Jo Chern

Category: reflection

  • “The time has come, the walrus said…”

    Eve of NaPoWriMo. Poetry exercises done: 0. Ah, yes, the cruelest month, indeed. My favorite book on writing poetry came from an unexpected source. I’ve been a fan of Stephen Fry since he and Hugh Laurie did their sketch comedy show on BBC and can’t read P.G. Wodehouse without his voice as Jeeves. But when…

  • Zen and the Art of Writing Bad Poetry

    After many months away from this blog, I’m coming back to torment my followers by making this my site for National Poetry Writing Month in April. I’m hoping to start doing some practice work here over the next few weeks. And, no, not all my poems for April will be related to Mindfulness, Buddhism, Qi…

  • Kuan Yin: Beyond Human

    He’s lying in the sun, breath heavy and fast, sides shrunken, bones of the chest and neck showing through the skin, backs of the ears and the toes almost hairless now. Just an old cat suffering from age and pain and a host of ailments. “Just put him down,” people tell me especially after they…

  • Age and Ache

      When I was young, if I was young, I believed the lies about how age creeps up on you, setting in like a fog, oozing into your pores a bit at a time. I also believed Sandburg when he said that the fog comes in quietly “on little cat’s feet.” Well, neither the fog…

  • Back Away From The Keyboard

    As other introverts will understand immediately, after I’ve charged into the world with some public face on, blogging faithfully for a week, for example, I’m left both exhausted and terrified and I slink back into my den, wrap my tail around my face and try to hibernate off the contact. I use to try to…

  • “Nothing Special”

    “I have been there and come back. It was nothing special: The river at high tide, The mountain veiled by misty rain”                                                                         Zen Buddhist saying Beauty…

  • The Hubris of The Lone Wolf

    “Chutzpah. Nothing but ego-driven chutzpah” That has been my brain for the last few days as I try to keep going with setting up The Qi Gong Center. Not that my brain has been alone in this derision. I’ve also been asked why I don’t just go join the local Tai Chi center. “But Tai…

  • The Parable Series: Let It Go

      And so the parable goes: A master and his disciple are walking along the bank of a river (there’s a lot of walking goes on in parables: second of the parable series and we’ve already walked twice) when they come upon a lovely young gentlewoman, standing on the bank and crying because she cannot…

  • So, A Buddhist and A Taoist Walk Into A Bar…

    I often write about Buddhist ideas and refer to authors and Buddhist scholars like Jack Kornfield but I have to admit I’m just not a nice enough person to be a Buddhist. Really. Quietly and patiently putting up with jive? I think not. Sitting quietly under the bodhi tree awaiting enlightenment like the bodhidarma? Ain’t…

  • The Meditation of the Stinky Feet

    Sitting, my free ten minutes scrolling before me, I find the breath, acknowledge the sensation and happily settle into my meditation. When I meditate, I try not to shut out the world, try instead to let all sensation in, listening to not just my breath but the gentleman, using the term loosely, in the next…