Meetingbrook        Dogen & Francis           Hermitage

Between Ragged and Bald Mountains; Between Buddhist and Christian Traditions   

               V  I  S  I  T         M  E  E  T  I  N  G  B  R  O  O  K         H  E  R  M  I  T  A  G  E                    

                                                   

Background:     

On 1May2009 Meeetingbrook Bookshop & Bakery returns to origin and source at Meetingbrook Hermitage on Barnestown Road at Ragged Mountain. From 29June1996 to 30April2009 Meetingbrook had a market face to its hermitage vocation. The bookshop and bakery existed as a place of hospitality and conversation at the harbor in Camden. The building we were leasing was sold in Spring 2009, we lost our lease, and have folded back home. 

We need new forms of being-with one another, a cosmotheandric spirituality, one that celebrates union with God & unity with Earth, Nature, & all Sentient Beings.

Meetingbrook Hermitage is a contemporary lay monastic practice & place of collation & recollection.  A  monastic is someone who longs for a simple and inclusive communion with life, love, and wisdom. We invite visitors to attend the times of these practices of conversation, meditation, and hospitality.  These 3 practices, often interchangeable, inspire radical originality. 

Blend and comprehend what, scattered, aches for wholeness.

To listen, to speak, & to be aware of the silence and stillness which are the ground of our presence in the practice of conversation, meditation and hospitality -- this is how we practice. We continue hospitality and conversation along with mindfulness practice in our newly transformed ‘Wohnkuche” (living-in kitchen). The Waterford wood stove is encircled by comfortable chairs and seating for at least 14 people with room for more. There will be coffee, a kettle for tea and hot chocolate, along with offerings of Saskia’s baked goods accompanying the gatherings.

Here is One - 

Another Itself.

With our chapel/zendo cabin just up from the barn, quiet meditation room in the house, and soon to-be retreat cabins, we continue our practice inviting the larger community to stop by and join in as you wish. Books & gifts are available from our online collection to purchase, as well as a large lending library. Baking goods waft the grounds. Bakery orders are taken. Stop by, sample.        

May all words and every silence engage us in deep listening and loving speech!

Foreground:

 Meetingbrook Conversation Practice: these are an hour long each evening, & comprise of      

  three parts: a time of reading around or sharing experience of personal journeying;  a brief  

             silence; an open time of conversation followed by a concluding final circle.  

 Meetingbrook Meditation Practice: these comprise of three parts: silent sitting; walking, 

reading, chanting;  collation and conversation.

 Wednesday Morning Open Hospitality: 8:00am-10:30am. Come by for breakfast. 

 Sunday Noon Open Hospitality:12:30pm to 3:30pm. Come by for brunch or just coffee   `       

             and tea. Catch up with neighbors, friends, or strangers. 

All events at Meetingbrook are, free, open, and informal.

 Quarterly Retreat Days: All day mindfulness retreat practicing looking, listening, & silence 

 Quarterly Festivals of Art, Music, Poetry, and Eco-spirituality: Gathering celebrating the seasons.

 Here’s the schedule for conversations and meditations. Conversations are 5:30pm-6:30pm

 Tuesday Evening Conversation: Theme: Buddhist: thought, meditation, and practice.

 Wednesday Evening Conversation: Theme: Personal: paths/practices, delights/ difficulties,

 Thursday Evening Conversation: Theme: Christian: thought, contemplation, & practice.

 Friday Evening Conversation: Theme: Creativity & Peace: the ways of art, spirituality, 

music, peace-making, poetry, and nature. Also a night for films and performances.

Meetingbrook’s promises are contemporary versions of the traditional counsels of poverty, chastity, & obedience. Ours are called contemplation, conversation, & correspondence. They encourage us to look, to listen, and to respond with oneself.

 Saturday Morning Practice: 7:00am - 8:30am  Involves: silent sitting; reading from different scripture or sacred text Lectio style; speaking to what is heard; collation at table.

 Sunday Evening Practice: 6:00pm - 8:00pm  Involves: silent sitting; walking meditation; 

chanting; table reading; mindful eating in silence soup, bread, and dessert; conversation.  

Collation is literally “to bring together”; an offering of  light fare to eat & drink.

 Recollection is a tranquil recalling to mind -- remembering who we really are. 

Ground:

Our personal practice focus involves the Buddhist Meditative, the Christian Contemplative, and the Engaged Service flowing from both. Our wider interest is keen and open,  inviting all interreligious or nonreligious exploration and inquiry into wonder & wholeness,

Love one an-other;   for, when we do,   there is no-other.

Visit the hermitage anytime to converse, be silent, laugh or cry, be mindful or explore no-mind.. Let’s  learn with one another in a spirit of profound humility. We look forward to engaging such community of being-with-care that is ordinary, accepting, & forgiving. 

May the heart/mind of the Christ & the Bodhisattva deepen our lives & ground us in service that is diverse, practical, diffuse, & real, 

 Donations to Meetingbrook are always gratefully accepted & happily received.  

Hermitage is 4 miles from town center: Mechanic St into Hosmer Pond Rd into Barnestown Rd. 

We’re 3rd driveway on left past Snow Bowl. You’ll see barn gate (open it), oar, & “M” on post. 

We encourage you in your practice and prayer. Let us be with one another in heart and mind ...now.

See you soon,            

Saskia and Bill,  m.o.n.o.  (“monastics of no other.” )

Embodying the dwelling place of the Alone; Stepping aside to make room for Another

64 Barnestown Road, Camden Maine 04843

    www.meetingbrook.org    207-236-6808   mono@meetingbrook.org

Until we can edit again on this website, for Hermitage Update and Events at Meetingbrook go to

http://sites.google.com/site/meetingbrookhermitage/Home

This is what is there now:

April 2009, Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage Update

Theme: Not Something To Be Grasped

We strike the set.

Of one thing it is said
"that is bad"
and of another it is said
"that is good."
But there is nothing
inherent in things
that make them good
or bad, for each thing's
self is empty of
independent existence.
(- Samantabhadra-Bodhisattva-sutra)

Props, costumes, and backstage scenery are tossed out to proscenium.

When the loons cry,
the night seems blacker,
The water deeper.
(Opening lines of poem New Hampshire, by Howard Moss)

The woman to my left reacted to her own words when contextualized as, "God is everywhere you are not."

The view of you, she said, is too small. I agreed, I said. Even though I didn't.

"God is everywhere you are not," I say again. To no one not here.

It is all so beautiful!

As you are.

Here.

No curtain.

Final Course in Miracles at bookshop/bakery tonight. We stay late cataloging and packing a few of the dozens of book-boxes over the final 7 days until the 30th.

Calm and contemplation
has in itself a
clarity and tranquility
beyond anything known to
earlier generations.
- Kuan-ting

Talk of forgiveness and atonement. Rosie brings up that if we are at origin we’ve never left nor ever changed our true intimacy with God. Like the conversation between two people when some surprise revelation is made and one is asked by an embarrassed another not to tell anyone about the matter -- the phrase is used: "This conversation never happened." So too with what we've called sin and guilt. In God's slang: It never happened! Forgiveness is radical return to original state. Forgiveness is a radical re-turning to and with original intimacy.

YES -- even after my death
you shall not escape me
I'll follow you
in the eyes of every hawk,
every falcon, vulture, eagle
that soars in whatever sky
you walk beneath,
all the earth over,
everywhere.
Yes -- and when you die too,
and follow me into that deep
dark burning delicious blue
and become like me --
a kind of bird, a feathered thing --
why, then I'll seek you out
ten thousand feet above the sea;
and far beyond the world's rim
we'll meet and clasp and couple
close to the flaming sun
and scream the joy of our love
into the blaze of death
and burn like angels
down through the stars
past all the suns
to the world's beginning again.
(from "Earth Apples: Collected Poems," by Edward Abbey, http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/abbey/abbey.html, )

Judith speaks of “setting things right.” I think of hermitage table practice where in silence the table is set for reading, soup & bread mindfully eaten, then sharing of observations with deep listening & loving speech.

Setting things right for Maria also suggests an additional aspect of atonement, making reparation or acknowledging transgress.

There's a sentence in the Course that reads:

13 Look, then, upon the light He placed within you, and learn that what you
feared was there has been replaced with love.
(Ch 13 The Guiltless World, IX The Cloud of Guilt)

Like much of the language in the Course, this needs further translation for me. Fear is called the opposite of love. Often, over both ordinary and extraordinary occasions, we find ourselves afraid -- as when a loved one is in the hands of a medical doctor. Some would say that fear suggests an absence of love.

I translate the sentence in a different way. Fear feels alone and separate from what we desire to be the loving, healing outcome. And yet, like setting things right (as with the table), the sentence suggests that fear has been re-placed with love. By bringing fear near to the source and consoling presence of Love Itself, our fear is re-placed in proximity to, in warming circularity with, love, with Love Itself. Love is the only reality that does not exclude anything, not even fear. Fear has a seat at the table of human experience, not to be banished nor shunted off to the cavernous darkness of alienation. As Maria says, “Do the loving thing!” When fear arrives, place it near love at the table of human/divine Eucharist, the table of our lives wherein the revelation of love is our constant collation. The grace of gratefulness feeds and sustains us as our sometimes fears are embraced and befriended as Love's gift to human uncertainty.

Perhaps our task is to extend God's love here and there. To extend is to continue as...without separation or exclusion. That's all there is -- what is here.

Your capacity to care is God, it is your beauty.
Anywhere care comes alive, God is present.
(Two lines by John O'Donohue from Beauty)

I am as God is creating me.

Here's the thing about God's creating...(or is it God-creating?):

Some disappear into it and are not seen separately again. Saints, the released, we say.
Some experience it.
Some know it.
Some have none of the above, but believe it.
Some anticipate the possibility that someday they might...
And some depend on others, maybe you and me, to safeguard and preserve the fact and reality for them -- what the Quakers call holding in the light.

It's what is done by all of us when we extend God's love.

Let's.

For each of our brothers and sisters.

With each.

Love.

Earth is home for now.

Welcome home.

I note there is a debate whether those who've tortured in the name of the United States should be investigated and charged with crimes. I'm sure inmates in prison will be watching the outcome of the debate. For if torture and killing were to be forgiven, there's a lot of folks who'd like to jump on that forgiveness truck. It is a grand notion -- to look ahead, not in rear view mirror.

Let's make it happen for all who've found themselves in a personal war. Forgiveness is a wonderful reminder that we all either kill or allow killing to be done in our names. Now is the time to set things right. Either fill the prisons with all who murder or empty the prisons of those in there for murder.

Here, beside a clear deep lake,
You live accompanied by clouds;
Or soft through the pines, the moon arrives
To be your own pure-hearted friend.
You rest under thatch
In the shadow of your flowers,
Your dewy herbs flourish
In their bed of moss.
Let me leave the world.
Let me alight, like you,
On your western mountain
With phoenixes and cranes.
- Chang Jian

A grateful woman writes: "If we stopped avoiding dying we could fully live." She's right, of course. Perhaps we should be busy living/dying. Nothing morose, mind you. Just the facts. An entropy of affirmation.

We are in transformation.

I want to call all the someones I've loved or tried to love. It's uncertain what happens around a curve out of sight. I'd say: I've loved you as long as rain fills April!

April Prayer

Just before the green begins there is the hint of green
a blush of color, and the red buds thicken
the ends of the maple's branches and everything
is poised before the start of a new world,
which is really the same world
just moving forward from bud
to flower to blossom to fruit
to harvest to sweet sleep, and the roots
await the next signal, every signal
every call a miracle and the switchboard
is lighting up and the operators are
standing by in the pledge drive we've
all been listening to: Go make the call.
(Poem "In Early Spring" by Larry Smith, from A River Remains)

I'll get to it. And if I don't, I've said it here.

Then again, that's my favorite prayer: 'Thanks for bringing me here!'

How it rains!

Raking stones back from grass. Cutting felled branches from path. Dismantling dam from second bridge still burdened from last week's flood.

Finishing work, sitting in green plastic chair by 1st bridge as twilight dimmed day. Heart slows. Head falls back. Bright light as I surrender.

Standing alone beneath a solitary pine
Quickly the time passes.
Overhead the endless sky
Who can I call to join me on this path?
- Ryokan

At table reading last night Henri Nouwen on his stay at Genesee Abbey.

I realize I am going to die.

It could be sitting by a brook.

It doesn't matter.

Living now.

The ubiquitous exclamation "Whatever!" is a one word position paper for the "Who gives a shit!" crowd. Who can fault them. It's not easy to care when every indicator points to the silliness of caring.

"Ask me if I care?' was popular a while back.

Something odd is taking place.

Sincerity is the fulfillment
of our own nature,
and to arrive at it we need
only follow our own true Self.
Sincerity is the beginning
and end of existence;
without it, nothing can endure.
Therefore the mature person
values sincerity above all things.
- Tzu-ssu (483-402 BC)

Existence might be ending.

Ask me if I care.

Because I do.

Don't you?

What do you mean "Whatever!"?

Poetry can bring us home.

Close or far, poetry opens the door.

Trust in the Heart

The perfect Way's like boundless space
Nothing lacking, nothing extra
It is because of choice
That its absolute truth is lost.
Don't pursue externals;
Don't dally in the interior void.
When the spirit remains serene
In the unity of things
Dualism vanishes by itself;
When that unity is not clear
There is loss in both directions.
- Seng-ts'an (d. 606)

Still, there's Thomas. He wants to see, feel, and hear this risen body of Jesus. Touch. You keep belief. He wants something that turns and walks off, stops and laughs.

Maybe there's a God above
And all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It's not a cry you can hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
(from song, Hallelujah, lyrics and music by Leonard Cohen)

The author wants the song to stop for a while. It's over-sung. Monks have that problem with psalms. I have that issue with so much that we say.

The community of believers was of one heart and mind,
and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own,
but they had everything in common.
With great power the apostles bore witness
to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus,
and great favor was accorded them all.
There was no needy person among them,
for those who owned property or houses would sell them,
bring the proceeds of the sale,
and put them at the feet of the apostles,
and they were distributed to each according to need.
(from Acts 4:32-35)

Maybe there'll come a day we share. Real sharing. Maybe.

Until then, there's poetry.

An Infant In Your Arms

The tide of my love
Has risen so high let me flood
over

You.

Close your eyes for a moment
And maybe all your
fears and fantasies

Will end.

If that happened
God would become an infant in your

Arms

And then you
Would have to nurse all

Creation!
(Poem by Hafiz)

Touch it. Let it happen!

There there.

Enlightenment is like the
moon reflected on the water.
The moon does not get wet,
nor is the water broken.
Although its light is wide and great,
the moon is reflected even
in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon and the entire sky
are reflected in dewdrops on the grass,
or even in one drop of water.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

If we go anywhere, we are there.

Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle
(Poem by William Carlos Williams, 1934)

The four of us at table in the prison pod read this poem 17 times as it read us the same number of times.

Take your time. You have 16 times left.

Go there.

There.

Through him, with him, in him.

A monk asks: "What is this 'seeing one's nature and becoming Buddha'?"
Daito replies: "The snow melts and the bones of the mountain appear."
- Daito (1282-1334)

Though, with, in.

The ending of Season 2 of "Life" had this voice-over:

What we learned as children --
that one plus one equals two,
we know to be false.
One plus one equals one.
We even have a word
for when you plus another equals one --
that word… is love.
(from "One," final season episode, Life, NBC, April 8, 2009)

Love is within through.

Hope is now changing.

Repeatedly undergoing birth and death is just due to grasping at objects. When we reflect back on the mind that grasps at objects, we see that the real identity of mind is originally pure. Within this purity, grasping mind does not exist. Within nirvana, fundamentally there are no thoughts moving; the movement is ever still. Being still, there is no seeking.
- Records of the Lanka

There is only now and there is only change.

Perhaps we can, if needed, live without hope.

Because hope is now changing.

I need you now.

What if resurrection is through?

When I give the poem to the monk in the tower room he reads it aloud to me. It is a moment that mirrors through.

Running Out Of Words
(for Fr. Robert, fondly)

The old monk is senile with sinus infection.
Who would listen to him?

Prattling on about “exitus et reditus” as if anyone
knew Latin words anymore.
We listen to be kind; there’s nothing in what he says for us.

We are visitors to his contemplative universe, exiles in a world of woe and credit cards, both full enough.

But I’m lying.

Once I dwelt in words, a room with dusty books and scattered papers piled
in order of abandonment.

“Detritus et transitus.”
This life an oscillation between throw away and go away.

Jesus might have a wrap on theological formal iteration, but in today’s 

world spirituality

it’s just irritation, something the pure of purse get to do in monastery or mountain spa with top dollar.

After Vigils, zazen, and walking
full moon through kindly silhouette branching chill tree, the cup of coffee
set on wood chair satisfies.

I lied about the monk too.

His senility is happy ploy forgetting what is not real even as illusions of time stack up like beams of dust reminding us to remember this remember that don’t forget.

He remembers one thing: He has 

gone out. 

He remembers another thing: He is 

come back.

Between these two one things reside all wonder and revelation of forgiveness, which I ask him for.

All trespass, all unkindly, all looking away,
unhearing, running off.

Out of words, knock on wood, prattling
on with silence.
(-- wfh/5:33am, Holy Thursday morning)

When the inner becomes outer and the outer becomes inner, there are no words for inner/outer.

Something has gone through.

It begins with palms. The rush of dream. Things will change now!

It's Holy Week. Things will change. 'Now' is always and only itself. Even so, now changes.

Becoming Real

Many people have the misconception that spiritual life or religious life is somewhere up there in the sky—an ethereal or mystical reality—and that our everyday life is too mundane and not so nice. Often people think that to be a spiritual person, we must ignore or neglect our everyday life and go into another, special realm. To me, being a spiritual person means becoming a real human being.
–Thubten Chodron, from Taming The Mind (Snow Lion)

Practice was lovely tonight. Carol, Saskia, Linda, Judith, Anna, Jory, Dean, Rokpa, Mu-ge, and I. Learning to smile as fear arrives.

In the morning off to monastery.

To silence.

Considering Christ.

All my brothers and sisters.

Becoming real human beings.

Let us hold one another in heart and mind.

For a quiet time, in a quiet place, in prayer, for quiet peace.

For us all. 

Until we can edit again on this website, for Hermitage Update and Events at Meetingbrook go to http://sites.google.com/site/meetingbrookhermitage/Home

This is what is there now:

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.