Acorns pelt the ground,
littering the lawn.
She calls them small prophets,
warning of the cold to come,
though I suspect the trees
only speak of the past.
Category: Mindful
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Casual Urgency
Now and then, in traffic,
or sipping tea at home,
it strikes me—this race
is likely halfway run.Who’s to say? We pace blind,
never knowing the final distance,
which makes strategy
a bit of a joke.Maybe I’m still in the first third,
time enough to jog, to breathe,
to save the sprint for later.
Or maybe the last lap’s begun,
and here I am, strolling
when I should be surging.Without sudden omnipotence,
all I can do is play the odds—
hope that forty-one is somewhere
near midcourse,
or not,
and feel my feet
where they land.
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Daily Practice
Sitting. Observing.
Noticing. Returning.Half an hour a day
for the past month,
showing up with the kind of discipline
that mostly goes unnoticed,
waiting for whatever benefits
people like to promise.Then today at lunch,
you dropped an entire bowl of soup.No swearing.
No self-lecture.
No dramatic kicking of broken ceramic
across the kitchen floor.Just the heat of it rising,
the familiar spike of anger,
noticed and left alone.A breath.
A towel.
The quiet work of cleaning it up.I guess this is what progress looks like.
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Meditation in Motion
Worn soles slap wet pavement.
My breath falls in step
with the city’s early pulse.One, two, three, four—
not chasing euphoria so much
as seeing if it might show up anyway.The right knee complains.
The Achilles tightens.
Discomfort tags along,
as it usually does.By mile two, warmth settles in.
Muscles loosen.
Thoughts thin out
without asking permission.No music. No voices.
Just rain and effort,
pain softens into something else,
something close enough to joy
I don’t argue with it.Past mile six, an idiot’s grin—
legs going numb,
heart feeling strangely light,
as if this could continue indefinitely,
which of course it can’t.Life intervenes.
The road ends.
Walking feels awkward,
now.I collapse on the driveway,
rain-speckled, still smiling,
stealing a small, private victory
before the rest of the world
wakes up and asks for things.
-
Buddha Nature
A life of rising and falling—
grasping, letting go.And underneath it,
something that doesn’t move.Not earned.
Not improved.It shows up
in the pause between thoughts,
in a breath
you don’t have to manage,
in a moment
that asks nothing of you.No edges.
No fences.Just a quiet
running through everything,
holding without holding.
The Truth About Tigers 