the same as he usually is

Tina sends Wendy Cope poem from The Writer's Almanac "Being Boring." It fits so well.

But it was the sentence later on about Hart Crane that brought me up short:  

  In 1932, while sailing on a ship from Havana to New York, he came out on the deck wearing a topcoat over his pajamas. He took off his coat, folded it neatly over the rail, and jumped into the Gulf of Mexico. His body was never found.  https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2003%252F07%252F21.html

I did not know that.

It takes me to the first two stanzas of his poem "The Bridge" (1930):

 How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes   

As apparitional as sails that cross

Some page of figures to be filed away; 

 —Till elevators drop us from our day ...  

(--from, The Bridge: To Brooklyn Bridge, by Hart Crane)

 It remains a curiosity -- the taking of one's own life. It is so widely frowned upon. Often condemned. In fact, illegal:

Suicide remains a criminal offence in at least 20 countries around the world, with some laws dating back up to 160 years ago.

Criminalising suicide doesn’t prevent people from acting on suicidal thoughts: it simply stops them from reaching out and seeking help in times of acute crisis.

In fact, at the World Health Assembly in 2019 all health ministers agreed that decriminalising suicide was an effective way to reduce deaths by suicide when they approved the World Health Organization (WHO) Mental Health Action Plan for 2021-2030.   

https://unitedgmh.org/knowledge-hub/suicide-decriminalisation/

  Except for those with untreatable or close terminal illnesses without any hope of prolongation or any quality of life, I opt for discouraging anyone from acting on suicidal ideation or moving toward setting plan to fruition. 

Why would I discourage suicide?

Here's Wendy Cope:

Being Boring             

                 'May you live in interesting times.' Chinese curse 

If you ask me 'What's new?', I have nothing to say
Except that the garden is growing.
I had a slight cold but it's better today.
I'm content with the way things are going.
Yes, he is the same as he usually is,
Still eating and sleeping and snoring.
I get on with my work. He gets on with his.
I know this is all very boring. 

There was drama enough in my turbulent past:
Tears and passion - I've used up a tankful.
No news is good news, and long may it last.
If nothing much happens, I'm thankful.
A happier cabbage you never did see,
My vegetable spirits are soaring.
If you're after excitement, steer well clear of me.
I want to go on being boring. 

I don't go to parties. Well, what are they for,
If you don't need to find a new lover?
You drink and you listen and drink a bit more
And you take the next day to recover.
Someone to stay home with was all my desire
And, now that I've found a safe mooring,
I've just one ambition in life: I aspire
To go on and on being boring.

I'll stay with that preference. . .

for the time-being.

domine ad adjuvandum me festina

 At three in morning

Rain, going to dooryard truck

Close windows, compline

not until now

 Monks chant Lauds from France

Mystery sound mattering

What we call God, here

an odd sense of connection

 Listening on Scribd to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig, the hardback on coffee table sent (gratefully) by Chris in Augusta of the Kennebec River Zen Center.

At Tuesday Evening Conversations Chris and (elder) Doris (who is in NYState) join in conversation in repeatedly inspiring colloquy about the practice, thought, and questions involved in Zen Buddhism and ordinary experience along the way.

The delight of shared peer dokusan wending way through aporia of zen and everyday life.

This is what we shared years ago together in prison conversations and continuing currently weekly at both maximum security prison up on the hill and minimum correction facility down to the farm -- inquiring and listening, laughing and pondering what appears before us, whether in body or mind or spirit, going forward.

One question that crops up regularly for those whose zen training was conducted in traditional settings with classical methodology is the question of what zen will look like in metamorphic transfiguration being sculpted by contemporary experience.

Coupled with the sorrow of disentangling from what has gone by and, as yet, not fully fused with what is coming to be, we practice with one another as "nowlings" (per Koenig, p.183):

nowlings  

n. the total set of human beings alive at any given  

time, a group that nudges slightly forward when-  

ever a new baby is born or the world’s oldest per-  

son dies, and turns over completely every hundred  

years or so; a random assemblage of billions of  

contemporaries who you feel an odd sense of con-  

nection to, because whatever problems we might  

face right now, we’re all facing them simulta-  

neously.  

From now, the present moment + -lings, inhab-  

itants of. 

Asked recently who my teacher is (or teachers have been) it occurred to me there are three:

• the community (however and wherever they show up)
• presence (in whatever form it is experienced), and
• whenever aporia (uncertainty) beckons

One day at a time, one step apace, the ambiguity and unsuspecting content of presenting-matters for conversation, sitting with one another in some fashion of improvisational theater, saying yes and going forward together in unscripted performance of the unfolding place and presence of one-another for the time-being.

deskscape, wallscape

 

don’t make three, don’t make two, don’t make (one)

Wordless Being

Worded World

Silence of Emptiness

Journey Itself

Passing Through 

All at Once

Originator

Originating

Origination

at the centre of religious experience

 Perhaps God's name is silence.

Maybe that's why so many are leery about silence.

If silence is God's name, perhaps the only way to see God's face is through the silence and emptiness of no-mind, which, some will say, is no-seeing at all. 

The Christian faiths based on the assertion that there is more to an understanding of silence than simply the interaction of humans with humans, or even the interaction of humans with societies or landscapes around them. Whether on not one accepts the assumption of theism (belief in a God), it belittles and impoverishes human experience not to treat seriously the Christian assertion of divinity, and it is the duty of any historian of religion to explore the working out of faith in the past with appropriate sympathy and understanding. Some will see that silences lie at the centre of religious experience, and will wish to affirm that they have had a profound and unfolding effect on the history of Christianity.

(--p.2, Silence, A Christian History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, 2013)

No-seeing isn't not-seeing. 

Not-seeing is a form of blindness.

No-seeing is seeing through mu-shin or no-mind.

What-is seen is what is passing through the seer into itself.

The seer is a waypoint.

The way is what-is passing through the seer enroute to the perennial elsewhere.

Where else is there?

Rest easy.

The rest is silence

anicca

 Sometimes you don’t feel

well, something doesn’t sit right, you

wait for things to pass

ninety five year old kenshō

Her koan was stuck

in her throat -- David pouring

water to ground -- he

felt God move within, three men

sacrificed for him, grateful

παράφωνος, λήθη *

                    (* discordant, oblivion) 

Cars go by from Hope

down mountain sluice Ragged/Bald

inching toward tide --

such surprise disinterest — tree

watching outside deeply mute

yes, it is

 Perhaps Christ is the story of unfolding creation through nothing to matter to psyche to pneuma to emptiness.

We've made Christ human (as Jesus is) because that is the medium through which humans investigate what is relevant to them.

Perhaps to trees Christ is tree. To water, water. To birds, bird.

To cosmos, cosmos.

 That which is flowing through, that which is at surface and depth at same time, that which is what it is as it is when it is where it is.

Apart from the institutionalized systems of belief, if one were to be asked "Do you believe in Christ?" -- the question takes on a different feel.

It would be like asking: is what is standing standing? is what is looking looking? is what is sleeping sleeping? The response to each would seem to be "yes, it is."

Each thing is what it is as it is when and where it is.

It is not a matter of believing in Christ.

It is more a fact of being . . .

Christ moving through.

the continuity

 It’s a fascinating prospect to awarely undergo “a direct experience of the continuity of the psyche with the cosmos.” 

 The general goal of mysticism is to achieve ever-increasing levels of awareness of the cosmos. This involves training exercises in attitudes and orientations toward the self and the world that promote the emergence of another level of awareness. This other level is best understood as experiential rather than cognitive or emotional or even intuitive, although it is important to note that the experiential level of understanding includes all of these three. Achieving this experiential level of understanding enters a domain where words, emotions and even intuition can no longer be used to communicate what is apprehended. Here the way cosmic reality is apprehended is neither by words nor by emotions but by a direct experience of the continuity of the psyche with the cosmos.

 (—p.597, entry “Mysticism and Psychotherapy “ by Anthony Badalamenti, in Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion; Eds: Leeming, Madden, Marlan, 2009)

If such is mysticism, I’m interested. In zen, mushin no-shin is described:

The Mind of No-Mind “Mushin no Shin” by Takuan Soho (1573-1645)

A mind unconscious of itself is a mind that is not at all disturbed by affects of any kind. It is the original mind and not the delusive one that is chock-full of affects. It is always flowing, never halts, nor does it turn into a solid. As it has no discrimination to make, no affective preference to follow, it fills the whole body, pervading every part of the body, and nowhere standing still. It is never like a stone or a piece of wood. It feels, it moves, it is never at rest. If it should find a resting place anywhere, it is not a mind of no-mind. A no-mind keeps nothing in it. It is also called, munen, “no-thought.” Mushin and munen are synonymous.

When mushin or munen is attained, the mind moves from one object to another, flowing like a stream of water, filling every possible corner. For this reason the mind fulfills every function required of it. But when the flowing is stopped at one point, all the other points will get nothing of it, and the result will be a general stiffness and obduracy.

(DailyZen)

In my original Catholic Christian metaphor so many syllogisms and dogmatic constructs came from rationalism and categorical catechesis. Direct apprehension or experience of reality itself as not-other or nothing-other might have been considered as beneath the theology of lofty intellectualism.

Catholicism and Humanism might have to be saved from themselves. Perhaps zen, mysticism, and poetic consciousness could help.

“The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.” (Karl Rahner, sj)

It does seem difficult for us to see things as they are, to accept things as they are, to allow things as they are to become what they inevitably will/must/can become.

We have never been other than what we are.

To become what you are — perhaps this is the heart of mysticism.

opinion is modified by facts, knowledge, and insuperable sensibility

 Let the legal system work. Anyone charged is considered innocent until proven guilty by a jury of peers. It’s a good system where doubt is a deterrent to the sometimes roughshod power of prosecutors anywhere.

There is a comfort knowing that self-serving willfulness has a countering limitation such as law.

Patience, facts, and jousting argument serve well the emergence of justice.

a future we can see

In prison this morning we read Hughes’ poem.

There’s poetry and, then, there’s political posturing and pretense.

Langston Hughes is the poet.

The other guy is best soon forgotten like bad prose and the offal of a disturbed skunk.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above. 

(—from Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again”) 

 The men around the table needed no prod or opinion from me.

They recognized the fraud of the politician without a scintilla of doubt.

What we did not speak of is fascism, a significant concern according to Robert Reich.

We spent time with poetry and the prophetic voice. Poetry, it seems, beckons us to a future we can see promise through.

that’s it, the buddha’s koan, “with”

 Stuck

In the middle

“with” 

(You)

all the poets, all the notes

 from snow bowl, band sings

"without love, where would you be

now?" -- big beat practice

a seer who sees all the way through

Seeing is its own universe.

It's not what is seen. It's what is seen through. 

For Richard Rohr, prophets do not foretell the future, but they do seem to anticipate futures that are shocking to the rest of us:    

 

Most of the prophets seem to be ordinary people who find themselves with a gift. Prophecy in the Bible is not a matter of foretelling, but—to play with the English language a bit—it’s forthtelling. Prophecy is speaking with such a forwardness of truth, direction, and passion that, after the fact, we say the prophet foretold it. It’s not that they’re really predicting something, it’s just that they have immense spiritual insight. The original Hebrew word for a prophet meant simply that: one who sees. A prophet is a seer who sees all the way through.   

 

The reason prophets can speak so clearly and strongly in the now is because they judge the now from, of all places, the future. Prophets have seen the future. In other words, they have seen where God is leading humanity. They have seen and drawn close to the heart of God and they know God is leading us somewhere good. Since they know the conclusion and where it is that we’re heading, they become impatient and angry at the present state of things. If we know where history is going and what God is leading us toward; if we know what our lives could and should be, why are we wasting time with all this violence and all this stupidity? https://email.cac.org/t/d-e-vjtqo-tlkridklo-s/  

 

Not fore- but forth- telling. A seeing that is beyond concept or ideology. A true seeing. 

A correspondence that undifferentiates. A way of being that transcends and includes, 

lives with aporia and ambiguity, accepts and accommodates all presenting itself. 

 In the mahahayana framework, all knowledge of God is

metaphorical, bending words and images in striking and

disturbing ways. The function of doctrine in mahahayana

theology is not to communicate a body of information

about God, but to engender a sense of the presence of

God beyond all words. All proclaimed knowledge of God is

parable, not entailing acceptance of a given state of

affairs in the Godhead but eliciting conversions within

the minds of the hearers.

The scriptural words of and about Jesus likewise

describe him as empty of essence. He presents himself in

the New Testament as unconcerned with his own identity.

It is impossible to understand him apart from the web of

relationships that form his life. As Edward

Schillebeeckx asserts, (There is no a priori definition

of the substance of Jesus.[14] He is constituted by

being related to Abba in silent awareness and to humans

in commitment to the rule of God on earth. In the phrase

of Ignatius of Antioch, he is (the voice of the Father

from silence." [15] He has no identity apart from the

1ather. Almost all the descriptive terms applied to

Jesus in the scriptures

refer him to the Father. He is the son of God, the word

of God, the presence of God, the sacrament of God among

us. One cannot define a sacrament apart from its

referent, and the referent of the person of Jesus

is not an immutable essence as defined by Greek

philosophy, but rather the Father who dwells in silence.

(in The Emptiness of Christ: A Mahayana Christology

by John P. Keenan, Anglican Theological Review, Pp.48-63)

So much to ponder here.

Dwelling in silence. 

thunder storm lights up night

 It a curious story. Jesus died because he was human. He didn’t stay dead because he was divine.

Many believe he now has extraordinary power to forgive sin, heal the sick, run a religious corporation, and help the Republican Party in America battle immorality and elect politicians, appoint judges, ban abortion, and increase the sale of guns, assault rifles, and chicken franchises.

Me, I don’t know.

Identity theft is rampant. Lies are de rigueur. Moral purity and political patronage is the privilege of wealthy conservatives with judges and elected hacks in their back pocket.

Jesus in America is someone the holy trinity might not recognize. 

Still, don’t hate on him.

Invite him to a meeting.

Say “Hi, Jesus” and make him feel welcome.

He’s near bottom.

Don’t serve him one for the road.

That’s a lie.

Roads don’t drink.

Fraud will run out of time.

across the universe

 Leaning back looking

Up last night cosmos full bright

Stars and stuff — today

Only blue washed sunlight white 

Puffs cloud sperse land sweeping breeze

lucha por la vida

 the struggle for life

this middle time walking through

we wander wonder

happying home from the dance

 Phrase from mister Joyce

In finnegans wake reminds

When girls were just girls

so we wouldn’t be so scared in the dark

 Telling a story

Keeping night creatures distant

Fire burns fear goes

via con dios

 you think its easy

saying hello and goodbye

over and over

aphasia can present as lexical-semantic deficits with verbal paraphasia

Meetingbrook Conversations are, if anything, diverse and divergent, anomalous and contemplative, literary and linguistically gymnastic. 

In prison this morning, among other things: 

• reflecting on thalamus,
• on gospel of Mary Magdelene, and
• the structures of appearance and disappearance in social constructs.

In other words -- aporia, chaos theory, and apophatic silence.

We wondered about change. Confrontation or insinuation?

We wondered about post-dualistic triadic or trinitarian interrelation.

We wondered whether e.e.cummings was right when he wrote:

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 non lecture two, in six non lectures, by e.e.cummings, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1952-1953) cf https://endorsements.livejournal.com/32911.html

 The thalamus, according to the National Library of Medicine:

 The thalamus is a mostly gray matter structure of the diencephalon that has many essential roles in human physiology. The thalamus is composed of different nuclei that each serve a unique role, ranging from relaying sensory and motor signals, as well as regulation of consciousness and alertness.          ... 

Though a central sensory relay station, thalamic lesions can paradoxically present with various non-sensory clinical patterns, thereby complicating diagnostic issues.

Thalamic aphasia can present as lexical-semantic deficits with verbal paraphasia but with intact repetition and naming.[10] Characteristically this pattern of aphasia following thalamic strokes shows speedy recovery.[11]                                                                                                                                (--Neuroanatomy, Thalamus, Tyler J. Torrico; Sunil Munakomi. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542184/)

As doorkeeper and distributor, one can imagine the passageway of: 

(1) The vast and incomprehensible in the field of Being entering 

(2) the portal/gatekeeper for directional distribution into the carbon-biologic entity we call human body. This biologic unit can receive and process only so much according to its specifications and capacity until it becomes surfeited and deluged shutting down further input. 

(3) Thereby, in this revolving stasis, there happens a falling through, an emptying into, a reorientation beyond material capacity, down into silent emptiness, wherein and whereby the ever-present origin without shape, time, or dimension -- dwells.

In our mythic theologic articulation through folkloric history, a placeholder designation has been ascribed, namely, trinity. 

This trinity -- origin, anthropos, and pneuma -- might be depicted as inception, conception, reception. Perhaps: the  eternal inchoate, the courageous engaged, the empty reposition.

In Western religious thought: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Perhaps: Being, Becoming, Beholding.

It is our experience that everything-that-is falls through that-which-is-aware into vast-emptiness-at-center.

This journey, if you will, is the spiritual narrative of birth, death, and beyond. Yes, there is death in the middle aspect of this journey. The body, the transportation, the collector and distributor, can only take so much burden, space, time, dimensionality and functioning of organs, before it ceases to contain and negotiate that which is passing into and through it.

So, Jesus dies on the cross after imploring the Father to find a workaround to this middle dilemma.

He says the Spirit (Άγιο πνεύμα) will carry on.

Like last breaths of hospice patients in quiet rooms going out and on beyond my comprehension, I am left with my compañeros and compañera in prison conversations, with one another in final circles of reflective contemplation and community.

With gratitude.

dizzying kinhin 3am

 Strong rain

Truck windows open

Stagger outside

absent minded

How we think about things determines what the things are that we think about.

Thinking of Christ without oppositions of divine/human, without dualistic tensions of either/or, even without rationalizations attempting to include or exclude anything in some arbitrary attempt to define or categorize.

Emptiness is neither nothing nor something.

It is what it is and what it is not.

 Modern understandings of Christ are still formed in terms of the Greek ontological model. The great majority of Christians, while confessing Christ as both human and divine, tend to fall unconsciously into one or another of the heresies excluded by the early Fathers: in their minds, Christ either becomes God striding through the world, or a man with particularly godlike qualities. It is  

precisely this kind of conundrum that a Mahayana Christology can avoid because, in basing itself on the doctrine of emptiness, it refuses to define either the divine or the human nature of Christ. If things and persons have no essences, as Mahayana holds, then they have no specific differences in light of which they might be defined. Mahayana theology is not compelled to do an intellectual balancing act in order to reconcile two opposite natures attributed to the same person. 

(—from, The Emptiness of Christ: A Mahayana Christology, by John P. Keenan, Anglican Theological Review, Vol. 75 No. 1 Winter.1993, Pp48-63)

I sit with a man who breathes in a breath pattern twenty seconds of seven gasps followed by twenty seconds of faint near nonexistent breath followed by the gasping seven breaths across twenty seconds.

We listen to “Absent Minded” a piano and string piece by Gabriel Òlafs.

Christ hears us.

Christ graciously hears us. 

In that soundless sound, 

in that mushin no shin (無心の心)

we become 

what Christ is becoming 

with us.

perhaps, soon, literacy and elocution

 In poem “Mnemosyne” by Friedrich Hölderlin:

We are a sign that is not read  

We feel no pain, we almost have 

Lost our tongue in foreign lands

(—in, What is Called Thinking?, by Martin Heidegger).

la nostalgia è passata ieri

 There’s no visiting

the past. Over shoulder glance

then head turns forward 

its what happens next — upaya — skillfully

 We are holding stem

Flower of dharma twirling

Awakening hand

straddling my first birthday

 There’s no explaining Nagasaki. Don’t listen to any of the rationalizations. Nothing decent can be inferred nor intimated.

Ugly is as ugly does. My Nana was right. She’d say, “handsome is as handsome does.”

Nothing about 6aug1945 and 9aug1945 in Japan is other than horrendous and appalling.

The big dumb celebrations then and since echo in the ribald enthusiasm for a current day corrupt man who wants control over America’s nuclear arsenal. 

शिव चीज़ों पर नज़र रखते हैं  — (Shiva keeps an eye on things.)

not the transitory and impermanent

The actor, stepping from stage after delivering lines, takes off wardrobe specific to scene, plot, and role, returns to street garb, leaves behind that which was temporarily necessary for the performed play, going on into the resumption of their life unfolding forward through time and place traversed by each new step next breath next encounter.

It is the natural unburdening of task, title, and time.

To not let go of our false self at the right time and in the right way is precisely what it means to be stuck, trapped, and addicted to our self. (The traditional word for that was sin, the result of feeling separate from the Whole.) Discovering our True Self is not just a matter of chronological age. Some spiritually precocious children see through the false self rather early. Some old men and old women are still dressing it up. If all we have at the end of our life is our separate or false self, there will not be much to eternalize. It is transitory and impermanent. These costumes are largely created by the mental ego. They were useful to us in our development. Our false self is what changes, passes, and dies when we die. Only our True Self lives forever. [3]

[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013), 27–28.  From “Letting go of the False Self”, Richard Rohr, CAC

 You can’t stay on stage once your bit player role is enacted and performed. You move away. Step off. Relinquish costume.

We are not who we think we are. We are, performatively, who we are coming to be.

All the world is a staging. Players erect, play parts, disassemble, and move on.

What goes on, what is perennial, is the theater of being, being itself, being here, (ultimately) this present moment — surrounding and surrounded by — the merely true in all its disguises, scripts, and deliverance.

Look at you!

We thought we wanted fame, to be famous.

 What we’ve really wanted is to be famished by and delivered unto — the play of it all.

Alas and alack, hithertofor and notwithstanding, treading and trodding, satchel on stick over shoulder, trippingly and traducing, we forge and forage on.

Do play nicely and well!

famiglia, il migliore

 Francis, Katherine

Nellie, Jim, Tom and Sarah,

Patricia — thank you!

post-ferry seen off-shore, pre-three lbs of coffee and bags of fragrant tea

 Drenching rain on beach

Running dog stepping through waves

Perfect morning walk

existence by numbers and ancestral change

 Begins eightieth year

Dawning seven and nine, this

Twenty twenty three —

One day by one day, minute

By minute healing forebears

one is there already

 Really, where do you think you are? 

Highest mountain in the West,                                                  

eighteen thousand miles from the East,

reaching the sky and dwarfing the other peaks. 

If one wishes to reach it, one is there already; 

for a Zen student can make a mountain 

wherever the feet are touching.

 

—Jakushitsu Genko Zenji (1290–1368) in dailyzen

Its easy to be mistaken, thinking we are somewhere when, in fact, we might be everywhere. 

transfiguration

 Jesus says:

“See through me.”

going out, coming in

The mystery of spiritual journeying.

Ultreïa = further beyond

 ανάσταση = resurrection

The going out is the coming in.

Canadian author Sue Kenney – suekenney.ca – suggests that pilgrims on the way to Santiago would say “Ultreya” to which pilgrims on their way home would respond “Suseya”. For her the term would be intrinsically linked to the way back, which was at the time a very important part of the Camino de Santiago with no easy transportation means. https://www.ultreyatours.com/blog/the-meaning-of-ultreya-suseya-santiago-de-compostela/?cn-reloaded=1

Maybe that’s an invitational consequence of growing older — a meditation on destination-less travel (or is that desensitizing travail?)

So many I know delight in outward accomplishment, vacations to other continents, cycling or hiking glorious trails and mountains across the country. I salute them.

These days, I am accomplishing nothing, vacating the premises, doing kinhin in open-air terra-zendo, napping in imaginal reverie, chanting with birds and mewing cats.

Quite simply, there’s nowhere to go … I am … already dwelling.

Prosit!

four days of contemplation

 It is the sacred triduum of 

Hiroshima, Transfiguration and Nagasaki. 

America grew tired of God the Father

Preferring to rid itself of Jesus

Ushering in a new era of mass-killing

Crucifixion by nuclear destruction

Of course the acts were horrible

The mindless raving of exterior solution

We are left with interior silence and prayer

Seeing the cruelty, unrejecting Christ who

Lets be seen all IS and YES and HOLY

As we shade our sorrowing unseeing eyes 

This is the call of sacred numinous

Turn again and look, see what is there

See WHAT IS here

Entering emptiness

Released from delusional calculations

Warfare of comparison and dominance

Today, this transfiguration triduum,

Reject error of ignorant gain and greatness

See through love, see through wholeness

Right now, right here, may particular be seen

A new vision of each and any

This one, that one, anyone

Shining through many and all

Silent One Expression  — Inner Communion

Semblance of Christ

Within reflecting through 

A Heart Sutra inviting us

Beyond, awake, and wholly rejoicing

if wishes were horses

 It doesn’t matter what I think about Donald J.Trump. But he should not be president again.

I don’t care whether he gets away with his crimes and unsupportable attacks on law enforcement, judges, prosecutors, citizenry, anyone who doesn’t kowtow to him, or someone who thinks for themselves and finds him repugnant.

I wish he’d go away.

I’d like our country to be decent, kind, thoughtful, and believable. He’s not.

If prayer has any purchase or validity, I pray he stops being so unbelievably disingenuous.

without nothingness, within emptiness —- (where/what god is)

 The nothingness

Without

Is not

The emptiness

Within

(Savor

This

Realization)

for a second the severed head does not realize

When brash thuggery

Mocks and derides and insults

Everyone suffers

Look at a dangerous man

Krishna as time sharpens sword

at end of friday evening conversation she said the words

Are you

Being

You

Yes

Are 

You Being,

You

been outside (so long)

 the dying are go-

ing within as God is with-

in -- make of it what 

you will -- no need to believe

we're outside now -- looking in

a hundred and two year old compañera

 We time together

she sleeping, bed, me in chair

listening, Richter,

as light descends out from room

I get up to go, say bye

ένας (one) ... νας (you)

 One has

No inside

No outside

One

Is merely, wholly

One

are in we

Creating inside out. 

Where nothing ever was ... comes what is now ... becoming that which is.

 Something seen and felt — but still -- within, nothing there.

“Real?” You ask.

As real as real is, yes, of course, real. But don’t be fooled. Real is what mind is ... making through ... imagination. 

Nothing at core. Everything with care. A longing to cure.

Here’s Browning and Sayers:

 But here is the will of God, a flash of the will that can,

Existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo, they are! 

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, 

That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.

 

Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought, 

It is everywhere in the world-loud, soft, and all is said: 

Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought: 

And there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!' 

... Robert Browning: Abt Vogler.

"I mix it with two in my thought"; this is the statement of the fact of universal experience that the work of art has real existence apart from its translation into material form. Without the thought, though the material parts already exist, the form does not and cannot. The "creation" is not a product of the matter, and is not simply a rearrangement of the matter. The amount of matter in the universe is limited, and its possible rearrangements, though the sum of them would amount to astronomical figures, is also limited. But no such limitation of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were, to destroy the material of a Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree - form to create a table -form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to "creation out of nothing", and we conceive of the act of absolute creation as being an act analogous to that of the creative artist. Thus Berdyaev is able to say: "God created the world by imagination."

This experience of the creative imagination in the common man or woman and in the artist is the only thing we have to go upon in entertaining and formulating the concept of creation. Outside our own experience of procreation and creation we can form no notion of how anything comes into being. The expressions "God the Father" and "God the Creator" are thus seen to belong to the same category — that is, of analogies based on human experience, and limited or extended by a similar mental process in either case.

(—from, The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers (Published 1941)

 I cannot imagine God. My mind would prefer to put something there. Some image. Some thought. Some narrative.

God has no place there. That’s ok, mind says, we’ll create a place called God. Churches, philosophies, theologies, and even secular savants, all create a place for God. Admission fees are charged. Rules promulgated. Sanctions applied. Apparel approved.

Rare is the inchoate imagination fixing no place to reside, no place to hide.

the great advantage of being alive 

                                                                     by e.e. cummings

the great advantage of being alive

(instead of undying)is not so much

that mind no more can disprove than prove

what heart may feel and soul may touch

— the great (my darling)happens to be

that love are in we, that love are in we

 

and here is a secret they never will share for 

whom create is less than have

or one times one than when times where —

that we are in love,that we are in love:

with us they’ve nothing times nothing to do

(for love are in we am in i are in you)

 

this world(as timorous itsters all

to call their cowardice quite agree)

shall never discover our touch and feel

–for love are in we are in love are in we;

for you are and i am and we are(above

and under all possible worlds)in love

 

a billion brains may coax undeath

from fancied fact and spaceful time–

no heart can leap,no soul can breathe

but by the sizeless truth of a dream

whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea.

For love are in you am in i are in we

          (poem, the great advantage of being alive,  by e.e. cummings)