ser con dios

what news?

I've quit

Donnie who?

Ha, ha. ha, 

no more

he'll pass

earth

remains

I'll pass

nothing remains

even the Pope

is critical

Salud para ti, Papa

(Health to you, Papa)

whether here or there

ser 

con dios

(Be with God)

snow bowl alive and jumping

 across Hosmer pond 

cold wind at back at face, one

step at a time, walk

never off center

 At center

Where truth resides

No opinion visits

At edges

Left and right

Bellicosity

Don’t let them

Convince you to step

Off middle way

mother nature

Walk with the wind (love)

Native American said

Be where peace steps (love)

unloading and disembarking

 When I jumped from the top floor

of the Actuarial Department of

the New York Life Insurance

building

I landed in a small town on

the Delaware River upstate

I studied and prayed, played

basketball and baseball, hit

tennis balls and pingpong balls

attempted to block a full running

tackle on a kickoff and crawled

breathless to side line nearly dead

It was the early sixties, JFK 

was shot but not yet Martin or

Bobby

Fr. Louis, talk done, would disappear

I was impertinent and naive

slipping past God on a stairwell

in Manhattan during the riots

at Columbia, staggering away

from one life to another, ersatz 

pseudo-

ronin and under-bridge non-saint

I had to learn how to pray

all over, a tug, lines cast off

no one on the bridge, adrift

in night harbor, tide going out, 

as abandoned as abandoning

listing and listless, creaking

through slip and breakwater

stars looking away, no moon

waves lapping at rusty hull

derelict

It sank somewhere miles off 

shore in sudden storm without

fanfare or known coordinates --

and there, depth scuttled by time

broken apart and blanched grey

bottomed and bedraggled

never to feel surface again

unsalvaged

 just the right place to mull

where buoyancy had disappeared

becoming at home in murky depth

far below passing liners and tankers

all going with effective weigh-points

to expectant calls with useful cargo,

gangplanks set and rituals followed

unloading and disembarking, ready

to return and resume passage homeward --

passing over shadow hull fixed firmly

on sea floor of no place else to go --

tucking, if nothing else, the unentered log  

nichts ergibt sinn *

 There's so much sadness 

so much turmoil

an odd president

odd vp odd doge odd fbi

odd dni odd ag odd sec/def

odd gop senate and house

It is an odd time in the USA 

odd

terrifyingly odd

I drink orange juice

eat Breton crackers

watch day dusk

in the silence of this front room

buddha christ and mary on windowsill

altar, they see it, nothing makes sense *

quóniam in aetérnam misericordia ejus

 The new clock from goodwill

Is one minute ahead in red numbers

Nuns from France chant psalm

No place no time I’d rather be

he wants money, pay him, send him away

 Such frumpy foolishness

a blanket over sleight of hand

look over here -- see the hat

see the rabbit see the switch

I think the people will rise up

I think he will be overthrown

down deep the American people

do not suffer fools gladly,  no way

at day's end will we allow a fool

to continue foolishness -- 

just pay him off,

run him out of town

campana

 There it goes

Sliding up from east

Slow dusk

There it goes

Sliding down to west

Fading daylight

Here i am

Between the two

Call me Campana toll

one bullet into a wall and a second

Sometimes a headline of a story just snatches your attention from wandering without focus. 

Today, 2025:

Anne Marie Hochhalter, Paralyzed in Columbine Shooting, Dies at 43, NYTimes, 18feb2025

Anne Marie Hochhalter, who spoke publicly about the long-lasting effects of  gun violence after she was paralyzed in the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine  High School in Colorado, was found dead on Sunday at her home in Westminster,  Colo. She was 43. The police said that officers had found Ms. Hochhalter after they were called for a  welfare check. The Adams County coroner, which initially handled  Ms. Hochhalter’s case, said it had been transferred to the Jefferson County coroner,  “given that her death was likely related to complications of paraplegia associated  with the Columbine shooting.” The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office said that  autopsy results were not yet available.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/us/anne-marie-hochhalter-columbine-shooting-dies.html

Twenty six years ago, 1999: 

Mother of Injured Columbine Student Kills Herself,  Associated Press, 23Oct 1999

The mother of a student wounded in the shootings at Columbine High School walked into a suburban pawn shop today, asked to see a handgun, loaded it and killed herself with a shot to the head.

The suicide by the woman, Carla June Hochhalter, occurred about six months after her 17-year-old daughter, Anne Marie, was critically wounded and partly paralyzed in the April 20 shootings by two student gunmen, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold.

This morning, Ms. Hochhalter, 48, asked to see a handgun at the Alpha Pawn Shop in Englewood. As a clerk handled paperwork, Ms. Hochhalter loaded the gun with bullets she had brought with her. She fired one bullet into a wall and a second one into her head, an Englewood police spokeswoman, Leticia Castillo, said. 

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/23/us/mother-of-injured-columbine-student-kills-herself.html

And here, the Wikipedia reference:

A school shooting and attempted bombing occurred on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States.^[b] The perpetrators, twelfth-grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered twelve students and one teacher; ten were killed in the school library, where Harris and Klebold subsequently died by suicide. Twenty-one additional people were injured by gunshots, and gunfire was exchanged with the police. Another three people were injured trying to escape.  (Wikipedia)

These stories stop you.

They root you.

Set you pondering.

Any questions?

gelassenheit

6°, I open window

for cold air

Spare

Change

Is all I can manage

Am I praying?

I can’t really tell —

If attention to word

Rare

Strange

Gone to ether after sound.

Like acosmism — the

Philosophy maya, denying

Universe has any absolute

Reality or existence apart from God —

Clear

Range

Stretching thinner than can be . . . seen

again and again it will have to “nichten”

Some philosophical papers are really dense.

An excerpt: 

Anders refers to sexuality to refer to everything enfleshed: “One

is tempted to vary the famous French saying ‘ni homme ni femme, c’est un capucin’ into: ‘ni homme, ni capucin, c’est un Dasein’” (349).

For Anders, the capuchin, the monkishness of Dasein is nothing nugatory: 

Heidegger retires into the cloister of his own Self, in order to become “authentic Dasein”; since he does not know of any way of becoming “authentic” within a definite world, a society; since, on the other hand he can’t help continuing to live in this world which, so to speak, continues “in spite,” it is bound to become “alien” to him: i.e., again and again it will have to “nichten” [vanish]. (345) 

(—p.204, ch.10, Da-Sein’s Pronouns, by Babette Babich, Original version appears in: Patricia Glazebrook and Susanne Claxton, eds., Heidegger, Dasein, and Gender: Thinking the Unthought. Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2024. 189-222.)

It does, however, appeal to the difficulty of becoming authentic. And the instinct to “vanish.”

Tonight at conversation we spoke about the word “acosmism.” 

References to A Course in Miracles, the Gita, the Gospels, William Blake, Advaita Vedanta, and the third season of True Detective were made.

And how in dying we “nichten” [vanish].

But return to Brahman, the Supreme Reality.

A mostly unappearing mode of being.

Yet, still, there. 

Still, here.

as words would have it

 In the novel, words: 

“Let tomorrow 

take care of 

itself”

Yes, care, 

of itself

Is what must be taken

Let (allow) tomorrow

It will, or it might, maybe

Show itself (finally)

petit-déjeuner

 Lavrov and Rubio 

Sit for breakfast

Time passes

Coffee cup emptied

Lavrov folds serviette 

Pushes back chair

Rubio, a small crumb,

haphazardly falls to floor

the way of interfaith dialogue in maine

the young baptist pastor

climbed ladder with hatchet

to chop ice from roof

of catholic buddhist woman

after leak dripped onto desk

sure and it is

From an Irish novel I’m reading:

      “He was a man in a suit of many yesterdays who liked to carry today’s newspaper.”

A good sentence.

through the passage up to, within, and through

 It seems a good time to say adios, 

perhaps I'll see you next time 

Not sure I've seen you this time

It's nothing you've done, It's me

I don't see so good, never have

So I say "to God" -- adios amigo

via con dios, go with God, I wish

 I had, gone with God. I don't know

what I went with, but I don't think 

it was God. I seemed always to want

something else, something other than 

God, what-is, haeccitas, (thisness).

So, 'to God' with you, go with God is

my prayer for you, as it is (come to

think of it) my prayer for me. You see

God is what-is, the thisness of this world

the next thing that happens, the last thing

that happened, the arrival, the noticing,

the departure. It is the dance. It is the dance.

But we want something else, something other,

not dancing through the music of transportation

but saying hold it, hold on, making of the tune

a closeted file in a locked safe, for later review.

Something other. Not this. That. Other than itself.

Hence my prayer -- Go with God -- who is always

going, going, gone, gone -- (hmmm) awakening

through the passage up to, within, and through.

Compañera, amiguis, amigo del alma

with all your annoying qualities, foibles

left-over syllables muttered while turning away

God is all that's left to us. We don't know this,

not for sure, but we suspect it. We lament our short-

sighted impatience and ill-conceived aggravation;

returning to bed, shifting for comfortable position

remembering to breathe, forgetting everything else,

not caring what tomorrow brings ... almost ... happy

chapelet

 rosary

for each being

a passing thought

a passing

prayer

for each being

neige moi-même

 Snow falling on Maine mountain 

Each flake a soul materializing

All my relations, all my arriving self

no body home

The other world

The one beyond my experience

Where the dead do what the dead do

Where my ignorance gains no access

A civilization of comings and goings

Beyond me, beyond you, beyond seeing

An address without a number

Door without handle, mail unopened

Dishes in sink, one glove on floor

nite

 A day might come when the thought would arise telling himself it could have perhaps been better to have been more social, less reclusive, a better fit in a crowded room.

He pondered such a thought.

It fell like a cigarette butt dropped onto the sidewalk of a late night street. 

He was no use to anybody. No one held any such illusion. He was useless in company. A potted plant.

And so he stayed for a long time.

And that was that. Which is what he thought.