The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.

The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
to see the universal and the particular,
simultaneously.
Regarding this one, call me when you get it.

by David Budbill

Wow, what a clear setting out of the human endeavour to live wisely! So simply and concisely stated – and yet as the last sentence indicates, anything but straightforward and worth knowing about when it’s achieved. I loved the combination of sage instruction with the down-to-earth commentary, the dry humour and the teacher-student familiarity I felt in it. This was not an aloof wise one diseminating wisdom – here is an friendly and encouraging fellow human who knows his way around the great endeavours and their challenge.

As so often happens, reading this poem made me curious about the person who the words travelled through, and the life that led to this expression. It came from one of the eight books of poetry written by David Budbill (1940-2016) with a title that intrigued me: ‘Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse’. His life was summarised on his website as ‘humble, engaged, and passionate’, and he brought his poetry into the world with others in musical collaborations reaching diverse audiences. Diving a bit more into the traces he’s left on the great web made me feel this almost childlike excitement: the world is full with wonderful people living what Lama Yeshe would call a ‘joyful and useful’ life, I only know of such a small fraction of them and yet they’re everywhere and here is another one!

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

But that’s not real, my mind demands,
trusting the seedless machine.
My mind repeats the newscaster’s
teleprompted panic. Repeats
the doctor’s doomsday speech.
There’s no time to not be real, it begs.

I point to my left lung–a satchel full
of tumors. Point to a pantry full of pills
that haven’t helped, a bed I have
hardly left for weeks.

Is this what you mean by real? I ask.

Yes! my mind screams, frantic
in its mission to make matter
all that matters.

But how
is that more real, I say,
than the first time I was breathless
from holding a stethoscope to my pain
and hearing the heartbeat of the whole world?

My mind argues like a seasoned lawyer,
all objection and rebuttals.
But I, an artist, stretch my heart out
into canvas, hand one brush
to joy and another brush to grief,
grinning as I watch them paint
the exact same rolling meadow
the same hue of emerald green.

That isn’t real, my mind insists
as I take off running through
the pasture, stopping only to do
a cartwheel beside a lonely windmill
who has always wanted a friend.

I fly up the solemn staircase
of a billionaire’s lifeless mansion
to replace the diamonds with raindrops
I found huddled on a leaf of a Birch
tree beside my home when
I was nine and a half years old.

It’s not real that you still have those!
my mind protests, as if everything
that ever was isn’t forever here.
As if I’m not still a giggling child
hiding in the place I know my mom will
look first, because I want to be found.

During my CT scan last week
I couldn’t find myself inside of myself
because my mind was louder than I was.
But then I gave up all control, unfurled
like the petals of a pen blooming
poems on the sterile walls,
for the next worried patient to water.

But that’s not real, my mind contends.
Real is provable. Googleable.

Then google this, I say, —

The chemo that kept me alive,
the chemo cold men in white coats
take credit for, is sourced from the bark
of the Pacific Yew tree and was first
discovered for its healing properties
by Two-Spirit Indigenous people
in the Pacific Northwest, who were guided
by the voices of moss and the mist.

Is that real? my mind asks.

I don’t see the point in answering
because my mind can’t hear the language
spoken by the moss, has never
picked the sweetest fruit from the saddest note
of a song and planted every seed
to feed the joy of those to come.

What’s the worst thing that ever happened
to you? my mind asked me long ago.

I said, Not believing in what I couldn’t yet see.

What’s the best thing that ever happened
to you? my mind asked me long ago.

I said, Learning that you are not me.

by Andrea Gibson

Sometimes words feel like an imposition, or a foregone failure. This poem (introduced here by the poet) gives me that feeling. How do I follow it? When I finish reading, I know I’ve received something essential, something precious. It feels like a blessing — one bestowed on my small, human self, which is just a fragment of all humanity. It lifts me into a glowing mixture of beauty and sorrow, swelling into what feels like heart-rending love. Thank you, Andrea Gibson.

Andrea Gibson died last week. That’s how I came across this poem at all. With their passing, their poetry, writing, and life stories have spread further and more swiftly, crossing boundaries and reaching me — and many others. They seem to have written from a place of desperate, beautiful truth-telling, from the insight of someone who knows how fully swept up in impermanence they really are. No space for denial, complacency, distraction, or anything inessential.

The poem also speaks, for me, as a teaching about the mind. One that Andrea seems to have felt compelled to speak urgently before they departed this earth. This is captured with striking clarity in the last lines, but also explored through the drama of their internal dialogue, making it deeply relatable. The lesson? That imagination is an extraordinary resource of wisdom — one we neglect and sideline to our peril. We need to bring it back. Let it speak. It may just save you, though probably not in the way you expect.

Finally, the poem also deepens this lesson by showing how materialistic thinking and behaviour pull us away from both our inner wisdom and the abundance of the wondrous world around us. Which are more precious, raindrops or diamonds?

Ps. Join me for the next Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry course beginning 30^th October 2025, to be introduced to a wide variety of poetry from many cultures and eras, that teaches us how to be deeply present and takes us beyond our small minds…

Photo by Pedro Netto on Unsplash

my insignificance thrills me
and the largest of my sadnesses
dwindle smaller than the space

between grains of sand
and in that moment,
knowing my place,

comes a love so enormous
I can love anyone, anyone,
even myself.

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I love and completely recognise the experience Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer describes here – how the perspective between the greatness of nature and the smallness of me can be both healing and freeing.

But I think there is something to watch out for when making that shift away from my habitual focus on Me and My trouble to what Mary Oliver pointed to when she said ‘Meanwhile, the world goes on‘. There can be a sense of disconnecting or abandoning ourselves in that shift, a kind of detaching to make the difficult stuff more manageable. A very human impulse of course, and actually an attempt at compassion (alleviating suffering) in itself, but if there’s a disconnecting involved, it’s a move away from wholeness and healing and so it will at best be a temporary assuaging.

So instead, can there be a reconnecting with the truth of that greater perspective, that lovingly includes our own stuff? It’s not about denying of our humanness or ‘the largest of my sadnesses’, but seeing what else is true? And there’s a subtle but important difference in the two…

Of course it may not always be easy to access a ‘lake or a sea or a mountainside’ when you need one. Luckily, our imagination can be a powerful ally and we may access that greatness through the porthole of our memory. And the sky is a powerful greatness in itself, even if we can only see a small piece of it in between big buildings…

Let’s practice accessing that love so enormous that we can love anyone, even ourselves!

PS one of the contexts for practising a change of perspective and loving anyone, even ourselves, is in the standalone weekend of Compassionate Imagery For Resilience…

Photo by Khatam Tadayon on Unsplash

Three hours of work on the last chapter
Friends I thought I had for life
The golden cross pendant my godmother gave me
Faith in God
Frequently, my equanimity

I almost lost:

The way out of the woods
My passport and smartphone at the Dutch tulip show
My virginity before I was ready
Three months’ earnings when I was mugged
Consciousness

I could easily lose:

The ability to walk down hills
More of my teeth
The man I will marry next month
The German names of birds
My sanity

No doubt I will lose:

My life and identity
My possessions
My achievements
My family and friends
Anything ‘me’ and ‘mine’

What cannot be lost:

a black-and-white cat
stalking the edge of the field
ready to pounce

by Ratnadevi

An intriguing poem by Ratnadevi – mindfulness teacher, poet, painter and author of the book Bringing Mindfulness to Life (which I highly recommend, by the way, as probably the most alive and relatable-to books on mindfulness that I have read, and I’m not the only one who thinks that). It’s an evocative mix of ingredients, which made me curious about what I would have written to these topics. But the last one in particular really left me pondering. Why did she name this seemingly random moment with the black-and-white cat as that which cannot be lost? Because it although it can be found, it cannot be owned as it’s life itself, happening right there at the edge of the field?

I can only guess. But it leaves me curious about what can be found but not held on to in this moment, and the next. Perhaps… everything?

PS if you’re curious to explore the magic of meeting life as it’s flowing, the Being Present course might be a good place to start…

Photo by Irene Strong on Unsplash

by Juan Ramón Jiménez

The Spanish Juan Ramón Jiménez lived a turbulent life if you are to believe what is summarised here, during which he wrote prolifically and received the Nobel prize for his poetry two years before his death in 1958. I wonder what led to his writing of these words, and whether his awareness of this ‘I’ who would remain standing when he died was a fleeting one or an abiding experience…

For myself, the poem feels like a reminder to not get too caught up in whatever I’m doing or believing, and to tune into what Annie Lighthart called ‘the second music‘. That slight shift in perspective that can make such a difference in how any given moment is experienced, making it wider, more poignant and more alive than the mono-experience of the autopilot and doing-mode. The poem reads almost like a koan: who is that one? Unanswerable perhaps, but a fruitful reflection nonetheless… thank you Juan!

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

If you’d like to read more poems by this author, why not check out their selected poems, translated by Robert Bly here.