don’t mind me, i’m dead

I died in Israel

I died in Gaza

I died in Ukraine

I died in Russia

I died in the arms of human stupidity

what is here, profoundly, is what we are, coming to be

You’re wrong if you say Hamas is evil, Israel good; or you say Israel is evil, Hamas good.

Hear me out.

No one is evil or good.

Everyone is merely mistaken.

It’s the annoying insight of ancient religious/philosophical thinking — that we are more often mistaken and deluded than accurately clear and spot on the mark.

Delusion says you’re bad I’m good or I’m bad you’re good.

The consequences of such thinking are bullets bombs and bullshit.

The non-deluded point of view looks like this:

• It is morning
• Make coffee or tea
• Spread bread with butter or honey
• Feel the surrounding presence coming/going 
• See yes in everything — and MU as nothing other 

• When cat jumps up, say “cat” 

• When dog sidles near, say “dog”

Learn what it is we must learn.

Epilogue

BY ROBERT LOWELL

 

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

I hear the noise of my own voice:

The painter’s vision is not a lens,

it trembles to caress the light.

But sometimes everything I write   

with the threadbare art of my eye

seems a snapshot,

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

heightened from life,

yet paralyzed by fact.

All’s misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

 

(Robert Lowell, “Epilogue” from Day by Day. Copyright © 1977)

 

I might be stupid, but I’m not crazy.

I know Reality is What Is Here.

And I love this . . .

Being

Itself

going elsewhere while remaining completely at origin

 Thought has no mass weight

Travels with no measured speed

Is there while still here

gazing through god into nothing other

 I get nothing from

God, nothing. When I pray God

Looks the other way

What am I…to do? I gaze

Into MU … seeing nothing

a son off grid under windmills

 Unfastened from world

one hundred and one year old

woman laughs on phone

yes is not no, but floating through

 The zen monk said yes

No one heard him — two loons

swam to shore — nodding

the saying of evil is muting itself telling why

To combat evil 

evil is combatant — this 

Is how things are — thus

The only way to silence 

Evil is to hear it out

what, now — no delay

 Neither Christianity nor Islam nor Judaism can survive their ineffectual rituals of political grandstanding and cultural exclusion.

The only hope remaining is an emerging consciousness wherein radical presencing and nondiscriminating inclusion breakthrough and suffuse our dull and dismal understanding of what existence and being-in-the-world really is.

It is time for such a mutation.

We must become one and whole and see what is our duty, our nature, reconstituted.

at sea, her unfinished psalm

 Topmast on schooner

Snaps killing doctor on deck —

(There is no last line)

it’s not about churches nor about religion

She asked my thinking

about Jesus — I said only

Inclusive presence

Embodied compassion — by

any other name — Is — God

last word on jesus

 If he embodied

Oneness and wholeness love and truth —

Then I acknowledge 

help me/see

 Israel/Gaza

Death/destruction covers land

Souls/hearts disappear

so deep and speaks to us deep to deep

Beyond what could be said is the silence that obviates the need for anything to be said. 

But silence is nowhere to be found.

Anything anyone says about God should be greeted by "Thank you, now go away."

In prelude to the non-echoing clear space of unaccountable muted utterance, one looks about seeing what is there without commentary, criticism, or clarification.

The language of God, it is said, is silence. All else is bad translation. 

Aquinas tells us that “angels are always announcers of divine silence.” Silence is surely one of the deep ways into the human heart and into divine mysteries, and it is integral to many forms of meditation in both the east and the west. But Aquinas gives credit to angels for bringing silence alive. 

 

He is also being somewhat paradoxical in calling angels “announcers of divine silence.” Isn’t announcing always an act of speaking? Not necessarily, Aquinas is saying—not when it comes to the divine silence, which is so deep and speaks to us deep to deep, depth to depth, heart to heart. 

 

But Aquinas also says that the angels don’t stop with the announcing; they also assist us to understand and interpret the divine silence derived from the divine mystery.  It is necessary after something is announced to someone that they understand the announcement. In addition, therefore, because we can understand by the intellect the things that are announced to us through the angels, they themselves by the brightness of their own light help our intellect grasp the secrets of God.    

 

(from, Are Angels “Announcers of Divine Silence?” by Matthew Fox)

 Listen -

(ing)

Silent -

(ly)

Nothing

is (said)

With 

(grace)

last walk of night

 High tide surrounds wharf

Long walk to Canadian

Coast Guard docked boats