Healing is for the grateful
No matter the difficulty
potior et patior
Thursday, September 11, 2025
well, done
Nothing will change.
Nothing always does.
Go ahead, do nothing.
See if you can.
You can’t.
You want to do something.
Anything.
Nothing is beyond you.
Look, I’ll show you --
Do you see the latest shootings?
Ok. Do nothing. Say things, but
Do nothing. That’s it. Well done!
chipmunk runs across rocks
In chapel/zendo
Light two candles
One incense stick
Dog leads me here
After mountain walk
Lays in front of Buddha
Kuan Yin and sangha sculpture
I do not ask him
Why we are here
Incense rises, god’s breath
Goes in and out window
Dog snores, his work done
He got me here
He god me near
Candles steady at 3 bells
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
looking me dead in the eye
With thanks to Tina, tonight, this poem by Andrea Gibson:
WHEN DEATH CAME TO VISIT
When death first came to visit, I refused
to let her enter my home. She sat outside
in the garden picking buttercups, painting
her face the color of the sun.
I stood at the window for hours watching
her, thinking, Why is she still here?
It's not like she has nowhere to go
I'd try to sleep,
but as soon as I closed my eyes,
I would hear her outside talking
daisies into blooming at night.
I suspect she knew,
I, too am the type to open my petals
for the moon. On my eighth night awake,
I did it. I don't know how, but I did it
I walked out to the garden
and invited her in.
I poured her a cup of lavender tea.
I made up her bed and turned down
the lights. I wished her good dreams,
though I knew her good dream
was to one day take my life.
I used to believe I knew my purpose,
thought for sure I understood my calling.
But my calling, I now know, has always
been this: to parent my own departure.
To never punish the child for being
who she is.
To keep a roof over the head of the truth.
To raise what will end me, with love.
Now people often ask how it feels
raising a delinquent,
a child capable of such awful behavior.
But what rule has she ever broken
besides the ones we make up
in our minds? Ask me instead
how it feels to raise a genius,
a child with a boundless 1Q.
She could get away with anything, yes.
She could get away with me any minute.
But I trust her. I have to.
I see some of the letters on a chart
on a wall. She has infinity/infinity vision.
Besides, who would I be
if I were someone who would say,
I'm gonna ground you
for wanting to heaven me?
I won't do that, ever.
It doesn't matter if I made her
with my body or not. She's mine.
I owe her a stable home. I owe her
an allowance without the stipulation
that she use it to buy me more time.
At night when I tuck her in,
I read her a story with the same three
words on every page:
"You are innocent. You are innocent.
You are innocent." I say. Before I close
the book she asks, But have you ever
known anyone who is so unwanted?
It's the saddest question in the universe,
and she asks it everytime. "People don't
know you," I say. "They'll want you
when they meet you, won't they?"
She says yes, looking me dead
in the eye. And you, she adds.
You're really okay
with who I want to be when I grow up?
I know I have to answer honestly.
I say,
"I don't want you to grow up
too fast. You know that. You know
I can't help but be one of those parents
who wishes their child could stay a child
forever. It's only because I've cherished
these years so much. But
when you're ready, I'll be ready,
I promise. I've committed
the rest of my days to learning
how to give you my blessing
when it's time for you
to follow your dreams.
I know it's how you say, I love you.
I know others will hear it as a curse
and try to rinse your mouth out with soap.
But I will hear your / love you.
I will hear it so clearly my last words
will be / love you too, as I watch you
make something of yourself,
as I open my petals for the moon.
(-- Poem by Andrea Gibson, 8|13/1975 - 7/14|2025)
and yet, and yet . . .
Anne Lamott wrote an opinion piece published in August 31, 2025 Sunday NYT, “What I Told My Sunday School Students About Death.” She wrote it after the recent shooting at the back-to-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis.
In it, this line:”There should be one inviolable rule: Children are not shot or starved to death.”
It occurs to me there is some fantasy writer imagining a tale wherein a chamber of far right legislators and senators are preyed upon by shooters blasting AR15s and 17s at them shouting “You had your chance to ban these weapons!”
Or a maddened former armed forces personnel now a secret service officer opens fire on members of the executive branch at a Rose Garden ceremony honoring ICE and Homeland Security on a slow news day. Someone is scripting such a TV Series episode for next season’s offerings during ratings week.
These are not Ms. Lamott’s sentiments. Hers are soup and casserole and kids kicking a soccer ball. And, after reading, we tear up and allow our hearts to break, again, with the inevitability and sorrow of violent acts. Gaza. Ukraine. America. The dark incomprehensibility of tolerated evil.
Or: 露の世は露の世ながらさりながら Tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara
This dewdrop world — Is a dewdrop world, And yet, and yet . . .
Under the image, someone added: "This poem by Issa was written upon the death of his child. With this in mind, there are two common ways to interpret it. One is pessimistic saying “how can flowers have the audacity to bloom in such a cruel world”. The other optimistic 'even in such a cruel world, flowers bloom’".
I prefer flowers to fantastic narratives of assassination and carnage. You cannot change the tortured human heart or deranged human mind by high velocity ordinance leaving empty casings and further sorrow on the ground.
Equally obscuring is appeal to a remedial deity urging a deus-ex-machina fantastical solution that includes unseeable rational and esoteric historical/theological explanations for actions committed in the world.
God and the devil are unworthy explanations. As are descriptions of mental illness and confused gender narratives. Nor is any other culture war or favorite paranoid talking point applicable to the occasions of horror and terror in our midst.
Why not simply say we don’t care?
Why not admit we love the deaths of the innocent?
Why not accept the fact that whoever gives us the most money will get our vote, or block our vote, for any legislation affecting their corporate bottom line?
We don’t care.
We have not come close to descending to the core of our being and finding there a felt union with all creation, all creatures, and divine obscuration -- experiencing the illogical desire to, finally, love whatever is, love what perennially presents Itself, love what and who we are side by side with everything else nearby.
Drop down dew, heavens above,
let skies rain down the Just One.
Rorate caeli de super,
et nubes pluant justum.
https://hymnary.org/text/do_not_be_angry_with_us_lord_do_not
Here’s a narrative interrogative -- Is there, at our core, an unfathomable interconnective reality that holds everything in an embracing unity -- what once we called love, spirit, God -- but now suspect is inevitable wholeness looking to be seen, waiting to be recognized, longing to be realized, urging us down into it, an invitation to flower our being into a more kindly, caring, and compassionate existence?
At core, care.
Where are we?
Is it possible to be Just One?
Tuesday, September 09, 2025
squaring to bunt
I am ready
To die
What?
I am
Ready to
Die
(What did
He say?)
He said
He is
Ready to die
Bullshit!
Well then,
At least we have
A baseline
εδώ τελειώνει η διαμάχη (here endeth disputation)
Belief is not evidence
What do I say of God?
I say: I don’t believe in God —
I dwell in the evidence of God
Beyond belief — not knowing God
But open to what reveals
Itself
barn and bedlam
It seems odd
The president is declaring
War on the United States
Hello, operator, please
Connect me with someone
Not compromised who
Can take the threatening
Man into custody until
Sanity clears his mind
Until then I’ll be hiding
In barn up in loft with
Old hay and stored table
Of man who died — it
Has set for two decades
With skis and large boots
It is a shame that death
And unraveled chief war-maker
Exist in this troubled realm
The dead man was a good man
The other guy, a mess, and not
So good, to our chosen shame
Monday, September 08, 2025
beyond the restrictions
“Real haiku is the soul of poetry. Anything that is not actually present in one’s heart is not haiku. The moon glows, flowers bloom, insects cry, water flows. There is no place we cannot find flowers or think of the moon. This is the essence of haiku. Go beyond the restrictions of your era, forget about purpose or meaning, separate yourself from historical limitations – there you will find the essence of true art, religion, and science.”— Santōka Taneda
1.
carry out the trash
smells fill the kitchen, carry
out smelly garbage
2.
what you think you think
does not make anything true
makes it what you think
3.
old man, shopping cart
two bouquets of cut flowers,
reaches for butter
the subject of their speculations
In prison this morning we spoke about Castor and Pollux,
Castor[a] and Pollux[b] (or Polydeuces)[c] are twin half-brothers in Greek and Roman mythology, known together as the Dioscuri or Dioskouroi.[d]
Their mother was Leda, but they had different fathers; Castor was the mortal son of Tyndareus, the king of Sparta, while Pollux was the divine son of Zeus, who seduced Leda in the guise of a swan.[2] The pair are thus an example of heteropaternal superfecundation. Though accounts of their birth are varied, they are sometimes said to have been born from an egg, along with their twin sisters Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. (Wikipedia)
In our hubris, we wondered if the Greeks actually believed the stories that have come down to us. (In the same way we wondered if the sweet Golden Retriever understood the baseball game she was taken to over the weekend.)
This evening I look into PHILO.
C H A P T E R I
HELLENISTIC JUDAISM AND PHILO
I. HELLENISTIC JEWISH ATTITUDE TOWARD
GREEK RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
WITH a single exception, none of the peoples who after the
conquests of Alexander began to participate in Greek philosophy
contributed anything radically new to it. All they did
was to master its teachings and furnish teachers. The Phoenician
population of Citium in Cyprus furnished Zeno, the
founder of Stoicism; Sidon furnished another Zeno, who
became the head of the Epicureans; Carthage furnished
Hasdrubal, who under the name of Clitomachus became the
head of the New Academy; the Hellenistic population of
Ascalon in Palestine furnished another head of the New
Academy by the name of Antiochus; Tyre furnished Dio-
dorus, who became the head of the Peripatetic school; and
Apamea in Syria furnished Posidonius, who established a
Stoic school in Rhodes, the only Greek philosophic school
which flourished at that time outside of Athens. But all of
these, though coming from the new centers of Greek culture,
and perhaps also of non-Greek origin, were thoroughly Hel-
lenized, not only in language but also in religion, and they
appear on the scene of history as Greeks, carrying on the
traditions of Greek philosophers. The schools which they
came to preside over, and, in the case of Zeno, the new school
which he founded, were Greek schools, flourishing in the
ancient seat of Greek civilization. The gods, the myths, and
the religious and political institutions which as philosophers
they had occasion to take as the subject of their speculations
were all the same as those of their predecessors from Thales
to Aristotle.
(--opening chapter, PHILO, FOUNDATIONS OF RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHYIN JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, and ISLAM, by H A R R Y N A T H A N A U S T R Y N W O L F S O N , 1947)
Stories gather suspicions gleaned from imagination and shaped by dreams that arrive within consciousness when attention is diverted from full alacrity and slowly slumbers through foggy dusks forming creatures and explanations and narratives that take their own direction despite reasonable doubt or objection.
Hence, philosophy and theology. Hence mythology and fantastical speculation.
On every street corner throughout history, someone smoking (whatever they are smoking) is asking the guy standing next to him (about whatever they are talking about) -- “Do you really believe that?”
Wheeler, the sweet girl Golden Retriever, is settling into the lap of the great-haired lady who comes into the library to welcome her back with a handful of treats.
The pacing and wandering resident who has come in and out of the room about ten times is also happy to see the service pup in training and stands still for a little bit.
Wheeler is in our story now.
She goes over to her corner behind the librarian's desk (who is talking about Castor and Pollux) and curls into her readiness to slumber.
What story is she conjuring?
Which one are we?
Then it is time for the final circle.
we're inside something, but what
Service dog brought back to prison this morning. Handler said she'd been to baseball game over weekend.
I wondered whether she knew it was a baseball game.
"Nah," said resident training person, "she just knew hotdog, loud noise, and many dozens of legs."
I asked him if the same might be true of us. Whether we have any idea whatsoever what game we are attending -- just that there's food, shoes, and others surrounding us.
He looked at me, nodded, and allowed as how that just might be the case.
We both looked at the dog, this time with a different curiosity.
nativité de la très sainte vierge
happy birthday
did you know
you would carry
the unspoken word
into a long poem
without pronouncing
an errant syllable
Sunday, September 07, 2025
truth be told
It doesn’t matter
If we like or dislike
What matters is
If what we like or dislike
Is able and free to go on
As what it is in itself
Free of our likes
Or dislikes
know no fear, know no grief
It is from the first millennium BCE.
6. Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no fear.
7. Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no grief.
How can the multiplicity of life
Delude the one who sees its unity?
(--from Isha Upanishad, Translation by Eknath Easwaran )
We’ve had a very long time to consider these issues and ponder the question asked.
How are we doing?
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