It looks easy
On television movies
Pulling the trigger
Killing someone
I don’t know what
I’d do in such life or
Death situation
Pulling the trigger
It is a big ask
Stopping someone from
Killing you by
Killing them
We ask people to do it
For us — soldiers, police
Ice goons —I might not be
Able to shoot a woman
in the face
Because she told me
She wasn’t scared
Or didn’t blame me
Light snow still falling Saturday afternoon.
Yesterday in prison we spoke of perspective, of seeing through, of seeing through space, of seeing through inner space and outer space. We are that which is seeing through.
We name this seeing through many things -- perception, awareness, consciousness.
"Consciousness," argues psychologist George A. Miller, "is a word worn smooth by a million tongues . . . Maybe we should ban the word for a decade or two until we can develop more precise terms for the several uses which 'consciousness' now obscures.1
He is of course right, but the solution he suggests is impractical. When one thinks about it there are few key words in our vocabulary that do not share the same polysemy. Should we also dispose of "life," "existence,” "time," "love," "humor," or "holiness"? They all invite idiosyncratic interpretations, even by professional users of these terms. Consequently they all are surrounded by a haze of ambivalence.
But ambivalence is not necessarily a drawback in human communication, because speech is only part of our total language system. And the inbuilt flexibility of words like "life," "love," and "existence" can even be advantageous. What is more, unless our emotional nature is stultified by an inflated rational pose, we can always empathize and reach out into the psyche of others and resonate with their feeling state or intended communication. Thus we may quibble about the definition of the word "love," but unless we are particularly callous or intransigent we know very well what it is to love. We also have a sense of what is means to be alive or to exist, notwithstanding the sophisticated word-splitting of philosophers.
I propose that the concept of "consciousness" falls in to the same category. We all intuit what it stands for, though our descriptions may not always match in every detail. Miller agrees: he writes: "Despite all its faults, however, the term would be sorely missed; it refers to something immediately obvious and familiar to anyone capable of understanding a ban against it."[2]
(--beginning of paper, On the Nature of Consciousness and Reality, An Overview of Jean Gebser's Thoughts on Consciousness, by Georg Feuerstein, Journal of Conscious Evolution, Volume 1 Issue 01/2005 ,
Perhaps we might do away with the word ‘perspective.' Settle on ’seeing through.’
We are that which is seeing through. No longer ask ‘who’ is seeing through. No association with a discrete person exercising perspective with perception.
We might find ourselves asking: What is that which is seeing through?
And here begins, again and incohately, the investigation of insight.
Perhaps we have become too enthralled with terms like consciousness, life, love, existence. We argue and dissect them, fancify and elaborate, complicate and obscure.
But when you ask me: What is that which is seeing through? -- you have my attention, and my ignorance.
Is that what Zen is asking?
Why we get all confused and pseudo clever in our responses?
Why we’re told to get back on our cushion, to look and breathe?
I don’t know.
The answer might be immediately obvious -- but I’ve always been blind, and now I am going blind.
Which might just be a blessing.
(With gratitude to the conversationalists on Friday morning in prison.)
I read the two volumes of her “Life of the Mind” in my winter rental off the sands of old orchard beach in 1981.
Here is Arendt on totalitarianism. https://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/download/101/168
To the people of the United States
Do not allow
Racist and corrupt people to
Rob you of your beauty
Call them their true names
Ugly, and cruel, unkind, and hateful
They are not America
They are the perversion of our identity
Be nice
Dissolve ice
Remove maga
Return to your true saga
The lad in the novel
Where a woman went lost
Hiking the AT ended up at
Dorethea Dix in Bangor
I’d visited there
There’s a mental illness
Thinking that the government
Is spying on you, is going to
Hurt you, hyper juiced and wary
I’ve looked at the brochure
The warden’s service, hiking clubs
Comb Maine woods
The thick growth hides and shelters
All visitors to the mind’s hospital —
Thank you for visiting
LOVE
(down
to my soul:
assume your nature as yourself
for the love of God
not even good enough
Stories
only
the possibility
of discrete
men
There is no intelligence
the equal of
the situation
There are only
two ways:
create the situation
(and this is love)
or avoid it.
This also can be
Love.
(Poem by Charles Olson)
Good people
Everywhere
See what is
Not good
Furrow their
Brows
Ponder such
Ugliness
Cannot call out
God
Wonder why
They ever thought
They
Could
I have a tin
Norwegian sardines
Something fishy
Is going on
Where does silliness like this come from?
You cannot describe it or draw it,
You cannot praise it enough or perceive it.
No place can be found in which
To put the Original Face;
It will not disappear even
When the universe is destroyed.
Mumon (13th c.)
You’d think that sensible people would sniff at such words and turn quickly to their horoscope or stock market numbers.
Still, I wonder about the Original Face.
What are we talking about here?
The Creator?
My mug?
The photo of Wenby at foul line?
There’s fog covering roadside trees out on Barnestown.
Five vehicles in neighbors yard tell of some reconfiguration going on in the three year unoccupied house.
My unoccupied life is this room these days. With nothing to say I listen to books, tires, interviews, and voices from my past wondering what’s becoming of this version of personal pretense.
The recluse is in.
LBJ died at 64 in 1973. MLK died at 39 in 1968. JFK died at 46 in 1963. RFK died at 42 in 1968.
I’ve outlived each of them. And have nothing to show for it, except some undiagnosed dementia and various actual diagnoses that shoot craps as to who will take me away. (Don’t blow on those dice, daddy has enough shoes and shirts for another forty years!)
Original Face! Really?
Give me a break.
These zen folks come here from China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea thinking we Americans are interested in silly riddles meant to liberate mind and body.
The only face I’m interested in is that of our dear leader, DJT. His “ …will not disappear even / When the universe is destroyed.”
It seems like he’s bringing us close. But, ah! Who cares?
Evil, cruelty, thoughtlessness, and absurd outcomes all live across the street from Zen.
Go ahead, wave.
There's really nothing to worry about.
Don’t look back. Don’t look ahead. Face yourself.
You're fin(e)!
See it now?
It’s not difficult
To be grateful —
Go ahead,
Say yes
Thank you
You are gift
That’s it
Appreciate, and
The world glows
Did not expect
To not want to belong
But, no, I do not
Preferring to walk by
Steps to door of
(You name it) church
Zendo, family living room,
Neighbor’s porch, your eyes.
It’s a rare disease, eremitic
Solitude, only statue of Buddha
Sample coffin cross at window
Winter trees in dooryard —
I listen to novel about woman
Lost in maine hiking on AT
And feel the community
The concern, the description
Recognizing how being lost
Is little different than found
Daylight diminishing, headlights passing
towards Hope between ragged and bald
I no longer
think
I follow
trump
whose thinking
is
pig-slop and
rotten cabbage
but it's
ok
those who
love him
tell us
he's sane and
we're not
so, there's that
When nothing
Is being
Said
Listen carefully
What you hear
Is nothing
Worth repeating
At Tuesday Evening Conversation:
In the Beginning
An Intimate Origin Story
Monday, 12jan2026
Brian McLaren reflects on the miraculous creation of the cosmos and everything in it:
The first and greatest surprise—a miracle, really—is this: that anything exists at all…. The first pages of the Bible and the best thinking of today’s scientists are in full agreement: it all began in the beginning, when space and time, energy and matter, gravity and light, burst or bloomed or banged into being. In light of the Genesis story, we would say that the possibility of this universe overflowed into actuality as God, the Creative Spirit, uttered the original joyful invitation: Let it be! And in response, what happened? Light. Time. Space. Matter. Motion. Sea. Stone. Fish. Sparrow. You. Me. Enjoying the unspeakable gift and privilege of being here, being alive….
Genesis means “beginnings.” It speaks through deep, multilayered poetry and wild, ancient stories. The poetry and stories of Genesis reveal deep truths that can help us be more fully alive today. They dare to proclaim that the universe is God’s self-expression, God’s speech act. That means that everything everywhere is always essentially holy, spiritual, valuable, meaningful. All matter matters.
Through the book of Genesis we encounter a story of goodness and interconnectedness.
Genesis tells us that the universe is good—a truth so important it gets repeated like the theme of a song…. Every river or hill or valley or forest is good. Skin? Good. Bone? Good. Mating and eating and breathing and giving birth and growing old? Good, good, good. All are good. Life is good.
The best thing in Genesis is not simply human beings, but the whole creation considered and enjoyed together, as a beautiful, integrated whole, and us a part. The poetry of Genesis describes the “very goodness” that comes at the end of a long process of creation … when all the parts, including us, are working together as one whole. That harmonious whole is so good that the Creator takes a day off, as it were, just to enjoy it. That day of restful enjoyment tells us that the purpose of existence isn’t money or power or fame or security or anything less than this: to participate in the goodness and beauty and aliveness of creation….
According to the first creation story, you are part of creation. You are made from common soil … dust, Genesis says; stardust, astronomers tell us … soil that becomes watermelons and grain and apples and peanuts, and then, they become food, and then that food becomes you…. Together with all living things, you share the breath of life, participating in the same cycles of birth and death, reproduction and recycling and renewal. You, with them, are part of the story of creation—different branches on the tree of life. In that story, you are connected and related to everything everywhere. In fact, that is a good partial definition of God: God is the one through whom we are related and connected to everything.
But he shot her
Dead
That’s ok
Shouldn’t there be
An investigation?
Don’t worry about it
But he shot her
Dead
That’s ok
I suspect
A time is coming
Moral insanity
Will kill immoralists
There’s no need for further
Fret, something (fate?
God? Inner incongruity?)
Will destroy ugly immorality
We won’t believe our eyes
Bad administrators (et al)
Will melt like nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark
Proving art and life reconstitute what is good
I saw Jesus yesterday
Limping in Hannaford
I prayed for this
Limping Jesus
“You're praying
For me?” Jesus said.
“Yeah, I am.” I said
Looking for soup
Dawn
Fingering beads
He prays:
Deus meus
Et omnia
Fiat mihi
Voluntas tua
Secundum ΛΟΓΟΣ
(λόγος)
Verbum tuum
Prosit!
He prays
Fingering beads
Dawning
Divine Expression
I want to be awake when I die
want to see the darkness
step up to my face
to hear senses say bye bye
brain switch off light
feet disappear beneath knees
I won’t have anything to say
no prayer, no bargaining --
what a shame to leave
undrunk
coffee milk
in refrigerator
Maybe Hobbes was right
and Locke wrong.
I hope not. And I don’t.
Hope is the stretching of luck.
Perhaps I’d rather not know.
Have some tuna fish and ginger ale
Contemplate Jeremiah Johnson
Chewing on rabbit from spit
As fellow mountain man rides off
Schopenhauer cheers me.
Sometimes to work out what something is, it is useful to contemplate its opposite. Arthur Schopenhauer is probably the best known miserabilist in the history of philosophy. Although he was once prosecuted for pushing his landlady down a flight of stairs, he was not on the whole an evil man. He thought ethics should be based upon compassion, and the compassion he felt both for animals and for his fellow humans can often be glimpsed in his writings. He was not bad, but he could be very grumpy and was a thorough pessimist. Even if he conceded occasionally that things could be worse, he probably would have added: “And they soon will be!” He even wrote a book called Studies in Pessimism.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/171/Happy_Thoughts
Although, I do hope his landlady recovered without much suffering.
Apart from her, I can think of several political landlords for whom a non-lethal tumble down to the well of a staircase would not be an undesirable occasion.
“Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.” G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
Please, ignore my thinking, I am a religious man.
The mean and ugly ones
Are already dead
May they go away
Leave us in peace
Finding whatever distorted
Afterlife they’ve fashioned
No argument
No factual evidence
Will convince
Liars and corrupts
They are wrong
Only time, heart attacks
Cancer or a stroke
Will get their
Attention — how’re
You guys feeling?
Faint blue gray
Morning eaves
Drip
We are all
Alone
No bird sings
Cracked shell
Scattered on
Snow
