A promise puzzled

The difference between "ego" and "god" is "ed" which is a Hebrew word meaning "altar" or, more to the point, "witness."

My grandfather, Thomas, climbing the stairs for the last time the night he died, made me promise never to leave the altar. I was a boy. My father and I carried the smoldering chair he died in while smoking a cigarette down the stairs, through the kitchen, into the back yard where in the night air it burst into flames.

The song's lyrics are: "I am blest to be a witness."

Pieces of a puzzle sometimes take decades to fit into place.

No way fog

If what they say of Maine, that it has only two seasons -- winter and the Fourth of July -- then, summer has less than four hours remaining.

At practice Tuesday evening we read "Sound of Wood Preaching Deep Underwater Words," Transmission Thirty-Eight, Yun-yen to Tungsten-Shan, from Living Buddha Zen, Lex Hixon's commentary on Zen Master Keizan's Denkoroku: The Record of Transmitting the Light. The final line of closing poem goes: "No way to enter here." And this sounds perfect. It takes no way to enter here, and, there is no way to enter here -- we are here! So it is with meetingbrook hermitage.

I love the consideration that we are here. I love those who say that God is here. I love the notion that Heidegger's "there-being" (Da-sein) is the word "here" at a crossroad (t).

Fireworks are cancelled tonight. Fog.

Just like my mind.

Who's up?

Morning coffee before rowing.

When anyone asks what baseball team I root for, I tell them the Brooklyn Dodgers. "You mean LA?" they ask. "No," I say, "Brooklyn."

Things have been quiet since 1957.

Hours to go before liturgical now

Oh God, come to my resistance!

Oh Lord, make haste to develop me!

No-one said: It would be; like this.

Monastic quiet, late afternoon, chapel/zendo, Saturday.



        No one said it would be like this.

Arriving-with; no-arrival

If God is now being revealed, what is Christ?

Christ is creative expression of this revelation.

Christ-mind is aware-ing this ever-new origin in everydayness.

no solution of continuity

I finish the finishing of what I thought I'd finished yesterday for the university. I understand, now, the term and the mythos behind the statement "mail it in."

Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply anything further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred shows itself to us. It could be said that the history of religions — from the most primitive to the most highly developed — is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities. From the most elementary hierophany — e.g. manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree — to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.

• The Sacred and the Profane : The Nature of Religion: The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture (1961), by Mircea Eliade,  translated from the French by William R. Trask, [first published in German as Das Heilige und das Profane (1957)]

The world is, indeed, a curious, if not mysterious, place.

It's a wonder we're not more insane than we already are!

Give us Roy Hobbs

So this is what it feels like to be on the receiving end of education's glancing eye!
.
The final hours, work submitted, a Nietzschean 'amour fati' (love of one's fate) settles over everything like a waiting room in Pen Bay Medical Center. Every minute following blood tests and body scans under powerful scrutinizing machines is not dissimilar to the post-posting countdown following submission of what could be considered the only blood you had available, the only organs ready for viewing. To mix the metaphor, it is the old prison movie where tight cinematic shots move from man strapped in electric chair (or on contemporary gurney) to warden standing by wall phone, to executioner whose hand is steady with legal justification and writ of personal exoneration based on employment duties. The clock is an ebb tide millimeter by millimeter advancing naked sands at midnight.
.
Will the call come through? Will the reporters in the viewing room write that a last minute stay of execution postponed the dismal derogation of death? Will the physician's face reveal useful information during those contracting steps nearing waiting room and anxious faces?
.
Here is where students choose a path: Harden to the unbeknownst? Or melt in uncertainty?
Of course, the student knows they forgot to answer this or that, forgot to add specific details on syllabus, forgot to correlate guidelines to actual product. But the time is past for reconsideration. "Go ahead," the hostage says (in yet another metaphor), "pull the trigger. I'm tired of the threats, the sequencing of escalating demands, the dropping away of fabricated dignity in the face of an unadorned dangerous reality of proximate terror." (By this time the kidnapper is quizzical and chagrined. Who talks like that to someone with a gun pointed at them?)
.
Enough already!
.
I grow more sympathetic to the intended and unintended anxiety of educational systems and procedural expectations at service to more accountable civic and academic credentialing. It is the way we winnow the willing-but-unwinsome from being where they might not best be, from doing what is best distributed elsewhere. Who would want a bat boy pitching or batting with two outs, two on, bottom of 9th? No, give us Roy Hobbs, whether on the mound or at the plate. Let the bat boy hand him the bat, exchange meaningful glance, then step back toward dugout.
.
I admit to not being fond of the fair but exacting guidelines of online teaching protocol. But fondness peels no potatoes. I do, however, assent and affirm the necessity. As well as the good efforts and calm guidance afforded by the facilitators.
.
In Mary Shelley's words, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded...”
(-- Mary Shelley, 1831, Frankenstein, Introduction.)
.
You have afforded us. We are not thrown into the void. Now...the waiting! The disconsolate endgame. The footsteps! The eyes on the wall phone.
.
Fade to lighter shade of gray.
.
Thank you for the opportunity!

Looks; like rain

One drop, falls everywhere.

hermitage (@meetingbrook)
6/25/12 4:06 AM
God is now being revealed. (God is now, being revealed.) God is now-being, revealed. So, if someone asks if you believe in God, look around.

Rain soaking roof and ground.

Bowing to Life
To bow is to no longer hold ourselves apart from the unpredictable nature of all of our lives; it is to cultivate a heart that can unconditionally welcome all things. We bow to what is, to all of life.- (--Christina Feldman, "Long Journey to a Bow")

Everything belongs.

This: gift, given

Rowing out to and around Curtis Island -- wind, tide, and swells all were kindly.

Late June late afternoon loveliness.

Happy to be able to enjoy this gift given.

If nothing else, then what?

There is no future. Take a moment. That's all there is. Smile at the starkness of this solitary stillness. Now, end thinking. Simply, look.

Life is based on trust

Prison is mistrust.

We visit mistrust every week with trust.

"Quiet on the set!" -- or, "Break a leg!"

Author: Yours, truly
Date: Thursday, June 21, 2012 11:06:39 AM EDT
Subject: "Quiet on the set!" -- or, "Break a leg!"

[Note: While taking a course on teaching online, it came to me a time 45 years ago. I posted this today on Online Course Journal. Now, here.]

~ ~~ ~~~ ~~ ~

In the fantasy I have a doppelgänger who is confident, organized, and sequential.  Then, like rainy mist dissolving in a curtain of cinematic slight-of-hand, the sun comes out, the pavement dries in seconds, and I am alone. I've been talking to this other being about their skills and modus operandi, and now passersby look strangely at me talking to myself in front of bookstore window. 

On public radio's Fresh Air, actor Jeff Daniels is telling Terry Gross about working with Meryl Streep. He says she is so intuitive and trusting of her instincts and the role that she does not plot out her every move, emotion, or response to fellow actor's lines, but merely enters the scene with dedication and dynamism, willing to (as actors say) risk the fall/feel the fail. But because she is the character as she enters the scene, and because she trusts the actors, director, script, and character -- she trusts herself in that situation to give what she can, be what she is, and project the integrity of the moment beyond the proscenium or into the camera.

In my brief survey after week two I checked off the box indicating that I was a little disappointed (in myself, in the assignments) because it is a big change for me to nail down the "scene" before the scene presents itself. That is the big difference for me between face-to-face teaching and on-line teaching. 

Like some adolescent rehearsing a phonecall to the cute girl in chemistry class, or an employee practicing what she wants to say to her manager about working conditions, trying to control the dialogue, leave nothing to chance, I find myself in a black hole of infinite devolution, abdicating and surrendering creative instantiation for a fixed platform  --  but without substance or resolve because it feels like play acting and not acting in a play.

Now it is week four. I will work to tidy up my module, insert the other modules for the syllabus, and soldier on. I usually teach on Wednesday evenings. Preparation for class runs the gauntlet of interesting ideas for the theme, wonderful quotes and textual references vying for inclusion, formatting the structure for the dynamism of student contribution and co-responsive responsibility for the weekly conversation about the subject. I go through a period of 'failure' during which I am almost completely uncertain what we are trying to accomplish. It is a matter of synthesis and inclusion -- students drive the agenda with their writing and reading. And I try to remain faithful to the pedagogical preference that "all knowledge is self-knowledge" and attempt to channel Meryl Streep stepping into the "action" when  I step into the classroom.

I remember studying improvisational theatre with Viola Spolin when, 40+ years ago, I was a lad in my early 20s. It occurs to me that the workshop I took with her in a theatre company has colored my educational philosophy more that I was aware of.  Here's a taste from Wikipedia:

Spolin's Theater Games transform the teaching of acting skills and techniques into exercises that are in game forms. Each Theater Game is structured to give the players a specific focus or technical problem to keep in mind during the game, like keeping your eye on the ball in a ball game. These simple, operational structures teach complicated theater conventions and techniques. By playing the game the players learn the skill, keeping their attention on the focus of the game, rather than falling into self-consciousness or trying to think up good ideas, from an intellectual source.

The intention of giving the actor something on which to focus is to help them to be in the present moment, like a mantra in meditation. In this playful, active state the player gets flashes of intuitive, inspired choices that come spontaneously. The focus of the game keeps the mind busy in the moment of creating or playing, rather than being in the mind pre-planning, comparing or judging their choices in the improvisation. The exercises are, as one critic has written, "structures designed to almost fool spontaneity into being."

Spolin believed that every person can learn to act and express creatively. In the beginning of her book, Improvisation for the Theater she wrote:

"Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become 'stage-worthy.'

We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything. This is as true for the infant moving from kicking and crawling to walking as it is for the scientist with his equations.

If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn; and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach. 'Talent' or 'lack of talent' have little to do with it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_Spolin

I'm glad to remember this. I might not be cut out for online teaching, but I retain the passion for learning, encouraging learning, participating in learning, and "Lernen Lassen" (letting learning happen).

It is not a Kierkegaardian "Either/Or" -- but it is instructive to posit that, for me, education is theater, and the stage is embodiment, living, present, and actual. A movable classroom of the mind/heart/body. This is the telling of story. Our story. 

Bastardizing Hamlet's words, I suggest: 'The play's the thing to allow imagination to sing.'

Thanks for the opportunity!


P.s. -- there is much I have to learn:

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded...”
(-- Mary Shelley (1831). Frankenstein, Introduction.)

Ebbing

Each green leaf waves goodbye to mother spring gone at 7:09pm to the vast invisible plain of numerical calculation.

The vast and empty place spring had been spreads along memory of verdant sprigs emerging into deeper darker green.

I will tide over until next season.

Long settled dust

Hasta este momento no hay absolutamente cambio alguno. (Up until now, absolutely nothing has changed.)

Steep is the mountain of Yun men, 
Rising straight upward, 
Leaving the white clouds down below! 
Its streams, dashing and eddying about, 
Allow no fish to linger around. 
The moment you step into my door, 
I already know what kind of ideas
You’ve brought with you. 
What's the use of raising again
The dust long settled in an old track? 
- Yun-men

It's a miracle any of us are capable of walking around sane. So much to be depressed about. So much split mind, deep regret, broken character. 

Beggars And Kings

In the evening
all the hours that weren't used
are emptied out
and the beggars are waiting to gather them up
to open them
to find the sun in each one
and teach it its beggar's name
and sing to it It is well
through the night

but each of us
has his own kingdom of pains
and has not yet found them all
and is sailing in search of them day and night
infallible undisputed unresting
filled with a dumb use
and its time
like a finger in a world without hands 
(Poem by William Stanley Merwin)

We work to keep our bodies alive. We must also strive to find enough breath for our spirit to carry through the journey with the body.

Bless me, father, for I am dimming.

I expect to be unseen for a while.

I am spring, gone.

Absolutely, nothing has changed!

Follow; no, one

It is good to be nobody. Just there. A person of no capacity. Without title. Of no importance. No consequence.

As a poet, or mystic, or insignificant mendicant wanderer might be.

In my hermitage a volume
Of Cold Mountain Poems;
It is better than any sutra.
I copy his verses and post
Them all around,
Savoring each one,
Over and over.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

Still, living in the world. On the streets. In doorways. At the edge of things. One's own, in service, without agenda.

Cold Mountain is a house
Without beams or walls.
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is blue sky.
The rooms all vacant and vague
The east wall beats on the west wall
At the center nothing.
Borrowers don't bother me
In the cold I build a little fire
When I'm hungry I boil up some greens.
I've got no use for the kulak
With his big barn and pasture --
He just sets up a prison for himself.
Once in he can't get out.
Think it over --
You know it might happen to you.
- Han Shan

We often live encapsulated in a web of fear and security. Perhaps there's another way, a way of simple love and insecurity, trust and acceptance.

HAN SHAN, THE COLD MOUNTAIN POEMS, tr. Gary Snyder

Preface to the Poems of Han-shan
by Lu Ch'iu-yin, Governor of T'ai Prefecture

No one knows what sort of man Han-shan was. There are old people who knew him: they say he was a poor man, a crazy character. He lived alone seventy Li (23 miles) west of the T'ang-hsing district of T'ien-t'ai at a place called Cold Mountain. He often went down to the Kuo-ch'ing Temple. At the temple lived Shih'te, who ran the dining hall. He sometimes saved leftovers for Han-shan, hiding them in a bamboo tube. Han-shan would come and carry it away; walking the long veranda, calling and shouting happily, talking and laughing to himself. Once the monks followed him, caught him, and made fun of him. He stopped, clapped his hands, and laughed greatly - Ha Ha! - for a spell, then left.

He looked like a tramp. His body and face were old and beat. Yet in every word he breathed was a meaning in line with the subtle principles of things, if only you thought of it deeply. Everything he said had a feeling of Tao in it, profound and arcane secrets. His hat was made of birch bark, his clothes were ragged and worn out, and his shoes were wood. Thus men who have made it hide their tracks: unifying categories and interpenetrating things. On that long veranda calling and singing, in his words of reply Ha Ha! - the three worlds revolve. Sometimes at the villages and farms he laughed and sang with cowherds. Sometimes intractable, sometimes agreeable, his nature was happy of itself. But how could a person without wisdom recognize him?
http://www.hermetica.info/hanshan.htm

Each step underfoot is the earth -- waiting and confident of return of each footfall and body's death.

Hide your tracks.

Let no one follow.

Follow no one.

Where am I in this

It's hard to figure out the truth.

Zen Master says the truth is "just like this."

On cushion this morning: god is this; god is in this; this is in god.

Where am I in this?

Don't ask, Herb would say, this is all there is.

Do this!

Friday night

Open house windows
Sound of car
Down Barnestown Road --
Dog barks at owl call

Metaphors

Kali stands for death in the service of life.

Metaphors reside in the body.

(--words recalled from Marion Woodman film, "Dancing in the Flames")

Zen saying: Better to see the face than hear the name

Greed is predictable. So is corruption. Retaliation is predictable. As is bullying behavior.

What isn't unpredictable?

Free will. The choice where we put our attention. That is still possible.

Fear is the glue that keeps civilization together. Without fear of consequence, men would take forcefully the women of their choice, elidi children would pull the wings off their younger siblings and women would tell their husbands their innermost thoughts. And that would be the end of the world, the end of the worlds on which human beings live. Without fear we would fly about at random like billions of unpredictable atoms. I must repeat that one does not fear a madman because he is dangerous; a madman is feared because he appears to have no fear, and therefore he is unpredictable and might do anything. And it is the same with warrior-poets. One does not fear them because they are dangerous; the sun, after all, is dangerous. But the sun is predictable (or it used to be before the Vild began to explode), and the  warrior-poets, those fearless fanatics of Qallar, are not. Often they act at random. Their passage through a crowd leaves a trail of fear, the fear of fearlessness, which is really a fear of randomness. To live in in a universe which does not listen to the plea for order and meaning is our most basic fear, and we fear it more than death. 
(--p.312, in Neverness, novel by David Zindell, c.1988)

Credentials and control are predictable. Security claims and surveillance are predictable. Torture is predictable. Police and military tactics are predictable. Drones and bank owners are also rote and rife.

Those who speak soundly are poets of a profound and original peace.

http://www.nathanielturner.com/images/New_Folder/daniel6.jpg

Prophets, however, are not predictable; they are not fortune-tellers, not clairvoyant, not good at guessing. They are, rather, observant, clear-eyed, and unswayed by misdirection. They see the truth or falsity of what is presented, hear the tinniness or soundness of what is being said, smell the foulness or bouquet of what passes before them.

Rev. Daniel Berrigan with other Occupy Wall Street activists in Liberty Park, New York City, June 7, 2012. (Photo: The Eyes Of New York)  

“This is the only way to bring faith to the public and the public to the faith,” Berrigan said softly as we spoke before the demonstration in the park that was once the epicenter of Occupy Wall Street. “If faith does not touch the lives of others it has no point. Faith always starts with oneself. It means an overriding sense of responsibility for the universe, making sure that universe is left in good hands and the belief that things will finally turn out right if we remain faithful. But I underscore the word ‘faithful.’ This faith was embodied in the Occupy movement from the first day. The official churches remained slow. It is up to us to take the initiative and hope the churches catch up.”

There is one place, Berrigan says, where those who care about justice need to be—in the streets. The folly of electoral politics, the colossal waste of energy invested in the charade of the Wisconsin recall, which once again funneled hopes and passion back into a dead political system and a bankrupt Democratic Party, the failure by large numbers of citizens to carry out mass acts of civil disobedience, will only ensure that we remain hostages to corporate power.

Berrigan believes, as did Martin Luther King, that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and the evils of racism.” And he has dedicated his life to fighting these evils. It is a life worth emulating.
(--about Daniel Berrigan, from, "America's Street Priest", by Chris Hedges, Truthdig,10June2012)
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_street_priest_20120611/

(Photo of Fr. Daniel Berrigan by Thomas Good)

Daniel Berrigan is in his 92nd year. I remember attending mass Berrigan celebrated in the Bronx at Fordham University in the late sixties. I happened to walk next to him in Norristown PA on an Ash Wednesday protest march during a trial in the late seventies. I listened to him read poetry, speak creativity to desolate souls, question the buttoned-down evil of war-making. Now an old man, he remains an annoying and fierce critic of the peculiar unquestioning insanity of public and private insistence on evil death and destruction masked as patriotism paternalism and preemptive pacification of the hoi polloi populace.

Dan Berrigan is the ur-grund ideogrammatic man standing-by-his-word, that is, fidelity.

His word is courageous, creative, convicted. He has spoken-for and spoken-forth, the real sign of prophecy, saying what is there to be said by one there to speak and enact what is there to be embodied.

America Magazine, July 2009)

The process of incarnation begins with true word and right speech becoming loving presence.

Thank you, Dan Berrigan!

(Fr Daniel Berrigan, Facebook profile picture, 2008)

You don't frighten me as you once did.

I've grown accustomed to your phrasing face.

We come to; birth

Before being conscious.

After being unconscious.

We depart beyond; death.

who hears it realizes

See things different. Hear, too, what you hear, differently.

Look. There was one who was enlightened with the sound of a bamboo being struck and another who clarified his mind upon seeing peach blossoms. Is the bamboo bright or dull, deluded or enlightened? Are peach blossoms shallow or deep, wise or foolish? Although flowers blossom year after year, not everyone who sees them is enlightened. When a bamboo cracks, not everyone who hears it realizes the way.   (--Dogen Zenji, 1200-1253)

There is no world to adjust to.  You are the world.

Do not adjust. Create.

Create what God is creating.

See?

Hear?

Quite a difference, don't you think...

Leaving the premises

I finish The Submission by Amy Waldman. It is over. A back-cover reviewer is right and wrong and right again in her blurb: "It's a literary breakthrough that reads fast and breaks your heart." (-Lorraine Adams)

It took me a long time to read. I did not want to finish the final chapter.

Who does?

"Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?"
--Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The artist doesn't tell you what to think. That's the vocation of the pedant and propagandist, like the perditious (verdammenswert) politician, of which there is surfeit.

No, the artist tells us -- merely -- to think, to feel, to imagine. "Use your imagination," says the lead character in the novel. But, where, we ask, will that take us?

"I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery."
--Billy Collins

Mystery is no four-square assurance of anything. Rather, we are placed in the middle of perpetual transition. Change, like water passing through the sound of a brook, is all we know of God, and all we get to look at arising and departing in our heart.

If you say you believe in God you are saying that you believe in this moment coming to be and passing away, this fleeting glimpse of emergence exchanging itself for the very next appearance to manifest what, itself, will evaporate in the following instant.

There is nothing to hold on to. And that 'nothing' is the pronunciating apotheosis of creativity. Here and gone, arriving and departing, seeing and dissolving -- the inscrutably beautiful come to visit just as we are leaving the premises.

Is heaven arriving without arrival?

Community works

Work crew disassembles Fred's yurt.

What a crew!

Unwrapped gift.

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.