No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

A famous Zen haiku reads: “The old Pond. A Frog jumps in. Plop”  This is a wonderful description of bare attention. The poet, Basho, goes directly to the essence of his experience: the pond, frog, plop. We can say that in meditation we are developing “plop mind”. We are stripping away everything that is extraneous to our immediate experience and simply being present with what is happening. This is bare attention: direct, essential, non-interfering.

Joseph Goldstein, Bare Attention