Living Happier With Poet Philosopher Noah benShea: Hope For the Best, Make Peace With The Rest

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41:33

Living Happier With Poet Philosopher Noah benShea: Hope For the Best, Make Peace With The Rest

by Dr. Azi Jankovic

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Noah benShea is one of North America's most beloved poet philosophers. He's been nominated for the Pulitzer prize, spoken in places such as the Library of Congress, and he has been published by Oxford University Press. In this episode of Within Us, he shares with Azi all about what has inspired him to inspire others over the many years of his career. He speaks about finding beauty in unexpected places, noticing miracles in everyday life, and staying hopeful through all of life's challenges.

Meet your Teacher

Dr. Azi Jankovic

Modi'in-Maccabim-Re'ut, Israel

Meet your Teacher

Dr. Azi Jankovic

Modi'in-Maccabim-Re'ut, Israel

Transcript

The number one illness in the world is depression. The number one reason for depression is stress. The number one stress is people trying to be in charge of what is not in their control. You're not in charge of what the world delivers to your doorstep. You are in charge of your response. Welcome to another episode of Within Us. My name is Azriella Jankovic and today I am interviewing the inspirational Noah Ben-Shia. Noah Ben-Shia is one of North America's most respected and beloved poet philosophers. He's a Pulitzer Prize nominated international bestselling author of 27 books translated into 18 languages. He's a scholar and theologian who has spoken in places such as the Library of Congress and the US Department of Defense. He's been published by the Oxford University Press and the World Bible Society in Jerusalem. His books and inspirational quotes and poems have been read by hundreds of millions of people and he has inspired countless individuals. It is a pleasure to have him on the show with us today. Welcome to Within Us Noah. It's a pleasure to meet you both in this incarnation of you and in this incarnation of me. Yes, Yes it's a pleasure to meet you in person you know it's funny I'm sitting here and I'm holding this book that was in my bedroom when I was what was this published in 1991? Yeah. I was 11 and my dad used to read me this book and it's really special because my dad and I did a lot of things together but reading wasn't always one of them but for some reason he would pick you know very rarely a special book and this this book and the other Jacob book were the two books that we read together and when I recently revisited these books after meeting you I realized where these phrases had come from that brought me so much peace so that is no small thing. When you talk about this is that some of the things you read across time brought you peace and were a blessing and a number of years back I was asked to give this talk or for a number years I give on the Sabbath someplace and I was looking at the scripture the tefillah the prayer that says shalom uvracha so I said to myself why does it say peace and blessing to ask for that because you would think that a blessing is as good as it gets and then I realized that any peace you find in life is its own blessing and any blessing that does not bring you peace is no blessing so I'm deeply honored that that that to whatever extent this book was a blessing more importantly it brought you peace. Brought me a lot of peace and I'll tell you that one of the lines was hope for the best make peace with the rest and that is one of the chapter titles in your book and I feel like it's so encapsulates the idea of faith that we can hope for what we think is the best and then ultimately make peace be at peace and be whole with this idea that there is a whole we are part of a wholeness that is so big and so great and that we can't understand it. No I remind people you were not a drop in the ocean you were every drop in the ocean. The teachers tell us that the Torah can teach you everything but humility and if you don't come to the Torah with humility then you can't learn anything because if you're filled with yourself you can't be increased by something greater than yourself. I'll give you an example of it. Fill your lungs with air and take another breath it's impossible you cannot take a breath until you release your breath. I have a place that I walk I live on the Pacific Ocean here in Santa Barbara and I walk every morning and across time and I walk very early I met this young African-American guy that was cleaning the toilets in his park and he had the best attitude so I said I knew him he always talked to me I walk and read and they always think that's kind of stupefying and we met and I said Michael I said how do you keep your great attitude you're in you know it wasn't like he was a neurosurgeon he was cleaning the restrooms in a public in a state park he said oh I have three rules so he told me his three rules and then I came back to a month later I said you know I went to give a talk someplace and I talked about my philosopher friend Michael and he said you made me the philosopher I said yes he said why I said because you said three things you said suit up shut up and show up and he said how did that become philosophy I said I'll tell you why suit up is to realize what emotions you bring to any moment you're in in your life do you bring your pride do you bring your anger do you bring your frustration what do you what do you enter that moment how are you dressing your emotional self so suit up shut up is because until you quiet your own ego right you're important just like everybody else quiet your own ego or my and then and then I said and show up he said show up I said yes you have to arrive be there in the moment be in the moment hope for the best make peace with the rest you're not in charge there's a hand larger than ours on the helm the one time Marlon Brando had an acting coach that gave him this direction play the part not the result play the part not the result the number one illness in the world is depression the number one reason for depression is stress the number one stress is people trying to be in charge of what is not in their control you're not in charge of what the world delivers to your doorstep you are in charge of your response respond don't react I wake up in the morning I'm in the shower I'm saying well you haven't been dishonest anybody you haven't aggravated anybody yet but it's early you still have the whole day in front of you so it's the whole day is hope for the best make peace with the rest I hear exactly what you're saying it's a constant effort sometimes we learn ideas spiritual ideas it seems simple simple but possibly not always easy and that's the work is to constantly be reminding ourselves with learning with prayer and with acts of connection in this world how do you think about spirituality in this context meeting any moment and seeing every moment is Hashem trying on masks you know they don't presume the moment because to presume the moment is blasphemy because we learn in learning that Hashem is without beginning without end the Christians think that Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega of the experience but the Alpha and the Omega is the first and last letter the alphabet and that's an understandable consciousness but in Judaism the consciousness is without beginning without end so not to presume any moment or where it will unfold how it will unfold and humor helps you with that in this next clip Noah shares a story of such humor a test that was given to people who are applying for a job and of the 800 people who applied for the job I'll tell you the one guy who got the job you're driving down the street on a rainy night in a car with only two seats as you pull past a bus stop you see three people it's pouring rain pouring rain there's an old friend of yours we haven't seen for years there's an old woman who desperately needs to get to a hospital and there's a man or woman of your dreams you can only put one person in the car who do you put in the car the guy who got the job answered I'd get out of the car I'd give the keys to the car to my friend let him take the old woman to the hospital and I would sit on the bench with the woman of my dreams oh that's brilliant yeah it's the unexpected introducing you to laughter introducing you to love how did your whole journey begin when my son was young and somebody asked him what his father does he says my father types that son of mine now is a PhD in religious studies and a brilliant Islamic and Judaic scholar teaches here at university I was recently asked to do a one-man show about Jacob the baker and stepping into this character on stage sometime in 2020 and they asked me about doing it without a script but really just sort of answering questions from people as if people were coming into the bakery to talk to Jacob and I was now he's this personality I said to them I would do this I would accept this stepping into this character because I don't people always said are you and Jacob the same person I said we are except I'm the one with character flaws you know that that's the difference between the two of us but I said I would do it then I woke up at three o'clock in the morning and saying oh my gosh this is a high wire act to stand on stage for an hour and a half and just answer questions in the character of Jacob the Baker sons the hubris that you may have as the author or some of any kind of a claim that you sort of you know you that you pursued or postured in your life got up in the morning and said to my wife listen I said yes but she said to me forget about it he said she's just you're better at this than giving a speech she said you've been getting ready for this for 50 years so just step into this character and be authentic kicker guard once yet that life has lived forwards and understood backwards all I knew when I was younger I was going to be a doctor I was a very high I'm the first person my family that graduated from high school let alone college I was originally born in Toronto from a blue-collar family my family moved a lot my father trying to make a living we moved back and forth between Toronto and the inner city of Los Angeles so I grew up in like an intense Jewish community and then I grew up in an intense black community and back and forth between us I went to school in two different countries back and forth a couple of times the only thing I knew that has been a constancy in my life has been I have always felt a profound connection to God I have felt God in my life well before I could understand it well before I knew I remember one time I'd been sort of this high achievement kid and all the stuff and I graduated from UCLA and I was a dean at UCLA a year after I graduated I was 22 I had a book of poetry that came out you know writing poetry is like throwing rose petals over the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo you know I say to people poets don't have to worry about selling out there was no one buying and then I became interested in scriptural literature first Eastern and then Western I thought great no and now you've made yourself completely unemployable from being the most likely to succeed in valedictorian to like what are you going to do now and I'm walking down the street and I tell you I'm crying I'm uncertain I don't know I don't know my middle 20s and I look to the sky and I say thank you thank you for the gifts you've given me now can you tell me what the hell I'm supposed to do with them and slowly the truth of what I supposed to do emerged they asked Michelangelo once how we sculpted the day but he said I just have to chip away the parts that don't belong I used to think when I first came up to give a talk that I would show up a big bag with everything I knew and how smart it was and all my story and then I realized that if I really wanted to see the truth I only have to go and look at my in pursuit of my blindness if I really wanted to hear the truth I only had to be in pursuit of my deafness if I wanted to be wise I only had to be in pursuit of my ignorance so when I came up to stage with this recognition I was only responsible for bringing my deafness my blindness and my ignorance with honesty and that's where I could start and I think once I was thinking that was Piusaggio in Italian more wise to do that my life began to unfold more clearly to me but even more to this observation every year between Christmas and New Year's my wife and I like to be in San Francisco we like looking at the store windows and being outside the restaurant I love cooking it's a big big surprise and we're in our hotel room it was a rainy night in San Francisco another surprise and we're watching the best of PBS shows for the end of the year and the window is open I could end I could hear the taxi honking in the street below and they're interviewing Peter Drucker the great business guru who had been an advisor to GM and General Electric and they said to him what was the first question you always asked he said the first question I always asked is do you know what your work is and when he asked that question it was like a Zen monk was banging me with a bamboo state saying wake up and I thought in my life I'd been a best-selling author and I'd achieved these things and nominated for this and I had some of this and some of the but I'm really here to be a source of strength to others that's my work all the rest of it whether I'm writing or talking or thinking or studying that's what I'm here to do I'm here to be a source of strength to others and that's as that was about as much clarity as I have achieved and I'm trying to do you know I'm trying to do that work a pair K of votes and as you're not expected to finish the work but neither are you excused from it you know I'm imagining you coming to the stage in your mid-20s and and and you're thinking that you needed to bring a big bag like you said of your knowledge and then you came to this idea as you said that you felt that bringing your blind or deaf spots to the forefront was the work what does that mean to you what does that look like and how can we do that in any craft and every craft is always humbled by what somebody else as a painter can't imagine a ballerina ballerina can't imagine a composer a composer cannot imagine the right it's just stunning in that regard but the you want to get comfortable enough with the craft so that when you have an inspiration the craft doesn't get in the way the challenge you have to sit down prepared to write something wiser than you are you have to prepare to access a knowledge that you wouldn't come to as an act of reason but you would come to as an act of faith and all faith is leap because reason will only take you so far because it doesn't make any sense for it to go further and people who live on the cliff grow wings if you have the courage to live your life prepared to leap into knowing something bigger than yourself a willingness to enter into a relationship with with god and the premise of that invitation is humility and so that's the first work of every great artist is to step into something larger than yourself picasso was an amazing painter he was a terrible person anybody who writes they're only goddesses and doormats who wants to know him as a person but when he stepped out of Picasso in that limited macho sense and stepped into something beyond him his work was exalted in that way my feeling is that God chooses God that's own violence you know and how do you step into it a number of years back I was in New York and it was a very wealthy woman lived on Central Park South whose husband had been very good friends with Toscanini and the Lincoln Square sit on a whole art scene in that so her at the end of a concert Toscanini would ask her husband how he liked it how he liked it he said oh the music was great how was the music was great and she said it wasn't until I read something you wrote in Jacob the Baker that I thought of what Toscanini said to my husband because Toscanini said to my husband not how was my music how were my silences how were my silences and in Jacob the Baker I write it is the silence between the notes that makes the music Toscanini the same thing is true by the way just to extend this this drosh for a moment when you sit in the the sukkah we are the sukkah is prescribed that there has to be space between the slots on the top of the sukkah because it can't be a permanent building it's a remind you it's a temporary habit when you open the the Torah the first word is Bereshit in the beginning and the first letter in Bereshit in the beginning is the Hebrew letter bait but the Hebrew letter bait is the second letter in the alphabet the first letter in the alphabet is the olive and the olive is silent so before the beginning there is the silence it's important to remember that to allow yourself to find peace in that silence a lot of us feel that unless we're saying something or there's something going on then nothing's going on too often we confused if you're not doing something you're not doing something big mistake to the western mind if you're not doing something you're not doing something in the western world especially there's an idea that silence is something to be afraid of you know that in the movie George Burns and John Denver and it's dear god I think the last scene of the movie George John Denver is in a car and George Burns is driving George's obviously playing the role of the deity and John Denver says to him well um can because it's coming to the end of the movie you know he says he says well can we talk in the future can we talk and George Burns says you talk I'll listen I think if you recognize that the divine is all present there's no space between you because you shut your eyes does not does not mean that god has gone into hiding you know it's just it's a recognition that god is omnipresent the question is where are you god is all listening are you god is all seeing are you looking I can't I want to make it very clear that in having this consciousness that doesn't mean that in my life its mission accomplished I remind people that we live on a little blue ball spinning in space at 1060 miles an hour that you don't know this has nothing to do with the truth of it you can find your balance and lose your balance at any moment you can have the terrible twos you can have your awful 22s you can have your uncertain 37s you can have your confused 50s you can say I'm getting older sadness when you're 65 and oh my god how old I am when you're 75 all those moments we can find our balance and lose our balance at any moment the question isn't a lot of us are raised to think that beating our self up as an active character it isn't the challenge isn't to be self abusive it's to be self accountable so when you witness yourself losing your balance what are you going to do about it and the whole idea of penance or shula and Judaism is about turning and bearing witness so all personal transformation requires us to bear honest witness on ourself it's it's I hear you I feel like the idea of Chuba this returning to our true essence is this constant it's in every moment we can return in every moment you can lose your way at any moment no one has ever found their way who has not felt lost I can one of the things happened across my life has been that at different times different large companies have wanted to make thoughts of mine and employ them in there in something for me I know if I wrote a book of poetry now you'd sell a thousand copies but when Starbucks came to me and they said they wanted to take a quote from one of my books and put it on 30 million Starbucks coffee cups I said oh well they don't reach some people and with a major player this came to me I had been a visiting professor of philosophy at UC San Francisco Medical School came back to Santa Barbara and they asked me could they take thoughts of mine and put them on patient trays in the hospital because when people read what I wrote they felt better about themselves and people who felt better about themselves got better faster so somebody heard this and they wanted me to come and talk to them and they had one of the major sugar manufacturers in the United States from CNN sugar and such and they said could we take Noah's thoughts and put them on little sugar packets and people buy a lot of will steal a lot of packets will make a lot of money that's how these guys thought so I said yeah okay they said well what would you call it I said I'd call it sugar for the soul so they put this up so they started doing it for all the hospitals and schools and it was like in 50, 000 places in central California in short time then Costco came and they started putting in different regions and so for a number of years these little sugar packets were culture in 50 or 60 million places a year and I thought about the impact because it wasn't like and each of them says you know Noah Ben-Shaheed it's got my name is like this with about 18 different quotes of mine I was thinking well one of the regions where Costco did it and now Cisco a major food distribution company and the largest in North America they have some guy who's a truck driver in Tacoma it's a quarter twelve at night this is all my imagination of course and he's going through a divorce and having a really tough time and he's got a cup of coffee to court it just he shakes his sugar packet and it says he looks at says no one has ever found their way who has now felt lost and I think for that moment this guy's life is a little bit less lonely and that's why I'm here so that's what he doesn't write me doesn't become a fan doesn't buy my books doesn't like you know nominate me for anything I went to I always asked to give this talk to executives for Gap and Old Navy big companies in North America so I finished this talk and one of them there was a woman who was a senior exec and she said boy 20 years from now if I meet somebody I'm gonna I'm gonna tell them what you said I said 20 years from now if you meet somebody you'll say you know 20 years ago I met this guy I can't remember what his name is Noah Mosley but I yeah he is he just won I feel so blessed in so many ways I'm from such a humble experience I just you know if you get to leave the world a little bit better that's as good as it gets and I feel blessed my son and a daughter and now a grandson and loved great women and my brothers are and I are close and I my parents were amazing and I just feel blessed and I try to pass it along because that's what you do for about five years I wrote a weekly column for a group in New York Times papers and I did this one piece called remember this my children what you want your children to remember when you're not around to remind them and there was a line in there that the Starbucks people came and they wanted to put that on that Starbucks coffee cup that they did and the thought was do not kiss your children so they will kiss you back but so they will kiss their children and their children's children don't forget I like to laugh even as I remember that parenting is a process of moving from management to consultant if you're lucky I'm gonna take that one with me I bet that's why I put it out there's a lot of people take that one with them to plant the seed does not make you the tree my wife says that Noah's 2000 year old teacher tech Larry me inhabiting a younger man's body somebody asked me if I believed in reincarnation I said I do I just don't think you have to die to be reincarnated I have had moments in my life where I felt so profoundly alone and abandoned and felt the hand of the divine walk in and put a hand on my shoulder in this in my head in that emotional place I have you know I I I you know it hasn't been constant and it's not like I was you know I I don't feel a victim in my life I feel a participant in my life and to some extent the moments of profound isolation were moments that were necessary for my profound transformation I think that those portal moments those those crossroads moments do more to reveal you than transform you they some people get older and turn out to be very negative dark shallow people and you can drown in three inches of water and some people get older and the wisdom that was part of their life at another point comes up same with being sick to get older is a state of isolation you begin to lose the people you love even as and this is what I experience as the veil between the worlds is very porous I tell people memory is the sacred garden take a walk with someone you love I think the veil between the world is very porous and people who have passed are not gone yeah at the end of the day this is about making peace with yourself it's a it's a promise a lot of us make to ourselves and never quite get to it right or I'll deal with that tomorrow one time after I'd finished a talk a woman came up to me and she said I want to ask you a question my having a difficult time in my relationship because my husband's not the man he once was and she wasn't talking about a Viagra moment she was just she was talking I saw that's interesting I said but the question isn't if he's not the man he once was but whether you're prepared to accept him for the man he might yet become and your willingness to accept him for the person you might yet become is premised on your capacity to accept yourself on the person you might yet become so when when we love people for who they were it's like we're locking him in to the past when we know physicists will tell us this theologians will tell us this you're the one crossing you and himself that you know God doesn't wear a watch only God can decide when it's time to open a rose all time is concurrent so I tell people I said look you are your body yourself you're a time machine I said in your memory you can go backward in time in your imagination you can go forward in time but the only place you can steer the time machine is in the presence so to borrow from my friend Ram Dass be here now you know that's the question be here now in this moment the Buddha reminds us that all of your guilt won't change the past all of your anxiety won't improve the future the here and now this is your friend Noah if I might right the here and now is now in here and that doesn't mean to be inattentive or not to be planning but just to understand that in Yiddish there's a line that men plan and God laughs my mother used to say if you want to give God a good laugh tell her your plans great window my mother's wit I love that I love that so much and I find what you're saying about the the world being poor is so fascinating and I'm curious what that means for you but I want to share a really quick story with you I haven't really told anyone this yet but I want to tell you what happened to me two weeks ago on Thanksgiving I it was my 39th birthday and I woke up in the morning I had a dream about my dad's sister who just passed away two years ago and she was in a wheelchair and she was felt like she was calling me to come to California for some reason she's not there physically but the whole family was going to be together at a home in the Sierra Nevadas where she her ashes were scattered under this persimmon tree and so I decided to buy myself a ticket from Israel I flew to California I surprised my parents and I spent the whole weekend with family and for the first time since my aunt's passing I went to the tree where her ashes were scattered and I was brought by a cousin of mine and the cousin had been at the service and she told me she said you know the service was so beautiful we sang John Denver song take me home country road and everyone was singing and everyone was crying and I was so touched by it was so beautiful I felt like she was there with me three days later I was with my mom and we had this beautiful walk along the beach and we talked and walked for hours and then we walked into a little vegan cafe in Encinitas and it was so beautiful it had meditation cushions on the floor and there was just something about there were books and just gorgeous atmosphere I said to my mom this is so beautiful I'm gonna cry and the second I said that the song take me home country road came on and I just had to cry and it was like of all the songs that could have come on and I said to my mom what someone if you know she said this was at Angela's you know it was like of course she wanted me to come here and I'm I don't might sound like I don't know maybe it sounds crazy but to me it's like what are the odds sometimes with these moments? Ozzy coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. I love that. Coincidence is God's cloak of humility. So beautiful it's so true and I think when we open our eyes to that we can experience that porousness right? They once asked the poet Robert Lowell about reading a poem in translation and he said reading a poem in translation is like kissing a bride through the veil I began to think about it and I said that the veil between the worlds is very porous if you think of the veil it's a series of interlocking spaces so you just choose a space choose an emptiness choose a silence that you will enter when you bought that ticket you said I'm on the bus and when you got on the bus your aunt said honk honk. The day after I bought the ticket okay I went onto the internet and I saw this picture of a VW bus that said it says underneath the only person you need to be worry about being better than is the person you were yesterday and it was the first time I'd seen that quote since my aunt posted it four years ago and you just said bus so here we are again. I don't have any confusion that we are in that we are in that we are in God's presence for me not to recognize that you and I in this conversation are in God's presence that would be blasphemous I'll give you an example of this place just because some people think like oh these are like two kind of whacked out late 60s people or something for a long time people thought that when you and I were sitting here that there's this you know a lot of lot of distance a lot of space between us but when Linus Pauling won the first Nobel Prize he won the second one for peace but his first one was for chemistry and it was in understanding how chemical bodies adhere to each other so like people thought when you put paint on something just one thing painted on top he said that's because you're not seeing anatomically if you see anatomically everything is interactive so between you and me this air isn't like a distance it's the same air that's interacting with all of your cells and interacting with all that we don't see things only speaks to our blindness if you look at I'll give you an example you look at a light bulb and you think oh there's the light well actually it's a vacillating pulse between two stems that's as dark as it is light but the speed with which it travels is set up for the same speed with which your eye can see it's like a movie when you see a movie when they were showing you the different images the different slides in a movie if it went any faster it'd be a blur if it went any slower you'd be looking at a series of still lights we see according to our blindness so what you have to see again is when you don't see the connection in some things what you're witnessing is your blindness because people thought the world was flat didn't mean the club has sailed over the edge you know you have to witness this so I think it makes a lot of sense to me now what you you said earlier about bringing your blind and your deaf spots to the forefront it makes a lot more sense now and it feels very much related to the difference between space and and and and no space like the veil that you spoke about it's it's not concrete there's the space between like the fronds on top of the car the booth that we make outside and there's so much connectivity here it's really so beautiful and time flies by so quickly speaking with you I have to say it's been a real pleasure the easiest place to connect in some way is noahbenshea. Com n-o-a-h cryptically enough ben shia b-e-n-s-h-e-a I tell people I get both anti-semitic and anti-catholic literature in the mail because some people think I'm ben shay instead of so noahbenshea. Com look if you if you google noah ben shia anywhere this morning somebody wanted me to look up something and I saw 35, 000 places where you can see something I've written or a book or something you'll find me I'm not I'm not I'm not hidden in that world I'm very excited about my one-man show an evening with Jacob the baker that I'm doing on stage in Santa Barbara but I just want to say that I'm I'm profoundly grateful for the opportunity to have this conversation with you because I think you are an honest voice who will lend this voice to others and for that my work is to try and be an ally to other people I want you to know there's a lot of people lives will touch the smallest stone dropped in the widest sea will send radiating circles under shores you will never know and for all the people who you and I never know whose life in some way may be touched by our conversation today they sent their thanks through me to you for doing the work you're doing and helping to you're so strong and be a source of strength to others inspiration is exactly what this was for me I have so much gratitude for Noah for having joined me and been in this interview and for you for joining me and for sharing with me in your notes and in your emails and on Facebook in my group circle of insight it's really wonderful to be on this journey with all of you if you haven't joined the group yet it's circle of insight on Facebook and it's a group where we focus on staying conscious being authentic and being real with our processes whatever it is that we're working on emotionally professionally interpersonally it is all about connecting and staying real and we're stronger when we're together friends we really really are so thanks again for joining me I want you to know that all week this is the week of Hanukkah it's eight days it's also the week where Christmas will be celebrated and it is a time of miracles so all week long I am donating half of the proceeds of my new book beyond all things to a really wonderful cause I am donating half of the proceeds of my book to those in need in the city of Jerusalem there are so many people around us at all times who need things like food and shelter and really basics that we cannot take for granted so if you would like to support this cause you can buy my book and know that half of the proceeds are going to those in need in Jerusalem book is called beyond all things and it is on Amazon and if you want to give directly you can contact me I'm going to be posting a link on my website to give to this this really important cause but in the interim feel free to reach out and let me know that you're interested in donating any amount even a few dollars really can go a long way and thanks again for being here I bless you to see so much light to be a source of light and you know the amazing thing about light is that one single candle is enough to light up this world I bless you with abundant peace now and always thanks so much for being here and remember that which appears to be beyond all things is also very much within us.