next step

The psalmist asks: How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:4)

And yet, sing we must.

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:

We who must die demand a miracle.. 

(—from W. H. Auden's long poem FOR THE TIME BEING: A Christmas Oratorio. It was written during the dark times of World War II.) http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/church/auden/

The miracle

of being

able

to listen

to another

is the infinite

within and

between

us.

first snow

We were never not having the conversation at nurses station at hospice house.

Nor were we never not having the cogent conversation at hospital in s.c.u. room with man whose brain tumors scholarize science for him, who sees patterns of sound in vibrative light.

It is an eternal conversation. It is about living and dying, the co-creating collapse of the possible into the actual moving into the improbable.

Hours go by.

As snow falls.

And the feast of Thomas Merton’s dying day walks formless the cloister corridor of fond recollection.

I drive home from hospice and hospital in silence.

Conversation is all we know of heaven and what we’ve forgiven of hell.

The radical proposal is to trust one another with what we call our lives.

today’s threefold inspiration

Buddha’s enlightenment day. Being awake is becoming aware.

Immaculate Conception of Mary. From the get-go, no barriers to realizing whole truth within one’s own incarnation.

John Lennon’s death. Words cannot tell what a poet reveals in song.

docta ignorantia,

Looking at the emergence of a new energy of dissolution and decomposition in body politic and cultural spirit, a change in sensibilities, a diminution of civility, and a distortion of attitudes -- is what we see.

A hardening disregard of what some feel is antiquated and naive humility or kindness.

Like Reinhardt’s paintings, Jerusalem in 2017 refuses easy categorization or blithe comparisons. Christian mysticism and Reinhardt’s Zen Buddhism both name my experience as what the late medieval theologian Nicholas of Cusa called “docta ignorantia,” “learned ignorance.” Indeed, Reinhardt cited Cusa in some unpublished notes: “How needful it is to enter into the darkness and to admit the coincidence of opposites, to seek the truth where impossibility meets us.” Cusa was talking about our knowledge of God, but we can be similarly ignorant of God’s people. 

We in the United States, and we in the Christian church and other religious communities, owe Jerusalem enough sustained attention for it to reveal itself to us. Sometimes that will require action, speech, and political movements, and that action can’t be put off forever, but such action needs to be rooted in patient attention to the Holy Land’s sparks of light and color, and to the depth and complexity of its darknesses.  (—from, REINHARDT IN JERUSALEM, October 20, 2017, by Brian Flanagan)  https://dailytheology.org/2017/10/20/reinhardt-in-jerusalem/

We need these opposites.

So as to, coincidentally, erase them. 

known in passing

I didn’t recognize him
three weeks later
moving from scu
to Med-Surg

to hospice house
where I sat with him
nearly two hours
until daughter came

In wohnkuche this
St Nicholas day
I read obituary
cobbling recall

my first threefold
encounter, as it is,
an ending uncertainty 

thank you

Justice
rarely visits

It does
send regrets

condolences
to victims

mere gaze

It was his breath. It was thin.

He was going deeper and deeper within.

I sit with him. I look. I breathe.

And I wonder —

Is this simple act, being present with another, our true nature?

And is an act of prayer, is a life of prayer, the willingness to approach our true nature alone as well with another?

Alone and another — wholeness and no-other — the prayer of seeing what is within all (swiwa).

When I left he was sleeping, I hope you run into him soon.

giving is receiving

The new template seems to be: down is up, sleaze is purity, lies are truth, treason is patriotism, sexual assault is ok, evil is the new pragmatism.

The Republican Party morphs into a raping army vanquishing the enemy, who, by any other definition, is the American people.

If you want to hear a spiritual message, here it is: May they receive what they are giving!

The curious fact is that when love and kindness is given, so it is received. When greed and self-serving is given, so it is received.

It is a difficult lesson to learn — that we are not two.

Nor are we one — until we come to see.

And when we see what is within all (swiwa) we’ve entered prayer — the place of ineffable transformation where the between allows what was thought of as separate to reveal the true intra-diaphanous inchoate.

Seeing-though ever-present origin!

1st advent

Om mane padme hum

Swiwa

See what is within all

civil twilight

when things
seem absurd
and you feel

bemused
and befuddled about
what is happening —

consider compassion
as
a way

toward dawn
through a
dark night.

koan poem too often too late broken open

I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)

Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –  
To tell one's name – the livelong June –  
To an admiring Bog!

https://m.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/im-nobody-who-are-you-260

nobody loves me, everybody hates me

Cowardly congress.

Absurd executive.

I think I’ll eat some worms.

lullaby

Where does congress go when it is going nowhere?

Where does religion go when it has nowhere to go?

We are left on our own.

There is no support or integrity.

Where do we go?

To sleep.

tatters

It seems the unseemly
rips open seams
of nation’s garb.

When garbled speech
fails to float and
words capsize unbuoyed.

Piece by piece
the peace we seek
falls in shreds at our feet.

Alas, emperor
cloaks himself in tatters
as tattlers tell of penury.

enough

Terrible
Repulsive
Untruthful
Monomaniacal
Pitiful

It is so worrying that such a person rules the country and affects the world.

Miserere nobis!

a single fabric

For What Binds Us

                BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight. 

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they've been set down—

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a 

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

(Jane Hirshfield, "For What Binds Us" from Of Gravity & Angels. Copyright © 1988 by Jane Hirshfield) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52468/for-what-binds-us

radical kinship

Sunday morning On Being interview with Fr. Greg Boyle sj. 

https://onbeing.org/programs/greg-boyle-the-calling-of-delight-gangs-service-and-kinship-nov2017/

Boyle is Buber-esque in his pointing to a homey sense or kinship wherein we’re all locked up together, where refusal to divide, recognition of the everyday, that we are and who we are is deep intimacy and profound respect due each and every being in this existence.

His mantra is: Now. Here. This!

At end he prestents Hafiz:

With That Moon Language

Admit something.

Everyone you see, you say to them
“Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud:
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.

Still, though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.

Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying,

With that sweet moon
Language,

What every other eye in this world
Is dying to
Hear.

– Hafiz

Ms. Tippett: Fr. Greg Boyle is founder and executive director of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles. His books include Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion and more recently, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship.

你好吗i nǐ hǎo ma how are you

How do we meet?

Martin Buber said that meeting is the essence of human activity, 

In order to preserve the imbrication of singular selfhood and the bonding of human personhood, Buber rejected the false choice between individualism and collectivism. As Buber always understood it, human wholeness lies in the meeting of the one with the other in a living fourfold relation to things, individual persons, the mystery of Being, and self. Every living relation is essential and contributes to human wholeness because human wholeness (“man's unique essence”) is known or posited only in living out a set of relations. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buber/

I meet this gentleman sleeping in his hospice bed on Saturday night visit to this dedicated hospice house Thanksgiving  holiday weekend.

Between moans and snores there are the pauses of breath. Then remnants of interior proclamations of thought reaching for vocal chords but losing its way through washed out roads and blocked bridges.

I’ve wandered into this space under tv playing extreme weather stories to far end of room where abandoned remote sits alongside someone’s two handled bag.

From next room the fussing sounds of an infant. My companion, in his doze, resounds similarly. An antiphony of inquiring protestations of arriving and departing consciousness separated by eighty decades of mirrored colloquy.

About Buber:

He is best known for his 1923 book, Ich und Du (I and Thou), which distinguishes between “I-Thou” and “I-It” modes of existence. Often characterized as an existentialist philosopher, Buber rejected the label, contrasting his emphasis on the whole person and “dialogic” intersubjectivity with existentialist emphasis on “monologic” self-consciousness. In his later essays, he defines man as the being who faces an “other” and constructs a world from the dual acts of distancing and relating. http://www.iep.utm.edu/buber/

We face each other by means of sounds and presence. Always in conversation, like newborn and long-live’d facing one another by sound alone, the calling-card of shy presence, we negotiate the nexus of invisible interstices the way mild evening mist and pre-dawn freezing flecks interconnect in what is between what is inbetween.

Where we meet is that emptiness between what is inbetween and what is not there.

My companion resumes recitative of snore, moan, and detoured proclamation.

Refrigerator motor harmonizes with weather numbers from unmatched images.

We pray the prayer of meandering breath. In. Out. Pause. Resume. Oremus.

We have met and do meet in this sacred ground we do not know the name of. So, we call it “here.”

Here we are.

Here is who we are and what we are as we encounter all we meet in unknowing intimacy.

There’s nothing to do here but be here.

This is how we are,

how difficult it is to remain just one person (Milosz)

At prison. On mountain. At home. At conversation.

With poetry.

Friday after Thanksgiving.

As it is, lovely.

gracias, grazie, merci, danke, shokran, xièxie

Humility never says "It's me!"
Kindness doesn't ask for a receipt.
Everydayness doesn't care about future payoff.

No one can control the behavior of another.
But what comes out of us in response is our character.

On Thanksgiving, gratitude is gifting another a loving response.

ask not

Fifty four years ago a sacrifice was made.

America sacrificed a president.

It broke something important.

It broke our will.

We wanted truth.

We got lies.

Shame.

covering jfk

I think of jfk on eve of assassination.

The death of our country with lies and deception.

Still covering.

unfolding itself right before your eye

Blue Jay in Yew bush picks at green needle. Hops to ground. Companion picks with her on empty husks for fresh seed. Ever skittish. Ever vigilant.

My morning teachers.

From An Introduction to Zen Buddhism 

Is Zen a religion? It is not a religion in the sense that the term is popularly understood; for Zen has no God to worship, no ceremonial rites to observe, no future abode to which the dead are destined, and, last of all, Zen has no soul whose welfare is to be looked after by somebody else and whose immortality is a matter of intense concern with some people. Zen is free from all these dogmatic and "religious" encumbrances. ... 

As to all those images of various Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and Devas and other beings that one comes across in Zen temples, they are like so many pieces of wood or stone or metal; they are like camellias, azaleas, or stone lanterns in my garden. Make obeisance to the camellia now in full bloom, and worship it if you like, Zen would say. There is as much religion in so doing as in bowing to the various Buddhist gods, or as sprinkling holy water, or as participating in the Lord's Supper. All those pious deeds considered to be meritorious or sanctifying by most so-called religiously minded people are artificialities in the eyes of Zen. It boldly declares that "the immaculate Yogins do not enter Nirvana and the precept-violating monks do not go to hell". This, to ordinary minds, is a contradiction of the common law of moral life, but herein lies the truth and the life of Zen. Zen is the spirit of a man. Zen believes in its inner purity and goodness. Whatever is superadded or violently torn away, injures the wholesomeness of the spirit. Zen, therefore, is emphatically against all religious conventionalism. ...

(--from, D.T. Suzuki, in The Question of God, Other Voices, PBS, 2004) 

 At Sunday Evening Practice we read at table from Tomorrow’s God, by Neale Donald Walsh.

A single oak leaf falls into Yew.

This moment.

I chant morning invitatory in cabin chapel/zendo. Light candle.Light stick of incense.

And this moment.

Sip coffee. Eat cereal. Take pills.

Charles Manson dies in prison at 83. Donald Trump lives in Washington DC at 71. Alabama will elect a man to the US Senate who is accused of sexual inappropriateness with teenage girls. Minnesota has to wonder about its senator. Every man who thought it was ok to take liberties with woman is now reappraised and under scrutiny.  Women who have been intimidated or silenced emerge from under the cloak of male privilege. A woman, unbelieved and unlistened to for so long regarding undesired behavior by men toward them, now speaks openly.

Justice is not out there somewhere. It is either in ourselves or it is nowhere. Not even in our institutions of law and systems of courts.

Justice has no separate existence from mind and heart of those who feel their way into fair and equitable balance between all beings, all things, all existence.

"The way to ascend unto God is to descend into one's self"; — these are Hugo's words. "If thou wishest to search out the deep things of God, search out the depths of thine own spirit"; — this comes from Richard of St. Victor. When all these deep things are searched out there is after all no "self" where you can descend, there is no "spirit", no "God" whose depths are to be fathomed. Why? Because Zen is a bottomless abyss. Zen declares, though in somewhat different manner: "Nothing really exists throughout the triple world; where do you wish to see the mind (or spirit, *hsin*)? The four elements are all empty in their ultimate nature; where could the Buddha's abode be? — but lo! the truth is unfolding itself right before your eye. This is all there is to it — and indeed nothing more!" A minute's hesitation and Zen is irrevocably lost. All the Buddhas of the past, present, and future may try to make you catch it once more, and yet it is a thousand miles away. “Mind-murder" and "self-intoxication", forsooth! Zen has no time to bother itself with such criticisms. (--D.T. Suzuki)

There is no justice. It doesn't exist.

There are individuals, though.

The grey cat eats kibbles on kitchen island. The white dog scratches on sliding door to come in.

Fire catches on right side of wood in wood stove.

Therefore, anything that has the semblance of an external authority is rejected by Zen. Absolute faith is placed in a man's own inner being. For whatever authority there is in Zen, all comes from within. This is true in the strictest sense of the word. Even the reasoning faculty is not considered final or absolute. On the contrary, it hinders the mind from coming into the directest communication with itself. The intellect accomplishes its mission when it works as an intermediary, and Zen has nothing to do with the intermediary except when it desires to communicate itself to others. For this reason all the scriptures are merely tentative and provisory; there is in them no finality. The central fact of life as it is lived is what Zen aims to grasp, and this in the most direct and most vital manner. Zen professes itself to be the spirit of Buddhism, but in fact it is the spirit of all religions and philosophies. When Zen is thoroughly understood, absolute peace of mind is attained, and a man lives as he ought to live. What more may we hope? ...           (--D.T. Suzuki) 

Yellow Finch on feeder as chimney smoke downdrafts across their feeding. 

what if God is the present moment

There it is, the question: What if God is the present moment?

What would change in our thinking? What would become of our lives?

Jesuit priest Jean Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751) called it the “sacrament of the present moment.” His book, Abandonment to Divine Providence, was the book most recommended by spiritual directors for many decades. His key theme is: “If we have abandoned ourselves to God, there is only one rule for us: the duty of the present moment.” To live in the present is finally what we mean by presence itself! 

God is hidden in plain sight, yet religion seems determined to make it more complicated. Much of low-level religion suggests that to find God you need this morality and that behavior and this ritual and that performance and this belief system. Western Christianity has largely refused to allow God to be as simple, obvious, democratic, and available as God has made (and makes!) God’s self—right here and right now.

(—from, Time-Tested Wisdom, Sunday, November 19, 2017, Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM)

Thich Nhat Hanh’s gatha is gentle resonance of this.

I have arrived. 

I am home. 

In the here. 

In the now.

What traditionally has been called ‘belief’ is now mere realization of what is here as what is here.

No one tradition owns God. No one owns God. God is one’s own.

This realization changes everything.

And the more things change the more they become themselves.

As God is.

As you are.

As is each thing, each being, each instant.

Becoming what is!

In practice.

“would dying be here” (Robert Creeley)

Middle-night stillness

Dog’s breath beside bed

Really

There’s no one here 

turning to

even now,
wind gust
crosses road --
for the wind
there is no
other side --
only cross
with no other.
If you want
to learn love
begin here --
as sun nods
to tree top
turning to
light

no, afterlife

             (a haiku for Dan)


in her turned garden

white ashes scattered after months

what remains of thislife

in

If you ask: Do I believe in God?

I will have to ask: Where am I?

If I look at where I am, and see ‘I am here’

and to be here is to be ‘in God’,

then I am being asked

if I believe where I am.

The sorrow of our time is

we do not believe where we are.

join them

true, world’s nuts

it’s how we keep on

until we stop,

get off, safely insane

break fast

I’ll have coffee and rye toast. A side of sausage links. And, please, could you bring me a new White House. Hold the current thinking, it’s gone bad. For a change I’d like sincerity, kindness, and truth with marmalade. What will that cost?

if you hear my voice today, harden not your hearts

We read psalms

we wonder

praying our

understanding

will transcend

dualistic flaw

mind cringes

implication

Lord punishes

and causes pain

But “his love

endures forever”

Reality is reality

Love is love

no dual reading

says Yes as

one and other

are not two.

By the way,

don’t make one

but see whole

the absence of

which is why

we don’t pray

or know what

prayer is

briefly

Purring cat

it is November

between blankets

edge; else

The edge

of what?

It is all I know

what is touched

there, intermingling

boundaryless this

with that, like

emptiness, we are

open space, where

nothing separate

is what we are

Nothing else

salute and sorrow

sun moves southeast rising
just to right of cedar trunks
coming up over woodpile and
chimney smoke through dooryard

female grosbeak lifts from seed-
hull ground to yew branch as cat haunches
at sliding door, barn-side thermometer
steady at 19°F this Veteran’s Day chill

counterintuitive cycle -- warriors fight
senseless wars keeping each other alive
until home when 20 suicides a day is
daily reminder cost subtracted patriotism

a man I know thinks I’m against veterans
it’s easier for him to think so
I’m against the stupidity of aggressive war
wasting lives posturing power deriding God

david stinson, friend and meditation companiero, 25sept25 -- 5nov17

Haiku,

(for David)

at first sight, walkway

seems empty — at bridge, at heart,

there is (MU) one there

MYTOI GARDEN (BLANK)

Art: Roberta Jackson

(e-card image from gratefulness.org; haiku by wfh) 

anthony sanborn, time served

I am pleased for Tony Sanborn.

I know him as a good man. 

I’m glad he continues to assert innocence.

In Hosea 6:6, some clarifying and difficult words: “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.”

May Jessica Briggs rest in peace.

May the Sanborn and Briggs family live their lives in peace.

And may Hosea’s words both disturb us and burrow into our meditations.

Good for Anthony Sanborn for his exit from prison. And good for Fairfield and Zerillo for their work on his behalf and in the name of responsible justice.

The murder of Jessica Briggs was a terrible event. The clear and definitive resolution of responsibility for her death does not appear to be any closer. 

The “elegant solution” allows a good man to resume a life in our community. It also reminds us that fair and responsible justice remains a fragile commodity in the hands of a powerful law enforcement and prosecutorial system perennially in need of oversight and review. 

The Sanborn case serves as warning and instruction. 

We have work to do.

the tent

At prison today, an academic symposium.

Learning, such as this, cannot be found anywhere else.

Men asking, and answering, what it means to engage in education.

From bottom up.

coming to word; coming to body

Violence is the failure to see our way clear.

Hatred is the failure to see the Way through.

What is our way? What is the Way?

Let’s look at this. Let’s look as this. 

This is our body. All of this.

It is time to incarnate.

words and good wishes will never suffice

Autocrats are arising.

Or, as someone we know likes to say, we’re just finding out what always has been in hidden operation. Ok. The man in the White House is only the public face of real power brokers and billionaire backroom manipulation of public belief in everyday democratic participatory republic consensus.

The ‘people’ are not in charge. Nor are they revolting. Everyday people and ordinary life are outside the concern of those growing in power and wealth.

The power elites attempt to discredit those who resist. They force them to struggle to make an income. They push them to the margins of society. They write them out of the official narrative. They deny them the symbols of status. They use the compliant liberal class to paint them as unreasonable and utopian. 

Resistance is not, fundamentally, political. It is cultural. It is about finding meaning and expression in the transcendent and the incongruities of life. Music, poetry, theater and art sustain resistance by giving expression to the nobility of rebellion against the overwhelming forces, what the ancient Greeks called fortuna, which can never ultimately be overcome. Art celebrates the freedom and dignity of those who defy malignant evil.Victory is not inevitable, or at least not victory as defined by the powerful. Yet in every act of rebellion we are free. It was the raw honesty of the blues, spirituals and work chants that made it possible for African-Americans to endure. 

Power is a poison. It does not matter who wields it. The rebel, for this reason, is an eternal heretic. He or she will never fit into any system. The rebel stands with the powerless. There will always be powerless people. There will always be injustice. The rebel will always be an outsider. 

Resistance requires eternal vigilance. The moment the powerful are no longer frightened, the moment the glare of the people is diverted and movements let down their guard, the moment the ruling elites are able to use propaganda and censorship to hide their aims, the gains made by resisters roll backward. We have been steadily stripped of everything that organized working men and women—who rose up in defiance and were purged, demonized and killed by the capitalist elites—achieved with the New Deal. The victories of African-Americans, who paid with their bodies and blood in making possible the Great Society and ending legal segregation, also have been reversed.

(-The Cost of Resistence, by Chris Hedges, in truthdig, 5nov17)

It is difficult to remember that the human spirit longs for what might be called Itself.

This Itself is reality without corruption or distortion. Without spin, yarn, denial, or hype.

The Itself was once called Truth. It was simple, stark, and sovereign. Above the hazy fog, above and beyond, is the luminous light of this galaxy’s inexorable star blazing necessary centricity for our ability to thrive and grow.

But the Itself is not enough for many of us. Instead, we seem to gravitate to that which is not itself, that which is artificial, substitute, lesser, derivative, less true, even false. In our ignorance of what is real, in our greed for what is false, and in our angry delusions positing ‘other’ and ‘enemy’ — we fail to see and feel that which is actually nearest to our very center, namely, reality/truth/itself.

"In the long run, no one can show another the error that is within him, unless the other is convinced that his critic first sees and loves the good that is within him. So while we are perfectly willing to tell our adversary he is wrong, we will never be able to do so effectively until we can ourselves appreciate where he is right. And we can never accept his judgment on our errors until he gives evidence that he really appreciates our own particular truth. Love, love only, love of our deluded fellow man as he actually is, in his delusion and in his sin: this alone can open the door of truth. As long as we do not have this love, as long as this love is not active and effective in our lives (for words and good wishes will never suffice) we have no real access to the truth. At least not to moral truth."

(- Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 69, in http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/)

Downstairs, Ethiopian Sidamo Italian coffee beans from Green Tree roaster in Lincolnville wait for grinder, water, and flame. The barn sits patiently waiting to be sorted and emptied. Chill morning waits for white dog to find soccer ball to dribble down dooryard.

It is voting day.

Maybe this time something good will come of it.

abnegatio

In 1968 we thought the world was coming apart. It did.

In 2017 we know the world has not only come apart, it has been kicked into the gutter.

Call me sentimental, but it’s perfectly clear that delusion and insanity have become the default ground of everyday activity and thought.

Guns and bullets.

Lies and narcissism.

Celebrity and wealth.

Hypocrisy and arrogance.

Now that I’ve given my credentials as a failing human being, I bow my head in expiation.

Ignore me.

I’m not here.

to know you’re not there

Zen masters would slap you upside the head. So would inner city mommas and drill sergeants and boxing trainers and someone suddenly realizing they’ve been standing just outside the universe in a deep void of detached forgetfulness.

Ms. Langer: Most people are just not there, and they’re not there to know that they’re not there. And when I address the difference between mindlessness and mindfulness — so since my mindlessness was leading in my thinking, there was no reason for me to appeal to anything Eastern. This was all a Western scientific notion as I was developing it. 

Ms. Tippett: Right. So interesting. 

Ms. Langer: And so mindfulness, for me, is the very simple process of actively noticing new things. When you actively notice new things, that puts you in the present, makes you sensitive to context. As you’re noticing new things, it’s engaging, and it turns out, after a lot of research, that we find that it’s literally, not just figuratively, enlivening. 

   So the Eastern notions — I did research, again, back in the ’80s, on transcendental meditation, and that’s also — meditation is also useful, but it’s quite different, and different ways of getting to the same place. Meditation, no matter what kind of meditation, is engaged to produce post-meditative mindfulness. And the mindfulness, as I and my students… 

Ms. Tippett: You’re saying it’s a means to an end, and you’re going straight to the end. 

Ms. Langer: Exactly. So for us, you’re noticing new things. You’re there. And I think that over the last ten, maybe even 20 years, that if you look at all of the different forms of treatments to become more mindful — this means to the same end — that they have become more and more like what we’ve been studying from the beginning. Meditation that used to be required 20 minutes twice a day is slowly changing. 

   But I find that what lots of these people do — and it’s also part of folk psychology, where you tell people, “Be there, be in the moment” — when you’re not in the moment, you’re not there to know you’re not there, so it’s really an empty instruction 

 (-Ellen Langor in conversation with Krista Tippett, Science of Mindlessness and Mindfulness, On Being)

Worrying about tomorrow makes waste of today.

At Friday evening conversation two attendees said they are future oriented. I realized I have no future in my attention.

Now and here seem to be sole attendants to my cell of solitary unconfinement and ever-present origin refinement.

For the time-being, that which surrounds the inner core of timeless mirroring ubiquity, it is our instant to instant practice to gassho and bow, sit ready and stand alongside what-is here-now in its very appearance.

Existence-in-Itself asks; Do you see this? Do you hear this? Do you feel what surrounds, is near, within?

Last night I held the hand of someone in dimly lighted room in hospice house. She welcomed me with this holy human hospitality. We sat in silence. Just that. Sharing what was there. Then, a family member returned. And we touched hands.

Today’s difficulties look at us, and seeing no one there, choose to evaporate.

 “Mindlessness is the application of yesterday’s business solutions to today’s problems.” 

 “And mindfulness is attunement to today’s demands to avoid tomorrow’s difficulties.”   (—Ellen Langer)

I don’t know the difference between life and death.

It seems mindless of me.

It seems we believe there is a difference.

If I had any beliefs they would be looking toward a realization that any sip of coffee, any glance at November leaves, or added hour in an arbitrary designation of time, is the whole of new light shining through and through each being arising in awareness of deep intimacy and perennial presence.

Bells announce what is brought to mind.

Sounding, as each thing does, the beginning-ending, the ending-beginning of everything.

have you ever seen such a sight

Three blind mice. Three blind mice.

Donald, Mitch, and Paul.

Where’s the farmers wife when she is needed?

only to

There is nowhere to go.

Not-now does not exist.

Siddhartha sat still.

Jesus arrived alone.

Here’s what I think: not fond of the metaphors ‘ransom’ and ‘debt’, I wonder how to say ‘emergent’ and ‘perfecting’ without holding some finished and final ideal in mind.

The words ‘beginning’ and ‘arriving’ come to mind. We are always doing one or the other without ever completing.

Complementing, yes. Complimenting, yes.

Nothing fixed that is not flowing. Nothing carved in stone that is not breath and water moving in and out with grace.

Even if the idea of God crumbled and lost its meaning, making no sense, having no cogency . . . 

Remaining would be here, 

Appearing would be now,  

Emerging would be this.

Three forms of presence: here, now, this — situation, circumstance, surrounding — these companions on the way: sat, chit, ananda (being, consciousness, bliss).

Perhaps we have only to look,

Only to listen,

Only to 

Only to,

Only to . . .

———————.      ———————-       ———————

(-from dictionary app):

only

ohn-lee IPA

— adverb 

1. without others or anything further; alone; solely; exclusively: This information is for your eyes only. 

2. no more than; merely; just: If it were only true! I cook only on weekends. 

3. as recently as: I read that article only yesterday. 

4. in the final outcome or decision: You will only regret your harsh words to me. 

— adjective 

5. being the single one or the relatively few of the kind: This is the only pencil I can find. 

6. having no sibling or no sibling of the same sex: an only child; an only son. 

7. single in superiority or distinction; unique; the best: the one and only Muhammad Ali. 

— conjunction 

8. but (introducing a single restriction, restraining circumstance, or the like): I would have gone, only you objected. 

9. Older Use. except; but: Only for him you would not be here. 

— Idioms 

10. only too, 

1. as a matter of fact; extremely: I am only too glad to go. 

1. unfortunately; very: It is only too likely to happen

what does it mean to be ‘doing now’

The two Jehovah Witnesses showed a brief video which was interesting.

We had a conversation which was interesting.

What was taking place between us (inter-esse) was as the question at end of video posed itself, namely, “What is Jesus doing now?”

What is, is reality.

Jesus is the perfection of human spirit.

And ‘doing now’ is the very name and definition of God.
(E.g., to the question “What is God?” The answer, “God is ‘doing now’!”)

Imagine!

Yes —

What are you doing now?

頂きます（いただきます）

Jo-Ann taught me the word during 50 years of friendship.

THE MEANING OF ITADAKIMASU 

In its simplest form, Itadakimasu 頂きますいただ　 is used before receiving something. That's why the most common itadakimasu translation is:
頂きます（いただきます）TO RECEIVE; TO GET; TO ACCEPT; TO TAKE (HUMBLE).

A year ago tomorrow (2nov16) she bowed to the guest who bowed back to her.

And went beyond.

Receiving, accepting, love.

I am a slow student.

In memory, today, I say はい!

Hai!

Yes!

do not hide your face from me

It matters, a sense of the holy.

This eve, it matters.

names

No one dying doesn’t want to live.

Does that desire propel life through death into another version of life pre-death?

I look into this. And see only to the edge of disappearance.

At Sunday Evening Practice we spoke aloud the many names of departed meetingbrook community members who’ve disappeared at that edge the last twenty five years. So many names!

patient visitor

In hospital rooms we laugh about things that are petits riens.

In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing. Antonio Porchia

When you think about it, what else is there?

touching her hand

when someone dies,

      in that place, that instant,

in your presence;

      the very next breath we take —

still, silent,

      unseeing,

the wonder of it . . .

this realization

Adonai, you have made me alone!

I am alone as you are alone.

There are, it has been said, no others.

Shema’ yisrael Adonai elohenu Adonai echad!
   (Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord alone!)

It means there are no others.

Does that sound scary?

If this were a horror film with horror thinking, yes, it would.

But as an ontological theological existential consideration, it suggests that our beliefs — that we are isolated alienated antagonistic individuals vying against one another for goods, possessions, and power — are error-ridden and illusory misunderstandings about the true nature of reality and being, illusions that keep us warlike and cruel.

We are alone.

Notions of a god that chooses some over others are deluded notions. Notions of a god that is better than other gods are mistaken notions. And notions of superior races, purer peoples, advanced intelligences, and higher classes of cultured and wealthy people — are historical and psychological aberrations of sociological and colonial fabrication.

We are alone.

And it takes courage to see this.

And willingness to realize this.

An awareness beyond ego myopia.

A humility to recognize god alone.

God is this realization!

hoc est enim corpus meum

In prison we spoke of current koan. I tell of eating apple cider toast in truck driving to Warren. I held it up and said, “this is my body.”

I bite into toast while aware of sky, fields, trees, colorful leaves — and, looking around, I think, “this is my body.”

I come to prison building, walk in with AA volunteer, NAACP volunteer, and loose shoelace caseworker. In front desk area I greet D’s father arriving for visit. In inside corridor I greet D being patted down for visit. In yard I greet S going to job repairing furniture. Arriving at education area I greet N assisting an inmate in class. In room used for Buddhist group I greet the men attending.

And I realize: this is my body, these are my body.

As the morning continued.

All of it . . .

Is my body.

what everything is filled with.

There are times when you don’t care. When you stay at home and rain falls persistently. When nothing seems to enliven.

He who has seen everything empty itself is close to knowing what everything is filled with. — Antonio Porchia

It is too difficult trying to follow the news out of DC.

As much as I’d like to think there’s something there, there isn’t.

I turn.

And leave.

let’s start with this

All this will pass.

A zen master said, “truth is just like this.” He said that definition of truth would still be true in 500 years. Truth is just like this!

So, we ask: What is this?

Many centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates used to walk through the streets and marketplaces of Athens, teaching his students. He would say to them, “You must understand yourself! You must understand yourself! You must understand yourself.” Then one day a student said, “Sir, you always say we must understand ourselves. But do you understand yourself?”   

“No, I don‘t know myself,” Socrates replied. “But I understand this ‘don‘t know.‘“ This is very interesting teaching. Buddhist practice points at the same experience, because most human beings pass through their lives without the slightest sense of what they are.   

We understand many things about this world, but we don‘t understand ourselves. So why do human beings come into this world? Why do we live in this world? For love? For money? For respect or fame? Do you live for your wife, husband, or children? Why do you live in this world? If someone asked you these question, you might very well answer, “I live for my children. I live to earn enough money for them, or maybe just to have a good life.” Most people think like this. They live only for their family, for some fleeting social respectability, perhaps to enjoy art or to get some powerful position. Everyone wants to have a good situation for themselves. If you look at this world very closely, it is easy to see that most people eat and sleep and live merely for their own personal happiness. Yet these things are not the real purpose of human beings‘ life. They are just temporary means for living in the world. If human beings cannot find who they are, how can they ever be truly happy?  

(—from The Compass of Zen  p.28, by Zen Master Seung Sahn)

 The events of these days and months in America’s political landscape have been, and will continue to be, bizarre and confusing. The president, some feel, is unhinged, petty, mean, and a narcissist of enormous and dangerous proportions. Others feel he is the perfect antidote to a stuffy, controlled, and ineffective governance in Washington DC.

I don’t know.

I have an opinion. It is my opinion that the divide between philosophies of governance, the divide between ethnic groups and races, the divide between sane use of force and insane use of guns and violence, the divide between responsible and respectful behavior of men to women and the crude, power abusing, sex using disrespect of women by pretentious men, the divide between wealthy and poor — all these divides have deepened and separated and stand against each other with little hope of reconciliation or harmonious outcome.

But this opinion, too, will pass.

We live in an existence that is fluid and ephemeral.

In this impermanent circumstance — Who are we?

What am I?

Socrates didn’t know.

I don’t know.

It becomes our task, our profound duty, to understand this “don’t know.”

I am “don’t know.” As are you.

Let’s start with this!

the word, of

Hear, O Lord, the sound.

Of.

My voice.

. . .

Note:  

of 

əv/
        preposition 

1.
expressing the relationship between a part and a whole.
"the sleeve of his coat"
2.
expressing the relationship between a scale or measure and a value.
"an increase of 5 percent"

fed up

The notions of truth or falsehood have been tossed out by this White House. Now the standard is ‘whatever we say is true; what you think about what we say is false.’

It will have to be a serious and concerted effort on the part of thoughtful people to resist and counterbalance the distortion and newspeak that cynical provocateurs serve as rancid food to hungry citizens.

gone

No
t
me

No
me

No
thing

Per
fect