End of first day runs

Unsaying Itself

On walk yesterday, apostrophes of muted exclamations to trees and dogs and earth.

This morning a question -- How talk with God?  A question of prayer?

I have no need to proclaim there is no God. I would rather say there is no containment or representation of God that can do what it might claim to do.

Trees, earth, snow, sky, dogs, sunlight. Apostrophes of love, each.

Whether naturalist or atheist, whether believing theist or mystic apophatic -- our best task is to see what is surrounding in the eight directions --(up, down, left, right, forward, back, before, after) -- and the directionless inner.

I greet you, each and all, with love. 

And yet, "I"do not love "you" as if some engineering bridge-builder connecting separate distant edges. Rather, we are love in the recognizing of what is surrounding us. 

Wu Wei, Bu Ji  -- (effortless act, nothing doing).

The susurrus of simple spirituality has moved from Word as language, through Word as flesh, to Word as silence.

I wanted to say this.

Before.

Recognition unsays me and everything becomes merely itself in loving gaze.

Franklyn at Farmington

Taking break from pulsing pain,

New snow follows Keylime yogurt.

Dogs know this bridge.

Sun standing on high branches,

Why we tell stories

It's the story that is told.

In scripture. In history. In your life and mine.

There is no objective external "truth" that is told.

It's the story. The teller of the story.

And the telling of it.

And when the story changes, history changes, scripture changes, you change, I change.

So, tell me, a story.

Wu Wei, Bu Ji

Wu Wei:

Effortless act.

Bu Ji:

Nothing doing.

One/no-other . . . another/no-one? -- (what is this ἔλλειψις, élleipsis, "omission" or "falling short")

If the act and the actor are isomorphic, there is no particular or proprietary face or name to attach to the act. There is the act itself, the work itself, nothing other.

But when a name or face emerges in the event of action, there is something attached that can be acknowledged. There is someone doing the act, something else at work.

"To remain nameless is to remain faceless, with hardly a life of one’s own. Accordingly, a character’s emergence from anonymity may correlate with a rise in importance.” (p.330, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, by Meir Sternberg)

We worry about incognito. We prefer disclosure. We demand from citizens and military members their name, rank, serial number, and a photo ID.

It used to be that G-d had no name, no one could see G-d’s face.

Only breath. Only sound. Only voice.

What occurs when appearance is demanded? With G-d an object is made, a something to implore or desecrate. With anything else, commodities are made, things to possess or annihilate.

What are we to do?

What about surrendering to the intimacy of one-an-other:
One/no-other; another/no-one?

The Heart Sutra says that emptiness is form, form is emptiness. Today it suggests to me not to make one the other, nor the other one.

The contemplative hermit might wish to be invisible, hidden within everything, doing nothing as no other.

Completely as what is.

February!  

of a Sunday afternoon

Talented actor dies from drug overdose.

Football players prepare to bang into each other on New Jersey field.

Reading on work from zen master O’Hara for tonight’s practice.

Root nerve pain left side upper rear reminds me of all the above.

Presentation, unaccountably and dismayingly, reminded.

Saturday night

Watching covert

Snoozing biggest and littlest

Death

There's nothing

To it

Happy Birthday Fr. Louis, o.c.s.o.

Tread well this erstwhile 99th!

"The grip the present has on me. That is the one thing that has grown most noticeably in the spiritual life -- nothing else."    (Thomas Merton)   http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com

The Merton Bookshed will glow today in your effulgence!

Lifeworld

What Husserl called subjectivity and it's world of experience.

Phenomenology,

1. A philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness. 

2. A movement based on this, originated about 1905 by Edmund Husserl. 

(--The Free Dictionary)

Here's looking at you, kid!

Actually, here is looking at you.

No kidding!

I'll have coffee with that question, please

Death inspires ethics.

It asks: If you are to die, how wish you to live?

She asks a fair question.

I'll live, for now, without sugar, inside that question.

Afternoon prayer

Gather

Water

Still

Mountain

Watchful

a way that takes nothing for granted.

Dog barks toward place where deer were overnight. The big goofy German Shepherd’s bellow has a resonance that holds ears in awe.

Postmodernism is an intellectual approach used in fields such as literary theory, sociology, and architecture. Although the term describes a broad class of viewpoints, in general postmodernism rejects the ideas of absolute truth and objective reality. Rather, it emphasizes how we construct our apparent realities by describing them, particularly through language.¹ A salient aspect of postmodern theory is the dense prose common to some humanities disciplines. Here is an example from a 1982 book entitled Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection by Julia Kristeva:

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced.²

Philosopher John Searle once asked Michel Foucault why his writing was so obtuse, when he was so easily understandable in conversation. Foucault told Searle that 25 percent of one’s writing needs to be incomprehensible nonsense to be taken seriously by French philosophers.³ Although Foucault rejected the postmodern label, he did believe that knowledge was generated through operations of power and his attitude reveals the intent of postmodernism to deliberately obscure.⁴

 (--from, "Academic Obfuscations: The Psychological Attraction of Postmodern Nonsense," by JIm Davies, article in Skeptic magazine issue 17.4, 2009).

 I remember Robert Lowell’s description of preparation for teaching his class -- one that I recognize:

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is “a young Republican." 

(--from poem, Memories of West Street and Lepke, by Robert Lowell

Lowell died at 60 from heart attack:

The Death of Robert Lowell, by Paul Mariani          September 12, 1977, Robert Lowell (1917 - 1977)

On this day in 1977 the poet Robert Lowell died at the age of sixty in the back seat of a New York City taxi. He had hailed the cab at JFK airport and was heading up to West 67^th Street, returning to his ex-wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. He had just flown back from a disastrous trip to Ireland, where he had gone to explain to his present wife, the Anglo-Irish Lady Caroline Blackwood -- like Hardwick a writer, as well as heiress to the Guinness Stout fortune -- why their marriage was over. The meeting at Blackwood's estate outside Dublin had of course ended badly, with Blackwood storming out with her three children -- the son she had had with Lowell and two daughters from two former marriages, one to the painter, Lucien Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud), one to the composer, Israel Citcowitz. At the end, Lowell still clutched in his stiffening arms one of Lucien Freud’s paintings of the young Blackwood, staring out from the canvas into the void.   http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=9/12/1977

Sara Teasdale’s poem fits:

Since There Is No Escape 

Since there is no escape, since at the end     

My body will be utterly destroyed, 

This hand I love as I have loved a friend,     

This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed; 

Since there is no escape even for me     

Who love life with a love too sharp to bear: 

The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea     

And hours alone too still and sure for prayer— 

Since darkness waits for me, then all the more 

Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore     

In pride, and let me sing with my last breath; 

In these few hours of light I lift my head; 

Life is my lover—I shall leave the dead     

If there is any way to baffle death. 

(--poem by Sara Teasdale, 1884-1933)

It could be death has a new name, “Baffle Death.” Is there any way to baffle death, or is baffle death the way?

What if our ethics were to begin with a sit-down alongside baffle death? Yes, begin there. Say hello. Share pleasantries: nice day; some water? a piece of fruit? what have you been doing with yourself?

Then: What, knowing you, am I to do with my life? How understand and deal with the concept of ‘others’? Am I...them? Are they...me? (Can you imagine the attentive gaze of Baffle Death, perhaps a kindly grandmotherly raised eyebrows state of readiness to sit as long as it takes for you to come to terms, come to peace with whatever understanding arises in your encounter.) Perhaps this new acquaintance will pour tea, offer Lorna Doones, and ask after your family -- their health, projects, whether they have warm gloves for the cold weather.

Maybe Baffle Death has been misunderstood, been thought of as an enemy, an unkind stranger unwelcome in our neighborhoods. Maybe, after the sit-down, a new view might emerge. Something not far from what we’ve known as ‘faith.’

There is a strong vein of hostility against orthodox religious believers in America today, especially among the young. When secular or mostly secular people are asked by researchers to give their impression of the devoutly faithful, whether Jewish, Christian or other, the words that come up commonly include “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old-fashioned” and “out of touch.” 

It’s not surprising. There is a yawning gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world. 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described one experience of faith in his book “God in Search of Man”: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement...get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. ...To be spiritual is to be amazed.” 

And yet Heschel understood that the faith expressed by many, even many who are inwardly conflicted, is often dull, oppressive and insipid — a religiosity in which “faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion.” 

(--from, “Alone, Yet Not Alone,” OpEd by David Brooks, NYTimes, Jan.27,2014)   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/opinion/brooks-alone-yet-not-alone.html?ref=davidbrooks

Often when we’re amazed we’re baffled. And there is hardly anything more baffling than death. We save our biggest one word questions for death: Why? Where? When? Who?

Baffle Death stays still and silent when approached by these questions. She is not aloof. She is completely feeling what you are feeling. Only, in such unimaginable stillness and silence such as death, we imagine it to be somewhere else, a far, far distance from our understanding. A long expanse away from our abilities to profoundly enter within the unimaginable mystery of compassionate presence awareness.

Yes, compassionate presence awareness, the real thing, is suffused with stillness, silence, and surrender in loving attentiveness.

Don’t fret about confusion, befuddlement, uncertainty, or unknowing.

Rather, be amazed!

Spirituality follows amazement along new pathways one step at a time.

Walking at night

Four hundred miles later.

Calais, looking across at St. Stephen's, Canada.

Cold ice where water hardens.

Matins

The metaphors of religion and scripture remind to look at what is now here as revelation in situ of story told as proleptic prelude.

If metaphor isn't this moment revealing itself, it was mere abstraction and dismissable. Now is the fulfillment of language. Grounding the specific and particular as touch of earth.

 Else we dwell in vast ocean fullness of possibility -- silence as genesis -- standing ready to create existence as breath of God in and through and with what is coming to be.

“There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all. 

There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent. And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning? 

There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed; when the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom: distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.” 

( – Thomas Merton, in No Man is an Island)

Any second now.

We shall be.

Released.

Awareness is empty; let things come, let them go

Live a blameless life.

This doesn't mean to do nothing for which you can accrue blame.

It means live not blaming anyone anything.

No blame from you toward another.

Accepting the condoning mystery.

As God is gazing.

As wind chatters with trees

I am content when setting out on Sunday morning the few steps given me.

   οἱ δὲ εὐθέως ἀφέντες τὸ πλοῖον καὶ τὸν πατέρα αὐτῶν ἠκολούθησαν αὐτῷ.
    καὶ περιῆγεν ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ Γαλιλαίᾳ διδάσκων ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς αὐτῶν καὶ κηρύσσων τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας καὶ θεραπεύων πᾶσαν νόσον καὶ πᾶσαν μαλακίαν ἐν τῷ λαῷ.
 At once, leaving the boat and their father, they followed him.
    He went round the whole of Galilee teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom and curing all kinds of diseases and sickness among the people. (From Gospel according to Matthew 4:12-23)

I wonder about this man. About the boat. What he was saying. How he cured. Why he cared.

The father at his boat must have felt abandoned. Or, at least, baffled.

So, I put on my green Irish fedora, brown tweed thinsulate sport coat, green Baffins, and in red sport shorts go out to bookshed, adjust heat, clear center table, shift blinds to hold heat, set out Quaker Meeting sign in front of snow-stiff red candle metal, watch white dog come up dooryard drive, walk through barn, back into house.

I suspect the boat got overturned, set on cross workbenches, placed by stone wall by cabin, to rest a few months until time for refit.

We're left to wonder. Left to ponder mysteries of time and purpose, touch and sound.

Just stepping from one thing to another and straight ahead for whatever else appears for our imagination.

unfinished justice, lost sanity

Thinking about 9/11.

Thinking about the US invasion into Iraq. Thinking about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Pearl, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet, et al.

It is a curious world where so much can happen that is filled with poisons.

At the root of human misery, Buddhism sees three destructive impulses: greed, anger and foolishness, which it terms the "three poisons." These are the essence of all the delusions and negative workings of life that impede the realization of our full potential for happiness and creativity. 

Of the three, foolishness is most fundamental, as it facilitates greed and anger. Foolishness here means ignorance (passive or willful) of the true nature of life. It is blindness to the reality of our interrelatedness--not merely our connectedness to and dependence on each other, but the connectedness of the unfolding of each of our lives to the unfolding of the very life of the universe; the fact that each of us is a vital component of life itself and a nexus of immense possibilities. Because it obscures life's true, enlightened nature, this ignorance is also referred to as "fundamental darkness."

(--from, Three Poisons --The Source of the Problem) 
http://www.sgi.org/buddhism/buddhist-concepts/three-poisons-the-source-of-the-problem.html 

So many dead. So many crippled. So many dispossessed. So much suffering and unfinished justice.

What has been the cost of the Iraq War? In strictly American terms, 4,486 U.S. military personnel died there (plus another 318 from Coalition allies); the dollar tab for the war is reckoned in the trillions. And in Iraq—how many people died as a result of the American-led invasion? That’s a harder question than it might seem. 

A new study with a controversial back story attempts to provide a good answer. Writing today in the journal PLOS Medicine, the University of Washington’s Amy Hagopian and 11 co-authors estimate that roughly 461,000 Iraqis died as either a direct or indirect cause of the war and subsequent military occupation. But reflecting the tortured effort both of getting good numbers from a war zone and the history of controversial past counts, by the time all their calculations had settled the researchers put their “confidence interval” for possible excess deaths between March 2003 and June 2011 at between 48,000 and 751,000.

(--from, A Better Stab at Estimating How Many Died in the Iraq War, by Michael Todd,, October 15, 2013, in Pacific Standard, The Science of Society)
 http://www.psmag.com/navigation/politics-and-law/better-stab-estimating-many-died-iraq-war-68419/  

How will we ever return to or find sanity again? 

God is: No idea; felt, in fact.

I place hands together and bow when passing cemeteries.

Time, you could say, does not have anything to do with that which is out-of-time.

The dead have just died. Always, just died. I greet them as they are transitioning through that timeless portal between now and now.

I say to them: God be with you!

I greet them in their new acclimation.

At Existentialism conversation Friday evening Willow said, "God is 'experiencing reality'."

No idea; felt, in fact.

Or, seen differently: Reality is no ideal felt in fact.

Too cold

Just too cold.

Coming back with very cold fingers

When walking mountain is too cold for nerves and bones in face.

Brook closes into itself.

January stands like yurt at turn of water -- empty and alone.

building dwelling mercy

Poets think being into existence.

Words become disclosure of existence.

Says Heidegger:

It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language's own nature. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man's subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his
nature into alienation. That we retain a concern for care in speaking is all to the good, but it is of no help to us as long as language still serves us even then only as a means of expression. Among all the appeals that we human beings, on our part, can help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first.

What, then, does Bauen, building, mean? The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in a place. The real meaning of the verb bauen, namely, to dwell, has been lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbor. The neighbor is in Old English the neahgehur; neah, near, and gebur, dweller. The Nachbar is the Nachgebur, the Nachgebauer, the near-dweller, he who dwells nearby. The verbs buri, büren, beuren, beuron, all signify dwelling, the abode, the place of dwelling. Now to be sure the old word buan not only tells us that bauen, to build, is really to dwell; it also gives us a clue as to how we have to think about the dwelling it signifies. When we speak of dwelling we usually think of an activity that man performs alongside many other activities. We work here and dwell there. We do not merely dwell-that would be virtual inactivity-we practice a profession, we do business, we travel and lodge on the way, now here, now there. Bauen originally means to dwell. Where the word bauen still speaks in its original sense it also says how far the nature of dwelling reaches. That is, bauen, buan. bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. it means to dwell. The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word barren however also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine. Such building only takes care-it tends the growth that ripens into its fruit of its own accord. Building in the sense of preserving and nurturing is not making anything. Shipbuilding and temple-building, on the other hand, do in a certain way make their own works. Here building, in contrast with cultivating, is a constructing. Both modes of building-building as cultivating, Latin colere, cultura, and building as the raising up of edifices, aedificare -are comprised within genuine building, that is, dwelling. Building as dwelling, that is, as being on the earth, however, remains for man's everyday experience that which is from the outset "habitual"-we inhabit it, as our language says so beautifully: it is the Gewohnte. For this reason it recedes behind the manifold ways in which dwelling is accomplished, the activities of cultivation and construction. These activities later claim the name of bauen, building, and with it the fact of building, exclusively for themselves. The real sense of bauen, namely dwelling, falls into oblivion.

(--In Basic Writings, Martin Heidegger, pp.348-350, from "Building Dwelling Thinking" in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans Albert Hofstader, 1971)

I heard a young woman yesterday speak of the "outlaw" point of view. How the belief that one or two or dozens of the imperfect members of the human race who are chosen to be our leaders and tell us what we can and cannot do -- how foolish we to believe they are actually for all the members of the human race who invite them into office, or even those they limit their attentions to. Governors, government, and governesses are there at the bidding of those who pay to protect private interests, property, and power. The unmonied and unpropertied are not to be trusted. Their protest and free speech is more and more seen to be dangerously unpatriotic and threat to the new narrow definition of national security -- anyone who disagrees with those who make the rules and have armed protection against those who disagree.

So much to think about.

So many poems to sit with.

So curious we are in such an atmosphere of fear, repression, and preparations provoking the populace into inauspicious unintelligent panting after the inappropriate as permanency.

Si culpare velis, culpabilis esse cavebis;
Dagma tuum sordet cum tua culpa remordet. 

(If others you wish to blame,
Take care you have no cause for shame;
Your dogmas are filthy and thin
If your own crimes gnaw you within.) 

(--p,96, from Passus 10, Piers Plowman {c.1367-1385} by William Langland, Wordsworth Classics, 1999)

As for temporary solution? Bach: Mass In B Minor, BWV 232 - Kyrie: Kyrie Eleison 1.

Mercy -- for everyone! 

Happy (for us your) birth...

... day (is celebrated), Martin!

Step, step, turn, step

At practice table last night we found a way to describe the tension satori brings between samsara and nirvana.

Nirvana fuses.

Samsara confuses.

In the first, one is in one and all alone as one.

In the other, each is in one together, bewilderingly so.

Or: I have no feet; versus: Did I just step on your foot?

When snow stopped falling...it revealed nothing in no new way

Why not poetry?

Why not zen?

        Not, adv.

In no way; to no degree. Used to express negation, denial, refusal, or prohibition: 'I will not go. You may not have any.'

-- the Free Dictionary

Poetry says nothing well.

 Zen is no way to be.

It's just a passing thing

The organism is fragile.

Pain diverts attention.

Eyes narrow and droop.

This, too, passes.

Matt calls; his father, Don, has died

Double Haiku 
(for Pat, after Don)


After the impish

twinkle in his eyes I think

I’ll remember most




The gate of his walk --

with such fond recall I find

I imitate it.

Drop ego, pick up the real. Understanding is overrated

He said Heidegger went over his head.

I said, "Good! That's where your imagination and heart are, over your head."

He looked at me, and took another piece of celery dabbing it into spinach avacado humus.

Then we read Pablo Neruda's poem:
(Two versions from the Spanish)

Parthenogenesis.

Day by day all those who used to give me advice get crazier and crazier. 

Luckily, I paid no attention  

and they took off for some other city 

where they live together 

swapping hats with each other. 

They were praiseworthy types, 

politically astute,so that all my ineptitude 

caused them great suffering: 

The got gray-haired and wrinkled, 

wouldn’t stomach their chestnuts, 

and finally an autumnal depression 

left them delirious.  

Now I don’t know which way to be- 

absent-minded or respectful; 

shall I yeild to advice 

or tell them outright they’re hysterical? 

Independence as such gets me nowhere, 

I get lost in the underbrush, 

I don’t know if I’m coming or going. 

Shall I move on or stand put, 

but tom-cats or tomatoes? 

I’ll figure out as best I can 

what I ought not to do - 

and then do it: 

that way, I can make a good case 

for the times I got lost on the way; 

if I don’t make mistakes 

who’ll have faith in my errors? 

If I live like a savant 

no one will be greatly impressed. 

Well, I’ll try to change for the better: 

greet them all circumspectly, 

watch out for appearances, 

be dedicated, enthusiastic- 

till I’m just what they ordered, 

being and un-being at will 

till I’m totally otherwise. 

Then if they let me alone, 

I’ll change my whole person, 

disagree with my skin, 

get a new mouth, 

change my shoes and my eyes- 

then when I’m different 

and nobody can recognize me 

-since anything else is unthinkable- 

I’ll go on as i was in the beginning.

(-- Poem by Pablo Neruda)  

...   ...   ...

Parthenogenesis

All those how used to give me advice are crazier every day.

Luckily I ignored them and they went on to another city

where they all live together constantly swapping sombreros.

They were worthy subjects, politically thoughful, 

and every fault I committed caused them such suffering

that they turned grey and wrinkled, gave up eating chestnuts, 

and an autumnal melancholy finally left them delirious.

Now I don't know what to be, forgetful or respectful; 

continue to give them counsel or reproach them for their madness. 

I cannot claim independence.

I am lost in so much foliage-

should I leave, or enter, 

travel or linger, 

buy cats or tomatoes?

I will try to understand what I mustn't do, then do it, 

and so be able to justify the ways which might escape me, 

for if I don't make mistakes, 

who will believe in my errors?

If I go on being wise, no one will notice me. 

But I will try to change, 

offer greetings with great care

and look to appearances with dedications and zeal, 

until I am all that they wish, 

as one might be and another might not, 

till I exist only in others. 

And then, if they leave me in peace

I am going to change completely, 

and differ with my skin; 

and when I have another mouth, 

other shoes, other eyes;

when it is all different, 

and no one recognizes me, 

since anything else is beyond me, 

I shall go on doing the same. 

--Pablo Neruda

When we will be what we see

If we were able to breathe, if able to pronounce a word, to create with the cosmos the cosmos itself -- would we not?

It is, I suspect, ours to do.

It is, I suspect, ours to be.

I ask you? No; just the asking

No wonder we don’t pause to look intently at what is revealing itself before us.

Much of our talk circled, appropriately enough, around nothing. In speaking of the Zen conception of the self, Nishitani quoted his favorite saying of Saint Paul: “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” “Who is speaking here?” is then his question -- one he has been asking himself for decades. It is evidently not the “I” or the “me”; nor does it appear to be Christ either. Who, then, is it? “Just who is this self?” 

Later in the evening, the question recurred in a different form. Always in this room, it seems, there ids a single rose in a bamboo vase that stands on a shelf above a table. A piece of tape covering a crack in the bamboo contributes somehow to the “rightness” of the ensemble. Looking over at the rose, Nishitani asked in quiet puzzlement, “Where is the flower blooming? What about the locus of the unfolding of this rose? Where does it bloom from?” He went on to muse upon the notion of nature, especially in Spinoza’s sense of natura naturans.

(--from p.xxvi, Introduction by Graham Parkes to The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Keiji Nishitani, Setsuko Aihara, SUNY series, c.1990)  

The self-causing activity of nature obviates the notion of a separate self doing the looking at some objective thing from some subjective thing.

The rose, the Christ, the self -- just who, what, or where is this . . . looking?

Glistening

Nature

Happy Birthday Martin!

Fog and

Rain all the way to Lewiston and back.

comes Monday

Let us pray --

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.   

(--prayer ending Office of Readings, Monday 13Jan2014)

What they have seen.

That they may see!

Recompense

Please, pay me no mind.

What he sees breaks his heart

heartbreaking                

       (a haiku for D.) 

when heart sees itself — 

enormous chunks of ice fall 

to flowing water 

-wfh, 12jan14

life (between us)

Nigel Warburton, virtual philosopher, does the podcast Philosophy Bites with David Edmunds. He is leaving his academic position at the Open University and is interviewed by The Philosophers Magazine, The Philosophers’ Magazine on the web. An excerpt:

So, does his interest in introducing ideas to people who might not know much about philosophy have something to do with this convoluted journey? It wasn’t easy for him to make his way into philosophy, so is he trying to make it easier for others? 

“No, that’s just the nature of philosophy. It’s always difficult – though nothing like as difficult as theoretical physics. If you’re not having trouble then you probably don’t really understand what’s going on. Many people seem not to have trouble, but I know from doing these interviews that if you ask them direct questions in ordinary language some can’t answer without jargon and mystification. 

“A lot of professional philosophers lack the imagination required to think about what it’s like not to understand something. Some have got into a complacent habit of speaking to each other in a kind of technical language, which is almost at times the avoidance of doing philosophy. They’re part of a culture of people who always say the same things and make the same moves: just making finer and finer discriminations between whether they’re a particular kind of materialist or a particular kind of functionalist. People stake out little claims. When faced with the need to explain what they’re doing and why it should be of interest to anyone at all outside of that culture, many flounder. 

“Not the best ones, interestingly. The really significant philosophers are able to explain with superb clarity precisely what it is that matters about a topic. Not just for others with similar interests but for anybody who might be concerned with philosophy at all. Weaker philosophers hide behind a series of coded nods and winks to each other. This often betrays a lack of clarity of thought.”

Nigel Warburton, co-presenter of Philosophy Bites, is interviewed by TPM’s editor, James Garvey. This article appears in Issue 61 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Posted May 28, 2013
 http://philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1159

The way, I suspect, to teach philosophy is to think along with others -- carefully, with authentic interest, open mind, a playful humor at the turns, dead ends, rest areas, and engaged interaction along the journey.

Presence is gift extended, gift received -- ultimately, gift we give ourselves. What is is always there. We, on the other hand, often don’t show up.

So, show up!

See, and listen to, whatever else is there.

Converse.

It makes for interesting life.

Life between us.

His cancer, he said, spreads

Dogen heard, “Dropping off mind and body,” and he took notice.

As we all.

Must.

Coincidentia oppositorum

When we no longer think in terms of opposition.

When meeting place is ground of intersection and coincidence.

My one companion is darkness.

Nobody else's footprint

The difficult part, they say, is to stay in your own footprint.

“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.  

They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint. For many absurd reasons, they are convinced they are obliged to become somebody else who died two hundred years ago and who lived in circumstances utterly alien to their own. 

They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems or possess somebody else's spirituality.”

 (--p.98, Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation)

If you want to find out where you've been or where you're going, pause a minute and -- look under your feet.

Exactly, see what is there.

in all creation

Ethical study belongs to all of us about all if it for all times in all places.

If Sophia is God’s world as eternally conceived in his Logos, and if divine humanity is the crown and consummation of creation, and if then this world in its every order is an aspiration to that divine world, then any ethics worthy of Christian culture will be one of whose concern is total: it must proceed from a rationale found not merely in the conscience or dignity of the autonomous subject, nor in a gross estimation of material goods and desires, nor in a purely social economy of civic duty; it will have the form of service to the entire cosmos as summed up in and brought about through human action. It is through humanity that the glory of God will be revealed in all creation, as Paul says, and this truth is the principle that governs Solovyov’s ethical philosophy. Not that -- in The Justification of the Good -- this is by any means immediately obvious.
(pp.xlii-xliii, Foreword by David Bentley Hart to The Justification of the Good, An Essay on Moral Phiosophy, by Vladimir Solovyov, c.1897 in Russia, trans. by Nathalie A. Duddington,M.A. 1918; 2005 ed.)

It might not be obvious, but it is worth the inquiry. 

here, then, we are, well

What do you believe?

(No, that's not the question.)

Where do you locate whatever belief you have?

(Yes, I'll try that question.)

I used to try to fit what I held as true into a formulation that squared with a particular system or context of recognizable sanction by an organization itself recognized as a verifiable corporate entity with provenance and resume and references eliciting nod and verification stamp of authenticating approval.

I now see less and less need for pinpoint and justification. What is true often eludes enclosure. Truth itself is more the whole of it all than a fragment of evidence proving a hypothesis.

Did I love such and such a person? Yes, I believe so.

Did I wrong that person? Yes, I admit so.

Does the wronging disprove the loving? No, they both exist. One In the other and through the other.

Until, looking from a vantage point neither inside nor outside the experience, one and the other are no longer two, separated, nor counterpoint. They fall into the whole of experience which is our common residence.

Experience is our common residence, not thought.

Thought is what the mind does with experience, real or imagined.

I no longer hold any belief.

I no longer hold anything true. Not anything. Everything falls that I try to hold.

I am, rather, held in the ambience of faith and trust that what is is what is.

I am held by the open and uncontainable truth which is the whole of everything and that which is beyond anything conceivable.

I have fallen into this place.

I am fallen into this open falling.

(Is this the description that many have attempted to fit into the metaphor of “sin" by saying, "I am a sinner!"?)

I am the experience of falling through this open falling.

Don't look for me there, there is no there there.

Rather, look at yourself. Look here and here and here.

How fares this here with us?

Well, then, here we are!