What have I? Not learned: yet

The insight was that the community is the great teacher. This includes all sentient beings, the whole of the cosmos, all that is, known and unknown. A pretty interesting zen master, guru, and mystic presence to have as teacher, eh?

All I can do is listen, accept, internalize, and respond. (L.a.i.r.) What is "lair" and where am I in it?

lair   [lair]
noun
1. a den or resting place of a wild animal: The cougar retired to its lair.
2. a secluded or hidden place, especially a secret retreat or base of operations; a hideout or hideaway: a pirate's lair.
3. British . a place in which to lie or rest; a bed.
verb (used with object)
4. to place in a lair.
5. to serve as a lair for.
(--from Dictionary.com)

What is in me? What is in the world? What's the difference?

What have I not learned yet?

Totality is everything that is happening in your own body/mind and everything that is not happening in your body/mind. Embodiment is the only thing that we can find. That's why trying to fix the universe by what we know is ludicrous, because what we don't know is constantly folding into the known. This is what manifestation is. We become enamored with the manifestation, forgetting that it is already gone and what is next, which is the unknown, is now expressing. All we can see is the known -- a ghost image that has nothing to do with what is next.
So in coming to the end of the spiritual search, we actually come to the beginning of the exploration of consciousness. This is not a path of looking or finding; it is not negating the thought-process or changing anything. It is the exploration of the manifestation and embodiment of totality, which is expressing itself in what is next after now, in my body, in my life, in my relationship, in all the forms and expressions that are apparent and all the forms and expressions that are not.
(p.42, in What's Next After Now, Post-Spirituality and the Creative Life, by Steven Harrison, c.2005)

The Tibetan prayer flags are sheer against barn siding.

Bach chorale fills morning kitchen.

Understanding Emptiness

Every moment of experience is contingent on a vast complex of myriad conditions. Nothing exists in and of itself as 'this' or 'that,' 'self' or 'other.' Everything is what it is only in relation to what it is not.
(-from, Stephen Batchelor, "Nagarjuna's Verses from the Center" -- Tricycle Magazine)

I don't think I am afraid of what is next.

I don't think. I am a-frayed of what is. Next...

the eyes see nothing; doing

Some think there's too much said about enlightenment. I agree. Except that it's like commenting on the weather. If you don't say anything about the weather, there's still weather.

Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water. You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky. The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long or short it's duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

I read slowly. And if I like a novel, slower still. These are these lines referring to protagonist, Mohammad Khan, architect:

Critics and historians credited him with helping to shift the aesthetic of the Middle East. "Even in a mosque you should feel yourself in a garden," he had told one interviewer. "Nothing between you and God."
(--p.287 of novel,The Submission, by Amy Waldman)

The line jumps out: "Nothing between you and God." And I think: maybe that's why so many feel uncomfortable with the notion of "nothing," because that is all that exists between you and God. And to realize God you have to move through nothing.

It asks the question: Do I want, really, to realize God?

Then again: Will "nothing" engulf and consume me?

If I submit, what will be left to be aware I have made submission?

"Gib deine Schönheit immer hin"

There are days when something striking and poignant arises. Eye and ear are grateful recipients.


Unpacking and shelving two dozen boxes of books from the house library of Saskia's mom and dad remind me I should have paid more attention the two years of German studied the better part of a half century ago.


I felt confident after the pattern drill, Mutter, wir haben post -- (Mother, we have mail). I stare with dull forgetfulness at titles such as Dostojewskij, sein Leben, sein Werk, sein Vermachtnis (Quellen und Studien zur russischen Geistesgeschichte) (German Edition)  or  Bildnis und Begriff - Die Rrepräsentationsproblematik in Max Frischs Roman "Stiller" (German Edition).


I did, however, memorize the Greek alphabet in what seemed like quick dispatch. I also set a good pick for Bob and Jon when the fast break failed to happen.


One of the pieces out of the haul box at end of day was KOVÁCS MARGIT MÚZEUM, SZENTENDRE. This museum booklet, with its photographs of figurines and sculptures immediately charmed. The pages gave way to decades of tiredness and separated with each turning.

#136, HALOTTI BESZED, 1970 (Trauerrede, a funeral oration. eulogy.)

#70, ANYAM, 1951 (Meine Mutter, my mother)

#117, ANGYALI  UDVOZLET, 1968, 

(Die Verkündigung, The Annunciation)

 The curve of surprise! The pathos of visage! The deflation of loss! 

This Gyűjtemény (Hungarian, for 'Collection') was housed in the Pest County Museums Directorate in Szentendre, where in 1972 she donated the majority of her work. Margit Kovács was born in Győr, Hungary on 30 November 1902 and died in Budapest on 4 June 1977. It was on the 25th anniversary of her death that I found her work. Dare call it coincidence! Did Saskia's mother and father visit the museum? Of course, the notation over "Ex Libris, Erica Huising" in Will's handwriting says "Szentendre, 1979."

While looking at these photographs I listen to "Wo gehest du hin?" by J.S. Bach (BMV166, 8fm) performed by the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestre and Choir, Ton Koopman, soloist. 

I am surrounded by late afternoon slanting sunlight wending through the sluice between Ragged Mountain and Bald Mountain. Hayden's Sonata #1 in F major. adagio e sostenuto, sends violin strains through deepening dusk green.

INITIALE. 

Gib deine Schönheit immer hin 

ohne rechnen und reden 

Du schweigst. Sie sagt für dich: Ich bin. 

Und kommt in tausendfachem Sinn, 

kommt endlich über jeden.

(--Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke)

Quiet. 

Beckoning.

Mu; If the sangha is the next great teacher

What you have to do is listen, accept, internalize, and respond.

And sit zazen.

Until the cows come home.

Metaphor tells us; many stories

The dark wet ground mountainside green ferns glow in gray evening light.

Dewdrop,
The gaudy beauty of this world
Has no attraction for me;
My closest friends are
Mountains and rivers,
Clouds swallow up my shadow
As I walk along,
When I sit on cliffs,
Birds soar overhead.
Wearing snowy straw sandals,
I visit cold villages.
Go as deep as you can into life,
And you will be able to let go
Of even blossoms.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

Mutatis mutandis, things being changed that have to be changed -- human heart, head, and hand crave harmony.

Go as deep into life as you can.

It is all story.

Easy is as easy does

The hardest lesson is coming to terms with dark in light and light in dark. It's not one or the other. Both are entwined.

When the mind's as is,
Circumstances also are as is.
There's no real and also no unreal.
Giving no heed to existence,
You're neither saint nor sage, just
An ordinary person who has settled his affairs.
Easy, so easy…
- Layman P'ang (740-808)

Where everything is in the same place, it's not a matter of amputation. It's a matter of navigation. How find your way to where you want to go and not slam into the hazards on left and right?

Prayer helps. Contemplation helps.

Settle your affairs!

Humbling haiku

When a gift is given, we are grateful.

Today, we compose this haiku for someone's kindness:

blue earth sphere floating
                      empty black space
just there
your kindness
has roots  

(wfh/nunc ipsum)

Earth in it's wandering meander through a very large expanse -- a breathtaking and breathgiving gift!

there really is no choice

If you ask nicely and say the right words you can get what you want. It's magical thinking.

This matter does not depend on being a male or female,
nor on being noble or a commoner.
If you once break through,
you are shoulder to shoulder with the Buddha.
- Ta-hui

On the other hand, if you keep quiet, wait for the inevitable to occur, you watch what you need walk through the door.

It's no thought at all.

What gives in us

Thought of Caryll Houselander at conversation tonight.

Simplicity is not — as so many think, and, alas, teach — silliness. Simplicity means not being complicated, not being double in any way, not deluding oneself or anyone else. The first exercise in simplicity is to accept oneself as one is. There are two tremendous results of this: one is humility; the other is that it enables other people to accept us as we are, and in this there is real charity.

People whose demand on others is simple and uncomplicated add to the life of the world. One of the main reasons for devitalization, depression and psychological tiredness is that we make complicated demands on one another.

(from, Giving Ourselves Unreservedly to Life, By Caryll Houselander, excerpted from "Wood of the Cradle, Wood of the Cross," by Caryll Houselander published by Sophia Press.) http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=528

Becoming a reed of God is to allow divine breath to flow unobstructed through you.

The Way does not need cultivation;
Just don't pollute it.
What is pollution?
As long as you have a fluctuating mind,
Creating artificialities and pursuing inclinations,
All is pollution.
If you want to understand the Way directly,
The normal mind is the Way.
What is normal mind?
It has no artificial contrivance,
No right or wrong, no grasping or rejection,
No ordinariness and no sanctity.
- Ancestor Ma (709–788)

The effort and struggle to remain separated from who we are is not worth the disappointment.

The acceptance of life as it is must teach us trust and humility. This is because every real experience of life is an experience of God. Every experience of God makes us realize our littleness, our need, our nothingness, but at the same time the miracle of Christ in us. Not only are we one of God's creatures — which is in itself a guarantee of His eternal creating love — but we are also His Christ, His only Son, the sole object of His whole love. These two facts balance the scales of trust: our nothingness and our allness.
(Houselander, Ibid)

Give in to what gives in us.

Passing through

                                          The water waves me on.

                                       

                                      

Where did I put my questions

Stupidity, said Bankei in the 17th century, is a good thing. Of course, he was a zen master. They like the "don't know" mind.

There's a difference between not knowing and operating with a "don't know" mind. One is simple ignorance. The other is Buddha mind seeing everything for the first time.

We are generally knowledgable. We know. And we let others know we know and what we know.

But the rare way is not not knowing and not letting on you don't know, rather, doing what you are doing with don't know mind in such a way that only discovery is what is taking place.

There, that's clear.

What else?

I don't know. That's because I'm stupid.

I'll take your questions now. You won't be needing them. Live the uncertainty with courage and joy.

There's nothing else remaining.

That, and heavy rain, thick mist, and lightning flashes with rolling thunder.

Nothing else.

At all.

A guest remembers what we forget

War deads. War kills. War is our new and profitable industry. Profits are gathered by the war-makers. These we do not honor.

So many die. These, we honor.

We honor those fallen with flowers, parades, and marching bands.

The people who send men and women to their deaths, to the deaths of hundreds, thousands, millions in war zones, lay wreaths on the perfidy of the politics of war under the illusion men and women are being honored.

These thoughts are anger and sorrow.

Rowing Saturday morning out toward Curtis Island, I pass below daily ritual as the canon at yacht club sounded at 8AM. The American flag was raised. I stopped rowing. I raised my hand to forehead in salute to those dead and deadened by war. I cried.

I was taken by the surprise of this private memorial. Just wind and wave and the spirits of all my brothers and sisters floating over the millennia of unenlightened mind steeped in conflict and violent action.

There's an awareness wanting our attention. A new step in consciousness that waits by our door. Oh God, it is time!

Last night at Sunday Evening Practice we read Ilia Delio on Franciscan Prayer. The reading ended with these words: "It is prayer, according to Bonaventure, that impelled Francis to see the world with new vision, a contemplative vision that penetrated the depths of reality. The world became Francis' cloister because he found it to be permeated with the goodness of God."

This is the cloistered life we long for. For all our brothers and sisters, here and gone.

Nowhere to go

Everyone speaks another's language.

If you forgive mindless misinterpretation or misbegotten misrepresentation what else is there to look around and see?

My God! What would become of us if everything came to be itself?

You, yourself. Me, myself. That, itself. Any, oneself.

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here 

(poem, seeker of truth, by e.e.cummings)

What does God want?

Don't ask!

Read the moment.

Way off

I don't understand why it is ok for the government to assassinate people whenever they want.

Am I missing something?

A magic trick

When Friday ends, it will be Saturday.

Turning around, returning home

Thursday morning at the harbor. Ellens Dritter Gesang (Ellens Gesang III, D839, Op 52 no 6, 1825), in English: " Ellen's Third Song", composed by Franz Shubert begins classical music on Maine Public Radio with Suzanne Nance.

The piece was composed as a setting of a song from Walter Scott's popular epic poem The Lady of the Lake, in a German translation by Adam Storck (1780-1822), and thus forms part of Schubert's Liederzyklus vom Fräulein vom See. (Ave Maria, Schubert, Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria_%28Schubert%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria_%28Schubert%29

At harbor the schooners ready for their season. Lewis French, Olad, Lazy Jack, Surprise, Angelique, Grace Bailey -- are finishing scraping, painting, varnishing, and polishing. And then the gray Mary Day arrives back, is turned by yawl boat, reversing into berth.

The harbor life and coastal stretch from bell buoys to weathered pilings becomes a kind of poetry. I daily row the poesis, the making-creativity of nature's hand, composition.

"La poesia es la conciencia de la tierra." (--Alfonso Cortes: Poetry is the conscience of the earth.)

A group wants to work toward returning parole to the State of Maine. I'm for it. I'd also like to return respect for parole, (voice, spoken word) as it arrives at and passes through us.

Mike Divine greets the sitting sipping surveyor with his cheery assessment of how fortunate we are to live here. And we are.

We secure lines, offload gear, feel solid ground underfoot, and get sent off with the encouraging appreciation of crew.

Who's next?

articulating one's own being in a new way

If some wonder if they or I have lost faith, tell them this: faith is our profound longing for truth, and is not lost. Belief, however, is what we temporarily hold as true until we experience the ungraspable nature of truth. 

Thus it is that faith remains while belief is lost.

Keep faith, lose belief. Truth emerges within and through everything. 

Humility recognizes ungraspable emergence. Arrogance ignores what it doesn't comprehend.

Keats called it "negative capability."

In a letter dated 22 December, 1817, the poet John Keats coined the term “negative capability” and defined it this way:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/negative-capability-defined-walking-in-mysteries-and-the-shoes-of-others/

Later, in his blog PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, the author adds:

In the Virginia Quarterly Review (April 1, 2005), the poet Galway Kinnell offers a similar expansive spin on Keats’s notion of negative capability, suggesting that negative capability includes not just a metaphysical suspension of judgment—allowing mysteries to be mysteries—but the Shakespearean power to “obliterate” oneself and walk, as it were, in the shoes of other beings (human and non-human!):

Walt Whitman had Keatsian “negative capability”—a certain shapelessness of personality, a peculiar power to obliterate himself and flow into some other being and speak it from within—and speak himself in the process. “I am the man—,” he wrote, “I suffered—I was there.” A transaction seems to occur: Whitman gives whatever he flows into a presence in human consciousness, and in return, this other thing or creature gives Whitman a situation and vocabulary which enable him to see and articulate his own being in a new way.

(ibid)

It is akin to the title of Pema Chodron's book "Comfortable with Uncertainty."

Cool water for thirsty bodies!

If you meet the Christ on the road...

There used to be an argument over who killed Christ. It was a silly diversion. No one killed Christ.

But the church is trying.

The church is becoming a silly diversion.

I'll tell you what. Christ stepped out from the back of the church to catch a breath of air.

I wish Christ well. It's an uneasy walk down those stairs and off into the countryside.

Unless the seed breaks open

Easwaren points out that the skin of the snake must be sloughed.

Old ideas, failing institutions, dead practices.

We are in trouble.

Fear, not love, could be our fate if no regeneration.

SOUTH India is full of snakes, and every year as I was growing up, when the earth was warm after the monsoon rains, I used to marvel at the sloughed-off snakeskins scattered across our fields. “Doesn’t it hurt a snake to shed its skin like that?” I once asked my grandmother.

“It has no choice,” she replied. “It will strangle if it can’t grow. It has to slough its skin or die.” In the same way, I would say, civilisation outgrows the skins of old ways that begin to strangle it. If they are not discarded, they become so constricting that civilisation begins to turn on itself and become self-destructive.

In the last fifty years, we have come to a crisis in human evolution where we have to choose between violence and non-violence. If we choose to tread the path of violence, not only do we
impede our evolution, but we invite destruction upon all of us.
(--from The Power Within, by Eknath Easwaren)
http://122.183.185.202/globaladjustments/?q=book/export/html/397

The customs we cultivate and costumes we don take on their own officiating insistence to behave in accordance with some haberdasheric dictate arising when final button is secured.

We must slough our bad ideas and useless patterns of mental formations that we've carried too long and at great debilitating price to our body-mind longing to enter a new freedom for love and joy.

Let shells of seeds and shell casings of armaments fall to ground, empty.

Begin at Home
We don’t have to begin peacemaking on an international scale. We can start to make our contribution right in our own city – beginning, like Gandhi, in our own home.

Here I can make a few practical suggestions. First and foremost, the roots of non-violence need to be planted in the home. Non-violence is the absence of violence.

A non-violent home is a home that eschews violence in every form: not only in action, which is absolutely necessary, but also in word and even thought. A home that is non-violent in thought, word, and deed is governed entirely by love.

Sow Non-violence
When we sow non-violence, we begin to reap peace. We should not expect a civilisation to change as easily as a snake sheds its skin. Progress is won slowly, over centuries. Despite appearances it is we, the ordinary people of the world, who have the power to change our lives. We make history together, all of us, by the sum of our choices and desires.
(--Easwaren, ibid)

Let us begin with "being." By the "sum," he says. Might he be referring to "sum, esse, fui, futurus?" I am to be (what) I have been (and am) going to be.

Realize this!

Enter Being Whole!

Unlearning what we think we know

Did you see a homeless person? Did it hurt?

Was there a sign that said, "Broke. Hungry"?

Such homelessness is sad. Such suffering is difficult.

What to do?

You deal with your shit in Zen by sitting with it. By breathing right into it. You don’t try and ignore it with pleasant thoughts or lofty ideas, and you don’t try and bury it with solutions. You deal with it, you work with it, one breath at a time. You hold it right there, in your breath. You don’t try and breathe it out; you don’t try and breathe it in. You keep it suspended in your diaphragm like a burning hot coin. Your problems won’t change; only you can change. That’s the point.
(- from, Growing Ground, by Steve Krieger)
http://www.tricycle.com/feature/growing-ground?page=0,1

Go ahead, extend a fiver. Hand over a banana. Don't preach, judge, or ignore.

Suffer the indignity of the sign-carrier.

Be happy you feel what you feel. You could just as easily have scoffed, mocked, or laughed. Instead you brought both of you to Saturday Morning Practice and even shed tears.

It is maddening when our egos do not know how to respond, don't know what to do.

Sei stille, be silence, be calm, shush!

God is speaking to your heart/mind.

Listen with care.

You will learn.

To unlearn.

Hold lightly if not at all what is at hand

Change.

Nowhere is it not.

Then, be there.

As it is, moving elsewhere.

Where you are, going.

Observing

"Creation knows no opposite." (from lesson 138, A Course in Miracles)

Trappist Thomas Keating wrote in a slender volume that "God is existence."

When I see this, I will let you know.

What is sitting meditation?
To remove ourselves from
all external distractions and
quiet the mind is called "sitting."
To observe the inner nature
in perfect calmness is called "meditation."
- Hui-neng

Until then, find me in the cabin.

A transient transcript of trinitarian coursework

God is God. God is O! Good. Then, God is good.

Good itself is God's name. Do good! Be good! See good!

"Bad" is a misapprehension of "good." This happens a lot. Like a cup of coffee. First sip, the best. Next ten sips, Ok! Then, final dregs, cool and uninspiring sip, not so much!

T: You mentioned the use of retreat practice in Roman Catholicism. Does that feature the same combination of solitude and meditation practice? Or is the structured meditation in retreat the unique offering from Buddhism?

RR: Both Buddhism and Roman Catholicism employ structured “form” practices and the formless practices of working with awareness itself. Father Thomas Keating, who runs the Benedictine monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, teaches what he calls centering prayer. My understanding is that this is very much a mindfulness discipline, bringing the mind to a point and training it to be present, then allowing the inner wisdom to gradually unfold from that. If you look at the other contemplative orders in Roman Catholicism, I think you’ll see quite similar practices.
Perhaps an important difference between Buddhism and Christianity is that, within the Christian tradition, there is usually a subject you are contemplating, whereas in Buddhism, especially with the formless practices, you are really opening the mind in and of itself; you are not contemplating a particular subject or figure. Ultimately, we are looking to simply open the mind and lay bare its depths. In Christianity you find that as well, so it’s not an absolute difference but a difference in emphasis.
(--From, INTERVIEW, The Power of Solitude, Shambhala Mountain Center's Reggie Ray talks to Tricycle's Ted Rose about the value of solitary retreat; by Ted Rose) http://www.tricycle.com/interview/power-solitude

I mention to woman in Wohnkuche last night after meditation practice there is a trinity to serve as teacher for us: listen, don't judge, learn!

Stillness in Wohnkuche this morning. White Border Collie asleep on futon. Ticking of two clocks. Hum of refrigerator motor. Silence of books. Mere gaze of every wall hanging, pillow, dream, and forgotten detail. Everything that ever was is here, hidden or unbidden, on or under surface of appearance. It is, as they say, all good.

I listen.

I do not critique or judge.

I'm learning.

of a tuesday morning

Spending time with students' papers. Margaret presents translation of Om Mani Padme Hum as: "Oh, but to see only through Wisdom's eye." It caught my attention.

What is "only through"...?

This morning, sitting in meditation cabin, a translation for Tuesday morning arises:

Looking in
to what is
shining through.

So, I wash last night's pots and plates, brew tea, and sit here to look into this.

Cleaning the bathroom or chopping the onions is no less important than sitting in deep meditation. Grasping this and acting on it is called waking up.
- Janet Jiryu Abels, "Participate Fully"

New green walking up to brook. White dog eyes sticks. Moist fragrance blossoms!

Drips water slowly dropping

Not much noise inside.

Toothbrush leans over rim looking at prone toothpaste.

Neither... nor mind... has anything to say.

Do don't say

Slow motion day. Polly's burial at Seaview. Attending Quaker Meeting.

Hoisting boxes to upper level of bookshed. Then Sunday Evening Practice.

It's the practice, not the narrative.

Some days...

The cookies are burnt.

Reading Fleet Maull at morning practice. Prison hospice stories.

We eat the cookies anyway.

Infinitesimally unknowable

Neutrinos passing through head to toe.

What else?

Hayah.

Life.

Passing through.

Us.

What has a middle but no sides

Justice is a fragile compromise. It does not mean awakening. Justice means that some law -- whether a statute law, or street law -- has been executed, and some renewed balance effected.

Only one who bursts with enthusiasm do I instruct;
Only one who bubbles with excitement do I enlighten.
If I hold up one corner and you do not come back to me
With the other three,
I do not continue the lesson.
--Confucius

The lesson of awakening is that justice is partisan control, only half the narrative exacting satisfaction; while true awakening is the whole story with compassion effecting balance without sides.

The men who were wrong are still wrong

After watching documentary "The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby" (2011) about former covert operator and CIA chief William Colby by his son Carl Colby, I think about the sorrow of it all.

Maybe the generals, spy agency, law officers, ubiquitous political names and faces hawking war and hellish advice, and a series of executive office presidents equally fogged with awkward motivation, were all wrong. Vietnam was so wrong. The same names and faces continued into Iraq and into our homes and domestic surveillance. Two wrongs make a horribly painful time for everyone involved.

The trail enters
Pines, the sound of pines;
The farther one goes,
The rarer the sound.
Mountains' light
Colors the river water.
Among peaks,
A monk sits Zen,
Facing an old branch
Of a cassia tree,
Once a seedling in the Liang.
- Chiao-jan (730-799)

It is not enough to remember. There must also be great sorrow for a people, for betrayal, and for current karmic reverberation.

Violence against another is violence against one's own being, so it is futile.
- Paul Hawken,"Upsurge

I have been wrong. I thought it was outside me. All this time I have labored under an illusion. Forgive me Mr Colby, Mr Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagon, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama. I thought it was you.

Going to sit in meditation cabin, light candle, light incense, alighting on cushion, I sit in the sound of rain on roof, falling to earth, the sound of awareness inviting a new sustenance of forgiveness.

I must go; change longs for me.

Itadakimasu: Thank you Nature for this nourishment and nurturance.

co-response and co-mu-union: a glancing withitness

I don't know which tries to be more insulting: celebrity news or religious/political/economic views. Bare bums or false behinds! Put differently, rear dead-ends and misinformation seem to distract the small amounts of attention allotted to each scanning-bot these days.

The World is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

(Poem by William Wordsworth)

Maybe that's what happens in a time-without-integrity. We turn to sports, celebrity, and numbing drugs. If the world is illusion, some think, then I'll get mine, thank you, the way I want it.

Don't be concerned with
who is wise and who is stupid.
Do not discriminate the
sharp from the dull.
To practice whole-heartedly
is the true endeavor of the way.
Practice-realization is not
defiled with specialness;
it is a matter for every day.
- Dogen 1227

I have no plan, antidote, desire for any kind of revival tent, nor a sense that anything has changed much in the last five thousand years.

All I have is a coffee maker, a zafu/zabuton, a pair of sneakers, some words to listen to and think about, things to tidy up, and this present moment to realize. And that's good enough for now.

Maybe you are the world.

Maybe if I meet you with respect and reverence we will converse the world.

Yeah -- it has never been a matter of converting or conversion, rather our job is to converse the world with an integration of conversation.

Whatever you say, I hear it, and we become the body of word in co-response and co-mu-union.

Ha!

Try that on for sigh/eyes!

while still alive

I like the distinction between being religious and having beliefs.

I don't favor belief.

I'll favor experience.

The yearning itself for what is connecting/felt.

Silence knows no other way

Tell me in silence.

No answers can be found, and no amount of questioning will bring out those answers. We may continue to ask, but as Brown notes, one thing Wiesel's writing suggests is ``that arguments justifying God in the face of evil are not only inadequate, they are diabolical.'' ([Brown], 154) Any answer cannot come from man, but from God himself. This is what Moshe the Beadle had tried to tell Wiesel when he was a young boy in Sighet, before the terrors of the Holocaust destroyed his life. Moshe said, ``Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him...That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!'' ([Night], 2-3) There can be no end to the questioning, even if there are no answers. To expect answers is a mistake, as Wiesel learned from the Wandering Jew, who told him, ``When will you understand that you are living and searching in error, because God means movement and not explanation.'' ([Legends], 93) That is his final discovery. His relationship with God does not depend on answers. We pray to Him. He handles those prayers in His own way. We can agree or disagree with that way. It's all very simple. In one of his prayers in The Six Days of Destruction, Wiesel writes, ``We do not demand answers, God. But if this is the last page of the human chronicles, assure us that we had the right to ask.'' ([Six Days], 55) If we ask and accept God's answer, even if He answers in silence, then we will have reached the level of Elie Wiesel's relationship to God.
http://www.stsci.edu/~rdouglas/publications/suff/suff.html
("Elie Wiesel's Relationship with God" By Robert E. Douglas, Jr., Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Humanities Sufficiency Program, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts)

I need not know any other way.

For this we call; for this we are called

"God means movement, not explanation."(Elie Wiesel)

Movement through illusion.

Outside, with full moon, Barred Owl asks and asks its question.

Use it and less it

Zazen in prison this morning. Former PTSD Marine and I speak of the residual horror of his duty-related killings hand to hand. Five of us read some ACIM sections. Two of the men are studying it inside.

Afternoon with the elderly poetry folk navigating words across the ocean of forgetfulness. Carver, Chaucer, Binet, Oliver, Greg Lamb, Guest.

Evening, David Abram and Edmund Husserl.

What a useless life!

I love it!

One by one, passing, bye

Retreat. Briefly. Cabin porch. Day after. Twenty two students of East Asian Philosophy crowded into meditation space.

Waking from sleep,
I can hear the dew in the trees.
I open my door
Overlooking the garden.
The winter moon
Clears the eastern cliffs;
Water murmurs
Through roots of bamboo.
The mountain stream's
Beyond my hearing,
But a mountain bird cries once,
And then again.
Leaning in the doorway,
I follow night through to dawn.
What words can I summon
For such mystery and peace?
- Liu Tzung-yuan (773-819)

Now, gone. Empty space. Time to tidy.

Polly dies. Mary dies. Christopher dies. I remember them in their transition. I wish them well.


 Up path from chapel/zendo, beyond felled tree, prayer flags behind sprig green.

Nothing. But, gratitude.

question answers

Learning practice. Final class of semester at hermitage.

We get through.

make not-me yourself

Poetry points to what is beyond itself.

To those who claim there is nothing beyond God, I suggest that nothing is the point of poetry.

The real way circulates everywhere;
how could it require practice or enlightenment?
The essential teaching is fully available;
how could effort be necessary?
Furthermore, the entire mirror is free of dust;
why take steps to polish it?
Nothing is separate from this very place;
why journey away?
- Dogen 1227

God is where nothing goes.

Encircling God with what is itself nothing other than itself.

With this, I have nothing to say about God.

Which is exactly what cannot be...said.

breathing time

Things go still.

Yellow finch jump branch to branch looking for seed. Moved feeder last week. These must have been out of town.

Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you. The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to himself, and he is the one who has made it all.”
― Kabir

Bishops pick on nuns. They are too "feminist" for the men in the church. These men have one hand on the light switch as the backs of thinking people exit their building. It will cut down on the electric bill if no lights are needed.

There's nothing left to do but continue, quietly, breathing. The men of the Supreme Court, the men in Congress, the candidates for high office, the executives in state government all have turned to perverse and pathetic positions at this time of hypocrisy and haute disdain. Things slide to the right at dizzying slant. The right-wing want to weaken the established government. Gun-folk want to re-write justice to be spelled "I've got the power." Some take curious solace that a mythic catastrophe will overwhelm everything this 2012 calendar year.

I'm not so sure. I think it is meanness. The three poisons -- greed, anger, and delusion -- rush through bloodstream and eat into veins on way to brain before corrupting heart. It is a hard time.

Men stuff round ball through round hoop and make millions of dollars making millions scream with elation. Other men swing wood stick against white ball and make millions of dollars running around three white bags. Other men hit small disc with curved sticks into a net splaying ice chips under steel blades to the roar of thousands watching. I'm not sure. I think it is an odd time.

“... What is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.”
― Kabir

I've no insight.

The yellow finch finds feeder. Leaves. Comes chickadee. Goes.

As I do.

And you.

In this our breathing time.

"In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug and we shall want to live more musically."
--Vincent Van Gogh

Things still...go.

In the morning, joy; new sprig near fallen oak

What does it mean to say, "The Lord has risen from the dead?" Have you? Is being dead not some end time when blood does not pulse nor breath cycle through this body?

Maybe not. Death might be that condition of being which is neither here nor aware of being not here. There is an insanity which mimics life by pretending to know and love. In fact, the mimesis is artifice and simulacrum .

What is real suffers with what is also real. Kitsch theology predicated on false fear and arbitrary obedience has no resemblance to true reverence and willing service. God is not in the pocket of any sect, denomination, religion, or philosophy.

God is cooing with mourning doves and watching with turkey buzzards. God is swimming with elvers and setting nets with fishermen. God is new sprig growing near fallen oak and rushing water alongside decrepit remnant of cable bridge gone from brook span. In brief, God is what is seen when the vision of God visits the relational eye of the yearning seeker of God -- wherever that is.

Who shall climb the mountain
Of the Lord?

O gates, lift high your heads,
Grow higher ancient doors...  

(-from Psalm 23 {24})

I have loved you and I have loved God as best I can. Awkwardly. Hesitantly. Disappointingly.

If all there is -- is love, then you have loved me and loved God as best you could at the time presenting itself.

No mistake, this is what we have to live with -- a Wabi-Sabi realization of impermanence, imperfection, and incompleteness.

What wonderful resurrecting allowance!

Wider and deeper and higher those doors through which we pass relieved of illusion and constraint, traveling with the fortifications of nothing other than what is passing through with us.

"What-Is" passing through.

With us.

Let's go.

We are meant to go.

Coming home to the homeless

In liturgy, reenactment is recherché symbol of event itself.

In other words, ritual is representation.

In mythic time we are at the moment beyond calculative time when soul spirit mind embodies what cannot be limited what will not be forgotten.

God! If anyone understood this, this would be all there is.

All there is here.

Transparency.

Itself.

Ill no longer

There is a secret.

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
― Franz Kafka

The secret is there are no secrets.

Tell everyone.

It's true!

Farm girl

We light candle, burn incense, for Jo.

Being with death.

Remembering her.

And her family.

is there anything else

Just tired.

Blossoms bring the Spring.
Spring doesn't take them with it
When it goes.
Clouds flow upon the stream.
The stream cannot hold them.
I'd ask why that is,
But no one's here, but
This tall tree,
Beneath which I will idle
Pondering:
The place:
The Spring,
Clouds passing.
- Yuan Mei (1716-1798)

Nothing else,

Just tired.

When there is none

It's not about pain.
Then, what?
It's about mortality. Pain is just a reminder.

Go to God, Jo, go to God Jo now

David writes to say his wife, Jo, died Saturday.

A Hindu chant is what happens the next 30 miles.

no stitch, no snitch

Whether it is a twenty year old crime or a Washington lobbying system -- we don't hardly ever know what is happening or what has happened.

What we call the "real world" is a warren of worrisome conflictual practices. Who could keep up?

A marriage, a life, a death, an unfinished story.

A payoff, a bribe, a legal destruction of our legislative and election systems. The illusion of a democratic republic.

It makes you wonder. Is there any fixed reality? It all changes.

Justice is no stitching and no snitching.

We serve time.

Move through.

That's it!

Oratory

In middle of night I think your name.

Lighten me; 'with' words, as in, "God be-with you"

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß
man schweigen." (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Abandoned Asylum, Northampton, Massachusetts

I stroll the grounds, as a grander era
Would have phrased it, and listen for lost screams.
In the town below, other cries are blasting
The grace of this shy, spring afternoon.
I’m here to recall what I never knew.

Broken glass trills softly, wood weeps rot.
I stand on tiptoe and stare through begrimed windows.
The flannel nightshirts are gone, the leather straps
And the tubs in which to take cold baths.
A whole hymn-singing century is mouse shit.

I listen for the ghosts of regimens. I listen
For bright eyes throbbing with dizzy faith.
I listen for the taciturn, the bleary, the mopey.
I sit in a shadow and wait for the manna of grief.
Here, the engines of betterment roared

With iron understanding. Here, moral fear
Played its riffs on the bent hearts of living bodies.
Here, the most awful beauty bloomed like lilies.
Behind the main building sumac is growing like crazy.
Lord, I pray to the bricks and splintered casements, lighten me.

(Poem by Baron Wormser)

Unless...one is a poet.

Here and gone

Sword, tempered, discriminates between what is staying and what, unnecessary, falls away.

Mix.

And moderate.

Hardness and plasticity -- a simultaneity both discreet and distinct.

Not discrete.

Not same.

It is important that we know what awakening is not, so that we no longer chase the by-products of awakening. We must give up the pursuit of positive emotional states through spiritual practice. The path of awakening is not about positive emotions. On the contrary, enlightenment may not be easy or positive at all. It is not easy to have our illusions crushed. It is not easy to let go of long-held perceptions. We may experience great resistance to seeing through even those illusions that cause us a great amount of pain.

This is something many people don’t know they’re signing up for when they start on a quest for spiritual awakening. As a teacher, one of the things that I find out about students relatively early on is whether they are interested in the real thing—do they really want the truth, or do they actually just want to feel better? Because the process of finding the truth may not be a process by which we feel increasingly better and better. It may be a process by which we look at things honestly, sincerely, truthfully, and that may or may not be an easy thing to do.
(--From, The End of Your World, by Adyashanti, 2009).

Rather, urgrund.

Start there. Find here.

Sword wordS. (So spoke Cheryl at Friday Evening Conversation.)

Confucius said: "Never give a sword to a man who can't dance."

Let us say this: Never speak words but in a learning loving circle.

Origination.

Sempiternal.

For the seeing: a spirituality of radical free interdependence

Illusion says, "I own this, you don't."

Truth says, "Those who own what is not theirs usually murder to get and keep power, property, and profit."

I say, "Choose truth."

What truth wants to tell you will overthrow the false and fatuous deceptive and deleterious -- that which erroneously thinks it is now in control of the world, it's goods, and the future. Those who, with this belief, accumulate and appropriate to themselves what is the home-ground of everything belonging only to itself.

Overthrow your self.

Yeah -- go with truth.

It's free.

For the seeing.

what is questioning this

God is speaking here.

Listen carefully.

I am as God is creating me.

The Wise Ones of Old

The wise ones of old had subtle wisdom
And depth of understanding,
So profound that they could not be understood.
Because they could not be understood,
I can only describe how they appeared in the world:

Cautious, like crossing a wintry stream,
Irresolute, like one fearing danger all around,
Ceremonious, as one who pays a visit;
Yielding, like ice beginning to melt,
Genuine, like a piece of uncarved wood,
Open-minded, like a valley,
And mixing freely, like murky water.
--Lao Tzu

Give or take -- it's the same thing.

Thursday Evening Conversation ends with final circle reflection.

What is this?

God is what is questioning this.

Trust questioning. Don't listen to those who say doubt is wrong.

Doubt is God's way of clarifying what is here.

Don't know! See what is here.

morning traffic through open door

We return to zendo with return of spring.

The dharma, like an oyster
Washed atop a high cliff:
Even waves crashing against
The reefy coast, like words,
May reach, but cannot wash it away
(--Dogen)

Yesterday, with guest hermit from down-east, resident meetingbrook hermit sweeps and cleans the wintered space.

To what shall
I liken the world?
Moonlight, reflected
In dewdrops,
Shaken from a crane’s bill
(--Dogen, 13c)

This morning, sun through windows, one bell sounds beginning, three bells sound ending, our sitting.

Four-thirty am

No movement. Nothing stirs. White dog on white couch.

Zazen practice

Train comes in. Train doors open. Train leaves station. Like smooth scoop of ground ball by graceful shortstop, shuffle of feet, the throw.

Take away nothing; what is there

Most of the time there are too many words.

When one contemplates
Sickness, old age, and death,
One sees that no one and nothing
Can escape them.
When compassion is born
In the heart,
One sees that there is no reason
To add to the evil and pain.
- Sutra on the Perfection of Wisdom

Tonight, there are just enough.

Nothing needs adding.

mi casa es su casa

We travel long distances in hours that would have taken weeks.

We never leave home -- our true home -- but we go a long way to do the things asked of us.

Look around.

We've never moved.

Welcome home!

We will all, verily, abide by the Will of God.

In the house, on opposite walls, complimentary images, a marriage takes place between, and halves no longer think they are what their name suggests.

Light touches us

In that instant of space.

Halves

Once again after dawn before questions
arrange themselves
into what we do, who to see, and each of us

is most pleasurably alone -- the first sounds
of traffic, muffled
by trees, find their way to the ear;

we don’t know what we’re hearing, and don’t
care. The light
touches us. We turn toward the dark.

Soon the equally mysterious world of women
and men, of momentary
common agreement and wild misunderstanding,

will impose itself naturally on the simplest event.
Anatomy will send
its differing messages to syntax and sense,

and beyond sense -- among the senses --
unbuttoned women
will witness grown men become babies again

and later watch their mouths shape perfectly
controlled sentences
from distances laughable and immense.

In the morning, though, now, while the secret
intercoms in our dream rooms
are still open and each separate body knows

but does not reach for what it wants,
we all live in the same
country, share the same absurd flag.

We keep our eyes closed as long as we can,
hang on to the vestiges
of night as if we were balancing

two delicate and always vanishing halves.
Then the alarm, and the body rises
to yearn for what is here and gone

(--Poem by Stephen Dunn, in, New and Selected Poems 1974-1994)

When we could be anything.

Or anywhere.

You are it

Sometimes, there's no place to hide.

C Becoming

1. Unity of Being and Nothing
§ 134
Pure Being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same. What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being — does not pass over but has passed over — into nothing, and nothing into being. But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet that they are unseparated and inseparable and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore, this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself.
(-- from, Hegel’s Science of Logic,
Volume One: The Objective Logic
Book One: The Doctrine of Being)

Hide as you might wish.

The sheer elegance of such a plight.

radical nothing belonging; no possessions

Call the names. You know them. From every country. From every age.

Those who rose from dead imprisonment of mind and spirit. Those who saw, embraced, were reborn in the unfettered freedom of mind and spirit. Those whose bodies walked through thick fear and emerged light and empty the other side.

Easter is a wonderful retelling of the story of transcendence by means of immersion. Moving through the curious and odd admixture of slant deception and trivial distraction that so many of us human beings carry along like backpacks loaded with heavy rocks.

In meditation we leave
The fires of defilement
For the coolness of clear samadhi.
And this feels just like the joy
Of falling into cool, clear water
After burning in the heat of the sun.
(- Great Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom)

Anyone is capable of entering the story of death and resurrection. Jesus did. So did Uncle Whatshisname and Aunt Whatshername. And that old guy that lived down the block. And the young woman who went by way of cancer in that small town. The child in Iraq. The soldier in Afghanistan. The monk in Tibet. The nun in El Salvador. The junkie in the abandoned warehouse. Your mother. Your father.

Yourself.

Jim Harrison, again:

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)

Wandering without chain, through empty yard, rock rolled away, the vacant pews and choir stalls, at night when prayer points in no direction, the surrounding intimate realization of Christ -- radical, nothing, belonging.

Nothing belongs but to itself.

Nothing belongs but to itself.

Nothing belongs but to itself.

There is nothing wrong with Easter --

In an emptying room of an emptying house sun goes off west in late afternoon.

If all the special wording is forgotten, there is only what remains of the day.

We often get lost in stories about stories failing to feel the weakening sun or hear the wind-soaked chime in a spate of solitude.

Come back to yourself.

Save -- (that is, create what is right now whole within) -- the world.