On Mindfulness

This picture is one of my favorites. I wish I could send you the smell of the Magnolia flower, hopefully you know it!

On Mindfulness


I can do it for a few minutes
floating through the food coop
marveling at produce,
beets are garnet hearts,
leeks are magic wands.

Time becomes a hula hoop,
fellow shoppers sprout wings and halos.
Time becomes scaffolding between
the misty mountains, Past and Present
no longer called Regret and Worry
nor even Nostalgia and Hope,
they are now just Now and Now.

But then once in my car in the parking lot,
I am chowing organic cheese puffs
and chugging bottled kombucha.
I am cutting off a driver to make a green light.

A new age guru proclaims
we avoid three minutes of pain
with three decades of addiction.
I think bullshit on the math
but nod at the theory.

I ponder porno and war,
what if we really stopped and watched
and felt and listened to one another.

It is windy out.
The cedar boughs are
fine fingers with lace sleeves.
Once high on mushrooms I saw
such trees reach out to caress me.
Today when I am still I can see them
pausing, waiting for me to reach back.

It is muscular in the beginning,
to pause and focus, to allow and receive,
to look for the space between in and exhale.

There are moments like that in a symphony,
the violinists and cellists must pull back the bow.
Even in pop music don’t you want me baby,
there is a chance between
chorus and verse, the bridge.

I manage it sometimes, for a second,
oh my god I am driving a car,
there are two brown flecks
in my daughter's right blue eye.
This morning there was a little cream left,
my son and I watched as we poured it into tea,
cumulus clouds against a dark sky.