When my mind begins

spinning tales of resentment,

weaving old grudges

into today’s brand new cloth,

I stop the spinning

and begin again, this time

weaving in threads of gratitude.

                                                                                    JDG

I don’t think she knew

my grandkids called me Gaba, but

after a session

where I talked much more than I

usually did, her

unconscious carefully wrote

out a check to Gabarant.

                                                                                          JDG

Sometimes I feel like

I’m a character in someone

else’s novel. From

time to time the author lets

me shape the plot, but

just when I get things going

as I’d like, she throws

in an unexpected twist

just to see how I’ll react.

                                                                                       JDG

Dark clouds overhead,

but in the distance the sky,

though not cloudless, holds

more light. Tomorrow it may

be the other way.

Such is the ever-shifting

nature of all our journeying.

                                                                            JDG

No ripple disturbs

the pond’s clear surface as day

begins. Trees stand tall

and motionless. The sky is

empty of calling

birds or shape-shifting clouds. May

the winds within grow

as silent as the winds without.

May my heart be as open

as the cloudless sky above.

                                                                                            JDG

They tried to tell me

they were learning to live in

the now, those grandkids

of mine, when they announced their

new motto was “Don’t

do today what can wait ’til

tomorrow,” but I

well knew for them the dishes

could wait for all eternity.

                                                                                                 JDG

They tried to silence,

as so many have tried before,

that voice crying in

the moral wilderness. They

might take a moment

and ask how well that’s worked in

history’s long arc. There

have always been those who heard

the silenced voices

speak and kept alive the call

to bend history’s arc toward justice.

                                                                                               JDG

It won’t make the news,

but today a stranger saw

me struggle to lift

a case of bottled water

and put it in my

grocery cart. “Let me help you,”

she said, and added

with a smile, “I’d want someone

to help my granny too.”

                                                                                                   JDG

I don’t want to make 

too much of this, but it’s true –

Every day on my 

way to work I pass by several

cemeteries. Though

I know they haven’t just sprung

up, my awareness

has and with it, a heightened 

sense of all life’s joy

and all life’s suffering, of

all that once was and

 all that is no longer -the

poignant price of being mortal.

                                                                                                                                     JDG

That squirrel came back for

another try and this time

it was do or die.

By turning his world upside

down and hanging most

precariously, he dined.

The pleasure must have

been all in the doing ’cause

he’s not returned for more chewing.

                                                                                                 JDG