poetry, photography and reflections on life, aging, and dharma
The Shambhala teachings speak of “effortless effort,” the quality of effort without struggle. I’ve never been very good at this myself – at one point in my career my nickname was “the bulldozer.” But I’m workin’ on it…
Another in the series of “where a poem comes from.” I was walking in a bookstore when the phrase, “we always believed that she could fly” came into my mind, loudly. That night, a poem arose. The details are from my mother’s memorial….
In another reflection on where poems “come from,” sometimes one encounters a place so intense that you need to write about it. Problematically, when it’s a place as iconic as the bottom of the Grand Canyon, well, it’s almost impossible to do so in anything close to a fresh way. This poem and the accompanying image came from a photo trip down the Colorado in April of 2014.