I rise at four, meditate and open Arthur Sze’s poetry book, The Glass Constellation, to these lines in the poem “The Flower Path”.

You must learn to see a pond in the shape of the character mind,

Walk through a garden and see it from your ankles;  

Wondering what the shape of the character mind is I ask AI who responds: 

The primary Chinese character for “mind” is 心 (xīn), which looks like a stylized, simple drawing of a physical heart, with a central vertical line, two curved strokes on the sides, and a dot at the bottom, representing the ancient belief that the heart is the seat of thought and emotion, often translated as “heart-mind”.  

And then I wonder if AI is a who, which brings me to Dr. Seuss’s book Horton Hears a Who!, and the words “a person’s a person no matter how small”, and as the mind curves in the shape of a heart, I think of how tragic it is that we have people leading our country who’ve never read Dr. Seuss.