I’ve been thinking about mindfulness lately, which is, I realize, sort of ridiculous; instead of thinking about mindfulness, I should just be mindful, right?

I do try, but then there’s always something in the back of my mind– a project for a client, how much Christmas gift-planning I have left (hey, I start early but my Decembers are very relaxed), books to read, reviews to write, wondering if my son will ever outgrow the vegetarian-except-for-bacon-phase, wondering what color I’d paint my front door if I owned a house with paintable front door (purple, but what shade?), how often I should be checking to see if Leonard Cohen is going on tour again,  which houseplant I’ve brought closest to death this week, how much I wish Parks & Rec season 7 was on right now . . . and so on.

I have a few friends who practice meditation,and they seem calmer and better adjusted than I feel, but every time I think about getting a meditation app or reading a book about how to meditate, I’m distracted by something (often a small something who likes to wear three shirts at once, demands very specific, non-findable episodes of Super Why, and recently expressed a need for a “poem-book,” thereby bringing his mother to tears).

Which is all a long way of saying that my one small step toward meditation is reading poetry. Sometimes—most of the time—I can’t read a full collection, but one poem? I can do that.

So this week I’ve been reading and re-reading Neil Fischer’s [As if the moon could haul through you], which is gorgeous, and is about clearing the mind, even if it fills the reader’s with heady images (“the purl of south-bending river”—I swooned, almost).