being enough; having enough

Morning meal of awakened earth. 

Modest repast. 

TONPA LA MED SANG GYAY RINPOCHE

KYOBPA LA MED DAM CHHO RINPOCHE

DRENPA LA MED GEDUN RINPOCHE

KYAB NAY KON CHHOK SUM LA CHHOD PA BUL

---

To the precious Buddha, unsurpassable Teacher,

to the precious Dharma, unsurpassable Refuge,

to the precious Sangha, unsurpassable Guide,

to the three Jewels, the sources of Refuge, I make this Offering. 

tibetan buddhist - mealtime prayer

http://www.worldprayers.org/prayerwheel/index.html 

May all find satis-faction.

May all comprehend and embody “enough” and “adequate.”

Guglielmo

Yes!

With morning comes affirmation.

The practice of mind.

Realizing the unrealized.

As the reordering of our life, brought about by moral training, creates the environment for meditation, the stillness of mind created by meditation will make possible the examination of reality that is the hallmark of wisdom. 

--  Lama Jampa Thaye, "Living by Meditation Alone" (Tricycle)

My brothers and sisters greet dawn with chant and song.

It is monastery of morning.

I remember William, namesake. And, by symbiosis, invisible patron.

William of Vercelli, Saint 1085-1142. founder, born in Vercelli Italy he was brought up as an orphan became a hermit on Monte Vergine, Italy after a pilgrimage to Compostella and attracted so many followers that a monastery was buillt. By 1119 his followers were united in the Benedictine congregation, the Hermits of Monte Vergine (Williamites) which he headed. The austerity of his rule led to dissension among his monks to restore peace he left and was taken under the protection of Roger I of Naples who built a monastery for him in Salerno. He founded monasteries through out Naples, and died at the Guglielmo monastery near Nusco Italy. He is also called William of Monte Vergine. Feast day June 25.

http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=585

The things we're not aware of!

The connections yet unrealized!

in center air

Back from evening hike on Ragged Mtn. We go to chapel zendo for compline. Final prayer asks for a quiet night and peaceful death.

Death is said to be a part of one’s life, but surely that is not the case if life has not preceded it. Robert Nozick said that “How unwilling someone is to die should depend, I think, upon what he has left undone, and also upon his capacity to do things.” In this sense a premature or untimely death is considered all the more tragic. Although death need not be feared, the prospect of not fully having lived life is heart-wrenching. We need time to realise our aspirations in order to leave a footprint behind. Whether or not we go “gentle into that good night” depends much on that footprint. Our life party will end in tears if we do not feel it is time to go. 

While an early departure has its obvious setbacks, receiving prior notification of it contains a blessing that many do not get. Millions of people each year die suddenly. They get no chance to say goodbye. With cancer you are usually forewarned, and you can fight it for a while. This buys time to put your house in order and say farewell to those you love. We all know that our time is finite, but we tend to live as if it isn’t. As hard as it is to confront, terminal disease allows the afflicted to live life in full realization of its finitude. There is no ‘later’ for which to put off those difficult gestures we otherwise never get around to doing. 

(--from The Party Without Me, David Rönnegard laments having to leave the party https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/The_Party_Without_Me

Out in dark, in empty cabin, a candle burns in center air.

For those needing light just now in their lives. 

One man, three sublime personas

John was a Zen Buddhist. As well as a messianic Jew. And a proleptic Christian.

READING Acts 13:23-25

According to his promise, God has brought forth from David’s descendants Jesus, a savior for Israel. John heralded the coming of Jesus by proclaiming a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel. As John’s career was coming to an end, he would say, “What you suppose me to be I am not. Rather, look for the one who comes after me. I am not worthy to unfasten the sandals on his feet.” 

(--from  Evening Prayer I for the Solemnity of the Birth of John the Baptist)

Here's the zen part: 

Not me; 

Another; 

Look there.

conversations

From a recent phone conversation with a young woman over many hours a goodly distance away.

1. Notes:

Notes and further reflection,
a conversation with C. (Maryland/Maine,13June2015) 

• Because of where we are, God resulted in Jesus’ suffering. (or, … God results in Jesus’ { or C’s } suffering. 

• He lived in the acceptance of the reality of the world in love.  (i.e. God as reality) 

• Infinite God =  (not ending God)          Something without end does not see things as we do trying always to terminate, either with our opinioning, appraising, or judging. With God, "there’s no end to it.” (As they say!) 

• There is a consistent lack of acknowledgment of what really is, and what really is there, and our participation with it, which is expressed through God...   (or, Reality, which becomes God’s existence now; or, that which God becomes existing now; or, that which now becomes God-existing; or, that which is God, the existing-now)...the God we reject, which results in our suffering in God which (or, who) continually calls for acceptance of it all. 

• The primary responsibility of being in the world is to realize the presence of God. 

• There is an unknown (of a) pattern that a criminal will reproduce a dangerous pattern of behavior harm.      There is a simultaneous need to protect from harm and to love. 

• (Or: There is an unknown pattern in consciousness that reproduces criminal behavior. This consciousness is always standing at a crossroad signaling left or right turn — leaving or staying — activating movement along behavior that either heads down harm or steps up love.) 

• In as much as we are separated from the awareness of God, so we participate with where we are in God which is God resulting in the presence of pain falsely interpreted as hate apart from the awareness of God in love. (Or: As much as we are this, we are that.)                       

• Perhaps: 

1. There is God.
2. There is awareness.
3. There is God, and there is the awareness of God.
4. There is us, and there is our awareness of God.
5. There is us, and there is our unawareness of God.
6. God is within and without all things. (or, With God there is no within and without; there is only presence.)
7.      When we are without the awareness of God, we still experience everything that is the presence of God, only, without awareness we derogate God-as-love, rather, now operating in unawareness, name the experience ‘hate’ or ‘evil’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’, and set out to ‘correct’ or ‘right’ the behavior or tendency that has been judged into the categories formulated by rational construct, while moving further away from the “awareness of God” we create a world of “pain falsely interpreted” and launch moral and bellicose activity to combat these categories, persons, forces, and separations.
8.      Whereas, “God resulting” is the flow of awareness that is inseparate and undivided in action and thought, an integrity of presence that receives all as the all it is, a sense of being that lives and moves and has its existence devoid of anything other than the awareness of God. Hence, we might conclude with Thomas Merton, there is no opposite of love, there is only love …and the perversion* of love. When love is perverted, (i.e. altered from its original course, or separated from original source) it is turned away — from source, course, and discourse — relegated and subjugated to distorted and corrupted unsaying or secrecy, a shadowy chicanery that purports to substitute fragmented self-interest in place of whole-sighted allocentric navigation of interrelationship, an aesthetic resulting in each instance a God-stance of consecration, concretion, and instantiation of what-is-this-moment-love.
9.       As much as we are this we are that. We are meant to be the whole of it in the same way we conceive of God as being the whole of it. 
10.      The Japanese appreciation of Wabi-sabi** applies.


...     ...     ...

*perversion |pərˈvərZHən|
noun
1 the alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended: all great evil is the perversion of a good | a scandalous perversion of the law.
2 sexual behavior or desire that is considered abnormal or unacceptable.
ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin perversio(n-), from the verb pervertere ‘turn around’ (see pervert) .


**Wabi-sabi (侘寂?) represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete".[2] It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence (三法印 sanbōin?), specifically impermanence (無常 mujō?), the other two being suffering (苦 ku?) and emptiness or absence of self-nature (空 kū?).
Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, asperity (roughness or irregularity), simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes. (—Wikipedia)

2. Poem:

Conversation
        
       By AI
            for Robert Lowell 

We smile at each other
 

and I lean back against the wicker couch.  
 

How does it feel to be dead? I say.
 

You touch my knees with your blue fingers.  
 

And when you open your mouth,
 

a ball of yellow light falls to the floor  
 

and burns a hole through it.
 

Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear. 


Did you ever, you start,
 

wear a certain kind of silk dress
 

and just by accident,
 

so inconsequential you barely notice it,  
 

your fingers graze that dress
 

and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,  
 

you see it too
 

and you realize how that image 


is simply the extension of another image,  
 

that your own life
 

is a chain of words 


that one day will snap. 


Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,  
 

and beginning to rise heavenward
 

in their confirmation dresses,
 

like white helium balloons,
 

the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning, 


and above all that, 


that’s where I’m floating, and that’s what it’s like
 

only ten times clearer, 


ten times more horrible.  
 

Could anyone alive survive it?  

(--Ai, “Conversation” from Vice: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Ai.) 

3. Comment:

        Phenomenological proof for the existence of what is most real:

Birdsong at dawn is the only proof needed that there is Loving-Being today. No creed. No ordination. No fealty oath. 

Only White-throated Sparrow and mist-testing Chickadee between Mourning Dove invitatory after invitatory. 

Let us pray: 

O This Reality, Come to show assistance! 

O Being Here, make way to help!

a good read

Yesterday at practice we read the following article from Tricycle: Son of a Gun, An arms manufacturer’s son visits home after moving to a Zen monastery, by Shozan Jack Haubner 

Here’s an excerpt:

As I sat on the phone with him, reaching deep inside for the right words to explain all this, how much he means to me and why I’ve set out on the course I have, the answer was right there in front of me all along. In my journal, instead of “The Death of God Left a God-Sized Hole,” I’d accidentally scribbled “The Death of God Left a God-Sized Whole.” 

For years, I was convinced that the death of a spiritual father figure—the death of God—was cause for eternal mourning and headshaking and teeth-gnashing. Now I’m beginning to see that it may be the very path to liberation. The first thing people want to know when they find out I’m a Buddhist monk is whether or not I still believe in God. If they’re atheists I tell them no; Christians, yes (or the other way around if I’m feeling truculent). But the truth is more complex and personal, and it mirrors my feelings toward my father. I still believe in Dad’s sincerity, integrity, and intentions, for instance, but long ago I stopped looking to him for answers or intervention, for him to rescue me—“guns ablazin’!”—from whatever personal Vietnam I might be suffering through. As with God, my relationship with my father has been marked by disillusionment, reassessment, and, finally, a search for deeper understanding. While I agree with him that our first job is to protect our families and then our country, for example, I don’t think our responsibility stops there, not anymore. In this day and age, it extends to the whole planet. 

God’s death creates a wide-open chasm of responsibility that we must fill. For me, the God-sized hole, through the prism of Buddhist thinking, has become a God-sized whole. 

After hanging up the phone, having resolved nothing, I said a quiet prayer back in my cabin, the kind I learned as a kid—a true prayer, the type that releases itself from within and is a kind of call, a cry, a blind thrust in what always turns out to be the right, the only, direction. It did not begin with “Our Father,” although I did have my forebears in mind. It went, simply, “Help,” repeated over and over with increasing intensity, until suddenly I came out the other side of the request. Instead of begging for help from some unknown source of the universe, I was telling myself to give it. The plea was its own answer, its own solution—a vocation.
http://www.tricycle.com/feature/son-gun

It is a good read. 

This anniversary of my father’s death.

Good, indeed.

no calculation

Only compassion.

Religious awakening does not depend initially on who we are or what we do; rather, it is becoming attuned to the working of great compassion at the heart of existence 

(.--  Taitetsu Unno, "Into the Valley" 
The path of imperfection)

The result of listening, of conversing.

Mere looking; correspondence.

“The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.” (--James Hillman)

by extension everything whole is progenitor

I send the lad an umbrella for Father's Day.

He sends Zabars.

It's raining here.

don't ask

Monsanto owns Blackwater?

Stop

There's something about the culture of exclusion and elimination. Take the south. Take racism and intransigent pretense of superiority on the part of white people. Take legislators with their code phrases, voter suppression, and gerrymandering doubletalking democratic values but enacting closet supremacy laws.

The murders in South Carolina yesterday are not a surprise "crazy" act, but a logical outcome of a century and a half effort to preserve and reinstate legalized slavery by harassing, imprisoning and disenfranchising black people.

The insanity has been institutionalized. It votes. It preens and struts to the tune of patriotic reels proclaiming us uber allies.

There is no sin to forgive by a forgiving Jesus, no criminal act for good legal minds to punish.  There is only perverted consciousness and deluded ideas carried by whole geographies of distracted people intent on punishing northern spoilsports for taking away a very lucrative slave economy. The new ruling class, bankers and corporate boards, now take their tax free profits and sweatshops off shore in the name of acting like real Americans. Just follow the wars and jump on equally lucrative reconstruction.

But I digress. What I really mean to say is -- stop!

Stop!

Just stop!

The stupidity, abandoned character, and inane "more guns" mantra coupled with "it's the black man in the White House's fault" spread an excruciatingly painful ignorance far and wide from the rotting core of an unembarrassable nation.

Das Erinnern

Viel, viel sind meiner Tage 
Durch Sünd entweiht gesunken hinab. 
O großer Richter, frage 
Nicht wie, o lasse ihr Grab 
Erbarmende Vergessenheit 
Lass, Vater der Barmherzigkeit, 
Das Blut des Sohns es decken. 

Ach wenig sind der Tage 
Mit Frömmigkeit gekrönt entflohn, 
Sie sinds, mein Engel, trage 
Sie vor des Ewigen Thron, 
Lass schimmern die geringe Zahl, 
Dass einsten mich des Richters Wahl 
Zu seinen Frommen zähle.

Friedrich Hölderlin

what is, being said, in our surround

My stomach just said something. Right there, next to Ruth Ozeki's novel "A Tale For The Time Being," it spoke a phrase. 

I don't expect the human species to be here for a very long time. At least, not me. One of these mornings this bed will be empty. "Was that his bed?" Someone will answer, "Yes, it was." And that will be that.

Thoughts come and go. Feelings come and go. Allow yourself to experience the transient nature of thoughts and feelings, welcoming everything that arises as Just this, not me, not mine.
(--- Sandra Weinberg, "Eating and the Wheel of Life")

Until then, there is just this morning. Squirrel on bird feeder. Chickadee chanting in green-leaf branch. Gray mottle cat on folded blanket at foot of bed in other room.

What you learn going in and out of prison is why not residing in prison is such a good idea. Arbitrary and ambivalent exercising of authority and power -- a practice mimicked at every juncture of interaction within the walls. Stay out of crime and prison. Unless, going in and out of prison, a shared equivalence of experience evokes Buddhist sympathetic joy or Christian corporal mercy that turns you inside out.

We are, each of us, where we are.

Sacred syllables waiting to be pronounced. 

Holy utterance waiting to be heard.

hebdomadarian silence

walking mountain

listening vespers

falling asleep

practice by seeing

Listening to talk today, (Just This: Integration and Harmonious Communion) delivered 24May2015,  http://www.ancientdragon.org/dharma/audio/adzg_podcast.rss   the speaker refers to phrasing used in 2002 talk citing Dogen’s words about enlightenment and delusion. I’ve highlighted the two phrases in the 2002 talk.

I want to talk today about enlightenment. Usually in my tradition, in Suzuki Roshi's lineage, we don't talk so much about enlightenment, because it's kind of a dangerous word. You might imagine that there is such a thing as enlightenment. But enlightenment is not a thing, but perhaps rather a verb. Dogen says in Genjokoan that deluded people have delusions about enlightenment. So having heard this word you probably all have such delusions. This is very natural that we would have delusions about some wonderful realm of enlightenment that exists someplace else. We hear this word enlightenment and think there's something we need to get, that we need to get higher, or that we need to be somebody other than who we are. And when you realize you are thinking that, this is actually an enlightened thought, because enlightened people are enlightened about their delusions, as Dogen says. So when you are sitting and aware of your restlessness, or fidgeting, or sleepiness, or wanting to be somebody or someplace else than where you are on your cushion, that is this basic delusion, and that is what we need to be enlightened about. We practice by seeing the ways in which we think we are not where enlightenment is.

(-- from Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, Talk: Enlightenment Day, by Taigen Dan Leighton, Mt. Source Sangha, Bolinas - December 12, 2002)  http://www.ancientdragon.org/dharma/dharma_talks/enlightenment_day

There it is: “deluded people have delusions about enlightenment”; "enlightened people are enlightened about their delusions".

I’ll sit with this. 

Leading in; leading out

After recent conversations, Dunn’s poem arrives.

ALL THAT WE HAVE

               To John Jay Osborn, Jr.

It’s on ordinary days, isn't it,

   when they happen,

those silent slippages.

a man mowing the lawn, a woman

   reading a magazine,

each thinking it can’t go on like this,

then the raking, the turning

   of a page.

The art of letting pass

what must not be spoken, the art

   of tirade, explosion,

are the martial arts, and we,

their poor practitioners, are never

  more than appearances.

At night in bed the day visits us,

happily or otherwise. In the morning

   the words good morning

have a history of tones; pray to say them

evenly. It’s so easy, those moments

   when affection is what

the hand and voice naturally coordinate.

But it’s that little invisible cloud

   in the livingroom, 

floating like boredom, it’s the odor

of disappointment mixing with

   kitchen smells,

which ask of us all that we have.

The man coming in now

   to the woman.

The woman going out to the man.

                         (—Poem by Stephen Dunn) 

Mr Dunn has been listening.

We can take his lead.

round 22:22

I've been looking at my brothers and sisters.

An odd bunch.

I'm thinking to stop looking.

Will the oddness stop?

Spirits and souls of the just, bless the Lord -- Sunday morning Hermitage walking willing

resulting

It was a long conversation. 

One of the things she said was, “Because of where we are, God resulted in Jesus’ suffering.”

The words are worth a prolonged meditation.

As is, wording is important.

as long as they present themselves

Each breath might be the final breath.

With this knowledge, I gratefully take this breath.

And this one.

la condition humaine

No need to add to or take away from presence.

Imagine.

Mere and sufficient presence. 

Sans doubte; ohne versprechen; sin explicación.

Such as beauty must be when unattached to any opinion or judgement.

Utterance, not narrative.

The other deepest thing

The secret is poetry.

Can you keep it?

Well, don't.

Free it.

daddy long-legs

It was inside the screen.

Then, moving screen aside, was outside.

Did it want back in?

So it is with us.

In then out.

Uncertain where one

is wanted;

where one

Is 

to be

found.

No; response

Excerpts sans merci:

Kalief Browder, Held at Rikers Island for 3 Years Without Trial, Commits Suicide              By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ and MICHAEL WINERIP, JUNE 8, 2015 

Kalief Browder was sent to Rikers Island when he was 16 years old, accused of stealing a backpack. Though he never stood trial or was found guilty of any crime, he spent three years at the New York City jail complex, nearly two of them in solitary confinement.In October 2014, after he was written about in The New Yorker, his case became a symbol of what many saw as a broken criminal justice system. Mayor Bill de Blasio cited the article this spring when he announced an effort to clear the backlogs in state courts and reduce the inmate population at Rikers. 

For a while, it appeared Mr. Browder was putting his life back together: He earned a high school equivalency diploma and started community college. But he continued to struggle with life after Rikers. 

On Saturday, he committed suicide at his parents’ home in the Bronx. 

(-- The New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-browder-held-at-rikers-island-for-3-years-without-trial-commits-suicide.html?_r=0

And:

As his father explained, he’d apparently decided that these torn strips of sheet were not strong enough. That afternoon, at about 12:15 P.M., he went into another bedroom, pulled out the air conditioner, and pushed himself out through the hole in the wall, feet first, with a cord wrapped around his neck. His mother was the only other person home at the time. After she heard a loud thumping noise, she went upstairs to investigate, but couldn’t figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until she went outside to the backyard and looked up that she realized that her youngest child had hanged himself.

(--The New Yorker, Kalief Browder, 1993–2015, BY JENNIFER GONNERMAN), http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-1993-2015 

Is there someone to say -- ‘Amen’?

No.

lofty emptiness

hidden stillness

nothing moves

only . . .

nowhere to go

A precise mapping for the explorer on the path to enlightenment.

An indulgent reçu.

“You see, my dear, goodness is the greatest force in the world -- and he’s got it.”

(--final line in 1946 film “The Razor’s Edge,” after novel by Somerset Maugham, said to Isabel of Larry Darrell)

With some elaboration:

The Katha Upanishad (commonly assigned to the forth or fifth century B.C.E.) is the first instance when we see a recognizable tradition of Yoga emerge. Within this poetic text there lies the first descriptions of the fundamentals of a yoga practice; the preparation of the body and the cultivation of stability in the mind that steel the aspirant for the discoveries of consciousness. The story unfolds as a conversation between a young, but spiritually endowed Naciketas and Yama the God of Death. Seeking the knowledge of the mysteries of life after death, Naciketas is initiated by the God Yama onto the path of emancipation. He is instructed in the practice of involution, the climbing of consciousness to ever higher levels of being, the transcendental self and the psychospiritual work that prepares the yogi for the event of grace. Reminiscent of the Baghavada Gita’s (500-200 B.C.E.) classic dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna that occurs in a chariot, so the poetic metaphor of the charioteer is used by Yama to instruct Naciketas of man’s relationship to the Higher Self.

Chapter 3, 3-9 

Know the self a rider in a chariot,
and the body, as simply the chariot.
Know the intellect (buddhi) as the charioteer,
and the mind (manas), as simply the reins.
The senses, they say, are the horses,
and the sense objects are their pastures;
He who is linked to the body (atman), senses, and mind,
the wise proclaim as the one who enjoys (bhoktri).
When a man lacks understanding,
and his mind is never controlled;
His senses do not obey him,
as bad horses, a charioteer.
But when a man has understanding,
and his mind is ever controlled;
His senses do obey him,
as good horses, a charioteer.
When a man lacks understanding,
is unmindful (amanaska) and always impure;
He does not reach that final step,
but gets on the round of rebirth.
But when a man has understanding,
is mindful and always pure;
He does reach that final step,
from which he is not reborn again.
When a man’s mind is his reins,
intellect, his charioteer;
He reaches the end of the road,
that highest step of Vsihnu.
And here exactly we find the first instance of the word Yoga used in context with its definition. A precise mapping for the explorer on the path to enlightenment. 

Chapter 6.10-11, 

When the five perceptions are stilled,
Together with the mind.
And not even reason bestirs itself;
they call it the highest state.
When the senses are firmly reined in (dharana),
that is Yoga, so people think.
From distractions a man is then free (apramatta),
for Yoga is the coming-into-being,
as well as the ceasing-to-be.

(--from Times Quotidian,) http://www.timesquotidian.com/2010/01/29/razors-edge/ 

Q: What will zen now look like? A: Like this -- “sense see say.”

Yes.

This.

What will zen, come to America, look like, roughly speaking, in 500 years?

I think it will become here the:

σχολείο γνώση καταλαβαίνω λέγω, (scholeío gnó̱si̱ katalavaíno̱ légo̱) * -- 

or, school of “sense see say.”

Thus, American zen hosts the traveling feast of Dhyana turned Chan turned Zen turns into sense/see/say -- an IAE, intuiting articulating engaging, where science and service blend with a poetry of expressive creativity that embodies the heart and soul of feeling sense, direct seeing, simple saying.

The meditative tradition arising with Upanishads and bouncing forward through haiku to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell lyrics -- accompanied by Robert Lax, Naomi Shihab Nye, e.e.cummings, William  Carlos Williams. Marilyn Hacker, Philip Levine, Adrienne Rich, Stephen Dunn, Alice Walker, Li-Young Lee.

Basho, Santoka Teneda, Issa, Han Shan, Rumi, Machado, Neruda, Yeats, Ginsburg, Logan, Lowell, Pastan.

Zen in North America actively intuits articulating engagement. This is done in either stillness and silence or in movement and speech -- both expressions of inner/outer service and nondual insight.

So, get on and off your cushion, walk briskly and amble thoughtfully, debate vigorously and carefully quietly listen.

Zen is coming to the USA.

It will dismantle the obsession currently known as security, and speak with science and ecology the musings of entire cosmos reflecting on each part articulating the whole with engaging service.

And, as the man in the white ME cap suggested at Friday Evening Conversation, comes quiescence.

Finally, through everything.

Further finally, of David Foster Wallace, in Tributes to David Foster
Wallace, someone wrote:

The first time I finished Infinite Jest, I had to pick up the phone. I needed to talk to someone. I needed human contact, a genuine connection, in the face of the loneliness of the book. I’ve wondered if this was intentional: that we were meant to be so saddened we had to reach out, to forget our petty concerns, and to feel the warmth of other people. 

The commencement address DFW gave at Kenyon convinces me that this compassion and connection, this humanness, was what he wanted. This passage comes to mind:

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

I did not know Mr. Wallace, but I know what his work means to me. Whether he was writing about addiction, John McCain, tennis, or dictionaries, he taught me that irony and apathy mask the truth of how we feel, and that we are capable of much more, that beauty and transcendence are out there, and we just need to know to look for them.

(—Namir Y)

(--from McSweeney's Internet Tendency)
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/tributes-to-david-foster-wallace

[*Note: To those thinking the use of Greek words to describe American experience is odd, remember we are talking 500 years from now. Surely some recurrent cyclic retrieval of expressive language will occur and we will be back to Greek origins embarking on a new homecoming Odyssey from another useless devastation of interminable war.]   

averse and perverse: correlating necessary reciprocity

Reading about police corruption.

The Chicago Police Department fought to keep private this horrendous photo taken between 1999 and 2003 of Officers Jerome Finnigan and Timothy McDermott posing with a black man as if he were a dead deer.  

Maybe it's because the cash-strapped city has already paid over a half a billion dollars in settlements because of police misconduct the past 10 years alone? 

Maybe it's because it was recently revealed that the Chicago Police Department has a secret facility it has been using to harass people off the record? 

Maybe it's because the City of Chicago just passed a reparations bill for the many victims their police have tortured? 

Even more likely, though, is that they really didn’t want the identity of these two officers in the spotlight.                                                                                    http://opcoa.st/HcxM6

Maybe Mencius was wrong in this case. 

Mencius' philosophy of human nature is summed up in the following argument from The Book of Mencius.Since man is originally good, it follows that1. he possesses the innate knowledge of the good and the "innate ability" to do good; (7A:15)2. if one "develops his mind to the utmost" he can "serve Heaven" and "fulfill his destiny;" (7A:1)3. evil is not inborn but due to man's own failures and his inability to avoid evil external influences; (6A:8) 4. serious efforts must be made to recover our original nature; (ibid) and5. the end of learning is none other than to "seek for the lost mind." (6A:11) http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~cp28/confuc.htm

Maybe America is exempt from such thinking.

Xunzi’s most famous dictum is that “the nature of man is evil; his goodness is only acquired training.” What Xunzi preached was thus essentially a philosophy of culture. Human nature at birth, he maintained, consists of instinctual drives which, left to themselves, are selfish, anarchic, and antisocial. Society as a whole, however, exerts a civilizing influence upon the individual, gradually training and molding him until he becomes a disciplined and morally conscious human being. Of prime importance in this process are the li (ceremonies and ritual practices, rules of social behaviour, traditional mores) and music (which Xunzi, like Plato, regarded as having a profound moral significance).Xunzi’s view of human nature was, of course, radically opposed to that of Mencius, who had optimistically proclaimed the innate goodness of man. Both thinkers agreed that all men are potentially capable of becoming sages, but for Mencius this meant that every man has it within his power to develop further the shoots of goodness already present at birth, whereas for Xunzi it meant that every man can learn from society how to overcome his initially antisocial impulses. Thus began what became one of the major controversies in Confucian thought.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/274068/Xunzi

Perhaps it is a case of caring. Who cares about corruption? Current thinking is that everyone -- everyone -- is a liar and a thief. As such, corruption headlines are merely human nature writ large. Anyone who says “I have nothing to hide," is hiding something.

What to do?

Nothing.

Do nothing.

It is the effort to right wrong that shifts wrong into righteous crusade masquerading as law enforcement that mimics and cynically takes on role and persona of wrongdoing, only now with patina of official untouchability.

It is little wonder that so much of the gun ownership conversation revolves around protecting the individual from both the law-averse and the law-perverse, the criminals breaking the law and the other criminals broken with law as cudgel.

China today debates rule of law versus values middle way.

Confucianism as the old ideology had been criticized for a long time from the official point of view in the past. However, Confucianism didn’t lose its core value actually. Perfect virtue, the Middle Way, and the authority admiration are still its salient features. The authority with the perfect virtue doing in the middle way is the perfect ideal to Chinese people. Zhou Enlai is just that type of man who is regarded as the person with all these characteristics.
There is confusion when the rule of law tries to come into China and be the fundamental pattern to rule the country. Whether the tradition rooted in Chinese be the obstacle to the rule of law, or the rule of law can replace the traditional value successfully with its distinguishing values
(--The Thinking Way of Confucianism and the Rule of Law, by Guoji Qin, Department of Politics and Law, Shenyang Institute of Engineering, in Journal of Politics and Law, 

Abstract: Confucianism as the old ideology had been criticized for a long time from the official point of view in China; however, its core value is still influencing Chinese society. On the way towards road of the rule of law, Confucianism is considered playing the negative role. It is necessary to study the framework of Confucianism systematically so as to understand why the rule of law shows difference in between China and western world, and why Chinese would rather resolve disputes in Confucianism way than the rule of law. I will discuss the thinking way of Confucianism, analyze its core value and the relation between Confucianism and the rule of law, through which get to the conclusion that Confucianism value has the inclination to avoid the law. http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jpl/article/viewFile/763/739

It might be a good idea to reconsider reciprocality and reciprocity as fulcrum points for moderating human behavior and society. Punishment and incarceration are only small particular points on a long and wide spectrum of the ethics of reciprocity. We have to look longer down the line of emergent creativity in order to moderate a harmonious way of being in the world with one another.

(At 4:43am the New York Times inside blue plastic covering is tossed from car onto front gravel gateway dooryard.)

 Day dawns.

3:15am pee patrol with old German Shepherd and middle-aged Border Collie to same dooryard was successful leading to Chinese philosophers as night seeped into twilight.

Time to nap a while.

My sympathies to all who suffer deviance in human justice.