Saturday, July 07, 2012

Art makes things themselves

Thank you for flowers of kindness and compassion. 

Woman walks to chapel/zendo with two flowers in glass jar. She leaves them by screen door with card from Partners in Health. 


It is summer light and breeze. Solitude and stillness.

Art makes things themselves.

Create the world well!


Friday, July 06, 2012

Just be here now

Humility is to the silent fact of things without explanation or apology.

Thursday, July 05, 2012

A promise puzzled

The difference between "ego" and "god" is "ed" which is a Hebrew word meaning "altar" or, more to the point, "witness."

My grandfather, Thomas, climbing the stairs for the last time the night he died, made me promise never to leave the altar. I was a boy. My father and I carried the smoldering chair he died in while smoking a cigarette down the stairs, through the kitchen, into the back yard where in the night air it burst into flames.

The song's lyrics are: "I am blest to be a witness."

Pieces of a puzzle sometimes take decades to fit into place.

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

No way fog

If what they say of Maine, that it has only two seasons -- winter and the Fourth of July -- then, summer has less than four hours remaining.


At practice Tuesday evening we read "Sound of Wood Preaching Deep Underwater Words," Transmission Thirty-Eight, Yun-yen to Tungsten-Shan, from Living Buddha Zen, Lex Hixon's commentary on Zen Master Keizan's Denkoroku: The Record of Transmitting the Light. The final line of closing poem goes: "No way to enter here." And this sounds perfect. It takes no way to enter here, and, there is no way to enter here -- we are here! So it is with meetingbrook hermitage.

I love the consideration that we are here. I love those who say that God is here. I love the notion that Heidegger's "there-being" (Da-sein) is the word "here" at a crossroad (t).

Fireworks are cancelled tonight. Fog.

Just like my mind.

Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Who's up?

Morning coffee before rowing.


When anyone asks what baseball team I root for, I tell them the Brooklyn Dodgers. "You mean LA?" they ask. "No," I say, "Brooklyn."


Things have been quiet since 1957.

Sunday, July 01, 2012

Hours to go before liturgical now













Oh God, come to my resistance!


Oh Lord, make haste to develop me!