
BROWSE ALL AUTHORS


Shanley McConnell – Mary sings a lullaby to her baby God

This Is For You

Lawrence Bridges – Lake Hughes Road

Brigitte Goetze – How We Come to Understand or the Heart, the Right Brain, and the Left Brain Muse about Science’s Most Famous Equation

Like Silt in a Flowing Stream – May Sarton on Solitude and Clutter

E.E. Cummings – Let It Go—The
Nicole Grace – One Note

Patrice Bavos – Sedona Prayer

Eloise Klein Healy – Iris

Normal Days – A Tribute to the Ordinary From the Far Edge of Life

Kurtis Ebeling – Snowmelt

Last Temptation

Mark Hammerschick – Permafrostedness Rising

In the Name of the Stranger – Pádraig Ó Tuama on the Language of The Troubles

Kazim Ali – Ramadan

Breathing

Gil Fronsdal on Immanent and Naturalistic Buddhism

Nathaniel Grayson – Some Distant Island

R. B. Simon – Shorn

Bradley Samore – After a Day of Others’ Demands

Kit Evans – When We Go to That Museum You Liked

Ursula K. Le Guin – Kinship

The Most Real and Creative Form of Human Presence: John O’Donohue on Soul Friendship

Passersby

Katie Jones – Morning

Adam Powers – Relative

Elisabeth Preston-Hsu – Kitsune Udon

Hiatt O’Connor – Waiting for Gravity

To Walk the Stones

Suzanne Eaton – windchimes

In Praise of Winter Hiking

Joshua C. Allen – The White Oak Peninsula

Leslie Ryan – Taking Refuge

A Love Letter to Nathaniel

Xiaoly Li – Light Breaks the Barrier

Ryan Diaz – Saint Hubert and the Deer

Jack Gilbert – Going There

The First Door of Liberation: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Vision of Emptiness and Interbeing

The Loss

Rooja Mohassessy – Intoxicated by Verses

Gully and Bayou

Spence Pfleiderer – A Simple Morning Prayer

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza – Seasonal Affective Disorder

W.S. Merwin – Rain Light

Giving Away More Than We Keep – Ayya Khema on Cultivating Generosity

Remember the Bear

Rose Strode – Saint Cuthbert Proclaims the First Sanctuary for Birds, 676 A.D.

Antoinette Kennedy – Soul in the Sky

T.S. Eliot – The Journey of the Magi

The Courage of Our Mistakes – Joan Didion on Self-Respect and Moral Nerve

Salamander

Carolyn Decker – An Approximation

Philip Booth – First Lesson

Discourse on the Absolute Truth

Samantha Wright – And Again

Ode to the Radio Telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Before its Collapse

Vanessa Able – Bhakti

The Glimpse of Eternity – Martin Buber and Our Relationship With The Divine

June Jordan – Poem for a Young Poet

The Curse

Gay Guard-Chamberlin – “Do You Have Any Advice for Those of Us Just Starting Out?”

Lawrence Bridges – The Fresh Fulcrum

The Expression of a Better World – Anaïs Nin on Transience and the Painful, Familiar Beauty of Music

Between Writers

Tamerlie Philippe – Fading Memories

Marie Howe – Death, the last visit

Christopher James – Cider, memories, and dreams

Sunset Meditation

Martine van Bijlert – this life we built

John O’Donohue – Beannacht / Blessing

Outer and Inner Ecologies: Activist Satish Kumar on the Importance of Seeing Our Own Divinity

Derek Furr – The Meadow

Jacob Lehmann – Constructed Spaces

Pamela Denyes – The Fog of October

Emily Dickinson – I Died for Beauty, But Was Scarce…

Chris Abani on the Balance and Patience of West African Beauty

Learning How to Breathe Again

My Backspaces

Marsha Warren Mittman – No Name

Tishani Doshi – Hope is the Thing

Letting the Old Thrills Die: C.S. Lewis on Being Alive to New Joy

Malignant – A Love Story

Rebecca Ramsden – Be Thou My Vision

Gabriela De Paz – Enredadera

Eugene Platt – September Poem

Anne Hillman – We Look With Uncertainty

Working With the Soul Nerve – Resmaa Menakem on Grounding Our Bodies

Morning Toast

Jenna Wysong Filbrun – Church

On Being Plan B

Jane Hirshfield – All The Difficult Hours and Minutes

What is Meditation? Shinzen Young on How to Deepen Our Focus

Barry Casey – Wait Here

Shangyang Fang – Chaconne

The Most Beautiful Thing We Can Experience Is The Mysterious: Albert Einstein’s Living Philosophy

Owen Brown – Emerging

Susan Coultrap-McQuin – Seeking Stars

Jericho Brown – Bullet Points

Pandemic Snow

The Full Awareness of Breathing

Cristina Legarda – Mary

Joseph Campbell On Experiencing Mystery

The River Cabin

Leonard Cohen – Roshi

You Have To Say Something: Dainin Katagiri on What To Say When There Is Nothing To Say

Brian Yapko – My Hunger for You

Astronomer Pippa Goldschmidt on Seeing Far and Seeing Up Close

Seamus Heaney – Wheels Within Wheels

The Self is Tied to This Body Like an Ox to a Cart

Lily Jarman-Reisch – Camino Real

Nancy Holt’s Mystifying Sun Tunnels in the Great Basin Desert

Around the Rings of Saturn

Adrienne Rich – The Corpse-Plant

Jeff Mann – Emerging

Each Breath One Takes is a Step Towards One’s Destiny

Katie Bowers – Even Though I Am Weary of Church Pews, She Is Not

Carl Jung and The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man

Allen Ginsberg – A Supermarket in California

The Buddha’s Last Teaching: Be Your Own Island, Your Own Refuge

Brandon McQuade – Two Whiskies

‘A Heart Slowly Reduced to Embers’: W. G. Sebald on the Fires That Burn Inside and Outside

No Way Out

Maggie Smith – Good Bones

Body Like a Rag, Mind Like a Mirror – Guo Gu Breaking Through Boundaries

Guo Gu’s Guide to Silent Illumination

Kevin James – Just for You

‘Nature is Never Finished’ – Artist Robert Smithson on Cultural Confinement and Finding Real Freedom in Art

Robert Bly – When William Stafford Died

Keeping Silence of the Heart: Cultivating Attention and Sobriety According to the Philokalia

Dane Lyn – holy musings at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2019

Pamela Wax – Capricorn Loses His Star

Samara Landau – Happenstance

La Mar, El Mar: Ernest Hemingway’s Kind, Beautiful, Cruel Ocean

Angelic Armendariz – Nonbeliever

Pablo Neruda – The Sea

Dogen’s Seal of the Ocean: How Meditation and Life Can Flow Like Water

Gary Snyder – For the Children

Flow

Out Of the Body and Into the Mountain: Nan Shepherd’s Journeys Among the Scottish Cairngorms

Kelly Joslyn – Before the Hunt

William Stafford’s Last Poem

‘Simply Be Aware of the Oneness of Things’ – Lao Tzu’s Lost Teachings from the Hua Hu Ching

Julia Park Tracey – Tufas

‘Your Job Is to Put On a Splendid Performance’: Epictetus’ Design for a Skillful and Happy Life

Ellen Bass – If You Knew

Surviving Intact – Norman Fischer on Zen, Language and Growing Old

Everything is Made of Mind: Norman Fischer on the Playing-Out of Impermanence and Eternity

Ellen Skilton – Like Every Good Thing

To Share Fear is the Greatest Bond of All: J.A. Baker’s Loving Portrait of the Peregrine

I Am Not Garysomething

Focusing the Mind: Santideva’s Verses on Meditation and Relationship

Laura Schaffer – Evening

Billy Collins – The Dead

M. Christine Benner Dixon – Portrait of Dad at the Cutting Board

The Poem Is a Place in Which to Feel: Mary Oliver’s Tribute to Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman – O Me! O Life!

Running With Life: Alan Watts on Freedom and Poverty

Wendy Blaxland – That Wind

This is the Life: Annie Dillard Asks, Then What?

Sanctuary

Robert Frost – Acquainted with the Night

The Koan of Baso’s Very Mind

Lenora Steele – From the Patient Lounge, Before the Bypass

Alain de Botton on Why We Marry the Wrong People

Carrie Shipers – Mother Talks Back to the Monsters

Rooting Firmly Into Life – Thomas Merton on Accepting Reality as It Is

Nicholas Trandahl – Francis and Sistani

Sealskin, Soulskin – A Fable About Returning to Our Wild Origins

This Might Seem Stupid

Marc Bamuthi Jospeh – You Have the Rite

Why I Write – A Conversation with Kathleen Dean Moore

Milarepa’s Song of Transiency and Delusion

Pete Mackey – Mourning

I Had a Brother Once: A Poetic Ritual for a Sibling’s Grief

‘Telling Stories is the Single Thing That Makes Us Human’ – A Conversation with Adam Mansbach

Agha Shahid Ali – Prayer Rug

Jonathan Koven – Stilled Wings Will Soar

Anger Is Me and I Am Anger

When I Run Out of Murakami

T.S. Eliot – East Coker from Four Quartets

Dave Sims – Watercolors

Buddhism’s Most Basic Teaching: Everything Changes

Hari B Khalsa – Three Poems

Jennifer Chesnut – Little Bird

Improvisations in Jazz – Bill Evans’ Kind of Blue Liner Notes

Leaving

Amy Lowell – A Blockhead

Healing With Our Wounds – Henri Nouwen on Working With Loneliness

Erika Michael – Entanglement

Rilke and the Labors of Love

Stephen Dunn – Allegory of the Cave

As Long as Your Dewlike Human Life Lasts

Matthew Kohut – White Ash

Living Like Birds, Loving Like Birds

Issa – This Dewdrop World

Cynthia Ruse – The In-Between

You Have to Have a Cup

Stuart Gunter – The Wind Telephone

A Boy and His Woodland Friends: Charles Mackesy’s Heartwarming Tale of Discovery

Three-Pack as Another Name for Beauty

Philip Larkin – The Mower

The Moon in the Water, the Body in the Mirror

Tracy Ahrens – Thicket of Memories

The Free Woman is Just Being Born – Simone de Beauvoir and Freedom in Creativity

Elizabeth Barrett Browning – Mother and Poet

The Struggle of a Buddha’s Wife

Lori Rottenberg – Heresy

Nietzsche on Why It Is Also Important to Forget

Lora and Jack

Barbara Kingsolver – How to Do Absolutely Nothing

Serape

The Vast Blue Ocean – Cuong Lu’s Love Letter to Those in Despair

Emma Wynn – Sitting Dawn

Life Stand Still Here – Virginia Woolf and the Little Miracles

Robert Bringhurst – Sutra of the Heart

Self-Realization – Brahman and the Absolute

Vanessa Escobar – Why I Can’t Eat My Grandmother’s Fried Liver and Onions

Bad Drivers and the Short View

Elizabeth Bishop – In the Waiting Room

Hey, Mockingbird

Buddha On The Phone, Buddha Watching TV

Amy-Sarah Marshall – Shelled

The Culture of Healing: Louise Glück on Art’s Restorative Power

Katya Belena – Dawn Dusk

G.K. Chesterton – The Convert

“The Total Functioning is You, The Consciousness is You”

Vanessa Watters – Amnesia

Sleep Faster, We Need the Pillows: Suzanne Buffam’s ‘A Pillow Book’

Wanda Coleman – Nocturne

Religious Training, Equanimity of Mind

Erin Pickersgill – For the Pleasure

The Value of Honey – Susan Brind Morrow on the Oldest Form of Agriculture

Diane Ackerman – We Are Listening

When the Lion Roars

Jones Irwin – Around Here

The Landscape of Loss – Liz Tichenor’s ‘The Night Lake’

Embodying Grief – A Conversation with Liz Tichenor

Muriel Rukeyser – Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

“Do Not Visit the Sufi Unless You Want to Benefit”

Their Love of Life Should Never Weaken

Han Shan – A Bug Crawling in a Bowl

The Path Through the Gateless Gate

George Stein – Specter

Born in the City of David

Dilruba Ahmed – Phase One

Mencius – To Fathom the Mind

Taylor Mallay – New Life

A ‘Difficult’ Disease

Intersection

Rebecca Elson – Antidotes to Fear of Death

Martha Nance – Waterwords

On the Anxiety of Non-Being

Margaret Bleichman – upon waking

The Ecstasy of Paying Attention

Audre Lorde – A Litany for Survival

Letters to My Unborn Daughter

How to Dance? Lessons from a Zen Master

Amanda Smith-Hatch – Redemption

To Possess Is To Give

Mary Oliver – Wild Geese

Better Than We Think: Directing Self-Love

Todd Williams – Lost Socks

Tacey M. Atsitty – Anasazi

Gin and Coconut Curry

Bodhidharma’s Bloodstream Sermon

Mark Christopherson – Interval and Slip

Seamus Heaney – The Peninsula

The Love of Particulars and the Dignity of Difference

Robin Knight – Vulpine Nature

Ordinary Devotions

Dad Too Late

A.R. Ammons – Play

A Terrible Assistant Manager

The Great, Generous Laugh

Robert Okaji – Three Poems

Extinction and the Turbulent Forces of Change

Yes, This

Jack Gilbert – Failing and Flying

Kodo Sawaki Gathered Together: Arthur Braverman’s ‘Discovering the True Self’

Avoiding Extremes: Buddha’s Discourse on the Middle Way

Andrew Withers – Beside the Water

The Difficulty of Looking at Your Own Face

The Rose-Pink Porcelain Bathtub

Ross Gay – Thank You

D. H. Lawrence – Phoenix

‘Better to Light a Candle’ – The Healing Power of Vespers

Peter Spaulding – Déjà Vu, According to The Matrix

The Magic Lives of Swifts

Gregory Pardlo – Raisin

All Real Living

Returning Home – From Keizan Jokin’s Zazen Yojinki

Janette Schafer – Passagio

What is Attention?

The Fly Antecedent

David Whyte – The Bell and the Blackbird

Respecting Ourselves, Respecting Things

Holly Allen – Michigan Green

Love and Death are Inseparable

Esso Station

Wendell Berry – The Peace of Wild Things

Words of Advice from Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The Gift

Elizabeth Alexander – Equinox

Boshan and Fostering Great Doubt

Alan Watts and Divine Play

Heard Island

William Shakespeare – When I Consider Everything That Grows

Champions

Don’t Hit Your Head, Just Pass Through the Door

The Only Kind of Courage That is Required of Us

Let the River Reach the Lake

Eihei Dogen – Death Poem

The God of Ideas

Bradley Samore – There Was Never a Door

At Sea With Don Quixote – Thomas Mann

Philip Larkin – High Windows

Hakuin’s Song of Zazen

Susan Cummins Miller – Pandemic Aubade, Sonoran Desert

How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?

Kamaiyah – Ten Toes High

The Self is Everywhere – Isha Upanishad

Chris Alaimo – Lovely Kid

The Absolute Nature of Suffering

Alice Dunbar Nelson – The Idler

Shunryu Suzuki’s Waterfall – On Separation and Death

David Rosenheim – Pineapple Sage

“You Can’t Pray a Lie” – Mark Twain’s Huck Finn

Samia Singh – The Storms Within

Mary Oliver – When Death Comes

The Path That Leads Into the Mountains

Matthew Kohut – I Me Mine

Aldous Huxley and Beauty

Jorge Luis Borges – Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf

Florence Scovel Shinn and the Game of Love

Jennifer Hollis – Baby Boy Hollis

Smelling the Flowers in Dogen’s Gardens – Marcia Lieberman’s ‘Clean Slate’

To Name and Describe, You Must First See

Theodore Roethke – The Waking

The Better Way to Catch a Snake

Raymond P. Hammond – F Train

Only Justice Can Stop a Curse

Galway Kinnell – Saint Francis and the Sow

The Guidepost of Silent Illumination

Every Book is a Failure – George Orwell on Truth in Writing

Gwendolyn Brooks – Boy Breaking Glass

Eighteen Thousand Universes Through Eighteen Thousand Eyes

Clifford Venho – Forest of the Unsung

“Now More Than Ever” – Morgan Parker
