The hiatus in this meditation journal invites reflection and comment, three months and more since my last entry.

It’s not that I don’t meditate now.  I admit to meditating less, but I meditate regularly.  And it’s not that meditation yields no results of interest, day by day; though I can say that it now rarely yields an experience that I have not already written about and posted in the past.  So there would be little point in writing it up in new words merely to keep this meditation journal alive.

I tried never to post a reflection on meditation itself, that was not tied in some way to a specific meditation’s outcome.  I find much of the mental and spiritual time I once gave to active meditation I now give both to reflections on meditation in general and to other forms of meditation that I have always sustained throughout my life: staring into space, with no particular thought; composing poetry; contemplating trees; and so on.  These yield writings, at times, but not of the kind embraced by this journal.

Some part of the determination and purpose with which I approached meditation for the last two and half years has shifted back to the writing of poetry.  I’m glad, relieved.  Indeed, I’ve sometimes wondered whether the inner calm to which meditation might lead and the sense of unease and energetic disturbance that gives rise to poetry might be antithetical conditions.  “If I were truly at peace, would I ever write poetry again?”  This sounds needlessly binary—a fear, not an insight—but it can’t, I find, be dismissed outright.

There may be more meditation journal entries to come, then, but in the present form, the journal enters a hiatus which may not have an endpoint.  So be it.  For the moment, new entries would only come at the expense of wu wei—that is, they would be effortful strivings cutting against the spirit of the Way.

23 July, 2025.