For all you meditating poets out there

Shedding new light on mindfulness

Okay let’s start and I must start at the beginning
I am dumber than I don't know I am

Meditate on that if you will

Everything I know is ancient history
Like scraps of Roman wooden messages
Written in charcoal ink in wax and when read then discarded
And found two milenia later at the bottom of an ancient privy

Palimpsets buried among the offsified dung
The message of History: "Mother send me more woolen underpants
It's cold as Hades in Britannia. Love Giaus"

100 hundred deep breaths later more thoughts flow by

And I realize how little I have actually evolved
My opposable thumb still useful
like a wrist sundial at night
Or that I am haunted by the memory
of having read a thousand self-help and spiritual books
But I still find myself patiently waiting like a dog at the french door
Hoping others will take action and let me in.

Clear your mind of such nonsense
return to the cloudless sunny skies of patient mindfulness

Arriving finally at the end the meditation music CD, serenely humbled
Humbled, the way one is humbled by reading an actuarial chart
Discovering in the hieroglyphs
I have a 66% chance of making it to age 67
And a 33% chance of hitting age 75
Oh, I think I can beat those odds

Or seeing the picture of my high school football team
Sent by a chair of the 40th reunion committee
Looking at the faces of my 18 year old team mates
He's dead and He's dead and Him I've known since
Since I was five but I haven't seen him for 30 years

What now have we in common? Except--
We played beneath the trees of his grandmother's house after kindergarten
And were on football teams whose glories are
enshrined in dusty glass cases
in some old gym in Shawnee Mission, Kansas
Wherever that may be, if it ever existed

The Ohm of the singing bowl vibrates into peaceful silence
Meditate on that if you will

Capitano Tedeschi

30

copyright 2009 Jamie Jacks
title from Shedding new light on mindfulness.Preview Cox, Richard H.; PsycCRITIQUES, Vol 54 (10), 2009. pp. No Pagination Specified.