Open the sack; look for hat

We row lighthouse keeper to Curtis Island. She needed to pick up some things for an upcoming trip. Smooth and calm waters, sunlight steady, skim ice covering inner harbor. On return from island we pass Sam and Susan rowing out. Susan was reciting soundly something about Spain and water sovereignty across our bow as they diminished steadily to a green dot on a distant fading tack. Mean temperature was 14degrees. Back at house, after walking with dogs around turtle islands on frozen Hosmer Pond, the thermometer said 7degrees. Sitting zazen in Merton Retreat the small gas fireplace tried its best to push back seeping cold. Chicken soup, hot, hale, and hearty, helped afterwards.

If you want to catch a rat
You don't need a fancy cat
If you want to learn the principles
Don't study fine bound books
The True Pearl's in a hemp sack
The Buddha nature rests in huts
Many grasp the sack
But few open it.
- Shih-te

Primary season scurries in and out of dark nests bringing pesty ideas into light of day best left in walls and crevices out of sight of pandering politicos dripping money from overripe financiers testing the traps of democracy with pungent cheese of plutocratic oligarchy. Or, as the fisherman on the dock might say: Rotten bait is only good for soon dead fish. And there's something fishy these days about the wharves of congress and supreme court and even the executive launch. With global warming and stinking pails of potash fertilizing money stuffed in ambitious gills it is no surprise the oxygen levels necessary to sustain life under and above water are diminishing. Sucking any sustaining nourishment out of weakening bodies, corruptive venture entrepreneurs prop up facsimile figures to postulate and gesticulate guppy mouthing of stale and rotting ideas that do not bode well for healthy civic and spiritual life. The political fishing grounds are badly and sadly polluted.

Gregory Corso stepped out of his attic to give us the following:

America Politica Historia, In Spontaneity

O this political air so heavy with the bells
and motors of a slow night, and no place to rest
but rain to walk—How it rings the Washington streets!
The umbrella’d congressmen; the rapping tires
of big black cars, the shoulders of lobbyists
caught under canopies and in doorways,
and it rains, it will not let up,
and meanwhile lame futurists weep into Spengler’s
prophecy, will the world be over before the races blend color?
All color must be one or let the world be done—
There’ll be a chance, we’ll all be orange!
I don’t want to be orange!
Nothing about God’s color to complain;
and there is a beauty in yellow, the old Lama
in his robe the color of Cathay;
in black a strong & vital beauty,
Thelonious Monk in his robe of Norman charcoal—
And if Western Civilization comes to an end
(though I doubt it, for the prophet has not
executed his prophecy) surely the Eastern child
will sit by a window, and wonder
the old statues, the ornamented doors;
the decorated banquet of the West—
Inflamed by futurists I too weep in rain at night
at the midnight of Western Civilization;
Dante’s step into Hell will never be forgotten by Hell;
the Gods’ adoption of Homer will never be forgotten by the Gods;
the books of France are on God’s bookshelf;
no civil war will take place on the fields of God;
and I don’t doubt the egg of the East its glory—
Yet it rains and the motors go
and continued when I slept by that wall in Washington
which separated the motors in the death-parlor
where Joe McCarthy lay, lean and stilled,
ten blocks from the Capitol—
I could never understand Uncle Sam
his red & white striped pants his funny whiskers his starry hat:
how surreal Yankee Doodle Dandy, goof!
American history has a way of making you feel
George Washington is still around, that is
when I think of Washington I do not think of Death—
Of all Presidents I have been under
Hoover is the most unreal
and FDR is the most President-looking
and Truman the most Jewish-looking
and Eisenhower the miscast of Time into Space—
Hoover is another America, Mr. 1930
and what must he be thinking now?
FDR was my youth, and how strange to still see
his wife around.
Truman is still in Presidential time.
I saw Eisenhower helicopter over Athens
and he looked at the Acropolis like only Zeus could.
OF THE PEOPLE is fortunate and select.
FOR THE PEOPLE has never happened in America or elsewhere.
BY THE PEOPLE is the sadness of America.
I am not politic.
I am not patriotic.
I am nationalistic!
I boast well the beauty of America to all the people in Europe.
In me they do not see their vision of America.
O whenever I pass an American Embassy I don’t know what to feel!
Sometimes I want to rush in and scream: “I’m American!”
but instead go a few paces down to the American Bar
get drunk and cry: “I’m no American!”
The men of politics I love are but youth’s fantasy:
The fine profile of Washington on coins stamps & tobacco wraps
The handsomeness and death-in-the-snow of Hamilton.
The eyeglasses shoe-buckles kites & keys of Ben Franklin.
The sweet melancholy of Lincoln.
The way I see Christ, as something romantic & unreal, is the way I see them.
An American is unique among peoples.
He looks and acts like a boyman.
He never looks cruel in uniform.
He is rednecked portly rich and jolly.
White-haired serious Harvard, kind and wry.
A convention man a family man a rotary man & practical joker.
He is moonfaced cunning well-meaning & righteously mean.
He is Madison Avenue, handsome, in-the-know, and superstitious.
He is odd, happy, quicker than light, shameless, and heroic
Great yawn of youth!
The young don’t seem interested in politics anymore.
Politics has lost its romance!
The “bloody kitchen” has drowned!
And all that is left are those granite
façades of Pentagon, Justice, and Department—
Politicians do not know youth!
They depend on the old
and the old depend on them
and lo! this has given youth a chance
to think of heaven in their independence.
No need to give them liberty or freedom
where they’re at—
When Stevenson in 1956 came to San Francisco
he campaigned in what he thought was an Italian section!
He spoke of Italy and Joe DiMaggio and spaghetti,
but all who were there, all for him,
were young beatniks! and when his car drove off
Ginsberg & I ran up to him and yelled:
“When are you going to free the poets from their attics!”
Great yawn of youth!
Mad beautiful oldyoung America has no candidate
the craziest wildest greatest country of them all!
and not one candidate—
Nixon arrives ever so temporal, self-made,
frontways sideways and backways,
could he be America’s against? Detour to vehicle?
Mast to wind? Shore to sea? Death to life?
The last President?

(Poem by Gregory Corso, “America Politica Historia, in Spontaneity” from Elegiac Feelings American. Copyright © 1970 by Gregory Corso.)
Source: Mindfield: New and Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1989)

No poets need apply this election year. Poets shape metaphor and seedling word, politicians mold fear and into needling absurd, smiling thousand dollar smiles, tossing pennies at paupers.

I'd rather row a lighthouse keeper telling stories on stern thwart to Tanzania to help with medical healing than listen to one more sorrowful syllable from rue-ling class Lotharios breaking hearts and hopes with magnificent cons and swindles paid for by elect-my-mouthpiece.org.

Enough, this Monday morning rant.

I look outside.

A cold rain starting

A cold rain starting
And no hat --
So?

(poem by Matsuo Basho)

The stark sanity of poetry!

Balm to current craze and personal maze madness!

At origin of all: that; is

Ha! Ha! Here! Ha! Ha!

I've got plenty of nothing here.

Sometimes it gets me down. For so long I've been elsewhere, there, mistaken. It is a relief to be turning a corner, bumping into here as though a mistake, a wrong navigation; and dangerous, each turning is, disconcerting.

Sermons there are, must be a million
Too many to read in a hurry
If you want a friend
Just come to T'ien T'ai mountain
Sit deep among the crags
We'll talk about the Principles
And chat about dark Mysteries
If you don't come to my mountain
Your view will be blocked
By the others.
- Shih-te

Snowshoeing Hosmer Pond with Saskia, Cody, and Rokie in light falling flakes we realize again the joy of being in this gift of mountain, pond, sky, and cold. Around edges thick with ice the steady lift and thump of wide attachments to winter boots create new paths through recent snow. There's nothing like it. Naturally, we love it as it is, here, for now.

Second reading 1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Brothers [and Sisters]: our time is growing short. Those who have wives should live as though they had none, and those who mourn should live as though they had nothing to mourn for; those who are enjoying life should live as though there were nothing to laugh about; those whose life is buying things should live as though they had nothing of their own; and those who have to deal with the world should not become engrossed in it. I say this because the world as we know it is passing away.

"Now" never passes away. "Now" is what we used to spell "Deus," "Brahman," "Adonai," "Allah," "Abba," "Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi" (Unexcelled perfect enlightenment), and "Divine Mother."

No matter how you turn it, ("now, mou, won"), this present and only moment is here, mine, victorious, and nothing special. It is also nowhere, noone's, nothing to gain, and profoundly circumincessionally interpenetrating.

Only now is; nothing else is.

Now, then, what is there to do?

Nothing!

however hard I think
still its the same
walking on fallen leaves
(--Santoka Taneda)

Nothing is growing short, Paul, except the obscure and illusory thought that there is an extension of time for us to durate.

For this morning, the counter-impression occurs.

Each face at each instant is the whole of creation present at origin of all that is.

Oh, look, here you are!

Another name for God.

How nice to see you!

Received email:

Today is the two-year anniversary of the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. That case gave corporations like Exxon or Bank of America approval to spend millions of dollars buying elections.

It is already happening, and it is wrong.

Changing Supreme Court decisions can take decades. A better alternative is to pass a constitutional amendment.

A new campaign called United for the People is underway to do just that. And, since we don’t have time to waste, this effort needs support from the very highest levels. Today we're petitioning President Obama to support a constitutional amendment to boot big money out of elections. http://act.rebuildthedream.com/sign/overturn_citizens_united?akid=390.154765.ct0su5&rd=1&t=1

Returning to contemplate email:

I have not grown sub-clauses and flow charts, nor have corporations grown lungs or hearts. Please help stop illusory legal metaphors such as "a corporation is a person."
Help return our country to real flesh and blood people away from corporate P&L spreadsheets.

If I was a political person, that's what I might say. As a religiously humanitarian person, this is my prayer.

Exactly and doubtlessly

Fire started in Wohnkuche wood stove. Temperature bumped in bookshed/retreat. Additional zafu and zabuton brought across snow covered wooden walkways from cabin to bookshed in faint blue nascent light rising behind bare limbs on Sally's land. Chairs moved in meditation area, incense lighted to welcome dawn -- the chores of Saturday morning preparation for practice. Like some Jikido lighting candles outside meditation hall and fires inside the enclosure, bare legged in calf boots and down vest, shuffling back and forth between buildings in inner silence with crunch underfoot, I carry out these dawning tasks grateful to be alive, walking, breathing, and about to brew coffee.

The Buddhas left their Sutras
Because people are hard to change
It's not just a matter of saintly or stupid
Each and every heart throws up its barricade
Each piles up his own mountain of karma
How could they guess that what they clasp so close
Is sorrow
Unwilling to ponder, as day and night
They do embrace the falsehood of the flesh

- Shih-te

Maybe not falsehood so much as only a fragment of the story. I look at my hand. Without understanding it to be servant of arm, trunk, neck, ears, brain, and mind, it would in it's forgetfulness think it is free without consequences to take what does not belong to it, hit what it thinks should be hit, and spend the whole day picking items from sale bins without any conversation with checkbook.

We are of a piece. We're asleep to this. Sometimes even snoring loudly in blissful unawareness of our enormous body and boundless spirit. Nothing in the universe is not part of our body. Our shutter-blink partitioning consciousness cannot extend the scope of lens wide enough to encompass the magnitude of our seen and unseen reality, so we sketch in miniature tiny canvases with delicate detail some limited acquiescence of our barrierless infinite Self.

There is no hope. Hope is a thought for some other time some other place. There is, however, profound unverifiable faith and love that what we are, although unknown, is exactly and doubtlessly what we are.

Home is where the odd and curmudgeonly truth dwells as a hermit in the forest eager for its solitude yet longing for a visit to pass an afternoon.

Beannacht
("Blessing")

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

(~ John O'Donohue, in Echoes of Memory)

Ah, yes, let gentle poets leave footprints through fresh snow into that hidden place of eremitic dwelling where our belonging sits and converses with Truth of Self of an afternoon with few words awakening delight!

No, one owns; Christ

This is why I love the new interface of blogger: Everytime I navigate away and return there's nothing there. Everything I've written that morning is gone. I've lost hundreds of words. Started over dozens of times. Learned nothing, quite obviously, not saving.

Christ doesn't save.

Every instant is new.

Christ sits in cafe looking out as you approach crossing street entering shoppe slide into booth where Christ sits now looking out as another you glances at watch pays for coffee and wonders whether being Christ will ever become more obvious as you look over to tale and table and see Christ gone, you turn, exit door, look left and right, exhale, create the world, enter it, astonish it with your love and beauty, allow it to destroy illusions you carry as your identity papers, wander nameless and kindly through this next thought and this next one, until you realize the snow falling around you is where you've come from and to which you will return whether or not the sip from coffee cup raised to lips gets to where it naturally goes or if the dream we call our life will kiss the phantasmic companion by our side which waking will only deepen appreciation of the invitation.

15. The face of truth is hidden by your orb
Of gold, O sun. May you remove your orb
So that I, who adore the true, may see

16. The glory of truth. O nourishing sun,
Solitary traveler, controller,
Source of life for all creatures, spread your light
And subdue your dazzling splendor
So that I may see your blessed Self.
Even that very Self am I!

17. May my life merge in the Immortal
When my body is reduced to ashes.
O mind, meditate on the eternal Brahman.
Remember the deeds of the past.
Remember, O mind, remember.
(--from Isha Upanishad, Eknath Easwaran Translation)

Christ does not save creation, doesn't save us from creation, doesn't allow some contract killer to snuff his life for a grander payoff.

Christ is creation. Christ is you and me. There is no payoff. Live and work as Christ as this very place we are.

There is only what is. What is not is not.

No one owns Christ.

Christ is ownerless revelation of the reality we call Christ.

Half and half mixes well swirling cloud in fresh brew
morning awakening in snow over everything.

Remembering what; remains

No matter what -- One is behind it all. Not causing, not determining, not some know-it-all about to say "I told you so!" each time we scrape our shin against coffee tables in the dark. But "behind" as in present beyond and within.

Ya na -- you are not alone! How many ways can that be read?

All this is full. All that is full.
From fullness, fullness comes.
When fullness is taken from fullness,
Fullness still remains.
...

6. Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no fear.
7. Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no grief.
How can the multiplicity of life
Delude the one who sees its unity?
...

9-11. In dark night live those for whom
The world without alone is real; in night
Darker still, for whom the world within
Alone is real. The first leads to a life
Of action, the second to a life of meditation.
But those who combine action with meditation
Cross the sea of death through action
And enter into immortality
Through the practice of meditation.
So have we heard from the wise.
(--from, Isha Upanishad, Translation by Eknath Easwaran, "The Inner Ruler", http://veda.wikidot.com/isha-upanishad-eknath

What's it like to be without alone?
What's it like to be within alone?

If you are not put off
By the voice of the valley
And the starry peaks,
Why not walk through the shady cedars
And come see me?
- Ryokan Taigu (1758-1831)

And so we visit one another. Say, "Hello!" Sip tea or coffee. Tell news of recent days. Share gossip. Wonder and wander about the Alone and being alone with the Alone. Meditation retreat stands ready to catch fallout. Books ready to absorb attention. Mountainside ready to walk up our feet each lift and place of our shoes.

Thursday mornings are hospitality. Hermits visiting hermits. Asking: What's the world doing now? Heads shake. Hands tremble at dexterous tasks. Hearts busy looking around for what it is they feel. Goodbye. Next time. Go well. Here's your hat, there's the door, what's your hurry?

Epiphanies come and go. We are in the captive cold of deep January. Pond ice gone thick. Wiper fluid leaping to salty windshields. Toes growing used to wiggling at edge of frosty hug. Small animals only wanting seeds get caught in traps of insensitivity and freeze. Only profound faith in Brahman/Atman inseparability allows sorrow simply to be sorrow, joy joy, and move through each event and occurrence with ready unfrightened revelation.

Let me know how you are faring.

Keep me informed how things are nearing.

Remember:

Fullness.

Still.

Remains.

What if the web were censured?

Mostly unaware and asleep

Alone in Community is the title of a book by William Claasen, subtitled Journeys into Monastic Life Around the World.

mon·as·ter·y (mn-str)
n. pl. mon·as·ter·ies
1. A community of persons, especially monks, bound by vows to a religious life and often living in partial or complete seclusion.
2. The dwelling place of such a community.
[Middle English monasterie, from Old French monastere, from Late Latin monastrium, from Late Greek monastrion, from Greek monazein, to live alone, from monos, alone; see men-4 in Indo-European roots.]
monas·teri·al (mn-stîr-l, -str-) adj.
(-- from, Free Online Dictionary)

I've lived the monastic life since I was thirteen years old pilgrimaging each morning to Bensonhurst Brooklyn's Twentieth Avenue station Sea Beach Line to rumble north to Manhattan where, at Fourteenth Street Station I would descend stairs to the Canarsie Line to North Sixth Station back in Brooklyn where in a converted fire station I attended high school for four years. The pilgrimage of two hours daily as a mendicant through the urban countryside with great variety of companions taught me solitude, watchfulness, and contemplation. Subway Itinerant Spirituality meant learning the scriptures of passing places, impassive faces, and bodily balance. For five and a half decades I have relied on that early undergrounding, overgrounding, but mostly ungrounding monastic training to find paradoxical urgrund in arrivals and departures, saying and unseating, greeting and loss, prayerful practice and pragmatic wariness, settle and besetting -- the composite experience of finding way in world of strangers to an interior disposition and destination which only serves as a turnaround, a repetitive daily practice where nothing is ever the same and nothing is different. Zen mind was being formed with formlessness.

Pine

The first night at the monastery,
a moth lit on my sleeve by firelight,
long after the first frost.

A short stick of incense burns
thirty minutes, fresh thread of pine
rising through the old pine of the hours.

Summer is trapped under the thin
glass on the brook, making
the sound of an emptying bottle.

Before the long silence,
the monks make a long soft rustling,
adjusting their robes.

The deer are safe now. Their tracks
are made of snow. The wind has dragged
its branches over their history.

(poem, “Pine” by Chase Twichell from The Snow Watcher published by Ontario Review Press. © 1998 by Chase Twichell.)

I love being in this monastery. I love dwelling in this metaphor. So much that I've been taught has been a secret teaching (such as purchasing pretzels the size of a man's hand, squirting mustard on its meandering convex). Thousands of sutras have been pored over ("if u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb") above seats where women rustle shopping bags between ankles. Rituals of indelible import have been performed (holding sliding closing door for running passenger whose timing was seconds slow descending platform stairs). A way of life stamped on an impressionable soul in a faraway land full of mysterious teachings and odd characters, gurus of impeachable habits and troubling pedigree, a community now seen as the face of god gazing at infinite emptiness pronouncing my religious name "Noonehere Noplacetogo."

West Evening Mountain Talk
Part 3, Muso Soseki

The monk asked, “Zen masters these days give a koan to their disciples. This makes students study words, doesn’t it?”

The Master answered, “No it doesn’t. Yuan-wu said, ‘Students who have just started Zen practice have no idea about it. So out of compassion the masters give them a koan as a signpost, so that the disciples can devote themselves to discovering oneness and dispelling random illusions, and to realizing finally that Original Mind is not something that comes from outside. After that, all the koans turn out to be pieces of tile for knocking at the gate.’ (from Dailyzen.com, http://www.dailyzen.com/zen/zen_reading1201.asp

Or, as Bob Dylan pronounced his vows: "Knock, knock, knocking at heaven's door." Where we dwell as community, each and all of us, mostly unaware and asleep, but good to go at any instant.

Alone, with and within, one another.

Seeing any,one

If you are racist, you're not alone.

In a frost-streaked robe.
Here there is no talk
Of the world's affairs—
Those matters that make
Wild the hearts of people.
- Chia Tao (779-843)

If you consider not being racist, you're not alone.

But if you long to be loving and forgiving to those who hurt and harm and have no compunction, you are alone.

God is the Alone.

Turn around.

See any...one?

For Martin: Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā

Martin woke up from sleep. Woke into dream. Told us dream. Fear was gone. He was gone.

We will awake. We will dream. We will speak. Fear will go. We will be gone.

Laetificus Letificus!

Benigne ades! Benigne dicis!

Nihil est!

Just this, Martin, so it is!

"As" Is

Help is on the way

What we need to do is find way to help and be helped.

On way, help is, near.

Near as true Self.

As you to me. As me to you.

Not to, with.

Nearer, my love, with you.

Nearer, my Lord, to thee. And with thee.

Approaching (heretical, to some minds, not merely to, not merely with, but) 'as.'

Kena Upanishad
Translated by F. Max Müller

First Khanda

1. The Pupil asks: 'At whose wish does the mind sent forth proceed on its errand? At whose command does the first breath go forth? At whose wish do we utter this speech? What god directs the eye, or the ear?'

2. The Teacher replies: 'It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of speech, the breath of breath, and the eye of the eye. When freed (from the senses) the wise, on departing from this world, become immortal.

3. 'The eye does not go thither, nor speech, nor mind. We do not know, we do not understand, how any one can teach it.

4. 'It is different from the known, it is also above the unknown, thus we have heard from those of old, who taught us this.

5. 'That which is not expressed by speech and by which speech is expressed, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

6. 'That which does not think by mind, and by which, they say, mind is thought, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

7. 'That which does not see by the eye, and by which one sees (the work of) the eyes, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

8. 'That which does not hear by the ear, and by which the ear is heard, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.

9. 'That which does not breathe by breath, and by which breath is drawn, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore.'
(First Khanda from Kena Upanishad,Translated by F. Max Müller)
http://www.realization.org/page/namedoc0/kena/k_1.htm

That alone.

And that, we are coming to see, thou art!

As is.

Wonderfully, as, is!

It is all and only gift; each

What does it mean to surrender oneself to God?

Haiku

returning silence
moonlight on fresh snow -- one look
still empty cloister

(wfh/nunc ipsum)

It is to present itself with what is itself.

Nothing

As simple

As this

Is

Seen...

Which one brings one to itself

There is nonviolence. And there is ignorance.

Only one of the above brings us to our true home.

What's that

Subtle. Not the thing but the thing itself. Back behind and far beyond our ability to see or hear, but that which is ground of seeing and hearing itself occurring.

Invocation

OM! May He protect us both together. May He give us enjoyment. May we exert ourselves through our radiance. May there never be differences between us in understanding. OM peace from heaven, peace from the earth, peace from the body!

OM! May my limbs, speech and prana grow. May my eyes, ears and the strength of the sense grow too. Everything is Brahman described in the Upanishads. Brahman never refuses to accept me. May I never refuse to accept Brahman. Let my Atman show interest in me and may all the virtues described in the Upanishads reside in me!

Chapter 1

By whose commands this mind works? By whose will the life's breath circulates? Who is responsible for man's speech? What intelligence does lead the eyes and the ears?

It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech. Also the life of all life, and the eye of the eye. The wise abandon the sensory world and become immortal.

There the eyes cannot travel, nor speech nor mind. Nor do we know how to explain it to the disciples. It is other than the known and beyond the unknown. So were we taught by our ancients.

That which the speech cannot reveal, but causes the speech to flow, know that alone to be Brahman, not this whom people worship here (through mantras).
(-- beginning of Kena Upanishad, translation by Jayaram V) http://www.hinduwebsite.com/kena.asp

Love that.

And that which that becomes.

To, finally, disappear.

There is no other way.

Playing with sand; forgetting why

Poetry is word for
Word an incomplete
Sentence for
Contemplation

On Amazon, this book description for Wabi-Sabi, which we will contemplate this semester:

Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete . . .
. . . wabi-sabi could even be called the “Zen of things,” as it exemplifies many of Zen’s core spiritual-philosophical tenets ...
Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty. It occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West . . .
Wabi-sabi, in its purest, most idealized form, is precisely about the delicate traces, the faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness . .
(-- book by author Leonard Koren)

I've never understood the notion of 'perfection' except in an ironic tone, someone's explicative, "Oh, perfect!"

Even when described as "making one's way through," (a phrasing used for years), 'perfect' has a quality of not being there, always en route, an approximate glimpse, a glancing show of ephemeral fade.

Consider the world light,
And the spirit is not burdened;
Consider the myriad things slight,
And the mind is not confused.
Consider life and death equal,
And the intellect is not afraid;
Consider change as sameness,
And clarity is not obscured.
- Lao-tzu

Wandering the edges of scholarship is close enough horseshoes for my recess mind. Glance and glimpse is preferred optic over stare and glare.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness and call that handful of sand the world. Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then.
(--Robert Pirsig, from his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).

On Kwan Um School of Zen website it is good to look at photo of Zen Master standing this past December at ceremony table Buddha's Enlightenment Day in grey robe. I sat across from her at interview time one retreat as we swam together on our zafus that day almost forty years ago in Heidegger's surf before bowing and leaving to be elsewhere and otherwise.

A rich inquiry, then.

And now?

It is always a good time.

No knowing why.

So bright; so full

In zendo I ask silently: Why am I doing this?

It could be the final tug of rounded moon jerking open mouth setting hook this deep water of winter night in fresh snowless new year.

I am beside myself no longer recognizing reflection in image shattered by piercing sharp white.

I send dogs out to investigate bladder and bowel as snow bowl churns water through blower spraying makeshift snow for dry runways until nature ceases demure pouting.

SHE IS

Her voice is a roundness. On full moon days, she talks about
renouncing meat but the butcher has his routine. And blood.

M’s wisdom. Still reliable.

There are sounds we cannot hear but understand in motion.
Slicing of air with hips. Crushing grass, saying these are my feet.
I want my feet in my shadow. Suffice to meet desires halfway.

Quiet. We say her chakras are in place.

When the thermos shatters, she knows the direction of its spill.
She knows how to lead and follow. Know her from this.

Sounds we cannot hear. The wind blows and we say it is cool.

Night slips under the door. We are tucked into bed and kissed
a fleeting one. Through the curtains, her voice loosens like thread
from an old blanket, row upon row. We watch her teeth in the
dark and read her words. She speaks in perfect order, facing where
the breeze can tug it towards canals stretching for sound.

Her faith abides by the cycle of the moon. See how perfect she is.

(Poem by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, “She is” from Rules of the House. 2003)

At table after reading sends silence and soup from tureen, mindful spoonfuls, it seems I might know why the bother to sit so long on zafu without knowing raises itself.

Ignorance: That if I wake, even a little bit, less of it would haunt the world.

Sipping soup -- tomato, leeks, and cauliflower -- under Wolf Moon, Old Moon, Moon After Yule, the pressure finally breaks, bread steeps, water tilts from glass, companions at ready.

The night watches.

Full moon at attention.

Cedars dripping soundless glow.

There is nothing I can do to alleviate suffering. Only wake. To it. And where it visits. Moonlight stepping through mountain trees no snapping twig.

What use waking?

None.

It is a sound we cannot hear.

So, we listen; it is our koan, night practice, on pillow, sleeping or awake.

Dogs return through open slider. One back upstairs, one to white sofa in front room on other side of Mutti's rocking chair. Red blanket and red stitching on throw pillows keeping vigil still.

1. "Wake, awake, for night is flying,"
The watchmen on the heights are crying;
"Awake, Jerusalem, arise!"
Midnight hears the welcome voices
And at the thrilling cry rejoices:
"Oh, where are ye, ye virgins wise?
The Bridegroom comes, awake!
Your lamps with gladness take!
Hallelujah!
With bridal care Yourselves prepare
To meet the Bridegroom, who is near."
(-- from, "Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying"
by Philipp Nicolai, 1556-1608
Translated by Catherine Winkworth, 1829-1878)

Faint trombone treading notation slope, from deep upland animal moan, the reduction is complete.

I return.

To sleep.

Walls have occupants

Scratching. Do they want through into this room? Or just a ruffled sleeping place safe for duration? Being franciscan and buddhist is impetus for wonder about wall-dwellers rather than assassination planning.

CAN BE NO SORROW

That narrow cot, hardly any bigger than a child’s, is where Droste died
(it’s there in her museum in Meersburg),
on that sofa Hölderlin in his tower room at the carpenter’s,
Rilke and George in hospital beds presumably, in Switzerland,
in Weimar, Nietzsche’s great black eyes
rested on white pillows
till they looked their last—
all of it junk now, or no longer extant,
unattributable, anonymous
in its insentient and continual disintegration.

We bear within us the seeds of all the gods,
the gene of death and the gene of love—
who separated them, the words and things,
who blended them, the torments and the place where they come to an end,
the few boards and the floods of tears,
home for a few wretched hours.

Can be no sorrow. Too distant, too remote,
bed and tears too impalpable,
no No, no Yes,
birth and bodily pain and faith
an undefinable surge, a lurch,
a power stirring in its sleep
moved bed and tears—
sleep well!

-- Poem by Gottfried Benn
— Translated by Michael Hofmann

There are times when ruffled beds are sole narrative of disengaging memory. Those glance-backs when crossing carpet stepping from back room body to kitchen mind already down stairs left turn traffic light straight ahead not late the whole complicated array of Noh characters kabuki akimbo hallways and desks, pens and pads, treatment plans and system flaws as thistle and fairy tale weave through morning toward lunch.

Even here
I Am
Still there.

Rather than break my vow to plum blossoms
I have settled here in this disheveled hut
Grey sleet seeps through briars at my window
Plumes of snow dance around its papered panes


Steep scarps loom above frozen woods
Deep clouds conceal the pool's icy stones
Such weather; I stoke up a few charcoal twigs
Wish for a way south, to Chiang-nan's shore.

( - Shih-shu (17th c-early 18th) -- from The clouds should know me by now: Buddhist poet monks of China
By Red Pine, Mike O'Connor)

I love when moon illumines night erasing importance of daylight scurrying. When present moment arises to remind that no other moment is real, that we live in illusion. That all the words spoken and heard are scrapings in walls bedding down for duration restless for clarification like junkies thinking shooting up meaning will dispense with formalities and usher in understanding laced with cream and honey.

Empty beds are artifacts of ancient civilizations replete with shards and sipping bowls for the journey.

Epiphany or Baptism? Churches wrestle with weekends as safeguards of canon celebration texts as pickup trucks with cardboard coffee cups finish Barnestown hill without a spill in new narrative of worship recorded and repeated daily with signs and symbols easily recognizable by all the faithful arriving at and passing beyond stop signs turning into convenience counters where liturgical greeting is monosyllabic and passing unstrange smile.

We love to be alone. It is heretical to want to be alone. Only love allows it. The crowd prays for assembly and receives assurance that the gathered that stays together displays together profession of affiliation and belief in sentences of faith signed and sealed boarding tickets pass-porting angelic checkpoints to foreign concepts welcomed as home.

The walls are silent. Resting time. Moon pulls Ragged Mountain over shoulder. Furnace takes night shift seriously. Pictures fastened to hooks vigil front room.

I love you.

Take that!

Sleep well!

Dwell not on a stumbling-block

Hui-Neng husked rice.

He couldn't read nor write. But he knew emptiness.

How wonderful of Lex Hixon to tell the transmission story for us in writing at Saturday Morning Practice these 38 years after meeting him at the red church of WBAI in NYC as he hosted his radio show "In the Spirit" on Sunday mornings.

I was more of a fool then than now. But now I know what a fool I am. You can guess the rest.

Chapter V. Dhyana

The Patriarch (one day) preached to the assembly as follows:--
In our system of meditation, we neither dwell upon the mind (in contradistinction to the Essence of Mind) nor upon purity. Nor do we approve of non-activity. As to dwelling upon the mind, the mind is primarily delusive; and when we realize that it is only a phantasm there is no need to dwell on it. As to dwelling upon purity, our nature is intrinsically pure; and so far as we get rid of all delusive 'idea' there will be nothing but purity in our nature, for it is the delusive idea that obscures Tathata (Suchness). If we direct our mind to dwell upon purity we are only creating another delusion, the delusion of purity. Since delusion has no abiding place, it is delusive to dwell upon it. Purity has neither shape nor form; but some people go so far as to invent the 'Form of Purity', and treat it as a problem for solution. Holding such an opinion, these people are purity-ridden, and their Essence of Mind is thereby obscured.

Learned Audience, those who train themselves for 'imperturbability' should, in their contact with all types of men, ignore the faults of others. They should be indifferent to others' merit or demerit, good or evil, for such an attitude accords with the 'imperturbability of the Essence of Mind'. Learned Audience, a man unenlightened may be unperturbed physically, but as soon as he opens his mouth he criticizes others and talks about their merits or demerits, ability or weakness, good or evil; thus he deviates from the right course. On the other hand, to dwell upon our own mind or upon purity is also a stumbling-block in the Path.
(--from, SUTRA SPOKEN BY THE SIXTH PATRIARCH ON THE HIGH SEAT OF "THE TREASURE OF THE LAW")
http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/huineng/huineng5.html

I'll have some rice with Tamara sauce, thank you.

One kernel at a time, if you please.

No more hiding. No more seeking.

Show me you love me

So much has to do with emphasis. Putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble changes everything.

Take the phrase: "Show me you love me." It can read like a command: SHOW me you love me! Or, it could sound like a gentle reminder of primal undifferentiated relationality: Show 'me' -- 'You' love me. This second reading invites the other into reciprocal reflective recognition that thee and me are not two, not separate, when love is the lens through which we see one another.

I Want to Know What Love Is

I gotta take a little time
A little time to think things over
I better read between the lines
In case I need it when I'm older
Aaaah woah-ah-aah

Now this mountain I must climb
Feels like a world upon my shoulders
And through the clouds I see love shine
It keeps me warm as life grows colder

In my life there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
Can't stop now, I've traveled so far
To change this lonely life

I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
I wanna feel what love is
I know you can show me
Aaaah woah-oh-ooh

I'm gonna take a little time
A little time to look around me, oooh ooh-ooh ooh-ooh oooh
I've got nowhere left to hide
It looks like love has finally found me

In my life there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
I can't stop now, I've traveled so far
To change this lonely life

I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
I wanna feel what love is
I know you can show me
I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
And I wanna feel, I want to feel what love is
And I know, I know you can show me

Let's talk about love
(-- lyrics from song, I Want to Know What Love Is, by Mick Jones, sung by Foreigner, 1984)

The plea of the song lyrics, "I want you to show me," is a plea for the unity of love. It is profound trust, " I know you can show me." You, me, we: can we see our whole, true, and interpenetrating interdependence? You show me. I show you. Together we appear when love is the lens.

It might take a little time.

Sermons there are, must be a million
Too many to read in a hurry
If you want a friend
Just come to T'ien T'ai mountain
Sit deep among the crags
We'll talk about the Principles
And chat about dark Mysteries
If you don't come to my mountain
Your view will be blocked
By the others.
- Shih-te

Listening to John Dear speaking about Dan Berrigan (now in his 91st year) I am reminded of the loneliness of radical vision. There was a line that suggested Berrigan felt that all that was left was the Bread and the Wine and one another's company. I hear these words as saying the mere elemental transformation of grateful thanksgiving with sacred presence experiencing together ordinary hierophanic revelation of (in this way) What-Is-Love, Being-With, One-Another, In-The-World. For Berrigan, Christ.

I recall the Berrigan lines:

bodies belong
where words
lead

(I misquoted them for forty years, substuting the word "are" for "lead." I've been static, Berrigan looks for movement.)

Turn the page, he says, let flare profound revelation.

Miracles

Were I God almighty, I would ordain, rain
fall lightly where old men trod, no death
in childbirth, neither infant nor mother, ditches firm fenced against the
errant blind, aircraft come to ground like any feather.

No mischance, malice, knives.
Tears dried. Would resolve all
flaw and blockage of mind
that makes us mad, sets lives awry.

So I pray, under
the sign of the world’s murder, the ruined son;
why are you silent?
feverish as lions
hear us in the world,
caged, devoid of hope.

Still, some redress and healing.
The hand of an old woman
turns gospel page;
it flares up gently, the sudden tears of Christ.

(Poem by Dan Berrigan)

Where is it written that it would be awful to gain the world and lose your soul?

It seems to me it would be an awful thing to lose the world to gain a soul.

There is no gain. No loss. 'World' and 'soul' are two only when misplaced emphasis is afoot. Christ longed for the world to be redeemed into the wholeness of sight. For the individual to see. For 'world, soul' to grow into unitive sight. For all creation's longing to be fulfilled in its true nature. For love to be, what it is, in the world, in each one, in time, and beyond.

We are not meant to use love for something else.

Love is useless. Forgiveness is useless. They are not to be used for anything other than what they are, namely, the only things that are.

Be, therefore, love.

Be, therefore, forgiveness.

Don't try to use them for anything other than what they are in themselves.

As you are in yourself; as you are in the world.

You are the world. You are Christ. Be bread. Be wine. With one-another.

No, really: "With" one-another!

We are being told

I love Earth.

If you are not put off
By the voice of the valley
And the starry peaks,
Why not walk through the shady cedars
And come see me?
- Ryokan Taigu (1758-1831)

I love you.

"We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe. All the disasters that are happening now are a consequence of that spiritual ‘autism.’”
(--Thomas Berry, from, The Great Work, 1999)

I love this one loving.

BARKING

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.

(Poem by Jim Harrison)

I love the realization there is so much further to travel in order to get right where we are.

We have not yet discovered what it means to be human. And it seems that this ordinary discovery is the most epiphanic that can be made – for when we have learnt what it is to be human, when we have suffered it, and loved it, we will know our true estate, we will know what gulf separates us from the gods, we will know what it means to be free, and we will know that freedom is really the beginning of our mutual destinies.
(-- by Ben Okri, in, A Way of Being Free, found as epigraph in, An Imperfect Offering, Humanitarian Action For The Twenty-First Century, by James Orbinski, M.D.)

I love the gift life is offering: world, love.

"The natural world itself is our primary language as it is our primary scripture, our primary awakening to the mysteries of existence. We might well put all our written scriptures on the shelf for twenty years until we learn what we are being told by unmediated experience of the world about us". -- Thomas Berry

I love listening to the sound of what is...

Being said!

Debate or Conversation? -- "Language speaks"

1.

Dos-a-dos?

Or, vis-a-vis?

Je ne sais pas.

Et vous?

Parlons!


2.

Language speaks (in the original German Die Sprache spricht), is a famous saying by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger first formulated it in his 1950 lecture Language (Die Sprache),[1] and frequently repeated it in later works.[2]
Adorno expressed a related idea when he said that language "acquires a voice" and "speaks itself."[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_speaks

3.

The Buddhas left their Sutras
Because people are hard to change
It's not just a matter of saintly or stupid
Each and every heart throws up its barricade
Each piles up his own mountain of karma
How could they guess that what they clasp so close
Is sorrow
Unwilling to ponder, as day and night
They do embrace the falsehood of the body

- Shih-te http://www.dailyzen.com/

Ponder well!

Name, please?

Who can pronounce the name of one without name? Go ahead, open your mouth. Give vibration to air rising from diaphragm.
Then, round lips, furrow tongue, and pronounce the name of the unnamable.

What do you hear? What do you see?

No one has ever seen God.

Where have we been looking?

Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us,
by letting us be called God’s children;
and that is what we are.
Because the world refused to acknowledge him,
therefore it does not acknowledge us.
My dear people, we are already the children of God
but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed;
all we know is, that when it is revealed
we shall be like him
because we shall see him as he really is.
Surely everyone who entertains this hope
must purify himself, must try to be as pure as Christ.
(--from First reading, Tuesday, Feast of Holy Name, 1 John 2:29-3:6

The koan "Mu" invites us to undistinguish.

We've been very particular in our finicky looking, only glancing where paid informants point their fingers.

There's a simpler invitation. With the myth of virgin birth comes the myth of ever-present Christ. It is a pure myth, nothing added nothing taken away, always and everywhere, present; all ways and every gaze, presence.

You can't, ultimately, fault the paid informants their attempt to control sight. Everyone has a scheme to get some cash ahead of the creditors and their opulent craving for more and more wealth. The servants of fear and greed feel a mindless loyalty to their masters who, themselves, fear their masters -- and so on, and so on.

"Magis" (more) from "magister" (master or teacher). If a teacher thinks he has more to give students, he might be mistaken. Students have only to open as wide as sky and learn from what is there. A good guide for discovering what is there is a teacher with nothing to give, only to open hand, heart, and mind to allow what is ever-present to be itself experienced, felt, known, revered.

When this ground and grounding reality is revealed, what we call Christ will be newly seen without seeing, called without naming, lived without being contained.

...all we know is, that when it is revealed
we shall be like him
because we shall see him as he really is.

Be like him. Be like her. Be like it.

See what really is!

As you really are.

Name, please?

Yes it is: please!

And, think you!

Mostly, follows: thank you

So, what now?

Light dawns. Candles are lit. Doggie diarrhea cleaned. Our new house-mate since his mistress' passing is at bottom of stairs looking soulful as I morning descend. The big guy's eyes show sorrow after distress. (Saskia's the best!)

“I started as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without having ceased to be a Christian?” (Raimon Panikkar)

Round and round we go. And where we think we should stop -- we should think again -- God knows.

Choose a place for meditation that is
Clean, quiet, and cool, a cave with a smooth
floor
Without stones and dust, protected against
Wind and rain and pleasing to the eye.

In deep meditation aspirants may
See forms like snow or smoke. They may feel
A strong wind blowing or a wave of heat.
They may see within them more and more
Light:
Fireflies, lightening, sun, or moon. These
are signs
That one is far on the path of Brahman.
(Meditation Experience in the Svetasvatara Upanishad)

And then:

May we hear only what is good for all.
May we see only what is good for all.
May we serve you, Lord of Love, all our life.
May we be used to spread your peace on earth.

OM Peace (Shanti) Peace (Shanti) Peace (Shanti) Peace (Shanti)
(Prayer from the Prashna Upanishad)

The traveler who travels with open hand, open mind, and open heart does not fear what is arrived at on the road. When fear does come, it is accepted as fear coming on the path. Seen, arrived at, accepted, and befriended, the journey continues -- richer with new and transforming companion.

“The Lord of Love willed: ‘Let me be many!’
And in the depths of his meditation
He created everything that exists.
Meditating, he entered into everything.
He who has no form assumed many forms;
He who is infinite appeared finite;
He who is everywhere assumed a place;
He who is all wisdom caused ignorance;
He who is real caused unreality.
It is he who has become everything.
It is he who gives reality to all.
Before the universe was created,
Brahman existed as Unmanifest.
Brahman brought the Lord out of himself;
Therefore he is called the Self-existent.”
“The Self is the source of abiding joy.
Our hearts are filled with joy in seeing him
Enshrined in the depths of our consciousness.
If he were not there, who would breathe, who live?
He it is who fills every heart with joy.
“Until we realize
The unity of life, we live in fear.
When one realizes the Self, in whom
All life is One, Changeless, Nameless,
Formless,
Then one fears no more.”
(Wisdom from the Taittiriya Upanishad on the One Who Became Many)
(--above from, The Upanishads, Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press)

"Day after day takes up the story." (-- from Morning Prayer, Monday)

Whenever I return home there are so many patches on my satchel telling where I've been and what is brought back.

Where' you been?

Watcha got with ya?

Hermit; with no exception.

A hermit is one who is alone. Or, maybe, lives with the alone.

They are alone themselves. They are alone with others. When two hermits are near each other, they are alone together.

Someone, after rowing, introduced me as a hermit. To them this seemed erroneous because: a) I was not in seclusion; and b) because I was with someone.

They are, of course, correct. And I allow them their correct understanding.

Still, as a hermit, leaving someone alone in their percept and concept does not mean that my intercept and intracept -- wherein oneness with what is there dwells within the alone nature of reality -- is diminished or revoked.

The hermit seeks to be alone with the Alone as the earth seeks to be ground to soil.

We are all alone.

The hermit, with the assistance of prayer and meditation, knows this.

Without fear, being alone means hellos and goodbyes are sounds we make coming and going in and out of the illusion we've been somewhere else or are off elsewhere.

In truth, we're always here, with whatever or whomever is here, with no exception.

We're alone and it is, as they say, a new year.

'Happy' is a good word for it!

Looking beyond lines and conclusions; Hear and lavish every morning!

On cushion at midnight gone in Merton Bookshed, ringing Tibetan cow bell and striking brass meditation bowl, from over hills repeated reports pulsing night sky, following silence, candle lit and wood joist glow, white dog backing onto folded legs, brown dog listening for approaching sounds, an invisible line is crossed.

A new year, new day, new beast in breast longing for itself in varied forms. Animate, anima, animal soul-forms reaching through walls and edges, looking beyond lines and conclusions, the calm procession stepping sacred pilgrimage hosting holy presence within and between and surrounding us, all things exchanging form and emptiness in ringing exaltating simplicity.

Morning Poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Back in Wohnkuche, toasting with Oakhurst Lowfat Eggnog, virgined, downing pills with each sip (an old monk's version of cocktail and hors d'oeuvres), then to bed dozing as chants by Krishna Das lull to sleep, we are happy to begin again.

The ways of proclaiming
The Mind all vary,
But the same heavenly truth
Can be seen
In each and every one.

- Ikkyu (1394-1481){Dailyzen}

The sentence recurs: There is nothing to lose.

We are a constant instance of being found.

Dare to be happy.

Dare prayer.

Hear and lavish every morning!

Begin again

There's nothing to lose!

In self-effacement and anonymity.

In the H'oponopono practice it is the expression of sorrow and love that reaches for mercy and forgiveness, saying, "I'm sorry," and, "I love you." It is mercy itself and forgiveness itself that you are serving for yourself and the other person.

No matter what.

In Tonglin practice the process of healing and transformation can be assisted with your breath by your allowing through you to the Buddha or Christ that which needs to be healed or transformed, allowing the return back through, the very healing and transforming grace.

In both practices, it is not you doing the forgiveness and love, healing and transformation -- you are only a conduit, a passageway to the source itself.

No matter what.

We are meant to be a passageway, and not in the way.

A Christian passage:

"Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done." (Luke 22:42)

A Buddhist passage:

"To follow the path of wisdom has never been more urgent or more difficult. Our society is dedicated almost entirely to the celebration of ego, with all its sad fantasies about success and power, and it celebrates those very forces of greed and ignorance that are destroying the planet. It has never been more difficult to hear the unflattering voice of the truth, and never more difficult, once having heard it, to follow it: because there is nothing in the world around us that supports our choice, and the entire society in which we live seems to negate every idea of sacredness or eternal meaning. So at the time of our most acute danger, when our very future is in doubt, we as human beings find ourselves at our most bewildered, and trapped in a nightmare of our own creation."
(from, Tibetan Book Of Living And Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche)

To a living way:

The following notations have been gleaned from the commentary of the translator, Raymond Blakney, in 1955 ...
The identity of China's mystics is complicated by the rule that no true mystic would know himself to be such.

"Where there is no author, however, it is necessary to invent one; and by the time the Tao Te Ching had been put in form, legend had supplied Lao Tzu, and Ssu-ma Ch'ien incorporated the legend in his Historical Records (Chap.63). It presents Lao Tzu correctly enough as one who had given up civilised and is impatient with Confucian ideas and who accordingly departs for points unknown, presumably to live out life as a recluse."

"Confucius came to Chou to consult old Lao Tzu about ritual." [and spoke of the heroes of old ...]

"Lao Tzu said,

All those men of whom you speak have long since mouldered away with their bones.
Only their words remain.
When a capable man's time comes, he rises; if it does not, then he wanders wearily around.
I have heard that good merchants keep their goods buried deeply to make it look as if they had none,
and that a superior man whose character is perfected will feign stupidity.
Give up, sir, your proud airs, your many wishes, mannersims and extravagant claims.
They won't do you any good, sir!
That's all I have to tell you."

"Confucius went off and said to his students: 'I know that birds can fly and fish can swim and beasts can run. Snares can be set for things that run, nets for those that swim and arrows for whatever flies. But dragons! I shall never know how they ride the wind and cloud up into the sky. Today I saw Lao Tzu. What a dragon!'"

"Lao Tzu practiced the Way and its Virtue. He learned to do his work in self-effacement and anonymity. For a long time he lived in Chou, and when he saw that it was breaking up, he left. At the frontier, the official Yin Hsi said: 'Since, sir, you are retiring, I urge you to write me a book."

"So Lao Tzu wrote a book in two parts, explaining the Way and its Virtue in something over five thousand words.
Then he went away.
No one knows where he died."

(from, The Way of Life - "Tao Te Ching" ...
The Mystic Wisdom of Ancient China, Translators Notes ... 1955)http://www.mountainman.com.au/taotrans.html

May no one know where we die!

And, not knowing, pray and practice for us a way of life: Way itself!

Thank you, old year!

Happy New Year!

Showing up where you are just this moment

Be. Here. Now.

Three good words.

Presence. Place. Present.

We watched film About Richard Alpert (Ram Das), "Fierce Grace," and had circle discussion at Rockland Public Library Thursday evening after shortened conversation at hermitage on year-end Course in Miracles text.

Judy choose from Teacher's Manuel a text to end with, a prayer to take us out. (I cannot find it just now, but in searching, find this):

IS EACH ONE TO BE JUDGED IN THE END?

Indeed, yes! No one can escape God's Final Judgment. Who could flee forever from the truth? But the Final Judgment will not come until it is no longer associated with fear. One day each one will welcome it, and on that very day it will be given him. He will hear his sinlessness proclaimed around and around the world, setting it free as God's Final Judgment on him is received. This is the Judgment in which salvation lies. This is the Judgment that will set him free. This is the Judgment in which all things are freed with him. Time pauses as eternity comes near, and silence lies across the world that everyone may hear this Judgment of the Son of God:

Holy are you, eternal, free and whole, at peace

forever in the Heart of God. Where is the world,

and where is sorrow now?

Is this your judgment on yourself, teacher of God? Do you believe that this is wholly true? No; not yet, not yet. But this is still your goal; why you are here. It is your function to prepare yourself to hear this Judgment and to recognize that it is true. One instant of complete belief in this, and you will go beyond belief to Certainty. One instant out of time can bring time's end. Judge not, for you but judge yourself, and thus delay this Final Judgment. What is your judgment of the world, teacher of God? Have you yet learned to stand aside and hear the Voice of Judgment in yourself? Or do you still attempt to take His role from Him? Learn to be quiet, for His Voice is heard in stillness. And His Judgment comes to all who stand aside in quiet listening, and wait for Him.

You who are sometimes sad and sometimes angry; who sometimes feel your just due is not given you, and your best efforts meet with lack of appreciation and even contempt; give up these foolish thoughts! They are too small and meaningless to occupy your holy mind an instant longer. God's Judgment waits for you to set you free. What can the world hold out to you, regardless of your judgments on its gifts, that you would rather have? You will be judged, and judged in fairness and in honesty. There is no deceit in God. His promises are sure. Only remember that. His promises have guaranteed His Judgment, and His alone, will be accepted in the end. It is your function to make that end be soon. It is your function to hold it to your heart, and offer it to all the world to keep it safe.
(from, A Course in Miracles)
http://courseinmiracles.com/teachers_manual/is_each_one_to_be_judged15.htm

Never fond of traditional definition of the word 'judge' -- it appears to me this morning as the Japanese word 'mu-ge,' which translates as 'no-barrier.'

[2] Suzuki-roshi discusses ri and ji extensively in the Sandokai lectures: "When you practice zazen more, you can accept things as your own, whatever it is, you know. That is actually the teaching of, you know, famous teaching of Kegon-jiji-muge.[2] Jiji-muge means 'being has no,' you know, 'no barrier, no disturbance.' It-it, you know-interrelated closely. And it is difficult to say, 'This is bird, and this is me,' because it is interrelated very closely. So it is difficult to separate bluejay from me. That is jiji-muge." [From fourth Sandokai lecture, SR-70-06-03, p. 3.] (--from Suzuki Roshi Transcripts, San Francisco Zen Center) http://suzukiroshi.sfzc.org/archives/index.cgi/680112V.html?seemore=y

God's final judgment is no-barrier -- the revelation and realization of no-separation (presence), no-distance (place), no-time (present).

God's promises are sure: Be; Here; Now!

The barriers and beliefs constructed by the mind have fallen to earth where Christ is found in each grain of soil, each gain of soul, each refrain of the song of God.

I'd buy a ticket for this show! Except that -- it's free, it's me, it's thee!

Want to go for a ride?

WHEE!!!

What is to follow what?

Working as surgeon with humanitarian hands, "Completely present with unclouded mind." That's what James Orbinski said he had to do as the killing took place around him -- about doctoring during the genocide in Rwanda in 2009 documentary film "Triage, Dr. James Orbinski's Humanitarian Dilemma."

Orbinski, former head of the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) was also there in Somalia, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sudan in humanitarian stark and terrible times when human cruelty and indifference was met with particular, specific, and concrete attentive response.

The tallest peaks
North of the district—
Cliffs so high
The road is lost in clouds.
At dawn,
I climb the tower for a look,
Gradually feeling
Their serene effect.
In smoke-blue haze,
Massed peaks
Appear as if joined.
When will I climb
And set foot there,
And gaze on all
Creation below?
- Chia Tao (779-843)

With a man like Orbinski there is only solid ground and real flesh. No gazing on what's below or lofty distance from which to pontificate or speculate. Science and service brook no metaphoric substitution. Horror and terror are real and awful weapons alongside machetes, Kalashnikovs, and withholding food.
Sharp desolation walks with dull consolation in the wrenching things his eyes have seen.

Never Forget!
by Saado Cabdi Amarre

If you're elected as an impartial judge
But you tend to stick close to your clan
Corruption will be rooted in your mind
If you sell property behind the owner's back
You'll find yourself playing a dangerous game
Deception and fraud are the enemies of justice
There's a clear line between them
If you shun responsibility and turn your back on the law
If justice is muddied then confusion will reign.

Hey you, Xaashi! Look at the children robbed clean of everything
Look at the pleas of those women the judge ignored
An astonishing arrogance that now goes unnoticed
A nation of evil-doers will never progress
When lawyers themselves corrupt the law
When people are bribed and imprisoned for nothing
Wrong-doing in this life will be paid for after death
Peace is impossible unless evil is confronted

It's irrelevant that this man comes from my neighbourhood
It doesn't matter to the case if you are close to him
The trial doesn't concern any of these issues
Hey you, judge, focus on the facts and on justice
You've got blood on your hands, you're tainted with deception
You hide poison at the bottom of the bowl
Here justice is as pointless as a poorly-tied camel-halter
Because all the judges are so easily bought
Those who can't bribe are forced to walk through a thorn thicket
My heart breaks at the suffering of so many people
It's an outrage if we can't bring justice into line
It's a disgrace if we don't all campaign for change

If the judge breaks the law and says robbery's legal
If the judge makes friends with greed and wealth
Never forget the true judgement of the grave!
Never forget there's a grave with your name on it!
Never forget hell and its punishments!
Never forget heaven and its blessings!
Never forget Allah records all your deeds!
Never forget the Day of Judgement!
Never forget that God is Chief Justice!
(The literal translation of this Somali poem was made by Maxamed Xasan 'Alto'
The final translated version of the poem is by Sarah Maguire)
http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/305/Never_Forget!

How we long for justice! How often is it's absence felt. Still, to go on, during no exterior verification of a fierce interior comprehension...

How puny I feel viewing these recent historical circumstances. Only a vague hope the feeling might turn into a sobering beginning from which to evolve.

This political and chaotic world needs sorting through with specific, detailed, particular, and felt acts of human decency so that insanity and inanity do not rot the roots of becoming human in the world.

"To See a World..."
(Fragments from "Auguries of Innocence")

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.

He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar.
The Beggar’s Dog and Widow’s Cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.
The Gnat that sings his Summer song
Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.
The poison of the Snake and Newt
Is the sweat of Envy’s Foot.

A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro’ the World we safely go.

Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.

(by William Blake, 1757-1827)

The task, as Dr. Orbinski points out, is to become completely present with unclouded mind for as long as we can to each person in whichever circumstance we arrive at.

Are we up to it? Am I? The onslaught of anti-humanitarian cynicism and profit-hungry rhetoric in the political theaters on this country's and world's stage alarms my naïveté. Christian charity and Buddhist compassion along with universal notions of justice and kindness might be inadequate antidote to greed, power, indifference, and smug elitism. What do you occupy to engender love in fearful places?

Somalia has been steadily worn down by decades of conflict and chaos, its cities in ruins and its people starving. Just this year, tens of thousands have died from famine, with countless others cut down in relentless combat. Now Somalis face yet another widespread terror: an alarming increase in rapes and sexual abuse of women and girls.

The Shabab militant group, which presents itself as a morally righteous rebel force and the defender of pure Islam, is seizing women and girls as spoils of war, gang-raping and abusing them as part of its reign of terror in southern Somalia, according to victims, aid workers and United Nations officials. Short of cash and losing ground, the militants are also forcing families to hand over girls for arranged marriages that often last no more than a few weeks and are essentially sexual slavery, a cheap way to bolster their ranks’ flagging morale.

But it is not just the Shabab. In the past few months, aid workers and victims say, there has been a free-for-all of armed men preying upon women and girls displaced by Somalia’s famine, who often trek hundreds of miles searching for food and end up in crowded, lawless refugee camps where Islamist militants, rogue militiamen and even government soldiers rape, rob and kill with impunity.

With the famine putting hundreds of thousands of women on the move — severing them from their traditional protection mechanism, the clan — aid workers say more Somali women are being raped right now than at any time in recent memory. In some areas, they say, women are being used as chits at roadblocks, surrendered to the gunmen staffing the barrier in the road so that a group of desperate refugees can pass.
(December 27, 2011, For Somali Women, Pain of Being a Spoil of War, By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, The New York Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/world/africa/somalia-faces-alarming-rise-in-rapes-of-women-and-girls.html?pagewanted=1

The dilemma is active hope in the midst of staggering numbness.

Even in my inadequacy and embarrassing smallness I affirm impossible human decency wherever enacted in the midst of frightening realization of what we are capable of -- what we must face in order to...in order to...what?

In order to...what?

This being the between we are

As a Catholic Christian and a Zen Buddhist I find no difficulty. It's a non-difficult middlemost.

The continual exchange of center and circumference finds me in the middle of this dance of perception and actuality.

Difficulty arises when the thought arises that there is a decision to be made between two options. When you reside in the between there is no decision. What is there is what is there. One? Other? Not two things: just one-an-other. Which is another way of saying there is no other, only this, where you are/who you are.

I'm never not who and where I have been. I will always be where and who I am.

What is there to be cut away with the blade of decision? What 'two' is perceived as needing excision and extrication in or from our mind?

To dwell in the middle of the world, of existence, of my life, is to dwell in the middle of the question: Which would you prefer to cut away -- your inhaling or your exhaling?

There is no decision required. I stand between the options and, for now, right here, practice both inhaling and exhaling -- with great delight and happy realization of the gift.

I practice accepting simplicity, anonymous service, accommodating silence. (asasas)

In its most non-dualistic form, existential freedom comes only from realization of the "true man":

"If you want to freely live or die, go or stay, to take off or put on [your clothes], then right now recognize the man who is listening to my discourse. He is without form, without characteristics, without root, without source, and without any dwelling place, yet is brisk and lively." (Discourse XIV)

Freedom arises when we recognize who we really are -- and in our normal way of being, it is shattered when we think, speak, and act from habitual identification with body/mind phenomena. The process of such identification, this "thirst for becoming" (a deeply insightful teaching of the Buddha himself), is manifest in the endless stream of our personal tendencies, divided neatly by Buddhists into the triad of desire, aggression, and ignorance. When we realize ourselves to actually be this free inner agent, then we become that freedom itself.

In the chronicle of Lin-chi's rugged teaching, we see a beautiful example of action without hesitation. His wild ways -- shouting, beating, knocking over tables, and so on — is but skillful means in accordance with clarity, without fixed root. The true man, ever and always, is free and unperturbed. In Discourse XVIII, we hear a teaching which sounds curiously like the Chinese Taoist, Chuang Tzu:

"Only you, the follower of the Way right now before my eyes listening to my discourse, [only you] enter fire and are not burned, enter water and are not drowned, enter the three hells as though strolling in a pleasure gardens, enter the realms of the hungry ghosts and the beasts without suffering their fate. How can this be? There are no dharmas [genuine objective phenomena] to be disliked."

(from, "Lin-chi and the True Man without Rank"
by Scott Mandelker, Ph.D. http://www.buddhanet.net/lin-chi.htm

This time of year I note Jesus, Stephen, John, the Holy Innocents, Mary, Joseph, Angels, Animals, Francis, Story, Imagination, Hopes, Longings, Christ-Mind, and New Beginnings.

I also note Siddhartha, Tathagata, Kuan Yin, Dogen, Bodhidharma, Lin-chi, Layman Pang, Bankai, Ryokan, Meditation Bell, Zafu, Only-Don't-Know, InterBeing, Buddha-Mind, and Incense.

Mostly, I note that everywhere I look, in whatever direction gaze falls, the middle of everything seems to surround and sustain the no-effort no-choice no-other... presence of perfection which is what is. This 'what is' (as you know) has been known by and called by different names. You'll be able to recollect the name or names most familiar to you. For me, these days, like in Faust, I have no names, for: “Names are but noise and smoke, obscuring heavenly light.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

We have poets. We are fortunate. Even in their attempts to convey a point of view they are blessedly circumflex.

13. Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; 5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10
Praise him.

(Poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844–89. Poems. 1918)

This dappling stippling adazzling -- this being the between we are -- with asasas gratefulness!

Wind blows, water flows, nobody knows.

Say it: Ain't life grand?!

Where no-one-else is

It's not so bad being alone.

The poem/video starts off with: "If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you've not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren't okay with it, then just wait. You'll find it's fine to be alone once you're embracing it."

Later:

Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after awhile nobody is dating them.

But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.

You can stand swathed by groups and mobs or hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.

But no one is in your head. And by the time you translate your thoughts an essence of them maybe lost or perhaps it is just kept. Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those “sappy slogans” from pre-school over to high school groaning, were tokens for holding the lonely at bay.

Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.

It’s okay if no one believes like you, all experiences unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be relived, keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, and the community is not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.

Take silence and respect it.

If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it, if your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.

You could be in an instant surrounded if you need it.

If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.

There is heat in freezing, be a testament.
(-- from poem by Tanya Davis – "How To Be Alone"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Being alone could even be when no one else is there.

Consider being no one else.

Be there where no-one-else is.

A work of art. Happily so.

The world disappears. Only sounds remain of a world evanescing. No need to remember it or wish it return. Only attend the sound of what is worlding said. Of that sound, heard through silence, comes to be what we need to see.

The Grace of Night Solitude

George the Golden sleeps in mud room. Mice forage in cabinets. Saskia visits family with our two dogs. I stay on futon alongside mudroom to keep George company. He complains. I tell him if he hadn't immediately peed on rug when his caretaker brought him in during the pipes-bursting emergency on Christmas night, maybe he'd be on this side of the glass door instead of on the many tiered bedding cushion and towels beside winter boots. He's content to watch the firestove orange flames and feel the up swoop ceiling fan drop warmth over partition to foyer flophouse in strange residence until morning.

I've had more luck than Han-Shan:

Late at night I sit alone
And work on deadwood zen
I stir the lifeless ashes
The fire won't relight
Suddenly I hear the tower
Chimes resound.
Its sound of clarity
Fills the winter sky.
- Han-shan Te-ch'ing (1546-1623)

We walk out to soft snow at 3:00am and feel the grace of night solitude, me in red shorts and Baffin boots and down vest, George in happy 5 inch snow peeing freely under white lighted wreath behind block and tackle hanging from bookshed ridge pole.

I bow to snow blanketed Christmas Buddha and Celtic Cross stalwart in new-found alliance in welcoming view to drop-by friends.

Surrounded by medical faces last week their greatest interest (aside from physical hearts) was the monastic hermit vocation in response to their questions wanting to know 'What do you do?' (as in: what does your heart do with it's erratic and restricted beats?

A seminar on surgical asymptomatic symbolism right there and then which was, at the time, here and now.

Life is life, all of it -- no choosing between this and that; mere acceptance of this and that and life in the between.

Still, we muse:

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
(Poem, "When You Are Old" is reprinted from The Rose. W.B. Yeats. 1893.)

Fondly so, for we are a frail and fragile recollecting family making way day by day.

Venite adoremus

Jesus, like Buddha before him, longed for us to transcend greed, anger, and ignorance. He wished to reintroduce generosity, compassion, and wisdom.

We live and die between this and that.

As visitors here and there let's opt for genuine peace, presence, and everyday kindness.

When ice on the pond is three feet thick
And white snow stretches a thousand miles,
My heart will still be like the pine and cypress,
But your heart, what will it be?
- Ziye (265-420)

Snow settles quietly on bronze Celtic cross and stone Buddha at outside corner of bookshed/retreat.

...pro nobis

Merry Christmas!

Note: There will be no Sunday Evening Practice on Christmas Day.

Christus Natus Est...

Nothing is without God

Word is, nor are we

Without God, that is --

Nor is nothing not

Within silence, everything is

Itself.

Coming to: ad venire; 28

Four men stacked the remainder of three cord of green wood I'd left under tarp where dropped the days surrounding Saskia's mother's passing transition here at the hermitage.

While they worked I was on a table watching someone's heart on large simulcast being explored one day then excavated the next by wires and cameras and balloons and meshy hold-em-opens.

God is good. People, all of us, are good. I gratefully acknowledge this and celebrate it.

I especially bow in gratitude to all the men and women extending acuity, skill, kindness, and care to those of us placed in their hands.

With love!

Sometimes you do come back.

U.S. Life Saving Service Station History
The Surfman Motto:
"You have to go out,
but you do not have to come back!"

A letter to the editor of the old Coast Guard Magazine written by CBM Clarence P. Brady, USCG (Ret.) which was published in the March 1954 (page 2) issue, states that the first person to make this remark was Patrick Etheridge. Brady knew him when both were stationed at the Cape Hatteras LSS. Brady tells the story as follows:

"A ship was stranded off Cape Hatteras on the Diamond Shoals and one of the life saving crew reported the fact that this ship had run ashore on the dangerous shoals. The old skipper gave the command to man the lifeboat and one of the men shouted out that we might make it out to the wreck but we would never make it back. The old skipper looked around and said, 'The Blue Book says we've got to go out and it doesn't say a damn thing about having to come back.'"

Etheridge was not exaggerating. The Regulations of the Life-Saving Service of 1899, Article VI "Action at Wrecks," section 252, page 58, state that:

"In attempting a rescue the keeper will select either the boat, breeches buoy, or life car, as in his judgement is best suited to effectively cope with the existing conditions. If the device first selected fails after such trial as satisfies him that no further attempt with it is feasible, he will resort to one of the others, and if that fails, then to the remaining one, and he will not desist from his efforts until by actual trial the impossibility of effecting a rescue is demonstrated. The statement of the keeper that he did not try to use the boat because the sea or surf was too heavy will not be accepted unless attempts to launch it were actually made and failed, or unless the conformation of the coast--as bluffs, precipitous banks, etc.--is such as to unquestionable preclude the use of a boat."

This section of the Regulations remained in force after the creation of the Coast Guard in 1915. The new Instructions for United States Coast Guard Stations, 1934 edition, copied Section 252 word for word as it appeared in 1899. [1934 Instructions for United States Coast Guard Stations, Paragraph 28, page 4].

source: U.S. Coast Guard http://www.lifesavingservice.org/motto.html

Include gratitude, to each and all, for safe return.

I do.

Coming to: ad venire; 27

Saskia brought flowers.

I don't crave fame and profit or care that I'm poor;
Hiding in the depths of the mountains
I keep far away the world's dust;
The year has waned and the skies are cold:
Who'd be my companion?
The plum blossoms are adorned in moonlight
One branch-new.
- Jakushitsu Genko (1290-1367)

Three of them. They are silhouetted in vase against 9th floor windows looking out to Fore River through veil of falling snow illuminated with city lights during a quiet stretch of hospital night.

Open my lips, Lord,
and my mouth will proclaim your praise;
for you do not delight in sacrifices:
if I offered you a burnt offering, it would not please you.
The true sacrifice is a broken spirit:
a contrite and humble heart, O God, you will not refuse.
(from Psalm 51, Morning Prayer)

Prayer, I submit, is communion of thought and feeling intended toward someone's or something's healing recovery and healthy wholeness. Prayer penetrates and integrates where it visits, whether in this seeming existence or beyond into seamless inclusive presence of longing itself.

I am grateful for the kind thoughtful feeling prayer arriving here from other heres beyond this specific one.

Where, I occlude, and happily conclude, all is well.

Coming to: ad venire; 26

Time to change heart.

"My heart exults in the Lord." (1 Samuel 2)

Leap out, leap up, Skip beat, block passage. Get fixed, watch breath. Carefully.

This is today.

As is that which we call "Lord."

Right now he's snoring in next bed behind curtain.

As is Portland beyond window shade.

As am I before forgetting interdependent interrelational interbeing.

Change heart, see things through, with love.

Welcome, winter, returning light!

Coming to: ad venire; 25

Maybe this is as far as I go.

Under evergreens
I walk along a pathway
Now gone to sight
Beneath autumn leaves strewn there
By winter's mountain winds.
- Tonna (1289-1372)

I step out onto bulkhead deck as night and pre-dawn discuss their border edges before turning to their ritual exchange. I look up at stars. So many so far so beyond what can be entirely seen. It is hard to see beyond the edges of things, places, or persons. Still, we are called, to do, this.

The edge of everything is the startling invitation to consider going beyond what 'ego' sees to the completely beyond realization of what-is-awake within the one seeing itself.

Maybe 'I' stops at the edge of 'this' and cannot go further.

Maybe this is as far as 'I' goes.

As 'I' momentarily surrenders its passport and dissolves suddenly into surrounding landscape, there remains only 'this' only 'here' only 'now.'

Maybe this is as far as I go.

Ask: What's there to do?

Ha! Celebrate! Rejoice! Laugh and cry! Enter awakening realization!

Say: That's a good one!

Ask each other: Where've you been?

Yeah, yep, and yes...

Now here this...

Love is useful.

Does it matter if it emanates from the idea of christian thinking (divinity incarnating as love-with-us) or buddhist thinking (fully compassionate heart/mind realizing true nature)?

Use it.

Just be grateful.

And use love to be of service.

Coming to: ad venire; 24

I update WiserEarth profile. Most times the response to 'who am I?' is 'dunno!' -- but once in a while a longer meditation is required. Here's this morning's:

At meetingbrook hermitage we practice between traditions.
We attend to and cultivate three particular promises: contemplation, conversation, and correspondence.
The hermitage silent sittings, respite retreats, formal and informal conversations invite practicing deep listening and loving speech.
Our need for honest inquiry into true nature -- relational resonance with earth, cosmos, other people, all beings, and the holy sacred unknown some call god some call reality some call wholeness -- brings us to prison, correctional center, nursing home, hospice space, college classroom, quiet conversation, and simply being-with others in everydayness.
We call ourselves m.o.n.o. (monastics of no other) -- a literation where 'one' and 'my' and 'mu' dance and play with each another as might kitten or koan seeing itself in a mirror.
We are grateful for the gift of being here, alone with others, in the surround of thoughtful, creative, and compassionate community.
Our activism is being-here and responding to what-is presenting itself.

It is quiet around the hermitage
As
Daylight seeps into earth

Coming to: ad venire; 23

Language belongs to the earth. The earth speaks through you and me. Word and words.

Listening is the primary gift. Given and received.

We've been overlooking the obvious.

Advent is the coming to be of word and words through all that is, revealing and concealing, engaging creative experience of breathing intercourse birthing inimitable now with ineluctable here, a marriage replete with distinctive union, pregnant promise, pastoral sacredness -- all that we thought was somewhere else someone other sometime distant -- rather, in this place with this one in this instant a felt, proximate, living, and loving presence with your name my face your eyes my feet your seeing my finding your breathing my hearing your touching my tasting your fragrance as we are as it is as will be...

When we, as we, come to...

The sound of...

The sight of...

The feel of...

What is...

Coming to...

Us

Coming to: ad venire: 22

Sunday Morning Recollection of Sorrow in Three Parts

Preface:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
(--Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

1.

Death
Grinned horrible a ghastly smile, to hear
His famine should be filled.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
(bk. II, l. 845)

2.

Last Convoy of American Troops Leaves Iraq, Marking an End to the War
By TIM ARANGO and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

BAGHDAD — The last convoy of American troops to leave Iraq drove into Kuwait on Sunday morning, marking the end of the nearly nine-year war.

The convoy’s departure, which included about 110 vehicles and 500 soldiers, came three days after the American military folded its flag in a muted ceremony here to celebrate the end of its mission.

In darkness, the convoy snaked out of Contingency Operating Base Adder, near the southern city of Nasiriyah, around 2:30 a.m., and headed toward the border. The departure appeared to be the final moment of a drawn-out withdrawal that included weeks of ceremonies in Baghdad and around Iraq, and included visits by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, as well as a trip to Washington by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.

As dawn approached on Sunday morning, the last trucks began to cross over the border into Kuwait at an outpost lit by floodlights and secured by barbed wire.
...
For security reasons, the last soldiers made no time for goodbyes to Iraqis with whom they had become acquainted. To keep details of the final trip secret from insurgents, interpreters for the last unit to leave the base called local tribal sheiks and government leaders on Saturday morning and conveyed that business would go on as usual, not letting on that all the Americans would soon be gone.

Many troops wondered how the Iraqis, whom they had worked closely with and trained over the past year, would react when they awoke on Sunday to find that the remaining American troops on the base had left without saying anything.
(--from New York Times, 18Dec2011)

3.

Hail, Coffee !

COFFEE affords a good restoring draft,
Which clears the fumes of wine too freely quaffed.
By her you gain, when you the table quit,
A calm more courteous, and a brighter wit;
And soon recovered, by her powerful aid,
You are not of a second feast afraid.
She by the god of verse is praised and loved;
The poet’s genius is by her improved.
Your frigid rimers, if at times inspired,
Write their best lines by coffee’s fragrance fired.
She can enliven philosophic plan,
And make an analyst a pleasant man.
Statesmen, through her, well feasted and content,
Form happy schemes of better government.
Knowledge sometimes to journalists she brings
Of court intrigues, and deep designs of kings.
Peace, truces, wars, she to his dreams can show,
And lets him, for three pence, the world o’erthrow.

(Poem by Jacques Delille, 1738-1813; From The World’s Wit and Humor, Volume X, French — Rutebœuf to Balzac; The Review of Reviews Company; New York; 1906; p. 237.)

Postscript:

There are some events in the world about which to add further personal words merely darkens, deepens, and disorients sorrow.