Rima Vesely-Flad [00:00:36] Hello, and welcome to this podcast series, Uplifting Black, Nichiren Buddhist Voices. I’m your host, Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad. I direct the initiative for Black Buddhist Studies, which is an academic and community-based project that centers the voices of Buddhist practitioners of African descent. I am so delighted to bring this series to you, because Black Nichiren Buddhist practitioners numerically make up one of the most significant Black Buddhist communities in the United States. And yet, and yet, the interpretations and the rituals of Black Nichiren Buddhists have often been marginalized. I would say that I myself am guilty of this. This podcast series aims to center the distinctive teachings and incredibly distinctive practices of Nichiren Buddhism. And to shine a spotlight on why the Nichiren lineage is so compelling for so many Black practitioners. In our first episode today, we will hear about the power of Nichiren Buddhist practice for Tina Turner, who is perhaps the most famous Black Buddhist in the world. We’ll hear from one of her biographers, Dr. Ralph Craig. Dr. Craig is the author of Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner, published in 2023. He’s an interdisciplinary scholar of religion. His research focuses on South Asian Buddhism. I will say that he is extraordinary in his language capacity. He works with textual materials in Sanskrit, Pali, Buddhist, Chinese, and classical Tibetan. And he is also a scholar of American Buddhism. Alongside his Buddhist practice of more than two decades, he received his PhD in religious studies at Stanford University. His research interests span early Buddhist preachers and Tina Turner. Thank you and welcome Ralph to our emerging podcast on Black Nichiren Buddhists. You have done groundbreaking work. I’m so excited for you to be our first interview in terms of thinking about not only Buddhist practitioners, Black Buddhist practitioners but specifically Black Nichiren Buddhist practitioners. And you are so pivotal in that you’ve published this groundbreaking book on the most famous Black Buddhist practitioner eve. And teacher, let’s include teacher. And not only have you published a book which has been so important and just evocative on so many levels which I know we’ll dig into. But you yourself are a practitioner and a scholar. So you bring so much insight in my mind to this series of questions and what nature and Buddhism means for people of African descent today. So I first want to ask you about your orientation towards Tina Turner, your excitement as an academic – because of course it’s an academic book – but also your personal commitment to researching her life and her identity and her practice as a Nichiren Buddhist practitioner.
Ralph Craig [00:04:02] Well, thank you for having me, Rima. I’m always happy to talk about my research and my research into Tina Turner. And it’s a kind of a funny thing with these book projects, as you know. Once you put them out in the world, they just take on their own life over and over again. I’m very grateful to be on here. You know, I’ve said in many contexts before that I think. For me, writing the book was really about kind of linking two phrases together, linking the way that Buddhist sutras usually start, right? They usually start with this, “Thus have I heard,” or “The following was heard by me,” or something like that. And anybody who’s read a Buddhist sutra before, they are constantly reading these words, right? So always being oriented to a tradition that remembers itself as oral, as about hearing, even as many today are reading those words, you’re always being put into a context where the tradition remembers hearing those words. So I think I’m kind of always attuned to hearing the tradition, right, always remembering that. There is some element of the tradition that remembers itself as being warm. And then I’ve read Tina Turner’s writings many times. And I was always struck by her first memoir, I, Tina, where at the end of it, in the epilogue, she closes the book by saying, when she’s ready, she will devote herself to teaching. And some will listen and some will hear. And so I began to think these two phrases together. “Thus have I heard” and “Some will hear.” And so, I started to think about Tina Turner seriously to think what would it mean to hear the things that she has to say about religion, about black religion in America, about Buddhism, about black Buddhism, about Nichiren Buddhism, about black nature and Brutus, about… All of these kinds of things, right? That’s really where the genesis of the work came from. I, like many people know Tina Turner’s story or knew some facet of that story and was of course inspired by it in some ways. It’s an inspirational kind of story. This kind of rag to riches narrative of the kind of public transformation of trauma. That turns into this successful life and career. And that is, of course, very inspiring. And I started to think more deeply about the place of religion in that story.
Rima Vesely-Flad [00:07:09] Yes, and you talk a lot about dreams in your book and her use of dreams and also the fact that there was so much healing in that process of dreaming. I would love for you to talk about what that meant for her, that language of dreams, that commitment to keep dreaming, and how Buddhism, and particularly. chanting from your research, how the how chanting fostered her process of dreaming and holding onto her dream.
Ralph Craig [00:07:50] But again, another term that continued to come up when reading her own discussions of her life and listening to her in interviews. And, you know, she as a public figure, right, has this vast public archive of her words. And it becomes an interesting project doing research to try to get your hands on the original transcripts or sometimes unedited interview footage. And I was able to get access to some of her major. Interviews, major long-form interviews, I was able to get access to some of the transcripts for those, right? And sometimes the original footage, right, the unedited footage shows an interesting project because constantly she would talk about dreaming, creativity, being a little girl in the cotton fields, you know, in 1930s Nutbush Tennessee, which is Not bushes and- interesting place because it’s in West Tennessee, so it’s the upper south, right? So a lot of the issues of the lower south. The way racism works in the upper South is different from the way it works in the lower South, race relations and things like this. Not to say that it wasn’t difficult or bad, but it was different than it was, for example, in the Delta, right, than it somewhere like Alabama or Louisiana, Mississippi, a different situation. So for her growing up as a little girl in Nutbush, in Cedar City, her family was sharecroppers and she was picking cotton. She always talked about dreaming in the cotton field and being left behind and often getting in trouble because others were filling their cotton, their bag, their sack with sometimes two or three times as much cotton as she was because she’s picking cotton and then contemplating and then looking up at the sky and then imagining herself elsewhere. And she tells us the story that made it into her last book, Happiness Becomes You, where, you know, she was picking rubies and diamonds. And then she’s called back to reality when her father calls out her name and tells her to keep up, right? And she’s not picking ruby and diamonds, she’s picking cotton, right, akin to diamonds for some, but not for her. So this dreaming seems to have always been there for her and always a way, right? It’s not surprising to me that she would get into a tradition like Soka Gakkai that talks about creativity and dreams as a way to, as they say in the Soka Gakkai tradition, challenge your karma, right. So there’s of course changing your karma but there’s also challenging your karma and we can talk about that. But it’s not surprising to me that she, that would be appealing to her because she seems to have always had throughout her life this way of using imaginative capacity and dreaming as a way to move through trauma, move around it, move through it, move beyond it.
Rima Vesely-Flad [00:11:09] With Soka Gakkai and that emphasis on dreaming, there’s also this very present, twice daily ritual practice and she, you and your book about her talk a lot about the meaning of chanting for her. So it’s curious, her body in the cotton fields, her body is doing something, her mind is elsewhere. In the chanting, there’s a kind of seamlessness, right, a kind of embodied presence, there is something that coheres for her in the ritual practice, and in the focus on a ritual object. And I wonder, what did you sense was so important in this particular practice for her as her mind and her body meet? And there’s that kind of synergy between that dreaming and then that body joining the dreaming.
Ralph Craig [00:12:07] So the Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhist tradition right there, they’re fond of this quote from Daisaku Ikeda, who was the third president of the Soka-Gakkai Buddhist organization in Japan, and he was the first and only president of these Soka Gakkai international global organization. And he passed away in November, 2023. And SGI members often memorize the following quote, right? And Tina Turner has mentioned this quote before. This is:
Never for an instant forget the effort to renew your life, to build yourself anew. Creativity means to push open the heavy groaning doorway of life itself. This is not an easy task. Indeed, it may be the most severely challenging struggle there is. For opening the door to your own life is in the end more difficult than opening the to all the mysteries of the Universe but to do so is to vindicate your existence as human beings. Even more, it is the mode of existence that is authentically attuned to the innermost truths of life itself. It makes us worthy of the gift of life.
And so for Turner, taking this quote, like many Soka Gakkai members, is the practice of a kind of pragmatism, right? This is something that comes out when you talk to Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhists, they’re always talking about how pragmatic they view their tradition, how pragmatic they view chanting, the teachings and the tradition. And I think it was her perception of the practice as being this practical way of addressing questions of freedom and karma, right, transformation. And the fulfillment of both spiritual and material desires. And on that last point, as many Soka Gakkai members turn or include it, see Soka-Gakkai as presenting a unified theory, if you will, of the relationship between spiritual and interior desires, right? I think it gives its members and practitioners a way of thinking. “Elevated spiritual aims,” if you will, elevated spiritual aims of thinking those together alongside very practical day-to-day material realities.
Rima Vesely-Flad [00:14:47] It makes so much sense to me, given the given what I know about SGI, and who’s drawn to SGI. I wonder because I know you’ve written about SGI communities more broadly than the biography of Tina Turner. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about your research, in terms of who’s drawn to SGI. And I would love to also hear a bit about your own experience. I know that this is both intellectual and academic and it comes also from a kind of personal curiosity, and I would love to hear about the broader community and the organization but also your own draw to it.
Ralph Craig [00:15:33] Such good questions. So in my broader research in Soka Gakkai, I became and I continue to be interested in the ways in which Soka Gakkai, the Jodo Shinshu tradition in the United States, and of course other Nichiren groups in the United States, other Zen lineages that don’t center silent meditation practices and so on. How these traditions are marginalized in the study of American Buddhism? And how traditions that center ritual enchanting and don’t understand ritual enchanting to be different from meditation, that’s what they understand meditation to mean, and they are well within, they are absolutely correct. Right? From a traditional perspective in Buddhist history and tradition, I became interested in the way these communities are marginalized in discussions about… In public discourse about Buddhism, and Buddhism in America, and definitely when talking about Black Buddhists in these kinds of communities. My broader research into Soka Gakkai then centers around, in many ways, the intellectual history of the tradition, because what I often find happens is in scholarship that then seeks to overcome, right, the neglect of a tradition like Jodo Shinshu or Nichiren Buddhism or something like that in the United States, Nichiren Buddhist lineages. What often happens then is that discussion becomes more about sociology and demographics, right, and less about the actual great philosophy, doctrines, practices, that these traditions engage. And so Soka Gakkai is often seen, if it’s thought of at all. Right. It’s often just noted that it has this presence of African-American members, and if we’re talking about SGI USA, right? And of course, SGI is all over the world, so that we would be having a different conversation about SGIs in Brazil, but not Soka Gakkai in India. These are the three largest Soka Gakkai organizations internationally, right, SGI USA, SGI in India, and SGI in Brazil. All right, so they each have their own unique of situations and demographic make-ups, obviously. But when we talk about SGI USA, talk about how there’s so many African Americans in the organization and so many Latino and Hispanic people in the organizations. And then that’s all they say about the organization. Oh, and they chant. And that’s somewhere on the spectrum from interesting to silly when we about chanting for material things right And that’s usually where the discussion stops. And what I’ve become interested in is the ways in which the Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhist tradition does very interesting things with its understanding of Nichiren’s teachings and doctrines, its interpretation of both Chinese and Japanese Buddhist philosophy, philosophical systems. And how it weaves those understandings into its kind of everyday practice, centering that on the Lotus Sutra. It draws a very pragmatic message from the Lotus sutra. And I think what makes some scholars uncomfortable, right, is I write about this and I think through this. I think would make some scholars uncomfortable is that Nichiren Buddhists, Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhists, in particular, but all Nichiren Buddhists, Nichiren himself, take the Lotus Sutra seriously in very particular ways. They don’t read it as a good story or a mythology or something like that. They read it, as Nichiren says, as a day-to-day record of our own existence. And so when the Lotus Sutras say this, Right. It talks about the Dharma rain that falls on all equally. Right. The Soka Gakkai takes that seriously and says, even if a person has no interest in philosophy, just wants to chant to get material benefits or just wants to be a part of the community is not even that interested in material benefits or philosophy or even really doing the practice per se. Right. They just want to be there. All are welcome. Why? Because the Lotus Sutra says, the Dharma rain falls on all equally. It doesn’t say it falls on the people we like or the people who are philosophically inclined or who are inclined to do the practice intensely. And it falls less so on the people who don’t do the practice intensively. It doesn’t say that. It says it falls all equally. I think that makes many scholars of religion uncomfortable. This kind of genuine discomfort with people who take these texts, these quote unquote myths, seriously, right? And for many scholars of religion, given the history of religious studies as a discipline, you know, it starts to shade uncomfortably towards theology.
Ralph Craig [00:21:10] But I feel well-placed because of my BA in theological studies. I am not uncomfortable at all with interacting with people or communities who take these kinds of practices seriously. But you also asked this question that I’ve skirted around. What about it appeals to me? What do I find compelling? And that’s an interesting thing for me because I often, I think one of the things that I enjoy about being a scholar is that I can write about aspects of Soka Gakai’s history, for example. Like any tradition, like any lineage, its primary concern is its own consistency and preservation. So parts of its history that don’t contribute to the consistent message or the consistent story it’s trying to tell, and parts of this history that maybe don’t read as well in the contemporary period. The tradition tries to just not deal with it. And as a scholar, I don’t have to do that, right? As a scholar I can look into those dark corners, into those parts of the tradition, the ways that the tradition has changed over time. When I’m writing about Soka Gakkai or thinking through Soka Gakkai, I don’t do it as an insider. I do it from the perspective of a scholar looking at its history. Right. And that allows me to tell stories about its history that maybe the tradition will not tell about itself, but that becomes complex. Right. Because I know many people in that community. And so when I write things that maybe they’re not as pleased about, and they do all of these conversion drives that bring many new members into the organization who only know the current narratives that the organization tells, they don’t know some of the kind of mid 20th century history of the organization, for example. So they might encounter my work and learn things that they did not know. And maybe things that the organization did not want them to know. And then they look at me. So that’s of course a line to walk. But for myself, what compels me to the lineage is that the hope on which it bases itself, a form of philosophy that Daisaku Ikeda often called Buddhist humanism, which is a catch-all phrase for this constellation of ideas that advanced the thesis that, one, all human beings possess unlimited stores of courage, compassion, wisdom, and life force, which is how Soka Gakai characterizes the state of Buddhahood or awakened potential, Buddha nature. Two, that this isn’t, this nature is not given by a deity of some kind, but rather is a natural feature of life, one’s birthright, if you will. And three, that because of this, all problems, whether they are social, personal, global, racial, gender, class, or any issue like that, 100% solvable. Because there is no problem that has a divine source. Every single issue has a very human source, a very humid reality behind it. And so because of that, it can be changed. In fact, it must change. And it will change one way or the other. There’s no guarantee it’ll change for the better. But there is this Buddhist guarantee that it will change.
Ralph Craig [00:25:26] So you might as well become an agent in that change. I find this thesis, this kind of Buddhist humanism thesis, very compelling. I find it very compelling to look at the world or to look out my window and to know always that fence over there where somebody had the idea to put that fence there. It doesn’t just happen to me. That when I move through the world and someone sees me as a racialized being, and tries their hardest to get me to see myself in that way, that is not natural. That is a construct.
Rima Vesely-Flad [00:26:09] Thank you.
Ralph Craig [00:26:09] Because it’s a human construct, it can, it will, and it must change. And I have energy to engage in the work of that change because I know that I’m not up against something that is, quote, divine or that is mystical in front of me. It’s very real. It has history. It has a trajectory. It has series of discourses. And I can intervene in that process.
Rima Vesely-Flad [00:26:40] Yes, what you’re saying reminds me of an interview I did with Lama Rod Owens, who is ordained in a Tibetan tradition. I’m not even sure what year the interview was, but anyway, he speaks a great deal about not always being in reactivity or not always being in response to white hegemony or white delusion, but rather being able to be still. Non-reactive and I find that to be very powerful and maybe one of the things that is most important to me in terms of establishing a consistent practice. The language that is resonant for me personally is refuge, and it sounds like Humanism, but I want to ask if there is a particular language that really evokes for you that sense that nothing is insurmountable because it’s not rooted in some kind of divine will or concept. If there’s something where you come back and say, no, that’s actually not true, or no, that’s not insurmountable.
Ralph Craig [00:27:52] If there is any particular language, for me, it’s the language of Buddhahood and Buddha nature. I was one of those people who became interested in Buddhist traditions, really for the story of Shakyamuni. I find it a very compelling story. And I find that even in the more mystical, the more what many modernists see as the kind of uncomfortable aspects of that story. Even in presentations of the Buddha as just a human being who did it, that is not the way much of the British tradition understands that figure. The Buddha is not like your Uncle John. He’s not like Uncle John, he’s fundamentally a different kind of being. And so even if you take readings of, for example, the Pali cannon, you can read it in a way where you read the unit as like just your average person who understood something particularly insightful about reality, lived his 80 years and died. Some of those teachings he gave according to the holly canon itself, right. Some of the teachings he gained in the heaven realms, some of those teachings he get, right, he was able to multiply himself at will. So. Even if you want to read it that way, you would have to be doing a very selective reading to make that work. So even with all of that, I find very compelling the story of the idea that Buddhahood, that awakening, is this ability to see reality on multiple levels. As it is meaning in every way that it is, including all the ways that it can be, right, by definition, because imagination is a part of the way reality really is. And by the very understanding of emptiness and this kind of Madhyamaka take, for something to be true, objectively so, if you say, well, I don’t like this person because they are like this. That they are this is an interesting statement. Right. Because one to say that, that would have to mean that every single person or being that encounters that person views them in exactly the same way. But that’s almost never true. And so I’m going to say, I don’t like this person because they are just, they’re pure meanness. There’s nothing else about them other than the fact that they’re mean. Then that would have to mean that every single person that encounters them sees them as pure mean, this doesn’t see them in any other way. But that is often not true for almost anybody or encounter. They are seen in multiple ways by different people. So because that is the case, then. That means emptiness, right, that there is no inherent way that they are there. There is a complex network of causes and conditions and what will be directly related to a set of causes and conditions that are before you. And that Buddhahood is this capacity that sees that, understands that, and engages reality on that level. As this kind of fundamentally creative endeavor. I find that immensely compelling. And so I come back to the word, Buddhahood, you know, or if you talk about the potential right Buddha nature. That’s central to some of the founding narratives of Soka Gakkai. Josei Tota, the second president of Soka Gakkai, [spoke of a] notion of human revolution. As a kind of modern way of understanding [Buddhahood]. Many Soka Gakkai members find that language compelling. I think that taking off my scholar hat and thinking as a practitioner, there are ways that that can be very compelling. I don’t find that particularly compelling, but there are many who do. I find the language, I am not put off by kind of classical, Buddhist notions and terms…things like that. I’ve studied Sanskrit, I’ve studied Pali, I have studied Tibetan, I studied Chinese, et cetera. So I’m not, when I come across these kind of classical terms, I’m not put off by them. I find them very interesting and inspiring. So I come back to that term a lot.
Speaker 2 [00:32:50] I love that you have such a range of knowledge. I often say, you know this, publicly, you are the most vast person I have encountered in the sense of yes, Tibetan, Pali, Sanskrit, in terms of language study and [a study of] Tina Turner, and you did it all at the same time.
Ralph Craig [00:33:12] What I often think, why can’t we, I mean, this is back to the work of Tito Turner on Soka Gakai’s history, much of the work that you do, for example. I mean one of the things that I find so intellectually useful about the work that you’re doing about Black Buddhism and Black radical traditions is that Black Buddhists, surprise to all, are actually interested in all the things that others are interested in. I mean, you and I have talked about this before, Rima, but there is this real perception, particularly in academia, and as driven as it is, as structured by the norms, questions, and considerations of a kind of a white neoliberal mentality, right, is that there’s this belief that like a quote unquote marginalized person, so like a Black scholar, and then if you term it a Black woman, it’s like even a whole other thing, right? They have this marginalized identity in the academy. And it is almost as if they believe you wake up in the morning, you rise from your bed, and your first thought is: What am I going to do with my black day? Maybe I will maybe I will engage in a series of black religious practices after having my black coffee and, you know, washing my face in a black manner. I’m going to read books about black faith. You know, as if like you’re as if your whole life is about society’s racial character is racialized characterization of you. Like, that’s your whole life. And so that then when a Black person becomes Buddhist, that then what they’re interested in is Black things, but in a particular, right? And your book opens up this space to actually ask, what are people who practice Buddhism, people who are of African descent who practice Buddhism, what do they actually say they are interested in? Your book gives us a way to think through those questions, right, in quite an extensive manner, and the work that you do is so important. So when I encountered your work and the work of other scholars that I guess we don’t have time to talk about, but when I encounter this, I say what do Black SGI members actually say compels them? What did Tina Turner actually say she found? What is compelling about this tradition? And it’s not always related to the ways, the social categories that they are put into. Tina Turner almost never said, in any of her vast archive, that because I am a Black woman, the practice of chanting did X for me. I she didn’t seem to think in that way. Even as she was well aware of herself as a Black woman in a racialized system. And that’s part of the reason she left this country, or she left the United States. Because of her feeling that from the perspective of her career, let alone her personal life, she could never be seen as the kind of artist she wanted to be seen as in this country. Even when she became immensely successful. And she left the United States at the height of her commercial success in the United Sates, right? So she didn’t leave the country because she wasn’t successful here. Even though sometimes in her, in telling of her narrative, it’s presented that way, but she moved from the United Sates in 1988 that’s after “Private Dancer” and the multi-platinum follow-up to that break-even route. So she left at the hype of her American success, right. If ever there was a time to leave, it would have been before “Private Dancer.” That’s when she was struggling in the United States. But she left when she, quote unquote, made it. So that highlights. I talk about this in chapter five of the book. That highlights that she had a different set of concerns for why she left this country. So she was well aware of herself as a racialized and gendered entity. In the kind of American system what would compel her to the practice of Nichiren Buddhism, right, of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism, was not that per se. Even though once she began doing the practice, it addressed many of those kinds of concerns for her. But what your book opens up, Rima, this is what I’m saying. What your book, the space and the scholarship that your book open up, a way to understand Tina Turner in this way of, and this is what I bring out in my book in chapter four, right? What this language of dreams, creativity, and the practice of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism.
Rima Vesely-Flad [00:38:47] Yes, yes.
Ralph Craig [00:38:48] She could imagine far more than, for example, the racialized, gendered, class-based social stratification in the United States. She dreamed far more of that for herself and left because she dreamed that and saw that there were places where she could live free of those restrictions, which is not a claim to say that racism doesn’t exist in Switzerland. That’s not the claim, right? The claim for her is that she could live in the way that she wanted to live over there. That’s difficult to capture on paper. On paper, we can say so and so is as racist, but in a different way, perhaps, than the writer has a different history, that there’s a different way that these issues play out socially than in the United States. But what that doesn’t capture is that she experienced it differently. And that’s why she made that her home and her citizenship. Comes back to this language of dreaming, creativity, these practices, and what I think Black Buddhists are doing. This is beyond the Nichiren traditions. And of course, for those who will listen to this podcast, we should be clear, as your work, your current work is highlighting, there are many Nichiren Buddhist lineages in the United States. Soka Gakkai is only one of them. Though it often dominates narratives about Eastern Buddhism. It is not the only Eastern Buddhist lineage. But I think speaking about Black Buddhists more broadly, that there is this way that the traditions, Buddhist traditions, teachings, doctrines, have helped many Black Buddhist imagine otherwise possibilities for themselves in the world. I think that that unites many of these understandings.
Rima Vesely-Flad [00:40:53] Well, that’s a wonderful way to conclude. Thank you, Ralph, for so much, the vastness of what you offer, your research and its specificities, the sheer range of your research and its specifications, and also your practice. It comes through. It comes though that you have a kind of groundedness. And an inner knowledge and this isn’t a cerebral exercise solely, although it is also that. And I appreciate your willingness to open us up into this inquiry into Nichiren Buddhism in the United States as practiced by people of African descent and moving the different lineages that comprise Nichiren Buddhist in the States, from the margins to the center of our conversation and privileging the different iterations, the practices and the meanings. That’s really what you’re getting at, what it actually means to practice this tradition. I really appreciate your willingness to bring Tina Turner to us and then the vastness of your training in classical Buddhist studies. It’s really, it’s quite wonderful in all of its ways. Yes, thank you, thank, you, thank you.
Ralph Craig [00:42:12] Thank you.
Rima Vesely-Flad [00:42:14] And if you would like to chant for us, we would use it. And if not, that there’s no pressure whatsoever.
Ralph Craig [00:42:20] Well, what we do, what I do twice a day every day.
Ralph Craig [00:42:28] Nam-myo-renge-kyo Nam-Myo-Renge-kyoo Nam-MYO-RENGE-KYO
Ralph Craig [00:44:09] So that was about two thirds of the whole thing that we do. I didn’t want to lose my place and start saying the wrong part, but I do always do it that fast, twice a day, every day. But I often chant, on average, about an hour a day unless I’m very stressed or something’s going on in my life, in which case I would change two or three hours or something like that. Or when I need to see things clearly. But thank you so much for having me on this podcast.
Rima Vesely-Flad [00:44:40] Thank you. Deep bows, deep bows.