WRITE 28 DAYS: MEDITATION RESPONSES – DAYs 25 & 26: Lovingkindness Towards Others & Lovingkindness Towards All Beings

I’m participating in Sharon Salzberg’s 28-Day Real Happiness Meditation Challenge again this year, and my plan for this blog series is to write a poem or reflection on each day’s practice. You can find all the responses on the landing page.


Meditating on Migration


I sit meditating, eyes a little open, spacious gaze, 
panoramic gaze, taking it in and taking nothing in, 
unfocused, not managing the moment but 
noticing you without wanting to 
through the window, wondering now 
why you’re here, where you belong, 
how your gaze looks to you,
what you gaze upon. 

Can you see me seeing you? 
I wonder where you fly. A nest or roost 
among tight branches, held in a tree’s hollow 
when you can, hidden in the prairie or the jungle’s 
moist leaves? I wonder while not watching you, 
while gazing panoramically,  
how you slot yourself through sky, 
air under and above, that felicitous vibe, 
the trace memory of wings before you, 
passenger pigeons, dodos, pteradactyls haunting 
your breeze, calling your name, holding you 
in their vanished and eternal dreams. 

How does it feel above the oceans, wetlands, highways, cities, 
all so lost and distant and small now, the feeling 
of being nightheld, star-led, moon-mad, 
aware without being aware 
of constellations marking space, the pull 
of the poles, heavy weather insistent like clouds 
traipsing your skymind, shadowing your protean trajectory.

How does it feel, crossing paths 
with all the others flapping and soaring 
across the roaming planet, all of you dropping down 
and rising up when you need to, 
when you have a mind to, 
when what you’re waiting to hear 
vibrates every one of your muscled feathers 
as you cast headlong into the quickening mist.

Half of my mind, most of my body, feels you 
catching currents, never knowing, always watching, 
ever wary, the map in your mind unfolding 
moment by moment as you adjust, pinion, swerve, 
flying blind, flying half-asleep, 
brain both here and there, 
and how 
do you know when you’ve found it, 
the moment’s deathless rest, 
the landing a thousand miles deep, 
water, earth, rooftop, anything but air,
anything but endless spacious air? 

© MMW 26 Feb 2023

clusters of birds migrating in May 2017 (Doug Hitchcox, Maine Aududon)

Leave a Reply