My Year of Meditating Virtually

A year of streaming my weekday morning meditation practice during the pandemic.

Seconds

“The world is too grand to reshape with babble.”

~ Jim Harrison

Daron LarsonJanuary 12, 2020Jim Harrison, poetry, light, darkness, time, impermanence, connection Comment

Time and Light are Kinds of Love

“Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?”

~ Tony Hoagland

Practice in Life, See Out, Feel InDaron LarsonDecember 22, 2019Tony Hoagland, poetry, mundane, life, time, attention, paying attentionComment

Let the Years We're Here be Kind

“a little broken, a little new.
we are the impact and the glue.
capable more than we know
to call this fixer upper home.”

~ Sleeping at Last

Daron LarsonSeptember 22, 2019Sleeping At Last, music, music video, home, family, time, impermanence, commitment, agingComment

What Poetry Can Do

“I want this poem to be nicer
than life. I want you to look at it
when anxiety zigzags your stomach
and the last tranquilizer is gone
and you need someone to tell you
I'll be here when you want me
like the sound inside a shell.”

~ Stephen Dunn

Daron LarsonJuly 31, 2019Stephen Dunn, poetry, timeComment

Something Slower, But More Tangible

“Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible?

Can we go outside and listen?"

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Hear Out, Hear In, EquanimityDaron LarsonSeptember 20, 2018poetry, Naomi Shihab Nye, listening, time, life, attentionComment

The Flutter of Your Earnest Heart

"Dive in with your eyes closed
For the life you were born to claim
And the water will be paralyzed
By the courage you contain
And the flutter of your earnest heart
It will fill the silent seas"

~ Ryan O'Neal

Daron LarsonJanuary 9, 2018Sleeping At Last, music, video, courage, time, memory, uncertainty, historyComment

Total Eclipse of Internal Interference

The real magic happens when we become intimately familiar with the moment-by-moment experience of being alive. Instead of trying to force complete experiences to happen. I focus on setting the stage for them to happen by exercising my attention.

When remembering to notice that we're alive becomes a habit, we begin to erode the internal friction that obscures our view of the richness we're swimming in every day.

Always Vanishing

"The trouble with the present is
that it's always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period – already gone."

~ Billy Collins

Gone, Myths & Misperceptions, Practice in LifeDaron LarsonJune 27, 2017Billy Collins, poetry, time, present, mindfulness, gone, impermanenceComment

Watching the Clock

"As conscious human beings, we know we die, and we therefore know our clock ends on, some level. So time just seems foundational. And I think a lot of the gymnastics that we do as human beings has to do with our relationship to the clock, or lack of a relationship to the clock. We squander time until it’s too late, et cetera. I love looking at the building blocks, the raw material, the irreducibles."

~ B.J. Miller

Practice in Life, Clarity, Notice Flow, GoneDaron LarsonFebruary 2, 2016On Being, B.J. Miller, death, time, imagination, suffering, health care, past, future, sensesComment

A Story I Will Try To Tell Without Words

the strangest things can conjure up the past,
and forgotten time will find its long way back.

as thin as air, as light as snow
some combination of the unknown,
but it doesn’t matter, i just know i need more.

~ Sleeping at Last

Breath Awareness, See In, Feel InDaron LarsonJanuary 25, 2016Sleeping At Last, senses, memory, time, impermanenceComment

It Ain't Easy

"I'll never be the fastest teenager, and I'm okay with that. It doesn't matter if I'm better or worse than someone. It just matters that in a year from now, I'm stronger, I'm faster, and I'm a better person."

~ Cole Cooper

Equanimity, MagnanimityDaron LarsonSeptember 14, 2015Cloud Cult, hope, time, uncertainty, medicine, illnessComment

Refine Your Lens

When I talk to people about finding stories in their life, I'm talking about finding things that are almost in their everyday that they can bring great meaning to and connect to audiences or to people around the lunch table.

~ Matthew Dicks

Practice in LifeDaron LarsonAugust 14, 2015Matthew Dicks, story, storytelling, practice, writing, advice, time, memory, mundane, creativityComment

Before You Know It

"How’s this poem for its ability to collapse all the years from childhood to middle age in a matter of fifteen short lines?"

Daron LarsonJune 2, 2015George Bilgere, poetry, childhood, aging, growing up, time Comment

The Opposite of Trivial

"The true material of knowledge is meaning. And the meaningful is the opposite of the trivial. And the only thing that we should have gleaned by skimming and skipping forward is really trivia."

~ Maria Popova

Daron LarsonMay 19, 2015education, learning, On Being, reading, meaning, idea, contemplation, timeComment

We Differ

Me — a teenager?
If she suddenly stood here now, before me,
would I need to treat her as near and dear,
although she’s strange to me, and distant?
Shed a tear, kiss her forehead
for the simple reason
we share a birthdate?

~ Wisława Szymborska

Daron LarsonMay 6, 2015poetry, growing up, Wisława Szymborska, self, time, agingComment