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April 2009, Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage Update

Theme:  Not Something To Be Grasped

The Bookshop and Bakery will be ending it's stay where it has been these 13 years. The new owner of the building on harbor edge wants the place for himself. So, on the 30th of April, we'll exit and he'll have it. 

Paul in Philippians, said:

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, 

Who,  though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. 

Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance,

he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. 

                (--New American Bible, from Philippians 2)

The Palm Sunday reading is good reminder.  We no longer grasp what will become of our market face. We look about for another site. We think about a bookmobile. We concede the backup plan -- to fold back into the Barnestown Road hermitage site. It all seems possible, and impossible. It's out of our grasp.

Still, the longing is there to continue a life of prayer, meditation, hospitality and service. That we'll do. What form it will take, where we will locate ourselves, what we will look like -- all this is unknown. When thought about, it resembles the mythological problem confronting the psyche face to face with the Jesus story and Christ event.

What form after death of body? Where will Christ be found? What will the resurrected Jesus look like? 

Our mythic journey is not in the same category as the one beginning with the narrative of Palm Sunday through Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and culminating Easter Sunday. But the narrative of our lives, all our lives, is not separated from each other. We are companions on the journey.

So, keep in touch. More information when it reveals itself.

There's not much we can hold on to, not much to be grasped.

We'll just fall into the empty, into the service of our human family, and all nature, humbled to have been able to be anywhere for so long.

With love,

, Rokpa ,  & Mu-ge ,

and all who grace Meetingbrook,
  4 April 2009

Rain and mountain melt begin to flood basement. The hole-through under Barnestown Road cannot let the volume pass. We connect sump pump hose out basement window. Two years dry and unplugged in submerged laundry basket and it springs to life, sucking our personal Bay of Fundy tide back from bottom of wooden stairs near new furnace.

I let mind and body go
And gained a life of freedom
My old age is taking place
Among ten thousand peaks
I don't let white clouds
Leave the valley lightly
I escort the moon as far
As my closed gate.
- Han-shan Te-ch'ing (1546-1623)

Turns out I do have retreat booked at Trappist monastery two states from here for Holy Week. And will go. Two films for two classes next Wednesday. A needed hiatus. A quiet look at what to do as current incarnation of meetingbrook prepares to die. What will be?

Which myth will prevail? Resurrection or Rebirth? Oblivion and Emptiness?

A Father’s Pain
by Larry Smith

My father ignored his pain,
rode it out without complaint—
high threshold they call it now.

He worked as a brakeman in snow and rain.
Once he pulled his own back tooth,
held the pain in his side one time
till it burst his appendix, then
lay in a hospital bed for days.

He wasn’t hard on us kids,
never struck us, took us to
doctors and dentists when needed.
He used to sing in the car
bought us root beers along the road.
He loved us with his deeds.

The day he died, he played golf
in the morning, came home,
muffling the pain in his arm,
went upstairs and lay down.
"A Father's Pain" by Larry Smith, from A River Remains. WordTech Press, 2006

Caring is good. Even in the pain. It's not an impossible teaching -- that suffering is redemptive.

John O'Donohue wrote: "Your capacity to care is God; it is your beauty." (p.225, in Beauty)

The gate is tied open tonight.

Maria says it is our humanity, not egoity, we should focus on. Tom says we should rise to what is unknown, not focusing on the minutiae of analysis and judgment. Saskia says the body has it's limits and is to be respected. Jory says we are meant to remain aware and concerned about the hurting, the poor, the unfortunate.

Humankind, in our weakness, is the doorway through which God, in strength, passes through to be of service.

Some people, not knowing the essential emptiness of good and evil, think practical cultivation of mind means to sit rigidly immobile, subduing mind and body, like a rock placed on top of grass. This is ludicrous. That is why it is said that followers cut off confusion in every state of mind, yet the mind that does the cutting off is a brigand.
- Master Chinul (1158-1210)

Spirituality isn't rising above the human, earthly, and fragile weakness of this existence. Spirituality is serving strength through weakness.

When what is wrong is seen, do not judge it. Serve God through it.

And don't think you have to save the world. That you have to martyr yourself. That because Jesus was crucified, you have to be. The ego likes to accuse you of not doing, nor being, enough.

Enough. You are enough. Because of you, because of Jesus, because of God -- we trust that all will be transformed, forgiven, and accepted with love.

Give Yourself a Break

Give yourself a break. That doesn’t mean to say that you should drive to the closest bar and have lots to drink or go to a movie. Just enjoy the day, your normal existence. Allow yourself to sit in your home or take a drive into the mountains. Park your car somewhere; just sit; just be. It sounds very simplistic, but it has a lot of magic. You begin to pick up on clouds, sunshine, and weather; the mountains, your past, your chatter with your grandmother and your grandfather, your own mother, your own father. You begin to pick up on a lot of things. Just let them pass like the chatter of a brook as it hits the rocks. We have to give ourselves some time to be.
(–Chogyam Trungpa, Ocean of Dharma)

To be.

With.

What is.

Love.

There's a new window in front room, our winter zendo

Those who wear the patched robe of a Zen wayfarer should be completely serious about taking death and birth as their business. You should work to melt away the obstructions caused by conditioned knowledge and views and interpretive understanding, and penetrate through to a realizations of the great causal condition communicated and bequeathed by the buddhas and ancestral teachers. Don't covet name and fame. Step back and turn to reality, until your practical understanding and virtue are fully actualized. - Yuanwu (1063-1135)

The better to see you with.

Even discouragement has its place.

From high above, the river steadily plunges.
Three thousand feet of sparkling water,
The Milky Way pouring down from heaven.
- Li T'ai-po (701-?)

What is it runs in kitchen ceiling? We look at each other.

New window inserted in front room.

The question, Saskia said, was asked at Congregational church whether one could be Jewish and Buddhist, Christian and Buddhist. What did they say, I asked. Good responses, she said. Concepts are only concepts.

Were I there, which, being a reformed hermit, I wasn't, I'd have added: Only God is God. We don't have to think that way anymore -- the way of this or that, one or other.

Call yourself what you want. Only, love, serve, forgive, and avoid doing what you'd not have done to you.

I call it before and beyond.

Before you dwells Another. Beyond you dwells the Alone.

Within each, what once called you dwells nameless and formless.

Still, there's room for discouragement.

We created a new way of life for Tibetan monks who no longer wear the robes. Nor are they monks, in their minds. I bow to the one I meet in Belfast. Coffee cup in one hand, thus one handed bow one handed coffee.

In the ultimate stillness
Light penetrates the whole realm;
In the still illumination,
There pervades pure emptiness.
When I look back on the
Phenomenal world,
Everything is just
Like a dream.
(- Han-Shan Te-Ch'ing)

We will found a lay monastic refuge for all expressions of reverence and wonder. We'll call it EW-- for East West, Engaging Wonder!

We'll occupy the Duck Trap Monastic Refuge and Hospitality.

 
Then our eggs and blueberry pancakes came.

We still want to be part of this wonderful engagement.

When we bow to open up the ego to the whole universe we are ordinary students practicing Zen. When the universe expresses itself through the body as a bow, that is the awakened perspective.

(--Shunryu Suzuki)

But we are nobodies.

With little imagination.

Less money.

And growing older each day.

I bow to you.

Orange marmalade?

The kind people at end of harbor said no to our inquiry about a space for meetingbrook. It is not always easy to smile back at God.

Our death is our wedding with eternity.
What is the secret? "God is One."
The sunlight splits when entering the windows of the house.
This multiplicity exists in the cluster of grapes;
It is not in the juice made from the grapes.
For he who is living in the Light of God,
The death of the carnal soul is a blessing.
Regarding him, say neither bad nor good,
For he is gone beyond the good and the bad.
Fix your eyes on God and do not talk about what is invisible,
So that he may place another look in your eyes.
It is in the vision of the physical eyes
That no invisible or secret thing exists.
But when the eye is turned toward the Light of God
What thing could remain hidden under such a Light?
Although all lights emanate from the Divine Light
Don't call all these lights "the Light of God";
It is the eternal light which is the Light of God,
The ephemeral light is an attribute of the body and the flesh.
...Oh God who gives the grace of vision!
The bird of vision is flying towards You with the wings of desire.
(Rumi, Mystic Odes 833)

One by one they come in and say how badly they feel we are losing our lease. Like the uncertainty of a wake there's an awkwardness -- even if you consider the one dead to have been foolish and irresponsible, you realize that someone in earshot might have loved them. We're chastened by the unexplainable aspect of love. 

The Guests
by Leonard Cohen

One by one, the guests arrive
The guests are coming through
The open-hearted many
The broken-hearted few
And no one knows where the night is going
And no one knows why the wine is flowing
Oh love I need you
I need you
I need you
I need you
Oh . . . I need you now

And those who dance, begin to dance
Those who weep begin
And "Welcome, welcome" cries a voice
"Let all my guests come in."

And no one knows where the night is going ...

And all go stumbling through that house
in lonely secrecy
Saying "Do reveal yourself"
or "Why has thou forsaken me?"

And no one knows where the night is going ...

All at once the torches flare
The inner door flies open
One by one they enter there
In every style of passion

And no one knows where the night is going ...

And here they take their sweet repast
While house and grounds dissolve
And one by one the guests are cast
Beyond the garden wall

And no one knows where the night is going ...

Those who dance, begin to dance
Those who weep begin
Those who earnestly are lost
Are lost and lost again

And no one knows where the night is going ...

One by one the guests arrive
The guests are coming through
The broken-hearted many
The open-hearted few

And no one knows where the night is going ...
(--Poem/song, The Guests, music and lyrics by Leonard Cohen)

Saskia says maybe we should contact the brother of our landlord who lives down under who's buying the cape and setting us loose. We laugh. Another deathbed conversion? We remember Nishitani's observation that when loss occurs the immediate response of the Western dualistic mind is to find substitute and replacement and go running back instead of allowing the all into radical emptiness, absolute nihility, and the becoming itself of itself.

A woman by back door sketched a woodblock depiction of three crosses as five of us read Rumi, Yeats, Rilke, Oliver, Strand, and personal creations.

A woman taking Catholic instruction says it was the Benedictine hospitality and open acceptance of the place that inched her to consider the path she is on.

A man who lives in war stories talks when no one else is around about the closer issues of his life. No footlights, only bare bulb on empty stage.

We'll be fine.

All of us.

For a while.

But then...

That's all there is.

Unless, of course, you consider the invisible to be the visible hiding in plain sight.

Fog drips from everything
I love
this morning in Maine.
(--wfh)

The woman turns to ascend the stair. She is singing the words, "Now is the time!"

We drive to Belfast to see what Fr. Joe has to say about the miracle and the guest no one understands nor anyone doesn't see.

It's a funny line from the Gospel, that if you love your life you will lose it; if you hate your life in this world you'll keep it for all eternity.

It is interpreted oddly.

To be able to be unhurried when hurried;
To be able not to slack off
When relaxed; to be able not to be
Frightened and at a loss for what to
Do when frightened and at a loss;
This is the learning that returns us
To our natural state and
Transforms our lives.
- Liu Wenmin (early 16th cent)

To love your life is to allow it to dissolve with and through and in others.

To hate your life is to take that life you hate with its judgments and unhappiness and harming with you into eternity.

Not a happy prospect.

Where Fear Ends

Fear is finding fault with the future. If only we could keep in mind how uncertain our future is, then we would never try to predict what could go wrong. Fear ends right there.
–Ajahn Brahm from Opening the Door of Your Heart (Lothian Books)

Earth is good. Body is good. You are good.

Lose your life. It's not yours. It belongs with God, who is everywhere.

Return.

Transform your life.

Begin here.

Begin now.

I have discarded the world of fame and profit.
How elegant is the morning sun
Shining on the rafters and eaves.
How cool are the terrace and pond after the rain.
I burn incense to break the deep silence,
And drink the spring water and relax in joy.
I penetrate into the wonders of Tao,
And chant ancient sutras.
When my mind is at ease, my spirit is gay.
When understanding is gained,
There is nothing left to comprehend.
Who can say that the realm of Tao is far from us?
How tranquil it is;
As at the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
- Ni Tsan (1301 –1374)

Nothing left.

Birth.

If God is transparent, what do we see?

We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time.
(--from final talk of Thomas Merton to novices at Gethsemane Abbey, Kentucky, mid 1960's)

If the seeing of God is readily apparent, are we natural mystics? If we do not enter this seeing, are we merely refusing what is taking place before us and beyond us?
"Everything is emptiness and everything is compassion." That's what Merton said after a profound spiritual experience just a few days before he died in Bangkok..

One, like Merton, can be a Catholic monastic or Christian seeker as well as an open reader, meditator, practitioner, and one who engages in service to brothers and sisters via the insights and pointers of religions and faiths not necessarily one's own.

On visiting Shorin Temple, Where Bodhidharma lived

The steep slope hangs above
the temple calm.
An autumn voyager,
I go by ways neither old nor new,
Finding east, west, the mind the same.
- Soen (1859-1919)

Everything returns to earth. We become earth mystics as separative thoughts dissolve into warming sun and melting snow begins to soften where our limbs will fold and surrender.

The Drunk Old Woman
by Cesare Pavese

Even the old woman likes to lie in the sun
and stretch out her arms. The heat weighs her down,
pressing her small face as it presses the earth.

Of things that burned, only the sun remains.
Men and wine have betrayed her, have consumed
the dark bones in her dress. But the cracked earth
hums like a flame. No call for words now,
no call for regrets. The shimmering day will return
when her young body burned like the sun.

The great hills reappear in her memory,
young and alive, like her body. The look of a man
or the sharp taste of wine can bring back
desire’s tension: a heat hums in her blood
like greenness in grass. Among vineyards and paths
memory becomes flesh. The woman lies still,
eyes closed, enjoying the sky with the body she had.

Beating beneath the cracked earth is a healthier heart,
like a father’s strong chest, like the chest of a man:
she presses a wizened cheek to the ground. Even fathers,
even men, are betrayed when they die. Their flesh,
like hers, is consumed. Neither warm thighs
nor the sharp taste of wine will arouse these men now.

In the sprawling vineyards, the sharp, sweet voice
of the sun whispers through the diaphanous blaze,
as if the air trembled. Grass trembles around her.
The grass is young still, like the heat of the sun.
The dead are young too, while memories live.
(--Poem by Cesare Pavese, translated by Geoffrey Brock)

When memory is alive, so too is everything. When memory fades, everything else fades. But, you must wonder, even in the fading, is everything any less alive?

Stop by. Say hello. Take coffee, tea, water. Tell what is on your mind. Point out what is before your eyes. Just because there is money to gain or lose, don't be distracted.

Life really is too short not to celebrate the consecration of the present moment.

Shining through all the time.

As God is.

Earthing.

Want a revolution?

Try learning on it's own.

Let's call this way of learning "universal teaching" and say of it: "In reality, universal teaching has existed since the beginning of the world, alongside all the explicative methods. This teaching, by oneself, has, in reality,been what has formed all great men." But this is the strange part: "Everyone has done this experiment a thousand times in his life, and yet it has never occurred to someone to say to someone else: "I've learned many things without explanations, I think that you can too....Neither I nor anyone in the world has ventured to draw on this fact to teach others." To the intelligence sleeping in each of us, it would suffice to say: 'age quod agis,' continue to do what you are doing, "learn the fact, imitate it, know yourself, this is how nature works." Methodically repeat the method of chance that gave you the measure of your power. The same intelligence is at work in all the acts of the human mind.
(p.16, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, by Jacques Ranciere, c.1991)

At conversation tonight we wondered how each one is doing with what is taking place in their lives. To talk when others listen is gift. To listen as others speak is learning. To find silence during both talking and listening is realization of the before and beyond. 

Before there is feeling,
Stillness is not increased.
Stillness is not there
Only when there is no thought
And no knowing.
After there is feeling,
Stillness is not obliterated.
It is not that stillness is absent
After there is thought and knowing.
This empty, aware, undimmed
Essence is what is called the Tao.
- Luo Hongxian (1504-1564)

It is The Annunciation today. Mary is spoken to by Gabriel. She listened.

Putting us in the prayer of transformation and transfiguration. The Christic emergence within and through the cosmos is symbolized in the ritual of the consecration:

Bless and approve our offering; make it acceptable to you, an offering in spirit and in truth. Let it become for us the body and blood of Jesus Christ, your only Son, our Lord.     (--from Eucharistic Prayer I, Catholic Mass)

We are to be what Christ is to be.

Being as itself divine.

All earth.

With us.

Changing

World.

Water rises and the depths of spirituality ascend. At same time, small self knows it is drowning.

Do you want to know what you are? Or are you content to be what you are not...knowing?

Divination showed my place
among these bunched cliffs
where faint trails cut off
traces of men and women.
What's beyond the yard?
White clouds embracing hidden rocks.
Living here still
after how many years
over and over
I've seen spring and winter
Change.
Get the word to families
with bells and cauldrons
empty fame has no value.
- Han-shan

Beyond the yard is the road. Then thickets. A rising. Comes Bald Mountain where, a dozen years ago in winter, a large herd of deer dared the south east slope in deep snow just down from the peak. A room full of people stared up the mountain.

It is March Madness. College teams, only a tad less imposing than the pros, run up and down taking mostly shove-through baskets from over the rim. The small, the skill jumper, the blind twisting layup -- these are the rare bones tossed to those of us too old for the type of bigness now called basketball. We're cranky too. Where's Pete Maravich? Cazzie Russell? Bill Bradley? Oscar Robertson?

"Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery."
-- Stephen Dunn (b. 1939), U.S. poet, essayist. "Basketball and Poetry: The Two Riches," Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs, Norton (1993).

My will is disabled. It doesn't know which way to turn. A faulty gyroscope. I want what God wants. Center everywhere, circumference nowhere. God and my will have everything in common. Neither can be found, both are in foul trouble.

The angel brought me to the entrance of the Temple, where a stream came out from under the Temple threshold and flowed eastwards, since the Temple faced east. The water flowed from under the right side of the Temple, south of the altar. He took me out by the north gate and led me right round outside as far as the outer east gate where the water flowed out on the right-hand side. The man went to the east holding his measuring line and measured off a thousand cubits; he then made me wade across the stream; the water reached my ankles. He measured off another thousand and made me wade across the stream again; the water reached my knees. He measured off another thousand and made me wade across again; the water reached my waist. He measured off another thousand; it was now a river which I could not cross; the stream had swollen and was now deep water, a river impossible to cross. He then said, ‘Do you see, son of man?’ He took me further, then brought me back to the bank of the river. When I got back, there were many trees on each bank of the river. He said, ‘This water flows east down to the Arabah and to the sea; and flowing into the sea it makes its waters wholesome. Wherever the river flows, all living creatures teeming in it will live. Fish will be very plentiful, for wherever the water goes it brings health, and life teems wherever the river flows. Along the river, on either bank, will grow every kind of fruit tree with leaves that never wither and fruit that never fails; they will bear new fruit every month, because this water comes from the sanctuary. And their fruit will be good to eat and the leaves medicinal.’
(Ezekiel 47:1-9,12)

I like that Jesus identified himself as the water of life.

From the sanctuary.

Good medicine.

Praying alone.

Nearly out.

The door.

Bowing.

Close.

This is the way the world lives -- one opinion piled on another until the strain of fantastical irrelevance creaks and worries even the most solid supporting girders.

It happens. You begin to feel like a stranger. Whose face in that mirror? Is that history mine?

At table last night during practice, reading O'Donohue on death in Beauty.

It doesn't seem to matter whether there is heaven, or rebirth, or nothing at all. Life now is what matters.

I twist vines to fashion a hanging curtain,
pillow my head on a stone,
lie down among cliffs.
I’ve made off with my body,
far from worldly cares;
cleansing my mind,
I hold fast to the True Void.
(- Priest Doji) (d. 744)

Tommy enjoyed meeting and chatting the Bishop this weekend. Sam is in Wooden Boat Magazine twice and he and Susan in Maine Boats and Harbors; thirdly, they are featured in a new book on Maine Street.

A woman back from hospital does not have cancer. Another is weary from her chemo therapy. A man keeps hope that he'll get post traumatic benefits some forty years later. Another woman has to leave Maine to get medical care in Pennsylvania with no insurance. Young kids make First Communion and Confirmation. We look at possible site on harbor for meetingbrook. Vegetable soup and garlic bread make fragrant each place they show up. Website glitch shuts us down for two days. No one seems to care about anything not real.

Memories of West Street and Lepke

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican."
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.

These are the tranquilized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.

Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.W."
He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections....
(Poem by Robert Lowell)

Sitting on floor in empty room at harborside -- just like we did 13 years ago down the wharf -- it feels like deja vu. Eternal recurrence, like String Theory, pervades an otherwise staid notion of space and time.

I bookworm through lost connections and imagine the world of opinion will one day cease. The stressed foundations will be eased off. Speculation and hypothetical will surrender to mere fact. The hungry will be fed. The sick attended. The sorrowful consoled.

You're More Than You're Cracked Up to Be

When self-centeredness comes to an end, we discover not that our “self” has ceased to exist but that the self is not what we thought. The self is no longer an inner sanctum of private experience or a narrow set of personal needs or expectations. Our world is our self, rather than our self being our world. Rather than constantly trying to impose our self onto life, we realize that all of life is who and what we are. Or, as Dogen put it: “To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That the myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.
–Barry Magid, from Ordinary Mind (Wisdom Publications)

Meetingbrook will become a useful oasis of hospitality and community, a gathering place of caregivers and helpmates in prayer and practice -- or it will quietly, mercifully, disappear.

These are what endings evoke. They become transitions and transformations, or they drop off into dark forgetfulness.

We will find a way.

Insha'Allah!

If it be your will!

If I gave you the words, would you write me a poem?

If you wrote me -- a poem -- I would be filled with words.

Mist and fog shroud out
the dust of the world.
Mountain and stream embellish
the place where I live.
At a time like this,
should I turn to scribbling poems,
the breeze and moon would surely
look down on me with scorn.
- Tami No Kurohito

When man was given dominion over things he was given naming rights. Things became what he said they were. This worked for a long time. We name it, we own it.

Lately though, names fail.

Hardly anything is what we say it to be. Why is that?

I'll tell you why: It's because the world is made of words, and the world is disappearing. Less to say about less and less.

Soon we'll have no names.

We'll probably turn out to be answers to unasked questions. We'll be silent gazes with nothing to answer to.

Do you love God? As yourself?

Don't make obstacle.

Follow the longing.

Don't let negativity turn desire into an obstacle of failed wholeness.

Evening View from Grass Hill

In love with mountains, I go out my gate,
Then lay aside the staff, rest on a pine root.
Autumn rivers border the broad fields,
Twilight haze parts me from the distant village.
As dew rises, the edges of the grove whiten;
Stars come out and tree tops grow blacker.
I can tell I’ve been sitting here a long time;
The dark moss already bears my print.
- Gensei (1623-1668)

There's a hidden wholeness that never disappears. Not as long as what is looking for it does not make it into an obstacle, an obstacle of objectified failure.

Failure is only failure.

No more no less.

Go ahead, allow yourself to fail.

Then recognize that there's nothing to be made of it.

So, don't make anything of it.

Return to the hidden wholeness unmade.

Conversations in prison and in shop allow what is there to be there -- sometimes with laughter.

Spring! It's spring!

Tom will be 85 on Tuesday. He says his practice is the normal. Nothing fancy, certainly not esoteric, only the normal presentation of life.

How boring to sit idly on the floor,
Not meditating, not breaking through.
Look at the horses racing along
The Kamo River!
That's zazen!
- Daito (1282-1334)

People talked about miracles tonight. I thought it was ordinary human moments in life. Wonderful moments, not miracles.

Tom says his balance is off. His cane helps.

Winter ends tonight.

Saint Joseph -- give us guidance!

Open us to the everyday.

Sometimes, even though you deal cards to yourself, you think the dealer is cheating you.

Simplicity is something that our
Fundamental nature inherently
Possesses. If we prepare in
Advance and nurture it within
Ourselves, then wherever we happen to
Be, whether in wealth and high rank,
Or poverty and low status,
In foreign lands, or in difficult
Circumstances, we deal with
Whatever situation we are in
By retaining our simplicity there.
It is not increased when we do great
Deeds or reduced when we are
Dwelling in obscurity.
Wherever we go, we are at peace,
Because we have found simplicity.
- Nie Bao (1487-1563)

You open, bet, then raise yourself.

You think you're bluffing.

You call.

Then fold.

A joyful Saint Patrick's Day!

The Hosting of the Sidhe

by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

HE host is riding from Knocknarea

And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;

Caoilte tossing his burning hair,

And Niamh calling Away, come away:

Empty your heart of its mortal dream.

The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,

Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,

Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,

Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;

And if any gaze on our rushing band,

We come between him and the deed of his hand,

We come between him and the hope of his heart.

The host is rushing 'twixt night and day,

And where is there hope or deed as fair?

Caoilte tossing his burning hair,

And Niamh calling Away, come away.

"The Hosting of the Sidhe" is reprinted from The Wind Among the Reeds. W.B. Yeats. London: Elkin Mathews, 1899.

Green is now and soon to be everywhere.

The word 'this' is attractive. It stays close. It is particular. There's an immediacy about it.

If students really have the
Intention to seek to be sages,
Then they must seek to focus
Their attention on this.
This is the basis for becoming
A sage.
- Zou Shouyi (1491-1562)

If you want to know what kind of life you might best live, it is this life -- the one you have begun to live. Nothing special. Simply one foot in front of the other.

This Is All I Ask

As I approach the prime of my life

I find I have the time of my life
Learning to enjoy at my leasure
All the simple pleasure
And so I happily concede

This is all I ask
This is all I need

Beautiful girl, walk a little slower when you walk by me
Lingering sunset, stay a little longer with the lonely sea
Children everywhere, when you shoot at bad men, shoot at me
Take me to that strange enchanted land
Grownups seldom understand

Wandering rainbows, leave a bit of color for my heart to own
Stars in the sky, make my wish come true
Before the night has flown
And let the music play as long as there's a song to sing
Then I will stay younger than spring

- Words and Music by Gordon Jenkins

It's not too much to ask.

There's a man comes into shop time to time. While others might tell of their skills and accomplishments, he will say he's nobody with no accomplishments, in fact, that he's probably the only one in the crowd with nothing to recommend him, someone no one recognizes. He's one of my favorite people.

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 "I'm nobody! Who are you?" by Emily Dickinson)

It's a lovely way to be.

Lost and last.

Nowhere to go.

But here.

Doing this.

Horarium for Sunday Morning: A liturgy of coffee and English muffin. Woman makes pilgrimage with Rokpa, Jane and Wallace to the wonderful land of Snow Bowl for morning exultation.

Wood sacrifices itself to old Waterford wood stove. Birds are given their daily seed. Cat wanders the premises looking for someone to devour. Resist him, ye winged communicants!

All is well.

A thousand mountains,
Wind and snow,
Stop me in my lonely tracks;
Turning my head to the western sky,
The road a dead end,
I recall the distant event of
Bodhidharma’s arrival in China
An old monkey howls from the highest peak.
- Wu Hsueh Tsu-Yuan (1226–1286)

I'll walk the four miles into town and join Jay in his quest for a suitable place to make omelets and make prolepsis of meetingbrook in a market face continuance. The sun warms. Winter is spending final week thanking mounds of snow for support given it over last three months. Winter was very successful this year: very cold, snowy, icy, and unrelenting.

I shall be standing before you there on the rock, at Horeb. You must strike the rock, and water will flow from it for the people to drink.’ This is what Moses did, in the sight of the elders of Israel. The place was named Massah and Meribah because of the grumbling of the sons of Israel and because they put the Lord to the test by saying, ‘Is the Lord with us, or not?’
(--from Exodus 17:3-7)

I like the "...or not?" What place does "not" have in the realm of presence? Buddhists smile at the question. Street slang from recent times predicated "not" at end of sardonic declarative as single word deconstruction of preceding sentiment. "I love you. Not!" Not for nothing, but perhaps it is for the balance of human preparedness that the word "not" wanders into our vocabulary at unexpected times.

These are difficult times economically. Still, we'd like to offer hospitality and warm simplicity in a place of mere contemplation, open conversation, and real service correspondence.

This should be easy, eh?

Maybe not.

Basic to a life of prayer is a childlike reverence for the immediate, concrete realities of everyday living. The wisdom of the contemplative way is to know that taking a walk, tying one's shoe, pouring boiling water into a teacup are incarnations of divine love. The universe is God's body In that it embodies the reality of his love which alone truly is and without which nothing is: You reach out and touch a single drop of water hanging from a leaf -- What are you touching really? Who is really touching it? -- the first intimations of an answer give birth to a song God sings deep within the heart. Those who hear this song know the bliss that surpasses understanding
(--from p.100, in The Awakening Call, Fostering Intimacy With God, by James Finley, 1984)

Gregg and Susan sing from their cd (Rambling Sailors) as Saskia cuts sausage, potatoes, and onions for Kraut Soup filled with sauerkraut and joy for today's Upstairs/Downstairs at the shop then Evening Practice here at hermitage.

Church is now a moveable feast of ordinary celebration. Churches, Synagogues, and Mosques have accomplished their tasks well -- readying us for a life of everydayness and gratitude for the hands and eyes and ears presenting God-in-the-world. Monasteries, Zen and Christian, have given us silence, watchfulness, listening, and wholeness of presence with stillness. Difference is no longer associated with division, wholeness embraces separation and whispers -- "Love sends no one away!" See the one you are!

What a delight to know that taking up a collection is becoming making ourselves a collection of community.

In your solitude, you are one of us.

In our practice, we are one with you.

Do you love God?

Yes, I love God.

Tell me about God.

I can't.

Why not?

I don't know what God is.

Do away with your old habits and start fresh.
Wash away your old opinions,
And new ideas come in
- Xue Xuan (1389-1464)

The ideas once held have dissolved. Now, there is only silence. A meditative silence full of wonder.

When Death Comes
by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
(Poem, When Death Comes, from New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver, Beacon Press)

We're not tourists. This is not a test. This is life. We're meant to live it through.

Death will come.

When it does I will go.

Through it.

In conversation we do not finish each other's sentences, we complete each other.

Today I sat before the cliffs
Sat until the mist drew off
A rambling clear stream shore
A towering green ridge crest
Cloud's dawn shadows still
Moon's night light adrift
Body free of dust
Mind without a care.
- Han shan

We do not try to communicate a truth we hold, we become the truth unfolding with our words.

Anywhere: in prayer, family, front line, hospital, brothel or prison, anywhere care comes alive, God is present.
(--from p.225, in Beauty, The Invisible Embrace, by John O'Donohue, 2004)

We do not attempt to correct someone we consider to be wrong, we long to recognize the embodiment of what is good in the moment.

There's no need to dispel the darkness of ignorance surrounding us. Better to allow the light residing at center of being to move through our hands and eyes and mouth and expand the edge of clarity a little further into the periphery of loving attention.

In prison today we were part of one of those circles widening itself beyond what might have been imagined.

A brief expanding full of gratefulness wide and round.

Remembering all our brothers and sisters.

Near and far.

It comes down to mind. Which mind are we using?

Empty yet aware, the original light shines spontaneously; tranquil yet responsive, the great function manifests. A wooden horse neighing in the wind does not walk the steps of the present moment; a clay ox emerging from the sea plows the springtime of the eon of emptiness. Understand? Where a jade man beckons, even greater marvel is on the way back.
- Hung-chih

When things get small, go large.

When noise goes loud, get silent.

Here's a secret: there is no opposite.

God has not created us; we are the hands and feet of God's becoming ascent.

Forget the things you think you know and the beliefs you think you hold.

Return to what God is becoming.

Only that which is loving faces the way.

There.

Alone.

Time is convenient.

I live far off in the wild
Where moss and woods
Are thick and plants perfumed
I can see mountains rain or shine
And never hear market noise
I light a few leaves in my stove to heat tea
To patch my robe I cut off a cloud
Lifetimes seldom fill a hundred years
Why suffer for profit and fame?
- Stonehouse

Let yourself be inconvenienced.

What are you learning?

Where would you like your learning to take you? What do you wish to learn? What will you do with it?

There's no time for confused thoughts.
Practice the meaning of single-mindedness.
Buddha isn't found by searching.
Look at the characteristic of your mind.
Generally, faith is like spring mist at first.
Be brave at the vanishing point.
- Godrakpa (1170-1249)

Students are sometimes confused, thinking they are being taught by someone else, someone called professor, or teacher. Not so. Students learn that which they discover themselves.

There's no teaching, only learning. All knowledge is self-knowledge. We share (or teach) what we don't know so as to learn what we long to know about ourselves -- small self, great self, and no self. To genuinely learn, one has to let through.

No Matter, Never Mind

The Father is the Void
The Wife       Waves  
Their child is Matter.

Matter makes it with his mother
And their child is Life,
                         a daughter.

The Daughter is the Great Mother
Who, with her father/brother Matter  
                               as her lover,

Gives birth to the Mind.
                         (Poem by Gary Snyder, in Turtle Island)

I'm only here for the show.

For the letting through.

Tell me...what do you see?

And are you happy?

So many have made us what we are.

Don't seek fame or fortune,
Glory or prosperity.
Just pass this life as is,
According to circumstances.
When the breath is gone,
Who is in charge?
After the death of the body,
There is only an empty name.
When your clothes are worn,
Repair them over and over;
When you have no food,
Work to provide.
How long can a phantom-like
Body last?
Would you increase your ignorance
For the sake of its idle concerns?
- Tung-shan

We are what many are.

Alive.

For now.

Words on wabi-sabi at table practice. We redesigned winter zendo. A flurry, finished by 6pm.

The Great Person from time past
Had no fixed abode,
In famed mountains hid his traces,
Grew old amid wind and frost.
From afar,
I know your white-rock hermitage,
Hidden in a haze
Of evergreen trees.
When the moon sets,
It’s mind-watching time;
Clouds arise
In your closed eyes.
Just before dawn, temple bells
Sound from neighboring peaks;
Waterfalls hang thousands of feet
In emptiness.
Moss and lichen
Cover the cliff face;
A narrow, indistinct path
Leads to you.                                                                                                                                 - Chia Tao (779-843)

Try warm simplicity. That's what one woman said at conversation practice.

Be old, weak, and imperfect.

But, throughout, be warm.

And embrace simplicity.

The shop.

Tho old place is settling into its final 6 weeks. Man and woman sing John Prine, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waite, and blues riffs on guitar. Sun brings in casual visitors for chocolate chip cookies, Topfen Kuchen, old brownie. Snow melts. Once a Tree moves out of their shop space up to main street. Two dogs sniff every inch of the place. In the stairwell wall to outside something has died and reminds us of the fragrance of future days.

A time for watching. With. Whatever takes place.

The worthies of old all had
means of emancipating people.
What I teach people just requires
you not to take on the confusion of others.
If you need to act, then act,
without any further hesitation or doubt.
- Lin Chi (d 867?)

When we dismantle bookshop/bakery we'll find a lot that has gotten lost over the 13 years. So many different opinions: move to this space, that space, how about the boat, how about the bookmobile? I tell folks we haven't thought about it yet. Not really. Too busy with deadlines doing the work that actually brings in some money. We've made no decisions except the fall-back one: pack up, go home, label boxes, trust.

For thus says the Lord, the Holy One of Israel: ‘Your salvation lies in conversion and tranquillity, your strength will come from complete trust.’ The Lord is waiting to be gracious to you, to rise and take pity on you, for the Lord is a just God. Happy are all who hope in him.
(Isaiah 30:15,18, from Noon reading, Sext)

The solitude of a lovely afternoon in an empty shop! I'm pleased for those who call upon God and are satisfied with what they receive in return. Hope is useful.

To live without hope is equally useful. For some there is no need for hope. Each moment is the prize. No looking forward to what will come, or might come, or could come if all is right with the universe, your soul, or God. No, each moment is its own gift. Right now, no pain. Right now, pain. Right now, awareness of pain or no pain. Just that.

Meditation By The Stove
by Linda Paston

I have banked the fires
of my body
into a small but steady blaze
here in the kitchen
where the dough has a life of its own,
breathing under its damp cloth
like a sleeping child;
where the real child plays under the table,
pretending the tablecloth is a tent,
practicing departures; where a dim
brown bird dazzled by light
has flown into the windowpane
and lies stunned on the pavement--
it was never simple, even for birds,
this business of nests.
The innocent eye sees nothing, Auden says,
repeating what the snake told Eve,
what Eve told Adam, tired of gardens,
wanting the fully lived life.
But passion happens like an accident
I could let the dough spill over the rim
of the bowl, neglecting to punch it down,
neglecting the child who waits under the table,
the mild tears already smudging her eyes.
We grow in such haphazard ways.
Today I feel wiser than the bird.
I know the window shuts me in,
that when I open it
the garden smells will make me restless.
And I have banked the fires of my body
into a small domestic flame for others
to warm their hands on for a while.
(Poem, Meditation By The Stove, by Linda Pastan)

Home. Farm gate closed and hooked. Bare stones at edge of road. Melt has been busy.

Ceiling fan circulates wood stove heat. Cat goes out into barn. There's a smell of kerosene the workman must have tipped in deep freeze behind strewn wood now pungent in thaw.

Room is quiet. Turning arms and creaking container for fire as dark pushes against windows.

The clear and obvious fact of things!

As they are.

Is joy.

Enough.

Eleven men in 3 conversations at Maine State Prison this morning. "Do you ever get tired of coming here" one asked. "No." That's because I don't have to. I'm not paid to. I'd get tired of it if I had to come by someone else's will.

There's a difference between wanting something and longing for something. There's no "willing" justice. There's only the longing to be with or near what is just.

The moon, spat from a mountain's broken mouth,
hangs remotely over my firewood gate.
Sudden moonlight ties
unsteady images to whiteness;
in cold dew the earth starts to breathe.
An autumn brook plashes in a still ravine
as blue mist breaks over deep rocks.
Purity flows into my dark dream
while cracked shapes hug the empty peaks.
Standing by my window over the pine river,
drowsy in the morning, I cannot think.
- Wang Wei (699-759)

As my mind breaks down it seems there is trauma in not seeing the way once seen. God or truth has disappeared from any fixed place and roams without fanfare every which way.

For I Have Lived Like a Dusty Angel
by Michael Blumenthal

And the muddy waters have washed over me,
coating my large wings with soot, clouding my eyes,
and the raging blood has coursed through my veins,
flooding the flatlands of virtue and decency,
ravaging the structures, inundating the houses,
shattering the windows, and I have grown heavy
with my deeds, and light with desire,
been betrayer and betrayed, wounder and wounded,
taken my turn at whatever was possible,
bad father good father infidel satyr,
been decent, forgiving, tender, wounding,
whoremonger exile patriot rake.
I have shaken the birches, made love
under the sycamore, wept beneath the willow,
I have trembled with desire
beside the mock orange (What good am I
to anyone, I ask, if I’m not good
to myself? Why pray to an invisible God
if I can’t please the beckoning flesh?)
And what more can a man ask of his body
but that it confess to everything? Sad bird,
this human one, but happy in exile: a confusion
of tongues, a mottle of trembling needs,
the dust still gathering on these broken wings—
the darkness, the hunger, the flickering soot.
(Poem, For I Have Lived Like a Dusty Angel, by Michael Blumenthal, c.1999
Reprinted from Dusty Angel)

If I'm going to love my self, I am going to have to love what is taking place around this table. Because "self" is not a fixed and static thing. Self is the betweening revelation of what has been, is now, ought to be, with who's here. What we call self is the continual arrival and manifestation of what we call God taking place between, within, in the midst of whatever whoever presents their being to the open in the open as the open.

So it is -- a conversation came to be and was and still is and will always invite.

More at acceptance.

More than forgiveness.

The manifesting of what is being talked about.

Like justice. Or holding as true.

What is being unveiled.

Revealing.

Just.

Us.

Morning. Rekindle fire. Sun takes more northerly angle coming over hills.

In myth class last night folktale about snake and man and fox and death as just reward. Several in class see death as non-ironic just reward. We talk about death of an old consciousness no longer serving us well. The one we have now. Needing transformation. Transmutation.

Heaven or Hell: Your Choice --
A big, burly samurai comes to a Zen master and says, “Tell me the nature of heaven and hell.”

The Zen master looks him in the face and says, “Why should I tell a scruffy, disgusting, miserable slob like you? A worm like you, do you think I should tell you anything?”

Consumed by rage, the samurai draws his sword and raises it to cut off the master’s head.

The Zen master says, “That’s hell.”

Instantly, the samurai understands that he has created his own hell—black and hot, filled with hatred, self-protection, anger, and resentment. He sees that he was so deep in hell that he was ready to kill someone. Tears fill his eyes as he puts his palms together to bow in gratitude for this insight.

The Zen master says, “That’s heaven.”        (--from Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings (Shambhala Publications, 2002)

Disorienting to contemplate changes in mind. Consciousness letting go of habit and pattern falling off its seat no floor below. 

"Try making a commitment to getting into the meditation posture at least once a day. You don't have to sit for any particular length of time, just get on the cushion. A lot of times, the hardest part is getting there. Once you're sitting down, you think, 'I might as well sit for a few minutes,' and more often than not, you're getting full sessions in."                                                                                                        ( –Insight Meditation Society co-founder Joseph Goldstein)

Cardinals at feeder. Border Collie at blue nylabone. Coon cat draped over brown chair alongside wood stove. Cereal in box considers change is coming. Yogurt, Kefir, cherries, milk.

I imagine a world where breakfast gives way to sunshine and snow begins to melt.

Where mountain keeps its counsel.

Light from everything.

Late.

Whether you are an innocent beginner or seasoned adept, you must show some spirit! Don't vainly memorize other people's sayings: a little bit of reality is better than a lot of illusion. Otherwise you'll just go on deceiving yourself.
- Yunmen (864-949)

Night.

Does God look like us?

It's a trick question.

Students of today get nowhere because they base their understanding upon the acknowledgment of names. They inscribe the words of stone dead old guys in a great big notebook, wrap it up in four or five squares of cloth, and won't let anyone look at it. "This is the Mysterious Principle," they aver, and safeguard it with care. That's all wrong. Blind idiots! What kind of juice are you looking for in such dried-up bones!
- Lin-chi (d.866)

I look at the fire in the firebox in the middle of the room. I have no idea, tonight, what people mean when they say "God will answer our prayer."

Is that because what we call God is the answer to whatever question we ask? Not that, "God will answer." Rather that God is answer. Is there a difference? Ask. Answer.

What I Believe
by Michael Blumenthal

I believe there is no justice,
but that cottongrass and bunchberry
grow on the mountain.

I believe that a scorpion's sting
will kill a man, 
but that his wife will remarry.

I believe that, the older we get,
the weaker the body,
but the stronger the soul.

I believe that if you roll over at night
in an empty bed,
the air consoles you.

I believe that no one is spared
the darkness,
and no one gets all of it.

I believe we all drown eventually 
in a sea of our making,
but that the land belongs to someone else.

I believe in destiny.
And I believe in free will.

I believe that, when all
the clocks break,
time goes on without them.

And I believe that whatever 
pulls us under,
will do so gently.

so as not to disturb anyone,
so as not to interfere
with what we believe in. 
(Poem, What I Believe, by Michael Blumenthal, 2005)

Odd to discover no beliefs. Mind doesn't know what to make of it. It tries. But fails.

Something not mind says it is OK. Says beliefs are the last snowstorm -- wild, heavy, consoling, aftermath to clean up, finally will melt and flow away. But for a while -- lovely. On trail in Rockport several trees down. Snapped. Bowed. Like supplicant. Never to straighten. Casualties of last snow. Burden of belief. Will be removed. Cut into sections. Burned for heat.

This emptiness has no perimeter. A solitude of immense stillness. Once I thought it was absence. No containing. Nothing to grasp on to. No longer. Now it is what is looking as itself.

Things move along. We adjust.

Whatever the reason you think you are alive -- look again.

Does God look like us?

Yard full of snow. Perhaps we want a retired bookmobile to make of the bookshop/bakery a moveable feast. We could travel with our book collection always with us. Just as we travel with our whole life hauled behind us.

Follow the truth of the Way.
Reflect on it. Make it your own.
Live it.
It will always sustain you.
Do not turn away what is given you,
Nor reach out for what is given to others,
Lest you disturb your quietness.
- Buddha in the Dhammapada

Listening to a talk on Isaiah Berlin. Freedom means choice and requires diversity.

No need to carry anything. Just this foot on ground. Then this one. Now this.

If God is the way life should be, look at how life is, and be glad to dwell within it all.

No one should be anything else.

God isn't.

Nor you.

Truth is overrated.

Loving-kindness and loving-service seem better companions.

Not going, not coming,
Rooted, deep and still
Not reaching out, not reaching in
Just resting, at the center
A single jewel, the flawless crystal drop
In the blaze of its brilliance
The way beyond.
- Shih Te (c. 730)

The trouble with truth is the company it keeps. So many want to be right. They cling to truth with one hand and hold a club to smash heads with the other.

If you can do loving-service, do it. If you can practice loving-kindness, practice it. But leave truth alone, let it find its own way.

Detecting lies is too exhausting.

Try loving acts.

Be what truth is.

Handsome is as handsome does.

Is this dog on or off his cushion?

The hermitage pup is one year with us on 1st of March. Rokpa, a Tibetan name which means to help and serve in harmony and continuance, was born on 4Oct2007 and adopted by us on 1Mar2008.

Dear friends, at every moment "the earth is full of the mercy of God," and nature itself is a lesson for all the faithful in the worship of God. The heavens, the sea and all that is in them bear witness to the goodness and omnipotence of their Creator, and the marvellous beauty of the elements as they obey him demands from the intelligent creation a fitting expression of its gratitude.               (from a sermon by St. Leo the Great, Thursday after Ash Wednesday, Office of Readings)

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Who's asking?

The Buddha's Path

Suppose we use a traveling metaphor for the universal spiritual quest. The main map the Buddha offered for the trip to happiness and contentment is called the Eightfold Path, but I have often thought it should be called the Eightfold Circle. A path goes from here to there, and the nearer you are to there, the farther you are from here. A path is progressive... on a genuine path you need to start at the beginning and proceed in a linear way until the end. With a circle, you can join in anywhere, and it's the same circle.

When the Buddha taught his path, he said it had a specific number of constituent parts; people could be sure they were going the right way if they saw any one of eight special markers....The order in which the traveler sees the signs doesn't matter. If we look at any sign closely, it becomes apparent that Right Understanding, the suspicion that it is possible to be contented even if we aren't pleased, arouses Right Aspiration to make a lot of Right Effort to develop more Right Understanding.... It's all connected.

(- Sylvia Boorstein, It's Easier Than You Think)

The weak Anthropic Principle is stated as such:

"The argument can be used to explain why the conditions happen to be just right for the existence of (intelligent) life on the earth at the present time. For if they were not just right, then we should not have found ourselves to be here now, but somewhere else, at some other appropriate time. This principle was used very effectively by Brandon Carter and Robert Dicke to resolve an issue that had puzzled physicists for a good many years. The issue concerned various striking numerical relations that are observed to hold between the physical constants (the gravitational constant, the mass of the proton, the age of the universe, etc.). A puzzling aspect of this was that some of the relations hold only at the present epoch in the earth's history, so we appear, coincidentally, to be living at a very special time (give or take a few million years!). This was later explained, by Carter and Dicke, by the fact that this epoch coincided with the lifetime of what are called main-sequence stars, such as the sun. At any other epoch, so the argument ran, there would be no intelligent life around in order to measure the physical constants in question-so the coincidence had to hold, simply because there would be intelligent life around only at the particular time that the coincidence did hold!"
(—from, The Emperor's New Mind, Chapter 10, by Roger Penrose)

We're so glad Rokpa chose to be with us.

And because he is with us, we're here.

As are you, where you are.

NAACP/Barack Hussein Obama/Martin Luther King celebration in prison this afternoon. Joe, Charlie, Billy, and others give talks and read poems. A good gathering.

The body of Buddha is everywhere,
Does the Goddess of Mercy live in the eastern sea?
Every green mountain is a place of awakening;
Why must you seek Mount Potalaka?
- Paegun (1299-1375)

Why are we here?

Because the question is asked.

Why are organizations that respect and honor individuals necessary?

Because a poet's grandmother occupies the first and last line of Joe J's poem asking her rhetorical question.

I'm glad to have been there with over a hundred responses.

On and on.

Pantoum of the Great Depression

Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on
We managed. No need for the heroic.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
I don't remember all the particulars.

We managed. No need for the heroic.
There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.
I don't remember all the particulars.
Across the fence, the neighbors were our chorus.

There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.
Thank god no one said anything in verse.
The neighbors were our only chorus,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.

At no time did anyone say anything in verse.
It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.
No audience would ever know our story.

It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us.
We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
What audience would ever know our story?
Beyond our windows shone the actual world.

We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
Somewhere beyond our windows shone the world.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.
And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
We did not ourselves know what the end was.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.
We had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues.

But we did not ourselves know what the end was.
People like us simply go on.
We have our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues,
But it is by blind chance only that we escape tragedy.

And there is no plot in that; it is devoid of poetry.
(Poem, Pantoum of the Great Depression, by Donald Justice, in New and Selected Poems, 1997)

We do not know what the end is.

It just is.

We are of earth. We come from earth.

In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn

But the essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
T. S. ELIOT

It was his story. It would always be his story.
It followed him; it overtook him finally—
The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.

Probably at the end he was not yet sorry,
Even as the boots were brutalizing him in the alley.
It was his story. It would always be his story,

Blown on a blue horn, full of sound and fury,
But signifying, O signifying magnificently
The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.

I picture the snow as falling without hurry
To cover the cobbles and the toppled ashcans completely.
It was his story. It would always be his story.

Lately he had wandered between St. Mark’s Place and the Bowery,
Already half a spirit, mumbling and muttering sadly.
O the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.

All done now. But I remember the fiery
Hypnotic eye and the raised voice blazing with poetry.
It was his story and would always be his story—
The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
(--Poem, “In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn” from New and Selected Poems. © 1995 by Donald Justice. )

Earth is where we'll return.

And let us not be separated from earth.

Olin quoted Ranciere.

"Reasonable man knows, therefore, that there is no political science, no politics of truth. Truth settles no conflict in the public place. It speaks to man only in the solitude of his conscience. It withdraws the moment the conflict erupts between two consciences. Whoever hopes to meet up with it must know, in any case, that it travels alone, without any retinue."
(Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p.90)

Truth alone exists.

The thought occurs.

I don't remember losing God. Not that I ever had God to lose. It's just there were assurances. More like...rituals...sunrise, sunset, night.

GOD'S GRANDEUR

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men not now wreck his rod?
Generations have trod,have trod, have trod;
All is now smeared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, not can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods
With warm breast and ah! bright wings.
(Poem, God's Grandeur, by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

The rituals seem a way off in the corner of some cavernous underground. And the words of men seem oddly menacing. The maddening thickness of far right thinking.

I've begun to fear some deep sorrow is about to cover the land. Maybe it's my inability to shake this body ache, or the second 12 inches of snow in three days. My mind is on strike. It allows no action before deadline. My life catches up with me as finish line nears. Roof rake pulls down great swaths of snow. Body says it is likely to seize up without advance notice.

We become a nation of expert opinion. Write out a check and someone gives their opinion at the same time as people pay admission to sit and listen to the opinion paid for. Nothing is for free. It is a shame. Free was always a good idea.

And you as well must die, belovèd dust

And you as well must die, belovèd dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
Than the first leaf that fell, this wonder fled,
Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise
Upon that day and wander down the air
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how belovèd above all else that dies.
(Poem by Edna St Vincent Millay)

Looking at Bald Mountain completely white with bent branches this afternoon so snow replete, I found myself just barely upright as something so recently within me went wandering down the air.

Obscurely.

Absenting.

I like chanting the Prajna Paramita Sutra. It brings me no closer nor leaves me further away. Just the chanting, even when begun too low in register.

Right Speech
"And what, monks, is Right Speech? Refraining from lying, refraining from slander, refraining from harsh speech, refraining from frivolous speech. This is called Right Speech."
(--Mahasatipatthana Sutta: The Greater Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness, in Thus Have I Heard: The Long Discourses of the Buddha, trans. by Maurice Walshe)

Snow again. Wet and heavy. With wind. We axed ice from roof this afternoon. Water flowed from behind the dam. Then it started snowing as we went to cushion and breath.

"Shikan" means nothing but, "Ta" means to hit, "Za" means to sit. SHIKANTAZA, or "just sitting," is alert nonselective attention which neither pursues nor suppresses thoughts, sensations, etc., but, rather, gives alert detached attention to whatever arises in and vanishes from consciousness.
http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/awakening101/shikantaza.ht

There was a time I thought to sit meditation, walk meditation, and breathe meditation was all that was needed.

That time is now.

No big deal. As a failure and as a success there's not much room for failure and success in meditation.

Just meditate.

Leave failure and success to those who like to place things in one box or another.

Night Rain
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 (1178-1234)

What Chin'gak does with rain the passing plow does with snow.

Who needs it?

Any of it?

Hit me.

No reason.