curriculum vital (née vitae): toward a course of learning together

Here we are!

Let's become interested.

Let's become conversant.

Let's become knowledgeable.

Let's become thoughtful.

Let's become acquainted with wisdom.

Let's
     think about,

     discuss,

     debate,

     call into question, and

     deepen

what we are looking at and studying.

Finally,

   let's converse with one another,

      write about what we are finding out, and

         learn how doing all of the above moves our behavior

             and thinking along

                 a journey of beneficial  

                     engagement with all involved

                         in the process of dwelling together
   
   in this existing place wherein we are.

Let's begin now.

At origin.

What do you mean, "Just as I thought?"

I have no opinion.

Some day I'll be able to say: "I have no opinion."

What's your opinion of that hypothetical?

Just

 as I ...

thought.

kazoolessly wished a good celebration

Aug 31, New Year's Eve .

In the morning, September.

In Vermont, a 42nd birthday.

A voice in good spirits!

Greek ἰδέα (idéa)

Plato said, “See!”

What an idea!

{From Latin idea (“a (Platonic) idea; archetype”), from Ancient Greek ἰδέα (idéa, “notion, pattern”), from εἴδω (eídō, “I see”), related to French idée. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idea }

as I was

There were fireworks over the harbor tonight. I heard them. It was after sitting shikantaza. It was after listening to compline. In the muted second floor of bookshed. In the quiet.

I heard them.

It might have been bombs in Syria or Iraq. It might have been exploding tear gas canisters in Furguson MO. It might have been gunfire in Chicago IL.

But it was Camden ME. They were celebrating windjammers. Waves and wind, hulls and sails.

As I was.

Celebrating solitude.

peeing under stars

                (haiku with dogs)

early reminder --

shaking winds brush tops of trees

Han on trunk says fall

vigils

                 (a haiku at 4:44am)

crickets pronouncing 

late august cusp dawn -- monk time;

nothing but god is

Acoustics and appreciatives

New mahogany Han from harbor boatbuilding scrap hangs on tree outside meditation cabin.

Shema on right side of doorway into cabin.

Birchat Habayit Mezuzah on jamb of Panikkar wohnkuche. ("Baruch ata bevoecha u'varuch ata betzeitechah" which means "Blessed are you upon your arrival and blessed are you upon your departure.")

The sound and touch of these beings!

Here is your teacher

There is nothing

To learn

Not here

The Dearth of God/Man: Learning together -- teaching God, teaching Man

Jesus' death as a dearth of awareness -- a scarcity and shortage -- suggests a deficiency we should look into.

Were both God and Man complicit in this dearth?

Was our awareness unready?

Will a return require fuller depth and wider inclusion to occasion?

Qui tacit consentire? Juvenal, Thales, & Buddha

Silence has a mind of its own. It has a body that is our own.

mens sana in corpore sano

English translation: You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body. Ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death, and deems length of days the least of Nature's gifts that can endure any kind of toil, that knows neither wrath nor desire and thinks the woes and hard labors of Hercules better than the loves and banquets and downy cushions of Sardanapalus. What I commend to you, you can give to yourself; For assuredly, the only road to a life of peace is virtue.

In original Latin: orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano. fortem posce animum mortis terrore carentem, qui spatium vitae extremum inter munera ponat naturae, qui ferre queat quoscumque labores, nesciat irasci, cupiat nihil et potiores Herculis aerumnas credat saevosque labores et venere et cenis et pluma Sardanapalli. monstro quod ipse tibi possis dare; semita certe tranquillae per virtutem patet unica vitae. —Roman poet Juvenal (10.356-64)

Which is in which? Is mind in body? Or, is body in mind?

I rather think they are two words, eight letters, that turn and dance and show various sides of themselves, forming transient and temporary expressions of their soundless manifestations twirling through evening patina of cloud-sun haze on greeny hills in Maine.

τίς εὐδαίμων, "ὁ τὸ μὲν σῶμα ὑγιής, τὴν δὲ ψυχὴν εὔπορος, τὴν δὲ φύσιν εὐπαίδευτος 

"What man is happy? "He who has a healthy body, a resourceful mind and a docile nature."^[1]

1. As quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, (R. D. Hicks, ed.), Lives of Eminent Philosophers I:37  (--Wikipedia)

Let's return to silence. It is the language of god. 

Silence, the face of god. 

Friday, waiting curbside for Saskia after her Jin Shin Jitsu she arrives saying, “I knew you were here, but I couldn’t see you.” If we are able to face this about god, we might be able to hear what is not said.

“I don’t envision a single thing that, when
     undeveloped, leads to such great harm as the
     mind. The mind, when undeveloped, leads to
     great harm.”
“I don’t envision a single thing that, when developed,
     leads to such great benefit as the mind. The
     mind, when developed, leads to great benefit.”
                   ......................
“I don’t envision a single thing that, when
     undeveloped and uncultivated, brings about such
     suffering and stress as the mind. The mind, when
     undeveloped and uncultivated, brings about
     suffering and stress.”
“I don’t envision a single thing that, when developed
     and cultivated, brings about such happiness as
     the mind. The mind, when developed and
     cultivated, brings about happiness.”

(-- The Buddha, Anguttara Nikaya 1.23–24, 1.29–30. Trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu.)

It is not mine to envision, it is mine to turn and twirl within the appearance itself.

How can I see what I am in the happiness of what is being itself?

What-is, being-itself: this, this, this is the appearance of  -- b o d y m i n d / m i n d b o d y  -- in and through and with the One Sustaining Gaze that is life in this place we call existence.

Sunday morning.

sit with this

Silence, the face of God, is what we gaze on without knowing.

If so, perhaps faith is the willingness to look.

The truly faithful see this.

breathing in, I have nothing to say; breathing out, I say nothing

Silence is the face of God.

No one has ever seen silence.

Cease practice based on intellectual understanding, 

Pursuing words and following after speech,  

And learn the backward step 

That turns your light inward 

To illuminate yourself.  

Body and mind of themselves 

Will drop away and your original face 

Will be manifest.  

—Dogen, 1200-1253

We want words.

We don’t want silence.

Except as monastics.

Faceless; wordless.

Unseen; unheard. 

nothing; kind

I said, “Try solitude.”

It was unkind.

There’s nothing to try.

The book on it

Jesus was a nice Jewish man.

Never anything other than.

Who recognized God in himself.

Becoming what he was.

Within.

Nothing other.

As himself, as God is, as a thing might be completely Itself.

God is...

That which is coming to be.

That which is.

Coming to be.

I give you my word

The poet 

ran out 

of words.

Settling 

for 

silence.

spiritual - religious; spirituality - religiosity; facing - facelessly

We have fallen between words. Which means we have fallen between worlds. A chasm of voided meaning opens exposing a bridge-less rhetorical lacunae into which unsuspecting pilgrims fall tumbling deeper and deeper into wall-less descent such as does not reveal to the falling one that they are falling at all. Mere gravitationless tumbling -- seeming like being solidly fixed in place -- whereas there is no place that they are. They have disappeared in plain sight of themselves. The reflection they believe they see of themselves is a repeating loop of an imagined time when they believed there was something to believe in that explained, sustained, and reclaimed.

Through such experiences, one thing was becoming clear to me: the dangerous power of the face, of the suffering face, the excluded face, the face of a victim. A story of suffering may become a morality tale or be co-opted by theory. A face calls in a different way. 

The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas famously argued that to be human is to be responsible for the suffering of the other, for the person whose well-being our very existence may be threatening. This obligation to others is encountered and symbolized in a unique way in the face-to-face relation. The faces of others present persons genuinely different from us, exposed to us. The vulnerability of the human face presents us with the claim: do not kill me. In a sense, Levinas says, the bare face of another says “do not deface me”; allow me, it says, my otherness without violation, shame, or indifference.4 

Wherever we are kept from seeing the face of the other, I was slowly seeing, whether of the other who stitches our clothing, or dies from our taxpayer-supported bombs, we make it easier for ourselves to act as if we, too, are not responsible for that other. It is an option only the privileged have available to them. 

(--from, Is Your Spirituality Violent? The Emergence of Violence as a Theme in My Theological Life and Work, by Tom Beaudoin, Santa Clara University http://www.scu.edu/cm/upload/Microsoft-Word-Beaudoin-s-Is-Your-Spirituality-Violent.pdf

Sitting in kitchen by bay window I hear periodic thumping. When I finally get up to explore, I see Chitta, one of our cats, looking at me from door between cellar, bathroom dining room and kitchen, as through demanding "what?" - as I notice a mature mouse struggling to right itself not far from hunkered gaze. After a conversation of eyes I take the dazed mouse out across Barnestown Road to the high growth, wishing it as well as it can be.

In prison Friday there were words that war is necessary. Look at the innovations for general use that emerge from product research in time of war -- the conveniences and gizmos that defense industry conjures alongside sidewinders and 50cal ammo. I am unconvinced.

Or, factories in foreign lands that make sweatshirts and sneakers for branded celebrities as lure for $50-100 dollar tag -- a voluntary walking advertisement that perpetuates the cult of "look at me" centered on exposure, bombast, and self-promotion. From mega-church shills to on-court on-field hubris, from glamorous body-shots to seductive substances ingested by the too-monied modeling for the too-down-and-dirty, we are lured into a celluloid/glossy/digital delusion that substitutes for the ersatz substitute of (shall we call it) radical reality. 

Radical reality, another awkward phrase, is what life is without addenda or adumbration.

It's nothing.

It's life.

Without making it anything other than it is.

Just...life.

What are the powers of violence that our spiritual commitments fail to comprehend? How can those who want to call themselves Christians avoid the demand for the spiritual practice of fostering an anticapitalist, nonviolent relation to God and our sisters and brothers, especially our sisters and brothers whose faces we will and can never see? For too long, the facelessness of the economic and religious other—student, worker, gay priest, terrorist suspect—has kept God faceless. But now Jesus returns to open for us the gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, and says to postmodern, consumer capitalist, American Christians: whatever you did to the most faceless of my sisters and brothers, you did to me. An idoloclastic strain in the Christian tradition may now be married to the ethical demand of our time: Jesus calls us by remaining faceless, by being present in and through our relation to the faceless. Jesus is the faceless man, who is kept anonymous by the way our spirituality fails to challenge our economic and religious practices. Jesus is the faceless man, whose flourishing is pinned, governed by our practices. 

Yet early Christianity also described Jesus as a parrhesiast, one who spoke confidently, freely, frankly. As a ritual reactivation of the dangerous memory of this parrhesia, we can ask, and ask again: How often do student voices about tuition inform university policies? How often do we ‘consumers’ hear from those who make our computers and cut our flowers? Who speaks for those arrested in the “war on terror”? When have gay priests been encouraged to speak of their reality? Does Christian spirituality search out the face and the voice, not of the random other, but of the other of the body of Christ and of the globalized economic body—the other on whom we depend and to whom we are related through politics, church, or economy?
What would a nonviolent Christian spirituality look like, both in the Catholic world and on the American scene? Might we have to free ourselves from the desire for spirituality itself?      

(-- Ibid) 

To gaze on life, gaze with life, gaze as life -- this is a real radical reality -- one wherein we see what is taking place, feel what we are seeing, and act without acting from within the action taking place as us in the occasion and circumstances wherein we find ourselves nothing-other than what is unfolding within, among, and between (what we have previously believed or thought of as) us and the world, self and other, subject and object, me and you, us and them, this life and afterlife, heaven and hell, haves and have nots, 1% and 99%, black and white, saved and damned, smart and stupid, living and dying.

I am falling between words. I am falling between worlds.

A piano piece on Keith Jarrett Radio plays -- Autumn in New York -- slow with piano and snare brush.

A bit drowsy and damp in Camden.

Dogs in dooryard.

Chickadee flies from feeder.

Kitchen surrender.

Face it.

It rains.

right up until the end

Christopher Hitchens was asked "How much longer are you going to do this?" He responded, "Until I drop."

He went on doing what he did best -- pointing out what he considered to be the foible of faith. His voice was needed in the conversation.

In 2011 he dropped. His voice is missed.

The "this" that Hitchens did was to annoy, consciously, the religious-minded.

I'm religious-minded. I'm glad he annoyed me.

laughing at nothing

Which way do you see it?

1. Death is nothing to laugh at.

or,

2. Death
             is nothing --
                       to laugh at.

monitum

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

(--from poem Epilogue by Robert Lowell)

Charlie, bemusing, said, “I like the word, I think I’ll use the word ‘repent’.”

Photos of militarized police pointing automatic rifles at unarmed men and women protesting the shooting of unarmed men in Missouri and Los Angeles is unnerving.

It is not a good time to be police. The helmets, the boots, the camouflage pants, the riot gear, the belief that anyone protesting mistreatment is candidate for being shot.

America is afraid of itself. It has become afraid of its citizenry. Congress is afraid of the black man elected twice president; so they play the white plantation owners’ game of disregard and disrespect.

Blowhards at Fox Spews rush to mock even the suicide for egoistic dollars. Keep the brown skins out, they bellow. This is a country for white men making greenbacks wet with surly arrogance.

I worry about the elasticity of apathy. The sleeping electorate has twisted its somnolence into a tight and thin tearing stretch of belief in corroded words such as “equality” “freedom” and “trust.”

The NSA luridly watches us into nakedness. The FBI becomes agent provocateurs inciting hapless anger into absurd plans to cause mischief -- then arrest the duped as terrorists. Throw them into cells.

The CIA foments unrest in foreign lands and spies on congress in its spare time. Assassinations are called like a bartender’s call for last round in barrooms throughout inebriated disheartened minds.

It is a dangerous time. In dangerous times the dangerous people with power and ammunition become more paranoid and dangerous -- making an unsafe situation even more unstable and unstoppable.

The church, having lost any moral cred, is a pantomime of an ancient play whose plot becomes a caricature of a once believable story now trivialized by kabuki ritual without real flesh and blood.

Is this our lament? That police, politician,  pundit, public plotter, pastor and priest have become shadowy relics of useless and cruel posturing? Mirrors become empty? Mouths say nothing worthy?

Surveillance -- first by an omnipotent and omnipresent God, now by an overreaching and oppressive state -- seems to be the one skill of those who would protect us from ourselves by executing us.

It seems a dark time lowers.
I fear something stupid looms.

But for this: Sylvia reads poem, John sings song.
Their paeans transcend pains that loom like gloom.

They finish learning how to work with the dying.
Their inspiring poem and song will serve what soon will die...well.

Is this where lament gives way to lamentation of Jeremiah all those vigilant monastic vigils?
“Jerusalem, Jerusalam, return to the Lord your God!" O People, People cease the fearful foolishness!  

brook stays, water goes on

Listening to water in brook on rainy morning is good enough for now.

When a shepherd sees that his sheep have scattered, he keeps one of them under his control and leads it to the pastures he chooses, and thus he draws the other sheep back to him by means of this one. And so it was when God the Word saw that the human race had gone astray: he took the form of a slave and united it to himself, and by means of it won over the whole race of men to him, enticing the sheep that were grazing in bad pastures and exposed to wolves, and leading them to the pastures of God. 

This was the purpose for which our Savior assumed our nature, this was why Christ the Lord accepted the sufferings that brought us salvation, was sent to his death and was committed to the tomb. He broke the grip of the age-old tyranny and promised incorruptibility to those who were prisoners of corruption. For when he rebuilt that temple which had been destroyed and raised it up again, he thereby gave trustworthy and firm promises to those who had died and were awaiting his resurrection. 

(--from Office of Readings, Second reading, Aug 12; From a treatise On the Incarnation of the Lord by Theodoret of Cyr, bishop)

I do not understand such a reading. Metaphor, allegory, history, homiletic, revisionary narrative, pious redaction, opaque prose?

I do not understand what or who "God" is, whether the stories of a Christ in the form of a slave are meaningful to contemporary audience, if belief in such things is a faded occupation.

(I've been spending time with two men in prison whose voices echo through the miles and their experience of bible along with anomalous followers of scripture they encounter from there to here. "Slave" and god allowing massive murdering does not resonate or endear for them.)

Water in brook runs down mountain outside yurt. Drops fall from overhanging tree onto vinyl roof making popping sound.

Faith without belief is a silent gaze into the appearing world. 

I have no doubt -- at least no crippling doubt -- that incapacitates gyroscopic balance.

Only wonder.

Swirling.

At bend in brook.

mesos; madya

Brandon in prison this morning said, “It’s not what I say, it’s what I mean.”

He captures the study of biblical literature.

It’s more than what the words say; it’s what they mean.

And for that, we have to go into the middle.

Between the words and our reflection emerges meaning. 

Clare; arriving at chapel/zendo

gratitude prayer, morning practice

thank you

for

bringing us

here

Practice

B
e well

W
ithin

O
neself

Ergo-nomics

Nagasaki 69 years ago. A cruel and unkind act. So suffering extends itself.

Treat

@meetingbrook: "Quiescence," the man said at another's 70th birthday celebration. He described that place between clouds & landscape. Where one is no ego.

It is nice to realize

Friends

Gather

what to do with my self

Killing the self is like finishing a cup of coffee. It just passes through, like everything else.

When Buddhism says, ‘It’s an illusion, it’s empty,' I think back to when Ignatius said, 'Your self -- —that's your problem. You have to conquer self, kill the self.' It’s that tradition, both in Christianity and in Buddhism, in which we are challenged to let go of what is so comfortable and what we cling to as who we are, if we're going to open ourselves to reality and truth.  -- Jerry Brown, “Politics and Prayer”

Then, let it.

Go.

completely seen is no longer seen

Someone fell onto the granite stones of the askew walkway of the Rockland Breakwater. I helped them up when they were ready.

5. Jesus said, "Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.
For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. [And there is nothing buried that will not be raised.]”
(--from The Gospel of Thomas)
http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html

The boy and I walked out and back.

Later, at practice, after zazen, visitor and I read Berdyaev and the epilogue to a book on western wisdom.

Ego fears evolution because it is impossible to hold on to what is moving toward both rest and cessation.

Evolution is the cessation and dissolving of what is moving through itself.

As such, we become what is gone, beyond.

what is seen when what is there is not

Two days after Hiroshima I turned one.

The prospect of being one in the aftermath of such craven cruelty continues to astonish.

You ain't seen nothing yet

Is that what transubstantation is? The sharing of being and consciousness between two? The breakdown of separation? That and the physical quantum intercommitment realization of matter?

Tomorrow is the feast of the Transfiguration.

Also the sacred day of Hiroshima.

His blocking foul was his sixth, so he banged his head on a door

It's complicated. The bible. Complicated. 

God, one of the inmates says, allows the slaughter of the innocents by Herod -- then, as Jesus, does this big speech about children being so valuable in the schema of things that no one should dare hurt one, or else.

Complexity.

Like four rabbis we argue scripture and come up with six opinions.

It's ok.

We're meant, we suppose, to be flummoxed.

Because...we are.

"I am here now," the character said. It might have been God's namespoken.

Sitting zazen the mountain grades itself.

Old school silence notes chainsaw and backhoe.

Chanting heart sutra no old age and death and no extinction of it.

Until the glass broke on kitchen floor there was no need for dust pan and sweep brush.

"you can talk only about a great weariness"

Doris sends us Yehuda Amichai:

Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.

~ Yehuda Amichai ~

(Panhala)

(The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

These are the days of the daze that is Israel and Gaza reminding us that strife is only a heartbeat away from death. These tribes, as one writer puts it, will forever be at one another. One side is penned in; one side is armed to the teeth. Their antagonism is bitter. Bitter still is the suffering of the ordinary people who wish to walk with their children, cook dinner, and sleep restfully through the nights of their lives. Theirs is no respite these days of dreadful and near terror crisscrossing the arbitrary borders of ethnicity, race, religion, and power.

In Maine, we are so fortunate not to be proximate to such disorder. Green hills, blue water, light rain over backroads and wood fences. The battles here are not nearly as fierce as our Middle East brothers and sisters. Here squirrel and chipmunk scurry feeder flotsam outside glass doors where two cats twitch tails following natural desire to catch and quiet anything moving in their vicinity. Alas, they do not transgress the translucent barrier to the outside! The mountain outback is resculpted by large-mouthed orange earth movers. Trees are taken. These zen teachers are intent to teach impermanence. Everything is chewed by change. It remains difficult to digest what has already passed through.

Don't worry. Be Happy. Thanks Bobby!

This morning at practice we read about Larry's parents visiting with his zen master in Ambivalent Zen, One Man's Adventures on the Dharma Path (1997). We laugh and cry at the humor of the encounter, thinking of our own parents, the wistfulness of memory of early stages of encounter with both new practices and familial connections.

Elsewhere in his book, Lawrence Shainberg writes:

My father points his fork at the book he has brought to the table and taps it sharply with the prongs. It’s a small thin book with a turquoise cover and several pages folded at the corners: The Wisdom of Insecurity. “Alan Watts,” he says, “is the wisest man who ever lived.” “But who is he?” “Well, I guess you’d call him a philosopher. A teacher of Zen.” Mother looks at him quizzically. After all, this is 1951, nearly two decades before Zen will become a buzzword of the “Human Potential” movement; before the publication of Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, Zen and the Art of Archery, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Zen of Running, and dozens of other such books; before the Beat Generation has made Zen its rallying cry; before there is such a thing as Zen perfume, and long before anyone other than those who practice with him is aware that Nyogen Senzaki, the only Zen master now in the United States, has begun to teach the meditation practice around which, in Japan and China, for nearly fourteen hundred years, the vision of Zen has been centered. “Zen?” she says. “What’s that?”  

Without a word, Dad stands, leaves the room and returns a moment later with another book by Watts. Opening to a passage he has marked, he reads:

“Zen Buddhism. . . is not religion or philosophy; it is not a psychology or a type of science. It is an example of what is known in India and China as "a way of liberation’. . . a way of liberation can have no positive definition. It has to be suggested by saying what it is not, somewhat as a sculptor reveals an image by the act of removing pieces of stone from a block.”

He looks at Mother to see if she is satisfied. Her smile is almost imperceptible, but I know what she is thinking. As long as we can remember, he’s been subject to these infatuations. He quit school when he was fifteen and did not read a book until he was thirty-five, but ever since then he’s been racing to catch up. Nowadays, he reads every morning from six until he goes to work at eight-thirty, and every evening after dinner until he goes to bed. Not infrequently, a book becomes transcendent for him, the answer to all his questions. And since he is by nature a proselytizer, convinced beyond a doubt that what is good for him is good for others, the book of the moment quickly appears at our dining table. Riding the waves of his enthusiasms, we have been through The Story of Philosophy by Will and Ariel Durant, The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang, Henrik van Loon’s Story of Mankind, and in recent months, now that he’s interested in psychoanalysis, books by Freud, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm. Closing The Way of Zen, he takes up The Wisdom of Insecurity again and reads aloud in a solemn voice:

“I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the 'Backwards Law.’ When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink you float. When you hold your breath you lose it - which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, 'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.’”

The reading continues for several minutes, but I hear nothing more. Indeed, the fact that I have heard this much is a kind of miracle. I am none too alert at the best of times, but usually, when Dad begins to read, I don’t hear words but pounding, a droning sound, like the hum you get with defective loudspeakers. But this time is different. The odd, reverse reasoning of the Backwards Law permeates my mind before I actually understand it. It is less a matter of thought than ventilation. Like a window has opened and a breeze is circulating in my brain. In a sudden, blinding flash, it seems to me, I have been offered my diagnosis and my cure. How can I doubt that the Backwards Law is the story of my life?
 Dad’s eyes are riveted on me. “Well?” he says. “What’s your response to that?”  

“To what?” I say. 

“Shall I read it again?”  

Without waiting for my reply, he points the book at me, crying, “For God’s sake, Larry, wake up! What is Watts talking about? Effort! Compulsion! Tension! Anxiety! Doesn’t it ring a bell for you? Don’t you realize how anxious and confused you are? How much you need to be liked, please everybody, no, don’t turn away, you know what I mean. All these hours you spend on the basketball court. Are you enjoying yourself? Having fun? Hell, no! Anyone can see that! You’re tortured! Driven by insecurity! But why? I’ll tell you why! You’re trying to make yourself secure! And it’s just that need that Watts is getting at. The need that defeats you right from the start! Don’t you see? The need for security makes you insecure!” 

* * *  http://www.tricycle.com/feature/ambivalent-zen 

Israel wants security. Gaza wants freedom. America wants to own everything and protect everyone from minutest deviation from security or freedom. The United States sees everything  -- and knows more than it will ever understand.

In Maine, I shoot baskets remembering how important and defining such activity was 50-60 years ago  in gymnasiums and schoolyards throughout city streets. I weary early these sessions, barely leave my feet, and surprisingly sink four in a row the same experimental two-handed overhead set shot gleaned from Larry Costello, Karl Braun, Dolph Shayes, and Richie Guerin. Maybe, like Pete Maravich, I'm looking to collapse and die on the court right after another missed shot rolls to a chain link fence further away than I might prefer to walk. It's just fine. We're forever on the free throw line after a foul is called. Its the world as it is.

Our zen practice doesn't dress up as Zen. It is tee shirt and cargo shorts with idiorhythmic bell and mokta rhythm in a meditation hall bedecked with world religions symbols and droppings of mice as well as flecks of insulation fallen from excavated ceiling by cloistered creatures doing their own practice in our absence.

It is Maine. 

And summer.

All is well.

Besides, it's all zen now.

The cat said to St. Peter, "Oh well!"

At poetry today Walt reads Flynn poem.

Forty-Seven Minutes 

        (Poem by Nick Flynn, b.1960) 

Years later I’m standing before a roomful of young writers in a high school in Texas. I’ve asked them to locate an image in a poem we’d just read—their heads at this moment are bowed to the page. After some back & forth about the grass & a styrofoam cup, a girl raises her hand & asks, Does it matter? I smile—it is as if the universe balanced on those three words & we’ve landed in the unanswerable. I have to admit that no, it doesn’t, not really, matter, if rain is an image or rain is an idea or rain is a sound in our heads. But, I whisper, leaning in close, to get through the next forty-seven minutes we might have to pretend it does.

We talk about it. We like it. In the group there are four people in their 90s. The eldest is 98. She reads two cat poems. 

She says she never expected to live this long. Born in 1916. She's been part of the poetry group for the five years it's been going on.

We pretend we'll continue to go on as long as we can.

It matters.

that’s ok; I’ll just hang out here

Reading Dan Berrigan on Deuteronomy for Thursday Evening Practice, No Gods But One.

He remains stark favorite.

Moses, the people’s leader for forty years, is denied entrance to the land he dreamt about.

Berrigan can always spot the bitter-sweet emptiness of all action.

numbers are people; in both Gaza and Israel

From Glenn Greenwald:

Published on

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

by

The Intercept

Terrorism in the Israeli Attack on Gaza, by Glenn Greenwald 

As I’ve written many times before, “terrorism” is, and from the start was designed to be, almost entirely devoid of discernible meaning. It’s a fear-mongering slogan, lacking any consistent application, intended to end rational debate and justify virtually any conduct by those who apply the term. But to the extent it means anything beyond that, it typically refers to the killing of civilians as a means of furthering political or military goals.
Below are two charts reflecting the deaths of civilians, soldiers and “militants” in both Gaza and Israel since the July 8 Israeli attack began. The statistics used are unduly generous toward Israel, since “militants” in Gaza are often nothing more than residents who take up arms to defend their homes against an invading and occupying army. Even with that generous interpretation, these numbers, standing alone, tell a powerful story: 

  

If you landed on earth from another planet this week, knowing nothing other than the most common use of the word “terrorism,” which side do you think would most frequently be referred to as “terrorists”?

Often, the most vivid illustration of the criminality of this attack comes not from data but from isolated stories. Yesterday, for instance, “in Khan Younis, five members of the Najjar family, which lost 21 people in a previous strike, were killed.” Meanwhile, “in the Al Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, an airstrike from an F-16 killed the mayor, Anis Abu Shamala, and four others in his home, some of whom had taken refuge there from intense artillery shelling nearby.” 

At the same time, the Israeli government’s messaging machine quickly switched from hyping rocket attacks, which were causing relatively little damage, to featuring what it began calling “terror tunnels”. The U.S. media dutifully followed suit, with CNN anchor (and former AIPAC employee) Wolf Blitzer touring a “terror tunnel” led around by the IDF and his flashlight, while the New York Times’ Jodi Rudoren did the same in an article headlined “Tunnels Lead Right to the Heart of Israeli Fear,” quoting “Israeli military officials”, “an Israeli military spokesman”, and “Israeli experts”. But a separate article in the NYT highlighted how these “terror tunnels” are actually used:

The strikes during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr came after the latest humanitarian halt to hostilities was punctured by attacks on both sides, culminating in the most deadly incursion yet by Palestinian militants through an underground tunnel from Gaza into Israel. 

Colonel Lerner said Tuesday that between four and eight gunmen had burst from the tunnel near a military watchtower near the border and killed five soldiersin an adjacent building with antitank missiles.

In American media discourse, when Palestinians overwhelmingly kill soldiers (95% of the Israeli death toll) who are part of an army that is blockading, occupying, invading, and indiscriminately bombing them and killing their children by the hundreds, that is “terrorism”; when Israelis use massive, brutal force against a trapped civilian population, overwhelmingly killing innocent men, women and children (at least 75% of the Palestinian death toll), with clear intentions to kill civilians (see point 3), that is noble “self-defense.” That demonstrates how skewed U.S. discourse is in favor of Israel, as well as the purely manipulative, propagandistic nature of the term “terrorists.”  

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/07/29/terrorism-israeli-attack-gaza

what do you think

Ode to Bach in E-flat Major

(two days breathing space)

morning at harbor

afternoon at Still,Marbles

 

reflection of things

becoming themselves

turn yourself inside out

Israeli bombs blow up Gaza. Many die. Many more are bloodied and hurt. In this awful choice by Israel to kill children, civilians, and decency Israel begins to forfeit whatever remaining sympathy and support there might be over its own darkened history.

Similarly, in prison yesterday, some men wondered how anyone could worship or respect the deity in biblical literature with its slaughtering commands, punishing ways, and honoring of deception and betrayal.

Then, this morning's news, Israel.

Published on Tuesday, July 29, 2014by Jon Queally, staff writer, Common Dreams 

More Than 100 Killed in 14 Hours as Gaza Death Toll Rises Above 1,200
      US continues to back Israeli assault despite international condemnation

The death toll in the Gaza Strip has now passed 1,200 people since Israel began bombing on July 8 and the Palestinian Ministry of Health reports Tuesday that more than 100 people were killed in the fourteen hours from overnight Monday into morning as mosques, homes, and other structures were hit during a sharp intensification of the bombardment.
In addition to homes, Gaza's main power plant was struck by Israeli shells which caused a massive explosion and a fire that sent thick plumes of black smoke into the air. Already suffering from massive power outages and a water crisis that puts the entire population at risk, the damage to the plant signals that those problems will likely worsen in the days ahead.
According to the Ma'an News Agency:

Earlier statements from the ministry had given the number of dead at around 57 for the morning, but after consultation with hospitals across the Strip the total was revised to more than 100 dead and hundreds more injured.
The Ministry of Health also said that as of Monday night nearly 5,000 homes had been completely destroyed, while tens of thousands more had been partially destroyed.
The United Nations, meanwhile, estimated that more than 215,000 Gazans had fled their home, or more than 10 percent of the besieged coastal enclave's total population.
Late Monday, Israeli authorities had given 400,000 Gazans evacuation orders, but with all the borders closed and the Israeli bombardment and ground invasion continuing in the northern, central, and southern Gaza Strip, the vast majority had nowhere to go except UN shelters.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the military campaign against the people of Gaza will continue until all the tunnels used by Hamas are destroyed.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/07/29/more-100-killed-14-hours-gaza-death-toll-rises-above-1200 

 What do you pray to? Who? Toward what end? Is prayer a quaint remnant of a magical consciousness that hopes for deus ex machina change?

Those whose business it is to write about the bombs and blisters of Middle East life measure the intent and strategies of Israel and Hamas as if a chess match before cocktails. Here in Maine this duet of disaster feels like the Tennessee prison extraction of an inmate in August 2010:

Inmate's death by Riverbend guards was homicide     Posted: Jan 31, 2011 3:31 PM EST
 Inmate Charles Toll died last August from asphyxia with suffocation. 

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - The state medical examiner has classified as a homicide an inmate's death at the hands of guards at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.
The Tennessean reports the medical examiner's officer watched a video of prison guards trying to get Charles Jason Frank Toll out of his cell on Aug. 17.
 
An autopsy report by Dr. John Davis says Toll was handcuffed behind his back and put face down on the floor where guards held him down for 10 minutes with a riot shield.
Toll was unresponsive and had distressed breathing for about five minutes. When guards rolled him on his back, he didn't have a pulse.
Davis declared that Toll died from asphyxia with suffocation.
Toll had been serving a 30-year sentence on multiple charges including aggravated burglary, escape and theft.

http://www.wkrn.com/story/13940987/inmates-death-by-riverbend-guards-was-homicide 

Also, New York Times, 29July2014, http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000003021046/a-prison-routine-turns-deadly.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&modref=HPVideoRefer&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news 

There's no need to take my own life. My life is being taken in Gaza. My life was taken in Tennessee.

The author of Ecclesiastes knows meaninglessness. Meaning is not given nor is it a given.
It is found between us.

Ghazal 10

Curls dishevelled, sweating, laughing, and drunk,
shirt torn, singing ghazals, flask in hand, 

his eyes seeking a quarrel, his lips saying, 'Alas!',
last night at midninght he came and sat by my pillow. 

He bent his head to my ear and said, sadly,
'O my anicent lover, are you sleeping?' 

The seeker to whom they give such a cup at dawn
is an infidel to love if he will not worship wine. 

O ascetic, go, and don't quibble with those who drink
          the dregs,
for on the eve of creation this was all they gave us. 

What he poured in our cup we drank,
whether the mead of heaven or the wine of drunkenness. 

The wine cup's smile and his knotted curl
have broken many vows of repentance, like that of
          Hafez.
- See more at: http://allpoetry.com/poem/11507967-Ghazal-10-by-Hafez-Shirazi#sthash.ZOVdoklo.dpuf

The rock opera Tommy introduces us to a new anamnesis:

See me, Feel me 

            Touch me, Heal me!

Repentance is returning to the heart.

Go ahead -- turn yourself inside out!

after rain

Bailing Jootje in Camden harbor.

Bailing immer call in Rockport harbor.

Bailing words in harbor within.

Dry.

return to the heart

Perhaps, now, pain begins.

It occurs to me that no one has understood "repentance."

Today, rowing, it occurs that it means return to the heart.

To feeling, without coercion. 

Where there is so much to feel -- joy and sorrow, delight and despair.

On the other hand, I might be the only one not understanding what repentance is.

But now, I turn around, returning.