Today at Meetingbrook

This single morning is enough

2012-01-31T06:30:00.001-05:00

River between US and Canada inky on evening walk along iced path rutted with snowmobile tracks. Cold wind. This morning temperature is -2 degrees fahrenheit here in Calais Maine.

The human body is a little universe
Its chill tears, so much wind-blown sleet
Beneath our skins, mountains bulge, brooks flow
Within our chests lurk lost cities, hidden tribes

Wisdom quarters itself in our tiny hearts
Liver and gall peer out, scrutinize a thousand miles
Follow a path back to its source, else be
A house vacant save for swallows in the eaves

- Shih-shu (17tt-early 18th c)

This body has been kind. It walks in freezing temperature, sleeps near snoring dogs, acknowledges passing beings, shares footlong tuna sandwich loaded with pickles, black olives, lettuce and peppers, drives through snow squalls over slippery soft new fallen flakes, reads The Dhammapada for two hours in front seat of green Element making pencil notations in margins, and allows itself to be breathed in and out by the atmosphere surrounding this planet Earth with humble surrender and acceptance of the comings and goings.

8. The Thousands

Better than a thousand pointless words is one saying to the point on hearing which one finds peace. 100

Better than a thousand pointless verses is one stanza on hearing which one finds peace. 101

Better than reciting a hundred pointless verses is one verse of the teaching (one dhammapada) on hearing which one finds peace. 102

Though one were to defeat thousands upon thousands of men in battle, if another were to overcome just one -- himself, he is the supreme victor. 103

Victory over oneself is better than that over others. When a man has conquered himself and always acts with self-control, neither devas, spirits, Mara or Brahma can reverse the victory of a man like that. 104, 105

Though one were to perform sacrifices by the thousand month after month for a hundred years, if another were to pay homage to a single inwardly perfected man for just a moment, that homage is better than the hundred years of sacrifices. 106

Though one were to tend the sacrificial fire for a hundred years in the forest, if another were to pay homage to a single inwardly perfected man for just a moment, that homage is better than the hundred years of sacrifice. 107

All the sacrifices and offerings a man desiring merit could make in a year in the world are not worth a quarter of the better merit of homage to the righteous. 108

Four principal things increase in the man who is respectful and always honours his elders -- length of life, good looks, happiness and health. 109

Though one were to live a hundred years immoral and with a mind unstilled by meditation, the life of a single day is better if one is moral and practises meditation. 110

Though one were to live a hundred years without wisdom and with a mind unstilled by meditation, the life of a single day is better if one is wise and practises meditation. 111

Though one were to live a hundred years without seeing the rise and passing of things, the life of a single day is better if one sees the rise and passing of things. 113

Though one were to live a hundred years without seeing the deathless state, the life of a single day is better if one sees the deathless state. 114

Though one were to live a hundred years without seeing the supreme truth, the life of a single day is better if one sees the supreme truth. 115
(--from, The Dhammapada, Gautama Buddha / Translated by John Richards,
http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/dhammapada.htm)

This single morning is enough.

Red pickup neighbor's truck starts engine. Dogs, mirabile dictu, do not bark.

Soon, Sorel boots with orange ice-grippers, peat canvas vest, green hooded anorak, brown scarf, charcoal wool watch cap, blue flannel lined jeans, thick grey sox, walking sticks, black gloves, sunglasses and a willingness to be breathed by sub-zero air and it is time to walk the river path with three companions.

Inshallah, to return and continue the day, the reading, the companionship, the driving, with coffee and liberty for all.

No sacrificial fire; just warm air blowing half to feet half to windshield ready for afternoon's predicted snowfall heading home.

Relenting; re-centering recent erring of the cosmos

2012-01-30T07:37:00.000-05:00

When I take a spoonful of soup into my mouth I am doing it for the hungry child in Somalia. I am nourishing the death row inmate sitting at last meal before execution. I am tasting the bittersweet realization that as one body, if mindfully aware, everyone is sipping soup, even those starving and about to die. It is not about keeping everybody alive -- that is not possible. It is about going beyond the barrier of death-ridden ignorance to the realization no one is separate, no one left out of the core of care, the center of being, the engagement with one-another which is the very nature of in-der-Welt-sein

Recapitulation. An act or instance of summarizing or restating the main points of something.

What are the main points of being alive, being here, of there being anything at all instead of nothing?

Being-in-the-World
(German: In-der-Welt-sein)
Being-in-the-world is Heidegger's replacement for terms such as subject, object, consciousness, and world. For him, the split of things into subject/object, as we find in the Western tradition and even in our language, must be overcome, as is indicated by the root structure of Husserl and Brentano's concept of intentionality, i.e., that all consciousness is consciousness of something, that there is no consciousness, as such, cut off from an object (be it the matter of a thought, or of a perception). Nor are there objects without some consciousness beholding or being involved with them.
At the most basic level of being-in-the-world, Heidegger notes that there is always a mood, a mood that "assails us" in our unreflecting devotion to the world. A mood comes neither from the "outside" nor from the "inside," but arises from being-in-the-world. One may turn away from a mood, but that is only to another mood; it is part of our facticity. Only with a mood are we permitted to encounter things in the world. Dasein (a co-term for being-in-the-world) has an openness to the world that is constituted by the attunement of a mood or state of mind. As such, Dasein is a "thrown" "projection," projecting itself onto the possibilities that lie before it or may be hidden, and interpreting and understanding the world in terms of possibilities. Such projecting has nothing to do with comporting oneself toward a plan that has been thought out. It is not a plan, since Dasein has, as Dasein, already projected itself. Dasein always understands itself in terms of possibilities. As projecting, the understanding of Dasein is its possibilities as possibilities. One can take up the possibilities of "The They" self and merely follow along or make some more authentic understanding. (See Hubert Dreyfus' book -"Being-in-the-World") (Wikipedia, Heideggerian terminology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#Aletheia

We are alone in the world. (Does that sound stark?) How about: We are all one in the world? (Does that sound frightening?)

My sorrow might not be 'my' sorrow. My joy not 'mine.' And my life? Whose 'life' is it?

How is it possible that I am dense enough or clever enough to manufacture a belief that I am separate or separated from the whole of everything that is in the world? What refined illusion do I hang on my wall as a mirror so that when I look into it I see the image of a disconnected entity on his own, for himself, less than/more than everything/everyone else, an isolated ideology of miraculous living at a distance from what-is?

How odd!

Tellhard de Chardin was convinced that the total material universe is in movement toward a greater unified convergence in consciousness, a hyper-personalized organism. He conceived of the universe as a vast transhuman body in the process of formation, held together by the Omega point, "a distinct Centre radiating at the core of a system of centers." Because of Christ, Teilhard indicated, we live in "an irreversible personalizing universe." Teilhard spoke of the organic nature of Christ as the total Christ whose activity consists in "recapitulation," or bringing the universe to its ultimate center through the transforming energies of the resurrection. Christ is the physical center of an expanding universe. By "physical" Teilhard meant ontological reality. Christ is the real personal center of the universe.
(--p.156, in, Christ in Evolution, by Ilia Delio, O.S.F., c.2008, Orbis)

With meditation and contemplation we begin to drop off the moments, years, decades, millennia misunderstanding of existence. The misunderstanding is understandable. We look as if from outside at the outside of everything, measuring distance and threat, dimension and tactical approach for small-self-interests. Food, shelter, clothing, the means to attain these, perpetuate them, the ability to protect them, who to mistrust, who might invade our storehouse, take our imagined future, defile our pure idea of eternal life, separate us from our separative thinking.

As flowing waters disappear into the mist
We lose all track of their passage
Every heart is its own Buddha
Ease off; become immortal

Wake up: the world's a mote of dust
Behold heaven's round mirror
Turn loose: slip past shape and shadow
Sit side by side with nothing save Tao

- Shih-shu (17th - early 18th c)

White Border Collie stares at me. The red geodesic ball is at side of bed on rug. He is flummoxed that I am not throwing it across room for the 15th time. That I am looking at a stupid square making clickink sounds while there is a perfectly good activity throw and fetch at hand. He doesn't think these humanoids hold much promise.

Sri Aurobindo's teaching states that this One Being and Consciousness is involved here in Matter. Evolution is the method by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient, and once having appeared is self-impelled to grow higher and higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop towards a greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second; but the evolution does not finish with mind, it awaits a release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. The next step of the evolution must be towards the development of Supermind and Spirit as the dominant power in the conscious being. For only then will the involved Divinity in things release itself entirely and it become possible for life to manifest perfection. (--from, Sri Aurobindo's teaching and method of sadhana. -- Sri Aurobindo on himself)
http://www.auroville.org/vision/sriauroteaching.htm

Rokpa makes quiet sounds, then more audible soft barks, poised on rug next to rocking chair, tail swooshing, eyes darting from red sphere to my being here.

He grows tired of my obtuse nescience.

I relent.

I lean over.

Pick up the whole earth, whole cosmos, round ball.

I throw it.

Outwandering; mendicant, empty handed

2012-01-29T04:39:00.000-05:00

5.3km row out and around bell buoy and Curtis Island greeted by Harbor Seal glinting wet sunshine watching me in mutual solitude as I place coin on bobbing monastery-church-of-the-sea bell tower for travellors seen or unseen. I imagine two bits will fetch a couple of coffees or something stronger in the world-beyond-world of mythic maritime lore.

A Life of Deep Awareness
The secret of beginning a life of deep awareness and sensitivity lies in our
willingness to pay attention. Our growth as conscious, awake human beings is
marked not so much by grand gestures and visible renunciations as by extending
loving attention to the minutest particulars of our lives. Every relationship,
every thought, every gesture is blessed with meaning through the wholehearted
attention we bring to it. In the complexities of our minds and lives we easily
forget the power of attention, yet without attention we live only on the surface
of existence. It is just simple attention that allows us truly to listen to the
song of a bird, to see deeply the glory of an autumn leaf, to touch the heart of
another and be touched. We need to be fully present in order to love a single
thing wholeheartedly. We need to be fully awake in this moment if we are to
receive and respond to the learning inherent in it.

~Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfield,
Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart

To be able to cavort with wind and swell, tide and sunlight, fish and fowl, memory and imagination in quiet cloistered solitude originates gratefulness while pulling oars move meter by meter over muted depths of alterity.

Otherness calls for awe and attention. It has to be contemplated with care. During which, in an unattended instant, it disappears and you are left alone.

In all ten directions of the universe,
there is only one truth.
When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same.
What can ever be lost? What can be attained?
If we attain something, it was there from the beginning of time.
If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us.
Look: this ball in my pocket:
can you see how priceless it is?
--Ryokan ( (1758-1831)

What stirs in barn to set Border Collie barking a second time this middle of night? He doesn't understand my dullness of senses. He comes to front room to sleep on white couch. Everyone else in household returns to bed. Sump pump moves water to Barnestown Road. Furnace takes its turn. Good laborers! Serving the temporary needs of the house and bodies.

The fool thinks, "I am the body"; the intelligent man thinks,
"I am an individual soul united with the body." But the wise
man, in the greatness of his knowledge and spiritual discrimination,
sees the Self as the only reality and thinks, "I am Brahman."
--Shankara(b.788)

It's not difficult becoming a fool. I've accredited it without much thought. I've been recognized by both peers and strangers alike for my decomplishment.

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
(--Poem by Robert Frost)

There's no one in the barn.

There's no one in this room.

Nor, videlicet, could anyone remain reading this.

Look at what is left alone!

Establish no; religion

2012-01-28T04:59:00.000-05:00

When Christopher Hitchens died where was God? When little girls go missing, long searches turning up nothing, until one afternoon, a passerby, sees something out of place, unusual, in wooded patch. When a man sits down to dinner with new friend, dabs lips as waitress asks about dessert, looks at companion, smiles, furrows brow, collapses, dies. When teenage boy feels mocking bullying is more than he can stand, can think of no way to ease out of the humiliating pressure of unrelenting belittling, tightens rope, let's fall body, ends breath.

Ryonen:
When Ryonen was about to pass from this
world, she wrote another poem:

Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the
changing scene of autumn.
I have said enough about moonlight,
Ask no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars
when no wind stirs.
(--Zen Death Poem)

I ask no more of God. It no longer matters whether someone says they believe in God or another says there is no God. A theist and atheist walk into a barrier. The theist is glad to meet God. The atheist walks around it.

At 4:44 this morning the question arrived: what's the difference between alertness and fear? Someone was saying yesterday that animals live in constant alertness for danger and threat. Similarly, the prevailing method of controlling the behavior of humans is to encourage them to be afraid. Fear, not love, keeps order.

To see clearly or think clearly is to be alert.
To be anxious about the outcome, an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that something is dangerous or threatening to well-being, is fear.

When a man knows God

"When a man knows God, he is free: his sorrows have an end,
and birth and death are no more. When in inner union he is
beyond the world of the body, then the third world, the world
of the Spirit, is found, where the power of the All is, and man
has all: for he is one with the ONE."
From: Svetasvatara Upanishad

When "no" is established, religion forms as fear arises.

Nor is it necessarily to be thought that "yes" originates an alert response to what reveals itself to us. Yes is open acknowledgement that what is there is what is there. Nothing more.

Can we love what is there? Can we live without fear?

Is Hitchen's clarity about the perversity of belief, the sorrow of family at child's remains, the shock of companion's sudden collapse, the still body of teenage boy -- are these things even dared spoken about in the context of alertness or fear?

Alert sorrow (or joy), yes; dread fear (or cowering reverence), no.

I prefer my yes or no to be yes and no. Not an absolute stand sealed in cement, but a step along a path then another step moving forward as moving is called for.

No religion need establish itself. "Itself" is disorganized, fluid, free, and always unique when it appears-- or when it remains hidden from our eyes. Still, there is only "Itself."

Only Itself is, Nothing Else is.

What, I wonder, is there to fear?

A Parable of Immortality

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch until at last she hangs
like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says,
" There she goes! "

Gone where?

Gone from my sight . . . that is all.

She is just as large in mast and hull and spar
as she was when she left my side
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the place of destination.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment
when someone at my side says,
" There she goes! "
there are other eyes watching her coming . . .
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout . . .

" Here she comes! "

~Henry Van Dyke

The name the Buddha used to refer to himself in scriptures is Tathagata. It means: "one who has thus gone, one who has thus come." It sounds paradoxical. It probably means one is beyond coming or going, one seeing truth.

Perhaps ours isn't to establish truth. Perhaps there is a humbler task, namely, to see what is there as it is there so shall it be there as it moves beyond to where it will next be seen.

We'd have to learn how to dwell for a while in a run-on sentence.

Like...life.

Remember, watch your steps

2012-01-27T05:55:00.001-05:00

God, it is said, is love.

Has anyone ever seen God?

Her written words were the expression of her lived, personalized experience of poverty: "Have confidence and strong faith that God will assist you in everything." And, she counsels her followers: "You must be convinced that God will never fail to provide for all your needs, material and spiritual alike... They will never be abandoned in their needs."
(--from website of Ursuline Sisters of Cincinnati, about St. Angela Merici, 1770@-1802)

We do not see our eye. The eye sees for us. God is that eye. No one sees God. We see what God sees. We are God's eye. Seeing the world is our vision. Whatever happens in the world we can choose to see things with the mind of God seeing things, as we say, differently, that is, carrying away with love whatever is however it is presented.

As Kali said in circle last evening, "I feel I am being present." Yes, sheer gift. Seen through. God's love.

The path to Han-shan's place is laughable,
A path, but no sign of cart or horse.
Converging gorges - hard to trace their twists
Jumbled cliffs - unbelievably rugged.
A thousand grasses bend with dew,
A hill of pines hums in the wind.
And now I've lost the shortcut home,
Body asking shadow, how do you keep up?
(--from THE COLD MOUNTAIN POEMS of Han Shan, tr. Gary Snyder)

Walking the grounds of the Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center in Bangor yesterday talking with someone slowly preparing to leave to return home, we are accompanied by all our shadows. They manage to keep up. There are simple words and encouraging that speak us over patches of ice on hard ground weaving through open field.

It's not simply that God is love. It's that we are what God is looking through seeing love.

So maybe the question isn't, "Have you ever seen God?" -- but rather, "Am I seeing what God is seeing?"

Rosie wondered if God even knows we're here -- which is a terrific wonder.

Presence doesn't make of itself something other than itself. It is itself seeing itself as no other nor anything else as other. Not separate. Not object. Not somewhere else.

Our need is to be what is seeing along the laughably rugged path to the hermit poet's place, the place we are never abandoned never failing to make our way with a different way of seeing.

God's way, body and shadow, keeping up.

Seeing nothing but what is there with love.

No longer looked for; present

2012-01-26T07:03:00.000-05:00

I don't wish to tell students about East Asian Philosophy; I'd like us to experience it.

So, we spend time with May Sarton last night.

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before--"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
.
(Poem by May Sarton)

The movement from here to here, from subject/object to subjectless object and objectless subject, from me and you to (oh my word!) You! -- is as arduous as allowing breath to be felt, seen, breathed without a breather.

In other words, there are no other words.

The sun no longer moves. You no longer move.

The sun is the tree -- deep within with no without -- astronomical immensity in a single dendrochronical sliver rounding itself as itself in its instant of becoming itself.

All so vague:
The reasons why in autumn
All fade away
And there's just this
Inexplicable sadness.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

Gifts are presents.

You can't give someone an experience. You can only present it.

You can moment it.

In the present.

Hence: Gifts are presents.

Occupy the present!

Be the moment!

Gift yourself!

As light.

Mary Oliver's first line in her poem "The Buddha's Last Instruction" is:
"Make of yourself a light".

The Buddha's Last Instruction
.
"Make of yourself a light,"
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal--a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire--
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
He raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
.
(Poem by Mary Oliver)

What we love about poetry is what we love within the experience of poetry -- namely, the present it gifts.

Bringing our frightened faces right here, inexplicably sad when sad, inextricably amazed when amazed.

That which is looked for, in the looking, no longer looked for.

Not needed.

Value valued valuing!

Looking itself.

Quarrels cease at once.

2012-01-25T05:02:00.000-05:00

What do you think?

DHAMMAPADA.

CHAPTER I.

THE TWIN-VERSES.

   1. All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.

   2. All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.

   3. 'He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,'--in those who harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease.

   4. 'He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,'--in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease.

   5. For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.

   6. The world does not know that we must all come to an end here;--but those who know it, their quarrels cease at once.

   7. He who lives looking for pleasures only, his senses uncontrolled, immoderate in his food, idle, and weak, Mâra (the tempter) will certainly overthrow him, as the wind throws down a weak tree.

   8. He who lives without looking for pleasures, his senses well controlled, moderate in his food, faithful and strong, him Mâra will certainly not overthrow, any more than the wind throws down a rocky mountain.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/sbe10/sbe1003.htm

Because what we think is the world for us.

There's a story in one of the Buddhist scriptures about a king who, in a state of acute depression took a drive one day through a park filled with huge tropical trees. He dismounted from his carriage and walked among their great roots, which were themselves as tall as an ordinary man, and noticed the way that they "inspired trust and confidence." "They were quiet; no discordant voices disturbed their peace; they gave out a sense of being apart from the ordinary world, a place where one could take refuge from people" and find a retreat from the cruelties of life. Looking at those wonderful old trees, the king was reminded immediately of the Buddha, jumped into his carriage and drove for miles until he reached the house where the Buddha was staying.[3]

In the Buddha, the king found the same thing he found in the stand of great trees: peace, quiet, serenity, refuge. This is what the Buddha was like: a stand of great, old trees. Metaphors like this work better to describe him than the usual array of words we use to describe humans. Rather than calling him wise or insightful or revolutionary, we say he was like a stand of old trees.
http://www.fvuuf.org/index2.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=233&Itemid=208

I think a stand of old trees is a good place for a good story.

What do you think?

Yes; learning to read

2012-01-24T04:58:00.001-05:00

Mystics see whole what we only partially suspect. It must be disconcerting.

The nearest way to God
Leads through love's open door;
The path of knowledge is
Too slow for evermore. (Angelus Silesius)

It is 46degrees and raining. Odd weather, January. From zero to 46, from crystal scrunch underfoot to foggy mist surrounding tree.

God never did exist
Nor ever will, yet aye
He was ere worlds began, and
When they're gone he'll stay. (AS)

On treadmill and rowing machine some mornings the paces of rehabilitation prepare one for healthier days as well as day's end. It is good effort, staying alive. It is good prayer, saying goodbye to what is going nowhere. Blood pressure and finger pulse, monitors and stretching, I join the small community of those reminded that to look back or look ahead are two confusing directions -- that being in place, actively going nowhere, is the curious momentum of each moment.

ANGELUS SILESIUS

by Paul Carus

THE OPEN COURT

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE

Devoted to the Science of Religion, the Religion of Science, and the Extension of the Religious Parliament Idea.

Volume XXII

CHICAGO

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY

1908

{Reduced to HTML by Christopher M. Weimer, August 2002}

p. 291

ANGELUS SILESIUS.

BY THE EDITOR.

MYSTICISM is, as it were, a short cut of sentiment to reach a truth otherwise inaccessible under given conditions, and since writing an article on the subject for a recent number of The Monist, I have devoted more time to a renewed perusal of one of the most prominent and interesting mystics of Germany, Johannes Scheffler, or as he is better known by his adopted name, Angelus Silesius, who was born in 1624 at Breslau, and died in 1677. While mystics of the type of Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg present their views in long essays of a philosophical nature which read like the dreams (or if you prefer, the vagaries) of a prophet, Angelus Silesius condenses his views in short apothegms, written in a somewhat archaic style, mostly in simple verse, and often with crude rhymes.

For an explanation of my view of mysticism, I refer my readers to the above-mentioned editorial article published in The Monist of January, 1908, pages 75-110. I have there attempted to translate of the lines of Angelus Silesius (on pages 104-109). Since this mystical thinker is little known in the countries of English speech, and since only a few of his verses have been translated, we present here to our readers an additional selection which will serve as instances of the peculiar God-conception of the mystics, so much like Buddhistic Nirvana; also the mystic ethics of quietism, the mystic psychology and mystic religion which teach man to seek salvation through breaking down the limits of the ego. By overcoming egoity it is promised that man shall attain divinity. Peculiarly noteworthy is the mystic's sensual conception of piety, and the representation of the soul's relation to God as a kind of mystic marriage. All this is typical of a certain kind of mysticism which exercised such a powerful influence at the end of the Middle Ages, but has now entirely lost its influence on mankind. http://www.sacred-texts.com/journals/oc/pc-as.htm

Ruffage, nuts, odd seeds in system, pink pills and oval pills, various shades of bluegreen pills, gurgling plumbing, laboring furnace, cooling wood stove, snoring dog, industrious mice, defiant squirrels, rolling cars passing in dark, unfathomable galaxies and universes out and about, rocksalt in crevices of peapod floorboards, creaking ceiling as occupant turns in bed, coughs, and gauges how much time remains to sleep.

What you for others wish,
You for yourself suggest.
If you don't wish them well,
Your own death you request.

A soul redeemed and blessed
No more knows otherhood.
It is with God one light
And one beatitude.

In Heaven life is good:
No-one has aught alone.
What one possesses, there
All others too will own.(AS)

It is humorous to consider most of our proprietary gathering unto ourselves here in the little-seeing world has been silly-stalking senselessness in the bemused eyes of infinite simplicity-sallying spirituality of the naught alone.

"Where is my residence?"'
Where I nor you can stand.
"Where is the final end
Where I at last shall land?"
'T is where no end is found.
"And whither must I press.
Above God I must pass.
Into the wilderness.(AS)

Morning begins arising light. Everywhere in town feet meet floor. Mind adjusts to flood of tasks. We are lucky to love what is here!

Friend it is now enough.
In case thou more wilt read:
Thou must the Scriptures be,
The essence eke, indeed. (AS)

Lucky to be learning to read.

Open the sack; look for hat

2012-01-23T04:49:00.001-05:00

We row lighthouse keeper to Curtis Island. She needed to pick up some things for an upcoming trip. Smooth and calm waters, sunlight steady, skim ice covering inner harbor. On return from island we pass Sam and Susan rowing out. Susan was reciting soundly something about Spain and water sovereignty across our bow as they diminished steadily to a green dot on a distant fading tack. Mean temperature was 14degrees. Back at house, after walking with dogs around turtle islands on frozen Hosmer Pond, the thermometer said 7degrees. Sitting zazen in Merton Retreat the small gas fireplace tried its best to push back seeping cold. Chicken soup, hot, hale, and hearty, helped afterwards.

If you want to catch a rat
You don't need a fancy cat
If you want to learn the principles
Don't study fine bound books
The True Pearl's in a hemp sack
The Buddha nature rests in huts
Many grasp the sack
But few open it.
- Shih-te

Primary season scurries in and out of dark nests bringing pesty ideas into light of day best left in walls and crevices out of sight of pandering politicos dripping money from overripe financiers testing the traps of democracy with pungent cheese of plutocratic oligarchy. Or, as the fisherman on the dock might say: Rotten bait is only good for soon dead fish. And there's something fishy these days about the wharves of congress and supreme court and even the executive launch. With global warming and stinking pails of potash fertilizing money stuffed in ambitious gills it is no surprise the oxygen levels necessary to sustain life under and above water are diminishing. Sucking any sustaining nourishment out of weakening bodies, corruptive venture entrepreneurs prop up facsimile figures to postulate and gesticulate guppy mouthing of stale and rotting ideas that do not bode well for healthy civic and spiritual life. The political fishing grounds are badly and sadly polluted.

Gregory Corso stepped out of his attic to give us the following:

America Politica Historia, In Spontaneity

O this political air so heavy with the bells
and motors of a slow night, and no place to rest
but rain to walk—How it rings the Washington streets!
The umbrella’d congressmen; the rapping tires
of big black cars, the shoulders of lobbyists
caught under canopies and in doorways,
and it rains, it will not let up,
and meanwhile lame futurists weep into Spengler’s
prophecy, will the world be over before the races blend color?
All color must be one or let the world be done—
There’ll be a chance, we’ll all be orange!
I don’t want to be orange!
Nothing about God’s color to complain;
and there is a beauty in yellow, the old Lama
in his robe the color of Cathay;
in black a strong & vital beauty,
Thelonious Monk in his robe of Norman charcoal—
And if Western Civilization comes to an end
(though I doubt it, for the prophet has not
executed his prophecy) surely the Eastern child
will sit by a window, and wonder
the old statues, the ornamented doors;
the decorated banquet of the West—
Inflamed by futurists I too weep in rain at night
at the midnight of Western Civilization;
Dante’s step into Hell will never be forgotten by Hell;
the Gods’ adoption of Homer will never be forgotten by the Gods;
the books of France are on God’s bookshelf;
no civil war will take place on the fields of God;
and I don’t doubt the egg of the East its glory—
Yet it rains and the motors go
and continued when I slept by that wall in Washington
which separated the motors in the death-parlor
where Joe McCarthy lay, lean and stilled,
ten blocks from the Capitol—
I could never understand Uncle Sam
his red & white striped pants his funny whiskers his starry hat:
how surreal Yankee Doodle Dandy, goof!
American history has a way of making you feel
George Washington is still around, that is
when I think of Washington I do not think of Death—
Of all Presidents I have been under
Hoover is the most unreal
and FDR is the most President-looking
and Truman the most Jewish-looking
and Eisenhower the miscast of Time into Space—
Hoover is another America, Mr. 1930
and what must he be thinking now?
FDR was my youth, and how strange to still see
his wife around.
Truman is still in Presidential time.
I saw Eisenhower helicopter over Athens
and he looked at the Acropolis like only Zeus could.
OF THE PEOPLE is fortunate and select.
FOR THE PEOPLE has never happened in America or elsewhere.
BY THE PEOPLE is the sadness of America.
I am not politic.
I am not patriotic.
I am nationalistic!
I boast well the beauty of America to all the people in Europe.
In me they do not see their vision of America.
O whenever I pass an American Embassy I don’t know what to feel!
Sometimes I want to rush in and scream: “I’m American!”
but instead go a few paces down to the American Bar
get drunk and cry: “I’m no American!”
The men of politics I love are but youth’s fantasy:
The fine profile of Washington on coins stamps & tobacco wraps
The handsomeness and death-in-the-snow of Hamilton.
The eyeglasses shoe-buckles kites & keys of Ben Franklin.
The sweet melancholy of Lincoln.
The way I see Christ, as something romantic & unreal, is the way I see them.
An American is unique among peoples.
He looks and acts like a boyman.
He never looks cruel in uniform.
He is rednecked portly rich and jolly.
White-haired serious Harvard, kind and wry.
A convention man a family man a rotary man & practical joker.
He is moonfaced cunning well-meaning & righteously mean.
He is Madison Avenue, handsome, in-the-know, and superstitious.
He is odd, happy, quicker than light, shameless, and heroic
Great yawn of youth!
The young don’t seem interested in politics anymore.
Politics has lost its romance!
The “bloody kitchen” has drowned!
And all that is left are those granite
façades of Pentagon, Justice, and Department—
Politicians do not know youth!
They depend on the old
and the old depend on them
and lo! this has given youth a chance
to think of heaven in their independence.
No need to give them liberty or freedom
where they’re at—
When Stevenson in 1956 came to San Francisco
he campaigned in what he thought was an Italian section!
He spoke of Italy and Joe DiMaggio and spaghetti,
but all who were there, all for him,
were young beatniks! and when his car drove off
Ginsberg & I ran up to him and yelled:
“When are you going to free the poets from their attics!”
Great yawn of youth!
Mad beautiful oldyoung America has no candidate
the craziest wildest greatest country of them all!
and not one candidate—
Nixon arrives ever so temporal, self-made,
frontways sideways and backways,
could he be America’s against? Detour to vehicle?
Mast to wind? Shore to sea? Death to life?
The last President?

(Poem by Gregory Corso, “America Politica Historia, in Spontaneity” from Elegiac Feelings American. Copyright © 1970 by Gregory Corso.)
Source: Mindfield: New and Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1989)

No poets need apply this election year. Poets shape metaphor and seedling word, politicians mold fear and into needling absurd, smiling thousand dollar smiles, tossing pennies at paupers.

I'd rather row a lighthouse keeper telling stories on stern thwart to Tanzania to help with medical healing than listen to one more sorrowful syllable from rue-ling class Lotharios breaking hearts and hopes with magnificent cons and swindles paid for by elect-my-mouthpiece.org.

Enough, this Monday morning rant.

I look outside.

A cold rain starting

A cold rain starting
And no hat --
So?

(poem by Matsuo Basho)

The stark sanity of poetry!

Balm to current craze and personal maze madness!

At origin of all: that; is

2012-01-22T04:17:00.001-05:00

Ha! Ha! Here! Ha! Ha!

I've got plenty of nothing here.

Sometimes it gets me down. For so long I've been elsewhere, there, mistaken. It is a relief to be turning a corner, bumping into here as though a mistake, a wrong navigation; and dangerous, each turning is, disconcerting.

Sermons there are, must be a million
Too many to read in a hurry
If you want a friend
Just come to T'ien T'ai mountain
Sit deep among the crags
We'll talk about the Principles
And chat about dark Mysteries
If you don't come to my mountain
Your view will be blocked
By the others.
- Shih-te

Snowshoeing Hosmer Pond with Saskia, Cody, and Rokie in light falling flakes we realize again the joy of being in this gift of mountain, pond, sky, and cold. Around edges thick with ice the steady lift and thump of wide attachments to winter boots create new paths through recent snow. There's nothing like it. Naturally, we love it as it is, here, for now.

Second reading 1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Brothers [and Sisters]: our time is growing short. Those who have wives should live as though they had none, and those who mourn should live as though they had nothing to mourn for; those who are enjoying life should live as though there were nothing to laugh about; those whose life is buying things should live as though they had nothing of their own; and those who have to deal with the world should not become engrossed in it. I say this because the world as we know it is passing away.

"Now" never passes away. "Now" is what we used to spell "Deus," "Brahman," "Adonai," "Allah," "Abba," "Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi" (Unexcelled perfect enlightenment), and "Divine Mother."

No matter how you turn it, ("now, mou, won"), this present and only moment is here, mine, victorious, and nothing special. It is also nowhere, noone's, nothing to gain, and profoundly circumincessionally interpenetrating.

Only now is; nothing else is.

Now, then, what is there to do?

Nothing!

however hard I think
still its the same
walking on fallen leaves
(--Santoka Taneda)

Nothing is growing short, Paul, except the obscure and illusory thought that there is an extension of time for us to durate.

For this morning, the counter-impression occurs.

Each face at each instant is the whole of creation present at origin of all that is.

Oh, look, here you are!

Another name for God.

How nice to see you!

2012-01-21T12:50:00.000-05:00

Received email:

Today is the two-year anniversary of the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. That case gave corporations like Exxon or Bank of America approval to spend millions of dollars buying elections.

It is already happening, and it is wrong.

Changing Supreme Court decisions can take decades. A better alternative is to pass a constitutional amendment.

A new campaign called United for the People is underway to do just that. And, since we don’t have time to waste, this effort needs support from the very highest levels. Today we're petitioning President Obama to support a constitutional amendment to boot big money out of elections. http://act.rebuildthedream.com/sign/overturn_citizens_united?akid=390.154765.ct0su5&rd=1&t=1

Returning to contemplate email:

I have not grown sub-clauses and flow charts, nor have corporations grown lungs or hearts. Please help stop illusory legal metaphors such as "a corporation is a person."
Help return our country to real flesh and blood people away from corporate P&L spreadsheets.

If I was a political person, that's what I might say. As a religiously humanitarian person, this is my prayer.

Exactly and doubtlessly

2012-01-21T07:15:00.000-05:00

Fire started in Wohnkuche wood stove. Temperature bumped in bookshed/retreat. Additional zafu and zabuton brought across snow covered wooden walkways from cabin to bookshed in faint blue nascent light rising behind bare limbs on Sally's land. Chairs moved in meditation area, incense lighted to welcome dawn -- the chores of Saturday morning preparation for practice. Like some Jikido lighting candles outside meditation hall and fires inside the enclosure, bare legged in calf boots and down vest, shuffling back and forth between buildings in inner silence with crunch underfoot, I carry out these dawning tasks grateful to be alive, walking, breathing, and about to brew coffee.

The Buddhas left their Sutras
Because people are hard to change
It's not just a matter of saintly or stupid
Each and every heart throws up its barricade
Each piles up his own mountain of karma
How could they guess that what they clasp so close
Is sorrow
Unwilling to ponder, as day and night
They do embrace the falsehood of the flesh

- Shih-te

Maybe not falsehood so much as only a fragment of the story. I look at my hand. Without understanding it to be servant of arm, trunk, neck, ears, brain, and mind, it would in it's forgetfulness think it is free without consequences to take what does not belong to it, hit what it thinks should be hit, and spend the whole day picking items from sale bins without any conversation with checkbook.

We are of a piece. We're asleep to this. Sometimes even snoring loudly in blissful unawareness of our enormous body and boundless spirit. Nothing in the universe is not part of our body. Our shutter-blink partitioning consciousness cannot extend the scope of lens wide enough to encompass the magnitude of our seen and unseen reality, so we sketch in miniature tiny canvases with delicate detail some limited acquiescence of our barrierless infinite Self.

There is no hope. Hope is a thought for some other time some other place. There is, however, profound unverifiable faith and love that what we are, although unknown, is exactly and doubtlessly what we are.

Home is where the odd and curmudgeonly truth dwells as a hermit in the forest eager for its solitude yet longing for a visit to pass an afternoon.

Beannacht
("Blessing")

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

(~ John O'Donohue, in Echoes of Memory)

Ah, yes, let gentle poets leave footprints through fresh snow into that hidden place of eremitic dwelling where our belonging sits and converses with Truth of Self of an afternoon with few words awakening delight!

No, one owns; Christ

2012-01-20T05:59:00.001-05:00

This is why I love the new interface of blogger: Everytime I navigate away and return there's nothing there. Everything I've written that morning is gone. I've lost hundreds of words. Started over dozens of times. Learned nothing, quite obviously, not saving.

Christ doesn't save.

Every instant is new.

Christ sits in cafe looking out as you approach crossing street entering shoppe slide into booth where Christ sits now looking out as another you glances at watch pays for coffee and wonders whether being Christ will ever become more obvious as you look over to tale and table and see Christ gone, you turn, exit door, look left and right, exhale, create the world, enter it, astonish it with your love and beauty, allow it to destroy illusions you carry as your identity papers, wander nameless and kindly through this next thought and this next one, until you realize the snow falling around you is where you've come from and to which you will return whether or not the sip from coffee cup raised to lips gets to where it naturally goes or if the dream we call our life will kiss the phantasmic companion by our side which waking will only deepen appreciation of the invitation.

15. The face of truth is hidden by your orb
Of gold, O sun. May you remove your orb
So that I, who adore the true, may see

16. The glory of truth. O nourishing sun,
Solitary traveler, controller,
Source of life for all creatures, spread your light
And subdue your dazzling splendor
So that I may see your blessed Self.
Even that very Self am I!

17. May my life merge in the Immortal
When my body is reduced to ashes.
O mind, meditate on the eternal Brahman.
Remember the deeds of the past.
Remember, O mind, remember.
(--from Isha Upanishad, Eknath Easwaran Translation)

Christ does not save creation, doesn't save us from creation, doesn't allow some contract killer to snuff his life for a grander payoff.

Christ is creation. Christ is you and me. There is no payoff. Live and work as Christ as this very place we are.

There is only what is. What is not is not.

No one owns Christ.

Christ is ownerless revelation of the reality we call Christ.

Half and half mixes well swirling cloud in fresh brew
morning awakening in snow over everything.

Remembering what; remains

2012-01-19T06:09:00.000-05:00

No matter what -- One is behind it all. Not causing, not determining, not some know-it-all about to say "I told you so!" each time we scrape our shin against coffee tables in the dark. But "behind" as in present beyond and within.

Ya na -- you are not alone! How many ways can that be read?

All this is full. All that is full.
From fullness, fullness comes.
When fullness is taken from fullness,
Fullness still remains.
...

6. Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no fear.
7. Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no grief.
How can the multiplicity of life
Delude the one who sees its unity?
...

9-11. In dark night live those for whom
The world without alone is real; in night
Darker still, for whom the world within
Alone is real. The first leads to a life
Of action, the second to a life of meditation.
But those who combine action with meditation
Cross the sea of death through action
And enter into immortality
Through the practice of meditation.
So have we heard from the wise.
(--from, Isha Upanishad, Translation by Eknath Easwaran, "The Inner Ruler", http://veda.wikidot.com/isha-upanishad-eknath

What's it like to be without alone?
What's it like to be within alone?

If you are not put off
By the voice of the valley
And the starry peaks,
Why not walk through the shady cedars
And come see me?
- Ryokan Taigu (1758-1831)

And so we visit one another. Say, "Hello!" Sip tea or coffee. Tell news of recent days. Share gossip. Wonder and wander about the Alone and being alone with the Alone. Meditation retreat stands ready to catch fallout. Books ready to absorb attention. Mountainside ready to walk up our feet each lift and place of our shoes.

Thursday mornings are hospitality. Hermits visiting hermits. Asking: What's the world doing now? Heads shake. Hands tremble at dexterous tasks. Hearts busy looking around for what it is they feel. Goodbye. Next time. Go well. Here's your hat, there's the door, what's your hurry?

Epiphanies come and go. We are in the captive cold of deep January. Pond ice gone thick. Wiper fluid leaping to salty windshields. Toes growing used to wiggling at edge of frosty hug. Small animals only wanting seeds get caught in traps of insensitivity and freeze. Only profound faith in Brahman/Atman inseparability allows sorrow simply to be sorrow, joy joy, and move through each event and occurrence with ready unfrightened revelation.

Let me know how you are faring.

Keep me informed how things are nearing.

Remember:

Fullness.

Still.

Remains.

What if the web were censured?

2012-01-18T06:57:00.001-05:00

Mostly unaware and asleep

2012-01-17T06:59:00.002-05:00

Alone in Community is the title of a book by William Claasen, subtitled Journeys into Monastic Life Around the World.

mon·as·ter·y (mn-str)
n. pl. mon·as·ter·ies
1. A community of persons, especially monks, bound by vows to a religious life and often living in partial or complete seclusion.
2. The dwelling place of such a community.
[Middle English monasterie, from Old French monastere, from Late Latin monastrium, from Late Greek monastrion, from Greek monazein, to live alone, from monos, alone; see men-4 in Indo-European roots.]
monas·teri·al (mn-stîr-l, -str-) adj.
(-- from, Free Online Dictionary)

I've lived the monastic life since I was thirteen years old pilgrimaging each morning to Bensonhurst Brooklyn's Twentieth Avenue station Sea Beach Line to rumble north to Manhattan where, at Fourteenth Street Station I would descend stairs to the Canarsie Line to North Sixth Station back in Brooklyn where in a converted fire station I attended high school for four years. The pilgrimage of two hours daily as a mendicant through the urban countryside with great variety of companions taught me solitude, watchfulness, and contemplation. Subway Itinerant Spirituality meant learning the scriptures of passing places, impassive faces, and bodily balance. For five and a half decades I have relied on that early undergrounding, overgrounding, but mostly ungrounding monastic training to find paradoxical urgrund in arrivals and departures, saying and unseating, greeting and loss, prayerful practice and pragmatic wariness, settle and besetting -- the composite experience of finding way in world of strangers to an interior disposition and destination which only serves as a turnaround, a repetitive daily practice where nothing is ever the same and nothing is different. Zen mind was being formed with formlessness.

Pine

The first night at the monastery,
a moth lit on my sleeve by firelight,
long after the first frost.

A short stick of incense burns
thirty minutes, fresh thread of pine
rising through the old pine of the hours.

Summer is trapped under the thin
glass on the brook, making
the sound of an emptying bottle.

Before the long silence,
the monks make a long soft rustling,
adjusting their robes.

The deer are safe now. Their tracks
are made of snow. The wind has dragged
its branches over their history.

(poem, “Pine” by Chase Twichell from The Snow Watcher published by Ontario Review Press. © 1998 by Chase Twichell.)

I love being in this monastery. I love dwelling in this metaphor. So much that I've been taught has been a secret teaching (such as purchasing pretzels the size of a man's hand, squirting mustard on its meandering convex). Thousands of sutras have been pored over ("if u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb") above seats where women rustle shopping bags between ankles. Rituals of indelible import have been performed (holding sliding closing door for running passenger whose timing was seconds slow descending platform stairs). A way of life stamped on an impressionable soul in a faraway land full of mysterious teachings and odd characters, gurus of impeachable habits and troubling pedigree, a community now seen as the face of god gazing at infinite emptiness pronouncing my religious name "Noonehere Noplacetogo."

West Evening Mountain Talk
Part 3, Muso Soseki

The monk asked, “Zen masters these days give a koan to their disciples. This makes students study words, doesn’t it?”

The Master answered, “No it doesn’t. Yuan-wu said, ‘Students who have just started Zen practice have no idea about it. So out of compassion the masters give them a koan as a signpost, so that the disciples can devote themselves to discovering oneness and dispelling random illusions, and to realizing finally that Original Mind is not something that comes from outside. After that, all the koans turn out to be pieces of tile for knocking at the gate.’ (from Dailyzen.com, http://www.dailyzen.com/zen/zen_reading1201.asp

Or, as Bob Dylan pronounced his vows: "Knock, knock, knocking at heaven's door." Where we dwell as community, each and all of us, mostly unaware and asleep, but good to go at any instant.

Alone, with and within, one another.

Seeing any,one

2012-01-16T19:14:00.001-05:00

If you are racist, you're not alone.

In a frost-streaked robe.
Here there is no talk
Of the world's affairs—
Those matters that make
Wild the hearts of people.
- Chia Tao (779-843)

If you consider not being racist, you're not alone.

But if you long to be loving and forgiving to those who hurt and harm and have no compunction, you are alone.

God is the Alone.

Turn around.

See any...one?

For Martin: Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā

2012-01-15T07:54:00.000-05:00

Martin woke up from sleep. Woke into dream. Told us dream. Fear was gone. He was gone.

We will awake. We will dream. We will speak. Fear will go. We will be gone.

Laetificus Letificus!

Benigne ades! Benigne dicis!

Nihil est!

Just this, Martin, so it is!

"As" Is

2012-01-14T04:44:00.004-05:00

Help is on the way

What we need to do is find way to help and be helped.

On way, help is, near.

Near as true Self.

As you to me. As me to you.

Not to, with.

Nearer, my love, with you.

Nearer, my Lord, to thee. And with thee.

Approaching (heretical, to some minds, not merely to, not merely with, but) 'as.'

Kena Upanishad
Translated by F. Max Müller

First Khanda

1. The Pupil asks: 'At whose wish does the mind sent forth proceed on its errand? At whose command does the first breath go forth? At whose wish do we utter this speech? What god directs the eye, or the ear?'

2. The Teacher replies: 'It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of speech, the breath of breath, and the eye of the eye. When freed (from the senses) the wise, on departing from this world, become immortal.

3. 'The eye does not go thither, nor speech, nor mind. We do not know, we do not understand, how any one can teach it.

4. 'It is different from the known, it is also above the unknown, thus we have heard from those of old, who taught us this.

5. 'That which is not expressed by speech and by which speech is expressed, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

6. 'That which does not think by mind, and by which, they say, mind is thought, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

7. 'That which does not see by the eye, and by which one sees (the work of) the eyes, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

8. 'That which does not hear by the ear, and by which the ear is heard, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

9. 'That which does not breathe by breath, and by which breath is drawn, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.'
(First Khanda from Kena Upanishad,Translated by F. Max Müller)
http://www.realization.org/page/namedoc0/kena/k_1.htm

That alone.

And that, we are coming to see, thou art!

As is.

Wonderfully, as, is!

It is all and only gift; each

2012-01-13T03:56:00.001-05:00

What does it mean to surrender oneself to God?

Haiku

returning silence
moonlight on fresh snow -- one look
still empty cloister

(wfh/nunc ipsum)

It is to present itself with what is itself.

Nothing

As simple

As this

Is

Seen...

Which one brings one to itself

2012-01-12T22:55:00.000-05:00

There is nonviolence. And there is ignorance.

Only one of the above brings us to our true home.

What's that

2012-01-11T04:21:00.005-05:00

Subtle. Not the thing but the thing itself. Back behind and far beyond our ability to see or hear, but that which is ground of seeing and hearing itself occurring.

Invocation

OM! May He protect us both together. May He give us enjoyment. May we exert ourselves through our radiance. May there never be differences between us in understanding. OM peace from heaven, peace from the earth, peace from the body!

OM! May my limbs, speech and prana grow. May my eyes, ears and the strength of the sense grow too. Everything is Brahman described in the Upanishads. Brahman never refuses to accept me. May I never refuse to accept Brahman. Let my Atman show interest in me and may all the virtues described in the Upanishads reside in me!
Chapter 1

By whose commands this mind works? By whose will the life's breath circulates? Who is responsible for man's speech? What intelligence does lead the eyes and the ears?

It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech. Also the life of all life, and the eye of the eye. The wise abandon the sensory world and become immortal.

There the eyes cannot travel, nor speech nor mind. Nor do we know how to explain it to the disciples. It is other than the known and beyond the unknown. So were we taught by our ancients.

That which the speech cannot reveal, but causes the speech to flow, know that alone to be Brahman, not this whom people worship here (through mantras).
(-- beginning of Kena Upanishad, translation by Jayaram V) http://www.hinduwebsite.com/kena.asp

Love that.

And that which that becomes.

To, finally, disappear.

There is no other way.

Playing with sand; forgetting why

2012-01-10T03:59:00.004-05:00

Poetry is word for
Word an incomplete
Sentence for
Contemplation

On Amazon, this book description for Wabi-Sabi, which we will contemplate this semester:

Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete . . .
. . . wabi-sabi could even be called the “Zen of things,” as it exemplifies many of Zen’s core spiritual-philosophical tenets ...
Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty. It occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West . . .
Wabi-sabi, in its purest, most idealized form, is precisely about the delicate traces, the faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness . .
(-- book by author Leonard Koren)

I've never understood the notion of 'perfection' except in an ironic tone, someone's explicative, "Oh, perfect!"

Even when described as "making one's way through," (a phrasing used for years), 'perfect' has a quality of not being there, always en route, an approximate glimpse, a glancing show of ephemeral fade.

Consider the world light,
And the spirit is not burdened;
Consider the myriad things slight,
And the mind is not confused.
Consider life and death equal,
And the intellect is not afraid;
Consider change as sameness,
And clarity is not obscured.
- Lao-tzu

Wandering the edges of scholarship is close enough horseshoes for my recess mind. Glance and glimpse is preferred optic over stare and glare.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness and call that handful of sand the world. Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then.
(--Robert Pirsig, from his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).

On Kwan Um School of Zen website it is good to look at photo of Zen Master standing this past December at ceremony table Buddha's Enlightenment Day in grey robe. I sat across from her at interview time one retreat as we swam together on our zafus that day almost forty years ago in Heidegger's surf before bowing and leaving to be elsewhere and otherwise.

A rich inquiry, then.

And now?

It is always a good time.

No knowing why.

So bright; so full

2012-01-09T02:14:00.002-05:00

In zendo I ask silently: Why am I doing this?

It could be the final tug of rounded moon jerking open mouth setting hook this deep water of winter night in fresh snowless new year.

I am beside myself no longer recognizing reflection in image shattered by piercing sharp white.

I send dogs out to investigate bladder and bowel as snow bowl churns water through blower spraying makeshift snow for dry runways until nature ceases demure pouting.

SHE IS

Her voice is a roundness. On full moon days, she talks about
renouncing meat but the butcher has his routine. And blood.

M’s wisdom. Still reliable.

There are sounds we cannot hear but understand in motion.
Slicing of air with hips. Crushing grass, saying these are my feet.
I want my feet in my shadow. Suffice to meet desires halfway.

Quiet. We say her chakras are in place.

When the thermos shatters, she knows the direction of its spill.
She knows how to lead and follow. Know her from this.

Sounds we cannot hear. The wind blows and we say it is cool.

Night slips under the door. We are tucked into bed and kissed
a fleeting one. Through the curtains, her voice loosens like thread
from an old blanket, row upon row. We watch her teeth in the
dark and read her words. She speaks in perfect order, facing where
the breeze can tug it towards canals stretching for sound.

Her faith abides by the cycle of the moon. See how perfect she is.

(Poem by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, “She is” from Rules of the House. 2003)

At table after reading sends silence and soup from tureen, mindful spoonfuls, it seems I might know why the bother to sit so long on zafu without knowing raises itself.

Ignorance: That if I wake, even a little bit, less of it would haunt the world.

Sipping soup -- tomato, leeks, and cauliflower -- under Wolf Moon, Old Moon, Moon After Yule, the pressure finally breaks, bread steeps, water tilts from glass, companions at ready.

The night watches.

Full moon at attention.

Cedars dripping soundless glow.

There is nothing I can do to alleviate suffering. Only wake. To it. And where it visits. Moonlight stepping through mountain trees no snapping twig.

What use waking?

None.

It is a sound we cannot hear.

So, we listen; it is our koan, night practice, on pillow, sleeping or awake.

Dogs return through open slider. One back upstairs, one to white sofa in front room on other side of Mutti's rocking chair. Red blanket and red stitching on throw pillows keeping vigil still.

1. "Wake, awake, for night is flying,"
The watchmen on the heights are crying;
"Awake, Jerusalem, arise!"
Midnight hears the welcome voices
And at the thrilling cry rejoices:
"Oh, where are ye, ye virgins wise?
The Bridegroom comes, awake!
Your lamps with gladness take!
Hallelujah!
With bridal care Yourselves prepare
To meet the Bridegroom, who is near."
(-- from, "Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying"
by Philipp Nicolai, 1556-1608
Translated by Catherine Winkworth, 1829-1878)

Faint trombone treading notation slope, from deep upland animal moan, the reduction is complete.

I return.

To sleep.

Walls have occupants

2012-01-08T03:57:00.001-05:00

Scratching. Do they want through into this room? Or just a ruffled sleeping place safe for duration? Being franciscan and buddhist is impetus for wonder about wall-dwellers rather than assassination planning.

CAN BE NO SORROW

That narrow cot, hardly any bigger than a child’s, is where Droste died
(it’s there in her museum in Meersburg),
on that sofa Hölderlin in his tower room at the carpenter’s,
Rilke and George in hospital beds presumably, in Switzerland,
in Weimar, Nietzsche’s great black eyes
rested on white pillows
till they looked their last—
all of it junk now, or no longer extant,
unattributable, anonymous
in its insentient and continual disintegration.

We bear within us the seeds of all the gods,
the gene of death and the gene of love—
who separated them, the words and things,
who blended them, the torments and the place where they come to an end,
the few boards and the floods of tears,
home for a few wretched hours.

Can be no sorrow. Too distant, too remote,
bed and tears too impalpable,
no No, no Yes,
birth and bodily pain and faith
an undefinable surge, a lurch,
a power stirring in its sleep
moved bed and tears—
sleep well!

-- Poem by Gottfried Benn
— Translated by Michael Hofmann

There are times when ruffled beds are sole narrative of disengaging memory. Those glance-backs when crossing carpet stepping from back room body to kitchen mind already down stairs left turn traffic light straight ahead not late the whole complicated array of Noh characters kabuki akimbo hallways and desks, pens and pads, treatment plans and system flaws as thistle and fairy tale weave through morning toward lunch.

Even here
I Am
Still there.

Rather than break my vow to plum blossoms
I have settled here in this disheveled hut
Grey sleet seeps through briars at my window
Plumes of snow dance around its papered panes

Steep scarps loom above frozen woods
Deep clouds conceal the pool's icy stones
Such weather; I stoke up a few charcoal twigs
Wish for a way south, to Chiang-nan's shore.

( - Shih-shu (17th c-early 18th) -- from The clouds should know me by now: Buddhist poet monks of China
By Red Pine, Mike O'Connor)

I love when moon illumines night erasing importance of daylight scurrying. When present moment arises to remind that no other moment is real, that we live in illusion. That all the words spoken and heard are scrapings in walls bedding down for duration restless for clarification like junkies thinking shooting up meaning will dispense with formalities and usher in understanding laced with cream and honey.

Empty beds are artifacts of ancient civilizations replete with shards and sipping bowls for the journey.

Epiphany or Baptism? Churches wrestle with weekends as safeguards of canon celebration texts as pickup trucks with cardboard coffee cups finish Barnestown hill without a spill in new narrative of worship recorded and repeated daily with signs and symbols easily recognizable by all the faithful arriving at and passing beyond stop signs turning into convenience counters where liturgical greeting is monosyllabic and passing unstrange smile.

We love to be alone. It is heretical to want to be alone. Only love allows it. The crowd prays for assembly and receives assurance that the gathered that stays together displays together profession of affiliation and belief in sentences of faith signed and sealed boarding tickets pass-porting angelic checkpoints to foreign concepts welcomed as home.

The walls are silent. Resting time. Moon pulls Ragged Mountain over shoulder. Furnace takes night shift seriously. Pictures fastened to hooks vigil front room.

I love you.

Take that!

Sleep well!

Dwell not on a stumbling-block

2012-01-07T15:13:00.001-05:00

Hui-Neng husked rice.

He couldn't read nor write. But he knew emptiness.

How wonderful of Lex Hixon to tell the transmission story for us in writing at Saturday Morning Practice these 38 years after meeting him at the red church of WBAI in NYC as he hosted his radio show "In the Spirit" on Sunday mornings.

I was more of a fool then than now. But now I know what a fool I am. You can guess the rest.

Chapter V. Dhyana

The Patriarch (one day) preached to the assembly as follows:--
In our system of meditation, we neither dwell upon the mind (in contradistinction to the Essence of Mind) nor upon purity. Nor do we approve of non-activity. As to dwelling upon the mind, the mind is primarily delusive; and when we realize that it is only a phantasm there is no need to dwell on it. As to dwelling upon purity, our nature is intrinsically pure; and so far as we get rid of all delusive 'idea' there will be nothing but purity in our nature, for it is the delusive idea that obscures Tathata (Suchness). If we direct our mind to dwell upon purity we are only creating another delusion, the delusion of purity. Since delusion has no abiding place, it is delusive to dwell upon it. Purity has neither shape nor form; but some people go so far as to invent the 'Form of Purity', and treat it as a problem for solution. Holding such an opinion, these people are purity-ridden, and their Essence of Mind is thereby obscured.

Learned Audience, those who train themselves for 'imperturbability' should, in their contact with all types of men, ignore the faults of others. They should be indifferent to others' merit or demerit, good or evil, for such an attitude accords with the 'imperturbability of the Essence of Mind'. Learned Audience, a man unenlightened may be unperturbed physically, but as soon as he opens his mouth he criticizes others and talks about their merits or demerits, ability or weakness, good or evil; thus he deviates from the right course. On the other hand, to dwell upon our own mind or upon purity is also a stumbling-block in the Path.
(--from, SUTRA SPOKEN BY THE SIXTH PATRIARCH ON THE HIGH SEAT OF "THE TREASURE OF THE LAW")
http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/huineng/huineng5.html

I'll have some rice with Tamara sauce, thank you.

One kernel at a time, if you please.

No more hiding. No more seeking.

Show me you love me

2012-01-06T03:59:00.000-05:00

So much has to do with emphasis. Putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble changes everything.

Take the phrase: "Show me you love me." It can read like a command: SHOW me you love me! Or, it could sound like a gentle reminder of primal undifferentiated relationality: Show 'me' -- 'You' love me. This second reading invites the other into reciprocal reflective recognition that thee and me are not two, not separate, when love is the lens through which we see one another.

I Want to Know What Love Is

I gotta take a little time
A little time to think things over
I better read between the lines
In case I need it when I'm older
Aaaah woah-ah-aah

Now this mountain I must climb
Feels like a world upon my shoulders
And through the clouds I see love shine
It keeps me warm as life grows colder

In my life there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
Can't stop now, I've traveled so far
To change this lonely life

I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
I wanna feel what love is
I know you can show me
Aaaah woah-oh-ooh

I'm gonna take a little time
A little time to look around me, oooh ooh-ooh ooh-ooh oooh
I've got nowhere left to hide
It looks like love has finally found me

In my life there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
I can't stop now, I've traveled so far
To change this lonely life

I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
I wanna feel what love is
I know you can show me
I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
And I wanna feel, I want to feel what love is
And I know, I know you can show me

Let's talk about love
(-- lyrics from song, I Want to Know What Love Is, by Mick Jones, sung by Foreigner, 1984)

The plea of the song lyrics, "I want you to show me," is a plea for the unity of love. It is profound trust, " I know you can show me." You, me, we: can we see our whole, true, and interpenetrating interdependence? You show me. I show you. Together we appear when love is the lens.

It might take a little time.

Sermons there are, must be a million
Too many to read in a hurry
If you want a friend
Just come to T'ien T'ai mountain
Sit deep among the crags
We'll talk about the Principles
And chat about dark Mysteries
If you don't come to my mountain
Your view will be blocked
By the others.
- Shih-te

Listening to John Dear speaking about Dan Berrigan (now in his 91st year) I am reminded of the loneliness of radical vision. There was a line that suggested Berrigan felt that all that was left was the Bread and the Wine and one another's company. I hear these words as saying the mere elemental transformation of grateful thanksgiving with sacred presence experiencing together ordinary hierophanic revelation of (in this way) What-Is-Love, Being-With, One-Another, In-The-World. For Berrigan, Christ.

I recall the Berrigan lines:

bodies belong
where words
lead

(I misquoted them for forty years, substuting the word "are" for "lead." I've been static, Berrigan looks for movement.)

Turn the page, he says, let flare profound revelation.

Miracles

Were I God almighty, I would ordain, rain
fall lightly where old men trod, no death
in childbirth, neither infant nor mother, ditches firm fenced against the
errant blind, aircraft come to ground like any feather.

No mischance, malice, knives.
Tears dried. Would resolve all
flaw and blockage of mind
that makes us mad, sets lives awry.

So I pray, under
the sign of the world’s murder, the ruined son;
why are you silent?
feverish as lions
hear us in the world,
caged, devoid of hope.

Still, some redress and healing.
The hand of an old woman
turns gospel page;
it flares up gently, the sudden tears of Christ.

(Poem by Dan Berrigan)

Where is it written that it would be awful to gain the world and lose your soul?

It seems to me it would be an awful thing to lose the world to gain a soul.

There is no gain. No loss. 'World' and 'soul' are two only when misplaced emphasis is afoot. Christ longed for the world to be redeemed into the wholeness of sight. For the individual to see. For 'world, soul' to grow into unitive sight. For all creation's longing to be fulfilled in its true nature. For love to be, what it is, in the world, in each one, in time, and beyond.

We are not meant to use love for something else.

Love is useless. Forgiveness is useless. They are not to be used for anything other than what they are, namely, the only things that are.

Be, therefore, love.

Be, therefore, forgiveness.

Don't try to use them for anything other than what they are in themselves.

As you are in yourself; as you are in the world.

You are the world. You are Christ. Be bread. Be wine. With one-another.

No, really: "With" one-another!

We are being told

2012-01-05T02:46:00.000-05:00

I love Earth.

If you are not put off
By the voice of the valley
And the starry peaks,
Why not walk through the shady cedars
And come see me?
- Ryokan Taigu (1758-1831)

I love you.

"We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe. All the disasters that are happening now are a consequence of that spiritual ‘autism.’”
(--Thomas Berry, from, The Great Work, 1999)

I love this one loving.

BARKING

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.

(Poem by Jim Harrison)

I love the realization there is so much further to travel in order to get right where we are.

We have not yet discovered what it means to be human. And it seems that this ordinary discovery is the most epiphanic that can be made – for when we have learnt what it is to be human, when we have suffered it, and loved it, we will know our true estate, we will know what gulf separates us from the gods, we will know what it means to be free, and we will know that freedom is really the beginning of our mutual destinies.
(-- by Ben Okri, in, A Way of Being Free, found as epigraph in, An Imperfect Offering, Humanitarian Action For The Twenty-First Century, by James Orbinski, M.D.)

I love the gift life is offering: world, love.

"The natural world itself is our primary language as it is our primary scripture, our primary awakening to the mysteries of existence. We might well put all our written scriptures on the shelf for twenty years until we learn what we are being told by unmediated experience of the world about us". -- Thomas Berry

I love listening to the sound of what is...

Being said!

Debate or Conversation? -- "Language speaks"

2012-01-04T03:49:00.000-05:00

1.

Dos-a-dos?

Or, vis-a-vis?

Je ne sais pas.

Et vous?

Parlons!

2.

Language speaks (in the original German Die Sprache spricht), is a famous saying by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger first formulated it in his 1950 lecture Language (Die Sprache),[1] and frequently repeated it in later works.[2]
Adorno expressed a related idea when he said that language "acquires a voice" and "speaks itself."[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_speaks

The Buddhas left their Sutras
Because people are hard to change
It's not just a matter of saintly or stupid
Each and every heart throws up its barricade
Each piles up his own mountain of karma
How could they guess that what they clasp so close
Is sorrow
Unwilling to ponder, as day and night
They do embrace the falsehood of the body

- Shih-te http://www.dailyzen.com/

Ponder well!

Name, please?

2012-01-03T07:10:00.000-05:00

Who can pronounce the name of one without name? Go ahead, open your mouth. Give vibration to air rising from diaphragm.
Then, round lips, furrow tongue, and pronounce the name of the unnamable.

What do you hear? What do you see?

No one has ever seen God.

Where have we been looking?

Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us,
by letting us be called God’s children;
and that is what we are.
Because the world refused to acknowledge him,
therefore it does not acknowledge us.
My dear people, we are already the children of God
but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed;
all we know is, that when it is revealed
we shall be like him
because we shall see him as he really is.
Surely everyone who entertains this hope
must purify himself, must try to be as pure as Christ.
(--from First reading, Tuesday, Feast of Holy Name, 1 John 2:29-3:6

The koan "Mu" invites us to undistinguish.

We've been very particular in our finicky looking, only glancing where paid informants point their fingers.

There's a simpler invitation. With the myth of virgin birth comes the myth of ever-present Christ. It is a pure myth, nothing added nothing taken away, always and everywhere, present; all ways and every gaze, presence.

You can't, ultimately, fault the paid informants their attempt to control sight. Everyone has a scheme to get some cash ahead of the creditors and their opulent craving for more and more wealth. The servants of fear and greed feel a mindless loyalty to their masters who, themselves, fear their masters -- and so on, and so on.

"Magis" (more) from "magister" (master or teacher). If a teacher thinks he has more to give students, he might be mistaken. Students have only to open as wide as sky and learn from what is there. A good guide for discovering what is there is a teacher with nothing to give, only to open hand, heart, and mind to allow what is ever-present to be itself experienced, felt, known, revered.

When this ground and grounding reality is revealed, what we call Christ will be newly seen without seeing, called without naming, lived without being contained.

...all we know is, that when it is revealed
we shall be like him
because we shall see him as he really is.

Be like him. Be like her. Be like it.

See what really is!

As you really are.

Name, please?

Yes it is: please!

And, think you!

Mostly, follows: thank you

So, what now?

2012-01-02T05:59:00.001-05:00

Light dawns. Candles are lit. Doggie diarrhea cleaned. Our new house-mate since his mistress' passing is at bottom of stairs looking soulful as I morning descend. The big guy's eyes show sorrow after distress. (Saskia's the best!)

“I started as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without having ceased to be a Christian?” (Raimon Panikkar)

Round and round we go. And where we think we should stop -- we should think again -- God knows.

Choose a place for meditation that is
Clean, quiet, and cool, a cave with a smooth
floor
Without stones and dust, protected against
Wind and rain and pleasing to the eye.

In deep meditation aspirants may
See forms like snow or smoke. They may feel
A strong wind blowing or a wave of heat.
They may see within them more and more
Light:
Fireflies, lightening, sun, or moon. These
are signs
That one is far on the path of Brahman.
(Meditation Experience in the Svetasvatara Upanishad)

And then:

May we hear only what is good for all.
May we see only what is good for all.
May we serve you, Lord of Love, all our life.
May we be used to spread your peace on earth.

OM Peace (Shanti) Peace (Shanti) Peace (Shanti) Peace (Shanti)
(Prayer from the Prashna Upanishad)

The traveler who travels with open hand, open mind, and open heart does not fear what is arrived at on the road. When fear does come, it is accepted as fear coming on the path. Seen, arrived at, accepted, and befriended, the journey continues -- richer with new and transforming companion.

“The Lord of Love willed: ‘Let me be many!’
And in the depths of his meditation
He created everything that exists.
Meditating, he entered into everything.
He who has no form assumed many forms;
He who is infinite appeared finite;
He who is everywhere assumed a place;
He who is all wisdom caused ignorance;
He who is real caused unreality.
It is he who has become everything.
It is he who gives reality to all.
Before the universe was created,
Brahman existed as Unmanifest.
Brahman brought the Lord out of himself;
Therefore he is called the Self-existent.”
“The Self is the source of abiding joy.
Our hearts are filled with joy in seeing him
Enshrined in the depths of our consciousness.
If he were not there, who would breathe, who live?
He it is who fills every heart with joy.
“Until we realize
The unity of life, we live in fear.
When one realizes the Self, in whom
All life is One, Changeless, Nameless,
Formless,
Then one fears no more.”
(Wisdom from the Taittiriya Upanishad on the One Who Became Many)
(--above from, The Upanishads, Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press)

"Day after day takes up the story." (-- from Morning Prayer, Monday)

Whenever I return home there are so many patches on my satchel telling where I've been and what is brought back.

Where' you been?

Watcha got with ya?

Hermit; with no exception.

2012-01-01T22:28:00.001-05:00

A hermit is one who is alone. Or, maybe, lives with the alone.

They are alone themselves. They are alone with others. When two hermits are near each other, they are alone together.

Someone, after rowing, introduced me as a hermit. To them this seemed erroneous because: a) I was not in seclusion; and b) because I was with someone.

They are, of course, correct. And I allow them their correct understanding.

Still, as a hermit, leaving someone alone in their percept and concept does not mean that my intercept and intracept -- wherein oneness with what is there dwells within the alone nature of reality -- is diminished or revoked.

The hermit seeks to be alone with the Alone as the earth seeks to be ground to soil.

We are all alone.

The hermit, with the assistance of prayer and meditation, knows this.

Without fear, being alone means hellos and goodbyes are sounds we make coming and going in and out of the illusion we've been somewhere else or are off elsewhere.

In truth, we're always here, with whatever or whomever is here, with no exception.

We're alone and it is, as they say, a new year.

'Happy' is a good word for it!

Looking beyond lines and conclusions; Hear and lavish every morning!

2012-01-01T05:46:00.000-05:00

On cushion at midnight gone in Merton Bookshed, ringing Tibetan cow bell and striking brass meditation bowl, from over hills repeated reports pulsing night sky, following silence, candle lit and wood joist glow, white dog backing onto folded legs, brown dog listening for approaching sounds, an invisible line is crossed.

A new year, new day, new beast in breast longing for itself in varied forms. Animate, anima, animal soul-forms reaching through walls and edges, looking beyond lines and conclusions, the calm procession stepping sacred pilgrimage hosting holy presence within and between and surrounding us, all things exchanging form and emptiness in ringing exaltating simplicity.

Morning Poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Back in Wohnkuche, toasting with Oakhurst Lowfat Eggnog, virgined, downing pills with each sip (an old monk's version of cocktail and hors d'oeuvres), then to bed dozing as chants by Krishna Das lull to sleep, we are happy to begin again.

The ways of proclaiming
The Mind all vary,
But the same heavenly truth
Can be seen
In each and every one.

- Ikkyu (1394-1481){Dailyzen}

The sentence recurs: There is nothing to lose.

We are a constant instance of being found.

Dare to be happy.

Dare prayer.

Hear and lavish every morning!

Begin again

2012-01-01T00:27:00.001-05:00

There's nothing to lose!

In self-effacement and anonymity.

2011-12-31T04:42:00.001-05:00

In the H'oponopono practice it is the expression of sorrow and love that reaches for mercy and forgiveness, saying, "I'm sorry," and, "I love you." It is mercy itself and forgiveness itself that you are serving for yourself and the other person.

No matter what.

In Tonglin practice the process of healing and transformation can be assisted with your breath by your allowing through you to the Buddha or Christ that which needs to be healed or transformed, allowing the return back through, the very healing and transforming grace.

In both practices, it is not you doing the forgiveness and love, healing and transformation -- you are only a conduit, a passageway to the source itself.

No matter what.

We are meant to be a passageway, and not in the way.

A Christian passage:

"Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done." (Luke 22:42)

A Buddhist passage:

"To follow the path of wisdom has never been more urgent or more difficult. Our society is dedicated almost entirely to the celebration of ego, with all its sad fantasies about success and power, and it celebrates those very forces of greed and ignorance that are destroying the planet. It has never been more difficult to hear the unflattering voice of the truth, and never more difficult, once having heard it, to follow it: because there is nothing in the world around us that supports our choice, and the entire society in which we live seems to negate every idea of sacredness or eternal meaning. So at the time of our most acute danger, when our very future is in doubt, we as human beings find ourselves at our most bewildered, and trapped in a nightmare of our own creation."
(from, Tibetan Book Of Living And Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche)

To a living way:

The following notations have been gleaned from the commentary of the translator, Raymond Blakney, in 1955 ...
The identity of China's mystics is complicated by the rule that no true mystic would know himself to be such.

"Where there is no author, however, it is necessary to invent one; and by the time the Tao Te Ching had been put in form, legend had supplied Lao Tzu, and Ssu-ma Ch'ien incorporated the legend in his Historical Records (Chap.63). It presents Lao Tzu correctly enough as one who had given up civilised and is impatient with Confucian ideas and who accordingly departs for points unknown, presumably to live out life as a recluse."

"Confucius came to Chou to consult old Lao Tzu about ritual." [and spoke of the heroes of old ...]

"Lao Tzu said,
All those men of whom you speak have long since mouldered away with their bones.
Only their words remain.
When a capable man's time comes, he rises; if it does not, then he wanders wearily around.
I have heard that good merchants keep their goods buried deeply to make it look as if they had none,
and that a superior man whose character is perfected will feign stupidity.
Give up, sir, your proud airs, your many wishes, mannersims and extravagant claims.
They won't do you any good, sir!
That's all I have to tell you."
"Confucius went off and said to his students: 'I know that birds can fly and fish can swim and beasts can run. Snares can be set for things that run, nets for those that swim and arrows for whatever flies. But dragons! I shall never know how they ride the wind and cloud up into the sky. Today I saw Lao Tzu. What a dragon!'"

"Lao Tzu practiced the Way and its Virtue. He learned to do his work in self-effacement and anonymity. For a long time he lived in Chou, and when he saw that it was breaking up, he left. At the frontier, the official Yin Hsi said: 'Since, sir, you are retiring, I urge you to write me a book."

"So Lao Tzu wrote a book in two parts, explaining the Way and its Virtue in something over five thousand words.
Then he went away.
No one knows where he died."

(from, The Way of Life - "Tao Te Ching" ...
The Mystic Wisdom of Ancient China, Translators Notes ... 1955)http://www.mountainman.com.au/taotrans.html

May no one know where we die!

And, not knowing, pray and practice for us a way of life: Way itself!

Thank you, old year!

Happy New Year!

Showing up where you are just this moment

2011-12-30T04:58:00.001-05:00

Be. Here. Now.

Three good words.

Presence. Place. Present.

We watched film About Richard Alpert (Ram Das), "Fierce Grace," and had circle discussion at Rockland Public Library Thursday evening after shortened conversation at hermitage on year-end Course in Miracles text.

Judy choose from Teacher's Manuel a text to end with, a prayer to take us out. (I cannot find it just now, but in searching, find this):

IS EACH ONE TO BE JUDGED IN THE END?

Indeed, yes! No one can escape God's Final Judgment. Who could flee forever from the truth? But the Final Judgment will not come until it is no longer associated with fear. One day each one will welcome it, and on that very day it will be given him. He will hear his sinlessness proclaimed around and around the world, setting it free as God's Final Judgment on him is received. This is the Judgment in which salvation lies. This is the Judgment that will set him free. This is the Judgment in which all things are freed with him. Time pauses as eternity comes near, and silence lies across the world that everyone may hear this Judgment of the Son of God:

Holy are you, eternal, free and whole, at peace

forever in the Heart of God. Where is the world,

and where is sorrow now?

Is this your judgment on yourself, teacher of God? Do you believe that this is wholly true? No; not yet, not yet. But this is still your goal; why you are here. It is your function to prepare yourself to hear this Judgment and to recognize that it is true. One instant of complete belief in this, and you will go beyond belief to Certainty. One instant out of time can bring time's end. Judge not, for you but judge yourself, and thus delay this Final Judgment. What is your judgment of the world, teacher of God? Have you yet learned to stand aside and hear the Voice of Judgment in yourself? Or do you still attempt to take His role from Him? Learn to be quiet, for His Voice is heard in stillness. And His Judgment comes to all who stand aside in quiet listening, and wait for Him.

You who are sometimes sad and sometimes angry; who sometimes feel your just due is not given you, and your best efforts meet with lack of appreciation and even contempt; give up these foolish thoughts! They are too small and meaningless to occupy your holy mind an instant longer. God's Judgment waits for you to set you free. What can the world hold out to you, regardless of your judgments on its gifts, that you would rather have? You will be judged, and judged in fairness and in honesty. There is no deceit in God. His promises are sure. Only remember that. His promises have guaranteed His Judgment, and His alone, will be accepted in the end. It is your function to make that end be soon. It is your function to hold it to your heart, and offer it to all the world to keep it safe.
(from, A Course in Miracles)
http://courseinmiracles.com/teachers_manual/is_each_one_to_be_judged15.htm

Never fond of traditional definition of the word 'judge' -- it appears to me this morning as the Japanese word 'mu-ge,' which translates as 'no-barrier.'

[2] Suzuki-roshi discusses ri and ji extensively in the Sandokai lectures: "When you practice zazen more, you can accept things as your own, whatever it is, you know. That is actually the teaching of, you know, famous teaching of Kegon-jiji-muge.[2] Jiji-muge means 'being has no,' you know, 'no barrier, no disturbance.' It-it, you know-interrelated closely. And it is difficult to say, 'This is bird, and this is me,' because it is interrelated very closely. So it is difficult to separate bluejay from me. That is jiji-muge." [From fourth Sandokai lecture, SR-70-06-03, p. 3.] (--from Suzuki Roshi Transcripts, San Francisco Zen Center) http://suzukiroshi.sfzc.org/archives/index.cgi/680112V.html?seemore=y

God's final judgment is no-barrier -- the revelation and realization of no-separation (presence), no-distance (place), no-time (present).

God's promises are sure: Be; Here; Now!

The barriers and beliefs constructed by the mind have fallen to earth where Christ is found in each grain of soil, each gain of soul, each refrain of the song of God.

I'd buy a ticket for this show! Except that -- it's free, it's me, it's thee!

Want to go for a ride?

WHEE!!!

What is to follow what?

2011-12-29T04:07:00.001-05:00

Working as surgeon with humanitarian hands, "Completely present with unclouded mind." That's what James Orbinski said he had to do as the killing took place around him -- about doctoring during the genocide in Rwanda in 2009 documentary film "Triage, Dr. James Orbinski's Humanitarian Dilemma."

Orbinski, former head of the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) was also there in Somalia, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sudan in humanitarian stark and terrible times when human cruelty and indifference was met with particular, specific, and concrete attentive response.

The tallest peaks
North of the district—
Cliffs so high
The road is lost in clouds.
At dawn,
I climb the tower for a look,
Gradually feeling
Their serene effect.
In smoke-blue haze,
Massed peaks
Appear as if joined.
When will I climb
And set foot there,
And gaze on all
Creation below?
- Chia Tao (779-843)

With a man like Orbinski there is only solid ground and real flesh. No gazing on what's below or lofty distance from which to pontificate or speculate. Science and service brook no metaphoric substitution. Horror and terror are real and awful weapons alongside machetes, Kalashnikovs, and withholding food.
Sharp desolation walks with dull consolation in the wrenching things his eyes have seen.

Never Forget!
by Saado Cabdi Amarre

If you're elected as an impartial judge
But you tend to stick close to your clan
Corruption will be rooted in your mind
If you sell property behind the owner's back
You'll find yourself playing a dangerous game
Deception and fraud are the enemies of justice
There's a clear line between them
If you shun responsibility and turn your back on the law
If justice is muddied then confusion will reign.

Hey you, Xaashi! Look at the children robbed clean of everything
Look at the pleas of those women the judge ignored
An astonishing arrogance that now goes unnoticed
A nation of evil-doers will never progress
When lawyers themselves corrupt the law
When people are bribed and imprisoned for nothing
Wrong-doing in this life will be paid for after death
Peace is impossible unless evil is confronted

It's irrelevant that this man comes from my neighbourhood
It doesn't matter to the case if you are close to him
The trial doesn't concern any of these issues
Hey you, judge, focus on the facts and on justice
You've got blood on your hands, you're tainted with deception
You hide poison at the bottom of the bowl
Here justice is as pointless as a poorly-tied camel-halter
Because all the judges are so easily bought
Those who can't bribe are forced to walk through a thorn thicket
My heart breaks at the suffering of so many people
It's an outrage if we can't bring justice into line
It's a disgrace if we don't all campaign for change

If the judge breaks the law and says robbery's legal
If the judge makes friends with greed and wealth
Never forget the true judgement of the grave!
Never forget there's a grave with your name on it!
Never forget hell and its punishments!
Never forget heaven and its blessings!
Never forget Allah records all your deeds!
Never forget the Day of Judgement!
Never forget that God is Chief Justice!
(The literal translation of this Somali poem was made by Maxamed Xasan 'Alto'
The final translated version of the poem is by Sarah Maguire)
http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/305/Never_Forget!

How we long for justice! How often is it's absence felt. Still, to go on, during no exterior verification of a fierce interior comprehension...

How puny I feel viewing these recent historical circumstances. Only a vague hope the feeling might turn into a sobering beginning from which to evolve.

This political and chaotic world needs sorting through with specific, detailed, particular, and felt acts of human decency so that insanity and inanity do not rot the roots of becoming human in the world.

"To See a World..."
(Fragments from "Auguries of Innocence")

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.

He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar.
The Beggar’s Dog and Widow’s Cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.
The Gnat that sings his Summer song
Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.
The poison of the Snake and Newt
Is the sweat of Envy’s Foot.

A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro’ the World we safely go.

Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.

(by William Blake, 1757-1827)

The task, as Dr. Orbinski points out, is to become completely present with unclouded mind for as long as we can to each person in whichever circumstance we arrive at.

Are we up to it? Am I? The onslaught of anti-humanitarian cynicism and profit-hungry rhetoric in the political theaters on this country's and world's stage alarms my naïveté. Christian charity and Buddhist compassion along with universal notions of justice and kindness might be inadequate antidote to greed, power, indifference, and smug elitism. What do you occupy to engender love in fearful places?

Somalia has been steadily worn down by decades of conflict and chaos, its cities in ruins and its people starving. Just this year, tens of thousands have died from famine, with countless others cut down in relentless combat. Now Somalis face yet another widespread terror: an alarming increase in rapes and sexual abuse of women and girls.

The Shabab militant group, which presents itself as a morally righteous rebel force and the defender of pure Islam, is seizing women and girls as spoils of war, gang-raping and abusing them as part of its reign of terror in southern Somalia, according to victims, aid workers and United Nations officials. Short of cash and losing ground, the militants are also forcing families to hand over girls for arranged marriages that often last no more than a few weeks and are essentially sexual slavery, a cheap way to bolster their ranks’ flagging morale.

But it is not just the Shabab. In the past few months, aid workers and victims say, there has been a free-for-all of armed men preying upon women and girls displaced by Somalia’s famine, who often trek hundreds of miles searching for food and end up in crowded, lawless refugee camps where Islamist militants, rogue militiamen and even government soldiers rape, rob and kill with impunity.

With the famine putting hundreds of thousands of women on the move — severing them from their traditional protection mechanism, the clan — aid workers say more Somali women are being raped right now than at any time in recent memory. In some areas, they say, women are being used as chits at roadblocks, surrendered to the gunmen staffing the barrier in the road so that a group of desperate refugees can pass.
(December 27, 2011, For Somali Women, Pain of Being a Spoil of War, By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, The New York Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/world/africa/somalia-faces-alarming-rise-in-rapes-of-women-and-girls.html?pagewanted=1

The dilemma is active hope in the midst of staggering numbness.

Even in my inadequacy and embarrassing smallness I affirm impossible human decency wherever enacted in the midst of frightening realization of what we are capable of -- what we must face in order to...in order to...what?

In order to...what?

This being the between we are

2011-12-28T02:36:00.001-05:00

As a Catholic Christian and a Zen Buddhist I find no difficulty. It's a non-difficult middlemost.

The continual exchange of center and circumference finds me in the middle of this dance of perception and actuality.

Difficulty arises when the thought arises that there is a decision to be made between two options. When you reside in the between there is no decision. What is there is what is there. One? Other? Not two things: just one-an-other. Which is another way of saying there is no other, only this, where you are/who you are.

I'm never not who and where I have been. I will always be where and who I am.

What is there to be cut away with the blade of decision? What 'two' is perceived as needing excision and extrication in or from our mind?

To dwell in the middle of the world, of existence, of my life, is to dwell in the middle of the question: Which would you prefer to cut away -- your inhaling or your exhaling?

There is no decision required. I stand between the options and, for now, right here, practice both inhaling and exhaling -- with great delight and happy realization of the gift.

I practice accepting simplicity, anonymous service, accommodating silence. (asasas)

In its most non-dualistic form, existential freedom comes only from realization of the "true man":
"If you want to freely live or die, go or stay, to take off or put on [your clothes], then right now recognize the man who is listening to my discourse. He is without form, without characteristics, without root, without source, and without any dwelling place, yet is brisk and lively." (Discourse XIV)
Freedom arises when we recognize who we really are -- and in our normal way of being, it is shattered when we think, speak, and act from habitual identification with body/mind phenomena. The process of such identification, this "thirst for becoming" (a deeply insightful teaching of the Buddha himself), is manifest in the endless stream of our personal tendencies, divided neatly by Buddhists into the triad of desire, aggression, and ignorance. When we realize ourselves to actually be this free inner agent, then we become that freedom itself.

In the chronicle of Lin-chi's rugged teaching, we see a beautiful example of action without hesitation. His wild ways -- shouting, beating, knocking over tables, and so on — is but skillful means in accordance with clarity, without fixed root. The true man, ever and always, is free and unperturbed. In Discourse XVIII, we hear a teaching which sounds curiously like the Chinese Taoist, Chuang Tzu:
"Only you, the follower of the Way right now before my eyes listening to my discourse, [only you] enter fire and are not burned, enter water and are not drowned, enter the three hells as though strolling in a pleasure gardens, enter the realms of the hungry ghosts and the beasts without suffering their fate. How can this be? There are no dharmas [genuine objective phenomena] to be disliked."
(from, "Lin-chi and the True Man without Rank"
by Scott Mandelker, Ph.D. http://www.buddhanet.net/lin-chi.htm

This time of year I note Jesus, Stephen, John, the Holy Innocents, Mary, Joseph, Angels, Animals, Francis, Story, Imagination, Hopes, Longings, Christ-Mind, and New Beginnings.

I also note Siddhartha, Tathagata, Kuan Yin, Dogen, Bodhidharma, Lin-chi, Layman Pang, Bankai, Ryokan, Meditation Bell, Zafu, Only-Don't-Know, InterBeing, Buddha-Mind, and Incense.

Mostly, I note that everywhere I look, in whatever direction gaze falls, the middle of everything seems to surround and sustain the no-effort no-choice no-other... presence of perfection which is what is. This 'what is' (as you know) has been known by and called by different names. You'll be able to recollect the name or names most familiar to you. For me, these days, like in Faust, I have no names, for: “Names are but noise and smoke, obscuring heavenly light.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

We have poets. We are fortunate. Even in their attempts to convey a point of view they are blessedly circumflex.

13. Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; 5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10
Praise him.

(Poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844–89. Poems. 1918)

This dappling stippling adazzling -- this being the between we are -- with asasas gratefulness!

Wind blows, water flows, nobody knows.

Say it: Ain't life grand?!

Where no-one-else is

2011-12-27T01:43:00.001-05:00

It's not so bad being alone.

The poem/video starts off with: "If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you've not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren't okay with it, then just wait. You'll find it's fine to be alone once you're embracing it."

Later:

Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after awhile nobody is dating them.

But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.

You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.

But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts an essence of them maybe lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those “sappy slogans” from pre-school over to high school groaning, were tokens for holding the lonely at bay.

Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.

It’s okay if no one believes like you, all experiences unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be relived, keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, and the community is not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.

Take silence and respect it.

If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it, if your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.

You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.

If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.

There is heat in freezing, be a testament.
(-- from poem by Tanya Davis – "How To Be Alone"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Being alone could even be when no one else is there.

Consider being no one else.

Be there where no-one-else is.

A work of art. Happily so.

2011-12-26T20:01:00.001-05:00

The world disappears. Only sounds remain of a world evanescing. No need to remember it or wish it return. Only attend the sound of what is worlding said. Of that sound, heard through silence, comes to be what we need to see.

The Grace of Night Solitude

2011-12-26T04:59:00.001-05:00

George the Golden sleeps in mud room. Mice forage in cabinets. Saskia visits family with our two dogs. I stay on futon alongside mudroom to keep George company. He complains. I tell him if he hadn't immediately peed on rug when his caretaker brought him in during the pipes-bursting emergency on Christmas night, maybe he'd be on this side of the glass door instead of on the many tiered bedding cushion and towels beside winter boots. He's content to watch the firestove orange flames and feel the up swoop ceiling fan drop warmth over partition to foyer flophouse in strange residence until morning.

I've had more luck than Han-Shan:

Late at night I sit alone
And work on deadwood zen
I stir the lifeless ashes
The fire won't relight
Suddenly I hear the tower
Chimes resound.
Its sound of clarity
Fills the winter sky.
- Han-shan Te-ch'ing (1546-1623)

We walk out to soft snow at 3:00am and feel the grace of night solitude, me in red shorts and Baffin boots and down vest, George in happy 5 inch snow peeing freely under white lighted wreath behind block and tackle hanging from bookshed ridge pole.

I bow to snow blanketed Christmas Buddha and Celtic Cross stalwart in new-found alliance in welcoming view to drop-by friends.

Surrounded by medical faces last week their greatest interest (aside from physical hearts) was the monastic hermit vocation in response to their questions wanting to know 'What do you do?' (as in: what does your heart do with it's erratic and restricted beats?

A seminar on surgical asymptomatic symbolism right there and then which was, at the time, here and now.

Life is life, all of it -- no choosing between this and that; mere acceptance of this and that and life in the between.

Still, we muse:

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
(Poem, "When You Are Old" is reprinted from The Rose. W.B. Yeats. 1893.)

Fondly so, for we are a frail and fragile recollecting family making way day by day.

Venite adoremus

2011-12-25T23:21:00.001-05:00

Jesus, like Buddha before him, longed for us to transcend greed, anger, and ignorance. He wished to reintroduce generosity, compassion, and wisdom.

We live and die between this and that.

As visitors here and there let's opt for genuine peace, presence, and everyday kindness.

When ice on the pond is three feet thick
And white snow stretches a thousand miles,
My heart will still be like the pine and cypress,
But your heart, what will it be?
- Ziye (265-420)

Snow settles quietly on bronze Celtic cross and stone Buddha at outside corner of bookshed/retreat.

...pro nobis

2011-12-25T16:05:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas!

Note: There will be no Sunday Evening Practice on Christmas Day.

Christus Natus Est...

2011-12-25T02:20:00.001-05:00

Nothing is without God

Word is, nor are we

Without God, that is --

Nor is nothing not

Within silence, everything is

Itself.

Coming to: ad venire; 28

2011-12-24T05:40:00.001-05:00

Four men stacked the remainder of three cord of green wood I'd left under tarp where dropped the days surrounding Saskia's mother's passing transition here at the hermitage.

While they worked I was on a table watching someone's heart on large simulcast being explored one day then excavated the next by wires and cameras and balloons and meshy hold-em-opens.

God is good. People, all of us, are good. I gratefully acknowledge this and celebrate it.

I especially bow in gratitude to all the men and women extending acuity, skill, kindness, and care to those of us placed in their hands.

With love!

2011-12-23T23:08:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you do come back.

U.S. Life Saving Service Station History
The Surfman Motto:
"You have to go out,
but you do not have to come back!"

A letter to the editor of the old Coast Guard Magazine written by CBM Clarence P. Brady, USCG (Ret.) which was published in the March 1954 (page 2) issue, states that the first person to make this remark was Patrick Etheridge. Brady knew him when both were stationed at the Cape Hatteras LSS. Brady tells the story as follows:

"A ship was stranded off Cape Hatteras on the Diamond Shoals and one of the life saving crew reported the fact that this ship had run ashore on the dangerous shoals. The old skipper gave the command to man the lifeboat and one of the men shouted out that we might make it out to the wreck but we would never make it back. The old skipper looked around and said, 'The Blue Book says we've got to go out and it doesn't say a damn thing about having to come back.'"

Etheridge was not exaggerating. The Regulations of the Life-Saving Service of 1899, Article VI "Action at Wrecks," section 252, page 58, state that:

"In attempting a rescue the keeper will select either the boat, breeches buoy, or life car, as in his judgement is best suited to effectively cope with the existing conditions. If the device first selected fails after such trial as satisfies him that no further attempt with it is feasible, he will resort to one of the others, and if that fails, then to the remaining one, and he will not desist from his efforts until by actual trial the impossibility of effecting a rescue is demonstrated. The statement of the keeper that he did not try to use the boat because the sea or surf was too heavy will not be accepted unless attempts to launch it were actually made and failed, or unless the conformation of the coast--as bluffs, precipitous banks, etc.--is such as to unquestionable preclude the use of a boat."

This section of the Regulations remained in force after the creation of the Coast Guard in 1915. The new Instructions for United States Coast Guard Stations, 1934 edition, copied Section 252 word for word as it appeared in 1899. [1934 Instructions for United States Coast Guard Stations, Paragraph 28, page 4].

source: U.S. Coast Guard http://www.lifesavingservice.org/motto.html

Include gratitude, to each and all, for safe return.

I do.

Coming to: ad venire; 27

2011-12-23T04:34:00.001-05:00

Saskia brought flowers.

I don't crave fame and profit or care that I'm poor;
Hiding in the depths of the mountains
I keep far away the world's dust;
The year has waned and the skies are cold:
Who'd be my companion?
The plum blossoms are adorned in moonlight
One branch-new.
- Jakushitsu Genko (1290-1367)

Three of them. They are silhouetted in vase against 9th floor windows looking out to Fore River through veil of falling snow illuminated with city lights during a quiet stretch of hospital night.

Open my lips, Lord,
and my mouth will proclaim your praise;
for you do not delight in sacrifices:
if I offered you a burnt offering, it would not please you.
The true sacrifice is a broken spirit:
a contrite and humble heart, O God, you will not refuse.
(from Psalm 51, Morning Prayer)

Prayer, I submit, is communion of thought and feeling intended toward someone's or something's healing recovery and healthy wholeness. Prayer penetrates and integrates where it visits, whether in this seeming existence or beyond into seamless inclusive presence of longing itself.

I am grateful for the kind thoughtful feeling prayer arriving here from other heres beyond this specific one.

Where, I occlude, and happily conclude, all is well.

Coming to: ad venire; 26

2011-12-22T04:58:00.001-05:00

Time to change heart.

"My heart exults in the Lord." (1 Samuel 2)

Leap out, leap up, Skip beat, block passage. Get fixed, watch breath. Carefully.

This is today.

As is that which we call "Lord."

Right now he's snoring in next bed behind curtain.

As is Portland beyond window shade.

As am I before forgetting interdependent interrelational interbeing.

Change heart, see things through, with love.

Welcome, winter, returning light!

Coming to: ad venire; 25

2011-12-21T06:12:00.000-05:00

Maybe this is as far as I go.

Under evergreens
I walk along a pathway
Now gone to sight
Beneath autumn leaves strewn there
By winter's mountain winds.
- Tonna (1289-1372)

I step out onto bulkhead deck as night and pre-dawn discuss their border edges before turning to their ritual exchange. I look up at stars. So many so far so beyond what can be entirely seen. It is hard to see beyond the edges of things, places, or persons. Still, we are called, to do, this.

The edge of everything is the startling invitation to consider going beyond what 'ego' sees to the completely beyond realization of what-is-awake within the one seeing itself.

Maybe 'I' stops at the edge of 'this' and cannot go further.

Maybe this is as far as 'I' goes.

As 'I' momentarily surrenders its passport and dissolves suddenly into surrounding landscape, there remains only 'this' only 'here' only 'now.'

Maybe this is as far as I go.

Ask: What's there to do?

Ha! Celebrate! Rejoice! Laugh and cry! Enter awakening realization!

Say: That's a good one!

Ask each other: Where've you been?

Yeah, yep, and yes...

Now here this...

2011-12-20T21:59:00.001-05:00

Love is useful.

Does it matter if it emanates from the idea of christian thinking (divinity incarnating as love-with-us) or buddhist thinking (fully compassionate heart/mind realizing true nature)?

Use it.

Just be grateful.

And use love to be of service.

Coming to: ad venire; 24

2011-12-20T06:20:00.001-05:00

I update WiserEarth profile. Most times the response to 'who am I?' is 'dunno!' -- but once in a while a longer meditation is required. Here's this morning's:

At meetingbrook hermitage we practice between traditions.
We attend to and cultivate three particular promises: contemplation, conversation, and correspondence.
The hermitage silent sittings, respite retreats, formal and informal conversations invite practicing deep listening and loving speech.
Our need for honest inquiry into true nature -- relational resonance with earth, cosmos, other people, all beings, and the holy sacred unknown some call god some call reality some call wholeness -- brings us to prison, correctional center, nursing home, hospice space, college classroom, quiet conversation, and simply being-with others in everydayness.
We call ourselves m.o.n.o. (monastics of no other) -- a literation where 'one' and 'my' and 'mu' dance and play with each another as might kitten or koan seeing itself in a mirror.
We are grateful for the gift of being here, alone with others, in the surround of thoughtful, creative, and compassionate community.
Our activism is being-here and responding to what-is presenting itself.

2011-12-19T15:53:00.001-05:00

It is quiet around the hermitage
As
Daylight seeps into earth

Coming to: ad venire; 23

2011-12-19T04:45:00.001-05:00

Language belongs to the earth. The earth speaks through you and me. Word and words.

Listening is the primary gift. Given and received.

We've been overlooking the obvious.

Advent is the coming to be of word and words through all that is, revealing and concealing, engaging creative experience of breathing intercourse birthing inimitable now with ineluctable here, a marriage replete with distinctive union, pregnant promise, pastoral sacredness -- all that we thought was somewhere else someone other sometime distant -- rather, in this place with this one in this instant a felt, proximate, living, and loving presence with your name my face your eyes my feet your seeing my finding your breathing my hearing your touching my tasting your fragrance as we are as it is as will be...

When we, as we, come to...

The sound of...

The sight of...

The feel of...

What is...

Coming to...

Us

Coming to: ad venire: 22

2011-12-18T06:35:00.000-05:00

Sunday Morning Recollection of Sorrow in Three Parts

Preface:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
(--Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

1.

Death
Grinned horrible a ghastly smile, to hear
His famine should be filled.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
(bk. II, l. 845)

Last Convoy of American Troops Leaves Iraq, Marking an End to the War
By TIM ARANGO and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — The last convoy of American troops to leave Iraq drove into Kuwait on Sunday morning, marking the end of the nearly nine-year war.

The convoy’s departure, which included about 110 vehicles and 500 soldiers, came three days after the American military folded its flag in a muted ceremony here to celebrate the end of its mission.

In darkness, the convoy snaked out of Contingency Operating Base Adder, near the southern city of Nasiriyah, around 2:30 a.m., and headed toward the border. The departure appeared to be the final moment of a drawn-out withdrawal that included weeks of ceremonies in Baghdad and around Iraq, and included visits by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, as well as a trip to Washington by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.

As dawn approached on Sunday morning, the last trucks began to cross over the border into Kuwait at an outpost lit by floodlights and secured by barbed wire.
...
For security reasons, the last soldiers made no time for goodbyes to Iraqis with whom they had become acquainted. To keep details of the final trip secret from insurgents, interpreters for the last unit to leave the base called local tribal sheiks and government leaders on Saturday morning and conveyed that business would go on as usual, not letting on that all the Americans would soon be gone.

Many troops wondered how the Iraqis, whom they had worked closely with and trained over the past year, would react when they awoke on Sunday to find that the remaining American troops on the base had left without saying anything.
(--from New York Times, 18Dec2011)

Hail, Coffee !

COFFEE affords a good restoring draft,
Which clears the fumes of wine too freely quaffed.
By her you gain, when you the table quit,
A calm more courteous, and a brighter wit;
And soon recovered, by her powerful aid,
You are not of a second feast afraid.
She by the god of verse is praised and loved;
The poet’s genius is by her improved.
Your frigid rimers, if at times inspired,
Write their best lines by coffee’s fragrance fired.
She can enliven philosophic plan,
And make an analyst a pleasant man.
Statesmen, through her, well feasted and content,
Form happy schemes of better government.
Knowledge sometimes to journalists she brings
Of court intrigues, and deep designs of kings.
Peace, truces, wars, she to his dreams can show,
And lets him, for three pence, the world o’erthrow.

(Poem by Jacques Delille, 1738-1813; From The World’s Wit and Humor, Volume X, French — Rutebœuf to Balzac; The Review of Reviews Company; New York; 1906; p. 237.)

Postscript:

There are some events in the world about which to add further personal words merely darkens, deepens, and disorients sorrow.

Coming to: ad venire; 21

2011-12-17T03:10:00.001-05:00

Three in the morning. Still. Here.

Your hidden hut is a solitary cloud
Upon the clear deep waters of a pool.
The pines about it are dewed
With the distant moon,
A glow of liquid light to be my friend.
I pass the night in the shadow of flowers,
Where garden herbs enrich
The patterns of moss.
I too would leave the world
And fly to the western mountains
With the phoenix and crane.
- Ch'ang Chien

Snow is being made at neighboring Snow Bowl through the night. Cold enough. Odds are it will actually snow naturally some day, ground hardening, our extended mud December anomaly bound to cease.

Friday Evening Conversation we watch short videos of David Abram speaking about voices of nature that we have been ignoring. How alphabet makes it possible for us to think human meaning is the only true type. That we've turned our back on conversations with tree and shrub, granite and stone, water and feathered family. Which cuts us off. Makes of each an object. Lonely. Incommunicant.

Here and Now
for Barbara

There are words
I've had to save myself from,
like My Lord and Blessed Mother,
words I said and never meant,
though I admit a part of me misses
the ornamental stateliness
of High Mass, that smell

of incense. Heaven did exist,
I discovered, but was reciprocal
and momentary, like lust
felt at exactly the same time—
two mortals, say, on a resilient bed,
making a small case for themselves.

You and I became the words
I'd say before I'd lay me down to sleep,
and again when I'd wake—wishful
words, no belief in them yet.
It seemed you'd been put on earth
to distract me
from what was doctrinal and dry.
Electricity may start things,
but if they're to last
I've come to understand
a steady, low-voltage hum

of affection
must be arrived at. How else to offset
the occasional slide
into neglect and ill temper?
I learned, in time, to let heaven
go its mythy way, to never again

be a supplicant
of any single idea. For you and me
it's here and now from here on in.
Nothing can save us, nor do we wish
to be saved.

Let night come
with its austere grandeur,
ancient superstitions and fears.
It can do us no harm.
We'll put some music on,
open the curtains, let things darken
as they will.
(Poem by by Stephen Dunn)

In prison yesterday an elderly Buddhist, a middle aged street blackjack afficianado, and a one-week-in new and shell-shocked inmate arrival each seemed to express a reluctance for traditional explanations of 'sin' and 'salvation.' It gathered our attention when one said he preferred personal responsibility, in and out, rather than a deus-ex-machina explanation.

Lesson 351

My sinless brother is my guide to peace
My sinful brother is my guide to pain
And which I choose to see I will behold

Who is my brother but Your holy Son? And if I see him sinful I proclaim myself a sinner, not a Son of God; alone and friendless in a fearful world Yet this perception is a choice I make, and can relinquish. I can also see my brother sinless, as Your holy Son. And with this choice I see my sinlessness, my everlasting Comforter and Friend beside me, and my way secure and clear. Choose, then, for me, my Father, through Your Voice. For He alone gives judgment in Your Name.
(from A Course in Miracles)

There we were.

Here we are.

A new appreciation of wording-with one-another.

Curtains no longer keeping in or keeping out.

Our quiet conversation with the night.

Coming to: ad venire; 20

2011-12-16T03:28:00.001-05:00

Even cranky intelligent curmudgeons have to let go. Engaging and enraging, Christopher Hitchens gave his view of politics and personalities with all stops open.

Christopher Hitchens died Thursday of esophageal cancer. He was, in the words of the Washington Post, “master of the contrarian essay” and, as his home publication Vanity Fair describes him, “a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker.” (from Truthdig, 16Dec2011)

I'd rather read raw and insightful than hedging and calculating. (While that sentence is spurious and obsequious, it reflects a delight for emperors' tailors willing to expose indelicate truth.)

Time is to be valued! You just try to learn Zen or Tao on the surface as something outside yourself, learning to recognize terms and slogans, seeking "buddhahood," seeking "mastery," seeking "teachers," considering them conceptually. Make no mistake about it -- you have but one mother and father, so what more are you seeking? Turn your attention back upon yourself and observe.
- Lin Chi (d 867)

Healing and wholeness are the tasks of human life. Broken truth longs to be put back together again even though it is the longing more likely to continue rather than impossible repair. One comes to live in the debris more accepting of chipped and fractured objects of affection.

Reading Isaiah 33:7-24 ©
Look, Ariel is lamenting in the streets,
the ambassadors of peace weep bitterly.
The highways are deserted,
no travellers use the roads.
Treaties are broken, witnesses despised,
there is respect for no one.
The land mourns, it pines away,
Lebanon is withered with shame,
Sharon is a desert,
Bashan and Carmel are stripped bare.
‘Now I stand up,’ says the Lord
‘now I rise to my full height.
You have conceived chaff, you will give birth to straw,
my breath shall devour you like fire...'
(from Office of Readings)

It occurs to me that a sentence coming to mind is worth contemplation: "There is no God like our God."

Rather than a triumphalist creed or screed or Hadith it seems the sentence contains its opposite -- There is no God like our God. There is only what-is-called-God. Not 'my' or 'our' or 'the' or any variant of seeming possessive certainty.

What 'God' there is is beyond our telling. So, we approximate. We emerge as approximating theists. Which is fine. Only, less annoying than convinced locators, smug creedalists, or court savants.

And because Love battles

And because love battles
not only in its burning agricultures
but also in the mouth of men and women,
I will finish off by taking the path away
to those who between my chest and your fragrance
want to interpose their obscure plant.

About me, nothing worse
they will tell you, my love,
than what I told you.

I lived in the prairies
before I got to know you
and I did not wait love but I was
laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.

What more can they tell you?
I am neither good nor bad but a man,
and they will then associate the danger
of my life, which you know
and which with your passion you shared.

And good, this danger
is danger of love, of complete love
for all life,
for all lives,
and if this love brings us
the death and the prisons,
I am sure that your big eyes,
as when I kiss them,
will then close with pride,
into double pride, love,
with your pride and my pride.

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: “The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera”.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.

To bread I do not ask to teach me
but only not to lack during every day of life.
I don’t know anything about light, from where
it comes nor where it goes,
I only want the light to light up,
I do not ask to the night
explanations,
I wait for it and it envelops me,
And so you, bread and light
And shadow are.

You came to my life
with what you were bringing,
made
of light and bread and shadow I expected you,
and Like this I need you,
Like this I love you,
and to those who want to hear tomorrow
that which I will not tell them, let them read it here,
and let them back off today because it is early
for these arguments.

Tomorrow we will only give them
a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
which will fall on the earth
like if it had been made by our lips
like a kiss which falls
from our invincible heights
to show the fire and the tenderness
of a true love.

(Poem by Pablo Neruda)

We are like this. God is like this. Truth is just like this.

So, I sit with the koan: What is this?

Even as night watches and wonders in monastic nescience.

Coming to: ad venire; 19

2011-12-15T04:58:00.001-05:00

When is an inch on a yardstick not an inch?

It's a good koan. Compliments of Willow.

The mountain's head is white
And mine is too
December dies, the year
Runs out its string as all things do
- Yuan Mei (1716-1798)

Half December.

Is there a death that can be called half-death?

I arrive in silence to this meditation place. Dog sleeps on white couch. Nothing moves. Letters appear. Thinking gives way to gaze.

One student, Zach, at last night's final class held at hermitage, wondered what the man would do who'd escaped the shadowy darkness of the Plato's Cave analogy rather than try to convince those still blinded to real light that there was more than they'd accepted in their darkness.

Robert Lowell's line came to mind: "All's misalliance. / Yet why not say what happened?" ((From poem, "Epilogue.")

Just saying.

No need to hammer and nail, measure or cut, design or build.

Only say what happened with no craving for anything other than the saying.

Here's how Lowell surrounds that line:

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(Poem, Epilogue, by Robert Lowell)

Give a poet an inch, he'll imagine us a new way to see the world.

And all views from our yard!

Coming to: ad venire; 18

2011-12-14T05:58:00.001-05:00

Different. Everything feels different. "Differre," (Latin), to carry away. Something about mortality.

On a more intimate note, he recalls interactions with his teacher, the late Seung Sahn (known to his students as Soen Sa Nim), with obvious admiration and a discernible sense of the teacher’s presence. Our discussion of Buddhism and not-Buddhism reminds him of his teacher pushing him into being a teacher. “I said to him,” he recalls, “‘Soen Sa Nim, I’m here to learn how to practice from you. I’m not interested in being a teacher; I want to be the student.’ And he said ‘If you are my student, then this is how you will learn to be a student, as you teach.’ And I said, ‘But I don’t know anything. I don’t know what to do. I wouldn’t know what to talk about.’ And he said, ‘Aawwwwww,’ as if he really deeply understood what my issue was, ‘no problem, you only talk about area you understand. Don’t talk about area you don’t understand.’” (- about Jon Kabat Zinn)
http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1296&Itemid=0

The Buddha said: "For one who takes nothing whatsoever as I or me or mine, such a one is free from the snares of the king of death."

Now, there's a practice!

That's what we heard at practice last evening.

Even the man knocked down and out by his cow in Antigonish Nova Scotia was there to hear those words. Back from subdural hematoma and months of mindful breathing in and out of consciousness.

Welcome, again, to Meetingbrook, David!

For both the words and the 87 year old's return to visit, we are grateful!

Coming to: ad venire; 17

2011-12-13T08:26:00.001-05:00

Lucy, Lucia, light through blindness. Quite a metaphor!

AH, RIDI DOTTORE

Everything
Begins
To fail

It's what
Beginnings
Do

Now, endings
Are
Different

Take Pagliacci

When
"La commedia
è finita!"

All we can
Do is
Go home

(wfh/13dec11)

A Tibetan teacher is giving opening remarks at a retreat and a snippet of the video catches my attention. He says that we are here, "taking time out of our lives..." -- and that's all I need to hear. Is that what we are being called to do? Take 'time' out of our life? Is that what 'home' is? Is home timelessness, dwelling in the eternal and infinite now, with nothing, nowhere else, and fully within the realization of What-Is-Wholly-Itself?

And this, right in the middle of what we call 'world?' In the midst of everything that presents itself? Seeing light through and beyond forms?

If you tell me it is all a story, a metaphor, that we are in a mind weaving endless tales of subterfuge and irony, deceit and heartbreak, all for the dramaturgy of divine realization, apogee and denouement revealing what our eyes, fraught with facts and fantasies, cannot penetrate; we are stunned by all final scenes pointing out paradoxical obverse, that we are of a piece with what has never broken off, with the Holy Itself, God, Father/Mother, Being, Truth, Love -- and have never, really, been anywhere else -- then I will have to continue looking at you, long and full of frowning wonder, while around us stage is struck, costumes folded, solitary lamp stand placed at empty center of proscenium where vacant seats rise to open doors and out into what Lucia sees.

But that is to come.

As we.

Come to.

This.

Lesson 347

Anger must come from judgment. Judgment is
The weapon I would use against myself,
To keep the miracle away from me.

Father[/Mother], I want what goes against my will, and do not want what is my will to have. Straighten my mind, my [Mother/]Father. It is sick. But You have offered freedom, and I choose to claim Your gift today. And so I give all judgment to the One You gave to me to judge for me. He sees what I behold, and yet He knows the truth. He looks on pain, and yet He understands it is not real, and in His understanding it is healed. He gives the miracles my dreams would hide from my awareness. Let Him judge today. I do not know my will, but He is sure it is Your Own. And He will speak for me, and call Your miracles to come to me.
Listen today. Be very still, and hear the gentle Voice for God assuring you that He has judged you as the Son[/Daughter] He loves.

I am listening.

Still.

Coming to: ad venire; 16

2011-12-12T03:24:00.001-05:00

Francis Poulenc Gloria performed by Down East Singers at Camden Opera House yesterday afternoon. I choose it over philosophy lecture at library. Anthony Antolini conducts, Soprano Christina Astrachan solos, and instrumentalist group, Ti' Acadie added vim and vigor. Soloist drew us into realization of text. I translate: "as sin is taken away, we are none other than mercy itself," or:

(miserere nobis; qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostram. Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis.
Have mercy on us; You who take away the sins of the world, hear our prayers. Who sits at the right hand of the Father, have mercy upon us.)

None, other than? Or, none other than? Mercy itself awaits simultaneous translation.

Something about being drawn in, "being" drawn in, brings tears through music. This balcony of eremitic gratitude!

Where He Found Himself

The new man unfolded a map and pointed
to a dark spot on it. “See, that’s how
far away I feel all the time, right here,
among all of you,” he said.
.         .”Yes,” John the gentle mule replied,
“alienation is clearly your happiness.”
But the group leader interrupted,
“Now, now, let’s hear him out,
let’s try to be fair.” The new man felt
the familiar comfort of everyone against him.
.                                   .He went on about the stupidities
of love, life itself as one long foreclosure,
until another man said, “I was a hog,
a terrible hog, and now I’m a llama.”
To which another added, “And me, I was a wolf.
Now children walk up to me, unafraid.”
.             .The group leader asked the new man,
“What kind of animal have you been?”
“A rat that wants to remain a rat,” he said,
and the group began to soften
as they remembered their own early days,
the pain before the transformation.

(Poem by Stephen Dunn)

It is 3AM. New intimate deck outside dining room slider is awash in moonlight. I step out barefoot to stand under the surrounding sanctuary of star and planet, empty space and unseen truth -- invitatory of cosmos chanting creation, transcendence transforming prayer into silent interiority, a suffusing simplicity.

At performance end Sunday afternoon Saskia steps into reception room as I walk to harbor to check dark brown linseed/pinetar'd Matinicus Peapod nestled between Manning's dark green dory and Lewis' dark blue sailing pod. Calmly tethered to floats where "Prophet" is at rest alongside three lobster boats inboard of shrinkwrapped schooners down from Landing. A glorious December twilight, lighted fir tree atop "Mary Day" mainmast, lighted star tops turret on Mount Battie up and away. French and Latin lyrics from concert as well as Acadian rhythms are settling into low tide sway of float where I balance softening to the passing flow...

Q: What kind of person is a Ch'an master?

Tao-shin replied: Someone who is not disturbed either by chaos or serenity is a person with the know how of good Ch'an practice. When one always dwells in tranquility, the mind perishes. But if you are always in a state of discernment, then the mind scatters chaotically. The Lotus Sutra says: "The Buddha himself dwells in the Great Vehicle. The power of meditation and of wisdom gives remarkable splendour to the dharmas which he has acquired. These he uses to save all beings."
- Tao-shin (580-651)

I don't mind forgetting. More and more disappears. Only what is right in front of me makes any sense. (And not much at that!)
For this I am grateful. It seems a new template arises subsuming everything 'else' into it. I do not know how this is done. I've lost whatever itinerary I thought I had. I'm just a tourist. Sightseer. Looking around.

Lesson 346

Today the peace of God envelops me,
And I forget all things except His Love
Father, I wake today with miracles correcting my perception of all things. And so begins the day I share with You as I will share eternity, for time has stepped aside today. I do not seek the things of time, and so I will not look upon them. What I seek today transcends all laws of time and things perceived in time. I would forget all things except Your Love. I would abide in You, and know no laws except Your law of love. And I would find the peace which You created for Your Son, forgetting all the foolish toys I made as I behold Your glory and my own.
And when the evening comes today, we will remember nothing but the peace of God. For we will learn today what peace is ours, when we forget all things except God's Love.
(ACIM)

It is like a new map unfolding a man.

There is no destination.

Nor any distance between here and here.

Coming to: ad venire; 15

2011-12-11T13:01:00.001-05:00

I've been watching Bald Mountain much of the morning.

It remains as it is.

Goes nowhere.

CHICKADEE

I am so
Glad

I am not
Something else

For this instance...
A poem
(-wfh)

There it is.

All.

By itself!

Coming to: ad venire;14

2011-12-10T23:12:00.001-05:00

We renew promises this feast of Thomas Merton at morning practice in the Thomas Merton Bookshed Retreat.

Another contrast with Augustine is his sense of humour. No-one can be all bad who says of Michelangelo’s Moses that “I’m glad the thing couldn’t speak, for it would probably have given out some very heavy statements”; or of Platonic philosophy that “there is a considerable difference between Plato and Plotinus, but I am not enough of a philosopher to know what it is. Thank God I shall never again have to try and find out, either.” Even when he performs some meritorious action, he scrupulously points out his mixed motives. Here he is on the way to hospital to be treated for appendicitis:
  ‘In the Fourteenth Street subway there was a drunk. And he was really drunk. He was lying prostrate in the middle of the turnstiles, in everybody’s way. Several people pushed him and told him to get up and get out of there, but he could not even get himself up on his feet.
  ‘I thought to myself: “If I try to lift him out of there, my appendix will burst, and I too will be lying there in the turnstiles along with him.” With my nervousness tempered by a nice warm feeling of smugness and self-complacency, I took the drunk by the shoulders and laboriously hauled him backwards out of the turnstiles and propped him up against the wall. He groaned feebly in protest.
  ‘Then, mentally congratulating myself for my great solicitude and charity towards drunks, I entered the turnstile and went down to take the train to the hospital. As I looked back, over my shoulder, from the bottom of the stairs, I could see the drunk slowly and painfully crawling back towards the turnstile, where he once again flung himself down, prostrate, across the opening, and blocked the passage as he had done before.’
  Thus he skillfully deflates the whole drama and convinces the reader that the act was at once infinitely unimportant and infinitely worth doing. This is, of course, true of everything we do; but the truth is easier to assimilate when you see it in action. http://www.universalis.com/-500/today.htm

Back in Wohnkuche we retell stories about our foolishness over the years -- the farms and properties we thought might be meetingbrook, the visit to the Bishop we thought might be a new form of religious life, the pleasant fiasco of meetingbrook in the marketplace we thought would keep us solvent. Mostly we reminisce about the lovely odd and wonderfully off-center folks passing through meetingbrook -- and still do.

“What is it not to sin? Do not ask much; go, the silent flowers will tell you.” (Angelus Silesia né Johannes Scheffler (1624-1677) )

Folly is the unwritten history of meetingbrook.

Foolishness
For other uses, see Foolish and Fool.
Foolishness is the lack of wisdom. In this sense it differs from stupidity, which is the lack of intelligence.[citation needed] An act of foolishness is sometimes referred to as a folly.

Foolishness and wisdom are contrasted in Paul's letter to the Corinthians. He condemns intellectual arrogance and advocates a humble attitude of foolishness in which it is then possible to learn. Plato likewise said, "He is the wisest man who knows himself to be ill-equipped for the study of wisdom" but Paul makes a distinction between wisdom and the reason of the Greeks.[1][2] (Wikipedia)

Still, we recite our promises, affirm we wish to continue them, then Saskia does bell chant, a lovely listening to the unabashed sound of brass bowl saying what it and inviter converse.

Three promises:

Contemplation, Conversation, Correspondence.
...as held by Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage“m.o.n.o.”(monastics of no other).

Contemplation is the promise of simplicity.
It is a gift of poverty inviting open waiting, receptive trust, attention, and watchful presence. It is a simple Being-With.
It is attentive presence.

Conversation is the promise of integrity.
It is a chaste and complete intention to listen and speak, lovingly and respectfully, with each and all made present to us. It is a wholeness of listening and speaking.
It is root silence.

Correspondence is the promise of faithful engagement.
It is responsible attention and intention offered obediently to the Source of all Being, to the Human Family, to Nature. It is a faithful engagement with all sentient beings, with this present world, with existence with all its needs & joys, sorrows & hope.
It is transparent service.

…………………………………………………………………

Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage invites & welcomes individuals interested in the practice of these 3 promises in their life. Whether the interest is in conversing, praying, deepening, learning, or even holding these 3 promises, we invite you to enter the inquiry and stillness. May the loving light and the compassionate peace of the Christ and the Bodhisattva accompany and support the efforts of each one.

………………………………………………………………..

Quotes:

1. We are going to have to create a new language of prayer. (Thomas Merton, Calcutta 1968)

2. When you go apart to be alone for prayer…see that nothing remains in your consciousness mind save a naked intent stretching out toward God. Leave it stripped of every particular idea about God (what he is like in himself or in his works) and keep only the awareness that he is as he is. Let him be thus, I pray you, and force him not to be otherwise. (Anonymous)

3. I long for a great lake of ale. / I long for the men of heaven in my house. / I long for cheerfulness in their drinking. / And I long for Jesus to be there among them. (Brigid, Celtic saint)

4. It is not by closing your eyes that you see your own nature. On the contrary, you must open your eyes wide and wake up to the real situation in the world to see completely your whole Dharma Treasure, your whole Dharma Body. The bombs, the hunger, the pursuit of wealth and power - these are not separate from your nature….You will suffer, but your pain will not come from your own worries and fears. You will suffer because of your kinship with all beings, because you have the compassion of an awakened one, a Bodhisattva. (Thich Nhat Hanh)

5. He who truly attains awakening knows that deliverance is to be found right where he is. There is no need to retire to the mountain cave. If he is a fisherman he becomes a real fisherman. If he is a butcher he becomes a real butcher. The farmer becomes a real farmer and the merchant a real merchant. He lives his daily life in awakened awareness. His every act from morning to night is his religion. (Sokei-an)

Videbimus!

Latin
Verb
vidēbimus
first-person plural future active indicative of videō
"we shall see, we shall perceive; we shall look (at)"
"we shall observe, we shall note"
"we shall understand, we shall perceive, we shall comprehend"
"we shall look (at), we shall consider, we shall reflect (upon)"
"we shall look out for, we shall see to, we shall care for, we shall provide, we shall make sure" (-from Wiktionary)

Prosit!

Coming to: ad venire; 13

2011-12-09T04:54:00.001-05:00

In text during Thursday Evening Conversation the phrase "as it is" was read.

Lesson 342
I let forgiveness rest upon all things,
For thus forgiveness will be given me.

I thank You, Father, for Your plan to save me from the hell I made. It is not real. And You have given me the means to prove its unreality to me. The key is in my hand, and I have reached the door beyond which lies the end of dreams. I stand before the gate of Heaven, wondering if I should enter in and be at home. Let me not wait again today. Let me forgive all things, and let creation be as You would have it be and as it is. Let me remember that I am Your Son, and opening the door at last, forget illusions in the blazing light of truth, as memory of You returns to me.

Brother, forgive me now. I come to you to take you home with me. And as we go, the world goes with us on our way to God.
(ACIM lesson 8dec2011)

Is occurred to me it would make a good name for a dog, "as it is," or, Asitis.

Another phrase, "as we go" arises in final sentence, wishing to transform into a name. Hence, "Aswego."

This morning it occurs further that it is a good name for God: Asitis Aswego.

My friends in AA might connect with this neologism/neonate and happily smile at meeting the new arrival.

Through that smile of recognition we hear soft voice saying: "I come to you to take you home with me."

And we are taken with it.

2011-12-08T10:05:00.001-05:00

Closer to our time, there is John Lennon, who in 1980 passed through our sight and disappeared.

IMAGINE

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

(Lyrics by John Lennon)

Be as one; live as one.

Good words!

2011-12-08T08:50:00.001-05:00

What did Buddha see? What breath did he take?

Also this 8th of December, along with the clear transmission of light through her mother into Mary, on this date:

Sakyamuni's Great Awakening

Traditions vary on what happened. Some say he made a great vow to nirvana and Earth to find the root of suffering, or die trying. In other traditions, while meditating he was harassed and tempted by the god Mara (literally, "Destroyer" in Sanskrit), demon of illusion.[3][4] Other traditions simply state that he entered deeper and deeper states of meditation, confronting the nature of the self.
In the Pali Canon, there are several discourses said to be by Buddha himself, relating to this story. In The Longer Discourse to Saccaka (MN 36),[5] the Buddha describes his Enlightenment in three stages:
During the first watch of the night, the Buddha discovered all of his past lives in the cycle of rebirth, realizing that he had been born and reborn countless times before.
During the second watch, the Buddha discovered the Law of Karma, and the importance of living by the Eightfold Path.
During the third watch, the Buddha discovered the Four Noble Truths, finally reaching Nirvana.
In his words:
“ My heart, thus knowing, thus seeing, was released from the fermentation of sensuality, released from the fermentation of becoming, released from the fermentation of ignorance. With release, there was the knowledge, 'Released.' I discerned that 'Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.'[5] ”

All traditions agree that as the morning star rose in the sky in the early morning,[6] the third watch of the night, Siddhartha finally found the answers he sought and became Enlightened, and experienced Nirvana.[6] Having done so, Siddhartha now became a Buddha or "Awakened One".[6][3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhi_Day

I'll breathe well knowing what Buddha saw.

Bodhi Day -- or Rohatsu, as it's known in Japan -- is the day the Buddha awakens. It's the day he finds enlightenment, sitting under the pipul tree.
A dear friend asked me the question I'm usually asking: so what? What does Bodhi Day mean? Disclaimer here: I'm not a worshipping kind of Buddhist. I don't believe the Buddha was a god, nor even divine. The whole point to Buddhism is that a human being did this -- achieved enlightenment. And that the rest of us -- because he elected to teach -- can also choose that path.
So here's what I believe, and why Bodhi Day is important:
I believe in little enlightenments -- like the day I realised that all the people and beings and plants and seas and fallen stars still live. In our breaths. That as we breathe out, we breathe our own cells into the air. And as we breathe in, we breathe in dinosaurs and comets and poets and bees and Frederick Douglass and Christopher Marlowe and Rumi and wars and loss and love and all that makes up our amazing world. And this connects us. To each other ~ in a kind of web that extends in all directions. Forever.
(from, Bodhi Day, Rohatsu, or Waking Up; Beliefnet; a personal insight into Rohatsu. BY: Britton Gildersleeve
Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/Inspiration/Articles/Bodhi-Day-Rohatsu-or-Waking-Up.aspx#ixzz1fxA8srZi

Exhale well today!

Coming to: ad venire; 12

2011-12-08T04:38:00.002-05:00

Drops drip from ceiling onto chest as I sleep. My chest. Wind groans through large cedars at north edge of house. 4:15am and all is 8Dec. This is the feast celebration of life passing through solid obstacles to reveal itself as nothing other than life-itself-through-itself, or, as some call it, Immaculate Conception.

Mary, the story has it, experienced mu-ge, no-barrier, during her arrival in form. The childhood prayer was: "O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee."

A zen koan prayer might be phrased: How does no-barrier allow no-other to appear with nothing present?

(Pause for effect.) Then response: Rain on sleeping man passes through dream without drenching one image!

Hello, Mary! Hello, all that is passing through! Today is your moveable feast!

And what a feast!

Last night I say to students not to fear the word "nothing."

Peonies

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open--
pools of lace,
white and pink--
and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities--
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again--
beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?
(Poem: "Peonies," by Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press).

Fallingness is our given nature.

As so, nothing falls through each, and, all, falling together!

Coming to: ad venire; 11

2011-12-07T05:57:00.002-05:00

Submission. To be sent under.

"God is not an object; God is the absolute Subject." (Henry Corbin, in The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism)

No predicate. No modifier. Verb implied and contained in Subject. No reference outside itself. Nothing outside itself.

Thrown under. ("Subject" 'sub'= under; 'jacere'= to throw). "Throw" - Origin: Middle English thrawen, throwen to cause to twist, throw, from Old English thrāwan to cause to twist or turn; akin to Old High German drāen to turn, Latin terere to rub, Greek tribein to rub, tetrainein to bore, pierce (Mirriam-Webster)

Teirein, Greek, to wear out. Is God, as absolute Subject, that which is wearing out, wearing out whatever thinks itself not-god; rubbing down, twisting and turning the mistaken perception or belief that there is 'other' that exists on its own, separate, even separate but equal, in relation to what-is-called-god? Is our phrase "Thrown under the bus" -- meaning colloquially to sacrifice or do away with, really a riddle phrased to be turned over and looked at again? To throw under the "bus" (when reversed) becomes "sub" or "under." Hence, to throw under the under.

Steiner (1978) offers a demarcation in that, a further aspect of Dasein, as argued by Heidegger, is that Dasein is grounded in language; Being-in-the-world expresses itself in discourse. Furthermore, he made a distinction between ‘Rede’, ‘the speech of Dasein’ and ‘Gerede’, ‘talk’. He avoided the triteness of using the term ‘idle chatter’ for ‘talk’ because it was far too reassuring for what he wanted to say. For Heidegger, ‘talk’ had lost its primary relationship-of-being toward the talked about entity and all that ‘talk’ was doing was to ‘pass words along’ or, to ‘gossip emptily’, fostering illusions of understanding that have no real comprehension. Dasein-with-others takes place in an echo chamber of nonstop bogus interaction, with no cognition as to what is being communicated (Steiner 1978).

The differences between authentic and inauthentic lives were contrasted by Heidegger through the agencies of fear set against anxiety, ‘speech’ contrasted with ‘talk’, genuine wonder opposed to mere novelty. Each disparate category comes about as an expected outcome of the complete antithesis between the self-possession of true Dasein and the collective lack of perception of an existence carried out in terms of ‘oneness’ and ‘theyness’. Heidegger denoted this latter state as ‘Verfall’ (‘a falling away from’ ‘a cadence into decline’). Heidegger was careful to point out that the condition of ‘Verfallensein’ (a fallen state) is not sinful, nor is the term meant to cast a moral value judgement.
Heidegger wrote;

“Dasein has, in the first instance, fallen away [abgefallen] from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its self, and has fallen into the ‘world’. ‘Fallenness’ into the world means an absorption in Being-with-one-another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity. Through the Interpretation of falling, what we have called the ‘inauthenticity’ of Dasein may now be defined more precisely. On no account however do the terms ‘inauthentic’ and ‘non-authentic’ signify ‘really not’, as if in this mode of Being, Dasein were altogether to lose its Being. ‘Inauthenticity’ does not mean anything like Being-no-longer-in-the-world, but amounts rather to quite a distinctive kind of Being-in-the-world – the kind which is completely fascinated by the ‘world’ and by the Dasein-with of Others in the ‘they’. Not-Being-its-self [Das Nicht-es-selbst-sein] functions as a positive possibility of that entity which, in its essential concern, is absorbed in a world. This kind of not-Being has to be conceived as that kind of Being which is closest to Dasein and in which Dasein maintains itself for the most part."

For Heidegger then, ‘inauthenticity’ and ‘fallenness’ are not mere mishaps or erroneous options. Rather they are essential components of existence, because Dasein is always Dasein-with and a Being-in-the-world into which we have been thrown. Acceding to the enticement of living a mundane existence is simply a part of existing itself. ‘Fallenness’ was a positive for Heidegger in the sense that there must be ‘inauthenticity’, ‘theyness’, and ‘talk’, for Dasein to become aware of its loss of self and strive for its return to authentic Being. ‘Verfall’ turns out to be the completely essential prerequisite towards the repossession of self, the struggle toward true Dasein (Steiner 1978).

Dasein is committed to searching out the authentic via the inauthenticity of its Being-in-the-world and Heidegger said that authentic existence is not something which floats above everyday fallingness. He postulated that a proper instrument is needed for seizing the everydayness and he said that that instrument is ‘care’ [Sorge]. Because in the condition of inauthenticity we ‘fall away from ourselves’, Heidegger said that we simultaneously fall into a frenetic busyness and an emptiness that gives rise to a sense of the uncanny. As we flap about feeling ‘homeless’ our everyday familiarity is shattered (Steiner 1978).

It is uncanniness that declares the pivotal moments in which Angst brings Dasein face to face with the terrible freedom of deciding whether to remain in inauthenticity or to endeavor to attain self-possession. ‘Sorge’ is the means of transcendence beyond being Dasein-with and Dasein-in to become Dasein-for and Sorge must be a ‘care for’ many things. These things include a concern for others, a care for the ready-to-hand, but in principle Sorge is a caring for the presentness and obscurity of Being itself (Steiner 1978). Heidegger said;
“When Dasein ‘understands’ uncanniness in the everyday manner, it does so by turning away from it in falling; in this turning away, the ‘not-at-home’ gets ‘dimmed down’. Yet the everydayness of this fleeing shows phenomenally that anxiety, as a basic state of mind, belongs to Dasein’s essential state of Being-in-the-world, which, as one that is existential, is never present-at-hand but is itself always in a mode of factical Being-there – that is, in the mode of a state of mind.”
For Heidegger, it is Sorge that signifies a mans existence and makes it meaningful. To be-in-the-world in an authentic existential pretext is to be ‘careful’. Heidegger concluded that ‘care’ is the primordial state of Being as Dasein strives towards authenticity (Steiner 1978).
(from, What Heidegger Means by Being-in-the-World, by Roy Hornsby, http://royby.com/philosophy/pages/dasein.html

Spirituality, or classical metaphysics,(Greek: τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά), where being-qua-being is focus of attention, is not easy to understand. It is difficult to submit, to be sent under. We prefer to be on top of things, even over the top. To rise to the heights. To stand above, to lord over. To make it to the highest peak. This is perhaps why there is no taste for authentic spirituality in the marketplace of spiritual materialism. Even "One nation under God" fails to alert attention to what is proclaimed. "Indivisible with liberty" seems even more foreign.

While everyone else
Is so busy striving,
The lone traveler
Is at ease by himself.
He's been living outside of convention
For a long time now;
In his pouch there is nothing at all.
When he walks,
He takes a cane for a companion;
When he talks,
He has the rocks for an audience.
If you ask him what his religion is,
When hungry it's a bowl of rice.
- Wen-siang (1210-1280)

What is uncanny is that we care.

Even if we don't know what to do or what to say, we care.

Being thrown-into and fallen-away we are dwelling at the portal of submission where care, dare I say, compassion and love, long to emerge through our being-in-the-world with one another into an understanding distinct and indivisible, as simple as a bowl of rice, a religion of proximate awareness, a philosophy of unity with diversity.

2011-12-06T18:54:00.002-05:00

I stopped the talk by Robert Kennedy SJ, Roshi as he was saying about awakening that it was "clarity of mind from beginning to end."

Tuesday Evening Practice in Merton Retreat had a time limit. And that's that.

Even if no beginning. Even if no end.

Clarity of mind.

Suffices.

Coming to: ad venire; 10

2011-12-06T04:38:00.002-05:00

Rest well. Feel well.

That's what I say as I leave to the person I am visiting in the psychiatric unit. Two others arrived as I did. Thus I remained a silent fourth in an echoing room during fragments of an old ritual conversing around phantom fire pit comfortable with nothing to say. They could be visiting me.

The Mountains' Friend

The broad arms of this dusty world
Hold few true friends.
One feels the pangs of loneliness, and sees
How cold the autumn air becomes!
But no, behold your search is ended here,
For countless mountains,
Blue afar, and green ones near,
Remain your friends eternally.
- Jakushitsu Genko Zenji (1290–1368)

For a while it is difficult to determine who is the patient and who the visitors. This happens at prison also; who's the cop, the inmate, the staff, the visitor? Pericopes of memory arise and are given words. Thoughts enter without knocking. Side glances thrown without trace of irony. Subtle theater in long run, actors no longer cue lines, it is a random emergence of Ionesco and Beckett writing absurd cross-dialogue. Somewhere, having forgotten play in progress, director sips espresso looking out blinds behind window reflecting back images of medicated theories with no clock on wall.

IN THE GALLERY OF THE ORDINARY

In their excess, their blowsy dreaming
and King Solomon-like tempers, the clouds
possess the grandeur of eighteenth-century oils,

when a painter earned his profession
as an anatomist. Those artists of verdigris
and gamboge, too gorged on joy, perhaps,

treated that blank pasture of the “heavens”
like something that had lived.
Their crawly undoings remind us

of the mean curiosities of sheep, the sea’s
half-remembered boil, or a few twisted bolls
of cotton—the morning phosphorescent

or sunset a dull, worn-out gilt.
The nights there were scumbled with light.
How could we ever have taken them

for the abstinence of art?
(Poem by William Logan)

I am perfectly at home in the curious ordinary of displaced images. Those who look for order and odes will squirm amid the erratic and unrhymed arias of unprocessed poetry. The protocol placers are wealthy with set pieces while the riffraff pencil or scampish bamboo brush hardly recognize what dull-lead or stone-rubbed black ink leave as trace behind.

What I really want to say has to do with Sintaklaas.

Saint Nicholas

St. Nicholas "Lipensky" (1294 Russian icon)
Bishop of Myra, Defender of Orthodoxy, Wonderworker, Holy Hierarch
Born c. 270 AD (the Ides of March)[1]
Patara, Lycia, Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey)
Died 6 December 343 AD
Myra, Lycia
Honored in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Lutheranism
Canonized Pre-Congregation
Major shrine Basilica di San Nicola, Bari, Italy
Feast
6 December [O.S. 19 December](main feast day)
9 May [O.S. 22 May](translation of relics)
(The "O.S." dates are for the Julian Calendar used by most Eastern churches)[2]
Attributes Vested as a Bishop. In Eastern Christianity, wearing an omophorion and holding a Gospel Book. Sometimes shown with Jesus Christ over one shoulder, holding a Gospel Book, and with the Theotokos over the other shoulder, holding an omophorion
Patronage Children, sailors, fishermen, merchants, broadcasters, the falsely accused, prostitutes, repentant thieves, pharmacists, archers, pawnbrokers

St Nicholas
Saint Nicholas (Greek: Άγιος Νικόλαος, Hagios ["holy"] Nicolaos ["victory of the people"]) (270–6 December 343),[3][4] also called Nikolaos of Myra, was a historic 4th-century saint and Greek[5] Bishop of Myra (Demre, in Lycia, part of modern-day Turkey). Because of the many miracles attributed to his intercession, he is also known as Nikolaos the Wonderworker (Greek: Νικόλαος ο Θαυματουργός, Nikolaos o Thaumaturgos). He had a reputation for secret gift-giving, such as putting coins in the shoes of those who left them out for him, and thus became the model for Santa Claus, whose modern name comes from the Dutch Sinterklaas, itself from a series of elisions and corruptions of the transliteration of "Saint Nikolaos". His reputation evolved among the faithful, as was common for early Christian saints.[6] In 1087, his relics were furtively translated to Bari, in southeastern Italy; for this reason, he is also known as Nikolaos of Bari. His feastday is 6 December [O.S. 19 December].(--Wikipedia)

Here's to fishermen, prostitutes, and pawnbrokers!

Here's to filling shoes with candy and small gifts on this feast!

Here's to all the disorders and disrepair needing master-craftsmen to refashion!

Art is no abstinence.

Poetry is the next phase unphrased, merely attended.

2011-12-05T12:24:00.000-05:00

Raven lands on dead branch. Surveys wetland. Leaps into downward sweep. Disappears.

What has it seen?

Where gone?

"Simplicity is the integration and unification of human capacities.
It is the peak sustained by a whole mountain of interconnected and interdependent parts, in which each part acts according to its nature while in complete harmony with every other part.
The vegetative, animal, and human faculties act in concert, each contributing in its own way and integrated into the more developed levels of consciousness. In this way they all are joined in complete submission to the spiritual will, which in turn is totally open to the divine will, both in oneself and in all one’s relationships."
( - Thomas Keating, from the December issue of
The Contemplative Outreach News)

It is back on limb. Bald Mountain takes shape all around it's shimmering black placement.

Gone again, mountain returns to itself.

Coming to: ad venire; 9

2011-12-05T04:24:00.001-05:00

I am listening for god. I am looking for god.

I will not hear god. I will not see god.

God is listening through me. God is seeing through me.

God is, as I am, nowhere to be heard. God is, as I am, nowhere to be seen.

Because you grasp labels and slogans,
You are hindered by those labels and slogans,
Both those used in ordinary life and those
Considered sacred.
Thus they obstruct your perception of objective truth,
And you cannot understand clearly.
- Linji (d. 867)

Let's begin again.

I am listening for god. There is no "I."
There is only "I am" listening through what "I" mistakenly think of as me.

I am looking for god. There is no "I."
There is only "I am" looking through what "I" mistakenly think of as me.

What is...god...listening to?
What is...god...looking for?

God is listening to the empty sound where "I" no longer clinks against anything.
God is looking for nothing in that place where "I" once thought it was but cannot occupy due to absence.

Only god is. Nothing else is.

What does this mean?

Look!
Listen!

Stop no...stopping here!

Go on!

Really...go on!

What is going on?
Who is going on?

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

(Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke)

We are neither here nor there.

Where are we? Where am I?
We don't know. I don't know.

For "here/there" is no place.
"That" does not see you.

You are listened through.
You are seen through.

God is doing-this. Listening.
God is observing-this. Looking.

Is there anyone hearing?
Is there anyone seeing?

Yes, yes, no/one.

Yes, yes, every/one.

You are correct -- there is nothing being said here.

Only the saying itself, the seeing itself, matters.

God is seeing/itself.
God is saying/itself.

God is where I am not to be found.

Coming to: ad venire; 8

2011-12-04T05:56:00.001-05:00

Sabbath. (Sabbaton, in Greek. Shabbath, in Hebrew.) To rest.

Seeing into Nothingness
This is the true seeing,
The eternal seeing
- Shen-hui (8th cent)

Emmet Fox says that righteousness is harmonious thinking.

May each rest well. Today. In life. Through death.

Allowing whatever we are coming to brighten the night.

Coming to: ad venire; 7

2011-12-03T04:22:00.002-05:00

If Christ were to appear, silence would no longer seem to permeate everything, silence would be everything.

Who would consider breaking silence?

Once, when we knew nothing about silence, we broke it. Scattered shards of words, billions beyond billions of splintered syllables, fell pell mell to ground covering pure insight with unfocused debris of echolalic tintinnabulation masquerading as approximate meaning.

Cacophony came to be the noise of our cracked communication. And we became Man. And dwelt in the caustic chat of the unsound.

you shall above all things be glad and young

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young,whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

(poem by ee cummings)

A man in prison yesterday sang German lyrics from Schiller and Handel, his melodious bass draping the table with thick wool warmth in the center of chill cinderblock surround. His dazzling conversational wit and learning enough to frighten away. I was charmed. What trouble is sure to follow!

He spoke of the sweetness of seeing. How those who see will not cease presenting the seen to the unseeing. A missionary of the apparent, this wandering Jew arrived like some brooding Sephardim Eli Wiesel creation fallen from esoteric Nubian pages out of Legends of Our Time.

Are we still interested in looking for Christ?

It is useless.

We are being looked through.

Being.

Looking.

Through.

the great advantage of being alive

the great advantage of being alive
(instead of undying) is not so much
that mind no more can disprove than prove
what heart may feel and soul may touch
--the great(my darling)happens to be
that love are in we,that love are in we

and here is a secret they never will share
for whom create is less than have
or one times one than when times where--
that we are in love,that we are in love:
with us they've nothing times nothing to do
(for love are in we am in i are in you)

this world(as timorous itsters all
to call their cowardice quite agree)
shall never discover our touch and feel
--for love are in we are in love are in we;
for you are and i am and we are(above
and under all possible worlds)in love

a billion brains may coax undeath
from fancied fact and spaceful time--
no heart can leap,no soul can breathe
but by the sizeless truth of a dream
whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea.
For love are in you am in i are in we

(poem by e. e. cummings)

Love is neither the answer nor the question.

Rather, love is the phenome/phoneme of silence in its selfsame original dwelling within...what is...all that is.

Coming to: ad venire; 6

2011-12-02T06:00:00.001-05:00

One creation, many corrections.

Something in last night's Course in Miracles conversation at the hermitage brought home a 30 year riddle posed by a couple in Saco correcting my statement beginning with "We create..." with their "God creates, man invents."

I chewed on that these years until last night. Ellen was saying something about creating and the dusty riddle appeared, looked at me, and asked: Ready yet?

There's only one creation-- and this is it, we are it. We, in turn, take what is created and invent ways and doodads, fancy replications and unique objects-- whether from materials or colors or words.

Paul and Kerry would be unsurprised to know it took me all these years to get their words from that 2nd floor office overlooking fields of children living away from home. They thought, even then, 'Nice enough fellow, a little slow,' and they were right.

The Course says this:

What is a Miracle ?

A miracle is a correction. It does not create, nor really change at all. It merely looks on devastation, and reminds the mind that what it sees is false. It undoes error, but does not attempt to go beyond perception, nor exceed the function of forgiveness. Thus it stays within time’s limits. Yet it paves the way for the return of timelessness and love’s awakening, for fear must slip away under the gentle remedy it gives.

A miracle contains the gift of grace, for it is given and received as one. And thus it illustrates the law of truth the world does not obey, because it fails entirely to understand its ways. A miracle inverts perception which was upside-down before, and thus it ends the strange distortions that were manifest. Now is perception open to the truth. Now is forgiveness seen as justified.

Forgiveness is the home of miracles. The eyes of Christ deliver them to all they look upon in mercy and in love. Perception stands corrected in His sight, and what was meant to curse has come to bless. Each lily of forgiveness offers all the world the silent miracle of love. And each is laid before the Word of God upon the universal altar to Creator and creation, in the Light of perfect purity and endless joy.

The miracle is taken first on faith, because to ask for it implies the mind has been made ready to conceive of what it cannot see and does not understand. Yet faith will bring its witnesses to show that what it rested on is really there. And thus the miracle will justify your faith in it, and show it rested on a world more real than what you saw before; a world redeemed from what you thought you saw.

Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality. (from ACIM)

Throw in a response to the unasked question: "What is the now?" and the response embedded above is: " 'Now' is perception open to the truth. 'Now' is forgiveness seen as justified."

We are created as one. All of us. Everything. Nothing outside. Nothing beyond.

When we do 'go beyond' we see this truth -- there's nothing there -- all is here, each and all included. When that 'nothing' is fully experienced an enlightenment takes place with the realization that wholeness is all there is and that even nothing is included. The experience of nothing is the awakening that something and nothing are not two things-- one is the other, the other...one.

But without this touch of nothingness in our lives our perceptions remain incomplete and wander off into dichotomy and fragmentation, judgments of separation and belief in the detachment of one thing from the other, one people from other people. Our whole belief in the current dissociative insanity of modern life, political state, and religious exceptualism is based on our inaccurate perception and inauthentic belief.

Something sweeter and more loving, kinder and simpler awaits our entering into it. One could say 'God' awaits our arrival at nothing-other than God.

The miracle is a correction, not a change. We've never left the one creation we are. When our perceptions to the contrary find their correction, finding their way back from wrong-turning thought and misdirected-actions through nothing-doing, we stand corrected, returning to our source-being as who-we-are, here, and now.

One creation; many corrections.

When Saskia comes down, I ask her, without her knowing what I am writing, for a last line. She says:
"Upon awakening there's sadness realizing a whole generation is gone and I arrive downstairs to burning candles, hint of incense, and sacred sounds enveloping ancestry."

2011-12-01T23:17:00.001-05:00

To a Quaker minister

Thank you,
Charlie,
For helping us
With silence to
Voice our love

Coming to: ad venire; 5

2011-12-01T04:44:00.002-05:00

Thanks. To November. Welcome December. Ninth meets tenth under effective guise of eleven and twelve.

HONORARY JEW
By John Repp

The first year, I grated potatoes, chopped onions
& watched. The second year, I fed all but the eggs

into the machine & said I'll do the latkes & did,
my pile of crisp delights borne to the feast by the wife

who baffled me, our books closed, banter hushed,
money useless in the apartment—house, my in-laws called it,

new-wave thump at one end, ganja reek at the other—
in which she'd knelt to tell the no one who listened

no more no no more no a three-year-old mouthing
the essential prayer. The uncle made rich by a song

stacked three & dug in, talking critics & Koch—
everyone crunching now, slathering applesauce, slurping tea—

talking Rabin & Mehitabel, radio & Durrell,
how a song is a poem or it isn't a song

& vice-versa. Done, he pointed a greasy finger
at me, said You can't be a goy. You—I say it

for all to hear—are an honorary Jew!
which, impossible dream, my latkes lived up to

for five more years. Then the wailing.
Then the dust.

(from The Poetry Foundation)

I've begun to feel like an old Jew in a crowd of young Christians and Muslims. They are civil enough, but I'm cautious. Even YHWH (bend my knee, peace be upon him) has gestured that waving dismissal at me like a hand dispassionately pulling the lever of slot machine no longer expecting anything from it.

As an old Jew I walk my childhood Brooklyn neighborhood past 70th street Herskowitz and 69th street Birdovitch grocery stores. PS 205 on 68th street where Goldberg shot his never-failing driving left handed fading layup in the gym decades before his television series became popular, and Blyberg schlepped stickball broom handle to inner courtyard white chalked strike zone on brick wall for our daily ritual.

I look like Martin Landau in Mitch Albom's Hallmark drama of his book Have a Little Faith about an old rabbi blessing the world with weary resolve and steadfast reminiscence. Like Herb Fink's hand falling forward similar to YHWH's after being asked how he was, saying "Don't ask!" even though you had. I'm the old church with hole in roof the black preacher labors beneath.

Faith! The perfectly absurd response to a perfectly absurd world. To luxuriate in recollection is gift of daydream. The realm of daily life is a mitzvah of daily prayer sent into vacant sanctuaries where, on Saturdays across from schoolyard stickball games, only a goy could throw light switches for temple service. It was my first ecumenical sermon-- lighting up the 67th street minyan. Was "goy" contraction for "good boy" -- what the yamulka'd old man with wispy long white beard said each time after?

Reminisce and Return was the theme in last night's class at university. "Erinnerung Schweigen" -- to luxuriate in recollection, is more: memory of silence, or, to bring through mind through silence. Afterward we watched Kieslowski's "Bleu" to deepen our peregrination.

Not yet dawn. Rambling recall through hazy memory on streets and faces of childhood haunts.

Sh'ma Yis'ra'eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.
Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
http://www.jewfaq.org/prayer/shma.gif

I am this haunted prayer.
Or, as poem:

I Am
This
Haunted
Prayer

Coming to: ad venire; 4

2011-11-30T03:56:00.001-05:00

What is there to look forward to?

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)

The Heart Sutra says form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Which makes, of course, everything clear. My murky mind has difficulty seeing this through. Trouble is resident companion of murky mind.

If the racial Other aspires to equal footing on the socioeconomic playing field, he is tasked with forcing his way out of the categorical cul-de-sac that his name and appearance otherwise squeeze him into. We call the process by which he does this “assimilation.” Though the Latin root here—shared with the other word “similar”—implies that the process is one of becoming absorbed or incorporated, it is a process that relies first on the negation of one identity in order to adopt another. In this sense, assimilation is a destructive rather than constructive process. It isn’t a come-as-you-are proposition, a simple matter of being integrated into the American milieu because there exists a standing invitation to do so. Rather, assimilation first requires refuting assumptions the culture makes about the immigrant based on race, and in this sense assimilation requires the erasure of one’s preexisting cultural identity even though that identity wasn’t contingent upon race in the first place.
(from, Writing Like a White Guy, On language, race, and poetry. By Jaswinder Bolina, Poetry Foundation,
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/243072)

The phrasing isn't form is 'similar' to emptiness, emptiness 'similar' to form.

One is the other.

If one is the other, then there is no other. If this is true, there is no one either.

No one; no other.

Each is itself as it is.

What does this mean for us?

Thich Nhat Hanh might quietly smile and say, "Interbeing!" We inter-are.

If so, then here is there, and there is here.

Spirituality and Corporeality are now interchangeably one-another with unmurky mind.

O God! What are you looking forward to?

2011-11-29T20:54:00.002-05:00

Zazen in Merton Retreat.

Step back on your own to look into reality long enough to attain an unequivocally true and real experience of enlightenment. Then with every thought you are consulting infinite teachers..
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

After practice we leave in silence.

Teachers arrive then depart.

Barn door is open.

Coming to: ad venire; 3

2011-11-29T07:38:00.002-05:00

Empty watch. Nothing to see. You and me.

Are we coming to?

The Pasture
BY ROBERT FROST

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

Advent, coming to, is harder than it seems. The narrative isn't about happily ever after. The narrative is about reality always here.

Walk out with me.

"There's a birthing into awareness of what the reality is right now." (Saskia says this, in from meditation cabin, going up stairs, white Border Collie crouching over green tennis ball, morning light remarkably simply there at window squares.)

I totter these days.

I sha'n't be in breath long.

You'll find this too.

2011-11-28T22:38:00.001-05:00

Once during slender crescent light
I wanted to be a poet
When dawn disappeared into daylight
I found I was merely a word
Waiting to be pronounced
Within an image
Of night
New moon
And thus
Not there

Coming to: ad venire; 2

2011-11-28T05:47:00.004-05:00

One is the loveliest number. Nothing is left out.

Yet, when one and nothing appear together, perfection is tickled..

Not everyone feels that way. So it is the profession of assassin proliferates today. Literally in the corridors of power and governance, figuratively in the hearts and minds of non-Buddhists and unintelligent problem solvers. 'Kill,' they say, 'rid me of these bothersome others!'

(Thich Nhat Hanh says you are a Buddhist if you practice awareness, concentration, and insight. He feels there are many who do not consider themselves Buddhists who are.)

21 The faithful city, what a harlot she has become! Zion, once full of fair judgement, where saving justice used to dwell, but now assassins!
(New Jerusalem Bible, Isaiah 1: 21)

'Now-assassins' murder what they consider 'other' to them. Drones and scope-rifles, IEDs and injected poisons, calculating security and ambitious prosecutors -- combine to wage war on 'now' by eliminating it, leaving in their minds only revenged past and ravaged future.

FAR AWAY, FAR AWAY . . .
By Franco Fortini

Far away, far away, men making wars.
Other folk's blood spilt on other folk's floors.

Only this morning I wounded my finger:
a thorn on my rosebush pierced like a stinger.

Sucking that finger, I thought of the war.
Sad is the earth! And those people, so poor!

I'm of no help, being here and not there,
nor can I reach them, by sea or by air.

And what if I could—what good could I do?
My Arabic's terrible! My English is, too!

What, should I stroll through the fields of the dead
leaving sheaves of my verses under each head?

No. Enough of this wretched irony-fest.
Let's put on a coat. The sun's low in the west.
(— Translated by Geoffrey Brock)

Christ looks out from the place of this moment.

Christ now has a coat around slumping shoulders.

To be born or not to be born?

This is what is -- coming to -- be the question.

A Postmortem Guide
For my eulogist, in advance

Do not praise me for my exceptional serenity.
Can't you see I've turned away
from the large excitements,
and have accepted all the troubles?

Go down to the old cemetery; you'll see
there's nothing definitive to be said.
The dead once were all kinds---
boundary breakers and scalawags,
martyrs of the flesh, and so many
dumb bunnies of duty, unbearably nice.

I've been a little of each.

And, please, resist the temptation
of speaking about virtue.
The seldom-tempted are too fond
of that word, the small-
spirited, the unburdened.
Know that I've admired in others
only the fraught straining
to be good.

Adam's my man and Eve's not to blame.
He bit in; it made no sense to stop.

Still, for accuracy's sake you might say
I oftened stopped,
that I rarely went as far as I dreamed.

And since you know my hardships,
understand that they're mere bump and setback
against history's horror.
Remind those seated, perhaps weeping,
how obscene it is
for some of us to complain.

Tell them I had second chances.
I knew joy.
I was burned by books early
and kept sidling up to the flame.

Tell them that at the end I had no need
for God, who'd become just a story
I once loved, one of many
with concealments and late-night rescues,
high sentence and pomp. The truth is
I learned to live without hope
as well as I could, almost happily,
in the despoiled and radiant now.

You who are one of them, say that I loved
my companions most of all.
In all sincerity, say that they provided
a better way to be alone.
(From Different Hours by Stephen Dunn published by W. W. Norton & Company 2000)

The now-assassins have never seen the likes of Christ.

It makes no sense to stop.

Not now.

The assassins are never convinced.

Christ, you and the assassins and I, are each now wondering how to be here alone.

(Or, as a poem:)

Christ

(you and the assassins and I)

are each
now
wondering
how to be
here
alone
(wfh)

To be alone is to be (complete-ly) with everyone.

Coming to: ad venire; 1

2011-11-27T04:51:00.005-05:00

Done.

There's nothing to be none.

Enter Vladimir.
ESTRAGON:
(giving up again). Nothing to be done.
VLADIMIR:
(advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.) So there you are again.
ESTRAGON:
Am I?
VLADIMIR:
I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.
ESTRAGON:
Me too.
VLADIMIR:
Together again at last! We'll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.
ESTRAGON:
(irritably). Not now, not now.
VLADIMIR:
(hurt, coldly). May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?
ESTRAGON:
In a ditch.
VLADIMIR:
(admiringly). A ditch! Where?
ESTRAGON:
(without gesture). Over there.
VLADIMIR:
And they didn't beat you?
ESTRAGON:
Beat me? Certainly they beat me.
VLADIMIR:
The same lot as usual?
ESTRAGON:
The same? I don't know.
VLADIMIR:
When I think of it . . . all these years . . . but for me . . . where would you be . . . (Decisively.) You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.
ESTRAGON:
And what of it?
VLADIMIR:
(gloomily). It's too much for one man. (Pause. Cheerfully.) On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.
(from Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, Act 1, opening lines)

What is? What is the good? What is the good of losing heart?

Now?

You, Lord, yourself are our Father,
‘Our Redeemer’ is your ancient name.
Why, Lord, leave us to stray from your ways
and harden our hearts against fearing you?
Return, for the sake of your servants,
the tribes of your inheritance.

Oh, that you would tear the heavens open and come down!
– at your Presence the mountains would melt.

No ear has heard,
no eye has seen
any god but you act like this
for those who trust him.
You guide those who act with integrity
and keep your ways in mind.
(First reading, 1st Advent, Isaiah 63:16-17,64:1,3-8)

Has the Lord strayed from his ways? Or have we strayed? From our ways? From his ways?

Are these 'ways' one or two?

When you are free and independent, you are not bound by anything, so you do not seek liberation. Consummating the process of Zen, you become unified. Then there are no mundane things outside of Buddhism, and there is no Buddhism outside of mundane things.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

We think, or want to think Act 2 will be better, will resolve absence and expectation, will reveal all that will be revealed. We are, not mistaken, rather, expect-taken. 'Expect-taken' is 1st cousin once-removed of expectation.

Expectations of well-being

Richard Lazarus asserts that people become accustomed to positive or negative life experiences which lead to favorable or unfavorable expectations of their present and near-future circumstances. Lazarus notes the widely accepted philosophical principle that "happiness depends on the background psychological status of the person...and cannot be well predicted without reference to" one's expectations.[1]
With regard to happiness or unhappiness, Lazarus notes that "people whose objective conditions of life are those of hardship and deprivation often make a positive assessment of their well-being," while "people who are objectively well off...often make a negative assessment of their well-being." Lazarus argues that "the most sensible explanation of this apparent paradox is that people...develop favorable or unfavorable expectations" that guide such assessments.[1]

Expectations Impact on Beliefs

The famous sociologist, Robert K. Merton, wrote that a person's expectation is directly linked to the Self-fulfilling Prophecy. Whether or not such an expectation was truthful or not has little or no effect on the outcome. If a person believes what they are told or convinces himself/herself of the fact, chances are this person will see the expectation to its' inevitable conclusion. There is an inherent danger in this kind of labeling especially for the educator. Since children are easily convinced of certain tenants [sic;cf. tenets] especially when told to them by an authority figure like a parent or teacher, they may believe whatever is taught to them even if what is taught has no factual basis. If the student or child were to act on false information, certain positive or negative unintended consequences could result. If overly positive or elevated expectations were used to describe or manipulate a person's self-image and execution falls short, the results could be a total reversal of that person's self-confidence. If thought of in terms of causality or cause and effect, the higher a person's expectation and the lower the execution, the higher the frustration level may become. This in turn could cause a total cessation of effort and motivate the person to quit.
(--Expectation (epistemic), From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

I have the near-cousin companioning this new liturgical season.

Expect-taken.

Rorate caeli desuper, et nubes pluant iustum.
Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the Just One.
http://www.chantcd.com/lyrics/rorate_caeli_desuper.htm

Just One.

No Act 2.

Just one.

One.

Of two dropped down.

There's nothing to be none.

Empty waiting presence.

2011-11-26T20:37:00.002-05:00

The surprise is the ferocity men in power show when nobodies threaten their power and control.

This matter (Zen) is like a great mass of fire: when you approach it your face is sure to be scorched. It is again like a sword about to be drawn; when it is once out of the scabbard, someone is sure to lose his life. The precious vajra sword is right here and its purpose is to cut off the head.
- Tai-hui (1089-1163)

There is now no doubt that the powerful and ferocious are failing to keep the earth under their feet.

Some again keep watch for the Christ. Will he come again into the narrative world of liturgical repetition? Can the theatre of creche and Christmas lore lure us into a soporific hope in the afterlife rewards of faithful observance?

Or is the Earth about to come into its own unstoried phenomenology where what is appearing is doing so always for this moment only?

Christ is this moment taking place.

See it, or don't.

But no pretending or pretence substitutes.

Just itself is all there is.

Birth it, or resurrect it, but don't bullshit. There's no bullshit possible. Not any longer.

This moment is taking place.

2011-11-25T22:18:00.003-05:00

It's never enough.

Unless you say it is.

Then it is.

Enough.

The True Wisdom.* 6 Yet we do speak a wisdom to those who are mature, but not a wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away. 7 Rather, we speak God’s wisdom,* mysterious, hidden, which God predetermined before the ages for our glory, 8 and which none of the rulers of this age* knew; for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 But as it is written:

“What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard,

and what has not entered the human heart,

what God has prepared for those who love him,”

this God has revealed to us through the Spirit.

10 For the Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God. 11 Among human beings, who knows what pertains to a person except the spirit of the person that is within? Similarly, no one knows what pertains to God except the Spirit of God. 12 We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the things freely given us by God. 13 And we speak about them not with words taught by human wisdom, but with words taught by the Spirit, describing spiritual realities in spiritual terms.* (1Cor2:6-10)

Breathe in.

There is no channeling.

Only this thought. This moment. This insight.

Is.

Enough.

2011-11-24T21:31:00.000-05:00

We tell stories, act through narratives, remember times, laugh, feast, and fade off.

Thanksgiving.

On the bay, rowing alone, a nickel on red nun #4 for passage fee, then back to harbor solitude extended.

Thanksgiving.

If there was anything I wanted, I cannot recall what it might be.

Thanks.

Giving.

2011-11-23T05:12:00.001-05:00

Silence of snow. Tarps on woodpiles. Dawn turns in eastern horizon. Eve of Thanksgiving.

Stillness.

Meditation Hall

Clear the land, thatch the rush for roof,
All around cherish the empty, the pure.
Mountain blossoms fall by a secluded door,
Within, one who has forgotten the world's schemings.
Concern with existence needs no possession,
Comprehending the void does not wait upon reason.
All things are of conditions born,
Profound is the silence in the midst of clamor.
A person's mind is very much the same;
A bird in flight, leaving no tracks behind.
- Liu Tsung-yuan (773-819)

What does it mean to be a monastic of no other?

Gospel, Luke 21:12-19
Jesus said: Men will seize you and persecute you; they will hand you over to the synagogues and to imprisonment, and bring you before kings and governors because of my name – and that will be your opportunity to bear witness. Keep this carefully in mind: you are not to prepare your defence, because I myself shall give you an eloquence and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to resist or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, relations and friends; and some of you will be put to death. You will be hated by all men on account of my name, but not a hair of your head will be lost. Your endurance will win you your lives.’

What is my life? If I am to win it, it seems important to know what it is.

Here is my life.

Now is my life.

What is here?

What is now?

This!

No defense. No loss. No gain. Just this as it is every single awareness every single time.

There is no other. There is one thing. We are this one thing.

How can we possible grasp what it means to be this one thing?

Snow continues to fall. Muted tires roll on Barnestown Road. Every slumbering awareness is slowing waking from sleep.

'Win,' from Sanskrit, vanas, means 'desire,' 'struggle,' -- at the same time embraces its extension -- 'desireless' 'effortless' so as to complete its surround.

We are the surround of being-here.

God-love being-here, as each and all is!

2011-11-22T15:32:00.005-05:00

Pepper spray is the new language of the police.

JFK's assassination is in an off year at 48, thus is kept quietly.

The liturgical year is in limbo. Between Christ the King and 1st Advent.

Cecilia inspires masses written in her musical honor.

Clouds enter Bangor in advance of tomorrow's storm.

We walk 5.80km through City Forest, delighted at the find.

Afternoon reading (None) 1 Corinthians 12:24,25-26 ©
God has arranged the body and that there may not be disagreements inside the body, but that each part may be equally concerned for all the others. If one part is hurt, all parts are hurt with it. If one part is given special honour, all parts enjoy it.

Trees are bare; they've entered the bed of November.

Some look at us and wonder if there'll ever be a tipping number of those who see the embodying connectivity of divinity that ligatures our seeming decatenation.

Loving God, I think, means serving the whole body.

Each.

All.

2011-11-21T21:54:00.000-05:00

Stacking wood. One stick on another. I have nothing else to do.

Dark and dim, the Bamboo Grove Monastery,
Faint and faraway, the sound of bells at dusk.
Your bamboo hat carrying home the evening sun,
Alone you return to the distant green hills.
- Tu Fu (712-770)

Green wood from Belfast. Some very seasoned from Southwick. One stick atop another. Back and forth. Back and forth.

There is no controlling life.

There is only temporary balance.

Each stick of wood another breath.

2011-11-20T17:12:00.007-05:00

Trip someone up, you are, perhaps, a "satan." That's what the word means way back down deep -- someone or something that trips up, like a root branch on a worn trail. Something that inhibits or opposes moving through or moving on.

There is no better somewhere else, smarter, more effective we can control.

One instant is eternity;
When you see through this one instant,
You see through the one who sees.
- Wu-men (1183-1260)

There is only this path which is the path you are on, upon which, if travelled, would reveal to you everything needed.

Walk that path.

Don't let anyone tell you not to.

If you trip, catch balance again. If fall, rise again.

Trust, radically!

2011-11-19T19:08:00.002-05:00

Dark early. Cold from hard row on Bay chills bones. Bed early.

The Way is arrived at by enlightenment. The first priority is to establish resolve -- it is no small matter to step directly from the bondage of the ordinary person into transcendent experience of the realm of sages. It requires that your mind be firm as steel to cut off the flow of birth and death, accept your original real nature, not see anything at all as existing inside or outside yourself, so all actions and endeavors emerge from the fundamental.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

There is no knowing.

Not anything.

So, we practice.

Not knowing.

Here.

2011-11-18T06:01:00.001-05:00

In the morning, when Earth feels light lift night from surface, prayer wanders from sleep into open recollection, and we are once again the still and vibrant sound of cosmotheandric spirituality, the surround of wholeness stretching embrace of harmlessness throughout all in this glorious reality called by us dawn, twilight, gazing God.

17 Domine labia mea aperies et os meum adnuntiabit laudem tuam
17 O Lord, thou wilt open my lips: and my mouth shall declare thy praise.
(from Paalm 51)

2011-11-17T13:23:00.002-05:00

It's a lot of money. Let's say it has been a necessary expenditure. I'm uncertain it is, but let's say so. It's a lot of money for war and death.

If Congress also approves the FY2012 war funding request of $132 billion, cumulative war funding would then reach $1.415 trillion total including:
• $823 billion for Iraq (63%);
• $557 billion for Afghanistan (35%);
• $29 billion for enhanced security (2%); and
• $6 billion unallocated DOD costs (1/2%) (see Table 1)

(from, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11
Amy Belasco
Specialist in U.S. Defense Policy and Budget March 29, 2011)
In, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress
Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

I'd prefer a different expenditure of so much money, such as health care, housing, jobs, or education grants to every student young or old.

It says a lot about us, our war fondness. I wonder about our sanity and souls. Surely it is insane to want to destroy and kill, over and over, even in the name of God, freedom, and security?

It's a lot to consider.

2011-11-16T23:31:00.001-05:00

No one wants sin. It is gone.

So, let it go.

And it is.

2011-11-15T21:15:00.001-05:00

Tired, there is no other place than sleep.

The sound of bell!

2011-11-13T23:46:00.003-05:00

The following day we walk the river, we walk the beach by the ocean.

We walk the wind and rest in the company of family, eating, sleeping, laughing, some tears and of course the stories.

HISTORY

There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are
And it cometh everywhere.

I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

We are what we tell ourselves we are.

Today we are family

2011-11-12T20:04:00.002-05:00

The opening paragraph of To Bless the Space Between Us, A Book of Blessings, by Irish poet and spiritual philosopher John O'Donohue goes as follows:  

"There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself, though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is welded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing. We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us. The gift of the world is our first blessing."

We blessed Erika, and we were blessed by Erika, today as we placed her in the earth in New Bedford.

She tricked us into coming together as a body of beings longing for blessing. We thought we'd gathered to bury her. Rather we were there to receive her blessing.

As we do whenever someone understands what is taking place between us and invites us into this middle presence, a heaven by no other name.

Festivities continue upstairs.

Solitude becomes me.

2011-11-11T02:48:00.005-05:00

At a Course in Miracles gathering Thursday evening as Erika lay in repose in "The Mutti Room" in Camden, Maine, dressed in her Thanksgiving attire, surrounded by the handiwork reds of her stitchery threads, receiving visitors touched by loving presence, a woman named Rosie from another room in final circle spoke the phrase -- "Erika's passing."

It' a wonderful phrase describing what has happened this week, these eight weeks following diagnosis, and the 89 years following her birth -- Erika's passing!

She is now and has always been passing through.

As are we all -- passing through.

We sometimes think that we're here to stay, that we own the place, that change and transition are unfortunate occurrences we have to tolerate and endure.

I think there's another way to look at it.

Erika, Mutti, Omi, Urgroßmutter, has shown us and is showing us how it is, how to live on this earth, even now, as she takes whatever steps there are to take beyond the last step of Thursday morning around 2am when she passed through her body for the last time in this realm exiting what we call the limitations of 'time' and 'space' and gliding with gracious love into the mysterious openness of timeless presence where the One we call Love Itself celebrates wholeness with this ever-new creation of loving light we have known by the names "Erika," "Mrs. Huising," "Mutti," "Omi," and "Dear Treasure."

Some would say: "She's gone," and they'd be right -- she is. Some would say, "She's gone beyond," and they'd be right -- she has. And still others would say, "She's still with us, and will never leave us." And these, too, are right -- feel her in your heart and mind, see her in your cups of tea, hear her in clinking glasses raised with endearing joy and laughter whenever family gather anywhere.

She knows now and shows here. She knows now and shows here that each one is right, that each one is an appreciated contribution to the extraordinary embrace of smiling welcome this good woman practiced as her daily yoga.

Erika would want us, I believe, to know that she's all right, that we're all right, that it's all right -- that at the deepest, truest, lightest level it's all love, and light, and bliss, and kindness, and hospitality, and family, and the community of everyone who lives and dies, suffers and rejoices, eats and drinks, weeps and laughs.

Wir loben Gott und sagen Dank,
Fur alles, auch für Speis und Trank
In Jesus Namen, Amen!

Today I take liberties to translate this prayer as:

"We happily speak our praise with God --
For everything and everyone --

for this woman, this family member, this friend, this sister of God-With-Us (also named Emmanuel, Jesus, Mary's child, the Christ),

for the food and drink

Of love, and love, and, yes, love!"

And so, and so, and so -- In the name of all that is holy, we thank you, dear woman, for bringing us here today.

Here, with one another, being-with everything, passing through!

The words heard from her so often are the words that apply so intimately to her: Schatzilein, Liebchen, Hertzilein

Treasured one! Loved-one! Heart-felt one!

Danke sehr!

Bitte schon!

We are passing through this experience with Erika's love.

May this experience be of benefit to each of us as well as all people everywhere longing for such an experience with generous love and gracious presence!

Prosit! Let it be!

2011-11-10T04:24:00.002-05:00

Then, nearing 2am, after a passion of final breaths, there were no more. Struggle of transition coming to quiet completion, Erika returns to origin. We sit in silent vigil for a while. Tears in her presence. The women prepare to wash and ready her body for journey.

2011-11-09T23:07:00.002-05:00

Harp music graced the room.

Kindness and compassion were the notes.

2011-11-07T21:00:00.002-05:00

These will be known as her last days. In front room, hospital bed, she breathes asleep the rhythmic cadences of prolonging reverie.

Hospice officially began today.

This house becomes a holy place.

As life continues through it all. Hers and ours.