Gale sends link to a video of a talk given in 1992 by a then 12 year old girl.

Severn Cullis-Suzuki, when she was age 12, traveled from from Vancouver, Canada to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and addressed the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. With her repetitive refrain "I am only a child..." said, "If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it." She was founder of ECO (the Environmental Children's Organization). "I'm here to tell you adults, 'You must change your ways'."

Then, concluding her address:

"My father always says "You are what you do, not what you say." Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown ups say you love us. I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you for listening."

It is a long and difficult practice, this learning to listen.

Some days it seems that adult humans are very hard of hearing. Maybe this increasing deafness is because so much of what we hear is deafening drivel. Curiously, instead of learning to listen, we are becoming adept as a society in the manipulation of others. We teach persuasion and spin, how to talk over someone else who is speaking, and the paramount skill of pundit and politician -- namely, saying: "Look...!" -- and changing the question, diverting attention from the issue at hand, and rotely enumerating talking points that hammer home the agenda of the speaker.

Discourse, meaningful relational conversation, and authentic debate are fading from our culture -- replaced by derision, dismissal, and denigrating 'talking-at' instead of talking-with.

There's a great need to listen to and hear words that are true and real. Severen's were true and real in 1992. (Listen to them.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g8cmWZOX8Q&NR=1

Here are some playful/serious quotes worth listening to aloud:

"Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened." ~ Anatole France

"No heaven will not ever heaven be; Unless my cats are there to welcome me." ~ Unknown

"We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals." ~ Immanuel Kant

"An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language." ~ Martin Buber

"A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself." - Josh Billings

"The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs." - Jeanne-Marie Roland

"I love cats because I love my home and after a while they become its visible soul." - - Jean Cocteau

"Some people say man is the most dangerous animal on the planet. Obviously those people have never met an angry cat." - - Lillian Johnson

"There are two means of refuge from the misery of life - music and cats." - Albert Schweitzer
--(http://animalkare.tripod.com/id10.html)

Maybe we have to start with the animals. Then plants. Only to arrive, after prolonged practice, at human beings. Start being kind. Then caring. Finally responsible, loving, and even wise to the needs of all living sentient beings.

We could start earlier. We might begin with rocks and stones. We'll gather them, stack them, rake the small ones into patterns pleasing to the eye. We will practice not throwing stones, not using them to hurt one another. We'll build wonderful dwellings of stone and let the trees rest and re-group for a generation. We'll roll the rocks, then rock and roll with the sounds of brook and stream, river and ocean.

We'll begin all over again.

Water

Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
nibbled away, the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.
(--Poem by Pablo Neruda)

Today in Maine water falls from the heavens. Upon the place beneath, we are twice wet. Old dog and I come back from mountain rain-walk, entering through barn with wet cat into kitchen.

Birds can rest and eat. (Cat snoozes at foot of bed.)

We have not yet learned how to speak relationally, listen relationally, live relationally.

Tom R. said last night: "Truth stands in itself."

Let's!

Learn to stand again.

What is itself is compassionately interdependent, relationally no-other.

To be truth where it is "it's own bright grace."

We must change our ways!

They are blacktopping the parking lot between bookshop/bakery and Waterfront restaurant. So, we are at hermitage until 5pm conversation.

Followers of the Way,
the one who at this moment
stands alone, clearly and
lively right before your eyes
and is listening,
this one is nowhere obstructed.
Unhindered this one
penetrates everywhere
and moves freely;
entering all kinds of situations,
is never affected by them
- Rinzai (d.866)

Intelligence, from the book Brilliancy, has to do with beauty. It must be elegant. Patricia brought the book with her, so we read a bit, and spoke of it. In his book, Brilliancy, A.H. Almaas describes and explores human intelligence as an expression of impersonal consciousness.

In an interview, Almaas responds:

Q: Do you differentiate between being present and awareness?

A: Presence is awareness, but then awareness that is aware of itself. Pure awareness can be aware of its own existence, independently of the form and content of any experience. Experience itself then becomes aware of its own presence. Presence and awareness are not two different things, because the experience is non-dual, no subject and object. It is therefore not awareness that is involved in self-reflection, but awareness that is aware of itself by being itself. In other words, consciously being oneself is the same as being conscious of oneself.
(--Translation of interview with Hameed in June 2006, by Han van den Boogaard, Publication in the magazine InZicht {Insight}, issue 1, 2007.)

Consciousness is consciousness. As God is God. As you, you. Put nothing on consciousness, or take nothing away, and it is exactly what it is. So too, God. And you.

"Oneself" is a lovely word. Each is oneself. Why add? Why subtract? These grade-school skills are mistakenly applied to self. Is it inaccurate, then, to speak of 'increasing' consciousness? Or 'decreasing' it? Is there only consciousness or no consciousness? Either on or off? (We used to say that our dog, Cesco, had two speeds: on and off. These days the 'on' speed is low battery; the 'off' has to be watched carefully to see if breathing is taking place.)

Emily Dickinson has a zen-like way of seeing. Even her literary editors take the same words and see them in more than one way:

IX
TO be alive is power,
Existence in itself,
Without a further function,
Omnipotence enough.

To be alive and Will–
'Tis able as a God!
The Further of ourselves be what–
Such being Finitude?
(--Part Five: The Single Hound, Emily Dickinson (1830–86), Complete Poems, 1924.)

Elsewhere, the same lines, presented in a different way:

To be alive — is Power —
Existence — in itself —
Without a further function —
Omnipotence — Enough —

To be alive — and Will!
'Tis able as a God —
The Maker — of Ourselves — be what —
Such being Finitude!

We are finite, bounded. In such circumstances, there is an immediacy to our lives.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that "Peace is every step."

Today, life is every breath.

Every breath, a prayer.

Prayer is every thing.

Everything is prayer emanating from itself.

So it is. We live lives of prayer.

Without trying to be aware.

We are.

They gave the Dalai Lama an honorary doctorate this morning at Smith College. He was fitted out with cape, white academic drape, and board hat with tassel. Then he made an address. He looked silly. Nevertheless, he is a humble man sweating under the burden of their honor in hot weather. The drape kept slipping off, his head was itchy -- but he kept their paraphernalia on, and was a perfect Dalai Lama during the whole event.

Childlike wisdom allows dressing-up without caring how you look.

"The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won."
–Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

Outside the bookshop all day the steamroller and bulldozer played tag with backhoe and crane. Tomorrow they'll finally blacktop the parking lot. Out back by the deck Jeff completes the fence helping people not fall into the harbor. The orange construction gate is removed. Stone and gravel will arrive in a few days. Saskia makes a deal with the French restaurant owner to buy four tables and chairs for the patio.

When, in the middle of my life, the earth stalks me
with sticks and stones, I fear its merciless beauty.
This morning a bird woke me with a four-note outcry,
and cried out eighteen times. With the shades down, sleepy
as I was, I recognized his agony.
It resembles ours. With one more heave, the day
sends us a generous orb and lets us
see all sights lost when we lie down finally.
(-- from section iii of poem, Three Valentines to the Wide World, by Mona Van Duyn)

We hear that Di's dad has died. Lies down. And we pray for him, her mother, and her.

Life is exactly what it is -- quite fragile, ferociously tenacious.

What great joy to be able to walk about.

While we can.

Each day.

No matter how funny we look.

The congressman says, "We don't want their oil." He says, "We don't want democracy in Iraq." He says, "We're there to help bring order to Iraq." He says, "There were mistakes made at the going into Iraq, there were mistakes made in the initial stages of the war, but now we are trying to help bring order to the country." He had visited Iraq. He had photographs. He ate baloney sandwiches with three marines from his home state. That's what he wants us to know.

My brief visit to C-Span is all the visit I need. I am as insane as all get-out.

Where beauty is, then there is ugliness;
where right is, also there is wrong.
Knowledge and ignorance are interdependent;
delusion and enlightenment condition each other.
Since olden times it has been so.
How could it be otherwise now?
Wanting to get rid of one and grab the other
is merely realizing a scene of stupidity.
Even if you speak of the wonder of it all,
how do you deal with each thing changing?
--Ryokan

Nothing is different than the way it is in the world. Each thing is exactly what it is. The recently retired director of the central intelligence agency now sits on boards of defense contractors and is paid several millions to advise them how to profit from the war on Iraq and the war on terror. It is a short hop from helping to invade a country to helping oneself to the spoils of war. It seems our process of government makes the hops seamless.

There are thousands upon thousands of students
who have practised meditation and obtained its fruits.
Do not doubt its possibilities because of the simplicity of the method.
If you can not find the truth right where you are,
where else do you expect to find it?
--Dogen

At Friday Evening Conversation, after reading the first half of the final chapter (on death) in John O'Donohue's
Anam Cara, the conversation looked into our changing notions about death, the person dying, and care of body after death as the soul chooses its time to leave the body.

We wondered about how some die easy and some die hard. Animals, someone said, are always present to their surroundings, the immediate moment, and their people. Humans, we observed, are seldom present to where they are, the time they're there, and the person they are near. Is the difficulty many have with death, especially as they near the time of death, that they have not been present most of their lives? O'Donohue writes that the obstacles and diversions begin to fall away as we near death -- impediments to being present -- and the dying person slowly realizes the extent to which they've been present or absent to their life. The new experience of authentic presence, as wonderful as it is, can be distressing to someone who has not practiced presence in their life. They now long for it, want to go back and remedy and redeem the losses they're suddenly aware of, and fight to cling to life desperately, uncertain what will come based on what was.

Those whose belief is such, will be assured there is a forgiveness of absence (some say 'sin') by a loving and compassionate God in the afterlife. This belief is comforting. Others hold that what we sow in this existence will be reaped afterwards. Some posit no afterwards. Others follow the belief in a transition set of bardos which result in a fresh start in an reincarnated being to work on the things not attended to, to practice loving-kindness where it was not practiced before.

The key is presence. And authentic presence is presence toward (and with) each and every being placed in our presence. Authentic presence includes even absence -- a presence in absence, therefore, no sin -- rather a non-separate attentiveness and kindness to each and all, here and away.

It is as though you have an eye
That sees all forms
But does not see itself.
This is how your mind is.
Its light penetrates everywhere
And engulfs everything,
So why does it not know itself?
--Foyan

Each is invited to know itself.

Itself -- the core reality of existence -- becomes our true home.

No need to invade, possess, exploit, or profit from the anguish and suffering of others.

We cultivate generosity and reverence for our brothers and sisters.

We become human.

As God-Itself.

Revealing love.

As it is.

The absurdity is that we load a gun, point it at another's head, pull the trigger, are startled by loud blast, and then -- as if in a dream in someone else's sleep -- we find fault in the laxity of enforcement of laws prohibiting excessive noise.

This war is our nation's great shame.

Stop Pretending
The great teachings unanimously emphasize that all the peace, wisdom, and joy in the universe are already within us; we don't have to gain, develop, or attain them. Like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight, there's no need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we already are--as soon as we stop pretending we're small or unholy. I could characterize nearly any spiritual practice as simply being: identify and stop, identify and stop, identify and stop. Identify the myriad forms of delusion we place upon ourselves, and must the courage to stop each one. Little by little deep inside us, he diamond shines, the eyes open, the dawn rises, we become what we already are. Tat Twam Asi (Thou Art That).
(--Bo Lozoff, from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran)

Somehow, we pretend we are not responsible for what our government is doing. We believe the hand is exonerated from the shame of what the fingers do. Blood is splattered on everything. Respectable men and women are pretending there is no blood on their faces and sleeves.

A time approaches when blood will dry. The murderers will have disappeared. Weeping will suddenly cease. Lies will drown in deep waters of silence.

Promise Of Peace

The heads of strong old age are beautiful
Beyond all grace of youth. They have strange quiet,
Integrity, health, soundness, to the full
They've dealt with life and been tempered by it.
A young man must not sleep; his years are war,
Civil and foreign but the former's worse;
But the old can breathe in safety now that they are
Forgetting what youth meant, the being perverse,
Running the fool's gauntlet and being cut
By the whips of the five senses. As for me,
If I should wish to live long it were but
To trade those fevers for tranquillity,
Thinking though that's entire and sweet in the grave
How shall the dead taste the deep treasure they have?
(--Poem by Robinson Jeffers)

It's not enough to say you love your country and your president. It no longer suffices to bluster and badger as if such crude primping were a badge of distinction worn by rude schoolyard bullies high on smack-down.

Someone, somewhere, must be sane.

Not here.

Not me.

I'm.

For.

Gone.

We are as we find out together we are what we are.

2. "Existence Precedes Essence"

Sartre's slogan — "existence precedes essence" — may serve to introduce what is most distinctive of existentialism, namely, the idea that no general, non-formal account of what it means to be human can be given, since that meaning is decided in and through existing itself. Existence is "self-making-in-a-situation" (Fackenheim 1961:37). In contrast to other entities, whose essential properties are fixed by the kind of entities they are, what is essential to a human being — what makes her who she is — is not fixed by her type but by what she makes of herself, who she becomes.[4] The fundamental contribution of existential thought lies in the idea that one's identity is constituted neither by nature nor by culture, since to "exist" is precisely to constitute such an identity. It is in light of this idea that key existential notions such as facticity, transcendence (project), alienation, and authenticity must be understood.

At first, it seems hard to understand how one can say much about existence as such. Traditionally, philosophers have connected the concept of existence with that of essence in such a way that the former signifies merely the instantiation of the latter. If "essence" designates what a thing is and "existence" that it is, it follows that what is intelligible about any given thing, what can be thought about it, will belong to its essence. It is from essence in this sense — say, human being as rational animal or imago Dei — that ancient philosophy drew its prescriptions for an individual's way of life, its estimation of the meaning and value of existence. Having an essence meant that human beings could be placed within a larger whole, a kosmos, that provided the standard for human flourishing. Modern philosophy retained this framework even as it abandoned the idea of a "natural place" for man in the face of the scientific picture of an infinite, labyrinthine universe. In what looks like a proto-existential move, Descartes rejected the traditional essential definitions of man in favor of a radical, first-person reflection on his own existence, the "I am." Nevertheless, he quickly reinstated the old model by characterizing his existence as that of a substance determined by an essential property, "thinking." In contrast, Heidegger proposes that "I" am "an entity whose what [essence] is precisely to be and nothing but to be" (Heidegger 1985:110; 1962:67). Such an entity's existing cannot, therefore, be thought as the instantiation of an essence, and consequently what it means to be such an entity cannot be determined by appeal to pre-given frameworks or systems — whether scientific, historical, or philosophical.
(from Existentialism, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy First published Mon 23 Aug, 2004, by Steven Crowell, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/)

What are we finding out? What do we understand by saying we are: "precisely to be and nothing but to be"?

Nothing but to be.

Authenticity.

Within.

Relationality.

Two seagulls sat each on a piling just off the patio. Nothing was tossed to them from balcony. The former tosser has found another residing place. The seagulls went their way.

The damp dusk chilled to bone.

To My Mother

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. 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.
(Poem by Wendell Berry)

So much doesn't matter. We fret, we fuss, we escalate the smallest things. But, truth is, it doesn't matter.

What does matter is that however absurd we are, there are others who top our absurdity.

"Tolstoy died poor. " That's what Annie said tonight, after Lloyd read from one of Tolstoy's letters.

"In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity."
(Leo Tolstoy, from War and Peace)

Free?

Maybe.

Unentangled.

Undismayed.

Is it.

Listening to the sound of what is taking place; looking at the sight of what is taking place. Engaging what is taking place with lovingkindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity -- we enter the vitality of May.

May I?

A woman remembers receiving chemo in a room with other women. She recalls feeling the love and care involved in the setting up and dispensing of the chemo. Sitting at Thursday Evening Conversation on lesson 123 of the Course in Miracles ( "I thank my Father for His gifts to me" ), she brings that experience to the circle in the bookstore.

We are looking at, perhaps even seeing, what is taking place.

As for me, I delight
in the everyday Way,
among mist-wrapped
vines and rocky caves.
Here in the wilderness
I am completely free,
with my friends,
the white clouds, idling forever.
There are roads,
but they do not reach the world;
since I am mindless,
who can rouse my thoughts?
On a bed of stone
I sit, alone in the night,
while the round moon
climbs up Cold Mountain.
- Han Shan

There's a variation of the Golden Rule taking place in her telling. It goes like this: Whatever is done to others is done to me.

There's both a chilling and heart-warming insight that comes with contemplation of interconnectiveness. It is this: We feel what we do to others; others feel what is done to us. It is all shared feeling, participatory experience. Such a communion of received reality seems, at first blush, wonderful. Then, frightening. Maybe, finally, just so.

The difficulty we experience in "receiving communion" is our unawareness of what is taking place.

We have grown used to thinking, analyzing, and interpreting. We have, correspondingly, forgotten much about feeling, presencing, and allowing/forgiving what is taking place.

The poet e.e.cummings wrote, "not to completely feel is thinking." We've grown so confused about matters of war, inequality, political deceit, and unkindness that we no longer know what to think. The configurations and complexities of contemporary economic, political, and moral considerations are making us numb. Not only do we not know what to think, we no longer feel what we feel. Our feelings about the chaos surrounding us have been referred to thinking, which has collapsed under the strain of absurdity, impotence, and fatalism.

Rest In Being --
Sitting quietly, feel what sits there. Explore the body you sit in. Observe the scintillating field of sensation we call the body.
Notice sensation's wordless quality.
Its sense of simply being humming through the body.
Go within sensation to that subtle presence by which the sensation is known. Feel the sensation within sensation.
Settle into that sense of being, of aliveness vibrating in each cell. Rest in being.
Just sit quietly and know. Let awareness sink into yourself. Know what knows. Experience directly that sense by which you imagine you exist. Enter it wholeheartedly. Sit in the center of that hum. Does it have a beginning? Does it have an ending? Or is there just a sense of endless being, unborn and undying? Don't ask the mind, which always limits itself with definitions, ask the heart, which cannot name it but always is it.
Rest in being.
(--Stephen Levine, from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran)

This is how one/an/other is cured. Maybe there is no cure for cancer. Maybe there soon will be one. But in the meantime, instead of focusing attention on the disease of cancer, we might instead give our attention to the health of the individual person who perhaps is suffering the disease. We can help cure one another. With lovingkindness. With compassion. With appreciative or sympathetic joy. And with equanimity and balance.

What we give out, returns. What we receive, is given. We are an infinite going out and returning in -- a figure "8" of wandering away from center, then returning through center core enroute out around and back again.

If we feel the sound and feel the sight of what is taking place -- we have become what God longs to be -- presence, loving and simple presence.

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis
(--poem by e.e. cummings)

Birds eat. Sun shines. Dog snoozes.

It is May!

The koan is simple. It takes the form of a statement: "Listen to the sound of what is being said."

The monk asked, "What is Buddha?" The master said, "Who are you?"
(--Joshu, quoted in 365 Nirvana, Here and Now)

A wonderful question.

Responding.

What is.

Being.

Said.

Full moon. Who would mistake the full moon for a hole in the night sky?

The Lost Necklace
...No special effort is necessary to realize the Self. All efforts are for eliminating the present obscuration of the Truth. A lady is wearing a necklace around her neck. She forgets it, imagines it to be lost and impulsively looks for it here, there and everywhere. Not finding it, she asks her friends if they found it anywhere, until one kind friend points to her neck and tells her to feel the necklace around her neck. The seeker does so and feels happy that the necklace is found. Again, when she meets other friends, they ask her if her lost necklace was found. She says, "yes" to them, as if it were lost and later recovered. Her happiness at re-discovering it round her neck is the same as if some lost property was recovered. In fact, she never lost it nor recovered it. And yet she was once miserable and now she is happy. So also with the Realization of the Self.
--Ramana Maharshi, 365 Nirvana, Here and Now

Do not seek, and you will not be found.

Anyone around my base is it.

Ready or not, there I go.

Home free!

We light candle and burn incense for Joseph this 1st of May.

St Joseph the Worker
The feast of Saint Joseph the Worker is not a mere Catholic copying of the Communist First of May – any more than Christmas is a mere copy of the pagan feast of Saturnalia.
The Christian view of work is diametrically opposed to the materialist view. A worker such as St Joseph is not a mere lump of labour – “1.00 human work units”. He is a person. He is created in God’s own image, and just as creation is an activity of God, so creation is an activity of the worker. The work we do echoes the glorious work that God has done. It may not be wasted; or abused; or improperly paid; or directed to wrong or pointless ends. To do any of these things is not oppression, it is sacrilege. The glory of the present economic system is when it gives so many, of whatever class, the chance to build and create something worthwhile, whether from their own resources, or in collaboration with others, or by attracting investment from others. But its shame is when that does not happen: when people are coerced, by greed or by poverty, into being “lumps of labour”. Whether the labour is arduous or not makes no difference; whether it is richly paid or not makes no difference.
(--http://www.universalis.com/)

We work because we are alive. When hands get dirty, we wash them. When someone asks for something, we attempt to serve.

Daily activity is nothing
Other than harmony within.
When each thing I do is
Without taking or rejecting,
There is no contradiction anywhere.
For whom is the majesty
Of red and purple robes?
The summit of the inner being
Has never been defiled by the dust of the world.
- P’ang Yun

Cesco still enjoys walking the mountain -- although, the circle we take grows shorter. A Border Collie, he's always working. We're merely his co-workers.

What a delight to be within his supervision.

Work well.

Sweet.

Sweat.

Nap.

The woman in the Bagel Shop said she was a non-participating member of a local small Christian church.

She was, however, interested in the cultivation of the Brahma Viharas, i.e., lovingkindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity.

The Brahma Viharas (Divine Abiding practices) are concentration practices that soften the heart and strengthen the mind. If we view the Buddha as a Doctor, the cultivations of metta (lovingkindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (appreciative joy), and upekkha (equanimity) were prescribed as medicines for that which ails us. We, who follow these wise directions, are the nurses administering the antidotes to suffering. With this perspective in mind:

Metta is the antidote to the poison of ill will.
Karuna counteracts symptoms associated with cruelty; the lack of mercy.
Mudita is the medicine for the pernicious symptoms of jealousy and envy.
Upekkha promotes homeostasis as it neutralizes clinging and craving and the insidious quality of indifference.
(--from the Brahma Vihara Foundation)

The coffee and conversation were helpful toward clarifying the Monday issues needing clearing conversation. Several people say hello and stop to settle lesser matters. The three of us are engaged in Spiritual Friendship Conversation in the public arena of coffee and bagels this rainy day.

It is pitiful that we are
living in a treasure mountain
but cannot see it.
If we develop an
enlightenment seeking mind,
everything becomes the
practice of enlightenment,
even if we are in the midst
of the various worlds of samsara.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

It is tempting to say: 'Life is not difficult, people are difficult.' Fact is, life is neither difficult nor easy. Life is unceasing surprise and incalculable grace placed before us. With our habits and conditioning, we, at times, behave in ways that are unskillful and troublesome. Hurts and disappointments result. So it is.

Life is life. I have no desire to make it other than what it is. I long only for what is source and sustenance of life. Prayer and meditation are doorway and window through which to look and pass into source and sustenance.

The Gardeners

In the spring she
drops the seeds, he
covers them. He
digs up the weeds.
She cuts the flowers.
She takes the blooms
and puts them in
every room. They soar
red from the tables, sprout
yellow from the shelves,
hang purple from
the ceiling, blue
from the edges of
lampshades. Clusters
of flowers sit in
tiny pots on every
windowsill, in open
cupboards, behind
the sink. He stands
beside her as she tosses
all the wilted leaves
into a rusty bucket.
This house is heaven's
door, the air gathering
the bashful smells of
blossoms, roots, cut
stems, wet dirt, new
and rotting leaves.
(--Poem, "The Gardeners" by Jack Ridl, from Broken Symmetry.)

It seems proportionate to say of ourselves (as of life) that we are "new / and rotting leaves."

This is as it is on hill behind feeder under fog through which rain falls where these eyes look on old brown leafy cloak on ground and light copper birthing bud on beech.

Air gathering.

Bored with war, America turns to baseball. Multimillionaire athletes take the field and calculate how many tens of thousands they are making just standing in the outfield for one inning. At home millions of fans watch and cheer the pitcher and hitter going through paces unfolding the drama of battle and wit, strength and good fortune.

The former Giants center-fielder summed it up with simplicity:

They throw the ball, I hit it.
They hit the ball, I catch it.
— Willie Mays

Everything else is propaganda.

Propaganda is "The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause."
Propagandist messages aim at influencing the opinions or behavior of people.

I look forward to a time when everything stands on its own and needs no propaganda, advertisement, explanation, or cheer-leading. Light will be what it is -- its own indication something is dwelling within. Something is, or will be, at home.

The Buddha's Last Instruction

"Make of yourself a light"
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal-a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.

And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
(--Poem by Mary Oliver)

We get frightened when we do not feel illumined by someone else's light. Our light within seems insufficient to us. But, truth is, all light is one light -- and that light is divine light. If we believe ourselves separate, we fall under the belief-cloak of shadow even while light-within radiates outward no shadow.

Reliving History

This must have been what it was like
the summer before the Great War,
quiet towns just like this, men and women
riding their bicycles through the streets
after dinner, no sound except their pedaling
and the squeaking of their seats under them,

the wet metal sound of grass being cut
always behind houses, out of sight,
all human voices murmuring or far away,
the pink and red zinnias blazing out at them
in that moment before dark,
the mix of the first woodsmoke
and the last apples so sharp
and sweet you could weep.
(--Poem: "Reliving History" by Francette Cerulli, from The Sprits Need to Eat.

No matter how absurd the salaries and brouhaha , I prefer baseball to war. I prefer a good backhand scoop by an agile third-baseman to the firing of semi-automatic and screaming obscenities of fear riddled with explosions thrown at those considered enemy in war zones throughout world.

Root for your team. Cheer a good play. Smile at a fan of the opposing team.

Pray for end of war. Work for an ending of any and all wars. Learn the terrifying demands of peace.

Love the game. It's life, and life is short -- no matter what anyone's opinion about what happens after death, it comes. As the narrative opening to "The Tibetan Book of the Dead -- A Way of Life" says:

Death is real. It comes without warning. And it cannot be escaped.

Play well.

Keep your head down for grounders. Don't rush your throw. Use the cut-off player.

Slide only when necessary.

Stretch.

Deeply skeptical/Profoundly trusting.

This morning these four words suggest an attitude of mind helpful toward maintaining balance and equipoise. When sitting in conversation, whether in open public or in enclosed prison environment, it is useful practice to maintain a mind that is balanced -- deeply skeptical/profoundly trusting.

Skepticism calls into question. Questioning is vital. The opposite of questioning is arrogance -- not questioning.

Trusting means firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing. The opposite of trusting is not caring, not investing any interest in contemplating wholeness.

Those who attain the Tao
Are masters of themselves.
The universe is
Dissolved for them.
Throw them in the company
Of the noisy and the dirty,
And they will be like a lotus flower:
Growing from muddy water,
Touched by it, yet unstained.
- Lao Tzu

Most friends and loved-ones would not understand saying to them you are 'deeply skeptical' of what they are saying or doing. They'd probably appreciate the 'profoundly trusting' phrase. Nevertheless, the slash between (/) is the solidifying presence of equipoise and balance that roots us in core center reality.

We are always to be questioned; always to be trusted. We are beings belonging to what is whole. At the same time we are creatures continually forgetting who we are, engaging in behavior often hurting oneself and others. It might be considered a useful gift to present to one another a presence suffused with deep skepticism/profound trust.

Never Forget:

Never forget:
we walk on hell,
gazing at flowers.
(--Poem by Kobayashi Issa, 1763 - 1828, from Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Translated by Lucien Stryk / Translated by Takashi Ikemoto)

If we would wish not to die in war, and wish to live in peace, we will have to learn a new way of seeing and being-with that is equanimous, harmonious, and rooted in keen-eyed awareness.

Daffodils under tube-chimes will open tomorrow.

Living soundly with one/an/other.

In middle place.

Good news!

Landlord sends letter with renewed lease for harbour bookshop/bakery, including upstairs harbour room used for visitor's retreats, meetings, respite stays, one-and-one conversations, and (of course) cooking. We're delighted for the opportunity to continue in the marketplace.

Each night, I gaze upon a pond,
A Zen body sitting beside a moon.
Nothing is really there, and yet
It is all so clear and bright.
I cannot describe it.
If you would know the empty mind,
Your own mind must be as clear and bright
As this full moon upon the water.
- Chiao Jan (785-895)

Cars are serviced yesterday, new phone service chosen, lots of food from outlet, and terrific interchange at Thursday Evening Conversation where we currently welcome a lively group exploring the Course in Miracles. Nancy, Dee, Kali, Irene, Lucy, Ananur, Saskia and I (in the spirit of absent conveners Jack and Kathy) laughed and investigated, listened and spoke about the invisible root acceptance of 'love' as a given -- with no need to add nor subtract, make special nor hold oneself back from the core root given reality. So much laughter at the gyrations and tumblesaults we each engage in to absent ourselves at the same time demanding 'specialness.'

875

I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch—
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.
(--Poem: "875" by Emily Dickinson.)

It is true most of us most the time want to experience what is there.

And yet, what of another way of 'seeing' what is there? By 'seeing' or 'knowing' that the core root reality is 'the love of what is' -- are we able to relax, lighten up, and let go of the demands someone 'prove' their love, give evidence, demonstrate it, and meet our evaluative approval that, yes (maybe) their love is good enough in our eyes? If love is the core root reality of each one's life, perhaps our attention might equally be given to the appreciation of one's life.

"What is' -- (or, that which we call God) -- is the core root reality of what we are and where we dwell in what we name 'this existence, this reality.' And yet, we are just a bit blind to what is foundational beneath, surrounding, and beyond us. So we lash out at, berate, implore, deny, use (and abuse), idealize, push away, blame and adore 'God' -- very often doing all these things at the same time.

And God Said "No"
Author: Claudia Minden Welsz

I asked God to take away my pain.
God said, No.
It is not for me to take away, but for you to give it up.

I asked God to make my handicapped child whole.
God said, No.
Her spirit was whole, her body was only temporary.

I asked God to grant me patience.
God said, No.
Patience is a by-product of tribulations; it isn't granted, it is earned.

I asked God to give me happiness.
God said, No.
I give you blessings. Happiness is up to you.

I asked God to spare me pain.
God said, No.
Suffering draws you apart from worldly cares and brings you closer to me.

I asked God to make my spirit grow.
God said, No.
You must grow on your own, but I will prune you to make you fruitful.

I asked for all things that I might enjoy life.
God said, No.
I will give you life so that you may enjoy all things.

I ask God to help me LOVE others, as much as he loves me.
God said... Ahhhh, finally you have the idea.

The word 'idea' is from Greek, from idein, meaning 'to see.'

We practice seeing by practicing attention, often, in silence and stillness. Chickadee and cardinal, blue jay and red wing blackbird, white-throated sparrow and finch, junco and nuthatch -- all are seen at back feeder this rainy Friday in April.

Earlier the old dog and young cat walked me along mountain as drizzle began. It was a sight to see -- dog, cat, and walking stick ascending and weaving the clearing, then descending and herding the divergent wandering away of one of us with diminished mind (versus the unmindful and crazed-mind of the other two.)

We live to see -- within and without -- one/an/other in everyday life.

Joy of rain. Delight of coffee. Stillness of expectation. Emptying the special into the ordinary and dancing solitary hands-together bowing deeply (if only with eyes) at what is there, what is near, what is seen, what has been, what is true, what is you.

The tepid rain falls
On the bare thorn.
(--Haiku by Shiki Masaoka, 1867 ~ 1902)

As does drip faucet drop into last night's saucepan.

Greet one in all!

epitaph, of ten

i have found
there
(is
nothing else)
i want

{just now, --wfh, 27apr07}

Two Chickadee work hard on slender branches to keep creation ripe for the word of continuity chirping through neighbor's dog barking.

The word of continuity -- (now the second dog barks contretemps to first) -- is suffusing awareness. We are the vibrating appearance of that word of continuity in everyday phenomenological moving from emptiness to form and back again. It is this betweenness writers about Jesus found so intriguing: He's there; he's gone; oh, there he is; where'd he go? Jesus would slip through silence/stillness the way a slash (/) inserts itself between words/things to hold them together while distinguishing distinctiveness.

With Jesus, as with all properly understood and authentically apprehended slashes (/), there is a falling away, a falling through. With this birth/death, human/divine, resurrection/ascension motif -- wherein both sides (seeming to be 'two') fall off and disappear -- we are left with only the slash (/). This is the concretion. This is the between.

This betweenness is a concretion. 'Concretion,' i.e. "to make actual or real: cause to take on the qualities of reality" --#2, in Merriam-Webster's). This concretion/between then itself slips from view (having nothing to hold fast) and itself enters the dwelling-place of what-exists-between-us-but-is-not-seen-nor-felt until we practice interconnectivity.

This is the usual dwelling place of what we call 'God' -- (when and if we indeed ever do call God). This calling, by whatever resonating vibration formulating sound/name in human speech or by any other sentient being's utterance, is our aspiration with every prayer, any mantra, each and every soulful murmur heard.) Everyone and everything is calling out God -- is calling out to God, is the voice of God calling us to ourselves, is what-is-calling-itself. This calling (Do you have a calling?) is the resonance of a continuity of word. Entre nous, entre les etoiles!

Between us/between the stars is a consolidating continuity of word -- an expression of what-is invisible.

Magnanimous Mind
Is like a mountain,
Stable and impartial;
Exemplifying the ocean, it
Reflects the broadest perspective.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

(The first phrase of a well-known anthem asks the most compelling question: "O say, can you see?")

Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Go out to the whole world; proclaim the Good News to all creation.
(--Mark 16:15)

Belief is like ice. If I had any beliefs, I would melt them down, pour them into the earth, and allow April to breath its transcending breath on them until they disappear into a deeper, more profound presence dwelling between one and the other -- becoming a concretion of one/an/other doing joyful circle-abouts on mornings when monks (chickadee, robin, junco, brook, branch, fallen limbs and leaves, bare trees, sunshine, cool air, curling incense, woman passing cabin window, boots unsheathed, candles lighted, cat at rest, and, finally, God Itself) -- all pass between what, in this sorrowful human world, -- (which thinks thoughts of separation, cultivating loneliness, domination, security, backbiting, exclusion, dismissing, king-of-the-hill, screw you, I'm the best, you're no good, my mother bakes better than yours, we're the only superpower, let's get 'them', you owe us these many dollars, I want your wife, just one more drink, you're not welcome here) -- has come to be called (mistakenly) "the real world."

We Are All Connected
The universe that we inhabit and our shared perception of it are the results of a common karma. Likewise, the places that we will experience in future rebirths will be the outcome of the karma that we share with the other beings living there. The actions of each of us, human or nonhuman, have contributed to the world in which we live. We all have a common responsibility for our world and are connected with everything in it.
(--The Dalai Lama, A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night)

Love yourself.

Disappear between everything.

Find what is silent/still.

Don't say a word.

Be what word is.

Between everything.

The 82 year old Buddhist from Nova Scotia sipped coffee at the shop. His hand shook when lifting cup. He said he had intentional familial tremors.

Intention tremor

A rhythmic purposeless shaking of the muscles that begins with purposeful (voluntary) movement. This tremor does not affect muscles that are resting. (--from Health AtoZ)

He says zazen helps. So does Jameson Irish Whiskey.

He said he'll send a postcard when he returns to the Highlands tomorrow.

He hopes to remain a happy agnostic until he dies.

"I don't know," I said.

He liked that.

Earth is home.

In Greek, "oikos," home, dwelling place. Morning -- walking Ragged, sitting on porch, then in loft of meditation cabin -- sound of chattering squirrel, chirping chickadee, and cascading brook. A solitary fly crawls across screen. Bare trees note warming April sun this Maine slow walk to spring.

Service to the Earth is divine service, just as the love of God is human love. All that remains is for us to spell it out in our own lives.
(p.152, in The Cosmostheandric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness, Orbis Books, 1993)

Reading Office of Readings, Book of Revelation. Some days the words fall off page and crumple like old leaves with no life in them. Only on some days. This is one of them. None of the ideas, beliefs, and concepts reach me -- like the frantic chattering of red squirrel reluctant to climb on green plastic mesh above feeder. (A second fly appears.)

It doesn't bother me that sometimes scriptures are dead, or that I am dead to them. Last night while chanting the Heart Sutra at end of sitting practice, the collective pitch and tone of the group reached funereal disarray. Sometimes something is lost. It happens often.

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
(--Poem by David Wagoner, from the book Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems, University of Illinois Press, 1999)

I no longer see home as a fixed place. It becomes breath. Sometimes I'm at home. At times I'm away. A day will come when breath will take itself and leave me. I don't know what will take place that day. (The two-note of sparrow tells me its version. I'm grateful.)

Poet Thomas Berry in The Great Work invites entrance into "...the awareness that the universe is a community of subjects to be communed with, not a collection of objects to be exploited."

This morning -- meow of cat, song of sparrow.

I leave scriptures today to all my angry brothers and sisters, to all those convinced only they have access to the one and only way. I leave God to those who jockey for positions of power or right hand, who mount pulpits of pronouncement or proclamation, occupy offices of control and security. I have wandered out into the open where soles of shoes and expanse of vision hold me balancing aloft for the time being. Enclosed rooms where proper procedure and rules of worship prevail are not for me this morning. White-throated sparrow is chanting the choral line, blue-jay lends antiphonal response.

Each tree sits perfectly in its own meditation. The large pine on its side at edge of hill, snapped twenty feet up, beyond brook near clearing, reclines broken on mountain after last storm.

Today I might die. I consider such unknowing prospect gift. A car passes up Barnestown Road.
Another, down.

It doesn't interest me whether there is any other place, any other dimension, any other realm of being. I entertain no hoops to jump through, no formula to recite, nor any fear worth attention.

I am here now.

On earth.

If you ask me about God, I will say "God is not only...". (There's no need for any further predicate).

Silence and stillness reveal all that is needed to know here for now.

Earth is home.

(Dishes are washed. Windows opened. Second cup of coffee.)

Untie that line.

The Boat and Shore
When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self.
--Zen Master Dogen, Moon in a Dewdrop, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi

Drift off.

Don't row.

Change!