perplexing the human race

Coming to end of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a nascent compassion for my fellow beings.

Kobold 

Grimm has provided one of the earlier and more commonly accepted etymologies for kobold,[3] tracing the word’s origin through the Latin cobalus to the Greek koba'los, meaning "rogue". The change to the word-final -olt is a feature of the German language used for monsters and supernatural beings. Variants of kobold appear as early as the 13th century.[18] The words goblin and gobelin, rendered in Medieval Latin as gobelinus,[19][20] may in fact derive from the word kobold or from kofewalt.[16][21] Related terms occur in Dutch, such as kabout, kabot, and kabotermanneken.[12] Citing this evidence, British antiquarian Charles Hardwick has argued that the house kobold and similar creatures, such as the Scottish bogie, French goblin, and English Puck, all descend from the Greek kobaloi, creatures "whose sole delite consists in perplexing the human race, and evoking those harmless terrors that constantly hover round the minds of the timid."[22] In keeping with Grimm's definition, the kobaloi were spirits invoked by rogues.[23] Similarly, British writer Archibald Maclaren has suggested that kobold beliefs descend from the ancient Roman custom of worshipping lares, household gods, and penates, gods of the house and its supplies.[24].                                                         

(--from Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobold

Looking at the terrors that hover round our minds.

And those who marshal their agendas through such consternation.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets. 

(--from site, The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, By Naomi Klein) http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

“Watch this,” said Hinzelmann to Shadow.

As witnesses, I suspect, we must. 

closer to ground

We're a worried people. The excessive vitriol of fevered minds spew crazy analyses of domestic or world events with a political carving knife sharpened to blood-searing manic telling without coherent connection to measure or proportion.

The right wing is becoming a new strain of contemporary fascism.

The left wing becomes a mirror of the bitter cold winds outside thin windows.

Minds are maddened with disturbing thoughts mutating into unrecognizable opinions spoken cynically into microphones, cameras and written into pixels, typeprint, and placards like billboards announcing the end will be bloody, cruel, and perpetrated by seemingly well-meaning assassins who yesterday were your coworkers, uncles, elected officials, and financial sector advisors.

Sound like a bad movie?

It is.

It is life at the beginning of 2014.

Last night at practice we watched a segment of Tibetan teachers speaking about the mind and light. How consciousness is beginningless. How disturbing thoughts divert awareness into agitation and anger.

We're a worried people. And worried people worry others whose narrow focus is to clear the streets of worrying people so that those who own the street can continue their unworried march toward peopleless legislation, banking, solocracy, control, wealth, and elimination of worrisome inequity by removing the unequal from the equation.

In my dream through the night I was handed a math test that I did not take. I was not able to discern what the test was for. I walked out without considering or recording a single answer to unread questions.

What alerts me is the possibility that thoughts are becoming the destruction of the mind.

Mind is the whole. Thoughts are carving up the whole into slices of opinion, judgment, and ideological waste that are fed to partializing operatives intent on confusing and contorting the fragmented into pawns of political players to funnel power to manipulating ambition.

I'm going to the mattresses.

Boil up a large pot of soup.

Grind coffee beans. Fill percolator with water. Stoke stove. Await the fragrance.

Meanwhile, in our own domestic chaos, two cats methodically prowl the house through the night knocking off whatever they can from shelves, desks, and tables in hallways, bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchen.

Breathing in, I know something else will fall.

Breathing out, I know, now, that everything tumbles closer and closer to ground.

being, speaking, and thinking

Here is how Panikkar writes about being, word, and speaking:

...In this context, I would like to make the far-reaching distinction between terms as used in scientific language and words as symbols as used by authentic philosophy. It is from this point that I have worked out the quaternitas perfecta of the word, the fourfold aspect of the word: the speaker, the spoken to (the addressed), the spoken about (that of which is spoken), and the spoken with, language (by means of which is spoken); in other words, the I, the Thou, the It (meaning, idea), and the Whereby (matter). 

   (h) With that, another connection unfolds: The word reveals reality’s cosmotheandric nature. By means of the polarity between being and speaking, the word overcomes the tension between being and speaking, the word overcomes the tension between being and thinking (the tension, forming the basis of western self-understanding -- and the foundation of modern science). Being speaks. Our ultimate task is not to think being, thereby hoping to arrive at the truth; instead, it is to enable being to speak by means of an active listening and obedience on our part (obedience and listening are related in english [ob-audire] and in german: Gehorsam and hören). In place of the polarity between thinking and being emerges now the triadic relation of being, speaking, and thinking. We not only say what we think but also what we are. Being is not only thought of; it also speaks.
(p.98, in A Dwelling Place for Wisdom, by Raimon Panikkar) 

 We are invited to learn how to listen.

Two plus two

Four?

No, two plus two remains nothing other -- just two plus two -- eh, Noah? Was that it? Nothing other?

one’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one:  

one’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one: 

which halves reintegrating, shall occur 

no death and any quantity; but than 

all numerable mosts the actual more  

minds ignorant of stern miraculous 

this every truth-beware of heartless them 

(given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss; 

or,sold the reason,they undream a dream)

one is the song which fiends and angels sing: 

all murdering lies by mortals told make two. 

Let liars wilt,repaying life they’re loaned;

we(by a gift called dying born)must grow 

deep in dark least ourselves remembering 

love only rides his year. 

All lose,whole find

                         (--poem by e.e. cummings)

A last line worth being called that.

A whole poem worthy of such a last line.

Wind and fog

Rain and whitecaps in Rockport Harbor.

The oddity of 60 degrees temperature swing in two days.

In gale winds Timberwind strains to hold.

No dinghies. No skiffs. No sloops.

la atención la atención si se quiere...

Richard liked to remind us,"What you put your attention on, you become."

The three wise men or kings or visitors from the East read the stars and discerned where to travel resulting in their finding, the story goes, the baby with its mother and father in humble circumstances. Once there, they gave presents, attended to the appearance of this curious ordinariness, then departed with whatever it was they experienced, returning home, avoiding the authorities, settling, one supposes, back into their everyday routines with little further chronicling of their curiosities.

Traveller, There Is No Path                                by Antonio Machado: Everything passes on and everything remains, But our lot is to pass on, To go on making paths, Paths across the sea. I never sought glory, Nor to leave my song In the memory of man; I love those subtle worlds, Weightless and graceful, As bubbles of soap. I like to watch as they paint themselves In sunlight and scarlet, floating Beneath the blue sky, trembling Suddenly then popping… I never sought glory. Traveller, your footprints Are the path and nothing more; Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking. By walking the path is made And when you look back You'll see a road Never to be trodden again. Traveller, there is no path, Only trails across the sea… Some time past in that place Where today the forests are dressed in barbs A poet was heard to cry "Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking…" Beat by beat, verse by verse… The poet died far from home. He lies beneath the dust of a neighbouring land. As he walked away he was seen to weep. "Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking…" Beat by beat, verse by verse… When the goldfinch cannot sing, When the poet is a pilgrim, When prayer will do us no good. "Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking…" Beat by beat, verse by verse. (Translated by Asa Cusack)

At practice last night we also read from Panikkar.

Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010) wrote:

I have given myself nine rules, or sutras: 

1. Begin with myself (not trying to change others).  

2. Begin within myself (hence, without impetus from outside). 

3. Open myself to the whole of reality (not a 'specialized' spirituality). 

4. Begin where I myself am...no waiting for the ideal point of departure. For eg: once I have money, once I get married etc... 

5. Do not consider the consequences. Here one needs a pure heart: otherwise one will be afraid. No one can calculate all consequences ahead of time, not even a computer.  

6. Be in solidarity - hence not in isolation. Solitude need not mean isolation. Solidarity can mean group, family, friends, whatever. 

7. Be self-motivated - hence, without outside help, without predetermination, without a fixed goal. The true self can never be motivated by a goal! 

8. Be non-violent - not straining the will, not wanting to overcome anything. Otherwise one is merely repressing constantly. 

9. Always make a fresh start.  

(--from A Dwelling Place for Wisdom, by Raimon Panikkar p.156)

It is an epiphany of the Epiphany we long for.

A good day to watch. A good day to listen.

Twenty degrees

What once would be thought freezing is today felt as heat wave.

Funny how the body adjusts to winter!

Manifestation, Epiphany

It is said when something appears to our consciousness that it came from nowhere, and, bingo! There is is!

Not unlike the immense, intense, and intimate Cosmos -- which is the realizing presence/absence of The Whole, apparent/hidden, deeply within and completely beyond what we call Being, Existence, Becoming Itself. Similar to the Christ  -- which, it might be said, is the Cosmos manifesting its divine source of inner energy, Love Itself. Not unlike the subtle evanescence and mysterious permeation of this felt intuition, recognizing spiritual companioning, ungraspable insinuating connectivity, that we sometimes call (I don't know) Presence Itself.

Being, Existence, Becoming Iteslf.
Love Itself.
Presence Itself.

This, all this, as they say: Showing Itself.

THE MANIFESTATION  

Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming

Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,

A seed pushing itself beyond itself,

The mole making its way through darkest ground,

The worm, intrepid scholar of the soil --

Do these analgies perplex? A sky with clouds,

The motion of the moon, and waves at play,

A sea-wind pausing in a summer tree. 

What does what it should do needs nothing more.

The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.

We come to something without knowing why. 

                                                                             (--Poem by Theodore Roethke, 1904-1963)

It is the Feast of Epiphany (typically on the 6th, Little Christmas, but reformatted to fit the Sunday-Spirituality Roundup).

Roethke grasped it. His final three lines a koan of unceasing contemplation.

Of course everything, the universe, existence, being, becoming, love, presence -- are all strange to us. We long, exquisitely long, for each of them, each of these manifestations.

But so is "God" strange. Our longing, our desire to realize the incomparable gaze of kindly belonging, is the stuff of inconsolable beauty and irreparable stillness.

Today is the day to consider the untouchable desire to realize what we are, what this is, what child is this of our acquainting encounter.

And pause a while.

A little while longer.

Ah, yes, another few seconds.

To quietly gaze at the nothing we are, the everything we are, the showing of oneself to itself as itself.

Happy, (profoundly trusting), Epiphany!

Relative

Imagine being delighted it is 18 degrees.

a...b...c... (let's start at the very beginning)

Remedial.

"The doctors said they think he went into a coma while he was driving, went off the road, ran the car into one of your road signs. Too lazy to look at where you are, to read the mountains and the clouds, you people need road signs everywhere."
(--Whiskey Jack to Shadow, p.512, American Gods, by Neil Gaiman)

Something important to think about.  We've forgotten how to read.

Remediate remedial reading.

  riˈmēdēəl / adjective 

1. giving or intended as a remedy or cure

Dawn, minus eight degrees

Is dawning.

Where am I?

Dawn is dawning.

Of itself

Not one thing is true; it’s all true

At end, life seems a curious exposition of images conjured from dream-state narratives running concurrently on two dozen neural pathways hitchhiking backcountry on currents of snowy breeze.

“None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you — even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.
Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.
So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Not a word of it is literally true. Even so, the next thing that happened, happened like this:” 

 (p.508, American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, 2001)

 In the dream a friend is shot through the right side of torso. I hide behind counter of coffee shop. Earlier, another friend is shot dead on a Mexico beach trying to convince some men not to take his backpack. That, as the perennially confused say, actually happened. Later again, near Pittsburgh, a woman who knew the man in the first dream died of lung cancer in her late forties after many cigarettes and a lot of dancing.

I think of them the way water thinks of icicles as unending stability.

Phenomenology, on the contrary, seeks to show that the everyday world is as self sufficient, and self-intelligible  as the objects of theory. It cannot and need not be made intelligible in terms of anything else; rather, it can account for the possibility and place of theory. The world is what we directly understand and in terms of which one can see how nature, equipment, persons, etc. fit together and make sense. Thus worldliness and Dasein’s correlative understanding of being are the proper themes for ontology. 

(p.122, Being-in-the-World, A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, by Hubert L. Dreyfus, 1991) 

Dead? What does that mean? 

In the world of dream and imagination it has no particular relevance. In the realm of God death is unaccountably irrelevant. It seems one possible reason many have trouble with God is they believe in death.

Blondel’s style of reading is to read a text through fully, eschewing polemics and taking of reified positions until the doctrines advanced in a text have been adequately understood. Then he proceeds to develop these doctrines or theses to their fullest extent, acting as if they were true in order too see what sort of consequences they would have for the thinking and acting subject. The aim is to assess the adequacy of the doctrines as the representation of a philosophical position, and this consists in two parts. First, there is the question of the adequacy of the representation. Second there is the question of the adequacy of the developed philosophical position itself. The goal of such a reading is to allow a doctrine or philosophical position to provide evidence of its own inadequacy on its own grounds, by indicating to us the extent to which it is true and able to provide an account of itself immanently, and by thereby indicating to us the extent to which it is only relatively true and insufficient, without thereby being simply false.
(-about Maurice Blondel, 1861-1949, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) http://www.iep.utm.edu/blondel/

 Death is the meditation of unimaginative functionalism.

Sure, biological functions that sustain a living organism cease.

But energy and matter seem to have a different contemplation in their imagination. We humans seem more constrained in our comprehension.

Consider differently: A pause. A caesura. A comma.

A gassho, a bow, an asperative prayer.

Then, the next thing happens, with or without recognition by that which we like to call “ourselves” -- this carbon-based consciousness.

I would be willing to attest solemnly to this as long as you are willing to consider “Not a word of it is literally true.”

But that it is all true.

Before sleep

-37 wind chill in Maine. 

Poor dears and deer 

and small critters

 in arctic cold tonight. 

May each find safety, 

warmth, and shelter!

Now, when nothing appears, we can see...

No one there.

No one here.

No.

One is never not anywhere.

Retrieving

To sit in God with silence.

To sit with silence.

To sit with.

To sit.

Is all.

Is, all.

Is silence with.

Is silence with God.

Is sitting silent in God.

Is silently sitting as God is.

Of God, Mary, Mother: An Experience of Apposition

Be apposite of what we think we are.

aujourd’hui

V: Domine labia mea aperies. 

     V: Thou O Lord wilt open my lips. 

R: Et os meum annunciabit laudem tuam. 

     R: And my mouth shall declare thy praise. 

V: Deus in adiutorium meum intende. 

     V: Incline unto my aid O God. 

R: Domine ad adiuvandum me festina. 

     R: O Lord make haste to help me.               

Let’s be of God, as Mary, Mother!

De Dieu, Marie, Mère.

We must consider first what it means to be "of" something.

The suggestion is origin, source, participation, identity, apposition.

Mary is “of God" mother as you are "of God" apposite.

ap·po·site  adj.

 Strikingly appropriate and relevant. ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from Latin appositus, past participle of apponere 'apply,’ from ad- ‘toward’ + ponere ‘put.’ apt in the circumstances or in relation to something: an apposite quotation | the observations are apposite to the discussion.1. well suited for the purpose; appropriate; apt
[C17: from Latin appositus placed near, from appōnere, from pōnere to put, place]  { dictionary.com + Apple}

Be Mother of God, Mary!

Be apposite of God, friends!

(From FREELANG - HAPPY NEW YEAR in many languages): 

DUTCH gelukkig nieuwjaar
ENGLISH happy new year
FRENCH  bonne année
FRISIAN lokkich neijier
GERMAN   Frohes neues Jahr / prosit Neujahr
GREEK  Καλή Χρονιά (kali chronia / kali xronia) / Ευτυχισμένος ο Καινούριος Χρόνος (eutichismenos      o kainourgios chronos) 
HEBREW    שנה טובה (shana tova)
IRISH GAELIC   ath bhliain faoi mhaise
ITALIAN   felice anno nuovo / buon anno
JAPANESE  あけまして　おめでとう　ございます (akemashite omedetô gozaimasu
LATIN felix sit annus novus
PERSIAN   سال نو مبارک (sâle no mobârak)
RUSSIAN С Новым Годом (S novim godom)
TIBETAN tashi delek / losar tashi delek

http://www.freelang.net/expressions/newyear.php

 It is a new time for new seeing and new being

Reading papers.

Last day of year.

A clean slate?

Certainly, icicle!

No better advice

Back of envelope for 2014 prescription drug plan:

A good motto!

Just this, just that

Minus one degree.

Furnace blower at 

bottom of stairs under 

register hums steadily.

If this were a real poem

its next line 

would tell something

personal.

It's not

It doesn't

Just the temperature

Just the furnace.

Bare

"Gesundheit," comes the voice from another room.

"Danke," the return.

There it is. 

The whole of communication in two words.

Final dialogue in final play at end of year

"'Nothing...'

Say it!"

"No."

Morning prayer

Stillness

and silence

and family of the holy

now,

and forever

Yes!

Not only don't we see what's there, we don't see what's not there

There's always another story.

At Last the Secret is Out

At last the secret is out,
as it always must come in the end,
the delicius story is ripe to tell
to tell to the intimate friend;
over the tea-cups and into the square
the tongues has its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear,
there's never smoke without fire.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir,
behind the ghost on the links,
behind the lady who dances
and the man who madly drinks,
under the look of fatigue
the attack of migraine and the sigh
there is always another story,
there is more than meets the eye.

For the clear voice suddently singing,
high up in the convent wall,
the scent of the elder bushes,
the sporting prints in the hall,
the croquet matches in summer,
the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
there is always a wicked secret,
a private reason for this.

(Poem by WH Auden)

There's more than meets the eye.

Always.

What is it to live between

Mountains, for example

Buddha and Christ, for example

Dream and sleep, for example

Inspector Bellamy and the solving of a mystery, par example...

Zen Master Bassui (1327-1387) speaks of Jizo bodhisattva.

Jizo is the guardian of children, travelers, and other voyagers.

Jizo stands for the mind-nature of ordinary people. Ji (the character for earth) is the foundation for the mind. Zo (the character for storehouse) is the storehouse for Buddha nature). It is in this Buddha nature that all the virtue of ordinary people is contained.
 (-- from book by Jan Chozen Bays)  http://books.google.com/books?id=rR4cBxpWPRUC&pg=PA239&lpg=PA239&dq=jizo+talk&source=bl&ots=xVVNuAW25L&sig=NYhepsajY6qkekXACqYnYQyEj18&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Ma6-UvnnC8_lsATq2oGoDQ&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=jizo%20talk&f=false

May all children be safe!

It is the feast of holy innocents.

Open your storehouse, O earth, and let the virtues of compassion of protection of gathering for good seed our heart/minds growing there light and sympathetic joy!

Sound it through: What Is, coming to be! A Christmas Meditation

Christus natus est nobis (Christ is born to us)

Breviarium Romanum - In Nativitate Domini, ad matutinum

Antiphona ad invitatorium

(Roman Breviary, antiphon and invitatory, Matins, Nativity of The Lord)

...

A Meditation, In middle of night

Christus natus est --

Inter nous

Internus

In terrae noos

Christ is born --

Between us

Within

In mind of earth

This is what we do at 2:22am?

Hear that?

What about this?

Psalm 18 (19) Praise of God the creator 

The skies tell the story of the glory of God,    

the firmament proclaims the work of his hands; 

day pours out the news to day,    

night passes to night the knowledge.  

  

Not a speech, not a word,    

not a voice goes unheard. 

Their sound is spread throughout the earth,    

their message to all the corners of the world. 

At the ends of the earth he has set up    

a dwelling place for the sun. 

Like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,  

it rejoices like an athlete at the race to be run.

It appears at the edge of the sky,  

runs its course to the sky’s furthest edge. 

Nothing can hide from its heat. 

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit,    

as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,    

world without end. Amen.

Between this and that...

Is,

where;

we live!

On the feast of Stephen; hold no one's coat

Walk and listen. This is my end of year conclusion. It is the only gift I can think of that bridges the material and spiritual edges between which so many for so long have created a bottomless chasm of separation.

"Gods are great," said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. "But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return...."
(p.417, in American Gods, by Neil Gaiman)

Walk and listen...and nap.

While it snows.

And read.

While still...able.

As dusk walks down mountain

We return our descent.

It occurs, perhaps...

God is the whole of everything as well as the everything we cannot conceive.

And Christ is the Cosmos beyond imagination.

And earth is Gaia, mother, birthing one by one, each incarnation, each expression and manifestation of source itself.

As was Jesus.

As are you.

Today, when earth gives a particularly enlightened being to us, why not converse with insight, enthusiasm, and energy the nature of this gift?