Allowing Now: The Book and the Poem

Some poems (not many) arrive complete. Most take days, maybe weeks, sometimes even months to get to that state of completeness where no more can be done. They are as pure and as perfect as they're ever going to be.

Some just won't let go. They keep asking for attention, even after publication. My mindfulness poem “Allowing Now” has been one of those.

Today, it's finally finished and about to be published in a collection by the same name–Allowing Now, a book of mindfulness poetry.

Allowing Now: The Book and the PoemWhy did it take so long? The substance of the poem was there from the start but the challenge was that I wanted not just to write a poem about mindfulness, the process of coming into the present moment and allowing what is to be. I wanted to give the reader–you?–a mindfulness experience in the reading.

I wanted to facilitate an expansion from the flurried thoughts of busy, surface mind into that  deeper and higher state. That asks for a certain kind of deep attention from you, dear reader.

Though we’ve only recently started to use this word for it, poets—and poetry lovers—have always cultivated the truth, magic and mystery we now call mindfulness. When we move more deeply into the moment we’re in, we ignite our own creative presence. Dormant faculties waken. Insight, imagination, intuition, inspiration are magnified. We see more, perceive more, know more.  We wake up to life and all the ways it expresses itself, including words.

Reading (and writing) poetry always calls for this fully-present state and reading and writing mindfulness poetry most of all.

The book is now available here on this very website or wherever good books are sold online.

Allowing Now
The talkers talk of leaving
or remaining, who should go,
what cannot stay, who’s right,
what’s wrong, where's goodness gone?
Too many old, the lawless young.
We’re bound to pay, we’ll come undone.
The planet’s doomed, the coming bomb.


I close my ears 
to third-hand tales.

I’ll feed no more 
on skeletons 
of doom or ruin
or drivel from the latest fool.

I’m calling now.


I breathe my breath:
Inhale. Exhale. 
For now.


For now
, 
no more of what 
the world calls news, 
filtered through another’s blues.



I breathe my breath:
Inhale. Exhale. 
For now.

Buoyed in the surge of now swirled in the swell of now washed in the flow of now lulled in the well of now I find perception magnified.
I see the world with new-washed eyes.

Our young, who never flourished more 
than they grow now
Our grown, who never knew more
than they know now
our old, who never garnered more 
than they sow now.

Peace, never more peaceable than now 
knowledge never more knowable than now
goodness never more visible than now.

And goodness knows
life comes in peace
and we are all as welcome
as we ever were, here, 
in the holy, flowing, hold of now.


I breathe my breath:
Inhale. Exhale. 
For now.

More mindfulness poetry at www.ornaross.com/mindfulness

Orna Ross

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