In cabin chapel/zendo statue of Francis moves from corner to under loft ladder.

There's something agnostic about July.

In corner where Francis was, small wood box with anchor carving on top.

I tell someone it is a tabernacle.

It holds nothing.

Home of God.

Sitting.

Within.

No thing.

Political convention begins.

Jimmy Carter spoke tonight in Boston at the Democratic gathering. He said: Ultimately, the issue is whether America will provide global leadership that springs from the unity and integrity of the American people or whether extremist doctrines and the manipulation of truth will define America's role in the world.
 
He's 80 years old, been president of the US, won a Nobel Prize, built houses for the poor, and monitored elections worldwide. Jimmy Carter thinks that in this upcoming election, "At stake is nothing less than our nation's soul."
 
I’ve finished the pavillion
On the pond’s west bank
Cleared out the trees
Across to the east
And this
No one understands
But I just wanted a place
To wait on the moon.
- Po Chu-I (772–846)

Hillary Clinton introduces her husband Bill Clinton who rouses the crowd. It's been a long slog from a ruptured vote in November 2000 to this official beginning to restore voter will in November 2004.

Neither too far to the right nor too far to the left, Americans will have a new chance to decide where the middle resides.

In an article published on Monday, July 26, 2004, Steven Laffoley from Nova Scotia, writes "Dissent is Now Dangerous" on CommonDreams.org about conversations he had in Maine. He says, In the local newspaper, buried on page twelve, I read that the Bush administration is test flying the conditions necessary for postponing the November election. A terrorist attack? A hurricane? An earthquake, perhaps?
I find myself wondering: is the "dissent" of pastors, landscapers, and filmmakers enough?
It is then that I realize: I am scared. After all, in America, dissent is now dangerous.

It is an odd thought that in America dissent is now dangerous.

To make now safe again.

We need an election.

A change.

The experiment of Meetingbrook is the intuition that enlightened ordinary individuals serve as unknowing teachers to us.

They don't know who they are. Nor do we try to determine who is or is not teacher. Meetingbrook holds as true that each person, each being, and each situation is itself a teaching.

Those who are following the Way should behave like a piece of timber which is drifting along a stream. If the log is neither held by the banks, nor seized by people, nor obstructed by gods, nor kept in the whirlpool, nor itself goes to decay, I assure you that this log will finally reach the ocean. If monks walking on the Way are neither tempted by the passions, nor led astray by some evil influences, but steadily pursue their course for Nirvana, I assure you that these monks will finally attain enlightenment.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

We're grateful there are beloved Zen Masters with devoted followers who call themselves students of the master.

We're ever further grateful there are so many ordinary non-masters who devote themselves unknowingly to be teacher and guiding examples of learning needing to be integrated within one's being.

Not to choose specific teachers, but to attend alertly to each person/being/situation is to exercise no-choice in the practice of mindful presence.

Compassion and humility are harmonious sounds in this practice.

Listening reveals dissonance and obedience encourages clear resonance as response to what is heard.

We assume enlightenment -- everyone's.

We practice to pass through.

To remember.

One's sound. 

Together.

Practice helps us pass through. The word ‘practice’ comes from Greek, praktikos, passein to pass over, fare, do; akin to Gk peran to pass through – more at FARE. (Webster’s Seventh)
 
Prepositions and pronouns. That’s what we talk about Tuesday evening after conversation. We read Finding Freedom, Writings from Death Row, by Jarvis Jay Masters. Do we pray to, with, in, for, or as God? Do we use you, he, she, it, I, they, or us when referring to God?
 
Some do not believe anything about God. Belief, they say, disperses direct experience.
 
“Beliefs about anything limit our experience and cause us not to be able to perceive what’s in front of our eyes and nose.” (Pema Chodron, on tape Pure Meditation)
 
That which we call the world is the result of a host of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen In the course of the total evolution of organic nature, have become entwined with one another and are inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past – as a treasure: for the value of our humanity depends on it. Rigorous science is in fact able to detach us from this ideational world only to a slight extent… but it can gradually and step by step illuminate the history of how this world as idea arose…
(Epigraph by Nietzsche, in Joan of Arc, The Image of Female Heroism, by Marina Warner, c.1999)
 
The idea emerges and takes root that only those who currently are in power deserve to be and remain in power. The belief grows that to criticize those in power is unpatriotic and hateful – even if the criticism is accurate, factual, and true. A great number of Americans actually believe the distorting rhetoric and misleading behavior on the part of the ruling administration has been good for the country and is excusable because the leaders are in power.

The story goes like this: our enemies hate us because we love freedom; some Americans criticize freedom-loving leaders who will do almost anything to defeat and eliminate our enemies; therefore, critics are enemies who hate freedom and hate their own country.
 
A story lives in relation to its tellers and its receivers; it continues because people want to hear it again, and it changes according to their tastes and needs. (Prologue, Warner)
 
We are asked to believe that there is only one truth – namely, that whatever we are told is the truth.
 
Mr. Joachim, who has considered very carefully the whole question of error, comes to the conclusion – which seems the only possible one for a monistic theory of truth – that the essential characteristic of error is the claim to express truth unqualified (p.143). He says: The erring subject’s confident belief in the truth of his knowledge distinctively characterizes error, and converts a partial apprehension of the truth into falsity’ (p.162).
(p.135, “The Monistic Theory of Truth” in Bertrand Russell’s Philosophical Essays, c. 1966) referring to book The Nature of Truth (c.1966) by Harold H. Joachim)
 
We need to deepen our practice. Our practice is to pass through the barriers and boundaries thrown up around us, distortions of truth that cloud perception and inhibit authentic inquiry. We are in danger from those claiming to “express truth unqualified.” Arrogance, lack of humility, and smug exclusionary certitude are clues to detect the danger.

Spirituality involves the practice of no barriers and prayer of no boundaries. This practice must stretch through theological and political aspects of life. Spiritual practice threads the disparate into a wholesome unity allowing what is true to pass through.

When pulled together
And bound, there stands
A hut well thatched:
But take it apart,
And we have the wilderness eternal.
- Anon

We need a new civil compact and social contract, one where we include everyone in a network of care and response. The tune we hear from the current breed of believers in the might and rights of the few is startlingly painful to the ear.

The World Is Too Much with Us
 
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.---Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.
(poem by William Wordsworth)
 
To get through this, to pass through a dark time, takes practice.
 
What is practice?
 
Love this question.
 
See it through.

What if middle way and middle trinity shared a secret?
 
Michael is concerned seven Carrier Strike Force Groups will be on maneuvers off the coast of China. Jean talks of 'walk-ins' to the planet the way one might walk-in to a hair dresser. Pia points out a blockage in throat of someone not acting on his intuition. The other Michael remembers when he did well as a healer. Dick has fleeting passing doubt about a Fox News Irish guy who might not be fair and balanced. Buzz holds an undistributed belief that to act is better than to think. Joanie says she didn't have a date on Sunday. Lola brought her dog in the car to meet Saskia who was off in her rowboat. Sylvia had lunch with someone who spoke to her mood. Jory liked Adyashanti's poem about "Here." Nancy is wondering about narrative and naming. Lloyd decides to leave early Saturday afternoon when there are too many unspecific words being read. Kristin performs her one woman show in Belfast. Sam plays harmonica. Susan wears swap shop hat. Betty sits a spell.   
 
Charlie is confident when he sings:
Man, they said we'd better
Accentuate the positive,
Eliminate the negative,
Latch on to the affirmative,
Don't mess with Mr. Inbetween.
No, don't mess with Mr. Inbetween!
(Transcribed from vocals by lyricist Johnny Mercer with Paul Weston and His Orchestra, recorded December, 1944)
 
I'm not that confident. I think we've lost sight of the between. From Buddha's middle way as silent truth to Jesus' middle say as loving word, from Aristotle's in medio stat virtus to Tolkien's Middle-earth, and to the piquancy of the Middle-East in our minds today -- we are invited to a new centrist philosophy that dwells in-between and acknowledges filiation and sorority with adjacent edges of everything.
 
We are in the middle of it all.
 
You are in our midst, O God.
 
The poet says his secret is silence.
 
Say nothing more.

Suddenly sun after night of rain. Brook tumbles Ragged as dogs drink and immerse up from crossing footbridge on morning mountain circle.
 
The Sun
 
 Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
 
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
 
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again
 
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
 
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
 
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
 
as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--
 
or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?
(poem by Mary Oliver )
 
We walk with a question. Is Ganz Anderer, (German for ‘wholly other’), of a piece with ‘no other?’ I’d been reading John Caputo’s Against Ethics. He writes about Abraham’s “Me voici.” He is making the point that in the French the ‘Me’ is the accusative case, the object of speech, addressed by an ‘other.’
 
The dogs don’t have this question. Cesco doesn’t even seem interested in responding to being addressed by my voice saying, ‘Cesco, come here!’ when he trots away to another dog or follows a car to the other end of the Snow Bowl parking lot from which a tan dog named Admiral emerges to a wagging tail. 
  
Jesus entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.
She had a sister named Mary who sat beside the Lord at his feet listening
to him speak.  Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said,
"Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the
serving?  Tell her to help me."  The Lord said to her in reply, "Martha,
Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.  There is need of
only one thing.  Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken
from her."
(Luke 10:38-42)
 
Can we be serving and listening and yet maintain there is no object, no other being served or listened to? Martha and Mary perform this theatrical piece with the one many have come to call the Christ. “Tell her to help me,” says Martha to Jesus. Mary says nothing.
 
In the shop today Chicken is cooked on the grill, salad plucked, podded peas shelled, strawberries sliced, goat cheese crumbled, and lettuce torn into wooden bowl. Cesco lays near where Buzz sat. Sando burrows in dirt under deck. Joanie sits quietly by fireplace. Therese calls from shop out front about remaining pickings. Earlier Alease calls from Maryland and we catch up the years. An artist from Rockland comes by and goes back with his sketch/paintings.
 
If there is only here, if there’s no time like or but the present, then the question about wholly other or no other  falls between the asking and the response. It is the ‘between’ that holds everything together.
 
What is between Martha and Mary? What is between serving and listening? What is between any of us?
 
Jesus’ answer is a trick answer. He tells Martha, “Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her." The trick is in the wording comes down to us in translation.
 
Jesus says, “It will not be” – is what is “taken from her.” Mary does not have “it will not be.” She does have what is, the part that will not be.
 
There’s something imbedded here that neither the dogs nor I comprehend as the afternoon lengthens. Saskia returns from her row out to sailboat in Rockport to secure lines for the blow someone says will come tonight.
 
Do not let anything come between you and what you consider not-you. Let nothing, what "will not be," rest between each and everything. The “better part” that Jesus refers to is listening/serving, each in each, wholly other/no other, as it is, on earth/in heaven.
 
Wholly no/wholly yes.
 
Otherless child.
 
Sometimes we feel.
 
So.  

To unknow is to allow the intelligence of the situation to reveal itself.
 
THE GOOD MAN HAS NO SHAPE
 
Through centuries he lived in poverty.
God only was his only elegance.
 
Then generation by generation he grew
Stronger and freer, a little better off.
 
He lived each life because, if it was bad,
He said a good life would be possible.
 
At last the good life came, good sleep, bright fruit,
And Lazarus betrayed him to the rest,
 
Who killed him, sticking feathers in his flesh
To mock him. They placed with him in his grave
 
Sour wine to warm him, an empty book to read;
And over it they set a jagged sign,
 
Epitaphium to his death, which read,
The Good Man Has No Shape, as if they knew.
(Poem by Wallace Stevens)

They might not know. But they are correct -- the good man has no shape.
 
Shape is not brought by the good person. Shape is given by what is found wherever that person is.
 
There are far too many words about things we know nothing about. All day long chatter and narration, commentary and senseless prattle.
 
Here too.
 
If there is a God, wordlessly that God dwells.
If there is a Christ, the body of Christ's incarnation belongs to you.
If a Holy Spirit has anything to do with this world, it is an allowing reality full of forgiving for the unallowed.
 
Form is not only emptiness, but emptiness is the unshapable loveliness of silence allowing itself our inspiration to sound through it.
 
Even when nothing is heard.
 
We are being spoken.
 
As we are.
 
Known.  

Two mornings two young skunks in Havahart moved up Barnestown Road to Bald Mountain side of road. Third day empty. But the ritual drive is made anyway. 
  
We never know what is trapped under blanket cover until door is open to set it free.
 
Look up to heaven and down on earth, and they will remind you of their impermanency. Look about the world, and it will remind you of its impermanency. But when you gain spiritual enlightenment, you shall then find wisdom. The knowledge thus attained leads you to the Way.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters
 
Separating young ones from mother is not a happy task. Sunday night the conversation was about mother and mothers. Someone suggested to give up the role of mother is what is meant be the sentence, "Mother-love is the only love that loves toward separation."
 
When role is abandoned, person sounds through. We become part of the unfolding reality, parenting (from L. parere=to give birth to) that person or that reality by participating in its appearance or life.
 
At Friday Evening Conversation talk of the need to step out of the game of dualistic stories, of good and evil, right and wrong, the mind games and brain washing of greed and power. There was passion and intelligence in the ad hoc topic of cultural change and the fomenting fear insinuating the country.
 
To stand mind-naked and humbly unknowing, allowing each the unfolding reality of their being, with loving attention, and no agenda.
 
Compassion.
 
For skunks.
 
Alike.
 

"Watch and pray," the saying goes.
 
I think the correct saying is -- "Watching is prayer."
 
Cloudy mountains, fold on fold,
How many thousands of them?
Shady valley road runs deep,
All traces of people gone
Green torrents, pure clear flow,
No place more full of beauty;
Birds sing my own heart’s harmony.
- Shih-Te (c. 730)
 
By looking, or watching, we allow what is unfolding the reverence of attention.
 
Just as the phrase "custody of the eyes" suggests we allow what is there to be seen in its own integrity -- not imposing and not detracting -- we learn to pray by seeing what is there in full alertness.
 
What is there -- full of beauty.
 
Of truth.
 
In itself.

The man from Georgia says that AIDS is God’s punishment on homosexuals. The question on C-Span is whether abstinence or condoms is the best method of preventing AIDS. Each of the three succeeding callers says they cannot believe each preceding call. The moderator smiles.

If you want to learn the Principles,
Don’t study fine bound books.
The True Pearl’s in a hemp sack
The Buddha nature rests in huts.
Many grasp the sack
But few open it.
- Shih Te (c 730)

On the floor of the Senate, Frank Lautenberg, Democratic Senator from New Jersey, is saying he is seeking a special prosecutor to investigate Halliburton and Vice President Dick Cheney and the no-bid 2.5 billion contract awarded for services in Iraq. Was Cheney involved in awarding the contract? Sen. Lautenberg says he was, and that an investigation is needed on this as well as the 160 million overcharge, or profiteering, on the part of Halliburton

The day starts hot. Cesco and Sando return with Saskia from walk to Snow Bowl. The two dogs snooze flat on floor.

I am the escaped one

I am the escaped one,
After I was born
They locked me up inside me
But I left.
My soul seeks me,
Through hills and valley,
I hope my soul
Never finds me.
(Fernando Pessoa)

The poet does not want to be found. Time was when “soul” flourished desired and revered as essence of a human being’s life. Here the poet, as the escaped one, hopes his soul never finds him. What spiritual stance is this?

[840]
Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book,
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.
(Fernando Pessoa, from 35 SONNETS, 1918)

Dreams come and go. Fact stays. The dream of a country. The dream for one’s life. The dream of how our lives conform with the theological dream of the life of God.

What fact stays? All of them. A “fact,” (from L. ‘facere’ ‘factus’ = to do, to be done), is a thing done, something that has actual existence.

Whether government or schools of theology – it is not what is dreamt of that matters, it is what is that matters. Facts have a way of staying around long after dreams have wandered off.

“We are ever unapparent,” says Pessoa in his sonnet.

We have escaped our soul.
We look everywhere in desperation.
What fact locates?

What are we, what are you, what am I –- doing?

Look.

Lost?

Mind is maddened by greed.

Greed appropriates the communal. It privatizes to the personal what belongs to no one. What maddens the mind is the belief, and therefore the urge to act on this belief, that land, things, ideas, people, and God can be owned. A more absurd notion, from a spiritual perspective, is hard to find.

There is anther view, namely, that each piece of earth, each thing, each idea, each person, and certainly what-is-called-God belongs completely, and only, to itself.

And yet, the most maddening history of humankind, whether secular or religious, is predicated on wanting for one's own what can only belong to itself. We want power, land, cause of riches, and sole rights to each. We name this want with conventional names -- from materialism to infallibility, from private property to dogma, from capitalism to fatwa, from democracy to tyranny. Whatever name we give it, the message is similar --"This is mine; You owe me."

Is there a way out of the vault of privatized belief? Is the "Way" -- in either Eastern or Western tradition -- something saner for us?

Those who have strong passions are never able to perceive the Way. It is like stirring up clear water with your hands; you may come wishing to find a reflection of your face, but you'll never see clearly in disturbed waters. A mind troubled and vexed with the passions is never able to see the Way.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

We have nearly ceased to listen. We do not listen to each other -- not beyond the surface words to the inner cry. Our capacity to enter the silent plea for recognition transmuted by each being is dulled by dismissive flip belief there is not much there to warrent our attention. This is how we erase God. This is how we yuck it up, hail fellows well met, and place our heads on pillows at night falling asleep to restless dreams reminding us we are missing something very important, waking in the morning to a world securely conforming to our marketable beliefs.

Moses said to the people: "If only you would heed the voice of the LORD,
your God, and keep his commandments and statutes that are written in this
book of the law, when you return to the LORD, your God, with all your
heart and all your soul. "For this command that I enjoin on you today is
not too mysterious and remote for you. It is not up in the sky, that you
should say, 'Who will go up in the sky to get it for us and tell us of it,
that we may carry it out?' Nor is it across the sea, that you should say,
'Who will cross the sea to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may
carry it out?' No, it is something very near to you, already in your
mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out."
(Deuteronomy 30:10-14)

We've nearly lost what is nearest to us. By hurling opinion at each other, by making objects and categories of each other, we have nearly become blind and deaf to what longs to be seen and heard.

God-life, that which is within and surrounding each and every thing, person, idea, and piece of cosmos, longs to be seen and heard. The vital spark that causes everything to be itself is muted by opinion and belief diminishing and denying the specific revelation of God's life is each specific face.

81
True words do not sound beautiful;
beautiful sounding words are not true.
Wise men don't need to debate;
men who need to debate are not wise.

Wise men are not scholars,
and scholars are not wise.
The Master desires no possessions.
Since the things she does are for the people,
she has more than she needs.
The more she gives to others,
the more she has for herself.

The Tao of Heaven nourishes by not forcing.
The Tao of the Wise person acts by not competing.
(from Tao Te Ching - Written by Lao-Tzu, A Translation For the PUBLIC DOMAIN by j.h.mcdonald 1996 )

We have nearly exhausted the Way by claiming to own it, sell it, develop it, auction it, privatize it, and keep it out of view.

But that behavior is madness. It is illusion. It has been elsewhere been called 'sin,' the turning away of (or from) God, the denial of God by denial of God's ever-presence.

What remains for us to do? How forgive and be forgiven for failing or refusing to see or hear God in and through one another?

Madness is belief that has little correspondence with what is real. Not the real we believe is real, but the real beyond belief. We have enclosed belief in our private collection and ownership. Locked away from the light and fresh air of open inquiry, privatized belief suffocates the mind.

Minds stagger under the weight of "my," "mine," and "me." Enclosed and stifling belief holds that the open should be closed, debt is wealth, the few know better than and thereby must dominate the many, to protect freedom it is best to restrict freedom, to champion justice is to hoard and portion it out selectively. It is a heavy belief which leads us to imprison, hold, and terrorize those who long for what we ourselves have, but who have difficulty reaching out for what we hold as ours.

How traverse the minefield and tar pit of greed? Is it still possible to dispel madness and retrieve sanity, to open mind and soul, let flow through us the lightness and freedom of reality beyond belief, the Itself, God-life?

Is greed a death-knell? Is privatized belief an inescapable madness?

Or can we still find a way to set free a saner, more inclusive, and compassionate Way in the world? Is it too late or too far from us?

As far back as Moses, we are told: No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.

Reflection of our true face is seen in the face of each and every being. By letting go the clench-and-grab mind we allow things to fall free to earth with all its idiorhythmic and unoccupying vastness. Freedom necessitates releasing God-life.

All for each. One for one. Itself for everything.

Dare we the Way?

Would it become us?

No one lives in words. We live in self-emptying.

When poet frees an injured hawk in his poem, downy feathers become the written page. When angel tries to live beyond despair, the sound under earth is chanting soil’s unseeing prayer.

Good is to practise the Way
And to follow truth.
Great is the heart that
Is in accord with the Way.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

1.

Two sentences hang from hermitage bookshelf in dining room: “Contemplation is silent prayer of no-boundary. Zen is engaged practice of no-barrier.” They’re seen at times when passing by that side of table. What they suggest for prayer and practice sometimes seems doable. Most times the words stay on page unread taped to shelf under books unopened.

They are invitations. They’re always there. We don’t often hear each invitation. If we do listen and hear what we are invited into, we might respond, we might enter into the reality; we might become obedient to it.

In Russian spirituality kenosis is a spontaneous way of life centered in participation with the incarnate Christ. Kenosis is simply self-forgetfulness expressed in acts of love toward others. Ippolit in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot expresses an insight into kenosis: “You are giving away, in one form or another, part of your personality and taking into yourself part of another; you are in mutual communion with one another; a little more effort and you will be rewarded with the knowledge of the most unexpected discoveries.” Kenosis is thought of, not as suffering, but primarily as loving obedience, the appeal to an active fidelity. The Russian word for obedience (poslushanije) suggests hearing and following, as hearing a call and responding to it, or hearing a person or being and responding. The interpreter can hear the call of the poem and obey it in terms of enacting or completing its own creation.

Kenosis involves an asceticism which, for the artist, means that she or he must be emptied of anything that distracts attention from the end of the art. From the viewpoint of the good of the work the artist needs to maintain the virtues of humility and generosity, the chief virtues of the creative personality. Generosity takes the form of self-giving. Keats wrote of the limits to which the self-giving of the poet can go and said that the poetic character is not itself, is everything and nothing, forms itself according to the work: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because [the poet] has no identity [but] is continually…filling some other Body”

…Kenosis as the essence of creativity implies that creativity is self-transcendence. A. H. Maslow views creativity as an elimination of blocks against the matter-at-hand, so that “we let it flow in upon us.” Maslow observes that a person is most integrated, unified, directed, and all of a piece when totally organized in the service of the creative matter-in-hand. He views creativity as systemic – as a Gestalt involving the whole person. In genuine, concentrated creativity there is less dissociation and splitting of facets and more here-now-allness.
(pp.90-91, The Word’s Body, by Alla Bozarth-Campbell)

2.

I often become stuck in the split. The idea stuck in my mind worked like a iron wedge and heavy maul against length of wood that meetingbrook should not be split into two places. That ingrained wedge has remained fastened inside the split but not sundered piece we call meetingbrook – one part leaning at mountain, one part leaning at harbor. This forked two-way is, as an idée fix, a distraction and duplication of meetingbrook. Over the years I’ve tried words to capture the need for me – that we need move to ‘consolidation’ or ‘confluence’ or ‘singularity’ – an attempt to put in one place what is in two. The whole metaphor of singularity spoke to me of non-duality.

The economics of bookshop/bakery in town and hermitage/chapel/zendo at Ragged/Bald seem unwieldy and more than we can hold together. We are not people of independent means. If our energy was not split we might have worked harder to attain and build the hermitage common-cloister on Sally’s land. Even those who love unsparingly the setting for hospitality and conversation we’ve created by the harbor express unsparing humor at the fact that a retail place it is not, but more like a place of sanctuary and welcome for hearts and minds wearily languishing for real inquiry and genuine listening.

These last two days, I broke. I stay away from harbor. I hide in hermitage room with books and thoughts. The animals visit but we remain in silence. Saskia goes by with word or two but I have fallen into somewhere prior to counting to one. The world does its business but I have no commerce, currency, or connection to it. Something breaks. I heard it. What was it?

3.

HURT HAWKS

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.


II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.
I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
(Poem by Robinson Jeffers)

The life of soaring redtail shifts from air to page. Poet intervenes, moving from lead to letters. An unsheathing from enclosure to unexpected discovery -- the poet has no identity, but fills some other body.

4.

The Guardian Angel

Afloat between lives and stale truths,
he realizes
he's never truly protected one soul,
they all die anyway, and what good
is solace,
solace is cheap. The signs are clear:
the drooping wings, the shameless thinking
about utility
and self. It's time to stop.
The guardian angel lives for a month
with other angels,
sings the angelic songs, is reminded
that he doesn't have a human choice.
The angel of love
lies down with him, and loving
restores him his pure heart.
Yet how hard it is
to descend into sadness once more.
When the poor are evicted, he stands
between them
and the bank, but the bank sees nothing
in it's way. When the meek are overpowered
he's there, the thin air
through which they fall. Without effect
he keeps getting in the way of insults.
He keeps wrapping
his wings around those in the cold.
Even his lamentations are unheard,
though now,
in for the long haul, trying to live
beyond despair, he believes, he needs
to believe
everything he does takes root, hums
beneath the surfaces of the world.
(by Paul Dunn, from New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton).)

It is hard to descend into sadness. Ours is an age where not to be optimistic is to be considered either unpatriotic or off antidepressants. Shrouding rhetoric intent on inducing forgetfulness swiftly skirts the places where sadness occurs. ‘We are a great country,’ the talking point says. ‘We are a holy church,’ it says. ‘Things are not that bad,’ it says. ‘Only negative people, haters, would hold that opinion,’ it says.

Angels guarding sad parts of the world themselves entwine within sadness with no reluctance. Trouble and difficulty exist in this world. Arguments that are made debating guilt or innocence place debaters outside and away from the facticity they skirt. There is a war in Iraq. Sudan is a slaughtering ground. Corporate crime is rife. Governments do deceive. There is a severe divide between those with means and those without means. People in power do abuse power. Priests do sexually abuse boys. Men and women of the cloth do break trust with their flock. And all of us fail and do disappoint by opting for falsity and disingenuity.

The human record of folly and arrogance is well documented. Human life is a curious history. Secular governments and religious institutions have both contributed to raising the quality of life, as well as degrading justice by avoiding compassion in their long histories. Institutions attempt to alleviate suffering. They also hogtie individuals little able to fight through against superior strength.

5.

Albert Camus, fifty-seven years ago, recorded his thoughts about what he saw and felt.

August 1937
Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so-called “vital interests.”
(p.48, Notebook I, in Notebooks 1935-1942, by Albert Camus, trans. by Philip Thody, c.1963)

August
On the way to Paris: this fever beating in my temples. The strange and sudden withdrawal from the world and from men. The struggle with one’s body. Sitting in the wind, emptied and hallowed out inside, I spent all my time thinking of K. Mansfield, about that long, painful, and tender story of a struggle against illness. What awaits me in the Alps is, together with loneliness and the idea that I shall be there to look after myself, the awareness of my illness.

To keep going to the end means not only resisting but also relaxing. I need to be aware of myself, in so far as this is also an awareness of something that goes beyond me as an individual. I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.
(p.44, Notebooks)

6.

Fog gives way to rain at dusk. Cat now sports bell collar brought by Annie. Saskia wants birds to be warned. He brings string toy into room where two dogs each open eye to clock his whereabouts. It will not be such a shock when cat leaps suddenly to arm of chair then stomach as I write.

We don’t live in words. They only tell something about where we might be. When we tire of them we have the option to try silence. With practice we might even find silence in our normally noisy mind.

Tonight I wander over the foreland hill, begging, not for death and not for life, but for something more singular than that divide.

I become mendicant listener.

Mere sound. Mere silence.

Dwelling there.

Noting.

God is beyond me. I have no idea who, where, what, or how God is.

I’m happy with the everyday way
Like the mist and vines in these rock-strewn ravines
This wilderness is so free and vast
My old friends, the white clouds, drift idly off
There is a road, but it doesn’t reach the world
Mindless, who can be disturbed by thoughts
At night I sit alone on a stone bed
While the round moon climbs the face of Cold Mountain
- Han Shan (c 730)

Times when desolation vacuums any bit of understanding from within and leaves not a trace of comprehension or ability to locate oneself, such as now, serve to remind how pervasive the impermanence and unknowing of this being in the world.

I am long unseeing. I have not yet learned the order of things. So encrusted in illusion and ignorance I have not begun to shake free into seeing a thing as it is and entering authentic not knowing.

[P]henomenology means letting things become manifest as what they are, without forcing our own categories on them. It means reversal of direction from that one is accustomed to: it is not we who point to things; rather, things show themselves to us. This is not to suggest some primitive animism but the recognition that the very essence of true understanding is that of being led by the power of the thing to manifest itself.... Phenomenology is a means of being led by the phenomenon through a way of access genuinely belonging to it.
(Richard E. Palmer, quoted in The Word's Body, An Incarnational Aesthetic Of Interpretation, by Alla Bozarth-Campbell, c.1979, p.6)

I, unfortunately, forget this revelation. I run, instead, to search out some set teaching, a string of beliefs passed on to those of us unwilling to allow things their own being, things continuously revealing themselves. I have failed to disavow either institutional or personal soporific stupor. Days come when feeling devoured by diffidence is the only sweetness alienation affords. The absurdity of clinging to what is not there, the disappeared specter of illusory autonomous self, that delusion of separateness held sacred and special by this mercantile world.

"I have ascended to the highest in me, and look!
The Lord is towering above that.
In my curiosity I have descended to explore my lowest depths,
yet I found God even deeper.
If I looked outside myself,
I saw God stretching beyond the furthest I could see;
and if I looked within,
God was yet further within.
Then I knew the truth of what I had read,
'In God we live and move and have our being.'"
(Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Author of the 12th Century)

These words mystify. How can we see beyond that which we can see? The illimitable above, unfathomable depth, the inaccessible within, the unreachable without -- the measureless omni-directional empty vastness -- that which we call the Reality of God, is that with which we live and move and have our being. Who can approach this reality? Who can avoid it? Reality is reality; it is what is. There is only reality. We are not other than reality. Or, do we think we are?

We are of a piece in this existence. Whatever way we verbalize this absolute truth, we are an interconnected wholeness. We depend on one another, materially and morally, to dwell in this world. We are interdependent. It is the absence of this realization -- the realization of who and how we are in this world -- that causes forgetfulness. Forgetfulness brings with it the perception that “others” are out to harm us, take from us, and even eliminate us from the unified whole that is our true dwelling place. With deficient mentation, this forgetfulness, comes the impetus to strike out against any real or perceived hostility, and act to remove the enemy. Not seeing our real face, not engaging one another in healing reparative interaction, leaves us with surface or shallow impulses of retribution and revenge that trigger violence, warfare, and desolation.

A quote attributed to Nietzsche says, “The most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do. “ (Friedrich Nietzsche)

I forget what we were trying to do. In this state of affairs, I feel stupid. I cannot remember who I am and what I am doing here.

EPILOGUE

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(Poem from Day by Day by Robert Lowell, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1975, 1976,)

This is our task and our penance – to see each face, acknowledge names, and go on living as though this occupation were enough for the time being. All the while, down below and far beyond this occupation, suspecting a far odder fact of life undergirds the fact of this world.

In the beginning was the Word;...
The Word was made flesh, and lived among us,
and we saw Its glory...

Indeed, from Its fullness we have, all of us, received.
(John 1:1,14,16. Paraphrased from The Jerusalem Bible by Bozarth-Campbell)

There is a Zen koan that goes, “Show me your original face, the one you had before your mother and father were born.” After many blank stares some conclude the question absurd. The effect feels something like the Cheshire Cat, appearing and disappearing with and without body, its head and face fading in and out of the storyline. There is a sympathetic feeling of phantom-face, not unlike an amputee, or even the split second following beheading. There is a sense of trauma.

We must be gentle with trauma. The trauma we face is the disappearance of our own face. In time, our face dissolves. Out of time, a variant seeing takes place with no referential viewing point to call one's own. What we call our 'viewpoint' collapses into mere view without subject viewing or object viewed. There is only what is, what is as what is, neither here nor there -- merely itself in every manifestation. To face reality, we believe, we must have a face over and against this reality. But what if “reality” was its own face? Would that realization change our minds from holding a separate, dualistic construct of reality -- to one that is everywhere seeing what is there to see?

What is merely itself in every manifestation could easily be another attempt to name the unnamable, to specify God.

Let's leave it saying: What is merely itself is What Is Merely Itself. Tautology dressed in capital letters, a mimesis reviewing something seen with emphasis on sacral seeing.

V
The dangers are everywhere. Auxiliary verbs, fishbones, a fine carelessness. No one really likes the odor of geraniums, not the woman who dreams of sunlight and is always late for work nor the man who would be happy in altered circumstances. Words are abstract, but 'words are abstract' is a dance, car crash, heart's delight. It's the design dumb hunger has upon the world. Nothing is severed on hot mornings when the deer nibble flowerheads in a simmer of bay leaves. Somewhere in the summer dusk is the sound of children setting the table. That is mastery: spoon, knife, folded napkin, fork; glasses all around. The place for the plate is wholly imagined. Mother sits here and father sits there and this is your place and this is mine. A good story compels you like sexual hunger but the pace is more leisurely. And there are always melons.
(from poem "The Beginning Of September" by Robert Hass in his book of poems entitled Praise, c.1979)

In the U.S. Senate today there is strong vocal opposition to a procedural maneuver by the majority leader to limit amendments to a bill that has reached the floor. Words make laws. Laws govern a country. What we say matters. What we do matters. What matters becomes our very lives. Words, therefore, are incarnational. We are embodied word. Thus embodied, each act is an expression, whether silent or articulated, of what we are. We exist as a liturgy of incarnation in the midst of the world.

The presence of the poem as an incarnate being has power over those who perceive it, as the presence of the Incarnate Word was shown to have power over those who saw and heard Christ. The Spirit, according to biblical theology, is manifested as the power of love between the Creator and the Christ, overflows into creation, and touches human life directly, to transform it as if by breathing a new life into human beings. The Spirit and the Word move together to change the quality of -- to redeem -- human lives. There is a power manifested in the event of interpenetration if all factors combine to reveal the communion that exists between the poem and the interpreter. This power forms what has been called in this study a circle of energy, and the audience, if the kairos of the performing poem has come, is taken up into this circle in the transforming experience of communion. The visible utterance of the incarnate word in the spirit-charged power of performance can have the effect of breathing new life into those who participate in its moment of revelation.

The incarnational aesthetic of interpretation presented in this study acknowledges the phenomenon of interpretation to be a creative metaphor, enacted through the at-onement between the poem as a speaking-subject and the performer as an embodying-subject. The environment created by their communion is a result of a complex process of dialogue, embodiment, and participation. The artistic event of interpretation as the revelation of presence in performance combines the dynamics of creation, incarnation, and transformation, as a poem, performer, and audience are brought together in the moment of clarity and power that is communion.

...Through its incarnate presence in performance the word interprets human life and speaks forth a new existence that includes those who see and hear it. The poem makes us, and it makes us new. In the ideal performance, the performance that the serious interpreter always strives for and frequently can attain, the experience of the poem is full and complete. From its fullness "we have, all of us, received."
(pp.142,3,4 in The Word's Body)

What have we received?

What's There
When the small hulking rock on my path through the early morning dark
started
To be the skunk it really was and waddle an undulant shuffle away from
me, showing
Its chiaroscuro self by the luminous leftovers of a full moon and stars, I
was startled
For a second or two, brought up short by the uncertain solidity of a
world that keeps
Falling back to a fluency that's just the simple fact of things being clear
as day and
Enigmatic — that transparency we say we see in Being, being just
opacity itself inside it
But seen clearly for a moment and telling no lies about itself, clean as
the swooplines
A suspension bridge has: such solid mystery they make and we walk on
water. Water
Too, is like that, hitting the back of your throat with nothing but its wet
cool, nothing else
In or beyond it — distinct as the invisible dawn bird or a voice inside a
voice, informing you.
(poem by Eamon Grennan in "The Hudson Review," Volume LVII, Number 1, Spring 2004 )

The day has grown hot. Sando pants on floor. Cesco snoozes quietly. Earlier Mu-ge pee'd on couch. We suspect he did it in a fit of pique over not being let out. He’s out now. From time to time squirrel chatters in complaint. Birds are more wary approaching feeder.

I don't know.

It's all beyond me.

I’ve come to an end.

It's a place to start.

Hillside walk through woods quiet morning of quiet day. Dogs wet from fog moist grass.

Those who are pure in heart and single in purpose are able to understand the most supreme Way. It is like polishing a mirror, which becomes bright when the dust is removed. Remove your passions, and have no hankering, and all will be revealed to you.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

Those hankering to lead country are poised to run at each other now that the foursome is in place. They will try to discredit each other. For the next 120 days America will be subject to a theatre déclassé substituting sideswipe for civil discourse and talking point monologues for enlightening debate. We might ask them to speak to each other about how best to lead the country and share with us their good insights. We might invite them to suspend attacks and divulge their personal fears and hopes about this great nation. We might find them tired of disingenuous rhetoric and willing to say “yes, yes” or “no, no” when asked questions. We might ask them to help us heal the sores and cracks laid on the body politic by false biography.

If we continue to cultivate acrimony and arrogance as our biographical narrative it will affect the biology of this nation and its citizens. We might inadvertently become pinched, vindictive, and sullen -- suddenly and physically -- experiencing a mutation of body and spirit that will shock us.

Caroline Myss says biography is biology.

Michael Toms: Caroline, one of the principles you wrote about in Anatomy of the Spirit is that "biography becomes biology." What does that mean--that our past somehow relates to our health?

Caroline Myss: Imagine that you have a hundred circuits of life-force energy coming into the top of your head. This life-force is the pulsating energy behind cell mutation and division, behind the heartbeat, behind the functioning of the body. This electromagnetic energy is also the energy that you invest into memories, thoughts, attitudes--into your history.

When I do a reading on somebody, I go after where you've invested those circuits; I go after every investment you have that is not in present time. I begin to pull your traumatic memories, your negative attitudes and self-image. So I'm looking at your biography. These are the biographical events that leave biological debt factors.

Imagine that, when you get up in the morning, you have a hundred dollars' worth of energy coming in. And you have a memory that's costing you sixty dollars a day to finance, and an attitude that's costing you twenty-five dollars a day. By the time you're done, you've got three bucks left over to manage your biography today!

What I recognized is that your biography becomes your biology--you are one and the same with your life and your history. Events that you have not yet reconciled, haven't forgiven, haven't let go of, are carried as that debt in your cell tissue.
(Excerpted from New Dimensions, YOUR BIOGRAPHY IS YOUR BIOLOGY, with Carolyn Myss,
Program #2576.)

The debt of the Iraq war -- the manner with which it was initiated, conducted, and profiteered – is heavy. The health of the nation – weakened by deception, abuse, and denial – borders on serious to critical. The story of America’s constitutional amnesia – a biography of ill sounding explanation – threatens to weaken a once healthy resolve toward justice.

We are still evolving. What we might become is uncertain. So much is in our hands. Do our hands welcome or dismiss? Do they touch with tenderness or launch explosives intent on destruction? Do they open wide in a gesture signifying abandonment of all pretenses to control, or do they clench and clutch imposing their will on those in their way?

There are very few people
who realise what God would make of them
if they abandoned themselves into his hands,
and let themselves be formed by his grace.
(St Ignatius)

Grace is a crucial necessity. Grace is God-life felt and manifested in ordinary human behavior. With grace we behave honorably and kindly toward one another. Without grace we attack and injure each other.

Nicole stops in to the shop just before Buddhist Conversation. This young woman says I don’t look so good. I tell her I don’t feel so good and that I am writing about how mean and intentionally hurting rhetoric or act cause us all to fall into ill-health. She thinks it is gloomy. I say I agree. She smiles. It is a brief flash of sunshine.

Is it so with God? Is that what happens when God-life suddenly appears through the veils and curtains that cloak and shield?

It’s not that illumination comes from somewhere else. It’s more that our realization of what is there dissolves the hindrances and lifts the bushel basket allowing the light to shine through.

The realization of ‘what is there’ is God-life freed into the world.

If all ideology were suddenly abandoned, all rhetoric suddenly silenced, if hearts and minds were suddenly free to reveal themselves as they are, would these four men -- would we – recognize each other as the light of God-life, illuminating one another and all who come to see what is there?

The most supreme Way seeks to find its way through us.

It is the story of our life, indeed, very life itself we gesture and articulate with each movement, with each syllable. We must move carefully. We must speak with care.

We must care. Even as we ask –“Who cares?”

Very life itself listens for our response.

Gracefully.

If America chooses the way of war, religion factors.

Americans are a religious people. The toughest thing to decide is what religion this war is fighting under. Is it fought in the name of God? Or is it a more secular invocation, fighting in the symbols and power of a state religion?

It is hard to know whether the wagers of war try to hasten some apocalyptic end time prefaced by chaotic warfare and unsettling devastation. The alternative explanations of empire or greed or even retaliation seem saner than the Armageddon fundamentalist fervor seems to welcome. Jesus, they say, is coming back to save the righteous and damn the sinner. The Middle East seethes again with portents.

Ahead, the green creek sparkles as it flows
Toward the cliff, a huge rock
With a good edge for sitting
My heart is like a lone cloud,
With nothing to depend on
So far away from the world’s affairs
What need is there to search for anything?
- Han Shan (~730)

I don't know about theories of devastation. Here's what I do know -- rain has begun to fall outside my window. Cut grass parallels the earth. Psalm tones float away over hills we walked this afternoon. The silence we sat with has disseminated through trees and over trails to nestling sanctuaries.

Michael says prophets' messages are always perverted.

On C-Span today a panel replay about war:
1. "What is war? The essence of war is death. It is the most powerful narcotic invented by humankind. Every war is ultimately about betrayal. In wartime everyone becomes objects." (Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, at Los Angeles Times Festival of Books)

2. "The mission of war is simple: it is to find other people and kill them." (Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, at Los Angeles Times Festival of Books)

3. "Chicken hawks are not militarists, they're religionists." (James Hillman, author of A Terrible Love of War, at Festival)

On the News Hour clip, when the President mentions the word "God" to the crowd of people on a campaign stop, there are cheers and applause. "The dead," he says, "will be mourned forever." The people cheer. He mentions Saddam Hussein in prison, the crowd cheers. He mentions "terrorists are running out of places to hide, they do not love freedom, that freedom has the power to change the world -- God bless America!" The crowd cheers. John Kerry finishes his comments at a gathering with an invocation for God's blessing on country and world. The crowd cheers.

The question of religion and politics is not the same as the question of church and state. Failure to make this distinction results in confusion. The problem of church and state has to do with institutions and the spheres of action that are appropriate for each. Here the concept of separation is valid. Thorny problems arise in two particular areas. 1. The first involves trying to steer between avoiding an establishment of religion and permitting its free exercise. Prayer in public schools and is among the most contentious. 2. A second range of problems arises when religious belief and practice conflict with secular law.

The problem of religion and politics defines another set of issues. Church and state deals with the relationship of institutions that are independent of each other. Religion and politics has to do with two spheres of activities in the life of the same persons. Citizens who belong to religious groups are also members of the secular society, and this dual association generates complications. Religious beliefs have moral and social implications, and it is appropriate for people of faith to express these through their activities as citizens in the political order. The fact that ethical convictions are rooted in religious faith does not disqualify them from the political realm. However, they do not have secular validity merely because they are thought by their exponents to be religiously authorized. They must be argued for in appropriate social and political terms in harmony with national values.

In both cases, we should be prepared to deal with complexities, ambiguities, and overlapping realms in which practical discernment must find workable principles to guide us that are as compatible with fundamental Constitutional imperatives as human reason can devise.
(Brief summary of essay by Kenneth Cauthen from chapter in his The Ethics of Belief: A Bio-Historical Approach, 2 vols. (Lima, OH: CSS Publishing Co., 2001)

Somewhere recently I read of how church was used in one person's memory -- "to hatch, match, and dispatch."

The times I've sat in monastery church or our chapel/zendo have been sufficient to indicate that, by preference and personality, it is the stillness and silence of God's presence that gathers my attention.

There's not much that needs saying.

It is the manner of movement.

Absence of name.

Glance of eye.

Says it all.

Let's reframe Independence into Interdependence.

An antidote to feeling stuck where you are is to reframe the picture.

If you endeavor to embrace the Way through much learning, the Way will not be understood. If you observe the Way with simplicity of heart, great indeed is this Way.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

Staying in the one place we are, do we find ourselves by sheer stillness?

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here
(poem by e.e.cummings)

Like Wallace Steven’s jar on a hill in Tennessee, does one become a compass point simply by placing oneself where one is? (Yesterday Lloyd spoke about a magnetic centering place. I felt I was due nowhere.)

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
(from poem, "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens

Perhaps religion falls away in July. The mysteries of Christianity, so celebrated at Christmas and Easter, seem unsponsored and ambiguous. In America the 4th of July feels like broken straw from a broom on floor following sweep-up after barroom brawl. It is the combination of secular polity gone cynical and sacred religion gone impertinent that colors summer solitude.

It’s not that nothing satisfies, nor that hopes and expectations seem fizzled, but rather it feels like both religion and politics are sinking “downward to darkness on extended wings “ Not only is there nothing to hold on to, there is no place to escape to.

all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter's not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then?

all history's a winter sport or three:
but were it five,i'd still insist that all
history is too small for even me;
for me and you,exceedingly too small.

Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave
merely to toil the scale to shrillerness
per every madge and mabel dick and dave
--tomorrow is our permanent address

and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do,
we'll move away still further:into now
(poem by e.e.cummings)

The thought of escaping into now has a delicious ironic summer drowse to it. Is it possible to be here and not here at the same time? Is now the end of then and beginning of when? Or is now a sliver of emptiness without comparative reference or promise of retrieving temporal measurement?

Still

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!
(poem by A.R. Ammons)

If we admit that nothing is lowly, will we also allow as how nothing is above another – except, maybe, in the evaluative calculations of measuring minds intent on securing a higher place for themselves by dint of their assessments?

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
-electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born-pity poor flesh

and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if-listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go (
poem by e. e. cummings)

If our religion becomes kindness, such as the Dalai Lama’s statement of his religion, will we practice kindness the way leaves play with the wind? Whenever the wind shows up, leaves practice correct relationship with it. They move and turn, sway with unresisting accompaniment. And when it is ripe, they fall to earth and find themselves there for another transfiguration.

Let’s fall to what is now here.

Let others believe the beliefs they hold and follow the paths they follow. Let others decry and deny, dissemble and resemble the images they hold to be true. Let others condemn and expel, contemn and resell their version of grand divine plan.

If what is here and what is now is not imbued with the fullness of what some call God and others call True Reality – then, I’ll have no part of here and now. I’ll take the whole of it by no other name than what appears as how and where and when and with what face it appears.

Religion and politics be shelved for July. It is the season of a switch.

The picture is of itself.

Unframed.

As it is.

Free.

We must become mystics.

We must come to seeing directly and being directly in contact with God, or the very principal fact of life, or absolute reality.

Despite the obstacles,
I pursued the great monk
The misty mountains a million layers high
He pointed to the road back home
One round moon, lantern of the sky.
- Han Shan (c 730)

Something about the sadness of not deepening and following the spark, the prophetic insight, the unbroken wholeness of authentic religion, no matter what the cultural denomination.

The mystic remains at home in touch with original source. The mystic is at home in any reality because the reality they understand is not broken into fragments of good or evil, true or false, mine or yours.

The great monk points to the road back home.

Every light guides us there.

So it is we come to see.

Hush and see.

We read and spoke about Holy Ignorance Wednesday evening. Thursday it was how, when real, we do not mind hurt. Hurt is hurt. It needs no narrative.

In the green creek, spring water is clear
At Cold Mountain, the moon’s corona is white.
Silence your understanding and,
The spirit of itself is enlightened.
View all things as the Void and,
This world is even more still
- Han Shan (c 730)

There is a hallow hollow at center of each work of art. A poem or painting tells the sacred experience of someone. That experience is non-transferable and non-duplicable. Emptiness cannot be mimed.

When the poet or artist presents their experience expressed in a work, all we can do is enter the empty whole of it and emerge with our own unique insight -- not a replica of that which created the transforming empty space.

It is the fact of it, the mere visitation to an authentic place, that evokes hush and seeing. The aesthetic becomes existential.

Those who dredge up stories of the past without insight are only filling time. Those who long for insight and wisdom are emptying now into its sensory dwelling.

There is no duplication or repetition. Each act, each breath, each aspect and instant belong to itself. This is how we learn who we are and how we become who we are.

Fog saturated harbor as evening sent sun enwrapped west.

Fog is fog as each thing is itself.

None need cumbersome narrative.

How will we know? Each is as each is.

Handsome is as handsome does.

By their fruits we'll know.

Hush and see.

God is what is seeing through us.

We do not see God. Perhaps God does not see us. These two sentences imply distinct and separate realities, distanced and instrumental one to the other.

Is there an understanding that allows a nondual transformative interpenetrative, interconnective, isomorphic, flow of what is thorough what is?

Who would have expected that the
Self nature is fundamentally
Pure and clean?
Who would have expected that the
Self nature is fundamentally
Beyond birth and death?
- Altar Sutra

What we mean by 'nature' is the 'what-is-ness' of what is there. It has been called essence. It has been called the 'itself.'

Some feel a profound change occurring. This takes the form of a shift of perspective and perception. We are not only looking at and seeing objects. We are now beginning to realize we are being looked at and seen by objects.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
(--poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Rilke's final two lines startle. We are an interchange of seeing. Neither subject nor object we are the flow of perception and perspective through itself.

The question arises for us, -- "What is itself?"

A woman who attends conversations at Meetingbrook writes:
It is my belief that we are small energy creatures in a big energy world, and that there are hundreds or thousands of other energy forces everywhere around us. God is not energy, my dear husband M. always says and I agree with you "God just is".
To me love is energy, so are also hate, fear, and compassion or perhaps I should say, so are all of our emotions. The heart is the big energy center and we all have our free will, and therefore we are also responsible for what energies we allow to flow through our hearts. If we choose to love our selves and other people (or a cookie, ha ha) then we open our heart for the love energy so that it can fill our body and send out love to the people or things we love and care for.

...I think the problem in this society is that too many are being taught the game of deception to reach power and/or the big bucks. To blame others instead of taking responsibility for own actions. Living a safe life is to be told what to do or to following someone else’s advice. By living a life this way you avoid your own pain and emotions and you totally block out all the positive energies just outside your own heartdoor, just waiting for the invitation. (Words from P., 29June04)

I like the phrasing, "just outside your own heartdoor, just waiting for the invitation." It resonates with her earlier, "God just is." I hear the use of the word "just" as a name of God, maybe a most important name of God.

The dictionary says "just" (from Latin jus = right or law) also means immediately, directly, only, merely, quite, very. The Sanskrit yos means welfare.

To fare well, to dwell well-being -- these are illuminations of 'just' at heartdoor, 'just' waiting for the invitation. This perception and perspective of God is a just view, one that tells us, with the poet, to change our lives.

"What's this?" -- asked Mark from back of shop when asked for comment during final circle Tuesday evening. Heather had been speaking about the space surrounding a clay handle, as example of Pessoa's words, "Nature has no inside." These visitors from Ontario, Canada just danced through their first conversation at the bookshop after an afternoon's row around the island with Sam and Susan and the celebration of our just being here.

What is this?

Just this.

Seeing.

Seen.

Nine years ago today Meetingbrook Bookshop & Bakery opened.

Never ask your teachers to explain. But when your activity of mind is exhausted and your capacity for feeling comes to a dead end, if something should take place not unlike the cat springing upon the mouse or the mother hen hatching her eggs, then a great flash of livingness surges up. This is the moment when the phoenix escapes from the golden net and when the crane breaks the bars of its cage.
-- Hakuin

Phoenix and crane gratefully visit.

As visits balloons, flowers, and torte for everyone.

Our's is an intuition of gratitude.

Thomas Merton writes:
The importance of this Zen intuition of reality is, in my opinion as a Catholic, its metaphysical honesty. It refuses to make a claim to any special revelation or to a mystical light, and yet if it is followed on, in line with its own vast and open perspectives, it is certainly compatible with a revelation of inscrutable freedom, love, and grace. In point of fact, we must always remember that Zen is situated in the religious context of a Buddhism which seeks the “salvation” of all creatures by insight.
(p.254, Mystics and Zen Masters, by Thomas Merton, c.1966)

Our's is the insight of gift and grateful receptivity.

With mere reciprocity.

We begin 9th year.