When The Penny Drops

And still,

when the penny drops,

I’m startled to find

how little there is to know

about our quaint genesis of life,

about our birth-forged resolution in death,

about how little we think we need to know, 

engaged for days and weeks and months, 

intent on obfuscation,

assumed impervious with the distractions called youth.

As year after year after year

living our silkworm lives

aging continues a hunger for its due,

patient like a feral cat.

Wary that there is never enough.

Yet never never matters.

So questionably we only flirt 

with pivotal questions: 

like how am I to be seen?

Does water flowing, know it has depth and tides?

Who demands to know (and why) 

the degree of wet that makes water moist?

Now, unquestionably close to being inactive, 

we’re told (or maybe I’m finally learning):

Penetrate the doubt.

Take comfort that inquiry permits response, 

that response enriches inquiry.

and as these days to contemplate,

by default decrease,

I’m yearning for a legacy, 

a koan-bred presentiment  

that’s thankfully saying:

to be content, 

there is no need 

to ponder if trees consider 

what water means to fish.

And still, 

when all is said and done, 

there is only a grace of spaciousness,

always a fullness of intimacy.

— Ed Sancious

Reflection on my life as it is

How do I hold it all, my life 

Gently, tenderly, angrily, pityingly 

Knowing it hangs, like an ill assorted, loose fitted garment 

The weave and pattern 

Complex, changing, or running together 

Like a huge jigsaw puzzle Randomly tossed by life

Dense and dark in some places But always with light filtering through 

Put this way

I don’t even need to hold it

I don’t even have a big enough container 

Just my being present to each fragment of experience 

Allowing it to filter through my being 

Staying open to the fluency of shifts and changing interpretations 

Knowing clearly my time span is limitlessly limited 

—Jean Lopez

A Shared Path

Sometimes, if we share a path together,

we will come to know each other a little better.

Perhaps, if the path is difficult,

treacherous in its weavings,

it is enough to bring us together,

and maybe for a little while we can forget 

that our differences, our fears, separated us, kept us apart.

For a little while, we can be whole, secure, and at peace.

We all share this path called life.

Perhaps we are at different points along the trail,

but it is the same trail,

that, at once, can take us nowhere, 

or anywhere we need to go.

—Paul Causey

Faces of play.

    Caught on film, a tall and lean coyote and a short and chubby badger play hide and seek at the entrance to a tunnel built to safely take them, should they want to go, under a highway to the other side. The coyote jumps up and down, tempting the badger to come along. The badger teases the coyote, comes toward him, then back, tempted to stay. After a lot of back and forth — tempt, tease, tempt, tease — finally they go off into the dark of the tunnel together. I, the badger, am thinking, why bother? It’s so much easier to stay here, be alone.

    Not to have to hear that my friend is about to leave for a week in Cambria with her husband. Then, after a two-day camping trip along the ocean, two weeks in their second home in the Idyllwild mountains before flying to Europe for seven weeks — Italy, Spain, Portugal — from which she will begin her walk along the Camino de Santiago, when her husband will join her to celebrate, no matter how far she has been able to navigate the Camino. 

    How not to compare myself? How not to think that on September 15th, the day she returns (it is now July 27th), I will not have moved, still inside my thinking mind, traveling the same path over and over, wearing it down as I continue to ruminate over “where to live the rest of my life.” 

    Certainly a daunting task I have set for myself! How can I possibly know from here, from today, where Life will want to take me? Where Life will want us to be for our last ten … fifteen …twenty years. (In twenty years, I will be a hundred and three!)

    How can I know where Life will want us to be … tomorrow? 

    Let alone where I will have landed twenty minutes from now on this blank page — where my hand is moving across and back, across and back.

    How grateful I am to have this writing practice to remind me that all I can really know is now. The smile I can feel on my lips, new, not there before. The sound of this pen as it scratches across the page. The green tea at my side, its terra-cotta cup too hot to lift. Sure (am I sure?) that soon the cup will cool and I’ll be able to smell jasmine flowers, reminded that I have a tongue and cheeks with the power to taste, recognize the difference between jasmine tea and sencha. Hear the sounds of the plane overhead as they fade into the sounds of a passing car, the caw of a crow. The slight breeze as it tickles the wind chimes to sing outside my open door and I have ears to hear it. 

    I am traveling, too. 

    Laura is young. May I not envy her, her travels. Haven’t I had mine? Not the Camino, though there were years when I did contemplate walking it. But many times the magical island off the coast of Maine where I stood high above the ocean, nothing but Portugal somewhere out there. The little beach town in Mexico I have come to know and love. I could keep going and make a list of all the places I’ve been. But why? To convince myself that there’s no need to fret? To convince you that I’ve made good use of this life? That this is worth your continuing to read?

    Does this mean that at 83 my traveling life is over? Maybe. Maybe not. Though discovering what it means to be at-home — wherever I am — seems more and more like good preparation for dying.  

    Earlier today, I saw a Monarch butterfly busily traveling from tree to flower and back to tree. Dancing in the air with another Monarch joined by a simple white … is it a butterly? Some people call it a moth. I thought about the arduous journey the butterfly has already been on, just to arrive here. Most recently its work to break out of the hard, yellow- and black-spotted coat it had been growing in; only then to practice patience while its wings were drying so it could finally spread its wings and fly.

    I don’t know how long a butterfly can expect to live. What if the butterfly and I were the same? We’re born. We endure our growing pains, even enjoy some of them, learn the need for patience and, finally, having grown into our full colors, able to enjoy the wonders of freedom, the chance to fly, our work here completed, we die?

    What if why we are here, a question some of us ask ourselves, is no longer a mystery?  Simply a journey to come back home.

—Sara Bragin

life is but a dream

life is but a dream

but whose dream is it anyway

but if not, what then

—Paul Causey

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Why row?

Just go


with the flow.

—Veda Smith

A Lullabied Dragon

I am humming a lullaby

hoping my ego will fall asleep

sensing how tired she must be

Not just nap time,

but a long, wary sleep

breathing heat but no flames

I’ll check on her with regularity

for we are bound by birth

I have an unreserved love

for my companion -

feeling if she is able to rest

I, too, will be at peace

Of course, she may be startled

awake by the world knocking about

but by now I’ve learned which

lullabies may soothe her

—Kathleen Burke

Ants and zazen

 

— Kim Mosley 

A poem in response to: A Day So Happy by Czelaw Milosz and The god of good taste by Ingrid Fetell Lee

Because although I did meet the god of good taste 

He felt hollow to me

I saw others around me bowing and scraping to him

And even when I believed,

I was wrong not to participate 

In the ritualistic offerings of my authentic self,

In order to survive and thrive in my environment 

At the risk of being crushed 

The quirky awkward parts of me didn't assent and,

Their embedded smoldering coals,

Held tightly my joy and life force.

And now having emerged

And I say this boldly, while holding my breath,

As it's so new and fragile 

That there is no thing on the earth I want to possess.

And no one worth envying.

Just delighting in.

—Jean Lopez

Cookies

— Kim Mosley 

You Look at me and Wonder

Painted Rocks by Paul Causey

What am I. Is this art? What am I supposed to see?

You could tell all kinds of stories about me.

You could say how my sharp edges have been worn down

through the years by wind and rain,

how my rough skin was worn smooth by the proximity of others like me,

others of my kind seeking to find a place of last repose.

Or you could simply say that I am a rock and that is enough. 

I need to do nothing, to be nothing other than what I am. 

What you make of me is not my concern. 

I am what I am. 

If I could form words, have lips, a mouth to speak, 

that is what I would say. 

But since I have none of those things, 

have not that capability, 

then you must figure it out for yourself. 

You can look at me and wonder. 

Or not.

—Paul Causey

Inspired by “Reading John Cage on Sound” by Sarah Webb

Reading John Cage on Sound

Rocks by Sarah Webb

John Cage says, sound doesn’t have to

mean anything. 

I say, a rock

may be heavy in the hand

may grit against the fingers.

We don’t have to write on it Stone

though I have a stack of four

on my railing for just that purpose–

to write stone in black ink on the flatter side

to write a haiku about time compressed into layers

to tell the rock to be archetype, meaning

but maybe it’s enough just to be rock

and maybe that’s why 

the rocks in that stack have sat

through ten summers of heat and rain and the step of doves

and I’ve never written on any of them.

—Sarah Webb

What is a poem?

The writing group dissolved.

I stopped writing

for 15 years.

I became a doctor of sorts

and conducted a business of helping others hear.

I would not hear my own heart calling. 

I pushed down my stories, slammed the door shut

tossed the key in the weeds.

When the tidal wave of COVID hit the main land,

I found the Zen writing group.

I lifted a rusted key to a long-locked door to an infinite corridor, 

where pickled songs and fairytales lived.

Some tumbled out, eager to see the light and taste the air again.

Some turned their owl eyes away from the darkness, 

blinked in the glare of the opening, 

uncertain if others would entertain their ugly splendor.

Other songs remain in cobwebs,

buried deep among the bricks,

waiting for a time before death to be revealed.

Some may stay silent. 

Some stay afraid

The songs that tumble out, they take our hands.

They guide us to the poems that live on the earth:

to the little green grasshoppers that spring away from our footsteps,

in the long stripes of Bermuda grass that defy Texas drought,

to the striped spiders the size of a silver dollar sidestepping the drip of the watering cans.

There is a poem in the slide of horsehair across the violin strings,

in the furrowed foreheads of symphony players, 

determined to boil the perfect spell of sound. 

There is a poem in the scream of the child who has no words yet, 

in their parents who frown, and sweat and embrace their uncertainty, their fear and their rage,

in the silence of the audio booth that holds them together

There is a poem in the paper wasp that licks a small castle 

from nothing to something

in the space of 10 days

There is a poem in the chair painted pistachio.

Despite all its bumps and its scratches in its moving and time,

it resists a collapse,

stays upright and strong.

—Emily Romano