The Four Sacred Pillars

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S2E16 TRANSCRIPT:

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[00:00:00] Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. My name's Mark. And I'm one of your hosts.

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: Yeah. And today we are going to talk about non theist pagan values. And specifically we're going to be exploring the value framework within atheopagan ism, which are called the four sacred pillars.

But first we're going to have to talk about what is sacred mean.

Yucca: And that's a big one. So. One of the things that pagans often get asked is, well, how do you know what's sacred? Or how do you decide what's sacred? If you don't have a book to tell you that, or if you are part of a tradition in paganism that doesn't have a set, defined belief around that, how do you do that?

Mark: Right. And one of [00:01:00] the criticisms that has been leveled at modern Neo paganism, mostly by, you know, conventional monotheists, but also by some other people who are closer into that community is that it doesn't have a robust ethical framework. There is. You know, w we're accused by conservative Christians of having no values and no morals and therefore, you know, being able to be rapists and murderers because there's no God to punish us and threaten us with hell.

Now as a skeptic, just on the face of that, that's a pretty remarkable set of claims that I would love to see some real evidence for, but beyond that I think that it's fair to say that because the modern neopagan movement grew in association with counter-cultural movements, that there has been a real emphasis [00:02:00] on rights and freedoms and not nearly as much emphasis on responsibilities. And what what an ethical framework outlines for you is what are you responsible to? What are you responsible for doing what is a value? What deserves service what kinds of behaviors are acceptable and what kind of behaviors are not? And pagans, to be honest, don't have much of that. There is the three-fold law, which is roundly rejected by many pagans.

The idea being that whatever you put out into the world comes back to you times three, which. It's very loosey goosey to begin with. I'd be real interested to hear an explanation of what the mechanism of that is supposed to be. And more than that, it's still doesn't really hold you accountable for specific kinds of behavior and specific responsibilities to other beings.

[00:03:00] Yucca: There's also the do no harm, you know, and if you do no harm, do you will something along that?

Mark: Right. And every action creates change and some of that change will be negative to some actor involved with it. So the idea of not doing harm becomes almost irrelevant because it's meaningless.

Yucca: Yeah, well, you get into the, what is harm and to whom, right? What are, who are you talking about? What you've got to really start defining what you're talking about. So something like that is just so broad that it, as you're saying becomes somewhat meaningless

Mark: Yes. And of course there are many pagans who simply reject both of those rules to begin with and their whole deal is I'll do whatever I want, according to my own value judgments in the moment. And. There's nothing inherently wrong with that [00:04:00] necessarily, except that situational ethics without any kind of guidelines can really get you in trouble sometimes because all of us have confirmation bias towards what we really want to do in the first place.

Right. Desire is a thing. So it's it becomes problematic that if you haven't actually explored this question of what's important. What kind of person should I be? How should I interact with others? What is my broader responsibility to the society I live in to the ecosystem that sustains me to future generations, all of those things.

If you haven't explored all those, then having to make that call in the moment won't necessarily lead to the best choices.

Yucca: Well, and you have the values, whether you're aware of them or not. And those what those values are, could be inherited from what you grew up watching on TV as a kid, [00:05:00] or from your super. Racist homophobic aunt or whatever. And, but when we really start to look at them and be really present with ourselves, we have that opportunity to examine them, see what they are and choose different ones.

If we want.

Mark: Yes. In my experience, pagans are. A little hypersensitive around discussions that have to do with right and wrong. For one thing, because the predominant religions look at right and wrong as a binary and right. And wrong are inherently a spectrum. The question is, who is it right for? Who is it not right for?

And to what degree?

Yucca: What context.

Mark: Exactly. And so situational ethics are really the best way to make those decisions, but not starting with a blank slate, starting with a set of frameworks for understanding the world helps a lot. [00:06:00] And so when I was first writing the essay that turned into the book, atheopagan ism and started framing this religion for myself.

And I need to emphasize again, when I started doing this, it was just for me, it wasn't, I didn't think anybody else would even be interested. So it's been surprising to see the enthusiasm When I first started thinking about, well, what is a religion and how can I get those functions that I found so fulfilling about being involved with the pagan community back into my life.

And the second of the three elements that I saw as being components of a religion was a value set. And I do think that it's fair to say that most pagan paths are a little weak on the value set, characteristic. The other two components are a cosmetology, a description of the world which can be anything from the world as [00:07:00] described by science, which is what I believe in to a

Yucca: yup. Pantheon and.

Mark: Wheel of karma, we're trying to escape or heaven and hell and a great judgment or taking your heart and weighing it against a feather to see whether you go on to an underworld, all those things. So that's the cosmology. And then of course the third element is practice

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: because a religion is not a philosophy.

It's not just ideas and thinking. It's activity celebration observances prayers, offerings creation of alters or shrines or other sort of sacred artwork, all those kinds of things.

Yucca: So the distinction, there would be a philosophy as a way of understanding, thinking about the world, including that cosmology in it, but there is no practice or.

[00:08:00] Mark: my contention. My contention is that you don't have, you don't have a prescribed set of holidays. And ritual practices as an existentialist. you You have ideas, you definitely have a framework for how you view the world and what you think is important. You have a value set. All of those things are true, but there's an implementation, a social implementation.

So for yourself, and then for your fellows who also practice the same path that I think makes the difference between a religion and a philosophy. And I know there are people who disagree with me about that, so that's okay too.

Yucca: Yeah, it's just another one of those ones that you'll see, particularly from the theist side of paganism, loving at non-theistic and say, this is, if you don't believe in gods, then you're not. Religion. And of course, we've talked about this so many times on the podcast before about, so not just within paganism, but all the other [00:09:00] religions that don't have gods either.

Mark: Exactly. If what we're doing, isn't a religion. It certainly bears all of the characteristics of a religion except for believing in supernatural beings. And we are sure, spinning our wheels and burning a lot of energy and time and attention and caring and love on this thing that Apparently isn't a religion. I don't know, it's working for me. It's helping me to be happy and more effective in the world. And

Yucca: And a lot of folks it's really quite lovely to see the community growing online and. Hopefully soon again, in, in person, as we've been talking about, the vaccines have been rolling out and the, some of the restrictions are lightening up. So this has been a joy to see over the past few years.

Mark: I have been Amazed and delighted because among other things I had assumed as I started to frame this naturalistic nontheistic pagan path, for one [00:10:00] thing, I did a lousy job of research to start with because there were other people that were already doing that. And so, and I just, I didn't find him when I was looking around.

I did not find their stuff. And so I don't claim to have invented non theist paganism by any means. I just developed this path. It's got a specific set of values and principles in it and a specific set of practices and a bunch of people apparently like it. So, I'm pretty psyched about that because one of the things that religion is good at is bringing people together.

Yucca: Yeah. So before we get into those specifics, why don't we talk a little bit about the idea of sacred, what that is? Ways that we define it and how that differs from related, but different ideas like divinity and worship and things like that.

Mark: Yeah. As I [00:11:00] started thinking about, well, all right. You've concluded that you need a value set. Well, what's it going to be? The first thing that occurred to me was that the axioms that religions build their principles on or. Principles of sacredness. They are about what is most important.

If you're a Christian, there is nothing more important than God. God is right at the top of the pyramid and God is sacred and everything about God is sacred. Right. And what we mean by sacred is, you know, that it's an opinion. It's a conclusion that we have drawn that this particular. Element of the universe is of such value that it deserves to be treated with reverence and respect and caring.

And well I said reverence, but reverence is the word that keeps coming up for me. And so I had to think about, well, what do I think is really deserving of reverence here in this big whole universe [00:12:00] and. I draw, I drew it down to four. What I call the four pillars, the four sacred pillars of atheopagan ism and they are truth, love life and beauty. And there's a difference between those opinions of what is sacred and say the idea in pantheism that everything is divine. Because that when you say everything is divine, what you're really saying is that there is a quality called divinity, like radioactivity or a temperature that can be measured in every thing that it contains.

And it can be determined to be there. And. [00:13:00] I don't believe in divinity. I don't think that there is a quality called that. I think that there are things that we think are so sacred that it's easy to confuse them with being divine.

Yucca: so the idea being that this would be some innate quality that was independent of the person perceiving it, that whether he, whether a human was there or not, whether are who else is out there in the universe than just us here on earth, that whether or not we were looking at it, it's still. Divine it's still.

And then what I'm unclear on it with the, with pantheism is that, is everything define or do are some things more divine than other things?

Mark: to my knowledge, and I need to acknowledge now that there are two major branches of pantheism. There is. Pantheism full-stop which ascribes divinity to everything in the universe. And [00:14:00] then there is scientific pantheism, which has a naturalistic cosmology, but whose value set is that everything in the universe is sacred. So there, there are, or distinctions between those two paths. I think you said it very well that. In a universe in which divinity was ubiquitous. It wouldn't matter whether there were any observers. To draw any conclusions about the universe. It would all just be kind of glowing with divinity because that's how it's made that has this intrinsic quality built into it.

That it, it does that. Whereas sacredness, as I keep saying is an opinion. The example that I used in my book is that if I get two pieces of four by four lumber and I bolt them at right angles to one another, suddenly I have a symbol that is very sacred to about a billion people on the [00:15:00] planet, because it's a cross to me it's still just lumber.

But to them, it's a highly sacred evocative symbol that carries with it, all of this meaning and all of this sort of theological. Burden and legacy, all that kind of stuff. So we have differing opinions. And what that means is that it's not about the lumber. It's about our opinions

Yucca: yeah. And that can be shared with people like you were saying the billion or so, who would share that perspective. And also not what I hold sacred might be different than what you do Mark, or although I suspect that there's quite a bit that we have in common.

Mark: I agree.

Yucca: but that, that sacredness is something that we assign.

That we understand that we give to it. It's it's about our [00:16:00] relationship with whatever that is.

Mark: Yes. Yes. At root, I think when we decide that something is sacred, what we're really saying is I have decided to conduct myself in relation to this thing in a manner that is deeply respectful because I consider it to be so important. And that brings me back around to those four pillars. Truth is.

Impossible to navigate the world without, and people who try to navigate the world without truth, find themselves in really messed up circumstances. And we see this in the United States a lot right now where we have the entire Fox news Q Anon. Conspiracy theory, right wing. That believes things that are demonstrably untrue, and it takes them into positions of paranoia and in some cases, violence, and it causes deep rift in our [00:17:00] society.

Right now, if those folks. We're more into critical thinking and skeptical interrogation of their positions. They would change those positions and they wouldn't be stuck in this kind of whirl of imaginary dangers and mysterious enemies.

Yucca: And then could focus on the very real concrete challenges and problems that we're facing as a civilization.

Mark: Yes. Exactly. So, and now is the time when we need to be doing that. And part of the great tragedy of the propaganda machine that began with Fox news and right wing blogs, and that kind of stuff is that we really don't have any time to waste on those imaginary dangers. We've got plenty of real dangerous that we need to address now. So truth. So truth is important. Speaking. The [00:18:00] truth is important. Seeking the truth is important.

Yucca: The pursuit of truth. That's what science is doing, using a very specific framework, but seeking that truth and trying to spiral in closer and closer to truth is one and important. At least for me, those that's one of the things that I consider sacred, but also deeply practical. Just incredibly practical.

It allows for the world that we live in for us to be able to be doing this podcast from hundreds of miles apart, looking at each other at screens, and then recording this and sending it out to all to the air buds of all of the wonderful listeners. Like without the pursuit of truth, this wouldn't be possible.

Mark: that's right. That's right. And so, yeah. I mean, the pursuit of [00:19:00] truth has been core to the human experience for as long actually prior to the advent of modern humans. I'm sure because problem solving is our superpower and you solve problems by understanding them and by finding solutions that actually work.

Now, sometimes you have to go through a bunch of iterations of things that don't actually work.

Yucca: most of the time.

Mark: Yes, but that doesn't mean that pursuit of what is true. Isn't what is most important at the core of that whole endeavor? So. That's just one of them. I considered truth to be sacred. And I consider that speaking.

The truth is really important, even when it's uncomfortable. I think it was Carl Sagan, although this is a little sharp for him because he's, he was such a kind man, but I think it was Carl Sagan. Who said, if it can be destroyed by the truth, it should be destroyed by the truth. We don't have time for delusion

[00:20:00] Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: in this world anymore. We don't have time for it.

 So

Yucca: who that quote was. Let's see.

Mark: might be Neil deGrasse Tyson, but I thought it was Carl Sagan.

Yucca: Being attributed to Sagan. Yeah.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. Well, he's not wrong. He's not wrong, honestly. And that can sound harsh because being confronted with the truth can be very painful for people. You know, the truth is that we don't really have any credible evidence to suggest that there are invisible. Intelligences with powers to, to affect the physical nature of the universe in the world. you know, the idea of gods and spirits and demons and all that. We don't have any credible evidence to suggest that those things are real. And what that means [00:21:00] is that if we apply some skepticism Ockham's razor, we clued that the odds are good, that they don't exist. And so we can move on to talk about things that do exist, like we do here on this podcast, but that can be an incredibly painful thing. For people that have. Fervently believed in those kinds of beings.

Yucca: Yeah. And also with truth, sometimes it turns out the things that we thought were true. Aren't we get new evidence. Is there new clues? And sometimes we gotta let go of the old way of. Thinking about things

Mark: And interpersonally, it's really important to note here that the truth, when it comes to an interpersonal dynamic between people can contain paradoxes. One person's perspective may have validity for [00:22:00] them in a way that doesn't square with the opinion of another person in the interaction. And.

There's still some validity to both of those perspectives, even if neither one reflects the exact truth of what words were said or who did what? Because interpersonal dynamics have layers and layers of emotions and motivations and

Yucca: There's such complexity and it's incredibly complicated as well. Yeah.

Mark: Very much. So

Yucca: And then we can get into the fun stuff of relativity with both perspectives, being true at the same time and all of that. And that's one of the things that was very uncomfortable when being first presented and still is found quite uncomfortable to our human brains to even think about them.

But. We get so much from trying to tease that apart [00:23:00] and try and figure it out and honoring that pursuit.

Mark: Yes. Yes. And so to kind of wrap this portion up, I consider truth the pursuit of the truth, the articulation of the truth and action, based on understanding of the truth to be a noble pursuits, to be. The actions of a person of integrity and the truth, therefore is sacred to me. The next pillar I don't have a particular order that I just say them in whatever order occurs to me at the time, but let's talk about beauty because that's one of the most misunderstood of the the atheopagan four pillars.

Yucca: I'm guessing you don't mean photo-shopped magazine ready when you talk about beauty?

Mark: No, not talking about physical beauty standards, conventional attractiveness anything that has to do with the shape of human bodies or the color of them or anything else I'm not [00:24:00] talking about. Any of that, what I'm talking about is the beauty of the natural world. Because what I have seen a lot happen, having worked in environmental protection for a long time, is that the first thing that goes out the door is the aesthetics. It's like, well, yes, that's a forest, but it could be timber. And then the argument turns into, well, but we have to produce, we have to preserve biodiversity, which is a good argument. It ignores the fact that when you mow down that forest, you make a God awful eyesore. And that in and of itself, the magnificence of the world is inspiring to us.

And I find that sacred in and of itself, the way that mountains look, the way that waves break the way that. That creeks, turbulent Babel across rocks, the the vistas of the stars than the various celestial bodies that are up there. The view of the earth from [00:25:00] space, these things they're profoundly moving and because they're profoundly moving, they count

Yucca: and not just sight, but also the sounds and the smells and the, all of the perception, the way that we interface with everybody else.

Mark: of nature. Maybe I should have called it that instead. The experience of nature is itself sacred. So, It's really important for me to explain that because it didn't even cross my mind in, you know, inimitable, you know, kind of clueless, white, straight guy fashion. The way that word beauty can be weaponized and has been weaponized against people. And that, isn't how, I mean it at all. It never was. And I just think that it's important for us to recognize that [00:26:00] it's not enough to say, well, it's only a desert, so let's dig a big hole and get out the uranium that, that violates my sense of the sacred arrangement of the world.

Yucca: That's something that I suspect is quite shared by many humans. You look around our world and work. We're constantly seeking that. And different people experience and express it in different ways. And, you know, that's changed between individuals and cultures and but there is also, there's something about that connection that we have with our world.

Mark: Yes. I mean, think about it. How many people flock to go to the beach all over the world. Right. And they can be of all different kinds of cultures. This is not a particularly Western or thing or Eastern thing, [00:27:00] or it's just, people want to go to where there is surf breaking over beaches.

Yucca: Especially at sunset or sunrise, something about that interaction with light at those angles and Oh yeah.

Mark: because it's beautiful and beauty is not, it's not an also ran characteristic. It's not a a disposable or dispensable quality to me. It's sacred.

Yucca: It's part of that, all that wonder. Okay.

Mark: Yes. So, truth. We talked about beauty. We talked about let's talk about life.

Yucca: Life. Yeah.

Mark: This is another one where we can have misunderstandings.

Yucca: Oh, as in some folks might think you're talking anti-choice when you say

Mark: Oh, well, 

Yucca: Oh, okay.

Mark: option, but There are, there's a lot of misunderstanding when I say life. I [00:28:00] mean life with a capital L I mean the biosphere,

Yucca: You biosphere. Yeah. Nature, right? Yeah.

Mark: The engaged interpenetrated systems of organisms and forces that constitute life on earth that is sacred and deserves difference, reverence service even sacrifice. It's like, no, I'm not going to do this thing. That would be really fun and cool because it's too destructive to the environment.

Yucca: Yeah. So, but not necessarily that you're not going to do anything that might harm a single life because as, because life is a system. That continues even the individual doesn't, but in order for there to be life, there has to be the death side of it. The life that is in our bodies, whatever your dietary choices are that comes from other life.

And that life [00:29:00] came from other life that came from other life that came from other life. Okay.

Mark: Life at root is an assembly disassembly, reassembly process at every level. That's what life does it assembles itself into recognizable organisms? It reproduces, if it can then it's disassembled those component parts are rearranged into new organisms may be the same kind. Maybe not.

Yeah. And that process just goes on and the disassembly is every bit as sacred as the assembly, honestly.

Yucca: Yeah. And we talk about this a lot in the autumn, but any time of year is it just is really important to, to see that life with a capital L is both. It's all of it. It's the creation and destruction. It's the rearrangement of the you're taking those Legos and you're pulling them apart near making your spaceship and then you're making your couch bed or whatever it is you're making next with it.

[00:30:00] Yeah.

Mark: right. And the more I learn about it, the more awestruck and Reverend I become about it I mean, that's the root of earth-based paganism, right. You know, fundamentally we're just wowed by the extraordinary fact that this is happening here. That it may be happening. Other places almost certainly is.

But it's happening here. It's happening a lot here. I mean, you know, you can go meters and meters down into the soil and you will still find it happening. The earth is absolutely lousy with life and and it's. It's magnificent. It's so beautiful. And it's so fragile because these chains of activity that lead to the creation of these new organisms are often very attenuated.

It only takes one interruption or two interruptions to prevent that from happening at all. So we have to tread so lightly and we're so bad at that.

Yucca: Yeah, because it's so interconnected. All of [00:31:00] it in, I would challenge somebody to find two organisms and not find a connection between them.

Mark: Yes.

Yucca: It's okay. Between that organism and pretty much any element up to a 92 that isn't somehow connected as well. Right?

Mark: Yup.

Yucca: Like it's just

Mark: 5 billion degrees of Kevin bacon.

Yucca: so. I mean that's for me that's the core or that the other, what we've been talking about is also so important, but the bios spear life itself, that is, that's the first place that, to me, I mean, it's hard put a hierarchy on it, but that to me, I would think of is that right?

Most sacred because without life, well, yeah. No truths. Right. And no, and we haven't talked [00:32:00] about it yet, but love, but yeah, those things that life is the prerequisite for anything else that we value.

Mark: Yes. I agree. I agree. And that then leads to the fourth pillar, which is love and love is so intrinsically. Inherently human. Not that other species don't have an effect amongst themselves because they absolutely do.

Yucca: Sure, but something can be a quality of us and others can also have that quality, but it's still, it doesn't make it less in us just because somebody else has it as well. Yeah.

Mark: And when we talk about not what is labeled love, which is sometimes abuse or control

Yucca: Or obsession

Mark: or obsession When we talk about genuine love, genuine wishing for the wellbeing of the other, you know, genuine feeling of kinship to the degree that when [00:33:00] someone else is hurt in some way, then you yourself are hurt as well.

That kind of affinity is such a magnificent.

Manifestation here on earth. I mean, it's it's the sort of thing where

Yucca: Right.

Mark: It's the emergent complexity, right? It's not the sort of thing that could have been predicted by looking by investigating Beatles and figuring out how they were going to evolve, how we were going to evolve from there.

It's a leap in a way. And. It contains such power for us as humans power to heal power to create safety power to create joy. And so I consider love to be sacred no matter who it's between. Genuine love. You know, that is truly loving and it doesn't [00:34:00] matter if it's straight or gay or

Yucca: We're not even romantic or yeah.

Mark: or because there's frankly, I mean, it's a pretty crappy word.

Love. We use it as a catchall for about 15 different kinds of relations. There are other societies that had many more words for those different kinds of relationship feelings. And I think that would be helpful for us to adopt if we were able to. But since we're presented with the big basket, I call the whole big basket sacred.

And that means that I don't have any right. Ever to. In any way, criticize or real love as it exists between people

And that a part of my responsibility as a social being is to foster the opportunities for love for other people.

Yucca: Yeah. And actually, can we pull the conversation [00:35:00] back to, you said the word, your responsibility. And I think that when we talk about sacred, it really is tied in with the responsibilities that we have, right. That if we believe something is sacred, We're acknowledging some sort of responsibility that we have to it's, if it's sacred to us, it's something that is worth protecting or it's something that is worth being in reverence of.

Mark: And in service to, and so I, I mean, I feel that I have a responsibility to live in service to all four of these things. You know, it is not consistent with my value system to countenance untruth because somebody doesn't want their rock turned over and everybody can see what's underneath.

No I think. The truth matters. I think that beauty matters and I [00:36:00] have spent quite a bit my career working in environmental protection, not only because of biodiversity and climate and pollution and environmental justice and all those considerations, but also because of the sheer aesthetics of nature and how magnificent it is and how moving and necessary it is for us to have the experience of nature. Likewise in my voting, in my personal interaction, all that kind of stuff. It's my job to foster love. And that means that I don't have much time or patience for people who have various kinds of bigotry against particular kinds of love, because they have been ginned up by some hateful mean-spirited preacher somewhere.

Yucca: Who's just using it as a way for control.

Mark: And fundraising don't forget fundraising.

Yucca: Yes.

Mark: And then finally, there's life itself. There is the remarkable fact that we're here and that [00:37:00] we are a part of a process. And that process is as close to magical, even though it doesn't have any magic in it as. Could possibly be determined or described.

And it is it's sublime. It's beyond description. I mean, I don't use this word ever because it's been so, so rundown, but it's awesome. Life on life is awesome. It is all inspiring.

Yucca: Yes. Clarify. When we talk about these things that are sacred to us, this isn't us saying, you should believe the same things that we do. That's for you to decide. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of these were things that you shared too, because as we've been talking about, they are pretty awesome, but these are things that are.

Quite [00:38:00] worthy of seeing as sacred, but there are things that, that we may have missed or interpretations that we have that, that vary and that's okay. And the discourse around that is valuable. That's where we all learn and grow from that.

Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I always go back to this and I'll go back to it again. When I first created atheopagan aneurysm, it was for me, it wasn't to tell anybody else what to think, what to do, how to behave any of that kind of stuff. It was more the exercise of all right. If there were a religion that really was going to work for me perfectly, what would it look like? And I'm not everybody I have encountered a few thousand people now in the world who seem to find this to be, you know, pretty close to working for them. But ultimately your path is your own and you can make whatever adjustments changes, [00:39:00] new creations that work for you in navigating your own world and making what you feel are ethical and responsible choices.

Yucca: Yeah. And that, that, that process is it's worth it. And it's valuable.

Mark: Yeah, we aren't really encouraged to think about big philosophical questions, very often in this culture. And that's a shame. It's not a surprise because we live in a society that is heavily invested in control, mostly by commercial voices, but also by political voices and religious voices. What, let's be honest.

Yucca: how often those are overlapped.

Mark: Yes. That is really remarkable how much the money thing and the religion thing and the authority thing I'll get wrapped up in each other. So, so have that conversation with yourself and with your friends? I,

Yucca: once. Right? Cause that's something that you're going to find new [00:40:00] things. Each time you look and maybe it's changed. Maybe your understanding has. We change. We don't, we're not static.

Mark: Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, where are we now? What else do we have to.

Yucca: And I think this is a, I think this is a great place to wrap up today knowing that in the future, we're going to come back and talk in more detail about some of the principles, as well as our. Seasonal topics and whatever comes up, which matches with what's going on in the world. So

Mark: Great. That sounds good. This has been a really fun, lively conversation. I've really enjoyed it

Yucca: me too. Thanks, Mark. 

Mark: and you're very welcome Yucca. And we'll see everybody next week.