Thank you, John!

Time is a concept
by which we measure
our gain.

I don’t believe in “better”;
I don’t believe in “worse”;
I just believe in “is”.

And if, beyond our fevered thoughts,
there is no past or future,
no yardstick to judge the present with,
then we are left with the freedom
to accept and embrace it,
with nothing to compare it to,
as the only reality
there ever is.

Why does the news
read like the script
of a cheap soap opera?

Why does this drama
of clashing opinions
draw us in
to this vortex of judgements,
this cauldron of conflict?

Why are we seduced
by these delicious distortions,
stoking the flames of our indignation,
stroking our sense of righteousness?

Why do we accept
the fodder we are fed
by those who would buy our attention?

Not because we seek the truth,
but because we are addicted
to living in a world,
an interactive fiction,
in which we are always right.

We have always been more than our thoughts,
and we have always known this,
when we were not thinking.

There is so much that we know,
when we are not thinking,
that goes unnoticed in our memories,
unindexed by analysis or judgement,
unremarked in our internal conversation,
but simply lived and experienced.

We were born this way,
drinking everything in,
content to not understand,
to rejoice in life itself,
not in the story about it.

The “me” I think I am
exists only in my memory,
a chain of thoughts
I have thought about myself.

It is a story strung together
from thought after thought,
until this train of thought
seems to solidify
into a sense of “me”,
into an object
of my experience.

How often I forget
that there is an “I”
who is witness to all this,
who sees these thoughts
come and go,
who sees everything
come and go,
welcoming
each new moment,
needing no story,
no explanation.

What a relief,
to see that I don’t have to be
the guy I’ve been trying to be
for all my life.

I have always been simply myself,
and that is all I ever need to be.

Thinking can be useful, but it can also turn against you,
when you let it commandeer your sense of who you are:

Your mind will tell you
that it has an answer for everything,
that thinking is the best path
to knowing and understanding.

It is the little despot
that schemes to rule your consciousness,
interrupting the flow of experience
with its constant stream of analysis.

It will distract you, if you let it,
from all the little epiphanies
that come from simply listening,
simply looking, simply feeling,
and accepting the bounty
of spontaneous knowing.

The people in our lives
are like the air around us,
like molecules dancing
in Brownian motion.

We are all caught up
in a quantum quadrille,
temporary partners
in a grand squaredance,
brought together
and torn asunder,
jostled and pulled
by chaos and karma.

We are dancing a dance
of serendipity and tragedy,
understanding and conflict,
friends and enemies,
coming and going
in endless patterns.

It is the soup
of our experience,
flavored
with the richness of joy,
and the bitterness
of defeat.

It is this dance
that makes us alive,
with all its vicissitudes,
and all its grace.

Joy is always
just a breath away,
just as heartbreak
is always just
a heartbeat away.

All we are given
is always right before us,
to step into
and stand in,
to cherish
or ignore.

The times i am happiest
are the times i am not “me”.

Sometimes,
there are just my eyes seeing,
my ears hearing,
or my hands playing,
with no one there,
no thoughts
to guide them.

Without a history,
without a reason,
there is only a witness
to the richness of experience,
to life’s gifts,
momentary and eternal,
little and big.

To find your true path,
stand quietly in each moment,
trust your inner knowing,
and put one foot
in front of the other.