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Meditation
He Arrived In A Hollowed-Out Studebaker Lark
We also had eyes for his car. You had to give up / all possessions to live here, George fine with that — / he’d just spent two cross-country months in the thing, / its front bucket seat removed for sleeping purposes — / and now an actual Lark was our newest town-runner.
October 2022The Desert Within
Douglas Christie On The Power Of Silence And Contemplation
There was a value placed on listening as closely as possible to the mysterious silence that supports existence, which is both the actual silence of the desert landscape and the silence of the self in contemplation.
December 2021Sunbeams
December 2021Silence is something that comes naturally when you are watching, when you are watching without motive, without any kind of demand, just to watch, and see the beauty of a single star in the sky, or to watch a single tree in a field, or to watch your wife or husband, or whatever you watch. To watch with a great silence and space. Then in that watching, in that alertness, there is something that is beyond words, beyond all measure.
A Thousand Cups Of Coffee
It’s like arriving at your destination after a long drive, only to realize your mind has been elsewhere the entire time and you have no memory of the lights you stopped at, the turns you made, the glide in and out of traffic. Morning arrives again, and I stand in the kitchen, startled to exist.
August 2021Sitting On My Mother
The scar in the turf in front of her headstone has long since healed. Her death date was blank at her funeral, reflecting our disbelief. It now reads, Sept. 11, 2010. Beside that is another blank for my father.
September 2020Just This Breath
I can’t see the virus, but I feel its seeds in me. I can’t see my faith, but I feel its seeds in me, too.
June 2020Fear Of Rest
In the stillness there are forces and voices and hands and nourishment that arise, that take our breath away, but we can never know this, know this, until we rest.
May 2020Sparrow’s Guide To Meditation
Meditation teaches that change is constant. You fool yourself into believing that you are a fixed entity, but you are not. You are a river of transforming whims.
January 2020It’s All Happening To All Of Us, All Of The Time
It is impossible to be a human being connected by affection to others and not be vulnerable to pains beyond our own.
May 2019