Nate Hagens

And there's a phrase about a finger pointing at the moon and the warning not to confuse the finger for the moon.

So as part of seven conversations, at least on this platform, I ask good people to define and hand me the moon.

And they keep gently offering me a finger.

And I keep picking up the finger and turning it over and studying it, asking why it doesn't look more like the moon.

I will be gentle here on a late Thursday afternoon for me and for you, because this might sound like I'm describing a locked door to us, like it's hopeless for people like us in the West, raised how we were.

I don't think it is.

This wall I'm describing that we build is real, but it's thin in certain places.

And I think everyone listening to this platform

has already stood in one of those thin places, possibly without naming it or understanding it.

Probably many of you don't stand within those walls at all.

I talked about this a little last week.

There is a moment when you're lost in a piece of music and the part of you that keeps track of yourself, the default mode network, it just goes quiet.

And there's that half second when you look up and see something, especially something beautiful, before your mind labels it, before the word arrives.

And then there's grief.

In my case, the recent loss of an animal that hollows you out so completely that the usual sense of some tidy little Nate running the show falls away.

Certainly standing in a forest at dusk when it gets hard to say where you stop and the rest of it, the trees, the soil, the birds, the full ecosystem starts.

Of course, none of that is proof, nor is it either a proper definition.

Those are just the times and places where our separate self quietly goes offline for a moment, and we've all been there.

We just don't usually reach for a Sanskrit word to describe a Thursday morning.

That feeling of being a self sealed off, looking out at a world that's over there is actually a core theme of the work we're doing at this platform.