the war on black men by officials and police just became a little scarier

Policeman, (nor the assembled hold-him-down, kneel-on-his neck-and-head officers) who killed Eric Garner with banned chokehold for selling individual cigarettes, is not indicted for the homicide.

He pleaded for breath.

Nobody, then or now, helped Mr Garner. 

Bramhall’s World, Justice system and Eric Garner

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/bramhall-cartoons-december-2014-gallery-1.2028602

Alice Walker on who actually killed Eric Garner.

 Gather

 ©2014 by Alice Walker for Carl Dix and Cornel West

It is still hard to believe

that millions of us saw Eric Garner die.

He died with what looked like a half dozen

heavily clad

policemen

standing on his body, twisting and crushing

him

especially his head

and neck.

He was a big man, too.  They must have felt

like clumsy midgets

as they dragged him down.

Watching the video,

I was reminded of the first lynching

I, quite unintentionally, learned about:

it happened in my tiny lumber mill 

town before the cows were brought in

and young white girls

on ornate floats

became dairy queens.

A big man too,

whom my parents knew,

he was attacked also by a mob

of white men (in white robes and hoods)

and battered to death

by their two by fours.

I must have been a toddler

overhearing my parents talk

and mystified by pieces of something

called “two by fours.”

Later, building a house, 

i would encounter the weight,

the heaviness, of this varying length

of wood, and begin to understand.

What is the hatred

of the big black man

or the small black man

or the medium sized

black man

the brown man

or the red man

in all his sizes

that drives the white lynch mob

mentality?

I always thought it was envy:

of the sheer courage to survive

and ceaselessly resist conformity

enough to sing and dance

or orate, or say in so many outlandish

ways:

You’re not the boss

of me!

Think how many black men

said that: “Cracker,* you’re not the boss

of me;” 

even enslaved.  Think of how

the legal lynch mob 

so long ago

tore Nat Turner’s body

in quarters

skinned him 

and made “money purses”

from his “hide.”

Who are these beings?

Now we are beginning to ask

the crucial question.

If it is natural to be black

and red or brown

and if it is beautiful to resist

oppression

and if it is gorgeous to be of color

and walking around free,

then where does the problem

lie?

Who are these people

that kill our children in the night?

Murder our brothers in broad daylight?

Refuse to see themselves in us

as we have strained, over centuries, 

to see ourselves in them?

Perhaps we are more different

than we thought.

And does this scare us?

And what of, for instance,

those among us

who collude?

Gather.

Come see what stillness

lies now

in the people’s broken

hearts.

It is the quiet force of comprehension,

of realization

of the meaning

of our ancient

and perfect

contrariness;

of what must now be understood

and done to honor

and cherish

ourselves:

no matter who

today’s “bosses”

may be.

Our passion

and love for ourselves

that must at last

unite

and free us.  As we lay our sacrificed

beloveds to rest

in our profound

and ample caring:

broad, ever moving,

and holy,

as the sea. 

*Cracker:  from the crack of the whip wielded by slave drivers. http://aliasbruce.typepad.com/alias_bruce/2014/09/alice-walker-on-who-actually-killed-eric-garner.html

"Advent, when ladder climbing stops we are ready to gather around the manger"

Something this way arrives from louie, louie this morning.

"Alexandra Bircken’s site-specific installation Deflated Bodies in the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield, forms part of her Eskalation 2014 exhibition."

"In the face of such injustice and harm the Bible prophetically kicks away the ladders and gives the lie to seductions of ladder climbing and ladder making. Seen through a biblical lens Alexandra Bircken’s Deflated Bodies portrays the horrific cost and the appalling waste of the thinking which blighted our world then and which continues to do so now. It makes plain all that God desires us to subvert and overthrow.”             

(--from art exhibition,  http://visualtheology.blogspot.com/2014/11/advent-when-ladder-climbing-stops-we.html

This morning watched night become dawn breathing light arriving shapes of mountain, tree. road. 

After Wallander & The Troubled Man

To remain safe & sane it is wise to ignore lies & secrets of government, corporation & institution. 

So...wise is humbling & foolish, eh? 

Yep!

I think: to know? what? don’t

I don’t know

what

to think.

The realm of non-thinking 

Can hardly be fathomed by cognition;  

In the sphere of genuine suchness 

There is neither “I" nor "other."               

                 - Yunmen (864-949)

To think,
know
what I don’t.

What to
think?
“I"?
Don’t know

missing; nothing

Cat spat at 3am. 

In the dream I sit on floor with one of Del Mastro brothers I knew in the 1960s. He is in brown habit. He died at thirty. He is telling me there will be a talk by a theologian, something about the abc's of Ten Commandments. While in the past an encounter with woman from early seventies. Can one be happy finding the particulars of past circulating in dream state?

Everything emerges from silence. Sounds itself. Returns to silence.

Are we, each of us, an articulation drawing us into form of something seen something heard, a moment's manifestation, then a Doppler diminishing, a fading image on screen going to disappearance?

We live, it is said, as dream within a dream. We feel this mirage real, we look at it, we are seen as it.

And so, take naps. Dream within the dream that resides as dream of Dream.

There's no need to wake up.

It's dream all the way down.

Cat, kneading her way with inner motor purring with momentary rest, decides to go to window again to see what she is missing.

I suspect it is nothing.

first candle; coming toward

New liturgical year. 

Repeat: arriving, always arriving.

One whole through billions of particulars.

Becoming apparent.

landing, intuition

Something gives way in peapod. At tie-up along harbor dock she fills with water. There's a time for each of us to come ashore. 

I say goodbye, he says

Mark Strand, poet, dies at 80.

In an interview with The Paris Review in 1998, Strand discussed the process of writing a poem:

Well, I think what happens at certain points in my poems is that language takes over, and I follow it. It just sounds right. And I trust the implication of what I’m saying, even though I’m not absolutely sure what it is that I’m saying. I’m just willing to let it be. Because if I were absolutely sure of whatever it was that I said in my poems, if I were sure, and could verify it and check it out and feel, yes, I’ve said what I intended, I don’t think the poem would be smarter than I am. I think the poem would be, finally, a reducible item. It’s this “beyondness,” that depth that you reach in a poem, that keeps you returning to it. And you wonder, The poem seemed so natural at the beginning, how did you get where you ended up? What happened? 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/29/mark-strand_n_6241750.html 

 The Remains

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

(--Poem by Mark Strand)

twin-nope: becoming moment and manifestation

Each breath a gift from breathing itself. Breathing itself could be called God or it could be called that-which-is-nowhere (twin).

Advent arrives. It augurs moving toward an occasion of moment and manifestation. Can twin be actually seen or encountered? Is "here" distinguishable from the one attempting to identify it as isolatable and identifiable?

Can that-which-is-nowhere be found as something apart from inquirer or inquiry? 

Is nothingness or emptiness the inseparate wholeness of that-which-is-nowhere? Have we finally begun to glimpse -- no, gaze -- through our reality? And cease the objectification and fragmentation of what we are?

With Thich Nhat Hanh's inspiration, and with prayer for his well-being, I add:

I am immigrant. I am black men shot dead. I am the shooter. I am the man frightened with illness. I am morning dawning through fallen snow. I am reading this. I am writing this. 

There is nothing going on that is not the going on wherein we breathe, move, and have our being. There is only breathing, moving, being. Surrounded by awareness, the one thinking they are aware has arrived at no-other-place-emerging (nope).

Twin-Nope is my utopia this final day of liturgical year. It is disappearance and reappearance. All of a piece. 

I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert 

stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems) 

on all sides, shifting as I speak, 

so that I was constantly 

face to face with blankness, that 

stepchild of the sublime, 

which, it turns out, 

has been both my subject and my medium. 

What would my twin have said, had my thoughts 

reached him? 

Perhaps he would have said 

in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument) 

after which I would have been 

referred to religion, the cemetery where 

questions of faith are answered. 

(-- from poem, AFTERWORD,  by Louise Glück) 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/243222

That which is nowhere.

No other place emerging.

Twin-Nope. 

a white (snow) friday

Today I am shopping for civility and kindness.

The deal is to become both.

No discounting; no crediting. Free for the awaring.

Only God extends the product.

what monastics look at when gratitude nods

The solitaries complete the day before the majority of people.

It is night.

In the surrounding silence the woman dedicated to the absence of God returns to her cloister.

The man who knows nothing brushes teeth and thanks empty godspace for visiting today.

sole sight, soul safeguard

Number 4 catches my attention: "back to a starting point."

I am not a violent person. Nor do I believe in violence -- neither its use by lawful or unlawful authority. 

There is an erosion of respect for the dignity of so many individuals, peoples, and things in our contemporary culture and society. 

What is the starting point from which we began our travels as human beings toward a communion of community?

Where would a return point us? What sort of turning would bring us to that place where it comes round right?

Prayer, a writer of fiction recently stated, is not to change the world, but to safeguard the soul in the midst of what is taking place.

From Dictionary.com

revolution
[rev-uh-loo-shuh n] Spell Syllables noun
1. an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.
2.
Sociology. a radical and pervasive change in society and the socialstructure, especially one made suddenly and often accompanied byviolence.
Compare social evolution. 3.
a sudden, complete or marked change in something:
the present revolution in church architecture.
4.
a procedure or course, as if in a circuit, back to a starting point.
5.
a single turn of this kind.
6.
Mechanics.
a a turning round or rotating, as on an axis.
b a moving in a circular or curving course, as about a central point.
c a single cycle in such a course.
7.
Astronomy.
a (not in technical use) rotation (def 2).
b the orbiting of one heavenly body around another.
c a single course of such movement.
Origin
1350-1400; Middle English revolucion < Late Latin revolūtiōn- (stem ofrevolūtiō), equivalent to revolūt (us) (see revolute ) + -iōn- -ion  

Perhaps prayer is revolution. 

Back to —

a

.

the ambiguity of pivotal moment

"It's so sad. It's just so sad." That's what a woman said in Ferguson Missouri.

Yes. It is.

All of it.

All of it.

monday before thanksgiving

when rain arrives    (with compassion)

frozen ground    (even hardest heart)

will soften    (practices Anicca)

Gott gibt und gegeben ist

Is it true that the death of any being, animate or inanimate being, is not the work of God?

God, the given-God, is life itself -- the origin, essence, and continuation of life.

That which is not-God is the desecration, diminishment, and destruction of life.

Do we have to think about this a little more?

Even here, one can think twice, but still find a compassionate inkling under incomprehensible whimsy.

Suicide Bomb Trainer in Iraq Accidentally Blows Up His Class                                      By DURAID ADNAN and TIM ARANGOFEB. 10, 2014

BAGHDAD — If there were such a thing, it would probably be rule No. 1 in the teaching manual for instructors of aspiring suicide bombers: Don’t give lessons with live explosives. 

In what represented a cautionary tale for terrorist teachers, and a cause of dark humor for ordinary Iraqis, a commander at a secluded terrorist training camp north of Baghdad unwittingly used a belt packed with explosives while conducting a demonstration early Monday for a group of militants, killing himself and 21 other members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, army and police officials said. 

Iraqi citizens have long been accustomed to daily attacks on public markets, mosques, funerals and even children’s soccer games, so they saw the story of the fumbling militants as a dark — and delicious — kind of poetic justice, especially coming amid a protracted surge of violence led by the terrorist group, including a rise in suicide bombings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/world/middleeast/suicide-bomb-instructor-accidentally-kills-iraqi-pupils.html?_r=1

Let's remind ourselves again -- the behavior of fanatics, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, is not (is not ) Islam, Judaism, or Christianity.

The root of bigotry and violence is fear -- not intellectual conviction, not emotional piety.

Fear, not-God, is the rallying cry of government, cable news demagogues, and church hawkers.

Fear is not-God.

I, rather, trust in God. Perhaps it needs to be said and written as given-God.

So, not-God is different from given-God.

Gott gibt und gegeben ist. (God gives and is given.)

The practice of es gibt is where the breath and the breather practice communion within and through the one breathing.

a greater joy is required

St. Cecilia and John F Kennedy on November 22.  Both murdered in interval of nineteen hundred years.

I’ve been thinking about the illusions we negotiate. Like safety, security, and fairness.

Murdering will continue. Murderers fear. Only those with no fear wii not murder.

Fearful people are so difficult.

So willing to kill.

Let’s think about it.

Let’s be silent, hear the music of silence, and find courage not to kill.

sentenced to, and sentencing, life

The student just said it, that, for Heidegger, Holderlin was the technology through which the river Ister became a poem presencing itself as sign and significance read and not lost.

Remarkably, an insight that entered the question of technology and unveiled what had been concealed.

The meaning that surfaces
comes to me aslant and
I go to meet it
   word for word, until I am
everything at once. 

(--Rita Dove, from her poem "Reading Holderlin on the Patio with the Aid of a Dictionary")

We joke that at a certain age one rewrites the narrative of one's life through a different lens. The difference between falling in love and failing in love becomes a single letter two letters away from each other (j,k).

The same student said she didn't like failure or the word failure. I held up the book by Kathryn Shultz, Being Wrong, and said there's something about failure we have come to oppose -- a dualistic foible -- and perhaps we might wish to question failure as to where it has come from and, more importantly, where it is going.

If we are a story being told (a story, being, told) why leave anything out?

Tell it, sentence by sentence, everything, at once!

book under calendar wednesday morning points out...

...what I couldn’t know in 1974 at George Washington Bridge Terminal where and when I purchased it.

Itadakimasu

Man from down the road at coffee this morning tells me of his flight returning from Japan ten days ago. There was very strong turbulence for well over ten minutes. Everyone had to fasten in. He had left his assigned seat to nap stretched-out strapped-in across an empty three seats up front.

The shaking and rumbling of the plane increased. He experienced concern, then fright, then fear. It was then that a mantra came to him. He repeated it again and again. Something shifted for him.

Here’s the mantra he composed:

This is singing
There’s nothing to fear
We are all

Curiously, he was ok after his recitation.

His mind was not turbulent. Or, perhaps, it was not separated from the outside turbulence.

When he got up and ricocheted down the aisle the fastened flight attendants scolded him his movement.

He returned to his seat next to his wife.

He took her hand.

The plane continued to Chicago.

In the middle of the night

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.

Walking farm field in Oxford Maine yesterday, I wondered how to pray.

And asked.

we as well

Fresh shapes at dawn.

"Art in time opens the soul to the numinous light of receiving the vision of the unjudged, with it comes compassion and well-being." (--Robert Hake, from Art in Time, a Clarity blog), http://clarityposts.blogspot.com/2014/11/art-in-time.html

If someone asks what practice emerging from 21st century buddhist/christian interbeing is worth our time, tell them it is the vision of the unjudged practicing unjudging seeing.

Practice, like history, moves with time and circumstance. The flaws of the past nod to evolving reparation of moment, allowing transformation.

Religions, like morning skies, spin into noon and sunset, hibernation, and resurrection as new expression of new awareness -- birdsong chant announcing.

So, we, as well.

travelogue

Leaving for Ellsworth, snow.

At Good Will store, hail.

To Machias and back, rain.

In bed, weary.

With sleep, dreams.

Where belief ends

              (a haiku)

One belief beheads

Another 

Hell with no hope --

No one asks why;

Why?

Prison Haiku

            (14nov2014)

In intimacy

Nothing intervenes -- --

Snow no longer falls

read in

Love learning. (A phrase to be read a variety of ways.)

A phrase

To be

Read in

Many ways.

(See how "a variety of ways" becomes "read in many ways".)

Seneca wrote, “Toti se inserens mundo,” a phrase translated by Hadot as “plunging oneself into the totality of the world.” Taking this plunge could be understood as the heart of active presence, of “being here now.” The Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku writes in Love of Knowledge (1987) that the self lives in the world like an illegal alien, always afraid that its identity will be questioned. “Taking the plunge” is the exact opposite. It means fearless presence, total involvement, holding nothing back. If it is difficult for the self to do this, if it clings to and defends its own positions and wants, that only underscores the need to challenge the self and the conditions it imposes on experience. 

Those who question the contemporary mindfulness movement ask whether it does justice to the Buddha’s revolutionary call to transform both self and world. But we do not have to conclude from this that the only alternative is to stay within the tradition, though for some that will clearly be the right response. Active presence does justice to the Buddha’s revolutionary impulse on a wholly different basis. Not holding back, fearlessly questioning, always going beyond what we know, active presence offers a way into the deeper existential and universal concerns that the Buddha raised through his teachings. 

(--from The Present Moment, by Jack Petranker, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2014)     http://www.tricycle.com/feature/present-moment

Like the phrase "being read in" wherein we do become signs that are read within the great reality (called "being") which is an open book unbeginning and unfinishable.

Learning loves.

What is prayer

Mind is relationality. Meaning is correct relationality. Sanity is clear connection.

Nothing intervenes clear intimacy.

Intimacy is realization of the interpenetrative unbroken.

The night is cold.

Prayer is being said.

We hold this dear man in the light

From Plum Village website:

Official Announcement

To all Plum Village Practice Centers,
To all Practice Centers and Sanghas World Wide, To our Dear Beloved Friends,

Plum Village, November 12, 2014

Re: Thay’s present health condition and how to support Thay’s recovery

With a deep mindful breath we announce to the world the news that yesterday, the 11th of November 2014, Thay, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh experienced a severe brain hemorrhage. Thay is receiving 24 hour intensive care from specialist doctors, nurses and from his monastic disciples.

At present, Thay is still very responsive and shows every indication of being aware of the presence of those around him. He is able to move his feet, hands and eyes. There are signs that a full recovery may be possible.

For the last two months, Thay’s health had already been fragile due to his advance age. He was hospitalized in Bordeaux on the 1st of November. He was gaining strength day by day until this sudden and unexpected change in his condition.

All the monasteries in the tradition of Plum Village are organizing practice sessions to generate the energy of mindfulness and to send Thay this healing and loving energy. We would like to ask the whole worldwide community of meditation practitioners to participate and support us in this critical moment. We know and trust that Thay will receive all your energy and that this will be a big support in his healing and recovery.

Our practice of stability and peace in this very moment is the best support we can offer to Thay. Let us all around the world take refuge in our practice, going together as a river to offer Thay our powerful collective energy. We are all cells of the great Sangha Body that Thay has manifested in his lifetime.

Future reports on Thay health and recovery will be posted officially at www.plumvillage.org, langmai.org, villagedespruniers.net, and www.facebook.com/thichnhathanh.

On behalf of the Monastic Dharma Teacher Council of Plum Village,

Bhikkhu Thich Chan Phap Dang Bhikkhuni Thich Nu Chan Khong Nghiem

dna

No one is without parents.

The earth and heavens are parents to all of us.

We arise from them and return to them.

Practice of meditative voweling

a ee iii oo u

Approach

Emerging

Entrance 

Into

Intimate 

Instance

Of

Open 

Umwelt

Bell sounds. Bow and begin.

Oremus

Deus in adjutorium meum intende

Domine ad adjuvandum me festina

This is how prayer becomes present:

God, come to my assistance;

LORD, make haste to help me!

Or, expanded:

Assist my being into instance and intimate compassionate service;

Let what-is-REAL show urgency with movement to action!

Yes, now I have entrance --

Owl calls through still darkness

The combined difficulty of both war and peace

It is a day to acknowledge and respect veterans both of war and of peace.

Only the warrior and surrounding fields of intimate engagement know the apophatic experience of seeing no other in waging truth throughout reality.

This is our prayer:

May all beings be happy,

May all beings be safe,

May all beings be free, and 

May all beings come to dwell in their true home!

The promise of emptiness

Believe in nothing

But God is nothing

Yes, there is nothing

Other than God 

A political bagatelle, knocking pegs

Jesus, like many others, has been marginalized and misrepresented. (Modern politics, take note, does this to all who would lead with integrity.) 

James Carroll in his opinion piece in the NYT writes:

And, speaking of God, in what way, actually, can Jesus be said to be divine? A scientifically minded believer wants to discard that notion, but before he does, he should remember that if Jesus were not regarded as somehow divine almost from the start of his movement, we would never have heard of him. And if faith in the divinity of Jesus is left behind because it fails the test of contemporary thought, Jesus will ultimately be forgotten. Is it possible that contemporary thought can learn from this old article of faith? What if the so-called divinity of Jesus lays bare not so much the mystery of God as the majesty of what it is to be human? 

(--from Opinion, NYT, Jesus and the Modern Man, By JAMES CARROL, NOV. 7, 2014)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/opinion/sunday/can-i-stay-with-the-church.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&region=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article 

Barack Obama isn’t Jesus. He is himself.

"In the teachings of Christ, religion is completely present tense: Jesus is the prototype and our task is to imitate him, become a disciple. But then through Paul came a basic alteration. Paul draws attention away from imitating Christ and fixes attention on the death of Christ The Atoner. What Martin Luther, in his reformation, failed to realize is that even before Catholicism, Christianity had become degenerate at the hands of Paul. Paul made Christianity the religion of Paul, not of Christ. Paul threw the Christianity of Christ away, completely turning it upside down, making it just the opposite of the original proclamation of Christ"

(-- Soren Kierkegaard, in The Journals) 

The Republican Party has become Obama’s Paul, casting a pall over everything about him. They darken him and sidestep any intimation of racial motivation.

People hold on to Obama as they hold on to Jesus -- often out of misplaced perception and distorted belief.

That’s the trouble with humankind.

We’re often not.

Neither kind.

Nor human.

all hands on deck; all souls on ground

new view of old mountain

gift of fallen tree

 

meanwhile, at harbor








empty moorings

and open channel













this curious early november

moving rowing peapod boat across harbor

Things are moving. 

Coming things brush by going things.

So much. To do. So little interest

In not doing

any of it

What are we, saying

embodying the dwelling place of the
Alone;

stepping aside to make room for 

Another

electricity, given connectivity, returns

Rain.

Falls heavily.

Not snow.

votes are in. (sigh)

Snow melts. Trees at corner of house continue to be chainsawed. Body tired. Pain in head. Tom Magliozzi dies. (The laughing spirit of click and clack and Car Talk. That’s notably sad.)

Generator fuel has not run out yet. No electricity yet.

Yawns through the room. Hard work all day.

Pizza box on center island.

One day, they say, all pain will end.

Election was painful. The Supreme Court and Citizens United money took the election to new distance from ordinary people. Democracy, sorry Leonard Cohen, is leaving the USA.

There’s got to be a better way.

What would that way be?

what do I pray for

A curious effect -- the more negativity I am exposed to, the more positive I become. It's not a virtue. It's a balancing of affect.

To be positive is to acknowledge that what is occurring is indeed occurring -- without commentary or opinion. 

It is what we have to look at. What we have to face. No conspiracy. No oppressive victimology. Just...there.

A sixth person dies in hospital from awful fire in Portland the other day. Two fishermen are lost at sea when their boat sinks. This is what is real. Not the results of political elections.

In four hours I will stoke the wood stove.

For now, I pray.

after storm

Work all day carrying cedar limbs to edge of property. Hibernian with chainsaw sculpts by eliminating branch by branch felled tree atop telephone and power line. 

Candlelight potatoes,sausage, and mushroom pie.

Moonlight on white snow without electricity.

There's a simplicity to hard work and good fare.

I will stoke the fire through the night.

All Souls, say, wind and snow

In the afternoon of All Souls the 50mph gusts joined with the foot of wet heavy snow to split and fell the over-150yr cedar tree at northeast corner of house. It fell in three directions -- a triangle splaying out across driveway, gateway, and roadside front. Our shaded privacy from Barnestown Road is gone. Moreso, our twenty-two year friendship with that dear tree now enters new rites of departure.

The thin place between those living-seen and those living-but-unseen is at its thinnest.

We look across and between.

Wondering.

A saint is with what is here, now, this. God is, so, with each in this way

Mit-Sein (with-Being).

Mit-Gott (with-God)

"Today is the Solemnity of All Saints, a holy day of obligation. The Church honors all those who are with God, the innumerable men and women who chose fidelity to Christ." (--from Divine Office, About Today, Feast of All Saints)

"Obligation" is our being tied together. It is our responsibility to our brother and sister beings.

"Christ" is the creative, loving, assisting manifestation of God.

This is what a saint is, one who is with God.

And all of us, each of us, is with God.

We might not yet realize it.

But it is true.

We are.

Look at this truth.

This will be seen.

All, hallows

The situation, occurring, gives words to the poet to tell of the occurring situation.

Hence, the poem.

A saint is one gathered from two enacting and embodying what is meant by being in the world.

fading calls for help

Domestic violence, men drugging women then sexually taking advantage, or, punching and bullying, these are indicators something is very wrong with our men, our culture, our way of life.

Frankly, I think it is high time that these violent crimes begin to cost men something. And that might mean that it has to cost those of us who love them something as well. I have shared in these pages before that I do not romanticize patriarchal families because I did not grow up in one. My father was a complicated, brilliant, hilarious and violent man, and my home life and childhood were infinitely better after he left our home. His leaving and his alcoholism cost me a father. But it saved me a mother. 

It is high time that we decide as a nation that the symbolic slaying (and perhaps the actual locking up) of some of our most beloved men is an entirely reasonable price to pay for creating a world safe for women and children, a world where we don’t accede to narratives that convince us yet again that predators are really “good guys.”

(-- in Salon, by Brittney Cooper, The Terrible Truth About Bill Cosby, October 29, 2014.)  http://www.alternet.org/terrible-truth-about-bill-cosby?page=0%2C0&akid=12419.268057.TpRu90&rd=1&src=newsletter1025176&t=10 

Wealthy athletes, politicians, corporate bigwigs, and celebrities can pay off the offended parties or prey on the pass given to the notorious and famous so as to avoid career ending penalties. But the majority of women are left to cower under threat and indifference.

Stupidity is one thing. Ignorance, another. But society’s belief in the untoward and unkind as a matter of course is an arrogance of significant weight leaning heavily on the fragile bridge of authentic connection between one another.

When that falls, we will hear the fading calls for help disappear in a deep darkness we have created.

persevere and insist

There's an election next week. 

Telephone rings with long messages touting candidates who either want to combat those currently in office, or, become the focus of next disenchanting election.

So many words.

What changes when we free the monastic vocation from the attitude of mono-cultural dominance? Nothing and everything. Let me give three examples of traditional values of the religious, East and West, that can be reinvigorated by the encounter of monks in dialogue qua monks. Paradoxically enough, the first, the classical contemptus mundi of the monk, today takes a new and more subtle turn: not abandoning the world (which is practically impossible), but swimming against the current, like living fish in the rivers, without rage or violence, but with poise and elegance, that is, with love and patience. “La paciencia todo lo alcanza,” used to say Teresa of Avila. Patience does not give up, rather, it perseveres and insists. It never gets discouraged, because it does not believe that a single individual, system, doctrine, or religion has the total answer. Humility, to me, means the courage to be imperfect, not finished.Secondly, the monastic vocation has meant “solitude.” But solitude does not mean isolation. On the contrary, solitude demands that I be truly myself so that I may share without encumbrances solidarity with the entire reality: Buddhakaya, karma, mystical Body, universal love. The greatest scandal of human history is religious wars—be they explicitly or implicitly religious. Even the fact that sometimes they can disguise themselves under the cloak of religion shows our responsibility: “Not of the world,” but in the world—which the “Father” loved so much.Thirdly, the monastic “calling” is ever new. It does not repeat itself, and it has no blueprint; it is not prescribed by any law. It needs to be not just discovered, but created by our cooperation with the very dynamism of reality, by holy “obedience,” that is, by attentive listening (obaudire) to the “divine” Voice—which is the Hindu name for revelation (sruti). It is not enough to “imitate” the Buddha, Christ, God. We have to become the Buddha, Christ, God—without asking like Peter, “What about John?” “You follow me” was the answer. 

(--From “The New Monk” by Raimon Panikkar)

The first thing to realize is silence.

After that realization, the eloquent emptiness will approach and introduce you to no meaning beyond the origin of meaning -- the ever present origin without parallel or perimeter.

Rowing around Curtis Island today, Saskia speaking on phone with woman several states away about the troubles she tries to navigate in her life. A maritime colloquy replete with passing tugboat and wind-pushed swells. The phonecall ends as we come into territory of no channel buoys, empty moorings, and floats on the hard.

The woman several states away has the answer already.

What must follow is courage to live it in her own life.

We tie up at dock, the only small boat remaining on the expanse of empty length.

Home from the sea.

Home is for all to see.

Prayer for her and all like her in troubled waters. 

Insisting silence, persisting, persevering prayer.

is love seeing practice through

A monk is one among many.

One who looks.

Seeing what is there is the practice of monastics.

As love is practicing the monk with being seen.

renew, face, earth

twilight before dawn

slim cat jumps to windowsill

fresh air fills night room

will do, now, through and through

Tires role Barnestown Road. Winds chant late October. Chimes tell their fidelity sounding what passes through them.

I will sit in zendo. Last night compline was sung in candlelight. That’s what occurs.

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]; July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, just the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is “The map is not the territory”.    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

We follow clues. They call us nearer what we think we are looking at. Our mind jumps to opinion, conclusion, and sets up rules regarding what appears to threaten our temporary belief. We become miserable with held opinions.

“The map is not the territory"

The expression "the map is not the territory" first appeared in print in a paper that Alfred Korzybski gave at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1931:^[1] In Science and Sanity, Korzybski acknowledges his debt to mathematician Eric Temple Bell, whose epigram "the map is not the thing mapped" was published in Numerology.^[2]

• A) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory...

• B) A map is not the territory.

The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves"^[3] in a number of paintings including a famous work entitled The Treachery of Images, which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe"). In The Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan rehashed the argument— that all media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds.
This concept occurs in the discussion of exoteric and esoteric religions. Exoteric concepts are concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and languageconstructs, such as mathematics. Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood.
Lewis Carroll, in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), made the point humorously with his description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile". A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
Laura Riding, in her poem "The Map of Places" (1927), deals with this relation: "The map of places passes. The reality of paper tears."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation

Downstairs, yesterday’s coffee will do.

Wood is stacked solidly out by cabin.

God is the silence beneath silence.

Neither map, nor territory, God is the saying of such and such, thus and so, without space, without end, without and within.

Saying with and without words or sound.

I love God.

Here.

There.

And, now, through and through.

words at practice from Montreal zen center

The zen master is saying that what I am is no content.

Perception comes first.

He says that when the world is real I am unreal. When I am real the world is unreal.

...

Stacking wood in afternoon quiet

Wet leaves

Grab fast to green wellies 

                     ...

Perhaps death is reality without object, without subject.

Hence, death is not a future event. It is a present released from any thought backward or forward -- only what is felt.

Here, and now, this.

Here is everywhere there

Consciousness is empty.

Only when perceiver arrives at the perceived does consciousness arise. As if from nowhere. Or nothing.

Awareness notes consciousness' arrival. And its departure.

As might a silent gaze see something occur that has no duration.

As for yet, I dunno

Man: who're ya voting for?

2nd man: dunno yet.

Man: smart fella.

1022eachyear

Had my father not been born, these words do not get written.

He was. These are.

It's sequencing.

So, it is.

How do I reach you

It is when you and I find common dwelling ground.

Muddle through middle.

"I" through "u."

When middle is reached muddle has been gone through.

You through I.

The middle is the way through.

My sister, 15 years ago, had no need to blow out the drawn candle flame

Is there something that traverses the seen and unseen?

Keep me informed.

in the course of things

Night falls

into darkness

so, we sleep