Wisdom attends.

Morning kitchen. Mu-ge snoozes on black chair. Cesco on tan rug. Sando on daybed by window. Saskia wipes counter after preparing dough for bread and setting squash in soup pot on stove.

The morning walk along mountainside with dogs was crisp and clear with sunlit silence. Water trickles down in furrowed meander from woods to pond.

The mountain was in the stream, both on the surface and in the glittering white of the polished stones in the streambed. Reflecting easily despite the rapid flow of the current. The snowy white mass seemed to double in size. It was the purest white you had ever seen, and it floated in the blue sky. The day was incredibly fresh and clear as you walked in it, step by step, each step complete in and of itself. Each step the beginning of a leap into the infinite present. The mountain enfolded you; the mind stopped, stunned, and still. You walked through the silence toward the mountain, each step a leap into the deep silence which is always present, always unfolding.
- from Journeys on Mind Mountain

There is a danger in colonialism. Jim Hightower and Michael Thoms discuss corporations, separating personal responsibility from the law to legally rob people, Enron and other bankruptcies of Savings and Loans paid for by ordinary citizens. They speak about Wal-Mart and other big boxes sucking money from communities and underselling local businesses.

Once sacred silence invited us into the divine. These days men in governing power encourage fear, stifling opposing views and reasonable demonstration, and foment a frightened silence. They mock the original language of God: -- Creative Silence. They replace it with insult and belittlement: -- terrifying aphasiac muteness.

On Wednesday, for the 50th anniversary, the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission gathered all the Marshall scholars now in Britain and British dignitaries who have supported the program, with Prince Charles presiding. The event, held at the University of London, was timed for the Bush visit, because Secretary of State Colin Powell, the keynote speaker, was one of five Americans being presented with the first Marshall medals. There were a few protest banners waiting for Mr. Powell around campus, but nothing extraordinary. Prince Charles showed up with what appeared to be one security guard.

But there was no Colin Powell.

A few hours earlier, the organizers were told that Mr. Powell was canceling, because of "security concerns." Every American I talked to was both sad and embarrassed — sad that an event intended to affirm the Atlantic alliance turned into another small victory for terrorists; sad that all these young Marshall scholars didn't get to see their secretary of state being honored and to hear his thoughts; and embarrassed that some nameless security officer decided Mr. Powell couldn't brave a few protesters, but Prince Charles could.

But this is more lament than criticism. I wouldn't want the responsibility of deciding when the president or secretary of state should appear in public.

These are tough calls. It's always hard to know where the line should be. But I fear we're starting to cross it in ways that could actually be dangerous for us all. Whether we're talking about our public officials or your family deciding whether to vacation in Istanbul, we all have to learn to live with more insecurity. Because terrorists are in the fear business, and every time we visibly imprison ourselves, they win another small victory and become more emboldened. Indeed, we could learn from the British. The I.R.A. murdered the queen's cousin and almost blew up Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her hotel — yet life in London goes on and the police here still don't carry guns.

I fear that the kinds of security officials who pulled the plug on Mr. Powell are becoming the new priesthood of our age. If the 1990's were the era of "Davos Man," the 2000's are the era of "Security Man" — and like a priesthood, these "terrorism experts" have unchallenged authority to curb our freedom in the name of freedom. Some of them deserve respect and know their stuff. But some wouldn't recognize the 6-foot-5 Osama bin Laden if he walked past them dribbling a basketball and dragging his dialysis machine.
(from "The Way We Were" OpEd, By Thomas L. Friedman, (Published: November 23, 2003, New York Times)

We must re-learn how to speak with each other. The joy of open conversation is necessary for healthy community. The people of the United States long to be, again, part of the world community of peoples. We long to be able to speak with each other in creative dialogue instead of shorthand invective laced with ad hominum name calling. We long to enter a dialogue with even, and especially, those who find repugnant the ways we do business and aggress wealth and reserves. In that conversation we will have to step down from our high horse and sit on the ground with one another.

Proverbs 9

1 Wisdom has built her house;
she has hewn out its seven pillars.
2 She has prepared her meat and mixed her wine;
she has also set her table.
3 She has sent out her maids, and she calls
from the highest point of the city.
4 "Let all who are simple come in here!"
she says to those who lack judgment.
5 "Come, eat my food
and drink the wine I have mixed.
6 Leave your simple ways and you will live;
walk in the way of understanding.

7 "Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
8 Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you;
rebuke a wise man and he will love you.
9 Instruct a wise man and he will be wiser still;
teach a righteous man and he will add to his learning.

10 "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
11 For through me your days will be many,
and years will be added to your life.
12 If you are wise, your wisdom will reward you;
if you are a mocker, you alone will suffer."

In the Catholic Christian liturgical calendar today is the feast of Christ the King. Taken from the metaphor of kingship, it intends to set the scene of royal leadership. Today’s metaphor might be different. It might be: Christ the Wise.

Gregory the Great (540-604), in his Homily on the Gospels, wondered whether it was possible to be in the world, (live in one’s culture and society with its norms and behaviors) but not be of it, (live as one’s conscience required, free to choose the way as one sees it).
He wrote:
I would like to urge you to forsake everything, but that I do not presume to do. Yet if you cannot give up everything of this world, at least keep what belongs to the world in such a way that you yourself are not kept prisoner by the world. Whatever you possess must not possess you; whatever you own must be under the power of your soul; for if your soul is overpowered by the power of this world's goods, it will be totally at the mercy of its possessions.
In other words, we make use of temporal things, but our hearts are set on what is eternal. Temporal goods help us on our way, but our desire must be for those eternal realities which are our goal. We should give no more than a side glance at all that happens in the world, but the eyes of our soul are to be focused right ahead; for our whole attention must be fixed on those realities which constitute our goal.
He says later that, “Nothing should interfere with your soul’s longing…”

The temporal is the world of time. The eternal is no time. The eternal is the now. The ‘now’ is what is and will be. So, we ask ourselves, what are we doing now? What are we doing throughout now and now and now?

It occurs to me that the verse from Proverbs – “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” -- longs to be heard anew. It is not that WE are to fear the Lord – as if fear and terror were avenues to the divine. Rather, it is the fear of the LORD that we will not understand the Holy One. If we read the line, paraphrased, as: The Lord is afraid that we have no comprehension or experience of the Holy One. The “Holy One” is our unity and familial inter-relationship and inter-dependence each with each, each with all, all with each, all with all.

It is as if the Lord was saying: “I am afraid they will not see who we are in, with, and through each other. If they understood my fear, my deep longing for each one to see and experience the truth of existence -- in, with, and through the Whole of Now – then, with that comprehension and experience, each one would begin walking the way of wisdom.”

SuSane would like that phrase, the “Whole of Now.”

When Tibetan monks poured sand from mandala, milk, and small flowers into the harbor yesterday morning, trace grains, white liquid, and yellow petals floated with outgoing tide passed oars of my skiff out into Penobscot Bay. One and each dissolved into each and All. Going on. The song of their passing sounding near every watery being.

Morning sun swings to other side of barn. The mountain is, indeed, in the stream. The stream is in the pond. The pond is on its way to the harbor. The harbor water glides into the bay. The bay into the sea. The sea touches every continent on its way. The earth connects with every neighboring celestial body making its way through space.
Widening space embraces and reaches out into every conceivable possibility within and beyond our comprehension and experience.

It is Sunday.

Attend wisdom!

Attend throughout!

Word opens world with watchful awareness.

In rowing skiff with photographer aboard I circle dock float where nine Tibetan Buddhist monks blow horns, beat drum, chant multi-tonal song while pouring sand and milk into harbor. The lovely artwork of sand mandala has dissolved in salt sea.

The mystical consciousness of St. Theresa implies a certain basic attitude toward the self. The thinking and feeling and willing self is not the starting point of all verifiable reality and of all experience. The primal truth, the ground of all being and truth, is in God the Creator of all that is. The starting point of all Christian belief and experience (in this context) is the primal reality of God as Pure Actuality. The "existence of God" is not something seen as deducible from our conscious awareness of our own existence. On the contrary, the experience of the classic Christian mystics is rooted in a meta-physic of being, in which God is intuited as "He Who Is," as the supreme reality, pure Being. The self-centered awareness of the ego is of course a pragmatic psychological reality, but once there has been an inner illumination of pure reality, an awareness of the Divine, the empirical self is seen by comparison to be "nothing," that is to say contingent, evanescent, relatively unreal, real only in relation to its source and end in God, considered not as object but as free ontological source of one's own existence and subjectivity. To understand this attitude, we have to remember that in this view of things Being is not an abstract objective idea but a fundamental concrete intuition directly apprehended in a personal experience that is incontrovertible and inexpressible. (from Zen and the Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton, 1968, New York: New Directions Books.)

Marti's mother is dying. She travels north to see her. We keep Joanne in prayer. Death is a personal experience that is hard to share.

D.T. Suzuki says: "Tasting, seeing, experiencing, living - all these demonstrate that there is something common to enlightenment experience and our sense-experience; the one takes place in our innermost being, the other on the periphery of our consciousness. Personal experience thus seems to be the foundation of Buddhist philosophy. In this sense Buddhism is a radical empiricism or experientialism, whatever dialectic later developed to probe the meaning of the enlightenment experience." (D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, N.Y., 1957, p. 48)

We walk through local Inn with its owner. We note its loveliness. We wonder whether the innermost being of Meetingbrook -- community cafe, retreat house, hospice rooms, place of intimate conversation -- would find itself in such a radical experience.

We notice we are not in control.

When, and as, light shines itself through -- we pray for grace not to be hindrances.

If happiness is hosting openness, we are happy to consider the open as host.

Receiving communion, we walk back to the shop with silent awareness of the Divine.

Say the word.

In prison this morning, Charlie had it this way: "There's so much crap that gets talked about here [in prison], I get tired of it. It's why I took a break even from these conversations. But I came back because these Meetingbrook conversations are a better quality of crap than the rest of it."

Steeply Mt. Yunmen rises
Leaving the white clouds way below
Its streams rush so swiftly
That no fish dares to linger
- Yunmen (864-949)

We can't linger too long in the heady rush of considerations about things beyond our comprehension. From reincarnation in our current existence, to "mere I" in Dalai Lama's talk in Salzberg, from Henri Nouwen's twofold poverty of heart and poverty of mind, to Philip Levine's poem about some things you know all your life -- we can glance and taste but seldom see and devour what passes quickly by us.

The Simple Truth

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.
(Poem by Philip Levine)

Once in a while, and then maybe again, we come to reside in our body whole and entire, aware of the incarnation briefly grasped then forgotten until next incarnation awareness. All in one lifetime.

Saskia said, "Happiness is hosting openness."

At end of prison conversation we say goodbye for this brief time until next time. Josh and Bob, Ryan and Charlie, Dick, Saskia, and I -- share the necessities and pleasantries of passage.

Maybe the raft is not the shore. Maybe there is no other shore. Maybe we are the flowing waters.

The very between of interconnectedness.

Hosting the open.

Merely.

"Each of us has the same right to pursue happiness and avoid suffering." (Dalai Lama)

Walking Ragged Mountain trails with Sando and Cesco in quiet moistness remaining from night. From stream where dogs drink the ocean four miles east can be seen through leafless trees. The taste of mountain stream is cool and plain.

The mighty ocean has but one taste,
The taste of salt.
Even so, the true way has
But one savor,
The savor of freedom.
- Majjhima Nikaya

There is reason to worry about freedom. Many people do not care for freedom. They care about ideas and control. In countries locked into repression, freedom is sacrilege. In countries that claim to be sole arbiters of freedom, dissent is treachery. It is becoming confusing which countries are most worrisome -- those who fear freedom and torture the infidel, or those whose freedom evokes fear and unleashes fear of freedom. In America there are many who fear freedom. This is worrisome.

The Most Famous Buddhist in the World
By Lama Surya Das

Q. How did the Dalai Lama become the most famous Buddhist in the world?

A: Spiritually speaking, many people assume that the Dalai Lama is like the pope of Buddhism. This is not true. For one thing, the Dalai Lama is the highest-ranking lama in Tibetan Buddhism, but he is not officially recognized as a leader among the other schools of Buddhism.
For example, although Tibetan Buddhism is the state religion of Bhutan, the last independent Buddhist kingdom in the world, Bhutan has its own head lama. Other schools of Buddhism have their own chief monks or sangha leaders. The Sangha Raja (Sovereign Monk) is the supreme patriarch of Buddhists in Thailand. There are also other heads of large Buddhist sects, such as Fuji-san, head of Japan's Nichirin, or Pure Land, sect of so-called "chanting" Buddhists, who are known for building "peace pagodas" around the world.

The Dalai Lama's role differs from the pope's in other ways, too. Buddhism is not arranged in so hierarchical a fashion as is the Catholic Church, and there is no single head or ascendant ruling school. In fact, in Tibetan Buddhism, there are four sects or schools, and the Dalai Lama is head of only one of them, the Gelugpa school.

The dramatic escape in January from Tibet of the 17th Karmapa Lama underscores the interrelationship of the various sects and their high lamas: the Karmapa (which literally means "man of Buddha activity"), is the third-highest ranking lama in Tibet and the head of another large sect, the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism, founded 900 years ago.

The Panchen Lama, Gendun Choekyi Nyima, meanwhile, is the second-highest ranking Gelugpa Tibetan lama after the Dalai Lama. Human rights groups call the young Panchen Lama, who would now be 10 or 11, the world's youngest political prisoner. After the Dalai Lama officially proclaimed him Panchen Lama in 1995, the boy was almost immediately abducted and imprisoned by the Chinese government and has not been seen in public since. It is feared that he is dead. All three of these lamas--the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa, and the Panchen Lama--are revered spiritual leaders and vital symbols of Tibetan independence both within and outside their homeland.

The Dalai Lama is also Tibet's political leader. He remains the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, which he established in the Indian hill station of Dharamsala 40 years ago, through the grace of Pandit Nehru and the Indian government, after escaping into exile himself in 1959. From there, he leads the fight for Tibetan cultural preservation and autonomy, if not complete political freedom and independence from Chinese rule. In each of the last 10 years, he has visited 50 or more countries on his mission of peace, nonviolence, and human rights. For his humanitarian work and peaceful resistance to Chinese Communist rule in formerly independent Tibet, the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.
(http://www.beliefnet.com/story/14/story_1463_1.html)

Freedom must be considered in the light of birth, life, and death. We're born, live, and die. Or so it seems. If birth fades, if death fades, there is only life. Right here. Right now.

When mortals are alive, they worry about death. When they're full, they worry about hunger. Theirs is the Great Uncertainty. But sages don't consider the past. And they don't worry about the future. Nor do they cling to the present. And from moment to moment they follow the Way. (Bodhidharma)

The two dogs lay in kitchen under fragrance of lentil soup, with and without sausage.

Here is where life resides.

And here,

And each here you are.

Michael talked awhile before going to pick up Pia. Three years in Sweden. Now in New Hampshire.

Overcome your uncertainties
And free yourself
From dwelling on sorrow.
If you delight in existence,
You will become a guide
To those who need you,
Revealing the path to many.
- Sutta Nipata

Dana asks what my philosophy of life is. It seems I can't remember being asked this in a very long time.

Life is love. Surrender to life, surrender to love. The Dalai Lama says his religion is kindness. I’m not always religious.

What I think is helped by Dogen – one continuous mistake. What we do next, (as God tells Joan of Arcadia), is what’s important. It’s the ‘next thing’ that differentiates God from ‘the other side.’

Tibetan monks are in Camden for a week. Nine of them will take soup and bread at the shop tomorrow, Wednesday, at noon. They’re creating a mandala.

To delight in existence reveals the path to many.

Studded snow tires are on Caravan. Oil change.

Hospice Memorial Service tonight.

Simple kindness; simple delight.

Christy says she swims every morning. She wants a zabuton and zafu. And information about pre-Christian Brigid of Celtic lore.

Constantly see your body as
Empty and quiet
Inside and outside
Communing in sameness.
Plunge the body into
The realm of reality,
Where there has never been
Any obstruction.
- Tao-hsin (580-651)

Lea says script of film being made nearby of book by Richard Russo starring Paul Newman was sold at local auction to benefit school for dropouts.

Fire crackles. Skiff is readied at dock for final row from floats on harbor in back of shop. Floats will be taken out for winter tomorrow.

It is an odd shop we have. It makes no profit. It seems like a new phylum, a peduncle. According to Teilhard, nature will suppress us.

In 'The Phenomenon of Man' Teilhard de Chardin discusses, in
some detail, the severe paucity of traces left behind by
beginnings, particularly the beginnings of branches on the
tree of life. In regard to commencements of all kinds he makes
reference to a 'fundamental condition to which experience is
subject, by virtue of which the beginnings of all things tend to
be materially out of our grasp.' (1) Applied to the evolution of
life, this condition can be designated as 'the "automatic
suppression of evolutionary peduncles".' (2) The context of
Teilhard's use of the term "peduncle" here gives it a purport
that is more or less equivalent to the term "bud". Indeed, he
says as much when he notes that the expression 'the
peduncle' has for him a meaning that 'comes to the same
thing [as] the bud'. (3) By the suppression of an evolutionary
peduncle on the tree of life, Teilhard simply means the
disappearance from view, of the bud, the incipient sprout,
by which a phylum began its life as a branch on that tree.
(Subject: Beginnings Leave Few Traces, Regards, Brian Cowan; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/teilhard/message/1370?source=1)

Perhaps November sets thought to diminishment. Impoverishment seems appropos in emptiness. We've neither the benefit of financial security nor the gift of inheritance. Like the seasonal cycle we try not to cling to what we do not possess.

It's the season of surrender.

There's nothing to relinquish.

The color she wants is violet.

Len, John, Peter, Sam set to play banjo, mandolin, guitar, and harmonica as Joanie comes through door with cane.
Saskia sets up flute stand.

It is time. Out back door, to skiff, away from crowd, oars in salt water, sun and sea stillness, slipping into traceless glide.

Joan had a failure of imagination.

Life is full of small and larger sorrows. No escaping them. No explaining them away. We grieve until next the grief extinguishes itself.

It's nice to see good drama, laced with humor and theology, on television.

What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make His way home
("One of Us," opening song for TV show Joan of Arcadia; Lyrics by Joan Osborne)

War is a larger sorrow.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 15 — Two American Black Hawk helicopters collided in midair and crashed Saturday evening in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least 12 of the American soldiers aboard and wounding nine others, officials said.
NYT, 15Nov03)

In class the other night two students mocked the fact and the person of former Vice President Al Gore who'd delivered a speech on "Wrong Targets" at Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C., November 9, 2003. Not a word about the substance of Gore's comments.

Elsewhere, in response to comments by Gore Vidal about the current administration in Washington published on Thursday, November 13, 2003 by The LA Weekly, a fellow writes me excoriating the man, his sexual and political stance, adding, "To give him forum is despicable and to listen to a "progressive" view is pure foolishness. Come on!!!" Not a word about the content of Vidal's comments.

Sorrows mount.

20 in Turkey Killed by 2 Truck Bombs Outside Synagogues:
Two truck bombs exploded today outside a pair of synagogues crowded with families celebrating bar mitzvahs, killing at least 20 people and injuring more than 300.(New York Times Online, 15Nov03)

If God was one of us, God died 32 times in Iraq and Turkey today. The United States government does not dignify deaths of Iraqi's by even mentioning or approximating the numbers killed in their country by Americans. News organizations have no numbers to add.

Who attends God's funeral?

Rebuilding Bodies, and Lives, Maimed by War
As more soldiers survive attacks that would have killed them a generation ago, more inevitably return from Iraq with grievous injuries.(NYT on the Web, 15Nov03)

We suffer failures of imagination.

(Tommy and Lloyd talk about grandparents and wars they've seen as fire burns to ash at end of day. Norm and Sky have walked back up Bayview to their house after talking of philosopher Paul Weiss, String Theory, and the necessity of conversing the various disciplines as spirituality finds new expressions of itself. Charlotte's sketches of Tibetan monks hang with silence from beam they arrived at this morning after conversation with The Grace in Dying.)

When imagination is blessed with light, we rejoice.

Veterans are old ones.

Everyone who has been in a war as a combatant is, I submit, an old one.

What they have seen, what they had to do, makes one old.

Subhuti, does it occur to you that I believe that through me living beings are led to liberation? Never think that way, Subhuti. Why? Because there is no separate being to lead to liberation. If I were to think there was, I would be caught in the notion of a self or person or a life span. Subhuti, what I call a self is essentially not a self in the way that an ordinary person thinks of it. But neither do I think of anyone as an ordinary person. However, knowing the essence, I can use the name, ordinary person
- Diamond Sutra

Day by day new men and women grow old surrounded by war. They go to war under orders from commander. They go to serve and protect. They grow in courage through fear and duress. We ask them to go through their lives prematurely old.

'Vetus,' in Latin, means old. We must be grateful to our old ones. They have fought and sacrificed for us.

Psalm 137 (138)
Thanksgiving
I will praise you, Lord, with all my heart, for you have heard the words of my mouth.
In the presence of the angels I will make music to you, worship before your holy temple.
I will praise your name because of your mercy and faithfulness: high above all other names is the greatness of your word.

Each day that I call on you, Lord, listen to me, strengthen my spirit.
All the kings of the earth will proclaim your glory, Lord, when they hear your word.
They will sing of the paths of the Lord, so great is his glory.
For the Lord is on high but he cares for the humble; and he knows the proud from afar.

If I walk in the midst of troubles, you will give me life. If my enemies rise up against me, your right hand will keep me safe.
The Lord does all that I need. Lord, your kindness lasts for ever: do not forsake the work of your hands.

It is now time for kindness.

Let us now become no longer old.

Let those who are veterans and those becoming veterans enter into the safe and liberating embrace of life without war.

Kindness with gratitude.

At prison conversation Ryan asked, "When do you live your truth, and when do you live their story?"

Know the functions of the mind.
Its functions produce
The treasury of teachings.
When its activity
Is always silent,
Myriad illusions become suchness.
- Tao-hsin (580-651)

In the text Ryan brought, the words, " The Ontong Javanese name according to everyday behavior and experience, not according to formal definition." And, "Names describe emotive experience, not observed forms or functions."(p.131, in Codification of Reality: Lineal and Non-lineal , by Dorothy Lee, 1959.)

Charlie was quiet. Bob spoke up. Joe was energetic. Saskia and Nancy spoke of truth and lies, and how story and truth both require attention.

Ryan said, "You don't have to look for what's not missing."

We were all there. Even those missing from Friday's table were there -- whether in traces or spirit, where traces of oneself reside. Everyone mind alerted was there.

Ryan said it at end, "That which holds all things together is the common language we are trying to learn."

Walking out of education/activities building after goodbyes, I put hand in packet and feel the 'person-down' alarm there. I'm stunned to say, "I forgot to turn this in." Polly and companions look at me with curiosity. I realize my mistake -- I'm still inside -- we haven't gone through the main wing to command central.

Such it was.

Such it is.

Still there.

In truth.

Moonlight slants cold through mountain trees.

Cabin woodstove shares warmth with candlelight.

Silence throughout as feeders swing in dark; birdseed’s first night.

Song of T’aego Hermitage

I’ve lived in this hermitage
How long I don’t know
Deep and secret and
Without obstructions
Heaven and earth meet
Like box and cover:
There’s no turning toward
Or turning away.
I do not stay in the east, west,
South or north
The jewel tower and the jade palace
Do not stand opposite me.
I do not take guidelines from
Bodhidharma as a model
As the light shines freely through
Eighty four thousand gates.
- T’aego (1301-1382)

Poetry is God’s name pronounced in chimney smoke.

Like string theory, we weave moments of life into patterns of sweet fleeting touch.

Dimension beyond dimension saturate seeing with silence.

Each child carries poems running with words not yet read, not yet lived.

God is not-yet lived.

Un-I-dimensional.

Note: The Bookshop/Bakery will be closed Friday 31Oct, Saturday 1Nov, and Sunday 2Nov. We will re-open for Tuesday Evening Conversation 5:30pm Tuesday 4 Nov, Election Day. Remember to vote!

.............

The question of Gretchen was unasked, but there, in our conversation last evening.

"Please tell me what religion means to you
Although I think you very good and kind,
I doubt if worship weighs much in your mind."(Faust, Part I, by J.M. von Goethe, in Eternal Life? by Hans Kung, p.153)

Eve of All Saints, then All Souls. Those in and out of religion regard the elements of saintliness wherever they are found. Kindness, generosity, reverence, respect, integrity, self-transcendence, and humility -- among other attributes. Perhaps what we call faith is the willingness to admit 'I don't know...but I assent" to the mystery of love and truth seeking itself in the world.

Auferstehung (Resurrection)

Sometimes we get up
Get up as for a resurrection
In broad daylight
With our living hair
With our breathing skin.

Only the usual things are around us
No mirage of palm trees
With grazing lions
And gentle wolves.

The alarm clocks don't cease to tick
Their phosphorescent hands are not extinguished.

And yet weightlessly
And yet invulnerably
Ordered into mysterious order
Admitted early into a house of light.
(Poem by Marie Louise Kaschnitz)

The ordinary, when seen, and seen through, is the divine. Water, bread, wine, human touch, and nature's touch -- all things, all beings -- when completely themselves, are the elements and body of God. Last night at Thursday Evening Conversation the word "commensality" was read. "At table together," sharing food and familiar reality with all arriving at table. The notion (and sometimes practiced belief) that we are of one family, therefore, we nourish and sustain each other with food and drink, as and in, the presence of God.

Today we travel to western Massachusetts to spend final two days with Vera (Saskia's mom's dog) who will be put down on Monday. Hips and legs gone, Vera and her sorrowing mistress, Erika, will part for now.

Coming to visit
The Western Capital’s
Old, crumbling ruins,
Listen: Han Shan’s temple bell,
In the evening, tolling.
- Sengai Gibbon

When visiting Trappist monastery in Spencer these next 3 mornings, I'll hear bell along rolling farmland. Each tolling will bring to mind family and friends, relatives and strangers, who've traveled beyond as Vera will.

It is a weekend of thin veils. Heaven and earth, (or however we word that which seems to be separated into the dimensions of the seen-living and the unseen-gone-beyond), near and interpenetrate each other at this time of year. This nearing is celebrated variously but consistently in diverse cultures as symbolic of our continuing communion with all life – seen or unseen, felt or faith’d. .

My prayer this weekend -- that the intermingling joy and sorrow of our lives be honored:
And yet weightlessly
And yet invulnerably
Ordered into mysterious order
Admitted early into a house of light.

Good and faithful friends and companions lead the way!

In this instance, Verousch.

Our gratefulness.

After rain, sun this morning. Brook tumbles. Hosmer Pond reaches over its edge.

Talk about miracles and healing at Wednesday Evening Conversation. Wondering what the revelation of miracles might be. Even if disease is illusion, as some hold, the body passes from current form. It goes. Some say, 'We die.'

Revelation Must Be Terrible

Revelation must be
terrible with no time left
to say goodbye.

Imagine that moment
staring at the still waters
with only the brief tremor

of your body to say
you are leaving everything
and everyone you know behind.

Being far from home is hard, but you know,
at least we are exiled together.
When you open your eyes to the world

you are on your own for
the first time. No one is
even interested in saving you now

and the world steps in
to test the calm fluidity of your body
from moment to moment

as if it believed you could join
its vibrant dance
of fire and calmness and final stillness.

As if you were meant to be exactly
where you are, as if
like the dark branch of a desert river

you could flow on without a speck
of guilt and everything
everywhere would still be just as it should be.

As if your place in the world mattered
and the world could
neither speak nor hear the fullness of

its own bitter and beautiful cry
without the deep well
of your body resonating in the echo.

Knowing that it takes only
that one, terrible
word to make the circle complete,

revelation must be terrible
knowing you can
never hide your voice again.
(Poem by David Whyte, in Fire in the Earth)

On one level it must be terrible to learn that most of what we think and believe, just isn't true. Put another way, when we see things as they are -- something radical and uprooting takes place.

O.V. de L. Milosz writes: I have seen. He who has seen stops thinking and feeling. He can only describe what he has seen. (from "Canticle of Knowledge," in The Noble Traveller, p.173)

At the conversation Andy describes the death of his neighbor in an old trailer in the woods of Waldoboro. Andy tells the long story as ten others listen. Described are foot washing and radiant light filling the hovel-like death room of his neighbor. All thoughts of Christ, works of mercy, and easy judgemental opinions are made null by the stretch of encounter from diagnosis of liver failure to taking down of sole remaining picture of Jesus from stripped home after death. Andy tells the story well.

Certain natures receive from youth to old age the nourishment necessary for their inextinguishable passion: at first poetry, then metaphysics, and finally science -- but true science, the passionate and loving science of the Divine. (Milosz, in April 26, 1933 letter to Caffe de Broquery)

What is miracle? What is healing?

If truth is at root of everything, it is usually covered. Was it Dan Berrigan who said, "The point at which one can do nothing, the point of truth"? When break-through occurs it is a point at which one can do nothing.

'Doing nothing' is an awkward phrase. It evokes frowns of disapproval. 'Doing nothing,' suggests non-doing, no doer, and doerless activity. We know how to do something, but how do nothing? How arrive at the point of truth?

St. Augustine said in On Lying, "When regard for the truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened, all things will remain doubtful."

Much in our contemporary world remains in doubt. Truth feels optional. And yet, without truth as root and raison d'etre, other ways of being feel optional also -- namely, beauty, and love.

"I was born for this, I came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice."
"Truth?" said Pilate, "what is that?" (--John 18: 37)

Jesus remained silent.

What are we seeing?

What revelation?

One's voice?

Propinquity.

Staying near -- during this time.

We are not to end life to see God.

In a book called Village: Where to Live and How to Live, Peter Megargee Brown tells us that the secret to true happiness is "to want what we have." He talks about the concept of "propinquity," which helps explain why Naboth's vineyard was so tempting to Ahab. In villages we are close to many things, but we do not have to "own" them to enjoy them. We do not have to have a perfect schedule, or house, or garden, or routine, to keep sabbath. (p.68, in Sabbath Keeping, by Donna Schaper)

Nearness.

To find you, I moved beyond the city,
A wide path led me, by mulberry and hemp,
To a new-set hedge of chrysanthemums
Not yet blooming although autumn had come.
I knocked; no answer, not even a dog.
I waited to ask your western neighbor;
But he told me that daily you climb the mountain,
Never returning till sunset.
- Sen Chiao-jan

Walking Rockport harbor road Monday with Sando and Cesco we meet Tom with Halley. Rounding Beauchamp point Tom and Saskia are saying, "In today's culture we don't talk about death. People are afraid of the fear the conversation might stir." But stir the topic and fear falls away when neighbor listens to neighbor speak of life before and beyond death.

Time, and our fixation with saving time and equating time with money, mutes our longing to speak.

Schaper says, "Sabbath is setting aside time for God." (p.1)
It is conversation about death, what precedes and what follows, that nears us each to each.

Nearness of each other and awareness of death enlivens life, not the opposite.

When we talk of the resurrection of the body, we mean then, as the Catholic theologian Franz Josef Nocke expresses it, "that not only man's naked self is saved through death, when all earthly history is left behind, all relationships with other human beings become meaningless; bodily resurrection means that a person's life history and all the relationships established in the course of this history enter together into the consummation and finally belong to the risen person."

In other words, what is at stake here is not the continuity of my body as a physical entity and consequently scientific questions like those about the whereabouts of the molecules simply do not arise. What matters is the identity of the person. The question arises then of the permanent importance of my whole life and lot. "God loves more than the molecules that happen to be in the body at the time of death," says the Catholic dogmatic theologian Wilhelm Bruening, rightly. "He loves a body that is marked by all the tribulation and also be the ceaseless longing of a pilgrimage, a body that has left behind many traces in the course of this pilgrimage in the world which has become human through these very traces.... Resurrection of the body means that none of all this is lost to God, since he loves man. He has gathered together all dreams and not a single smile has escaped his notice. Resurrection of the body means that in God man discovers not only his last moment but his history."
...
By losing himself into the reality of God, man gains himself. By entering into the infinite, the finite person loses his limits, so that the present contrast of personal and impersonal is transcended and transformed into the transpersonal. If ultimate reality is not nothingness, but that All which we call God, death is not so much destruction as a metamorphosis: "vita mutatur, non tollitur," "life is changed, not ended," it is said in the preface of the Catholic requiem mass. It does not mean ending, still less perishing, but consummation; not a diminishing, but a fulfilling, infinite fulfillment.
(pp. 111-112, in Eternal Life? Life After Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem, by Hans Kung, c1984)

To live in propinquity -- that is, to live nearness -- is the origin of community, hospitality, and openness. As in Sen Chiao-jan's poem our neighbor knows our whereabouts. We are on the mountain. We are on the earth.

While we love our independence, (good neighbors but good fences) -- we long for interdependence, (faces with smiles, gates that open).

In our stubbornness we sometimes choose to end what might only require change.

Largely because we are heirs to a Roman imperial culture that controlled the writing of history, we are inclined to read Rome’s story through rose-colored lenses. We tend to see the march of the Roman Empire as a civilizing work of human progress. … But what if Roman imperial power itself, not in decline but at the peak, was the real darkness? … [For an entire century before and an entire century after Jesus’ life, Rome was engaged in war against the Jews in Israel. Around the time of Jesus’ birth, according to] scholars Richard Horsley and Neil Asherman Silberman: "The Roman armies had swept through many of the towns and villages of the country, raping, killing, and destroying nearly everything in sight. In Galilee, all centers of rebellion were brutally suppressed; the rebel-held town of Sepphoris was burned to the ground, and all its surviving inhabitants were sold into slavery." Thousands of Jews were killed. Villages in Galilee were laid waste. In Jerusalem, where rebels had briefly taken charge, the Romans showed the lengths to which they were prepared to go to maintain control by swiftly executing anyone even suspected of collusion in the rebellion. … The Roman means of execution, of course, was crucifixion. … This means that just outside the wall of the Jewish capital, crosses were erected – not three lonely crosses on a hill, as in the tidy Christian imagination, but perhaps two thousand in close proximity. On each was hung a Jew, and each Jew was left to die over several days. … And once squeezed free of life, the corpses were left on their crosses to be eaten by buzzards. (from Constantine’s Sword, pgs. 79-80, 83, by James Carroll )

Empires and empire builders first destroy then rebuild in their image. The close proximity, (the propinquity), of crosses fastened with bodies of those resisting imperial power in ancient Galilee -- and the bodies ripped by steel and explosives in current day Iraq, Israel, and Palestine -- are reminders to watch with wariness and name with unblinking courage the behavior of those who kill, destroy, and appropriate for themselves that which is their neighbor's.

We've been asked, some say commanded, to allow our neighbor to be who, where, and when they are. This "suffering, permitting, and allowing" is the meaning of the Latin "patior," and extends to "experience, undergo, and endure."

It is not easy to suffer gladly the foolish behavior of men seeking and taking power unto themselves at the expense of authentic understanding of who is "neighbor." Time is running out. Perhaps going with it are jealously, miserly witholding, and fear of strangers. It is time.

Prayer sets aside time, getting lost in the reality of God.

Prayer sees God through life.

Staying near during this time.

A ball in a corner for ten years. Or a rag doll picked up by hand or foot.

The Poustinia is a place of self-emptying. The will of God places and picks up who you are like ball, like rag doll.

The moon is a house
In which the mind is master.
Look very closely:
Only impermanence lasts.
This floating world, too, will pass.
- Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481)

The small cabin filled with cold silence this October Saturday morning. Five of us on cushions -- that is, when Cesco wasn't licking noses of sitters with jikido attentiveness. (The jikido, or monk on daily duty, walks around the zazen hall carrying a flat paddle called a kyosaku, with which he taps the shoulders of zazen practitioners. Cesco uses nose and tongue.)

We read from Poustinia, Encountering God in Silence, Solitude and Prayer, two pages on Kenosis (self-emptying). Catherine Doherty's writes on the profound traditions of Christian spirituality surrounding the Russian word 'poustinia,' which means 'desert.'

Catherine's work at Madonna House and in print have led some to long for her canonization as saint.

Fr. Neuhaus is Editor-in-Chief of First Things magazine, and one of the outstanding thinkers and commentators in the Christian world today. In the December, 2000, issue of the magazine, he reflects on his first, and then a more recent visit to Madonna House.

“[Catherine’s] little book, Dear Father: A Message of Love to Priests, can be summed up: ‘Yes, but do you believe, do you really believe, the wonder of who Christ is and who you are for him? Show it! Live it!’ One is reminded of Chesterton’s remark that the only sin is to call a green leaf gray. Catherine railed against a world and a Church that seemed so indifferent to the luminosity of love.

“Poustinia, perhaps her most influential book, is a strongly moving account of a practice of silence, solitude, and prayer drawn from the Russian experience of pilgrimage and time apart in which a poustinik lives in a small hut—for days or months or years, or for a lifetime—in an isolation that is also total availability to the community. The heart of the poustinia is kenosis, joining Christ in the emptying of the self, as described by Paul in Phillipians 2. ‘I think that God calls the poustinik to a total purgation, a total self-emptying,’ writes Catherine. She cautioned against the impulse to be relevant by doing something useful as the world measures usefulness. ‘If you want to see what a “contribution” really is, look at the Man on the cross. That’s a contribution. When you are hanging on a cross you can’t do anything because you’re crucified. That is the essence of a poustinik. That is his or her contribution.’ Poustinia is one of the more insightful and disturbing books on prayer I have read in a long time.' (Testimonials from Catherine newsletter, re Catherine de Hueck Doherty)

Cesco and Sando run up the path toward brook.

Light colored Saab turns right onto Barnestown Road.

The tossing loveliness of ball and rag doll.

The will of God.

Emptying.

When in prison we dance with stillness.

Conversation encircles the willingness of each to speak from one's true self.

Today Hawkin's on Power vs. Force, Hillman on Yoga, Wilson on The Occult, as Yancey's What's So Amazing About Grace rested at middle of table.

Four of us gave space and freedom to each other.

From the banal to the noble, the silence and words from paper and mouths invite us to consider what is illuminating the very presence drawing us together.

We tap dance the power of presence down hallways of individual perception.

When we encounter hypothetical aggression or hostility, we practice stillness.

And allow God to find God's way into the world.

With gratitude each to each.

Truth is God.

That's what Mahatma Gandhi held.

Ahimsa, or non-violence, is truth in action.

For him, and for our consideration, truth and ahimsa are inseparable.

After Missing the Recluse on the Western Mountain

To your hermitage here on the top of the mountain
I have climbed, without stopping, these ten miles.
I have knocked at your door, and no one answered;
I have peeped into your room,
At your seat beside the table.
Perhaps you are out riding,
Or fishing, more likely, in some autumn pool.
Sorry though I am to be missing you,
You have become my meditation.
The beauty of the grasses, fresh with rain,
And close beside the window the music of pines,
I take into my being all that I see and hear,
Soothing my senses, quieting my heart;
And though there be neither host nor guest,
Have I not had a visit complete?
The afternoon fades, I make my way
Back down the mountain.
Why should I wait for you any longer?
- Ch-iu Wei

We disappear from each other. Presence, full and unhidden appearance, is where truth resides. Yet, disappearance feels more common than appearance. Just as lies feel more pervasive than truth.

If truth is God -- then we begin the path to seeing why lies endanger us as individuals and as nation. We are in danger of hiding from one another, and from God.

How do we pray, how do we tell ourselves, if we hide away from truth, hide away from God?

Why should I wait for you any longer, Lord God of All? I am surrounded by death, and those who would divide us from you. Lies are our constant companions.

Are we to be left desolate and separated by lies? Or will we find our true place in each others' lives? Are war, killing, and deception our only salvation? Or is there a greater truth that longs to emerge into appearance?

Bede Griffiths and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spoke about a new vision:
Both felt that the articulating of a modern mystic vision was the primary need and objective of our time, and the central purpose of their own lives. Both felt that this needed to be paradoxically a unitive vision, in which "union differentiates." Thus Bede writes:

"Teilhard de Chardin always emphasized the principle that union differentiates. We become more ourselves as we enter more deeply into relationship with others...We do not lose ourselves, but we lose our sense of separation and division and discover our integral oneness in the One Reality. This is essentially a mystery of love...The whole process of evolution, as Teilhard Chardin saw it, is a process of personalization. The ultimate goal of humanity is a communion of persons in love...This is the meaning of Christian doctrine of the Trinity, that the ultimate Reality...is a communion of love (5)."

Bede in his later years, also through the influence of Teilhard, became committed to the integration of science (especially the "new physics" and Jungian psychology) into a dynamic unitive vision, "in a new evolutionary perspective" (6). Kathryn Spink rightly notes that "the principle of transformation was one which under the influence of Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin [Fr. Bede] would eventually apply to life in general " [thus Fr. Bede wrote]: 'I see life in terms of transformation, matter being transformed into life, life into consciousness, and consciousness into divine experience'." (7). This line from Fr. Bede directly reflects the vision of Teilhard, though it expresses in more accessible terms Teilhard's noologistic language about cosmogenesis evolving into biogenesis into noogenesis. (Teilhard de Chardin and Bede Griffiths, By Robert Hale, OSB Cam, in THE GOLDEN STRING Newsletter, Vol. 7 No. 2 Spring 2001)

This process of transformation awaits awareness and opening of consciousness -- ours, and that of all creation.

Gandhi felt that truth alone exists.
The doctrine of Ahimsa, non-violence, was always at the very center of Gandhi's thought and work. He always believed in non-violence and lived by it. There was an obvious relationship between the doctrine of truth and non-violence: Satya and Ahimsa. As Gandhi says, I made the early discovery that if I was to reach God as truth and truth alone I could not do so except through a perfect vision of truth can only follow a complete realization of Ahimsa. To see the universal and all- pervading spirit of truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility. (My experiment with truth, p.401-2).

For Gandhi, Truth and Ahimsa are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to disentangle and separate them. As he puts it, Ahimsa is the means and Truth is the end. Thus, Ahimsa becomes our supreme duty and Truth becomes God. “Truth exists, it alone exists. It is the only God and there is but one way of realizing ".
(Collected works. vol 44, p. 59).

Thus, Ahimsa is the fundamental means by which Truth can be realized, that is, Moksha can be achieved. Ahimsa includes non-violence in thought, feeling and action and also means total humility, love, compassion and service. (from Gandhian Thoughts , http://channels.vandemataram.com/vindex.jsp?sno=12)

Moksha is final freedom -- salvation and liberation -- from our unawareness and hiddenness. This liberation is the freedom longed for in the deep center of all being and each being. We long to realize who we really are.

Have mercy on me, God, have mercy. My soul flies to you for refuge.
I will hide in the shelter of your wings until the time of ambush is past.
I will cry to God the Most High, to the God who cares for me.
(Psalm 56 (57) Morning prayer in time of affliction)

The ambush is upon us. The attack of opinion and noise, ideology and ice cold conviction, is all over us from airwaves and newsprint. God is redefined into war and power, falsity and lie. The souls of those seeking the true God are frightened by the deception and patronizing puppeteering that masquerades as privatized faith and divinity these days in our country and the larger world.

Is our visit to the recluse complete? Have we learned something on the mountain that answers the question, "Why should I wait for you any longer?"

Is God hiding within each and every one of us, each and every being, until our consciousness is transformed and we see, finally, who we really are in each other's lives?

If truth is God, then all truth is relational.

Alone with others. Union differentiates.

Nuptiality.

No retribution.

The Psalmist will state the sinner thinks, “there is no God, no retribution”.

Ahead the green creek sparkles
As it flows toward the cliff
A huge rock with a good edge for sitting
My heart is like a lone cloud
With nothing to depend on
So far away from the world’s affairs
What need is there
To search for anything
- Han-shan

I’ve been concerned about lies. My lies. The lies of the Bush administration. And, the great lie.

Like mountain ground in late October we are asked to live with lies as paths live with coverings of leaves.

Gathering Leaves

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.

But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.

I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight;
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where
The harvest shall stop?
(Poem: "Gathering Leaves," by Robert Frost, from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Holt, Rinehart and Winston).)

Sickness of heart at the distortions, selective emphases, and downright lies that fall from Bush and his handlers. Not just about Iraq. But also environment, economy, oil, corporate war profiteering, this administration’s dismantling of rights, fairness of representation, and disproportionate psychological disparagement of any opposing opinion.

Once we thought truth was God, and lies the opposite of God.

With what purpose, Lord, do you stay away, hide yourself in time of need and trouble?
The wicked in their pride persecute the weak, trap them in the plots they have devised.
The sinner glories in his desires, the miser congratulates himself.
The sinner in his arrogance rejects the Lord: “there is no God, no retribution”.
This is what he thinks – and all goes well for him.
Your judgements are far beyond his comprehension: he despises all who stand against him.
( Psalm 9B (10) Thanksgiving )

Still, I give thanks that even in God’s absence, we long for God.

We want those who try to hide God to go away. They will take money with them, but we want them to go away.

That’s all. God is love. And God is truth.

We must be with God. And with God is no retribution.

The sinner is right about no retribution.

As a fool I have to accept both Bush and God.

If one must go away, may the true one stay.

Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.

Why do fools love?

October koan.

Time is odd.

Who knows what time it is?

Time is not God.

"Sabbath is setting aside time for God." (Donna Schaper, in Sabbath Keeping).

Setting aside time, we surrender to what we do not know.

Despite the obstacles
I pursued the great monk
The misty mountains a million layers high
He pointed to the road back home
One round moon
Lantern of the sky
- Han-shan

The great monk is the height and depth of one's being. In pursuing the great monk we must first relinquish surface ephemera holding us to flat plane.

Prayer lifts and falls from the surface of things.

Prayer is attention. It is time gone and place abandoned.

Gone where? Abandoned to what?

To pray for a longer time is not the same as to pray by multiplying words, as some people suppose. Lengthy talk is one thing, a prayerful disposition which lasts a long time is another. For it is even written in reference to the Lord himself that he spent the night in prayer and that he prayed at great length. Was he not giving us an example by this? In time, he prays when it is appropriate, and in eternity, he hears our prayers with the Father.

The monks in Egypt are said to offer frequent prayers, but these are very short and hurled like swift javelins. Otherwise their watchful attention, a very necessary quality for anyone at prayer, could be dulled and could disappear through protracted delays. They also clearly demonstrate through this practice that a person must not quickly divert such attention if it lasts, just as one must not allow it to be blunted if it cannot last.
(from A letter to Proba by St Augustine)

We pray when attention lingers on true longing. Not desires, nor wishes; not hopes, nor beliefs.
There is a longing that is true and more than true. It abides with us. It dwells as the essence of our existence.
Prayer is engagement with what is -- right there, before and behind, above and below -- ordinary sacred.

This longing is for that which is -- for what and who we are.
We ask and ask again: Who am I? Who are we?

This is where poem arises.

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

A poem should be equal to:
Not true--
(Archibald MacLeish, in Ars Poetica )

I remember today my sister. It is the fourth anniversary. Her son, Mark, writes: ‘Today should not be a day of sadness for us, but one of celebration -- Mom turns 4 today!’ Her daughter, Lori Ann, writes: 'I was awake this morning at 1:02am and sat in silent prayer.'

Birth and death -- these two expressions of life -- visit one another.

Finding life -- is equal to -- itself.

Where time is set aside.

And God is still.

The road back home.

Here and now.

Submission.

She is reading the Koran. She reminds me that submission is the heart of prayer.

Why in our fear of not praying as we should, do we turn to so many things, to find what we should pray for? Why do we not say instead, in the words of the psalm: I have asked one thing from the Lord, this is what I will seek: to dwell in the Lord’s house all the days of my life, to see the graciousness of the Lord, and to visit his temple? There, the days do not come and go in succession, and the beginning of one day does not mean the end of another; all days are one, simultaneously and without end, and the life lived out in these days has itself no end.
So that we might obtain this life of happiness, he who is true life itself taught us to pray, not in many words as though speaking longer could gain us a hearing. After all, we pray to one who, as the Lord himself tells us, knows what we need before we ask for it. (from A letter to Proba by St Augustine)

I have asked only one thing from the Lord.

This...do I seek.

To dwell as and where I am. In the very house of God.

Day by day we bless you, Lord: we praise you for ever and for ever. (from the Te Deum)

And although I have not yet surrendered, I can still pray.

I submit. Underwith. Undergone.

Underway.

At hand.

That's what Luke the Evangelist wrote. "Say to them, 'The reign of God is at hand.'"

In my house there is a cave
In the cave there’s nothing at all
Pure emptiness
Really wonderful
Glorious and splendid
Bright as the sun
Vegetarian fare nourishes this old body
Cotton and hides cover this illusory form
Let a thousand saints appear before me
I have the Dharmakaya for my very own
- Han-shan

Dharmakaya, for Buddhists, is full. Dharmakaya is home.

Dharmakaya (Dhar?ma?ka?ya) (?), n. [Sanskrit, dharma Law + -kaaya body. [w] san-lun, [p] san1lun4, [k] samnon, [j] sanron.]
1. The dharmakaya (fa-shen ) is the experience of the transcendence of form of the five senses - and realization of true thusness.
2. the Buddha body in its self-nature, which is the same as the dharma body;
3. The Dharma body (fa-shen) is considered to be the eternal indestructible true principle, the Buddha's original body.
4. 1. Dharmakaya (body of the great order); the true nature of the Buddha, which is identical with reality, the essential laws of the universe. Equal to the laws of physics. The Dharmakaya is the experience of the unity of the laws of physics. It represents the "law" (dharma), the teaching expounded by the Buddha.
5. The Experience is timeless, permanent, devoid of characteristics and free from duality. It is the spiritual body of the buddhas, their true nature, which all buddhas have in common. (http://www.selfknowledge.com/109716.htm)

We celebrate St. Luke today. He was a convert to Christ.
And remain in the same house, eating and drinking what they provide, for the labourer deserves his wages; do not go from house to house. (Luke 10)

When at home there is no need to go from house to house. To be at home is wherever one is. Whenever completely "with" or "as," we are home. Whether with another, or, as oneself -- home is where we dwell not as two, nor with one. Home is nuptial. Not two. Not one. Rather, each as each, each with each.

Beloved brothers, our Lord and Saviour sometimes gives us instruction by words and sometimes by actions. His very deeds are our commands; and whenever he acts silently he is teaching us what we should do. For example, he sends his disciples out to preach two by two, because the precept of charity is twofold-love of God and of one’s neighbour.
The Lord sends his disciples out to preach in two’s in order to teach us silently that whoever fails in charity toward his neighbour should by no means take upon himself the office of preaching. (from A homily by Pope St Gregory the Great)

To preach is to be what we are saying.

We wonder what our global village would be like if we took time to listen to what everyone was saying – no matter what the language. In every conversation, the silences speak more truthfully than the words. Do we know how to listen for the Silence which allows the Word to be heard?

As hermits and solitaries we may wonder what we should do when senseless wars, boundless greed, overweening arrogance determines the future of our beloved earth. Perhaps it is our job to insure that there IS enough silence for the Word to be heard? Can we cultivate quiet so the Voice of Love can silently seep into our anguished, anxious hearts and teach us ways of compassion, forgiveness and mercy?

What can we do? “(We) have been told what is good, and what the Lord requires of (us):… only to act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with our God.” (Micah 6:8) (from "A Word from Still Wood" in Raven's Bread, Food for Those in Solitude, Vol: 7 No: 2 May 2003)

This is what we are.

We are to act justly. We are to love tenderly. We are to walk humbly.

With God.

When are two not two? When is one not one? We ask ourselves.

Rain falls on everything this Saturday morning.

The response is at hand.

Promise and hope dissolve into fact.

Generally speaking, practical application of Zen requires detachment from thoughts. This method of Zen saves the most energy. It just requires you to detach form emotional thoughts, and understand that there is nothing concrete in the realms of desire, form, and formlessness; only then can you apply Zen practically. If you try to practice it otherwise, it will seem bitterly painful by comparison.
- Foyan (1067–1120)

Fact finalizes fanciful thought of Red Sox and Cubs.

This form filled with temporary sadness.

We are left with Friday morning.

Brook rushes past hermitage.

Dazed yellow leaves rest on ground after strong gale yesterday.

Cubs lose. Sox extend.

There’s a master who feeds on rosy clouds
He lives concealed from common wanderers
No matter what the season, it’s really restful
The summer is very much like the fall
Hidden streams are always gurgling
The wind murmurs in tall pines
Sit here for half a day
And you’ll completely
Forget a hundred year’s woes.
- Han-shan

The original face we show, the one before mother and father were born, is the face in our mirror.
Seeing this face, we are prepared to hear Jesus' words, "Before Abraham was, I am."
He saw through the koan.

Seeing through our own face, we see.

What?

Entering the inquiry, we are what is seen.

From every side, in and out, above and below, seeing and seen.

Holograph -- entirely handwritten by author.

Holy words.

One's own.

Sign on door today:

Closed Today
(Gott sei dank)

Open at 5:00pm
for Evening Conversation

..............

There's a stillness in October's quiet light today.

Walking meditation.

Canoe.

And gratitude.

Red Sox and Yankees even up at 2 each.

In baseball there is no attaining mastery. There is only one play at a time. One pitch, one swing, one set of movements at a time.

Do not say, “I understand! I have attained mastery!” If you have attained mastery, then why are you going around asking other people questions? As soon as you say you understand Zen, people watch whatever you do and whatever you say, wondering why you said this or that. If you claim to understand Zen, moreover, this is actually a contention of ignorance. What about the saying that one should “silently shine, hiding one’s enlightenment?” What about “the path is not different from the human mind?” - Foyan (1067–1120)

Walking Whitney Road loop through Lincolnville in sweet colorful sunlight this afternoon.

There's no knowing any outcome.

Go out. Come back. See. Then say what is seen.

Or keep silent.

As Sherman did at table in wheelchair as we greeted him in white house on Eaton Ave prior to walk.

Eyes alone in response.

Buddhists use hermitage for retreat this weekend. Nice they're here.

Sitting alone in peace
Before these cliffs
The full moon is
Heaven’s beacon
The ten thousand things
Are all reflections
The moon originally
Has no light
Wide open
The spirit of itself is pure
Hold fast to the void
Realize its subtle mystery
Look at the moon like this
This moon that is the heart’s pivot
- Han-shan

Maybe the world is a hologram. Brain too. Used The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot at prison conversation Friday.

Who or what is the seeing?

'Beloved, the illumined soul sees clearly that from the One Life comes forth all living things, and that there is no separation possible when man lives and moves and has his being in his Divine Source. Therefore, the words "I and the Father are One", are fully realized to be Truth.' (p.116, in Your God is My God by Gladys De Meuter, c.1965)

The Source is with us.

October joyful sunlight!

Reality is not what we think it is.

Wanting to go to the eastern cliff
Setting out now after
How many years
Yesterday I used the vines
To pull myself up
But halfway there
Wind and mist made
The going tough
The narrow path grabbed
At my clothes
The moss so slippery
I couldn’t proceed
So I stopped right here
Beneath this cinnamon tree
Used a cloud as a pillow
And went to sleep
- Han-shan

Reality is how we see it as.

Visiting hermit in Stockton Springs.

I think of the other Sister who said of a group in Nova Scotia, "They lost their blessing."

The moon illuminates a thousand peaks
with the brilliance of daylight,
The sound of the bell falls
on my pillow of old friend’s poems;
In my thin monk’s robes,
unafraid of the frost’s harshness,
I rise, roll up the thin blinds,
sit in the depths of the night.
- Tesshu Tokusai (? – 1366)

In the depths of this current night -- I wonder if we have lost our blessing.

Moon full of itself over water from lighthouse across to Castine.

Neither here nor there.

Lost between.

Cold sky. Clear moon.

The white clouds
On the mountain tops
Poke halfway into this thatched hut
I had thought too cramped
Even for myself
- Koho Kennichi (1241–1316)

Solitude is the way moonlight lives in clouds.

Passing through.

Wind has gone by. Boats unjump. Lashings hold.

Francis of Assisi returns quietly to mountainside and sealight.

Yom Kippur comes with sundown.

If we see, we forgive.
If we abandon dark resentments, we let light within each other be seen.
If all is empty and open, what is seen is what is one alone, each in each and all.

Write this down, Brother Leo.

Hear O Israel!

If you are spiritually sharp,
you can open your eyes and
see as soon as you hear me
tell you about this.
Have not people of immeasurable
greatness said this truth
is not comprehensible by thought,
and that it is where
knowledge does not reach?
Were it not like this,
how could it be called
enlightened truth?
Nowadays, however, people
just present interpretations and views,
making up rationalizations;
they have never learned to be thus,
and have never reached this state.
- Foyan (1067–1120)

October!

Light.

Joy.

Francis of Assisi joins us.

Morning sunshine. Cesco and Sando in cabin with three of us. Walking meditation in dew bright green underfoot.
Chanting psalms celebrating nature and source.

Body impermanent like spring mist;
Mind insubstantial like empty sky;
Thoughts unestablished like breezes in space.
Think about these three points over and over.
- Godrakpa (1170-1249)

We are grateful for Francis' life then and now.

Simplicity. Acceptance of all beings. Dedication to Christ-mind and Christ-body.

Creation itself fills with quiet joy.

Francis, its offspring, wanders soundless at center.

Emptying Christ mirror!

Transitus of Francis.

Leaving time and body. Entering eternity and spirit.

Who enters this door, who studies this teaching
Has to be thorough and push to the end.
Empty your body, and reason remains;
Blank your mind, and the world is void.
Cloud-draped trees form a sheet of white;
In a mountain’s mouth the sun’s a red slice.
The flag moves or is it the wind?
It isn’t the wind or the flag.
- Stonehouse

Forgiveness returns us to original reality. To the unborn. Where what is is itself.

The pain of dwelling in original reality while yet in time and body was for Francis perfect joy.

Tonight we celebrate his return.

Write it down, Brother Leo.

All life is original life.

Greet God!

In this time. In this body.

Peace.

And all.

Good.

We remember angels. Silent presences. Unseen.

What communication with God? Just that. Entering God.

Whatever you are doing, twenty-four hours a day, in all your various activities, there is something that transcends the Buddhas and Zen Masters; but as soon as you want to understand it, it’s not there. As soon as you try to gather your attention on it, you have already turned away from it. That is why I say you see but cannot do anything about it.
- Foyan (1067–1120)

Angels are just that.

Our barn roof leaks.

Extension rains drenched coast of Maine yesterday through morning. Hurricane Juan washed ashore at Halifax Nova Scotia and passed through PEI.

In my house there is a cave
In the cave, there’s nothing at all
Pure emptiness, really wonderful
Glorious and splendid, bright as the sun
- Han Shan (c. 730)

Sitting in cabin last night with rain along roof, three times 20 minute bell struck. No movement save the moth immolating itself in candle sending waves of extinguished light to vacant and occupied cushions and mats.

Angels today -- Gabriel, Michael, Raphael -- a feasting.
Alone, we are never...alone.

Is that a message? That we are never alone when we are alone?
Is this what the hermit experiences? We are more alone when with others?

Paradox? If solitude is gift, no one can give it to you. It is something taken away.
Solitude is the realization we are alone with others when we are fully with them.

Fully with is beyond the need to make oneself understood.
It is silence that makes gift of solitude when alone with others.

Archangels with us. Emptying.
They say, "The Lord is with you."

Mary said, "Let it be so!"
We say, "Ah, yes, may it be, so."

A dissolving emptiness.
Then, solitude.

The beauty of your house, Lord, the place your glory dwells.
Home.

Bookshop/Bakery closed today.

In honor of Rosh Hashana, Sunday day of rest, Hurricane Juan bearing toward Nova Scotia, Saskia visiting family, and some silence, some solitude.

Cesco on rug, Mu-ge in basket on kitchen daybed. Rain light, then torrential, then pausing, and then again falling steady between mountains.

Living alone where none other dwells,
Shrine among the pines where mountain tints encroach,
Old man’s been ninety years a monk:
Heart beyond the clouds a lifetime long.
White hair hangs down, his head’s unshaven:
Clear black pupils smile deep mysteries.
He can still point to the orphan moon
For me alone, relaxes his discipline, this moment.
- Kuan Hsiu (832– 912)

There's joy, Emily D. says, in being nobody.

The same joy, one might say, in greeting everybody... as God... greeting.

This moment.

For giving.

A way.

Near.

We bring Tolle, McPhee, Ingram, D.T.Suzuki into prison and meet Fulghum, Richie, Ryan, Bob, and Joe in there.

A steady wind scours the autumn moon
From a stagnant pool,
From the crystal spring every place pure now
Just as it is.
Why, then, does karma yet coil and bind?
- Miao Yin (376–380)

If we think we stray from the central axis of our life, the longing, the pull, (some once only said 'guilt') draws us back to the reality beyond thinking, the center point, the axis itself.

Some say, to God. Some say, to the awareness of God.

Forgiveness asks into our midst this time, Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur. Bob asks how to deal with the past.

Now. With acceptance and surrender.

We forgive. Are forgiven.

Until we become aware, there is nothing to forgive.

We are, we become, forgiveness itself.

Note: The bookshop/bakery will be closed Tuesday and Wednesday. We'll be back Thursday. There will be no scheduled conversations until Thursday Evening.
.........

Suzuki Roshi said that there realy are no enlightened beings, there is only enlightened activity.

It seems a flower, but not a flower;
It seems a mist, but not a mist.
It comes at midnight,
It goes away in the morning.
Its coming is like a spring dream
That does not last long.
And its going is like the morning cloud.
You will find it nowhere.
- Bai Juyi

Even going for a drive is nothing special.

So, we go for a drive.

Local Buddhist Meditation Group pulls into driveway. Their regular place must be locked this morning. The cabin is here, unlockable, and open.

There's no need to go anywhere. If we wish to pray, pray where we are. If we wish to meditate, meditate right here. If we wish to enter the liturgy of transformation and transfiguration, remember the word and ground of being itself.

You can’t try to do the cut,
But you can intend to be that person
That the cut is expressed through.
Staying close to the point of emergence
Is your benchmark.
- Ji Aoi Isshi

The point of emergence -- one's body, one's mind -- nature itself.

Mu-ge heals well and returns to samurai-cat attacking anything that moves and the walls themselves in their stillness.

Sando looks more and more like an aging dog decided to become a dust mop.

Cesco is the busy boy, whose personal space radius expands with every foot nearing his black and white Border collie perimeter, barks and furrows forehead in complaint.

Across road neighbor worships at lawnmower.

The temple, monastery, zendo, church, mosque, and meeting hall are all in our presence.

This morning, may our presence be with us...and with all nearing their presence.

Fresh cut grass!

The scent of transformation!

Bursting. From encircled enclosure to expansive exclosure.

No longer separate. No longer equal. No mental distinction that juxtaposes “separate/equal.” Just, itself. Each and every thing, each and every being: itself.

Some dislike evolution. The difficulty with evolution is the extension of it. Where will it stop? Nowhere?

Nowhere! Everything that is will be itself turning and turning throughout unending length of beyond and completely beyond.

Do not try to seek the Truth
Just don’t cling to opinion
And you won’t linger in dualism.
Let go, leave things as they are
Obey the true nature of things
And you’re in harmony with the Way.
- T’sen T’sang

I write Jim after learning of his sister Paulette’s death, holding them in prayer.

Another Jim and I have coffee in hermitage kitchen this morning. We remember Karen who, before her death, traveled to Cape Breton’s Gampo Abbey several times to sit in retreat and listen to silence, the ocean, and Pema Chodron’s words. Cancer has a way of focusing. Death, a way of minuting joys.

September Twelfth, 2001

Two caught on film who hurtle
from the eighty-second floor,
choosing between a fireball
and to jump holding hands,

aren't us. I wake beside you,
stretch, scratch, taste the air,
the incredible joy of coffee
and the morning light.

Alive, we open eyelids
on our pitiful share of time,
we bubbles rising and bursting
in a boiling pot.
[Poem: "September Twelfth, 2001," by X.J. Kennedy, from The Lords of Misrule (Johns Hopkins University Press). (The Writer's Almanac)]

When I read Kennedy’s poem to Karl the other day he nodded. “For the past year every day has been September 12th for Cathy and me.” Their focus, like shaved head, grows out.

We support each other when we slowly forget the differences our minds create between us. We come to resemble what and whom we love.

Mary’s voice is heard. She visits chapel/zendo. Passes place her and Ben’s St Francis bird feeder stood for a year.

Rain rushes down, pushes September air through windows, darkening dooryard.

“Out from bread, on the one hand” -- (a very loose translation) – might be what “expansive” means, rendered from Latin (ex-pan-sive). Expansive Francis. Expansive community. Expansive death. Expansive seeing beyond what we couldn’t see beyond before.

As Catholic Christian liturgy celebrates, we are the elements of bread consecrated into the reality of Christ, extended each to all in ever widening expansive offering, in the name of love.

“…we bubbles rising and bursting…”

“…the true nature of things…”

One for the other.

One another.

No other.

How approach Being?

Morning cabin sunlight. Tibetan incense silently scents rough wood interior. Cesco stretches on floor. On cushion with lower back discomfort, stillness.

Sitting quietly alone
meditating is not hard.
What is hard is living
on a broad scale and
responding to the world at large.
- Wu Yubi (1391-1469)

Simeon knew.
Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother: "This child is destined to be the downfall and the rise of many in Israel, a sign that will be opposed -- and you yourself shall be pierced with a sword -- so that the thoughts of many hearts may be laid bare." (Luke 2: 33-35)

Our Lady of Sorrows today. Holy Cross yesterday. Christians practice to learn how these vignettes inform their perceptions of this day.

If an end time approaches, it has all the effort of Israel, Palestine, United States and Great Britain. Arab frowning watches fawning foreign corporations cut up for themselves what Middle East once considered theirs.

Sando slows in shaggy sweetness. Mu-ge survives urinary blockage. His food is changed. He's complaining.

I don't know what it is like to have men with automatic weapons patrolling streets outside dooryard and likely to fire at any threatening movement according to their scale measurement of what is dangerous.

I lament their fate in Iraq and Middle East. I lament the fate of combatants and noncombatants. I lament the fate of the world shuffling toward destruction with simple-minded notions of ownership and justice.

Mu-ge lies on table. He swats at pen and envelope Saskia's been keeping track of tasks for day. Pen goes down. Followed by envelope. He goes to Cesco's food bowl. A spray of additional envelopes gets thrown in that direction. Meows away.

Last night at Sunday Evening Practice reading "True Forgiveness" in Sun Magazine, article from Richard Smoley's Inner Christianity. His thought-provoking last lines:
Does God have an ego to be offended by our petty failings? Obviously not. Can we really say what is in the heart of others? We know we cannot. But Christians past and present persist in accusing others of heresy, blasphemy, and other such offenses in the pathetic belief that they are defending God. Of course, we can do not such thing. What we are defending here is the ego's last resort -- itself reified into an image of God. And this is the last and perhaps most difficult lesson to learn: the surrender of one's own cherished image of God, nurtured and fostered, perhaps, by years of religious education. This sacrifice is typified by the last words of Christ on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34) The ultimate sacrifice we have to make is that of my God.
(p.16, The Sun, September 2003)

It seems radical, confusing for us, that even Jesus had to relinquish the notion of "my" God.

God is God. God is not portioned or partialed. The Itself belongs to Itself. So too, each of us belongs to each of us.

It is not that we don't owe each other anything. More that no one owes "me" anything.
Owe and own are reckless partners.

There is only I-Thou. No "I" exists without "Thou." Only in the mind -- the mind deluded and separated from the play of reality itself -- is there an "I" separate from the "Thou."

Core reality is the play of I-Thou throughout each and every being -- tumbling into, out of, and through existence -- in this mysterious creation suffused with life.

If we see this, if we hear this, we have taken up the cross and sorrow of awareness. The experience startles. This cross and sorrow transmutes into infinite extension and joyful illumination.

Where does this extension lead? What does this illumination reveal?

The only thing death teaches anyone who dies is that there is no death.

Can this really be?

"War is necrophilia." That's what Chris Hedges said in his talk on War as Addiction.

Like all addictions, like all illusions, like all idols and false gods, war loves what is not there.

Morning cabin sunlight. Stillness. A silence stretching across borders. Sanctuary suffusing itself in and through whatever passes, whatever slows, and whatever stops.

Haiku Re-sounding Air
Morning prayer -- repair!
Let go of fear; Love what is
Here. Open with care.
(wfh)

"...so that the thoughts of many hearts may be laid bare."
"...responding to the world at large."

Really be.

Sluice runs between Bald and Ragged Mountains. Barnestown Road carries enclosed pods of passage up and down its length. Everyone going somewhere. I have nowhere.

Mountain air is different from the world of people,
Always with a feeling of ancient times:
Cloudy trees put on a hue for each of the four seasons,
But the voice of the valley spring has only one tune.
Rain makes the warbler’s robe heavy with dampness;
Warm breezes lighten the butterfly’s sleeve.
Though I’ve written poetry till I’m an old man,
I have yet to astonish the spirits and gods.
- Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672)

Mr. Bush claimed Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher. I hope other students of philosophers learn more from their teachers than he seems to have learned from his. Martin Heidegger said the role of the teacher is "lernen lassen," to let learning happen. What Mr. Bush seems to be teaching the world is not learning, but frightening vengeance. Mr. Bush, I begin to fear, is as ill suited a teacher as he was a student.

A contrast between one and the other:
1. Gospel Luke 6:27 - 38
Jesus said, “But I say to you that hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from him who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to every one who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again. And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.
“Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back”.

2. President Urging Wider U.S. Powers in Terrorism Law, By DAVID E. SANGER
QUANTICO, Va., Sept. 10 — President Bush called today for a significant expansion of law enforcement powers under the USA Patriot Act, using the eve of the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist acts to say that his administration was winning the war on terrorism but that "unreasonable obstacles" in the law impeded the pursuit of terror suspects.

With his speech here today at the F.B.I. training academy, where he spoke to a cheering crowd of federal investigators and troops from the nearby Marine training base, Mr. Bush plunged directly into the debate over whether the Patriot Act's provisions were too far reaching. He argued that they did not reach far enough and promised, "We will never forget the servants of evil who plotted the attacks, and we will never forget those who rejoiced at our grief."

Mr. Bush proposed letting federal law enforcement agencies issue "administrative subpoenas" in terrorism cases without obtaining approvals from judges or grand juries, expanding the federal death penalty statutes to cover more terrorism-related crimes and making it harder for people suspected in terrorism-related cases to be released on bail. (New York Times, Sept.11, 2003)

Perhaps poets make better sense of our experience than presidents.

To a Terrorist

For the historical ache, the ache passed down
which finds its circumstance and becomes
the present ache, I offer this poem

without hope, knowing there's nothing,
not even revenge, which alleviates
a life like yours. I offer it as one

might offer his father's ashes
to the wind, a gesture
when there's nothing else to do.

Still, I must say to you:
I hate your good reasons.
I hate the hatefulness that makes you fall

in love with death, your own included.
Perhaps you're hating me now,
I who own my own house

and live in a country so muscular,
so smug, it thinks its terror is meant
only to mean well, and to protect.

Christ turned his singular cheek,
one man's holiness another's absurdity.
Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,

the surge. I'm just speaking out loud
to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,
doomed to become mere words.

The first poet probably spoke to thunder
and, for a while, believed
thunder had an ear and a choice.

(Poem: "To a Terrorist," by Stephen Dunn, from Between Angels (Norton).)
[Note: this poem was written prior to 9/11/01)


Garrison Keillor's touch is light and true for our reflections two years later.
On this day in 2001, it was a clear, crisp, sunny morning in New York City. Students were in their second week of school. People were getting to work in cars, buses, and trains. Alessandra Fremura had planned on leaving for work at 8:00, but her babysitter was 20 minutes late. Virginia DiChiara couldn't get her golden retrievers to come in from the backyard, so she decided to have another cup of coffee. Kenneth Merlo was supposed to go in the office, but he decided to spend the morning helping a friend hook up her computer instead of going to his office. Michael Lomonaco stopped in the lobby of the World Trade Center to order some reading glasses from the one-hour eyeglass store. Michael Jacobs was running late when he reached the Trade Center lobby. He rushed to make the elevator, but the doors slid shut in his face. A musician named Michelle Wiley was at home in her apartment. She sat down at her piano in her nightgown and shower shoes, and stared out her window at the Twin Towers before beginning to play.

We might closer note our distractions and delays.

Today, Jesus, Stephen, Garrison, and Ishikawa are far more enlightening and inspiring than George, Dick, Donald, and Paul. It is good we have philosophers, poets, raconteurs, and mountain monks to ease us through the pathways and jagged sluices of our lives.

Wherever I am to be today, I have nowhere to go.

I take bread in silence this morning.

One bread. One body.

Sacrament of unity.

With all.

We are not thinking as God does.

No difference? No other?

Once you suddenly smash through,
and go on to make the leap beyond,
you will find that everything
around you and all that you do,
whether active or at rest,
is the scenery of the
fundamental ground,
the original Mind.
There will be not a hairsbreadth
of difference between you
and other things;
there will be no other thing.
- Daito (1282-1334)

A friend sent this haiku:

Morning Prayer: Thanksgiving
Eyes drink light-filled bay,
Lungs breathe, heart beats, feet tread dew'd field
Life, not death, is Now.
(DK)

"Peace always," she writes.

Even in the draft of a hard disintegration, in the falling of cherished hope. Even with the realization things are seldom as they seem to be, in the presence of the one we look for, look at, seeing them as they are. Even when we begin to open our mouth, when we're nearly certain the truth is about to be pronounced. Even when our mind attempts to rest awhile in that place which turns out to be no-place.

Jesus and his disciples set out for the villages of Caesarea Philippi.
Along the way he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" They
said in reply, "John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others one of the
prophets." And he asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter said
to him in reply, "You are the Christ." Then he warned them not to tell
anyone about him. He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer
greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and rise after three days. He spoke this openly. Then
Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. At this he turned around
and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me,
Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do." He
summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them, "Whoever wishes to
come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For
whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life
for my sake and that of the gospel will save it." (Mark 8:27-35)

He warned them not to tell anyone about him.

We are not thinking as God does.

Dissolve self. Appears God.

Love, not death.

Safe and sound.

Groundless and silent.

2nd Anniversary Haiku

I think about death --

Where does one go with this thought?

Monks chant; bright full moon!

(wfh)

Lost our way?

Last night at Sunday Evening Practice we read of Mary of Bethany and her perfume. "Let her have her way," was what Jesus supposedly said when the men groused about her display of love and respect.

When Jesus said elsewhere, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," he invited anyone interested in their way, the truth they seek, and the life they live to pass through the Christ that Jesus was passing through.

For the set and satisfied believers in Jesus it is sufficient to state that Jesus was the Christ, and that's the truth, you're not, and we'd better change our lives to follow Jesus. While there is merit to this formulation, it doesn't satisfy all of us.

"Let her have her way," might be a colloquial version of "G'wan, lighten' up." But something about the context and texture suggests he meant what he said, he was observing and approving her way as her way.

Today has been curiously quiet at the hermitage. Morning Eucharist at OLGH, the book order behind 'closed' sign, donuts and juice at Rockport Harbor, hurting back and nap, sitting in cabin, reading about Iraq and Bush, corn, quiche and cookies with well-water.

Calendar celebrates Nativity of Mary, Jesus’ mother, this 8th of September. Two women said rosary after service. Man watered flowers. Hiker Bill left quietly as I sat with silence a while.

It could be the 11th nears. A quiet drapes as it does when too much is heard. As if overhearing a conversation or solo lament unaware you are privy to secret utterance. The space around you becomes very still. You want to back away. Every breath is too loud. Surely you will be found out as having lost innocence.

Innocence is lost. Long lost. We have heard the braying and bantering. The behind the drapes conspiratorial plotting emerges to front step soapbox. Theses are nailed to doors of perception. Uncleansed, our sight sees only the finite details of doubtful doublespeak.

William Blake understands absence of innocence – and we live with the absence of infinity trying to see through snarling greasy panes of ass’s views about the world they desiccate and desecrate every day.

Weariness insinuates and mutes mind. It cries, ‘Away, away,’ turning this way and that to catch glimpse of finger pointing the way away. None. Just noiseless open eyes registering nothing while confronted with what is there?

War, this war, has darkened my perception. I am left prayer. So I pray: for the woman who directed adult education Midcoast; for the man who chaired St. Bonaventure University’s trustees; for thousands of Americans and thousand of Iraqis murdered, for those in Chile, Nicaragua, Palestine, Israel, Liberia, India, El Salvador, and all the myriad places chosen to be killing grounds for killers.

Thomas Keating writing in The Mystery of Christ speaks of all being, everything in the cosmos, now the residing place of Christ-Reality.

It’s not that everyone should embrace the Christian faith, not at all. It’s just that those who claim to do so should at least try to comprehend what being Christian means. Not the stupid finite fallacies of personal agenda and myopic greed -- but a cleansed view that sees through each action and thought into infinite presence suffused with what we long for most, ordinary love.

Don’t let those miserable know-it-alls divert you, Mary. Break that alabaster jar. Make a lovely stink.

Have your way.

Each our way.

Christ.