Seeing myself doing what my self cannot see

Another you? In a parallel life, another you?

When the thinking mind takes a break for even a few seconds, a kind of relaxed awareness replaces the usual stream of thoughts. We need to encourage this and not fill this space with anything else; just let it be.
- Tsultrim Allione, "Feeding Your Demons"

It's not esoteric.

Only recognition there is awareness behind action, seemingly separate from it.

The act goes by.

You remain.

Without doing anything.

Just aware you are doing and not doing anything.

Tricky, eh?

When distance does not appear as measurement

Maggie dies.

Margaret Ray Eddy

December 17, 1920 - February 18, 2013 

Good journey Maggie! We have been so fond of your and Walt's many year participation in Poetry, Tea, and Thee at Quarry Hill. Your kindly spirit and keen listening gave the gatherings a deeper feel for the words everyone read. To Walt and the family: our gratitude for Maggie! Continue well in her memory!

Soon, a few feel, there will be no death.

I wonder.

Camden to Fort Kent to Presque Isle to Camden. Three days, 600 miles.

How far do you travel, dear Maggie?

Free the worms!

Glorious day in Fort Kent. We have to depart early for Presque Isle. Ten to twelve inches of snow will begin this evening.

I'm concerned for the worms.



Walking with Rokie earlier this morning at UMFK, this sign. I don't feel it is fair to worms that they cannot dig in the earth. The sign excludes no one else. They must have had difficulty with overachieving worms in the neighborhood. Another man-made rule.

I can see the worms carrying signs quoting Psalm 22:6, King James Version (KJV):

⁶ But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.

No doubt, Obama had something to do with this. Get me the Republicans on the line. Just one more thing!

Where are you; going

Route 11 to Fort Kent. White out blowing snow across roadway. We walk campus for evening stroll.

In room we watch the debacle a decade ago leading up to Iraq war. Such a sad and distorting group of  bellicose prevaricators! It is astounding no one answers to war crimes.

Is awareness disappearing? Is opening presence the horizon? Will our ignorance be penetrated?

Father, Son, Spirit.

Mother, Daughter, Spirit.

Metaphors all.

Take us beyond ourselves!

A human being is the universe seeing itself.

Dark matter, the space scientist said, is like love.

At table someone quoted an astronomer saying that God is the boundary of the unknown.

Someday we'll learn about both.

Love; the unknown.

It is a very very huge canvas.

Step back; look carefully.

Curiosity skills our at...tempt bypassing death

The bald doctor feels he is healed even if the cure lags behind. It's the same phrasing a woman named Anita Moorjani uses to describe her return from near death coma and advanced cancer.

I listen to REM's "Everybody Hurts." I wonder how it is I'd never heard the song in the 20plus years it has been around. I send it to a young woman in Maryland coming through her second spinal surgery.

Bells chime in strong wind snow laden.

The futurist Kurzweil thinks he will live without dying. The cusp is at hand. Death thou shalt die.

I don't know.

Maggie is nearing death. We chanted a farewell yesterday to her worn and weary body. Her husband and two sons were in the room as we arrived and left. Walt is stricken. After 72 years together.

As curious as curious is
life is
just so
curious.

with only their faces showing

Statistics are faceless.

Here are faces that remind us life is personal.

Politics draws us away from human feeling.

Can you experience the feeling? The sorrow, the anger, the innocence, and the importance of paying attention?

Palestinian Funeral Shot Earns Award for Photographer                                               

Details Published on Friday, 15 February 2013 14:03

HENSEN'S WINNING PHOTO (COURTESY OF: AFP)

by Associated Press 

Swedish photographer Paul Hansen won the 2012 World Press Photo award Friday for newspaper Dagens Nyheter with a picture of two Palestinian children killed in an Israeli missile strike being carried to their funeral. 

The picture shows a group of men marching the dead bodies through a narrow street in Gaza. The victims, a brother and sister, are wrapped in white cloth with only their faces showing. 

"The strength of the pictures lies in the way it contrasts the anger and sorrow of the adults with the innocence of the children," said jury member Mayu Mohanna of Peru. "It's a picture I will not forget." 

Hansen's Nov. 20 shot won top prize in both the spot news single photograph category and the overall competition. It portrays 2-year-old Suhaib Hijazi and her 3-year-old brother Muhammad, who were killed when their house was destroyed by the Israeli attack. They are being carried by grieving uncles, as their father Fouad was also killed, and his body can be seen in the background of the picture. 

The children's mother, whose name was not provided, was in intensive care. 

"This prize is the highest honor you can get in the profession," Hansen told The Associated Press. "I'm very happy, but also very sad. The family lost two children and the mother is unconscious in a hospital." 

(from, Palestine News Network: http://english.pnn.ps/index.php/culture/3938-palestinian-funeral-shot-earns-award-for-photographer)

I'm trying to.

I feel it.

I can.

Je t'aime...

Love, they say, is what this day is about.

That's a nice thought.

Consciousness with disappearance is born nature; awareness as opening presence is unborn nature

And if I did have anything to say, I would say it in the wind.

"And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen."
(--from poem, Ash Wednesday, by T.S. Eliot)

But I have nothing.

Except this: Awareness is consciousness with disappearance into opening presence.

Some facts are out of the question

One man speaks to the nation. Another kills one more person in California then burns to death after shot heard in cabin hideaway. Armies kill thousands, sharpshooters hundreds. No equivalency. No moral. Just facts.

Whistleblower or liar? The Los Angeles police department will reckon their losses.

Nobel peace exemplar or high tech hit man to all perceived enemies? Power is so overt.

Facts are not dreams.

Dreams 

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

(Poem by Langston Hughes)

What is attractive about facts is their reluctance, of themselves, to wear disguises.

But in the hands of authorities and potentates they seldom ever resemble themselves.

Fires burn out.

Rhetoric cools.

The wrong of any injustice, however, smolders.

Any questions?

A child is born to Nicholas and Alexandra near Washington, D.C.

здоровье для всех! (Health to all!)
Добро пожаловать! (Welcome!)

on hearing the news the Pope will step down

Va bene!

It is time to go. What mysterious grace will be at work in the election of what comes next?

Perhaps an innovation.

Maybe a triadic revelation will overcome the catholic church.

From trinity to triadic inspiration: we will elect a cleric, a religious, and a layperson -- one of whom must be a woman.

These three will begin a new thing, and scripture will concur: "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43:19)

Come Holy Spirit, and renew our faith in what is of God with us!

Edges falling upon everything

Sun on trees morning after storm. Nothing has changed. Russian State Symphony Cappella sings Fervent Supplication from Rachmaninov's Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Op. 31.

And the nothing that has not changed? The listening. The quiet stillness where breath finds no one there to impede passage from one mountain to another mountain. Breath is wavering shadow of cedar branch on white pillow, sketch canvas of appearance, a solitary showing, brief display, fleeting glimpse of artist's impression, ah! The kindness of evanescent duration!

Does the hand know it is a hand? Does the chair know it is a chair? No! It is thinking/naming that says so. So, in the absence of thinking, where is the hand and chair? They are nowhere to be found.
...
Only consciousness is ever truly present, knowing and being itself eternally, taking the shape of sensing, perceiving and thinking but never being or becoming anything other than itself. The presence of all seeming things properly belongs to consciousness alone.
(--Rupert Spira, p.184, in Presence, The Intimacy of All Experience, Vol II, c.2011)

The two people in their car during blizzard found both warmth and death. Seeking one the other slipped into back seat to sit awhile with them taking shelter from digging out.

The Catholic Church reminded the faithful that it need not be a serious sin if egregious circumstances keep them from attending mass this Sunday.

Toboggan racers cram snow bowl to compact into one day what blizzard shortened from two.

There will be coffee.

Prayer comes first.

Then shoveling.

I cannot imagine any longer what resembled understanding back when fear and longing for anything other than what is here now presenting itself would drive headlong from despair to desperation. A time without shoveling, prayer, or coffee.

What do you want from this cajoling appearance we call our lives? If we look around we see, like Stevens' blackbird:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
(By Wallace Stevens) 

I 

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird. 

II 

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds. 

III 

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime. 

IV 

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one. 

V 

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after. 

VI 

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause. 

VII 

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you? 

VIII 

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know. 

IX 

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles. 

X 

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply. 

XI 

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds. 

XII 

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying. 

XIII 

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

It is stanza nine (IX) that rivets my attention. The edge. Even as it gives way to circles beyond itself. The never-ending going there, flying through edges no longer edges.

The light has moved from pillow-canvas.

For now.

Until the nothing that it is gives itself to next our awareness wherever consciousness sketches itself within what calls itself into change and nothing but your loving gaze falling upon everything.

Dialogue, Saturday Afternoon

Buddha: Think it's enough?
Christ: Don't think, feel.
Buddha: Feel it's enough?
Christ: Nothing is enough.
Samuel Beckett: Would you two please take this conversation somewhere else. I'm waiting in this chair for anything to become clear.
Buddha: (to Christ) Did you hear that?
Christ: (looking around; says nothing)
Beckett: hmm...Looks like snow.
Christ: That's clear.
Buddha: I could loan him my hat.

Exitus. Nihil reliqui. Tantum vox manet.

Litany flake

For shelter,
For warmth,
For food,
For companionship, animal and human...
For giving.

Nothing, but
gratefulness!

Blowing

Snow.

A lot of it.

Leaving with no sense of return

Hijra, departure.

It is when we leave who we think we are. The narrative takes a turn. We stay to hear the words. A storm is coming. Maine, February. Too seldom, snow.

Cars go up Barnestown Road. Pickups with plows, like cats at dinnertime, keen with anticipation. Single white birch at road into horse barn across way.

Sloth, slow-moving into afternoon, a seldom solitude, hermit's paradox.

When the poet's words are roadmaps of feeling.

To a new country.

the next word you speak will become the world

He was saying that poets say the world before it (whatever "it" is) becomes the world.

How can you say something before it comes to be?

Peace.

True and no bullshit peace. 

What is beyond god

If god is all there is, what is beyond god?

Perhaps, we might say, nothing.

Here.

Here is gone beyond there.

There is nothing here.

Here is nothing there.

Crucified there returns here.

Someone asks: Where are you?

No one responds: I am here.

And thus, what is beyond god?

Nothing, no?

Know this...

Yes!

no holding

Zazen is not football.

It touches down to earth.

With nothing to gain.

Only loss.

Saying 'yes' to my 'no'

The presentation ends nothing.

Substitution means that ethically the boundary between myself and the other seems almost to dissolve, so that however unique we are as two different perspectives on the world, however unequal we may be in terms of worldly advantage or strength, in the end I must find it impossible to distinguish her well-being from mine. If one makes this a conscious realization vis-a-vis the other, then it is clearly a form of self-denial comparable to the annihilation-of-self that Weil associates with imitating the divine abdication: "God denied himself for our sakes in order to give us the possibility of denying ourselves for him." (p.89, Simone Weil, Waiting for God, c.2001). The resemblance her idea bears to substitution is all the more striking a page later, when Weil writes that the person "from whom the act of generosity proceeds can only behave as he does if his thought transports him into the other. . . . [He] accepts to be diminished by concentrating on an expenditure of energy, which will not extend his own power but will only give existence to a being other than himself, who will exist independently of him." (WG 90). Weil goes so far as to express this as "consenting" to one's own "destruction" (WG 91) in favor of the other's "creation." Without this emphasis on "destruction" -- here closely allied with Weil's notion of "affliction," to which we will turn in a moment -- the image of being "transported into the other" could easily be dismissed as hyperbolic metaphor. Decreation is a "self-destruction" to which the other invariably calls me -- a call integral with the ordinary course of life, if no less "supernatural" for all that.

(pp.32-33, from Decreation as Substitution: Reading Simone Weil through Levinas, by Robert Charles Reed, Boston College, in The Journal of Religion, Jan. 2013)

 Curious, isn't it -- you don't figure nothing as having nowhere to go.

These days I imagine mysticism to be seeing someone through another.

While it is not yet clear what the call calls me to do, it should be evident that decreation , like substitution, amounts to an ethical relation to the other which, far from privileging my "being" over against theirs, deliberately reverses the priority I naturally give to self-preservation.
But how does such a reversal become concrete? Must one literally make a physical sacrifice of oneself? For good reasons, Weil is reluctant to give us an explicit formula, although she therefore leaves us somewhat in the dark as to how one reverses so basic a priority. Levinas's answer might be that there is no need for us actually to do anything: the reversal is already the essence of what it means to be a self. Subjectivity is already to be substituted for the other. Whatever it may subsequently entail in terms of action, substitution is not something one wills or even does; it is the very essence of human selfhood. In Levinas, therefore, we find not merely certain striking parallels with Simone Weil's thought, but a way of understanding decreation as in some sense a basic ingredient or fulfillment of ethical subjectivity.
(--Reed, 33)

Or, beyond mysticism, I imagine the seeing of oneself in others invites seeing no-self through others, merely, the one there.

Is pure subjectivity pure objectivity? No self, no other?  This might be different from "me" and "you."
 To see through another means to see what the other sees. To see my self through you. Self and other become what they are -- not one, not two.

Merely what is seeing.

Merely: what-is, seeing.

unfinished quote...

Who said it? Was it Paul Valery?

 It went: Not to conclude is a sign of a creative mind.

To conclude is calculative.

To unconclude is to create.

There's no telling

Parallel lives.

We are living different streams at once.

You know this is true, and so do you. 

Good point

"Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."
--David Lloyd George

Add new alternator; piece by piece a new car. Add everything, little by little a new spirituality

Haiku
(for buddhist practitioner on his birthday)

One day into next
year -- what does "first glimpse" augur?
Birds fly free. Fondly...
(wfh)

In an article written in 1999, Gary Cummins tells about Thomas Merton's three epiphanies: wherein, in a Havana Cuba church, 1940, he sees heaven; on a Louisville Kentucky street corner, 1958, he sees the human race; and in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka, 1968, he sees creation.

I can imagine Raimon Panikkar smiling with his word, "cosmotheandric" -- the concretion and synthesis of any future spirituality.

In, Thomas Merton's Three Epiphanies, by Gary Commins, Theology Today 1999 56: 59, the following, 

In Havana, he had seen heaven; God belonged to him. In Louisville, he had seen the human race; they belonged to one another. At Polonnaruwa, the inert rock pulsated with divinity, reality, life: all matter was charged with compassion, the cosmic body of Buddha, the essence of all things. He had seen emptiness (sunyatu) and compassion (karuna), the primary elements of enlightened-mindedness, the All and the Nothing of St. John of the Cross. 59 Theologically, he had written, there were differences, but psychologically, there was “an exact correspondence between the mystical night of St. John of the Cross and the emptiness of Sunyata.”All religions, Merton had said, end up “with the simplest and most baffling thing of all: direct confrontation with Absolute Being, Absolute Love, Absolute Mercy or Absolute Void.” 61 

59. TheOther Side of the Mountain, 332; and Love and Living, 20.
61. ThomasMerton, Mystics and Zen Masters (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux,
1967), 62.

And later:

[Meister] Eckhart, imagining Paul’s vision on the Road to Damascus, described what Paul had seen:

One is that when he rose up from the ground with open eyes he saw Nothing, and the Nothing was God; for when he saw God he calls that Nothing. The second: when he got up he saw nothing but God. The third: in all things he saw nothing but God. The fourth: when he saw God, he saw all things as nothing. 

(-- The Sermons of Meister Eckhart, Vol 1, 153. quoted by Cummins) http://ttj.sagepub.com/content/56/1/59.full.pdf 

Flying free, augured, first glimpse is the deepest...

Yet...

Why are we here?

We are
All here
To be
Alone

Together

à toi aussi

It just might be that the Catholic Church has exhausted its institutional vice grip on the men and women under its control. It might finally become what so many over the centuries have become.

In quiet hidden places contemplatives and solitaries, ordinary individuals, are no longer compelled to follow the dictates of anything outside. Their completely interiorized and non-dual space of patient acceptance and participatory engagement with the holy-itself as wholly-itself, allows the entering, engaging, and becoming radically empty experiences of nameless trust in the longing of creation to serve and love itself in others, to care for and be-with others in themselves.

The church is dead! Long live what will become of it!

Long live the open-space, the within/without of no-other, the non-dichotomous presentation of true-reality, the profound residing place of what we are becoming-in-becoming, the simple complexity of dwelling with the no-other in the no-other as no-other.

Gather nothing. Let each go its own way into what is itself the wordless gaze of imageless kindness and wisdom felt as compassionate presence.

Good morning!

It is Sunday!

Deaccession

A Trappist monk I met 15 years ago died last week. A kind man.

Thanks, brother Benedict!

Just that. Nothing else.

Deaccessed.

Taking; leave

In the dream there is goodbye saying. End of year, end of term, ending itself.

Saying, some say, goodbye, is never; easy.

Seeing Through Self
When we question ego-mind directly, it is exposed for what it is: the absence of everything we believe it to be. We can actually see through this seemingly solid ego-mind, or self. But what are we left with then? We are left with an open, intelligent awareness, unfettered by a self to cherish or protect. This is the primordial wisdom mind of all beings. Relaxing into this discovery is true meditation—and true meditation brings ultimate realization and freedom from suffering.
-- Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche, "Searching for Self" (Tricycle)

Needlework on Hungarian pillow by Saskia's mom. This room; her breath, stitched.

What would you say goes, what stays, in leaving?

The sweetness. The aching heart. The footprints of animal in frigid snow, an open field in central Maine, words of lad from northern Vermont telling temperature and his surprised fondness for his place right now in his life.

Moving chair in dream doesn't bring closer. A stage set in moving picture.

If you ask me, I would answer this: never go anywhere, there is no leaving, then, follow it with, yes, moving through dream as dream fades into placing wood on red ash in brown Waterford stove.

Love, only love, allows this.

Allow this.

With. Yes, with...

Love.

Resting through winter

Q: How are you?
A: I see.

William Blake said, "As a man is, so he sees."

And so: How are you?

Through words to source

Uncommunity breeds separatist anger.

I'd rather we cared for one another.

Holiness rather than sacred structure.

Cold sitting; warm (enough) experience

The zen of D.T. Suzuki is in the fire.

Empirically speaking, our existence.

Explicated.

This is not a test

All we can do is become aware that all we can do is not much.

Reading Vanity Fair article from August 2006, "9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes," by Michael Bronner,
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/08/norad200608.

It's not much. But we do what we can.

The stories some tell afterwards. . . . Well, that's another story.

New and unforeseeable

Carrying wood in from barn five a.m. the thought occurs: if Panikkar is right and cosmotheandric spirituality is our new awareness, then I am walking god through barn, carrying god to woodstove, and placing god on glowing embers in still warm enamel box. If this is so, the wind whipping flags hanging from buildings, the pinpoint white of distant stars in frigid sky, and futile labors of basement furnace all are the shared revelations of one god seen from the perspective of one sharing god with all that is.

Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha are about anything, they are about a profound understanding of identity and the broadest possible meaning of liberty—teachings that sooner or later had to appeal to a people for whom suffering and loss were their daily bread.  (--from Charles Johnson, "A Sangha by Another Name")

 What usefulness is such an awareness of the inseparability of all Being? Would such an identity change how this mind-fragmented world has splintered wholeness into shards of dangerous brokenness?

Dialogue is important for Panikkar but not purely mechanical or informative dialogue but rather what he calls “dialogical dialogue” which leads to recognizing difference but also to what we have in common, which in the end produces mutual fecondation. Dialogue is not a luxury for mankind, it is something absolutely necessary and inter-religious dialogue plays an important role. By this Panikkar does not mean an abstract theoretical dialogue, a dialogue about beliefs, he means a deep-reaching human dialogue in which one seeks the collaboration of the other for mutual realization since wisdom consists in being able to listen. Religion is not an experiment for him, it is an experience, an experience of life through which one is part of the cosmic adventure, with neither worry nor anxiety. This, for example, leads him to put forward the notion of “identity”. He was once asked during an interview: “Where do you find your identity?” His answer was:” By losing it rather than looking for it: by not wanting to hold onto an identity which has not yet been fulfilled and therefore is impossible to find in the past because it would only be a copy of something old. Life is a risk; adventure is radical innovation; creation comes about day after day, it is something absolutely new and unforeseeable”.(--from, Laudatio of Raimon Panikkar Alemany during the solemn academic ceremony of his investiture as Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Girona. Presented by Prof. Josep-Maria Terricabras, sponsor of the new Doctor. http://www.raimon-panikkar.org/english/laudatio.html)

I must, then, be content that "something absolutely new and unforeseeable" is entering from barn to Wohnkuche then slipping back to this writing space as early cars come down Barnestown road from Hope.

There are, I suspect, many ways to praise god and pray with god for peace and light and requisite warmth for all beings creaturely splayed and displayed throughout earth and cosmos. 

The faint blowing air from antiquated registers and workman gas furnace is one example of honest labor seeking to alleviate discomfort and chill. 

In hospital yesterday morning visiting patients, I stand in the field of unknowing with them. We punctuate time for those moments -- an identity unforeseen, surprising, new, and creating itself.

Martin Luthor King said he only wished to do God's will.

As it is.

In heaven

And on earth.

Throughout all.

Of Being.

In the wind

Space is not nothing. It is curved and fabric'd and full of emptiness.

Not unlike ourselves.

It does make you wonder. Even a little bit. About what we are.

WIND ADVISORY
Now - Sunday, Jan 20, 7:00pm...WIND ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 9 AM THIS MORNING TO 7 PM EST THIS EVENING...THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN GRAY HAS ISSUED A WIND ADVISORY... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 9 AM THIS MORNING TO 7 PM EST THIS EVENING.* WINDS...SOUTHWEST 20 TO 30 MPH WITH GUSTS UP TO 55 MPH.* TIMING...MID MORNING THROUGH EARLY EVENING.* IMPACTS...DOWNED TREES AND OR POWER LINES.PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...A WIND ADVISORY MEANS STRONG WINDS OF 31 TO 39 MPH OR GUSTS OF 46 TO 57 MPH CAN LEAD TO DAMAGE DUE TO DOWNED TREE LIMBS AND SCATTERED POWER OUTAGES.

Perhaps we are gusts of wind on unsettled days. Or, maybe, breathless stillness at times of deep settled peace. We might even be intakes of breath between phrases of song that have chosen us to form their ephemeral melodies of an evening's enchantment. There's no predicting nor controlling where we, a passing instant of earth breathing itself as gift with no guarantee of another to follow, will find ourselves after next exhalation.

Abandoning Futile Endeavors 

To look for total satisfaction in oneself is a futile endeavor. Since everything changes from moment to moment, where can self and where can satisfaction be found? Yet these are two things that the whole world is looking for and it sounds quite reasonable, doesn’t it? But since these are impossible to find, everybody is unhappy. Not necessarily because of tragedies, poverty, sickness, or death: simply because of unfilled desire. Everybody is looking for something that isn’t available.
- Ayya Khema, “No Satisfaction

Wind and wonder have myriad names. Yours. Mine. God's.

Marvel is that we find pause to reflect on the transient puff of movement we are in a vast and near completely incomprehensible cosmic magniverse.

I hear cats' running feet along floor above. I hear myself in the settled stillness of this pre-dawn darkness. I hear your silence glancing from your eyes on these words in your thoughts within your breath asking a question voice will not speak.

The wind, it is said, blows where it wills. Freely, some say.

There is a phrase used when someone has escaped their confinement and are unaccounted for.

"In the wind."

We are, "In the wind."

Yes! That's it.

Look for each, look fo each one of us, passing through, out of sight, merely heard and faintly felt.

Not unlike that last fleeting forgetting imagined breeze we wondered about thinking itself a thought suspecting itself a visit in a dream itself a wisp going by itself recalling nothing itself passing...

Gone...as it will...go!

What time is it

The morning has its own way.

"Minutis minuendis (in a smaller yet corresponding way), every person represents and symbolizes all of reality." (p.141, A Dwelling Place For Wisdom, By Raimundo Panikkar, c.1995)

 Mutatis mutandis (only the necessary changes having been made) we appear together appearing in our difference.

Christianity is convinced that it bears a message of integral salvation for Man and thus sees itself as the fullness of all religion and the perfection of each religion.
. . . It should be clear from the very beginning that the Christian attitude not only does not contradict the corresponding Hindu attitude, but elicits in it a homeomorphic way,* for, just as if I really love you I will have to allow you to love me, so if I want to communicate the best I have to you -- even if I want to convert you -- I will have to let you also communicate your best to me -- even to the point of converting me.
[* By homeomorphism we understand the 'topologically' corresponding (analogous) function (a functional equivalent) within another setting, Hinduism in this case. Cf. R. Panikkar, the Intrareligious Dialogue, p.xxii.] (--from The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, by Raimundo Panikkar, c.1964) 

Winter zendo is chilly. Snow falls surrounding. Rokie yawns, white on his white, in front of gas fireplace. Tibetan incense sifts up through holes in burner box. We are alone this morning. Our journey here is short -- out through barn, up short rise to Merton Retreat, around to door, to where we are, always here.

I delay arriving at seiza bench to finish these words, a privilege of solitude. Yesterday it came over me (again) how what is needed is a deeper experience of the primal awareness at origin of the many spiritual traditions found throughout the world and time and history. Even the symbols and images, icons and antiphons, mudras and stillnesses, bows and prostratations, chants and processions, beads and benches, suras and sutras, huts and temples, cathedrals and poustinias -- all these are the breath of participation in the here-holy!

I have fallen in love with the presence of everything. Even those things alerted as not my preference, I am learning to affirm. 'Difference' is a valued guest over coffee or tea. We sit with each other, lending and borrowing insight and intuition amid harmony and discord.

We read a letter from an inmate friend disclosing crimes and categories of classification not until now shared after years of sitting together. Yes, this is his facticity; yes, this is my mit-zein. He sends a poem about children sleighing hill by the Androscoggin River, homage to children of Newtown Connecticut.

Cody is let out through the barn and Rokie is released from zendo to greet him. The big boisterous German Shepherd is a goofy gift following the death of his mistress, Erika. He is one of those 'differences' in my perspective.

This space is still chilly. The small stove will work all day and be ready for the Sunday morning Quakers who will sit warmly with silence.

The ending bells will soon chime. I only sat on seiza a brief spell -- such delight in change of routine -- this big chair, these words, the twisting plume of fragrance, the rumination.

The white Border Collie is back at door. He knows what time it is!

Show me; what is real, what is true

It's not what we know; it's that we're willing to show. Appear. Show up. Present ourselves.

And enter the fray. Enter dialogue. Enter unknowing.

How Hegel structures and presents, from the viewpoint of the stage of the beautiful, as the stage of abstraction, the history of Greek philosophy, will not be further illustrated here. Instead, we will follow a short indication of Hegel's interpretation of four fundamental words of Greek philosophy. They speak the language of the key word "being", 'einai' ('eon','ousia'). They speak in ensuing western philosophy constantly up to our own times.
In the enumeration as translated by Hegel,, the four fundamental words decree: 1.'En', the whole; 2. 'Logos', reason; 3.'Idea', the concept; 4. 'Energeia', actuality. 

'En' is the word of Parmenides.
'Logos' is the word of Heraclitus.
'Idea' is the word of Plato.
'Energia' is the word of Aristotle. 

To understand how Hegel interprets these fundamental words we must attend to the following two points: on the one hand, to that which for Hegel is decisive within the interpretation of the aforementioned philosophers in contrast to what he mentions in passing. Secondly, the manner in which Hegel interprets the four fundamental words within the horizon of the key word "being". 

In the introduction of his Lectures on The History of Philosophy (Hoffmeister a.a.O., S. 240) Hegel explains: "The first universal is the immediate universal, that is, being. The content, the object is therefore objective thought, the thought of what is." Hegel means: being is the pure state of thought of what is immediately thought, without the reflectiveness of thinking that thinks this thought apart from its notification (Ermittelung). The determination of pure thought is "the indeterminate", its notification is the immediate. So understood, being is the immediate indeterminate representation in general,in such a manner, indeed, that it keeps awy from itself the omission of determination and mediation, as it were, inveighs against them. Out of this, it becomes clear: being as the first simple objectivity of the object is thought starting from its relation to the thinking subject thanks to the pure abstraction of the latter. It is important to note this, first of all, to understand the direction according to which Hegel interprets the four philosophers in question, but likewise to measure the power that Hegel attributes each time to the fundamental words. 

Parmenides' fundamental word is 'hen', the one, that which unites all, and so the universal. Parmenides explains 'semanta', the sign, through which 'hen' shows itself, in the great Fragment VIII with which Hegel is acquainted . Nevertheless, Hegel finds the "highest thought" of Parmenides not in 'hen', being as the universal. The "highest thought" according to Hegel is rather ennunciated in the statement:"Being and thought are the same". Hegel interprets this statement namely in the sense: being as "the thought, there is" ("der Gedanke, der ist") is a production of thought. Hegel draws from Parmenides' statement a prefiguration of Descartes, with whose philosphy the determination of being out of the essentially positing subject begins. Accordingly Hegel will explain: "With Parmenides has philosophy proper begun.. This beginning is certainly still nebulous and indeterminate"(WW XIII, S.296f.). 

Heraclitus' fundamental word is 'logos', the gathering, that allows the display and appearance of everything that is, the totality of entities. 'Logos' is the name that Heraclitus gives to the being of entities. But Hegel's interpretation does not orient itself strictly from out of the 'logos'. This is peculiar, very peculiar given that Hegel concludes his preface to the interpretation of Heraclitus with the words: "there is not a proposition from Heraclitus that is not contained in my Logic" (a.a.O.S. 328) From the point of Hegel's Logic, the 'logos' is reason in the sense of absolute subjectivity. But the Logic itself is the speculative dialectic by means of which the movement of the immediate universal and the abstract, being as the objective , is reflected in its opposition to the subject. And this reflection is determined as mediation in the sense of becoming, wherein this opposition is returned to itself, made concrete, and brought to unity. To conceive this unity is the essence of speculation that develops as dialectic. 

(--From Conference of the Academy of Sciences at Heidelberg, July 26, 1958, Hegel and the Greeks, by Martin Heidegger) http://www.morec.com/hegelgre.htm

So much to be considered. For example, each other.

Let us pray!

CONCLUDING PRAYER
Attend to the pleas of your people with heavenly care,
O Lord, we pray,
that they may see what must be done
and gain strength to do what they have seen.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
– Amen.
(--from Office of Readings, Friday morning)

Judy said we are all an extension of God. Creation is the extension of God. We are creation temporarily manifest. God is what is appearing through what is here to be seen.

Mountain. Dog. Cat. Another dog. Another cat. Woman. Man. Buddha. Christ. Holy Relationality. Icons all.

All windows through which what is true and what is real longs to shine through.

We are blessed!

Directly encountering

Ideology is not the answer.

Not even concepts.

In the second century, Nagarjuna wrote The Madhyamika Sastra, in which he used concepts to destroy concepts. He was not trying to create a new doctrine, but to break all the bottles, all the flasks, all the vases, all the containers, to prove that water needs no form to exist. He outlined a dance for us, a dance for us to drop our categories and barriers so that we can directly encounter reality and not content ourselves with its mere reflection.
(--From THE SUN MY HEART, From Mindfulness to Insight Contemplation, by Thich Nhat Hanh, c.1988)

Water.

Water is the teacher.

Direct experience, like water, seeks humble ground.

Mine eyes have looked at...

Be careful what you look at.

You become what you see.

Look with love at love.

Interruption [of friendship] is disappointing but unavoidable

I have friends I've not seen or spoken to for years. For decades. Some for half a century.

This does not lead me to ask if friendship is friendship if it is not practiced in the open and full of bonhomie with pledges of affection, affiliation, and propinquity. Friendship is equally a thing of quiet and spacious distance whose nearness is the air we breath, the sky we see, the ground underfoot. Connection is everything; and all is connected, at all times, in all places, with the realization no time no space separates what is real. Interruption, yes; irrevocable separation, no!

3. IVO.You are right. I am most grateful to realize that you are concerned about your son. Nothing but the spirit of charity has opened my mind and its thoughts to you. Would that your kindness might grant me this favor, that whenever you visit your sons who are here I might have recourse to you alone just once, with no others present, and lay bare without interruption the ardor of my heart.3 

4. AELRED. I shall gladly comply. I am delighted to see that you are not prone to empty and idle talk, that you always introduce something useful and necessary for your progress. Speak then with out anxiety. Share with a friend all your thoughts and cares, that you may have something either to learn or to teach, to give and to receive, to pour out and to drink in. 

5. IVO. I am ready not to teach but to learn, not to give but to receive, not to pour out but to drink in, as my youth prescribes, my inexperience demands, and my monastic profession counsels. But lest on these distinctions I should unwisely waste the time needed for other matters, would you teach me something about spiritual friendship? What is it? What values does it offer? What is its beginning and its end? Can friendship exist among all persons? If not among all, then among whom? How can it remain unbroken and so without any troubling disagreement reach a blessed end? 

6. AELRED. I wonder why you think I should be asked these questions. Obviously all of them were treated more than adequately by the greatest teachers of old. I wonder why especially, when you have spent your boyhood on studies of this kind and have read Tullius Cicero’s volume On Friendship, where in an engaging style he fully treated everything that seems to relate to friendship and gave a sort of outline of some of its laws and precepts.
(P.56, Spiritual Friendship, by Aelred of Rievaulx)

The unbroken nature of friendship becomes apparent in the longing of heart for the friend. Time, distance, circumstance -- these are accidents of existence that color but do not remove the canvas of friendship once it has been marked. Canvas ages, weathers, dulls, and cracks. Still, what has begun continues in its own hue with its own perspective of changed clarity and shifted stance. Pentimento.

I have loved what I could not sustain and deepen at its time of origin. The tenderness of a friend's eyes, the timbre and tone of confiding voice, the ambling meander of strolling conversation through evolving and deepening spiritual friendship -- these etch themselves on both conscious soul and dormant self. I have been asleep during nascent love, unaware during another's reaching hand, distracted during someone's request for simple presence and honest response. For this, I am sorry. For this disappointment, I relent. For this abandonment, I linger in the solitude of slowly emerging awareness, and silently touch the surrounding forgiving emptiness of repentant recollection.

68. AELRED. Have you forgotten that Scripture says “a friend loves always”?64 As you recall, our Jerome also said, “friendship that can end was never true.”65 Sufficient and more than sufficient proof has also been given that friendship cannot subsist without charity. Since in friendship, then, eternity may flourish, truth light the way, and charity delight, see for yourself whether you should withhold the name of wisdom where these three coexist.69. 

IVO. To what does this lead? Should I say of friendship what John, the friend of Jesus, said of charity,“God is friendship”?66,70. 

AELRED.This is novel indeed and lacks the authority of the Scriptures.The rest of that verse about charity,however,I surely do not hesitate to attribute to friendship, because the one who remains in friendship remains in God, and God in him.67 This you will perceive more clearly when we begin our dialogue on the fruit or value of friendship.Now if in our guileless simplicity we have spoken enough about the nature of friendship, let us reserve for another time the remain ing questions you suggested for consideration.71. 

IVO. When I am so keen to learn, this interruption is disappointing but unavoidable, as I am summoned to supper, which I am not allowed to miss, and you must meet your obligations to the many who wait in line for your attention.
Here Ends the First Book on Spiritual Friendship(P.69, Spiritual Friendship, by Aelred of Rievaulx; translation of De Spirituali Amicitiâ by Lawrence Braceland, sj)

Many ask, 'Why is God so difficult?' Perhaps IVO hints at it when he says, "God is friendship."

And we are neverendingly interrupting God.

We break the continuity, but we cannot sever the reality.

Reality, is, I suspect, that what is, is as it is, eternally and infinitely.

This morning I am here with all friends. Those near, those far.

Still, all here.

This . . . this instills joy!

We/you, we/you, up we/you!

What is love?

Love tries to transform everything into itself by leaving everything as it is.

To extract: Love tries to transform, leaving everything; into itself, as it is.

Love turns everything into itself by leaving everything as it is.

To wit: Love turns everything, leaving everything; as it is, into itself.

Love is what is.

Love is what is itself.

No subject, no object.

Just, and only, merely: Itself.

Go ahead, ask yourself: What am I?

Go ahead, answer yourself: Love is the question/answer.

If we must ask, and we must: Be what you ask; Be what you answer.

... ... ... ... ...

The word "ame" gives a clue. I am me. I ame.

"Ame," in Latin and Old French, means "soul" or "spirit." In Romani it means "we."

We/you, we/you, up we/you!

... ... ... ... ...

Coming at this sideways, there are two songs found on YouTube:

Two different songs; two views of a similar "ame."

Song "Let Me In" sung by the United Pursuit Band.
"Look My Way,
Look My Way,
Look My Way,
Look My Way,
My Love."
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m4vRL_HwhM

Song Let Me In, sung by The Sensations.
"Whee-ooo, whee-ooo
Hoo-whee-oo.
Whee-ooo, whee-ooo, hoo-ooo-ooo, whee-ooo,
Whee-ooo."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjS-_09839E
(Lyrics under video, press ^)

Stepping aside to pray by oneself

From the center of what we call this apparent cosmos emerges mind. And from this mind emerges everything urging itself with imagination.

It is Sunday. Let there be Christian reflection of this imagination. Let it surround terrestrial, celestial, and far-stretching swirling vibration of matter forming stars, planets, suns, and clusters, galaxies and superclusters, all the observable universe, along with the invisible urge of Being to realize Itself in the center of everything, point vierge -- the virgin point of what is now, to be, and always at origin.

We are baptized into this emergence.

Waters of realization.

Through our nature.

Silence. And deep...

Stillness.