In the deep recesses, is the snow still deep? Meetingbrook tries to find its way.

Which way
Did you come from,
Following dream paths at night,
While snow is still deep
In this mountain recess?
- Ryokan (1758-1831

MEETINGBROOK LAURA COMMON (A draft proposal for further conversation)


1. FINDING COMMUNITY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE

Q: WHAT IS MEETINGBROOK LAURA COMMON?
A: Meetingbrook Laura Common intends to be a community of individuals engaged in their own practice/prayer/study alone or with others.

Q: WHAT IS A ‘LAURA?’
A: ‘Laura’ is from a Greek word meaning foot trail, lane, or path. It represents the worn trails we travel between dwellings.

Q: WHO CAN BELONG TO THE LAURA?
A: Those identifying themselves as practitioners of a spiritual or religious discipline might wish to be part of a loosely knit association of individuals who intentionally choose to
· 1. Deepen their practice,
· 2. Share the delights & difficulties of their practice with another or others in soul-friend (1x1) conversation and circle (group) conversation,
· 3. Invite an openness of practice/prayer/study in one's own particular tradition or discipline so as to encourage others theirs.

Q: WHY CONSIDER BEING PART OF A LAURA?
A: In an age of many religious traditions and spiritual practices, there is often a lack of exposure to and conversation about the practice individuals actually engage in to deepen their practice/prayer/study.

Q: IS THERE A GOAL?
A: The goal to encourage each other to have a chosen practice, to actually practice, to share the experience of practice, to ask questions that arise from it, to invite others into the experience and questions so as to create a community, a sangha of practice/prayer/study that is available to enrich each other and visitors to the process.

Q: IS THERE A FEE OR COST INVOLVED?
A: No and yes.

Q: NO?
A: All events at Meetingbrook are free, open, and informal.

Q: YES?
A: Meetingbrook Bookshop and Bakery on Camden Harbor is the central clearinghouse and space for gatherings, conversations, information, and study – these things are part of our practice, that is, Bill and Saskia at Dogen & Francis Hermitage.
We are inviting the wider community, if they wish, to become subscribers to Meetingbrook to help pay the costs of rent, utilities, and meeting space.


Q: WHAT DOES THE SUBSCRIPTION GET THE SUBSCRIBER?
A: A forum, a place, a retreat room, an on-line and bi-annual journal, a community of practitioners that is willing to openly support each other in their practice. O yeah, free coffee, tea, summer sails with Saskia, and the (oftentimes) looniest bunch of people your tolerance can take.

Q: DO I HAVE TO GIVE UP MY CURRENT AFFILIATIONS?
A: No. The purpose of the Laura is to be a resource to all people of practice, prayer, and study. The goal is to deepen and share individual journeys. Then, to go back to our individual practices, or religious/spiritual affiliations and deepen one’s life in that setting if that is the call. The Laura Common wishes to be a common space where everyone with an intent to draw closer to their own truest reality – natural, divine, human, -- might find others similarly engaged and practice/pray/study with each other.

Q: WHERE DOES THE ‘LAURA’ NOTION COME FROM?
A: A “Laura” is a series of trails that lead from one's dwelling place to another's dwelling, to a common meeting place, and back again. Historically it is associated with what is called 'a laura of hermits.' These are individuals who have chosen to live an intentional life of solitude and community.
Some might live alone. Some might live alone with another. Some might live alone with others. Those who are part of a Laura are part of a larger community of individuals dedicated to living a life of contemplative, meditative, mindful, engaged, and loving service to self, each other, the world as we find it, and the ground of all being – known to some as True Self, God, Christ, Buddha, or Love Itself.

Q: DO YOU HAVE TO BE CHRISTIAN OR BUDDHIST TO BELONG?
A: No. At Dogen & Francis Hermitage Saskia and I practice in our root Catholic tradition as well as in the tradition of Zen Buddhism – but that is our practice, not the standard for anyone else. Each is meant to bring their root and/or current tradition to the Common and learn deeply there.

2. CHOOSING LAURA MEMBERSHIP

Membership suggests responsibilities and benefits.

Responsibilities include:

1) Daily Practice: Maintaining a (daily) practice/prayer/study engaged alone or with others.
2) Weekly Recording: Journal, letter-write, voice/video tape an entry concerning some delight or difficulty of your practice/prayer/study. This is for your own use.
3) Monthly Soul-friend 1x1 conversation: Willingness to regularly (monthly) speak with another person about matters of practice/prayer/study.
4) Monthly Community Conversation: Attend (monthly) a conversation conducted by another on some aspect of their practice/prayer/study.
5) Quarterly Invitation to Practice: 4 times a year extend an invitation to others to visit your practice in your own dwelling or in a common location.
6) Bi-annual Convening of Conversation: Twice a year convenes a conversation open to other Laura members and/or public on any chosen aspect of your practice/prayer/study.
7) Annual Retreat: Attend (yearly) a retreat of several days, or week in a setting honoring the simplicity, silence, and service in the tradition of your practice/prayer/study.

Benefits include:

1) Participate in an intentional community of practitioners where your particular expression of practice/prayer/study is respected and deepened.
2) Have abundant opportunities to share your personal practice/prayer/study with others.
3) Have forum to experience a variety of spiritual and intellectual traditions and disciplines and the personal encounters of others in that forum.
4) Utilize a network of individuals willing to practice non-judgmental and open loving speech and deep listening.
5) Have an ongoing online and bi-annual printed journal to read and contribute one's reflections and observations about their practice/prayer/study.
6) Utilize retreat resources for quiet and solitude. There is a meditation cabin at Ragged Mountain and a Harbor Room at Meetingbrook's two locations. Other retreat rooms might be available at other Laura member's dwellings.
7) Participate in volunteer service to the greater community where you live, or in the mid-coast area. There are prison conversations, community bakery visits to homebound and nursing facilities for recipe and hospitality purposes, and opportunities to be a resource for respite retreat and support for those experiencing the need to have a time-out because of life situations.

3. LAURA SUPPORT
Meetingbrook invites a subscription membership to help pay rent and keep going the programs begun there. While there is no fee to be part of Meetingbrook's Laura Common, donations and gifts for the ongoing costs and support of Meetingbrook are both welcome and needed.

4. BECOMING A SUBSCRIBER/MEMBER OF MEETINGBROOK
There is a yearly overhead of $18,000 to lease and maintain the cape on the harbor currently housing the bookshop/bakery and hermitage harbor room. This building is used for conversations, study groups, meditation practice, and retreat stays. It too will become part of the Hermitage non-profit organization so that all donations will support the practice/prayer/study that takes place there as well as the volunteer programs centralized there.
We’re thinking of 36 donors @$ 500 each to begin the first year. Nevertheless, all and any donation will be gratefully received.


Meditating deeply
Reach the depth of the source.
Branching streams cannot
Compare to this source!
Sitting alone in a great silence
Even though the heavens
Turn and the earth is upset,
You will not even wink.
- Nyogen Senzaki (1876-1958)

5. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: WHAT IS THIS?

To the question, "What Is This?" -- the Laura Common might wish to respond, "This is our practice, prayer, and study -- to present with simplicity & attention, integrity & silence, faithful engagement & transparent service -- who we are and what we do in each moment and situation we encounter."

At a recent Sunday Evening Practice someone pointed out there are three aspects of practice to consider for the Laura Common:
1) Personal Practice - that which an individual routinely engages in for his or her own practice, prayer, study.
2) Household Practice -- that which a household, (where two or more persons dwell together), regularly sets as a time to practice, pray, study together.
3) Community Practice -- that form wherein many people gather together outside the home (whether church, sangha, or other community) to practice, pray, or study.

These three forms connect with a larger understanding of the balance we try to maintain between solitude, intimate sharing, and broader community. The Laura Common intends to be just one of many other vehicles to encourage contemplation, conversation, and correspondence. This, and the engaged service of mindful compassion and awareness, is what practitioners offer to each and all. As individuals with a practice we choose to inform each other of what it is we do, keep all beings in mind and heart as we do our practice, and invite anyone who wishes -- whether new beginner or old beginner -- to be part of a wide and varied community of practice.

May all beings be happy! May all beings be safe! May all beings come to dwell in their true home -- with wisdom and compassion. And may the love of God, This One, help us 'reach the depth of the source!'

We'll have 3 weeks of Wednesday Evening Conversation (17, 24, 31July, 5:30-6:30pm) about the Laura.

[wfh/11July2002, Feast of St. Benedict]

Walking from shop to grocery store Saturday night I see doors of Catholic Church open. I enter. I'd stayed away from this particular parish church since before Ash Wednesday. I'd spent the duration going to church in the towns north and south of ours. The local pastor had, in my and other's opinion, abused the power of the pulpit for personal reasons. He only apologized to the people he'd been unkind to after 4 months of sorrow and fretting on their part when he left recently for 6 months of residential therapy.

The inside of the church was quiet and vacant, but for a lone man in third pew. He turned and noted my entering. Gregorian chant sounded gently the silent interior.

This morning the substitute priest, a chaplain at the State Prison we also visit, said he'd opened the church last night as he will every Saturday night 8-10pm for quiet contemplation.

He said one or two had stopped by the night before, no doubt surprised to see the church doors open.

Do we not cherish the
Infinite brightness
Of the one bright pearl?
Who can surpass
The virtue of this
Brilliant, radiant pearl
That covers the universe?
The essence of causality
Never ceases and
The pearl is always bright.
It is our original face and enlightened eye.
- Dogen (1200-1253)(dailyzen)

Doors are made of spirit as well as wood. It delights that these doors are open again.

Open doors reflect a bright pearl. We long to see our original face in this silent hospitality.

EVE, MOTHER'S BIRTH
(for Catherine)

When my mother was born
whole reaches of universe came to be

when she died, so many coffee cups
beer glasses stay dry in cupboards --

still the universe drinks
without pouring a single drop

from what is not open.
When mothers are born

every point of light spouts itself
over and open over again

a wondrous thirst never slaked,
each word mothers our creation.

(wfh)

There is no news in silence. Nothing is revealed with possessions.

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 Zongyuan (773–819) (dailyzen)

Dead chipmunk killed by cat is left out in open for crows. Government leaders plan similar scenarios for enemy leaders of countries considered threat to our way of life.

Women with cancer visit. Their chemo regimen balds heads and frightens hearts -- they reappraise what is dear to them.

The world is dizzy with greed and criminality on the part of heads of corporations. In America the sickness of excess and deception nauseates those who cause the infection and those suffering the received infection.

Diogenes, Socrates, Buddha, Christ, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Francis, Benedict, Teresa, Dorothy, and many others -- all search and seed the ground of earth/being for what is honest, true, and loving.

Concern with existence needs no possession…
Profound is the silence in the midst of clamor.

The emptiness of our arrival and departure seeks middle emptiness that trusts without grasping.
Birdsong and clanging bell attest to silence.

What I love about this life is simple awareness excluding nothing.
What I love about silence is what is included.

There is no news anywhere that is not in silence. If I learn to read the emptiness appearing around me, if I learn to hear the news of silence – then -- I will cherish and understand what and who I am.

Then, as now, I will leave no tracks, no trace.
Simply, one in flight.

Yearning is the only trail between what we’re not and what is really there -- what we really are.

If you meet a fencing master on the road,
show him your sword,
If you meet a poet,
offer her your poem.
When you meet others,
say only a part of what you intend.
Never give the whole thing at once.
- Mu-mon (1228)

Do we hold back our gifts because experience indicates many people will glance at them, shrug, and turn away to something else?

Everyone is poet. The ability to see what is really there -- the dance of energy passing through myriad forms – belongs to anyone willing to pause, look, and listen.

Everyone wields a sword forged in fires of their own perceptions. We fence with real and imaginary opponents, ones we perceive encroaching beyond boundaries considered sacrosanct. The sword we use – taken from the scabbard of self-image – should only be carefully shown, if at all.

At Lectio this morning Matthew’s words about Jesus’ yoke being easy, his burden light. This union (yoke, yoga) is easy. The task (burden, focus) is light. Ease and light – (letting go, passing on) – governs the simplicity of response impermanence evokes.

Yearning is the trail we travel between arrival and departure. This footpath connects us to all that is. It is not acquisitive. It is releasement.

Gifts imply what is given and what is giving. To hold back a gift is to have only shattered promise in one’s hand. To refuse a gift is to fist approaching kindness.

When we yearn for and show carefully what we are, we create a trail for others to explore. Processing along the trail will be discovery for creator and pilgrim -- holy communion with each we meet, poetic realization with all we see.

Yearn deeply. Learn phenomenally. Cut illusion with the sword of awareness. Enjoy the hike.

When prayer finds me I am always surprised. I'm not always aware I'm lost. Like a friend appearing in a summer morning's playful tag, prayer taps shoulder with "you're it" and scoots away behind birdcall.

I found my way up
Yoshino’s precipice-hung
Path and into its
Past, seeing there the blossoms
I sought that spring – ages ago.
- Saigyo (1118 – 1190)

Ages ago there was only linear time. Long straight extension from an unimaginable past stretching to an unimaginable future. Then arrives prayer.

Prayer encircles. It enfolds. What seemed once to be a line straight and narrow becomes a round return, origin to origin.

If I pray for a happy life and happy death for those who come to mind, I am praying for their happy life and death at the very moment of their life and death. It doesn't matter that they've been dead in linear time's measurement for 30 years or 3 days. Prayer reaches into the instant of that person's life, the instant of their death, and touches them there.

Prayer is eternal presence. This eternal presence consists of the one praying, the one prayed for, and the One Presence encircling and enfolding each in prayerful round return.

Each and any prayer is eternally real. It is, as well, felt presence in time. It acknowledges and participates in the creating life of the whole family of Being -- humanity, all sentient beings, matter itself, divinity itself. (What we call non-divinity, or non-being, or some, evil -- might be the separating, non-inclusive, fragmenting, othering, and divisive intent/activity to avoid and deny what is whole -- causing harm and suffering.)

Prayer heals and wholes that which has been broken by those of us not yet ready for love, not-yet ready to be Love's dwelling place. When I'm tagged by prayer in my forgetting, touched by presence when I'm lost -- suddenly I remember -- be prayer, say prayer, long for what I am.

God is the longing that inspires prayer. We are God's longing to inhabit and transform this sacred family.

Prayer is surprising. Let's surprise each other!

The strawberry moon came full over Curtis Island. Tom O'D alerted us, took zoom lens and camera to edge of Waterfront patio and clicked away at it. The new waitress from Colorado, then kitchen crew, customers, all stood in a silence of liturgical vigil at its rising.

If your mind is fixed on a certain spot,
It will be seized by that spot and
No activities can be performed efficiently.
Not to fix your mind anywhere is essential.
Not fixed anywhere,
The mind is everywhere…
The Original Mind is like water which flows freely
Whereas the deluded mind is like ice
There is a passage in the Diamond Sutra that says:
“The mind should operate without abiding anywhere.”
- Takuan (1573-1645)

The universe in a rounded moon, and St. John's Day to boot. The sky resplendent, conversation in open air, a sense of loss and gain all at once.

We will stay where we are at Ragged Mountain. The moon is familiar there too.

When I die will the world still exist?
This is a spiritual question. If God Alone Is, and I die -- does the world still exist?

Although the marvelous
Lines are difficult to trace,
Still I can make out
Several layers of mountains,
A jumble of peaks,
Like shell-spiraled locks of hair.
Faraway streams and mountains,
Peaks swathed in clouds,
Just like a painting,
Have captured the essence.
Gazing into emptiness,
I long to ask the monk about it.
If I don’t learn the meaning
Of the reclusive life,
I can but sigh with regret until the day I die!
- Su Shih 1073 (dailyzen)

The reclusive life is returning to what alone is.

The novelty of Christianity from the sociological standpoint, as compared with other religions, lay in breaking down all imperative relationship between religion and the family, clan, nation or empire, giving it a personal basis in conscience. (opening line in Church and State c.1939, by Luigi Sturzo)

Perhaps the reason prayer is vital is in its personal basis. What we call 'conscience' is the dwelling place of what is and can be known, seen, and intuited -- the apparent and the hidden -- residing in the very essence of each individual. Prayer -- or the meaning of the reclusive life -- is enfolding conscience resting in itself, in what is true and loving. Prayer asks into and invites what is there to see and know with (i.e. to dwell as conscience). Prayer resides within a common wholeness. Prayer engages what is there.

What alone is! All else is dispersion, diffusion, and dissimilation.

If I recall, e.e.cumming's words go something like: Better worlds, I suggest, are born, not made -- and begin with the birthdays of individuals. Let us pray, therefore, not for better worlds, but for individuals.

In response to my first question above, I suspect the world will still exist when I die. The mystery of appearance and disappearance is more than one person's biographical terminus. Still, there is something to contemplate here that corresponds to the meaning of the reclusive life. If God alone is, and I have died into Christ's mysterious passage -- through creation, through life, through death, into what is alone God -- then, what else is there?

As I live and as I die -- I'll be gazing into this emptiness -- knowing the sight of God is what is looking through me. This will be my prayer.

One day I'll no longer sigh with regret at what I no longer am.

Have you ever wondered what time is? Ever thought it is only an agreed upon convenience serving to keep events, places, and autobiographical incidents separate and sequential?

Time seems to be the mask Now wears so not to frighten us. Seeing or doing all at once hardly allows for a change of clothes.
Time is a wardrobe stagehand backstage assisting the changes we think we must make before appearing again before others.

We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It is a question of time, not motive.
(p70, in novel The Holder of the World, by Bharati Mukherjee)

News comes we might not get the farm.
I trust the nexus, the transition from one thing to another thing. Spring becoming summer; something held as possible becoming the possible itself holding nothing.

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven....I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event. (Harold Brodkey "Manipulations" in Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, p217)

I trust what is wanted, not always what we want. A difference? I don't know.

The Manifestation
Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming
Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,
A seed pushing itself beyond itself,
The mole making its way through darkest ground,
The worm, intrepid scholar of the soil--
Do these analogies perplex? A sky with clouds,
The motion of the moon, and waves at play,
A sea-wind pausing in a summer tree.

What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
(Theodore Roethke)

This warm afternoon breeze moves through wind chimes, cars up Barnestown Road, sun streaks through bamboo slats at window facing barn. Each doing what it should.

And us?
It is a question of time.
For now -- I think we're out of it.

Suddenly solitude. A sequestering silence. Dusk at Ragged Mountain.

In quiescence I hear the
Cinnamon blossoms fall.
When night comes,
The Spring mountains are silent.
Suddenly the moon appears
From behind the clouds
And startles the young birds;
By the mountain stream they chirp and chirp.
- Wang Wei (701–761)

If I were to be asked right now what is Meetingbrook -- I would have nothing to say.

This nothing is best unsaid but better sounded by Oriole and Grosbeak, Finch and Nuthatch, Chickadee and Sparrow.

If we say nothing, can anything come of it?

Green stillness.

Poetry and Psalms make secular and sacred life more tolerable.

Today is the feast of St Romuald. "St. Romuald lived and worked during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. He fully realized in his own life the spirit of the Rule, and he wisely reinterpreted it, emphasizing the solitude of the hermitage. St. Romuald wanted the hermitage to be characterized by a greater simplicity and a more intense penitential and contemplative practice." (from Introduction to the Rule for Camaldolese Benedictine Oblates)

St. Romuald's Brief Rule

Sit in your cell as in paradise;
put the whole world behind you and forget it;
like a skilled angler on the lookout for a catch
keep a careful eye on your thoughts.

The path you follow is in the psalms -- don't leave it.
If you've come with a novice's enthusiasm and can't
accomplish what you want, take every chance you can find
to sing the psalms in your heart and to understand them
with your head; if your mind wanders as you read
don't give up but hurry back and try again.

Above all realize that you are in God's presence;
hold your heart there in wonder as if before your sovereign.

Empty yourself completely;
sit waiting, content with God's gift,
like a little chick tasting and eating nothing
but what its mother brings.

The monk's cell and the inmate's cell have much in common. One of which is time for considering what poetry and psalms open into.

In the Maine State Prison last Friday -- where we returned for twice-monthly conversations after a lengthy hiatus due to the closing of old prison in Thomaston and moving into new prison in Warren -- we spoke about the first few pages of Socrates Cafe and an essay in The Poet's Work (edited by Reginald Gibbons).
Christopher Phillips' Socrates book, subtitled "A Fresh Taste of Philosophy," begins with a lead line quoting someone saying, "Psychiatry is the rape of the muse." We conversed about this opening salvo for a while. The second piece, entitled "Why Write" (1972) by Gunter Kunert contained the following:

The more I tried, as I wrote, to dissolve into what I was writing, the more severely the number of themes and subjects was reduced (as if that were the price) -- however inexhaustible I had formerly believed them, as others believed in the diversity of life. With increasing identity of text and author, the author's role as clown or teacher ends; every mortal impetus loses its imperative aspect and becomes viewpoint and style, the frequency of the literal essence into which the author withdraws. The lack of freedom in every literary effort increases proportionally, and variability decreases, because all that succeeds is what promotes transformation; everything else comes about halfheartedly or not at all. (Kunert, p137, in The Poet's Work)

Chris said that insanity is that which transcends contemporary thought. Sane acts we understand; insane acts we don't understand. "The insane is where thought cannot go," he added.

Paco thought that by lumping the not understandable into categories with labels and diagnoses, we are able then to dismiss the person and hold onto the label. Paco then went on to say that considering the practice of Meetingbrook to come into prison for no other reason than to have a conversation - no pay, no other obvious agenda, nothing but the conversation -- was most likely considered crazy by a vast majority. (He added a great compliment -- "You guys are freaks!")

Ed spoke of Viet Nam experience -- finding wallet and pictures of a dead enemy soldier's family -- as a blinding light in 1972 for him. (We'd been talking about the Leonard Cohen lyric that went something like; "There is a crack in everything, that's where the light comes in.")

Aren't we all trying to retrieve the original felt experience when we write, speak, converse, or even care about anything? To say, as above, that poetry and psalms make secular and sacred life more tolerable, is not to say there is no pain or depth of anguish. It does, however, remarkably, free us.

Joe wondered, "Can an insane person describe insanity?"
Paco described what must be one of the most punishing aspects of residing in prison, namely, you never know in any prison conversation whether it is a mask you are talking to -- or through. "We're so great at adapting," he said.

I've heard Paco's observation before. It is not restricted to those behind walls of an official prison. There are other prisons of subtler walls. But the suspicion that the person we think we are conversing with is either not really there, playing us, or is masking a role that might or might not be authentic -- that is a prison conversation. That is one of the real deprivations, the absence of freedom to be ourselves.

At end of this conversation at prison, there is poetry. Andre, Joe, and Mike had one of theirs. Cheryl had one by Hafiz.

The minds
Depict me tribal,
Religiously contradicting myself,
Reading script from the Bible
with visions homicidal.
Beauty is deprived with my eyes open.
I keep my eyes closed, and dream of butterflies
until they end up my size,
flying with knives trying to slice throats.
Decisively my mind chose to find
a place safe in the Devil's oasis.
There's nothing he doesn't cater.
Every acre is filled with temptation,
intoxication and riches major.
It makes me hate to sleep or wake up.
One world is degrading, one world is fake.
But they both have plenty snakes,
and spiritually my boundaries won't let me
reach a space where all is sacred.
I stuck on a globe with open drapes,
my mind naked.
Praying what I state or what I think
can change created fates we make up
and let penetrate us.
At any rate when we keep faith and
learn that when we're sleep we're awake,
Both worlds will hate us.
(Andre)

And,

Seg
Sitting here time goes passing,
Past and present keep on clashing
The present goes off into the past.
The future is here present at last
(Mike)

Hafiz gets the last word:
God wants to see more playfulness in your eyes.
If you pray, somewhere in the world some good will happen.

We try to be, secular and sacred, more tolerable with each other in this way, in this life.

Monetary life or monastic life?

We live in a moneyed economy. It buys rhetorical persuasion. It can even buy an unseemly silence - with hush money. It builds cathedrals of corporate power -- whether for the aggrandizing of human or divine beings. It feathers nests. It creates tomes of binding contracts, inheritance dispersions, and tax laws. Money is our secular scripture.

Likewise, what used to be Holy Scripture has given way to fundamental literalists on one side and deconstructive allegory on the other. Where do we find the middle road -- where written word mingles with inspired thought -- leading to personal insight while conserving original text?

What would it look like to live sacred poverty?

Devote yourself to the Absolute Emptiness;
Contemplate earnestly in Quiescence.
All things are together in Action,
But I look into their Non-action,
For things are continuously moving, restless,
Yet each is proceeding back to its origin.
Proceeding back to the origin means Quiescence.
To be in Quiescence is to see “Being-in-itself.”
- Lao tzu (dailyzen)

Though he was in the form of God,
Jesus did not deem equality with God
something to be grasped at.
Rather he emptied himself
and took the form of a slave,
being born in the likeness of men.
(Philippians 2:6-7)

When Jesus "emptied himself" becoming Christ; when a Buddha puts Nirvana on hold to return to the dwelling place of someone still suffering, becoming Bodhisattva -- am I attentive to their embodiment of poverty?
Most often not.

The moneyed way is norm. Poverty is either failure to carry one's weight in the eyes of those who can -- or poverty is practice seldom attempted, even by those who profess it for religious or spiritual purposes.

As the world experiences detonation of its unreflective acceptance of the moneyed way, I ask: Is the monastic way retrievable and meaningful for individuals residing in our contemporary culture?

If God is One and we long for that Oneness to be what we are, is poverty a requisite practice of One?

Devotion to "Absolute Emptiness" (Lao tzu) or to "the form of a slave" (Paul) invites us into the mystery hiding in existential human life. This devotion pivots on the question: What is the longing at root of my existence?

What and how we respond to this question will shape the form of the world in which -- and as which -- we live.

Do we Christians have it wrong? Not yet trying poverty -- do we consciously postpone Christ-life?
Do we Buddhists (and other religions) have it wrong? Not yet recognizing that any suffering is shared suffering -- do we elongate illusion? Is life able to be simplified with its root longing?

Wasn't the inability to simplify life a Turgenev character's reason for suicide?
When we kill ourselves, are we not also really killing Oneself? By failing to simplify our lives are we, wittingly or unwittingly, contributing to the postponement of Oneness and the prolongation of suffering in the world?

Monastic poverty is the simplification of one's life.

Monastic poverty allows Life-Itself to resource the lives of all. By choosing moneyed life over monastic life I choose what can be bought and sold in this conditioned world over what can be shared and given in unconditional freedom.

This choice asks: Being-in-itself? Or, beings-for-your-use? The first requires contemplation to embody. The second merely requires our willingness to reach out and take for our own whatever we want. The first is what we truly are when we finally see our inner true nature. The second is what we manipulate and accumulate as our external net worth.

This Being-in-itself -- whether Christ-Life or Buddha-Life -- is a dimension of love and compassion that is the essence of holy poverty and sacred scripture.

Imagine choosing the form of a slave? Imagine longing to simplify and not knowing how to?
I ask myself: What is this one longing? What devoted form of service am I willing to disappear into?

We are each one in this longing.

Monastic life is longing for what Alone is.

Here is what birth is.
When here we birth what is here, we birth what we are.

Today is Saskia's here-day.
We each and all are birthed in her birthing here.

We are told to realize that
Not a single thing exists.
In this field birth and death
Do not appear.
The deep source,
Transparent down to the bottom,
Can radiantly shine and respond
Unencumbered by each speck of dust
Without becoming its partner.
- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091–1157)

No dust, no encumbrance, no birth no death --
Only partnering what is within without becoming partner.

Happy Saskia Day Here!

Tuesday night rain cloaks everything with its sound.

We are fortunate to hear this sound, to say so, and to praise both its origin and destination.

Our worst worry is not dirty bombs or other forms of terror.
The worry worth our attention is not to hear, say, or appreciate the sound of rain.


“From the very beginning
All things are in nirvana”
Here’s spring with its hundred blossoms,
A yellow warbler singing in the willow.
- Anonymous(dailyzen)

Mini the cat licks herself. Saskia talks with her mother by phone.
Fifty years ago tonight they both prepared to receive and give birth. It was received. It was given.

Rain is birth cloaking everything with its receiving giving sound.

The taste of spring lingers in opening ground, nature, and faces.

Three sisters (from Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia) visit and appear to be three appreciating angels at the shop. Dana arrives and confirms their appreciation of Meetingbrook.

Hugh and Virginia (now famous with article written on their Poems/Pictures book in local paper) came to visit the ordinary working class on their rounds,

Silvia says Mercury is in direct following retrograde -- ("Don't sign any contracts during retrograde," she chirps.).

Later at food market I tell Nancy about the Mercury news. She asks if that's good or bad. I tell her I haven't a clue. (She buys spring water; I buy seltzer). We laugh.

In a grove of tall bamboos
Beside an ancient temple
Steam rolls from the brazier
In fragrant white clouds.
I’ll show you the path of Sages
Beyond this floating world,
But will you understand
The lasting taste of spring?
- Baisao (1675-1763)(dailyzen)

Charlotte and friend borrow canoe to paddle the harbor. (Sando walks her home and stays for two hours with her ball-throwing friend.)

Barbara returns for naturalist week on the ketch Angelique. She's been doing Yoga down south and readying to teach it. (She took bus up from Carolina; her body is unfurling.)

Tenzin the dog was in with Holly the Tibetan Rug specialist. (Cisco kept the younger pup in his sights with low growls each time the tailless one approached.)

Kristen stopped in the day after her triumphant return to stage in The Apple Tree at civic theatre. (Word is she can really act and sing.)

Schooner Susan drops off copy of her first cd, Water Meets Sand. (She's gone to meet the cover creator in Lincolnville.)

Saskia naps under eaves, tired from all she does to bail the bilge and maintain freeboard on the good ship she has poured herself into. (She's a courageous captain!)

A fishing boat in the afternoon carried wedding party from town landing to yacht club reception passing shop with calls of celebration from harbor side. (We are all at the beginning of nuptiality.)

Who was it said, "All Being is Nuptial"?
It is.

We ask each other: What is it our hearts long for?

A regular life. Full of the liturgy of the hours, zazen sitting, hospitality, conversation, stillness, and silence. And solitude. Especially what Henri Nouwen calls 'solitude of the heart.'

Thinking is not the perseverating noise that rattles inside people's heads. Thinking is watchfulness. It is a seeing that allows what is there to be seen. Thinking is not worrying. Thinking is not analyzing or judging. Thinking is seeing itself.

"There is a pleasure in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the course necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain." (Durant)

"To be a philosopher," said Thoreau, "is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a love of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust." (in The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant)

South and north,
Sharing a single mountain gate,
Above and below,
Two temples both named T’ien-chu.
Dwelling therein is
An old dharma master,
Built tall and skinny
Like stork or swan.
I do not know what
Practice he engages in,
But his green eyes
Reflect the mountain valleys.
Just looking into them
Makes one feel fresh and pure,
As if all one’s baneful
Vexations had been cleansed.
- Su Shih (1073)

When we see what is there, we are not other than what is there. Green eyes reflect the mountain valleys.

This afternoon the harbor is calm and sky is cloud gray.
When we see, will we see what we see?

What is it our hearts long for?

Absurdity -- the unsound and stupid -- postures as power and wealth in our culture. This is unfair.

The sound and wise invest money and rule confidently the institutions of learning, government, religion, and financial matters. They are not the absurd ones.

Real absurdity hides in simplicity and poverty. Within or without awareness – in Spirit, Truth, and Love.

Though night after night
The moon is stream-reflected,
Try to find where it has touched,
Point even to a shadow.
- Takuan (1573–1645)

It cheers to think we no longer know the whereabouts of our priests, roshis, rabbis, sages, and saints. They are hidden within the ordinary sound of birdsong. They are felt in the passing fragrance of mowed field. They reside in the silence of cloud-break sunlight on scarred wood desk. They wander without knowing the pathways the rest of us wander.

It is not the lies, deceit, greed, nor even pretense of good intention that disturbs about the culture of professional political and private-public power grabbers -- it is the absurdity masked as the American Way, Capitalist Way, Plutocratic Way.

Absurdity -- the unsound and stupid -- belongs instead to a different segment of our world. Absurdity belongs to the fools whose lives are lost in the sacred silence of stillness, solitude, and simplicity.

Ridiculous, unreasonable, and incongruous -- radical holiness -- the foolish way of one lost in God.
This one does not kill, substitute the unreal, take from another, lie, or pretend the unlovely is lovely.

Somewhere this morning there are Buddhists reciting precepts. Somewhere there are Christians praying promises. Jews saying a blessing. Muslims proclaiming the greatness of God. Hindus making vows real. Native Americans chanting the earth and sun into being. Atheists and agnostics caring for loved ones and the earth.

Somewhere -- absurdity is regaining its correct domain. Those who grab power, money, influence, and control of who lives and dies -- they should not be allowed to appropriate the alias absurdity -- they should be given a name resembling something less valuable: like stocks, lawyer's bills, and success.

Absurdity belongs with the lovers of the earth, sentient beings, human family, and divine guest. These failures, chaotic expressions, and imperfections are what is now and ever sacred. The sacred – the unpretentious absurd – our lives.

Absurd. Seem strange?
"Try to find where it has touched" -- and heal within that place.

Upstairs in Harbor Room Dana and Saskia set up new register for use. Schooner-bum Susan comes in with the mastered cd from her afternoon recording session. We play it. She can sing.

It's a hot afternoon. My heart is in a pine glade.

Alone in mountain fastness,
Dozing by the window.
No mere talk uncovers Truth:
The fragrance of those garden plums!
- Bankei (1622 – 1693)(dailyzen)

Or brown needles grounding shade through sanctuary walking path.

Just because a body is in prison, no need for mind to stay shut up.

Joe asked if we would cease to be human once we arrive at cosmotheandric awareness. Once we awaken a spirituality and consciousness that Raimon Panikkar names and toward which, he suggests, we are evolving.

We returned to Maine State Prison this morning after 5 months. That time was closed to volunteers due to the prison's move from Thomaston to Warren. Everyone had to be reorientated -- retraining prisoners, guards, and staff -- as well as lastly, volunteers.

For two hours 15 of us sat and read, conversed, laughed, spoke for heart and head, recited poetry -- and released the expression that cannot remain unfree.

No thinking, no reflecting-
Perfect emptiness:
Yet therein something moves,
Following its own course.
- Shinkage-ryu sword school (dailyzen)

Dick thought the human was chaos and mistake. Hyun felt that view didn't take into account the oscillating spirituality we'd wrestled with after the Capra/Bateson dialogue. Panikkar's 9 ways not to speak about God suggested alternate thinking about what discourse might fly.

Andre's insight that divinity will not be tainted by one who sees all things in simplicity -- and Kevin's experience that nature "just picks up" when attended to -- sparked thought about the relationship between complexity and consciousness.

Chris said that the ability to make a decision is where chaos begins. Deprived of that choice we remain infantilized. With choice and decision we court mistake and error.

Barbara Rhodes' Zen talk on the illusion and suffering of separation brought attention to the molecular exchange taking place in the midst of our gathering together, and however unaware we might be, there is profound interconnection.

Thor -- ("the image of you / you can't undo"), ("to know death / is to know the wind / that whispers through the trees") -- and Andre ("I wondered if I'm under a spell / you have to wonder") -- recited poems and lines from their poems.

It was a wonderful return. We'll have Meetingbrook Conversations in prison every other Friday morning. We'll put our bodies behind locked doors and barbed wire in exchange for the wonder and wind sweeping through our common exploration.

Water is scarce, says Skip Day -- town Manager at Lincolnville -- when we run by him our plans for Meetingbrook Farm. He thinks we'd be fine with what we wish to do. Of course we are like scarce water trying to seep deeper into ground.

However deep your
Knowledge of the scriptures,
It is no more than a strand of hair
In the vastness of space;
However important seeming
Your worldly experience,
It is but a drop of water in a deep ravine. -
Tokusan (dailyzen)


Walking boundaries, house inspection, water tests, mortgage inquiry, questions and questions by those who come into the shop. E-mails of advice and wariness. Exclamations of hope and expectation! Always the unknown – where will money come from to support the purchase of farm and initiate the volunteer programs at Laura Common?


But we take one step at a time. Last night reading Plotinus by Hixon -- the ending paragraphs of the love and compassion the One processes forth with what one is -- a slinky extension rounding into itself, twisting to the shape of our dna and awareness.


One day we will see. That day there will be nothing special to note -- only birdsong, cloud cover, flowering bushes on roadway, and fragrance of something baking in the kitchen.


We are fortunate to even write these words.







Sunday, May 26, 2002

Source. Expression. Integration
This sacred three. Holy Trinity. Sei, in German, Be! Source of what is. Expression of what is. Integration of what is.

This cold night bamboos stir,
Their sound- now harsh, now soft—
Sweeps through the lattice window.
Though ear’s no match for mind,
What need, by lamplight,
Of a single Scripture leaf?
- Kido (dailyzen)


At the shop today good music. Coming Home from Dvorak's New World Symphony. Sam, Hugh, Virginia, and Saskia play, visitor sings words. Outside I tell Virginia to play that at my memorial service. Woman playing piano, Idona -- first time in since husband died. Man from Florida, Charles' brother Edson, first time in since wife died. Woman from Rockport -- first time in -- a respite from weariness showing in her eyes. Just that -- with coffee, soup, and rhubarb kuchen, strawberry kuchen, and fire in the fireplace. Just that, a fact of being.


We breathe, laugh, sing. We talk, greet, say goodbye. These trinitarian acts infused with source, expression, & integration -- this is a practice worth practicing. Thomas Berry (p.136) in Buddhism tells of the moment Dante in the Divine Comedy wrote -- after his vision of Divine Reality that he had seen therein -- "All the scattered leaves of the universe bound by love in one volume" (Par.xxxiii, p.85). Is this the Godhead, the Sacred Trinity celebrated today even by those of us who see only through another's words?


Moonlight on kitchen roof is not blown off by stiff winds.

We remember and pray for all those dead and deadened by war. It is Memorial Day Weekend.

A single moon
Bright and clear
In an unclouded sky;
Yet still we stumble
In the world’s darkness.
- Ikkyu (1394-1481)(dailyzen)

In that darkness stumbles another priest, this time an Archbishop. A different kind of war. Not sexual -- as some would explain it. But a war between what we think -- and what we do.

The Church war is being lost. Thought and dogma clash with fact and act.
When the war ends the priesthood will not be recognizable. War is hell.

Earth turns and stars punctuate dark distances. What priests were for, they thought, was conveyance of the sacred to a world absent God. The sorrowful mistake is made by thought.

God is absent absence. Conveyer is without conveyance. Thought made other. Other is absent.
The world will have to adjust to what is devoid of what was thought of it. And it will.

Those who have forgotten God have forgotten earth and forgotten what they convey. We are here to convey sacred to sacred. Water conveys water. Fire conveys fire. We've forgotten that.

So many are dead and have deadened others in the name of what they thought life should be.
No thought, please. Let what is itself convey itself. Forget other. See yourself in all, as what is.

Find what is you. What is conveys what is. What you are conveys what you are.
See yourself as yourself. See each and all as each and all. Don’t make other. Don’t make dead.

Life is not thought. Life is life. Life is love without thought. And love without thought lives itself with forgiveness and compassion.

It is Memorial Day Weekend. We try to remember. We try forgiveness and compassion. We try life. What we are is what we do.

Life – ‘bright and clear in an unclouded sky.‘
Remember?

The ten Ox-herding pictures took us from searching to disappearing to showing up in the middle of the marketplace last evening. David and Jim sat on either side of Buddha statue newly placed upstairs in the harbor room. Saskia was flu prone on the futon. Delia arrived (as usual) in time for the finishing with contributing comment.

In the stillness by the empty window
I sit in formal meditation
Navel and nose in alignment,
Ears parallel with shoulders.
Moonlight floods the room;
The rain stops, but the eaves drip and drip.
Perfect this moment—
In the vast emptiness, my understanding deepens.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

Tonight we close in on the final chapter of the Jim Marion book. At hour's end Tom sums up, "Whenever you hold onto another's thought as though it was the truth, you ain't."
Nancy started up the stairs but wisely withdrew keeping her silence at mêlée’s end.

Tide's high. Moon's nearing full. Ryokan's "Perfect this moment --" is at the window.
The window of opportunity, the great spiritual moment, says Richard Groves in The Sacred Art of Dying, is the moment of death.

Nothing is more important, says Blessed Fintan. Hospitality. Hospice. Presence.
Every instant, at the window. Soon enough, the window itself.

Pentecost Haiku

All together
body gone, body revealed
you are this one
breathing
(wfh)

Pentecost Haiku, Evening Edition

The fact itself,
the fact revealed,
the fact realized --
as I live and breathe!
(wfh)

What is the coming of the Holy Spirit?

Is it the realization of what is in fact true?

Paul wrote:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body- Jews or Greeks, slaves or free- and all were made to drink of one Spirit. (1Cor.12:13)

The fact that we are one body, "so it is with Christ," remains a fact whether or not it is realized. Perhaps the coming of the Spirit is the realization of the fact.

The work of art is, indeed, the by-product of a state of high functioning. The state of spiritual exaltation is fundamental to creative activity, whole skills and measurements are secondary. It is the measurement of an ontological experience. The great painter Ku 'ai-chih (c. 344-406) points out that the purpose of painting is chu'an shen, or the revelation of the spirit. He says:

"Forms are used to reveal the spirit; when it is lost, one deviates from the principle of discarding the 'fishing net and the snare' and the purpose of painting is missing.... Even though there be light and shade in the painting, nothing is better than to communicate with its spirit when one gazes at it."

Wang Wei (fifth century critic) stresses the same idea: "When the spirit is not revealed in the form, what is carried by the form is not in action." What is in motion is revealed through form, but is itself not the form. When spirit is not in motion, it is the unrevealed reality in the form; when in motion, it vibrates in the vision of the beholder.
(in Creativity and Taoism, A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry, pp.208-209)

Christ is revealed and realized in and with the Spirit. Jesus disappears so as not to be obstacle. Spirit reveals the transparency of that disappearance. That is -- the new dwelling place of Christ in the hearts and minds of those who love -- an incarnation that leaps from beloved children story in the Bible to felt experience resonating in the body.

Bamboo shadows sweep the stairs,
Yet not a mote of dust is stirred;
Moonbeams pierce to
The bottom of the pool,
Yet in the water not a trace remains.
- Zen Dust (dailyzen)

It is Eve of Pentecost. We border the realization.
We look with simplicity. We listen with silence. We act with service.

Some revelation is at hand. "It vibrates in the vision of the beholder."

Boats are lowered from Wayfarer's travel-lift at regular interval. Floats are in. Channel markers too. The harbor comes alive with brightwork, rattling, batten, and hull paint. Deckhands seize sail to mast-hoop as gaff-rigged schooners ready for season.

We have the farm under contract. This fact is equally disturbing and humbling. Karl, head shaved, says "calling" and continues eating Topfen Kuchen -- as though everything is said with that word. As though with each forkful raised to mouth the vocation of Meetingbrook is visible, the sound of it audible.

Every thing,
Every place is real,
Each particle makes
Up the Original Person.
Still, the absolutely real
Is voiceless,
The true body’s
Majestically out of sight.
- Chosha (9th century)(dailyzen)

So much to worry about and doubt.

I read the poet Randall Jarrell,
In a letter to his red-haired Viennese friend, Elisabeth Eisler, Randall prided himself on being "quite optimistic, mostly in order to save bother: I accept, dismiss and forget about bad things that happen as quickly and well as I can." I guess one of the great principles of my life is: 'O don't bother, forget about it...'"
Saving bother coupled with my own great commitment to William James's "Wisdom is knowing what to overlook" spared us many a squabble.
(Mary von Schrader Jarrell, in Introduction to Remembering Randall, A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell)

No bother. What takes place, takes place.

The elegant and large ketch Sumurun ties up at Willeys wharf.
Sam and Susan row by in their dory. Charlotte comes in under her large daisy hat and hangs flyer of the Wabanakis of Maine and the Maritime. Alan pours tea. A seagull inspects Waterfront Restaurant deck. It is warm.

James is right -- "Wisdom is knowing what to overlook."
The Original Person is what is only seen in silence and stillness. Transparence is her shape. Emptiness his sound.

Let's try wisdom. Let's listen to the voiceless.

Yesterday Isidore the Farmer looked over rolling acres and saw silence.
Today Ramana, the saint of primal awareness, smiles and remembers his name often pronounced in the Wednesday Evening Conversation reading from Lex Hixon's book.

Earlier Ignacio from Bolivia laughed and took pictures and talked about the United Nations stay he'd done for Franciscan International. Thirty-four years between conversations and I remember how sweet a fellow he is, and Francis our common bond.

There is much questioning about the farm negotiations. If they collapse, that would be fine. If they take root, also fine. But the most important incarnation is the Laura Common. That belongs to itself. We are caretakers of that belonging -- taking care to listen to it speak itself, taking care to watch it form itself.

Spirit, holy and true, inhabits the sound and form of what is Itself for and with others.

As the earth longs for the spirit of holiness and truth, so does the Spirit present Itself to any of us willing to dwell in that good company.

Come to earth! Dwell here in peace and good will!

Rain
Watering earth.
May mothering Spirit ground.

Liturgically we are between things. Between Ascension and Pentecost.

O monks, there is neither going or coming or standing still; neither is there duration or decline or growth; nothing is fixed and still, nothing moves nor has foundation. This is the end of suffering. (Early Buddhist text, quoted in Bruno Barnhart's Second Simplicity)

That which Barnhart the Camaldolese Benedictine points to -- pure ultimate unitive reality and to unitive contemplative experience, reawakening in the Christian tradition by the encounter with Buddhism today -- is rainfall today. Everywhere everything is watered.

Veni Creator Spiritus, Come Creator Spirit.
Being between mothering -- our unknowing birth.

Terence on life support Friday afternoon allowed my hand on his head, on his hand. Water, holy and wet, forgave him if ever he'd forgotten he too was water. Two women cried by his bed. Water remembering he was water as he died.


In the realm of True Purity
there is no such thing as
“I” or “he” or “she”
nor can “friend” and “foe”
be found.
The slightest confusion of mind
and innumerable differences
and complications arise.
- Muso (1275-1351)

This morning canoe ride in harbor after sunrise and Eucharist at 7:30 service, I bought ground coffee, muffins, and New York Times at French and Brawn. On Bayview Street sidewalk a still and stiff bird with blood splattered on neck similar to Terence’s. On one knee I pick it up placing on bed of flower against tree in front of ice cream shop. Like water under paddle earlier and wine on lips at altar rail the flow of life and breath, rising and falling, dispensation and death interspersing each other as coffee poured through filtered grounds to air pot.

Prayer touched Terence's head and hands in final hours. And prayer knelt to move bird to funeral bier. At Sunday Evening Practice we laughed at Cheryl's talking to a piece of cake, saying she was talking to her mother -- laughing -- when words couldn't do what words often can't.

We mother with our love whatever we attend.
Happy Mother's Day -- all of us-- who've ever let their heart attend life!

Ascension Thursday was our decision time:

We have decided: 1) to obtain a lovely farm to live a quiet, contemplative, and engaged service life that can invite others to do the same in their own communities and homes. We have one picked out and are making an offer. 2) We will retain the bookshop/bakery on Camden’s Bayview Street with its retreat room above it on the harbor – it will be supported by membership subscription.

So it is.

"Here's the hardest part," says the man struggling.

The container is not what it contains. The institution that has conveyed within it a core essence is only a conveying shell, not the essence itself. The essence, he says, is that which belongs to everyone. Water may be conveyed by brook, pail, bottle or cupped hands. But water is the essence.

When you’re settled in Zen,
Your mind is serene,
Unaffected by worldly distractions.
You enter the realm of enlightenment,
And transcend the ordinary world,
Leaving the worldly while
In the midst of society.
- Fenyang

Right in the middle of society, right in the center of the conveyance -- right there within your heart, right here looking out from our eyes.

Gratitude for the carrying forward. Now, go home!

Light Dancing From Water to Brown Wood Planks and Beams
(A Thursday poem after 40 days)

It is where the heart is.
The sun rises warm on right shoulder.

Harbor surface calm with small ripples rubbed by breeze.
It is Ascension Day!

If Christ were to disappear from our eyes,
Would it matter to the heart?

It is the heart that sees what the eyes cannot.
The very next person I look at, the very next awareness of my heart,

There...
Here...

Christ has returned home. Christ is seeing what you are
Seeing.

Here it is again.

A Proposal for Intentional Community:
Meetingbrook Hermitage -- A Laura Common
Maine USA, and dwelling places elsewhere

Meetingbrook proposes a Laura of Hermits, an intentional community, a loosely knit association of individuals seeking what might be called Zen Contemplative Ecology. A “hermit” is one longing to dwell with simplicity, silence, & service -- deepening their life alone or with others. “Embodying the dwelling place of the Alone, Stepping aside to make room for another.” Hermits are those longing to dwell in their true home and in true community.

For the purpose of Meetingbrook’s proposal, “laura” means the pathways and waterways connecting us on our journey. A laura is:
1. a gathering of individuals living their own lives in their own dwellings;
2. peripheral to a central location shared for communal use;
3. building community with distinct yet similar shared intention to deepen one’s life;
4. each engaged in idiorhythmic practice (i.e. according to one’s own rhythms and schedule) -- whether prayer, meditation, contemplation, energy work, healing unease, encouraging physical, intellectual, spiritual health & balance;
5. with periodic sharing of each person’s conversation & practice in community;
6. devoted to the common intent of cultivating peace, compassion, engaged service, merciful reconciliation, and lovingkindness;
7. welcoming hospitality and generosity of spirit within and toward others.
8. A Zen Contemplative Ecology is, for this proposal, the practice of seeing directly & clearly -- now, safe, & whole -- interrelationships of individuals in community, sentient beings in nourishing environments, and a cosmotheandric awareness (of earth & nature itself, divine presence, and human family) that caringly and carefully makes room for each other.

A Meetingbrook Laura Common -- welcomes individuals, couples, & families. Members of any or no religion are welcome. Members of sanghas, orders, followers of specific teachers, are welcome. Those on any particular spiritual path, those willing to allow others to practice their own religious and spiritual path, are welcome. Inclusive, autonomous, & generous hearted people, are welcome. Those who appreciate diversity and a plurality of seeking, those realizing and embodying what is natural, sacred, and human – the immeasurable gift of existence and life beyond compare -- are welcome.

The mere prospect of connecting what already touches us is attractive. Identifying, consciously and intentionally, as part of Meetingbrook Laura of Hermits, deepens the affection and mystery of living life alone with others. Whether you prefer: to live alone on one’s own; live with others; or live alone together – we will explore how to dwell engaging solitude and community – a dedicating of life and love -- with God, each other, oneself.

If interested, come join us for some exploratory conversations toward the creation invited by a Meetingbrook Laura of Hermits. If nothing else, it might provide some thoughtful considerations, laughter, & a spate of belonging!
If interested in such an exploration, please email or call 236-4346, leave name and #.

Thanks, Bill Halpin and Saskia Huising 25Feb2002 - 6May2002 laura@meetingbrook.org

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Proposed Engaged Service Projects for Meetingbrook:
1. Conversations in Prison
2. Community Bakery Volunteer Connections and Recipe Ethnography for those in Good Health and Healing Recuperation
3. Practice and Study of Inter-Religious Peace, Understanding, & Tolerance.
4. A Laura Common – A Practicing Zen Contemplative Ecology Community.
5. Respite Community Resource -- Time Apart for Those Suffering Alone or With Others.
………………………………………….

Theme -- Meetingbrook Hermitage: As and In A Laura Common

Writing this on 5May2002 I remember my mother who died this date 1981. It is also four days until the Christian feast of the Ascension. On that day we will have chosen the way Meetingbrook will go on. It might have been an arbitrary choice of date for decision – but it’s ours.

Ascension, however else it has been conceived and celebrated, is the feast of Christ returning home to dwell as and in Father/Mother, Spirit & Truth. That Jesus opened himself completely to this Christ Reality is the joy of his followers.

Ascension is the return to one’s true reality. Some have called it one’s true self, others the absolute, divine self, ultimate, nirvana, liberation, or the ground of our being.

It might entail disappearing into undifferentiated suchness, as Buddhists speak of it. It might entail giving up our attachment to separateness and embracing unity. Or perhaps it entails a final tiring of fear and a corresponding surrendering to love

Ascension is coming home.

In Jesus’ Ascension it appeared he was leaving those who loved him. They were wary of his assurance he’d be with them always. Always! They might have been consoling words, but their eyes saw him no more. He was gone. No longer out there to see.

Here – that’s the promise Jesus tried to assure them – I am here. Here with you. See me, he said, and you see the Father, and the Paraclete (a supportive comforter – like sangha, community) will come. And all will be well with each and all.

(As I write this I break to dash to kitchen stove every five minutes to spray and bake bread.)

Still uncertain but open to what Ascension means for Meetingbrook, we listen and watch, both in silence and conversation. We don’t know. What we trust is our “yes” to the call to contemplate, converse, and correspond with all that is taking place.

If you want to be no
Different from the buddhas
And Zen masters,
Just don’t seek externally.
The pure light of a
Moment of awareness
Is the Buddha’s essence within you.
- Linji (d.867) (dailyzen)

At the end of his Gospel account, Matthew has Jesus saying as he ascended,
Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold I am with you always, until the end of the age. (Mt.28:19-20)

“To observe all,” – what a lovely teaching and learning to dwell with one another in common!

Here is what we propose: To engage the lovely teaching and learning – the sacred reality that observes all dwelling with one another in common.

In trusting appreciation, we go on.

At end of Lectio, Kristen prays us out with her words, "O Christ, may we move with ease into your bountiful emptiness."

Is the truth the world does not understand this -- that the one before us is the whole of the Father, Son, Spirit -- that the core reality is right there, right here? The "commandments" Jesus speaks of -- that if we follow them all will know we are disciples -- are these commandments the affirming yes of acceptance of the core reality of this existence?

If we love Jesus (or anyone) we become a way of being that does not make what we love other. Therefore, there are things we will not do -- not to, because of -- the one we love. Affirming whole present reality -- seeing as one seeing one -- we abandon the illusory othering view. There is no other to do wrong to. There is no wrong to be done -- not, at least, if we abandon ourselves into love.

Inside the sacred fence
Before which I bow
There must be a pond
Filled with clear water;
As my mind-moon becomes bright
I see its shadow reflected in the water.
- Daito Kokushi (1213-1279)(dailyzen)

Five days to the 9th. Monday we view a farm with friends.

The pond with clear water is in the viewing with friends -- the truth the world cannot see. Viewing with the one before us, looking back at the one viewing us.

The view, the viewing itself, the one viewing, the viewing with one another – this is the interview with Christ, this is the interview with Bodhisattva.

Those who would master Zen fully engage and embody this interview.

Pilate asked, “What is truth?” Jesus stood silent before him. Pilate didn't get it.

Enlightenment is no big thing. It is dropping into the one, into the viewing, interviewing the reality right before us. Seeing truth as it is.

What is that? And what is this?

O Christ, may we move with ease into your bountiful emptiness!

Cisco wags tail greeting at door of shop. Sando, the veteran, snoozes by bakery case.

To be resolute in the way means
from the beginning never to
lose sight of it, whether in a
place of calm or in a place of strife;
to not cling to quiet places nor
shun places where there is disturbance.
- Daikaku (1213-1279) (dailyzen)

A little boy named William wearing yellow and wine red is carried in by his mom after Buddhist Studies, He grabs on to ribbon of bell over counter. He rings and rings. His father's sister is in India with the Tibetans,

Gary Snyder's words say we don't change reality but we can transform ourselves.
With that, an elevating of awareness, a deepening of consciousness.

Mini is curled for the night on chair by desk in 2nd floor room at hermitage.

War is one of those realities. We cannot live as war. We must be peace.
Sorrow for one. Pray for the other.

I wouldn't want to live in a world where no one winced when a cat was killed -- even in a Zen story. Relationality is the human story. We are not the moral of a teaching story. We are the story.

Dirk wondered if (a phenomenological example) my comment on observing a body, a bat, and blood on the floor, one concludes something wrong had occurred -- was absolute or relative. "It was felt," I said. And if the whole is to be whole, it is a related whole.

Paul and Jim worked on the birchwood floor of cabin this weekend. In kitchen with coffee we spoke of clay feet and those in religion. Community begins when each one realizes the commonality of their ordinariness. Intention to live a particular kind of life only points to the way you wish to travel. Those who travel with or near are community to you. We all have clay feet. It is our earthy steps that give us the grace of each other -- not our lofty aspirations.

All the holy ones have turned within and sought the self, and by this went beyond all doubt. To turn within means all the 24 hours and in every situation, to pierce one by one through the layers covering the self, deeper and deeper, to a place that cannot be described. It is when thinking comes to an end and making distinctions ceases, when wrong views and ideas disappear of themselves without having to be driven forth, when without being sought the true action and the true impulse appear of themselves. It is when one can know the truth of the heart.
- Daikaku (1213-1279) (dailyzen)

When we pray we pray earthbound for all alongside moving as we move. Deliberate with each other, there is much to say and listen to on our way.

Fear might be the need to cut, stack, and burn wood; but ash is how we are transformed into love.

Poetry is what remains
when words dive into fire.
Poetry is ash seen
transformed back to lumber,
ahead to tomatoes.
(wfh)

Pulling Mark Strand's book of poems Darker (1970), the following:

The One Song

I prefer to sit all day
like a sack in a chair
and to lie all night
like a stone in my bed.

When food comes
I open my mouth.
When sleep comes
I close my eyes.

My body sings
only one song;
the wind turns
gray in my arms.

Flowers bloom.
Flowers die.
More is less.
I long for more.
(Strand, p.30)

At Friday Evening Poetry Annie reads poem about bus ride Boston to Rockland shared with young Korean carrying belongings wrapped by mother in paper with strings looped and tied. We see in words she left out her own finger placed on the bow being tied on what this young man carries in his journey. She is mother to him departing at Union Street. Of course, the poem and destination is left without sentimentality at Union.

Sando on one bench with me, Cisco on other bench with Saskia, Annie alongside logs glowing with fire in hearth.
Cisco is a border collie who will stay with us. He arrived Friday morning. His mistress leaves Maine for Florida and asks us to be home for Cisco. Black and white, over 10 years old, Cisco acclimates to hermitage and shop. He is sweet. He stares at Mini the cat, which has become meditation object for Cisco. Everyone is learning their space, sniffing proximity, and giving room for each other. It goes well!

There are three things I must do before dying:
1. wash dishes;
2. walk meditation path;
3. scratch cat passing to window;
Now I am ready. Now I die.
(wfh)

Poetry helps make an ash of ourselves. That's the more and less of it!

The Church, said Doug, is collapsing. "Did you ever think it would disintegrate in our very lifetime?" he asked at Chase's Daily breakfast last week.

The Boston Globe reports Cardinal Law sent faxes to his priests: "Cardinal Bernard F. Law is cracking down on efforts by lay Catholics to organize in Greater Boston, ordering priests not to cooperate with an evolving coalition of parish leaders." On the Globe website the 27April2002 headline reads, "Law seeks to curb organizing by laity."

The frown becomes scowl. The clergy, good or bad, has given itself the Church.
Laity must now, as in the beginning, give themselves to Christ.
Until they admit their absurd appropriation of what belongs to all Christians, all beings, all nature, the institution with its hierarchical arrogance should be left to flounder and fail.
When Christ is allowed back into the Church the laity will welcome back the clergy

Don’t tell me how difficult the Way.
The bird’s path, winding far,
Is right before you.
Water of the Dokei Gorge,
You return to the ocean,
I to the mountain.
- Hofuku Seikatsu (dailyzen)

Someone I worked with in New York once addressed the behavior of an opinionated school secretary in his employ saying, " She is impertinent." Irrelevant, insolent, no longer worth listening to -- this was his meaning twenty-five years ago in the child welfare agency. It was an icy dismissal, done with an unflinching belief that his characterization would carry the condemnation of opinion and its holder.

The institutional Church in the Globe's story -- and in the pedophilia scandal -- mimics the secretary and the director. Impertinence and, like Toynbee's declining slope of post-creative deterioration, a dominant minority carving stone with dictum better left unworded.

I walk to the mountain. There I find bird path, no other way.

Here is why we are in the world!

Closed out the old year
And held a dream of spring behind
My shut eyes…til now
This morning I opened them to see
It’s really come into the world.
- Saigyo (1118 – 1190)

Nature snowed through the night. As morning middles itself, sun looks at the unlikely spill, melting swiftly. Like last evening's conversation -- nature's urge is to present itself as it is for all to engage.

Separate dissatisfies. Unified releases. In the interim we measure the alleged supposed apparent and believed distance of one from the other. This activity is known in places as "sin."

The days stretch toward 40. There are 13 remaining. What will ascend?

Maria turned 74 Wednesday. We sang to her last evening. A jar of Trappist Apricot Jam curled itself in her hand. She believes in love. Thus she is, loved! Tom smiled with her out the door heading home.

Christ blames no one for the death of Jesus.

No one is converted to truth by means of blame or shame. What moves us to change our way of life is the compassionate revelation that the ignorance, mistakes, and misunderstandings we’ve cultivated can give way to a deep and lovely awakening of our true nature, true relatedness, true being.

Mind's no solid
One can touch or see --
Dew, frost.
(--Dogen)

Ephemeral and beautiful, dissolving and disappointing, impermanent and wistfully watched disappearance.

Once we learn to accept failure, love grows. We do not grow by thinking about it or by wishing for it, but only by the experience of failure. (Thomas Keating ocso, The Mystery of Christ, p120)

These 40 days of prayer, meditation, and conversation about Meetingbrook continue with us. And you too?

In every vocation, events and other people constantly reactivate our emotional programs for happiness, along with the accompanying turmoil that occurs when these programs are frustrated. Such self-knowledge is not a disaster but the necessary condition for changing them. When these have been dismantled, our ministry starts to work of itself because, once freed from the obstacles of pride and subtle forms of selfishness that hold the false-self system in place, the Spirit of God can work in us.
The seventy-two disciples, flushed with success, came to the Lord expecting to get a pat on the back, and all he said was, "Don't get excited about working miracles. Anybody with a little psychic power can do that. What really counts is that you are part of God's plan. The thing to rejoice in is that you are chosen to become divine and to join me in raising the consciousness of the world." (Keating, p.121)

No blame, no shame -- only the new foolishness of sun and mountain, sea and sky.

Like water running brook tumbling down Ragged we smile and wave to each other with passion and passing recognition.

We'll have many things to converse about. If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow, it doesn't matter.

What matters is choosing to be what each truly is, choosing to dwell who we really are.

Dew, frost -- ourselves!

Hawk? Or eagle overhead? The silent walking meditation Lauras itself along Ragged Mountain on Saturday morning.

An enfolding meditation on our retreat day:
1. Zen is looking; Zen is listening.
2. Inviting insight, allowing what is there to reveal itself, as it is.
3. Prayer is gratefulness, trusting what is there to reveal the presence of God. For where is God not?
4. Jumping in, engaging what is there, acting & moving, a transformation which affirms, empties, resurrects, and ascends.
5. At origin, still -- listening, looking, the practice of no barriers.

Brook carries itself before our eyes.

By becoming a human being Christ annihilated the dichotomy between matter and spirit. In the Person of the Divine-human Being, a continuum between the divine and the human has bees established. Thus, God's plan is not only to spiritualize the material universe, but to make matter itself divine. This he has already done in the glorified humanity of his Son. The grace bestowed on us by the Ascension of Jesus is the divinisation of our humanity. (Thomas Keating, in The Mystery of Christ, p.86.)

Sando lay in the brook looking at us, lapping water, and epitomizing the emerging and engaging convergence of our lives. Susan sings a song. We bow to the betweening embodiment, and return to the hermitage for lunch.

The grace of the Ascension enables us to perceive the irresistible power of the Spirit transforming everything into Christ despite any and all appearances to the contrary. (p.87)

The bird overhead, I think, was a hawk. Watching us as we step our prayer mindfully.

Jo is bald like a Zen nun. Head shaved clean as a whistle. So is David's -- but he hasn't just come home from a second bone marrow transplant. On back stoop in the cool of evening Jo asks what is my dream. I tell her to be the monastic I am.

To seek and long for God alone. And since nothing is really separate from God -- to seek and long for each other in our awakening into the realization of God. So many are alone, even alienated, unaware of their true relatedness, their true home. To invite -- quietly, kindly, and compassionately -- oneself and each into their own very nature, this is the practice of contemplation, Zen, and engaged service. To invite Christ, God, Bodhisattvas, holy men and women -- each into the wordless silence of love's simplicity, stillness, and sanctuary.

Empty and desireless,
Cold and thin, simple and genuine,
This is how to strike down
And fold up the remaining habits
Of many lives.
When the stains from old habits
Are exhausted,
The original light appears,
Blazing through your skull,
Not admitting other matters.
Vast and spacious,
Like sky and water merging
During autumn,
Like snow and moon
Having the same color,
This field is without boundary,
Beyond direction,
Magnificently one entity
Without edge or seam.
- Hongzhi (1091-1157)(dailyzen)

It was 94 degrees at 1:33pm in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. Now, Jo calls down to say "ice cream" -- and in that calling all is for the moment just as it should be.

Someday, David says, illness and disability will be no more. Will that eventuality be a conclusion of courage or a cause for reassessing all valuing?

"To ice cream," says David, going up stairs with his Welsh laughter.

To say it simply -- we might have found ground -- a place for Meetingbrook Hermitage to root.

The seedling these several years searching soil, is, perhaps, ready to enfold, dive deep, and unfold. It's still early. But, something quickens!

On a doorpost in a lovely house in Belfast there is a Mezuzah with the Shema. "Shema" is the word that begins the verse "Shema Israel", "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One". (Deut.6). Upstairs, on the door to a bedroom with a tank of tropical fish, there is a crucifix.

In the readings for this weekend the Jewish Yeshua (Jesus), who had been put to death, is reported to breakfast on the beach with a small group after a fishing encounter that yielded a surprising catch.

These memory devices -- words on doorposts, wood on doors, words on paper -- are set there to remind us of a ground longing to arrive home. The Lord is One. The child of God who died rather than deny that reality. The story of surprise nourishment when we release our controlling will and open to the free and loving wholeness that each is in God. These are fragments of a picture we puzzle to understand.

If you think that you
Have cut off illusory mind,
Instead of simply clarifying
How illusory mind melts,
Illusory mind will come up again,
As though you had cut off
The stem of a blade of grass
And left the root alive.
- Menzan Zuiho (1682-1769)

Our task is to clarify how illusory mind melts. If we allow this clarity to arrive with a still, silent, safe, and aware compassion -- we might be able to simply live with each other as neighbor, friend, and family.

We can't cut each other out. We can't cut each other up. Something else is being called for. We, if we are to live profoundly the gift we each have been given, must listen.

"Listen," says St Benedict in his rule. "Hear," says the Shema. Take root illusion, and watching, let it melt away -- the Zen invitation calls.

The ground is softening. It is mid-April. Smell that ground. Feel it. Love it. It -- everywhere and at every depth -- is our source.

In Belfast this week we found ground. For this next week, we'll watch, listen, and pray.
Soon, we trust, we’ll see!

The windbell rings outside my window over kitchen where Zwiebel Kuchen (onion cake) lofts its scent with breeze moving through bell and open window. Sunlight. Daffodil stalk rises dark green alongside empty birdfeeder. A lovely morning! And yet, will this all one day disappear?

About the mystery that the cosmos has to disappear, Teilhard de Chardin said –
The more I think about this mystery, the more it appears to me, in my dreams, as a “turning-about” of consciousness – an eruption of interior life – as an ecstasy. There is no need to rack our brains to understand how the material vastness of the universe will ever be able to disappear. Spirit has only to be reversed, to move into a different zone, for the whole shape of the world immediately to be changed. (The Future of Man, p.322)

In 1955, 10April, on Easter Sunday, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died. His writings -- a combining of biology, paleontology, philosophy, and spiritual visionary reflection – had to wait until after his death to be published. He was as obedient a Jesuit as he was an unorthodox thinker.

He'd written a reflection finished in Tientsin, on 25 March 1924, titled, "The End of the World." It is found in his book The Future of Man as the final essay. It ends,
When the end of time is at hand, a terrifying spiritual pressure will be exerted on the confines of the real, built up by the desperate efforts of souls tense with longing to escape from the earth. This pressure will be unanimous. Scripture, however, tells us that at the same time the world will be affected by a profound schism -- some trying to emerge from themselves in order to dominate the world even more completely -- others, relying on the words of Christ, waiting passionately for the world to die, so that they may be absorbed with it in God.

It is then, we may be sure, that the Parousia will be realized in a creation that has been taken to the climax of its capacity for union. The single act of assimilation and synthesis that has been going on since the beginning of time will then at last be made plain, and the universal Christ will blaze out like a flash of lightning in the storm clouds of a world whose slow consecration is complete.

…At that moment, St. Paul tells us (1Cor.15: 23ff) when Christ has emptied all created forces (rejecting in them everything that is a factor of dissociation and super-animating all that is a force of unity), he will consummate universal unification by giving himself, in his complete and adult Body, with a finally satisfied capacity for union, to the embrace of the Godhead.

Thus will be constituted the organic complex of God and world – the Pleroma – the mysterious reality of which we cannot say that it is more beautiful than God by himself (since God could dispense with the world), but which we cannot, either, consider completely gratuitous, completely subsidiary, without making creation unintelligible, the Passion of Christ meaningless, and our effort completely valueless,

Et tunc erit finis. [Then it will be finished.]

Like a vast tide, Being will have engulfed the shifting sands of being. Within a now tranquil ocean, each drop of which, nevertheless, will be conscious of remaining itself, the astonishing adventure of the world will have ended. The dream of every mystic, the eternal pantheist ideal, will have found its full and legitimate satisfaction. ‘Erit in omnibus omnia Deus.’ [‘God will be all in all.’)
(The Future of Man, pp322-323)

We are in 'between' time. We’re happy to move along our ordinary lives. But something nags. There is a suspicion that we really don’t have much figured out. But we go on, as we must.

Elsewhere, a web essay looks at Teilhard's thought:
To be fully ourselves, according to Teilhard, we must head in the direction of "convergence with all the rest...towards the other." He puts it grandly: "The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis."

The danger, or the evil, is not so much the ego as it is egocentrism! Teilhard denotes that egocentrism (or egoism) confuses "individuality with personality." Becoming separate, the ego "individualizes itself." It is a fatal move, it is regressive. It seeks "to drag the world backwards towards plurality and into matter."

For Teilhard, the point of the individuation process, or being open to universal insight, is to further the evolution of cosmic (and human) consciousness and creativity.

Teilhard believes that there is an enfolded creative Intelligence within the depths of the cosmos...and that every aspect of human experience can be affected by this creative Intelligence, mainly via a "breakthrough" experience.
("The Cosmic Plenum: Teilhard's Gnosis: Cosmogenesis," by Beatrix Murrell on web Stoa del Sol essays)

The wind picks up. Gale warnings off the coast. White clouds chat against April blue sky. So much on the ground – in Israel and Palestine for example – is besieged by momentary uncertainty, by the nearby dissolution of particular lives. We are no longer that far. Not merely from warfare and terrorism – but we are not that far from the change in consciousness Teilhard speaks about.

This “turning-about,” this “breakthrough” – not that far? Between here and there, between now and then – what fears of ours will have to dissolve?

While we ponder, phoebe, crow, and redwing blackbird sing psalms and antiphons into the wooded wind.

Between you and me, what's going on?
Resurrection might be the beginning. Ascension the continuance. What is the end? And what is between beginning and end?

The season of Easter with another 40 days to wonder and wander -- something dies, something survives and rises, and now the wait. The wait between rising and ascending. Ascending? What does that mean?

What if we were like the zen master who said "Is that so?" each of the times he was slandered and apologized to for the slander? Both times he stated or asked, "So it is!" or "Is that so?"

What if we were like Jesus who when asked if he was who some said he was answered only "You say so!" -- returning to the investigators their own words, their own minds?

The zen master went on living, we suspect, long after his earlier death in the opinion of townsfolk for the (uncommitted) sin of impregnating a young girl. He simply accepted her giving over of the child to him, the scorn of the people, then the apology and acknowledgement many years later he was not the father of the child. He returned the child to its mother with the same words, "Is that so?" with which he received the child those years before.

Jesus returns to life with a similar question. "Is this so?" he asks. Made the object of hope, then the object of betrayal and rejection, he is put to death, a death (not without searing anguish) he accepts. Now -- no longer object -- the empty, stark, unrecognizable, and unfinished reappearance from the tomb. Jesus takes to this hiatus. He is between things. Between places. A kind of thin place that nears and involves.

Julian of Norwich writes:
So in our true Mother Jesus our life is founded in his own prescient wisdom from without beginning, with the great power of the Father and the supreme goodness of the Holy Spirit. And in accepting our nature he gave us life, and in his blessed dying on the Cross he bore us to endless life. And since that time, now and ever until the day of judgment, he feeds us, and fosters us, just as the great supreme lovingness of motherhood wishes, and as the natural need of childhood asks.
(--from Showings, p.304, in Peoples Companion to the Breviary, Easter Monday, c.1997)

So high you cannot
Climb or get close to it;
Raindrops scatter in the flying wind.
The gate is barred with green moss.
Suddenly forgetting thought,
Without attainment,
Only then will you be sure
The gate has been open all along.
- Zen Master T’aego (1301-1382)(dailyzen)

All along? Is that so?
This time wandering the between occupies me. My mind is completely confused. Nothing makes sense. I am lost. My only sanity is the poet's words that say that the forest knows where I am, the song of the bird knows where I am, and the earth I stand on knows where I am.

And in this season of Easter, that too knows where I am, I hope.

Mary Magdalen, who had eyes for Jesus alone, saw him and mistook him for the gardener. Two disciples walked miles with him between Jerusalem and Emmaus, talked hours with him, and thought him a stranger. To recognize the risen Jesus, you would have needed a special grace -- as when Jesus murmured to Magdalene "Mary", or broke bread with Cleopas and his friend at Emmaus. And still, for all the mystery of this new Jesus, at once seated with [God] in glory and moving magically through the barriers of our earth, he is the same Jesus who was fashioned from a teen-ager's flesh, the same Jesus who walked our dust and waked our dead, the same Jesus who hung three hours between two robbers, the same Jesus who, Scripture proclaims, "always lives to make intercession for [us]" (Heb. 7:25). Without so risen a Christ, without so loving a Lord, Christianity is a sham and a scam.
(--Walter J. Burghardt, SJ, Lovely in Eyes Not His Own, pp. 43-44, in Peoples Companion to the Breviary, vol.2, p.208)

"Intercession," (L. inter=between, cedere=to go) might mean more than we have considered. To go between is more than an intermediary task. To go into the between has more of 'a new way of being' quality to it. To live between, to live within the between -- this is so strange a way of dwelling! Are we, unknowingly, residing in that between? And do we do whatever we can, anything we can, to busy ourselves out of that center?

This and that, this or that -- we need hiatus. Where look?

Life from the Center is a life of unhurried peace and power. It is simple. It is serene. It is amazing. It is triumphant. It is radiant. It takes no time, but occupies all our time. And it makes our life programs new and overcoming.
(- Thomas R. Kelly, Quaker Spirituality, p. 305, op.cit.p.202)

This is a time between. Simple grace is to be aware of it. Special grace -- well, there's no telling when that appears -- isn't this so?

Lost, I ask: what is taking place?

The zen master says, "nothing special."
The contemplative says, "special grace."

How peculiar! How particular! Here we are.

[Website was out of commission for a week. Karl has righted. Events and Update will be posted in the righting.]