A guest remembers what we forget

War deads. War kills. War is our new and profitable industry. Profits are gathered by the war-makers. These we do not honor.

So many die. These, we honor.

We honor those fallen with flowers, parades, and marching bands.

The people who send men and women to their deaths, to the deaths of hundreds, thousands, millions in war zones, lay wreaths on the perfidy of the politics of war under the illusion men and women are being honored.

These thoughts are anger and sorrow.

Rowing Saturday morning out toward Curtis Island, I pass below daily ritual as the canon at yacht club sounded at 8AM. The American flag was raised. I stopped rowing. I raised my hand to forehead in salute to those dead and deadened by war. I cried.

I was taken by the surprise of this private memorial. Just wind and wave and the spirits of all my brothers and sisters floating over the millennia of unenlightened mind steeped in conflict and violent action.

There's an awareness wanting our attention. A new step in consciousness that waits by our door. Oh God, it is time!

Last night at Sunday Evening Practice we read Ilia Delio on Franciscan Prayer. The reading ended with these words: "It is prayer, according to Bonaventure, that impelled Francis to see the world with new vision, a contemplative vision that penetrated the depths of reality. The world became Francis' cloister because he found it to be permeated with the goodness of God."

This is the cloistered life we long for. For all our brothers and sisters, here and gone.

Nowhere to go

Everyone speaks another's language.

If you forgive mindless misinterpretation or misbegotten misrepresentation what else is there to look around and see?

My God! What would become of us if everything came to be itself?

You, yourself. Me, myself. That, itself. Any, oneself.

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here 

(poem, seeker of truth, by e.e.cummings)

What does God want?

Don't ask!

Read the moment.

Way off

I don't understand why it is ok for the government to assassinate people whenever they want.

Am I missing something?

A magic trick

When Friday ends, it will be Saturday.

Turning around, returning home

Thursday morning at the harbor. Ellens Dritter Gesang (Ellens Gesang III, D839, Op 52 no 6, 1825), in English: " Ellen's Third Song", composed by Franz Shubert begins classical music on Maine Public Radio with Suzanne Nance.

The piece was composed as a setting of a song from Walter Scott's popular epic poem The Lady of the Lake, in a German translation by Adam Storck (1780-1822), and thus forms part of Schubert's Liederzyklus vom Fräulein vom See. (Ave Maria, Schubert, Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria_%28Schubert%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria_%28Schubert%29

At harbor the schooners ready for their season. Lewis French, Olad, Lazy Jack, Surprise, Angelique, Grace Bailey -- are finishing scraping, painting, varnishing, and polishing. And then the gray Mary Day arrives back, is turned by yawl boat, reversing into berth.

The harbor life and coastal stretch from bell buoys to weathered pilings becomes a kind of poetry. I daily row the poesis, the making-creativity of nature's hand, composition.

"La poesia es la conciencia de la tierra." (--Alfonso Cortes: Poetry is the conscience of the earth.)

A group wants to work toward returning parole to the State of Maine. I'm for it. I'd also like to return respect for parole, (voice, spoken word) as it arrives at and passes through us.

Mike Divine greets the sitting sipping surveyor with his cheery assessment of how fortunate we are to live here. And we are.

We secure lines, offload gear, feel solid ground underfoot, and get sent off with the encouraging appreciation of crew.

Who's next?

articulating one's own being in a new way

If some wonder if they or I have lost faith, tell them this: faith is our profound longing for truth, and is not lost. Belief, however, is what we temporarily hold as true until we experience the ungraspable nature of truth. 

Thus it is that faith remains while belief is lost.

Keep faith, lose belief. Truth emerges within and through everything. 

Humility recognizes ungraspable emergence. Arrogance ignores what it doesn't comprehend.

Keats called it "negative capability."

In a letter dated 22 December, 1817, the poet John Keats coined the term “negative capability” and defined it this way:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/negative-capability-defined-walking-in-mysteries-and-the-shoes-of-others/

Later, in his blog PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, the author adds:

In the Virginia Quarterly Review (April 1, 2005), the poet Galway Kinnell offers a similar expansive spin on Keats’s notion of negative capability, suggesting that negative capability includes not just a metaphysical suspension of judgment—allowing mysteries to be mysteries—but the Shakespearean power to “obliterate” oneself and walk, as it were, in the shoes of other beings (human and non-human!):

Walt Whitman had Keatsian “negative capability”—a certain shapelessness of personality, a peculiar power to obliterate himself and flow into some other being and speak it from within—and speak himself in the process. “I am the man—,” he wrote, “I suffered—I was there.” A transaction seems to occur: Whitman gives whatever he flows into a presence in human consciousness, and in return, this other thing or creature gives Whitman a situation and vocabulary which enable him to see and articulate his own being in a new way.

(ibid)

It is akin to the title of Pema Chodron's book "Comfortable with Uncertainty."

Cool water for thirsty bodies!

If you meet the Christ on the road...

There used to be an argument over who killed Christ. It was a silly diversion. No one killed Christ.

But the church is trying.

The church is becoming a silly diversion.

I'll tell you what. Christ stepped out from the back of the church to catch a breath of air.

I wish Christ well. It's an uneasy walk down those stairs and off into the countryside.

Unless the seed breaks open

Easwaren points out that the skin of the snake must be sloughed.

Old ideas, failing institutions, dead practices.

We are in trouble.

Fear, not love, could be our fate if no regeneration.

SOUTH India is full of snakes, and every year as I was growing up, when the earth was warm after the monsoon rains, I used to marvel at the sloughed-off snakeskins scattered across our fields. “Doesn’t it hurt a snake to shed its skin like that?” I once asked my grandmother.

“It has no choice,” she replied. “It will strangle if it can’t grow. It has to slough its skin or die.” In the same way, I would say, civilisation outgrows the skins of old ways that begin to strangle it. If they are not discarded, they become so constricting that civilisation begins to turn on itself and become self-destructive.

In the last fifty years, we have come to a crisis in human evolution where we have to choose between violence and non-violence. If we choose to tread the path of violence, not only do we
impede our evolution, but we invite destruction upon all of us.
(--from The Power Within, by Eknath Easwaren)
http://122.183.185.202/globaladjustments/?q=book/export/html/397

The customs we cultivate and costumes we don take on their own officiating insistence to behave in accordance with some haberdasheric dictate arising when final button is secured.

We must slough our bad ideas and useless patterns of mental formations that we've carried too long and at great debilitating price to our body-mind longing to enter a new freedom for love and joy.

Let shells of seeds and shell casings of armaments fall to ground, empty.

Begin at Home
We don’t have to begin peacemaking on an international scale. We can start to make our contribution right in our own city – beginning, like Gandhi, in our own home.

Here I can make a few practical suggestions. First and foremost, the roots of non-violence need to be planted in the home. Non-violence is the absence of violence.

A non-violent home is a home that eschews violence in every form: not only in action, which is absolutely necessary, but also in word and even thought. A home that is non-violent in thought, word, and deed is governed entirely by love.

Sow Non-violence
When we sow non-violence, we begin to reap peace. We should not expect a civilisation to change as easily as a snake sheds its skin. Progress is won slowly, over centuries. Despite appearances it is we, the ordinary people of the world, who have the power to change our lives. We make history together, all of us, by the sum of our choices and desires.
(--Easwaren, ibid)

Let us begin with "being." By the "sum," he says. Might he be referring to "sum, esse, fui, futurus?" I am to be (what) I have been (and am) going to be.

Realize this!

Enter Being Whole!

Unlearning what we think we know

Did you see a homeless person? Did it hurt?

Was there a sign that said, "Broke. Hungry"?

Such homelessness is sad. Such suffering is difficult.

What to do?

You deal with your shit in Zen by sitting with it. By breathing right into it. You don’t try and ignore it with pleasant thoughts or lofty ideas, and you don’t try and bury it with solutions. You deal with it, you work with it, one breath at a time. You hold it right there, in your breath. You don’t try and breathe it out; you don’t try and breathe it in. You keep it suspended in your diaphragm like a burning hot coin. Your problems won’t change; only you can change. That’s the point.
(- from, Growing Ground, by Steve Krieger)
http://www.tricycle.com/feature/growing-ground?page=0,1

Go ahead, extend a fiver. Hand over a banana. Don't preach, judge, or ignore.

Suffer the indignity of the sign-carrier.

Be happy you feel what you feel. You could just as easily have scoffed, mocked, or laughed. Instead you brought both of you to Saturday Morning Practice and even shed tears.

It is maddening when our egos do not know how to respond, don't know what to do.

Sei stille, be silence, be calm, shush!

God is speaking to your heart/mind.

Listen with care.

You will learn.

To unlearn.

Hold lightly if not at all what is at hand

Change.

Nowhere is it not.

Then, be there.

As it is, moving elsewhere.

Where you are, going.

Observing

"Creation knows no opposite." (from lesson 138, A Course in Miracles)

Trappist Thomas Keating wrote in a slender volume that "God is existence."

When I see this, I will let you know.

What is sitting meditation?
To remove ourselves from
all external distractions and
quiet the mind is called "sitting."
To observe the inner nature
in perfect calmness is called "meditation."
- Hui-neng

Until then, find me in the cabin.

A transient transcript of trinitarian coursework

God is God. God is O! Good. Then, God is good.

Good itself is God's name. Do good! Be good! See good!

"Bad" is a misapprehension of "good." This happens a lot. Like a cup of coffee. First sip, the best. Next ten sips, Ok! Then, final dregs, cool and uninspiring sip, not so much!

T: You mentioned the use of retreat practice in Roman Catholicism. Does that feature the same combination of solitude and meditation practice? Or is the structured meditation in retreat the unique offering from Buddhism?

RR: Both Buddhism and Roman Catholicism employ structured “form” practices and the formless practices of working with awareness itself. Father Thomas Keating, who runs the Benedictine monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, teaches what he calls centering prayer. My understanding is that this is very much a mindfulness discipline, bringing the mind to a point and training it to be present, then allowing the inner wisdom to gradually unfold from that. If you look at the other contemplative orders in Roman Catholicism, I think you’ll see quite similar practices.
Perhaps an important difference between Buddhism and Christianity is that, within the Christian tradition, there is usually a subject you are contemplating, whereas in Buddhism, especially with the formless practices, you are really opening the mind in and of itself; you are not contemplating a particular subject or figure. Ultimately, we are looking to simply open the mind and lay bare its depths. In Christianity you find that as well, so it’s not an absolute difference but a difference in emphasis.
(--From, INTERVIEW, The Power of Solitude, Shambhala Mountain Center's Reggie Ray talks to Tricycle's Ted Rose about the value of solitary retreat; by Ted Rose) http://www.tricycle.com/interview/power-solitude

I mention to woman in Wohnkuche last night after meditation practice there is a trinity to serve as teacher for us: listen, don't judge, learn!

Stillness in Wohnkuche this morning. White Border Collie asleep on futon. Ticking of two clocks. Hum of refrigerator motor. Silence of books. Mere gaze of every wall hanging, pillow, dream, and forgotten detail. Everything that ever was is here, hidden or unbidden, on or under surface of appearance. It is, as they say, all good.

I listen.

I do not critique or judge.

I'm learning.

of a tuesday morning

Spending time with students' papers. Margaret presents translation of Om Mani Padme Hum as: "Oh, but to see only through Wisdom's eye." It caught my attention.

What is "only through"...?

This morning, sitting in meditation cabin, a translation for Tuesday morning arises:

Looking in
to what is
shining through.

So, I wash last night's pots and plates, brew tea, and sit here to look into this.

Cleaning the bathroom or chopping the onions is no less important than sitting in deep meditation. Grasping this and acting on it is called waking up.
- Janet Jiryu Abels, "Participate Fully"

New green walking up to brook. White dog eyes sticks. Moist fragrance blossoms!

Drips water slowly dropping

Not much noise inside.

Toothbrush leans over rim looking at prone toothpaste.

Neither... nor mind... has anything to say.

Do don't say

Slow motion day. Polly's burial at Seaview. Attending Quaker Meeting.

Hoisting boxes to upper level of bookshed. Then Sunday Evening Practice.

It's the practice, not the narrative.

Some days...

The cookies are burnt.

Reading Fleet Maull at morning practice. Prison hospice stories.

We eat the cookies anyway.

Infinitesimally unknowable

Neutrinos passing through head to toe.

What else?

Hayah.

Life.

Passing through.

Us.

What has a middle but no sides

Justice is a fragile compromise. It does not mean awakening. Justice means that some law -- whether a statute law, or street law -- has been executed, and some renewed balance effected.

Only one who bursts with enthusiasm do I instruct;
Only one who bubbles with excitement do I enlighten.
If I hold up one corner and you do not come back to me
With the other three,
I do not continue the lesson.
--Confucius

The lesson of awakening is that justice is partisan control, only half the narrative exacting satisfaction; while true awakening is the whole story with compassion effecting balance without sides.

The men who were wrong are still wrong

After watching documentary "The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby" (2011) about former covert operator and CIA chief William Colby by his son Carl Colby, I think about the sorrow of it all.

Maybe the generals, spy agency, law officers, ubiquitous political names and faces hawking war and hellish advice, and a series of executive office presidents equally fogged with awkward motivation, were all wrong. Vietnam was so wrong. The same names and faces continued into Iraq and into our homes and domestic surveillance. Two wrongs make a horribly painful time for everyone involved.

The trail enters
Pines, the sound of pines;
The farther one goes,
The rarer the sound.
Mountains' light
Colors the river water.
Among peaks,
A monk sits Zen,
Facing an old branch
Of a cassia tree,
Once a seedling in the Liang.
- Chiao-jan (730-799)

It is not enough to remember. There must also be great sorrow for a people, for betrayal, and for current karmic reverberation.

Violence against another is violence against one's own being, so it is futile.
- Paul Hawken,"Upsurge

I have been wrong. I thought it was outside me. All this time I have labored under an illusion. Forgive me Mr Colby, Mr Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagon, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama. I thought it was you.

Going to sit in meditation cabin, light candle, light incense, alighting on cushion, I sit in the sound of rain on roof, falling to earth, the sound of awareness inviting a new sustenance of forgiveness.

I must go; change longs for me.

Itadakimasu: Thank you Nature for this nourishment and nurturance.

co-response and co-mu-union: a glancing withitness

I don't know which tries to be more insulting: celebrity news or religious/political/economic views. Bare bums or false behinds! Put differently, rear dead-ends and misinformation seem to distract the small amounts of attention allotted to each scanning-bot these days.

The World is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

(Poem by William Wordsworth)

Maybe that's what happens in a time-without-integrity. We turn to sports, celebrity, and numbing drugs. If the world is illusion, some think, then I'll get mine, thank you, the way I want it.

Don't be concerned with
who is wise and who is stupid.
Do not discriminate the
sharp from the dull.
To practice whole-heartedly
is the true endeavor of the way.
Practice-realization is not
defiled with specialness;
it is a matter for every day.
- Dogen 1227

I have no plan, antidote, desire for any kind of revival tent, nor a sense that anything has changed much in the last five thousand years.

All I have is a coffee maker, a zafu/zabuton, a pair of sneakers, some words to listen to and think about, things to tidy up, and this present moment to realize. And that's good enough for now.

Maybe you are the world.

Maybe if I meet you with respect and reverence we will converse the world.

Yeah -- it has never been a matter of converting or conversion, rather our job is to converse the world with an integration of conversation.

Whatever you say, I hear it, and we become the body of word in co-response and co-mu-union.

Ha!

Try that on for sigh/eyes!

while still alive

I like the distinction between being religious and having beliefs.

I don't favor belief.

I'll favor experience.

The yearning itself for what is connecting/felt.

Silence knows no other way

Tell me in silence.

No answers can be found, and no amount of questioning will bring out those answers. We may continue to ask, but as Brown notes, one thing Wiesel's writing suggests is ``that arguments justifying God in the face of evil are not only inadequate, they are diabolical.'' ([Brown], 154) Any answer cannot come from man, but from God himself. This is what Moshe the Beadle had tried to tell Wiesel when he was a young boy in Sighet, before the terrors of the Holocaust destroyed his life. Moshe said, ``Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him...That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!'' ([Night], 2-3) There can be no end to the questioning, even if there are no answers. To expect answers is a mistake, as Wiesel learned from the Wandering Jew, who told him, ``When will you understand that you are living and searching in error, because God means movement and not explanation.'' ([Legends], 93) That is his final discovery. His relationship with God does not depend on answers. We pray to Him. He handles those prayers in His own way. We can agree or disagree with that way. It's all very simple. In one of his prayers in The Six Days of Destruction, Wiesel writes, ``We do not demand answers, God. But if this is the last page of the human chronicles, assure us that we had the right to ask.'' ([Six Days], 55) If we ask and accept God's answer, even if He answers in silence, then we will have reached the level of Elie Wiesel's relationship to God.
http://www.stsci.edu/~rdouglas/publications/suff/suff.html
("Elie Wiesel's Relationship with God" By Robert E. Douglas, Jr., Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Humanities Sufficiency Program, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts)

I need not know any other way.

For this we call; for this we are called

"God means movement, not explanation."(Elie Wiesel)

Movement through illusion.

Outside, with full moon, Barred Owl asks and asks its question.

Use it and less it

Zazen in prison this morning. Former PTSD Marine and I speak of the residual horror of his duty-related killings hand to hand. Five of us read some ACIM sections. Two of the men are studying it inside.

Afternoon with the elderly poetry folk navigating words across the ocean of forgetfulness. Carver, Chaucer, Binet, Oliver, Greg Lamb, Guest.

Evening, David Abram and Edmund Husserl.

What a useless life!

I love it!

One by one, passing, bye

Retreat. Briefly. Cabin porch. Day after. Twenty two students of East Asian Philosophy crowded into meditation space.

Waking from sleep,
I can hear the dew in the trees.
I open my door
Overlooking the garden.
The winter moon
Clears the eastern cliffs;
Water murmurs
Through roots of bamboo.
The mountain stream's
Beyond my hearing,
But a mountain bird cries once,
And then again.
Leaning in the doorway,
I follow night through to dawn.
What words can I summon
For such mystery and peace?
- Liu Tzung-yuan (773-819)

Now, gone. Empty space. Time to tidy.

Polly dies. Mary dies. Christopher dies. I remember them in their transition. I wish them well.


 Up path from chapel/zendo, beyond felled tree, prayer flags behind sprig green.

Nothing. But, gratitude.