Still Lantern

Writings

Observations on steadiness in ordinary life.

Drop by Drop: Craving, Renunciation, and the Context That Can't Be Handed Over

Why hearing the Buddha's teaching isn't enough: how gentle nudges of craving build suffering drop by drop, and how practice builds the context to see them.

Looking Directly: What the Contemplation of Death Can Teach Us

A gentle guide to death contemplation in meditation practice: why looking at our own mortality brings clarity, tenderness, and a simple daily method to begin.

The Second Arrow

A reflection on grief and the two arrows: how believing something is permanent deepens the pain of losing it, and what it means to hold what we love loosely instead.

Acute suffering in love and work rarely comes from caring too much, it comes from a dependency so narrow that fear does the caring. On widening the field.

Why so much of daily exhaustion comes from managing how life feels rather than from life itself, and how meeting reactions with awareness and care, instead of more bracing, lets the strain actually lift.

Four Truths, Four Verbs

The Four Noble Truths each assign a task. Most of what goes wrong in an ordinary day is applying the wrong one.

The Hand That Already Knows

A reflection on how mindfulness turns harmful habits from hidden comfort into felt danger, the same instant, unhesitating withdrawal the hand already has for a hot stove.

The Trained Mind

Understanding how the mind works, and how to train it, is the complete work in total.

The Smallest Unit of Suffering

How a single moment of resistance builds into suffering, and why the noticing meant to interrupt it has to stay gentle rather than becoming one more thing to grip.

Minding the Gap

The first of a three-part series on the interval between contact and craving: why the mind is built to close that gap as fast as possible, and why it matters far more on ordinary days than in a crisis.

Part two of the Minding the Gap series: why the pleasant is harder to observe than the painful, why distraction erases the gap entirely, and why a loss is never the cause of suffering, only the bill arriving for purchases made in the dark.

Learning Not to Leave

The final part of the Minding the Gap series: how watching the breath without correcting it becomes the training ground for standing in the gap, and why the watching has to stay soft and warm to actually work.

Each Small Bell

A poem about the small pulls toward the phone, the cupboard, the TV, and the quiet that opens when you stop following them. Presence as not becoming.

A meditation poem about a batter's walk back to the dugout after striking out, and how the way we carry a moment shapes the one who meets the next.

A meditation poem about the sting of another's happiness, and the gladness that comes from seeing a fellow traveler whole.

A meditation poem about meeting anxious, restless weather with curiosity instead of endurance, and letting the mind's tight grip slowly loosen.