A Love Letter to My Teachers

It’s morning. The radiators are making their gentle symphony for the first time this fall. The day will be filled with writing, learning my piece for my grandson’s important day, bits of work in the morning, acupuncture and food shopping in the afternoon. As usual, my mind is a jumble. I keep thinking about the love I feel for my meditation and yoga teachers — the quiet gratitude for how they guide us toward the simple act of settling.

In their company,
the noise begins to fade,
and out of the tumble of thoughts
a few themes emerge that ask for focus.

The practice is not to erase thought,
but to observe its dance
to step back and witness
the mind’s machinations from a distance.

To follow the breath
And observe the runaway sleigh ride
down the mountains of narratives
we hold dear,

Then on the inbreath
to return to the mountaintop
and see more clearly:
the now,
this second, unlike any other
the singularity of this moment

In that instant comes the realization
The mind at rest and the consciousness awoken
I am the banks of the river
The feeling is both electric and humbling
the clarity, the flash of awe
that everything is interconnected:

All time flows between its shores
from the first tremor of the Big Bang,
to the quiver of my first breath of life
at my mother’s breast
through the loves and losses
within the microcosm of my lifetime,
to my grandson standing at the Bima
in a few short days at his Bar Mitzvah.

As my eyes open
Tears form at the fullness of the feeling
that for the first time in this life’s memory
that all is as it should be.

The idea forms that perhaps
I have been bent and shaped,
formed, tumbled and polished
by the wisdom of the cosmos
to be useful in some way

Perhaps only through these words
To be a signpost
To the next step
In the eightfold path

With heart/mind overflowing
I bow to honor each of you
And whisper words of gratitude
For the sacred spaces
the ancient wisdom and skillful guidance
you cull from the daily struggles
of a soul’s journey in a human’s form.