Angels among us?

Etymology: The word "angel" in English (from Old English and German Engel), French (from Old French angele), Spanish, and many other Romance languages are derived from the Latin angelus, itself derived from Koine Greek: angelos, "messenger" The ultimate etymology of that word in Greek is uncertain.[2]

In Hebrew & Arabic the primary term for "angel" is "malakh", "malaika", or "malak" (derived from the Semitic consonantal root l-'-k, meaning "to send." This root is also found in the noun "Melakha", meaning "work", and the noun "Mal'achut", meaning "message". Other words referring to angels include kruv[3] describing young children, from which the English word "cherub" is derived. Another Hebrew term is Gil-Gulim, meaning "revolving," and angels are sometimes depicted as wheels with wings. Derived from this is the Hebrew term "Gal-Gal," "the rotation of fortune, change."[4]
(--Wikipedia)

What if "angel" was the word we use for the unbroken connection extending throughout all of existence -- all of being -- between what we call the Holy and what we call Ourselves? In other words, "angel" is the communicative intuitive remembering of wholeness, going to origin, open flow of awareness with no diversion.

If, for an instant, we become alert to the revelation of what is taking place, we are in the presence. We might say we are in the presence of angels, or we might say we are in the presence of Presence Itself. No bifurcation. Rather, a susurrus of sensate awareness seeming to suggest from a distance something that enlightens the action we are about to take, the thought we are attempting to reveal, or the reality we are longing to be.

Isolate and full, the moon
Floats over the house by the river.
Into the night the cold water
Rushes away below the gate.
The bright gold spilled on the river
Is never still.
The brilliance of my quilt
Is greater than precious silk.
The circle without blemish.
The empty mountains without sound.
The moon hangs in the vacant, wide constellations.
Pine cones drop in the old garden.
The senna trees bloom.
The same clear glory extends
For ten thousand miles.
- Tu Fu (712-790)

It is not yet easy to dwell in the understanding that all is inseparate and of a piece. We deal with spatials and temporals. There is an 'out there' and an 'in here' in our designations. The prospect that there is only 'here' and that every point along the line, every pause around the circle, is every other point, every other pause -- even while positing the opinion that there is no 'other' -- intrigues us and astounds us.

In our myths, in the stories we speak out of the silence of 'not knowing', we attempt to draw a sketch of our longings and fears.

Michael (the name means "Who is like God?") is said to be the captain of the heavenly armies. He is mentioned in the Scriptures in Daniel 10:13,31; 12:1 (where he is said to be the prince of the people of Israel); in Jude 9 (where he is said to have disputed with the devil about the body of Moses); and in Revelation 12:7 (where he is said to have led the heavenly armies against those of the great dragon). He is generally pictured in full armor, carrying a lance, and with his foot on the neck of a dragon. (Pictures of the Martyr George are often similar, but only Michael has wings.)

Gabriel (the name means "God is my champion") is thought of as the special bearer of messages from God to men. He appears in Daniel 8:16; 9:21 as an explainer of some of Daniel's visions. According to the first chapter of Luke, he announced the forthcoming births of John the Baptist and of our Lord to Zachariah and the Virgin Mary respectively.

Raphael (the name means "God heals") is mentioned in the Apocrypha, in the book of Tobit, where, disguised as a man, he accompanies the young man Tobias on a quest, enables him to accomplish it, and gives him a remedy for the blindness of his aged father.

Uriel (the name means "God is my light" -- compare with "Uriah", which means "the LORD is my light") is mentioned in 4 Esdras.
(--from Michael and All Angels, Sept 29, http://satucket.com/lectionary/Michael.htm)

Rain drenches earth this celebration of angels. In Catholic tradition 29Sept is designated for the Archangels and 2Oct is for the Holy Guardian Angels. In a time of discouragement and disillusionment we long for equanimity and poise in the face of what is presenting itself.

It matters that we attempt to become and remain alert.

Every human and sentient being, every stone and molecule of air, water, mineral, and empty space -- we are all intertwined and interconnected.

If it be.

Your will.

Angels preserve us!

On zafu at first light.

For no reason it rains,
Whispers of reality.
How lovely it sings,
Drop by drop.
Sitting and lying I listen
With emptied mind.
I don’t need ears,
I don’t need rain.
- Chin’gak

Finally bed this late night.

No-birth, no-death.

Cat comes in from rain.

We'll vote soon. Another month and small change. Let's practice now.

Where gather mists and clouds,
A happy world.
Thick swirls of incense smoke
Wreathe Heaven’s Gate.
The bell of Prajna chimes
Through vacant days.
Amida’s sutras are one
On quiet nights
Brooks sigh and sing
Like harps when rain has stopped.
Birds chirp sweet melodies
As sunshine dims.
The Way lies not far off-
Why toil for it?
Bodhi bears fruit
Right here inside the heart.
- Huynh Sanh Thong

Michael Moore's film, Slacker Uprising, ends with REM's "Its The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)".

It's free to see.

America should be .

So lucky.

New moon. Jewish New Year. Archangel's feasts. Free louver doors from someone's driveway.

Bailout plan fails in House of Representatives. One candidate blames the whole thing on the other. It could be funny, the blaming. No one is laughing. These people could possibly be president and vice-president. There's not much light.

A dash of rain upon
The lotus leaves. But the leaves
Remain unmarked, no matter
How hard the raindrops beat.
Mind, be like the lotus leaves,
Unstained by the world.
- Chong Ch’ol (1536)

These are serious times. Economic crisis. Leadership crisis. War and intelligence crisis. Makes you want to go off and listen to loons deep into the night.

People We'd Rather Avoid
Metta (lovingkindness) is to be extended towards all beings and all manifestations, yet most of our difficulties lie with people. It is much easier to love birds, dogs, cats, and trees than it is to love people. Trees and animals don't answer back, but people do, so this is where our training commences. . . . Sometimes people find they don't feel anything while practicing metta meditation. That is nothing to worry about; thoughts aimed often enough in the right direction eventually produce the feelings. All our sense contacts produce feelings. Thoughts are the sixth sense, and even if we are only thinking metta, eventually the feeling will arise. It is one means of helping us to gain this heart quality, but certainly not the only one.

In our daily activities all of us are confronted with other people and often with those whom we would rather avoid. These are our challenges, lessons and tests. If we consider them in that manner we won't be so irritated by these experiences. . . . When we realize that such a confrontation is exactly what we need at that moment in order to overcome resistance and negativity and substitute metta for those emotions, then we will be grateful for the opportunity.
(--Ayya Khema, in When the Iron Eagle Flies)

Where shall I go? How far can I go? And when I arrive -- what then? Where will I be?

all ignorance toboggans into know

all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter's not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then?

all history's a winter sport or three:
but were it five,i'd still insist that all
history is too small for even me;
for me and you,exceedingly too small.

Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave
merely to toil the scale to shrillerness
per every madge and mabel dick and dave
—tomorrow is our permanent address

and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do,
we'll move away still further:into now                                                                                  (-- Poem by E.E. Cummings)

It's too much to think about.

Storm went east. Ginger cookie got set right. Stars are out. Zazen first, then compline.  

The practice of meditation is a matter of developing and establishing your energy. Indeed you must not waste it. The beginner should just push ahead with determination and awaken the genuine will to practice. Make it your basic purpose in chanting the scriptures to stabilize your energy in your hara. You should not diminish your energy by chanting the scriptures in an unnaturally forced way, nor by emptiness zazen, and the like. In chanting the scriptures, you should just train yourself in the stabilization of your energy.
- Shosan (1579-1655)

Man from France who visits Citeaux visited shop telling love of Trappists. Sufi practitioner moving to state of Washington left address of friendly foundation.

Cat in from out. Up on bed. Dog sticks nose in.

There's no authority says I'm anything other than what I'm not. So I remain anonymous. 

Outside.

Where I belong.

Hurricane, they say. Tonight more rain and wind. Late Sunday it will make landfall down east Maine or one of the Atlantic Provinces -- New Brunswick or Nova Scotia. There's a surprise. A small hurricane, they say, more a tropical storm. Still, small boats are huddling inner harbor.

After sunset the whole world is cool,
And after a rain, mountains and rivers are clear.
The prevailing wind comes from the west,
The sounds of autumn are congealed
In the sounds of grasses and trees.
I feel the rapidity of passing years,
And lament the fading away of material things.
Who would feel distressed
Seeing how the seasons affect man’s emotions? Let me ask the philosopher of the Gateway
To the Void.
What method is there to practice,
Which will cause me to abandon the
Desires for gain and not cause
Vexations to arise?
- Po-Chu-i (772-846)

The new coffee maker brewed on cue at 6AM in the newly cavernous kitchen at Ragged Mountain. Oatmeal with Kefir, French Vanilla yogurt, chocolate chips melted therein.

A couple from Vermont stop in. A geologist, she is taken with one of the stones Saskia found on an island. He tells me about Martinism. They take a ginger cookie and forget to pay before they leave.

Consequently, the Trinity, composed of the three terms which we have specified, should be considered under two aspects.

1. We should first look at the synthesis of this trinity, the cause of its reality. The third term (God the Holy Spirit) contains these conditions in itself.

2. We should then analyze this synthesis by dividing it into its three constituent terms, and by determining the existence of the two opposite terms, active and passive, positive and negative. We must not forget that during this analysis we destroy the reality of the being thus divided into fractions.

Every reality, of whatever kind it might be, is therefore composed of three terms, and these three terms are contained in one sole whole. This truth is quite as applicable to physics as to metaphysics; the works of Louis Lucas upon physics and chemistry, 1 and of Wronski in mathematics, 2 are an irresistible argument against those who think that a philosophical principle is a foolish idea, without any practical import.

The third term of our theogonic series, or God the Holy Ghost, therefore represents the whole body of God, who can be analyzed in this way--
(--from CHAPTER XIV. GENERAL SUMMARY OF THE SYMBOLICAL TAROT. THEOGONY--ANDROGONY--COSMOGONY, in The Tarot of the Bohemians, By Papus, [Gérard Encausse, (b. 1865 d. 1916)] Translated by A. P Morton, [1892])

I give Michael cookie for helping the woman bring sailboat to finger float. He thinks we'll catch fish for weeks with the knots she netted to cleats for security. He's like that.

The water is still calm. No wind yet. I'll take in the dory rower wind vane and fold in the sail flag. The tables are rolled to rear of patio. Chairs tucked under yellow bird house by lock marina fence.

There you are.

Time to go.

Home.

Senators McCain and Obama met in Louisiana tonight in their first debate. Good for them. We need to hear them side by side.

No matter what they said, the fact of saying it in full sight with no place to hide is important. Even if there are misrepresentations or sleight of hand comments, we can watch how they respond to the peculiar jousts.

Where he lives is indeed most
Elegantly secluded,
And the people who live there
Have all attained tranquility.
Dense groves of bamboo line
Both side of the road,
The clear brook flows by the hut.
How free and relaxed is the monk,
Having abandoned all the worry
And anxiety of the world,
The four meditations unite him
With Suchness so that he regards
Everything as illusory.
- Meng Hao-jan (689-765)

In prison this morning we red Raymond Carver's poem, "Happiness."

Happiness

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
(Poem by Raymond Carver)

One of the men said he sometimes looks out his window at the chain link fence with rolled razor wire atop, and sees it as beautiful.

To see anything as itself is to see beauty.

The longing to see this moment reveal itself, to see what is wholly itself, is beauty.

Look here!

Beautiful!

God is one.

Monk Ch’ung-fan! Monk Ch’ung-fan!
You left in autumn to go to Mt. Fu-fu,
Now it is spring and you have not yet returned.
You must be fascinated by the bustling scene of
Falling flowers and singing birds,
You must be enjoying the solitude, surrounded
By brooks and mountains just outside your door
And window.
Surrounded by hills, who cares anything about
The affairs of the world?
As the city dwellers gaze into the distance,
They see nothing but peaks covered with clouds.
- Wang Wei (701-761)

There is no other.

We're home.

No matter what they tell us.

I prefer compassion.

To you, who are like a solitary cloud coming
Out freely from the mountain cavern,
Any famous scenic mountain serves as your refuge.
- Yuan-chien

Over being right.

Oscar the dog had a bath. His human companion looks for work. Couple from Florida stop by. Maine autumn briskness delights them.

Toy with the flowers
And their fragrance
Scents your garments.
- Kido Chigu (1185-1269)

Walked to Rockport Harbor and back last evening. At harbor a newly constructed boat sits at dock. I climb stairs to look at her.

ADVENTURE is a 53-foot historic replica of an 18th century colonial trading vessel designed by the late William Baker. She will replace an existing replica that currently is on display at the Charlestowne River landing.
(--Rockport Marine writeup)

Belted Galloway herd chewed hay. Said hello to Herb at his grave site in Rockport Cemetery. In my ear the public radio version of the urgency of financial repair.

This morning, church. Waking at dawn, first color coming from eastern horizon. Water in harbor unmoving. Calm at end of dark night. We ate upstairs after Saskia and Rokpa returned from rowing and I from walk. I'm reading from The Moral of the Story, An Anthology of Ethics Through Literature (Singer and Singer editors). The stories remind just how complex living as a human in this existence can be.

One of the regulars talks to two women about hypnosis, psy-ops, proliferation, and other world issues of population, sustained economies, and personal as well as world problems.

Russian chant plays from cd. Now Gregg and Susan's cd, Rambling Sailors, Wanderlust plays sea chanteys. Four women row out to sailboat for first autumn sail. O'a comes by to pick up Rokpa to play with Bailey the elder poodle up on the 12.8 acres for sale.

I drink Kefir, probiotic raspberry version. The air becomes ungrounded with theories swirling like drunken nutrinos just off their trajectory from some unnamed galaxy.

An Opportunity to Create the Future
It is a characteristic tendency of human beings to indulge in emotions such as happiness, grief, or anger in response to present conditions, failing to balance these feelings with the awareness that present conditions are results of past causes. It is illogical to face the present only as an object of enjoyment or tolerance, neglecting to use it as the opportunity to create the future.
(--Muso Kokushi, in Dream Conversations)

If the world is stranger than can be proven, it is not stranger than we can imagine.

Dissociative fugue: People with this condition dissociate by putting real distance between themselves and their identity. For example, you may abruptly leave home or work and travel away, forgetting who you are and possibly adopting a new identity in a new location. People experiencing dissociative fugue typically retain all their faculties and may be very capable of blending in wherever they end up. A fugue episode may last only a few hours or, rarely, as long as many months. Dissociative fugue typically ends as abruptly as it begins. When it lifts, you may feel intensely disoriented, depressed and angry, with no recollection of what happened during the fugue or how you arrived in such unfamiliar circumstances.
(--MayoClinic.com)

Maybe we don't remember who we are. Maybe there are multiple dimensions and multiple personalities. Maybe there are two, three, four, or five Americas, each ruled by secretive cabals intent on hiding their actions and decisions from each other and from the general populace. I don't know. That's beyond me. I like cookies and peanut butter and jam on English muffins.

The Banking, Housing, & Urban Affairs Committee gathered this morning to hear Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission Christopher Cox testify.

But after hours of back-and-forth, the committee’s leaders said explicitly what had seemed clear all day: that they rejected the administration’s plan. “What they have sent us is not acceptable,” the committee chairman, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, told The Associated Press.

The panel’s ranking Republican agreed. “We have to look at some alternatives,” Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama told The A.P.

One after another throughout the session, senators from both parties said that, while they were prepared to move fast, they were far from ready to give the administration everything it wanted in its proposed $700 billion plan to buy up and hopefully resell troubled mortgage-backed securities. (-- Bailout Plan a Hard Sell on Capitol Hill, By MARK LANDLER and STEVEN LEE MYERS, Published: September 23, 2008 The New York Times)

How do we hear what is true? How put into practice what we know to be true? How do we discern the real from the unreal, the natural and authentic from the fabricated and fraudulent?

His mother and his brothers came looking for him, but they could not get to him because of the crowd. He was told, ‘Your mother and brothers are standing outside and want to see you’ But he said in answer, ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and put it into practice.’
(--Luke 8:19 - 21)

In quiet places I sometimes ask out loud for help to listen to what is true. I never hear any response out of the ordinary.

Only ordinary sounds.

From mothers'.

Brothers'.

Sisters'.

Hearing.

Sometimes the ugly sound of a bomb is exactly what it is -- an ugly sound. Whether that bomb is made of destructive metal and explosive detonators, or if it is made of 700 billion doubtful dollars, much of which will go to benefit very greedy men and institutions at root the cause of this financial fiasco. The sound of the oncoming bomb should give us pause.

Between the cost of the Iraq war (some three trillion, says the Washington Post) and the cost of the administration's Wall Street debacle (most likely well over one trillion) -- you would think someone would have thought of simple things like health care for everyone, equal expenditure for educational quality for our children, and proper care of bridges and roads. The sound of our imbalanced priorities hurts the ears of anyone listening.

The sound of peaceful music, the sound of terrible noise, are both clearly revealed as they are and nothing else. Nonetheless, we prefer the peacefulness and dislike the irritation of the noise. We try to control, to change things to how we want them. This can be done with a certain degree but cannot be done completely and eternally. If, on the other hand, we accept things as they are and see things as clearly revealed as they are, that acceptance itself is the first step toward unbreakable peacefulness.
- Eido Tai Shimano (b. 1932)

This might be the one straw too many. It's hard to imagine that enormous amounts of money will be paid out to failed leaders by failed leaders while so many support their "betters" utterly against their own interests and needs.

Do not refuse a kindness to anyone who begs it,
if it is in your power to perform it.
Do not say to your neighbour, ‘Go away! Come another time!
I will give it you tomorrow’, if you can do it now.
Do not plot harm against your neighbour
as he lives unsuspecting next door.
Do not pick a groundless quarrel with a man
who has done you no harm.
Do not emulate the man of violence,
never model your conduct on his;
for the wilful wrong-doer is abhorrent to the Lord,
who confides only in honest men.
The Lord’s curse lies on the house of the wicked,
but he blesses the home of the virtuous.
He mocks those who mock,
but accords his favour to the humble.
(Proverbs 3:27 - 34)

Wisdom and humility are in short supply these days. We are crowded in by mocking mendacity.

We need silence. And space for solitude. Stillness and a sense of holy diffidence. All will, we want to think, be well.

Jesus said:
‘No one lights a lamp to cover it with a bowl or to put it under a bed. No, he puts it on a lamp-stand so that people may see the light when they come in. For nothing is hidden but it will be made clear, nothing secret but it will be known and brought to light. So take care how you hear; for anyone who has will be given more; from anyone who has not, even what he thinks he has will be taken away.’
(Luke 8:16 - 18)

Jesus was talking about understanding, not money. If you have it, it will increase. If you don't have it, what little you might think you have will dissipate. To understand requires stark engagement with what is taking place.

It is good counsel to "take care how you hear."

So many sounds come our way. It is difficult to discern the sincere from the sarcastic -- there are training programs to coach the sinister to sound like the sacred.

Only genuine inner silence will hear the difference.

Listen well.

We are brothers and sisters -- first and foremost.

Learn this first.

Peace wants you.

The mountain air sparkles as the sun sets,
Birds in flocks return together.
In these things there is a fundamental truth,
But when I start to explain it, I lose the words.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

Surrender now.

Friday Evening Conversation reading John O'Donohue's Beauty.

Lola begins, and others contribute to, what we might say (right there, right then) 'beauty' is. We arrive at: Beauty is the longing for this moment to reveal itself -- and what is needed -- so to complete itself.

My mind is like an autumn moon,
Pure and transcendentally elegant.
It is impossible to compare
This mind with anything.
How could it be possible
For me to explain it to you?
- Unknown

When things reveal themselves, when someone shows up at a time of need -- we think: 'beautiful!' When early morning sunlight slants through silence, we experience beauty.
When some person appears and presents an unfiltered view of their own mere nature, without pretense or posturing, we share beauty. When that radiant peace that cannot be articulated visits, and we pause in the open place of grace, we have become for that instant and forevermore -- with beauty, beautiful.

Simply give away your beauty
without talk and reckoning.
You are still. She says for you; I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold,
at last comes over everyone.
(-- Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke)

For 'You are still' the German also allows 'You are silent.'

Explanations, excuses, apologies, attacks and accusations are very often dull reminders we fail beauty.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.
(--Poem by William Carlos Williams)

Read.

And weep.

Here's a solution to the rash lies being promulgated by certain members of the campaign for the American presidency: Do not vote for them. Lies have predominated civic discourse for years. It is time to stop lying. I'll start -- I'll stop.

Only the Things Themselves
What one thinks or reads is always qualified by the preposition "of,"or "about," and does not give us the thing itself. Not mere talk about water, nor the mere sight of a spring, but an actual mouthful of it gives the thirsty complete satisfaction.
(--D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism)

A visiting Baptist minister and his wife visited today. We had a good conversation as brownies baked upstairs. A strong hug said goodbye. We've disagreed over the years. Now none of that matters. We're just who we are.

Tommy and Michael bet a dime whether there'll be a draft by May. I'd lay a side bet their dime won't be worth 4 cents by that time.

"No ideas but in things"
(--William Carlos Williams,from his 1944 poem "A Sort of Song")

Here's the thing: a disaster looms as financial markets collapse and the same government that encouraged predatory lending is patting the failed lenders on the knee, offering their bruised egos some ice cream, and sending them home with a quarter of our future. Meanwhile, foreclosures abound, and the borrowers are out on the curb, no change, no ice cream, no assistance from their government. The scourge of free market socialism for the rich and old fashioned brushoff poverty for the rest of us!

There's scant better humor than Jon Stewart's over the foolishness and crisis.

I don't like the unkind ways the ads have turned.

Appeals to our stupidity are not pretty.

It's hard to laugh them off.

Wall Street is bombed by blind pilots dropping good sense into shredding machines.

the moon's brightness
does it know
where the bombing will be?
(--Santoka Taneda)

The two women talked about their disappointment with the Catholic church and their delight to have made a retreat with Benedictine women. Of course it is strange that monastic spirituality would be deemed other than a Catholic experience.

Maybe it is.

Who else but profoundly contemplative prayerful people would understand the nothing and emptiness of any concept, any image of God.

We laugh together. They play with Rokpa. There is no God.

Like.

God.

What is good for us?

The wind is still, but blossoms fall,
Birds sing in the quiet of the mountain.
This is Kannon’s wondrous wisdom:
Ah!
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

To be here, as who we are, shall we be here.

Last evening's Kabuki theater. Full moon rising seesaws with orange sun falling. Earth rolls with the tide and evening gives round white light in sky a black backdrop. Harvest light from harvest moon.

More and more I realize less and less. As it stands today, I am nobody.

Light

Dwell!
You are the Light itself.
Rely on yourself,
Do not rely on others.
The Dharma is the Light,
Rely on the Dharma.
Do not rely on anything
Other than Dharma.
- Pali verse

I belong nowhere. I know nothing. And even that, I'm not too sure of. To most people, I am nothing. This is a glorious life!

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
(--Poem by Emily Dickinson)

A high school student snaps shutter pointing through window display. Her mother says thank you for the high contrast opportunity. It's what we do.

We'd like to think we're not owned. Not indebted. We are. We'd like to think we are free. Unfettered. Our own persons. We are. Strange to consider that true. Probably is.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
(--Poem by E.E. Cummings)

Young woman taking side trip from college stops by. We talk a bit. She takes Thomas Merton tapes and says she'll be back.

I'm aware things seem tenuous. Nor does it matter. The sun is out. Peanut butter cookies are handed over. Coffee poured. Plum cake (Flammenkuchen) is cut. Two women ignore me as they come in, look at something, then leave. Such confirmation is rare.

Everything and everybody is intensely fragile.

Stocks and banks fall and fold.

The future is not where some thought it might be.

Among the sorrows that tear a mother's heart, disrespect toward her child by inattentive and neglectful others is particularly hurtful. Mary knows a mother's sorrow.

"Buddhist teachings say that every being has been our mother in the past."
( --from Women of Wisdom, by Tsultrim Allione.)

So much room for sorrow!

49. As the bee takes the essence of a flower and flies away without destroying its beauty and perfume, so let the sage wander in this life. . . .

54. The perfume of flowers goes not against the wind, not even the perfume of sandalwood, of rose-bay, or of jasmine; but the perfume of virtue travels against the wind and reaches unto the ends of the world. . .

58. Even as on a heap of rubbish thrown away by the side of the road a lotus flower may grow and blossom with its pure perfume giving joy to the soul, in the same way among the blind multitudes shines the pure light of wisdom of the student who follows the Buddha, the one who is truly awake.
(from - The Dhammapada, trans. by Juan Murasco from Everyday Mind)

The sorrow Mary experiences now is the tendency of our civilization not to see whole, the denial of whole-sight. There exists, rather, a vapid unwillingness to assent to and confirm all that is, all that is needfully alive, and all that is alive and intimately part of us.

One of the endless fascinations for me in studying Shakespeare's texts is the fact that he does not content himself with one view of any given problem. In Romeo and Juliet, for instance, he does not settle for a simple look at the evils of those who engage in feuding, but he factors in many variations on the theme: people who actively engage in feuding die, people who condone feuding suffer, and people who claim that they do not approve of feuding but who lack the courage or strength to actively oppose or stop it also pay the price for their folly. Romeo and Juliet die for their rashness. The Montagues lose two family members for their feuding, as do the Capulets. Even the Prince suffers the loss of family members because, he says, he ignored the wrong-doing. All are punished. Similarly, in Julius Caesar, an even-handed justice is meted out to a number of people who fail to live up to an appropriate standard of loyalty to others.

(--from "All are Punished": Studying Varying Loyalties in Julius Caesar, by Carolyn P. Henley, http://www.shakespearemag.com/fall98/punished.asp)

In Stonington today a once lovely converted sardine carrier lists to port dishevelled and peeling, hardware tossed haphazardly on upper deck, tied to dock like a disoriented mad-woman in a bad movie lashed to her bunk by her feuding offspring.

Financial institutions that sailed fast and devil-may-care, saddled by an inattentive and dry-rotted non-regulatory administration, come crashing down on ledges at low tide threatening to sink many, a dry-drunk executive unable to connect the dots of forecast, frantic profits, and fiscal folly.

The neglected ship of state and state of ship are two sad sights on a financially sad day.

Still, the sun and brisk wind on a warm September day brought us along the peninsula in good cheer. Visiting wharves and churches, Renys and Good Will, donut shop and small cafe, we eat our way into the middle of the ninth month smelling the fragrance of seaweed in low tide and whitecaps on blustery bay.

There is a way to counter sorrow.

Don't be other than it.

Sorrowful situations demand sorrowful attention.

Then -- move through and beyond it as best you can.

Our mothers wish us well.

Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve!
(Our life, our sweetness, and our hope, greetings!)
(--from anthem, Salve Regina)

Greet well one another.

The cross is the transition from ignorance and harmfulness to true aliveness and wakefulness. To die on the cross is to awaken here and now.

So, when Christians celebrate Jesus' death on the cross, it is not some gruesome murder that is the mystery. Rather the mystery is the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness, from mindless reactive impulse to mindful active feeling. The mystery is that anyone could make that transition given the deceit and misdirection that tries to pass for leadership in this country today.

In spring, hundreds of flowers,
In summer, refreshing breeze.
In autumn, harvest moon,
In winter, snowflakes accompany you.
If useless things do not hang in your mind,
Every season is a good season.
- Mumon (1183-1260)

On the feast of the Holy Cross we celebrate this transition. We die to separation and awake to community. We die to arrogance and wake to genuine inquiry. We die to fragmentary interpretations and awaken to integral realization -- we are one another, we are the earth, we are that of God awakening in this existence.

The corpus is not -- neither dead nor alive. The body is transition.

We are crossing over.

Today we crossed the footbridge in Belfast to visit Alden. We like him. We talk of boats, politics, loved ones gone beyond, and the need to vote intelligently.

Jim loaded his skiff for bay crossing to island.

We cross paths with one another -- enriched by realizations experienced therein and within.

It is a fool's errand to try to nail the world to the cross. Only the individual, voluntarily and free of any duress, can step into or onto the transition -- step openly through awareness transitioning into love, justice, and wholesome equality.

Would that there were one or two of us willing and able to put off false self and take up true self full of grace and wisdom.

Accept no substitutes.

It's not about lies. Everybody tells lies. No, the political lies and distortions are about something else.

Holding his stick,
He points directly to humanity,
Yet as he was originally without form,
This portrait is not true.
His form cannot be seen
As form,
His benevolence is merely his
Natural benevolence.
If, all of a sudden,
You can understand this law,
Then your spirit can roam
Beyond the world.
- Ingen (1592-1673)

What are the lies about?

Death.

Each lie kills without mercy.

Presence, attention, listening, & acceptance. That's the answer.

Here's the question: How do you know someone loves you?

Joshu (778-897) asked his teacher, Nansen (748-834),
“What is the Tao?”
Nansen replied, “Ordinary mind is the Tao.”
Joshu asked, “Shall I try to seek it?”
“If you try for it, you will become apart from it,” Nansen replied.
“How can I know the Tao unless I try for it?” persisted Joshu.
“The Tao is not a matter of knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion, not knowing is ignorance. When you have truly reached the Tao, undoubtedly you will find it as vast as the boundless space. How can it be discussed on the level of right and wrong?” With these words, it is said that Joshu came to a sudden realization.
(- Case 19 from Gateless Gate)

Tomorrow on Schooner Bowditch, a memorial for Richard. He died the first of December. We'll bring his brass bowl.

We'll invite the bowl.

Sound his remains into sea.

Returning.

Ourselves.

I imagine, at the instant of their transitioning deaths, the three thousand from seven years ago today made an intention. Their instant of what we call death was spent in prayer. They saw reality, true reality, as only the at-death can see it -- and their hearts and minds opened. That opening expressed a core longing of human existence -- a longing for compassion, love, forgiveness, and peace.

Untainted Space
One of the most common analogies used to describe the Buddha-nature is space itself. This analogy has three aspects. First, just as space is omnipresent and yet is unpolluted by everything it pervades, similarly, Buddha-nature pervades every sentient being without being in any way tainted. Second, just as galaxies and universes arise and pass within space, so do the characteristics of our personalities arise and pass within Buddha-nature. Our sensations arise and pass away; Buddha-nature continues. Third, just as space is never consumed by fire, so this Buddha-nature is never consumed by the "fire" of aging, sickness, or death.
(--B. Alan Wallace, in Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up, from Everyday Mind)

So, too, we today. We open heart and mind to vast and clear space. Our longing is for compassion, love, forgiveness, and peace. That mind, that longing, traverses time and transcends our ordinary consciousness. With this liberated mind we find ourselves comixing here with there, this time with that time -- all is the service of now, the presencing of presence itself.

This comixed, always originating now, is the prayer of compassion, love, forgiveness, and peace.

We share in this with our brothers and sisters of September 11th, each and every expression of September 11th, each and every place we find ourselves.

They teach us in this openness as we teach them in this openness.

The time we share is rife with compassion, love, forgiveness, and peace -- remember how this gift spread in 2001 immediately following the devastation?

And then we forgot.

Let's remember the real gift they gave us, that we give them.

No more distortions.

Rain this Tuesday. John in from Bangor. Chris from Belfast. Dean from the old Camden bookstore. Sam and Susan play harmonica and splice line. Rock climbing couple come in to check radar on web. She's not happy to be flying to Florida in the eyebrow of Ike the storm.

John, Chris, and I have at the large movements of history, economics, population numbers, and geologic shudders. Perhaps what has been looked at as moral flaws of government representatives has merely been their awareness of the inevitability of decline and deterioration resulting in a single-minded effort to survive and prosper during the down slide. Don't we each wish to remain alive and ahead of the jaws of predation?

So many folks are looking at climate and atmosphere and registering despondency. Where, they ask, has the leadership been? Why has there been such reluctance to admit that forces beyond morality and human intention are at work -- the undulations of civilizations laboring under their own weight, the down turn of creativity into decline and rule by dominant minority stifling political creativity with their totalitarian rules and theocratic pronouncements? The stages of genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration were identified by Toynbee -- will there be surcease from the repetitive wheel threatening western civilization at this time of American power?

In a classical text entitled "The Questions of King Milinda," a monk named Nagasena uses an allegory. . . A group of people gathered on the edge of a flooding stream want to go to the far shore but are afraid. They don't know what to do until one wise person comes along, assesses the situation, takes a running leap and jumps to the other side. Seeing the example of that person, the others say, "Yes, it can be done." Then they also jump. In this story the near shore is our usual confused condition, and the far shore is the awakened mind. Inspired by witnessing another, we say, "Yes, it can be done." That is one level of faith. After we have jumped ourselves, when we say, "Yes, it can be done," that is quite another level of faith.
(-Sharon Salzberg, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Spring 1997)

Jay has found a lovely spot for himself and pup to meadow roost awhile. Anne calls for schedule of evening conversations. Tina confirms that 'foal' might mean pregnant. Tom brings mail and asks if we got the earlier box of books. Rain stops.

At evening conversation we read from Thomas Moore's foreword to the book by Anthony de Mello, Sadhana. (Sadhana is a Sanskrit term meaning spiritual practice, or, a means of accomplishing something -- a discipline in pursuit of a goal. (Wikipedia). A phrase jumped out: "...the manifestation of the soul in the body" -- leading us to speak of body/soul in this existence, of feeling our way through, and the cause/effect dynamic in Buddhism and the present moment.

Joan, Carol, Saskia, Deb, and I complete the hour as visitor David arrives at end of conversation. He and friend join in a post-final circle extension. He says his faith is what keeps him (to consternation of others) either sane or insane. His intensity bespeaks a vibrancy about positive living.

At snow-bowl an old and wizened frog refuses to budge from roadway as we walk Rokpa the Border Collie -- who suddenly notices a hop and turns when Saskia looks closely at the road sitter. We go by and leave it to its drizzly meditation.

If we saw things differently, would we live free from fear and negativity?

Maybe all does work unto good.

If we completely feel.

It is my friend Jo-Ann's birthday. Someone I love.

Rokpa wanders docks in Rockland. The Jenny Norman leans in with the wind. We walk breakwater to lighthouse.

Students today do not know the truth at all. They are like goats nosing around, taking whatever they find into their mouths. They cannot distinguish the servant from the master, the guest from the host. People like this enter the path with the wrong attitude; they cannot enter into clamorous situations, yet they call themselves genuine renunciants. In fact they are really worldlings.
- Lin Chi (d 867)

Burning stick of incense and lighted remains of tea candle before icon of Mary. A birthday bow to this kind apparition. What an exceptional gift, this birth!

Parting

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
(Poem "Parting," by Emily Dickinson. Public domain.)

There's a joy in parting found nowhere else.

Going away releases awareness of profound longing.

Soul searches for itself.

Finding.

Nothing other.

At all.

Through gate early this morning a man and woman who would marry later on the J&E Riggin schooner out of Rockland. They said they were following a Buddhist custom wherein on your wedding day you present a gift to monks in honor of the day.

Susan and Greg make music and leave their latest cd as gift to mono's (monastics of no other) at meetingbrook. Inside chapel/zendo, next to seated Buddha, a square package wrapped in tan thread is left. We arrive as they exit, greet with embrace, and quietly part to sit a while, to pray for them, to serve this lovely tradition.

Mist darkens the peaks of
A thousand mountains;
Wind sings, blows the tips
Of the beautiful trees into leaf.
The tip of the pagoda rises
Through the clouds;
Setting sunlight lingers
In the after glow.
- Minagawa Kien (1734-1807)

The bay blew hard but the sun came clear for their vows.

Such good food all day.

Cheers and love!

I am in your debt.

Avoid getting into debt, except the debt of mutual love. If you love your fellow men you have carried out your obligations. All the commandments: You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and so on, are summed up in this single command: You must love your neighbour as yourself. Love is the one thing that cannot hurt your neighbour; that is why it is the answer to every one of the commandments.
(--Romans 13:8 - 10)

Who can say, "I am you."

Amness is amnesty. Isness is forgiveness.When we don't awake to Being, when we fail to remember Being, we consequently do not practice forgiveness -- not extending it nor receiving it. Forgiveness is the all-encompassing. Nothing is left out. It is only when we intentionally and repeatedly attempt to push ourselves away from the all-encompassing, when we attempt in word and act to push others out and away from the all-encompassing, that we dwell in unreality and illusion, thereby choosing to live in a false and insubstantial realm of what has traditionally been called 'sin' and also known as delusion. This delusion very often harms everyone encountering the delusional aspect of fragmentation and separation.

We are, as many are coming to understand, better people than harming and hurting agents fostering separation and divisiveness.

We must remember, recall, and re-embody what we really and truly are -- being all-encompassing.

“There is no material that exists for the production of Name and Form; and when Name and Form cease, they do not go anywhither in space. After Name and Form have ceased, they do not exist anywhere in the shape of heaped-up music material. Thus when a lute is played upon, there is no previous store of sound and when the music ceases it does not go anywhither in space. When it has ceased, it exists nowhere in a stored-up state. Having previously been non-existent, it came into existence on account of the structure and stem of the lute and the exertions of the performer; and as it came into existence so it passes away. In exactly the same way, all elements of being, both corporeal and non-corporeal come into existence after having previously been non-existent; and having come into existence passes away.”
-- Paul Carus, The Gospel of Buddha

Nothing comes and nothing goes. In Vedanta it is called pure consciousness.

Nothing else to be said.

Hospitality welcomes everyone as themselves.
Who's there to fool?
Stay who, stay where, you are.

We become sick allowing ego to rule and control. (Ill, us, I, on). We grow ill when "I" is always on and dominating.

We live mostly in illusion. It isn't life or existence that is illusory. Many of us are full of illusion.

A single path upwards
The thousand sages
Do not assist me.
- Jiun Sonja (1718-1804)

Worst part is it's impossible to figure out for sure why anyone does anything.

Let's begin a new version of play -- (ludo, ludere, lusi, lusus = to play) -- wherein we play with and in the world, we play with and for one another, and we play lightened by the joy of playing through life.

To live in illusion is not to play well with others, to be dead serious instead of alively playful.

Let's be well.

And playful.

Within.

Ourselves.

If politicians lead by example, we are a people of put-downs. We are meant to mock and denigrate our opponents. We are to admit no mistake, to say nothing but talking points that repeat verbatim the same response to whatever question is asked, and, finally, if the modeling is effective, to encourage one another to slash and burn, destroy and eliminate anyone standing in our way. It's a strategy resembling 'take no prisoners' but is more like imprisoning everyone in disdain and dismissive dislike. Except, of course, the true believers who will sacrifice intelligent inquiry and settle for mindless prattle that has nothing at all to do with anything but creating an enemy and defeating that enemy. Whatever the political affiliation, these men and women serve something other than you and me, something a little bit below our dignity and honor.

It's an odd leadership and an odd way to lead.

There was a monk who asked the Master, “Does a person who has had sudden awakening still need to continue with cultivation?”
The Master said, “If one has true awakening and attains to the fundamental, then at that time that person knows for himself that cultivation and non cultivation are just dualistic opposites. Like now, though the initial inspiration is dependent on conditions, if within a single thought one awakens to one’s own reality, there are still certain habitual tendencies that have accumulated over numberless kalpas which cannot be purified in a single instant. That person should certainly be taught how to gradually remove the karmic tendencies and mental habits: this is cultivation. There is no other method of cultivation that need to be taught to that person.”
- Kuei-shan Ling-yu (771-853)

With our words we create the world and each other. How are we doing?

"The origin of language is in essence mysterious. And this means that language can only have arisen from the overpowering, the strange, and the terrible, through man’s departure into being. In this departure, language was being, embodied in the word: poetry. Language is the primordial poetry in which a people speaks being.”
(--Martin Heidegger, in An Introduction to Metaphysics)

If we wished to save the world, or enlighten every person, would we do it with our next words and our next words after them?

One does not discover the absurd without attempting to write a manual of happiness. "What! by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
(--from The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus)

I am not happy unless you are.

Well...

Well?

Sometimes you don't care. It's easy to care and it's easy not to care. Caring is tidal. It's noticeable at either lift or bottom. It's a matter of whether caring is worth caring about.

Weary, I yearn for the forest and hills;
Against my will, ten years have I spent
In the world of men.
Burning incense, I take leave of the assembly,
Shunning worldly affairs, I depart.
The mist invites me and I know that it is time to rest.
Men of little talent are not guests fond of mountains.
Men of little virtue do not make companions for gathering leaves.
Should someone ask, “When will you come back?”
I would reply, “The white clouds and the green water
Are boundless and serene.
- Jiun Sonja (1718-1804)

So much is about suffering, the stranger, and service. Maybe they're the tree sisters of ethics. How well do we treat these sisters?

Life is difficult. Life is easy. If we choose either of these statements we are likely to write a story that will confirm the chosen statement.

We're here to live our lives, not live a story. Our lives are fraught with turns, joys, and disappointments.

We pray to see our way through.

Take care. Be care. Or don't

You'll be just fine.

Watched film "Recount." Thing about the past is it never changes. Although someone said when you change your mind, you change the world, past and present. Maybe the better man won and the world went to hell. Maybe the better man lost, and the world went to hell. Politics and elections are not about the best person leading. Politics is about winning. That's all.

When hungry, eat.
When cold, put on clothes
Even children three feet tall,
Are aware of these things.
The teaching beyond doctrine
Is transparently clear;
Why should you have your eyes open
And still act foolishly?
Someone asked me for one of my
Coarse comments,
So I wrote out the above gatha
As a response.
- Isshi Bunchu (1608-1645)

The waitress at breakfast in Belfast said she didn't care for any of them. It's all talk, she said.

It takes a powerful faith to posit the truth will out. And if the truth does out, it is spun and spun until dizzy and unrecognizable. Truth staggers away unsure and impertinent.

They sprang to their feet and hustled him out of the town; and they took him up to the brow of the hill their town was built on, intending to throw him down the cliff, but he slipped through the crowd and walked away.
(--Luke 4: 30)

Jesus is nearly unrecognizable. People create image and caricature and wonder where the true man disappeared. They are left holding words no dictionary could breath life back into.

A peanut butter slather on rye toast with cherry preserves on top helps put things into perspective.

Clearly we are not going to throw anyone off a cliff.

What is to be true between us?

Questions being asked: Will the storm nix the Republican Convention? Whose baby is it in Alaska? Is the cross actually the between place, the unifying action that eliminates "other" and "opposite"?

This mind has from the very beginning been independent of birth and death. It is neither green nor yellow, without form and characteristics. It does not belong to either existence or nothingness, and it cannot be reckoned as either young or old. It is neither long nor short, neither large nor small. It transcends all limitations, words, and traces. It is just this very thing- if you stir a thought, you miss it. It is like empty space, without limits, beyond conceptualization. It is only this One Mind that is Buddha, and Buddha is not different from sentient beings.
- Huang-po (d. 850)

It's a tense time.

Political storm as well as hurricane storms mainland. Things will be upset. Change to occur.

About the cross: To die on the cross is to create no other.

Thirty six years ago this day the boy born in a river town hospital is today a fine man going camping without his tomato sauce but with fresh scones. He, too, thinks about the storm and the baby.

A new koan arises: Why did Jesus die on the cross? Because no one had to enter the reality of fractured humanity and remove the cult of the broken. "No one" was his true name. He did nothing other than place "itself" at center. God died for no other reason than to remove "other" from the equation.

Each is now itself.

At center we are free.

A lovely way to be!

A monastic presence asks us the question: "Are we willing to investigate what is going on between us?" It is a life of simplicity, compassion, and faithful engagement.

Who can live such a life in today's world?

Illusion and enlightenment depend on each other,
Principle and actuality are ultimately the same.
All day long, sutras without words,
Through the night, Zen without sitting.
Warblers sing in the willow grove by the river,
A village dog barks at the moon.
I have no one to share my feelings
So I just write what is in my heart.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

A writer late evening buying books at shop said tonight that once you have a "self" and "other" you have capitalism.

"No other" is a different kind of communal compassion and economic sharing.

I want everyone to have health and care for that health.

In prison today we wondered whether public remorse was a stage play. Given a mask, the saying goes, a man will tell the truth. Given a stage, we say, a man will playact. It is near impossible to figure out whether a man is telling or feeling the truth or if he is running his lines.

Let us sit together on a mat of reeds
And watch the mountains
Turn purple in the sunset.
- Rai San’yo

Fireworks over Camden Harbor for Windjammer Weekend. Pizza on patio.

Individual conscience is the measure of character. Informed and clear, the individual conscience is inviolable. The work is to inform and clarify.

We get old.

So it is!

For a moment, consider how the heart of America has changed.

There is suffering in the world. One feels sorrow at the suffering. We try to help see one another through.

Talking about food won’t make you full,
Babbling about clothes won’t keep out the cold.
A bowl of rice is what fills the belly;
It takes a suit of clothing to make you warm.
And yet, without stopping to consider this,
You complain the Buddha is hard to find.
Turn your mind within! There he is!
Why look for him abroad?
--Han shan

Biden says his mother told him, "No one is better than you. Everyone is your equal. And you are the equal of everyone."

One plus one equals one.

I don't know if it matters who becomes president.

The duality lies only in the skill
Or clumsiness, the honesty or
Dishonesty, of the person.
The content of the practices may vary,
But what difference is there in the goal
That is reached?
- Hakuin (1685-1769)

Dirt is dirt. Sight is sight.

Can we see what is right?

Kitchen. Cat plays. Dog plays.

The middle way involves a willingness to accept either rebirth or no rebirth of consciousness in another life. But the problem of rebirth of craving is the most universal, as well as the most significant and most urgent, for it pertains to all times, regardless of whether it be this moment, this life, or future lives if there are to be future lives. If one has solved this problem and is freed from craving, then all other problems cease to be problems, for with respect to them he has ceased to crave.
- Dialogues of the Buddha

Not to want. Not to want to live. Not to want to die. Just not to want.

There is nothing else I can do;
I walk on and on.
(--Santoka Taneda, trans. John Stevens)

Visiting empty rooms where meetingbrook might want to or not want to move to.

Democrats feature Teddy and Michelle.

All we can do, until we can't, is to walk on, walk off, walk with.

For those born today, for those dead today, we pray.

Tom and Taneda practice their gate.

Gone walking.

One Vietnam vet got hot with another Vietnam vet out on the shop's patio while a third Vietnam vet inside grumbled that being a blowhard or even a POW in Hanoi during that war, while excruciating, was not exactly a rationale for deciding the presidential race. Pain as the reason for exacting and prolonging more pain seems counter-intuitive.

Inexplicably, and dangerously, the metaphor is enacted by a woman falling and banging her face on concrete ground. Everyone assembles to help her -- medical nurse from restaurant, ambulance EMTs, a flurry of first aid -- and she is transported, alert, asking how she got on the ground, a hurting time to follow, to emergency room and another length of recovery. Inside the shop a mixture of emotions -- concern for the woman's well-being alongside the veterans' grousing about how anybody who's been in combat can retain a bellicose bravado.

At least one person is silently praying for wounded woman and wounded warriors.

In the Liang Imperial Palace
He would not explain who he was,
But crossed the river
With sealed lips and piercing eyes
Until he arrive at
Complete tranquility:
A single flower,
Five petals together in the spring.
- Shin’etsu (1639-1696)

No wonder Iraq and Afghanistan are so ignored these days by Americans -- they're still fighting the Vietnam war, still blaming Democrats or generic anti-war sentiment for pulling out, and still stuck with the point of view that any acts committed in the name of democracy, no matter how heinous or criminal, get a free pass.

Afghan Leader Assails Airstrike He Says Killed 95
By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: August 23, 2008

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai strongly condemned on Saturday a coalition airstrike that he said killed up to 95 Afghans — including 50 children — in a village in western Afghanistan on Friday, and said his government would be announcing measures to prevent the loss of civilian life in the future.

Government officials who traveled to the village of Azizabad in Herat Province on Saturday said the death toll had risen to 95 from 76, making it one of the deadliest airstrikes on civilians in nearly seven years of war.

The American military said Saturday it was investigating the attack.

The Karzai government has expressed outrage over recent airstrikes that have led to civilian deaths, as popular support for the coalition presence in Afghanistan dwindles. The tension comes at a delicate time for the American-led coalition, which is facing a resurgent Taliban with a perceived shortage of troops, leading it to rely more on air power to battle militants.

Mr. Karzai also denounced the coalition after an airstrike on July 6 killed 27 people in a wedding party — most of them women and children, including the bride — in eastern Afghanistan.

War, the war-makers like to say, is sloppy. That's shorthand for an assumed permission to shoot and kill anyone proximate to a suspected mark or targeted asset. In war only enemy kills or destroyed targets count. A good soldier or fighting force is forgiven much in the name of a nice try, sorry for the mess, but it was for the good guys, and we are ok.

Pinning the tail on the terrorist is not as easy as we once thought. There's a lot to the narcissus myth.

In the tale told by Ovid, Echo, a nymph, falls in love with a vain youth named Narcissus, who was the son of the blue Nymph Leirope of Thespia. The river god Cephisus had once encircled Leirope with the windings of his streams, and thus trapping her, had raped ("seduced") the nymph. Concerned about the baby's welfare, Leirope went to consult the prophet Teiresias regarding her son's future. Teiresias told the nymph that Narcissus "would live to a ripe old age, as long as he never knew himself."

One day when Narcissus was out hunting stags, Echo stealthily followed the handsome youth through the woods, longing to address him but unable to speak first. When Narcissus finally heard footsteps and shouted "Who's there?", Echo answered "Who's there?" And so it went, until finally Echo showed herself and rushed to embrace the lovely youth. He pulled away from the nymph and vainly told her to leave him alone. Narcissus left Echo heartbroken and she spent the rest of her life in lonely glens, pining away for the love she never knew, until only her voice remained.

Eventually he became thirsty and went to drink from a stream. As he saw his reflection, he fell in love with it, not knowing that it was him. As he bent down to kiss it, it seemed to "run away" and he was heart broken. He grew thirstier but he wouldn't touch the water for fear of damaging his reflection, so he eventually died of thirst and self love, staring at his own reflection. The narcissus flower grew where he died. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(mythology)

We are in danger of never knowing ourselves.

To a Terrorist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first poet probably spoke to thunder
and, for a while, believed
thunder had an ear and a choice.
(--Poem: "To a Terrorist," by Stephen Dunn, from Between Angels, Norton).

There's no choice in war once war has begun its lumbering crushing roll over human life and human decency. War-makers, like wrecking balls, know only one thing.

Absurdity and holiness vie for our attention.

I cannot imagine any outcome of war other than devastation and revenge. War does not bring peace. Disgust with war and disillusionment with destruction are merely prelude to the proposition of peace.

Forget about Iraq and Afghanistan. Forget about patriotic words proclaiming victory and honor and noble causes. Forget about ever forgetting the insane experience of hateful war.

We're meant to remember the folly foisted on us by depraved minds during a deprived time.

We're meant to attend all of it -- the aftermath of one woman's unexplainable fall, one man's terrible torture, a foreign country's tenacious fight, and a home nation's bitter memories.

Healing begins contemporaneously with the immediate experience and realization of harm. It only remains painful suffering when recovery, understanding, and forgiveness are not practiced wholeheartedly. You would think that consolation and prolongation of healthful care and careful health would be the order of the day, every day.

A counter-intuitive proposition is one that does not seem likely to be true when assessed using intuition or gut feelings.

Scientifically discovered, objective truths are often called counter-intuitive when intuition, emotions, and other cognitive processes outside of deductive rationality interpret them to be wrong. However, the subjective nature of intuition limits the objectivity of what to call counter-intuitive because what is counter-intuitive for one may be intuitive for another.

Flawed understanding of a problem may lead to counter-productive behavior with undesirable outcomes.
(-- from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-intuitive)

A face is a fragile thing. Face, in a different metaphor, is equally vulnerable. Our prayers and attention are given to the woman who recovers from this fall. So, too, to the men who try to adjust their minds to the experiences that have harmed their body and mind. Included in this prayer are those who do not completely comprehend how and why we fall, who throw themselves headlong into unaware and painful devastation, and consequently make bloody and terrified those nearby when they hit hard unyielding reality.

How is it any of us survives to another day?

The woman with gray hair with house in Castine knows Joe Biden. Their kids went to school together. She was happy to hear he was the VP choice for the Democrats. The resident Republican wore out his cynicism and went along with the good feeling of the folks from Delaware.

Seven Points of Practice

1. Study and practice the buddhadharma only for the sake of the buddhadharma, not for the sake of emotions or worldly ideas
2. Zazen is our truest and most venerable teacher
3. Zazen must work concretely in our daily lives as the two practices (vows and repentance), the three minds (magnaminous mind, nurturing mind, and joyful mind), and as the realization of the saying “Gaining is delusion, losing is enlightenment.”
4. Live by vow and root it deeply.
5. Realizing that development and backsliding are your responsibility alone, endeavor to practice and develop.
6. Sit silently for 10 years, then for ten years more, and then for another ten years.
7. Cooperate with one another, and aim to create a place where sincere practitioners can practice without trouble.
- Uchiyama Roshi (1975)

To live for God is to live in the open. The cloisters of a day gone by were ways of protection for a mind still separating the inner life from outer life. Solitude now must be found in the middle of one's life along the wandering footprint between mendicancy and madness. For the world is mad when it scapels itself in two, labels one half an enemy cancer, and tries to sew the projected errant half onto a judgment to be enshrined in defamy and hung as ideology alongside bathroom mirror for daily confirmation.

The vast lands of monasteries were an external attempt to define depth of soul with expanse of enclosure. No longer. Dualisms diminish. Our new need is as was the old one -- to explore the inner expanse as no other than ("not") anything the mind presents. What is, seen, is what is not -- that is, "no other than."

Not me. Not you. Not God. Not truth. Not love.

Our goal is to enquire, explore, experience and embrace all that is as no other than what it is as it is in itself.

God is absolute solitude in the midst of daily life. Collectedness and fusion -- not from any without, but the breakdown return to the unified whole from which there has never been a departure in fact, only in belief.

And humor. Dedication to holiness is not the same as preservation of sacred ground set off from the crowded byways of ordinary commerce. Our holy ground is under our feet. Let's look there. As you stand humbly and gratefully in your own footprint of no other, everything is invited to stand on their own.

From now on one's feet. Look under your feet!

Jesus told Peter he was right. (Peter, of course, that Mulla Nasruddin of the Christian scriptures, always has it right by flaw, unknowing, askew interpretation, and favored love.) In the reading for this sabbath: Yes, as Peter responded to Jesus' question, "You are the Christ!" The Christ is the son and daughter of the living God. Tell no one he or she is the Christ. Given our habits, we'd try to make ourselves very special, make others not as good, then conclude they are dispensable, not worth the ink we've written them off with in our mind.

1. "When I was in the desert," said Nasruddin one day, "I caused an entire tribe of horrible and bloodthirsty bedouins to run." "However did you do it?" "Easy. I just ran, and they ran after me."
   
   
2. A certain conqueror said to Nasruddin: "Mulla, all the great rulers of the past had honorific titles with the name of God in them: there was, for instance, God-Gifted, and God-Accepted, and so on. How about some such name for me?" "God Forbid," said Nasruddin.
   
   
3. "May the Will of Allah be done," a pious man was saying about something or the other. "It always is, in any case," said Mullah Nasruddin. "How can you prove that, Mullah?" asked the man. "Quite simply. If it wasn't always being done, then surely at some time or another my will would be done, wouldn't it?"

Christ is nothing special. We are nothing special. We are (each) a place of collation and recollection -- a practice of collectedness and fusion. If we bind, things are bound -- everywhere. If we loose, things are loosed -- everywhere. There is no action that can be restricted to just one place. What happens in one place happens everywhere.

Perhaps we have to not-know our place. To "no other than" our place. (Maybe "don't know" is shorthand for "do no t'other know.") I've long felt my existence to be as an exile in the land of not-knowing. Every word heard from the land of othering -- the contemporary world of "know othering" --is a stinging bite on this body of no-other.

Let each come to their own understanding of their true nature. The truth and power of the Dharma will prevail. The grace and inspiration of the Spirit of advocacy for one another will root and transform us.

We must pray for one another. We are unique. Not better than, nor worse than. Just unique.

Unique. And one.

And.

One.

Another.

Our monastery is the attention given to all of itself.

Searching for praise and honor
Keeps mankind restlessly moving,
But in the warm sun and peaceful wind,
Things renew themselves naturally.
Needing no human control,
The spring brightness is both pale and deep;
In the mountains of endless rest,
There is a single tranquil person.
(- Gesshu Soko 1618-1696)

There is a new monastic life being formed. Not a knock-off of traditional monastic life. But something new.

At the intersection between monastery and cafe, university and front porch -- at the place where intellectual, artistic, musical, and poetic cross paths with care for the elderly, the dying, the outsiders, and the stranger -- there is where the new form of enterprise/vocation takes shape.

The sea helps. Messing about in boats helps. Food and dogs and bicycles help.

A chapel and a zendo help. A large room with fireplace for conversation and collegiality helps. A disrobing of titles, accouterments, and pretensions help. A sense of simplicity coupled with a crying need of creativity helps.

Meetingbrook is asking the questions: What are we? What will we become?

If we listen to people until they grow tired of being listened to, then we have come to a learning beyond teaching.

Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae,
vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.
ad te clamamus
exsules filii Evae,
ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes
in hac lacrimarum valle.

Eia, ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos
misericordes oculos ad nos converte;
et Iesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,
nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.
O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.

Translated:
Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,
our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve;
to thee do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

Turn then, most gracious advocate,
thine eyes of mercy toward us;
and after this our exile,
show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Ma (ry)

The hymn/prayer goes on to say:

-- Pray for us O holy Mother of God,
-- that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ."

Perhaps it is the "promise" of Christ, the same promise each shares. Because each shares the promise of Christ. What we become is what we are. Christ-reality, like Buddha-nature, is our promise and our emerging realization.

The monastic life attends to this.

There's a line in the Course in Miracles: "Teach only love for that is what you are."

Good words.