I'll Look Around

"I'll Look Around" - Billie Holiday
I'll look around until I've found Someone who laughs like you I know somewhere spring must fill the air With sweetness just as rare As the flower that you gave me to wear I look around and when I've found Someone who sighs like you I'll know this love I'm dreaming of Won't be the old love I always knew.

I love you mom.

beautiful otherness

Lotsawa World

Lotsawa World

A poem by William Stafford

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

-William Stafford

Auspicious circumstances

Eyes,wide open.

Meditation

Sometimes people think that when they meditate there should be no thoughts and emotions at all; and when thoughts and emotions do arise, they become annoyed and exasperated with themselves and think they have failed. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a Tibetan saying: “It’s a tall order to ask for meat without bones, and tea without leaves.” As long as you have a mind, you will have thoughts and emotions.

-Sogyal Rinpoche

For Thelma

The door doesn't shut quite as well. You died on a thursday, the day followed beautifully. You've seen the vibrant colors before so it's ok to stay indoors. Oregon knows you well and so do the tributaries are now aligned. The lake by your home sits quiet, the fountain is not working, once it remembers your ice-skates scissoring on it, it will be fixed again. You explained death to me very well since it means to be alive. Here. Now. Inside me it is always summer for you. Outside it is cold and I am out of wit.

Thelma 1908-2005

hollow

our palms
the image of fossils, the feel of silenced earthquakes, the taste of tongues belonging to our grandmother over-and-over, the smell of shrine and flowers, of dried raindrops, of moments so impermanent even elephants remind us.

our palms
the warmth and cold of death, of humming reminders of prayer and calling. It is a calla-lilly, a leaf turned over, a single moment seen as forever. I look forward to skins folding over each other drawing lines that makes us all irrelevant.



"It is for you, it is for you." - William Stafford