At My Window

I’m a poor meditator,
the kind who needs it most,
ever wound around
the monkey bars
of my monkey mind,
no devotion-discipline of any kind,
until I stumbled on a form
I call window meditation.

Read a poem or passage,
sit quietly with the words
in front of any window,
let the window be a frame
and watch the world through it,
coming back within the frame
each time the monkey-mind
gets distracted and wanders off.

The second day at the window,
I witnessed something I had
never seen before.
We have lived here for six years,
surrounded by turkeys and oaks,
but I had never seen the turkeys
going to roost or coming down.
That morning, as I was meditating,
a rafter of wild turkeys
began to descend from the trees,
flow-gliding to ground, one-by-one,
each like a black velvet ink drop…
and it felt like a gift.

A wisp of cloud floating into the frame
felt like a gift…

the spare beauty of tree-branch
shadows on the stucco wall…

an annunciation of green buds…

sunlight glinting on glass…

and an anonymous little bird
appearing, just like that,
on a branch,
almost made me weep.

The more I look, the more I see.
Boundless wonders happening,
and I am part of this everything.
If I were to experience all, all at once,
I think I would burst into flame.

Ann Keiffer
February, 2016

Image Credit: Herman Abramovitch (ahermin) on deviantart.com

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About Ann

I am interested in the strange beauty of brokenness, in transforming possibility in difficult times, in how we heal even when we can’t get better, in the alchemy of surrender, in the interplay of light and shadow, in the bounty of everyday wonders, in the gift of laughter…and writing about it, all and everything.

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