a song I enjoyed as a boy

Bluffs on the Guadalupe River

17 miles upstream from Kerrville, Texas

artist: Robert Julian Onderdonk

If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it? 

Dogen

Socks without holes

Reading the Heart Sutra before dawn
Even before coffee
Pico Verde, my loud conure

Announces that he is now awake at 5:15AM
Great squawks from the other room
Later Looking for socks without any holes -- it's a chore
Morning in my world

James Lee Jobe

If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one. 

Shunryu Suzuki

Singing before dawn with no one listening

It is so early that it might still be late
Or it could be the other way around
Time is an instrument that measures
Something that doesn't need to be measured
It is well before sunrise and yet I am awake fully Again
I meditate focusing on my breath
Not for very long, really Just thirty minutes
After that, coffee
And a moment or two outside to check the sky
A very old song comes to me
One that I enjoyed as a boy, and I begin to sing

James Lee Jobe

Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.

Pema Chödrön

Scattering seed for birds

The first gray light of a winter morning

Walking among my fruit trees 

I cry for my dead son

I then scatter those tears 

Like seed across the cold ground

But the birds won't even go near

James Lee Jobe

In the Mountains on a Summer Day

Gently I stir a white feather fan,

With open shirt sitting in a green wood.

I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;

A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.

Li Po

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Thanks, James