In every moment
is the chance
to pay attention.

Attention
allows intention,
which allows choice.

Without them,
we become machines,
playing out old programs,
at the mercy of the patterns
of our past.

We are not fully alive
until we pay attention
to the life within us
and all around us;
and every moment
is a chance
to pay attention.

Life does not create our problems.

We create them for ourselves
with our endless commentaries.

Beneath all our stories,
there is a silence
where life flows effortlessly
when we allow it.

I am signing
a nonaggression pact
with myself.

No more
will I try to fix
what I fear is broken.

No more will I judge
what I don’t understand,
or resist what I am
uncomfortable with.

I am promising
to embrace whatever may come,
to accept it as gift,
to trust in the wisdom
that lives in me
and in everything around me.

(with gratitude, to Thich Nhat Hanh)

Sometimes I sit,
just for the pleasure
of simply sitting.

Not to learn
to be a better sitter,
but just to be sitting.

I was born out of emptiness,
and to emptiness I will return.

The more I look into that darkness,
the more I see the birthplace of everything,
where everything must also return.

And when that day arrives,
I need not fear falling
into some strange, forbidding place,
for I will be going home.

There comes a time
when memory foam forgets,
and Eveready isn’t ready.

These are the moments
that remind us
that our world is run
by the engine of entropy,
and that things wind down,
by and by.

All our expectations
are but wistful dreams,
destined to dissolve
in the light of day,
when we are given glimpses
of the divine cycle
of becoming and decay,
granting life to everything
in its time.

What is nature to us,
except a mirror
of our own nature,
our essence stripped bare
of all our thoughts
and pretensions.

In the moment you discover
that your thoughts are mostly noise,
you can begin to find the peace
that is always there beneath them.

What’s so special
about the present moment
is that it’s all there ever really is.
​
All our other moments
are just ideas,
thoughts about moments passed,
or moments yet to be.
​
Endless hours roll by
while we ruminate
about what happened,
or what might happen,
while what IS happening
passes by us,
unnoticed.
​
This is the tragedy of our lives:
that the more time we spend
assembling and assessing
our lives’ stories,
the less time we spend
actually living.