I guess we'll move it back and then we'll move it up when you guys go like that and then we'll move it up. Although Naomi's going to step before you climb. So she doesn't need this does she? Yeah. She does? Yeah. So what we do is move the mic back. Yeah. Keep that here. Just a little. Okay. Yeah, that's good. I'm sorry. And then after she goes, we'll just move it back. Yeah, we'll school as well. It might not be that good. I think that's our cue here. I guess we're starting. Ryan's always starting stuff. Always starting stuff. Come on, Ryan. I'm not letting you start anymore. It's good. Thank you all for coming. There are some open seats up here. If anyone is still needing a seat and a couple over here on the edge. So if you don't like your seat or if you want a seat, maybe if people join us at the end, you can wave your hand in there if you have an open seat next to you. Anyway, hi. Thank you all for coming. I'm Naomi Heindel, executive director here at North Branch Nature Center. And I'm so glad to be here with all of you this beautiful evening for an evening of reflections and celebration of nature through the spoken, written, and musical arts. Presented in partnership with the Kellogg Hubbard Libraries' home city and recorded tonight by Orca Media. So a couple quick things before we get started with the program. Thank you. First, a land acknowledgement. The first flowers are up out on our trails. The fish will be biting soon. The snows have finally maybe left for the year. And I was recently reminded that for thousands of years, this would have been a time of year when abnaki families would be packing up their winter camps up here in the uplands after a winter of hunting big game and heading in their canoes downstream to gathering spots along Lake Champlain to see how others had made out over the course of the winter to celebrate the warmer weather and longer days coming. And here we are gathered tonight on abnaki land to do the exact same thing. Second, we have a sound system now. Hooray! Wave your arms around if we need to turn it up or turn it down or whatever. Third, there will be a brief intermission tonight in part so that you can enjoy this beautiful exhibit on the walls by artist Nick Netto. These are the illustrations done to accompany former North Branch Nature Center Director of Education Amy Butler's new book, Educating Children Outdoors. So should you wish to purchase any of these pieces or prints or cards or Scudder's Poetry book or DCD's or Amy's book that we have in the back or anything else from our gift shop, I would be, or Marjorie's book. Marjorie's book is out there too, thank you. I would be happy to help you with that as would Lane Fury and Emily Seifer and Em Sloan. So we will all be milling around. As you know, this evening is a fundraiser for North Branch Nature Center's 2024 annual fund, which means that by being here tonight, you are contributing to our core work and our mission of connecting people with the natural world. So thank you so much. The presenters are offering this event as a fundraiser because they want to share their love and support of North Branch with you. We're pretty low-key in how we do that so there will be no cowbells or paddles raised or anything like that but we do welcome donations and memberships. It is our spring membership season so whether you've been involved at North Branch for nearly 30 years or this is your first time here tonight, please consider joining as a member or donating and any of us here on staff can help you with that. Before I turn the stage over one more thing. We are in the process right now of planning for NBNC's future and would love to include your voices in our strategic plan survey. So if you haven't yet, please share your thoughts through this survey. QR codes here. Wi-Fi password is North Branch. All one word, all our case. And help us shape the next five years at North Branch. Okay, thanks for letting me share all of that with you. Now I get to introduce five fabulous members of the Central Vermont community, longtime friends of NBNC and folks who deeply love our natural world and our human connections with it. So please welcome Scutter Parker, Brian Pfeiffer, Marjorie Ryerson, Ruth Einstein, and Dee Davis.  There are a couple more if anybody wanders in. As a minister, it was always impossible to get people into the front seats. So it's very rewarding to see how well you've done tonight. Come with me. Join me in the pasture where placid brown cows cut paths across the slope and trample ripe mud near the spring that sprouts in the knoll's crease. Listen to the small explosions of their tasting, long inhalations of their drinking. Sit beside me on the familiar boulder where moss grows brittle in the bright eye of the sun and miniature gray lichen columns bear red-lipped bowls across the rusty quartz. I haven't gone for years. How could I have known I was waiting for you even then? And I think that's how I feel about tonight. And I think that's probably the way Brian and Marjorie and Ruth and who's that other guy? And Dee feel. We get a chance to explore our own lives, look into the world around us and then share it with you and have the connection that comes from that intimacy of opening up the stories of our own lives and inviting you to share yours and focus on exploring yours way beyond this setting. So that's what we're doing tonight and that is a gift for all of us and thank you for being here. I want to thank Naomi and North Branch and I want to thank Kellogg Hubbard Library but Naomi's done such a good job at all of that. The art is incredible. Thank you to Orca Media for being here. And I want to thank my wife and constant partner in all of this, Susan Sussman, who is lurking somewhere. There she is, okay. And she's a constant partner except when I abandon her and she takes over on the electronics and things with buttons which she does incredibly well. She's like our manager. She's not in our roadie. So I have, I managed to come out with a book in 2020 just at the peak of COVID and so many events were there to be canceled and that was called Safe As Lightning and I forgot to bring any of them tonight but you can order them at Bear Ponds if you'd like. Safe As Lightning is the title poem for that volume. Long before guilt was invented, this stream managed rocks without it. Never a threat or weedle just shifted them with strength when it was gathered. Changes from every storm were there for my exploration. That's how its small riffles and dark pools became such freedom for me. Neither worms I pierced nor speckled fish I hooked cried out in accusation. In turn, they claimed me. Taught me to fin in plebs beneath a dark green overhang of rock. Oh, how the heart is taught to bargain. Search the hard ground of obedience and its deceptions. I would rather sink my feet in black, lonely banks where a holy beaver pond spills disconcerting welcome through the trees. There is no promise I will be safe if I relinquish. It is a place where for a few years burk trout fatten and silt accumulates until some torrent tears the sticks apart and I come exploring next June's fertile mud. Nothing I can promise spares the children. My grandson shudders at colliding arguments of thunder but will not be denied from lightning. And the other way we express our love and connection is by building things. This organization, the library, the bridge, all kinds of the things that give us a chance to be together in a part of each other. But there's one thing that didn't get built. This is called a coal plant in Iowa. A coal plant in Iowa that never got built provides me with stacks of paper for the printer and I have scribbled notes made lists for years on the back sides of evidence from earnest witnesses declaring the benefits of burning coal. The first drafts of this poem were all printed on the other side of a 2007 long-term reliability assessment. How quickly the enormity of what did not happen eludes me. It was January. The wind roared snow across the fields of Marshalltown. Most recited that the billion dollar plant would make things better, I was there to disagree. They still packaged beef in Marshalltown and now that same wind makes its own electricity. It was a ritual of formal testimony to establish need. There were rules to guide what could be said. I dressed appropriately, spoke my careful argument. There are rules for poetry as well but it's easier to break them. That other talk goes on and on. The words and rules so slow to change. At least one coal plant doesn't. A foot-high stack of paper waiting blank-side up is all that's left of it. This is a trip that Susan and I took along with others and looking around. A couple of others who were here. A branch to southwest Texas and this is a poem about Star County Park in Texas. His skin is like, we're waiting, we're looking for seats. There are three over there. Yeah. Let's do this. Yeah.  I think we're going to do it. Okay. Star County Park, Texas. His skin is like desert varnish, dark from dust and time and sun. He has laid claim to the rotting gazebo. It's a ray of faded novels, unused self-help books. It's 90 degrees and it's just getting started. So we join him in the shade. Someone still mows the field. The campsites offer cracked cement tables, tilted brick benches. He is gracious. We are awkward in what has become his personal public space. He used to work for Pepsi making labels until he couldn't take it any longer. Now he says he's on his journey. So are we. He shows his snake stick with two pencil points to hold the catch. Snake hunting has been hard the last few days. We are on the prowl for Vermillion fly catchers. Binoculars at the ready. He says they're all over the place singing in the morning. It's time for lunch. We get full bags and coolers from the van. He readies his moldy bread and milk. We offer cheese and turkey in a spinach wrap, water in a plastic bottle. Then grapes and a couple oranges. He says thank you very kindly. You belonging strangely welcoming. We find the bird. It's tiny insistent brilliance. A creature just surviving brings such pride for us. Delight fulfillment. We watch it whisk from tree to tree. Go back up and thank him. This is called the fox. It was when we lived up on Hill Street in Cliff Street. It wasn't as Hill Street, it was Cliff Street in Montpellier. She sat calmly on the neighbor's porch after two feet of snow. That was enough to bring the whole street outdoors. We'd glimpsed her in the secret of her own pursuits. A smudge of rust at the woods edge. Now she sat there so much more intimate than myth. Almost too small to be real. No evidence of cunning. As though she would gladly come inside out of February's storm. Stand back we said. Don't let the pets out. Make sure the children stay away. Police were summoned. Fish and wildlife was besieged with calls. Soft hairs bristled on our necks. Before she left she paused in front of me. Full coat soft russet. Legs delicate. Black stocking. She stood inside at distance my body had been taught to keep. Squinting at me. Neither offering nor asking. Then trotted down the path the neighbor had dug to come up and see for himself. Disappeared in the snows deep before the officials came. And then finally the poem that's going to be the title of my new volume coming out sometime probably in next year. The Poem of the World. The poem of the world reveals itself like a dose hoof tapping ice till she can drink. Startles like the rust of purple on this falls for Cynthia leaves though it may have used that small voice every year unheard. Blinks like red and blue potatoes dug this morning drying in the sun testing their startled untrained eyes. It's the unexpected tickle the fit of shared laughter in our urgency of touching that becomes another way of making love. It's an ocean beach of pebbles that suddenly starts singing each stone its own tink together a glorious indifferent song. And it's the voice of each bird I have only heard as morning chorus landing with its own song and bright perfect body in my brain. It is even now I begin to see them the subtraction of birds taking summer with them too busy to announce their leaving. The poem of the world wants me to wake in my own body. It is astonished I might let these supple bones grow brittle. It is the sudden thing I trust. My good friend and co poet fellow poet poet of Marjorie Ryerson whose book views for manhunger is here. She remembered to bring it. She didn't even have anybody to remind her which is really good. And they're going to be for sale out there. So Marjorie welcome and thanks for joining the natural selections team. You've been selected naturally. We're honored to be here with all of you and with two very dear and long time friends. Brian and I have a long history of getting to know each other at The Times Argus way back several centuries ago. It was great. 40 years ago. 40 years ago. So I'm going to read several poems from this book that was published last year and I'm putting together a second book that the designer is working on now. This first poem is called Darkness. We have a choice between types of darkness. The darkness that obscures or the darkness of inner peace. The darkness of loneliness or the dark comfort of one's lover on a winter night. The darkness that haunts long hallways or the darkness that asks us to prepare a longer table. There is the darkness of barren land. But the darkness of moist earth in spring is our sweetest reward. This poem is titled How to write a poem that is brief. Pick a topic like describing a leaf. Don't attempt to write a poem about grief. Avoid any poems describing a thief while you're at it. Skip having a motif and be sure to stay away from comic relief or poems about the great barrier of reef. Instead, write a poem about corned beef or else craft a poem about a handkerchief and don't dare show your finished piece to your favorite editor in chief. This poem came from a real experience. I didn't make up any of these details. It is not in this book. It's coming out in the next book. It's called The End of the Drought. The God's grief breaks wave after wave of thunder. Horsely slams roofs. Streets hide under masks of frothing brown satin. Water sprays from fire hoses hidden in the sky. Aiming for parched fields below. Turning the air as opaque as fog. The birch trees leaves gyrate in circles like a billion pasties glued to something without design or gender. Crisp grass, grass sits passively repelling the assault on its fragile stems. A train hauls through town, water blinding the windows. The greased tracks can't hold the embankments in place. Gravel and mud shimmy into adjacent fields. The air is full of the sound of a thousand bare feet walking through sticky mud. The sound of 20 million librarians saying shhhhhh. Bathtubs are emptied over the edges of roofs. Cracked bleach gardens deflect churning waters that Korean toured Asphalt in search of busy intersections. Quaking dogs hide under benches. This rage, this passion, this gift from anemic clouds is too late for the hay crop. Too meager for depleted reservoirs. Drivers, unable to see through weeping windshields, pull onto the shoulders of roads, climb semi-dazed from their cars. They let the rain soak their shirts, shoes, hair as they turn their faces upward squinting like small children walking out into the noonday sun from a darkened movie theater. Too soon, the pagan celebration slows and stills. The sky lightens, the firemen and librarians go home. Leaky faucets drip from the ends of every pine needle. Drops hang like eyelet lace along the edges of railings, gutters, electric lines. Open blue sky explodes onto center stage. The streets are liquid ribbons racing away as if late for work. Blending with light, this poem is called. It doesn't matter the words we use. Every poem narrates the same story. Each poem attempts to make sense of the jagged past, tries to walk the thin ice of the present. Each poem slips moist fingers into the future, snoops into rooms whose doors are locked. Elsewhere, biologists in antiseptic labs bend over microscopes hoping to discover why words cannot move us closer to our own parched cores. Does it matter that scientists have discovered the dream genes for risk and uncertainty? Does it change anything if the Big Bang never happened? All we need to know is that when our eyes meet those of the sun and don't shrink away, and I'm not talking about the eclipse. I should wear a tips glasses to read this poem. Don't shrink away, we fuse with the spirit of a poem. When what we see coalesces with light, we know ourselves at last. The solitude of November. In the meditation known as November, branches shove thin fingers into ashen air. The first snowflakes drift dizzily down in slow motion as if the clouds are just learning their numbers, counting out one plus one makes five. Naked November holds out her bare palms welcoming the imminent darkness to come. In this month, lanky rivers settle heavily onto their beds, unobserved, undisturbed, relieved to hibernate in ice until spring. Humans are hesitant visitors to this ancient month, a time in which candidates no longer fly and trees last starved leaves abandon hope. Everywhere, once vibrant plants have folded at the wastes like tired old ladies tying their shoes. It is best to be alone with November, a month whose reward is ample space for breathing, a month that follows toxic heat, brash colors, reckless harvests, and humans struggling to complete their summer chores, racing against clocks that tick too quickly. November spreads her gray silk across damp ground, a carpet for drowsy meadows, for the few who choose to see. Giraffes don't buy drano.  Eagles don't wander the aisles of Walmart hunting for bargains, their high heels squeaking on polished floors as they smoke packs of unfiltered kennels. Chipmunks never send gifts to distant cousins via 72-foot, 18-wheel FedEx trucks that grind up interstates and down dirt roads. Their engines devouring fossil fuels have six miles per gallon. They're tailpipes gifting the air with benzene, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide. Chickens don't spend money having their feathers trimmed or their nails painted. Butterflies don't order toilet paper by the carton. And when did you last see an elephant drive his shiny BMW from Dallas to Portland or a suit and a chimp with diamonds in her ears fly Delta from New York to Paris to sip Calvados and visit the Louvre? Poem came from traveling down the length of the Mississippi River taking photographs of it, and it inspired numerous poems. It's called The River's Wisdom. The water twists, torals howling forward. This river sucks enough water from springs and storms to keep plummeting its level power beyond every next curve. Whirlpools and eddies, random but constant, shiver the surfaces that spin gold at dawn, that shimmer blue at high noon, that dress entangled black silk as the new moon ascends the ridge. This river's wisdom is in charge. Even during the crest of April, as snow melt fattens its blustering core. Even in late January, when geometric-scored ice seals in the current with winter lace, this river knows what all rivers know. Its language is constant music as it breaks its glass against rocks, thuds its drum against fallen trees, shimmies its slick body under dripping bridges. This river doesn't sing for humans who've grown forward stopping and starting on emails, paychecks, reality TV. This river, its wisdom is in its lack of need. This river's wisdom isn't attaining harmony even while thundering. This river's wisdom isn't simply being in a place without time. This river's wisdom is in welcoming roots, light, eternity, no questions asked. This river's wisdom is in valuing the life within. I'm not much of a microphone person. Can you all hear me okay? No? Thanks for being here everyone, and thanks for being you. I don't have poetry for you tonight. I have two short essays to read. One is about a flower and love, oddly enough, and that'll be after the intermission. And the other is about a little butterfly in a big place, which I'll read for you now. Some of you may know that I spent 21 years in Vermont visiting bogs around the state looking for a tiny butterfly. And last May I finally found it. I've written about that experience, and my students in the Field Naturalist Program at UVN asked me to write an essay for the magazine that they produce every year, and they asked me to write about scale, about small things and big things. So even though I spent 21 years looking for this butterfly, I spent about a week writing this essay. And it's a bit of a mess still. I'm still working on it. It's called Elphin Wings in Big Places. And let's be honest about the genus Colophorus. With a few green exceptions, these aren't exactly charismatic butterflies. Commonly known as Elphins in Green Hair Streets, Colophorus butterflies perch with their wings folded closed over their bodies, in which point they become about the size of a penny in only somewhat more ornate. The Colophorus have never inspired poetry or gained much traction on social media. They've not been like a cause to lab at demonstrations or marches.  Except maybe me. Because tiny and gossamer, these butterflies can express big and enduring ideas in nature, including human nature. The first is intimacy. Once you locate a Colophorus butterfly, perched on a twig or a flower, it will usually allow you to approach and sit in its good graces. And that's really unusual among butterflies. After a while, yeah, your Colophorus will depart the scene.  Because it's really hard, perhaps even heartless, to turn your back and walk away from one of these little butterflies. After all, rarely are we so close and unobtrusive to wildlife. Especially airborne animals, sitting with a Colophorus butterfly, watching it sip nectar or lay an egg, seeing it interact in the most fundamental ways with the world, feels like some sort of guilty pleasure of which I might not be worthy. And these Colophorus butterflies, they're called brown elephants, they're actually copulating. These kinds of close encounters don't make insects any less different from us, but certainly make some less remote and more relevant to our own drama. Our own dramas in the world. So the next is diversity. Depending on whose unsettled taxonomy you prefer, at least three dozen of these butterflies, three dozen Colophorus species live on Earth, and maybe many more. We're not sure, like maybe eight or so. Mostly in northern zones, boreal and temperate zones, including about two dozen in the Americas. And here's the thing about these butterflies. Some species are what we call generalists, which means they lay their eggs on a number of different plants, and that's where the caterpillars can feed and grow. Other Colophorus are specialists. Their caterpillars live on a highly restricted diet of one and only one plant. Regardless of what they eat, or actually because of what they eat, Colophorus exemplified one of the greatest relationships in the history of life on Earth. The shared evolution of insects and plants. At its most basic, insects get food, and plants get pollinators.  Now, it turns out that moths and butterflies prefer angiosperms. And those are the leafy plants, the flowering plants that lots of us know and love. Orchids and oaks and grasses and goldenrods. Angiosperm leaves are soft and nutritious for the caterpillars. And the diversity and abundance of the flowers and their nectar is great for the adult butterflies. But here's the thing about these butterflies. Some of them, some of the Colophorus go for gymnospherms. Those are the avagras, like pines and spruces and cedars in their ilk. And that's really an unusual thing about butterflies. This affinity for conifers. It's a really odd bond. It's really rare. And I think it's actually maybe my favorite thing about Colophorus butterflies. Their attraction to conifers. Trees with needles. That one there, it's called Hessel's Hairstreak. It lays its eggs on Atlantic white cedar. It's not a plant we have in Vermont. And no other plant in the world. You might find the cedar in no Hairstreaks, but you will never find a Hessel's Hairstreak far from Atlantic white cedar. And I actually have the good fortune to encounter those two species, the butterfly and the cedar, across the full extent of their range, their shared range. And it's this coastal and inland strip that runs basically from the Gulf of Mexico up to southern Maine. So it's a sort of swath of territory. And a lot of people might see that territory if you envision it. Because this extended megalopolis knows the eastern seaboard, right? Well, where people see that, I see the only swath on this earth where a little green butterfly can meet up with its essential tree. This next one here on the bottom, this thing's called Blogg Elfin. This is the one that I found after searching for 21 years. And the scene is like this, and this is closer to home. You know, closer to home it turns out that one of the most elusive butterflies on the continent, Blogg Elfin, survives on black spruce.  In woodland bogs across northern New England and adjacent Canada. And even at the relatively few bogs where it's known to live, relatively few take it from me. Blogg Elfin is basically still unknown. It flies around for only about two weeks from late May into early June. And that's it. That is done for the year. The rest of the year, a bog Elfin exists on spruce spows as either an egg, a caterpillar, or a chrysalis, all of which are virtually impossible to find. So generation after generation, bog Elfins never willingly leave the bog. It's their community. And a bog is indeed a community. A bog is more than a remote open space with a squishy mat of sphagnum where outrageous flowers bloom like purple flames. A bog is more than the sum of its scattered trees and shrubs, its rare birds nesting and its black flies out for blood. A bog is an idea and an experience with a history and a culture and a future. A bog exists and thrives or dies because of all sorts of things. Bedrock and soil, its latitude and longitude, the weather and climate affecting it, and lots of other things, not the least of which are humans and all their manifestations. Anything from a chainsaw to a 66-year-old guy walking around on a gimpy knee and carrying an insect net. And as it turns out, a bog is a community. It turns out Vermont's got like 97 of these wild places, these wild communities, and we call them natural communities. And each one is distinct and defined and categorized and repeating across the landscape when conditions are just right for them. We put names on these communities so that we can know about where we are in the world when we visit them A natural community is a synergy that gives us reason, meaning, even story. And you know, as it turns out, a little cloth or butterfly is really no different. To my mind, a bog elfin is a bog.  As an adult on the wing, it sips only the nectar of rodora, leathery, and other bog flowers. A bog elfin is made entirely of bog. And everything that conspires to be a bog. And you know, maybe that's really all the story I need. Reclusive and rare on the wing for about a few days, a bog elfin is more than a little brown butterfly. It's a living monument to its community. From the glacier that helped make the place a bog to the orchids that will glow purple and white on its squishy mat, not long after the elfin and I have departed the scene. A butterfly the size of a penny unwittingly tells me where I am in the world. And when we sit together on the bog, you can bet that I won't turn my back and leave, not until the elfin flies away first. It's so fun doing these multi-media events. I wanted to make a comment about one thing I love about music, art, poetry, and everything in between is that it's almost like you get to travel without going anywhere. And like our first piece was Brazilian, a piece called Black Northeast, written in the 40s. I don't really know anything either. That's why I like hanging out with people like this. The only thing I really know is music, but if you ask me a question, if we're not playing music, I really don't know how to answer it. I don't have much to say. We're going from Brazil to Pakistan. We're going to go to Pakistan now. This is the Scotch fiddle tune. And I just want to let everyone know we're going to do a Scotch fiddle tune. We're bringing Scotland and Pakistan together. And then I wanted to let you all know I'm going to do just like a quick ditty before our break. I'm going to sing a song. And I'll introduce it. We've got to be in the moment too. So we're going to be in this moment. And then I'll do a little ditty before we take a break. And I'll let you know what that's all about when we get there. Are you ready? Absolutely ready. That's what I want you to do. Kingston Trio got out of the floaty Tom Dooley. They wrote a song called Scouts and Soda. Now just to share a little personal information, this is my dad's favorite. So I want to solve a wishing well. He left April 3rd. He's doing great. On the New Jersey tomorrow, we're going to celebrate his life. Remember? A lot of belly carton, a lot of jewelry, a lot of Johnny Cash and of course, he's called Mary and also the Kingston Trio. If you know the song, join in anytime. Scouts and Soda Mud in your eye Baby, do I feel high on me? Oh oh oh oh Dry martini So enjoy some refreshments in the lobby and join as a member of North Branch if you haven't yet and you can visit any of the North Branch staff and buy all their books and CDs please. We'll see you back in a few minutes. Thanks. 815 we're starting again. I know, well we'll wish you that. Yes. There you go. We're going to play a song in three. We haven't had a waltz yet. We can say we're going to France. We're going to go to France. We're going to go down the hall. Yes, we will. This is a, can you pronounce this? That's what we're going to do. Don't mess up. Beside me, multiple times a day he gazes at me with deep love. Then gently places his forehead against my mouth. In the mornings he moans with longing, gently pressing against me as I awaken. He loves to eat and is consistently grateful for food I placed before him. He readily communicates how much he missed me when I come home from a few hours away. He consistently rewards me with gentle affection and love. He quietly talks to me throughout each day, his eyes squinting with smiles. His native language is not mine, but I understand everything he says. He has four legs and a long furry tail, my ideal lover. If night's breath plays its flute to the stream, inspiring dreams in sleeping fish. Or if the stream stretches its sparkling fingers around miles of its own vial in while night leans heavily down, pulling the bed covers over. I wonder if the dying cedars lining the stream bank bend toward their gyrating reflected images, or instead if the water dances upward toward starved tree roots offering its song as nourishment as well as hope. I wonder if the percussion of time asks the vibrations of instant gratification to dance while the stream plays its piano and sheds tears. Or if the vibrations challenge the percussion and determine who is stronger, wiser, kinder, more enduring. I wonder if the fireflies see anything but themselves conquering the dark, and if they assume the powdered sugar of stars above is merely their own reflection, illuminating another night as it seeps in above distant mountain reaches. House windows have been clothed in mourners black for more than five hours while my four-poster bed has been singing a love song to me, telling me how lonely it is for the weight of my warm body pressed against its mattress. My bed has been crooning to me. Don't turn on the lights. Don't check the time. Don't think about the return email you did not write to that long ago, friend. Don't consider going back downstairs to shove yet one more log in the wood stove. Don't worry that you never got all the dishes in the sink wash. Come, please come, it moans. Slide your soft body horizontally into my arms. Let me hold you and love you.  The bed then gets down on its knees and proposes marriage. It whispers my name with a familiar timbre then spreads itself gently beneath me. The highest wall, the highest wall ever built across our path, is made from the rugged material called grief. When you get there, reach out. Intimately explore its barbed surface with your tender fingers. Accept its imprint on your body. Acknowledge that this wall will forever alter your path forward. Know that this wall will shape new directions for your life, but also know that when you arrive at the wall, you will find community there. You will never be alone at the wall. We are all there with you. This next poem is called Instructions for the Eight Billion, and it is a participatory poem, so you are welcome to follow it. Be still and breathe in. Feel the silky air. Pull it into your abdomen. Feel yourself full from your knees to your shoulders.  Allow your mind to empty. Allow your mind to still. Be no more than the air you breathe. Acknowledge your thoughts as though they are strangers passing by on the street. On each inbreath, feel the last century pour into you. It is your inheritance from flapper girls to the Korean War, from model tees to moon landings, from the parched corn fields of the 30s to AA meetings, from New Orleans jazz to Mr. Rogers to AIDS. All its moments, all its inhabitants are alive in you. They reside in your lungs, each restless commuter, each stalled snow plow driver, each tired private biology professor seeking a new cure, each elementary school nurse doing throat cultures watching the clock. Let them all float away. Cradle your left hand in your right. Touching your index fingers at the middle knuckles. Touch the tips of your thumbs together and hold them still. Continue to breathe deeply. Slowly, silently count one as you breathe in. One, breathe out. Two, breathe in. Two, breathe out. Three, three, four. Each breath is your legacy for this country and this century. Your hope for rainforests, your gift of lessons learned about wars, your anguish for the warming planet. This present moment is all that we have. Breathe it in. Fill your abdomen, your ribs with the roundness of the blue shrouded globe with 14 billion-year-old stars still traveling away from the Big Bang, still a long way from wherever they are going, stars still searching for meaning and finding it only in the journey. Now concentrate on your left hand. Let the center of your being be in your left hand.  Let that energy radiate to the ends of your toes and to each follicle where 100,000 hairs grow from your scalp. These breaths belong to you alone, powerful and whole, without compromise. This legacy is yours alone in the package of your genes, in the wholeness of this moment, in your breath, in your abdomen, in your light. This closing poem I'll dedicate to Ruth, empty. It's called Music Doctors. The world unravels, burns and shreds in ways none of us have imagined and in ways none of us knows how to repair. Yet healing tears flood our cheeks as Box BWV 974 Adagio saturates the room. Masane's meditation Adagio also raises the rivers of our soul's gardens as does Arvo Park's Spiegel in Spiegel. Music doctors are as old as the human race. These healers drench us with the only medicine that truly heals, medicine that numbs our agony so that we can go on. Well, I've been working on this essay for a year. This was scary for me. I didn't think I could pull it off, and I didn't pull it off. So I scrapped it about a week ago, everything that I'd written, and rewrote it. And here it is. I bet you I've been promising my readers. I'm writing now. I'm substacked. It's sort of my, the ground I've stepped out there. It's called Chasing Nature. You can read the there. Both of these essays are not there yet. So these are their debuts. This one I'll get there sooner or later. And it's called Blood in Love. And this is the setting for it. These are the words behind our home. As a writer and field biologist, I have an unofficial policy on love. I avoid using the word in print. Oh sure, I profess love for my family, friends, and most of all my partner Ruth and our dog Odin. But in essays about nature, I find love to be hollow and cheap. Which is somewhat a problem for a writer. Unlike other languages, English offers us few verbs for expressing a deep and abiding affection or reverence, short of the love that we reserve for the people closest to us. I might easily say or write that I love date bars or Jimi Hendrix or rainbows, but not in the same way that I love Ruth. Any of us might love our local coffee joint, or a painting in our home, but we probably get by OK where either of them gone forever. Which brings me to my relationship with blood, Ruth. It's complicated. What began as a passing fancy grew into an innocent crush, which then blossomed into a genuine fondness. After that came a fairly strong affection, which then became outright adoration. And it didn't stop there. Longing and devotion crept into the relationship, and then euphoria. So now, it's like, I don't know any other way to put it. I think I'm in love with blood, Ruth. Maybe like nothing else in nature. And I'm being serious about this. And so like a confused teenager or a besotted adult, I'm trying to make some sense of this. And when I need to make sense of things, I usually go for a walk, think, read, and write. Mostly I write. So here we are with my work in progress. And I've got bullet points. The first is intrinsic beauty. I like the looks of this plant. The simplicity of its single broadleaf and lone stalk bearing a flower with those pearly elegant petals. Usually eight petals, sometimes more, eight on the left, ten on the right, and usually alternating in length and subtly in shape like that one on the left. But not always. Blood root is unpredictable. Relationships can be like that. That we humans are drawn to flowers is incontrovertible. No news there. Why we're drawn to flowers is another matter. All sorts of research suggests that early humans associated flowers with survival. No, we didn't eat them really. But long before pharmacies and supermarkets came on the scene, flowers might have alerted our ancestors to the start of a growing season, the season of fertility, and opportunities for plant medicines and fruits. So I don't know, maybe I buy that. More than anything, I think we like flowers because they're beautiful. And that's enough for me. We give each other flowers when we're sick or when we hurt or have suffered loss. Flowers make us feel better, especially when we're with them in the wild woods. When I see it there in the woods, blood root makes me feel good. Even euphoric. Like seeing someone I love. So the next is timing. Blood root is happening now in places like this. It's among a suite of plants, some of which we call ephemeral, that go about their business of reproduction in the naked woods of early spring. Blood root announces that the forest is about to resurrect itself, to breathe again, to release its salamanders and spores, and everything else it held in trust for us through winter. Like what's not to love about that? And then there's moods. Blood roots got plenty of moods. And audacity is one thing. This flower dares to show itself when a late snowfall might put an end to its vernal ambitions. But not too much audacity, really. Blood root's not reckless after all. And for good reason, blood root can be wary, cute, kind of dorky, artsy, mysterious, and simply magnificent. And okay, yeah, I'm anthropomorphizing here, which is not only bad science, but in the Anthropocene, it's probably an insult to blood root. But then again, we're human. Insults happen, even in loving relationships. But finally, I think I love blood root for its impermanence. And I have the same. I guess it's more like a mantra. Just get me to the blood root. I say it to myself when I'm scared, whenever the future seems uncertain. After my own brush with death six years ago, during the pandemic, when I've worried about Ruth's well-being, even as I try to make some sense of the world, its wars and hatred and crimes of injustice, a flower in the woods behind my home offers me respite. Even equanimity. Just get to the blood root. And guess what? We've made it. The first blood root popped up for us behind our house on Monday, this past Monday. And I visited with it every day this week. But here's the catch about blood root. In some ways, this relationship is kind of a spring of flame. Any one blood root plant will bloom for only a week or so. Then it's done. If rain or snow or time knock those petals to earth, there's no flower in waiting to take their place. By May around here, the blood root show is mostly over. So even as my rendezvous or trist with blood root has just begun, I also know that every day is slipping away. Blood root reminds me that nothing lasts forever and that I can be present here now. So is that love? Can I use that word? I don't know. No, a plant won't fix the world, put an end to my doubt and dread or even completely. And no, I don't believe we'll find our salvation solely in knowledge or intelligence or even what passes as our politics. Equanimity comes mostly from within and from what's genuine in the world. People, art, poetry, nature. And in case you had noticed, it's spring. So if this plant isn't your thing, the spotted salamanders are getting it on. American wood cocks are probably painting with the peepers right outside this door right now. And the Azure butterflies have just taken flight. Like all good stuff. But for me, here, now, or at any time of year, whether I see it or not, blood root is a force of nature. Kind of like gravity or faith or reverence. Kind of like love. I love it. I don't know if we could go down. So I realized when I put this second group of poems together that they're all sort of about God, whoever they are. I was a minister for a while and my parishioners always suspected I was a Unitarian. They were pretty much right. So this is the first church that I served in in McIndoo Falls, Vermont, which is a little village in the town of Barnett. Not Barnett. It's called Come Near. When Buddhists bought a farm in Barnett, the women in Bev's hair salon had stern words to say about failed Christian mission dollars sent away. They had been invited up for tea. Everyone went. And can you imagine leaving bare ledge in the living room? But when Bev's son brought home the woman he'd married while stationed in Thailand, Bev made space bloom at their family table. Special plates, rare preserves, the younger children clamoring to ask and tell father grinning at his son as if the prodigal had come. The new wife sat there giggling. Youngest child wriggling on her knee as though they all, including God, had been set free. And this is about someone who visited our home because it had been his home before. Recognition. He stands by the rock wall and roses, stares out across the valley at Northfield Hills. Sometimes it seems he just comes to cry. Our driveway, house, lawn where he waits, are on land clawed and leveled from rough pasture that sloped uphill from what was his home. Our garden, snug inside its fence, was his backyard. There are visits from others who once lived here, tugged like ghosts. Some stay and wait for recognition. So I go out and stand with him. I know the house is gone, but I don't have any other place. A hummingbird, frums past, lands for sugar water on the red plastic feeder. What was that, he calls out, astonished. You must have seen them when you lived here. Oh no, they hadn't come up with them yet. We watch it drink and dart away. I do know what he means. Each year it feels my eyes create the chestnut-sided warbler, singing all over this garden when I first put its tiny body and its voice together. And every June the grief of apple blossoms stuns me with departure. I say, wait. I go inside, find the chipped white aggies, streaked with blue. The garden soil keeps offering. Return them to their owner. And my father was a preacher. He became a preacher late in life, and he dove right into it, heavy. It was a little hard for the rest of the family. And yet, this is the story I remember and grieve about. Summer of 1966. As for the land you left, it was like an affectionate divorce done quarreling with seasons on the farm. We came back, planted trees each spring faster and more orderly than they could plant themselves. The summer before you died, suddenly you only wanted to walk the boundaries of the farm. Even jobs we'd planned together, cutting poplar or planting fur, easily postponed. We looked for old ax marks, faded splotches of paint, skeletons of fence posts, barbed wire pressed to earth by 30 years of leaves. Tracking through a cedar woods you pushed past brittle branches up a slender stream that disappeared beneath a web of roots. Suddenly, a small pool at the base of giant cedars lined with black forest silt, water almost invisible, except at the center where a spring surrounded by a cone of sand surged from a channel in the rock, a few grains dancing. Kneeling on the mat of cedar needles you reached to the other bank, bridged the pool with your body, bent your head to drink where the water stirred. I knelt on that bank as you had. Knees found creases yours had worn there over time. Years later I learned you'd brought each of your children here the place you loved an almost perfect secrecy. And then just getting a little more direct I find, you know, we all can say that we find the deepest part of ourselves in nature, but the other way to find the deepest part of yourself is to find the thing you really don't want to look at. The thing you don't want to talk about, the thing that sits there like a boulder in the kitchen sound. And so this poem is called When We Talk With God as I said, whoever they are. Part of us knows when we talk to God we're talking with ourselves. This doesn't mean at all that the conversation is superfluous on the contrary. It may have been put off for years. Think how long we go with child or lover mentioning no more than pet care pick up schedule, groceries. And this is God we're talking with. Or as I began by saying me, I, even us perhaps. There's such insistence that God needs respect, confession, a bit of groveling. But don't these seem distracting and unnecessary if God lives with our wounds, dreads, cruelties, secret delights, irritating habits, every day, right here beside us? Maybe it's the self-importance of eternity that provokes this gap between us. As if cathedrals were the kind of thing we should spend time on trust and good food, opportunity, honesty for the kids, or everyone for that matter.  Not that it isn't, but I'd like the chance to not screw up the present sometimes it slows to a crawl and opens like a rose. So what if we even risk the friendship we think we already have? Honesty is choosing more, my love.  And then this is Moose Bob. Dee, where are you? And this is this one of the box? This is about Moose Bob. Okay. And this is a trip that we took going up to Moose Bob with Chip Darmstadt who was hoping to see a spruce grass and didn't, again. Moose Bob. The blue-headed virial pokes its thread of song in and out among balsam buds erupting like green caterpillars and the first red maple leaves. Each hop, unpredictable and yet decisive, its body knows just how to stitch shafts of sun to recovering winter branches. We hope a spruce grass will land on that rotting log parade for us in the innocent glory that makes it easy prey for hunters. It never learns. It doesn't come to our benign impatience but a black-backed woodpecker hammers prize its way along a tilting spruce. We stopped in Island Pond for coffee and talked with the tired waitress. Walked down gravel, flecked with colored plastic graded to left to use this spruce and fur. Some think backwater. Some think salvation. In the bog, pitcher plants sprout blood-red blossoms. Sun dew closes on its insects. Lip fingers clasped as though in prayer. In a beaver pond, dead trees stand sentinel. A pair of woodpeckers take turns disappearing in the farthest stem. No creature here is prospering or seeking righteousness. Just doing what they can. The way they learned since the last glacier. White admirals are feeding in the puddles on the road. Some broken. One wing to the ground as pickups pass. Ragees hoarding, raucous. Moose chomp lily pads. Links are coming back for hairs. We come hungry from our ordinary lives.


I have a walk-in tub observation that only you will understand the problem with the walk-in tub is You got to walk in Butt naked and just sit there and wait. You just got to sit there Raises up and start sliding underneath your legs.  It's all a humiliation You gotta be there No It's over also drainage. You got to wait for that drink to go down. You're just oh my god It's that's a tough sell But they make it look appear humiliated on the way in and the way out. How good is this bath?  I don't know exactly how I don't think there is


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com. Happy Tuesday coming at you with 2019-2020 Panini Chronicles basketball fat pack break number 816. Big thanks everybody right here for getting in on the action. As always, we're gonna do the break itself first and then we'll re-randomize your name, see who wins those, what are we giving away here? Wins those mixer spots, that's a pretty underrated mixer folks, check that out on jaspyscasebreaks.com. So for the break, two out of two, but hard for different dice roll for the giveaways. So one, two, three, four. And got Ryan down to Kenny. Four times for the teams. One, two, three, and fourth and final time. Brooklyn Nets down to the Los Angeles Lakers. Down to my Lakers. Basketball starting up again tomorrow, can't wait. All right, so here's the first half of the list right here. Michael with the gris. Got Brian Frank with the pelicans. Who knows, could be some surprises in this, this little filler pack here. Let's, no trade window for these little side breaks. So let's box these up, print and rip. Although I did pull that. All right, here's the final print out right here. Hot off the presses. Let's adjust that top camera right there, all right. This is a nice second year Luca Donchich. PJ Washington, nice John Morant. Tremont Waters. All right, we got a recon John Morant going to Michael and Memphis. And the playbook Luca Donchich. Going to Dallas, that'll be for Jonathan. All right, so not too bad for a little pack here. Now let's flip back to the list. Let's gather your names again. Robert down to Kobe Chan and everyone in between. Let's roll it again, randomize that list eight times. So it'll be the top three after eight. Good luck. One, two, three, four, five, five, six, seven, and eighth and final time. After eight, so now from four, sorry Martin, from four on down just missed it. Thank you, I appreciate you giving this a shot. Congrats to the top three. That'll be, oh, Martin, you got a spot anyway. Robert and Kobe Chan, last time, oh Joe, nice. Kobe, there you go folks. I'm Joe, I'll see you next time for the next one. Bye bye.


فشرف بل اشتغالي بالعلم ولا تبغي به ما عشت يا دا دا دا لا وياله من شراف عظيمي الحمد لله رب العالمين له الحمد الحسن والثناء الجميل وشد أن لا إله إلا الله وحده لا شريك له يقول الحق وهو يهد السبيل وشد أن سيدنا ونبينا محمد والله عليه وعلى آله وأصحابه والتابعين لهم بإحسان إلى يوم الدين أما بعد إن شاء الله تعالى today this is going to be an introduction this lecture by God and also tomorrow's lecture are both going to be an introduction to an upcoming series of contemporary issues that are out there and this introduction is root causes for deviation what are the root causes that bring about deviation إن شاء الله تعالى this is going to be as I said an introduction to upcoming series so I will be speaking about atheism and I will be speaking about feminism I will also be speaking about the preservation of the Quran and I will also be speaking about those who say we only take the Quran and we reject the Sunnah of the Messenger and many more all of that is going to be upcoming series after I finish this introduction which is called root causes of deviation my beloved brothers and sisters الله سبحانه وتعالى He has created the creation upon a natural disposition فطرة as he said in the Quran فطرة الله التي فطرة الناس عليها the natural disposition in which الله تعالى تعالى placed in the people and from the things that Allah تعالى تعالى he placed in the people the natural disposition which he placed in them is محبة الحق loving the truth وإرادتي and wanting it so from the فطرة and I'm going to be using this term very often the word فطرة فطرة means natural disposition the basic instinct from the فطرة of the people is محبة الحق loving the truth and wanting it ولي ذلك الشيخ الإسلامي بنوتي مي سرن is مجموعة الفتاة the 10th volume page 88 والقلب خولقة يحب الحق ويريده ويطلبه إبنوتي مي سرن the heart was created wanting the truth loving the truth and seeking the truth and he also said فإن الحق محبوب في الفطرة وهو أحب إليها وأجل فيها وألد عندها من الباطل الذي لا حقيقة له فإن الفطرة حبه ذلك he says الحق is loved to the فطرة the natural disposition وهو أحب إليها and it is more beloved to it وأجل فيها and it is more honorable to it and more sweet to it than the battle that has no reality to it so the فطرة loves the truth and it respects the truth more and it finds sweetness in the truth than the falsehood that has no reality to it فإن الفطرة for verily the فطرة لا تحب ذلك it doesn't like falsehood he said this in his مجموع الفتاة the 16th volume page 338 so as we see the نفوس the people's soul is مفطورة على معرفة الحق الله تبارك وتعالى created it recognizing and knowing the truth that's what Allah said in the Quran when he was talking about نبي الله موسى Allah said ربنا الذي أعطى كل شيء خلقه ثم هدى our lord is the one who gave everything to us to his creation and then he is the one who guided through مهدى he guided his creation سبحانه وتعالى and also the messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم he said in the hadith الإمام المسلم narrated in the صحيح والإثم ما حاك في صدرك وكريت أن يطلع عليه الناس that evil is what regurgitates in your heart and you dislike for the people to see you do it so what does this hadith show us it shows us that every single body and every one of us has been given an innate ability to understand that which is evil and feel uncomfortable and not want to be seen doing it today سبحان الله a lie detector is used and the person is asked questions and is interrogated and the lie detector will tell whether the person is lying or not how are they able to find out when he is lying from when he is telling the truth what they are getting to is the fitr of the person the human has been created not to be inclined to evil but to be inclined to good وذلك الشيخ الإسلام ببنوتيميا also said في النفسي ما يوجب ترجيح الحق على الباطل before we were talking about the nafs has been made to among the fitr is something that loves the truth inclined to the truth it's not only that إبنوتيميا goes a step further and he says that the person's fitr what's inside your fitr is to want to know the truth from the falsehood he says in the person's fitr there is something that makes him want to distinguish the truth from the falsehood whether it is في الإعتقادات والإرادات whether it is belief related matters or whether it's act related matters or intention related matters وذا كافن and that is enough he says في الكونها ولدت على الفطر and that is enough to show that the person is innately built with this in his natural disposition and that is what Allah also said رح عز و جل Allah says in the Quran أف من كان على بيينة من ربه ويتلوه شاهد منه عبد الرحمن ناصر سعديو in his تفسير he said something very powerful regarding this verse which is أف من كان على بيينة the one who is upon بيينة عبد الرحمن ناصر سعديو he said بيينة means الوحي الذي أنزله الله the بيينة in this verse means the revelation that was sent down from Allah من ربه ويتلوه and he recites it شاهد منه when there is a testimony and a witness from it the witness here he says الفطرة المستقيمة والعقل الصريح he says عبد الرحمن ناصر سعديو so the بيينة is الوحي الذي أنزله الله the revelation in which Allah has sent down سبحانه وتعالى and the witness for it is الفطرة المستقيمة the steadfast and upright natural disposition والعقل الصريح and the rational mind and the intellect that hasn't been tainted in any way for more shape so my beloved brothers and sisters if the fitra remains in its natural form it does not get tainted then it will not request except for the truth فإنه لا تطلوب إلا الحق it will only ask and it will only seek the truth now pay attention to this brothers والحق واضح بيينه لا وموظفي the fitrah is inclined to the truth it wants the truth it gives precedence to the truth it distinguishes the truth from the falsehood that we need to understand pay attention this is very important that you understand this point and then comes the truth itself so you're already inclined to the truth how is the truth the truth is clear it's something that has no taint over it there is no veil over it that it's hidden so the fitrah that is inclined to the truth the fitrah that is inclined to the truth that wants the truth that loves the truth that seeks the truth it won't find it hard to find the truth itself because the truth has a clarity on it it is when he did that that's what mu'ad pointed out when he said فإنه على الحق نورة on the haq there is light on the haq there is light you will be able to find it and this answers the question of so many people does it not who say everybody is claiming to be upon the truth who is right what you need to understand is that اولا your fitrah you as an individual Allah placed in you innately to be inclined to the truth to want the truth to hate the wrong and the evil and the harm and Allah سبحانه وتعالى out of mercy and his generosity and his kindness he made the truth clear for you so that's where the ayah comes in فمن كان على بينات من ربه the wahi is here it's clear ويتلوه من ربه ويتلوه شاهد منه and then the witness for it is the fitrah المستقيمة the person is aakal and the fitrah and they are easily going to find harmony and they are easily going to coexist both of them and this is manifested in the act of one noble companion عبد الله بل سلام رضي الله تعالى عنه he was a jewish man and when he saw the messenger when the prophet migrated to Medina عبد الله بل سلام he resided in Medina عبد الله بل سلام he lived in Medina so he saw the messenger and he looked at his face and he is now going to tell us what happened this is narrated by Imam Ahmad and his Muslim community in his Sunan he says when the prophet came to Medina the people they ran to the messenger عبد الله he said I was from those who ran to him I was from those who went to him فلما تبينت وجهه he said when I looked at his face I observed him to see his face he said when I looked at his face and I clarified his face عرف أن وجهه لي سبي وجهي كذب I came to realize that his face was not the face of Allahia so look what's happening here the fitrah is now seeing the truth right in front of it فكان أول شيء يقوله كتب من الثاني ناني كان يا إيوة الناس أفشو السلام يا الناس تعبوا أتعيني أزضعوا كنت تسويل أنت ستأخذ جنة في حياته. That's the first thing which he had. So look at look at عبد الله بن السلام his action. The fitlah that wanted the truth that is inclined to the truth saw the truth right in front of it. And the message عليه الصلاة والسلام was what? The revelation was coming down on him. His statements that were coming out of his mouth. عليه الصلاة والسلام was what? وحيون a revelation from who? الله سبحانه وتعالى. أبو محمد بن حزم الظاهر رحمه الله يزال بوك called مداوات النفوس. It's a book that talks about manism and his etiquette. The restitution of knowledge that a muslim needs to come with. And look what he says in that. He says افضلوا نعم الله على العبد. From the greatest blessings of Allah upon a slave is أن يطبيعه على العدلي وحبيه وعلى الحق وإيثاره. إذن الله تبارك وتعالى he builds in you innately justice and to love it. وعلى الحق and the truth and giving it presidents وإيثاره over everything else. A statement more detailed. A statement more detailed than the statement of أبو محمد بن حزم. And more in depth was said by none other than the noble إمام ابن القيم الجوزية رحمه الله. ابن القيم said فإن كمال الإنساني the completeness of a person مداله على اين يشيل العالم. The first one is معرفة الحق من الباطل. Recognizing the truth from the falsehood وإيثاره وعليه and giving presidents to the truth over the falsehood. Those are the two. The first one is what معرفة الحق recognizing the truth from the falsehood. The second one is وإيثاره وعليه and giving presidents over فيه يخطيه رشة the truth over the falsehood so once you recognize one from the other it doesn't just become mere knowledge and mere understanding comprehension rather it turns into a manifestation of actually striving to the truth over the falsehood then he goes on to say pay attention so those are the two foundations right which the completeness of a person is connected to look what he says after that المنازل الخلق ، الناس المنزل لا يدفع ، الكثير من الناس are not of different levels and different positions عند الله in the eyes of Allah. تعالى في الدنيا in this world والآخرة and the day of judgment إلا بقدر تفاوت منازل في هادين الأمرين. Except their differences in the two aforementioned points. The only reason why you would find a person entering Jannah في الدوس الأعلى. Are you there brothers? And another person may be entering a lower level or another one entering a lower level in Jannah. It's because these two foundations were not present fully and completely in this person. Pay attention to this. He goes on to say وهو ملداني and they are the two things أثن الله سبحانه وعلا أنبيائه بهما في قولي تعالى. And they are the two things which Allah سبحانه وعالى has praised his prophets for having these two fundamental points. These two foundations is what Allah praised his prophets for. الله سبحانه وعالى واذكر عبادنا إبراهيم وإسحاق ويعقوب أولي الأيدي والأبصار. Allah says to the messenger واذكر mention عبادنا our slaves who إبراهيم وإسحاق ويعقوب These three noble prophets إبراهيم وإسحاق ويعقوب واذكر يعقوب. الله سبحانه وعالى يقول أولي الأيدي والأبصار. ابن القيم its what الأيدي means what القوي في تنفيذ الحق Its the one who is strong in executing the truth. So again you see. He manifests on his limbs. He's able to execute the truth. والأبصار means what He goes والأبصار أل بصائف دين inside of the religion again distinguishing the truth from the false what do you mean for وصفهم الله describe these three noble prophets بكامالي ادراك الحق with having complete perception of the truth where Kamali can feed him and the complete ability of executing the truth so that my beloved brothers and sisters gives us a true understanding that the truth is not something that is far-fetched it's something Allah placed in you سبحانه وتعالى it's something that is in your heart and it is also something Allah has clarified for you when it comes to the details matters pertaining to it now that we've understood that there are factors there are root causes that makes that person lose the ability to approach the truth and make them become deviated there are factors there are root causes that would make an individual sway away from the truth and fall into deviation and misconceptions and misguidance and all of these root causes revolve around three ثم are the main headings the first one is the person has an evil motive an evil intention a corrupt motive the second one is the ignorance the second one is the ignorance and the third one is our oppression and transgression those three are they are the summary and the main points and headings in which all of the points I'm going to mention go back to but when we go into details we can expand on more so there's so much I'm going to come under سؤال قصدي there's so much that comes under الجهل and there's so much that fall under ظلم it comes in different forms but these are the خلاصة الخلاصة of what of why a person would be swayed away from the truth and why a person with what fall into misguidance so the first root cause for deviation is الجهل and ignorance the first one is الجهل and ignorance as I said before brothers and sisters الحق واضح وبينون the hack is true and it's clear and it's easy الله stays in the Quran ولقد يسرن القرآن الله says we have made the Quran easy and what Allah made easy my beloved brothers and sisters is its wording rereading the Quran and pronouncing the Quran and articulating the Quran is something Allah has made easy سبحانه وتعالى also الله تبارك وتعالى made easy فهم معنى to understand the meaning of the Quran understanding the Quran is something Allah has made it easy for the people so this shows us that the truth is easy and it's simple also الله سبحانه وتعالى sorry also the messenger also the messenger عليه الصلاة والسلام told us that الحلال وبينون that the حلال is clear والحرام وبينون and the حرام is what it is clear و بينهما and between them is أمور المشتبهات what is which us ambiguous unclear and the consensus of the علماء is this foundation that I mentioned which is that the حق is clear are you there that is clear is something that is إجماع by consensus I didn't want to transmit إجماع because so many people say well the حق is not clear like that nothing is black and white but this is this matter is consensus that the حق is clear so now that we've understood that my beloved brothers and sisters the ones who propagate the falsehood and who push the falsehood and who spread falsehood is who based on our first root cause is that is somebody who has no knowledge and no understanding and comprehension who doesn't have who's not given any consideration a person and an individual who hasn't given any form of consideration to the textual evidences the كتاب, the sunnah and the statement of the صحابة and the تابعين he's not given any consideration to that those are the type of people you tend to find who spread who propagate who push falsehood if you observe those people and you look at them you come to know is people who don't have علم of the Qur'an and the sunnah and the statements of the صحابة and the تابعين and that's why Ibn Al-Qayyim transmitted in his Kitab the first volume of page 44 the statement of Imam Ahmed he says إنما جاء خلاف من خالف لقلة معرفة بما جاء عن النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم he says that Imam Ahmed sayness Imam أهل سنة والجماعة Imam Ahmed said لقلة معرفة of those who have disputed an argument have occurred because of what because they had little understanding of what بما جاء عن النبي they had little knowledge and understanding of that which the messenger came with يا إخوة the people of ignorance and misguidance are what they are look at them and that's why he said the salaf used to say أهل البداع the innovators are the enemies of the textual evidences that's what they hate the most شيخ الإسلام إبنو تيمي also said فالحق يعرفه كل أحد إبنو تيمي says the truth everybody knows it and everyone can recognize it فإن الحق الذي باعت الله به الرسول because the truth which Allah has sent the messengers with لا يشتبه بغيره على العرفة it does not mix up for the person who knows the حق let me take back his statement let me explain his statement again فالحق يعرفه كل أحد the truth everybody knows it فإن الحق الذي باعت الله because the truth in which Allah sent the messengers with the one who knows it doesn't mix up with him for anything else كما لا يشتبه with just like the gold that has it's not pure gold if you bring it to a man who sells gold who knows gold you can't fool him he will know that this is a this is fake gold the one who knows who has knowledge when you come up with things you can't mix it up for him إبن تيمي says this in his what مجموعة الفتاة the 27th volume page 315 to 316 so why is it that the battle can be mixed up for somebody how can battle be mixed up with the truth for somebody you with me brothers how it can when you don't have knowledge when you don't have knowledge of the religion and you don't have understanding what happens my beloved brothers and sisters you are your enemy and the individual is able to confuse you because you have no understanding إبن القيم says in his book this 18th volume page 18 page 18 إبن القيم says إبن القيم says the things are the reasons that prevent a person from accepting the truth are vast and large in amount so there are many things that make a person not want to accept the truth you with me from them is what الجهل ignorance به ignorance of it ignorance of it ignorance of it is what is a reason of refusing to accept the truth when it's presented to you pay attention it goes on saying and it goes on to saying and this reason is what the majority of the people are in then it goes on to saying because anybody who has hate towards something he shows it enmity وعادة أهله and he also shows enmity to the people who are in it or the people who are carrying that knowledge it doesn't like them are you with me and it brings me back to the statement of عليبنا بطالب he says عليبنا بطالب and said جاهلونة لأهر العلم أعداؤ عليبنا بطالب said the owner of a person is connected to that which they can perfect والجاهلونة لأهر العلم أعداؤ and the people of ignorance are enemies of the people of knowledge they hate the people of knowledge the most you know why because that's where they are unable to spread them his guidance they are going to be broken with evidence right بالتأكيد ، هذا is why the Rafi that they hate Abu Huraira because Abu Huraira brought generations that broke their backs and that is the reality of every misguided person ابل تيب رحمة الله he has an explanation on the hadith لا يزني زاني حين يزني وهو مؤمن when he was explaining it page 35 in his explanation they published it alone by itself page 35 of this hadith he says the following it's also present in his مجموعة الفتاة he says except deficiency in following the sunnah in knowledge and implementation you will not find a person who had fallen into innovation except the reason why he fell into innovation is because of deficiency in his knowledge and also in his implementation وإلا except فمن كان بها علمان because if he was a person who has knowledge of it ولها متابعا and one who was following the sunnah لم يكن عنده دعين إلى البدعة فإن البدعة يقع فيها الجهال بالسنة then there would be nothing calling him to innovation for verily innovation the only ones who fall into it are who الجهال بالسنة are people who are ignorant of the sunnah so the jahal brothers and sisters who are listening it is a root cause of why a person will deviate from the truth why a person will fall into misguided now my beloved brothers and sisters a point I have to mention which is what many people will say and they use the excuse of ignorance for an individual they will say يا أخي you can't blame him he's ignorant he doesn't know he doesn't understand he's just a مقلد he's a blind follower so he's ignorant is this ignorant an excuse let's look at what the علمان said regarding this particular matter شيخ الإسلام ابنوتيم عاليه رحمة الله he says ويلحق with ذمه من تبين له الحق فتركه ابنوتيم says بلتومة سكولدن ربوكن is attached to من تبين له الحق the person who the truth becomes clear to him فتركه and leaves it is that it or من قصر في طلبه or the person who becomes short in looking for what the truth حتى لم يتبين له until it never became clear to him in other words he came short he didn't go out of his way to find out basically what he did was he came with تفريض في رفع الجهلي عن نفسه he came short in uplifting ignorance from himself basically ابنوتيم says he's saying that the rebuke and his scolding falls on to it also who the one who came short in looking for the truth until it never became clear to him أو أعرض عن طلبه معرفة أو he turned away from looking for it why because of a desire or because of laziness أو نحو ذلك or anything like that is he excused is he said that he's لا يا أخي تبين لك الحق the truth has become clear to you فتركته فترك the truth that was brought to you تبين لك الحق


Good to be here on this stage. This is my fourth float conference, which I am super thrilled about. And I've got a really, I have a topic that's really close to my heart. I mean, it's all about the immune system, obviously, which is like what I do. But like, this is something that is really important to me. I'm calling it, this is not a very descriptive title, but flotation rest and the immune system a second look. Because we're going to be looking back at the data that I presented in 2018, but that I re-analyzed to look at it in a more rigorous way, to really kind of tease some new findings out. But to get started, I want to take a bit of a different approach than I've taken in the past. What does atherosclerosis, diabetes, and depression have in common? Well, for one, they've all been steadily increasing over the past 50 years. And for another, they're all involved with this regulation of the immune system. Now, to just quickly recap what I talked about in 2018, and don't worry if you haven't seen that talk, I'm going to go deeper into a little later. But just to give you the idea of why mental health like depression might be related with the immune system. In 2018, I talked about how we evolved to have a very specific response to stress. And along with that response to stress came an activation of the immune system. And along with that activation of the immune system came the activation of a series of behaviors that were fine tuned to keep us safe. And those behaviors look really similar to depression and anxiety. Now in modern times, we don't have the same types of threats around us. But when we read the news or see something really stressful, it's kind of affecting us like a life or death situation, as if it were a saber-toothed tiger. And so in modern times, a lot of times, our response to stress is to have mental health challenges. Now, I just want you to hold that in mind as that brief recap. We're going to dive back into this from a deeper perspective a little later on. But I want to talk about why all of this has been increasing. Why are these immune conditions, from autoimmune disorders to allergies, to cardiovascular problems, to mental health challenges? Why are they just skyrocketing in the past 50 years? It doesn't make sense. And then what can floating do to help? Well, in order to answer this question, we're going to have to go, again, back in time. So in 2018, I took you back in time to see my little friend Clara as a cave woman. But we're going to have to go even further than that. We're going to have to go farther back than dinosaur Clara. We're going to have to go all the way back to the onset of life itself with microbe Clara. Now, to get an understanding of all of this, I want to talk about the history of the planet Earth and specifically the history of life on planet Earth. So the Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years. And that's really hard to visualize. So if we think about it in terms of a calendar month with 30 days, every day would be about 150 million years. So the first seven or so days on that calendar were abiotic. There was no life, it was just rocks and liquids and lots of other stuff. But something special happened on that eighth day. And we still don't quite understand it. But it was the onset of simple life or prokaryotic life. Prokaryotic life is life that doesn't have a nucleus, doesn't have any organelles inside of it. It's just very simple and it's very similar to bacteria.  Though whatever happened on day eight was probably a lot simpler than that. Now for millions of years, we just had these bacteria on the planet. But then on day 13, one of these prokaryotes ate another prokaryote. And instead of digesting it, they started working together. And this was the birth of eukaryotic life or the cells that make up our body. Unicellular organisms that cooperate with other organelles inside of them like mitochondria. And the history of earth and life was dominated for about two weeks with just unicellular eukaryotic and prokaryotic life. It wasn't until the last four days of that month that we had multicellular animal life or metazoic life. On the 27th day, we had the Cambrian explosion, tons of creatures all kind of sprouting out from who knows where. We still don't understand why it happened. And then to put this even more in context, dinosaurs existed straddling the last two days of that month. And then if we want to get even more specific, homo sapiens don't show up until three minutes to midnight on the final day of the month. One of the things that you'll notice about this calendar is that it's filled with microbes. Trillions and quintillions of microbes all around us. In fact, we evolved living in harmony with most of these microbes. They're a part of us. We grew together. You might have heard the term the human microbiome. Our microbiome or the microbiota, which are the individual microbes, is all around us. You've probably heard about it mostly in the context of the gut microbiome, which is super important. But we have a microbiome everywhere else, on our skin, on our lungs, in our armpits. There are microbes all over us. And the thing is that we live in harmony with these microbes. They help us. They are our oldest friends. But sometimes old friends get separated. And this talk is about what happens when we get separated from our old friends and what that means for the immune system. Now humans evolved as hunter-gatherers in savannas and grasslands. We were in constant contact with the soil. And in that soil were soil bacteria, some of our oldest old friends.  We were constantly eating them, bringing them into our bodies. They were then leaving our bodies. This is called pseudo-commensal, because they weren't commensal bacteria that didn't live with us, but they were constantly going in and out of us. And so in order for us to have a relationship with these pseudo-commensals, we had to kind of negotiate how to interact with each other. And so on the one hand, these pseudo-commensals, these soil bacteria and other old friend microbes, they had to kind of maintain or regulate our immune system so that they weren't seen as a threat. And over millions and millions of years, we became dependent on them doing so. And so in order for us to be healthy, we need to have these bacteria, these microbes, helping to regulate our immune systems. I want to talk about this a little further, partly because I think the immune system needs a bit of an image shift. Most of the time when we think about the immune system, we think about a warrior. We think that our immune cells are out to fight things or out to destroy things or to make sure we don't get sick. They're here to make sure that we're good and okay and healthy. And that's partly true. But I'd like to introduce a different metaphor. I like to think of the immune system as the bouncer at a club. Hang with me here, hang with me here. So let's go to Club Corpus, and we've got our immune system bouncer. And so this bouncer is here to let the good microbes in, keep the bad microbes out, make sure that we don't get sick off of some of them, but to make sure we still have a steady stream of microbes coming into our body because they're super important for our health. And old friends are kind of like the regulars at the club. They become friends with the bouncer. They help keep the bouncer really calm. They make sure that he's well-regulated. And in addition to that, these old friends can help to let other things into our bodies that aren't microbes that we still kind of need to have coming in and out of our bodies like gluten, pollen, pectander. When we have a regulated immune system that is functioning in the way that we evolved, it helps us to not have allergies, to not develop these sensitivities that have become so rampant in modern life these days. So what happens when we get separated from these old friends? And why did we get separated from these old friends? Well, specifically, we moved into cities. We left the soil. Ever since the advent of agriculture, we started to remove ourselves from the environments that we evolved to live in, which was foraging for food, hands in the dirt, living in harmony with the soil, especially from a very young age. And when this happens, we lose that regulating influence of these old friends. Going back to our club example, without his old friend, the bouncer gets really angry. Suddenly, all of these harmless things from the environment that we didn't have to worry about before all get rejected. And not only that, but the bouncer starts to turn on the people who work at the club, like the gut and the pancreas and the lungs, and maybe even turn on the club owner herself. When we're separated from our old friends, we see increases in allergies, autoimmune conditions, and mental health disorders. Now, you might be thinking, well, I get the allergies and autoimmune disorder condition thing, because that's kind of like the immune system fighting against things that should be inside of you or fighting against what's already inside of you. But like, how does this relate to mental health? And now, I'd like to go back and do a quick recap of what I talked about in 2018, because it's critical to understanding how all of this is interrelated. So in 2018, I introduced Cableman Clara, hunter-gatherer, as we've been talking about, and one day Clara was out foraging for berries when in the distance she saw a saber-toothed tiger. Now Clara got really anxious and scared, and a system in her body went right up. The system is called the sympathetic nervous system, or you might be more familiar with it as the fighter flight system. Now, when the fighter flight system is activated, our body is prepared to deal with immediate stress, and that includes things like elevating heart rate and blood pressure, so that you can get your blood pumping to get oxygen all throughout your body and nutrients, nutrients everywhere it needs to go. Rapid breathing, so that you can bring more oxygen into your lungs, get everything moving, because you might have to flee or fight. Increased sweating to cool down your body if you're going to have to be doing a lot of motions. Altered metabolism and attenuated digestion, that metabolism helps to free up easy energy so that you can access it so you can move really fast, and digestion starts to get shut down because digestion is a really energetic process, and we don't want that going if we need to flee or fight. But most pertinent to this discussion is activation of the immune system. Now, why would this make sense? Why would it make sense for our fighter flight system to start preloading our immune system? Well, let's go back to Clara and see why this could be important. Clara's not looking so good. So, Clara got into a fight with the saber-toothed tiger. She fortunately left with her life, but she has some wounds, and she needs to heal. She probably has some infections. She's got a lot of things that the immune system has evolved to take care of. And so, this in essence, oh, well, this manipulation of our body and our mind by the immune system to help us to behave in ways that help us to heal is in essence what psychoneuroimmunology is, which is the field that I got my PhD in. So this activates a series of behaviors that are critical for being able to cope with an infection or being ill, called sickness behaviors. This includes fatigue. Fatigue allows you to conserve your energy so that you're able to have more energy stores to deal with the highly energetic process of the immune system. It increases pain sensitivity, which allows you to not move things that might be injured. Decreases appetite, which might seem a little counter-intuitive, but again, digestion is highly energetic, and we want all that energy going to our ability for our immune system to take care of things. It also leads to social withdrawal, which can have a couple different meanings on the one hand, it's the idea that if you're infected, removing yourself from your social group might be really adaptive. On the other hand, there's some research that shows that individuals who are dealing with sickness behaviors, they actually get more approach towards their caregivers and more removal from others. And so it's kind of this manipulation of behavior so that you're seeking out people that can help you. And it also increases anxiety. If you're vigilant, you can make sure you don't get injured again, make sure that you have the space to heal. Do these symptoms look familiar to you? It looks like depression. In fact, it doesn't just look like depression, it is depression in some circumstances. For us, as we evolved, being able to have these set of behaviors to help us to heal when we're injured or sick was critical. And in the case of the sympathetic nervous system arc, basically, if Clara had run away and gotten away, this might not have even kicked in. But because Clara ended up getting injured, then there was a reason for these sickness behaviors to emerge. It had an adaptive reason to be here. But in modern day society, when we don't have saber-toothed tigers around, again, we're dealing with the news, we're getting stressed out. And when we get stressed out and it seems like a life or death scenario, we might be activating some of these similar circumstances. However, in most cases, our immune system doesn't go crazy. It doesn't engage. We get really stressed out, we kind of move on. But with the loss of old friends, with the loss of that regulatory component keeping our immune system calm, we're at much higher risk of having an out-of-control, exacerbated inflammatory response to daily stressors that can then precipitate mental health conditions. And something that might have just been an adaptive response suddenly becomes catastrophic. So I wanna pause to summarize what we've been talking about so far. Humans co-evolved with environmental microbes that we refer to as old friends, and they helped to regulate our immune system. Separation from our old friends dysregulates our immune system, resulting in more inflammatory diseases that includes things like autoimmune disorders, but also mental health conditions. And an elevated immune response in response to stress exacerbates a previously adaptive mental health response. Something that at one time would have helped us to get out of danger now without the regulation of old friends suddenly puts us in even more danger. So the big question is what do we do about this? And we're gonna talk about floating, but floating is a small piece of the puzzle. And I don't have time in this talk to go through all of the different ways that we can try to get back in touch with our old friends, try to learn how to regulate the immune system. But the thing is, is that those are the questions that I find so invigorating. What we need is a holistic approach. My dissertation was all about novel mental health therapeutics that looked at things as a whole, and tried to not piece out different aspects of the body or experience, but to really look at the body as a whole unit and identify how we can develop interventions that work with our body, work with our old friends, work with all of these things that we know on a multi-dimensional level. And floating is potentially one of those therapies. So one of the things I didn't talk as much about in 2018 that I wanted to bring back into this talk was to talk about what we already know in floating before the research that I've done about floating in the immune system. There's not much, but I wanted to kind of review it because I think it's important for us to get our head around. And it was important to me when I wrote my dissertation. As probably everyone in this room knows, John Lilly and Peter Seudfeld were two of the developers of the float tank back in the 50s and 60s. They initially thought that floating was going to be incredibly stressful. And most of their work was around trying to design these environments and study how stressed out people became. And of course, none of that worked. And they discovered that floating is in fact incredibly anti-stress. And there's many different ways and studies that have shown that floating can help with stress. Floating improves well-being and improves stress-related symptoms. It improves stress-related pain. It can improve symptoms of burnout. Additionally, on a biological level, reduced stress response and connection with floating can reduce levels of cortisol. And it can also decrease circulating metabolites of sympathetic nervous system hormones like adrenaline and noradrenaline. So coming at this whole picture, we can see that float on the one hand can help us to reduce stress, which is a huge component of this tapestry that we've been discussing, right? Because stress is still the precipitating factor that is getting us to dysregulation. But there are more kind of hands-on approaches that floating can do with respect to the immune system. So for one, floating can help reduce sympathetic nervous system activity, which again goes into kind of reducing stress. For another, it can help enhance the parasympathetic nervous system, or our rest and digest system. And this kind of helps to promote immunoregulation. Additionally, floating has been shown to reduce inflammatory symptoms of specific disorders, including rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. So there's something going on here. And then finally, there was one published study that claimed that floating altered the immune system for the better. Unfortunately, it's not a very good study. They didn't use standard terms, they also didn't really report what was going on very well. So I kind of just include that as it happened. So let's talk a little bit about the current study. The current study was done at the Laurier Institute for Brain Research at Liber, which is where I do my research here. I recently moved to Tulsa for my clinical internship, which has been really nice to be super close to Liber. That is one of our, that is our open float pool right there. And this was the study that my immune research was based off of. So this is a paper that's available. This has been talked about at the float conference. Justin has spoken about this paper on multiple occasions. This was just showing that floating can elicit relaxation and interreceptive awareness, particularly in anxious individuals. This paper found that floating induced serenity and induced relaxation, it decreased muscle tension and decreased state anxiety. So I took that data set and specifically analyzed the individuals that we had immune data on. This is just a quick table. I hate putting tables up here, but I always think that these are important. It gives you kind of the breakdown of who is in our sample. We had more anxious individuals than we did our healthy reference sample. And then one piece that I think is interesting to hold on to is this anxiety sensitivity index, the ASI-3. Our anxious group was super high on this index, whereas the healthy reference sample was pretty low. That's what you would expect in people who aren't dealing with anxiety. Hold on to that because it's gonna be important when I give one of the results. Just remember that there was a striation of anxiety sensitivity among this population. The study was basically, it was a two-condition study. It was a crossover design, so everyone was their own control. You would start out either with a float session or watching a documentary, BBC Earth in a dim room, and then you would have a one-week washout period and then you would do the other condition. So it was all randomized, and we did blood collection before and after both the float and before and after the film condition. And in that blood, we analyzed 10 different immune markers or cytokines. I don't have time to go into all of them, but I have created a little bit of an animation that shows you that they cover a wide variety of different aspects of the immune system. So what we can see here is that we go from innate to adaptive immunity. We've got pro-inflammatory to anti-inflammatory. Each of these different cytokines kind of plays a different role in the large tapestry that is our immune system functioning. And by looking at their concentrations in blood, we can get kind of a snapshot about what's going on in these individuals on an immune level. So let's take a look at some of the findings. So I wanted to start with this because the main expectation of this study was not actually found. So we thought that floating would change the immune system across the board for everyone. And it didn't. And this is just one of our cytokines, IL-6. It's one of the ones that we had the most hope in. Just to explain this graph, so you understand it, is that on this y-axis here, we have concentration. Along the x-axis, this column is the pre-control, post-control, pre-float, post-float. And we're looking at a box plot here. So the line in the middle is the median. The box covers the interquantile range. I know that doesn't make sense. And then there's whiskers to cover the rest of the range. Anyway, now that that's out of the way. What you can see here is that all four of those boxes look pretty much the same. And when you look at this across all 10 of our cytokines, this is what we found. Basically, floating didn't change the immune system across the board for everyone. And I think that this is something really important to keep in mind because it's informing where we go and it's informing the claims that we can make. However, there was one interesting result that came out once we looked at the moderating effect of anxiety sensitivity. It came up with one pro-inflammatory metric, or pro-inflammatory marker called IO1-alpha, which is a specific pro-inflammatory cytokine. And this is really exciting. It's a preliminary finding. It was kind of secondary to the main analysis of what we were looking at, so it'll inform kind of where we go next. But what we find here, again, here we're looking in the dark blue, you see the film control. In the light blue, you see the flotation rest condition. Along the y-axis is the concentration data. Each of those individual points corresponds to a measurement. And then you have before, after, before, after. And then, if you look at the lines, the line that is darker is the significant one. None of the other lines reach significance. But what you'll notice is that the short dotted line is for the trend for individuals who were one standard deviation below the mean in an anxiety sensitivity. The longer dotted line is for individuals who were at the mean of anxiety sensitivity. And the solid line is individuals that were at one standard deviation above the mean in anxiety sensitivity. Again, lots of words. What does this mean? What we're finding is that the people who decrease in a pro-inflammatory marker are the ones who are most anxious and it's only happening in a flow condition. And this is really interesting because it would suggest that perhaps floating is going to be most effective in terms of the immune system for individuals who are maybe already struggling within inflammatory condition. It might not change things for your average person, but in people that might already have something that's inflammatory, like potentially anxiety sensitivity, it might lead to a decrease in inflammatory markers. We have a lot more work to do. We're still figuring this out, but when I did this reanalysis, I got really excited. So just to recap these findings. In this study, one session of flotation rest did not significantly shift markers of inflammation overall for everybody. One session of flotation rest did decrease circulating concentrations of one pro-inflammatory marker, IL-1-alpha, but only in participants' high in anxiety sensitivity. And we need to do a lot more research. And the exciting thing is that there's a lot more research coming up. So this is part two in my immune trilogy. Hopefully next year I will be coming back to talk about the study that we're going on right now. So instead of looking at baseline immune markers, which to be honest, don't shift for a lot of different interventions. We're taking a look at immunoreactivity, which plays into the idea of old friends, right? If our old friends were here to help us regulate our immune system, what if we could measure changes in immunoreactivity? So the study that I have going on right now that is wrapping up actually, takes a look at individuals who have floated eight times and it looks before and after and it takes a look at how reactive those individuals' blood is to an immune challenge to bacterial cell membrane wall. And we're gonna see if there's shifts in response to floating. So that is coming up. I will hopefully have this analyzed by next summer. I'm looking forward to sharing it with you. That is everything I have for you today. Thank you so much. Stay tuned for more. I am the one plug I wanna make is that I am working on kind of transitioning to starting to make online content. And I'm working on a YouTube channel. I'm working on a TikTok channel, Instagram, that kind of stuff. There's not a lot out there yet, but social media, I'm at Flux and Flux. YouTube channels live life in Flux. There's like one or two videos up there yet. My main first project is going to be about the old friends hypothesis. I wanna make a series of YouTube videos that delve really deep into this and talk about it from a lot of different angles because it's something that's really important to me and something that I think a lot of people need to hear about. But anyway, thank you so much for your time and I look forward to chatting with you after the conference.