosom of family, Emerson's family part of the time, Thoreau's family, mothers, sisters, uncles, aunts during the remainder. When his father died, he took over the management of his pencil-making business, a cottage industry carried on in the family home. But Thoreau had no wish whatsoever to become a businessman himself. Trade curses everything it handles, he wrote. And so he never gave to pencils more than a small part of his time. He was considered an excellent surveyor by his townsmen. And whatever he did, whatever he laid his hand to, he did well. But to no wage-earning occupation would he give his life. He had, as he put it, other business. And this other business awaited him in the woods, where, he wrote, I was better known. November 8th, what is your favorite dish? A guest asked Thoreau as they sat down to a sumptuous Emerson meal. The nearest, Thoreau responded. At Harvard, they teach all the branches of learning, Emerson remarked. But none of the roots, Thoreau replied. Refusing to pay a dollar for his Harvard diploma, Thoreau said, let every sheep keep its own skin. November 9th, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. A stereotype but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them. But is it true that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation? And if so, did Henry escape that desperation himself? Well, he allows for exceptions, indicating the mass of men, not all men. As for himself, when one of his friends, Ellery Channing, declared morosely that no man could be happy under the present circumstances in reply, Thoreau declared, without hesitation, but I am happy, he spent nearly a year in his dying. And near the end, two weeks to write anymore, he dictated the following in answer to a letter from a friend. You asked particularly after my health, he said. I suppose I have not many months to live, but of course, I know nothing about it. But I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and I regret nothing. June days are rendered so much sweeter by our society choir. Thank you so much. Shortly after he had moved to the village of Concord, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson was introduced by a mutual friend to a fellow Harvard University alumnus, guy named Henry David Thoreau. The younger man struck Emerson as an individual of unusual abilities. My friend, Emerson recorded in his journal, has as free and upright a mind as any I have ever encountered. From a temperamental standpoint, these two men could, on the other hand, have been no more different. But for whatever reason, they hit it off. At Emerson's urging, Thoreau began to keep a journal of his own, and in a quarter of a century, he filled some 40 volumes with his musings and observations. Although more than a few of his acquaintances found Henry insufferable, Emerson admired some of the very qualities that put other people off. His speech, Emerson wrote, was laconic and biting and laced with ironic humor. Emerson found that refreshing. And Thoreau was not one to waste or to mince words. When he spoke, he was often blunt and to the point. Emerson found his pithy epigrams, particularly appealing. The bluebird carries the sky on its back, Thoreau wrote. And nothing is to be so much feared as fear, an expression to which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is particularly indebted. Physically, Emerson and Thoreau were an odd couple. A quaint stump figure of a man is the way that William Dean Howells described Thoreau, while Emerson was noted for his long, lanky, six-foot frame. But both men's noses dominated their features, and each was pale-skinned and blue-eyed. Thoreau's glance could be very intimidating, Emerson noted, for his terrible eyes often blazed with an icy, grayish light. Whether it was his chilly personality, his physical characteristics, or a combination of the both, Thoreau never found an intimate life partner. Twice, as a younger man, he proposed marriage to two different women. Twice, he met with rejection. For someone with Thoreau's hypersensitive character, Edward Abbey speculates, these must have been disabling blows to what little confidence he possessed. But throughout his life, Thoreau did not lack for casual companionship. Although he once declared nature to be more interesting than people, he did enjoy a close relationship with members of his own immediate family, as well as with the Emerson household. And as a some-time house guest, Thoreau served as a handyman, a gardener, a secretary, and a childcare provider for the Emersons, winning the enduring affection of their children. On one occasion, he responded to young Lydian Emerson's concerns about her chickens. Lydian was upset that her hens had to be confined to their coop during the coldest months of the year, lest their feet freeze. Well, Henry, a master of invention, made each hen a little fitted pair of cowhide booties that could be secured around their slender ankles, and thus they could promenade freely in the frozen backyard. Given our subject's reputation as a hermit, which is owed largely to his descriptions of his life at Walden Pond, the foregoing may seem to be somewhat out of character. And it is true that in that classic piece of American literature, Thoreau does provide us with a very different self-portrait. He built that small cabin on a piece of property that Emerson owned on the banks of Walden Pond at a total cost of $28.12. A detail he faithfully recorded in his journal. And here, as Thoreau famously put it, he set out to live deliberately, fronting only the essential facts of life. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. Those were to be his watch words. And as Thoreau tells it, he went to great pains to apply that principle both to his material and his relational life. No superfluous curtains would adorn this new domicile, nor did he require a doormat, of which he wrote disparagingly. I had no room to spare within the house, nor room to shake it, time to shake it outdoors. I prefer to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil. And I think I've lost my simplicity, simplicity. And Thoreau could be just as dismissive of friendship as of his material wants. He says, I love my friends very much, but I find it of no use to go to see them. And even when I meet them unexpectedly, I part from them with sorrow.  Each social faculty in which all others delight, he mortifies. And what is his compensation? Eternal solitude and endless blundering. Well, this year does mark the 200th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau's birth, an appropriate occasion to inquire into the source of his ongoing appeal. During his lifetime, he was surrounded by the social and literary leaders of the transcendentalist movement, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Margaret Fuller. Now, although Emerson recognized his genius, Margaret Fuller, for her part, scorned Thoreau. And as editor of The Dial, a transcendentalist journal, she rejected most of the material he submitted for publication. And yet, Henry David Thoreau, he is the one among all these notables who survived, who even conquered the test of time. Edward Abbey did not bring along Emerson's essays for inspiration as he floated down the Green River. He chose Waldo, which, in the estimation of historian Perry Miller, certifies Thoreau as the supreme artist to come out of that transcendentalist ferment. As a writer, Miller says, he stands far above the pale wreath of Ralph Waldo Emerson. So how to account for the enduring source of this man's appeal? Well, here there are three facets of Henry David Thoreau's thought and his literary product that are worth mentioning. The relationship that we have as human beings to the natural world, that's one. The lifestyle that we might choose to adopt for ourselves is two. And our social and ethical responsibilities as individuals, that's three. Now, with respect to nature, Thoreau's outlook can only be described as religious. Nestling near to nature's bosom, we sense the divine presence. We are privy to transcendental truths. And here Thoreau comes closest to the Emersonian ideal of the natural spirit-infused man. The good river god has taken the form of my valiant Henry Thoreau, Emerson enthused. And Thoreau's own meditations on nature read like a 19th century biblical psalm. Of thee, O earth, are my bone and sinew made. To thee, O son, am I a brother. To this dust, my body will gladly return as to its origin. Here I have my habitat. I am of thee. Thoreau qualifies as a nature mystic. For as Paul Bowler observes, his sense of kinship was so profound that on occasion he felt totally absorbed into the natural processes surrounding him. And it is in this capacity that he has been a reliable source of inspiration for spiritually oriented naturalists ever since, like Lauren Eisley, or Annie Dillard, or Sigurd Olsen. Thoreau was impatient with the abstractions and with the armchair philosophizing of his fellow transcendentalist. He was eager to equate himself with nature firsthand. Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. The 21st century poet Gary Snyder once wrote, and Thoreau would wholeheartedly agree, nature is not a place to visit. It is home. This was not a passing fancy for Thoreau. Both before and after his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond, he continued to spend what seems like an inordinate amount of time trekking through the woods and the fields of eastern Massachusetts. And on these treks, he typically would be seen by neighbors wearing a straw hat, sturdy shoes, trousers heavy enough to wade through the thick underbrush to fend off the rough bark of a tree that he might climb to examine a hawk's nest. His outsized passion for the outdoors sometimes got under Emerson's skin, for whom it signaled a lack of ambition, a waste of great potential. Emerson said, it is an inexcusable fault that Henry would rather be the captain of a Huckleberry party than the head of the American engineers. Brushing off criticism like this, Thoreau expressed his own displeasure with the Puritan work ethic. The order of things, he said, should be reversed somewhat. The seventh shall be man's day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow. The other six, his Sabbath, to range this widespread garden, drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of nature. Thoreau's relationship with nature did have its practical side, however. Nextoling its therapeutic value, he said, if you are filled with melancholy, go to the swamp. See the brave spears of skunk cabbage buds already advancing in the new year. Do not despair of life. You have no doubt forced enough within you to overcome all of your obstacles. In much the same vein, traditional Japanese healers prescribed what they call forest bathing, shinrin yoku, to treat stress, insomnia, and anxiety. And then lastly, there is Thoreau, the scientific naturalist. He claimed to be able to tell the time of year within two days by simply observing the condition of the plants around Waldenpond. His journals, from which much of the material in Walden was drawn, contain detailed descriptions of the plants and the animals he encountered in the landscapes he traversed. His powers of observation, Perry Miller observes, seemed to indicate that he had additional senses to the five that we possessed. And Thoreau's sensitivity toward and his deep knowledge of the natural world aroused his protective instincts. And so he became a sharp critic of unrestrained free enterprise. And he anticipated, by 100 years, Aldo Leopold's land ethic, a man would be judged a loafer, he wrote, if for love of the woods he walked in them half of the day. But if that man spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods, making the earth balled before its time, then he will be esteemed as an industrious and enterprising citizen. Thank God they cannot cut down the clouds, he said. All kinds of figures are drawn on that blue ground with those fibrous paints. That's one facet of Thoreau's legacy that is so much admired even today. But a second has to do with another of his epigrams. He said, a man is rich in proportion of the number of things that he can afford to let alone. Thoreau was an outspoken advocate of voluntary simplicity. And his retreat to a sparsely furnished cabin on the banks of Walden Pond was meant to be a test of those principles, simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. And that has become a mantra for generations of his admirers ever since. And although he would not emulate them, Ralph Waldo Emerson did applaud his friend's efforts in this regard. How near to all the old monks in their aesthetic religion, he said, Henry has no talent for wealth. He knows, however, how to be poor without the least bit of squalor or inelegance. There is, however, more than a whiff of hypocrisy in the claims that Thoreau made for himself. Writing in The New Yorker recently, Catherine Schultz took issue both with Thoreau's rigid asceticism and with his failure from time to time to walk his talk. On the one hand, Thoreau described salt, salt as an unnecessary luxury. He advised eating only a single meal a day in order to spend more time doing important things. He claimed that a six by three foot wooden tool chest would make a fine home, provided it was equipped with a few air holes. Robert Louis Stevenson, after reading the book Walden, said he abstains from almost everything that his neighbors innocently and pleasurably use. But his obstemious claims aside, it was Thoreau's inconsistency that troubled Catherine Schultz the most. Because in Walden, he does gloss over the fact that he was just a 20 minute walk from the village green and conquered. And when he would walk into conquered, he'd stop by his mother's house and they would wash his clothes and he could get food from their larder and oftentimes he was invited to share Emerson's table. Schultz says that Thoreau lived a complicated life, but he pretended to live a simple one. Does it matter in the end that he failed to measure up to the ideals that he professed? Well, to the extent that he faulted others for their simple indulgences, it does matter because he's asking more of us than he's asking of himself. Nevertheless, at a time in history, when the average person in the world's 34 richest nations consumes over 220 pounds of stuff every day, most of it simply a function of our modern lifestyles, then perhaps a little more emphasis on simplicity wouldn't hurt. Finally, let's consider Thoreau's social and political positions. As a thinker who elevates individual rights and prerogatives over collective responsibilities, he is often cited approvingly by libertarians and advocates of limited government. Human institutions are a frequent target of Thoreau's disdain. Businesses are rapacious.  The voice comes up from the houses of worship, he said, but they are not so brace and cheering as that which rises from the frog ponds of the land. But Thoreau's harshest criticisms were reserved for the public sector, for, as he famously said, that government is best, which governs not at all. And so despite the able assistance that he rendered members of the Emerson family, Thoreau denied that the individual had any social obligations beyond him or herself. I come into this world, he said, not chiefly to make this a better place to live, but just to live in it, be it good or bad. And despite his professed scorn for those who labor, rather than walk leisurely in the woods, Thoreau evinced very little sympathy for what he called the non-producers. They are bloodsuckers, fastening themselves to every helpful man and woman in the world. And Rand couldn't have said it better. Thoreau was also no fan of democracy. He mistrusted the popular will, which he said can exhibit strength, but not morality. He expressed great confidence in his own conscience, which he insisted is the sole arbiter of right and wrong, true and false. He fancied himself a man in touch with the higher truths about which the mass of humanity, ruled by their passions, know next to nothing. With respect to the wisdom of his elders, he wrote dismissively, I have yet to hear the first syllable of advice from my seniors. All of that being said, and despite his inconsistencies, Thoreau often did respond to the promptings of his own conscience, that seat of all moral and ethical authority. And in meaningful ways, he protested the federal government's imperialistic policies by refusing to pay his taxes, a stand that did land him in jail until an unknown party paid his taxes for him. He was an ardent abolitionist. He defended John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, and he wrote that in a slave state, prison is the only place that a free man can abide with any honor. Reformers from Gandhi, the Berrigan brothers to Martin Luther King Jr. have all gained inspiration from Thoreau's germinal essay, resistance to civil government. It's also important to put Thoreau's denunciations of government and American society more generally to put them in their proper context. Because much of what he was writing in the 1840s and the 1850s was in reaction to the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and his successors. He said that American culture has become vulgar and mediocre. It was the decline in America's public standards that made Thoreau into this militant nonconformist that caused him to express a preference for solitude over society, for nature over humanity. And two centuries after Thoreau's birth, an admirer of President Andrew Jackson now sits in the Oval Office, which might make it a little bit easier to understand how he felt at the time. Thoreau struggled with tuberculosis in his final years. He succumbed to the disease in 1862, just shy of his 45th birthday. And whatever they made of him in life, his friends were inspired by Thoreau's dying. He refused all medications to ease his pain. I elect to die with a clear mind, he said. Nor did he lose his wry sense of humor. One world at a time, he said, brushing off questions about the afterlife. And when his Aunt Louise asked if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau smiled at her and said, I did not know we had quarreled. Sam Staples was a hunting buddy of Henry Thoreau's and he was also the county jailer who had locked him up for a night years earlier. Sam Staples was one of the last to see Thoreau alive. Later he reported to Ralph Waldo Emerson, never spent an hour with greater satisfaction. Never saw a man dying with so much peace and so much pleasure. Henry David Thoreau. Now it is time for the giving and the receiving of our offertory. And as you can see, your gifts will be shared with Vosses de la Frontera. And you can see more about the work that they're doing outside on the table directly across from the center doors. Please be generous. Thank you, Dan. We gather each week as a community of memory and of hope to this time and this place we bring our whole and occasionally our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past seeking here a place where these might be celebrated, received and shared. A couple of entries in our Cares of the Congregation book this morning. One, a family hug to the Goodmans. Sean's back there behind the controls. Sarah, Sean and Jamie are celebrating Jamie's first year here in the world. So happy birthday to Jamie. And then an individual sharing the thoughts perhaps of all of us as we think of those who were killed or injured on London Bridge and in the marketplace in London yesterday. This happens with such frequency anymore that it's tough to process it all and think about what our world is coming to. But again, our thoughts are with those who are grieving those losses this morning. In addition to those just mentioned, we would acknowledge any other unexpressed joys or sorrows that remain among us and these we hold with equal concern in our hearts. Let us sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and hope. So by virtue of our brief time together this morning, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. Now I invite you to turn to our closing hymn and that would be number 75, The Harp at Nature's Advent, sung to the tune appropriately enough, Walden. And we will just sing the first three verses and we conclude with one more brief selection from Henry David Thoreau. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend it all, what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. Please be seated for the postlude.