Friday, May 24, 2002


We remember and pray for all those dead and deadened by war. It is Memorial Day Weekend.

A single moon
Bright and clear
In an unclouded sky;
Yet still we stumble
In the world’s darkness
.
- Ikkyu (1394-1481)(dailyzen)

In that darkness stumbles another priest, this time an Archbishop. A different kind of war. Not sexual -- as some would explain it. But a war between what we think -- and what we do.

The Church war is being lost. Thought and dogma clash with fact and act.
When the war ends the priesthood will not be recognizable. War is hell.

Earth turns and stars punctuate dark distances. What priests were for, they thought, was conveyance of the sacred to a world absent God. The sorrowful mistake is made by thought.

God is absent absence. Conveyer is without conveyance. Thought made other. Other is absent.
The world will have to adjust to what is devoid of what was thought of it. And it will.

Those who have forgotten God have forgotten earth and forgotten what they convey. We are here to convey sacred to sacred. Water conveys water. Fire conveys fire. We've forgotten that.

So many are dead and have deadened others in the name of what they thought life should be.
No thought, please. Let what is itself convey itself. Forget other. See yourself in all, as what is.

Find what is you. What is conveys what is. What you are conveys what you are.
See yourself as yourself. See each and all as each and all. Don’t make other. Don’t make dead.

Life is not thought. Life is life. Life is love without thought. And love without thought lives itself with forgiveness and compassion.

It is Memorial Day Weekend. We try to remember. We try forgiveness and compassion. We try life. What we are is what we do.

Life – ‘bright and clear in an unclouded sky.‘
Remember?


Thursday, May 23, 2002

The ten Ox-herding pictures took us from searching to disappearing to showing up in the middle of the marketplace last evening. David and Jim sat on either side of Buddha statue newly placed upstairs in the harbor room. Saskia was flu prone on the futon. Delia arrived (as usual) in time for the finishing with contributing comment.

In the stillness by the empty window
I sit in formal meditation
Navel and nose in alignment,
Ears parallel with shoulders.
Moonlight floods the room;
The rain stops, but the eaves drip and drip.
Perfect this moment—
In the vast emptiness, my understanding deepens.

- Ryokan (1758-1831)

Tonight we close in on the final chapter of the Jim Marion book. At hour's end Tom sums up, "Whenever you hold onto another's thought as though it was the truth, you ain't."
Nancy started up the stairs but wisely withdrew keeping her silence at mêlée’s end.

Tide's high. Moon's nearing full. Ryokan's "Perfect this moment --" is at the window.
The window of opportunity, the great spiritual moment, says Richard Groves in The Sacred Art of Dying, is the moment of death.

Nothing is more important, says Blessed Fintan. Hospitality. Hospice. Presence.
Every instant, at the window. Soon enough, the window itself.

Sunday, May 19, 2002

Pentecost Haiku

All together
body gone, body revealed
you are this one
breathing
(wfh)

Pentecost Haiku, Evening Edition

The fact itself,
the fact revealed,
the fact realized --
as I live and breathe!
(wfh)