ne rien faire du tout

 I have

Nothing

To do

And I

Will

Do it

Even 

though

I do

Not know

How to

Do it

twenty years later

At end of 

conversation on

Shunyata she said 

“To be one with 

God 

is to no longer 

know God.”

i would not have been here without it

 Id like to 

thank Friday

For staying 

Until

It’s end

samskaras

 God might be. Good.

But, do we want. 

God to be. Good?

Volition and intention

Karma, action, is womb

For us to be born into

This. Next instant. Free

skhisma

 She told us the word at Tuesday evening conversation, “schismogenesis”.

I’d not heard it before.

Schismogenesis is a term in anthropology that describes the formation of social divisions and literally meaning "creation of division", the term derives from the Greek words σχίσμα skhisma "cleft" (borrowed into English as schism, "division into opposing factions"), and γένεσις genesis "generation, creation" (deriving in turn from gignesthai "be born or produced, creation, a coming into being"). The term was introduced by anthropologist Gregory Bateson and has been applied to various fields  https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Schismogenesis

This is that time. 

Cleft and theft.

por la misericordia de nuestra realidad más profunda

 They say Jephthah made a deal with God — Help me defeat the Ammonites and I’ll sacrifice to you the first person who greets me when I return to my household. He beat them. It was his 12 year old daughter who came dancing out to greet him on his return. He grieved his bad luck. (What did he expect?) Then, after three weeks, he sacrificed her in flames. (Cf Judges 11:29-39)

 Stephen King must have written that novel.

Derangement and horrible tales sometimes fill what is (oddly) called sacred scripture.

My cat stretches on brown blanket.

I’d rather read Carse on The Religious Case Against Belief.

Some sacrifice people in order to achieve some benefit for themselves in their derangement. 

Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin display this derangement. Perhaps new books of the Bible will be written on them. Lord knows they have their flock and followers willing to summon new apotheoses.

The world, despite our best hopes, is mostly absurd. History often a theater of the absurd. Individuals, with their dramatic beliefs, diminish themselves in stature and sensibility by embracing the far fetched and proclaim the nonsensic shamanic credos of their feverish imaginations gone askew.

Forgive me, I stopped drinking alcohol some thirty years ago, and the hangover drapes itself over the nonsensical thinking and proclamation of my surrounding communitas.

We dwell in an ethos and culture of imponderables. So we make things up. Much of our telling is a prevarication on an ill-conceived and diseased apprehension of what we like to call ”reality.”

(Don’t mind me, I’m busy contemplating cottage cheese penetrated by remaining strawberry jam.) It is Thor’s Day. I will not get hammered today. Rather, I grieve for those slaughtered in Cambodia, German concentration camps, Gaza, Ukraine, Tulsa, the trail of tears, the fields of Flanders, the terrain of the Iliad and Odyssey. 

Tolstoy asked, What then must we do?

I’ll sit here a little longer pondering that question.

What I won’t do is ask God for some favor promising to kill some folk if I am granted the favor.

Call me old fashioned, but live and let live still sounds attractive.

And may all the tyrants, dictators, and fascists fall face down in a mud puddle.

And may the souls of all our departed, through the mercy of our deepest reality, rest in peace! Amen

adoremus, venite

 Nuns at Neumz chant compline

Small joys

Psalms and antiphons

Clarity of bells

presto, disincarnato

Cardiologist says

You can live with the weariness,

get surgery, and/or, soon enough die

Ophthalmologist says You can live 

with the cloudiness, start unseeing

or get lasered

Oncologist says

MRI will tell advancement

in pancreas, millimetering

Also, Waldenström 

 macroglobulinemia, he says, is

a slow train, but will get there

Oral surgeon

has done his damage

says someday I'll adjust

Nurse practitioner says

diabetes is loading its guns

adjusting its scopes

Priest says, who? What's 

his name? Forgive me, I

Don't know him

Former friends say

yeah, I remember him,

odd, quiet, what was his name?

Meditatiion community says

no, can't picture him

did he ever sit with us?

My parents, grandparents, 

sister. those I've known all say -- 

we're dead, let the living figure it out

Jesus says

let him without thick skin

toss the last scone

Buddha says:

if you meet him on the road

call ICE, ship him to dark site

And you, yes you, what say you?

"I say I can't dine, can't dance, Ive

got to purchase a cow."  MU!

The best news I've ever gotten:

"Cheer up, Bill, things are only 

going to get worse!"

(That last advice from Trappist

monk who kept sheep, wrote

poetry, sold jams, and sat zazen)

Being nobody is good practice

a time comes soon when insight

will perfect with disincarnation

honoring what is and who were

Cedar tree

Outside window

Across dooryard 

driveway

God’s within

Within God

This Wednesday

Morning

Candle 

And

Incense

Burn

a new vocabulary

Epigraph to James Carse’s book The Religious Case Against Belief:

 To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe.

— JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Mr Carse was on the selection committee that kindly awarded me a small fellowship to do graduate work in religion in 1969/1970. 

With my gratitude, 

A description of his book:

Through careful , creative analysis, James P. Carse's The Religious Case Against Belief reveals a surprising truth: What is currently criticized as religion is, in fact, the territory of belief. Looking to both historical and contemporary crises, Carse distinguishes religion from belief systems and pinpoints how the closed-mindedness and hostility of belief has corrupted religion and spawned violence the world over. Drawing on the lessons of Galileo, Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ, Carse creates his own brand of parable and establishes a new vocabulary with which to study conflict in the modern world. Carse uses his wide-ranging understanding of religion to find a viable and vital path away from what he calls the Age of Faith II and toward open-ended global dialogue. 

https://ebook.yourcloudlibrary.com/library/CamdenPublicLibrary/search?query=James%20carse

The rest of Sartre's quote goes:

Thus to believe is not to believe any longer because that is only to believe. [For instance, say that I believe that Peter likes me. Then I know that I believe this. But I also am aware that there is no external evidence for this belief because Peter could just be pretending. Hence I also believe that Peter does not like me. The same arguments hold for the belief in God, as we saw in Kierkegaard. This is why belief (like faith) is different from knowledge.] 

(--found in Sartre: Nothingness and Bad Faith, pp.3-4,  https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~degray/CP05/Sartre%20-%20Nothingness-Bad-Faith.pdf) 

surrounding, inhabiting

 I have not found God

nor is God findable

I do not look for God

nor am I not merely looking

rather, God remains within

and fully without

I cannot look for something

that will not be seen

and so -- here we are, looking

through Being to see what is not

what is completely beyond Being

surrounding, inhabiting, Reality

not even a poem can make up something like this

 That's what the poet said after reading his poem.

The First Law of Thermodynamics

He was a good ole boy, and when he died his friends carried out
his final wish—the body was cremated and the ashes stuffed
into shotgun shells. They walked through the woods he loved
and fired aimlessly into the trees—he came down everywhere
in a powdery rain, a pollen of ashes that once was the memory
of a boy walking under trees showering him with leaves.

(Poem by Joseph Stroud) 

 Which leaves us grateful.

we come here to be alone

 I have

no

relationship with

God --

one without two

disappearance

Itself

acknowledging retreatant

 dry stones

in empty brook

this

is why we pray

this

is how we meditate

wenn das alles ist, was es gibt

 I am closing in

Nearing, if you will,

Nothing at all

There is no comfort

In this realization —

Just this, itself

at the wake

 After he dies

Many will say

Goodbye, good luck

We’re done with you

Let absurdity end

That’s over

We will look at

Each other and wonder

How it was allowed

To happen

The raw idiocy

The moral mud

on seeing photo of old friend

 it is good to arrive

at this age

because this is the

age we are

this very year, every 

age is good

because it is

the age you are

look around

everything is

the age it is

without exception

there is no other

age to be when 

you are the age you are

do not commit suicide

rather, look around

everything is the age

it is, nothing else

do not kill another

when flowers receive 

water there is nothing

else to say, just water

in soil, Sunday morning

è nel profondo della vita

quando la morte rientra in sé 

è nel profondo della vita

when death reenters itself 

it is deep within life

each step down to open gate

the surprise of morning

the ability to walk, the quiet

mountain, the good st Bernard/

border collie hunkering

in dooryard outside barn

it is sunday morning, no peignoir

no complacency, no church

just sunlight on bald mountain, 

dry ground lifting each foot

everything has returned within

remembering signs and symbols

liturgical phrases, ritual, sounds

catholic and zen buddhist, an

archeology of buried remains

walking back up to good dog

there’s no place to go, I am the 

journey, pilgrim reentering itself 

when death comes 

back to itself 

it is in the 

depths of life