It was spring and finally I heard him among the first leaves – then I saw him clutching the limb in an island of shade with his red-brown feathers all trim and neat for the new year. First, I stood still and thought of nothing. Then I began to listen. Then I was filled with…
We look with uncertainty beyond the old choices for clear-cut answers to a softer, more permeable aliveness which is every moment at the brink of death; for something new is being born in us if we but let it. We stand at a new doorway, awaiting that which comes… daring to be human creatures, vulnerable…
The optometrist says my eyes are getting better each year. Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription. What’s next? The light step I had at six? All the gray hairs back to brown? Skin taut as a drum? My improved eyes and I walked around town and celebrated. We took in the letters of the…
I want to be like the maples, letting go so easily of their leaves in the slightest autumn breeze, surrendering every piece of themselves they no longer need, and embracing bareness like a new suit they can simply step into. But I’m more like the beech trees, which cling to the husks of their leaves…
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising. How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken. How people come, from delight or the…
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few” ― Shunryu Suzuki My mind is full, and not always mindful. And I’ve been doing this a while. It’s not getting easier, but it is geting deeper, messier. What a joy! The deep path of mindfulness training as opposed to the…
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day that closes the moment you begin your plans. What you can plan is too small for you to…
“One practice that I use sometimes – say, in my dentist’s waiting-room – I call The ABCs of Grateful Living: I go through the alphabet and note for each letter the first word that comes to my mind. Then, I try to make a connection between that word and my practice of grateful living. It’s a…
The Humble Raisin is a portal to Mindfulness and beyond! How can a humble raisin possibly be a portal not only to the world of Mindfulness, but to the subtle thinking and emotional realm that goes on just beneath consciousness and then further down into the root of compassionate energy and a sense of connection…