December Night's Walk One-Sentence Meditation

On a still, snow-crunching night with bright Orion's Belt (Three Kings or Three Sisters or Three Nothings or Three Anythings, take your pick) guiding us, the dog and I walked Burnet Park and its islands of nightshade green, its light show dotting the Happy Holidays (Unnamed) landscape of snow and ice and memories of June, both of us delighting in the jingly-jangly clip-clop clop-clip symphony of horse hooves, children's voices, and five ladies with Slavic accents in a cigarette-smoke-wreathed circle bidding us good evening.

Advent haiku 2

dishwater gray sky

hollow blank slate yearning cold

silent seed stirring

listening

...to John Fahey's "The New Possibility..." CD. 12-string guitar.

Not many better Christmas albums.

Advent haiku

Sarum blue vestments
flickering wreath candles' flame
waiting for pink, still

holiday malaise?

Is it creeping in, my annual malaise, which may be more a healthy and spiritual sanctuary than a depression? It may be. Is it not sensible to retreat from that which is senseless? Or am I merely escaping responsibility? If Wordsworth said, "The world is too much with us, late and soon;/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers," what would he say of rampant consumerism masquerading as religiosity?

addition by substraction

I had a tooth pulled (i.e., extracted) today.

The pain of yesteryear called TMJ was likely the hairline fracture in the removed tooth.

Call it addition (improvement) by subtraction (extraction).

Went smoothly enough.

Versed, a brand name for the anesthetic midazolam, works wonders. At least for me.

I do not take the success of this "procedure" (the all-purpose medical euphemism) for granted.

Oh no.

I really don't.

December haiku

vanilla coating

skeletal branches dripping

pointillist patterns