A woman or man of prayer cannot fathom the depth of the call.

The waters saw you, O God,
the waters saw you and writhed,
stirred up even to their depths.
The clouds poured down water,
the clouds sounded their voice,
your arrows shot forth.
Your voice thundered in the whirlwind,
your lightnings lit up the world,
the earth trembled and shook.

Your way led through the sea,
your paths through the great waters,
your steps left no trace behind them.
-- from Psalm 76 (77)

Following the call necessitates passing through a traceless way.

We cannot know the way calling us; to claim to is mere fancy.

We cannot know God. We can only know the pause -- the stutter when we hear the call.

Practice is the pause.

No trace.

We live with skunks. They've been spraying, probably each other. Tomorrow I'll begin a campaign to drive them away. It's only right.

Like the empty sky,
It has no boundaries,
Yet it is right in this place,
Ever profound and clear.
When you seek to know it,
You cannot see it.
You cannot take hold of it.
But you cannot lose it.
In not being able to get it,
You get it.
When you are silent, it speaks.
The great gate is wide open
To bestow alms,
And no crowd is blocking the way.
- Takuan

The trouble with skunks is their smell. It's hard to approach them without fear of being attacked. They engender fear.

Skunks are skunks.

Like war.

An intolerable stink.

Dorothy said, "There's no place like home."

Day and night the cold wind
Blows through my robe.
In the forest, only fallen leaves;
Wild chrysanthemums can no longer
Be seen. Next to my hermitage
There is an ancient bamboo grove;
Never changing, it awaits my return.
- Ryokan

Out in the cabin someone from away makes a private retreat. Smoke rises.

The Lord reveals his glory in the presence of chosen witnesses. His body is like that of the rest of mankind, but he makes it shine with such splendour that his face becomes like the sun in glory, and his garments as white as snow.
The great reason for this transfiguration was to remove the scandal of the cross from the hearts of his disciples, and to prevent the humiliation of his voluntary suffering from disturbing the faith of those who had witnessed the surpassing glory that lay concealed.
With no less forethought he was also providing a firm foundation for the hope of holy Church. The whole body of Christ was to understand the kind of transformation that it would receive as his gift. The members of that body were to look forward to a share in that glory which first blazed out in Christ their head.
(From a sermon by Saint Leo the Great, pope)

Each place serving as temporary residence is a place to pass through.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
(Poem by Derek Walcott )

Maybe there is no place like home.

Strangers passing through.

A temporary and concealed dwelling.

Changing form.

Mother? Father? Each being, as it is, is what is.

Thirty years ago my father died. Twenty four years ago so did my mother.

Zen enlightenment is as if you have been away from home for many years, when suddenly you see your father or mother in town. You know them right away, without a doubt. There is no need to ask whether they are your parents or not.
- Dogen

The deaths of my mother and father gave way to looking around at what now become my parents.

This is one of the gifts of zen, namely, all things are seen as mother and as father. In fact, it is the crux of contradiction in Christian/Zen investigation -- that each being, as it is, is what is.

Jesus said, ‘You have learnt how it was said: You must love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say this to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you; in this way you will be sons of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike. For if you love those who love you, what right have you to claim any credit? Even the tax collectors do as much, do they not? And if you save your greetings for your brothers, are you doing anything exceptional? Even the pagans do as much, do they not? You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.’
(Matthew 5:43 - 48)

"And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee. And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother?"
Mk.3:32-33

Passing through -- making one's way through -- is the perfection of our heavenly Father/Mother. We don't get to choose our mother or father. They appear each moment in each person. They are revealed now and now and now as each being appearing in our way.

We come to being through our parents. This is the first stage.
We must leave our mother and father as they must leave us. That is only the second stage. Finally, we are invited into a new way of being -- where each encounter is father, each engagement is mother. At this stage we are quickened and resounded.

The very activity of coming into being, passing through our lives with attentive compassionate awareness, and then emerging beyond any barrier or boundary to quiet realization of interdependent origination -- this is the life of prayer, perfection, and practice.

Perfection is not the done deal or final state. Perfection, rather than being understood as a state of completion rid of imperfections or flaws, is the literal process of "making one's way through." [Per=through; facere=to make] In street jargon the word 'perfection' could mean 'keep on keeping on,' or 'see you on the flip side,' or ' you can make it through this.' Jesus is encouraging us to remain open through each encounter -- to allow each engagement to fill us and sound through us -- to come to see what is really and actually passing through us here and now.

Prayer originates; perfection is the middle passageway that leads to the final and unending activity; practice!

Hence, it is: "Thanks mom...Thanks dad."

With gratitude it might dawn on me that love is practicing each of us as we are.

Passing through.

The real war is between cowardice and contrition.

It is time to abandon 'coward.' Will we fall into 'contrite?'

If you have developed great capacity and cutting insight, you can undertake Zen right where you are. Without getting it from another, you understand it on your own. The penetrating spiritual light and vast open tranquility have never been interrupted since beginningless time. The pure, uncontrived, ineffable, complete true mind does not act as a partner to objects of material sense, and is not a companion of myriad things. When the mind is always as clear and bright as ten suns shining together, detached from views and beyond feelings, cutting through the ephemeral illusions of birth and death, this is what is meant by the saying “Mind itself is Buddha.” You do not have to abandon worldly activities in order to attain effortless unconcern. You should know that worldly activities and effortless unconcern are not two different things, but if you keep thinking about rejection and grasping, you make them two.
- Hui Neng

Sometimes we call cowardice by nicknames that seem easier to respond to -- such as 'realism', or 'caution', or a current favorite, 'patriotism.'

John Dear is a Jesuit priest working for peace. Recently, in a talk, he said:
“I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves,” Jesus tells us. Imagine a pathetic, vulnerable, fragile little lamb surrounded by a group of starving wolves. What are they thinking? “Get the mint jelly, fellas, it’s lamb chops for dinner!” If we’re going to follow Jesus, we’re going to be devoured. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to cost us.

But for some reason, we think subconsciously that since we are Americans and Catholics, we can work for peace and justice, we can be active in the church, we can even try to end war and change the world and the church--without getting into trouble. We think that we can do these things without causing problems or upsetting people or getting kicked around like Jesus did, that we don’t need to take up the cross or suffer or risk our lives, that somehow or other, we won’t end up as he did, that we will make everything work out alright with no discomfort at all. And the moment we face opposition, we get upset, we complain, we give up and we walk away. We want everything to be easy.

I’m here to tell you that if we want to follow Jesus, if we want to become his authentic church, if we want to put the Gospel into practice, if we want to help end war and disarm nuclear weapons and serve starving humanity, if we really want to change the church, we have got to expect that we will get into trouble. We have to expect a difficult lifelong struggle because the status quo of injustice is not going to cave in easily. We have to risk the cross and resurrection, we have to enter the Paschal mystery, and it’s going to be messy and we’re not going to like it and everyone’s going to be upset with us and we will feel like failures.

And when this happens, I submit, then we’we're finally getting somewhere. Dorothy Day once said that we measure our discipleship to Jesus by how much trouble we are in. So my message is: Become holy troublemakers for peace and justice just like Jesus.
(from A Talk by John Dear at the Call to Action Conference, November 6, 2004. "Getting Into Trouble for Peace and Justice: The Next Step on the Path of Discipleship to the Nonviolent Jesus", Milwaukee, Wisconsin )

The word coward sounds close to 'cowed' -- that is, as a transitive verb, "to frighten with threats or a show of force." As an adjective it means, "frightened into submission or compliance." (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=cowed)

John Dear is worried about our nation. He is more worried about the heart and soul of each of us. In an article published the 15th of February, yesterday, he writes:
We have become a culture of Pharisees. Instead of practicing an authentic spirituality of compassion, nonviolence, love and peace, we as a collective people have become self-righteous, arrogant, powerful, murderous hypocrites who dominate and kill others in the name of God. The Pharisees supported the brutal Roman rulers and soldiers, and lived off the comforts of the empire by running an elaborate banking system which charged an exorbitant fee for ordinary people just to worship God in the Temple. Since they taught that God was present only in the Temple, they were able to control the entire population. If anyone opposed their power or violated their law, the Pharisees could kill them on the spot, even in the holy sanctuary.

Most North American Christians are now becoming more and more like these hypocritical Pharisees. We side with the rulers, the bankers, and the corporate millionaires and billionaires. We run the Pentagon, bless the bombing raids, support executions, make nuclear weapons and seek global domination for America as if that was what the nonviolent Jesus wants. And we dismiss anyone who disagrees with us.

We have become a mean, vicious people, what the bible calls “stiff-necked people.” And we do it all with the mistaken belief that we have the blessing of God.
(http://www.commondreams.org/)

There is a wonderful teaching and admonition I remember from one of our Tuesday Evening Conversations on Buddhist Study and Practice: Do not call the unlovely lovely -- do not call the lovely unlovely. It is a strong reminder that, whatever our unwillingness to face publicly our cowardice or contrition, at least we must not fail to see the unlovely as unlovely, and the lovely as lovely. In other words, do not lie to ourselves, do not actively cultivate delusion. To pretend not to see, or pretend that what we see is not actually what we are seeing -- is a grave injustice, to ourselves and to others.

John Dear takes us to the doorstep of his metaphor and belief when he says:
There are many problems in the church, and many problems in the world, but there are no problems with Jesus. He remains wonderful, gentle, loving, inviting, and disarming, and he is busy at work transforming our world. My hope and prayer is that we can learn his story more and more, listen to his words, do what he says, become his friends, and get into trouble like him, that we can be nonviolent like him, compassionate like him, and dangerous like him.

So I wrote a little litany for you:
In a world of hate and fear, be holy troublemakers of all-inclusive, universal love.
In a world of merciless cruelty, be holy troublemakers of compassion and mercy.
In a world of lies, be holy troublemakers of truth.
In a world of injustice, racism and sexism, be holy troublemakers of justice and equality.
In a world of death, be holy troublemakers of life.
In a world of despair, be holy troublemakers of hope.
In a world of war, be holy troublemakers for peace.
In a world of violence, be holy troublemakers of Gospel nonviolence in the name of the troublemaking, nonviolent Jesus. Thank you and God bless you.
(from ending of John Dear's talk in Wisconsin)

It is a splash of cold water to read these words that follow in the tradition of Daniel and Phil Berrigan, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, Eddie Doherty and Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Thich Nhat Hanh and Thomas Merton.

Has Jesus been captured by 'believers' and delivered, again, to an undisclosed detention camp as an enemy combatant and detained without representation or contact with the outside world?

Surely the super power of liberty and freedom would not attempt to hijack and breakdown by torture and humiliation the mind and heart of Jesus -- would they? Surely the institution claiming to administrate his will on earth would not alter the words and will Jesus left for us -- would they?

Those questions are too big for me. I have a more personal, and more profound, obligation. Mine is to incarnate what Jesus incarnated. It is a task Christians fear the most; it is the invitation Christians in name only (CINO: See no?) step back from and will readily deny as heresy and scandal, and that is -- to reveal and become what Jesus revealed and became.

O my God! I am heartily sorry. For having offended...everyone -- by not seeing them as they are; by not seeing you where you are.

Teach me to fight, with nonviolence, my cowardice.

I am here to be contrite, to be worn away.

To return to earth.

War is not the way.

Your way is!

Don't talk about love.


If you fail to achieve freedom in this life, when do you expect to achieve it? While still alive, you should be tireless in practicing contemplation. The practice consists of abandonments. “The abandonment of what?” you may ask. You should abandon all the workings of your relative consciousness, which you have been cherishing since eternity; retire within your inner being and see the reason of it. As your self-reflection grows deeper and deeper, the moment will surely come upon you when the spiritual flower will suddenly burst into bloom, illuminating the entire universe.
- Wu-hsin

Be what the word signifies.

Silently, the action, with smile.

We practice incarnation.

Sure, the Buddha dies. Who doesn't? Say what you want about what occurs afterwards, but let's acknowledge -- just as there is suffering, there is death.

The bodhisattva will not allow fear of death to interfere with ascending life.

This life, you must know as the tiny
splash of a raindrop,
A thing of beauty that disappears even
as it comes into being.

Therefore, set your goal.
Make use of every day and night
to achieve it.
-- Tsongkhapa

Saskia says she can read Thich Nhat Hanh's Living Buddha, Living Christ fifty, no, one hundred times. "It's my new bible," she glows. There's something in this Zen Master's being and writing that reveals his embodiment of bodhisattva compassion.

Nirvana Day, Buddha's death, occurred this week.
Mahayana Buddhists are one type of Buddhists. Many of them are Japanese. They celebrate February 13 as the anniversary of Buddha's death.
For Buddhists, this is not a sad day, but a time to remember that Buddha moved from one state of being to the next.
(http://www.kidsturncentral.com/holidays/glossary/defnirvan.htm)

From one form to the formless; from one aspect to transforming vista.

Although Tibetan Buddhism holds that all beings are capable of enlightenment, enlightenment is not the end of the path, for the ultimate goal is to lead all beings to that attainment. For this reason the potential buddha renounces enlightenment for himself and returns to the world to teach until beings are liberated. This is known as the 'bodhisattva ideal." A bodhisattva is a "wisdom being;" of the many bodhisattvas who figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Chenrezik, the Lord of Compassion, is the most revered.
(-- p.xiii from Introduction, in Tibetan Folk Tales, Fredrick and Audrey Hyde-Chambers)

The underlying core of all creation, material or spiritual, is the intention to make manifest what is most real -- the longing of light for love, and the longing of love for light.

At the north window, icy drafts
Whistle through the cracks,
At the south pond, wild geese
Huddle in snowy reeds;
Above, the mountain moon
Is pinched thin with cold,
Freezing clouds threaten
To plunge from the sky.
Buddhas might descend to this world
By the thousands,
They couldn’t add or subtract one thing.
- Hakuin

Is there only one thing? And is that one thing longing light for love, longing love for light?

The six syllables perfect the Six Paramitas of the Bodhisattvas.
Gen Rinpoche, in his commentary on the Meaning of the mantra said:
"The mantra Om Mani Pädme Hum is easy to say yet quite powerful,
because it contains the essence of the entire teaching. When you say
the first syllable Om it is blessed to help you achieve perfection in the
practice of generosity, Ma helps perfect the practice of pure ethics,
and Ni helps achieve perfection in the practice of tolerance and
patience. Päd, the fourth syllable, helps to achieve perfection of perseverance, Me helps achieve perfection in the practice of concentration, and the final sixth syllable Hum helps achieve perfection in the practice of wisdom.

So in this way recitation of the mantra helps achieve perfection in the six practices from generosity to wisdom. The path of these six perfections is the path walked by all the Buddhas of the three times. What could then be more meaningful than to say the mantra and accomplish the six perfections?"

The six syllables purify the six realms of existence in suffering.

For example, the syllable Om purifies the neurotic attachment to bliss and pride, which afflict the beings in the realm of the gods.

Syllable...........Purifies..............................Samsaric Realm
Om.......... -- bliss / pride..................................... -- gods
Ma.......... -- jealousy /lust for entertainment............. -- jealous gods
Ni.......... -- passion / desire................................... -- human
Pe.......... -- stupidity / prejudice............................. -- animal
Me.......... -- poverty / possessiveness......................... -- hungry ghost
Hung........ -- aggression / hatred............................... -- hell

"Behold! The jewel in the lotus!"
http://www.dharma-haven.org/tibetan/meaning-of-om-mani-padme-hung.htm

As our consciousness deepens into awareness and dissolves into pure awareness, we come to see (and be seen as) that which longs for the core of being to be revealed and manifest in (and as) this world. The Christ and the Bodhisattva, in their respective traditions, are narration and engagement with us in the passage through all the diversions, distractions, and dispersions associated with our human journey.

Buddha Amitabha then further instructed him "If you want to relieve the suffering of the six realms, you must propagate the Six-Syllable Mantra "OM MA NI PAD ME HUNG" which will stop the rebirth and sufferings of the beings of the six realms. Each of the syllables will eliminate the cause and condition to be reborn in one of the respective six realms. "OM" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the gods’ realm. "MA" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the demi-gods realm. "NI" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the human realm. "PAD" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the animal realm, "ME" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the hungry ghost realm. "HUNG" will eliminate the cause and condition to be borne in the hell realm. You must engage, keep, recite and absorb this. This will empty the six realms."
http://www.karma-kagyud.org.sg/Voices/voices-Avalo.htm

No birth, no death. "Life" perdures throughout -- a way of being that knows no beginning nor any end. This mysterious way of being -- this "life" -- is that which listens with our ears, looks with our eyes, smells with our nose, touches with our skin, and tastes with our tongue. Life hears, sees, scents, feels, and savours through us and all creation. If we attune to this mystery, this "life," we come to expression and incarnation as that one and same mystery.

"Buddha of great compassion, hold me fast in your compassion. From time without beginning, beings have wandered in samsara, Undergoing unendurable suffering. They have no other protector than you. Please bless them that they may achieve the omniscient state of buddhahood.

With the power of evil karma gathered from beginningless time, Sentient beings, through the force of anger, are born as hell beings and experience the suffering of heat and cold. May they all be born in your presence, perfect deity."
(--from "The Meditation and Recitation of Four-Armed Chenresig")

Recently a health inspector came into the bookshop/bakery. By visit's end she and three of us were in a conversation exploring anger, our own and in general. She was recommended Thich Nhat Hanh's book Anger, Wisdom for Cooling the Flames. As she left, her report indicated a minus one on our yearly evaluation, namely, we need to get a hanging thermometer for our cooler -- which registered 41.2 degrees on her digital device, and well within the regulations. The balance of it! Her visit was a worthwhile exchange of time and temperature.

As long as any living being
draws breath,
Wherever he shall be,
There, in compassion
Will the Buddha appear,
incarnate.
( -- Ngon tok gyen)

Today we practice this breath.

Throughout, and now, we incarnate life.

Life, our mutual longing for light with love.

May we behold this jewel in the lotus of practice with one another!

Crossed driveway; filled birdfeeders. Closed shop today. Deep snow. Recuperating.

I crossed seas and rivers,
Climbed mountains, and
Forded streams in order
To interview the masters,
To inquire after Truth,
To delve into the secrets of Zen;
And ever since I was enabled to
Recognize the path.
I knew that birth and death are not
The things I have to be concerned with.
For walking is Zen,
Sitting is Zen,
Whether talking or remaining silent,
Whether moving or standing quiet,
The Essence itself is ever at ease;
Even when greeted with swords and spears,
It never loses its quiet way,
And all that befalls cannot perturb
Its serenity.
- Yoko Daishi

It's not about birth or death.

Last night until this morning, the silence of no electrical power to hermitage. It felt like a hermitage. We sat zazen, then spoke of light and "Te igitur" -- "Therefore, you..." beginning the liturgical re-enactment of birth-death-grateful-communion in the Catholic Christian Missale Romanum (a donated book) opened on table to beginning of Canon of Mass.

It is a story of invitation and gathering. I don't think it is about punishment, suffering, and death. I think the story of Jesus is about invitation, gathering, and the mysterious center of our being that longs to manifest fully in this world, in this existence.

I'm not fond of the idea of heaven that is far away and detached from everyday experience. Heaven is within. And the Father is within. The Mother surrounds. We pass through and are blessed with their characteristics and geneology. A new DNA is being written. The script and grammar are borrowed from a Language of Being only barely begun to be heard in our consciousness.

We are meant to become what Father and Mother are -- enlightened and engaged -- in this very world. We forget our family and relatives sometimes -- especially the illimitable expanding endless reach of who all are part of our family. We forget who you are.

There's a need to recuperate from forgetfulness.

There's a need to remember Father and Mother.

Christ, the narration of our story, passes through with us.

Through darkness to light; through anger to compassion; through despondence to active engagement.

Climb mountains, ford streams, rest in bed -- pass through each and every reality with quiet confidence. You are on your way. I am on my way. Each way is surrounded by guiding companions.

Therefore...

You! You! And you...!

A good day to rest. Shop closed today.

Midwinter, the eleventh month.
Wet snow falls unceasingly,
All the mountains have become the same color;
On the myriad paths, human tracks are few.
My past journeys now all seem like dreams,
The door to my grass hut is deeply covered.
All night long I burn small chunks of wood
And silently read poems by masters of the past.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

The Laura Conversation Wednesday Evening was on Savitri, A Poem by Sri Aurobindo.

Will led conversation pointing out that a great deal of light is placed on more and more events in the world. Light is core of everything. That light is rooted at center of each and every thing -- rock, plant, animal, human. And nation? Of course. Light longs to shine through. God, seen as metaphor of light, longs to be seen through. Who are we? We are to be the seers. With, through, and in the human person, light longs to dwell in this world.

To see this longing through -- reveals the core of being.

By seeing, light is released.

That notion appeals.

Whether rumors of expanding war or data about the expanding universe, from alliances between competing corporations to upcoming marriage between royalty and consort -- it is part of our evolutionary consciousness that so much is revealed which once remained long concealed. It takes seconds -- what once took days, months, or years -- to come to light.

A flood of data arrives, at times, with worrisome consequence. The light of awareness reveals trouble as well as hope. What follows any revelation is story. We make up stories to establish a perspective on data and lack of data. Stories attempt to explain, deflect, or try to settle the new knowledge into an understandable pattern. From this pattern we formulate response.

North Korea unveils nuclear information. Iran warily watches new U.S. Secretary of State build up rhetoric presaging new incursion into Iran. The Pope goes home to recuperate. In Maine it snows.

Awareness is one necessity we do not dare ignore.

New form and new understanding must follow.

Or disintegrate.

Altogether.

Choose light!

Part of the illness I experience has to do with my failure to comprehend and dwell with "these countless persons of one self" -- the many faces I fail to see as my own.

Will, a man who attends Wednesday's Laura Conversations, sends quote from Savitri, A Poem by Sri Aurobindo.

First, a word from Sri Aurobindo about the poem:
The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.
Sri Aurobindo

Here is the excerpt received today:

All she can do is marvellous in his sight:
He revels in her, a swimmer in her sea,
A tireless amateur of her world-delight,
He rejoices in her every thought and act
And gives consent to all that she can wish;
Whatever she desires he wills to be:
The Spirit, the innumerable One,
He has left behind his lone eternity,
He is an endless birth in endless Time,
Her finite's multitude in an infinite Space.

The master of existence lurks in us
And plays at hide-and-seek with his own Force;
In Nature's instrument loiters secret God.
The Immanent lives in man as in his house;
He has made the universe his pastime's field,
A vast gymnasium of his works of might.
All-knowing he accepts our darkened state,
Divine, wears shapes of animal or man;
Eternal, he assents to Fate and Time,
Immortal, dallies with mortality.
The All-Conscious ventured into Ignorance,
The All-Blissful bore to be insensible.
Incarnate in a world of strife and pain,
He puts on joy and sorrow like a robe
And drinks experience like a strengthening wine.
He whose transcendence rules the pregnant Vasts,
Prescient now dwells in our subliminal depths,
A luminous individual Power, alone.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has called out of the Silence his mute Force
Where she lay in the featureless and formless hush
Guarding from Time by her immobile sleep
The ineffable puissance of his solitude.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
Has entered with his silence into space:
He has fashioned these countless persons of one self;
He has built a million figures of his power;
He lives in all, who lived in his Vast alone;
Space is himself and Time is only he.
The Absolute, the Perfect, the Immune,
One who is in us as our secret self,
Our mask of imperfection has assumed,
He has made this tenement of flesh his own,
His image in the human measure cast
That to his divine measure we might rise;
Then in a figure of divinity
The Maker shall recast us and impose
A plan of godhead on the mortal's mould
Lifting our finite minds to his infinite,
Touching the moment with eternity.
This transfiguration is earth's due to heaven:
A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
His human portion, we must grow divine.
Our life is a paradox with God for key.
-Sri Aurobindo, in Savitri -- A Legend and a Symbol,Book I Canto 4 Pages 66-67

We are sons and daughters of God. We must grow through this paradox and revelation.

I must meet my family -- my whole family -- with deeper appreciation, acceptance, and engaged interaction.

For us to transfigure into dwelling places of peace, a combination of submission, suffering, and profound inquiry is required.

To see though masks of imperfection.

Homeopathic practitioners say that "like cures like."

This is the balm, the need of one another.

What do we each see?

I feel sick. It's not virus. It is the secret nation.

It is a recurring feeling. I felt it during El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala. And yet, there are moments when something else arises. Like the feeling during profound illness that the nausea cannot last forever, I like the fact that George Bush and this administration -- recurring reminders of hidden governance and secret agendas -- that they, too, will go away.

There is a Pali chant which I like very much. I don't know if I have the tune quite right but it goes something like "All things are impermanent, they arise and they pass away. To live in harmony with this truth brings great happiness." How do we learn to live in harmony with this truth of impermanence? When we first meet it we think of it only as: "our life will end." But impermanence is in each moment. Each instant. All things are impermanent - all the time. Everything arises and passes away. And in the practice of zazen we see this.
(from "Dogen Zenji's Zazen," a talk by Abbess Zenkei Blanche Hartman, Oct. 1999)

We sat Sunday Evening. At table we read from Cheri Huber. She wrote, Life will not prove to you that you are inadequate. The only evidence of your inadequacy comes from those voices, that conditioning.
(in Trying To Be Human, Zen talks, c.1995).
The voices she refers to are the inner voices of resistance. These are the voices we hear in our head every day, those saying, 'You can't do it,' and 'You're not good enough.'

I hear these voices whenever I hear the gloating voices of the President and other Republican examples of -- (what has become for me) -- smirking arrogance. It is hard to love these people. It's hard to respect someone you feel is smacking you around. It's one thing to stand in church and pray for victims of tsunami devastation, or sit on zafu holding difficult people in lovingkindness metta inclusion. It is quite another thing to discern harm being done or discriminate whether someone is actively intending to commit crimes in your name. Further, the difficulty of what then to do.

Suffering love is not an easy prescription to fill.

"To enter deeply into meditation is to enter into the mystery of suffering love. It is to encounter the woundedness of our human nature. We are all deeply wounded from our infancy and bear these wounds in the unconscious. The repetition of the mantra is a way of opening these depths of the unconsciousness and exposing them to light. It is first of all to accept our woundedness and thus to realize that this is part of the wound of humanity. All the weaknesses we find in ourselves and all the things that upset us, we tend to try to push aside and get rid of. But we cannot do this. We have to accept that "this is me" and allow grace to come and heal it all. That is the great secret of suffering, not to push it back but to open the depths of the unconscious and to realize that we are not isolated individuals when we meditate, but are entering into the whole inheritance of the human family." (Bede Griffiths, p50).

The annoying invitation that Buddhist nirvanic awareness and Christian incarnational resurrection issues is that I consider -- not running away -- but being present to, consciously entering, and willingly transfiguring the reality Mr. Bush fashions and hurls at me and the world.

It is not enough for me to take the advice of a Republican friend -- that spirituality demands not paying attention to this world. (He, of course, regularly contributes money to Bush campaign and Republican causes). He writes:
How can you dare to blend politics and war with the right of passage of a soul, any soul that takes on for itself the task of completing its mission on this earth. That path compels noninvolvement with the various crisis's going around as they always will to confuse and dilute the strength necessary to complete the task. Be above the fray. All problems are designed to confuse and deter. (email, 5Feb05)

His words do not make me pause. Bede Griffiths' do.

"The resurrection does not consist merely of the appearances of Jesus to his disciples after his death. Many think that these appearances in Galilee and Jerusalem are the resurrection. But they are simply to confirm the faith of the disciples. The real resurrection is the passing beyond the world altogether. It is Jesus' passage from this world to the Father. It was not an event in space and time, but the passage beyond space and time to the eternal, to reality. Jesus passed into reality. That is our starting point.
It is into that world that we are invited to enter by meditation. We do not have to wait for physical death, but we can enter now into that eternal world. We have to go beyond the outer appearances of the senses and beyond the concepts of the mind, and open ourselves to the reality of Christ within, the Christ of the resurrection."
(p.77, Bede Griffiths OSB, The New Creation In Christ: Christian Meditation And Community (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1994))

It is a bit confusing to consider that the eternal, that reality itself, is the dwelling place of the Christ. Not the easy Jesus of facile cultural one-upmanship, but the essential ground of existence as experienced by mystics of every tradition by whatever name they wish to call it.

The world of Bush and company must become suffused by the ground of being. Let them call out 'Jesus, Jesus,' 'Lord, Lord' -- as they slap aside the poor, create more suffering, and play king-of-the-hill. For the rest of us, there must be a quieter and more involved way to dwell as companion and family to those most distressed and discarded by powerful and wealthy forces.

I'll have to spend more time in meditation.

The sickness I feel at this time of conquest and disregard for law and common decency must find healing balm in quiet understanding of what is eternal and what is real.

No one owns truth. No one owns the world. Nor can truth remain hidden and privatized for long. Anyone pretending to own and control these things is performing a solipsistic pantomime in a dark corner of their mind they believe no one can see. It is not a world that can be claimed and owned by a permanent landed ownership class.

We are visitors here. The unhidden is a public park. We must dance together in the open.

Everything arises, and passes away.

And then arises in new light.

Can we see this?

A starting point.

To your health!

"Faith," says a man lecturing at University Synagogue in Irvine California, "is a conversation stopper."

Invoke "Faith" and no criticism is brooked.

It is worth a moment of pondering.

If there is a God, however "God" is conceived or conceptualized, there's no need for Faith. If God is here, there, and everywhere -- then something more obvious is called for than belief without evidence.

The reason those who search
For the Way are unaware
Of its reality is simply
Because from the first
They accept all their
Discriminations for true.
Those have been the very source
For birth and death.
How clear, in a dream,
The Three Worlds are.
When you wake,
All is empty,
All the myriad worlds are Mu!
Where does this seeing take place?
The entire earth is the eyeball of a
Buddhist monk --
Take one more step!
- Hakuin (1685-1769)

Let's take a step back. There's no reason to gasp with horror that cherished beliefs and institutions are crumbling or are about to disappear into irrelevance. It is more the option to grasp what it is that religious revelation has attempted to make manifest in this sensible world.

What is attempting to manifest in this world and on this earth?

We must walk, carefully and caringly, the ground of our being. The Golden Rule -- treat others as we wish to be treated; don't do to others what you don't want done to you -- constitutes the ground we all walk.

Compassion and love survey that ground with an attentive presence all their own -- they are the present moment unveiled with joy and inclusive appreciation.

Charles Murray, conversing on C-Span, suggests we might wish "To be a valued place" -- i.e., a person or place that would be missed if absent or gone. A Buddhist response to that fine suggestion might be that a valued place has no absence, is ever-present, and cannot be missed.

We long for wholeness of presence, wholeness of being, and wholeness of seeing.

Mind's destiny is the madhouse, because a part
trying to pretend to be the whole is already mad, insane.
(p.28, The Grass Grows By Itself, Osho)

We must learn to dance with one another, to turn with one another -- to fall into conversation without fear.

We have two options -- conversation and war; and "Faith" is a conversation stopper.
(Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)

Why are we at war?

"MU!"

We must unask the question that has as its aim to convince or explain. Our need right now is to investigate. We need to investigate, profoundly and without fear, what is right before our eyes, right under our feet.

In effect, we must begin to practice in, with, and through one another. Practice what?

Practice the sacred ordinary.

For now, Meetingbrook sees contemplation, conversation, and correspondence as sacred ordinary practice.

For now.

No more!

At what point does discussion cease to add, but only fall to subtraction?

The pointless mind of distraction.

In the autumn of my sixty-sixth year,
I’ve already lived a long time.
The intense moonlight
Is bright upon my fact.
There’s no need to discuss
The principles of koan study;
Just listen carefully to the wind
Outside the pines and cedars.
- Ryonen Genso (1646-1711)

Nothing else to say. We simply look.

In silence.

Is there more?

No.

The party's over.

Swearing-in fallen silent, dancing done, State of Union thrown into filing cabinet of speeches delivered -- America's world goes on with myth-making, resource-taking, and altruism-faking.

It is a question, they say, of trying to make the world safe for freedom and democracy.

America has appropriated a particular interpretation of Christianity and claimed all of Christ. We are also appropriating a Buddhist koan that asks to show the Buddha.

If you understand the answer clearly,
There was no Buddha before you
And there is no Buddha to come.
- Mumon

America the new Buddha? This Buddha is not Buddhist. This Buddha is not even a Buddha. But, that doesn't matter. In their own eyes, America is never wrong, has no doubts, and is doing the bidding of all gods, devas, angels, talk-show hosts, and born-again reconstituted messiahs -- and therefore is the Buddha, the Christ, and Apocolyptic Avenging Angel rolled into one governing group of ideologically intoxicated good old boys (and one girl).

Joan Chittister writes from Ireland about an incident and a mindset:
Dublin, on U.S. Inauguration Day, didn't seem to notice. Oh, they played a few clips that night of the American president saying, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

But that was not their lead story.

The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.

A series of pictures of the incident played on the inside page, as well. A 12-year-old brother, wounded in the fray, falls face down out of the car when the car door opens, the pictures show. In another, a soldier decked out in battle gear, holds a large automatic weapon on the four children, all potential enemies, all possible suicide bombers, apparently, as they cling traumatized to one another in the back seat and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her parent's blood.

No promise of "freedom" rings in the cutline on this picture. No joy of liberty underlies the terror on these faces here.
(Published on Friday, January 28, 2005 by the National Catholic Reporter, "What the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Day" by Joan Chittister) (http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0128-35.htm)

"It is a little frightening," someone said yesterday passing through the shop, "that what these people in charge are doing is being done in the names of each and every one of us." At conversation yesterday evening we read "The Politics of Victimization," by Mel Gilles. Anyone who has known abuse or bullies will shiver in recognition at her words. (http://www.awakenedwoman.com/gilles_abuse.htm)

In the Laura Soul Friend Circle last evening there was considerable passion and wisdom about abuse, bullies, and spiritual caution.

"God made the angels to show Him splendor -- as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind! If He suffers us to fall to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can, and yes, then we may clamor like champions...if we have the spittle for it. And no doubt it delights God to see splendor where He only looked for complexity. But it's God's part, not our own, to bring ourselves to that extremity! Our natural business lies in escaping..."
(Sir Thomas More, in A Man for All Seasons, play by Robert Bolt)

Escaping is a tricky tactic.

Joseph Campbell writes in his classic work about the Monomyth:
The hero is the man [or woman] of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be revolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death -- the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be -- if we are to experience long survival -- a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia)to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence is a snare. When our day is come for our victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified -- and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn.
(pp.16-17, in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell)

And then:
Professor Toynbee uses the terms "detachment" and "transfiguration" to describe the crisis by which the higher spiritual dimension is attained that makes possible the resumption of the work of creation.
(Campbell, p.17)

Many do not know what to think about America's war and strategy in Iraq and the threat of expansion into other countries. Disintegration and schism worm through the soul, through body politic and body social -- causing a civilization close at home and in the desert to shiver.

I think it is time to escape into the present reality.

We are to be born from the middle, the center of submission and recurrence.

No Christian, Buddhist, Neocon, or anyone else can appropriate to themselves that which belongs to each and every person, each and every name.

What is it that belongs?

Being born -- once and again. Again -- once and for all.

Renounce bullies. Escape abusers. Hide in the center of truth and awareness.

Dissolve abusive dreams and let bullying behavior disintegrate into its own demise.

We must be about life. About love and compassion. We must be about the work of creation.

Don't be fooled.

Resurrect...

Rebirth...

Oneself.

Beginning, now.

Only to learn.

Searching for words,
Hunting for phrases,
When will it end?
Esteeming knowledge
And gathering information
Only maddens the spirit.
Just entrust yourself
To your own nature,
Empty and illuminating
Beyond this,
I have nothing to teach.
- Bankei Yotaku (1622-1693)

Beyond this and that -- is mother.

Tibetans believe that we have all lived so many lives that every single person we pass in the street was in some former life either our parent or child. "Seeing all beings as our mother" is recommended in traditional Asian Buddhist cultures. We come into existence in each moment totally mutually dependent, with all phenomena. Thus all beings are like our mothers, helping give us birth, and are worthy of our love.
(pp.215-216,"Kshitigarbha (Jizo), Monk as Earth Mother," in Bodhisattva Archetypes, Classic Buddhist Guides to Awakening and their Modern Expression)

Beyond mother and father, male and female, you and me -- is wordless entrusting nature.

Original monastic practice.

Looking under our feet.

Seeing one's life!

Ramesh Balsekar has written: A painting can never know why its painter created it.

Maybe we don't understand what we call 'free will.'

If one understands Amida Buddha,
His paradise is not far;
But if one has doubt, it is indeed distant.
The compassionate Buddha
Will not come from the West,
The dying soul will not be
Taken to the western paradise.
It is like the moon shining upon the waters;
It does not sink to the lakes and ponds,
Nor do they rise to the heavens.
Pure water reveals the moon,
A pure mind manifests the Buddha.
If the mind understands and gives praise,
It reaches satori.
- Ungo Kiyo (1582-1659)

'Free will' might just be the realization there is no separate will, there is only God's will and our attempts to divert from that. Once we abandon our conditioning and ego, we are free to be what the undifferentiated creating painter is painting.

There is no faith in God without total acceptance of "what is" in the present moment -- including all the ugliness.
(-- Ramesh S. Balsekar, in The One in the Mirror, See What You Truly Are!)

Sitting in 'winter zendo' front room of hermitage house, dawn light gives outline to outdoor tree and indoor tree. Cat stretches as I bow. Hit, hit, hit of wooden box in rhythm with Prajna Paramita. Of course there is no need to practice -- no need for prayer, nor to turn off whistling tea kettle on stove.

Still, all three happen and are done.

Sunlight climbs down Bald Mountain.

I sew cat's ripped toy.

Barge breaks ice in west channel of Camden harbor. What minutes ago was solid across is broken apart into floes in time for descending outgoing tide.

Notch the arrow of emptiness
To shoot the hawk of ultimate meaning;
If you’re not right on target,
You will be deceived by this barbarian monk.
- Fugai Ekun (1568-1654)

I worry the arrow set loose from America's hand and sent wobbling dangerously into a foreign heart will not rest unreturned.

Cupid's arrow says love. I don't know what this invasive arrow stands for.

...and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God.
(1 Corinthians 1: 28)

There is an edge to our reasoning. What is over that edge? Is there an unforgiving solidity that aggression smashes against? Will an arrow poisoned by ignorance send an unyielding venom through the barrier we imagine separates "us" and "them?"

Albert Einstein proffered the theory that the edge of the universe is constantly expanding. Being completely nothingness, a perfect vacuum, the universe is expanding into what Einstein imagined to be "less than nothing." He posited that if a rocket ship were to approach the edge of the universe, exceeding the speed of expansion, it would disintegrate, because apparently even "nothingness" has an edge, a solidity to it. Letting go of the contents of mind, of desire, leaves nothing to obstruct the entrance into "less than nothing." The actual experience of "less than nothing" cannot be accurately imagined because even that moment of imagination is "just another something" in the mind.
(p.52, in Who Dies, An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, by Stephen Levine, c.1982)

The ice flows out. Solidity breaks apart. One country elects to smash through and waits to see what follows.

The bow is slack. A confident, uncomprehending, man grins after the something he has loosed.

Einstein, in another dimension, looks blankly at the man.

The man has something in his mind.

Just another something.

We are befuddled.

Where will it land?

At prison today eight of us read from Bo Lozoff's It's a Meaningful Life, It Just Takes Practice.

One of the guys says that each aspect -- the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual -- is receptor and originator of the world we pass through.

Nancy says there's a dynamic tension to be practiced. We have to sit with the contradictions pressing in and out. At times, just that -- to sit with.

The fuel in the tea brazier is burnt out,
So I collect pine needles,
The fields of medicinal plants are empty,
So I cut vegetable roots.
Naturally dull, I've forgotten Zen activities,
My gate is darkened at noon by
The shade of ancient trees.
White clouds impart a sense of peace
To my Zen meditation,
Green grasses suffice to make a rug for my guests.
What I have collected is a hundred years
Of emptiness.
- Isshi Bunshu (1608-1646)

Murder. That's what it's called. Prison. That's where murderers go when caught and convicted. Conversation. That's what takes place afterward between those of us who have and have not murdered.

It's a crap-shoot. So we shoot the breeze. We drift along one another's breath. We keep ourselves in one another's sight.

The 1st Noble Truth in Buddhism reminds us.
1. Life means suffering.

To live means to suffer, because the human nature is not perfect and neither is the world we live in. During our lifetime, we inevitably have to endure physical suffering such as pain, sickness, injury, tiredness, old age, and eventually death; and we have to endure psychological suffering like sadness, fear, frustration, disappointment, and depression. Although there are different degrees of suffering and there are also positive experiences in life that we perceive as the opposite of suffering, such as ease, comfort and happiness, life in its totality is imperfect and incomplete, because our world is subject to impermanence. This means we are never able to keep permanently what we strive for, and just as happy moments pass by, we ourselves and our loved ones will pass away one day, too.
(http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/fourtruths.html)

We collect a hundred years. Of emptiness.

Awareness of emptiness. Looking to see.

Turning with one another.

Listening. Even, hearing.

It takes practice.

A suicide changes his mind. He decides to stay alive. Eleven die in his place.

The president tells people to vote in Iraq. Many die. He lives. Some wonder what he is doing in Iraq, Iran, the Middle East.

Vibrating within
The ear are many voices
But their origin
Has a source which may be called
The sound of no sound.
- Takuan (1573-1645)

It is bewildering to hear and see the antipathy against America. How a few people could turn a country around so quickly is astounding.

"Prayers don't change the world, but prayers change the people, and people change the world." (Albert Schweizer)

Iraq and America exchange glances.

Is anyone listening?

Will awareness transcend and include forgiveness?

So -- in thinking about someone's "wrongdoing," are we being in a judgmental mood, blindly, stubbornly identified with a position from which we condemn or accept? Or are we in an open, impartial space of wondering and examining what is going on in ourselves, and why anyone would be doing what they are doing?
Suspending the judgment of someone else's violent action, we may discover, maybe to our surprise, a movement of animosity and violence in ourselves. Can we examine it thoroughly, not looking away, not needing to condemn? Don't actions of violence and animosity speak clearly for themselves, revealing their driving ignorance, their divisiveness and destructiveness -- their lack of love? In our relationships with each other, do we need judgment and condemnation, or rather understanding and compassion?
This is the miracle of awareness: it gives birth to intelligent and compassionate action. Awareness does not judge, condemn, or accept, because it has no me-ness to be defended or nurtured. In the wonder of clear-seeing, me-ness is in abeyance, leaving infinite room for love.
(pp.101-2, in The Wonder of Presence And The Way Of Meditative Inquiry, by Toni Packer, c.2002)

Is awareness love?

Blizzard white along Maine coast. And at the mountain, snow on snow.

Human nature is developed by profound
Serenity and lightness,
Virtue is developed by harmonious
Joy and open selflessness.
When externals do not confuse
You inwardly,
Your nature finds the condition
That suits it;
When your nature does not disturb
Harmony, virtue rests in its place.
- Huai-nan-tzu

Bird feeders full. We shovel, sit on open porch facing brook, and will light fire in cabin. Shop closed. Joanie celebrates 75th birthday.

Hearing that John had been arrested, Jesus went back to Galilee, and leaving Nazareth he went and settled in Capernaum, a lakeside town on the borders of Zebulun and Naphtali. Matthew 4:12 - 23

Imagine the disappointment when you are no longer allowed to speak or hear truth.

Those who favor the opposite of truth are forever trying to make truth something else.

Where we come down is that everything is itself.

Truth is sacred. 'Itself' is what we call one's everyday revelation. God is this moment revealing Itself.

Meetingbrook sees contemplation, conversation, and correspondence as the sacred ordinary.

Begin again? [The bookshop/bakery is closed today.]
.....................

Things are seldom how we think they are.

At Wednesday Evening Laura Soul Friend Conversation we read Rumi's "Moses and the Shepherd," and a piece from Julia Cameron about getting the God we understand.

In the course of the conversation Will M. said: "It is time to frame the future, not tear down the present."

My doctrine is to think the thought that is unthinkable, to practice the deed that is non-doing, to speak the speech that is inexpressible, and to be trained in the discipline that is beyond discipline. Those who understand this are near; those who are confused are far. The Way is beyond words and expressions, is bound by nothing earthly. Lose sight of it to an inch, or miss it for a moment and we are far away from it.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

In the poem/story Moses hears the shepherd praying and becomes upset with the prayer's earthy, simple, and folksy language.
Moses could stand it no longer.
"Who are you talking to?"

"The one who made us,
and made the earth and the sky."

"Don't talk about shoes
and socks with God! And what's this with your little
hands
and feet" Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like
you're chatting with your uncles.
Only something that grows
needs milk. Only someone with feet needs shoes. Not
God!

The shepherd goes off chastened and confused. Then Moses is forced to reconsider:
A sudden revelation
came then to Moses. God's voice:

You have separated
me from one of my own. Did you come as a Prophet to
unite,
or to sever?

I have given each being a separate and unique way
of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
What seems wrong for you is right for him.
What is poisonous to one is honey to someone else.

Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to me.

I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.

Isn't this a new frame for us to look into? Isn't it time to stop tearing down the efforts of others to open to God, and frame a future where God, the Open Itself, is allowed to be what God is, and not what we think God should be?

Moses finally caught up
with him.

"I was wrong. God has revealed to me
that there are no rules for worship.
Say whatever
and however your loving tells you to. Your sweet
blasphemy
is the truest devotion. Through you a whole world
is freed.

Loosen your tongue and don't worry what comes out,
It's all the light of the spirit."

The shepherd replied,

"Moses, Moses,
I've gone beyond even that.
You applied the whip and my horse shied and jumped
on itself. The divine nature of my human nature
came together.

Bless your scolding hand and your arm.
I can't say what has happened.

What I'm saying now
is not my real condition. It can't be said."

The shepherd grew quiet.

When you look in a mirror,
you see yourself, not the state of the mirror.
The flute player puts breath into the flute,
and who makes the music? Not the flute,
The flute player!

Whenever you speak praise
or thanksgiving to God, it's always like
this dear shepherd's simplicity.

When you eventually see
through the veils to how things really are,
you will keep saying again
and again,

"This is certainly not like
we thought it was!"

Today is a day of new beginnings. Every day, of course, is. But today we begin again to frame the future. Tearing down the present -- whether we are tearing down persons, religious or ethnic groups, regimes or nations, beliefs or ideas -- is cad's play. We must mature. We begin again today to explore and recreate a timeframe wherein many can live through their stories into the heartfelt reality of a place they can call home.

Those who understand this are near.

We open to them.

And we pray for them -- just as we pray for those who are far -- there are many of them.

Actually, we must near a difficult but liberating truth: There is no us and them. We are them. When we decide to deny them, to punish them, to exclude them, to make them suffer -- someone has to wake and remind those of us suffering a world tearing apart -- we are them.

Not one single penny should be paid into the delusion that we are not them

Rather, the entire glorious wealth of the world for one shining, seeing, soul the profound reality seeking the revelation of the Open Itself into the frame of our present dwelling.

We frame the future with loving hands.

It is simplicity --

Through you a whole world is freed.

Will God find us?

It is the feast of Antony, Abbot, founder of monasticism.

Something has existed
Before heaven and earth;
Shapeless and silent
In its origin,
Yet the master of
Every image and form,
It can never wither
With the passing of time.
-- Bankei (1622-1693)

As the country moves to permanent war footing with the world, is it time to personally retreat to peace dwelling with God?

Should we worry? A radio program from American Radio Works, the documentary arm of American Public Media is titled "No Place to Hide." It is about surveillance and loss of privacy. Information technologies monitor everyone. We are an American Surveillance Society. Both business interests and national security interests operate together to sell and secure the American soul. It is worth pondering whether we should worry.

It is enough to make those not wanting public scrutiny a bit squeamish. On the other hand, if there is an alternative, an address for safe dwelling, it might be called "transparency." We might wish to search it out and call it home. The fact is we are being watched both by merchant/governmental agencies and, for many, a more troubling entity. That entity is what many call God.

We suspect we should worry about civil and governmental surveillance. On the other hand, we don't think much about what used to be called an all-seeing God. When we do, it has the remnant petulance of a mind that worries peccadillo and indiscretion will be revealed and embarrass. (They are. And they do.) For politicians it is the stuff of blackmail and disgrace. For the rest of us it is evidence we are exactly what we are. And what are we? Watched!

Blessed be the Lord,
for he has shown me his wonderful kindness
within the fortified city.
In my terror, I said
"I am cut off from your sight";
but you heard the voice of my prayer
when I called to you.
(from Psalm 31)

Government, especially now the American government, watches us in the name of freedom and national security. The effect is we are co-opted. In a different, more metaphysical realm of consideration, the One-We-Call-God watches us in the name of a deeper, more real, and honest freedom. The effect of the OWCG watching is invitation. This invitation is not a co-option; it is a more subtle and discerning asking into co-operation. It leads to release from false freedom and illusory security. It moves toward an ultimate freedom. Ultimate freedom, it needs be said, often seems a vague and unrecognizable goal. So does God.

Frank Bianco asked Mac, a Trappist monk, about his life.
Monks want to give God more room in their lives, he said. The key, he continued, is self-sacrifice. It sets the stage for contemplation, which is nothing more than prayerful awareness of God's presence. A monk works at stripping himself of all that is passing, the obvious, things that satisfy the senses. The smallest sacrifice builds willpower. "Like they say, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. You need discipline. You need to learn to say no."
(p.12, Voices of Silence, Lives of the Trappists Today, by Frank Bianco, c.1991)

The 'no' we say need not be harsh and angry -- although often it is. The no can be quiet. This quiet no to false security, and the accompanying erroneous belief in 'more and more,' is a solemn acknowledgement of a deeper promise residing at the heart of our existence. That promise is morphic 'yes.' It is a yes that gives form to the new creation searching to be revealed in a tired, troubled, and turbulent world. It longs to be revealed with, in, and through us -- each of us.

"Merton once wrote," Mac said, " 'A monk is somebody who seeks God because he has been found by God.' You know when you've been found. Something tells you this is where you belong. That's what we mean when we say you're called to this life. God finds you."
(p.13, Bianco)

It is coming time to disappear.

Wordsworth named it "18."
18.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The Winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not -- Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
-- poem by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Not only is the world too much with us, we are becoming co-opted by the world, and forgetting co-operation with the Spirit of Truth.

St Antony, Abbot (251 - 356)
St Antony is the originator of the monastic life. He was born in Egypt: when his parents died, he listened to the words of the Gospel and gave all his belongings to the poor. He went out into the wilderness to begin a life of penitence, living in absolute poverty, praying, meditating, and supporting himself by manual work. He suffered many temptations, both physical and spiritual, but he overcame them. Disciples gathered round him, attracted by his wisdom, moderation, and holiness. He gave support to the victims of the persecutions of Diocletian, and helping St Athanasius in his fight against the Arians. He lived to be over a hundred years old, and died in 356.
The Gospels are full of wise sayings of Jesus that seem to be ignored, and one of the most poignant of these was in his meeting with that young man who asked over and over again, insistently, "What must I do to have eternal life?". When, in the end, Jesus told him that if he wanted to be perfect he would have to sell all that he had and give the money to the poor, the young man went away, sorrowing; because he was very rich. What could be more of a waste than that? You tell someone what he has to do, and he is afraid to do it. And yet... 250 years later, St Antony hears the story, and does give away all that he has, and becomes the founder of monasticism. And then again, over 1,000 years later, St Francis of Assisi hears the story, and gives away his possessions (and some of his father's) and revolutionises Christianity again.
Not all the words that we speak are forgotten, even though we cannot see their effects ourselves. Let us pray that those unknown effects may always be good ones.
(http://www.universalis.com/readings.htm)

The effects of the 17th will lead us to the 18th.

Tomorrow is the 18th.

Find our hearts?

Help us hear.

Martin Luther King Jr. arrived this date. Happy Birthday, Martin! Our gratitude for who you were and what you changed.

Our change might be "mendicants of no other." Thus retaining the lettering "m.o.n.o."

In the dream the woman says, "Do you have a cliche'd schedule?" I answer yes. She shrugs. I ask what she has. She begins to say, "It is an extended..." I do not hear how she completes the response. The rest is left to my contemplation as I wake.

In the realm of True Purity, there is no such thing as "I" or "He" or "She," nor can "friend" or "foe" be found there. But the slightest confusion of mind brings innumerable differences and complications. Peace and disorder in the world, the distinction between friend and foe in human relationships, follow upon one another as illusion begets delusion. A person of spiritual insight will immediately recognize what is wrong and before long rid themselves of such an illusion.
- Muso Kokushi (1275-1351)

We change our third Saturday retreat to a 3rd weekend extended mindfulness weekend. We use is as a time of continual and constant reminder to do what we are doing, be what we are, hear what we are hearing, and speak what we are speaking. We end the formal 3rd Saturday 8 hours of retreat at the hermitage.

Rather, we take it to heart, and we take it on the road. We focus on attention, intention, mindfulness, deep listening, and loving speech with a more intense, expansive, and everyday practice of these qualities.

We embrace mendicancy. A mendicant is one depending on alms for a living; practicing begging. Mendicant derives from Latin mendicare, "to beg," from mendicus, "beggar."

Heidegger says that the question of philosophy is 'why are there things rather than nothing?', but surely there is an even prior question: why objectify the world after all? or, more simply, why do we want to know? It sounds like a psychological question, but it is only partly that. The moment we ask it we are involved in the whole process of what I have called recreation, the constructing of human culture and civilization, and the question turns into something more like: 'why is simple existence in the world not good enough for us?' Whatever the answer, the question itself seems to push us away from the biblical story of a beginning creation, and towards the vision of recreation as a future goal in which our own efforts are involved.
(p.54, in Creation and Recreation, by Northrop Frye, c.1980)

Simple existence in the world is good enough for us.

I don't know why there are things rather than nothing. Nor why some have more things than others. I don't know why some have very little, some do not have enough, and some have nothing.

A beggar, or mendicant, in this mythology, is someone following intuition of gift and gratefulness.

'Beggar' is a word and way of being that is seldom aspired to. [Middle English, from Old French begart, ultimately from Middle Dutch beggaert, "one who rattles off prayers."]

We ask for, we beg for, nothing other than what we have; no other than what we are.

Prayer is act of communion.

Prayer is gift, not obligation. Life is gift, not recompense. Mendicancy is gift, not disgrace.

We rattle on.

Without cliche.

Merely...grateful.

There -- is no other way.

Solitude is a hermitage with no walls.

Hermits are who they are because What Is remains itself.

Follow the opportunity to seek out perception,
But you must travel the path alone.
If you have not found illumination,
Go where you may achieve completion.
- Ch'en Hsien (1634- 1654)

Even when with others, a hermit enters solitude. This is when each is allowed to be each and all allowed to be all. A hermit does not disconnect. Rather, a hermit allows root connection to be the heart of the hermitage of solitude. There is no cultivation of disconnection or strain to connect what is already of a piece.

Still, there's something to be said for being alone.

The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths.
( from The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard.

I daydream peace in the world. I daydream comfort for those suffering natural catastrophes. I daydream the foggy white mist of mountainside after snow. I daydream everyone resting in the presence of God -- everyone completely themselves.

The hermit is before God. His hut, therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery. And there radiates about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation and prayer, a universe outside the universe. The hut can receive none of the riches "of this world." It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases it gives access to absolute refuge. (Bachelard)

This week at hermitage is quiet stretch. I nightdream of my sister and husband greeting me in visit-- first since death placed them in dream garden together. I write to tell niece and nephew. We are orphans and children of orphans. There is a roundness to solitude.

In speaking of the "Dialectics of Outside and Inside," the author speaks of our modern obsession with circumscribing things, the modern's "geometrism" or "geometrical cancerization." We geometrize everything from property to national boundaries, from forests to green-spaces, from ideology to psychology of the individual -- all is cut up, divided, entrenched. But, says Bachelard, being is all around us, not circumscribed. We are not the center of being, nor is anything else, for that matter. Hence there is neither being-here nor being-there.
(from, "Hermit's Hut, Hermit's Dream" book reviews in Hermitary http://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/hermithut.html)

I can no longer penetrate the fog of 'there' and 'here'. In the dream I know I am dreaming and caution myself to be aware it will soon enough fade. It does. Both in the dream and out of it are tears for the joyful visit.

Being is all around.

Us.

Truth is back from holiday.

"Knowledge of the Father," says Irenaeus, "consists in the self-revelation of the Son." The metaphor no longer hides what it carries within.

If revelation unfolds what has been hidden, and truth consists of the not-hidden, something important is constantly being revealed.

"Truth," a zen master said, "is just like this."

We ask: When is a lie a lie? Or, is a lie a convenience, something used to accomplish a greater end than merely being truthful? There is, I imagine, much to be said for 'convenience.' But for truth -- there is always, and only, 'this.'

The moon and the paper are the same white
The pupil of the eye and the ink, both black.
This mysterious meaning remains a circle,
Beyond the possibility of understanding.
- Sokuhi (1616-1671)

Just for a moment, we pause to consider this truth, this revelation:
U.S. Ends Fruitless Iraq Weapons Hunt. White House Says Iraq Weapons Search Over; Evidence That Bush Used in Argument for War Not Found.

WASHINGTON Jan 12, 2005 -- The search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has quietly concluded without any evidence of the banned weapons that President Bush cited as justification for going to war, the White House said Wednesday.
Democrats said Bush owes the country an explanation of why he was so wrong.
(The Associated Press)

What is this truth we are being told today?

No one can know the Father apart from God's Word, that is, unless the Son reveals him, and no one can know the Son unless the Father so wills. Now the Son fulfils the Father's good pleasure: the Father sends, the Son is sent, and he comes. The Father is beyond our sight and comprehension; but he is known by his Word, who tells us of him who surpasses all telling. In turn, the Father alone has knowledge of his Word. And the Lord has revealed both truths. Therefore, the Son reveals the knowledge of the Father by his revelation of himself. Knowledge of the Father consists in the self-revelation of the Son, for all is revealed through the Word.
The Father's purpose in revealing the Son was to make himself known to us all and so to welcome into eternal rest those who believe in him, establishing them in justice, preserving them from death. To believe in him means to do his will.
(From the treatise Against Heresies by Saint Irenaeus, bishop)

If Word and words are mere conveniences, we are lost.

We must find justice.

Death cannot continue.

See son, see father. Hear lie, hear death.

When one's word is no good, death clutches the heart.

We must retrieve and release truth.

Word truth now!

This, this, this...

In the open.

The bookshop and bakery will re-open Saturday, 15 January, Martin Luther King's birthday.

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

Spirituality is a way of traveling and arriving home.

Relief effort from tsunami continues in South Asia. In Iraq, more deaths from violence. Water drenches Southern California.

Dwelling at home requires dedicated practice.

The way to true spirituality
Cannot depend upon others;
One instant of enlightenment
And I go beyond body and self.
The myriad and profound virtues
Are complete;
Anywhere in the universe is now my home.
- Mokuan (1611-1684)

There is a weaving around knowledge to arrive at wisdom. Wisdom holds home with courage and strength.

Thomas Merton was constantly trying to find his way home.

Merton was able to distinguish quite clearly the difference between human learning - to which he may have perhaps arbitrarily confined the entire Socratic dialectical process - and wisdom, that is, between knowledge gained through hard thinking and knowledge that reveals itself through hard experience and inner solitude. In short, wisdom appears only after one has abandoned a life of hubris, and experiences, in depth, the hollowness of intellectual knowledge, and the painful sense of moral and spiritual depravity. Moreover, unlike most other artists and writers, what distinguished the monk was that he was a great mystic and contemplative. As it has been noted by many, the psychological and spiritual makeup and the modus operandi of mystics and contemplatives from different traditions tend to be very similar, though the roads and goals they take and reach may be quite divergent, even contradictory. (John Wu Jr.)

At this time in this country we are inquiring into what home is. In personal life there continues tension between university and monastery, head and heart, knowledge and wisdom.

Even as a young budding writer Merton was able to fathom the difference between the knowing of oneself in the Platonic Dialogues and the knowing (or, shall we say, more accurately, the "unknowing") of the true self one finds in all authentic traditions, mystical, Zen or otherwise. In this discrimination, you can see why he ultimately chose the monastery over the university and why he would have been constantly at sixes and sevens in an academic setting where high power intellects joust for the critical competitive edge that may end in great frustration. This choice of place itself comes, I think, from profound self-knowledge, for he most likely would have suffered badly in any other place except in a monastery. For, is it not true that part of life's wisdom is to know where we belong, where we would do the least damage to ourselves and others?
(John Wu Jr.)

What if home is dwelling well within oneself?

Although a very good intellectual, Merton knew that the Socratic kind of knowing could not possibly satiate his real desire for a fulfillment that would ultimately please and lead him back to his Maker. He had this enormously significant intuition that somehow wisdom and the search for the inmost self did not lie in the gaining of knowledge; it lay, rather, in the losing of it.
(from a revised version of the paper presented at the First General Meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society at Southampton, May 17-19, 1996. The original title was "Thomas Merton and the Spirit of Zen." by John Wu, Jr.)

I've been thinking about my dwelling place, about truth and deception.

This is the definition of sin: the misuse of powers given us by God for doing good, a use contrary to God's commands. On the other hand, the virtue that God asks of us is the use of the same powers based on a good conscience in accordance with God's command.
Since this is so, we can say the same about love. Since we received a command to love God, we possess from the first moment of our existence an innate power and ability to love. The proof of this is not to be sought outside ourselves, but each one can learn this from himself and in [her]self.
(From the Detailed Rules for Monks by St. Basil the Great, bishop, Office of Readings, 11Jan)

There is an innate home wherein we are invited to dwell.

Our journey encircles, widening to nearing, that place.

Our spirituality practices this journey home.

Travel well.

Arrive well.

Anywhere.

Truth is not-hidden.

Open words, open acts, and open hearts reveal what we call truth. Clear sight through clear space helps clear the debris of troublesome and unfortunate deception.

In the mountains
Are many companions of the Way,
Sitting Zen, chanting,
Forming a natural community.
But if you gazed
Far off from city walls,
In this direction,
All you would see is white clouds.
- Wang Wei (701-761)

Let's remember something important -- the heart cannot be fooled. The mind can be fooled, but not the heart. In America today we know minds are easily fooled. Hearts, when faced with direct encounter, are more direct. The heart sorrows with sorrow. The heart grieves when broken, is torn when bereft of trust.

Despondency is a purse seine encircling both sides of simplistic distinctions cultivated as republican/democrat, red/blue, or conservative/liberal. These distinctions are a deception. Deception hurts both sides, deceiver and deceived.

Deception sometimes hides in belief. We are told to believe blind patriotism equals will of God for America, an America touted to be God's favorite country by dint of wealth, arms, and a faith-filled populace.

This belief is not true. The favor of God, or what we can know of it, is absence of deception. It is best thought of as heart's longing to reside with God in true union. That dwelling place is where each being -- each person, each thing, and each longing of the heart -- is most truly at home. We need more than belief. We need the actual presence, the felt reality, of our true home. Love and peace define that home.

All wisdom is from the Lord,
and it is his own for ever.
The sand of the sea and the raindrops,
and the days of eternity, who can assess them?
The height of the sky and the breadth of the earth,
and the depth of the abyss, who can probe them?
Before all other things wisdom was created,
shrewd understanding is everlasting.
For whom has the root of wisdom ever been uncovered?
Her resourceful ways, who knows them?
One only is wise, terrible indeed,
seated on his throne, the Lord.
He himself has created her, looked on her and assessed her,
and poured her out on all his works
to be with all mankind as his gift,
and he conveyed her to those who love him.
(from Ecclesiasticus 1)

By uncovering wisdom we begin to retrieve sanity. There's no sanity in lies. No health in false promises. Mind cannot sustain falsity. Mind requires real substance. Mind needs honest truth to remain sane. These times challenge sanity.

This new year we must find a new equilibrium. Nature frightens many with surfeit of water. America frightens many with overstated fear.

We cannot allow that fear to feed and grow. Fear breeds fear. Terror feeds on and feeds fear. We need balance. The fulcrum must be well balanced and centered between healthy fear and healthy trust. If trust is abandoned -- we topple into the arms and armaments of fear.

That balance, that fulcrum, is wisdom.

We pray for all...wisdom.

Unhidden.

Holding us.

True.

President Bush is mistaken. He underestimates the American people. Once the whiff of failure overcomes the fragrance of partisan policy victory, he will have to leave his office and leave sorrowing hearts behind his departure.

Look up to heaven and down on earth, and they will remind you of their impermanency. Look about the world, and it will remind you of its impermanency. But when you gain spiritual enlightenment, you shall then find wisdom. The knowledge thus attained leads you to the Way.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

This departure is not about politics. It is about the collective soul of many peoples who will not allow error or terror to wear a pressed suit and friendly smile.

Peter addressed them: 'The truth I have now come to realise' he said 'is that God does not have favourites, but that anybody of any nationality who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him.'
(Acts 10:34)

It was an awful presidential campaign season last year. The insult to intelligent people worldwide will not be easily brushed aside with further arrogance and foolish posturing of invincible pretence. It is surprising that these false God controlling men do not fear the exact justice of the real God beyond their clutch. It is a curious hubris that believes safe passage through blasphemy and deceit is their privilege.

But Jesus replied, 'Leave it like this for the time being; it is fitting that we should, in this way, do all that righteousness demands'.
(Matthew 3:15)

There will be an inauguration in Washington. It will be a glitzy and triumphant celebration. They won. They will reward their faithful.

Alentejo Seen From The Train
Nothing with nothing around it
And a few trees in between
None of which very clearly green,
Where no river or flower pays a visit.
If there be a hell, I've found it,
For if ain't here, where the Devil it is?
(1907, poem by Fernando Pessoa)

We will suffer this display as we suffer the spectacle of Iraq.

We will pray for all who long for justice.

We will call for the just of the world to speak out.

We will ask the president to change his heart, to change his mind, and to change the course of mistaken decisions he has taken.

This is not a red/blue or republican/democrat child's game.

This is something far more serious.

Ask yourself. Go on, ask.

Do you hear what it is?