once born
the giving birth
sustains
Monday, August 31, 2026
the last star broken by storm
Where we’ve come from is nowhere near anything else.
Now here near nothing else.
Something has existed
Before heaven and earth;
Shapeless and silent
In its origin,
Yet the master of
Every image and form,
Can never wither
With the passing of time.
--Bankei (1622-1693)
Bankei is perhaps most famous for his teaching of the Unborn (Japanese: fushō 不生). The Unborn (also fushō fumetsu 不生不滅, "unborn and undying," or "no creation and no annihilation"[9]) derives from the Sanskrit term, anutpāda (no-birth, no-arising, not-born, non-produced, no-origin).[web 1][web 2] The Indian tradition sees the term anutpāda as an aspect of the ultimate truth, emptiness; since emptiness does not arise or cease, it is not born and never dies.[10][11] The term is also used in the Lankavatara Sutra, where it is equated with emptiness.[12] According to D.T. Suzuki, anutpāda is not the opposite of utpāda (arising) but transcends opposites. It is the seeing into the true nature of existence,[13] the seeing that "all objects are without self-substance."[14] The phrase fushō fumetsu不生不滅 (unborn undying) also appears in the Heart Sūtra.[note 1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankei_Y%C5%8Dtaku
Why all the feelings of loneliness experienced in the world?
Is it we think we are someplace else, away from some imagined place we are convinced we ought to be?
What if there is only love?
What if every place was our true home? Every person our true family? Every experience our true reality?
Richard Hugo’s poem “Villager” is one of my favorites. When you get to the final stanza, take note:
Villager
What's wrong will always be wrong. I've seen him lean
against the house hours and glare at the sea. His eyes say
no boat will come. His harsh throated seemingly
good natured mother bends her back to the soil
and there at least all grows well. When I speak with him
his eyes move away to the sea and I imagine
the red in his face from drink is also from
some ancient tribal shame. To him I'm wealthy.
When we talk I know how wealthy I am.
The police have him on file: petty theft.
I'm certain he steals to make up for the nothing he finds
every day in the sea, and to find money for drink.
Some days a woman picks him up, a sister I'm told,
takes him away and hours later delivers him back
passed out. Next morning again he's propped against
the house, the tide out in his eyes. I imagine
his sister, if that's who she is, knows oblivion
is what he must have often to survive.
I have much to tell him. And nothing. I'd start
with the sea. I'd say, there was another sea something
like this long ago, and another me. By the time
I got to the point he'd be looking away and be right.
No two hurts are the same, and most have compensations
too lovely to leave. At night, a photo glows alive
inside him when his mother's asleep and the cops
aren't watching. It lights up in the dark
whenever he looks hard and by dawn has burned out.
I almost forget: he'd do anything for you. Love him
for what you might have become
and love him for what you are, not that far
from him. We are never that far. Love
everyone you can. The list gets longer and shorter.
We're seldom better than weather. We're nearly as good
as a woman we met in passing once at Invergarry.
Don't be sorry, for him or for self. Love the last star
broken by storm. And love you. You hold it together.
Holding it together is the ensemble performance of non-separation. “We are never that far.”
This morning I came across The Dish from 2013 where Andrew Sullivan included this poem:
Thought Problem
by Vijay Seshadri
How strange would it be if you met yourself on the street?
How strange if you liked yourself,
took yourself in your arms, married your own self,
propagated by techniques known only to you,
and then populated the world? Replicas of you are everywhere.
Some are Arabs. Some are Jews. Some live in yurts. It is
an abomination, but better that your
sweet and scrupulously neat self
emerges at many points on the earth to watch the horned moon rise
than all those dolts out there,
turning into pillars of salt wherever we look.
If we have to have people, let them be you,
spritzing your geraniums, driving yourself to the haberdashery,
killing your supper with a blowgun.
Yes, only in the forest do you feel at peace,
up in the branches and down in the terrific gorges,
but you’ve seen through everything else.
You’ve fled in terror across the frozen lake,
you’ve found yourself in the sand, the palace,
the prison, the dockside stews;
and, long ago, on this same planet, you came home
to an empty house, poured a Scotch-and-soda,
and sat in a recliner in the unlit rumpus room,
puzzled at what became of you.
(From 3 Sections © by Vijay Seshadri)
I am left with the inquiry, its own poem, a worthy koan:
What-is
Becoming
of me
Sunday, August 30, 2026
you must travel the path alone
Reading The Bible With and Without Jesus, How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently • by Amy-Jill Levine & Marc Zvi Brettler, 2020.
It does seem that the world is begun and sustained by stories. That which is told about somethings is often that which is believed. For better or worse.
And if the narrators-in-chief wield enough power and exercise the greatest threat of punishment for disbelief, that narrative has staying power.
Follow the opportunity to seek out perception,
But you must travel the path alone.
If you have not found illumination,
Go where you may achieve completion.
--Ch’en Hsien (1634- 1654)
Chen Xian [Ch’en Hsien] 陳賢
(1613?-1672?)“Guanyin” 1661觀音Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper112.3 x 40.8 cm. (44 1/4 x 16 1/8 in.)A single figure of the Bodhisattva Guanyin sits on a strongly patterned rug, with shoes in front, sutras placed to one side, and holding a fly-whisk. The image is distinctly feminine, as is usual for the later periods of Buddhism, and much attention was given to the creation of a lovely and attractive image. The painting is signed in the lower right, Chen Xian, with one seal reading Songqi, “Pine River,” while the colophon by the artist is signed Songqi, Jian, perhaps an alternate name meaning “durable” rather than “virtuous.”
Maybe that’s why zen stories seem so cryptic and off-center, challenging the reader to dare make sense of them.
Cultures and societies, institutions and smaller units of identity-making organizations, write mission statements, offer rationales, histories, identity narratives, proclamations, and “abouts” on Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs, Instagram, and ’take your clothes off and act sexy’ apps.
Everyone says ‘believe my telling.’
Governments add ‘or else.’ As did dominant institutions like nations and churches and corporations.
Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, hears the cries of the world. Often it is the cries of those whose stories do not add up, who suffer the telling of other’s stories decimating their lives.
Maybe that's why I prefer metaphors. They're shorter. They suggest and infer. They don't try to overpower or control.
The one simple thing about metaphor is that it moves
us from one place to another, the word itself of restless
parts, from buried Greek meta meaning “over, across,
behind” and phoreo – “to bring, bear, carry.”
--Marianne Boruch
These days I seem to sit alone and watch the tone of branches moving on the mountain.
You could say they're going nowhere but where they are with grace. But neither am I. And I ain't got much grace.
If you're going to tell me stories, be brief, and add question marks at end of each paragraph.
Is God is an incomplete haiku unconcerned about how many syllables remain?
holy hush of ancient sacrifice
Mostly, if I had to admit it, I’d rather not know.
A living nescience seems refreshing. But an attentive living nescience. Not one of those ignorant boorish types of dullardry wherein stupidity masquerades as premium sophistry and pronounces itself the wisest most accomplished being ever conceived by woman. Our current instance of such proclamation is insufferably obvious and lives between Lake America and the Gulf of America
“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degreeshttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prolixity of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”
― Richard P. Feynman
People want to know if I am well.
I don’t know. I can’t tell. And good intentions pave all the way to hell.
Although I am surprised whenever one additional breath follows another.
My new motto is “One nap at a time.”
There, at least, preludes of unknown travels speed by without coherence or prolixity.
Hence, a modest aphasia and dizzying circumlocution sweeps the path with straw broom leading to latch of hermitry gate.
Saturday, August 29, 2026
tat tvam asi and bohm’s ‘implicate'
Peer Gynt Suite, No. 2, Op. 55 Part 1. The Abduction of the Bride, Ingrid’s Lament, plays.
A good background to the prattle of pundits trying to find new ways to tell us about the most absurd man ever to hold public office and his idiotic actions and rantings intended to foist his will and wealth into greater magnitude.
Gynt’s Arabian Dance prances across air waves. Earlier I watched documentary about the reintroduction of Przewalski's horses into China's Jungar Basin and Gobi Desert which, remarkably, helped revive dead soil, return native vegetation, and slow desertification.
“What is the ground of everything?” asks the Upanishads.
“Brahman!”
Brahman, in the Upanishads (Indian sacred writings), the supreme existence or absolute reality. The etymology of the word, which is derived from Sanskrit, is uncertain. Though a variety of views are expressed in the Upanishads, they concur in the definition of brahman as eternal, conscious, irreducible, infinite, omnipresent, and the spiritual core of the universe of finiteness and change. Marked differences in interpretation of brahman characterize the various schools of Vedanta, the system of Hindu philosophy based on the writings of the Upanishads. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/brahman-Hindu-concept)
“The individual is where the whole becomes local,” says the documentary on David Bohm and the Upanishads, about the "implicate order.”
The notion of implicate and explicate orders emphasizes the primacy of structure and process over individual objects. The latter are seen as mere approximations of an underlying process. In this approach, quantum particles and other objects are understood to have only a limited degree of stability and autonomy.[3]
Bohm believed that the weirdness of the behavior of quantum particles is caused by unobserved forces, maintaining that space and time might actually be derived from an even deeper level of objective reality. In the words of F. David Peat, Bohm considered that what we take for reality are "surface phenomena, explicate forms that have temporarily unfolded out of an underlying implicate order." That is, the implicate order is the ground from which reality emerges.[4] wikipedia
It seems hard to understand. We are not part of it. We are it.
I reread the Chandogya Upanishad
The Chandogya Upanishad is one of the oldest and most important Upanishads, belonging to the Sama Veda. It explores profound spiritual ideas through stories, dialogues, and philosophical teachings. A central theme is the concept of “Tat Tvam Asi” (“That Thou Art”), expressing the oneness of the individual soul (Atman) with the universal soul (Brahman). The text emphasizes the power of meditation, sound, and knowledge, especially the sacred syllable Om. It includes lessons on ethics, self-discipline, and the pursuit of ultimate reality beyond material existence. Through symbolic narratives, it guides seekers toward liberation and inner realization. https://vedantastudents.com/chandogya-upanishad/
The whole cannot be analyzed. Only dwelt-as.
God cannot be understood.
Rest in the unknowing incomprehension of the unknowable.
There, right there.
Here, only here.
to be free
Listening to songs
Their simple narrative
Singer with raspy voice
Became so familiar
Success is a funny arc
When it comes it comes
Mostly it stays off shore
Drifting away, nothing more
Friday, August 28, 2026
new chaplain recognizes tau on my hat
In prison one of the men worries. He feels that with Dolly and Tim in their eighties, and me older than them, it won’t be long and I’ll be missed and he feels it could be soon. Another guy agreed as he read a collaborative poem he partially authored. The tall Black Jew entered wordlessly, sat beside me, opened his new tallit, put it over his head, bowed in his chair, got up, walked out, left his ID badge on the chair, wordlessly.
The way to true spirituality
Cannot depend upon others;
One instant of enlightenment
And I go beyond body and self.
The myriad and profound virtues
Are complete;
Anywhere in the universe is now my home.
—Mokuan (1611-1684)
We fret over a Creeley poem as I have been for decades. We’re uncertain about it. Much like being 82 as Shabbat nears and my tall friend ghosts us having abandoned his carceral identity.
Song
God give you pardon from gratitude
and other mild forms of servitude
and make peace for all of us
with what is easy.
(—poem by Robert Creeley)
One of the men is painting a canvas of a Sadhu toking ganja. It looks like he is singing into a hand microphone.
I’m not so sure about death, old age, conversion to Judaism (as another tall inmate has done), gratitude and other mild forms of servitude, or what I’m doing anymore.
The day inside and outside goes by.
Another man from India is shy about some sly undertaking he’s about. Said he’ll be in next week.
We walk the mile out.
It’s been a lot of years.
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
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