A 35-year-old oven
Prayer
Miracles
Tap dancing
Microwaves
Mashed potatoes
Wine
Wishes
Small families
Small appetites
No expectations
Pie
Laughter
Leftovers
Forgiveness
Sunshine
Rain
Moon
Stars
Age
Perspective
Children
Ancestors
Memory
Forgetfulness
Forever
Gratitude is humility on a plate. Thank you for coming to my table.
Would you walk us through a typical day in your life?
Oh dear! It’s just like yours, literally. I’m the first up and into the kitchen. (I love a quiet house at dawn.) I feed the dog, make a breakfast that my daughter is likely to ignore. I check e-mail, and begin the daylong practice of responding to whatever appears. I quickly make the bed, get dressed, drive my daughter to school, take an exercise class and then I’m home again for the dog walk. I have a grand scheme of what I’d like to do each day, but am usually overtaken by small practicalities and urgencies. Sometimes the big thing on my list is something as little as pruning the azaleas! I do a little bit of writing here and there, sometimes for the blog, an article or something longer. Words sing to me all day long, and every now and then I catch one or two! My daughter is out of school at 2:30, the afternoon falls, I cook dinner, run the vacuum, finish a load of laundry, take my daughter to gymnastics. Before bed I sit on my cushion, and this is how I keep company with all the ancestors who have come before me. Then I let the day be done. I never regret what I haven’t done. Even as I write this I am overwhelmed with gratitude that this right here is my life. Who could want more?
. . . Read more of the interview on Mama Here Now.
Sometimes the room is so still that the only thing you can babble about is gratitude. I am forever grateful to my teacher, and my teacher’s teacher, for showing me the deep sanity of practice.
A sky that never darkens.
An ocean that never empties.
Beyond patience and surrender,
the dignity of having no choice.
Sitting quietly, doing nothing
giving birth to a whole wide world.
Sharing my practice is the only thing that matters, because practice takes care of every single thing. Come sit by me two weeks from now in a world of your own creation.
Deeper Still: a Breath & Meditation Workshop, Washington DC, Oct. 21.
Someone sent me something that renders me mute with gratitude.
Blackbirds
by Susan Mitchell
Because it is windy, a woman
finds her clothesline bare, and without rancor
unpins the light, folding it into her basket.
The light is still wet. So she irons it.
The iron hisses and hums. It knows how to make the best of things.
The woman’s hands smell clean. When she shakes them out,
they are voluminous, white.
All night my hands weep in gratitude
for little things. That feet are not shoes.
That blackbirds are eating the raspberries. That parsley
does not taste like bread.
From now on I want to live
only by grace. In other words, not to deserve things.
Without rancor, the light dives down
among the turnips. I eat it with my stew.
Today the woman’s hands smell like roots. When she
shakes them out, they are voluminous, green.
All day they shade me
from the sun. The blackbirds have come to sit in them.
Since this morning, the wind has been enough.
Image above is “Clothesline,” a painting by Heather Horton.
To the woman pulling out of the parking lot on Friday who rolled her window down and said, “Are you Momma Zen?”
To the ones who asked.
And the ones who came.
To the one who wrote, “If I’d known what your workshop was about I wouldn’t have come.”
To the people who traveled across states and south from Canada.
Who saw a sign that said, “turn here.”
And even though it was far they thought, “It’s not too far.”
For the airport rides and the spare bedrooms.
For the reunions and first meetings.
The coffee, the breakfast, the dinner, the talks, the tears.
For the last-minute cancelations.
For the names I didn’t remember.
And even the “constructive criticism.”
For not saying, “You’re older than I thought.”
For the sun in Asilomar, the rain in Pittsburgh, the old friends in Houston, the new ones in DC, the love in Georgia, and the stars in Colorado, oh the stars in Colorado.
For meeting your children. For bringing your mother.
For looking me in the eye.
And for sending me on my way.
To the man at the Zen Center on Saturday who said, “I’m here because of you.”
That’s only half of it.
I’m here because of you.
I’m here because of you.
I’m here because of you.
Reprising, reposting and reflecting on the amazing transformation of little punkins around here.
Because Mika said any self-respecting pumpkin pie starts with real pumpkin, I went to the overcrowded and overstocked supermarket two full days before the holiday in search of the small cooking pumpkins required to get my pie rolling right. That’s when I discovered that fresh pumpkin pie must be a kind of a urban myth in these parts, because after the six-month Halloween selling season, all those precious little pumpkins are all sold out or out back in the trash. So we started with this, Georgia’s mummy pumpkin, which was still sitting around looking cute and useless, and set out to give it new life as a savory, flavory dessert. read more
Purchased the Wii she put #1 on her wish list for the last three years now that it has fallen to #2 behind hamster, the kind of retro hamster that – like the two fish, turtle and dog – requires someone’s mother to clean and feed it.
Encouraged her good dad to buy a little Christmas tree and found out three days later it cost $100.
Coerced my daughter into having a cup of hot cocoa with me at Starbucks despite her protests that, in 70-degree sunshine, she wasn’t very cold right now.
Raided her piggy bank to pay for the cocoa with every intention of repaying it.
Let my husband pick out a computer for her and he chose one that is better than mine.
Spent $160 on gifts at Target and allowed the cashier to sign me up for a store credit card to save 15 percent, a process that took 15 percent of the trouble it will take to cancel the credit card.
Soon realized that 15 percent of $160 isn’t nothing but amounts to less than nothing.
Learned that a plumbing leak requires replacement of the dining room ceiling before our Christmas company comes.
A ceiling over our heads instantly amounted to my greatest wish and blessing.
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Planes fly
Dogs sleep
The pancreas secretes enzymatic elixirs
Sun shines
Wind moves
The bluejay calls for peanuts on the back porch
Friends greet
Pain subsides
The disposal still works
Light fills
Shadows fall
Ventilation from the ambient air into the alveoli of the lungs
The abundance of it all
And me, sitting here doing nothing.
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