Mindful
Mindful - meaning Summary
Ordinary Life as Instruction
The poem presents attention to everyday life as a discipline that leads to joy and wisdom. The speaker finds wonder not only in dramatic events but in ordinary sights and sounds, treating the natural world as a continual lesson. By urging herself to look and listen, she suggests that mindfulness means surrendering the self to the world's abundant, renewing presence.
Read Complete AnalysesEvery day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light. It was what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation. Nor am I talking about the exceptional, the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant - but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab, the daily presentations. Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these - the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean's shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?
Feel free to be first to leave comment.