Daily Regeneration

"Abandon all your projects so you can be with the flower with no intention of exploiting it or getting something from it..." Hanh, from "Our Life is a Work of Art"











Or Mere Smile


Buddha had held up a flower among a thousand followers.
He was seeking reactions. What was this flower, who could truly see?
This situation did not lend itself for all to fully understand what was expected.
A particular color, a growth pattern, a hundred cross petals, who could say.
In the crowd, however, Buddha saw a man he knew by name
and he must have been thinking little for all he held was a smile.

The flower is also our hours. The flower the minor miracle of a gull flying overhead.

Yesterday the first day of daylight's savings and we walked out over
slightly melting ice sheet of the bay here near the end of this winter.
It was as bright a white as any seen in the Mediterranean, the Tibetan Plateau.
We might stop in our tracks, loosen up the hoods to fully hear the wind
shake the snow off the surrounding limbs of trees and bathe in it for a moment.
Close your eyes. What comes to mind but the pistil of the sun raining down
and reflecting directly back up.

Morning, darker than before. On the way back from dropping a child at school
a haze of light had by now begun to accumulate along the northern bluffs.
The street side trees had parted to open a triangle of open air,
where a small white plane dashed across, the airport no more than thousands of feet away.
So easy to complain of the airport, the airplane, the early morning dark.
To say goodbye to your daughter in the morning leaves
a vast space surrounding your life, but they are all flowers that rise
up through us, up from a ground that is or is not seen,

a stem, a seed, a longing for summer days or mere smile.