Time, Place, Classroom
WHEN The world gets so noisy. Too many voices straining, pushing past their natural limits to be heard. Our small ears can’t discern provenance or factuality. Reactions quicken, turning knee-jerk, protective. WHERE There is the place where trees thicken into extended families, root systems entwined beneath the earth. Look for the leafy canopy that forms […]
Prospecting for Grace
Praise The faithful sun, generously stirring energies of Earth and atmosphere, coaxing every green thing towards the rising song of spring. Parents walking with their children outside, smiling and laughing, nodding at neighbors out washing their cars. Quieted streets yielding their usual ruthless noise to melodious birdsong, squirrels rustling in the brush, the wind whistling […]
Love is a Rendering
Love is a Rendering Telling you how I love you is like trying to find things that haven’t been said about the ocean. My hands prefer to paint it— affection, water— sweeping, striped backgrounds, turquoise and deep salient greens, silvery whites frosting every liquid peak, and there’s the sky hovering above the seas like […]
Receiving the darkness
The word solstice was born from the Latin sol ( sun) and sistere ( to stand still). Solstice, winter This darker interlude could be a meditation, a reckoning with the deceptive nature of time. The exacting practice of being present is to show up for each round moment as if it were everything. This is […]
Morning is mostly a prayer
It’s been over a month since I last posted here. The reasons are many, but I guess it all whittles down to this: not blogging begets not blogging. I’m here now, though, offering this poem I wrote last month. It was a rainy November, indeed. Undone Honestly, it was the morning sky. November sun, rare […]
The Meaning of Compassion
The Kuan Yin She keeps watch in the warm corner of my bedroom, her bearing almost more regal for the rivers of cracks and generous chips that mark her faded turquoise. Her right hand, the deliverer of action, folds into Gyan Mudra, the gesture of consciousness. Preparing to take her picture, I haul myself into […]
Fat on Silence
I need to write it down. I should do this before true memory fades and is replaced, as it so often is, by a recall that looks like The way I wanted it to be, or The way I think it should have been. This is what we do, being humans of great imagination […]
The art that blesses my listening hands
Making Art with Beach Stones My home hums with them–— the smooth and rough, pale and dark, striped, speckled, some with lines, or bits of mica mesmerizing the light. They number in the thousands by now, populating table and bins and buckets, lining mantels and perched on shelves, […]
NOT ZEN, BUT NOW
Being present is easy when the blue sky moment is trimmed with green grass, when temperate breezes blow your hair back gently from your bright, clean face. You can hop off the worry train quickly in such minutes and hours. You can drop your baggage carelessly to the ground without so much as a glance […]
The Art of Being Present
art by my friend Marina Powdermaker. Find more of her work at https://www.etsy.com/shop/MarinaPowdermaker PAST where I am rereading the same testimonies from the same perspective: accused, accuser, over and over the details wearing deep grooves into the ledger in my mind. It must be truth, Mind says then, because I can’t erase the lines. FUTURE […]