Photograph by Pamela Gay

Inviting Mara to Tea: Overwriting Clouds

No is a dark cloud; yes is a blue sky, but even a dark cloud will come to pass and be overwritten by a clear blue space called sky − time goes faster if you open the doors and windows and breathe     just breathe    and you will have more space inside your being for whatever will come and go in this time, which is your life, your life time after all.

"Morning Poem," Photograph by Pamela Gay

If she hadn’t risen early this morning, she would not have seen the beautiful shadow portrait on the bamboo screen on her back porch – and snapped it up.

Mother’s Day

A woman florist in the Bronx complained about having to work 15-hour days the week before Mother’s Day – so many flowered bouquets to prepare, and worse, the behavior of the people requesting the flowers – she was a mother, too.

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"Democracy Now," Photography by Pamela Gay

“If democracy worked, I wouldn’t have done this.”

"Treecut" Photograph by Pamela Gay

“Treecut,” she said, snapping this photo,
as if this were a new art form.

 Sentenced to Death

In the morning as was her ritual, she carried a cup of espresso and her MacBook Air to the old oak library table next to a sunlit window of plants ever-reaching higher-higher, causing one visitor to exclaim “I like your trees,” when lo & behold, just as she was about to land her MacBook Air, there lay a fly, a sight that caused her eyebrows to rise and her sleek laptop to fall fast&furious, crushing the fly, and it was then after that heightened instantaneous moment of being that she heard some echoes: her yoga teacher starting class with some sentence about how we must respect every living creature, which echoed varieties of this commandment by Buddhists, which then made her think of the story Buddhist nun Pema Chodron told about how she once spent four hours of her day trying to help a bug out the door, and then she remembered asking her yoga teacher at the end of class if fleas were included, as her Maine coon cat had recently suffered a flea attack and she admittedly had been drowning fleas one-by-one in hot, soapy water, which she would not have done with this fly, and then she began thinking about the national debate about whether the death penalty should be banned as a form of punishment, which led her to ask herself what had this fly done except lived its life as a fly, and then she thought she’d better get on with her day, that thinking about sentencing had gone on too long–
like this sentence.