• WINTER MEMORY

    As I stare out the window and watch the snow slowly build on the limbs of the now barren sugar maple, painting it with a whiteness that bears heavily giving the smaller branches a better view of the ground in which their fruit of the summer lies buried. I am forced to wonder if the…


  • SELF?

    There is one thing that none of the books on discovering who you are when you are adopted bother to tell you. If the did, it wouldn’t change anything, but it is a burden you assumed you’d easily bear that grows heavy with time. What they don’t warn you is that you will discover yourself,…


  • THE BURDEN

    We are obligated to carry memories, and as we get older the burden grows ever heavier, we bend under its weight, knowing we dare not lose even one for once castoff, the weight is carried off like the smallest feather on a storming wind. Soon enough it is we who will become the burden that…


  • NO MIND, NO BUDDHA

    Baso knows well only the ox truly understands the yoke but if you offer it the ox will not accept. Why would you seek to become the ox as it would be better to burn the yoke. A reflection on case 33 of the Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate)


  • LIKE DUST

    We are obligated to carry memories, and as we get older, the burden grows ever heavier, we bend under its weight, knowing we dare not lose even one for once cast off, the weight is carried off like the smallest feather on a storming wind. Soon enough it is we who Will become the burden…


  • A DIFFERENT WORLD

    In a different world, I would write you stories, poems, that would bring a tear to your eye, that would make you laugh even when your mood would deny joy, that would bring freedom to some and loosen the shackles on many, that would reflect peace, that would lighten your burden, that would heal, if…


  • BURDEN OF WINTER

    On this one a taste clinging gingerly, on this one clumps, here a variegated blanket. Each tree bears the burden of winter in its own way.


  • THE MESSENGER TIRES

    He says, in a quiet aside he hopes no one will overhear, that he has grown tired of being an angel. And not for the reason we might think, he adds with a wry smile. The work is not all that difficult, in fact there seems to be less of it week by week, but…


  • TEN DIRECTIONS

    It would help, she said, if you would stop thinking of yourself as Sisyphus and all of life as the rock. You might actually, one day, begin to enjoy what you do. It would help, he said, if I could be like a great blue heron, grow wings and take to a summer sky leaving…


  • DROP IT

    It is a burden he does not want to bear any longer, one he would shed in a moment, but there is no place to put it and you cannot just leave it anywhere. And so he continues to bear it dragging it here, carrying it there, always attached to it, and it to him.…