Kerry Ellen,
Becca & Megan,
and Lisa Jean
in Rockport Harbor
of a Thursday
After coffee milk
And blueberry lemon
Slice
Next to white van
Topped with green canoe
Driver listening
To some audio novel
As I do to Dr No
by Percival Everett
It occurs to me
We are each
Appearing
As if from
Behind
What is in front
Nothing Being written
by the nothing that is
And the nothing
That is not — call it
Creatio ex nihilio
This:
At the sound of the bell
in the silent night,
I wake from my dream
in this dreamworld of ours.
Gazing at the reflection
of the moon in a clear pool,
I see, beyond my form, my real form.
—Kojisei (circa 1600)
That.
Chris at Tuesday Evening Conversation brought up revealed truth.
Perhaps, that which can’t be reached by ordinary thought or logical inference.
What is it?
Try this . . .
If Reality is a unified extension of Being, (or vice versa) and if what is whole is the background Source of What Is, do things emerge out into appearance as surprising isomorphic realizations of already inter-existing relational phenomena whose form and formlessness blink on-and-off, in-and-out, throughout time and space, dimensions and imagination revealing Itself by means of Attention and/or Ritual Faith?
Theologians have their word, transubstantiation. One thing becomes another thing even as appearance seems to indicate it is what it was, and (let’s call it) faith seems to hold that it is now what it really is.
“Hocus Pocus” is a diminutive phrase coming from “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” the words traditionally used at the consecration in Catholic liturgy. One level of reasoning, however incomprehensible, is that bread is no longer bread, wine no longer wine, but, now, body and blood of Jesus the Christ. This contention, patently absurd on its surface, haunts the imagination of nonduality and non-separative wholeness of being.
Perhaps, in effect, the reality of transubstantiation is not really about change, but rather, about pointing to the very nature/fact of what something is.
We acknowledge ordinary temporal and spatial change. Winter becomes spring. Bare trees flower. Youthful bodies become aged bodies.
But what of non-temporal and non-spatial metamorphosis? “Form is emptiness, emptiness form.” The Heart Sutra also claims there is “no old age and death and also no extinction of them.”
Night becomes day, day becomes night. Things change, we say.
Woodpecker dismantles tree trunk. Dozens of cars occupy the same space only seconds apart. The 18 year old who rebounded and jump shot is now the 80 year old watching the Warriors end their season with bad shooting losing to the Kings with Klay Thompson 0 for 10 and scoreless in defeat.
But let's re-translate plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, an epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”).(wiktionary) -- usually translated "the more things change, the more they stay the same"
Let's put forward this translation: "The more a thing changes, the more it becomes itself."
Hundreds of thoughts and emotions occupy the same physical emotional intellectual space only milliseconds appending in tandem.
Cats are hungry and watchful at same time. Dog stares and pees at same time. What we call (in ignorant appellation) human and divine, matter and form, one and many, this and that, mine and yours — are separative words for one reality done distinct and believed to be different.
Which brings me back to transubstantiation. Our personal preference hubris makes of one two. (See e.e. cumming’s poem.) Still, I am confounded as to how singularity, morphic resonance, and quantum entanglement figure with the notion that each thing is each thing — and yet each thing is part of and belongs to Itself-as-Itself, one thing as another, another as one thing.
Separation is a great excuse for war, injustice, crime, and punishment.
Metaphors abound. Is “the body of Christ” a metaphor for what is whole, entire, without beginning or end, eternal (no time), infinite (without boundary) and non-imaginal (without an image)?
Our imagination creates worlds. God’s, we say, created this world. (Explain that to someone sitting in a cafe with a New York Times.)
Let Wallace Stevens have his stanza:
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,Before they fly, test the realityOf misty fields, by their sweet questionings;But when the birds are gone, and their warm fieldsReturn no more, where, then, is paradise?”
(From poem, Sunday Morning, by Wallace Stevens)
The mystic looks without discrimination.
Mystics see what is there to be seen.
Is that awkward word "transubstantiation" a finger pointing to what is, being, revealed?
Do I think
There’s anything
After death?
I won’t know
So why
Guess.
Lights out
Fire ashes
Scattered
If I owe you
Five bucks
Check coin can
We dwell from day to day. *
Word is brought back about a gathering at Camden Opera House for Dean J. this afternoon.
Images and music, videos of his singing opera pieces, incidences of his theatre work, stories by those who knew him. It was lovely, I'm told.
What is it about those who sing? Even if, when asked, say nothing about the religious implications of their song?
I suspect the very act of song is value dispersed and dispensed throughout, over, and within those surrounding that which is sung.
Dean was an aspergent.
Earlier the contemplative nuns from Neumz set out this Missa--Coommunio:
Cantáte Dómino, allelúia:
Sing to the Lord, alleluia:
cantáte Dómino, benedícite nomen ejus:
sing to the Lord and bless his name:bene nuntiáte de die in diem salutáre ejus,
Announce his salvation from day to day,allelúia, allelúia.
alleluia, alleluia.
Had they sung it at his memorial, he'd nod his head at their art.
Woodpecker telephones
from tree
It rings and rings
through morning light
brrdrrdrr brrdrrdrr brrdrrdrr
Does not go
to answering machine
No one home
No one
wishes to pickup
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, {1926-2005} p.186, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 2008; originally in For Love, Poems 1950-1960)
After last night’s (wonderful) conversation I’m beginning to think it will resemble something like
"e contrario-poetica-cogitatio" (ie, on the contrary-poetic-thought) —or, as the acronym of the Latin
"e contrario-poetica-cogitatio" would look like “ecpc” — (phonetically: easy-peasy).
In 1971 this date was Easter.
Outside NYU chapel in Greenwich Village a street person smiled from a small group on their way back to Brooklyn -- and then, fewer, on to highway west.
It was spring.
Bend down and there it is:
No need to wrest it from others.
With the Way in complete agreement,
The mere touch of a hand is spring:
The way we come upon blooming flowers,
The way we see the year renew itself.
What comes this way will stay;
What is gotten by force will drain away.
A secluded person on an empty mountain,
While rain falls, picks some blades of duckweed.
Freely feeling the flash of dawn:
Leisurely, within the celestial balance.
–Ssu-k’ung T’u (837-908)
Life together.
Curious, isn't it?
It's less a promise than a fact.
That's what life is -- even when seeming separation tries to convince the opposite.
What seems to be is no substitute for the depth of what is.
rain again
sitting alone
dusk lowering
cracked open
sunflower shells
on wood walk
Trying to see.
Where would I go?
Anywhere, everywhere, is a teacher pointing to something worth considering, a deepening of the dharma, a telling of the gospel, a recitation of torah, a poetry of creativity, one final glimpse of a vanishing cosmos whispering sweet melody through empty space.
How amazing, how amazing!
Hard to comprehend that
Nonsentient beings expound Dharma.
It simply cannot be heard with the ear,
But when sound is heard with the eye,
Then it is understood.—Tung-shan (807-869)
Whoosh of cars passing along Barnestown Road.
In the dream two dinghies swept under waterfront (my childhood church?) are suddenly gone as I try to figure how to get them up and out to be used again.
Then they’re not there. My socks wet and torn in the grisly bottom of receding water trying to avoid shards of iron, glass, and ragged stone now exposed.
There’s no floating away. No air pump to inflate the no longer there green edged inflatable.
The childhood wooden church was torn down leaving demolition site between 61st and 62nd street just up from Bay Parkway. I’d spent many hours in silence in that creaky snap-settling building after shutting it down evenings after working answering door and phones in rectory during school years.
The red candle in sanctuary.
The bicycle ride home in the dark along 21st avenue.
The smell of Lima beans from Nana’s stove lingering up basement stairs.
too visible
I lose interest
looking up names
I've known
everyone wants
to be known
it's the ones
not found
instanding
near, undetected
I’m nearly ready
To die
All I have
To do
Is pick up
Pile of
Laundry from
Behind door
Clear off
Desk in room
Where no
Poems litter
Old pens
Dried ink in
Dusty cans
Pistachio shells
Vacant abandoned
Behind unread book
Body checking
Out going off
Across road
Where crumpled
Debris in ditch
Unpicked
By house with
No letterbox
With back to sun
dooryard sumie strokes
high trees on gravel-dirt
don't look at god
look at what god is
looking at
Someone said there will be an eclipse of the sun.
I wonder if it’s ok not to care…
Wonder is good.
Math is not my strong suit.
Hardly anything adds up.
Here's e e cummings:
one's not half two. It's two are halves of one:
one's not half two. It's two are halves of one:
which halves reintegrating,shall occur
no death and any quantity;but than
all numerable mosts the actual more
minds ignorant of stern miraculous
this every truth-beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss;
or,sold the reason,they undream a dream)
one is the song which fiends and angels sing:
all murdering lies by mortals told make two.
Let liars wilt,repaying life they're loaned;
we(by a gift called dying born)must grow
deep in dark least ourselves remembering
love only rides his year.
All lose,whole find
(Poem by e.e.cummings)
Last line cheers.
Lose it all, find the whole. Lose all, find whole. When everybody loses, the whole is found.
In prison today, gelassenheit.
A good word.
God is
What is
Here
No belief
Realizes
This
Achoo!
Bless you —
Thank you
You’re
Very
Welcome
The church I attend
Has no walls
Has no preacher
Nor takes collection
The church I attend
Is the earth
Each step each bird
Each tree in the wind
Rabbi Aaron is on to something.
They asked Rabbi Aaron what he had learned from his teacher, the Great Maggid.
“Nothing at all,” he said.
And when they pressed him to explain what he meant by that, he added: “The Nothing-At-All is what I learned.
I learned the meaning of nothingness. I learned that I am nothing at all, and that I Am, notwithstanding.”
[1:198] Tales of the Hasidim, Rabbi Aaron of Karlin (1736 – 1772)
I stand by him, or not far from him, maybe, closer than I think.
Notwithstanding.
Last night's conversation touched on forgiveness.
Maybe I was cranky, but the thought occurred, what forgiveness? We don't forgive. It's not ours to do. Forget-about-it!
There's nothing to forgive. There's no past. Come to think about it, there's no separate self. What's to forgive?
The universal body of reality
Is so subtle that you do not
Hear it when you deliberately listen for it,
And you do not see it when you look at it.
As for the pure knowledge
That has no teacher,
How can it be attained by thought or study?
--Huanglong, 1002-1069
We live in a curious time.
We become a nation of victims.
Our Grand Poobah Victim wants to become Number One Chief of Everything. His platform and credentials list himself as the greatest victim of all time, greatest savior of all time, greatest man of all time. We are lucky to be living during his exalted suffering and undeservedly generous accumulation of money.
I'll stick with Huanglong.
Where is he? Where is he?
Where did you see
Jesus? I didn't.
Neither did I.
Do you think
that means anything?
No, I don't.
Does that mean I'm
not christian?
No, it doesn't.
I would like to be
christian.
What would that be?
Human, I'd be
human.
Ok, then be that.
I will, I'll
be human.
Yes, human.
Do that. To become
human was Jesus'
vocation, human
and he did that.
You do that too.
Is that what it takes
to be christian, to be-
come human?
Yes, that's what it takes.
Wind then rain then snow then fierce wind
Electricity goes out then comes back then
(Undoubtedly) will go out soon again.
bathtubs filled with water, jugs and dozens
of used juice half gallons filled at the ready
In time to remember MLK’s assassination
1968
That awful year of war and murder
When we were younger and full of failure
The country in psychosis ammunition and hate
Something broke within so many forgetting
Why go on why not despair why not give up
Tonight it is just a snowstorm with gale winds
The darkness different the man who is a fool
Might become president again his handlers
Planning mischief and mayhem again theft
Of sucker’s money, right wing ideology
Roughshod over everyone, all skimmed
Money funneled into his accounts, sneers
And snark, disdain and denigration, a moral
Bankruptcy while stealing your money and
dignity
I get ahead of myself
I must remember no one
Takes anything away
From us — we always
Give it up
We must not want dignity
And compassion, not want
Justice and democracy, not want
Community and common weal
The prospect that universal, infinite, and eternal reality might be localized in an individual, an instant, or a particular yard of earth, is both intriguing and mind-boggling.
If so, if true, then a career of teaching ethics at university wants a do-over.
On second thought, who'd affirm such an outlandish proposition?
We all want resurrection in some form. Jesus’ resurrection is a potent, focused, and compelling statement about what God is still and forever doing with the universe and with humanity. Science strongly confirms this statement using its own terms: metamorphosis, condensation, evaporation, seasonal changes, and the life cycles of everything from butterflies to stars. The natural world is constantly dying and being reborn in different forms. God appears to be resurrecting everything all the time and everywhere. It is not something to “believe in” as much as it is something to observe and be taught by.
I choose to believe in Jesus’ bodily resurrection because it localizes the whole Mystery in this material and earthly world and in our own bodies too—the only world we know and the world that God created and loves and in which God chose to incarnate. (Read all of 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul keeps saying this in many ways.) [1]
If the original divine incarnation was and is true, then resurrection is both inevitable and irreversible. If the Big Bang was the external starting point of the eternal Christ Mystery, then we know this eternal logos is leading creation somewhere good, and the universe is not chaotic or meaningless. Alpha and Omega are in fact one and the same. [3]
--Richard Rohr, CAC, Resurrection and Incarnation, 3apr24
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013), 86–88.
At last night's Tuesday Evening Conversation, Chris, Tina, Asha, Saskia and I circled around Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber's takes on the structures of consciousness and the indications of mutation into the (upcoming) integral structure and the concretion of the spiritual.
Gebser writes:
What happens to the earth - and the earth is nothing but an event which in materialization has become progressively slower - originates in more encompassing and spatio-temporally non-localizable interconnections. (ibid)
We'll have to re-visit the whole-within-the-whole conversation, the localized and non-localizable, the spooky notion of quantum entanglement.
Until then, I'll sneak in the question -- Is any act, is every act -- is any thought, is every thought -- a non-localized impression on every other place, time, and being in the cosmos?
If we are, indeed, interconnected in ways we have not yet begun to consider, is the two thousand year old story/mythology of one man's transcendence of the there-to-fore limitations of human existence and its spiritual/material contours meant to be, for us, here and now, a meditation and contemplation whose significance exceeds our current structure of consciousness as we stare into the bottom of our coffee cups and empty box of donuts?
Bring on the nor'easter snow storm!
Let's go out into the gale and drift away!
Sounds
of mourning dove cool air through open window
Not everything is contained in three dimensions
There is, they say, a great deal more beyond us
It is beyond me, this doll within doll universe
My eyes close, sleeping life proscenium prior to word
Presentation sans parole, aphasia sine sensus
speculation without seeing,
I am no longer able to comment
curious, eh, that we think we look out at things
as if I am looking out at the room
as if I am in the room looking out at the room
some would say there is only looking
no inside no outside
no one here making this observation
awareness
grasps
nothing else
then
lets that
go
falling
silently into
itself
--wfh
These days the easter meditation remains a metaphoric and mythological mystery to me.
The possibility that the traditional occurrence-set of passion/death/resurrection/ascension/pentecost in its historical/theological telling is not five distinct occurrences -- but one remembrance, one activity, one thought-fact -- intrigues me.
In the midst of suffering and death there is an overcoming and a surrender, a releasing and an arising into what can never be comprehended, but only passed through.
Like the torrent that rushes to the sea,
Like the sun and moon that glide towards
The western mountains;
Like the flight of days and nights,
Hours and seconds,
Human life passes inexorably.
--Padmasambhava (717-762), Tibet
I am aware that human life passes.
I am aware of little else beyond that fact.
As good a thought on Easter Monday as you might find in scripture:
[Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg often quoted Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous line, “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” and she advised people to “fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
(—Heather Cox Richardson, in Letters From An American, 31mar2024)
From inert to moving and awake.
A splash of fresh water this morning.
Today is a good day to be alive.
Today is a good day to die.
Such is the blessing of Easter.
Might not seem like an Easter poem, but here it is anyway:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
(--1919, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
Maybe for too long we've thought a theos ek mēkhanēs (deus ex machina) would appear from the heavens or at least from the fly loft. Yeats seems to suggest that such thoughts of rescue might need to be grounded closer to earth, closer to the complexities of human perception, psychology, and existential ethical maturity.
Mythology is the skin of meaning. The sinews and bones, blood and inner interrelationalities are ours to activate and engage. It might be the rough beast of our indelicate desire to finally cut through the posturing bullshit of errancy and embrace redemptive truth of compassionate belonging.
It is Easter.
What is arising through our reluctance and fears? What is longing to move through moribund hesitancy into break-ground appearance (think crocus and daffodil) in this transitional time?
