monday morning

 Ah, snow

Spring snow

Stay home snow

a familiar haunting passing lyric pleading to be experienced

“See me. Feel me. Touch me. Heal me.” (from “Tommy”, by The Who)

Maybe what we call “the divine” or "the ineffable” is a familiar haunting passing lyric pleading to be experienced.

Furthermore, the scriptural model better represents “God’s all-embracing immanence in all of creation”—and, he argues, Centering Prayer happens to fit squarely within the scriptural model. More advanced Catholics, Frey suggests, gradually transcend and integrate the Western model; thus, critics of Centering Prayer must simply be stuck in the Western model.25 

 

If nothing else, this is advanced rhetoric. But, depending on exactly how one fleshes out the notion of the-self-in-God and God-in-the-self, Frey may also be describing the fuzzy syncretic edge where Catholicism meets Buddhism. Compare, for example, the scriptural model of the-self-in-God and God-in-the-self with this Soto Zen priest’s description of “the Zen version of God”: 

 

[E]ven though Zen does not conceive of the Ineffable as being personified, we still believe there is something incredibly intimate and personal about it. Dogen writes, “We ourselves are tools which [the Ineffable] possesses within this Universe in ten directions.” We are not part of the Ineffable in spite of being our personal self, or in addition to being our personal self. There is no Ineffable apart from the myriad manifestations of the universe, including our personal self. Just as the Ineffable shines through a beautiful piece of music, it shines through us.26

        How do we Zen Buddhists direct ourselves toward this “Zen version of God”? By the practice of shikantaza, or “just sitting”—a form of meditation that is strikingly similar to Centering Prayer. 

 (--in "On Centering Prayer and Shikantaza", by Jill R. Gaulding, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, 2020)

The word “anoësis” comes to mind. 

• anoësis

Etymology

From a- (“lacking”) +‎ noesis (“cognition”).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) enPR: ănōēʹsĭs, IPA^(key): /ænəʊˈiːsɪs/

Noun

anoesis (uncountable)

1. (psychology) The reception of impressions or sensations (by the brain) without any intellectual understanding.      

 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anoesis#English

Something there is that cannot be successively thought. Not rationalized, not conceptualized, not cognitive, not understood.

Experienced?

Maybe.

Felt?

Maybe.

Become our practice?

(Hmmm...!) 

I’ll sit with that.

we have in him nothing honorable

 Sometimes

An ignorant man

Is only

An ignorant man

starting off on the wrong foot

 Hey, you

    Me?

Yeah you

     What?

Come here

     Why?

…   …   …

[If this had been a real interlocution you would have been directed to mind your own business. We appreciate your compliance with this advisory.]

then, silence

 Car passes

Truck passes

Bird sings

This is 

What Saturday

Morning sounds like

If you

Want to know god

Know this

voici où j'en suis, pour l'instant

 Here 

(is where)

 I am, 

for now

Here

(My love)

Is

Here

There

(Is no)

There

There

How

(Difficult is it)

To be

Here

One

(Minute ago)

It was

4:44

Now

(It is)

Not, not

Anymore

I admit 

(my love) 

it is

Good

 To 

(See you)

As you are

Here

this clear no-awaring

 Something about anesthesia

room full of medical folks

being told "have a good nap"

wondering if you will go under

then . . .

opening eyes in different room

having been gone, gone, gone

now back from no-where

doctor from India patting shoulder

saying I'm ok, saying, if I want,

I could get heart surgery I could

get pancreatic surgery, or, if I didn't,

live well until time says, "hey, you

want to go back to that deep no-where?"

and I wonder what it will be like

this new un-timing, this clear no-awaring

cœur et étreinte

We hold these

Family members and

Ancestors fondly in heart

Everyone, everyone

Is family and ancestor —

It is large heart, wide embrace

joseph

 I've liked Joseph 

since I was a kid.

I also like the phrase 

"On earth, (as it is), in heaven"

in the prayer his kid spoke.

There's something Buddhist 

in the narratives about Joseph --

caring, protective, mostly silent. 

( I suppose he was a pre-christian 

Christian as well).

He disappeared silently

he lived mostly silently

He seems under-celebrated,

matter of fact, as it should be,

 as it is in heaven, as it is on earth

if that is so, this is no

 This

Is my last

Will and

Testament.

Really?

What is

This?

Do you think you

Want to know?

“Yes” [then] “No “

无心 (pinyin: wúxīn)

 If I had anything to say

I might try to say it

As it is

Nothing comes to mind

sip, beathaigh an madra, siúl

tea with no milk 

lemon poppy muffin

French monks chant

their obscure mystery

Ensō stretches on Tibetan rug

there is no reason to live

just sip tea, finish muffin

watch temperature on sunporch

rise, with gratitude to capable

cranky Irishman’s labor now lost

so much goes bye whether

you are looking or not

if only for comparison

I heard Leo XIV use phrase "Step toward Christ."

And I wondered -- is this stepping arising toward what is

already there, or, stepping closer to what is not yet here?

Wisława Szymborska's poem

We’re extremely fortunate 

 

We’re extremely fortunate

not to know precisely

the kind of world we live in.

One would have

to live a long, long time,

unquestionably longer

than the world itself.

Get to know other worlds,

if only for comparison.

Rise above the flesh,

which only really knows

how to obstruct

and make trouble.

For the sake of research,

the big picture

and definitive conclusions,

one would have to transcend time,

in which everything scurries and whirls.

From that perspective,

one might as well bid farewell

to incidents and details.

The counting of weekdays

would inevitably seem to be

a senseless activity;

dropping letters in the mailbox

a whim of foolish youth;

the sign “No Walking on the Grass”

a symptom of lunacy.

  

 --Poem by Wisława Szymborska

 --Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh in (The End and the Beginning, 1993)

Perhaps it is fortunate not to know why what is happening is, in fact, happening. Perhaps it would scare me. Or, lead me to some depressive action incommensurate with my wellbeing.

In a sane time the rules of clear communication and reasonable expectation would provide a modicum of sanity and a sensible following of events.

Szymborska sounds a little Buddhist with her lines:

Rise above the flesh,

which only really knows

how to obstruct

and make trouble.

 And the nod, perhaps, to form and emptiness:

From that perspective,

one might as well bid farewell

to incidents and details.

I suspect not everything has to be reflected in Buddhism just because I'm a Buddhist. Nor should everything be reflected in Christianity because I'm a cradle Catholic, (catholique né d'une famille catholique).

Nor need every thought-provoking phrase be washed through my interest in Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Native American, Pagan, Agnosticism, and Atheism, much less the foreign languages that call to my attention. But that seems to be a choice I make.

 I am interested to:

Get to know other worlds,

if only for comparison.

(Thank you, Wisława -- poetry is the other great spiritual/religious touchstone while here.)

Papa Leo seems like the kind of guy, thoughtful and full of imagination, Wisława and I would like to take tea with. We could look to her empty chair at cafe table, her gentle smile and intriguing whereabouts part of her poetic soucier. 

We could "step toward" what is longing to be out there ahead of us, respectfully beckoning with quiet compassion our words, our bodies, and the extremely fortunate choices we might happily make to narrow the gap between there and here.

jhāna

 Waking up

Realizing

It is still

Only Tuesday 

buíochas le sinsir

 Happy

To be

Irish

Thanks Ma,

Da, all

Ancestors

la maladie mentale le paralyse

 Forget the pretend 

Adversarial 

Red vs blue

I’m afraid

Truth is

The man is insane

I’ll say it

You don have to

Keep up the pretense

Soon, he will

Be removed

His terrible derangement

let’s listen to the story, carefully

all we 

have is 

hearsay

so many 

stories

to sift

christianity

rehearses

raw narrative

no sé nada.

 ha!

finally

the truth

nothing to hear

 bell

everything sits

shikantaza

slaper wakker

From The Atlantic, Feb 2026, The Commons:

This summer, while visiting

Washington, D.C., with my

son, we went inside the Jefferson

Memorial and read the inscrip-

tions on the walls out loud. One

quote struck me deeply: “I am

not an advocate for frequent

changes in laws and constitu-

tions, but laws and institutions

must go hand in hand with the

progress of the human mind.

As that becomes more devel-

oped, more enlightened, as

new discoveries are made, new

truths discovered and manners

and opinions change, with the

change of circumstances, institu-

tions must advance also to keep

pace with the times. We might

as well require a man to wear

still the coat which fi tted him

when a boy as civilized society to

remain ever under the regimen

of their barbarous ancestors.”

This excerpt from a letter by

Thomas Jefferson resonated with

me immediately. Jefferson— the

original originalist— would have

been appalled at some of our

recent Supreme Court decisions. 

 

Brad Erickson

Iowa City, Iowa

 

Jill Lepore replies:

In high school I had a won-

derfully pudgy and eccentric

tenth-grade history teacher. He

taught in a second-story room

with a wide plate-glass window

that looked out at a mountain

in the distance, whose silhouette

resembled a sleeping giant. In the

middle of an especially boring

lesson—the accidental presidency

of John Tyler, say—he’d lumber

across the room and haul himself

up onto the radiator beneath

the window and lie down on it,

exactly lining up his belly with

the mountain’s summit, his head

and feet with its smaller peaks:

he, the giant. He’d sigh, settling

in, and then he’d appear to nod

off . We’d wait, a little nervously.

And then suddenly and in a

whirl of motion you could not

imagine as within the capacity

of so large and old and ungainly

a man, he’d roll off the radiator,

leap to his feet, and cry, “The

giant wakes!” And it would be

very thrilling, and we’d all snap

to attention, and he’d move on

and—somehow, somehow—he’d

make the fall of the Whig Party

gripping. In short, I heartily

agree with these readers, and I

hereby offer my assurance that

the whole point of my sleeping-

giant analogy with reference to

Article V of the Constitution,

aside from being a nod to a

beloved teacher, is that somehow,

somehow, and I suspect one day 

soon, “the giant will wake” ! 

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/magazine/pdfs/202602.pdf 

These recent months have been like being slapped in the face by some arrogant bully. For the immediate present it feels disorienting and shocking. But after taking some breaths, and maybe a refreshing nap, it becomes time for the sleeper to awake. 

so laufen diese dinge nun mal.

My body doesn’t want to leave the house anymore.

It loses its taste for food.

It sits in chair by window

Drinks seltzer in evening. Tea these mornings 

A student’s first task should be to abandon your idea of your self. To abandon your idea of your self means that you should not be attached to this body.

Even if you have understood the sayings of the ancients and sit all the time like iron or stone, if you remain attached to this body, it is impossible to attain the way of the buddhas and enlightened ancestors, even in myriad eons over a thousand lifetimes.

Dogen (1200-1252)

My body gets ready to disappear.

It’s ok.

It’s how these things go. 

atmospherics become you

 How long

Do you

Want to live?

Let me

Ask you —

Where does

Breath go

When it rains?

Breath beholds

Bodies

sailor’s longing

 Sea  me

Now

behold

 Such

A good

Word

Be it

Done

With me

aurevoir

We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time - Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today. They've been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so! Thank you for your attention to this matter.  (DJT, 3/12/26, social media post)

 

When his time comes

As it will

We will wonder

How he happened

There will be flowers

Muscle words and grand

Hyperbole — then, quietly,

Things go on, as they do

Let it go, let all of it go

That’s what things do,

They go — we’ll 

Never understand why

croyez-le ou non

 God

Is not

To be

Found

God 

Is 

What Is 

Here

evacuation orders

Ιt’s good that he’s dead.

War loves its dead.

Will his love transform death and dissolve war?

Their aim was good, waiting for rescuers to attend to the dead and wounded. Then firing at their asses. [The next few lines are my anger.] 

Our Israeli cohort doing what they love to do in the Middle East. Kill, destroy, maim. They are God’s chosen, They are Trump’s chosen. “But we survive,” they say, that mischievous grin on Netanyahu’s face inviting Jared and Ivanka to Jerusalem. “First we kill, then we break bread,” he purrs. The American Press knows how to report on Israel’s tactics. Can you spell -- ‘a n t i s e m i t i s m’ -- whenever anyone criticizes our Jewish friends?

Here’s what the LATimes reports:

• • Father Pierre al-Rahi, a priest in southern Lebanon’s Christian-majority village of Qlayaa, was killed by an Israeli tank shell while helping wounded civilians.
  • His death underscores the widening toll of renewed Israel-Hezbollah fighting, which was triggered by the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran.
  • Pope Leo XIV paid tribute to Al-Rahi, saying, ‘May the blood he shed be a seed of peace for beloved Lebanon.’ [cf. https://youtu.be/uTpkJxGRuxE?si=IFE0Gmm05EKU8_LF]

• QLAYAA, Lebanon — The bells rang, their peals obscuring the buzz of the Israeli drone overhead as the casket of Father Pierre al-Rahi arrived at the parish he had served.  

  
  Only days before, Al-Rahi had stood in the very churchyard where the crowd assembled Wednesday for his funeral. He had announced that the people of Qlayaa would ignore Israel’s evacuation orders for southern Lebanon and remain. 

  
  “He gave us strength to stay rooted here. He kept repeating, ‘We’re staying,’” said Eveline Farah, a 67-year-old resident. 

  
  And he had lived up to his word, Farah added. So when an Israeli tank shell struck a house in the village on Monday, Al-Rahi and others rushed to help the elderly couple living there.That was when the second shell struck, wounding Al-Rahi and five others. He bled to death later that day, bringing home to Qlayaa, one of the few Christian-majority areas in Lebanon’s south, the latest conflict between Israel and the Islamic militants of Hezbollah. It’s a war no one here wants. 
  https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-03-11/priests-death-in-lebanon-brings-war-to-community-that-wanted-peace 

  And The National Catholic Reporter: https://www.ncronline.org/news/lebanese-maronite-catholic-priest-killed-israeli-tank-fire-southern-lebanon 

  [The next few lines are what a desolate philosopher who sees war as insanity might write.]

  The crime is not ignorance. The crime is failure to discern the core of care longing to ascend to the surface of human interaction. We know it is there. It wishes to ascend of itself to the material manifestation of social, ethical, and political recognition. 

  Human greed obfuscates. The craving for power and recognition obviates care crawling up from obscurity to the light of human practice. Core care like spring seed pushes itself toward manifestation. But the heel and boot of personal aggrandizement and pretense stomps it back down into dark soil. The ugliness of human power ambition cannot abide the longing of the human spirit for peace, justice, and the humanitarian way.

  We seem to be stuck in a desolate and deficient psyche and psychology of egoistic accrual of self-determined ideopathy decidedly recondite and obtuse. Not only don’t we know who and what we are, we don’t care to consider the deeper constitution and implication of our raison-d’être.

  
  

  [I end here. “I” ends “here."]

  Perhaps better said: me ends here.

  “Here" is all there is. 

  “Me” absents. Me abstracts. Me takes an erasure to reality-as-it-really-is, rather fabricating a reality that mendacity tries to weave with swollen tongue and cancerous ambition.

  “I” doesn’t know anything.

  Intentionally pretending to know what is best, to know anything true, and absenting what is here, is the death-knell we hear transposing healing loving silence into the cynical noise of war, deceit, and perversion.

  I am ashamed of myself.

genug fűr jetzt

 I give up

To sleep

I give up

To God

It’s enough

For now

qui es-tu?

 nobody’s here

            who are you?

nobody

            you’re nobody?

yeah

            and you’re here?

yes

            good to know

generative origin, ever-present

 It feels I've lived far too long. 

Not worn out by fields, nor slain by stones or arrows, bullet or shrapnel. No one in my neighborhood slit my throat. No Circus Maximus chariots impaling my body or wild animals tearing my flesh, no gladiators whipped my back with barbed metal,  

OUR ANCESTORS' SHORT LIVES 

 --by Wislawa Szymborska

(Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

Few of them made it to thirty

Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees.

Childhood ended as fast as wolf cubs grow.

One had to hurry, to get on with life

before the sun went down,

before the first snow.

Thirteen-year-olds bearing children,

four-year-olds stalking birds’ nests in the rushes,

leading the hunt at twenty—

they aren’t yet, then they are gone.

Infinity’s ends fused quickly.

Witches chewed charms

with all the teeth of youth intact.

A son grew to manhood beneath his father’s eye.

Beneath the grandfather’s blank sockets the grandson

was born.

And anyway they didn’t count the years.

They counted nets, pods, sheds, and axes.

Time, so generous toward any petty star in the sky,

offered them a nearly empty hand

and quickly took it back, as if the effort were too much.

One step more, two steps more

along the glittering river

that sprang from darkness and vanished into darkness.

There wasn’t a moment to lose,

no deferred questions, no belated revelations,

just those experienced in time.

Wisdom couldn’t wait for gray hair.

It had to see clearly before it saw the light

and to hear every voice before it sounded.

Good and evil—

they knew little of them, but knew all:

when evil triumphs, good goes into hiding;

when good is manifest, then evil lies low.

Neither can be conquered

or cast off beyond return.

Hence, if joy, then with a touch of fear;

if despair, then not without some quiet hope.

Life, however long, will always be short.

Too short for anything to be added.

Maybe good and evil are unknowable.

Still we think or utter prayers to the Great Unknown hovering and weaving in and through our consciousness. We continue to pray for a good life, productive life, a life that has meaning and conscious kindness.

Optimism is possible. 

We hide and we seek similarly. We know when we do wrong. We know when we do right. We are not ignorant. Ignorance is a costly excuse pretending we do not understand our behavior.

Even if we cannot fathom there is a God (or there is God) we ought to pray. As a youth I was taught that "Prayer is the lifting of the mind and heart to God." 

Even if you subscribe to the awkward notion that "God is not yet," you could understand the thinking that suggests that manifestation is the continual origination of what is coming to be.

This line of thought is generative. 

Perhaps we've not understood creation and procreation. If not to enrich existence and enliven reality for the benefit of all life, then why bother?

If there was another line to Szymborska's poem, perhaps: 

        "So add nothing, let out source and grace." 

Radically, at root, there is for us, source and resource, eternal invitation, to resound and rejoice.