“Fear confuses the mind” Sylvia Boorstein
                     from don’t just do something, sit there, p. 135.

The small mind
noodles her way
dust ball to fallen crumb
across the floor of doing
and not doing
of deciding, not deciding.

Really!  There is no way
to help your children
once they have flung themselves
into the rivers of willful action
into the waves of cause and effect.
You watch them rise and fall
yearning to call out to them,

Don’t drown!
or Fear confuses the mind!
or Accept “what is!”
although you yourself have mastered
these laws imperfectly
or not at all.

In fact, you are only beginning
to understand them just now
as you stop yourself
from flinging them like tattered

gossamer lifelines
toward your suffering children.
                                    1/10/2005