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
