It was about 23 and a half years ago, 9-11 happened.

At the time I was working in advertising.

I had grown up in a Buddhist household.

I had been a part of a Buddhist sanga, but I was making my living in advertising.

And when in the aftermath of the planes hitting,

I went to volunteer, and it turns out they didn't have any need

for an art director, copyrighter.

There wasn't any copy to write.

So I had that disheartening moment of realizing

that what I was doing for a living was not really bringing value to anyone's life.

And that for me was a moment where I decided to, in the aftermath, realized with a spiritual priorities.

Fears of training, I wound up being asked to become a Buddhist teacher, then I became

Buddhist pastor.

And a lot of the events happened as well, both in our lives, such as the pandemic, but also culturally, realigned my way of

looking at my life and the world that I live in. In 2005, a writer named David Foster Wallace

gave a commencement speech at Kenyon where he noted that

sometimes the most obvious, important realities are the ones that are hardest to see and even

harder to talk about.

That we live in a system where the most vital and important and necessary resources

that we need to live are in fact privately owned and that some people have access to vital

resources and other people don't. In other words, we live in a system that fosters a delusion

that's wholly unethical that some people are deserving of medical care, education, a place to live,

...