rejoice the heart

What does God want?

If God is a transcendent and supreme being beyond imagination, what is wanted?

If "God" is the originary energetic impulse inherent in all manner of matter, is there some destination or goal wanted?

“If we would completely rejoice the heart of God, let us strive in all things to conform ourselves to his divine will. Let us not only strive to conform ourselves, but also to unite ourselves to whatever disposition God makes of us.”  (--Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Uniformity with God’s Will, 5)

  What disposition?

dis·po·si·tion

/ˌdispəˈziSH(ə)n/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1.  a person's inherent qualities of mind and character.

2. the way in which something is placed or arranged, especially in relation to other things.

What is there within us? Inherent?

Or, what is somewhere else? Beyond?

1. • 
     

     
     

     
     

     2.
     the way in which something is placed or arranged, especially in relation to other things.
     "the plan need not be accurate so long as it shows the disposition of the rooms"
     synonyms:

Gazing up at 

The cherry blossoms in spring 

My mind is refreshed 

I can even forget  

The ups and downs of life. 

- Rengetsu (1791-1875). (Dailyzen) 

Either way, it comes down to what is.

It is August.

Time to thank all originators and perpetuators.

Pray to have the heart for it!

a near mortally wounded government

In fifteen months we'll be down to one Democrat candidate for president. 

Between now and then the current occupant of the white house will have exhausted the patience and decency of the greater population. He will either have withdrawn or been deemed utterly unreelectable. 

The Republican Party, damaged beyond recognition after having backed and made excuses for the aberrancy of their prior four years will be splintered into revisionist apologists or reeducated extremists. 

A Democrat will be elected. Who will that Democrat be? It doesn't matter. Whoever it is will be a triage president caring for a near mortally wounded government. 

I think there are hard years ahead.

unitary reality

Listening is the sacrament of silence and forgiveness.

But I remembered once meeting the great humanistic psychotherapist Carl Rogers, who was the grandfather of a good friend. Later, I studied films of him working with patients. I noticed that he rarely spoke, but that his listening was so devout it drew out the truth from his clients like a healing salve. Something he had written had always stayed with me:

Before every session, I take a moment to remember my humanity. There is no experience that this man has that I cannot share with him, no fear that I cannot understand, no suffering that I cannot care about, because I too am human. No matter how deep his wound, he does not need to be ashamed in front of me. I too am vulnerable. And because of this, I am enough. Whatever his story, he no longer needs to be alone with it. This is what will allow his healing to begin.

Sharing our stories helps us to heal. Intuitively, I sensed that the greatest gift I could offer Travis in that moment was my undivided attention. Listening without judgment is probably the simplest, most profound way to connect. It is an act of love.
[...]

Excerpt from: "The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully" by Frank Ostaseski. Scribd.

Each of us is participatory in another’s actions.

Suggesting a deeper prospect of unitary reality.

creation spirituality

In-fleshed

Hands and feet

Touch and travel

Spirit-life

Just

Now

no love, no god

Does saving our soul mean preserving the life of God within and thus without?

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.”
(—Ignatius of Loyola)

Is this what I have been missing?

Is God before and beyond us as that which is praised, reverenced, and served?

Saying it differently, is that which is praised, reverenced, and served — God?

Do I love God?

And not loving, there is no God?

No love, no God?

For me?

Is God that which is in the very act of praising, referencing, and serving?

Without which nothing else is?

Today is Ignatius’ feast day.

I greet this reality.

vive la différence*

There is a nomadic quality to monads. Wandering away from home into a solitude that longs for home.

We created a motto for our hermitage:

Embodying the dwelling place of the Alone;
Stepping aside to make room for Another.

While looking toward intimacy with all things, all beings -- there is a non-attachment that is called for which some mistake for detachment.

They're not the same thing.

...   ...   ...

* (responding to David Brook's op ed piece, 29july2019)

reversing the blade at each turn

Haiku

      For Sam Manning (d. 9july19)

sculling through narrow

dockage, Sam stood for passage

to smiling kindness 

to love neighbor as self is unambiguous

He has a death grip on everyone's attention.

He will be remembered as a president who shattered the office, broke congress, made criminality his prime bragging right, and left in his wake a disillusioned country. 

He’ll wear all such designations as medals of accomplishment and Emmys of notoriety.

We have in this person a truly disconcerting phenomenon. 

He’s our president. 

We created him.

be an outcast

For a long time poetry has been the way, for me, to see through the world.

I like what I see when I see through poetry.

Be Nobody's Darling  
                  By Alice Walker 

Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.
Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.
Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
Or line the crowded
River beds
With other impetuous
Fools. 

Make a merry gathering
On the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave hurt words
They said. 

But be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.

There is poetry to putting hands together in gassho whenever passing a cemetery.

Ask those there to pray for us. Invite them to be with God.

My plan is to fashion a tee shirt that says on front:

May God
have  mercy
on your soul 

And on back:

May God
put mercy
in your soul 

I will wear it to every gathering where prejudice and meanness is preached until I get arrested, go to jail, and die in prison.

Someone at Sunday Evening Practice said they'd visit me in prison, sit with me as I lay dying.

That was a kind offer.

(woe)man

This is the age of compromised morality when virtue is for saps and the really cool guys and gals are devoid of any resemblance to family values and religious nobless oblige.

Rather, slime and seduction, mockery and megaphone insults — these are what a real (woe)man, a real leader needs to thrive.

I don’t buy it.

I think that Ms Dowd’s turn to herself as story with self referencing soap operatic memes is a brilliant display of trump-shtick writing mirroring the president-shtick tv show currently running on every channel and reviewed in every news column.

When the Theater of the Absurd had its run last century who would have thought it would be embodied and performed as our daily bread from political and church pulpits much the way Soma was delivered in George Orwell’s Brave New World.

Are we citizens now mere data points for meaningless unconscious consumption of both burlesque governance and parody punditry?

I am loathe to think...

So?

these days

thinking about truth

it cannot be seen

it is God

and who believes in God

just sitting, saturday morning

I don't know

what to think

about this.

...

I don't

know what

to think

about this

...

I

don't know

what

to think about

this

but a whimper

There is a denial of responsibility on part of senate to attend to election health for the country. 

Their tired excuse of staying partisan efforts is ludicrous. 

We are going to have to replace intransigent legislators or see our representative democracy replaced by foe and fiend.

getting on with it

ok

Senate & McConnell refuse election security legislation.

Two things:

I. I'm ok that democracy has run its course with the Republicans in power.
2. I'm ok that Trump has beaten the system and justice, and gotten away with everything.

Now then, my two mile walk through cemetery and harbor side was useful.

And, having watched the Netflix documentary The Great Hack, then, Carole Cadwalladr on TED, I feel what Martin Heidegger's essay on technology warned about has come into play.

Democracy and fairness in elections has played out.

Justice for wrongdoing of people in privileged high places is no longer in play.

ok

Let's get on with it.

Whatever that means.

Lament
BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY 

Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I'll make you little jackets;
I'll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There'll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why. 

jittai

What does being alive mean?

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Is ‘being’ alive?

Is that the switch? Not that we come to an experience of our aliveness — because such an experience could still leave us alone in our aliveness. Rather, it is ‘being’ that is alive.

Hence, an experience of ‘being alive’ is the first step out of separated existence toward integral existence wherein everything is alive and we are part of vital reality.

It is the first step toward beginning to experience and understand what has been known as the ethic of reciprocity, or, the golden rule.

If everything is alive, and our task is to learn to live in proper relationship with everything and everyone, our attitudes, judgments, laws, and interactions take on a new and profound viewpoint.

Your children are not your children. 

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. 

They come through you but not from you, 

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

(—Khalil Gibran, The Prophet, On Children)

 Life’s longing for itself. 

We long for the ‘Itself’

実態, じったい 

• jittai

• true state 

• actual condition 

• reality

 Itself.

radio drama

Judiciary committee done; Intelligence committee convenes.

If you like the dynamics of rhetoric and persuasive speech, the hearing satisfies.

As a nonpartisan member of the radio audience I appreciate the pro and con efforts of partisan adversaries.

Mueller is hammered, then courted. As a fellow 74 yr old I empathize with the former fbi director’s sometimes stuttering response to the rapid fire shoehorned questions while thumbing through a 400 page report in front of him.

Two things:

1.

I admit to making use of dithering elderly privilege when I dislike any interrogatory sent my way.

2. 

This to Nytimes Bruni op-ed today:

If you’ve read the report you’ve earned the right to be crazed with the obliviousness of those that haven’t. The thing about truth is that it doesn’t care who holds it or who pushes it aside. Truth is it’s own best company. Truth knows that solitude is what it is most given.

Sitting by river in Milo Maine, dog licking water from his coat, the second hearing begins.

Mueller must be tired of the questions. 

So many of us are tired of what the presidency has become and what Congress is not.

surround it with inner space

There is great delight in close and reflective reading, in intelligent and insightful conversation.

Bill Moyers is known for facilitating both.

Bill: What about the notion of creating something from nothing? 

Hugh: You have to have nothing in order to really make something. You have to enter yourself in order to find. He power — to get the gift of being able to emanate something. You have to create space — or allow space to occur. Rilke once said that in order to know a tree, you have to surround it with inner space — only in your renouncing is it truly there.
 (P.6, Bill Moyers, Genesis, A Living Conversation) 

It is a time in our culture and mythology for a new metaphor to stretch us into the contemporary and atemporal beyond.

Inner space is outer manifestation.

Behold what is within without.

finally

Tolstoy wrote of Mosaic Law and Eternal Law

Jesus, he said, acknowledged the former but proclaimed the latter --

Something passing passes; what is perennial is loving wisdom  

superstition stupor-nation

If you step in shit,
it's hard to ignore

America has lost
its sense of smell

same shoes
every day

walk through
people's house

people's halls
as heads turn

left foot
right foot

pretending no stink
proclaiming perfume

reasonable haiku

I would like to be
depressed for a while — do not
attempt to reach me

haiku (after reading news)

too many places
so dark
where go to find light —
save yourself here now

background feuerbach

Is God

Itself?

Our not

Seeing God

Our blindness?

What is

In itself

A matter of

Experience

With no

One experiencing

a lucky hand

Suboxyn, the men said, in prison Friday. So began the tutorial. Its use in recovery programs. Its relation to heroin. Its substitutionary function. How one proposed reentry house was refusing to sponsor it for proposed population in proposed newly purchased house.

Two of men in our room had been heroin users. They knew suboxyn, explained the feeling, explored the politics, stated their own positions, supported the drug-free stance for returning to the street.

These were serious men in for serious crimes expressing serious consideration for a serious issue of our time, and their time. They’ve been working on themselves. They have practices and points of view. You can feel it.

Someone brought The Science of Mind, a book by Earnest Holmes. We read around. Another was paging through Zen and The Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton. A new fellow was going through Tricycle magazines.

Men came in and out. We silently sat. We did walking meditation. We talked. It’s a Friday morning ritual over twenty years running. I greet one man in German. Four, five, six in hallway — our brief yet sufficient re-up. These are friends. One tells me of another man in smu having a shitty time of it.

After final silence and final circle, we embrazzo, shake hands, extend greetings to absent woman and dog, and I wander through heavy steel doors. A short-timer wants to know if he could attend a meetingbrook conversation when he gets out in four weeks. Come on by, I say.

Signing out at captains row woman introduces herself as part time chaplain while regular chaplain is doing military chaplain training duty. She’d done it, she says, happy to be filling in, hoping to stay on, proud that her father had been baptized in prison many years ago and she’s now here.

The walk out is, as always, a practice of gratitude for having walked in and being able to walk out. Desk officer as I sign out says same thing to me. “So, they’re letting you out, eh? He reaches over and shakes my hand. Something very profound is acknowledged in haiku brevity.

A work crew is removing the large stones from failed path cut into grassy oval years after the failure was apparent the day after laying it. Something new, asphalty, will be coming. Men from the farm shovel and rake the rehabilitation in hot sun.

I started teaching college courses in the old prison thirty years ago, eleven years before the millennium. I’ve sat with and learned with a lot of men. Something more unexplainable than fondness is felt, is in the bones.

Somebody up there likes me.

Or, it’s been a lucky hand.

DeThe Science of Mind, a book by Ernest Holmes.

resist punching in nose

There’s no dealing with bullies. Bullies in schoolyards and corner stores stay bullies in business, become bullies in White House. 

In my old neighborhood, which was not far from toughguy-in-chief, there was always someone with nobility and character who would shrivel the Bluto with a withering look — no need for a punch in the nose. 

Tolstoy became fascinated with the words, “Do not resist evil.” He, along with that fellow from Nazareth, had serious credibility when looking at errant misguided baloney. 

Where is that real-deal moral embodiment today?  

saturday sitting sessihin solitary touching heart mind

We sat and breathed together four hours

Meditation retreat in hospice room

Walking meditation, silent chanting

Fingering beads, spine straight,

Looking at my life his life my life

Our life, her life, my missing the point

Bowing, touching hand, wishing well

And yes all will be just as well is

Saying goodnight to nurse telling

Woman just died as we each will

writing poem for poetry, tea, and thee

Old song, old test

I’d say, forgiving

The way she laughed 

About the chocolate chip

Cookie she’d just eaten

Or when I said I’d gained

Some weight, she looked

At me with cheerful disregard

Saying we don’t have to change that.

If I could keep her laughing

Everything would be alright

Checking boxes, no, nothing’s

Changed, I’m fine, thank you

Now that four years ago

I no longer have blond hair

We walk to end of counter

Can I read, with glasses, top line

V h t w (hesitate) p a

Another slide: q k s o g

Good, she says, returning to 

Our spot, # 132 above us

She used to walk 8 miles a day

When I tell her I walk 2. She’d 

Donated an organ to her son.

The walking was necessary.

I said good for both of them

As we went again to corner booth

She looked at me, looked at screen

Said this was you in 2011, want to

Leave that picture? Her colleague

Waiting behind her looked at me

Looked at screen, shook her head

When I said I didn’t look much different

We all smiled at one another. 

There was nothing left to say

It was just one of those things

I’ll get by as long as I have you

wfh/

19july19

broken shells on ground, skitterish birds, red squirrels, chipmunks

“The price of human suffering is very very high. I don't know what we're going to do." (hospice nurse, from, Stopping for Death, The Nurses of Wells Hospice, documentary, Kanopy)

nothing to say

one of those lookups

yesterday their anniversary

he holds a coffee cup

sharing prefix/suffix brook

evil

Here’s what Wikipedia says of evil:

One of the five paintings of Extermination of Evil portrays Sendan Kendatsuba, one of the eight guardians of Buddhist law, banishing evil.

Evil, in a general sense, is the opposite or absence of good. It can be an extremely broad concept, though in everyday usage is often used more narrowly to denote profound wickedness. It is generally seen as taking multiple possible forms, such as the form of personal moral evil commonly associated with the word, or impersonal natural evil (as in the case of natural disasters or illnesses), and in religious thought, the form of the demonic or supernatural/eternal.^[1]

Evil can denote profound immorality,^[2] but typically not without some basis in the understanding of the human condition, where strife and suffering (cf. Hinduism) are the true roots of evil. In certain religious contexts, evil has been described as a supernatural force.^[2] Definitions of evil vary, as does the analysis of its motives.^[3] Elements that are commonly associated with personal forms of evil involve unbalanced behavior involving anger, revenge, fear, hatred, psychological trauma, expediency, selfishness, ignorance, destruction or neglect.^[4]

Evil is sometimes perceived as the dualistic antagonistic binary opposite to good,^[5] in which good should prevail and evil should be defeated.^[6] In cultures with Buddhist spiritual influence, both good and evil are perceived as part of an antagonistic duality that itself must be overcome through achieving Nirvana.^[6] The philosophical questions regarding good and evil are subsumed into three major areas of study:^[7] Meta-ethics concerning the nature of good and evil, Normative ethics concerning how we ought to behave, and Applied ethics concerning particular moral issues. While the term is applied to events and conditions without agency, the forms of evil addressed in this article presume an evildoer or doers.

Some religions and philosophies deny evil's existence and usefulness in describing people.

Etymology

The modern English word evil (Old English yfel) and its cognates such as the German Übel and Dutcheuvel are widely considered to come from a Proto-Germanic reconstructed form of *ubilaz, comparable to the Hittite huwapp- ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European form *wap- and suffixed zero-grade form *up-elo-. Other later Germanic forms include Middle English evel, ifel, ufel, Old Frisian evel(adjective and noun), Old Saxon ubil, Old High German ubil, and Gothic ubils.

The root meaning of the word is of obscure origin though shown^[8] to be akin to modern German Das Übel (although evil is normally translated as Das Böse) with the basic idea of transgressing.^[9

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil

Follow the link for a much more comprehensive treatment of evil in Wikipedia.

learn, face to face, something true and loving

Remembering Eric Garner. (d. 17july2014)
Remembering Freddie Gray.
Remembering Michael Brown.
Remembering Sandra Bland.
Remembering Tamir Rice.
Remembering Philando Castile.
Remembering Samuel DuBose.
Remembering Terence Crutcher.
Remembering Sylville K. Smith.
Remembering Walter Scott
And all those I can't remember or don't know.

Kevin: Oh, I don't want to do it. I'm a very emotional person when it comes, like, stuff like this. And crying is, like, hard not to do. 

Dave: Well, somebody got to cry for us all, you know. 

Kevin: Yeah, man. I think that's what I do a lot of the time. 

Dave: You crying for everybody? 

Kevin: I think I cry for, you know, everybody. Yeah. 

Dave: Thank you.

(from documentary, Copwatch, directed by Camilla Hall, 2017, on Kanopy) 

We note and have gratitude for:

Ramsey Orta
Kevin Moore
David Whitt
Jacob Crawford

We start out not even looking at one another. Then we watch one another. Soon, we fervently trust, we will see one another -- and learn, face to face, something true and loving.

...   ...   ...

(For background, cf Fearing For His Life, The Cost of Recording Police Brutality in The Verge, 13mar2019, by Chloé Cooper Jones) 

is, indeed, wrong

For many of us, outrage and incomprehension have run their course with this president. 

A new calculus emerges. Perhaps all that Trump says is wrong with America is, indeed, wrong.

Just because the messenger is thoroughly distasteful and reprehensible it doesn't mean that the message isn't true.

Trump is possibly right -- America is a dark and hateful place.

That, and the need to mistrust every agency currently operating in the government, along with the need to give credence only to proprietary corporate interests, becomes a dizzying and depressing prospect.

Thank God, some say,  Trump has arrived!

s l i p

Sitting silence, no one is saying anything. 

In this silence, all are gathered listening as presence with one another. 

We are between one another. 

An inter-presence. 

Can you feel it?

Silent listening inter-presence.

Yes?

Yes!

Unless you are the president of the United States.

Then "no" is the operative word.

No Blacks. No Puerto Ricans. No Palestinians. No Somalis.

Only white men.

Women, some women, are ok as long as they compliment white men.

It is 2019. The president tells four women to go back to the countries they came from.

Go back to Massachusetts. Go back to Michigan. Go back to Minnesota. Go back to New York City.

He doesn't mean country. He means go back to wherever it is that people of color, that women of color should hide themselves and not interfere with their white betters; those who bet that fear of difference will motivate votes for the man in the White House; those who delude themselves that because of their white skin color they are better than others.

Something has broken right in front of our eyes.

Is broken.

Its time to sweep up the broken pieces and place them in the dustbin.

Take then to the dump.

And drive out of that place of refuse, take a left turn, and return too affirmation.

Accepting what is coming to be.

A community of people attempting to become human.

Face to face.

Attending.

Silent listening inter-presence.

Grüß Gott...