Night
Takes to bed
Quietly
Friday, August 28, 2026
Thursday, August 27, 2026
what is longing to be-with-us as nothing-other is with us.
So many so often consider “mystical union” to be some sort of fireworks and transcendental out of body experience.
Odds are, it’s not.
It is quite possible it is a different sort of nearness. A nearness that feels like no other, or, in different words, a no-other feeling that does not register as an experience.
Rather, an unremarkable reality that so infiltrates one’s being that it doesn’t feel like anything else -- just what is taking place at any given moment.
The unio mystica—the “union” between “God” and the “human being/self”—in its most popular meaning might seem to refer to the vague and subjective feeling of “proximity” periodically felt by certain individuals (mystics) toward some higher “reality”. Experts in mysticism today no longer believe the naïve view that the term refers primarily to an “experience” of that reality, one characterized by “ineffability” and the loss of individual awareness in the face of that overwhelming “presence”.13 In fact, there is nothing at all vague or subjective about the unio mystica, which has been explained in rigorous detail by Religions 2025, 16, 94 4 of 27 the great theorists of the Abrahamic traditions and surely by theorists of other traditions as well. Since the expression—“union” or the “unio mystica”—finds its origin and development in Western Christian sources, we should not be surprised to see that specialists of that tradition have most thoroughly developed its meaning.
Scholars of Christian mysticism—e.g., the Benedictine monk Sebastian Moore, the Dominican scholar Louis Roy, and the Chicago Divinity School historian of religions, Bernard McGinn—have presented in some of their writings, an approach to the unio mystica grounded in a theory of consciousness, specifically in what some of them have termed the mystical consciousness. 14
In other words, they have explained the meaning of “union” between “God” and the “human being/self” as a meeting (“uniting”) of “human consciousness” with “divine consciousness”,15 and the overcoming of the former by the latter (“identity”). Their discussions of the unio mystica also draw from and seek to coherently and self-consistently explain the multitude of statements of Christian mystics16 pertaining both to the pole of “uniting” as well as to the pole of “identity”.
Bernard McGinn presented a useful summary of a theory of the mystical consciousness in his 2008 article-length study, “Mystical Consciousness: A Modest Proposal”. As he clarifies there, the mystical consciousness is characterized by a continual “uniting” with “God” the unitas spiritus),17 the latter understood as a “co-presence” found within the mystic’s consciousness; or rather as a kind of “consciousness-beyond” or “meta-consciousness” (to use a term offered by Thomas Merton) (McGinn 2008, pp. 44–63 at 47, 48). Whereas ordinary human consciousness involves acts of loving and knowing together with the self-awareness (and intentionality) of the human subject who acts and knows, the mystical consciousness adds a further element, namely an “infinite other”, who/which is not grasped as another object of consciousness18 but an “infinite ground”19 of knowing and an endless source of loving that transforms the mystic’s consciousness and becomes evident in his actions.
(McGinn 2008, pp. 47, 51–53; Roy 2003, p. xv).
(--from Rethinking the Unio Mystica: From McGinn to Ibn Arab¯ by Arjun Nair, pp. 3-4https://www.academia.edu/127122244/Rethinking_the_Unio_Mystica_From_McGinn_to_Ibn_Arab%C4%AB?email_work_card=view-paper
Perhaps it is the Nothing Special (by Charlotte Joko Beck), Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (by Shunryu Suzuki), or Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychoanalysis (by Barry Magid), or The Experience of No-Self (by Bernadette Roberts).
We so want something to happen. Something to radically upset our familiar way of seeing things.
But what if the unio mystica is just our ordinary life without perversion, delusion, or grasping?
When the Buddha said we are already enlightened, when Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, when Robert Lowell wrote “we are poor passing facts / warned by that to give / each figure in the photograph / his living name” (poem, Epilogue) -- we are invited into everyday/ordinariness without making anything other of it.
Then there is the difficult counterintuitive poem Song by Robert Creeley that challenges our understanding and causes us to ponder:
God give you pardon from gratitude
and other mild forms of servitude
and make peace for all of us
with what is easy.
Perhaps we think that God is hard, demanding, a harsh judge, uncompromising, unappeasable, and a miserable absent tyrant.
Or, perhaps, despite any reconcilable evidence that God is loving and kind in a world that provides mayhem and terror, war and despicable behavior in our midst, we implore protection and solace.
We ask “where is God?”
It seems to me we are missing something vital and important.
Maybe God is nothing other than where we are who we are.
Something is longing to be-with-us as nothing-other is with us.
What do those words say?
Be Still and Know I Am (God)
With You Always
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
knowledge thus attained
Just because we behave stupidly by allowing stupidity to rule our country, there might be yet a little room left to repent and remove stupidity from his golden pretentiousness.
Look up to heaven and down on earth, and they will remind you of their impermanency. Look about the world, and it will remind you of its impermanency. But when you gain spiritual enlightenment, you shall then find wisdom. The knowledge thus attained leads you to the Way.
—Sutra of Forty Two Chapters
We do not have to remain stupid.
Or allow the stupid to remain in control.
What knowledge will we need to accomplish this?
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
assorting
divinity seems
to be lost on us
this god talk
and after life
miracles faith
and good works --
these days my
attention slows
when christians
jews or muslims
proclaim their belief
to be sole and true
I’d rather not
vote who’s right
who gets the prize
for best story or hype
and rely on what we
know best, human oddness
stories and videos and films
about our bizarre ways
the repercussions and
ripples circling out into
a never-ending flood of
anguish and dread trying
to survive what nature and
nasty folks have foisted
so, tell me, about your
difficulties and periodic joys
the things you dream and things
you suffer on the way to oblivion
and I will feel with you your life --
but spare me your belief in some
divine accountant or testicular
tyrant enslaving and salvifically
releasing peons and populace
whimsically whoring themselves
for favor and fantasy akimbo --
no, not for me, an onlooker
Rather --to sit on sunporch
heat in a silent stillness, with
no expectation or hope, someone
asking do I feel ok, which feels
an absurd question -- of course
I feel ok, whether sickly or well --
what else is there at my age but
the feeling of feeling as I do --
it all could end today, or in another
month or year or decade -- all by
itself whether any of us feel fine or
suffer the way we each do everyday --
we get up, put one foot in front of
the other as best we can, and while
the time away. Why calculate? Why
strategize, why complain, why try
to rationalize a purpose for the theater
of absurdity we tread and pivot and sing --
give me nothing and I will have nothing,
something and that something will fade
dogs will get biscuits, cats their cans
and French toast suddenly appears
and it will set itself free
its silly
to wonder
if today
is last
sun rises
over mountain
cars pass
to town
in youth
i'd bicycle
to church
for mass
now I
turn face
to wall
close eyes
the ritual
turns itself
to mind
remembering
that once
anything
appears it
beckons God --
take and
receive
this
truth
become
gloriously
unnoticeably
transparent
what is normal mind
Is it possible?
Are we by nature the Way? The Way without cultivation?
The Way does not need cultivation;
Just don’t pollute it.
What is pollution?
As long as you have a fluctuating mind,
Creating artificialities and pursuing inclinations,
All is pollution.
If you want to understand the Way directly,
The normal mind is the Way.
What is normal mind?
It has no artificial contrivance,
No right or wrong, no grasping or rejection,
No ordinariness and no sanctity.
-- Ancestor Ma (709–788)
Mazu Daoyi (709–788) (Chinese: 馬祖道一; pinyin: Mǎzǔ Dàoyī; Wade–Giles: Ma-tsu Tao-yi, Japanese: Baso Dōitsu) was an influential abbot of Chan/Zen Buddhism during the Tang dynasty. He is known as the founder of the Hongzhou school of Chan. The earliest recorded use of the term "Chan school" is from his Extensive Records.[1]
He is most famously known for his two teaching statements: "This Mind is Buddha" (ji xin shi fo 即心是佛) and "Ordinary Mind is the Way."[2]
It is hard to conceive.
It is hard to believe.
One foot in front of another.
One step then one step then one step.
Monday, August 24, 2026
Sunday, August 23, 2026
neither each nor all
High above
Airplane passes
No one in there
Knows I am here
So it is
With the gods
We’re too small
To mattter
But the One God
Who knows no other
Feels Itself
In each of us
i’ve not been out walking
These days it’s hard to know where to look.
When I see
The purity of
The lotus flower,
Then my heart
No longer is stained.
—Mokuan (1611-1684).
These days there’s so much I forget to do.
la parole, (wording)
Many acquaintances
Are in for murder
We are alike
We sit together
I must have
Murdered long ago
It’s what we did
It’s what we do
Saturday, August 22, 2026
what is seen is what is quiet glory
I prefer to think
of Siddhartha walking
town to town
I prefer to think
of Jesus walking
town to town
talking about weather
children with mothers
stones untripping feet
two men five hundred
years apart -- good men
with good eyes -- looking
at what is there
a benevolence passing by
everyone better for it
Buddha, Christ --
these titles had feet
look under yours
first without a second
in and out of planet fitness
in tank tops and sweats
next to Spectrum next to
Maine Health quick care
as dog and I walk behind
building waiting on quick stopee
I read Robert Lowell back in car
this line: “O that morning might
come without the day--“ (from
Ulysses and Circe) and it sounds
right, surmising I’m the only one
reading Lowell in this parking lot.
Test is inconclusive, I’m told as
we drive to ABC bakery for coffee,
cinnamon cruller and bathroom --
the harbor is busy, sail and power
boats coming to dock, marine patrol,
small craft enter and leave --
It is morning that feels holy, day
devolves into purpose and errand
like having to write some other lines
after a particularly good one, knowing
no duplicate will distract those first
slanting beams of emergence from sleep;
Lowell on Marlborough Street book-worming,
in West Street Jail lower Manhattan, then, later,
mid-town, in back seat of taxi, his writing ends
Friday, August 21, 2026
In time of trouble
One of the men
Wanted to heal me
This morning
Thank you, I said,
No need. I’ve lived
A long life, long enough.
He was resigned but not
Happy. He’s been in prison
Thirty years. We like him
But if he healed me
I’d have to keep going on
Trying to stand on one foot
If I ever had to take a sobriety
Test. I practiced in the lobby
And wobbled. When another
Man came in to talk about
Mother Mary and seeing God
It seemed natural. I’d been
Listening to Ramakrishna talk
About the Divine Mother earlier
And his seeing God so it didn’t
Seem too far-fetched. It is prison,
After all, a place of anomaly and
stretched imagination to be heard.
So we read two poems about
Grandmothers, dreams, grinding pits
& berries, remembering motion of love
in prison today
Grandmother
by Grace Cavalieri
for Graziela Zoda
What is the purpose of visits to me twice since you’ve
died?
Downstairs near a woodstove I hear you
in motion, always working,
a long silken dress—
tight sleeves at your wrist, soft above the elbow
wide top at your shoulder for free movement.
When we were young you didn’t visit—
you never baked a cake that I remember
or babysat or held me in your lap.
you were in the men’s part of town running a man’s
business
calling the world to order,
seven children behind you
raised singlehandedly in your large house. You were
moving, always moving.
When I kept losing things like my parents,
my children, money
my time and health
why did you appear in my room with gifts painted
red, yellow, blue,
brilliant colored toys. What
essential fact did you want me to know,
that the body is the essence of spirit and so
must be in motion?
Now that I’ve lost my foothold, my direction, my way,
what is your message, strong spirit,
strong Grandmother,
what is the meaning of your dream-present,
a bright clock shaped like a train—
simply that it moves?
— Poem by Grace Cavalieri.(1932 -). Grace Cavalieri is an American poet, playwright, and radio host of the Library of Congress program The Poet and the Poem. In 2019, she was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of Maryland.
... ... ...
Tawkwaymenahnah
I walk around the small tribal
welfare cabin Kookum
had lived in, searching
for her grinding stones.
On hot August days
we would sit for hours grinding
chokecherries, pits and all.
She would hum or sing
softly in Cree, put the mash
into small patties on cookie sheets,
cover them with screens
to keep the birds out,
set them on the cabin’s low roof
to dry in the hot North Dakota sun.
In the dead of winter, she would soak
the dried patties overnight,
then fry them in bacon grease,
add flour and sugar,
the small shack filling with a tangy
sweet scent, and summer
flooded my every pore.
I take my grandkids berry picking,
they complain of heat, mosquitoes, ticks,
twigs catching their braids.
I wear my apron, make a pouch
to pick the low hanging berries
with one hand and toss them in
like Kookum did.
Kneeling before the flat rock,
braids tied back,
smaller rock clasped in hand,
I pound the fresh berries
pits and all.
Grandkids want to try,
and soon the rock is singing
my grandmother’s songs.
Copyright © 2021 by Denise Lajimodiere. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 24, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Poet Laureate of North Dakota, 2023–2025
Denise Lajimodiere is an Ojibwe poet and the author of Stringing Rosaries (North Dakota State University Press, 2019), the recipient of a Gold Medal from the Midwest Book Awards, as well as a Silver and a Bronze Medal from the Independent Book Publishers Association.
Lajimodiere lives on Turtle Mountain Reservation, in North Dakota. In 2023, she was appointed poet laureate of North Dakota.
lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
It is beyond curious that no one, no one, is capable of reining in the current president of the United States from his grift and graft, criminal actions, deceitful attacks against anybody and everybody who disagrees with him, war-mongering, ICE-murders, unlawful destruction of the White House, and general usurpation of the legislative and judicial branches of government.
Unless...
Unless it is meant to happen.
Unless the destruction of the United States government has been the agenda of a cadre of Republican operatives who’ve smothered any dissenters and made lemmings of Republican House Members and Senators, and Supreme Court Justices.
The president owns the Justice Department.
He owns media coverage of his every absurd proclamation and lie.
It is damned brilliant.
(I feel so silly.)
My hat is off to him.
Maybe he is the apocalyptic pale rider unmounting and destroying known civilization.
Until I hear otherwise, I will burn sulphur and creosote in his honor and wait for the end to befall.
There’s a new sign at every entry port to the US:
"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate”(Dante). Abandon hope all ye who enter here!
Thursday, August 20, 2026
sitting on sun porch with grey cat
I disappeared this summer
the gears inside my head froze
i'd sit, stare out, cough, sip tea
nothing wanted to go on
cars passed on road
dog slept under yew bush
mariner went sailing -- I sat
nothing going on, empty
the way cat sleeps on couch
its not so bad, disappearing
mind goes off on its own
not one dream is true nor real
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
wir haben post
I lived until 82
then I disappeared
where I am now
I do not know
everything looks the same
but no one answers mail
I say something, no response
I think of a Franciscan friend
shot dead today 29 years ago
in Colebrook NH, an editor
he tried to wrestle rifle from
killer’s hands, failed, was shot
Dennis Joos wrote odd animal
stories in Callicoon in winter
As I said, at 82 I am in that
parking lot where he and the woman
he tried to save lay dead in august
lingering about, after the fact
but I don’t know -- it all seems quiet
where two troopers, the woman
and Dennis lay still and unresponsive--
once we walked around the pond
saying beads on crown before studying
the way they spoke in Ancient Greece
scanning lines of Aeneid and Odyssey
pattern drills of Mutter, wir haben post
lowing cows up on the hill
callouses on knees, water on foreheads
But that was long ago. Now the dead
go about their day with Thorton Wilder
detachment and curiosity at what
the living are doing, where no guns
or maddened men try to prove some point
and don’t -- where everything waits
and rests in peace, still wondering,
a still gazing cat on red futon cover
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
lentil soup and quiche
if I were a zen monk
I would do the dishes in the sink
place them on wood dryer
walk away thinking -- there
that’s done -- and wait for door
to open, she thinking, ah, they’re done
the only thing that ever saved my life
Yellowstone sent me to this song:
Turtles all the way Down
I've seen Jesus play with flames in a lake of fire that I was standing in
Met the devil in Seattle and spent 9 months inside the lion's den
Met Buddha yet another time and he showed me a glowing light within
But I swear that God is there every time I glare into the eyes of my best friend
Says my son it's all been done and someday your gonna wake up old and gray
So go and try to have some fun showing warmth to everyone
You meet and greet and cheat along the way
There's a gateway in our mind that leads somewhere out there far beyond this plane
Where reptile aliens made of light cut you open and pull out all your pain
Tell me how you make illegal something that we all make in our brain
Some say you might go crazy but then again it might make you go sane
Every time I take a look inside that old and fabled book
I'm blinded and reminded of the pain caused by some old man in the sky
Marijuana, LSD, Psilocybin, and DMT
They all changed the way I see
But love's the only thing that ever saved my life
So don't waste your mind on nursery rhymes
Or fairy tales of blood and wine
It's turtles all the way down the line
So to each their own til' we go home
To other realms our souls must roam
To and through the myth that we all call space and time
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