hanging chads

 I sit and do not stare at anything

I glance

everything is where it is

right there

do you believe me --

don’t

I am not to be trusted

that’s that

today’s leafy carpet, next year’s soil

 When I lose my way

I look in every direction

For hint where to travel

When able to stand and waddle

I mostly watch ground

Which seems nearer than ever

Inches of fallen leaves on path

Shushing under boots as dog and I

Near gate to house through barn

for now

 I don’t know nor care 

about life after death.

That’s it

Nothing more

anicca

 Meetingbrook.org website has disappeared.

Today at meetingbrook still hangs around.

Impermanence.

Soon, everything gone.

How do I feel about this twenty five years writing a blog?

Thirty years website?

365,698 visits so far this month.

3,414,430 since sept 2001

So ist das Leben!

Oh well!

seeing through

I wandered into zen around 1963. I read John C.H. Wu while in novitiate with the Franciscans in Lafayette NJ. I sat next to the bookshelf during conferences and his book kept saying ‘pssst’ ‘pssst’.

I looked through Wu and continued looking through these 63 years. While never seeing clearly, the practice of looking through has been a subtle melodic accompaniment to what seeing might be. 

Enlightenment means seeing into

your own essential nature,

and this at the same time means

seeing through to the essential

nature of the cosmos and of all things.

—Yasutani, 1885-1973) 

Hakuun Yasutani (安谷 白雲, Yasutani Haku'un; 1885–1973) was a Sōtō Zen priest and the founder of the Sanbo Kyodan, a lay Japanese Zen group. Through his students Philip Kapleau and Taizan Maezumi, Yasutani has been one of the principal forces in founding western (lay) Zen-practice.

 --wikipedia

Some have said it’s not so much the looking at as it is the looking as. 

Curiously, these days I’ve noticed a distinction arising. There is glancing and there is gazing. When i’m feeling blah and off to some sit down/lie down passing altar in front room, I glance, I merely note, and pass. No feeling, no lingering. 

Other times, passing through or sitting in white chair, I gaze. I take in what is there. I let pass through what is permeating on its way through. I linger.

The glance says ‘I note.’ The gaze says, ‘I am not’.

It might seem a facile distinction, but, these days, presence and non-presence seems to depend on how I feel and whether I want to continue...anything.

“[T]he essential nature of the cosmos and of all things” -- I suspect, must contain the birth and death of stars, galaxies, and the smallest forms of life -- all arising and departing according to some impulse/logic we have not yet been able to figure out. 

I watch my body packing its valise with things it will not need. I note my energy has been sent by UPS to an undisclosed location. My thoughts wander Penn Station looking up at arrivals and departures afraid to approach ticket counter with empty wallet. My breath is a child holding on to the sleeve of a worn coat covering a body chilled with season change.

I glance at things.

Periodically I gaze.

I don’t know what I am seeing; I don’t know what I am seeing through.

another nice mess

I give up.

Where?  

If all things are returned to the One,

To where does that One return?

--(Saying appears in classic Zen records, such as Case 45 of the Blue Cliff Record, attributed to the Tang dynasty master Zhaozhou Congshen (Jōshū). [1])

Often at the scene of an accident there will be a cop waving people to keep on going saying, ‘Move along; nothing to see here!”

These zen masters of sidewalks and roadways are unnamed bodhisattvas in the lineage of Jōshū urging us to enter the prospect that where we are is where we are going and that where we have been is where we’ve never left.

One is, after all, One.

I walk out into chilly October Tuesday morning, pass water, kinhin (經行) to wooden gate by road, watch sun begin descent from atop bald mountain like some rusty rustic blanket ballet falling from bed when sleep grows old and body asks for movement.

An aside: 

(--Radical environmentalist and author Edward Abbey, famously said that if you cannot urinate outside on your own property without being seen or bothered, your neighbors are too close and you have moved too near to civilization. [1, 2])

I often lose track of what day it is these days. I listen to nuns in France chanting Laudes. Simple morning prayer whose Latin benignly obscures facile delve for meaning leaving only aesthetic attention to their cadence melody.

The silence in wohnkūche suffices as naved monastic enclosure chapel in imagination good enough for me. The thin thread of geographic location stretches wraith-like these days as worn-through consciousness billows with slightest breeze into chimerical phantasmagoria. 

Who needs to go anywhere when I am (we are) already there?

Where does the one return?

Yes!

Or as my Jewish neighbor in childhood Bensonhurst used to say again and again, “Don’t ask!”

On my doorjamb, this:

     שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד

• Transliteration: Sh'ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad
• 
  
• Translation: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (Or, “The Lord Alone.”)
• 
  

The monastics sing:

 Omnes Angeli ejus,        All his Angels, 

 laudáte Dóminum de cælis               Praise the Lord from the heavens!

Perhaps the universe is One.

And there is no reaching or transcending this One.

And here we are!

Hmmm, "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!” (Oliver Hardy)

knock, knock, knock

 green Adirondack chair

facing bald mountain --

yellow burnt orange

slow revelation of color

turning clouds drift west

to east as mountain sits still

this wide zendo facing one

another cushioning silent love

overlooking the obvious

 I’m no psychologist or psychiatrist, but this: https://youtu.be/dJtbSg0MaMQ?si=OZomq1IXzEYt9zh4

A day will come when we will ask how in God’s name this state of affairs came about and was allowed to continue.

There will be sorrow and deep regret in the asking.

christ graciously hear us

 what if there were no ‘mistakes’

if everything that has happened 

has happened of necessity

all of it, no accident, no mistake

what logic applies, what reasoning

the necessity of everything?

if you ask me have I sinned

I’d say October leaves

on ground belong to earth

I would say both hurt and joy

are yesterday’s notes on a page

torn out beside an ink-dry pen

cruelty

 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/opinion/midterm-ads-ramaswamy-acton-ohio.html

OPINION, 

DAVID FRENCH, There Is Nothing MAGA Won’t Sink To, Oct. 25, 2026, 6:00 a.m. ET

and no crowd is blocking the way.

What is Takuan writing about? Surely not pickled radish. Hmmm!

Like the empty sky,

It has no boundaries,

Yet it is right in this place,

Ever profound and clear.

When you seek to know it,

You cannot see it.

You cannot take hold of it.

But you cannot lose it.

In not being able to get it,

You get it.

When you are silent, it speaks.

The great gate is wide open

To bestow alms,

And no crowd is blocking the way.

—Takuan Sōhō (沢庵 宗彭; December 24, 1573 – January 27, 1645)

The unnamable?

 The untamable?

The no-name reality?

The redoubtable and misnomered Hashem?

Despite our immersion in it we are fish unable to name water, birds unable to word sky, earthworms without an idea of soil, humans without a haiku of air.

And yet, we pass through and go on.

There is no believing in God. There is only moving-through-reality.

This moving-through-reality is our nature. When we move mindfully and with a semblance of grace we practice our True Nature.

This True Nature is our surround, our inner core, our permeable and pervasive presence without name or form.

Just now . . . the cawing of crow!

Just now, the arriving cat stepping on chest.

Just now . . .