that’s amore

Moon rises over bald mountain

One is across the road

The other 238,856 miles away —

So it seems, so it seems

ice out

 early winter

hits this land

icy hatred and cruelty

cover the streets

only a sane mind

and warm heart

can reverse 

this frigid time --

cosmic algorithm

longs for caring defrost

waits for

it

είμαστε εύθραυστοι,

of course we’re fragile

anything can hurt us

but its the sharp bad ideas

that cut the deepest

like “we don’t want you here”

like “poor people are disgusting”

stop it!

heal the sickness of ideology

heal the ugliness of self-referential

narcissism and grandiosity, you

are now patient number one in

this current moral plague

get treatment, go for healing

don’t throw up on the rest of us

we have our own lies to negotiate

our own deceptions to navigate

we don’t need yours, not a bit --

let’s assume you’re simply hurting

someone in pain, innerly distraught 

deep-rooted conflict, emotional nausea

we can commit to helping you heal

we don’t have to scream and curse you

we’ve not exhausted sympathy, empathy

we’re not cruel, unfeeling, you’re one of us

do you see this? can you understand this?

you are not alone until you are alone --

and if you are alone, we are all alone

an abyss of unconnected dissolution

so, stop it, stop the ugly screenplay

written for you by the worse self within

throw it out, face a new blank page

stare at it, don’t make a mark, wait ...

it will come to you, the healing diacritical

mark, the word that begins anew what longs

to connect to next word, gathering phrase

sustaining sentence full of copulatives and

parallel lines, verses of interspecific gather

a realization of something you are not yet --

we are fragile

don’t let the fear of it run you into psychosis

yes, you will live on further until you die

but you won’t die detached from everything

the way you seem to be right now

thinking you are the only one, the best, the king --

you’re not, you’re one of us, be that, before it's

too late, for you, for us, forgone and forlorn

wound and round we go

 round up the jews

round up the latinos

round up führer’s enemies

round up president’s critics

germany wound up ugly

america grounds up decency

and we the people? our wound

is too deep to feel, but mortal

hitler was ugly in belief and act

trump is ugly with ice and lies

fury and furor follow indignity

round and round we go

and where it’ll stop

we know, we know

dos-à-dos

Two cats

Roam house

Where mice

Show and go

if i didn’t care

When tired, 

sleep.

Zen wisdom

Rainy night

do we really all lie, most of the time

 into House

long live 

curmudgeons --

much to see

oddly

get up, go ahead, do something, move

Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation today:

Elias Chacour is a Palestinian Arab-Israeli and a former archbishop of the Melkite Greek Catholic church in Palestine. At one point in his ministry, Chacour went against the orders of local authorities to build a secondary school to educate the youth in his community in Galilee. He drew on his understanding of the Beatitudes to strengthen him in overcoming many challenges to its completion:   Knowing Aramaic, the language of Jesus, has greatly enriched my understanding of Jesus’ teaching. Because the Bible as we know it is a translation of a translation, we sometimes get a wrong impression. For example, we are accustomed to hearing the Beatitudes expressed passively:  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.  Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.  Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.  “Blessed” is the translation of the word makarioi, used in the Greek New Testament. However, when I look further back to Jesus’ Aramaic, I find that the original word was ashray, from the verb yashar. Ashray does not have this passive quality to it at all. Instead, it means “to set yourself on the right way for the right goal; to turn around, repent; to become straight or righteous.”   How could I go to a persecuted young man in a Palestinian refugee camp, for instance, and say, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” or “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”? That man would revile me, saying neither I nor my God understood his plight, and he would be right.  When I understand Jesus’ words in Aramaic, I translate like this:      Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you who are hungry and thirsty for justice, for you shall be satisfied.  Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you peacemakers, for you shall be called children of God.  To me this reflects Jesus’ words and teachings much more accurately. I can hear him saying, “Get your hands dirty to build a human society for human beings; otherwise, others will torture and murder the poor, the voiceless, and the powerless.”  Christianity is not passive but active, energetic, alive, going beyond despair….  “Get up, go ahead, do something, move,” Jesus said to his disciples.   Ultimately, the secondary school was completed and allowed to stand, despite the lack of official permits for water and electricity. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/set-yourself-on-the-right-way/

Prison was closed to volunteers today. 

I admit to loving cancellations. 

As well as the notion of going beyond despair.

from here to deeper here

 I watch moonlight

On empty road

Very slowly

Pale distance

Lumbering gait

One car

Passes through

This meditation

Vigiling 

Sacred transition

From here to

Deeper here

an unasked koan

Not sure it’s understood what is meant by the word hermitage. It’s where a hermit lives. It’s not really a meditation center. It’s not really much of anything anymore, if it ever was.

So it’s nice when exiting the barn there is a car in the dooryard and a man standing next to it. He was wondering about the “Dogen” center and if people came on retreat here. “No,” I said, "we don’t do much public stuff anymore." An Israeli, he tells me about his children, his interest in Buddhism, and I point him to the chapel/zendo.

The last few days we’ve run into three or four old-timers from meetingbrook, whether at marine harbor, small grocery store, large grocery store. It feels like a school reunion, to which I never go.

The hermitage has gone inside itself.

I love that there are places groups gather to meditate. Our conversations seem to be our only public practice -- on zoom three times a week, in prison twice a week, and soul-friend conversations whenever they happen. Although, the other resident at the hermitage carries the frequency of such encounters.

I have gone remarkably idiorrhythmic. 

It’s not really an advance in practice. More like a meandering haphazard awareness that everyplace is meditation hall, every person is sangha practitioner, each bit of news is dharma talk, whatever arises is koan study.

Bald Mountain across the way grows dark. A tilting fade of blue sky above it with darker clouds scattered. The clock-change sobers everything.

Perhaps one thing a hermit does is live the alone.

The alone, or the Alone, is a curious mystery. Hard to tell whether it is a general meshugana, or some form of undiagnosed idiopathy that arises and remains. Or, giving a positive spin, there is a beckoning into legitimate contemplative homeopathy burrowing below an asymptomatic absorption into the unknown.

The world is a monastery, this residence is a hermitage, my life is a mendicancy dependent on what falls into the begging bowl of my grateful soul.

           circumnavigating an unasked koan

 

My words are leaves

falling through bare branches

on a path never swept clear 

I let them settle where they fall

my life has no direction

at all 

both a concern

and (surprisingly, happily)

a joy 

(wfh, nunc) 

sorge

 “Being in the world is essentially care.” (Martin Heidegger)

If so, those who act in uncaring ways are, essentially, not in the world.

One can only wonder where they are?

If not here, where?

With so many in the current Washington DC administration, we look at their attitudes and actions are reasonably conclude they’re not from around here.

They live a little distance from themselves.

And very far from the rest of us.

je suis au milieu des transparences

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=87&issue=6&page=1 (ff)

I find Les Transparents, 

by Rene Char.

Then it occurs to me:

Nothing is hidden from us

We are the ones invisible

Dwelling as

Not willing to be seen

We think: ‘I’d love to see God’

But, alors, God is not to be seen —

God is “affable and quick of tongue”

And we are morose 

and slow to hear

Transparencies, that’s what we are

Reluctant to be morning

Sunlight glinting off passing cars

nothing follows now

 I will

sleep

now

and then --

there will be

nothing

left 

unsaid --

nothing

after elections, something in the air tonight

 something was lighter

in the air today

like breaking surface

gasping for air --

the relief that barrier

can be broached

no hand holding down head

fresh breath suddenly drawn

it is about time

 Thinking of Peter Maurin (1877-1949), his curiously written essays, friendship with Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker.

Blowing the Dynamite 

 

Writing about the Catholic Church,

a radical writer says:

“Rome will have to do more

than to play a waiting game;

she will have to use

some of the dynamite

inherent in her message.”

To blow the dynamite

of a message

is the only way

to make the message dynamic.

If the Catholic Church

is not today

the dominant social dynamic force,

it is because Catholic scholars

have failed to blow the dynamite

of the Church.

Catholic scholars

have taken the dynamite

of the Church,

have wrapped it up

in nice phraseology,

placed it in an hermetic container

and sat on the lid.

It is about time

to blow the lid off

so the Catholic Church

may again become

the dominant social dynamic force.

https://www.easyessays.org/

The Catholic Church, like the US Government, is a potential force for good, if the personnel within each are able to transcend their personal and moral flaws.

As does, the above sentence, apply to me.

(Damn, non-duality!)

moment of observation -- hanzi (汉字)

At Tuesday Evening Conversation, the sudden delight visiting with Edwin Morgan’s poem brought by Tina.

Aberdeen Train

Rubbing a glistening circle

on the steamed-up window I framed

a pheasant in a field of mist.

The sun was a great red thing somewhere low

struggling with the milky scene. In the furrows

a piece of glass winked into life, 

hypnotized the silly dandy; we

hooted past him with his head cocked,

contemplating a bottle-end,

and this was the last of  October,

a Chinese moment in the Mearns.

 

(Poem by Edwin Morgan {1920-2010}, 1968, in Centenary Selected Poems, 2020)

Landscape

Nature looking back 

on minuscule observer

the hanzi (汉字)

so deftly drawn

cancer cares, we’re unused to its affection

 Yes

Oncologists like numbers

This household pairing

Stepping on scales

Oxygen clips on fingers

(Hand pressing abdomen)

One in remission

The other

Not yet full transmission

The careful symmetry of it

this way through

 We love to read poems at meetingbrook conversations

They are secret doors into our common intuition —

The doors are unlocked

As is, our willingness,

 to walk through

those who voted today

We vote

to say

we’re here

As long as 

voting is allowed

and fair

the ship of state 

will not founder

nor smash on rocks

just as absurdity

is not the final chokehold —

we will send away the corrupt

moon coming to top of tree

the heart of the matter

Outside chapel/zendo

Deer look over shoulders

On Ragged and Bald mountains

Inside chapel/zendo

A different look

No hunting allowed

that-which-is, given

The classic distinction is that only God creates, we invent, organize, or manifest.

And yet if someone were to say “We are creating God”, what would our reaction be?

I think God is creation itself -- both the appearance of what is experienced, and, the process of bringing into being that which was not here before.

In prison today, our conversation.

We wondered what it meant to say “Death is nothing else.” That perhaps the reason we fear death is that we want something else.

We wondered if suicide is deluded thinking that this life will end and something else will replace it.

If death is nothing else, if there is only this, itself, mind, God, now, and the energy moving through everything, through and through, whether in the body or without the body -- is our attention and awareness the apprehension of reality as a whole before thinking about it, measuring it, comparing it, judging it -- a mere presencing, refuging and the intimacy of not knowing?

Mozart is given the music. So too Bach. Beethoven. Every musician, singer, composer, poet, novelist and playwright. Inspiration as that-which-is given.

I am dull. I do not listen. I do not feel. I try to make something happen. Nothing happens.

I am alert. I listen. I feel the stillness. I do nothing. And, of itself, there comes to be that which is revealing itself.

The language and music of God is silence. But we prefer something else. And there is nothing else.

There is much we do not understand about death. When the senses cease to receive what the intellect attempts to find meaning in, we mourn the departure of the visible and sonorous gateway that we call a human life. 

Silence and stillness attend us.

Creation detects the heart and mind of invisible wholeness.

There is nothing else.

Live with it and die with it.

It is the coming and going, the one who comes and the one who goes.

Between the coming and the going . . . 

nada más

 I think I understand it now.

     Understand what?

Death.

     You understand it?

Yes.

     How so?

Death is nothing else.

     Nothing else?

Yes, death is nothing else . . .

extra, extra, walk all about it

 We are the Sunday

Morning harbor walkers, we

Nod good morning, cross

Footbridges, inspect 

Sailing craft and fishing boats

Place coin on green thwart 

Faint chant from France as

Sunday Times, coffee, donut 

Replace scripture, new

Testimony to our

World extra church, cant or

The need to atone

merci et auvoir

It’s only a game

Say those who don’t know better —

No, it’s a sorrow

It’s possible I

Might have been disappointed 

No matter who won