if you are a poem, word yourself kindly

 They talk about Dōgen in New Mexico 

All their words nod their heads on way out

Yes, yes, they say, we are in agreement 

We will go to bed now, we might dream 

chanting out-breath

Evening

Sounds 

Itself

All-together

idipsum

Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life moves Stephen King's ultra long re-rendering of The Stand off to the side. 

When in doubt, try philosophy. You are not alone there.

“With respect to Stoicism, Hadot has described four features that constitute the universal Stoic attitude. They are, first, the Stoic consciousness of "the fact that no being is alone, but that we make up part of a Whole, constituted by the totality of human beings as well as by the totality of the cosmos"; second, the Stoic "feels absolutely serene, free, and invulnerable to the extent that he has become aware that there is no other evil but moral evil and that the only thing that counts is the purity of moral consciousness"; third, the Stoic "believes in the absolute value of the human person," a belief that is "at the origin of the modern notion of the 'rights of man'"; finally, the Stoic exercises his concentration "on the present instant, which consists, on the one hand, in living as if we were seeing the world for the first and for the last time, and, on the other hand, in being conscious that, in this lived presence of the instant, we have access to the totality of time and of the world." 17 Thus, for Hadot, cosmic consciousness, the purity of moral consciousness, the recognition of the equality and absolute value of human beings, and the concentration on the present instant represent the universal Stoic attitude.

 The universal Epicurean attitude essentially consists, by way of "a certain discipline and reduction of desires, in returning from pleasures mixed with pain and suffering to the simple and pure pleasure of existing.”  

― Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, 1995

I walked by Thomas Berry in 1970 from whom I was taking a course on the Bhagavad Gita. We were crossing Fordham University between classes. He gave me what he’d indicated was a traditional greeting of India, “Are you upon yourself?” It was a curious and intriguing greeting.

Hadot gives the wonderful example of Augustine, who read in the Latin version of Psalm IV: 9 the expression ;,, idipsum. Although the Hebrew text contains wording that simply means "at this very moment” or "immediately," Augustine, prompted by Neoplatonist metaphysics, discovers in this in idipsum a name of God, "the selfsame." He thus discovers here a metaphysics of identity and divine immutability, interpreting the expression as meaning "in him who is identical with himself." 6 Both a Latin translation and a Neoplatonist metaphysics come between his reading and the text. (Ibid, Intro. p3)

I must come to accept that I am no different than the world, its manifestation, and the occupants residing therein. We come from the same stuff, only variously organized, presented, and affected by the vicissitudes of physical and psychological experience. (Such as, why am I nutsy-fagan and you are not?) 

Whereas one of God’s names, “the selfsame” (idipsum), suggests integrality within oneself, (or within Itself).

Left to contemplation, of course, is how and why we differ so much ethically and morally? How it is we do not recognize or actualize a sense of fairness and justice, compassion and equality within our own species and cross-species with all our relative-beings?

Therapists and psychologists might have a deeper understanding of the variations and perversions of human behavior than I do, and recognize corrective or restrictive methods to corral and refocus behavior deemed to be errant and antisocial. There are, through, times and instances when human behavior has little resemblance to a norm of consideration and respectfulness and gravitates to a horrific execution of cruelty and pain. Witness Gaza. Witness Ukraine. Witness concentration camps and exporting residents to foreign prisons.

Is there something to meditate on with idipsum? Not that we become all alike, but that there is some integrity and transcendence of fragmentation in becoming what we are, something as stated in Hadot --

He thus discovers here a metaphysics of identity and divine immutability, interpreting the expression as meaning "in him who is identical with himself.”

We study the Sandokai. 

"Sandokai" (參同契 in Chinese, also known as "Cantongqi") is a foundational Zen poem written by Shitou Xiqian (Sekito Kisen in Japanese) in the 8th century. It is a core text in the Soto Zen school and explores the relationship between the relative and absolute aspects of reality, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things. The poem's title itself can be translated in various ways, including "Merging of Difference and Unity," "Harmony of Difference and Sameness," and "Identity of Relative and Absolute”.  AI

We read Hadot.

We read Scriptures of various traditions.

We are learning to read our own souls. 

We begin with pronunciation. We move, slowly, to keener perception. 

surely some revelation

 Reading Stephen King’s “The Standing.”

Something about the slow inevitability of it.

Reminds me of everything falling apart under the demolition crew in Washington. Goodbye to public broadcasting, private universities, rule of law, adherence to constitution, ability to criticize, willingness to think, capitulate capitulate, capitulate.

“The beast is on its way. And it’s a good deal rougher than Yeats could ever say…” says a character.

Someone might chide for lack of optimism. They’d be right.

Sometimes things look exactly what they look like. No makeup improves.

The difference between a realist and a fatalist is subtle. I don’t care to try to make it.

I finish the smoothie the kind woman made.

I keep thinking a nap would make things more tolerable. 

It might.

No nuclear submarine sailor can step outside for a starry night stroll when at two hundred yards depth.

why are you weeping

 Co-monastic calls leaving prison. (I am recovering.) She tells of wonderful conversation. Their winding way through and back into themselves.

They looked at two of Guite’s poems about Mary Magdalene. Their conversation, she said, was deep and rich about family, abuse, difficult trust, and winding journey through desert to safety.

XV Easter Dawn

He blesses every love which weeps and grieves

And now he blesses hers who stood and wept

And would not be consoled, or leave her love’s

Last touching place, but watched as low light crept

Up from the east. A sound behind her stirs

A scatter of bright birdsong through the air.

She turns, but cannot focus through her tears,

Or recognise the Gardener standing there.

She hardly hears his gentle question ‘Why,

Why are you weeping?’, or sees the play of light

That brightens as she chokes out her reply

‘They took my love away, my day is night’

And then she hears her name, she hears Love say

The Word that turns her night, and ours, to Day.

(—Poem by Malcolm Guite)

. . .

Mary Magdalene

Men called you light so as to load you down,
And burden you with their own weight of sin,
A woman forced to  cover and contain
Those seven devils sent by Everyman.
But one man set you free and took your part
One man knew and loved you to the core
The broken alabaster of your heart
Revealed to Him alone a hidden door,
Into a garden where the fountain sealed,
Could flow at last for him in healing tears,
Till, in another garden, he revealed
The perfect Love that cast out all your fears,
And quickened you  with love’s own sway and swing,
As light and lovely as the news you bring.

(—Poem by Malcolm Guite)

once a wise person said nothing

 It’s the silence

No need to talk

Letting things be

They’ll get better

Or get worse

Left alone

I’m not good company

For those wanting more

Or wanting less

Everyone is annoying 

When wanting things

To be otherwise 

Things are not otherwise

Nor is wisdom found

Where it is not

bonne matinée

 Morning cat

Asks nothing

Kneads blanket

Purrs

not that I knew who i was, but i was there

 Nice to let him take his shoes off before killing him.

It’s a Bensonhurst thing.

So too, my father wanted my mother to take his shoes off after staggering to his bed after collapsing in the kitchen, as he was having a heart attack. He died shoes off his feet.

After befriending Simone through a series of meetings, Gravano, with the assistance of Milito and Joseph "Stymie" D'Angelo, abducted Simone from Yardley Golf Club in Yardley, Pennsylvania (part of suburban Trenton, New Jersey), and drove him to a wooded area on Staten Island. 

Gravano then granted Simone's requests to die with his shoes off, in fulfillment of a promise he had made to his wife, and at the hands of a made man. After Gravano removed Simone's shoes, Milito shot Simone in the back of the head, killing him. Gravano later expressed admiration for Simone as a so-called "man's man", remarking favorably on the calmness with which he accepted his fate.[11].       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammy_Gravano

I’m sure I passed Sammy “the bull” Gravano in the neighborhood. You pass a lotta guys. He might have been the guy who banged my head on the sidewalk over and over and over after I suggested (as a kid) he might not want to be so vulgar to Marie who lived two houses down. He wasn’t fond of my suggestion. How I didn't just lay there and die is a mystery. I’ve never been right in the head afterwards. If him, he was 7 months younger than me.

Bensonhurst was like that. Great diversity. I played schoolyard basketball daily with a small left handed guy with a great left side drive backboard shot named Gary David Goldberg who was unstoppable. He was 6 weeks older than me. Had a successful career in film and television as producer and writer. 

Yusuf Hawkins, aged 16, was chased down and killed by a white group of teens in 1989 on 20th avenue down the street from my family house years after I’d moved away.

I can reconstruct every sidewalk crack and gutter sewer grill in the whole neighborhood; every address, 50s car, soda shop and subway stop within three mile radius.

You get to appreciate small kindnesses like neighbors calling hello, winning a pickup game against much better players, early morning bicycling to parish church to serve weekday mass. Even letting someone take off their shoes before you execute them.

Not far away, 1.8 miles away, was Lafayette high school. Sandy Koufax went there, as did Jeffrey Epstein, Gary Goldberg, Al Ferrara (who taught me how to throw as major leaguers throw from the outfield), Rhea Perlman, Larry King, Paul Sorvino, Rochelle Owen, and the Aspromonte baseball brothers.

It seems like a long time ago. 

It was home. 

I grew up there.

It's a bit of a fog.

But I remember everything.

as i live and breathe, this mantra

Christus Iesus

Unum cum Deo

Permitte nobis intra

Hanc viam tuam

. . .

Χριστός Ιησούς

ένα με τον Θεό

Επιτρέψτε μας να είμαστε μέσα

αυτός ο δρόμος σας

[Christós Iisoús

éna me ton Theó

Epitrépste mas na eímaste mésa

aftós o drómos sas]

. . .

 christ jesus

one with god

allow us within

this your way

i could be in kiev or gaza

I  consider mortality

Cuff says i still have

Blood pressure

Despite seven days

Red mouth following

Surgery

Sooner or later

With or without me

Blood will stop

non-mirrored non-image

 I admit it

today’s leadership

today’s administration

is troubling, hard to stomach

but here we are

afterthoughts in a non-coherent 

set of absurd statements

yet longing for care and compassion

here’s what to do

go within, find there what is needed

even if without is overwhelming

within is where true dwelling enlightens

when the world gets turned inside out

it becomes a non-mirrored non-image

those looking for their own resemblance

see nothing but the gaze of God; haecceity

time, it’s on our slide

 I was thinking about changing the world

but then I thought, change it into what?

I was thinking about changing the word

but then I thought, change it into that?

And that’s what I did.

That.

Now all you have to do is do that.

You’re welcome.

You’re well, come!

Slide on in.

There you go --

that’s that

and write down useless notes

 I once took those walks. Morning beach, low tide, wind song, dog prints. Of many southern Maine beaches, Biddeford Pool had the curve and point, behind the big house an Irish or English round stone cottage, where I imagined I lived whenever I passed.

(Many things about this place are dubious.)

I'd like to retire there and do nothing,

or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:

look through binoculars, read boring books, 

old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,

talk to myself, and, foggy days, 

watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.

(--from The End of March, poem by Elizabeth Bishop)

It was the middle-time of my vagrancy. Not here, not there, not this job, nor that, a wandering promise with no payoff, a diminishing debt of detachment, seagull stretching toward fishing boat abaft piling on wharve with blue tubs of bait standing ready in their desultory smell.

Forty years gone by, friend from then, housemate, will visit with wife in a few days. We had a place there, two streets back, close enough to the ocean, not the dream place, but good enough winter rental.

There’s not much to see in the sea. Rising and falling swells. Stones at shoreline laced with faded and frayed green lobster line telling of days gone and owners gone. The old big doors and open wall launch for once big rowing station rescue boats at coast guard outpost their now quiet stories garbled with small shifting stones rolling in crosscurrent tide against sea wall.

I got a ticket once for leaving car there when I walked the length toward Goose Rocks. I never paid it. I’ve dreamt they were coming after me.

Forty four years in Maine, over half my life, the broken wooden traps have given way to bent green wire ones in small coves wedged between boulders smoothed by wet repetition.

You don’t have to live by the shore. It's close enough.  Sit there in pickup with coffee and bland donut for dunking. Visitors from away with iPhones and Nikons finding gems to take back with them, or those with enormous telephoto lens, their intimate nearness to take back to Photographic Workshop on their way to the big glossies and coffee table books.

Even back then I was a vagabondo trasandato -- a scruffy vagabond with no eye for anything lasting -- a single wave on a long shore of sea wall knowing how to deflect a glancing intrusion, shunted off, back out to lowering tide, a smashed trap now holding only stories of what once was thought to be caught.

this no-name thing has got to end

Tao has

no name

excuse me --

what shall we call you?

Tao has

no response

walks off whistling 

with (as) the wind

step aside, let him through

 perfidy

has no boundary

watch, watch

there -- the stepping

over -- oh my sweet

lord -- the shamelessness

ok, ok, calm down

it’s only moral turpitude

only ugly example

nobody cares anymore

we’re all angry, want

revenge, so what if lies

blind us -- perfidy

wears a smile, dresses well

everyone loves the pluck and

brazen rashness, the winning

we love a winner, let the good

times roll, we love a winner

with a third perspective

I’m always in a fog.

Does that mean I am always with God? 

"And the Lord descended in the form of a cloud, and Moses stood with him there.” (--from Exodus 33:7-11,34:5-9,28)

Maybe fog and cloud are different.

Maybe there is no difference.

Is that what the Gospels teach? There is no difference?

In our world difference is the only thing there is.

Better than, less than, more affluent than, better educated than, holier than, than, than, than.

 “Than” is used to introduce a second element in comparison.

But is it meaningful to say there is no comparison with God?

God is.

We are.

This is.

That is.

But no comparison.

No second element. 

Generally speaking, Zen cherishes simplicity and straightforwardness in grasping reality and acting on it “here and now,” for it believes that a thing-event that is immediately presencing before one’s eyes or under one’s foot is no other than an expression of suchness. In other words the thing-event is disclosing its primordial mode of being such that it is as it is. It also understands a specificity of the thing-event to be a recapitulation of the whole; parts and the whole are to be lived in an inseparable relationship through an exercise of nondiscriminatory wisdom, without prioritizing the visible over the invisible, the explicit over the implicit, or vice versa. 

 

As such, Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” that is “a positionless position,” where “not two” means negating the dualistic stance that divides the whole into two parts, while “not one” means negating the nondualistic stance occurring when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation. The free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen’s achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot be confined to either dualism or non-dualism, neither “not one” nor “not two”. 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/

In that cloud, what some call God, might also be called positionless position.

It might also be referred to as presence without appearance.

Like health hiding behind the appearance of ill-health. Or life hiding within the appearance of death.

(It is too hot to move today. Indicators say 880, real feel 1000)

It often amuses how some always want to appear the smartest in the room, criticizing and conducting (in their view) a series of outmaneuvering comments to diminish what has been said. It is how they practice two.

Others . . . (never mind.)

The only cloud meaningful today to most people is where our computer data is held. It is perceived as safe-keeping or is the focus of cyber-crime, data-theft, and identity theft.

We’re not much interested in God.

Profit, yes; power, yes; pederasty, yes; perverse greed, yes.

Almost no one wants to be in God. 

Almost no one.

Almost.

No.

One. 

Not two.

Maybe...three.

the calculus of facing what the day brings

 church remembrance today

Martha, Mary, Lazarus (he

died, laid in tomb, was called

out) -- damn -- he needed

a bath, everyone said so

so, what are we to think?

I dunno, shit like that is rare

dead is dead, mourners mourn

have some food and drink, say

goodbye, hit dusty road, go

where the living go on living

for now

doesn’t seem fair, like trump

figuring to pardon Maxwell lady

export minorities to other countries

rake in any and all money he can

smile, golf, pontificate, scowl

he is not Jesus

nor his followers christian

people die throughout country

shot and knifed and mowed down

by cars, hardly any of them brought

back to life, even if they wanted to be

this is nothing else

 if someone points 

a gun at you

fires it

remember this --

because this

is all of it

others will talk sad

will ask why

will give opinion

but you, you will

know this, and this

is all of it

a version for now

 Christ Jesus

One With God

Allow Us

Within 

This (Your) 

Way

couldn’t guarentee

Inch by inch

Monday steps forward

Toward noon

Second by second

I have counted the end

Of caring about Monday

So many I’ve worked with

No longer say good morning

No longer say anything

mors non est mors, sed vita est vita

 The dead are hard to see

From across field, dog barks 

There are no mirrors

There’s nothing to see

Even if i were

Looking

priorities

 Starving child in mothers lap

Starving child on bare mattress —

His wood shot went off to right

Tee it up again

mu

 I met the Buddha on the road

She smiled

Wished me good morning

Walking up hill

Safe and sound

Unmolested by no koan

a shadow that never leaves

Being a Buddhist is like being a Christian.

We ask “why?” without wanting to know.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts. If a person speaks or acts with an evil thought, suffering follows him, as the wheel follow the hoof of and beast that draws the wagon.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts. If a person speaks or acts with a good thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.

Dhammapada

We ask “why not?” and begin to laugh.

Siddhartha and Jesus sit across the room, shake their heads, look at each other.

Good company, both. 

beauty on the water

Walking mountain yesterday, lightheaded and weak from recent surgery and seepage of blood, the quiet green of ground the watching blue of sky. I am not alone in my solitude.

When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”

(from Wendell Berry poem, “The Peace of Wild Things”)

“Yes” said no-one there. “Yes” responded nothing seen.

Green ground and blue sky surrounded the walking.

Redwing blackbird chanted evening vespers.

I made it home.

With several steps to spare.

As Tháy finishes his words about zen and saving the planet.

johnson and proeneneke

Mountain men

Utah, Alaska

Hardy, colorful