Mindfulness for those who would rather not
The Bits of Me
Sometimes there are bits of me that scream energy, a fierce kind of passion. Those bits rise and carry me with them and the tingling at the back of my neck and my hair rising and full with goosebumps. But they die quickly. The most of me is afraid and quivering and hiding. Full stop.…
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Liars
I missed the last full moon of the winter. The clouds covered the sky and hid that big, glowing orb so that the only light above us that night wreaked from the town, a spirit bouncing on the underbelly of the clouds laboring to get outside, and the moon above it all moving through the…
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A Penny for the Old Guy
I spend a lot of time thinking about impractical stuff. I’m not often losing sleep about what to make for dinner or cleaning my truck, things that would be really useful. For me, thinking is mostly in the clouds, and I’m losing sleep because of it right now. I’ve spent years trying to figure out…
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The Old Dog, Again
The old dog panting at my feet. She’s uncomfortable. She always is. We think she can’t really feel her hind legs, and we think she has pain in her spine in the rear, her tail bits. She can’t tell us this of course, we’ve tried to become canine mind readers. She pants, and I reach…
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Connect the Dots
My normal M.O. isn’t to prattle on about spirituality, but I came across something last night that caught my attention. I’ve been thumbing through a book titled We’re All Doing Time, written in the 90’s I think by a guy trying to help prisoners find spirituality. His emphasis is mostly eastern meditative practice, but he…
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The Shakes
Some days I live without framework, without structure, in a world where the laws of physics and matter have no hold. I see buildings melting into people on the street, music intertwined with the frantic and nervous tapping of my heel on the floor. My thinking isn’t there, my mind is weak, my heart washes…
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Sucked In
“Just snap out of it!” I woke up this morning on the verge of a bad day. I spent the night sleepless and woke groggy after hitting snooze a bunch of times. Raising the blinds and looking through frozen crystals in the sky it was obvious we’re in a deep freeze again. Not even the…
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Billy in the Maron Valley, snippet
Melissa smiles and the boy relaxes and he smiles at her too. She puts her hand on the rear railing and swings herself out of the truck to land in the dirt underneath. A little wind whistles through the grasses nearby and Melissa looks toward it, wild oats bending with the breeze and the rigid…
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20 More Minutes, revisited
I said it wouldn’t be easy, didn’t I? Just 20 minutes a day. It’s so simple, but its been days since I’ve managed to make myself hive off the time. Dropping the practice is both symptom and cause, and it spirals downward until a certain, dark point where I just give up. But it’s dawned…
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The Second Edge
I’m grateful that people are talking about the importance of mental health. Bringing awareness to how common mental illness is to the general public gives some power to those who suffer. It brings them out of the shadows, no longer sitting alone on the sidelines watching those better adjusted (an assumed quality of course) carry…
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