Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, Barry Spacks, emptiness, flow, less is more, nothing, spirituality on October 9, 2012| 2 Comments »
The great gift, contrary to assumption,
is to disappear.
—Barry Spacks, The Pleasures of Flow
Like the scent of lemon
once intense in bare hands.
Like cottonwood leaves—
how they flee
first in heaps
and then one
by one
leaving empty
degrees of space.
Like the last note
of the solo cello
after the bow
has stilled.
Like stars
in the face
of one
great star
so close
to us.
Like
the taste
of a kiss
that persists
long after
the lips
are
gone.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, letting go, loss, love, nothing, poem, poetry on June 3, 2012| 2 Comments »
Our steps interlocked,
Michelle asks me, “What do you need,”
and it occurs to me that everything
I love can and will be taken from me.
The wind that fills the sail
will eventually shred it.
The child who curves her body
into the breast will wean, will grow,
will leave. It is not true that I need nothing,
Oh Maslow, you gave us the map,
but an affinity with nothing is
perhaps what I need.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged meditation, nothing, noticing, poems, poetry, silence on April 9, 2012| 2 Comments »
Still,
still,
and then new leaves
are ruffled by
the morning breeze
and shimmied, trembled,
shaken till they’re
still.
Silent,
silent
till the birds
all trilling through
the trees are heard—
they sing their spirals,
coo and call until they’re
hush shhh.
Quiet,
quiet,
till the bloom
of anger does
what angers do—
riles, outcries
and tells us lies
until we live
it through
and then it’s quiet here
and silent, still,
till something rises
as it will
from nothing—
and how always
we return always
to nothing.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awareness, gratitude, haiku, integrity, letting go, nothing, sacred on January 5, 2012| 2 Comments »
evening news headline
Man Lucky To Be Alive
it is all of us
*
all this letting go,
said the hands, and nothing
to show for it
*
standing naked in
the downpour, the biggest part
of me does not get wet
*
I bet somewhere there’s
lively applause for all this
beauty we’re making
*
all those years holding
up a ceiling when it was
time to live outside
*
God said nothing
and I listened closer and
really heard nothing
*
your body,
there is not one hair that
isn’t holy
*
I keep no secrets,
the wind said, so no one can
ever blackmail me
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged meditation, nothing, stillness, tanka on November 26, 2011| 1 Comment »
Be still.
—Lama Surya Das
It would be easier
to walk ten hundred miles
through swamps
than to do what you ask of me:
nothing.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged night, nothing, poem, sitting still, words, writing on November 22, 2011| 1 Comment »
Even night is not night enough.
—Franz Kafka, in a letter to Felice, his fiancé, 1913.
When even the night
is not night enough
nor does salt seem
salt enough, and the hole
in the looming who am I
is enormous,
but not enormous enough
to gulp down the damn ego whole,
perhaps that is the time
to sit very still
and forget about writing.
There is nothing,
nothing the words
can do then except
not enough because
nothing is enough,
which is to say
only nothing
is enough, and perhaps
in that inadequate night
we are sufficiently vulnerable
to really know nothing.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, nothing, tanka on October 25, 2011| 1 Comment »
Nothing, nothing, nothing
will take away
the loss.Still,
how I hate coming to you
with nothing.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 84, everything, nothing, synergy on October 18, 2011| 2 Comments »
it’s probably yours
the nothing
found today
on my hike
thank you
between
the leaves
the spaces
so
open
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 84, no ideas but in things, nothing, William Carlos Williams on September 25, 2011| 1 Comment »
For years I believed him—
no ideas
but in things
since I emptied
my closets
I see
no ideas
but in nothing