What implications if we are alone with What Is Alone?

A buddha is one who does not seek.
In seeking this, you turn away from it.
The principle is the principle of
Nonseeking; when you seek it,
You lose it.
If you cling to nonstriving,
This is the same as striving.
Thus the Diamond Cutter Scripture
Says, “Do not grasp truth,
do not grasp untruth,
and do not grasp that
which is not untrue.”
It also says, “The truth
that the buddhas find has no
reality or unreality.”
- Pai-chang (720-814)

Is it the case that beneath the stories we tell to buoy our frightened mind there is a deep and radical emptiness through which we will not fall, but within which peace is encountered as nothing other than one's existence itself? Or do we imagine the Holy One as sitting in a chair with teacup and cookie plate on table with flowery cover?

The practice of solitude entails remaining well within yourself while understanding the emptiness of any separate reality other (or no other) than the Wholly Oneself.

In Catholic calendar it is the feast of Romuald. He saw something that he awkwardly yet effectively attempted to show to others.

St Romuald (c.951 - 1027)
He joined a Benedictine monastery but made himself unpopular there by trying to get the lax monks to mend their ways and so, with the permission of his abbot, became a wandering hermit. In a constant fight against the degenerate monasteries of the day, he founded hermitages and monasteries where a life of prayerful solitude could be truly lived. The monastery at Camaldoli, which he founded and where he remained as abbot for a number of years, became the first house of an order of hermits which still exists. But Romuald took to his wanderings once more, and died in a monastery he himself had founded at Val di Castro – as he wished, alone in his cell.
http://www.universalis.com/

It sounds like a trick phrase, "alone in his cell." Are we not alone in our cells?

It's the birthday of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). I like the idea that "despair, [and...] disillusion, are, [...] no illustration of personal weakness."

Mathematician, physicist, and theologian, inventor of the first digital calculator, who is often thought of as the ideal of classic French prose. Pascal lived in the time when Copernicus' discovery - that the earth moves round the sun - had made fallen human beings insignificant factors in the new order of the world. Facing the immensity of the universe, Pascal felt horror - "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." For him the world seemed empty of ultimate meaning or significance without Christianity, which he defended against the assaults of freethinkers. While Montaigne lived at ease with skepticism, Pascal was tormented by religious doubt, and took the question Why are we here? with the utmost seriousness, revealing his thoughts in his most famous book, the posthumous PENSÉES.

"Pascal's disillusioned analysis of human bondage is sometimes interpreted to mean that Pascal was really and finally an unbeliever, who, in his despair, was incapable of enduring reality and enjoying the heroic satisfaction of the free man's worship of nothing. His despair, his disillusion, are, however, no illustration of personal weakness; they are perfectly objective, because they are essential moments in the progress of the intellectual soul; and for the type of Pascal they are the analogue of the drought, the dark night, which is an essential stage in the progress of the Christian mystic." (T.S. Eliot in Selected Essays, 1960)

"Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling," Pascal said, "do not understand the process of reasoning, for they would understand at first sight and are not used to seek for principles. And others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles, do not at all understand matters of feeling, seeking principles and being unable to see at a glance." But Pascal's belief in God was based on personal religious experience - he saw that reason cannot decide the question of God's existence, but he could appeal to it. In Pensées Pascal wrote: "Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is."
(--from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bpascal.htm)

Will we evolve in awareness that we will be able "to see at a glance"? To see at a glance is to have no interference blocking what is there to see.

Solitude can help. Solitude invites what is there to see.

Some men in prison celebrate another kind of solitude today. It is "Juneteenth."

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.

Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another, is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another, is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. All or none of them could be true. For whatever the reason, conditions in Texas remained status quo well beyond what was statutory.
(from History of Juneteenth, http://www.juneteenth.com/history.htm)

There are so many layers of solitude, many layers of community within solitude. We are comforted, you might say, by the gift and ability to see at a glance.

"But, if this part of our history could be told in such a way that those chains of the past, those shackles that physically bound us together against our wills could, in the telling, become spiritual links that willingly bind us together now and into the future - then that painful Middle Passage could become, ironically, a positive connecting line to all of us whether living inside or outside the continent of Africa..."
Tom Feelings, in http://www.juneteenth.com/aboutjuneteenth.htm

We ask -- What implications if we are alone with What Is Alone?

We answer -- We are solid, in solidarity, with everyone. Everyone's experience is my (our) experience. God is not absent. God is presence itself -- everywhere at once. How is it God is so denied, even by, (some say, especially by) so-called believers?

Belief, emptied of content, is authentic affirmation -- is radical faith.

Solitude invites us to enter this emptiness.

Where all is.

Finally.

Wholly.

Alone.

We.

Silence positions the body between points of view held and spoken -- a presence unbidden. Most conversations never take place. Serial speaking predominates.

The urge to make philosophy into Philosophy is to make it the search for some final vocabulary, which can somehow be known in advance to be the common core, the truth of, all the other vocabularies which might be advanced in its place. This is the urge which the pragmatist thinks should be repressed, and which a post-Philosophical culture would have succeeded in repressing.

The most powerful reason for thinking that no such culture is possible is that seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places, constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally humiliating. Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognise it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.” This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre’s remark:

Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are.

This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together -- the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.

A post-philosophical culture, then, would be one in which men and women felt themselves alone, merely finite, with no links to something Beyond. On the pragmatist’s account, position was only a halfway stage in the development of such a culture -- the progress toward, as Sartre puts it, doing without God.
(--from 5. A Post-Philosophical Culture, in Consequences of Pragmatism, Essays 1972-1980, by Richard Rorty; published by the University of Minnesota Press, 1982.)

After two weeks in a position of unbidden presence, the requisite difficulty arises returning to talk that passes time. I concede the neighborliness of talking about what has taken place. Still, silence makes extraneous the need for explanation or persuasion. Presence insinuates itself within silence the same way birds precede dusk with clear and simple song.

In a recent book, To Achieve Our Country, Richard Rorty reasserts the traditional idea that the United States has the unique potential of coming closer than any other nation to the creation of a moral society, one in which "liberty and justice for all" becomes a reality. But he departs from the traditional belief that we have this unique destiny because of our special relationship to God. Instead, he bases his optimistic belief on a political ethos that "has no room for obedience to a non-human authority" but only to "freely achieved consensus among human beings."

Rorty assumes that moral values are created by human beings out of our experience and therefore have no need of any foundation in some entity or force that transcends our needs, desires, and hopes.
(--from, Does American Democracy Need God? - book by Richard Rorty, raises the question of America's belief in, and need for, God -- in Humanist, July, 1999, by Lawrence Hyman)

To say nothing of God. Of which, or, of whom nothing need be said.

I mistrust myself casual benedictions commending Gods blessing on someone. (I knew a man for whom such a salutation sometimes sounded like telling someone to go f**k themselves. His rote dismissal was not believable.) Nor is, I submit, God believable. I suspect God is merely present. In that presence, God is the breath between words, an invitation to converse with authentic, albeit reluctant, speech.

All truth is conversation.

This is spoken; that is responded.

And, for now, we hold this and that with reverent attention.

Until next we pause between inhalation and exhalation.

Where presence perdures.

The Syrian-born priest ended his words with -- "Love forgives."

I left. My gratitude for these words was a berry scone and coffee at Chase's Daily, kissing the waitress Kristen who served the surrogate eucherist.

Cease practice based
On intellectual understanding,
Pursuing words and
Following after speech.
Learn the backward
Step that turns
Your light inward
To illuminate within.
Body and mind of themselves
Will drop away
And your original face will be manifest.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

She'd sung last night at an Italian restaurant, forgot some lyrics, and was tired. She was sardonically happy to be in Maine, "Where," she said, "careers come to die."

It is the man who is forgiven little who shows little love.’ Then he said to her, ‘Your sins are forgiven’. Those who were with him at table began to say to themselves, ‘Who is this man, that he even forgives sins?’ But he said to the woman, ‘Your faith has saved you; go in peace’.
(--from Luke 7:36 - 8:3)

Faith is love spelled longer. Just as hope is faith spelled shorter.

Driving through upper Searsmont and Liberty I listen to Jane put the finishing touches on her morning radio show on WERU. Judy Collins is singing about being promised to go boating on the Seine, and watching the Paris sun set in her father's eyes.

Later the dyslexic success talking on New Dimensions is saying that we are all of what human can be; we're to acknowledge all of it. I wonder about finding balance in the places where wholeness finds itself in us -- where nothing is excluded, and each fact is at home with us, even as we pack our bags with each act of leaving home.

I end two weeks at harbour room on solitary retreat.

LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered;
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.
(--written by James W. John­son, 1899. Found at The Cyber Hymnal)

What else could we pray for but to be -- True to our God, true to our native land -- eh?

We have to do this alone.

No matter who is near us.

To be true to 'this' is a solitary act.

To be true to 'that' is a solitary fact.

Even forgetting lyrics, we still sing.

Love forgives.

I have found a solution to war.

In the Catholic Christian calendar there are back to back celebrations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. To end war I propose an international, ecumenical, interreligious, multicultural feast and celebration of the Human Heart of Earthly Existence, followed by equally universally celebrated feasts of The Heart of all Being, the Heart of All Sentient Beings, the Heart of Coming-to Being, and, finally, the Heart of Ancestors Once-in-Being.

When we acclaim the "Immaculate Heart of Mary," we likewise acclaim the Immaculate Hearts Of All Attempting Awareness So As To Alleviate Suffering In The World.

Or, "I HO AAA SAT AS IT W."

To cling to oneself as Buddha,
Oneself as Zen or the way,
Making that an understanding,
Is called clinging to the inward view.
Attainment by causes and conditions,
Practice and realization,
Is called the outward view.
Master Pao-chih said, “The inward view
And the outward view are both mistaken.
- Pai-chang (720-814)

What is between the inward view and the outward view?

Compassion and the Individual:
Whether people are beautiful and friendly or unattractive and disruptive, ultimately they are human beings, just like oneself. Like oneself, they want happiness and do not want suffering. Furthermore, their right to overcome suffering and be happy is equal to one's own. ...When you recognize that all beings are equal in both their desire for happiness and their right to obtain it, you automatically feel empathy and closeness for them.
Through accustoming your mind to this sense of universal altruism, you develop a feeling of responsibility for others: the wish to help them actively overcome their problems. Nor is this wish selective; it applies equally to all.
- The Dalai Lama, Compassion for the Individual

"ETA," or, "equally to all."

What's our "eta" (estimated time of arrival) to "ETA" (equally to all)?

"What Is" presents "Itself" equally to all.

Is this why so many of us find it difficult to experience God?
Is this why so many of us find it difficult to love God?
Is this why so many of us find it difficult to dwell as God dwells in this existence?

I've found a solution to war.

Q: What is it?

A: Find your heart!

Yes, do this. (We "do this" when we "what-is" something. To "what-is" something or someone is to allow their true nature to be seen through, that is, we "God-view-it." We "Allow-God-God's-way-in-and-through-it.")

Be immaculate -- do not contain flaw or error. Of course there are (what we call) flaws and errors in this existence. Let them go. They were meant to go. Then, let them. There's no need to contain. Open my heart. Open your heart. Let each error or flaw go. They will, you know. Go. That's what change is. Letting go...going on.

The more we change, the more we become what the heart becomes -- immaculate.

Dwelling in the open. That's how we become hermits.

In the desert. ("desert," from L.de- + serere, means "to join together.")

Be a hermit.

Dwell in the desert of the heart.

The morning is spent in the heart of prison.

"Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation."
-- Kahlil Gibran

This feast of the Sacred Heart, we pray:

Most Sacred Heart of Christ,
be mercifully with us,
merciful with us,
as we near a life of mercy with one another!

Jonathan writes to tel me about Richard Rorty: "No question the smartest guy I ever got to stand in a room with. What a shame."

Richard Rorty, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Stanford University, passed away on Friday, June 8, 2007, at home in Palo Alto.
(http://www.stanford.edu/~rrorty/)

Things do, at times, feel like they are falling apart.

"Philosophy occupies an important place in culture only when things seem to be falling apart...At such periods, intellectuals reinterpret the past in terms of an imagined future. "
(– Richard Rorty, "Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude," Philosophy as Cultural Politics)

It's time for philosophy.

Richard Rorty - philosophical hero to some and enemy of philosophy to others. Richard Bernstein has noted that Rorty-bashing has become something of a philosophical sport. Love him or loathe him, you cannot ignore him. There is no doubt that Rorty is one the most influential, controversial, prolific, and widely read philosophers in the world. Unlike many of his contemporaries, and following the example of his own heroes William James and John Dewey, he is a public philosopher writing for a broad audience on a vast range of topics related to social justice and democracy.

Rorty sets out his stall in two early texts, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). Rorty is a pragmatist. That is, he believes that language cannot claim accurately to represent reality as some sort of 'mirror of nature'. Instead, the best we can hope for is that knowledge provides us with the means to cope effectively with the 'real' world. There is no truth 'out there' to be discovered. For example, the word 'gene' does not necessarily correspond to some sort of real thing. What matters most is whether or not thinking in terms of genes helps us to cope with the particular environment in which gene-talk has an effect. The resultant collapsing of the assumed 'facts' of hard science into the softer discourse of the humanities and the arts means that there is no guaranteed way of getting beyond language and seeing the world as it 'really' is. All attempts at 'worldmaking' are cursed by an inescapable ethnocentrism.

(-- Philosopher of the Month, April 2002 - Richard Rorty, Simon Eassom, http://www.philosophers.co.uk/cafe/phil_apr2002.htm)

Two former Navy men named Hugh regale one another downstairs. Some folks drop in who are familiar with Shahola PA and Rohman's Tavern, Barryville and Rebers Restaurant, the old Glendella where my family and parent's friends would go on vacation during my childhood. There are photos. Or were. With generational deaths the brown envelopes with hundreds of photos have become candidates for someone else's useless clutter. My sister's son might have jettisoned them. I'm philosophical about the past. It has passed through my life. I have passed through time. Everything is passing through 'now.'

Few people are capable of wholehearted commitment, and that is why so few people experience a real transformation through their spiritual practice. It is a matter of giving up our own viewpoints, of letting go of opinions and preconceived ideas, and instead following the Buddha's guidelines. Although this sounds simple, in practice most people find it extremely difficult. Their ingrained viewpoints, based on deductions derived from cultural and social norms, are in the way.

We must also remember that heart and mind need to work together. If we understand something rationally but don't love it, there is no completeness for us, no fulfillment. If we love something but don't understand it, the same applies.

If we have a relationship with another person, and we love the person but don't understand him or her, the relationship is incomplete; if we understand the person but don't love him or her, it is equally unfulfilling. How much more so on our spiritual path. We have to understand the meaning of the teaching and also love it. In the beginning our understanding will only be partial, so our love has to be even greater.
(--Ayya Khema, from When the Iron Eagle Flies )

Love, we'll have to consider, is greater than love of wisdom, philosophy. We must also love the fool, the rogue, the scamp, and the ne'er-do-well.

In a time when things fall apart, wisdom might not be enough.

The sailors leave. World War II and Korean War have been fought again and flags flown with pride in their recounting. Soon the reading group for Course in Miracles will assemble. The woman and her mother drive back from the arduous task of considering a used car to buy.

Rorty denies the possibility that humanity could one day be united by a common realisation of the truth of how we ought to live. Indeed, he accepts that the best we can possibly hope for is a consensus amongst a very large percentage of the population. What matters most is that there is a 'them' opposed to 'us' and that we are open to the possibility of changing our historical, contingent language-game to expand it to include others. Liberalism is the only political philosophy, to Rorty's mind, that allows alternative language-games to co-exist side-by-side and thus keep open the possibility of us hearing the 'unfamiliar noises' of others and incorporating them into our world view. Inevitably then, he has drawn the wrath of neo-Marxists in particular from whose ranks come the strongest critics of his political philosophy. However, Rorty has continually rebutted and refuted his 'enemies' and, in public debate, he is a formidable opponent, well worth handing over real money to see and hear.
(--- Richard Rorty, by Simon Eassom)

I like the idea of handing over real money.

To see.

To hear.

Lost?

Pray.

"Consider every day that you are then for the first time--as it were--beginning; and always act with the same fervour as on the first day you began."
--Saint Anthony of Padua.

Found?

Pray.

Saskia's "Continuation Day."

Happy Continuation Day
If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people. To be born means that something which did not exist comes into existence. But the day we are “born” is not our beginning. It is a day of continuation. But that should not make us less happy when we celebrate our “Happy Continuation Day.” Since we are never born, how can we cease to be? This is what the Heart Sutra reveals to us. When we have tangible experience of non-birth and non-death, we know ourselves beyond duality. The meditation on “no separate self” is one way to pass through the gate of birth and death. Your hand proves that you have never been born and you will never die. The thread of life has never been interrupted from time without beginning until now. Previous generations, all the way back to single cell beings, are present in your hand at this moment. You can observe and experience this. Your hand is always available as a subject for meditation.
--Thich Nhat Hanh, Present Moment, Wonderful Moment

In the dream just after daybreak I am wandering through time. Bob C. and Jon W. are there in a Franciscan context of departure, as is Diane in a prison context of finding a spot to continue conversations. Departure and continuation are familiar themes. There are times I cannot remember leaving places I've been. I feel I am still part of this particular place, that group, a work situation, a former relationship, my family home, a lookout on scenic mountain, a conversation with a man in wrist and leg restraints, -- or myriad other re-presentations of faces and situations arriving and departing with residue of feeling, even in dream-state. When I awake, I am both there and here. I think -- Bob is dead. I'll call Jon in Virginia. How is Marge doing with her twins? Is Jo-Ann's new married life her cup of tea? Where did Jim H. from Rhode Island disappear to? Where does anyone, especially those who have died, disappear to?

"We find it so hard to accept the fact that it's all temporary. But things change. We change. Our growth, the identity God gave each of us, is the product of inexorable change. Whenever we become attached to anything, we try to stand in the way of change. We can't. We're setting ourselves up for a fall..
"Ownership is the self-delusion of frightened, insecure people. God gives us roses, sunsets, youth. He invites us to drink deeply, allow experience to expand our being..."
(p.90, in Voices of Silence, Lives of Trappist's Today, by Frank Bianco)

Clouds over Penobscot Bay this morning. Wind gusts whip water and flags.

We own nothing. Still, we celebrate everything.

It is joy to feel all of it -- the sorrows and the glad smiles.

There'll be a cake. A sign. And flowers.

Because we love to carry on.

So we do!

Contemplatives sometimes think they are going to meet God. It's an encouraging thought. What is found out is that, first, they are deconstructed. Whereupon, an empty self is astounded at its own irrelevance. Before despair darkens the psyche, there's a possibility of humility sneaking in. Humility grounds thought in an open-eyed watchfulness of one's self.

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

Contemplatives, once grounded, look to their brothers and sisters in a new light. Once deconstruction takes place, the individual deconstructed and grounded continues in a posture of watchful appreciation. This person learns compassionate awareness of their brothers and sisters -- how each suffers in their lives; and of all of creation -- how it, too, watches us.

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.
(--from Love After Love, poem by Derek Walcott

Once compassion emerges with humble awareness, the contemplative looks again the original impulse to meet God -- only now, without any idea whether, where, how, or even if such a meeting is desirable. Having seen one's self, (or, oneself) -- and having begun a more authentic pilgrimage along the path of compassion -- a contemplative no longer strives to grasp or experience something called "God."

[Addendum, 12June07: I find the passage I've been writing around in the chapter "Pray All Ways" in Frank Bianco's book on Trappists]
"Saint Bernard talks about coming to the monastery to see God. But when we get here, that's not what God lays on us. What he lays on us is self-knowledge. Then the second phase is a compassionate viewing of our brother. Only then do we reach that image of God that brought us here."
(--from p.99, in Voices of Silence, Live of the Trappists Today, by Frank Bianco, c1991)

Receiving communion is no longer what once thought to be.

The bare fact of love itself reveals itself in no other.

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, Love After Love, by Derek Walcott)

What we call "other" is nothing other.

That's what love is.

Love is our nothing other.

A feast of ordinariness.

Contemplative stillness.

One step at a time.

There's a Quaker saying that we are to let our lives speak.

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

From somewhere on the harbor a sudden voice carries over the morning water calm: "Good morning God! Good morning planet! Good morning family!" Just as suddenly, silence again. I look out. Nothing detectable. Only the sound of what is...being...said.

A Homecoming

One faith is bondage. Two
are free. In the trust
of old love, cultivation shows
a dark graceful wilderness
at its heart. Wild
in that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds
of what we know. O love,
open. Show me
my country. Take me home.
(--Poem by Wendell Berry, from The Country of Marriage)

Vesper Hill Chapel, the open air stone and wood gift to this community, holds Friends Meeting for Worship at 9:00am Sunday mornings.

There, today, I go.

(Would that such were so!)

There, today, sitting.

With God. With planet. With family.

Home.

Kirk recited, or perhaps more to the point, embodied, poetry. He re-presented the feeling of the poem as body of words experiencing themselves in artful expression.

Being a Buddhist
Have confidence in your own spiritual potentiality, your ability to find your own unique way. Learn from others certainly and use what you find useful, but also learn to trust your own inner wisdom. Have courage. Be awake and aware. Remember too that Buddhism is not about being a Buddhist; that is, obtaining a new identity tag. Nor is it about collecting head-knowledge, practices and techniques. It is ultimately about letting go of all forms and concepts and becoming free.
--John Snelling, Elements of Buddhism

One who loves poetry cheers every masterful embodiment of poem and encourages every poet finding their fingers and toes and beginning to make primal sounds.

Alana sends poem by Carl Phillips:

Bright World

—And it came to pass, that meaning faltered; came detached
unexpectedly from the place I'd made for it, years ago,
fixing it there, thinking it safe to turn away, therefore,
to forget — hadn't that made sense? And now everything
did, but differently: the wanting literally for nothing
for no good reason; the inability to feel remorse at having
cast (now over some, now others), aegis-like, though it
rescued no one, the body I'd all but grown used to waking
inside of and recognizing, instantly, correctly, as mine,
my body, given forth, withheld, shameless, merciless—
for crying shame. Like miniature versions of a lesser
gospel deemed, over time, apocryphal, or redundant — both,
maybe — until at last let go, the magnolia flowers went on
spilling themselves, each breaking open around, and then
apart from, its stem along a branch of stems and, not of
course in response, but as if so, the starlings lifting, unlifting,
the black flash of them in the light reminding me of what I'd
been told about the glamour of evil, in the light they were
like that, in the shadow they became the other part, about
resisting evil, as if resistance itself all this time had been
but shadow, could be found that easily. . . What will you do?
Is this how you're going to live now? sang the voice in my
head: singing, then silent—not as in desertion, but as
when the victim suddenly knows his torturer's face from
before, somewhere, and in the knowing is for a moment
distracted, has stopped struggling — And the heart gives in.
(-Poem by Carl Phillips.)

Forgive me for what I thought was poetry. Thinking seldom is.

What is poetry, is indeed...its own...embodiment.

Never allow anyone to form your mind. No one could receive your enlightenment for you; do not allow them to construct your opinion.

Have none of it. Not mind, not opinion. Only the full feeling face of the person before you. Only unconditioned receptivity of the reality of the one presenting themselves, as they are, before you. What you feel as they reveal is what you feel. Trust it, watch it,.

Zen Master Dogen wrote: "Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself."

Be body.

Feel each.

Word.

Wanderers.

We're vagabonds.

How radiant, yet how peaceful and relaxing,
The spirit of Spring is!
Surely out of this spirit
All these blossoming mountain cherries burst.
- Kamo no Mabuchi (1697-1769)

Vanilla Bean ice cream with Cranberry Walnut cookie splashed with Canada Dry ginger ale.

Silence makes home a forwarded address.

Morning in-town walk. One Belted Galloway, standing in middle of fenced pasture, moo'd loudly. One more monk in the world. Gene the walker passed on other side of road, hands clasped behind back, making his rounds. I look in windows of Swiss Cottage, Buzz-vacated, now for sale, and try to remember when real estate prices were last sane. Cheerful fellow asks how far I walk; he's at the end of his, turns in driveway, last house on left before Bayview.

It has been asked,
“How should those who enter
The path apply their minds?”
All things are originally uncreated
And presently undying.
Just let your mind be free;
You don’t have to restrain it.
See directly and hear directly;
Come directly and go directly.
When you must go, then go;
When you must stay, then stay.
This is the true path.
A scripture says,
“Conditional existence is the site
of enlightenment, insofar as you
know it as it really is.”
- Niu-t’ou Hui-chung (683-769)

What does it mean to keep or hold someone in prayer? The making of a statement of intention to hold in prayer is part of any spiritual life, certainly of a monastic life. Praying my hand-beads as I walk the roads I mention names adding, "May God's blessing be with them!" Passing Herb's grave and Ben's grave, and the "Unknown, Unwanted" grave of the 5 month old quarry baby from many years ago, I pray for them and their neighbors along tree shaded cemetery. I pray for names over the years, for those passing me today, and for relatives of people I've not met.

Prayer is appreciative communion resounding our reliance on one another in this life and existence. Prayer asks into God-nature to comfort, protect, and enlighten those for whom we pray, those we've forgotten to include, and those for whom we'd rather we didn't have to pray. Prayer is the assent, conscious or unconscious, of unity -- a oneness too profound for thought, a union so inchoate it itself is the prayer we do not know how to pray.

Since it was the will of God’s only-begotten Son that men should share in his divinity, he assumed our nature in order that by becoming man he might make men gods. Moreover, when he took our flesh he dedicated the whole of its substance to our salvation.
(--Thomas Aquinas, Office of Readings, Feast of Corpus Christi)

The catholic Christian metaphor is a good one. (Literally -- a "good one.")

It is the affirmation that at core of existence is a benevolent unity within which all belong. This belonging does not exclude anyone or anything. Everything belongs. And as -- (the metaphor extends) -- the body of Christ. "Christ," here, might be considered "what-is, sacred-in-itself." Thus, our prayer is for this Corpus Christi in our midst. The most difficult realization is that which is closest.

Jack comes in. He's bought a new boat. He wants me to read the name on its side. It is across the channel, tied to his recently purchased finger float. He's happy with his purchase. It's a J-boat. He says I'd appreciate the name; others would think its two kids' names. The name is Samadhi.

Samadhi, (Sanskrit, lit. "establish, make firm"), is a Hindu and Buddhist term that describes a non-dualistic state of consciousness in which the consciousness of the experiencing subject becomes one with the experienced object.
(footnoted --Diener Michael S., Erhard Franz-Karl and Fischer-Schreiber Ingrid, The Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen; -- in Wikipedia)

I've noticed over the years the emergence of a new phrase of valediction. (Ed S. was the first to catch my attention with it. Then, others.) They would say, "Have a good one!" Maybe it began as a shortening of , "Have a good day!" Nevertheless, the words themselves have a life of their own. They are a prayer of sorts. This prayer attempts to remind someone to have a "good one" -- to enter the sacred space of communion with everything as it all appears, and even as it all remains invisible.

The art of dharma practice requires commitment, technical accomplishment, and imagination. As with all arts, we will fail to realize its full potential if any of these three are lacking. The raw material of dharma practice is ourself and our world, which are to be understood and transformed according to the vision and values of the dharma itself. This is not a process of self- or world- transcendence, but one of self- and world creation. The denial of self challenges only the notion of a static self independent of body and mind--not the ordinary sense of ourself as a person distinct from everyone else. The notion of a static self is the primary obstruction to the realization of our unique potential as an individual being. By dissolving this fiction through a centered vision of the transiency, ambiguity, and contingency of experience, we are freed to create ourself anew.
--Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs

On one level I pray wanting to be prayed for.

I often forget who I am and why I am here.

Prayer -- coming or going -- is an act of calling to mind, an invitation to remember, a commitment to try to embrace and embody our whole and complete reality.

We forget often and we do not pray often enough.

Corpus Christi is today self- and world- creation, anew.

No leaving out.

Passing.

(Joyfully.)

Through.

This retreat at Harbour Room has enough silence and solitude for now. Morning sun penetrates sea fog. Tracy brings plants and flowers for gardens. Tie-hack (the white husky) appears in Barney's truck, walks about the back deck, a little bruised, shaved, and dazed -- but on her own after being run over last Saturday. Lobster boats pull abeam, greet, then head for open water with this year's traps. The shop is quiet. Last night's coffee is good enough until fresh pot in a bit.

Something necessary and radical is changing.

Kate, from New York, sends a piece written by Thomas Merton:

O my brother, the contemplative is not the man who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say in the surrender of our own poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist. The message of hope the contemplative offers you, then, brother, is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God; but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present to you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons. The contemplative has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that if you dare to penetrate your own silence and dare to advance without fear into the solitude of your own heart, and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God through you and with you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union in the depths of your own heart, of God's spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and He are in all truth One Spirit. I love you, in Christ.
Such are the few ideas I have had, written in haste -- so much more will be said so much better by others.
Yours in Christ Jesus, br. M. Louis (Thomas Merton)
{--from, Monastic Apology, br. M. Louis
(Thomas Merton), http://essenes.net/mertonletter.html}

It is a time to penetrate, dare, and risk a new solitude of intimate union in the open.

When things feel foul and emotions hoist storm flags, it is time to remember the very ground of being-itself -- this place of God's spirit and your own secret inmost self,

And, as well, remember the collateral collation of this existence.

Transitory, Insubstantial and Conditional:
To say that Buddhism is transitory, insubstantial and conditional is merely to restate its own understanding of the nature of things. Yet its teachings endlessly warn of the deeply engrained tendency to overlook this reality.... Instead of seeing a particular manifestation of the Dharma as a living spiritual tradition of possibilities contingent upon historical and cultural circumstances, one reifies it into an independently existent, self sufficient fact, resistant to change. Living continuity requires both change and constancy. Just as in the course of a human life, a person changes from a child to an adolescent to an adult while retaining a recognizable identity (both internally through memory and externally through recurring physical and behavioral traits), so does a spiritual tradition change through the course of its history while retaining a recognizable identity through a continuous affirmation of its axiomatic values. Thus Buddhism will retain its identity as a tradition as long as its practitioners continue to center their lives around the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha and affirm its basic tenets. But precisely how such commitment and affirmation are expressed in different times and places can differ wildly. The survival of Buddhism today is dependent on its continuing ability to adapt.
(--by Stephen Batchelor, in The Awakening of the West)

Walking the self-same and seemingly-divergent paths of "change and constancy," we set out on a practice that necessitates both the threefold love of God's One Spirit, and the Three Refuges (Three Jewels) in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

A hermit's life must adapt.

"Know therefore today, and take it to your heart, that the LORD, He is God in heaven above and on the earth below; there is no other.
(--Deut. 4:39, New American Standard Bible, 1995)

As "monastics of no other" it is both oddly satisfying and curiously desolating to approach the realization that there is, in fact, no other.

It is time to open the doors.

I'm afraid today. Of what? I don't know. I'm afraid that the fear I feel is only me. I'm equally afraid that the fear I feel belongs to the larger body of my brothers and sisters in the world.

(Someone is likely to be thinking "Love is the absence of fear" -- and thus I am fallen outside the protection of love. This might be so. Hence, fear.)

Question: You say that the suchlike Dharma Nature is embodied by both sentient beings and the Buddhas identically and without duality. Therefore, if one group is deluded, both should be deluded. If one group is enlightened, both should be enlightened. Why are only Buddhas enlightened, while sentient beings are deluded?

Answer: At this point we enter the inconceivable portion of this teaching, which cannot be understood by the ordinary mind. One becomes enlightened by discerning the mind; one is deluded because of losing awareness of True Nature. If the conditions necessary for you to understand this occur, then they occur; it cannot be definitely explained. Simply rely on the ultimate truth and maintain awareness of your own True Mind.

Therefore, the Vimalakirti Sutra says: “Dharmas have no Self Nature and no Other Nature. Dharmas were fundamentally not generated in the first place and are not now extinguished. Enlightenment is to transcend the two extremes and enter into non discriminating wisdom. If you can understand this doctrine, then during all your activities you should simply maintain awareness of your fundamental Pure Mind. Do this constantly and fixedly, without generating false thought or the illusion of personal possession. Enlightenment will thus occur of itself.

If you ask a lot of questions, the number of doctrinal questions will become greater and greater. If you want to understand the essential point of Buddhism, then be aware that maintaining awareness of the mind is paramount. Maintaining awareness of the mind is the fundamental basis of nirvana, the essential gateway for entering the path, the basic principle of the entire Buddhist canon, and the patriarch of all the Buddhas of past, present, and future.
{--Hung-jen (early 8th century), Excerpted from: The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch’an Buddhism, by John R. McRae 1986}

My mind has gotten away from me. I slip and tumble down the slope of rootless suspicion.

I am alone.

In a ditch.

Words are stones.

Even the most benevolent are hurled weapons cutting my face and head.

There's nothing to do but let the day go its way across the sky to its horizon.

I can't see anyone passing by.

Throughout night, rain. Purple Finch sings at daylight. Flags are curled back over railing on balcony.

A good day to be quiet and ask: What is spirituality?

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

Begin with breath. Breathe!

Look around. See!

Listen openly. Hear!

Engage what is there. Serve.

My reading of what happened in early Christianity is that those communities knew Jesus the Christ was risen and living. Did they want to hear the stories of Jesus? Of course. But that is not why these four Gospels were written or collected into the canon. These four Gospels --and only these four Gospels-- form the internal and eternal sequence of spiritual practice: Face change, endure suffering, receive joy, and serve. Early Christians wanted to know how to practice Christianity --not the flat words of an "original Jesus." And the great truth has endured the passage of centuries and numerous translations.
(from THE SOCIAL EDGE INTERVIEW: AUTHOR AND SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR ALEXANDER SHAIA, by Gerry McCarthy) http://www.thesocialedge.com/archives/gerrymccarthy/1articles-apr2007.shtml

Wind stiffens flags at wharf's end by Wayfarer Marine where blue travel-lift waits on next hull.

Preparing farm prison presentation/conversation to be held in three weeks. Some poems and questions about topic: What is Spirituality? "What is" spirituality is the most difficult practice. Who can take in the behavior and secret shenanigans of the world and still practice a transformative engagement that occasions profound friendship and panentheistic revitalization of this phenomenal existence?

One can begin with Shaia's "Quadratos" -- namely:

[T]he internal and eternal sequence of spiritual practice: Face change, endure suffering, receive joy, and serve.

The fragrance of rain borne by wind over salt seas.

Water weaves ways down wet window.

There are days when the only sanity is solitude.

What sages learn
Is to return their nature
To the beginning
And let their minds
Travel freely in
Openness.
What developed people,
Learn is to link their nature
To vast emptiness and,
Become aware of the
Silent infinite.
(- Huai-nan-tzu)

Solitude is the open itself.

Without belief or ideology, the open emptiness of solitude is comfort.

Since my house burned down
I now own a better view
Of the rising moon
(-- Poem by Masahide, 1657-1723)

Elsewhere, Masahide's poem is translated as:

The barn’s burnt down
but now I can see
the moon above.

Loss opens once hidden vistas.

This.

Alone.

Suffices.

Longing: The erstwhile natural state of humankind. Belonging: That which is longed for. Breathing: That which we do before, during, and after the course of longing and belonging. Until, that is, breath pauses, disappears, enters stillness.

One of the reasons we call breath (or 'spirit') 'holy' is because there is no life without it.

Thomas Aquinas when trying intellectually to interpret the revealed mystery of the Trinity,...saw the Word, the Son, proceeding by way or by mode of understanding and the Breath, the Spirit, proceeding by way or by mode of will.
(P.3, The Word and the Spirit, by Yves Congar, c.1984)

Will is our longing for home; home is where we dwell as one.

Yesterday Meetingbrook began an additional place of conversation at Maine State Prison, a segregated unit not able to avail themselves of ordinary offerings. We unpack some Metallica lyrics and observe how many of us mask our inner life and insights in harsh noise designed to turn away anyone approaching.

The waterfall on South Mountain hits the rocks,
Tosses back its foam with terrifying thunder,
Blotting out even face-to-face talk.
Collapsing water and bouncing foam soak blue moss,
Old moss so thick
It drowns the spring grass.
Animals are hushed.
Birds fly but don’t sing
Yet a white turtle plays on the
Pool’s sand floor
Under riotous spray,
Sliding about with the torrents.
The people of the land are benevolent.
No angling or net fishing.
The white turtle lives out its life, naturally.
- Wang Wei (701-761)

Our lives are lived in the midst of unsettling externals and equally difficult to decipher interior impulses. We're often surprised to look around and see where we are, where we've landed.

Where The Wild Things Are (Metallica lyrics)
Artist: Metallica
Album: Reload
Year: 1997
Title: Where The Wild Things Are

So wake up, sleepy one
It's time to save your world

Steal dreams and give to you
Shoplift a thought or two
All children touch the sun
Burn fingers one by one, by one

Will this earth be good to you?
Keep you clean or stain through?

So wake up, sleepy one
It's time to save your world
You're where the wild things are
Toy soldiers off to war

Big eyes to open soon
Believing all under sun and moon
But does heaven know you're here?
And did they give you smiles or tears?
No, no tears

Will this earth be good to you?
Keep you clean or stain through?

So wake up, sleepy one
It's time to save your world
You're where the wild things are
Toy soldiers off to war

You swing your rattle down
Call to arms, the trumpets sound
Toy horses start the charge
Robot chessmen standing guard

Hand puppets storm the beach
Fire trucks trapped out of reach
Hand puppets storm the beach
Fire trucks trapped out of reach
All clowns reinforce the rear
Slingshots fire into the air
All clowns reinforce the rear
Slingshots fire into the air
Stuffed bears hold the hill till death
Crossfire from the marionettes
Stuffed bears hold the hill till death
Crossfire from the marionettes
We shall never surrender

All you children touch the sun
Burn your fingers one by one
Will this earth be good to you?
Keep you clean or stain through?

So wake up, sleepy one
It's time to save your world
You're where the wild things are
Toy soldiers off to war
Off to war
Off to war

So close your little eyes
(http://www.lyricsmania.com/lyrics/metallica_lyrics_219/reload_lyrics_1089/where_the_wild_things_are_lyrics_12370.html)

Some wonder: Where is God in this world?

Theologians mull:

The Spirit, then, is from the Father and the Son. Augustine reflects about this datum, often within the context of his ordinary preoccupations, such as the need to answer certain questions, to reply to the Donatists, or to throw light on the spiritual life of believers and their life in the Church. He says, for example:

'Scripture enables us to know in the Father the principle, auctoritas, in the Son being begotten and born, nativitas, and in the Spirit the union of the Father and the Son, Patris Filiique communitas... The society of the unity of the Church of God, outside of which there is no remission of sins, is in a sense the work of the Holy Spirit, with, of course, the cooperation of the Father and the Son, because the Holy Spirit himself is in a sense the society of the Father and Son.

The Father is not possessed in common as Father by the Son and the Holy Spirit, because he is not the Father of the two. The Son is not possessed in common as Son by the Father and the Holy Spirit, because he is not the Son of the two. But the Holy Spirit is possessed in common by the Father and the Son, because he is the one Spirit of the two.' (27)

Augustine was naturally loving and always gave priority to charity. As a pastor and teacher living in the midst of Donatists, he elaborated an ecclesiology at two levels, that of the sacramentum and that of unitas-charitas-Columba, in which the Spirit was the principle of life, unity and effectiveness to save. Even in his early writings, he called the Spirit charitas. (28) This idea emerges from the first evidence of his interest in a theology of the Holy Spirit. It can be found, for example, in his preaching and his commentaries on Scripture. (29) It is clearly present in De Trin. VI, 5, 7. Augustine concludes: 'They are three, the one loving the one who has his being from him, the other loving the one from whom he has his being, and that love itself.'
(from, Augustine, the Trinity, and the Filioque-Yves Congar; St. Augustine's Theology of the Holy Trinity. Excerpt from Yves Congar's book I Believe in the Holy Spirit {vol. 3, Part B - chapter 1: Augustine} outlines Saint Augustine's understanding of the person and role of the Holy Spirit in relation to the other two persons of the Most Holy Trinity.) http://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/library_article/736/Augustine__the_Trinity__and_the_Filioque_Yves_Congar.html

Where are we in this world?

We look. We listen. We engage.

That.

(In effect. Is...)

Love.

Itself.

It is good to be in conversation circles at the prison.

44

Fame or integrity: which is more important?
Money or happiness: which is more valuable?
Success of failure: which is more destructive?

If you look to others for fulfillment,
you will never truly be fulfilled.
If your happiness depends on money,
you will never be happy with yourself.

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching)

And to belong.

In the world.

A woman we know dislikes religion -- immensely. Even as we converse and argue together, I admit she has a point. Our deeper argument has to do with the relationship of individual to belief. A man we know worries about casting any doubt on a person's belief. His concern centers on the question of what does he have as replacement belief should his words cause their current belief to fall away.

It would be a difficult argument and a harder practice to claim that religion and belief are unnecessary. I would not make that claim. Unless...a profound faith, an existential hope, and a fearless love were to wander into our lives and be recognized as the mysterious presence of what once we were satisfied to call "God."

This ineffable knowing would have no exterior validation other than the day to day living of one's life. No rational proof, no literary tenets, and no rhetorical persuasion would be satisfactory credential. Only the breath by breath, step by step, glance by glance, engaged ordinariness of simple presence -- only this mere being-with one another in everydayness would be the offering of such a life

The problem is not religion but religious orthodoxy. Most moral thinkers—from Socrates to Christ to Francis of Assisi—eschewed the written word because they knew, I suspect, that once things were written down they became, in the wrong hands, codified and used not to promote morality but conformity, subservience and repression. Writing freezes speech. George Steiner calls this “the decay into writing.” Language is turned from a living and fluid form of moral inquiry to a tool of bondage.

The moment the writers of the Gospels set down the words of Jesus they began to kill the message. There is no room for prophets within religious institutions—indeed within any institutions—for as Paul Tillich knew, all human institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Tribal societies persecute and silence prophets. Open societies tolerate them at their fringes, and our prophets today come not from the church but from our artists, poets and writers who follow their inner authority. Samuel Beckett’s voice is one of modernity’s most authentically religious. Beckett, like the author of Ecclesiastes, was a realist. He saw the pathetic, empty monuments we spend a lifetime building to ourselves. He knew, as we read in Ecclesiastes, that nothing is certain or permanent, real or unreal, and that the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal, that, since death awaits us all, all is vanity, that we must give up on the childish notion that one is rewarded for virtue or wisdom. In Ecclesiastes God has put ’olam into man’s mind. ’Olam usually means eternity, but it also means the sense of mystery or obscurity. We do not know what this mystery means. It teases us, as Keats wrote, out of thought. And once we recognize it and face it, simplistic answers no longer work. We are all born lost. Our vain belief in our own powers, in our reason, blinds us.

Those who silenced Jesus represented all human societies, not the Romans or the Jews. When Jesus attacks the chief priests, scribes, lawyers, Pharisees, Sadducees and other “blind guides” he is attacking forms of oppression as endemic to Christianity, as to all religions and all ideologies. If civil or religious authority enforces an iron and self-righteous conformity among members of a community, then faith loses its uncertainty, and the element of risk is removed from acts of faith. Faith is then transformed into ideology. Those who deform faith into creeds, who use it as a litmus test for institutional fidelity, root religion in a profane rather than a sacred context. They seek, like all who worship idols, to give the world a unity and coherency it does not possess. They ossify the message. And once ossified it can never reach an existential level, can never rise to ethical freedom—to faith. The more vast the gap between professed faith and acts of faith, the more vast our delusions about our own grandeur and importance, the more intolerant, aggressive and dangerous we become.
(from "Chris Hedges: I Don’t Believe in Atheists," May 22, 2007, By Chris Hedges.
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday night, Chris Hedges and Sam Harris debated “Religion, Politics and the End of the World.” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070523_chris_hedges_i_dont_believe_in_atheists/)

Here at Ragged Mountain we have our own brand of intolerance. This morning the hav-a-heart trap rattled noisily. When I approached there were two red squirrels saying "Uh oh!" I took them for a ride to a lovely setting with ocean view where they quickly found a tree to reassess their needs. Back at the farmhouse we'll listen to the ceiling and the walls to determine whether the crawlspaces find new tenants. Extraordinary rendition is closer to home than I'd easily admit.

In the shop, discussion often goes to the dangerous influences in our lives. If someone feels religion or belief to be dangerous influences, there are still the persons-as-themselves to be considered, respected, and engaged. Each one of us has a history and a traceable journey we've traversed. Some have moved from one belief to another, from one religion to another, or from a particular tradition to the abandonment of that tradition. These are sometimes very personal and very difficult transitions. Some of us stay with the beliefs, religion, and tradition of our earliest days. There are many permutations of personal spiritual life. Each, I submit, must be acknowledged and appreciated as being, for the individual involved, the journey they travel. We honor one another by honoring the journey.

We also inquire. We ask: How is your journey? We ask: How can we help? We ask: Tell us where you've been and where you are, and where you feel you might be heading?

If we ask into our own journeys, we are prepared to hear the inquiries of others. If we are willing to share (safely) the questions we've asked and the answers we've heard, we are valuable companions to brothers and sisters on their ways.

The most valuable responses we can give to the questions of belief and religion are our own responses. When we are willing to say where we are, others might hear where they are.

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
(Reinhold Niebuhr, in his Irony of American History, c.1952.)

If we are able to forgive ourselves for being exactly as we are at the time we are that way, we might learn how to forgive one another for being exactly as each is at the time they are that way.

Put another way, every journey begins with acceptance and ultimately arrives at acceptance. Between acceptance and acceptance is the wobbly, wavering, wonderful and sometimes wayward journey we call our lives.

In the Park

You have forty-nine days between
death and rebirth if you're a Buddhist.
Even the smallest soul could swim
the English Channel in that time
or climb, like a ten-month-old child,
every step of the Washington Monument
to travel across, up, down, over or through
–you won't know till you get there which to do.

He laid on me for a few seconds
said Roscoe Black, who lived to tell
about his skirmish with a grizzly bear
in Glacier Park. He laid on me not doing anything. I could feel his heart
beating against my heart.
Never mind lie and lay, the whole world
confuses them. For Roscoe Black you might say
all forty-nine days flew by.

I was raised on the Old Testament.
In it God talks to Moses, Noah,
Samuel, and they answer.
People confer with angels. Certain
animals converse with humans.
It's a simple world, full of crossovers.
Heaven's an airy Somewhere, and God
has a nasty temper when provoked,
but if there is a Hell, little is made of it.
No longtailed Devil, no eternal fire,

and no choosing what to come back as.
When the grizzly bear appears, he lies/lays down
on atheist and zealot. In the pitch-dark
each of us waits for him in Glacier Park.
(Poem: "In the Park" by Maxine Kumin, from Nurture. Viking Penguin, 1989.)

Last evening's conversation was about Patricia's interest in the boundless.

Much help is needed to negotiate and navigate our way through the barriers and the boundaries.

The grizzly patterns.

Wanting unraveling.

It is a fact that many in the world mock others in the world. Mockery is just another one of those facts of life everyone must learn to endure. To endure these difficult experiences -- without cynicism or bitterness, but with composure and equanimity -- is a meditative practice worth learning

As the gate of heaven opens and closes,
Can you be impassive?
As understanding reaches everywhere,
Can you be innocent?
Producing and developing,
Producing without possessing,
Doing without presuming,
Growing without domineering:
This is called mysterious power.
(- Tao-te Ching)

To endure something difficult is not the same as relinquishing one's dignity and being cowed by the mockery heaped. In the beginnings of Christianity the notion of martyrdom -- suffering for what you hold as true -- was rife.

They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem; Jesus was walking on ahead of them; they were in a daze, and those who followed were apprehensive.
(--Mark 10:32)

Of course, apprehensive. It is a shock to the system (the personal system as well as the political system) when you realize your views are eliciting mockery and scorn.

Cindy Sheehan, once reviled by the Republicans for her criticism of them, becomes also reviled by Democrats after criticizing them. She holds as true that neither of the political parties is really interested nor courageous enough to effectively admit and act on the futile failure of this country's invasion and occupation of Iraq. She is mocked. She withdraws from the fray.

12. Nirvana is attained by giving all,
Nirvana is the object of my striving;
And all must be surrendered in a single instant,
Therefore it is best to give it all to others.

13. This body I have now resigned
To serve the pleasure of all living beings.
Let them ever kill, despise, and beat it,
Using it according to their wish.

14. And though they treat it like a toy,
Or make of it the butt of every mockery,
My body has been given up to them.
Why should I make so much of it?

15. And so let beings do to me
Whatever does not bring them injury.
Whenever they may think of me,
Let this not fail to bring them benefit.
(Excerpt from Shantideva's The Way of the Bodhisattva, From Chapter 3: Taking Hold of Bodhichitta)

What does others injury is what they do to us. Likewise, our acts and intentions concerning ourselves go a long way to either bring injury or pardon to another. We heal others when we are ourselves healed. Wholeness has no other place to go but everywhere.

mock·er·y (mk-r)
n. pl. mock·er·ies
1. Scornfully contemptuous ridicule; derision.
2. A specific act of ridicule or derision.
3. An object of scorn or ridicule: (made a mockery of the rules.)
4. A false, derisive, or impudent imitation: (The trial was a mockery of justice.)
5. Something ludicrously futile or unsuitable: (The few packages of food seemed a mockery in the face of such enormous destitution.)
(--from The Free Dictionary)

Let's find something to praise.

Some small appreciation.

To countervail.

To encourage.

Is there no going back?

Carrying vitality and consciousness,
Embracing them as one,
Can you keep them from parting?
Concentrating energy,
Making it supple,
Can you be like an infant?
Purifying hidden perception,
Can you make it flawless?
Loving the people,
Governing the nation,
Can you be uncontrived?
- Tao-te Ching

If there is no leaving home, there is no going home again.

There's no going back because there is no "back" to return to.

There's no time like the present.

No time.

Like...(only just)

The present.

If we were mindful, would we agree with Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote in the Prologue to his Report to Greco, that : "God is being built."?

Into a person,
Absolutely free
From thoughts and emotions,
Even the tiger finds no room
To insert its fierce claws.
- Shinkage-ryu sword school

I don't know why God is feared. Someone has badly imprisoned human imagination.

Our ancestors call out to us in our cells and memories. They are asking us to reconsider our myths, reverse our thinking, and reverence the One from which we come and to which we are to be building. There is now, and always has been, a truer way to dwell and act than that which deception wishes to turned us from. "Way" -- whether as articulated by Christ, or by Lao Tzu -- is our true course.

"Reach what you can, my child."
Your voice was grave and dark, as though iisuing from the deep larynx of the earth.
It reached the roots of my mind, but my heart remained unshaken.
"Grandfather," I called more loudly now, give me a more difficult, more Cretan command."
Hardly had I finished speaking when, all at once, a hissing flame cleaved the air. The indomitable ancestor with the thyme roots tangled in his locks vanished from my sight; a cry was left on Sinai's peak, an upright cry full of command, and the air trembled:
"Reach what you cannot!"
(--p.22, in Report to Greco, by Nikos Kazantzakis, c.1965)

To reach what "I" cannot requires "you" and "you" and "you," "Our" father/mother, our ancestors and guardian angels, our deepest longings and most sacred instincts -- all collate and collaborate together to awaken our attention.

In the United States today is Memorial Day. For us it is a time to honor and pray for all those dead and deadened by war. So many have died. So many have been deadened.

God is the most resplendent face of despair, the most resplendent face of hope. You are pushing me beyond hope and despair, grandfather, beyond the age-old frontiers. Where? I gaze around me, I gaze inside me.Virtue has gone mad, geometry and matter have gone mad.The law-giving mind must come again to establish a new order, new laws.The world must become a richer harmony.
(--p.22, Kazantzakis)

This is the day following Pentecost. Something happened that day...long ago. Was it an intimation of a "richer harmony" beyond hope and despair?

I belong to this longing for a richer harmony. And I long to follow this "Way" with all who are willing to accept the gift of being "friend" one to another. If this is "church' -- then I am a church-dweller. Church is the doing of what we are. Are we friends on the way to a more subtle, richer harmony?

They have set their mouth in the heavens,
and their tongue traverses the earth.
Thus they sit in their lofty positions,
and the flood-waters cannot reach them.
They ask, “How can God know?
Does the Most High have any understanding?”
Behold, then, the wicked, always prosperous:
their riches growing for ever.
(from Ps. 72, Office of Readings)

Many of us do not attend church any longer. Not even those who show up at church on Saturdays or Sundays are assured they are attending church. Church is the doing of what we are. If we are not engaging (with body, heart, or mind) all our brothers and sisters, near or far -- we are not attending church.

Mindfulness is today's church without and beyond walls.

Mindfulness is present-time awareness. It takes place in the here and now. It is the observance of what is happening right now, in the present moment. It stays forever in the present, perpetually on the crest of the ongoing wave of passing time.

If you are remembering your second-grade teacher, that is memory. When you then become aware that you are remembering your second-grade teacher, that is mindfulness. If you then conceptualize that process and say to yourself, "Oh, I am remembering," that is thinking.
(-Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English)

If we are willing to practice mindfulness, we are being built as God is being built.

The priest in Belfast mentioned the "Way" Jesus spoke of, and the "friends" he spoke with.

1 When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together.
(--Acts 2)

Perhaps "church" is the practice of being "all in one place together." (Not a building; not an institution; not even a denomination.) When we attend one another wholeheartedly, we are in the "place" of the "way" of "friends."

All of them look to you
to give them their food when they need it.
You give it to them, and they gather;
you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
But turn away, and they are dismayed;
take away their breath, and they die,
once more they will turn into dust.
You will send forth your breath, they will come to life;
you will renew the face of the earth.
(--from Psalm 104)

We will come to life.

With. One. Breath.

As is the way of friends.

Seeing things through.

Together.

We are you.

What is this Holy Spirit?

The question clear,
The answer deep,
Each particle,
Each instant a reality,
A bird call shrills
Through mountain dawn:
Look where the old
Master sits, a rock, in Zen.

- Sodo (1841-1920)

The other night, somewhere between 1:00am and 3:30am two owls called back and forth to each other in the valley echo of Ragged and Bald Mountains. Their five pointed sequence went on through dozing off and waking up.

26. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.
(-- John 14:26; New International Version)

We need to be re-minded.

Everything has been said -- all at once, all of a piece. It has been a very long time since this existence was spoken-into-being. The sounds of being -- words, vowels, and consonants -- are still making their way through space/time to our eyes and ears.

To be spoken-into-being is the fact of human life. It is a continual reverberation.

If the Holy Spirit is the constant and continual reverberation of creative inspiration, we are pleased to pray for, to, and with the Holy Spirit. We are the corresponding echo of belonging.

We belong in silence.

Breathing into and being breathed upon.

A lovely silence of belonging.

We belong in silence.

All the places we're not.

One minute of sitting, one inch of Buddha.
Like lightning all thoughts come and pass.
Just once look into your mind-depths:
Nothing else has ever been.
- Manzan (1635-1714)

We spoke about the film Into Great Silence (Die Grosse Stille).

Dee said, "They didn't smile." Ananur said, "They were so secure."

They were so secure, maybe they didn't have to smile.

All the places we're not, love can only be.

Love can only be where we are not.

Tell me: Where is God not?

If we disappear, that is, if our self-centered ego dissolves into mere and clear presence, will God be realized?

Forget security.

Honor your work.

Smile.

We are exiles from our true home.

This affair is like the bright sun in the blue sky, shining clearly, changeless and motionless, without diminishing or increasing. It shines everywhere in the daily activities of everyone, appearing in everything. Though you try to grasp it, you cannot get it; though you try to abandon it, it always remains. It is vast and unobstructed, utterly empty. Like a gourd floating on water, it cannot be reined in or held down. Since ancient times, when good people of the Path have attained this, they’ve appeared and disappeared in the sea of birth and death, able to use it fully. There is no deficit or surplus: like cutting up sandalwood, each piece is it.
(- Letter to Hsu Tun-chi from Zen Master Ta Hui)

Becoming an exile is necessary. Home is not in a single place. We must constantly leave home to happen upon home as it reveals itself to us.

Body Found in Iraq Is California Soldier,
By JEREMIAH MARQUEZ
Associated Press Writer

Posted: Today at 9:03 p.m. Updated: 29 minutes ago

TORRANCE, Calif. — The body of a U.S. soldier found in the Euphrates River in Iraq was identified Wednesday as a California man who was abducted with two comrades a week and a half ago, a relative said.

What did we expect? War murders men, women, and children. People who are deluded by security will not hear the cries of exiles.

We are spiritual exiles.

God is not in a single place.

We must leave God and family to happen upon God and family.

I sorrow for God found dead in the Euphrates River. I sorrow for the California man whose body washed up on shore. I pray for him, his family. I pray for God. It is a mystery

In Iraq, each soldier is it. Each civilian is it. You are it.

Exiles.

Face it.

Cheryl said, "Even in grief, joy."

Others said, "Even in anger, joy." Even in depression, joy."

Followers of the Way, do not be deceived by teachers who everywhere say “I know Zen, I understand the Way,” and who endlessly deliver discussions like mountain torrents. All this is action that produces hellish Karma. If one is a true learner of the Way, one does not search for the faults of the world, but rather speedily applies oneself to attain genuine insight. If one only can see with perfect clarity, then all is completed.
- Rinzai (d. 866)

Maybe joy is appreciating that what is taking place is, indeed, taking place.

Joy is completely being-with what is taking place.

Earlier in the shop, before conversation, someone spontaneously called for a resolution of impeachment of the president and vice president. By swift and sudden parliamentary maneuver, a motion was made, seconded, and voted on. Outside, Jeffrey measured the pulpit for a new set of beams, Richard fastened hooks for a diminished number of dinghy lines, and Thomas complained that the code for a fence he had to construct around his gallery's roof sculpture garden was stricter than the restaurant's there at the harbor.

I'm not sure anyone recorded the vote inside the shop, or whether there is any mechanism to implement what was decided. One man voted with his back to the proceedings.

It was a typical lovely sunny Tuesday at the harbour. I'm not sure anyone really wants impeachment. It would be so embarrassing.

"Even in embarrassment, joy," says someone without opening her mouth, without counting today's dead in Iraq.

I don't always follow my breath. Sometimes it leads me through body pain. I'd rather fall asleep. Sometimes my breath says: "Don't mind me; I'm just passing through."

In seated meditation, with one's back straight, one is enjoined to breathe naturally but deeply, intentionally and slowly, so that the breathing is centered on the lower diaphragm. One thus becomes aware that it is the whole body, not just the lungs, that participates, or rather, partakes, in the breathing. And as one becomes more and more familiarized with this way of breathing while doing zazen, this way of real-izing one's connectedness with the breath flows into what one does after zazen. One finds oneself breathing more easily and with a greater sense of relaxation and satisfaction.
This process of familiarization with the breath is what we experience as we go on in our practice: the connection between our zazen and the rest of our daily life, taking the fourfold posture given above, gyo-zen, or Zen in action, ju-zen, or Zen in passivity or relaxation, and ga-zen, or Zen in horizontal position, that is, even while one is asleep, in addition to zazen, comes to be realized more and more.
(--from Rediscovering the Breath, by Ruben Habito; Excerpted from Healing Breath, Orbis Books)

These last few days we've been coughing and trying not to speak or breathe. We take walks with Cesco along Ragged bottom to Hosmer Pond, the three of us slow and variously failing. Something has grabbed us and shaken us wobbly.

Each moment, death is possible. It's the price of birth. It's the payment at the end of the check-out line. After a life spent shopping for -- whatever -- love, happiness, peace, enlightenment, we have to "check out." It is our debt for all the joys, happiness, ecstasy, and love we've been given throughout our lives. The cost of each life is exactly one death. May all beings get their money's worth!
(--from Zen and Hospice, By Joe Benenate, DO; Maria Kannon Zen Center)

We meet a young Border Collie racing after tennis balls flung up hill. Her name is Annie. She and Cesco greet one another. Annie shares her ball. Her human says she does that with no one. She must be taking compassion on an old failing relative. It is joyful to view the expanse of age and vitality between the 3 year old and the 16 year old working dogs.

It can be dangerous to encounter others’ pain, because it’s tempting to shut it out, not feel it. I’d especially like to shut out the pain -- and therefore the humanity -- of people with whom I disagree – the soldier in the tank, Donald Rumsfeld, suicide bombers.

But the experience of encountering another’s pain can also break through the illusion that we are separate beings. One day during a religious festival in 2004, some people set off bombs that ripped through Shi’a shrines in both Baghdad and Kerbala. I knew that some dear Iraqi friends, including a little girl named Houda whom I especially loved, were at the shrine in Kerbala. I was trapped for awhile at the shrine in Baghdad and could not get to their house until the following day. I practically ran to their home, and when I saw little Houda, surprised both myself and her by bursting into tears.

That is when I realized how much I loved her, that she was my own child. And I realized that every child is my own child – every child is our own, every person our brother or sister, every sentient being, every animal, rock and tree, is part of us. Literally, by blood, by breath. We are each other and we are responsible for each other. If we all woke up to this, wars would disappear because we simply could not hurt each other anymore. Conflict would not disappear, but we’d figure out some other way to solve our problems.
(from Practicing Zen in Iraq, By Sheila Provencher, Maria Kannon Zen Center)

There's a simplicity when illness lays you low.

Attention naturally falls to breath.

Mine.

Yours.

Our.