Saturday, October 11, 2014

Why not say "God"?


The bud. 

The breaking open.


The flowering.

What can be said?

Friday, October 10, 2014

evidence


Friday morning. 

October.

A Merwin poem --

To the Happy Few


Do you know who you are

O you forever listed
under some other heading
when you are listed at all


you whose addresses
when you have them
are never sold except
for another reason
something else that is
supposed to identify you

who carry no card
stating that you are—
what would it say you were
to someone turning it over
looking perhaps for
a date or for
anything to go by

you with no secret handshake
no proof of membership
no way to prove such a thing
even to yourselves

you without a word
of explanation
and only yourselves
as evidence


(--poem, “To the Happy Few” by W.S. Merwin, from Collected Poems: 1996-2011. © Library of America, 2013.)

May each become the evidence so many seek!

Thursday, October 09, 2014

be seen


The difficulty is when we receive new insights we file them away in dusty narratives.

Or misfile them under familiar names.

When, instead, light finds no darkness wherein to hide.

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

logico redactus


The way I see it is: All knowledge is self-knowledge!

And all choices we make lead to the former sentence.

Tuesday, October 07, 2014

carry across morning


Possible scattered showers, says weather website.

      weather haiku
possible, we think  
scattered drifting dreams, tree leaf 
showers earth -- autumn 
                                   [wfh, nunc ipsum]
Every explanation falls behind woodpile. Rotting wood from old excavations damp with dark soil wondering why they are moved now. For now, no explanation suffices.

Behind this season, they say, comes a cold season with harsh winds and long darkness.

One log atop another. The dropped pile is formed into retrievable shape for frosty morning slog.
[Basho] practiced Zen without insignia or ordination. Every decade he experienced a catastrophic reordering of his life. 'Let my name be "Traveler,"' he implored, following the narrow road of poetry to the far north. He shattered clever wordplay haiku to create a new mosaic of language, solitary and raw. ‘ he old verse can be about willows,’ he observed, 'but haiku requires crows picking snails in a rice paddy.'                                         -- Wendy Johnson, "Seventeen Syllable Medicine"
I will take oar and trust swell and chop to carry across morning.

Monday, October 06, 2014

in medio stat virtus


Bruno created a monastic enclosure around silence.



Imitation, like silence, sincerely forms what it flatters.

The motto of the Carthusians is Stat crux dum volvitur orbis, Latin for "The cross is steady while the world is turning."

Silence, like circle surrounding itself, evokes stillness in movement.

Sunday, October 05, 2014

Particular good is done, either way


One author claims jesus was a myth.

Does it matter?