the sound of what is being said

Earth is sill.

And silent.

Earth's stillness and silence is prayer.

We pray to the extent we listen to earth.

Still and silent we learn what act is, what action means.

Walking dirt road above fundy waters fingering beads kwan seum bosal (perceive world sound).

Mountain Ash and walking stick curving hilly stretch.

as time goes by

faces

voices

change --

(watch)

It is the

play of

appearance and

fade away

(makes)

life

itself

e-

motion-

ally

fascinating 

monday aft 81° easterly

In a different country

An hour left behind at border

Ferry crosses Bay of Fundy yawing

Fog surrounding temporal disappearance

Grey water grey sky grey horizon

sun eve practice

Now that
Everything has Become clear We see That we are No w here

on counter, flowers

In the room someone is sleeping.

It is prelude sleep.

Husband arrives.

Doesn't want her to suffer.

in prison we talk of this

What are we doing here?

Each one of us -- what are we doing here?

All of us as a whole, what are we doing here?

Not what brought us here, or brings us here, not the causes or conditions of our arrival -- but the actual and decipherable, visible and calculable, ordinary and contemplative saying of the results of our mulling of the question, what are we doing here?

What am I, what are you, what are we, doing here?

As with all depths and dark places, we wander into and wander through this question -- as the question of this, arriving at us, now and now always and only now.

Here. This. Now.

What?

at nursing home we talk of this

Spring
     By Jack Gilbert

I call it exile, or being relegated

I call it the provinces.

And all the time it is my heart.

My imperfect heart which prefers

this distance from people. Prefers

the half-meetings which cannot lead

to intimacy. Provisional friendships

that are interrupted near the beginning.

A pleasure in not communicating.

And inside, no despair or longing.

A taste for solitude. The knowledge

that love preserves freedom in always

failing. An exile by nature. Where,

indeed, would I ever be a citizen?

do we

I hear the chaplain at the prison say to the new correction officer recruits moving from outer lobby to hallway and security center to pick up their radios and other equipment, “be safe, be alert, and be servants.”

Inside, I meet with three inmates and program coordinator for the duration of the morning talking about the next phase of their Code of the Warrior groups they’ve been holding over the past year.

The antidote to needless violence is an awakened sense of honor, duty, and responsible relationality.

There’s a lot to think about.

Grossman illuminates some of the methods that have been adopted over the years to help troops achieve emotional distance from their enemies. Troops have been drilled to fire on human-shaped targets but not to think about the act of killing itself. The focus has been placed on the mechanics of aiming and firing and responding quickly to changing scenarios. Troops have been taught to “neutralize targets” as efficiently as possible and the word “kill” has been carefully avoided. 

Livingstone Smith points out that modern civilian society seems to support this approach and itself fails to confront the reality that waging war involves authorizing the intentional killing of other human beings:

[W]e (contemporary Americans) go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging the simple and obvious truth that war is all about killing people. Read the newspapers and listen to the speeches of our politicians. Young men and women are called to “serve their country” by going to war. When they’re killed, we’re told that they “gave their life for their country” (a foolish idea: soldiers’ lives are taken, not given). But how often do you hear young people asked to go to war to kill people for their country?15

In other words, we persuade people to kill on our behalf by describing the actions of war, where possible, in terms that sound wholesome, moral, and inspiring; and where this is not possible we use neutral objectifying terms that cloak the emotional impact of these actions. A positive impact of this is to emphasize the warrior virtues, such as loyalty, discipline, honor, courage, and sacrifice (which are all very real and necessary), yet a more unfortunate consequence is that this language downplays the negative effects of war on those who kill. It is a cruel bait-and-switch, made worse by the lack of sustained support for veterans who are living with those effects. As novelist C.S. Harris laments: “We don’t take good care of the men we ask to risk their lives and health for us, do we? We use them, and then when they’re no longer of value, we toss them away.”16 

(--from, “Dehumanizing the Enemy: The Intersection of Neuroethics and Military Ethics”  By Shannon E. French and Anthony I. Jack)

I wondered aloud whether the responses to the question asked to everyone associated with the prison, “What are we doing here?” would surprise us. Whether inmates, case workers, correction officers, teachers, administration, volunteers -- what would the various responses be?

Perhaps it would be said: “We’re here to create community. To ensure the health and well-being of each of us. To help one another to see more clearly, with greater light and purpose and compassion. We are here for one another -- for the good of each and all.”

the loneliness of someone who feels there's something to teach

I read about a man who killed himself near a river in Wyoming.

He was in pain, homeless, and interested in spirituality.

It is hard when someone believes something. Anything.

You start thinking there's things you gotta do. Or don't do.

I'm sad he felt there was no other way out.

I’d have preferred he'd found no-other way through.

There were coordinates sent for someone to find his body and his truck.

mashugana

Storm, storm, storm.

Fire, fire, fire.

WASHINGTON — Climate change denials amid catastrophic hurricanes are a reminder that humans are not a particularly smart species, Pope Francis said Sunday while flying over areas in the Caribbean decimated by Hurricane Irma. 

“Man is stupid,” he said, referencing a passage in the Old Testament, according to the The New York Times and The Associated Press. “When you don’t want to see, you don’t see.” 

A correspondent for Crux Now had a slightly different translation of the pontiff’s comments: “Man is a stupid and hard-headed being who doesn’t see.” 

The pope — who has sparred with President Donald Trump on several issues, including climate change — also urged the climate skeptics of the world to consult with a scientist. 

“Those who deny climate change need to go to scientists and ask them,” Francis said, according to Crux. He said the scientific community has been “clear and precise” in linking human activities to the ongoing crisis and that “each [person] has a moral responsibility, bigger or smaller.” Climate change is a “serious matter over which we cannot make jokes,” he said. 

(--from huffington post, 11sept2017).  

Drought, drought, drought.

Melt, melt, melt.

[Voice over]: Did you hear the one about the cab driver in mid-town Manhattan who picked up a fare who looked like Donald Trump on 5th avenue? (Heh heh.) Turns out it wasn't Trump. Anyway, the cabbie took him to Sardi's and dropped him off at 10:45 pm. The guy gets out of the cab, turns to the cabbie, and says: 

"Do I look like a fool? I know you think I look like Trump. You better not make any jokes about me. I’ll sue, I swear.”

Stupid, huh? 

Whattya gonna do? It's a crazy world! The cabbie went back to Qatar the next week. 

He’d had enough with the American mashugana. 

Desert, desert, desert! 

a conception of circumstance

Prayer is the practice of presence.

If you wish to include the notion of God in this descriptive, do so.

Still, practicing presence is prayer. No object, no subject, mere presence adding nothing.

To become a person of prayer enter the place of presence, between us, with open heart, open mind.

With nothing other than this realization.

9/11

it’s time

(shudder)

16 years later

it’s time

(re-membering)

standing in rain

hurricanes come

and go

as we

come and go

with no

fanfare

or

any fear

we’ll explode

destruction

on everything

silly tv people

standing in rain

noses dripping

back to you

in studio

can you tell me

Really,

Where does

Water

Come from

the fall

Sitting around outdoor fire in iron circle pit

We ask into balance between all opposites

Honoring the individual in the group

The group as individuals

Making no choice to separate them --

Not even by spelling the names

Of religions that attempted to contain

Drop the words

Hold the experience

Then drop the experience

And fall

And fall

stay and hold things, absurdly, up

He ended his final words to me by writing, “...rest in chaos my old friend...”.

I don’t think that’s how I am where I am. I’m more sure of the chaos, unsure of the ‘rest'.

Maybe that’s where many if not most of us are -- restless in chaos after someone we know takes their own life.

R. did. (So we were told.) No newspaper yet lists any death notice. I look.

I am chagrinned. (“Stressed or embarrassed at having failed or been humiliated.” --Dictionary)

It’s always that way when a sudden cutout in the fabric of familiarity reveals an empty nothingness.

Jennifer Michael Hecht wrote:

So I want to say this, and forgive me the strangeness of it.  Don’t kill yourself.  Life has always been almost too hard to bear, for a lot of the people, a lot of the time.  It’s awful.  But it isn’t too hard to bear, it’s only almost too hard to bear.  Hear me out. 

In the West, in the past, the dominant religions told people suicide was against the rules, they must not do it, if they did they would be punished in the afterlife.  People killed themselves anyway, of course, but the strict injunction must have helped keep a billion moments of anguish from turning into a bloodbath.  These days we encourage people to stay alive and not kill themselves, but we say it for the person’s own sake.   It’s illegal, sure, but no one actually insists that suicide is wrong. 

I’m issuing a rule.  You are not allowed to kill yourself.  You are going to like this, stay with me.  When a person kills himself, he does wrenching damage to the community.  One of the best predictors of suicide is knowing a suicide.  That means that every suicide is also a delayed homicide.  You have to stay.  The reason I say you are going to like this is twofold.  First of all, next time you are seriously considering suicide you can dismiss it quickly and go play a video game (or something else meaningless and fun, it’s when we try for meaning that we go crashing into the existential wall – the universe is absurd, to get along with it, you should be too).  Second, and this one’s a little harder to describe, if you are even a tiny bit staying alive for the sake of the community, as a favor to the rest of us, I need to make it clear to you that we are grateful that you stay.  I am grateful that you stay alive.  

(--from, January 11, 2010, On Suicide [by Jennifer Michael Hecht])

And I wonder -- was it because he saw the chaos of the dirt cellar and the haphazard sump-pump dug hole after a torrent of mountain runoff threatened our vulnerable furnace as the moribund old pump gave fits and starts, coughs and seeming death during a Sunday Evening Practice that made everyone but me nervous and anxious to do something?

It was a restful chaos that night.

Or his purchasing fittings for the new pump that balanced on century-plus stone foundation wall just above the archaeological grid of an ancient burial ground subterfuging order and efficiency.

He fled.

In early February he wrote:

We all connect with the source individually.  To have that mediated - by anything:  church, state, canon, etc - is antithetical to the alpha and omega of the life experience.  To allow oneself to be intermediated in such a way is, in my opinion, giving up the essence of being.  I will cite the manner in which Jains choose to slip the mortal coil.

He’d implied a reference to Sallekhana. I’d not looked it up. I did today

Coming around only in emails decrying something I couldn’t decipher. Maybe the ignorance of the people who pretended to lead the world. Maybe the futility of trying to understand the idiocy of our collective deception and simpering intellectualization promulgated by pundits and professional commentators for set fees per shows. Maybe he saw something that hid beneath his ability to word it into submission.

As uneasy as the communiques may have made me feel, I was always glad he sent them. Like a hanging walk-bridge over a deep and dangerous chasm, there was a gladness it was there, but an uneasiness to step out onto it.

Until it fell.

And the river below raged to cover and obliviate any sign of what it took with it.

Hecht said, “the universe is absurd, to get along with it, you should be too”.

I will rest in those words

photo from R’s meditation room, rec’d 14june17

Attempting to find balance.

A little while.

encountered with care

Adam and

Eve

(let's say)

Earth dirt

and

Air breath

Are told

Not to know 

What is 

Good

Bad

in

Existence

Ok

Ok

The first

Story 

Was zen

Don't know

(you see?)

Don't

Know --

Only take 

existence

As a living

Reality

Longing for

It’s source

(let’s say

maker, creator)

Without knowing

Who or

Why

Other than

Existence

Itself

Encountered

With care

hurrying cain if abel

storms

slice

states with

water

and there

is nothing

to do

but

wade

through

mythology

koto-jitai

Thing-itself.

I learn today that someone who practiced with us died recently. (We are told. By his own hand. I’ve found no written evidence of this news anywhere. Watching Neil deGrasse Tyson on c-span I am urged to find some corroborate supporting evidence.)

Still...

A shock to learn.

He ended his last email I received with these words:

Or, more likely, we are - all of us - inextricably planted in Bourdieu fields ... All of us who live, have lived, or will ever live ... But then I'm just rambling on ... Truly I wish you well ...rest in chaos my old friend. ..

I sent a playful response:

Bourdieu in August
             (An Etymological Haiku) 

'Ha’  bit  us          [we suddenly laughed] 

  do  xa*                [we are seldom nearer than far away] 

fi   eld                  [fie on elders]         -  {fie on “objective relations which exist ‘independent                

“'.of individual consciousness and will 

ah, embodiment!

…   …   ...
* [The word  xa is used in Chinese meaning ‘far']

Commentary: R, Good to hear from you. Cheers, and thanks for well-wishes! And you as well! B

That was 1August17.

Today, I mourn.

As the story is heard.

arriving encounters, healthy responses

Chemo makes you sick.

Chemo makes you well.

It is the coinciding time that rivets attention.

Like meditation devotees dwelling in charnel grounds, dissolution of ego and it's attachments until arrival at indissoluble clear core of one's being beyond defense or delusion. There, the seeing and assaying, the assenting and sunrising of equipoise and compassion toward the suffering and transforming of what is presented to us.

In prison Friday one man said, "The world is our response to it."

At table practice Sunday evening we read article from Lions Roar about the crucible of spiritual intimacy. Afterward the man who lives half the year in Thailand spoke about how we continuously accuse reality and bring charges against it thus promulgating and prolonging suffering where mere loving attention and caring response longs to be.

Each event arrives as a refugee at our door of self. The story we fabricate about the event, the reaction we emit, the complaint and charges we bring against the arriving fact -- these comprise the house of narrative suffering we build for ourselves to inhabit.

Can we dwell in mere encounter without making of it anything other than what is there, what it is of itself, what is called for in response without reactivity or ego histrionics?

It is Labor Day.

The work is loving presence.

The day is our life.

Maine turnpike flows southwest with departing cars.

Maine stays.

Like our ground self, there is a watching depart that which departs, and a watching remain that which remains.

Safe home to those traveling home!

Healing home to those hospitable to arriving encounters and healthy responses to them!

Two thirds of chemo regimen, her six month practice, walk out of wood stove-warmed meditation cabin last night, into a candlelit table of loving community and challenging teachings she has chosen for us to sip with delicious soup brought from Hosmer Pond residents and chocolate cookies from Wiley Road cookie lady -- a warm practitioning gathering on an otherwise cool and rainy night.

blueberry pancakes, coffee, and gratefulness.

What does it mean to “cause to appear to oneself”? * 

Silence arrives in sight and sound.

As if... nothing there. Or, extensive expansion of what is without separation or disconnection by thought.

“Thinking” is still and still takes place.

Thinking is a word worth thinking about.*

But no thought breaks into pieces this-one-reality-now.

In Thomas Merton’s writings on silence and writing (Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing - Thomas Merton - Google Books.webarchive) -- in From a Letter to Victor Hammer, May 14, 1959, Merton writes: “The beauty of all creation is a reflection of Sophia living and hidden in creation. But it is only our reflection.”

Later in the letter he writes:

 “For Sophia is not an ideal, not an abstraction, but the highest reality, and the highest reality must manifest herself to us not only in power but also in poverty, otherwise we never see it. Sophia is the Lady Poverty to whom St Francis was married. And of course she dwelt with the Desert Fathers in their solitude, for it was she who brought them there and she whom they knew there. It was with her that they conversed all the time in their silence.) Echoing Silence, Google Books

We need poets and mystics. They see things many of us don’t. They think about things. And there is much we might think about that would change the foundation of our understanding of the basic ground of existence and the mind that looks at it.

Soloviev thought of Sophia as the universal oneness, the oneness of God with creation. He saw history as a process of man and nature falling away from God and splintering into separateness and then eventually reuniting in a higher synthesis. Sophia symbolized that potential synthesis. For Soloviev that all-oneness with God became the goal of history. But Sophia was to him more than just the abstract idea of Divine Wisdom. Influenced by the symbolic language of the mystics and by the description of Wisdom in Proverbs, he perceived Sophia in feminine form. She was the Eternal Feminine, “the feminine soul of the world.”  

In his most famous poem dealing with Sophia, “Three Meetings,” first published just two years before his death in 1900, he tried to describe the three indescribable mystical encounters that he apparently had with her. The last was in an Egyptian desert in 1875, and he writes of her eyes full of azure flame, appearing amidst the purple of heavenly splendor and the smell of roses. The image of her filled his being. Only she existed. Past, present, and future were all encompassed in her gaze, as were the blue “seas and rivers,” the “distant forest,” and the “heights of snowy mountains,” all of which Soloviev stated he saw stretched out before him. Earlier, before even leaving Cairo in 1876, he wrote a poem (“My Queen Has a Magnificent Palace”) about Sophia, his “queen,” which described her palace with its golden pillars, her jewel-filled crown, and her garden full of roses and lilies and a silvery stream. But when far below she sees her abandoned and desolate friend, she comes to him bathed in light and full of quiet tenderness. She covers him with her radiance. Thus, to Soloviev, Sophia represented not only the mystical oneness of the universe, but also a tender, loving, maternal force, and his most potent symbol of beauty.    

In one of his Lectures on Godmanhood he stated that “Sophia is the ideal or perfect humanity, eternally contained in the integral divine being or Christ.” Both Godmanhood and Sophia represented his utopian desire to bridge the gap between heaven and earth and to create a universal oneness. As he had indicated years earlier in a letter to a cousin, he hoped to help bring about the Kingdom of God on earth, “the kingdom of eternal, spiritual relations, of pure love and happiness.”   

(--from section “Vladimir Soloviev’s Godmanhood and Sophia”, in WISDOM FROM RUSSIA: THE PERSPECTIVES OF DOROTHY DAY AND THOMAS MERTON, by Walter G. Moss), the perspectives of dorothy day and thomas merton - The Wisdom Page

It is the final celebratory weekend of summer.

Time for blueberry pancakes, coffee, and gratefulness.

...   ...   ...

* From Online Etymological Dictionary

think (v.) 

Old English þencan "imagine, conceive in the mind; consider, meditate, remember; intend, wish, desire" (past tense þohte, past participle geþoht), probably originally "cause to appear to oneself," from Proto-Germanic *thankjan (source also of Old Frisian thinka, Old Saxon thenkian, Old High German denchen, German denken, Old Norse þekkja, Gothic þagkjan).

Old English þencan is the causative form of the distinct Old English verb þyncan "to seem, to appear" (past tense þuhte, past participle geþuht), from Proto-Germanic *thunkjan (source also of German dünken, däuchte). Both are from PIE *tong- "to think, feel" which also is the root of thought and thank.

The two Old English words converged in Middle English and þyncan "to seem" was absorbed, except for its preservation in archaic methinks "it seems to me." As a noun, "act of prolonged thinking," from 1834. The figurative thinking cap is attested from 1839.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=think

response to a student, on book burning

M

Thanks for this. A good piece.

...Technology has undoubtedly changed the way we share and save information, but Knuth argues that the core motivations for book burning, in whatever form the act takes, remain the same: prioritizing one type of information over another.  

“That’s why power is so scary,” Knuth says. “Because power allows you to put into effect the logic of your own beliefs.”  

(--from, A Brief History of Book Burning, From the Printing Press to Internet Archives, By Lorraine Boissoneault 31Aug17)

Lucky for us the human brain has upwards of 100 trillion terabytes of retention [a rough guess] and twice that amount operating system for inquiry [see first brackets].

The power referenced in final paragraph of article is a little scary -- in that, at times, the only logic of the power-wielding is the illogic of narrow opinion and lamentable prejudice. When thrown against real knowledge, the monkey wrench makes an awful clatter and a grinding breakage of confidence that what we've arrived at by honest investigation and communal confirmation might be, indeed,  invalid and untrue.

You are right to invite me to learn from this article. The wrong teaching of self-interested power threatens our reliance on clear and beneficial knowledge to help us see and understand the unfolding world we encounter every day.

Cheers to you and yours this cool morning auguring autumn!
B

solitary lostness, the poet said

Maybe we don't know why we do what we do.

If a kindness is done, if an act of presence is made, perhaps 'knowing why' is too much to ask for.

Like faith or prayer it is just something we do, some dream we wander through, without any clarity.

An outstretched intuition of something without name or form we speak into, listen closely for.

du jardin

Quarante cinq ans --

avec la reconnaissance pour le cadeau du garçon

nigh

From The New York Review of Books:

“Be wary of paramilitaries,” the Yale historian Timothy Snyder warned in his recent book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

August 29, 2017, 2:39 pm

 (--from, Trump’s Hoodlums, by Masha Gessen, NYR of Books)

morning practice

one

  

     is 

not 

     two 

where and what

A man I was visiting in a place where dying is as usual as morning marmalade on rye toast looked straight ahead and said, " I don't know where I am nor what I am."

He became my teacher the rest of the evening doing nothing other than what each minute brought to him.

In the kitchen I sipped ginger ale and bit into a baked square before going back to his room to thank him for allowing me to sit with him the time we had.

Once I visited Mt Vernon in northeastern Virginia where George Washington lived from 1747 to 1799, 52 years, one year longer than the man I visited said he has been married.

Addendum:

Abstract The distinction between place and non-place has occupied a critical role in both the philosophy of place and human geography for the last 20 years. In a distinction that stems from Marc Augé but is traceable to Edward Relph, “place” is thought as being relationally constructed, laden with meaning, and shaped by a broader history; home being emblematic of place. “Non-place,” on the other hand, is taken to mean places divested of meaning, homogenous, and largely interchange- able; airports, supermarkets, and pre-fabricated of ce complexes being examples. Whilst this distinction has tended to be pervasive and in uential in phenomenologi- cal accounts of place, critical analysis on the relation between place and non-place has been sparse. This paper aims to (1) develop an analysis of the distinction, ambiguities, and tensions between place and non-place. (2). To question and interrogate what kind of difference is involved in this distinction. (3). To address the role inter- subjectivity and affectivity plays in the “sense of place.” 
(--from, Place and Non-place: A PhenomenologicalPerspective! by Dylan Trigg , in academia.edu weekly digest)

body knowledge

Round and

Round

We go, 

and

Where we

Stop

(No-

body

Knows)

hard

Rain

In 

Texas

one/other

Reading from Dogen at Sunday Evening Practice.

Being-Time.

You can't have one without the other.

Relationality is our pedagogy.

Interrelationality is our catechetics. 

We already know each other, why not, finally, introduce ourselves?

arrving home, resting here, within now

When the reader is ready, the words will appear.

Second reading.     

From the Confessions of Saint Augustine, bishop 

O eternal truth, true love and beloved eternity 

Urged to reflect upon myself, I entered under your guidance into the inmost depth of my soul. I was able to do so because you were my helper. On entering into myself I saw, as it were with the eye of the soul, what was beyond the eye of the soul, beyond my spirit: your immutable light. It was not the ordinary light perceptible to all flesh, nor was it merely something of greater magnitude but still essentially akin, shining more clearly and diffusing itself everywhere by its intensity. No, it was something entirely distinct, something altogether different from all these things; and it did not rest above my mind as oil on the surface of water, nor was it above me as heaven is above the earth. This light was above me because it had made me; I was below it because I was created by it. He who has come to know the truth knows this light. 

O Eternal truth, true love and beloved eternity. You are my God. To you do I sigh day and night. When I first came to know you, you drew me to yourself so that I might see that there were things for me to see, but that I myself was not yet ready to see them. Meanwhile you overcame the weakness of my vision, sending forth most strongly the beams of your light, and I trembled at once with love and dread. I learned that I was in a region unlike yours and far distant from you, and I thought I heard your voice from on high: “I am the food of grown men; grow then, and you will feed on me. Nor will you change me into yourself like bodily food, but you will be changed into me.”
I sought a way to gain the strength which I needed to enjoy you.
But I did not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who is above all, God blessed for ever. He was calling me and saying: I am the way of truth, I am the life. He was offering the food which I lacked the strength to take, the food he had mingled with our flesh. For the Word became flesh, that your wisdom, by which you created all things, might provide milk for us children. 

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace. 

 (--from, Office of Readings, Feast of Augustine, 2nd Reading)  
https://divineoffice.org/0828-or/?date=20170828

Arriving home

Resting here

Within now

water

the rain

falls

and falls

Texas cannot

float

tired

drenched

fell upon

that something else may be something we’ve never noticed before

A fellow practitioner sends: 

Second, there is an internal process that unfolds when one experiences being fully heard. When we feel we haven’t been heard, we feel we have to keep repeating what hasn’t been heard until someone finally “gets” it. Until that point we’re stuck and can’t move on. We aren’t ready to hear or discover something new that hasn’t been felt or acknowledged before. Once we are heard, there is an inner process that is ready to unfold. The stuck-ness is gone and something new is free to appear. That something else may be something we’ve never noticed before about our own situation or our feelings about it—some undiscovered or unacknowledged facet of what is implicit, waiting to be experienced. Every situation is infinitely intricate and complex, like a tangled ball of yarn, connected in some way with everything else we’ve ever known, thought, or experienced. Pull one end of the string a bit, and a little more unravels, revealing itself in the light of consciousness. By being with and hearing a suffering person, we co-create a shared space in which the sufferer’s experience can unfold in new and surprising ways. 

(--from, Contemplative Chaplaincy, Psychotherapy, and Buddhist Ministry: Similarities and DifferencesPosted on May 8, 2017, on website The Existential Buddhist, dharma without dogma), http://www.existentialbuddhist.com

Haiku visits

brief encounters

passing practice presence

obscenely slouching forward -- a lament

The president of the United States has pardoned a man who defied a court order to cease harassing, detaining, and jailing people of foreign descent without due cause and sufficient suspicion.
He had been convicted of this crime, and was to be sentenced in early October.

The person on the porch said, “Because he is such a buffoonish character, the temptation is to laugh at his follies and make fun of him. But he is a dangerous and insidious individual who is on course to subvert and sabotage not only the values of the country but the very existence of the United States.”

The man who said this was on his way out of the country to “attend to family matters.”

It becomes harder and harder to not see this behavior of the president as TV Reality Show nonsense and see it, rather, as the worst attack against the United States yet. The suspicion is that bombs will explode, bullets will fly, citizens will be imprisoned, rights, freedoms, and protections will be suspended in short order.

Ironically, militias that once protested their fear that government would usurp civilian rights are now cheering the government’s potential usurpation of rights because “their” man is leading the coup d’etat.

Congress is also bewildered. Their party owns the three branches of government and has the power to do anything -- except that their president has his own agenda which ignores them and foments division and denigration on them.

What nobody seems to admit is that we are at a critical juncture with a rogue dangerous egoistic demagogue whose unpredictability and grandiosity plants conflict and discord in minds and hearts of both citizenry and international community.

Religious apocalyptic believers feel this is the beginning of the end.

Nihilist racists and mordant right wing groups sense the final battle.

Anarchists do too.

As do Republicans and Democrats.

Even Boy Scouts in America cheer the lewd opportunistic exhortations of the leering leader selling wealth and sex cookies to them.

Curiously, no one, really, no one seems to care. Not care in the sense of having the slightest idea how to counter such inevitable bullying and lording over.

Everyone seems to feel its time. Time for democracy’s demise. Time for unbridled and unprincipled power to ascend a new and higher throne than mere presidency. A new ledger-ship of ruling family.

The confusion and consternation of thoughtful people, media types, and non-boy scouts are only outliers to the lemming culture racing to the president’s towering and ludicrous dystopia.

“How Great Thou Art” is a redirected hymn the mute and vociferous alike offer to the bland and banal triumphant trumpeting smirking man on center stage orchestrating something unseen before yet obscenely slouching forward.

feeling is fact; emotion is interpretation of feeling

Cup

of

coffee

after

prison

conversation


No politics


Shared

reasoning and

mutually

compassionate

presence

give me three reasons to continue practicing meditation, prayer, contemplation

This

One

Reality