hold life like a face

At Tuesday Evening Conversation someone asked about confession. 

It still seems to me that each person knows what is right what is wrong -- emotional distress or lack of loving upbringing not to the contrary.

If so, each person wishes to unburden themselves following promulgation of unseemly, unkind, or unhealthy behavior or thought intentions.

There's a grounded balance of equality of forces that resides within and around each individual. Quite likely, said ground also exists within and around each corporate institution however many officers or administrative personnel engage issues under consideration affecting multiple individuals or general public.

I think we know.

And we want to say what we know.

To be equitably, freely, and refreshingly, there where we are.

Poet Ellen Bass:

         The Thing Is

              BY ELLEN BASS

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again. 

Poem ©2002 Ellen Bass, "The Thing Is," from Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, (Grayson Books, 2017).

Is that the desired outcome following confession -- "to love you, again"? 

The eremitic impulse is to shy away from entangling proximity in favor of solitary attentiveness just off to the side. 

Even there, once a clearing of geographical collectivity has been made, there arises a sense of vacuity, an awareness of one without two, a stillness of ding-an-zich

In Kantian philosophy, the thing-in-itself (German: Ding an sich) is the status of objects as they are, independent of representation and observation. The concept of the thing-in-itself was introduced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and over the following centuries was met with controversy among later philosophers.^[1] It is closely related to Kant's concept of noumena or the object of inquiry, as opposed to phenomenon, its manifestations. (wikipedia)

Sometimes grief sits with you like reticent friend knowing that to remain wordless is to approximate (or to proximate) presence in a different metaphysic.

Everything, one assumes, is within everything else. What we experience as separateness is our reluctance to see what is there in ways that ordinarily cannot be seen. 

Some say that God is within. I think they want to say, but restrain themselves, that God is the within.

When I hermeneutically translated for my own prayerfulness the mantra -- here explicated by the Dalai Lama A Talk On Om Mani Padme Hum, "Om Mani Padme Hum" (Sanskrit pronunciation) or "Om Mani Peme Hung" (Tibetan pronunciation) -- I did it in idiorhythmic fashion.

For me it worded itself as: 

    Behold what is within without; Behold what is without within.

It is this translation (if you will) of the mantra that stays with me. It suggests for me non-duality, a "don't make two; don't make one" admonishment, an experience of wholeness that eludes definition, categorization, and division.

It is, at times, an experience that nears loneliness. But there is a concomitant realization that aloneness is not necessarily loneliness. 

Maybe Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson came close in the chorus of their rendition of Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys.

We greet one another in passing. No need to make anything more, nor less, than that. 

Perhaps we've missed the meaning of forgiveness, of sacrifice, of confession, of the teachings of the Buddha, of the revelation of the Christ. 

It's an inside job. The external world is perceptual gymnastic parallel bars against and around which we fling our bodies in twirling awkwardness round and round toward dismount and dismantlement.

The words try to tell us. They say:

Be still

and know

that/this --

I am

(--God)

Love, again. 

yes your honor, swear me in

 I'm moving back to

Washington DC, try to

get jury duty

today's headlines tomorrow's joke

 cartoon characters

laugh at their audience, take

their money and run

realizing the errors of my thinking

 Never buy a new computer the morning after a former president is (again) indicted for criminality.

He was.

I don’t.

The United States ponders folly with fierce foray into no-nonsense justice.

a fabric of silence so fine and old that even a breath could tear it

Maybe choice-less life is best. At least, a few-choices life. I still have sport jackets from early 1970s. They currently hang from line on sunporch taken from dark closet and waiting for sun to burn dampness, dust, and time from recesses of corduroy and wool.

A new wood-appearing vinyl flooring upset every inch of accumulation moving into boxes that lean against boxes against turned-over chairs and to-be-sorted-later piles of disturbed inessential but squatting residents of shelves and coffee table. They squint on bright porch. They know I'd just as soon leave them there and forage my way through their languid insouciance for the next five years.

Still, at 6:45am practice this morning, I pretend there's nothing else to do and sit zazen, chant heart sutra, pronounce four vows of the bodhisattva, mention names to be prayed for, then listen to one co-practitioner snort on round rug in middle of chapel/zendo and another co-practitioner pronounce a meta blessing for all relations all beings all for the greater glory of what is before us.

 It is important to remember that there is no “right” breath. If you carry with you the idea that your breath should be deep and full when in reality it is shallow, you immediately get into trouble. At times the breath is deep, at times shallow, at times freely flowing, and at other times it can feel blocked. Your practice is to be with your breath as it is, learning to let go of how you think things “should be.” Mindfulness of breathing is a practice of learning to harmonize your attention with what is, in this moment. Short, long, deep, shallow are all fine breaths. Trust your body; it knows what is needed.

 (--from, Receiving the Breath! A meditation Q&A with Christina Feldman, By Christina Feldman SUMMER 2003, tricycle)

It is August. July has slipped beneath the heat, torrential rains, perennial fog, and its overall dyspeptic thirty-one day stay around mid-coast Maine. I bid farewell, thank you for your efforts, see you next year (if either of us is yet continuing in the circling repetition of calendar reappearance.

In the unshelfing process, Adam Zagajewski's book of poems "Mysticism for Beginners" shows up and beckons:

On Swimming 

The rivers of this country are sweet
as a troubador’s song,
the heavy sun wanders westward
on yellow circus wagons.
Little village churches
hold a fabric of silence so fine
and old that even a breath
could tear it.
I love to swim in the sea, which keeps
talking to itself
in the monotone of a vagabond
who no longer recalls
exactly how long he’s been on the road.
Swimming is like prayer:
palms join and part,
join and part,
almost without end.  

(Poem by Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) from Mysticism for Beginners, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997)

These breaths. There's one. There's one. And another. I'll be darned!

Darned, yes, the unfulfilled wish of dozens of socks in other hermit caverns in other rooms unfound and mostly forgotten.

Like my breath. A companionship that is always arriving always leaving sometimes staggering sometimes unbearably joyful, loved and let be.

Almost without end. 

Ainsi soit-il! 

the line which follows it

 At Sunday Evening Practice, mistakes and uncertainty. How do these inform practice of prayer and meditation?

We read about how Dogen spoke of One Continuous Mistake. Elsewhere, an article about What God, Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Have in Common. Therein we wondered what might be the benefit of agnosticism?

Certainty eludes me. Not that I look for it. That search stopped a long time ago. 

I do not look for certainty.

I merely look.

I am convinced by very little, not much of anything, perhaps nothing.

What joy there is, and there is much, is the looking. Looking into. Looking at. Looking with. Looking as.

Whatever is seen is acknowledged. Appreciated. Attributed. Accessed, as best as possible.

I am a mendicant of affirmation -- I say yes to what appears. 

Skepticism does not obviate affirmation, it gives it shape and cautious approval. The yes is both wary and worrisome -- but it is also accommodating. 

The skepticism is not a judgment. It is a cautious consent to continue on.

Is it possible to say 'yes' to everything even when 'no' abides just out of sight waiting to see if it need appear when properly summoned?

In prison this morning, after talk of Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Wiesel, Vonnegut and Herbert -- we touch on e.e.cummings who also quoted Blake:

Better worlds (I suggest) are born, not made; and their birthdays are the birthdays of individuals. Let us pray always for individuals; never for worlds. "He who would do good to another" cries the poet and painter William Blake "must do it in Minute Particulars"—and probably many of you are familiar with this greatly pitying line. But I'll wager that not three of you could quote me the line which follows it

     General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, &flatterer

for that deeply terrible line spells the doom of all unworlds; whatever their slogans and their strategies, whoever their heroes or their villains.

(--from, six non-lectures, by e.e.cummings) 

Ideas and ideologies, whether religious, philosophical, or political are the stuff skepticism walks around giving respectable distance.

Individuals, though, are a place to step closer to, to move more inquiringly near, and to invite into a shared turning of both words and dos y dos circumnavigation.

It is a dance.

Imagination steps into the room and asks 'why are you here?'

look who shows up

 Two sneezes

Before bed

Sudden chill

Thây’s all

Surprisingly

the day I died while yet remaining still

 Who stands in a bathtub filled with water in desert mission

Who reaches over to move space heater closer to the tub

Who is thrown against wall saying “I’m still alive, I’m still alive”

This is how one becomes a zen Buddhist contemplative Catholic 

Alive, for now, I am, for now, still, for now

A member of the non-order of thomas merton and pseudo-death by

Electrical appliances and mortal electrocution watered against beatless heart  

Two years after Bangkok fabled shower story where Trappist monk lay dead after talk

Of Marxism and Monasticism in 1968 during the lie called Vietnam War

The saint of skeptical transcending vision 

smiling sardonic simplicity (dear annoying Tommy Merton)

zen masterful monk meandering this Sunday through breezy airwaves

if you (don’t) think about it

 Nothing has happened before.

“Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen.”  (Jorge Luis Borges)

Nothing will happen after. 

keep room for those who have no place else to go

 In prison Friday morning considering non-transactional presence. 

Where each act is not about you not about me not about benefit or deprivation. Where there is a middle space, a space between, autonomous and auto-defining, repository of potential, possibility and  probable promise if left to its own, treated with care and concern, allowed to unfold and express its coming-to-be along with its retrieval-of-ancestral-worth.

Right there, not me not you, not one not two, the whole of it prior to dissection division distortion.

What is whole

This by Joy Harjo: 

For Calling The Spirit Back 
From Wandering The Earth 
In Its Human Feet

by Joy Harjo

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that 
bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control. 

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel
the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and 
back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were 
a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the
guardians who have known you before time, 
who will be there after time.
They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people 
who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought
down upon them.

Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, 
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few
years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and
leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the 
thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning 
by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call yourself back. You will find yourself caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. 
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It will return 
in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be 
happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and
given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who 
loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no 
place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next 

 person find their way through the dark.  

© Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution From Holy Beings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

on his right wrist

                (for L, as his drew nigh)

His watch was far from

What actual time it was

As if it mattered

room

 

compañeras compañeros

 Community is teacher.

Practice is teacher.

Great doubt, skepticism, is teacher.

Finally, great faith, that which is beyond reason or belief, is true teacher.

I bow to my teacher/teachers

 Chris asked all attending at Tuesday evening conversation who our teachers are/have been.

Such a good question.

We mulled and pondered.

Now I ask you: Who are/have been your teachers?

Here’s a hint: they are alive within you within us.

simplemente no saber y un espacio vacío en el mundo*

 James the Greater, back then. They say he was the first of the apostles to be killed, it was 44AD. 

His memory is pilgrimage these days, Camino de Santiago.

Nineteen hundred years after his death, when circumstances brought my parents to the moment of birthing the possibilities inherent in a new life, I arrived, unknowing and an empty space in the world.

History hides so much. 

Beheading someone because they say what they've seen and heard was then, and is now, horrendous.

Where does one go when the mighty challenge the low?

Where does one go to sound the truth, to face the facts, to change one's life?

Look to one another.

See in one no-other.

No need to murder a different experience of reality.

Listen to it.

Just that.

Let what is being told be told -- without fear or the impulse to erase what is before you.

What has changed? 

Still, where I thought I was --

* just unknowing and an empty space in the world.

6:45am practice

When any one sits

Everyone is sitting

When any one practices

Everyone is practicing

Oh, my brothers and sisters

Welcome to chapel/zendo

when

 Why not now?

mais oui

 At practice tonight E spoke of “the holiness of insignificance.”

A good phrase.

A sacred petit rien.

this is everything

 What is

Now

Is God

this changes everything

 What if

Now

Is God

at the source, nothingness

 Today, Mary Magdalene.

Way to go, ma chérie!

stat virtus

 It is not pessimistic to say that half the population is bad.

It is not optimistic to say half the population is good.

Everything is halved. Yin and Yang. Angelic and devilish.

No one is all good. No one all evil.

It is all a balancing fulcrum, a middle point, comme ci comme ça.

That’s where we meet.

It’s where we begin. 

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

sitting while chopin op.20 in b-minor is played on violin

 She has no recall

Memoryless with good smile

She does not eat meal

a comment on this morning’s post

  Comment on the fragment approaching nearness of poetry:

Is

     There

A 

     Poem

               Here

It occurs to me that the world of “there” is where we put “other.” It satisfies the penchant to distance and objectify, to “they” and “them.” It is a world of category and concept, of statistics and trends, of the foreign and stranger.

The world of “here” is that of no-other. Here evokes the close, the intimate, the non-differentiated. Here emerges presence. Here suggests embodiment, incarnated self-sameness, a divine realization of Itself. Here is where One dwells — (the mysteriously unfathomable, that which is beyond understanding, the nameless that we have called so many names.)

Poetry occurs, rarely and blessedly so, when something, some place, some intuition, some engagement — speaks or expresses itself (Itself) on its own without interference or contrivance or clever manipulation.

Hence, poetry is Being-written. Being-danced. Being-played. Being-sounded. 

Being-there-as-here. Being-here-as-there.

Cheslaw Milosz wrote in his poem Ars Poetica? —

The purpose of poetry is to remind us   

how difficult it is to remain just one person,   

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,   

and invisible guests come in and out at will.

If he is on target with this stanza, it might explain the reluctance to encounter or embrace poetry. (That, and poor pedagogy surrounding our early exposure to experiencing poetry in the academic classroom.)

Milosz gives us a good reminder of what is here. 

approaching nearness of poetry

1.

Is

     There

A 

     Poem

               Here

2.

Ταυ

      Crosses

                Distance 

Presencing

       What is

                 Revealing

3.

Itself

for hearing only -- ἀκροαματικός

Can't learn all words. Maybe some. Here's one: acroamatic  

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin acroamaticus, acroaticus (“esoteric”), at first chiefly in reference to the “esoteric” and originally oral teachings of Aristotle, from Ancient Greek ἀκροαματικός (akroamatikós, “for hearing only; esoteric”), from ἀκροάομαι (akroáomai, “to listen”).

Adjective

acroamatic (comparative more acroamatic, superlative most acroamatic)

1. (rare, chiefly archaic) Of or pertaining to hearing. quotations ▼
2. Esoteric, abstruse; (in particular) taught orally to select students and not disseminated. quotations ▼
3. (education) Based on lectures or exposition by monologue. quotations ▼coordinate term ▼

Wiktionary 

The word appears in "On Distinguishing the Acroamatic from the Dogmatic", by Babette Babich, 2023, Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education.

To be a student, according to Nietzsche. is not as easy as many blithely identify themselves.

To be a student, Nietzsche argues in his lectures on the ‘future of our educational institutions,’ is to be a listener. To this same extent, Nietzsche (1980) emphasizes that attending university is about ‘hearing’ lectures: thus “all education toward culture is, as said, ‘acroamatic’” (p. 740).

At issue is Nietzsche’s emphasis on hearing, and above all on what it takes to be able to hear. Heidegger’s student, Gnther Anders, focuses on what he calls “listening” and the active role required of the listener (listening is not passive), and in the case of Nietzsche’s lecture series, this is complicated, since for Nietzsche, a Classicist, a Graecist, as at the time of his speaking everyone who had enjoyed a university education would and could be expected to understand Greek, as a facility with Greek (and of course Latin) was to be assumed, it was then a prerequisite for matriculating and thus for hearing university classes as well as for taking a degree. (Ibid xvi)

My early years, six decades ago, of studying Greek and Latin have not yielded a facility and proficiency, merely an appreciation and affection. My native language, English, has benefitted by the classical exposure of an Associate's Degree in Classical Languages, something which, at the time, seemed more a chore than a delight.

 The acroamatic, as Nietzsche emphasizes, is derived from the Greek ἀκροαματικός—“for hearing only”—and ἀκροάομαι—concerning listening—referring to ‘things heard,’ teachings communicated not in writing (think of Plato’s famous caution in the Phaedrus) but orally, just and only to and for those who have met the prerequisites for understanding and who are thus capable of hearing what is communicated. 

In the same way, Nietzsche’s provocative book subtitled ‘for all and none,” his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, emphasizes speaking, recounting the different “ways” Zarathustra “speaks” to his followers or disciples, to his animals, to the old saint he meets in the forest as recounted at the start of his Vorrede or Prologue, or to the crowd in the marketplace that hears him proclaim his conception of the “overhuman” and who, listening with their own convictions and expectations, take him not to be speaking of the human that is to be ‘overcome,’ whatever that might mean, but as the equivalent of an opening act for the tightrope entertainment they had all come to see. Esoteric as such, the ‘acroamatic’ method of instruction is traditionally contrasted with the erotematic, that is the dialogical method of teaching that is a matter of persuasion, i.e., belief and conviction, and dogma. The dialogical method has clear and convicted appeal; thus Nietzsche often invokes our ‘convictions’ as a word for our persuasions or prejudices, as these have faith on their side. The acroamatic is more challenging, relevant to the extent that one needs an account of a culture, of expert knowledge; thus Nietzsche’s reference to the epopts, and to the Platonic doctrine of the unwritten teaching, crucial to reflections on education, using the distinction between insiders and outsiders, esoteric and exoteric.8  (Ibid)

 Dialogical is a worthy method of entering into and moving through expressions of thought. Usually associated with communicating and learning, to dialogue has an implication of transparent interpenetration wherein one person lets go of the firm ground they imagine they occupy, and traverses through the interpositional-between, that fixed space or distance separating two beings, their opinions, their beliefs, their ruminations. This type of travel, one might even suppose, is a mystical or subatomic interchange of logos/mythos through the no-longer-defined-as-objects participants. 

  Old English dialogas (plural), from Latin from Greek dialogos, from dia ‘through’ + logos ‘word’; compare with Greek dialegesthai ‘converse with’; subsequently reinforced by Old French dialoge.    --cf online etymological dictionary 

The "through-ness" of our wording activity must be reconsidered. There is a neutrino-like behavior that experiences a no-barrier movement into and through whatever it encounters. Word is, if you will, a spiritual act in a world that seldom sees or experiences anything that does not fit the category of mass, material, or solidity. We have become estranged from the actual activity we engage in when we purport to converse, to dialogue, to speak the world into being with our articulation of what-is-real into reality.

The appreciation of reality is a gift of listening.

Authentic listening is not a ping-pong back and forth of lobbing language at an opponent during concept-combat, argumentation, or debate.

Listening is a spiritual practice of contemplative interpositional-betweenness wherein a new being, a third manifestation, arises in the open horizon diaphanously emerging as a numinous transcendence into a new way of thinking, feeling, and living in presence and manifesting wholeness.

Becoming a beholder.

The unforeseen occurrence of --

Beholding One Beholding.

if you are doing something, nothing is hidden

what will happen when 

formal practice disappears —

nothing will be seen

when box score listed at bottom shows free throws missed in n.i.t. championship

 new york times one jan

nineteen sixty one -- Buckeyes

beat Bonnies by two --

my former teammate, right guard 

missed five free throws, (sigh)

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1961/01/01/98430353.html?pageNumber=127

opposent

                   (For RJK, d. 17july2019)

 not a misspelling

just a word for a once friend

there are no mistakes

tutti quanti, tutto il 

tempo — uncertain friendship

fog not fog

Maine is humid fog and rain.

Flowers not flowers, fog not fog;
It comes at midnight, goes at dawn.
Arriving like a spring dream,
Leaving like the morning clouds-
No way to hold it.

— Pai Chu-I (772-846) dailyzen

There are no parts to reality. 

The probability of reality is that reality is possibly the only true phenomenon.

Start here.

There’s no hope anywhere else.

et ipse te enútriet

Finnegans Wake might sound like nonsense, but sometimes nonsense has lovely lilt and pleasing echo. Not unlike history, “never get stuck in another man’s fight” (James Joyce, in FW)

July 16 marks the 160th anniversary of the most destructive riot in U.S. history. On July 13, 1863, certain Democrats in New York City rose up against the Lincoln administration. Four days later, at least 119 people were dead, another 2,000 wounded. Rioters destroyed between $1 and $5 million in property including about fifty buildings, two churches, and an asylum for orphaned Black children. In today’s dollars, that would be between $20 million and about $96 million in damage.  . —Heather Cox Richardson

Sides swing back and forth. Republicans, Democrats; Left, Right;  You, Me.

We desire God; we are repulsed by the idea of a God.

You love life; you loathe it.

        jacta cogitátum tuum in Dómino,

cast your care upon the Lord,  

        et ipse te enútriet. 

           and He will support you

— Missa — Introitus, 16july2023

Curiously, we forget history. 

Incuriously, we slide through invisible time as though immaterial neutrinos suddenly taking a right turn heading into barber shop for a not-there cut.

Tread lightly, downpours in hiatus will reconvene in thirty minutes. Rhubarb will be picked, dog walked in the breach. I’ll wait for the exhalation of nature to inhale what next breath might be offered this Sunday morning.

The events of daily occurrence linger lost in potential until, when suddenness shrugs and matters materialize, voila, men act and bizarre thoughts find arms and legs to set out to streets and wells of deliberative bodies to writhe in the agony of human opinion enacting the deranged madness of senility pretending to be courage and pro patria engagement with the enemy du jour.

Pour me a double orange juice. Kill the fatted English muffin. Roast the day old coffee. I am ready for battle. 

I am ready to give my life for a parchment commendation and an inch of eschatology in the nonlocal newspaper.

do you have a view with no room

 Someone always wants you dead. Watching CIA drama. All about secrets. And money. Who’s got power. Who wants it.

That, and the annoying possibility there might be life after death (thanks Raymond Moody) makes a person wonder how you get out of life dead?

It’s too much to think about.

So, don’t.

if anything was wrong we’d have heard

 It doesn’t matter

If you live you die

One breath leads to another

Until it doesn’t

It all disappears into God

Who is lost, nowhere to be found

kai ouden menei

In prison yesterday one of those fleeting but important intuitions — every belief, prayer, story, thought, or experience we have or relate is only, as one of the men puts it, a placeholder until something else or next comes along that changes, deepens, or eradicates that which is the placeholder. 

Heraclitus of Ephesus (535–475BC) wrote: “Everything flows and nothing abides” (Greek “Panta rhei kai ouden menei”)

So, pray what is familiar to you. It, and you, will change. Let both happen.

“Tommy," Willie said. "I love you, you son of a bitch, and don't die."
Thomas Hudson looked at him without moving his head.
"Try and understand if it isn't too hard."
Thomas looked at him. He felt far away now and there were no problems at all. He felt the ship gathering her speed and the lovely throb of her engines against his shoulder blades which rested hard against the boards. He looked up and there was the sky that he had always loved and he looked across the great lagoon that he was quite sure, now, he would never paint and he eased his position a little to lessen the pain. The engines were around three thousand now, he thought, and they came through the deck and into him. 
"I think I understand, Willie," he said.
"Oh shit," Willie said. "You never understand anybody that loves you.”   

― Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream

The gist is the guest. Comes and goes. Like supper. Dishes placed in sink. 

Morning. 

Washing up. Grinding coffee. Splitting English muffin. Down toaster. Liturgy from France.

Understanding seems a luxury.

Undergoing feels more the case.

One moment to the next. Then, the next.

Flowing through.

ising unto itself

 Yes

No matter

What

Yes

Awaiting

Further

Orders

Of

Trans-

Substantiation

Con-

Substantiating 

Yes

to what (yes)

Was, Ising 

and going it will be gone

 If this night is last

I say I’ll have no other

Let it pass and go

neither hide nor hair

 Spin-wording hyper-

sense through cross-fibers weaving

Finnegans Wake climbs

out from ridiculous earth

through cloudless sky to these ears

sentinels to mountainside

Once I was less a clownish hobo. Then everything started to fall off the table to ground.

Once I thought I had a home. Then all the walls began to crumble and no barn slider opened to dooryard.

Once the yurt and brook stood sentinels to mountainside. Then solitude whispered invitation and soul forages like low snorting deer as insects crisscross outside door screen.

Tumbling water at turn of brook will soon arrive at Hosmer Pond where young day campers delight unperspectivally their ritual play of a hot afternoon.

Things, if you glance around, as they say, are looking up.

 

tip of finger, peeling skin

 So many publications, newspapers, tabloids, congressional hearings, opinion pieces, junk mail, any panegyric. 

A finger points at the moon, but the moon is not at the tip of the finger. Words point at the truth, but the truth is not in words. – Huineng

Walking out into summer day, up past gate toward yurt and brook, past cemetery, the mountain climb, the scattered sounds of Thursday morning.

Everything

falls

away 

perfectly

on considering my death

Reading obituaries. 

My death will not be unexpected. I will not have fought a fraught battle courageously, nor will I want a gathering of loved ones to wave me off to a reunification tour of relatives and good friends in some heavenly coffee house where brioches and millet muffins are free and fresh.

 Obituaries seldom say “he’s off to hell to burn forever” and understandably so — it’s hard to see through smoke and sulphuric fog to track the wretched deceased’s downward spill.

My room, my squalid cell, will not be roped off and amber froze as a museum look-in for two bits on Saturday tours, nor will any plaque hang from lamppost indicating right here he leaned and fell while attempting to comfort a broken down Ford 150 whose radiator leaks to the curb.

I will spare the public their lachrymose response to sordid departure, wreaths of dandelion and crabgrass, after-service table filled with potato salad and four-bean gorp alongside Pillsbury rolls.

No.

When I die just go about your business. Stay away. Write no nonsense about how I loved to fish and attend art openings, gave waifs and scraped-knee lads a nickel or dime for the candy store, tipped my cap to the honorable ladies perusing main street with kidlets in tow. 

There’s no need to pause. No need to ponder. No need to pretend.

He’s gone. That’s it. What’ll we have for breakfast? 

Did you take the garbage out?

no bell no cushion no kidding

 kitchen quiet house

quiet -- God is completely

beyond this place this 

time -- God completely within

this -- quiet meditation 

no practice other than just practice

Weather hot, wind weak,

dog in yard dug deep in dirt

here in kitchen, words --

"practice is enlightenment"

said Dogen -- practice practice

the commas, yes, the commas

 Friend said someone responded to the question, “Do you believe in God?” with,“I believe in nothing but God.”

Good words.

I heard it this way:

I believe in nothing, but, God. . .”

to turn about, turn about with

In prison yesterday morning, conversation about gravitational waves, perception, our illusory perceptions, the unceasing awareness we must bring to every encounter, each person before us, whatever temporary conclusions we draw as to the relative safety or danger of each assessment made. As well as laughing at our own absurdity and posturing.

Then there's this:

His universe-as-one-giant-computer theory, as described by the author and science writer Robert Wright in The Atlantic Monthly in 1988, is based on the idea that “information is more fundamental than matter and energy.” Professor Fredkin, Mr. Wright said, believed that “atoms, electrons and quarks consist ultimately of bits — binary units of information, like those that are the currency of computation in a personal computer or a pocket calculator.” 

As Professor Fredkin was quoted as saying in that article, DNA, the fundamental building block of heredity, is “a good example of digitally encoded information.” 

“The information that implies what a creature or a plant is going to be is encoded,” he said. 

“It has its representation in the DNA, right? OK, now, there is a process that takes that information and transforms it into the creature.” 

Even a creature as ordinary as a mouse, he concluded, “is a big, complicated informational process.”

(--NYTimes, 4july23, Edward Fredkin, 88, Who Saw the Universe as One Big Computer, Dies)

 As an 'informational process', a description which, in a different time and head-tilting consideration, Heraclitus (6th C. BC) would probably nod in affirmation, as would A.N.Whitehead (1861-1947), the term 'process' indicating a developing progression moving through the parameters of time and space.

Those in prison would like such consideration. While terms like punishment and rehabilitation are part of the lexicon, and new terms such as restorative justice and prison abolition, parole and community confinement, enter the discourse. In addition, there are other lexical considerations to mull. 

Familiar terms such as evolution and mutation, maturation and moral change, existential awareness and personal integrity. 

Men in prison, by and large, change. I know many men who've been in prison for 20, 30, 40 years. They are not murderers. Yes, they've committed homicide, the act. But they are not their crime. They do not think, "Man, I can't wait to get out so I can murder again." It was something they did, not something they are. Most would say it was a terrible moment in their lives. A moment that hurt everyone involved. And they understand the reverberations felt affecting the wide circle of consequence and heartbreak. 

But they do not need to be kept in that clanging box of static memory. They have, by and large, stepped beyond their terrible moment. So very many are ready to be graced if allowed to demonstrate their newness to the greater society beyond the echo chamber of closed recrimination.

Modern prisons, mostly the good ones (if such can be said), offer courses, trainings, seminars, counseling, conversations, job-skill development, work regimens, and higher education. Maine State Prison and Bolduc Correctional Facility are two places where meetingbrook *conversations are held each week. These are open-ended, drop-in, any-topic, exploratory conversations where poetry, physics, politics, personal exploration, philosophy, the nature of space and the cosmos, psychology, or even the subtleties of language and how words and thinking affect how we perceive the world.

These are joyful gatherings where straight-talk with insight and honesty takes place, and where posturing and bullshit seldom take place.

Kibitzing and laughter are equally at the table. It is my favorite swap for teaching university courses. (I hate grading. And would not want to navigate the quisling offerings of AI chat bots.)  I love the open agenda and constant flow in and out of participants with their enthusiastic thoughtful investigatory insights and non-mandated personal writings meant to augment our common inquiries and conversations.

We turn together. They turn within themselves. We turn within ourselves.

Perhaps, soon enough, prison systems and society at large will also take the turn, and allow the vast number of folks in prison who are no future threat to anyone, to have their turn at redemption and creative reconnection with life outside prison.

* conversation (n.)

mid-14c., "place where one lives or dwells," also "general course of actions or habits, manner of conducting oneself in the world," both senses now obsolete; from Old French conversacion "behavior, life, way of life, monastic life," and directly from Latin conversationem (nominative conversatio) "frequent use, frequent abode in a place, intercourse, conversation," noun of action from past-participle stem of conversari "to live, dwell, live with, keep company with," passive voice of conversare "to turn about, turn about with," from assimilated form of com "with, together" (see con-) + versare, frequentative of vertere "to turn" (from PIE root *wer- (2) "to turn, bend").

(--Online Etymological Dictionary) 

To turn

about

Turn 

about

with

nothing left

sleep

well

hospitality and radical humility

 Let it arrive

As it is arriving

Just so, it arrives