When a poet dies he does not take his words with him.
What he does take is everything yet to be brought into words into a world of his creation.
Sort of like what some people imagine occurs happens when God dies. Or died. Or will.
A good poet, like a good God, resides in the after-resonance of a poem, or a world that feels what has been created.
AT THE CLOTHESLINE
Millie was in the backyard hanging the laundry. I was watching her from the kitchen window. Why does this give me so much pleasure? Because I love her in a million ways, and because I love the idea of clean laundry flapping in the wind. It’s timeless, a new beginning, a promise of tomorrow. Clothespins! God, I love clothespins. We should stock up on them. Some day they may stop making them, and then what? If I were a painter, I would paint Millie hanging the laundry. That would be a painting that would make you happy, and break your heart. You would never know what was in her mind, big thoughts, little thoughts, no thoughts. Did she see the hawk circling overhead? Did she hate hanging laundry? Was she going to run away with a sailor? The sheets billowing like sails on an ancient skiff, the socks waving goodbye. Millie, O Millie, do you remember me? The man who traveled with cloth napkins and loved you in the great storm.
(Poem by James Tate, December 8, 1943 – July 8, 2015)
Prayer of those who dwell in a Monastery of the Heart
Loving God,
You who dwell in our hearts,
make for us a cave there
in which to hear your voice
more distinctly,
feel your care
more tenderly,
understand your will
more clearly,
and come to know
your presence
at every moment
of our lives
with new clarity
and new courage,
with new faith
and new urgency.
++
Enable us to grow
in the Benedictine spirit
in ways that make us
compassionate co-creators
of a world in process,
creative keepers
of the human community,
loving listeners
to the heartbeat of the world,
caring sisters and brothers
to its wounded
and bringers of peace
to a world in distress.
++
Let us sink into your Word,
let us nourish it to life,
let it lead us beyond
the burdens of the day
so that we may become
the people you desire us to be.
Give us hearts
where all may enter in,
ears to hear your call,
hands to do your will,
voices to sing your praise
and soul enough
to recognize You
in everything we do.
This we ask
through the intercession
of all the faithful monastics
who have gone before us
and through the grace
of the living God.
Amen.
Feelings of guilt and shame. And to tease out what was right from what was wrong. What the weathermen had right was our understanding of what the position of the United States is in the world. It was this knowledge that we just couldn’t handle. It was too big. We didn’t know what to do. In a way I still don’t know what to do with this knowledge. I don’t know what needs to be done. And it still eats away at me as it did 30 years ago.
(--words {almost accurate} of Mark Rudd, former member of Weather Underground, from documentary, 2003)
Add another dozen years, and the names Dohrn, Ayers, Whitehorn, Gilbert, Boudin, Oughton, Jaffe roll by on final credits. The Vietnam War, Flanagan said, made us all a little crazy. The murder of Fred Hampton in his bed was pivotal, and it was raw police excess.
The Vietnam War was cruel, illegal, terroristic, a lie, and tore this United States into shreds still not taped back together yet.
Deaths in Vietnam War (1965–1974) per Guenter Lewy
Allied military deaths
282,000
NVA/VC military deaths
444,000
Civilian deaths (North and South Vietnam)
587,000
Total deaths
1,313,000
Estimates of the total number of deaths in the Vietnam War vary widely depending upon the time period and area covered by the data.
Guenter Lewy in 1978 estimated 1,313,000 total deaths in North and South Vietnam during the period 1965–1974 in which the U.S. was most engaged in the war. Lewy reduced the number of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese battle deaths claimed by the U.S. by 30 percent (in accordance with the opinion of United States Department of Defense officials), and assumed that one third of the battle deaths of the VC/NVA were actually civilians. His estimate of total deaths is reflected in the table.[1]
Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA Spring Offensive were killed or abducted on the road to Tuy Hòa in 1975.[78] Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 1–2.5 million sent,[79][80] while somewhere between 50,000 and 250,000 were executed.[79][81][82][83] Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).[79][81] According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, between 200,000 and 400,000 Vietnamese boat people died at sea,[84] although Rummel cites estimates ranging from 100,000 to 1,000,000.[81] Including Vietnam's foreign democide, Rummel estimates that a minimum of 400,000 and a maximum of slightly less than 2.5 million people died of political violence from 1975–87 at the hands of Hanoi.[81] In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.[85]
The Grateful Dead perform their final concert. The Dalai Lama says he might be the last one. Friedrich Nietzsche uncompromisingly sought to accept all events and situations in his life.
This thought:
Write me a poem? the voice asked.
But there is no me,
so no poem
nothing to be said --
done
so in
silence
Then, Nietzsche:
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
America, it will be said this weekend, is having a birthday. Perhaps a reversal will take place. It will give back what it has taken by force and self interest. A gift returning fruits of expansion, greed, violence, and ignorance. It will antidote poisons.
A gift of enlightened abnegation.
The Acknowledgment of Suffering Is a Gift
As the early Buddhist teachings freely admit, the predicament is that the cycle of birth, aging, and death is meaningless. They don't try to deny this fact and so don't ask us to be dishonest with ourselves or to close our eyes to reality. As one teacher has put it, the Buddhist recognition of the reality of suffering—so important that suffering is honored as the first noble truth—is a gift, in that it confirms our most sensitive and direct experience of things, an experience that many other traditions try to deny.
Empty cabin filled with sunlight and birdsong sits ready for experience and evidence.
Perhaps there is nothing other. Thomas, rather than example of no faith is example of what faith longs for.
Faith longs for what is actually directly in front of us longing to be engaged, entered, felt, and unobjectified by dissolving into intersubjective affirmation of meaning without objective definition or rational certitude.
See suffering, be suffering.
Not to see/be is not to want to see another, not wanting to see self, not wanting to see God. Not to be what we see.
Thomas said no to not.
Thomas felt yes and came to understand heaven and earth as heaven is earth.
God is here as here is God.
A good birthday, America! A good feast day, Thomas!
In the metaphor God comes to earth, entering the creation.
Enters creation he created
As
Creator.
Thus entering himself
As it enters itself.
It has always seemed to me that Christians do not understand incarnation -- not the Incarnation, not what it means to see heaven as earth, this life as all life, finite existence as satisfactorily an end in itself.
What if Christian life were the creative manifestation of wholly transforming earth divinely human embodying beginning to end what becomes
Allos, others. Autos, self. Didatikos, apt and skillful in teaching. Autos Didatikos Allos, self teaching through others. Autodidallocism.
THE LIGHTEST TOUCH
Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests your whole body,
steeling you for revelation.
In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.
The paradox of our practice is that the most effective way of transformation is to leave ourselves alone. The more we let everything be just what it is, the more we relax into an open, attentive awareness of one moment after another. (-- Barry Magid, “Five Practices to Change Your Mind,” Tricycle)
At table practice last night, reading Larry Rosenberg, we thought about suffering.
“There is suffering in life,” is the Buddha’s first Noble Truth.
It, like everything else in the existence of time/being, will cease.
What I believe, what I value most, is transitoriness.
But is not transitoriness — the perishableness of life — something very sad? No! It is the very soul of existence. It imparts value, dignity, interest to life. Transitoriness creates time — and “time is the essence.” Potentially at least, time is the supreme, most useful gift.
Time is related to — yes, identical with — everything creative and active, with every progress toward a higher goal. Without transitoriness, without beginning or end, birth or death, there is no time, either. Timelessness — in the sense of time never ending, never beginning — is a stagnant nothing. It is absolutely uninteresting.
By attaching to suffering as “my” suffering, by craving it to be something else, by desiring it to go somewhere else (as if it weren’t everywhere throughout everyone) -- we increase suffering or, at minimum, prolong it.
YANA, WANA, you are not alone, we are not alone.
And yet, the feeling of aloneness can overwhelm us. It is this belief that we are detached from others, unattached from sky and birds, earth and tree, mother and father, neighbor and relatives, friends and former friends -- this belief/feeling, so devastating, must be looked at from a long and loving vantage place.
Some people say that God is always with us. This comforts them as a closely held belief/experience. Others say as long as we remain in this existence we are beings in Being which is the whole of what-is. This observation has been known to comfort as well. Still others hold that God, Being, and Kenosis is a trinity unfolding of source origin, worded existence, and self emptying -- a process of emerging from nothingness, moving through existence, and transforming into unknown continuity.
What we hold as true, for now, is important to our ability to see our way through now and that which appears in the extension of now called by some ‘time’ or ‘future’ or ‘our lives going forward.’
Rosenberg writes:
Yet even the most fundamental teachings of the Buddha, such as the four noble truths, deserve to be held up to the light of inquiry described in the Kalama Sutta. I learned this in my early days as a Vipassana yogi, when the Thai forest master Ajahn Chah visited the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. At that time, many of us were enthralled with the liberating power of “letting go.” In our discussions, everyone was letting go of this and letting go of that—and often letting go of “merely everything.” As he listened, Ajahn Chah seemed to grow skeptical. He encouraged us to slow down, back up, and carefully examine the moments when we were actually suffering. Rather than rush to let go, he urged us to make direct contact with the suffering and to see whether it was caused by some form of craving and attachment, of wanting things to be other than the way they were. He felt that the real letting go was learned by seeing the price we paid by holding on and resisting—and the joy experienced when we were free of the burden of attachment.
Paying attention to our own experience of suffering, rather than our conceptual notions of letting go, gave us the chance to see the benefits of the four noble truths in the crucible of our own lives. The transformation of suffering that comes from awareness is most powerful when it’s intimate with the experience of your own life. Inquire, question, and test your understanding of the teachings so that it becomes bone deep.
At 3:42AM, following 3AM peeing ritual conducted by elderly German Shepherd out by garden Buddha statue, these words are transported to southern resident who has finished watching the 2013 documentary “Anita” about that generous and courageous woman Anita Hill. It follows closely behind Sunday Evening Practice conversation where those assembled considered the “bone deep” words of the article in Shambhala Sun. These words to someone suffering emerge in middle night where thinking about these things goes its own way on its own:
I've been thinking; "family" is often not limited to those who've birthed us biologically, but to a community of care who birth us in our current struggle to make it through, You have a wide "sangha" I.e. community of folks practicing presence now who hold you in their heart/mind. Our ongoing sustaining family often looks different than what we think they should look like. We are happy and graced, as are the many "odd" members of the meetingbrook community, to hold you in the light of care and love. So, if you want a rest, and circumstances arise fortuitously, come here for whatever time you need to rest and regroup energy to re-engage your spiritual/physical warrior journey to a future that awaits you and belongs to you with the company of unexplained grace and shared suffering.
It's all gift. Even the frustrating, lonely uncertainty our minds can't figure out. Gift. So, oddly, we stumble awkwardly, trying to arrive at the door of gratitude, stuttering our "thank you" and "hallelujah" to the unexpected and heretofore unrecognized face appearing there.
You have that gift. There and here.
[We practice our life in order to] ready to presence assistance for whatever time you wish.
No matter how you look at it, things always seem slant.
Soaker-rain over everything. I turn over wheelbarrow. It falls empty.
Our individualistic culture gives us the impression that we are each biologically separate beings--
separate from each other and from nature. At Harvard I received an excellent education in the reason-
dimension of my mind. I am so grateful. But to be back here in Cambridge is an opportunity to see
both the value and the limits of this education. Reason has its place, its value and its use, but we are
not in fact separate from one another and nature. The existence of our galaxy among billions of them is
preposterous, and it is totally unlikely that any of us are here, right now. It is absolutely unreasonable
that we are living on a sphere that is rotating on its axis at 1,000 miles an hour, rotating around a sun-
star at 67,000 miles an hour and spinning through the Milky Way galaxy at 568,000 m.p.h. All of this
is happening in virtually empty space that has no up or down. We can forget our tiny efforts to control
the situation. Blaise Pascal (17th c.) mused that “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not
know.” My heart is teaching me things that reason and science can’t prove but which--nevertheless!--
cultivate palpable experiences of hope, beauty and love. Reason’s most powerful questions--why, how,
where and when--seem irrelevant and powerless in the vicinity of goodness, compassion and beauty.
My heart is receiving a teaching from the Beyond Within, that we give each other our being, and
our spirits are nourished by the spirits of others. With the hormone treatment and the radiation I often
feel fatigued and sometimes afraid, but my emotions are labile and tears of love are always ready to
soften the hard pan created by reasonable fears. I can feel a little depressed and lost in practical tasks,
but then I feel a surge of desire as I lay suspended on my altar tables. I want to live!
The other day, as I lay on the acupuncturist’s table with needles in my chest and abdomen, I put my
hands over my eyes and a rich blue light dotted with countless shimmering stars poured through my
eyelids into my whole being. Jesus was holding my hand out here at the boundary of a never-ending
explosive, evolving and gorgeous cosmos, and letting me go.
Dis-ease is our de-fault position. We long to find ease with what is taking place in our life.
It takes a while for mind to cycle close to what is really taking place.
(After receiving photo and teisho from Chris, “Buddha as a shithead. ...he would smile.”)
Garden Dialogue Record
Koan:
Buddha: [splat] Hey, what's that?
Blade of Grass: huh?
Buddha: I said...[reconsidering]...oh, never mind!
Comment:
Hence began important teaching by Buddha arising from grass.
And then, there is Ikkyu:
Enlightenment
Ten years ago I couldn't stop thinking, feeling,
Just anger, just rage, until this moment.
A crow laughs, the dust clears, I hold the arhat's fruit.
Spotted sunlight in Zhaoyang Palace, a pale face chanting.
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.
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 VercelliItaly 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.
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.
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)
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:
There is God.
There is awareness.
There is God, and there is the awareness of God.
There is us, and there is our awareness of God.
There is us, and there is our unawareness of God.
God is within and without all things. (or, With God there is no within and without; there is only presence.)
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.
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.
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.
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
