Saturday, April 14, 2012

We will all, verily, abide by the Will of God.

In the house, on opposite walls, complimentary images, a marriage takes place between, and halves no longer think they are what their name suggests.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Light touches us

In that instant of space.
Halves

Once again after dawn before questions
arrange themselves
into what we do, who to see, and each of us

is most pleasurably alone -- the first sounds
of traffic, muffled
by trees, find their way to the ear;

we don’t know what we’re hearing, and don’t
care. The light
touches us. We turn toward the dark.

Soon the equally mysterious world of women
and men, of momentary
common agreement and wild misunderstanding,

will impose itself naturally on the simplest event.
Anatomy will send
its differing messages to syntax and sense,

and beyond sense -- among the senses --
unbuttoned women
will witness grown men become babies again

and later watch their mouths shape perfectly
controlled sentences
from distances laughable and immense.

In the morning, though, now, while the secret
intercoms in our dream rooms
are still open and each separate body knows

but does not reach for what it wants,
we all live in the same
country, share the same absurd flag.

We keep our eyes closed as long as we can,
hang on to the vestiges
of night as if we were balancing

two delicate and always vanishing halves.
Then the alarm, and the body rises
to yearn for what is here and gone


(--Poem by Stephen Dunn, in, New and Selected Poems 1974-1994)
When we could be anything.

Or anywhere.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

You are it

Sometimes, there's no place to hide.
C Becoming

1. Unity of Being and Nothing
§ 134
Pure Being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same. What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being — does not pass over but has passed over — into nothing, and nothing into being. But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet that they are unseparated and inseparable and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore, this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself.

(-- from, Hegel’s Science of Logic,
Volume One: The Objective Logic
Book One: The Doctrine of Being)
Hide as you might wish.

The sheer elegance of such a plight.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

radical nothing belonging; no possessions


Call the names. You know them. From every country. From every age.

Those who rose from dead imprisonment of mind and spirit. Those who saw, embraced, were reborn in the unfettered freedom of mind and spirit. Those whose bodies walked through thick fear and emerged light and empty the other side.

Easter is a wonderful retelling of the story of transcendence by means of immersion. Moving through the curious and odd admixture of slant deception and trivial distraction that so many of us human beings carry along like backpacks loaded with heavy rocks.
In meditation we leave
The fires of defilement
For the coolness of clear samadhi.
And this feels just like the joy
Of falling into cool, clear water
After burning in the heat of the sun.

(- Great Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom)
Anyone is capable of entering the story of death and resurrection. Jesus did. So did Uncle Whatshisname and Aunt Whatshername. And that old guy that lived down the block. And the young woman who went by way of cancer in that small town. The child in Iraq. The soldier in Afghanistan. The monk in Tibet. The nun in El Salvador. The junkie in the abandoned warehouse. Your mother. Your father.

Yourself.

Jim Harrison, again:
Barking

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.

(--Poem by Jim Harrison)
Wandering without chain, through empty yard, rock rolled away, the vacant pews and choir stalls, at night when prayer points in no direction, the surrounding intimate realization of Christ -- radical, nothing, belonging.

Nothing belongs but to itself.

Nothing belongs but to itself.

Nothing belongs but to itself.

Sunday, April 08, 2012

There is nothing wrong with Easter --


In an emptying room of an emptying house sun goes off west in late afternoon.

If all the special wording is forgotten, there is only what remains of the day.

We often get lost in stories about stories failing to feel the weakening sun or hear the wind-soaked chime in a spate of solitude.

Come back to yourself.

Save -- (that is, create what is right now whole within) -- the world.