Dripping spigot speeds beat into white pot in kitchen sink.

Your heart knows
The way to Heng Mountain.
You are not afraid;
Few people go there.
Inside the boat,
You still hear birds and temple chimes.
At the river's source,
You dry your monk's robe in the sun.
You had a family,
But left it when young;
Now there is no temple
That would not welcome you.
Managing to find
A shelter in the cold,
You do your usual zazen
As snow fills up your door.
- Chia Tao (779-843) dailyzen

Steady flow into sink, a drummer's flurry before handing lick back to tightened faucet.

Ayya Khema's words tonight at conversation about anicca, dukkha, and anatta -- impermanent, unfulfilled, of no core-substance -- also drip through kitchen's quiet.

Ball rolls in from front room. Border collie chases after. Maine coon cat sleeps on bed across from sink.

Wendell Berry ends his poem "To My Mother" with the lines:
...And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,
where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

Baking paper fits on tray for frozen croissants defrosting.

Two good words: unentangled; undismayed.

Those who love have forgiven.

A fifteen year old boy in town committed suicide a few days ago. Citizens of the town anguish again. Will his death become contagious?

During a question/answer at Festival of the Spirit with a visiting spiritual teacher yesterday morning there was conversation about the death by suicide. Someone noted that the prevalent response at these times is crisis intervention counseling. This is following the event. We have to ask: What might precede the suicide and the response?

Turn your attention within;
Don't memorize my words.
You have been turning from light to darkness
Since before you can remember,
So the roots of your subjective ideas are deep
And hard to uproot all at once.
This is why I temporarily use expedients
To take away your coarse perceptions.
- Yangshan

"Expedient" means: "1. Something that is a means to an end; 2. Something contrived or used to meet an urgent need."

Novelist and existentialist philosopher Albert Camus wants to remind us about suicide. In 1942, in his philosophical essay LE MYTHE DE SISYPHE (The Myth of Sisyphus), the famous statement: "There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that."

Teenagers think about suicide. That consideration is enough to frighten many adults. Suicide is a means and something contrived to end a thought, a feeling -- to put to rest an urgent need.

Norman Scrimshaw, in his Spiritual Dialogue talk yesterday morning, used the example of two phrases "all will be well" and "thy will be done" as guides toward finding peace and happiness. He used a ski metaphor -- each phrase as an individual ski to take us on our run.

I sat with the issue in the balcony.
The thought teenagers have is what the culture reinforces: all is not well, especially not with you, and it never will be well. The feeling is reinforced by other members of their age group: you're a jerk, uncool, a loser, and an object of scorn, derision, and laughter.

Contemporary culture -- whether political, corporate, athletic, celebrity, or peer -- falls easily into this posture of degradation.

The crisis response has to precede the suicidal impulses pulsating through contemporary life.

Need a suggestion? Whenever you hear anyone -- teen or adult, or group of either -- putting down some person or group, step up and step in and say the following: "I overheard what you were saying. And what you were saying about that kid (or that person, or group) also applies to me. I'm going to have to do some self-searching about this. Maybe you too."

We all can do some self-searching. Maybe we'll come to the suspicion we can't say anything about someone else that doesn't also apply to each and every one of us. With that seed of knowledge we can begin to embody the suffering that is tossed around so blithely by people who do not yet realize they are talking to and about themselves.

Suicide is the feeling and thought we are eliminating the unbearable pain of the feeling and thought that all is not well, and that we must control the world, our life, and everything that passes through each.

Actually, all will be well.

Actually, God's will being done is awareness and compassion toward oneself --oneself in all its appearances -- even in the appearance of our tormentors.

Actually, suicide is an option -- a serious, and in some ways, an important one. But suicide as understood in a new way -- namely, the dissolving of the thought and feeling of the isolated and separate self. With this dissolving of the feeling and thought of an isolated and separate self ultimately comes the awakening and awareness of oneself -- in, with, as, and through each appearance. The seeming "other" and the seeming "isolated self" dissolve. We are left with "What Is" -- ("God" by any other name.)

What we are left with is where we begin as a community of awareness. It is beyond subject and object. It is a place where each is itself -- not two, not one -- but whole and entire with what is whole and entire. Mystics see God -- in this, as this -- place.

The Golden Rule -- seeing neighbor as self, not doing to another what we do not wish to experience ourselves -- requires a reflection on the process and the structure of suffering. This reflection needs to precede events like suicide. The awareness undergirding this insight and intuition is like the process of gold in fire.

When does gold ore become gold? When it is put through a process of fire. So the human being during the training becomes as pure as gold through suffering. It is the burning away of the dross. Suffering has a great redeeming quality. As a drop of water falling on the desert sand is sucked up immediately, so we must become nothing and nowhere ... we must disappear. (~Bhai Sahib, quoted in 'Travelling the Path of Love' Ed. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee)

This is what we have to talk about.

Let this conversation become contagious.

Until and as it does, we go about our lives. Currently, in this town, we sorrow the death of this young man.

An infant named Grace slept in rocker in lobby of film festival in Rockland this evening.

The sound of a swollen
Mountain stream rapidly rushing
Makes one know
How very quickly life itself
Is pressed along its course.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

The Sufi teacher interviewed on screen said praising God and serving one another in God were good things to do.

The practice of presence; the presence of practice.

Grace awakens.

Make enemy and there is enemy. Thought-form becomes solid.

Luminous is this mind,
Brightly shining, but it is
Colored by the attachments
That visit it.
This unlearned people do not
Really understand,
And so do not cultivate the mind.
Luminous is this mind,
Brightly shining,
And it is free of the
Attachments that visit it.
This the noble follower
Of the Way really understands;
So for them there is
Cultivation of the mind.
- Anguttara Nikaya

Recognize suffering and suffering begins to dissolve.

We participate intimately in the movement of mind -- in the cosmogenesis of what is to follow upon current place.

Thought-forms, or "memes" (as one writer puts it) take on lives of their own.
meme (mēm) n. A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.
[Shortening (modeled on GENE) of mimeme, from Greek mimēma, something imitated, from mimeisthai, to imitate. See mimesis.]
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=meme

meme
The term and concept of meme (pronounced [meem] from the Greek word μνήμη for 'memory') is a neologism that first appeared in the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Though Dawkins defined the meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation," memeticists vary in their definitions of meme.
Different definitions of the meme generally agree, very roughly, that a meme consists of some sort of a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics). Dawkins introduced the term after writing that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission Ã?‚— in the case of evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplifies another self-replicating unit, and most importantly, one which he thought would prove useful in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.
In casual use, the term meme often refers to any piece of information passed from one mind to another.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme)

If we cultivate the mind -- (let life flow through life-giving thoughts; let pass and fall away life-denying thoughts) -- we participate with light finding its way through this existence.

Light will find its way through darkness -- through it, not eliminating it. It is attachment to misunderstanding that believes we eliminate and destroy darkness. When men act with such a mind, everyone suffers,

We must allow light on suffering so as to comfort those who suffer.

This morning, at dawn, first light walked with Cesco and I up path winding way through trees and brook. Yellow-brown leaves on mountain path damp from nighttime's memory are practicing stillness during quiet passage.

The mind of earth participates with each step, with four of us sitting in fire-warn cabin, with psalmic melody including in prayer our vast brother/sisterhood.

Luminous and brightly shining watchful earth, dwelling place of what is lovely and true, all that we hold sacred, God-life as it is -- we grow, tend, and nurture -- this.

This open mind.

This open heart.

Surrounding us.

The hermitage is carried within. World is monastery. The convent is a woman's walk along rooted earth and sea salt speckled stone stepping down to beach.

Found on the wall of a convent soon to be destroyed:

In haste and hurry we gather
Up our tattered robes,
And pack up our traveling bags:
Not much to take.
Sleeves brushing white clouds,
We retreat to the cave's mouth,
Carrying the moon on our shoulders,
We circle the sky's edge.
I feel such sad pity for the young cranes
Nesting on the pine tops,
And for abandoning the flowers I
Planted at the foot of the fence.
Again and again I admonish the cats and dogs
Not to hang around the homes of lay people!
- Jueqing (1537)

You see, the religious institutions have gone to ground. They have fallen into the very molecules that reverberate sound through skin and skull.

Some are sad at the grounding. Some want special uniform and special treatment to try to assure them they are special in the eyes of the people, if not in the eyes of the divine.

Blackbird

There was nothing I could have done --
a flurry of blackbirds burst
from the weeds at the edge of a field
and one veered out into my wheel
and went under. I had a moment
to hope he'd emerge as sometimes
they will from beneath the back
of the car and fly off,
but I saw him behind on the roadbed,
the shadowless sail of a wing
lifted vainly from the clumsy
bundle of matter he'd become.

There was nothing I could have done,
though perhaps I was distracted:
I'd been listening to news of the war,
hearing that what we'd suspected
were lies had proved to be lies,
that many were dying for those lies,
but as usual now, it wouldn't matter.
I'd been thinking of Lincoln's,
". . .You can't fool all of the people
all of the time. . ." how I once
took comfort from the hope and trust
it implied, but no longer.

I had to slow down now,
a tractor hauling a load of hay
was approaching on the narrow lane.
The farmer and I gave way and waved:
the high-piled bales swayed
menacingly over my head but held.
Out in the newly harvested fields,
already harrowed and raw,
more blackbirds, uncountable
clouds of them, rose, held
for an instant, then broke,
scattered as though by a gale.
(Poem "Blackbird" by C.K. Williams)

Hermits today move out through the world to ground where truth brooks no cover, no promise of other.

There was nothing else we could do. Not then. We didn't understand what their haste would destroy.

We have to slow down. Now. Pause to look.

Scatter from fear. Alight feathers. Say what must be said.

Abandon the vaguely assuring estrangement of lies.

Wander rooted ground truthfully, unknowingly.

Sing psalmic verses praising (absurd) kindness.

Be what religion has forgotten -- to become.

Be what is -- well.

Marquee on main street says "Strand." We strand ourselves watching Evelyn Glennie in 'Touch The Sound,' a film by Thomas Riedelsheimer

In the shade of two trees
And the hanging green of the cliffs,
One lamp for a thousand years
Broke open the dark barriers.
I too now realize that phenomena
Are nothing but a magic show
And happily grow old among the mist,
The rivers, and the stones.
- Miaozhan (1260-1308)

Her music, her life, and her spirit open for us sound and gaze. Steve D. and friends are hosting again "Cinema of the Spirit" in Rockland.

This hermitage was here first
Only then, the world.
When the world crumbles,
This hermitage will not be destroyed.
The host inside the hermitage
Is present everywhere.
The moon shines on the eternal void;
The wind whistles through
Ten thousand openings.
- Shiwu (1347)

Hermitage, for tonight, is long loving gaze into the core-and-care of "what is." Hermitage is itself the invitation to look into "what is."

Hermitage is practicing -- this alone -- with a silence that permeates both wordless emptiness and wording presence.

In the Shinto teaching of “the God-like way,” we find the following: "The heart of the person before you is a mirror. See there your own form"

Lovely the artists making for us this world lovely.

There is a mirror we are invited to look into. What we see there, and what we do next, is effectively our meditative practice and spiritual journey.

Within the vast expanse of dust
Essentially a single suchness,
Whether vertical or horizontal,
Everything bears the seal of Vairochana.
Although the entire wave is made of water,
The wave is not the water;
Although all of the water may turn to waves,
The water is still itself.
- Zhitong (d.1124)

To be "still itself" is a profound awareness.

The name Vairochana means "He Who Is Like the Sun" or "the Radiating One." Vairochana represents either the integration of or the origin of the Dhyani Buddhas. His wisdom is the Wisdom of the Dharmadhatu. The Dharmadhatu is the Realm of Truth, in which all things exist as they really are. Vairochana's wisdom is also referred to as the All-Pervading Wisdom of the Dharmakaya. The Dharmakaya is the Body of the Law, or the absolute Buddha nature. (http://www.tsl.org/Masters/buddhas/dhyani/vairochana.html)

The mirror takes nothing and gives us nothing back. It, too, is circumference and center of our body.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
(Poem by Derek Walcott)

The Shinto maxim in line with the Christian Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") is "The heart of the person before you is a mirror. See there your own form."

Peel the image.

Honor the dead.

It is their day.

All of ours.

It is time.

Country, world, knows what must happen.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---
(Poem by Emily Dickinson)

A saint seeks God.

As all souls do.

It is November.

Morning walk across northeast side of Ragged Mountain. Earth is soft moist on trail.

You ask me why I live
In jade mountains.
I smile, unanswering.
My heart is calm.
Peach petals floating on the water,
Never come back.
There is a heaven and earth
Beyond the crowded town below.
- Li Bai (701-762)

On mountain, yellow leaves snuggle against broken branches diverting water in crooked streams. Leaves have detached from trees and fallen to earth where they can roll where brisk winds take them -- a new freedom that only follows loss

Your son, my lord, has paid a soldiers debt.
He only lived but till he was a man,
The which no sooner had his prowess confirm'd
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.
(--from Act 5, Scene 9, Macbeth, by William Shakespeare)

War is the deficiency of human reason to honestly engage the differences rife in our common experience of existence in this contemporary world. There's nothing honorable in war -- except the way men and women, trusting their superiors, place their lives on battle lines and varied stretches of deadly dangerous geography. Iraq is one of those places. One could, if pressed, respect the hearts and minds of everyone engaged in the war -- soldiers, civilians, and people of every stripe and strife. Each acts for some reason felt to be adequate to the act.

War horrifies me. The deficiency we encounter when some cry "War!" is the frightening triumph of ideology over human reason. I do not wish to entertain the cases where force is necessary and immediate. I speak of times when such action is not necessary, not wise, and not for the common good. At this point of human history we know the horrors of war -- we know when necessity demands response, and we know the futility of unfocused engagement. It is hard to imagine sane men and women initiating a war for purposes they cannot articulate, using strategies they cannot justify, and whose duration they consider to be never-ending and never-satisfying.

Men who proclaim themselves knowers of God's special advice are hard so-called "teachers" and "favored channels" to tolorate. So many want to be "daddy" and "master."

You, however, must not allow yourselves to be called Rabbi, since you have only one master, and you are all brothers [and sisters]. You must call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor must you allow yourselves to be called teachers, for you have only one Teacher, the Christ. The greatest among you must be your servant. Anyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and anyone who humbles himself will be exalted.
(Matthew 23:10 - 12)

When a woman last evening told of the behavior of her family when she was a young girl, it occurred to me that the man and woman she described were not her "family" -- but were sorrowful patterns of destructive behavior stuck in habitual conditioning. Her real "family," it was countered, were all the things and all the beings that she treated, and that treated her, with love and respect, serving one another with attention and compassion. This notion of family is put squarely within the creative capability and constructive energy of herself. Corrosive attachments to something are not the thing itself. Enliven the thing itself, the vital shoot of our vital authentic being, and that which is unnecessary has nothing to cling to. What falls away is not true family. True family resides lovely within.

We can't want a "not." Not to remember, not to feel, not to experience, or not to repeat what was done to us -- these are wanting nots.

We can only long for a "yes" -- something that is itself, unconditioned and self-organizing -- and this longing resides deep within us. No one can tell us what we want. What is "yes" is an affirmation of what is most true -- looking at it, seeing it, and allowing it to drop into and through our being. As it passes through, we experience a moment of grace. We are free within what is itself. What is not itself falls away.

Be wary of any and all "selling" jobs.

It is the insanity of our times that some continue to call upon God, Jesus, Mohammad -- or any other named or believed-in god or personage -- to sell, justify or back their foray into war. The deviousness of invoking "God" or "country" in order to stir up passion for killing and destroying -- is, at this point of history, the depth of impiety and danger.

Forget the "war" on terror. It wants a "not."

Remember to serve one another with humility.

Such remembrance longs to be who we are.

A calm heart sees heaven, sees earth.

Each within another.

A loving, lovely sight.

One small part of barn cleaned and cleared today. We win race to dump, arriving just ahead of 4:00PM.

In autumn
even though I may
see it again,
how can I sleep
with the moon this evening?
- Dogen

Maybe when we wake up we'll see there is no choice -- only the longing and need to realize oneself alongside another.

Yes, you love all that exists, you hold nothing of what you have made in abhorrence, for had you hated anything, you would not have formed it.
And how, had you not willed it, could a thing persist,
how be conserved if not called forth by you?
(--Wisdom 11:21)

The invitation to "come forth." Jesus called to Lazarus, saying "Lazarus, come forth!" We are called to come forth.

Practice, repetition, and repetition of the repeated with ever increasing intensity are its distinctive features for long
stretches of the way.
(- Eugen Herrigel, Zen and the Art of Archery )

Wood fire in cabin all day.

Porch swept.

Prayer said.

In prison today there was a memorial service for a man named David.

Originally there is no such thing as Buddha, but by necessity the name was given to him. Originally there is no such thing as mind. To attain enlightenment is to realize the one thing. For the sake of illustration, it is said that the one thing is empty, but it is not really empty. Mind of no mind is the true mind, wisdom of no wisdom is the true wisdom.
- Hyechi’oi

All we can say is what we are.

What are we?

Present!

It's a funny world.

Even with insects--
some can sing,
some can't.
(Poem by Kobayashi Issa; Translated by Robert Hass)

We can only wait to hear the song that begins tomorrow when grand jury results are announced in Washington DC.

There's not much to like with what we hear from and about our leaders in the nation's capital.

Some have an ear for the sound of truth.

Some don't.

We've grown used to executing people for their faith.

Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is.
The future has not yet come.
Looking deeply at life as it is
In the very here and now,
The practitioner dwells
In stability and freedom.
We must be diligent today.
To wait until tomorrow is too late.
Death comes unexpectedly.
How can we bargain with it?
The sage calls a person who knows
How to dwell in mindfulness
Night and day
"one who knows the better
way to live."
- Bhaddekaratta Sutra

Increasingly, my faith is in the present (now), in presence (here), grateful for presents (gifts) of this moment and this place.

America will not (if awake) permit anyone -- not foreign, not domestic -- to take away freedom, life, and the pursuit of happiness. Not anyone. Even if the threat comes from those who swear they are protecting and guarding the good heart of American tolorance and hospitality -- the good heart and fierce honor of its people (when awakened) will remember not to forget its soul. It is a dangerous time. We must wake up. The threat is at our door. Both sides of the door.

We in America are having difficulties with our leaders. They have taken advantage of our fear, anger, and our sleep. Misrepresentation, and many say, overzealous belief in an ideology that does not conform to the religious, ethnic, racial, and commonsense values of fairness, justice, and obedience to law -- has clouded the judgement and decisions made by the American administration..

The time is coming, and is near -- when the men and women who have played fast and loose with the philosophy of law and independence of this land -- will be forced to face the historical judgement that their actions and intentions be held in disrepute. Of this there is no doubt.

It is a time to pray. Pray for them, and for the rest of us who have had to put up with them. And pray for all whose lives and freedoms have been violated.

This prayer is toward wholeness. This prayer is toward healing. This prayer is, finally, toward transparent compassion and love.

We can learn this, this prayer.

No more executing people. Let's execute -- that is, "pursue, carry out, and follow" -- prayer where it takes us.

As the lyric goes in the theme song "Over There" from the powerful TV drama of the same name about the war in Iraq, "If you know one, say a prayer."

We can do this.

Know one.

Say it.

2,000 American military dead in Iraq. Many more Iraqis.

He leans into twilight on a bamboo cane,
Waiting for me at Tiger Creek.
Hearing tigers roar, he urges me to leave,
Then follows a rushing brook back to his hut.
Wild flowers bloom beautifully in clusters.
A bird's single note quiets the ravine.
In still night he sits in an empty forest,
Feeling autumn on the pine forest wind.
- Wang Wei

It is a lamentable number.

So, we lament.

Americans.

Iraqis.

Dead.

Yellow leaf falls through rain. Wind has its way. Rises, then falls. Late October bluster.

Two methods enable us to rectify our heart:
The first is study,
Enriching our mind through practice and discipline;
Training, studying until an inner light begins
To grow within.
This seed of consciousness, the sages teach,
Should be nourished and kept in silence.
The second is the cultivation of Virtue.
A sincere student discovers the working of Tao
By overcoming all manner of temptation.
Hordes of riches are outweighed in merit by
A single word, Virtue.
- Loy Ching-Yuen (1873-1960)

Woodstove warms cabin. Two hermit/monastics sit then chant morning prayer under metronomic beat on roof. It is a lovely yet absurd practice. Tonite we'll sit then chant heart sutra with rhythmic beat on wood box.

Words.

Silence.

Do not court death by the errors of your ways,
nor invite destruction through your own actions.
Death was not God's doing,
he takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living.
To be -- for this he created all;
the world's created things have health in them,
in them no fatal poison can be found,
and Hades holds no power on earth;
for virtue is undying.
(Wisdom 1:14-15)

There's no other reason for practice than practice. It is in itself what we do. No one to please. No one to impress. No advertising. No hiding. Just silence and words moving into and through words and silence.

The seasons, spring, summer, autumn and winter, follow one another in harmony. The quarters from which the winds blow function in due season without the least deviation. And the ever-flowing springs, created for our health as well as our enjoyment, unfailingly offer their breasts to sustain human life. The tiniest of living creatures meet together in harmony and peace.
(from A letter to the Corinthians by Pope St Clement, d.101AD)

Cat curls on bed in kitchen. Dog stretches on bed in study. Saskia brings chicken soup to shop at harbour. I watch yellow leaf drop through wind and rain.

I have nothing to say about God. Nor do I have anything to say against God. I accept God as God accepts me. God is God. Bill is Bill. It is a delightful, wet, and stormy day.

Love is love. Truth, truth. Presence, presence.

Birth is birth and death is death.

Life is life.

Nothing more?

Nothing less!

Seeds finally in bird feeders.

Seed, itself, cultivating.

Jane donates ten years of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review to hermitage. They reside in harbour room for reading and borrowing.

Tommy and Saskia loaded wood yesterday into pickup from hermitage dooryard by mountain. This morning we'll unload at harbour. Fires begin in earnest in large hearth at bookshop/bakery today. Sam will like that. He began bringing daily kindling this week.

The harbour room is now equipped with wireless internet access for visitors to use. We are now a Hermitage/Internet Cafe. I suppose the difference is that should you get nothing from the computer, that would be just fine.

The waters of Penobscot Bay backdrop harbour room. Moorings unhook their boats as October frost dips toes and temperatures into autumn tides.

When water is pure and sparkling clear,
you see straight to the bottom.
When your mind holds no concern,
no circumstance can turn you.
And once your mind doesn't stray
you are residing in spaciousness.
From such awareness nothing hides.
- Han shan

Saskia makes brownies. She'll take to tiller and jib with Alana for brisk sail.

Morning practice in the breath-watching middle 30's cabin at sunrise. We walk meditatively the lower mountain up to waterfalling cascades. We turn reflexively looking for second dog, catching up within.

Sun on yellow and burnt orange leaves on trees.

Mu-ge, cat-kibble breakfast taken, has thousands of blowing leaves to pounce.

Zen and contemplation are not mysterious.

If we see this -- there's nothing to say.

Except, perhaps, as World Series begins, "Play Ball!"

The New York Times, Fox News, the Networks, news media and sources..
The United States Government.
The Roman Catholic Church.
Major financial institutions.
Large corporations.
Guardians of law.
Civic vigilance.

Are failing.

They fail readers, viewers, citizens, church-goers and children, the public and employees, neighbors and newcomers.

Before the window
yellow leaves rustle.
I sit in meditation
without the least word
and look back to see
my illusions completely gone.
- Han Shan Te-ch'ing (1546-1623)

It is surprising how widespread the failings of what we've known and trusted.

The institutions fall away in failure -- as we await our illusions to fall away.

May we not, ever again, be led into temptation.

But delivered from the absence of truth, absence of compassion, absence of good, and absence of integrity -- that these failings represent.

We will look back and wonder how we ever had faith in these embarrassing examples of deceit and illusion.

When we do look back, and when we continue on our individual and common ways, perhaps it will be with forgiveness and mercy -- but it will never again be with trust.

In order to come to terms with this new abandonment -- we will need profound meditation and deep contemplation.

Without the least word.

In prison this morning we sit awhile with a table full of conversation in one room, followed by silent sitting with fledgling meditators in another.

It is refreshing.

Words and silence.

Starting new.

Some argue the words "attached" and "detached."

Better we find a middle ground. Somewhere between "engaged" and "not-clinging." Just there, in that middle between, we suspend -- surrendering to what is -- God is there.
About this dwelling-place, we are unknowing.

Above all don't wish to become a future buddha;
Your only concern should be,
As thought follows thought,
To avoid clinging to any of them.
- Dogen

When I dozed off five years ago -- just after midnight and just before tap on foot told me my sister had breathed her last -- a stillness held us all in the presence of what is taking place.

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
(--Emily Dickinson)

The word we speak is our presence gathered into community, sangha. For some -- church, assembly, or circle.

Word is community as silence is solitude. Between the two, profound faith -- that is, unknowing presence.

The Lord's ways are pure; the words of the Lord are refined in the furnace; the Lord protects all who hope in him.
(from Psalm 17 {18})

There, in middle of everything that seems to be two, dwells what is of itself.

That which is of itself -- not one, not two -- dwells in the sound of word pronouncing the unknown with attentive silence.

We chant Compline. Invite bell. Extinguish candles. Walk back from chapel/zendo.

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there . . .
(from "Asphodel," poem by William Carlos Williams)

We are poems.

Being written.

Found there.

The war in Iraq is lost.

The "war on terror" is a foolish statement uttered by curiously detached men who seem not to care that international and national rules of common decency are abandoned as cruelty and torture become tit for tat between terrorists and U.S. troops along with mercenary hirelings.

The Buddha said: "My doctrine implies thinking of that which is beyond thought, performing that which is beyond performance, speaking of that which is beyond words and practicing that which is beyond practice. The way that can be expressed in words stops short; there is nothing which can be grasped. If you are wrong by so much as the thousandth part of a hair, you will lose the Way in a flash."
- Sutra of 42 Sections

At Wednesday Evening Laura Conversation there is agreement not much can be trusted coming from press, media, and government. The role of each seems to be obfuscation. Still, some say, the search for clarity cannot abandon truth and compassion. Engaged Buddhism and engaged Christianity (to name only two forms of engagement) ask us to assist the hurting and work for peace. The absence of trust need not inhibit authentic action toward finding balance between individuals and nations at a time of questionable behavior and doubtful resources.

In the Oval Office no visitor is obliged to fall upon
knees and weary the President's hand with kisses.
Yet the fear Tacitus expressed could be voiced today.
He worried that such "a monotony of disasters"
as those ordered by Nero might, if recited, disgust all
who heard them. He preferred not to sicken his readers
lest they be "fatigued of mind and paralyzed with grief."
In Rome thousands like us could only pray for relief.
(Poem: "Of Presidents & Emperors" by David Ray from The Death of Sardanapalus and Other Poems of The Iraq Wars.)

Jesus and Buddha's devotees debate whether we are on our own or if we are an integrity of community in the tasks confronting human being in the world.

We're on our own because we cannot find trustworthy confidence in our leaders.
We're in this with everyone because, no matter the weakness and shortsightedness of those claiming to act on our behalf, we must find a way to transcend their shortcomings and enact a reasonable and sane response to the anger and suffering of the world.

If you took notice of our transgressions, Lord -- Lord, who would be left?
But with you is forgiveness, and for this we revere you.
I rely on you, Lord, my spirit relies on your promise;
my soul hopes in the Lord, more than the watchman for daybreak.
(--from Psalm 129{130})

I don't suspect it occurred to many after 9/11/01 to forgive the men, known and unknown, who brought about the killing and destruction in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania.

Some say it would have been too brave an action for our limited mind, heart, and spirit. In other words, Jesus, so embraced by pious platitudes, proves to be beyond the mettle of furiously fatuous men out to prove how tough they really are.

Death and loss demand a spirit that transcends retaliatory revenge and conquering combat. Seldom, and (obviously) not after 9/11, does anyone invoke the forgiveness of Yom Kippur or Easter Sunday following a grievous hurt. First we demand justice (read, revenge) -- then we attack. Only then do we find ourselves saying prayers for our fallen men and women.

What has become of the heart of religion?

There are many signs that religion is irrelevant in contemporary discourse and decisions having to do with matters of might and malicious menace. Islam, Christianity, and Judaism fail to impress in this our current torturous repetition of narrowness and fanaticism exercised by adherents within each of the three religious faiths.

More's the pity.

We could use some real faith.

Where shall we look?

What excuse will we offer as substitute sacrifice for truth?

Who will officiate the obsequies?

White moon breaks through.

The voidness so created within Bodhi
Is but a bubble in the ocean.
Worldly realms, countless as the dust,
Arose in this relative emptiness.

When the bubble bursts, the void's unreality
Is exposed:
How much more so is that of the three realms?
Though all return to One Nature at the source,
There are many expedient methods for the purpose.
- Surangama Sutra

A woman thinks she is dying and that friends abandon her. She might be right about both. Her mood is certain skepticism about what doctors cannot find in her.

"There is no such thing as a romantic experience. There are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance -- that is all. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last! Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so."
(--Oscar Wilde)

Perhaps we do eliminate what we think we are by drips and drabs. What's left afterwards? An unfair question. We can only know the second before the end of knowing. The woman takes comfort in her knowing. No one else does.

Creativity is no death and no extinction of it.

Like the Zen Case where if you have no staff it will be taken away.

We only lose what we do not have.

Take two, call morning; if one, no call.

This is silly. What nonsense.

Do all beings come to dwell in their true home?

May they!