no one shows me nothing

 “When you meet a master swordsman, show him your sword. When you meet a man who is not a poet, do not show him your poem.”

― Lin-Chi, (Linji Yixuan), 臨濟義玄; born during the Yuanhe era (806–820), China, Chan Buddhism

do not forsake me

 Oh my darling

I will never

Forsake you

Once a song

Has been sung

It stays and stays

As it is

Forever

Young 

This our song

Is not wrong

Wait, wait along

rosary mala

 I finger beads

A swimmer 

throwing arms

In riptide

Just to see

How long

their last breath

Will be

aujourd’huii

Nagasaki.

And Edith Stein. 

The way the world behaves.

As we look for ways to embrace The Reality that is beyond the confused reality of human politics, prejudice, war, killing and slaughter, greed and obscene ideology.

Bombing a Japanese city that had weather more amenable to atomic destruction via American death plan. The savage calculation of trading Japanese civilian lives for American military lives.

The only actual fact that we could get at the end of the second month of study, at the beginning of October, was that at Nagasaki they had recorded the burning and cremation of 40,000 bodies. It is my belief that there must have been 20,000 or 30,000 more in the ruins, buried or consumed by the fire. https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/

And then, at Auschwitz:

• Sainte Thérèse-Bénédicte de la Croix, dans le monde Edith Stein, carmélite, martyre, et Patrone de l’Europe. Juive athée à la recherche de la vérité, elle la trouva en lisant la vie de sainte Thérèse d’Avila, et demanda le baptême. Entrée au Carmel quelques années plus tard, elle mourut déportée à Auschwitz, en 1942.

• Sainte Thérèse Bénédicte de la Croix, religieuse (carmélite) martyre, patronne de l’Europe 

  Edith observe la jeune veuve d’un de ses amis philosophes, Adolf Reinach, investie d’une Foi sereine : « Quelle espérance inexplicable.. », songe-t-elle. À ce moment là, « son incrédulité cède, tandis que la lumière du Christ se lève dans son cœur : le Christ dans la lumière de la croix ». Peu après, sa lecture éclair de la Vie de Thérèse d’Avila est l’étincelle : l’amour du Christ l’embrase, elle a 30 ans. Elle verra pour la première fois pleurer sa mère chérie quand elle lui annoncera sa conversion.
  Assimiler prestement un catéchisme est un jeu d’enfant pour la juive lettrée, familière de l’Ancien Testament : « Dix éminents théologiens ne suffiraient pas à répondre aux questions de cette philosophe », s’exclame un prêtre. Bientôt baptisée, la « fille du peuple élu est fière d’appartenir au Christ non seulement spirituellement mais également par le sang ».

  https://www.barroux.org/saints-du-jour/saint-romain-martyr/?event_rdate=20250809000000%2C20250809000000

There’s a lot to think about.

Reality (capital R) is beyond Being, says Heidegger. Existence flows from Being. Physicality and materiality result from existence. Psyche, emotions, and sensory feel accompany materiality, corporeality and biology. And then there’s the thing we call spirituality. 

It is said that Reality is God, or, God is Reality. God/Reality is beyond Being. 

Spirit is spoken of as:

• Spirit (animating force), the non-corporeal essence of living things
• Spirit (supernatural entity), an incorporeal or immaterial being

Philosophy, religion and folklore

• Spirituality, pertaining to the soul or spirit
• Holy Spirit, a divine force, manifestation of God in the Holy Trinity, or agent of divine action, according to Abrahamic Religions
• Great Spirit, conception of a supreme being prevalent among some Native American and First Nations cultures
• Vitalism, a belief in some fundamental, non-physical essence which differentiates organisms from inanimate, material objects
• Pneuma, an ancient Greek word sometimes translated as 'spirit'
• Soul, the spiritual part of a living being, often regarded as immortal
• Mind–body dualism, the view that mind and body are distinct and separable
• Geist, a German word corresponding to ghost, spirit, mind or intellect
• Psyche (psychology), a Greek word for 'soul' or 'spirit' used in psychology 

• Genius (mythology), a Latin word for a divine spirit present in every individual person, place, or thing

--wikipedia 

To live a spiritual life is, in some way, to approach and appreciate that which is both within and beyond that which can be experienced or apprehended. 

It is often said that God is Spirit. The Creator, it is said, is not the Creation. It is also said that the Creator is in the creation and creation is in the Creator, but they are neither synonymous nor identical. In the same way spirit permeates matter but is not matter. Spirit comes and goes. It is said no one knows where it abides, when or where it will make itself felt, nor what occasion or influence the presence of Spirit effectuates.

Does Spirit better existence?

Might existence become closer to Spirit in such a way as to deepen the character and activity of existence and those existing within the realm of Being?

And all this confronts the further conundrum that the essence of Reality is no separation. What we call “sin” is the belief that we can separate ourselves from one another and the Wholeness of Reality.

We can’t. 

But we think we can and believe we do when behaviors and actions are such that some feeling, some reasoning, tells us “we have sinned” we have separated ourselves from the Whole. What follows is a warren of consequential events and activities, psychological and characterological accretions that imprint who we think we are with others, what we assess as determinative patterns of personal behavior in social and cultural contexts.

And so, we murder and kill Edith Stein. We kill and murder 60,000 civilians at Nagasaki. 

What we are left with are explanation, justification, argument, rationalization, and triumphal militarism and ideology.

The Nazis probably thought they were right. America probably thinks they were right.

I implore all who are so inclined, rethink things.

finally

 For all

Of us

Grace and

Good health

être ici

 what if 

you were

never born

what if

you never

die

would you

still

hear laudes

still

delight in

being here

où étais-tu juste avant la naissance

 thanks

mom, dad

nana, bamp,

uncle Jim, nono

patricia

and all in

mile circumference 

of bay ridge avenue

eighty one

years ago

just that, thanks

I light candle

will ready for

prison, grateful

for all of it

where 

I

was

where

I

am

on receiving an analogy beyond compare

 There’s nothing cute about saying 

your abuser is your spiritual teacher.

He’s not.

Abuse is not cute.

Rather, may your suffering end

May your abuser break both his hands

And if you are in the mood to forgive,

Forgive God for sleeping late unaware

it’s very clear

 I remember a theological treatise, a found haiku, sung by the likes of Tony Bennett and Diana Krall, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Harry Connick jr:

It's very clear,  

 

our love is here  

 

to stay

            (--from song “Love is here to Stay” ) by George Gershwin with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, 1938)

There is profundity in the intimation that there is a simultaneity and synergy between the word/realities expressed as “love is here”.

If “love” and “here” are co-origin and co-terminus of one and the same reality, then it does become very clear that "our love is here to stay.” 

The lyrics are plain and simple. 

"Love Is Here to Stay" was the last musical composition George Gershwin completed before his death on July 11, 1937. Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics after George's death as a tribute to his brother. Although George had not written a verse for the song, he did have an idea for it that both Ira and pianist Oscar Levant had heard before his death. When a verse was needed, Ira and Levant recalled what George had in mind. Composer Vernon Duke reconstructed the music for the verse at the beginning of the song.^[2][8] Originally titled "It's Here to Stay" and then "Our Love Is Here to Stay," the song was finally published as "Love Is Here to Stay." Ira Gershwin said that for years he wanted to change the song's name back to "Our Love Is Here to Stay," but he felt it wouldn't be right since the song had already become a standard.^{[8]     Wikipedia} 

A man in prison who attended meetingbrook conversations never said anything for several weeks when he joined. Sitting across from him, I noticed one day he was mumbling something just outside of hearing. Then again. Later, again. I realized he was speaking lyrics from a song or songs. When I noticed this, I would quote back across the divide a corresponding lyric that his eyes recognized, and he’d smile. This went on for months, even longer. It was the way he’d communicate in a group such as ours. I became fond of him. Then, as will happen in prison, he was gone.

 The poetry of prophets, poets, lyricists and aphasic seers contain insight and wisdom too easily overlooked. 

When, of a sudden, our attention is uncommonly alerted to something being spoken, something being sung, something in ordinary conversation, or in a book, a film script, an article -- something, if you will, unconscious of itself but bearing reference or allusion to something beyond itself -- we are fortunate when such revelation occurs.

"It is as though", as Kazantzakis wrote,  

It is as though we had buried Someone we thought dead, and now hear him calling in the night: Help me! Heaving and panting, he raises the gravestone of our soul and body higher and still higher, breathing more freely at every moment. (#27, The Vision, in THE SAVIOURS OF GOD, Spiritual Exercises, by Nikos Kazantzakis, Translated by Kimon Friar)

Poetry is the breath between words, the connecting air between you and me, it is the sound of what-is being-said resonating in the open.

As is prayer.

For that matter, prayer is “as is,” engaged and attended to, whenever our awareness gives itself to Itself. 

Let us!

見透か, misukasu, see through

 Seen through

Christ is transparence 

See through

You are this Christ

Seeing through

they still wonder why they lived when so many others died

From “Hiroshima", by John Hersey, August 23, 1946, in The New Yorker:

I—A Noiseless Flash

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.

(--opening paragraph, John Hersey’s original article, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/takes/jane-mayer-on-john-herseys-hiroshima 

Then, the final paragraph: 

It would be impossible to say what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima. On the surface their recollections, months after the disaster, were of an exhilarating adventure. Toshio Nakamura, who was ten at the time of the bombing, was soon able to talk freely, even gaily, about the experience, and a few weeks before the anniversary he wrote the following matter-of-fact essay for his teacher at Nobori-cho Primary School: “The day before the bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning, I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister’s sleeping place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram. My mother and I started to pack our things. The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding. Hataya-san told me to run away with her. I said I wanted to wait for my mother. We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park one night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki’s mother was wounded and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.” ♦  

Published in the print edition of the August 31, 1946, issue.  

oremus

 Breeze from fan

Crosses brown blanket

Like prayer does

This dozing mind

σωφροσύνη

It sometimes felt quaint when studying philosophy to focus on a word or concept that felt attractive or worth pursuing. 

Sophosyne (Ancient Greek: σωφροσύνη) is an ancient Greek concept of an ideal of excellence of character and soundness of mind, which when combined in one well-balanced individual leads to other qualities, such as temperance, moderation, prudence, purity, decorum, and self-control. An adjectival form is "sophron".^[1]

It is similar to the concepts of zhōngyōng (中庸) of Chinese Confucianism^[2] and sattva (सत्त्व) of Indian thought.^[3] (wikipedia)

The pull of philosophy was the investigation of ways of being in the world that ennobled the individual and benevolently considered the well-being of the community. There was a naive yet refreshing preference for a human society that transcended an ignoble descent into egoistic and self-aggrandizing behavior taken at the expense of others and uncaring about shared benefit or mutual support.

Aristotle included discussions of sophrosyne^{[12]: III.10–11} in his pioneering system of virtue ethics. 

 

Aristotle believed sophrosyne described "a mean with regard to pleasures,"^{[12]: III.10} distinct from self-indulgence on the one hand, or perhaps anhedonia on the other. Like courage, sophrosyne is a virtue concerning our discipline of "the irrational parts of our nature" (fear, in the case of courage; desire, in the case of sophrosyne).^{[12]: III.10} 

 

His discussion is found in the Nicomachean Ethics Book III, chapters 10–12, and concludes in this way:

And so the appetites of temperate men (σώφρωνος) should be in harmony with their reason; for the aim of both is that which is noble: the temperate man (σώφρων) desires what he ought, and as he ought, and when he ought; and this again is what reason prescribes. This, then, may be taken as an account of sophrosynes (σωφροσύνης).^{[12]: III.12} 

 

As with virtue generally, sophrosyne is a sort of habit, acquired by practice.^[12]: II.1 It is a state of character, not a passion or a faculty,^[12]: II.5 specifically a disposition to choose the mean^[12]: II.6 between excess and deficit.^[12]: II.2 The mean is hard to attain, and is grasped by perception, not by reasoning.^{[12]: II.9 [Ibid]} 

It seemed an easy study and an accomplishable goal. When living with a group of people whose acclaimed goal was to deepen their lives with character and virtue, it seemed reasonable that something good would emerge.

Good did emerge. Even prayer, service, worthwhile actions done for the betterment of others, and a sense of unravelling the mysterious depths of, as yet, unmanifest revelations emanating from the depths of being emerging through existence.

Idealistic? Yes.

Contemplative? Of course.

Worthwhile? I thought so. And still do.

As Joseph Brodsky and Cheslaw Milosz would say over and over at a reading done with Peter Vierick that I attended once at Mount Holyoke College decades ago: “And yet, And yet, And yet...”.

The Red Wheelbarrow

                        BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

(--William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan.) 

Williams provides us with the finest not-particularly-zen koan that poetry has experienced.

Brodsky and Milosz knew how vital were their “And yets...”.

And now I do too.

hiroshima, nagasaki and transfiguration (3)

               ( a waka)

                  私は死、あなたは生

                  Watashi wa shi, anata wa nama          

               (I am death, you are life)

Christ is not

Nuclear devastation, Still, 

Nor is he not, 

Now, now, what is arising

Shows through comforting

Stillness

hiroshima, nagasaki and transfiguration (2)

               (a waka)

Sun into room, dog

Outside open door, brothers 

Japanese sisters

Candle and incense afire

Bells of matins peal for you

hiroshima, nagasaki and transfiguration (1)

             (a haiku mantra)

Christ Jesus 

One With 

God, allow us 

Within this

Holy loving

Way

the very condition of human existence

When I moved to Maine in 1981 I had a winter rental just off the beach in Old Orchard. I bought the two volume set of Hannah Arendt's Life of the Mind and was lulled by salt air and breaking waves.

It was left unfinished by her death (1906-1975). The volumes were divided into two parts: Thinking; and Willing. Her proposed third volume, Judging, was only just begun. On the day of her death it is said the first page was found in her typewriter.

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." (--Hannah Arendt, from an interview with Roger Errera in 1973, her last public interview, Found in https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/on-fake-hannah-arendt-quotations-2024-08-04 Roger Berkowitz 08-04-2024)

In writing about truth and the difficult task to discern truth (on the best of days), she points out (what seems to me) that intentional obfuscation and blatant lying has the result of confusing reality with false simulation of propagandized deceit. The sorry outcome is that no-one retains the capacity to believe in the facts that are actual facts. The prevarications that are wrongfully presented as facts to a confused populace become, for them, holy writ from their substituted contemporary messiah.  

This is the intent of our current leadership. They abandon actual fact for deceitfully rewritten narratives of dissembled untruth. The people become indoctrinated to the dissemblance. They no longer know what is up and what is down. They have been duped. They have become deceived persons.

Martin Heidegger spoke of truth as unhiddenness  

("Aletheia" (ἀλήθεια) is a Greek word meaning truth or disclosure. In philosophy, it often refers to the unveiling or revealing of something that was previously hidden or unknown, and is contrasted with "doxa" (opinion). In Greek mythology, Aletheia is also the personification of truth, similar to the Roman goddess Veritas." (AI) 

 

We have become a culture of "doxa."

In classical philosophy, "doxa" refers to opinion or belief, particularly when contrasted with true knowledge or episteme. It represents a less certain form of understanding, often based on perception or social consensus, rather than rigorous reasoning or evidence. The word "doxa" (δόξα) comes from the Greek verb "dokein," meaning "to seem," "to think," or "to accept," according to research papers.   (AI)

I read a sign on someone's door while walking the other day -- something to the effect that we are not living in a political crisis, we are living in a moral crisis -- this time is saturated with philosophical and theological obscuration, i.e. acts of intentionally hiding or concealing something. This is being done by people for whom moral thinking and religious philosophy are considered to be for chumps and losers who do not subscribe to solipsistic and narcissistic personal greed and aggrandizement.

It is a very dangerous time.

The underpinnings of a just and fair society, one representing all people living therein, has become weakened and is being destroyed by the interests of a few who seek to control the finances, institutions, and thinking for their small minority of like-minded wealthy and powerful friends. This type of sect and clique is narrow and self-serving.

They are usurping Christianity. They are fracturing democracy. They are confusing those who have difficulty thinking things through and who cannot think for themselves. They are unkind people who use others for their own ends. As Arendt said "a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

I am not confident as to the outcome ahead.

I do, however, still care. 

In Martin Heidegger's philosophy, "care" (Sorge) is a fundamental structure of Dasein's being, encompassing both concern and solicitude and revealing the way humans exist in the world as beings oriented towards their own being and the world around them. It's not just an emotion or a behavior, but rather the very condition of human existence, revealing how we are fundamentally engaged with ourselves and the world.  (AI) 

 

As do, (I'm certain), you, care.

Sitting or walking meditation is, throughout, the practice of non-deluded looking and open hearted willingness to see.

See you at practice! 

1.34 milliseconds shorter

 My, my! Where does the time go?

Mysterious boost to Earth's spin will make Aug. 5 one of the shortest days on record

EARTH, AUG 5 – Earth's rotation is accelerating due to factors like the moon's recession and melting ice sheets, causing three shorter days in 2025, with one 1.36 milliseconds shorter, scientists say 

• On Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025, Earth's solar day will be 1.34 milliseconds shorter than 24 hours, making it one of the shortest days since records began.
• Amid less understood core dynamics, scientists note that the reasons for Earth's rotation speed increase in recent years are unclear, with liquid core slowdown likely involved.
• In July, scientists forecast solar days shorter than 24 hours on July 9, July 22, and Aug. 5, with Aug. 5 being the shortest at 1.36 milliseconds less.
• While imperceptible to humans, millisecond variations can affect computers, satellites and telecommunications, necessitating atomic clock tracking.
• Experts caution that a negative leap second could be added if Earth's rotation accelerations continue through 2029, with about 40% probability by 2035.   https://ground.news/article/earth-spins-faster-changes-in-earth-rotation

 Short, short my life, and shorter this day of my life.

Texas will have less time to steal five democrat-won seats in congress.

Trump will have less time to shake down universities into paying him for protection in the neighborhood.

ICE will have less time to run down schoolchildren, laborers, and green card holders to throw then into custody, prisons and concentration camps for their crimes against far-right racist ideology.

Meanwhile, on earth:

        At Dusk    

at dusk
i often climb
to the peak of kugami.
deer bellow,
their voices
soaked up by
piles of maple leaves
lying undisturbed at
the foot of the mountain

(--Taigu Royokan, 1758-1831)

It doesn't bother my dog Ensō that at final pee at night there are glowing eyes of deer inside his fenced enclosure. They look at us, casually step toward fence, and gracefully jump over it. Ensō pees, turns, heads into barn, gets treat in wohnkuche.

Time, contrary to song lyrics, is on nobody’s side. It just meanders its footprint allowing everything that could take place to take place even when light shines on its activities.

But this losing of time -- what do we make of it?

Be thou undisturbed. Maple leaves are soaking up our voices. 

Step quietly, carefully.