From barn door
Starlight
From bed,
End-light
Saturday, December 27, 2025
anachronistic fidelity
what do you mean
you are different
not the same
different
day is cold
eight bells
snow tightens
light darkens
perhaps we should
abandon who we think
we are, the purity of
our preferences, let
what is passing
pass, without comment
the way the thought
of peace is not peace
and a prayer is just
a preference thrown like dice
mes défauts et mes péchés ne définissent pas qui je suis.
'Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.' (Confucius)
Of course John Prine wrote
a song called “Christmas in Prison”
the day comes, the day goes
people start talking about new year’s
no wrapping paper, no candles
just wary greetings from second tier.
and it's over, same old same old
voices loud and Christ got born and all
back in his home with steel door closed
night does its job putting day to sleep
like this
Yes
One day follows
Another
Three hundred
Sixty three days
Until Christmas
It’s beginning
To look
A lot like this
Friday, December 26, 2025
recollecting
Zen is the practice
Of no barriers;
Contemplation the practice
Of no boundaries.
May we (mais oui)
Practice well!
last leafs
there are a few of them on the mountain
hangers-on, shimmying in brutal cold
staying put, watching friends fall away
willy nelson has his say, says it just right
any day now, any day, now, we shall be . . .
No prison conversation today
Education department closed
Just well-wishes
To all of us
In our prisons —
May we be released
Soon
Thursday, December 25, 2025
pourquoi, parce que
78 “,,, because of the tender mercy of our God,
by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
79 to shine on those living in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.”
—Luke 1
summa catholica
Think about
Solitude
You’re
Alone
Thing about
Prayer
You’re
In God
Thing about
Being human
You’re alone
With God
λόγος, logos, reasoning, intuiting, energy of creating word
“The eternal birth of the word takes place in the ground of the soul.”
(--Meister Eckhart)
“It is the awakening of the pure I am in each of us as each of us.”
(--Rupert Spira)
https://youtu.be/oUVQBuEtrM8?si=f2pZoiqX3iI6L69H
Prosit!
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
accept as true
To believe is not a belief, it is an act of faith
It is not to understand, but to affirm, to consent
If I believe in God, I can say yes. Saying yes does
not mean I comprehend what yes implies, only
that I step forward, or sit on cushion, or look in eye
while unable to say anything but please and thank you
of the whole rather than just fragmented parts
Putting my solitude into perspective, coming off Tuesday Evening Conversation about the good and the not-good, about cruelty and diseased self-aggrandizement, this from Edward R. Murrow on Buchenwald, April 15, 1945. I was eight months old.
https://youtu.be/YlhQvPfYSXk?si=6o2PIBnFLBdRWhb-
Robert Lowell wrote in his poem “Epilogue” --
All’s misalliance,
Yet why not say what happened?
It seems to me, today, that remembering the suffering of others is suitable impetus to long for the awakening in oneself and others (both of whom, obtuse and cruel), which awakening is the coming to earth of a new vision, a new expression, and a new embodiment of what it could mean to be human.
The Jesus story, now subsumed under Christmas lights and tinsel, gets pushed into the corner of living rooms and church carols. Instead of being seen as a radical invitation to love and transform the very nature of personal self into an interpersonal and inter-cosmic re-evaluation of existence itself, we have continued on our familiar holiday routines of gifts, goodies, and grousing.
(Remember, these words from someone solitary and reclusive during these days of culmination of a calendar year and the festivities of theological sensationalism. These words are suspect and aperspectival.)
The cats have been fed and there’s more coffee in the kitchen
I’ve begun to consider the incarnation as the revelation of things as they are.
When we abstract all the folklore, myth, and metaphor, we look at desert people under the thumb of formidable and merciless rulers.
These rulers have replicated this impulse to dominate and control those living within the ambiance of their authority throughout history.
This is the way things are. The question is -- is there something afoot, something not-yet, that pierces the facts of human existence as it is and has been -- so that a transformation, a going beyond how things have been, a devastating realization/penetration into a new reality, a new character, a new revelation is available and presenting itself?
I don’t know.
Are we so damaged by narcissistic self-absorption that the invitation to incarnate a new aseity, auto-generative, wholistic, autodidactic -- the unfiltered inchoate creative imagination of that-which-we-have-called-God?
I don’t think I have fully understood this “story” this offering of incarnation and its universal imagination infusing all of creation and each being therein.
I don’t think we have understood this.
But the invitation to sit inside it, to contemplate it from within, and to empty out what no longer serves us toward some sort of moksha, some variant understanding of redemption...
Some arrival that recognizes both those who knew Buchenwald and those willing to embody the transforming ecstatic liberation remembering who we really are, who we are not-yet, becoming.
We are poor passing facts,warned by that to giveeach figure in the photographhis living name.
(--Robert Lowell, ibid)
Hashem (הַשֵּׁם)
(Or, as it might have played out in the neighborhood where I grew up:
What’s your name?
Don’t worry about my name.
What’ll I call you?
Don’t call me anything.
How will I know it’s you?
You won’t.
[silence]
What should I say?
Say thank you, then shut up and go away!
[exeunt]
When you can’t grasp something, don’t. When you can’t hear something, stay silent. When you have no idea what to say or do, practice MU!
I’ll be on my cushion if you want me.
it’s beginning, to look
Plow passes
Quiet
Bald and Ragged
Stillness, mountains
Look out
As I do
At what is
Coming to be
Tuesday, December 23, 2025
huh . . . what trouble
Cuppa chai tea.
Waiting on snow.
Bread order picked up from Rockland.
Provisions stocked.
Dog and his mistress packed up and drove off.
Bird feeders filled.
Till now you seriously
Considered yourself
To be the body and to have a form.
That is the primal ignorance
Which is the root cause of all trouble.
--Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)
My primal ignorance turns to look at me.
My body sits in chair by window.
Banana bread.
Coffee milk.
“Huh...What trouble?” Jeremiah Johnson answered the old trapper who asked him if it all was worth the trouble.
Depends how you look at things.
Body just goes on doing what it does.
Ignorance or not, one step at a time.
Moving through.
let, instead, love
The vitriol
Against this president
Becomes unproductive
Let him go
He is meant to go
Let, instead, love
Pray to become
A better person
In his absence
Monday, December 22, 2025
and it’s right there
Faggin says he will soon be able to prove that a tree has consciousness, that it has no need of a brain, but has consciousness.
Entanglement took over thirty years to prove that entanglement exists after the first experiment showed that it exists because scientists didn’t want entanglement. ...It connects everything from the inside. It’s what allows the world to be holistic. (--Frederico Faggin)
In prison today we looked at Joseph Brodsky’s poem:
December 24, 1971
For V.S.
When it’s Christmas we’re all of us magi.
At the grocers’ all slipping and pushing.
Where a tin of halvah, coffee-flavored,
is the cause of a human assault-wave
by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels:
each one his own king, his own camel.
Nylon bags, carrier bags, paper cones,
caps and neckties all twisted up sideways.
Reek of vodka and resin and cod,
orange mandarins, cinnamon, apples.
Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway
toward Bethlehem, shut off by blizzard.
And the bearers of moderate gifts
leap on buses and jam all the doorways,
disappear into courtyards that gape,
though they know that there’s nothing inside there:
not a beast, not a crib, nor yet her,
round whose head gleams a nimbus of gold.
Emptiness. But the mere thought of that
brings forth lights as if out of nowhere.
Herod reigns but the stronger he is,
the more sure, the more certain the wonder.
In the constancy of this relation
is the basic mechanics of Christmas.
That’s what they celebrate everywhere,
for its coming push tables together.
No demand for a star for a while,
but a sort of good will touched with grace
can be seen in all men from afar,
and the shepherds have kindled their fires.
Snow is falling: not smoking but sounding
chimney pots on the roof, every face like a stain.
Herod drinks. Every wife hides her child.
He who comes is a mystery: features
are not known beforehand, men’s hearts may
not be quick to distinguish the stranger.
But when drafts through the doorway disperse
the thick mist of the hours of darkness
and a shape in a shawl stands revealed,
both a newborn and Spirit that’s Holy
in your self you discover; you stare
skyward, and it’s right there:
a star.
Copyright Credit: Joseph Brodsky, "December 24, 1971" from Collected Poems in English, 1972-1999. Copyright © 2000 by the Estate of Joseph Brodsky.
One of the men wanted to be sure I made a note of what he was about to say in final circle: “Love is the action of removing within for the sake of without.”
Earlier a staff member engaged in playful banter with three of the men and said to one of them a sentence that also bears some thought: “They’re always together and I’m not.”
This notion of disappearing into the reality at hand resonates the holiday called Christmas coming up in three days.
One says the ‘why’ of incarnation and crucifixion has to do with love, “not to be devoid of his presence.”
An entering and an absenting?
I wondered if the “inside/outside” should be switched in his words on love. “No,” he said.
And I take it to my meditation seat.
the essence of tyranny is predetermined answers to unasked questions
"There are no questions to a machine. There are only answers to a machine." (---Federico Faggin)
Trumpism is a machine.
It has only its own answers
unhearing any questions asked
affirming participation, what no longs to show
Yes
If what is
Real and true
Whispers in darkness
So too the holy
Like morning mist
In spray of trees on mountain
Yes
If pale blue light
Brushstrokes upper left
Of northeast window pane
Yes
I say yes, this spiritual life
Of noticing and listening to
What longs to appear and sound
Yes
Let me out
I will go
Into emptiness there —
Yes
Sunday, December 21, 2025
falling back on that which is in and of itself
It is consciousness that creates mathematics, not mathematics that creates consciousness. (---Federico Faggin)
there it is
beyond mathematics
consciousness itself
options
if you love me
become flesh
if you love what-is
become human
otherwise,
remain invisible
otherwise
utter no sound
how we appear
darkness and silence,
she said, the feminine --
light and logos shine through,
he said, nothing
pride of working class
Cat occupies swivel chair
Curls in corner of it by window
She thinks catching mouse in
Middle of night gives privileges,
Bah, phooey, I toss it from window
Sit in another chair
this sweet strong animal will bring us back
Whoa, (pulling on reins)
Good gal, ease up, (comes to stop)
Good goin’, my dark beauty
.(snorts, scrapes ground, stands still)
Far enough, steady girl, rest a beat
We’ll be turning back, (stands unmoving)
Wintah' balances on front legs,
Darkness at its end, beginning, still,
It is time to turn, (gently pulls
head to left) looks down moonless trail
Starts ahead, slowly, easy, carrying
Light in saddlebag, as tired darkness,
Dismounted, on solid ground, is left behind—
Now each step inch by inch urges toward light
Winter’s cold rehab through stasis looks ahead
Each step inch by inch getting lighter
Deep darkness changed us, pausing, lets up,
Look inside, we hear from little way, do you feel it?
Yes, yes (we think) we do. (Turning, turning),
new dawn, new light. Right here, just now, turning
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