For me, reading a poem is a way for my thinking brain to pause and to shift to being in this moment.  Present moment awareness gets hi-jacked in trauma and stress. And yet we reclaim our inherent capacity to be present by practicing. A project called “A Year of being Here. daily mindfulness poetry by wordsmiths of the here & now” publishes beautiful  poems everyday that help us shift our awareness. Check out  and subscribe to the collection which is curated by Phyllis Cole-dai at mindfulness poems.

LAO TSE: WE ARE THE RIVER

Our life has not been an ascent
up one side of a mountain and down the other.
We did not reach a peak,
only to decline and die.
We have been as drops of water,
born in the ocean and sprinkled on the earth
in a gentle rain.
We became a spring,
and then a stream,
and finally a river flowing deeper and stronger,
nourishing all it touches
as it nears its home once again.

*

Don’t accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage,
a river at its deepest
and most nourishing.
Sit by a river bank some time
and watch attentively as the river
tells you of your life.

“We Are a River,” from The Sage’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for the Second Half of Life, William Martin’s free-verse interpretation of the classic work by Lao Tzu (The Experiment, 2010).