and we recognize -- words after 9/11

 As September 11 approaches, this:

For me, that there's something "out there" and that I'm here no longer meant anything, because every time I thought there was something out there, it turns into inevitably something opposed to me. Something I have to define myself against, whether that's God, or whether that's a Christian, or whether that's a Muslim, or whether that's a Buddhist. And that's not my experience.  

My genuine experience of life is that there is nothing "out there." This is all there is. And when you see the seamlessness of it all, that's what I mean by "God." Every tradition has that. Every morning, three times a day since I'm five or six years old, I've been saying, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One." Right? It's one of our few creedal statements, the Shema. Three times a day, since I'm six years old.  

If you ask what 9/11 really did, it made me understand the truth of that. The truth of that, "Everything is one." Not that there's some guy hanging out there who has it all together, who we call "One," but that it is all one. We all know it deep down. We've all had those experiences. whether it's looking at our child in a crib or whether it's looking at our lover or looking at a mountaintop, or looking at a sunset. Right? We've all had those experiences. And we recognize, "Whoa. I'm much more connected here."  

That's what those firemen had. They recognized; they didn't have time to think about it, right? Because actually, if you think about it, you begin to create separations. They didn't think about it. All they knew is we're absolutely connected. We're absolutely connected to the 86th floor. Well, that's where God is. That's not where God is. God isn't anywhere. That's what we mean when we say God. ...

(--from, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, PBS interview, Rabbi Irwin Kula, winter 2002) 

Words take on so much more when they are deeply felt. 

no t here

Voice: remember,

Listener: remember what?

Voice: remember you know nothing and have nothing to teach.

[silence]

Voice: are you still there?

Listener: yes.

Voice: there’s the problem!

Listener: yes, of course.

by any other name

 We are one phrase in the universe’s telling of itself.

Stones: Stones are very slow stories with secret memories of fire inside. If you just put a stone on a table it becomes an altar, and a temple appears around it. 

(—John Tarrant, in Meet the Blue Dragon, Lion’s Roar, 31july19)

Dont make anything out of it.

It will go away. 

turning away

when the burley man

stood in doorway of his agenda

nothing else entered room

from the creative void

We begin eleventh year of poetry group at nursing facility. Twice a month for an hour.

At conversation on porch at hermitage solitaries claim their idiosyncratic preferences.

We are only what is taking place.

lived through

Reading about Robert Lowell, his poetry, manic-depression, and family history of mental illness.

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Characterby Kay Redfield Jamison, 2017

It’s a hard and distressing disease.

Still, one does what one can with what one has.

“Darkness honestly lived through is a place of wonder and life.” (Robert Lowell)

He also wrote,

All’s misalliance. 

Yet why not say what happened?

(—from his poem Epilogue, 1977) 

prête à partir

As nears what nears

Good dog weakens

His caretaker has gone to the mats

Keeping close

As what seems to be closing

Comes closer

In the earth

What is Christ? Whatever Christ is, Christ is in the earth.

Where is Christ? Wherever Christ is, Christ is in the universe.

Teilhard de Chardin looked in.

In is where what is resides and reverberates.

And generates energy to actualize expansion to everything we consider to be the outer or exterior presentation to everything else in the realm of encounter.

The within of existence — that which stands in, before and beyond,

 [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in  him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible . . . . all things were created through him and for him [Colossians 1:15]. . . . 

But Teilhard felt that the full cosmic significance of this vision and its physical reality had been overlooked among his coreligionists. . . . 

When Teilhard tried to stress the cosmic aspect and bring it forward as a central motif in the Christian view of reality, his friends were embarrassed. . . . Teilhard apparently had an instinctive grasp of something which he was not free to express under the terms of his tradition. Yet it was a vital feature of his own system, in fact, it was the bond which he so desperately sought between his God in heaven, taught by his religion, and his God in the earth, taught by science and experience in life. The story of his life is the story of his struggle to bring this darkly sensed Mediator into such a form that both sides of him could live with it. It was a terrible conflict, but it produced a great many beautiful fruits both in his writings and in his own character. . . . 

The central conception in Teilhard’s notion of the cosmic Christ is that “the universe forms one natural whole, which finally can subsist only by dependence from [Christ]. That’s the main thing.” [1] Teilhard sees himself as “the evangelist” of “Christ in the universe,” one who preaches Christ as containing “all the unyielding immensity and grandeur of the world.” [2] His “fundamental vision” [3] as expressed in The Divine Milieu is of Christ as All-in-everything, in its reality and in its future. 

(— in, Cosmology: Part Two, All-in-Everything, Beatrice Butreau, in Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, Wednesday, September 4, 2019)

When some say we are meant to dwell in God, they are suggesting something much deeper that one might suspect. 

beable, this spiritual reality

Just what it looks like.

I. ‘BEABLES’ AND INDUCTION 

When I was in graduate school in Scotland, I was told the following parable by my advisors. An economist, a mathematician, and a logician were on a train traveling north. Just after they passed the Scottish border they noticed a single cow standing in a field. The economist remarked, “That cow is brown. All cows in Scotland must be brown.” The mathematician replied, “No, one cow in Scotland is brown.” The logician quietly but firmly muttered “No, one side of one cow in Scotland is brown.” There are many versions of this parable involving a variety of professions and there are any number of lessons to be taken from it. It is usually meant as a dig at one of the particular professions that is included, especially when told by a member of one of the other professions. At the heart of the parable, though, is an open question: how much can we reasonably infer from a given observation? 

It is worth noting here that my advisors were both mathematicians. As such, I always had the impression that the parable, as they told it, was meant as a dig at both economistsand logicians. Clearly the economist has over-extrapolated from the given data. That point is hardly up for debate. But has the logician under-extrapolated? The fact is that our intrepid travelers do not know if the cow is the same color on both sides absent additional information. It is entirely possible that the mathematician, in casually suggesting that the cow was entirely brown, was wrong. Yet, in our own experience with cows, most of us would probably think it highly unlikely that a cow had such asymmetrical coloring as to be entirely different on either side. 

... 

For the purposes of science, the existence of certain things is taken as self-evident. I may awake tomorrow to find that I am actually a Buddhist monk living in a monastery in the Himalaya and that my life as a physicist was nothing but a dream. The logician mightrightly point out that I can’t disprove that. But it doesn’t help me in the here and now where, dream or not, I am a physicist. As one unnamed reviewer in Philosophical Magazineonce put it, science is the “rational correlation of experience” (as quoted in [13]). In order to ‘do’ science we must have some common base from which we can build our theories. So we assume that certain elements of our collective experience simply must exist. In fact the logician in the parable does not deny the existence of the cow nor even that one side of the cow is brown. The denial is only of an inferred experience. The logician takes the phrase “rational correlation of experience” literally in that none of the travelers ‘experience’ (observe) the other side of the cow. They can only rationally correlate what they directly experience. Of course that’s a problem for quite a few theories. Here is where Bohr and Bell are right; the world of our direct experience is classical[*].

(from, Bell’s Theory of Beables and the Concept of ‘Universe’Ian T. Durham Department of Physics, Saint Anselm College, Manchester, NH 03102(Dated: May 8, 2018)

[* What is the definition of classical physics?clas·si·cal physics (klăs′ĭ-kəl)Physics that is based on Newton's laws of motion and does not make use of quantum mechanics and the theory ofrelativity. ♦ Classical mechanics refers to Newton's laws of motion and other principles of mechanics based on them.Classical mechanics does not work when dealing with bodies (such as electrons) moving at speeds close to that oflight, or when making measurements of atoms and subatomic particles. These phenomena can only be described byquantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. ](--The American Heritage® Student Science Dictionary, Second Edition. Copyright © 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. )

From one's perspective.

What, then, is the aperspectival view?

It is the self consciousness of the collapse and meaninglessness of our spiritual reality which has lost the efficacy to provide us with the live meaning of our being. Gebser's uniqueness consists however in his profound insight into the today's situation of our spiritual reality. Namely, as mentioned above (at the beginning), he saw a transition of the structure of consciousness and its confusion resulted from the struggle between the power of conservatism and the surge of the new consciousness and its phenomena ready to make a leap. 

This Gebser calls the integral structure of consciousness which is revealed in the aperspective world whose characteristics are becoming evident in visual arts, music and sciences and philosophies. 

One of the characteristics is disclosed in the concretion of time, whose early emergence may be evidenced in projective geometry with its symbolic form of sphere, Mozart's music (don Giovanni et al), further cubism, surrealism and tachism in painting, the emergence of the modern physics, several philosophical attempts of concretizing time from its abstraction as a whole (Bergson, Nietzsche, Jaspers and Heidegger). Another feature is the overcoming of Reason and rationality by transcending duality, rejection of reductionism, liberation from atomization (including egoistic individualism),
being free from space and scientific objectivism. 

More positively said it is the pursuit of integration of all separation, isolation, fragmentation and opposition by concretization of time as a whole. By so doing, reality becomes transparent. This Gibser calls diaphaneity. 

In the face of the desperate threat to our humanity from the above mentioned deficient forms of the mental, perspectival structure of consciousness, Gebser's ultimate goal is to properly understand this new emergent reality consciousness by exploring concrete phenomena of the structures of consciousness as its principles. Thus in order to actualize that this new spiritual reality, when more intensified, becomes more real and effective, we must have an explicit awareness of this spiritual reality. 

In his approach Gebser is rigorously phenomenological in the widest sense (although he does not officially admit it). Gebser attempts to explore and reveal the intentional correlation between the various structures of consciousness and the cultures as the correlates of these projections of consciousness. His concept of doiphany is precisely the procedure and attitude in which what is concealed is to reveal itself. The self-evidentness of our mundaneity has to be put to the "epoche", and the concealment of our everyday doxa must be demolished, thus we are drawn out of our mundane attitude and shifted to the attitude of diaphany or transparency such that the genuine reality is to disclose itself to us as it actually is.

(from, TAO AND THE APERSPECTIVAL WORLD, For Cultural Studies Conference1990, At University of Oklahoma, by Eiichi Shimomisse, California State University) 

The students I'm studying with this semester will have to forgive me my going-over-the-time.

A faculty member yesterday said I've a reputation for doing so.

I didn't know it was noticed. 

from ramon panikkar's website

Cosmotheandric or theo-anthropo-cosmic (dimension) 

“The cosmotheandric intuition is the totally integrated vision of the seamless fabric of the entire reality… the undivided consciousness of the totality” (The Cosmotheandric Experoence). 

“There are not three realities: God, Man, and the World; but neither is there one, whether God, Man or World. Reality is cosmotheandric. It is our way of looking that makes reality appear to us at times under one aspect, at times under another. God, Man, and World are, so to speak, in an intimate and constitutive collaboration to construct Reality, to make history advance, to continue creation: (The Triniity and the Religious Experience of man, London and New York 1975). 

The cosmotheandric intuition expresses the all embracing indissoluble union, that constitutes all of Reality: the triple dimension of reality as a whole: cosmic-divine-human. The cosmotheandric intuition is the undivided awareness of the totality." What Panikkar proposes is to live so open to this triple dimension of reality, open to others, to the world, and to God that we might achieve harmonious communion with the all: the cosmotheandric reconciliation. It is a matter of an experience more mystical and ineffable than philosophic in the traditional sense, but it breaks the customary philosophico-theological molds.

The cosmotheandric dimension is another way of expressing the radical Trinitarian conception of reality (cf. later discussion). The triadic structure and the trinitarian conception in RP are not merely in his thinking but also in his methodology, and he even organizes his writings in triadic structures as in the case of his “novenas” (three times three).

Cosmotheandrism, "the goal and fullness of all religion" (The Trinity), is an indispensable concept for understanding panikkarian thinking. The cosmotheandric intuition, the cosmotheandric mystery, or more precisely although less euphonically, the theoanthropocosmic reality, reveals that it is relationship that unites the divine, human and cosmic reality.

Understanding this vision requires the perspective of advaitic non-dualism and of radical relativity (cf. later discussion), and a new innocence that overcomes the fragmented vision of reality that we humans have in order to achieve that understanding and unitary experience of the reality in which we are immersed.

This new innocence “has been freed from the longing for perfection, which necessarily implies being better than the rest… It is pure aspiration… [It is situated in] the realm of pure grace” (La nueva inocencia, Estella 1993). The aspiration to harmony “is established in reality when we are in accord” and presupposes good humor, sweetness, serenity and peace, which are “manifestations of the structure of reality”. It is not the ingenuous dream of wanting to recover paradise, but rather “the healing, in modern Western culture, of the wound the Enlightenment inflicted by separating epistemology from ontology, by making knowledge the hunt for the object by the subject”. Thus, “no part of the dichotomy between the object, the objective thing disconnected from man and the subject, subjective mind”, falls outside the “concupiscence of objective knowledge”; rather the new innocence envelopes knowledge and the knower in the same act because it knows that the one is not given without the other”, without the relationship (Ibid.).

“If the Christian message means something, it is this experience of the cosmotheandric reality of all being, of which Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, is the paradigm. In Christ Matter is not on its own, nor is Man on one side and God on the other; none of these intrinsically united dimensions surpass the others, so that it does not make sense to affirm that Christ is more divine than human, more worldly than heavenly, or vice versa. The veil of separation has been torn, and the integration of reality begins with the redemption of man” (Culto y secularización. Apuntes para una antropología litúrgica, Madrid 1979).

nothing here

Mind. Itself.

No me. No you.

See this

See everything

to sit still

Labor Day.

Vocation to Solitude — To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls up on that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars… to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into the bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of life into a living and vigilant silence. 

—Thomas Merton from "Thoughts In Solitude" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956). (louie, louie)

Silence of morning. 

science and non-duality

I finally heard the cliché.

Listen to the cliché, David Foster Wallace said.

The cashier said, "Have a good one."

And I heard it -- the koan invitation.

To have

a

Good

One.

look back; looking’s here

Perhaps we’ve never been safe.

The emerging narrative is that if you feel wronged it is your prerogative to shoot and kill anyone in your path.

If you are someone with power, you mock and insult anyone you wish.

I do not like shooters or arrogance without decency.

My dislike is useless.

I choose, instead, to become what I am not.

I talk to a man in a hospice room about Robert Lowell, about manic depression, about the ways we disappear inside a chaos of disarray, a mind gone away from itself.

Psychiatry sits without remedy.

Poetry walks without destination.

Philosophy thinks about peach cobbler.

Two dogs down the hall, one on bed, one on floor, wonder when their human will wake up.

August ends and September dawns.

Mind is what is, appearing before us.

If we lose our mind it is because we lose the ability to face, with grace, that which appears.

In a chaotic world — in a chaos of social, economic, unseeing foundation, and unloving distraction — we have no need of one another.

So we destroy one another. Just as mind tries to destroy matter, just as we become addicted to resentment and revenge, just as desolate disconnection reasons that all’s misalliance. Why bother saying what’s happening.

The peach cobbler tastes good. Like long desired equanimity.

Here.

Here’s looking at you!

Go on.

Look back.

the answer to the question is "Yes."

watching sky

on sofa

with Rokiie

Are all of the points of light in the night sky, other than the moon, planets, and artificial satellites, that we call stars also suns?  

The Sun is a perfectly ordinary star -- a great, glowing ball of gas. In its core, it fuses hydrogen into helium, as all stars do for the majority of their lives, in order to generate enough pressure to avoid collapsing under its own gravity. In that sense, I think the answer to the question is "Yes."

A subtler aspect of this question might be whether other stars are "suns" in that they have planets of their own. In that case, the answer is "No, not quite." Planets are very common around other stars, orbiting as many as 30 percent of stars similar to the Sun. However, there are plenty of stars for which we have no evidence of orbiting planets.

 http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/physics/78-the-universe/stars-and-star-clusters/general-questions/346-what-is-the-difference-between-a-star-and-a-sun-beginner

feeling him breathe

turning earth

toward morning

geboten: necessary

Eight of us on evening porch spoke of what is real.

Is what is now enough?

Eight universes in thinking multiverse bid each other

Good night

the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual:

Good words, well written.

James Davison Hunter, who wrote, “The Death of Character,” once noted that good character does not require religious faith. “But it does require the conviction of truth made sacred, abiding as an authoritative presence within consciousness and life, reinforced by habits institutionalized within a moral community. Character, therefore, resists expedience; it defies hasty acquisition. This is undoubtedly why Søren Kierkegaard spoke of character as ‘engraved,’ deeply etched.”                                                                     

(Opinion, The Man Trump Wishes He Were, By David Brooks, Opinion Columnist, Aug. 29, 2019)

Character, "the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual," (dictionary) -- the conviction of truth made sacred.

How profoundly we long for it!

one and one repetitive

It is between that which never has been separated that a redundant conjoining takes place.

It is that oft heard sentence:

• New Jerusalem Bible: They are no longer two, therefore, but one flesh. So then, what God has united, human beings must not divide. Matthew, 19:6, - Bíblia Católica Online,
•  New International Version: So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."
• King James Bible: Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

When are two one? When they are not two.

When is one not two? When it is not one.

But these are merely opinions, not something known.

So, we study Sandokai.

The relationship between relative and absolute is a huge preoccupation of Zen. Why? Well, frankly, it’s also a preoccupation of many other spiritual traditions. To see this, all you have to do is look for the dualities about which people get very worked up: Divine (or Ineffable) versus human, pure versus impure, transcendent versus mundane, separate versus (re)united with God, ideal versus actual. This duality is so pervasive and recurring, ancient Chan masters adopted a special term for each side: Ji (or Shih) is the concrete, phenomenal (relative) aspect of existence, while Ri (or Li) is the absolute or ultimate aspect of existence.
(--from, 74 – Sekito Kisen’s Sandokai: The Identity of Relative and Absolute – Part 1 by Domyo | Sep 27, 2018)

 It appears the mind we sally forth with is of the sort that splits and severs, dividing each thing from itself, as an english muffen is torn in two, placed in two sides of toaster, buttered and jammed, only to be reunited in the body that takes them in, one after the other, piece and whole devoured by the partial and completion that is human perception and perspective inching toward whole-sight.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."    (-Albert Einstein, What Life Means to Einstein, 1929)

We might find ourselves arguing if one and one equals two, or...

whether one and one is one itself repetitive.

the humble acceptance of an abiding wonder for “the thing not named.”

What we don’t know is what we are. The essence of things is their isness without conceptualization and without calculation.

The nameless now.

For indigenous people, the stories hint of something unspoken. Theologian Megan McKenna and storyteller Tony Cowan refer to this element as “the thing not named.”

”In more theological or religious terms it is the Midrash, the underlying truth, the inspired layers that are hinted at, that invite but do not force themselves upon us. They must be searched out, struggled with and taken to heart. It is, at root, the mystery that makes the story memorable, worth telling over and over again, and staking your life on it. [4].  

Hopi elders engage multiplicity by referring to the ineffable as “a mighty something [a’ni himu].” [5] Wisdom instructs the elders that one cannot stake life on limited human perspectives; there must be more. And so the elders inquire into the nature of ontology, social location, and the universe with the humble acceptance of an abiding wonder for “the thing not named.”    

(—Cosmology: Part One, Richard Rohr,  Holistic Knowing, Wednesday, August 28, 2019

 Light comes up out east. A new morning.

The hermitage might be ready to rename a sailboat the Sandokai Edelweiss. It will serve to take out for gentle sails those cared for and those caregiving — whether cancer care, hospice care, or those experiencing loss, rehabilitation, or various realms of healing or respite. The reconciliation of opposites, a brief time of nameless presence.

This quiet before dawn.

When what has been called prayer prays itself into formless, nameless, presence.

Nothing there.

The dance of relative and absolute. The inviting undulation of individual and whole.

The humble acceptance of an abiding wonder for “the thing not named.”    

i, no one

What is the cross?

What dies of the cross?

I

Dies.

No one

Lives

surprising

If you can’t find your
Self
Perhaps there is
No self to find

With some thought
You might find
This realization
To be

Good

unicity

Anything I do is everything I do.

where we are going

Each religion is a distinct personality.

We are looking for the true self.

It is found only in communal milieu.

No separate religion is enough for

a future spirituality.

No separate egos

only empty wholeness

arising moment to moment

new and again new and this

moment arising 

open hearted

On porch

Conversation —

Friday evening

Summer cooling

get rid of it

What to do with cynicism?

In others: fight it.

In myself: look more closely at my fears and resentments.

Cynicism cannot abide.

by your lonesome

Friend’s wife died a recluse thirteen years after his death. He’d had a private service. She’d had no service.

Sounds right, in a lonely sort of way.

Fact is, alone is alone, no matter how crowded you try to make it.

Somehow this matters nine years and twenty two years later.

No hermit wants company.

Everybody’s already with you when you’re by your lonesome.

behind bamboo slats

cross in morning

sun leafy birdsong

burning through fog

face looked through, for Dennis

What evil doesn’t realize is good is everybody’s business.

Drega instead stood over Dennis as he had Scott Phillips. “You should’ve minded your own fucking business,” he said. Holding the rifle as if it were a pistol, he drilled, in rapid succession, four bullets into Dennis’s back. Then he changed the ammo clip on his rifle in motions that struck Susan as “very controlled, well practiced.”
(Excerpt from: "In the Evil Day: Violence Comes to One Small Town" by Richard Adams Carey. Scribd.)

Whereas evil is narrow, secluded, cowering, and very very lonely in its execution and thinking, it fears good, yet cannot be rid of it.

Twenty two years ago yesterday Scott, Les, Vickie, and Dennis were shot and killed in Colebrook NH by a man entrapped by evil.

When someone acts and believes that they alone control the fate of others, we see the face of evil in that person's face.

Absence.

Be frightened with such a sight.

But when someone sees the good of others intermixed with one's own good, making no act nor holding no belief that excludes, eliminates, or deprives another nor anyone from compassion or inclusion — we look into the face of good, our face is looked through with good.

Presence.

Thank you Dennis.

Good be on you!

library named for a friend closes

“Poor is the nation that has no heroes; shameful the nation, that having, forgets.” (on plaque in library dedicated to Dennis Joos) 

STEWARTSTOWN — Saying there has been “little to no use” of it in recent years, voters at Town Meeting on Tuesday agreed to close the Dennis Joos Memorial Library, which is named after a hero-victim of the 1997 mass murder in nearby Colebrook.  (New Hampshire Union Leader, 15mar19)

 The new version of library, Scribd, I'm surprised to find, has the book In the Evil Day: Violence Comes to One Small Town, By Richard Adams Carey.   (2015)

So this will be my day. Dennis, I recall, is the second schoolmate (that I know of) to be shot and killed. Bob Coles was killed in Mexico on a beach in the late 1970s trying to stop someone from stealing his backpack. Then Dennis, newspaper editor, trying to stop a man with a gun who killed two law enforcement officers, a lawyer, and him.

The morning mutes.

I read.

And remember the stories Dennis wrote in 1963-64 in the Franciscan college alongside the Delaware River.

Somewhere, in some box, piled on by other boxes, in a hallway, some pages, yellowed and creased, no doubt buried deep, sleeping words, a Joos story, hibernates.  

asking now not i

When did I become a contemplative mendicant?

About the time the Staten Island ferry from Brooklyn across gave way to the 13august59 beginning of the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge which was opened on 21nov64. 

High school wasn’t early enough. More likely, without knowing it, it was the early days of being an altar boy in Grammer School, at 6:30am mass at st a’s between 61st and 62nd street. The early mid-50’s bicycling the variegated ten blocks in the quiet of early morning, the choreographed movements at foot of altar, the words in Latin/English, the incomprehensible meaning of the ritual, the gestures, the transsubstantiated  simplicity of wafer and wine into cosmic mythological-theological integrality. A not yet teenager wandering within a philosophical metaphysic intersecting human personality and spiritual esoteric hermeneutical emptiness — while cycling my Schwinn past Denny Chin’s Hand Laundry, Stein’s Deli, PS 205, 20th Avenue BMT Sea Beach line station, John Lazarus’ and Howie Ablin’s houses. The Brooklyn Dodgers hadn’t been shanghied yet. 

That’s where, I suspect, it began.

ALL SAYING MUST BE BALANCED BY UNSAYING, and knowing must be humbled by unknowing. Without this balance, religion invariably becomes arrogant, exclusionary, and even violent. 

ALL LIGHT MUST BE INFORMED BY DARKNESS, and all success by suffering. St. John of the Cross called this Luminous Darkness, St. Augustine, the Paschal Mystery or the necessary Passover, and Catholics proclaim it loudly as the mystery of faith at every Eucharist. Yet it is seldom an axiom at the heart of our lives. 

  The early but learned pattern of dualistic thinking can get us only so far; so all religions at the more mature levels have discovered another “software” for processing the really big questions, like death, love, infinity, suffering, and God. Many of us call this access “contemplation.” It is a nondualistic way of seeing the moment. Originally, the word was simply “prayer.”
[...]
Excerpt from: "The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See" by Richard Rohr. Scribd. Read this book on Scribd.: https://www.scribd.com/book/268080969

The sewer tops, the curb-side cars, the wooden steps, the silence of journeying through porous realms of reason and mythology, the corn muffins and egg creams, Daily News and Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
Harold Tribune and The Tablet, Tommy my first boss, the vacant lot with infield stones we played baseball on Saturday mornings. All of it a surreal fog of nescience and wonder spanning then til now faces and names forming what looks back looking out, birdsong and lawnmower, mountains and passing cars, han and shikentaza, coffee and psalms, this Sunday morning.

The interior life took root.

I think I asked for it. It separated me out. I looked into distances. I knew nothing.

Nor

Now

Do

I

the real expression of itself

“I” doesn’t care for “you.”

If there is only care...

No”I” and no “you” — no duality to confirm Descartes’ speculation that mind and matter — the thinking thing and the extensive thing — can never connect or reach each other, then what are we left with?

We are left with reality as it is.

As it is? Does reality care?

There is nothing outside of reality. Even illusion is a distortion of reality from the inside.

Thus, “I” cannot care for “you.”

Rather, care resides as reality resides, as, with, through itself.

Thus, if we do not care, we are living illusory or unreal lives.

In truth, to be real is to care.

To care is to be the real expression of itself.

Of oneself. Not the self. Oneself.

What remains if subjects and objects are taken away?

What is gone? Gone? Gone beyond? Gone completely beyond?

Is there a willingness to wake up...

And see?

no object; reflective action

Ask me

If I care

I will tell you

I don’t care.

Ask me if I will help

Someone suffering

I will say, yes, I will.

Caring is not a state of being.

Caring is right now being aware of,

And serving, someone needing help.

I don’t care for you.

I am

You.

And I am

Has no object.

Only reflective action.

assumption (הנחה) day

Here is my assumption: one is present with, (יהוה).

We will slowly come to see when we begin to be, completely, one with one's wholeness (שלום).

Becoming, (הופך), what we are.

one is present with, יהוה

Mary.
Jo-Ann.
Janet.

What does it mean to be assumed into heaven?

I assume, if there is some heaven beyond my comprehension, these three women are there.

Why?

Because they just might be where they were when they were walking this earth.

Where once you are when you are there, so forever are you where you are when you are there.

If heaven is where God is, and God is where one is present, then one is in heaven and in God when one is present where one is.

Mary.
Jo-Ann.
Janet.

off watch

Red squirrel
Comes off mountain
Wanting on bird-feeder

I cannot permit
As long as I look —
This trespass

what is looking out

Your language is silence. No wonder we do not hear you.

Morning sunlight through green leaves. An old tree beyond unwired fence post. And stillness. Everything in place. You sound yourself and there is nothing to hear but silence. You move with profound slowness and all we see is stillness. 

We, on the other hand, are noisy and bustling. It is our way. Saying so much yet hardly nearing truth. Moving so fast yet seldom arriving anywhere near peace.

You move with the breeze, shadows of leaves sweeping zendo floor raising no dust. You return to stillness and stone on rug is forever just touching surface rippling.

We think we are born and think we die but know nothing of the apparent two edges of life. In this instant there is no birth no death and we still know nothing but do not know what we know.

You are edgeless. I am all boundary. You are the empty pause between sound. I am the chattering of squirrels when protesting their inconvenience.

In the solitude of silence and stillness...everyone is here, aren’t they?

There is nowhere to go, is there?

There’s nothing to see, is there?

There’s no one asking these questions, is there?

I don’t know if I am looking out at the green and sunlight or if what is the inside of everything is emptying itself from within to show what is looking out from the center of everything.

When I began this I was going to quote Micah. Here it is:

From the book of the prophet Micah  The nations go up to the mountain of the Lord  

Thus says the Lord: In days to come the mount of the Lord’s house Shall be established higher than the mountains; it shall rise high above the hills, And peoples shall stream to it: Many nations shall come, and say, “Come, let us climb the mount of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, That he may instruct us in his ways, that we may walk in his paths.”For from Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
 
He shall judge between many peoples and impose terms on strong and distant nations; They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again. Every man shall sit under his own vine or under his own fig tree, undisturbed; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.   

For all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, But we will walk in the name of the Lord, our God, forever and ever. On that day, says the Lord, I will gather the lame, And I will assemble the outcasts, and those whom I have afflicted. I will make of the lame a remnant, and of those driven far off a strong nation; And the Lord shall be king over them on Mount Zion, from now on forever.  (Micah 4, 1)

To walk “in the name of the Lord” is to wander through no name, everywhere, where time is not.

At this, little remains to do, little has been done, little is what we are.

There is the returning to inside of everything. There is this pilgrimage to allow the passage.

As the mouth of the Lord of host speaks.

Nothing, all of this, is heard.

today is a good day

some get told they have six months to live

some look to left as truck hits car

the rest of us never know

so, in zazen, we die daily

yanah

Where do they all come from? Where do they all go?

Zen people say there is no birth. They say there is no death.

And yet they are here. And each one will soon enough leave.

You
Are
Not
Alone
Here.

haiku

             (for “tutti quanti”)

Former tennis opposent—

Another set

A different court

...   ...   ...

(On learning of a death. Last match 42 years ago)

andirivieni, coming and going

Why not admit that there are enemies?

I have in mind those that can be called, and actually are, enemies.*

I know many of their names. I find it difficult to love them.

The language of enemies is seen as the end of a conversation—or the end of relationship. 

We assume everyone is doing their best, or failing on some things but not everything, or that people are cogs in a complex machine over which they have little control. We let systemic oppression be the problem. When we see others hurt, when we encounter people enacting terror on their neighbors, we assume they are simply misguided. 

Yet Christians follow scriptures in which enemies are named with clarity and vigor. The third chapter of Luke begins by naming the names of the tormentors of the Jews of the first century: Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, and Herod. Right up front we are introduced to the full swath of political actors who oppress and terrorize the common people of Judea. 

Tiberius was the emperor known for his extreme paranoia and wrath that spread like a disease across his territories. Pontius Pilate, the prefect of Judea, executed political enemies without trial and was infamous for his bribes and insults. Herod Antipas imprisoned and executed his enemies over personal slights. 

Luke sets the scene for the gospel in a tyrannical, volatile, and oppressive political climate. And he wants us to know who is in charge, who makes this repression possible. He doesn’t reduce the problem to “good people who do bad things.” He doesn’t blame systems. He names enemies.

(--from, THE FORGOTTEN CHRISTIAN DISCIPLINE OF LOVING YOUR ENEMIES, If you're going to love your enemies, you need to know who they are.  BY MELISSA FLORER-BIXLER, Sojourners, sept-oct 2019)

They don't want to have a conversation with me. My silence is uncertain it wants to break for them even if they did.

I used to sit with a man who was on Nixon's enemies list. There was a leftover pride he and his family felt even four decades later.

My enemy seems self-driven and self-absorbed. (When I think of self, the word anattā arises.)

My enemy seems fixed and stuck in an unyielding opinion about Browns and Blacks, Muslims and Democrats, Women and Humility. (When I think of unshakable opinions and unrelenting prejudice, the word anicca arises.

My enemy seems unaware of the harm and consternation, fear and cynicism, disheartened apathy following in his (their) wake as they roil and rant in demeaning depredation. (When I think of this behavior, the word dukkha arises.)

There are men and women who are my enemies. You know their names.
And yet, in turn, these enemies have characteristics that don't exactly have faces, they are three poisons --greed, aversion, delusion.

The three poisons (Sanskrit: triviṣa; Tibetan: dug gsum) or the three unwholesome roots (Sanskrit: akuśala-mūla; Pāli: akusala-mūla), in Buddhism, refer to the three root kleshas of Moha (delusion, confusion), Raga (greed, sensual attachment), and Dvesha (aversion).^[1][2] These three poisons are considered to be three afflictions or character flaws innate in a being, the root of Taṇhā (craving), and thus in part the cause of Dukkha (suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness) and rebirths.^[1][3].    (Wikipedia) 

Last night while sitting in vigil with a man just deceased I thought about how, in one final instant, all the things that were carried to that moment -- medical issues, mental concerns, emotional worries, financial depletion, spousal surprise at sudden turn, the labored agonal respiration -- just fell away, and quiet stillness, what some call peaceful resting, others call death of the body, and yet others might call the mysterious disappearance.

Andirivieni.**

**The coming and going -- of, in, and through -- this life.

Can we, can I, love this?

All of it?

...   ...   ...

*

en·e·my

/ˈenəmē/

Learn to pronounce

noun

plural noun: enemies

1. a person who is actively opposed or hostile to someone or something.

   synonyms:

   foe, adversary, opponent, rival, nemesis, antagonist, combatant, challenger, competitor, opposer, hostile party; More

   • a hostile nation or its armed forces or citizens, especially in time of war.

     noun: the enemy

     
     

     "the enemy shot down four helicopters"
   • 
     

     a thing that harms or weakens something else.

     
     

     "routine is the enemy of art"

no click nor clack

havahart traps

wide open unbaited —

no one wants to travel

stumbling into a crowded page

all the bright lights

the sounds of accomplishment

not here --

red cardinal and yellow finch