Each hour of Evening Conversation is a contemporary version of monastic choir's chanting psalms. Our words might be Rumi, Dunn, Gibran, Bert the small machine repair poet, or a woman writing about a naked man proclaiming paradise on a rainy day.

Were there no grasping of any sort of kind whatever by anyone at anything - that is to say, no grasping at the things of sense, no grasping through speculative opinions, no grasping after mere ritual and rule, no grasping through theories of the soul - then there being no grasping whatever, would there, owing to this cessation of grasping, be any appearance of becoming?
- Dialogues of the Buddha

When there is no sin there is no forgiveness. When there is sin there is no need of our forgiveness to forgive sin because sin is forgiven. Everything is holy. As we are. Innocent, as Bob said, from the get-go. Originally innocent.

I wonder why we have such a difficult time with that.

Why is God not our every breath?

Nothing to be grasped.

Only released.

I don't think we comprehend exactly what we are doing in this world at this time living the circumstances of our existence. Because we do not grasp the mystery of existence we settle instead for details that confirm suspicions. We say: I am privileged; I am wealthy; I am destitute; I am stranger; I am everything I could hope to be; I am happy; I am not happy. Each particularization seems to temporarily satisfy the judging and categorizing mind.

These judgments are merely a pair of commas in a 700 page novel. The story surrounding them is far beyond the comma's grasp -- so far that even if every comma was to be in communication with every other comma, perhaps a total of 70,000 commas, they would compare notes, attempt to assess the pause each permitted, and would come no closer to the story in all its complexity and profundity than any individual comma might have arrived at.

Reverence in Every Direction
A young man named Sigala used to worship the six cardinal points of the heavens--east, south, west, north, nadir and zenith--in obeying and observing the last advice given him by his dying father. The Buddha told the young man that in the "noble discipline" of his teaching, the six directions were different. According to his "noble discipline" the six directions were: east; parents; south: teachers; west: wife and children; north: friends, relatives and neighbors; nadir: servants, workers and employees; zenith: religious men.

"One should worship these six directions," said the Buddha. Here the word "worship" is very significant, for one worships something sacred, something worthy of honor and respect. These six family and social groups mentioned above are treated in Buddhism as sacred, worthy of respect and worship. But how is one to "worship" them? The Buddha says that one could "worship" them only by performing one's duties toward them.
(-- Walpola Rahula, in What the Buddha Taught)

A tall visitor came into the shop this week. Speaking to a friend of his he mentioned the name of a small town in New York State. I looked over at him, suggested that he was left-handed, "yes," had a good jump-shot, "yes," and pronounced a last name, (to his surprise, correctly. "Yes," he said. I said my name. Recognition after 42 years. He played on the high school team, I was on the jr. college team. We'd pushed each other around under the boards for a while 45 years ago.

Soul, he said, knows no time.

Mixed-Up School

We have a crazy mixed-up school.
Our teacher Mrs. Cheetah
Makes us talk backwards. Nicer cat
You wouldn't want to meet a.

To start the day we eat our lunch,
Then do some heavy dome-work.
The boys' and girls' rooms go to us,
The hamster marks our homework.

At recess time we race inside
To don our diving goggles,
Play pin-the-donkey-on-the-tail,
Ball-foot or ap-for-bobbles.

Old Cheetah with a chunk of chalk
Writes right across two blackbirds,
And when she says, "Go home!" we walk
The whole way barefoot backwards.
(Poem "Mixed-Up School" by X. J. Kennedy from Exploding Gravy: Poems to Make You Laugh. Curtis Brown, Ltd., 2002)

Meeting him again, his wife and sons, was a delight. His path brought him to his current incarnation as rector of an Episcopal church well below Maine. We mentioned names, recalled some history, and spoke through and around circle of Thursday Evening Conversation of how we view today's understanding of how and who we are in matters of forgiveness, awareness, and judging. We can only surrender, said his wife. She's on to something.

When we "go home" it will most likely be "The whole way barefoot backwards." We'll be looking at our feet, where they've been, holding gleefully our balance.

The past, it is said, is preface. "Preface" is a good word. It is a saying beforehand what will eventually unfold. Everything is before our face, at every moment of our lives. Right here.

And yet, we seldom see.

But we can laugh at our spiritual myopia. We can barely see for tripping over our own feet. Maybe its because the zen saying asks us to "Look under you feet" -- a feat likely to unseat social equanimity -- but a practice helpful to spiritual grounding.

This old monk meditates and
Rests in the empty mountains
In loneliness and stillness
Through the days and nights.
When I leave the pure cliffs,
I am distracted by callers
The world of people is first
And always the world of people.
- Seigan Soi (1588-1661)

I remember fondly the year of fast break, boxing out, and road trips stopping at diners and maximum security prisons. Recently in an empty gym I took one shot from behind the key, and, missed.

The basketball I bought in Antigonish Nova Scotia needs air. It sits spin-less in barn under rafters where birds nest and bats sleep in thin spaces.

It is the Dormition Day of Mary. For all the Marys who've found themselves passing through sleep -- my greetings on this feasting day!

Practice infers forgetting who we are and what we are doing. If we didn't forget, if we didn't wander off-balance into outlying areas, there'd be no need for practice. Practice is waking up to where we are, remembering who we are, and in return finding balance again.

Only to forget and wander off again, as seems to be our habit.

Consistency
What good is meditating on patience
if you will not tolerate insult?
What use are sacrifices
If you do not overcome attachment and revulsion?
What good is giving alms
If you do not root out selfishness?
What good is governing a great monastery
if you do not regard all beings as your beloved parents?
(--from The Life of Milarepa, trans. by Lobsang P. Lhalunga)

Practice makes perfect. That is, practice makes its way through. Life is passing through. No passing through, no life. I know what not passing through feels like. Stuck. In a rut. No movement. This usually accompanies, or at least signals, a failure to practice.

Sweetness

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear

one more friend

waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness

has come

and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,

for a while lost

in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk

to mouth-size,

hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness

that doesn’t leave a stain,

no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....

Tonight a friend called to say his lover

was killed in a car

he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed

to repeat, and I repeated

the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.

Often a sweetness comes

as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,

then returns to its dark

source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road

it’s traveled

to come so far, to taste so good.

(Poem by Stephen Dunn, “Sweetness” from New and Selected Poems 1974-1994. Copyright 1989 by Stephen Dunn.)

Practice sometimes is a sweetness. It reminds you of what has gone by. It returns you to a more balanced center -- but accompanied by the realization that a duration of time and span of missed events will not be retrieved. The sweetness of return is tempered by the sorrow for the lost and missing -- that of us absent.

If faith is trust in love and truth, faith reminds us there is a home that has not gone anywhere -- even as we look for it in disarray.

I Belong There

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird's sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to
her mother.
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them
a single word: Home.
(Poem, I Belong There, by Mahmoud Darwish, Translated by Carolyn Forché and Munir Akash)

A friend in Maine has buried his father. A friend in Connecticut has buried her mother. These, with others, remain in the invisible house of prayer carried in contemplative mendicancy and meditating sunyasins.

With no permanent abode or fixed landscape -- the life of practice, prayer, poetry, and presence -- rely on faith to continue. To continue through the vagaries and unforeseen transformations visited on those who wander unknowing through this life. And unknown. Whose names we do not know. Or have forgotten. But whose breath of whisper can be felt in solitude.

We are of a piece. Cloth without seams. But ignorant, mostly, of this understanding of our true home. As we meander through details of day. Distraction of dialogue scripted by insane thoughts dissociated and dedicated to dissemblance.

Poet Mahmoud Darwish looked with open heart and bleeding mind (or bleeding heart and open mind) at his people and invited words to carry the Palestinian refugee experience out from fear and anger into our hearing -- seeking a home in a world within us that knows no hatred nor accepts lies. He died last week.

Passport

They did not recognize me in the shadows
That suck away my color in this Passport
And to them my wound was an exhibit
For a tourist Who loves to collect photographs
They did not recognize me,
Ah . . . Don’t leave
The palm of my hand without the sun
Because the trees recognize me
Don’t leave me pale like the moon!

All the birds that followed my palm
To the door of the distant airport
All the wheatfields
All the prisons
All the white tombstones
All the barbed Boundaries
All the waving handkerchiefs
All the eyes
were with me,
But they dropped them from my passport

Stripped of my name and identity?
On soil I nourished with my own hands?
Today Job cried out
Filling the sky:
Don’t make and example of me again!
Oh, gentlemen, Prophets,
Don’t ask the trees for their names
Don’t ask the valleys who their mother is
From my forehead bursts the sward of light
And from my hand springs the water of the river
All the hearts of the people are my identity
So take away my passport!
(Poem, Passport, by Mahmoud Darwish)

Each belongs, always and only, to itself.

What is itself? Solitaire aut Solidaire? Or is it: Solitaire et Solidaire? Start with this question.

Come home.

Practice the sound of it.

Listen to the sound of what is... being... said.

Out of words?

The Master Pai-chang said, “Our school does not belong to either Mahayana or Hinayana. Neither does it differ from Mahayana and Hinayana. We should carefully consider them both and establish a rule that will include them both in a harmonious way, and at the same time be appropriate to the needs of the situation.” With this in mind, the Master initiated the establishment of separate Ch’an communities.
When the unsurpassed bodhi is expressed through the body it is called Vinaya; when it is expressed through the mouth as speech, it is called Dharma; when it is practiced with the mind, it is called Ch’an. Though these are three different functions, they all return to a single reality. It is like different rivers and lakes which have their own names: though the names differ, the water’s nature is always same. Vinaya is Dharma, and Dharma is not asunder from Ch’an. How could one falsely create any distinctions among the three?
- Wei-k’uan

Say nothing without words.

It's hard to understand why the United States cannot bring itself to provide medical care to all. For those with no money. Those sick. Those dying. It's hard to understand how HMO's have taken over what used to be called health care. Insurance companies decide whether someone lives or dies, in pain or in sanity.

Perhaps Americans are fatalists at heart. There's no use thinking that the world doesn't belong to the wealthy and the corporate capitalists, so why think it?

Humans born into this floating world
Quickly become like the roadside dust:
At dawn small children,
By sunset already grown white-haired,
Without inner understanding,
They struggle without cease.
I ask the children of the universe:
For what reason do you pass this way?
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

There's no wonder why Christianity has replaced Christ with Jesus the personal savior. Belief in Christ would demand love and compassion, truth and justice -- no one left out. Clinging to Jesus needs only believe that Jesus has saved you and probably you alone -- aside from (perhaps) the tight clique of your church-mates who believe exactly what you do with the same words and the same condemnations of errant unfortunates.

I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!
—Luke 12:49, NIV

Luke thought perhaps the Christ would burn away ignorance and blindness, and we would come to see our true nature -- and serve one another.

But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is completed!
—Luke 12:50, NIV

The baptism of Christ is the devastating experience of coming to understand the essential relationality of each with each -- while at the same time undergoing the darkness of the impulse to "other" those we cannot seem to accept as (we cannot accept) ourselves.

Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.
—Luke 12:51-53, NIV

To divide is to see two. It is to see the moving away of something from itself. Why Christ is interested in 'cleaving' demands a fresh looking at the word. What does cleave mean, intransitively? "To penetrate or pass through something by or as if by cutting." Is this the division, the cleaving, of Christ? Like some primordial neutrino ("an uncharged elementary particle that is believed to have a very small mass, that has any of three forms, and that interacts only rarely with other particles") -- is Christ passing through us as a severing spirit leaving us cauterized and connected where once we thought ourselves cut off?

He said to the crowd: “When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, ‘It’s going to rain,’ and it does. And when the south wind blows, you say, ‘It’s going to be hot,’ and it is. Hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time? “Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right? As you are going with your adversary to the magistrate, try hard to be reconciled to him on the way, or he may drag you off to the judge, and the judge turn you over to the officer, and the officer throw you into prison. I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.”
—Luke 12:54-59, NIV

We don't now know, nor probably have we ever known, how to be in the world as one with another. Is this one of the mysteries of Christ? Is this one of the confusing revelations we've come to call "trinity" -- wherein one is "through, with, and in" -- without getting lost or forfeiting distinctiveness?

Is this America's flaw? That it never really trusted in the idea of Christ -- except as talisman recitation for political gain?

I propose faith and practice. Faith here and now as trust in love and truth. Practice as placing the experience of faith (i.e. trust in love and truth) as first and foremost act in one's life.

America lacks faith.

We practice (to our detriment) its opposite.

But -- as they say -- it's never too late. It is late. But not too late.

It might be nice to live in a Christ-centered country. Perhaps what has been called 'Christianity' has to be laid to rest. And let rise Christ from the center of human experience.

Is it there that we learn to recognize the Holy One? Was Teilhard de Chardin on to something?

Will the Holy One, the emergent Christ, rise from the center of creation as creativity itself hidden deep in the heart of creating-love and revealing-truth?

Practice this. Faith this. Enter origin.

I'm so tired of cheap imitation.

There is always and only the event, that which is taking place. Even in that, what forever differentiates the event from itself is the story told about it. Every perspective is exemplified by a narrative told from a different direction. You might come to believe that no event actually took place, just the imagined stories of a variety of narrators.

Bodhisattvas receive and uphold all the teachings, and yet do not give rise to attachment to the teachings. Bodhisattvas think, “I should contemplate dharmadhatus as illusions, all Buddhas as shadows, all Bodhisattvas as dreams, the Buddha’s teachings as echoes, all worlds like illusions
(- from the Avatamsaka Sutra)

Russia and Georgia change the news.

August 12, 2008
Russia Steps Up Its Push; West Faces Tough Choices
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — Russian troops stepped up their advance into Georgian territory on Monday, attempting to turn back the clock to the days when Moscow held uncontested sway over what it considers its “near abroad,” and arousing increasing alarm among Western leaders.

Even as they prepared to convene an emergency meeting of NATO on Tuesday and President Bush denounced the Russian actions in the strongest terms to date, the United States and its European allies faced tough choices over how to push back. They seemed uncertain how to adjust to a new geopolitical game that threatened to undermine two decades of democratic gains in countries that once were part of the Soviet sphere.

Russian troops briefly seized a Georgian military base and took up positions close to the Georgian city of Gori on Monday, raising Georgian fears of a full-scale invasion or an attempt to oust the country’s pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili. Mr. Bush, little more than an hour after returning to Washington from the Olympic Games in Beijing, bluntly warned Russia that its military operations were damaging its reputation and were “unacceptable in the 21st century.”

“Russia’s actions this week have raised serious questions about its intent in Georgia and the region,” he said. “These actions have substantially damaged Russia’s standing in the world, and these actions jeopardize relations with the United States and Europe.”
(-- The New York Times)

It seemed easier when as spectators with three billion others Messers Putin and Bush chatted at Beijing's opening ceremonies. The choreography, the graphics, the artistry, and the athleticism of the Olympics are pushed aside (once again) by merchants of arms and power.

Let's gather the adults for a second. Huddle together. As if we were going to perform our routine. The one we've been practicing over and over. The one event worth our life.

The Continuous Life

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost-a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.
(Poem "The Continuous Life" by Mark Strand from New Selected Poems. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.)

Four men from the USA come to the finish wall just ahead of four men from France.

The United States was timed in 3 minutes 8.24 seconds, shattering by nearly four seconds the world record that its B team had set the previous night. France won the silver in 3:08.32.
(--The New York Times)

So much less noisy and less bloody than tanks and rockets and 50 caliber rounds.

I opt for contests of skill and grace and strength.

Like the friendship and holy efforts of Clare with Francis.

Who will teach the children how to be in the world with a direct experience of the event and not others' words about it?

Who will show war as the cowardice it is?

Note: There will be no regular Saturday Morning or Sunday Evening Practice this weekend (9th-10th Aug). The chapel/zendo, as usual, is available for use.
........................

So much to do in so little time. Arrive for Eucharist as woman invites our considering not being worthy. (I’m not, yet am.)

The New York Times from market on road from Westfield. Mrs Murphy’s dozen donuts at quite a reasonable price. Breakfast with the mother/daughter leaving for wedding seven hours away. Settling into dog-sitting, crows cawing, thunder darkening cool breeze after raising American and Canadian flags up pole.

Friday Afternoon of a Birthday
Purple finch on barn red rail jumps to vacant feeder's green.
Hops to metal edge, looks in sliding door. Back to railing. Up again
to wooden bar's empty container. Looks in room. “Where? What?”
Calls once, whistles once, chirps then flies away.
(--wfh, 08.08.08, Southwick)

All eights. Variations of fours, eights, beetles song, and hermitage address calculate this respite retreat with doggy solitudes up a rain ravaged driveway under canopy of tree in August.

Philippe Aries, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973, and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death.
“Death,” he wrote, “so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.”
(p.60, in The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, c.2006)

The use of mere detail enlivens.

Halley's Comet
by Stanley Kunitz

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground's edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
"Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I'd share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate.
So mother scolded me
and sent me early to my room.
The whole family's asleep
except for me. They never heard me steal
into the stairwell hall and climb
the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street—
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.
(Poem "Halley's Comet" by Stanley Kunitz, from Passing Through, W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.)

Everything red and green details our coming and going. Today, gratitude I've been here and not yet gone.

So Take a Look at Me Now
Sitting is essentially a simplified space. Our daily life is in constant movement: lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place. In the middle of that, it's very difficult to sense that we are in our life. When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance--which is absolutely the most valuable thing there is--to face ourselves. Meditation is not about some state, but about the meditator. It's not about some activity or about fixing something. It's about ourselves. If we don't simplify the situation the chance of taking a good look at ourselves is very small--because what we tend to look at isn't ourselves but everything else. If something goes wrong, what do we look at? We look at what's going wrong. We're looking out there all the time, and not at ourselves.
(--Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen)

The quiet today is about nothing out there.

Here today.

Looking.

Note: There will be no regular Saturday Morning or Sunday Evening Practice this weekend (9th-10th Aug). The chapel/zendo, as usual, is available for use.

Transfiguration of Christ. Nuclear attack on Hiroshima. What connection?

Translucence. Carnage. "We won!" says the military man. We've won in Iraq. We'll win in Iran. There's no arguing with that kind of assessing championing. No wrong can be done. It's white hats all over the place.

Wisdom replaces ignorance in our minds when we realize that happiness does not lie in the accumulation of more and more pleasant feelings, that gratifying craving does not bring us a feeling of wholeness or completeness. It simply leads to more craving and more aversion. When we realize in our own experience that happiness comes not from reaching out but from letting go, not from seeking pleasurable experience but from opening in the moment to what is true, this transformation of understanding then frees the energy of compassion within us. Our minds are no longer bound up in pushing away pain or holding on to pleasure. Compassion becomes the natural response of an open heart.
--Joseph Goldstein, in Seeking the Heart of Wisdom

When Jesus showed through all faces and every formless aspect of himself, he suggested no one tell anyone else of what they saw.

Good advice.

See for yourself, he was saying.

The thing about carnage is how convenient it is. What is inconvenient about translucence is how it reveals everything. No place to hide, nothing to hide.

There's no doubt everything will find itself faced with light of truth.

Might as well begin now.

Let's invite ourselves to be seen shone through.

What if everything shone through one thing.

What would that one thng be?

As mind is, so is the Buddha;
As the Buddha is, so are living beings.
One should know that the Buddha’s and mind’s
Essential nature is boundless.
- Avatamsaka Sutra

Belief is impossible. Drop belief.

Seeing is what remains when everything else falls away. Seeing...as in immediately apprehended without discourse.

Walking town without a word.

Only each thing.

By itself.

Shone through.

At times we forget that we are not that important. Not outside everything else. That's where everything is what it is. It's a shame when some things or some people are not what they are meant to be.

The soldiers stuck in Iraq are targets of a people who no longer, (if ever they did), want them there. The oil companies decorate their offices. New bank accounts are opened. The current-to-be-former president and vice president figure they, like their predecessors, will make ten million minimum a year on speeches, paybacks, and profits from their time as quardians of public trust.

Two Sides of a Coin that does not Exist

All things reflect, interpenetrate, and indeed contain all other things. This is the organic nature of the universe, and is called mutual interdependence in classical Buddhism. Affinity and coincidence are its surface manifestations . . . the other is no other than myself. This is the foundation of the precepts and the inspiration for genuine human behavior.

To acknowledge one's own dark side with a smile and to acknowledge the shining side of the other person with a smile--this is practice. Keeping the shining side of one's self always in view and holding fast to the dark side of the other--this is not practice.,
(--Robert Aitken, Encouraging Words)

Every day one of us dies. We ask these men and women to go to Iraq, prepare the ground for oil companies, work with the prospect of IED's, and to come home again and redirect their fear and hatred of enemies to less violent battles. Or they could go into politics and become snipers as do candidates for high office.

U.S. Confirmed Deaths:
Reported Deaths: 4132
Confirmed Deaths: 4129
Pending Confirmation: 3
(As of 4Aug08, http://icasualties.org/oif/default.aspx)

There's a sickness hereabouts that hasn't been named yet. I'll try. Let's call it shame on us. It is hard to come to terms with shameful behavior. In prison the child molesters are treated like garbage. In politics shameless molesters of trust and purveyors of personal preference are given pensions, privilege, and libraries to house their redacted papers.

"Anthem"

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring ...

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
(--Song, lyrics by Leonard Cohen)

If we forgive our leaders their awful acts, is that a sign we are mature? Or merely impotent?

I favor a middle path. Let's inquire and investigate the thinking, rationale, behavior, and implications of what the American leaders have wreaked these last six years.

And if a clean assessment says all was as it had to be, no lies, no wrongdoing, no shameful acts -- then I shall be content.

Inquiry is a comforting promise.

Forgiveness is willing to wait.

Rotten fruit gathers flies.

Shamefulness, ultimately, wants to be caught out.

Light longs to be let in!

The thunderclap and lightning flash were simultaneous. Everyone for a half mile thought they'd been hit by the end of life. Instead, for an instant, perfect awe.

When he chews on “Mu,” even his teeth disappear,
Biting on its suchness, there is an inexhaustible store.
A koan like “Buddha is Mind” is a million miles away
Like the wind blowing on a horse’s ear,
Or a painted plum fragrance.
- Isshi Bunshu (1608-1646)

Reading Nouwen on Transfiguration at Sunday Evening Practice. Folks from Connecticut stop by. We wonder how you forget Tabor in Gethsemane. Then we remember how hard it would be to embrace all joy and all sorrow. And not separate them with preference.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
(--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

The Russian novelist dies.

He is excused.

A recluse sat on bench. Said he was a recluse. Suggested we should reduce bakery prices at end of day. Fussed a bit. Said goodnight and left saying he always enjoys stopping by. Exits with friend.

Earlier an anti-Obama regular played all the Republican talking points and predicted that, if elected, he'd be a failure as president. He can't see what many see in the man -- wants McCain because he knows the military. Recites Omar Khayyam, mentions an Air Force General who recently died, then said he'd see me tomorrow. We both sign a young man's petition for Independent candidates to get on Maine's ballot.

A woman came to tears remembering a local priest's kindness to her. Colin Grant's violin music from cd.

We’re all stir crazy --
been in the body so long.

And on the day he died
Maharaji whispered,
“Today I am released from central jail forever.”

But we are not in the body,
the body is in us,
depends on us for life
(not us on it).

Jesus said,
“I am the Light.”
Us all.
The Evershining.
(from p.267, in Who Dies? An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, by Stephen Levine, c.1982)

A man and woman we know 13 years, were married then divorced, re-enter shop together. "A reunion," she says. He's moving in with her after a few marriages and many years. He says he's on his way to heaven. I ask express or local? He says he'll be making all the stops.

The trail is dangerous
Among snowy, silent peaks.
With the Master gone,
Who goes this way for meditation?
Dust slowly gathers
On the tea table;
Before his death,
Tree colors already had changed.
The pagoda stands
In blowing pines;
Footprints fade
Along the roaring stream.
Passing by the grieving temple,
The tiger
Hears the sutra,
Weeps.
- Chia Tao (779-843)

One sutra I've long liked is Isaiah's:

Oh, come to the water all you who are thirsty;
though you have no money, come!
Buy corn without money, and eat,
and, at no cost, wine and milk.
Why spend money on what is not bread,
your wages on what fails to satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and you will have good things to eat
and rich food to enjoy.
Pay attention, come to me;
listen, and your soul will live.
With you I will make an everlasting covenant
out of the favours promised to David.
(--Isaiah 55:1-3)

There's not much to do but pass through the words and faces that pass through the shop.

If it's all been an illusion, fine.

If it's all been foolishness, fin!

If anything comes of this time -- fantastic -- but I don't count on it. It's just been something to do, some place to be, some attention given freely, and some listening done with grateful presence.

The poem in Stephen Levine's book on conscious living, conscious dying, said we are not in the body, the body is in us.

In two groups in prison then again at Friday Evening Conversation we fall into the prospect of ever-shining light as Christic us.

Beings are owners of their actions. . . heirs of their actions; they originate from their actions, are bound to their actions, have their actions as their refuge. It is action that distinguishes beings as inferior and superior.
--Culakammavibhanga Sutta, from The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi

It is thought provoking to consider the body/spirit dance a time killing dos-a-dos conception. The split back-to-back, like corollary face-to-face, are verbal approximations of a phantom separation we call you-me, same-different, or even inferior-superior.

Rather, in a dance done in solitary, unitary, stillness -- what you are I am. What I am, you are.

There is another way.

Find it oppositeless.

There's the action!

Dance well!

To be clay in potter's hands is not to know the shape you are becoming. There's no foreknowledge. There's only acknowledging each one as it is appearing.

You are this moment coming to be.

One who strives to make Truth home
May at times be lonely.
One who fawns on the powerful and influential
Will know the chill of solitude for ages.
The superior person peers deeply into
Transcendent reality,
And thinks about the body
They will have after this one is gone.
Rather should one suffer a temporary loneliness
Then the solitary chill of ages.
- Hung Ying-ming

An eclipse will occur in the morning. A woman who studies the heavens says there is strong energy affecting many today. Could that be my excuse?

Ignatius founded the Jesuits. They educated me after my feet steadied. By inviting thought.

With a sprinkle of earthen humor.

Saltier, please!

Preserve doubt and inquiry.

The temptation to become someone is as difficult as the temptation to become nobody. At twilight everything stills. Cabin porch is wood quiet. Lid from bottle turns on glass, water gives itself, three gulps.

Those who wear the patched robe of a Zen wayfarer should be completely serious about taking death and birth as their business. You should work to melt away the obstructions caused by conditioned knowledge and views and interpretive understanding, and penetrate through to a realization of the great causal condition communicated and bequeathed by the buddhas and ancestral teachers. Don’t covet name and fame. Step back and turn to reality, until your practical understanding and virtue are fully actualized.
- Yuanwu (1063-1135)

Solitude took me today. After mowing grass I retire to silence away from the sawing of wood for side window wall, emerging when dooryard empties in late afternoon. I build catch latch for 'welcome friends' gate for rear opening of barn. Back of house and barn are now fully fenced and gated in hopes of keeping young Rokpa from distractedly making way to road.

I distractedly make my way through July -- never a favorite. It's a long haul of repair and restoration to old kitchen and store room between house and barn. Long hours of other personalities. Sometimes solitude reaches in and pulls us away.

To memory.

The Snowy Day

The last time I saw you, we met for coffee on a snowy day.
Outside the window of the coffee shop, the snow fell silently

& heavily, the traffic on Coldspring Lane blurred & vague,
each car a cumbersome dream vehicle plowing comically into eternity.

But there you were, real as day, drinking a real cup of coffee.
You were back from India, you had slept for two days, the coffee

tasted wonderful, you said. You had flown to a mountain monastery
to find in prayer & silence what you could not find in the everyday,

taking only a few books, a change of clothes, because for too long you
had carried your life like two suitcases heavy enough to kill you.

When it snows, everything is light & dark at the same time. Black coffee
in a white cup, the hours leaked away, until our cups were empty,

the afternoon gone. Then a kiss on the cheek, a door opening out
into the cold, & I was walking away, up a slippery snowy hill
nothing at all

like your mountain & so little to hold onto. That night the snow fell
& fell & fell, erasing every landmark, quieting the world for a while.

Later, after you died, I had a dream. The phone was ringing.
It was you, your voice, on the other end of the line, laughing

as you said, "Beth, it's Greg. I'm in the hospital. I'm not dead."
(Poem "The Snowy Day" by Elizabeth Spires from The Wave-Maker: Poems. W. W. Norton & Company, 2008)

Candle before Buddha statue. Incense wood from Latin America brought by Tom several years ago. From over at Snow Bowl, sound of Rokpa barking. The nightly return from town and walk there. I am truant. Suddenly many dogs are howling and barking. The neighbor's up the hill from their chained-in pen are the most mournful.

Sitting with bare feet up on wood kindling box. Dusk. Doorway to darkness. I pass through.

There are days when in that darkness everything seems quietly irrelevant.

Tires on gravel.

Engine off.

Door opening, closing.

Soon, face of woman, face of pup.

When there's nowhere to go, go there.

A few weeks ago there was a hostage taking in prison. The two hostages, a staff person and an inmate, were people we know. They survived long hours of negotiations. There were, we're told, cuts on head and face. The hostage taker did not have his life taken -- but might have. He is in segregation. Life returns to what in prison is called normal.

No picnic, prison. The same as civilian life, only different.

Compassion is Union
In Mahayana Buddhism in particular great emphasis is laid on realizing the union of wisdom and compassionate action. Human fulfillment is seen to lie in the integration of the inner and outer dimensions of life, not in transcendent wisdom or world-saving compassion alone. As long as we remain delusively convinced of our egoic separation, then we remain cut off from the capacity to empathize fully with others. Such empathy is nothing other than the affective response to insight into the absence of egoic separation. For when the fiction of isolated selfhood is exposed, instead of a gaping mystical void we discover that our individual existence is rooted in relationship with the rest of life. For Thich Nhat Hanh, this is the realization of "interbeing"; for the Dalai Lama that of "universal responsibility": two ideas at the heart of contemporary Engaged Buddhism.
(-- Stephen Batchelor, The Awakening of the West, from Everyday Mind)

We engage in three different conversations each Friday morning. One in protective custody pod, one with the Buddhist group, and one open to general population. Each venue leaves us delighted with the fact of the time and conversation that takes place.

Sometimes two, sometimes seven, always the perfect number. Poetry, science, meditative mind, a map of Iran, a piece by Nietzsche, or Elie Wiesel, or Sharon Salzberg, or perhaps David Brooks or Lao Tzu. It's wide open.

And we love it.

Just a small group of individuals.

Conversing.

Together.

The man is tired of moving.

"I'm 73. I've packed too many boxes in my life. You can take the books I've left on shelves." I carry them to front seat of car, then back behind rear seat. There are a lot of books. The eight boxes of books he will take with him are boxed and sealed by front door. When my last trip is done, I bring him two French prayer books. He fingers them, pronounces their titles, then hands them back. "No, you take them." I say thank you for the books, "They'll go to our borrowing library at the hermitage." He nods to that.

Then I ask him for his blessing. If he is surprised it is translated into quick standing as I bow head. The priest puts both hands on my head and prays for good be done, helpful communication with all who come through our doors, and loving connections be forged. I say amen, we'll pray for you, take the (prison-made small wooden) boat to carry you well in your sails to unknown places, and be well as you go. This near stranger and I, in the glow of books relinquished and books received -- but more -- in the light of all we ever really need, mere attention and presence, however briefly, with one another. Handshake. A pause. A hug. I leave him at his desk in a room with empty shelves under a church he has served as good-enough priest.

Earlier in the dentist's chair (while nine fingers and a backhoe excavated my mouth) I thought about God. Grateful for no pain, (at that moment), I wondered about belief in God. An unformed notion came to mind. To believe in God is to believe in the cooperative nature of all-that-is working towards the cooperative nature that all-that-is encounters. At each moment. In each event. With each person.

The trouble many have believing in God is that they do not experience this cooperative nature in the world, in the earth, or in people. Perhaps sin is the withholding of cooperation.

More than that, the difficulty we experience has to do with mind and consciousness. When it is said that God is everywhere, does that mean that the cooperative nature of everything is always available? And if we do not consciously experience that nature, then are we not experiencing God? The mind, (actually the heart/mind), is pivotal here. The saying 'What you see is what you get!' is operative. All things can be seen as good, as cooperating, and graced -- no matter what occurs. The occurring is merely the occurring. Things happen! Things happen willy-nilly or they happen intentionally according to the actor. Bottom line -- things happen.

The mind that enters here. What it does with what happens determines whether the individual judges the action (or event, or words). Judgement takes up residence in the desirable or undesirable part of town in our mental neighborhood. What happens, of itself, is merely what happens.

Here enters consciousness. When those whose awareness is of a particular type say that 'All things work unto good!' -- they are considering "all" things, not some, not a few, not many -- but all. And they have this mind as a regular presence. No matter how much something hurts, or seems terrible, or is actually terrible -- their mind sees through the event, action, or words to an interconnective cooperative milieu. This milieu, a setting or environment of cooperative nature, is mostly invisible to the eye.

Old sayings such as "No one has seen God", or, "God is invisible', or 'You cannot see God and live" give us pause. They might be true, but true in a way we have yet to understand. To see God in this realm is not to see a particular distinct body with the nametag "God" affixed. Rather, to see God is to see the clear cooperative nature of all reality and all existence and all being. That "seeing" dwells nowhere else but in the eye of the one seeing. That which 'sees' God is that which is seeing.

You forget the Rock who begot you,
unmindful now of the God who fathered you.
The Lord has seen this, and in his anger
cast off his sons and his daughters.
“I shall hide my face from them,” he says
“and see what becomes of them.
For they are a deceitful brood,
children with no loyalty in them.
They have roused me to jealousy with what is no god,
they have angered me with their beings of nothing;
I, then, will rouse them to jealousy with what is no people,
I will anger them with an empty-headed nation.
Yes, a fire has blazed from my anger,
it will burn to the depths of Sheol;
it will devour the earth and all its produce,
it will set fire to the foundations of the mountains.
(~ Deuteronomy 32:18 - 21)

The jealous, angry, demanding God of our linear narrative thinking is becoming the accepting, compassionate, inviting God of our encircling existential consciousness. The fact that we feel the face of God is hidden from us posits some faced being hiding that very face from us because we deserve to be so treated. (And often, it must be said, we behave so badly that this line of reasoning appears a valid line.)

But what if God is the encircling existential consciousness of pervading cooperative nature -- nascent and inchoate throughout all that is?

I don’t go out to wander around
I stay at home here in Miura
While time flows on through
The unbounded world
In the awakened eye
Mountains and rivers completely
Disappear.
The eye of delusion looks out upon
Deep fog and clouds.
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)

We don't see God because our minds are looking for someone else, someone other, far away, beyond this world, this time, this reality. God, like our notion of heaven, is somewhere else.

If we were to drop all notions of God and settle into a mind that transforms everything into such a cooperative nature milieu, an existential consciousness dwelling in the between -- between good and bad, between right and wrong, between heaven and hell -- perhaps we might come to see in a way quite different and wholly encircling. Nothing left out, no one othered. Each place a sacred place where holiness is our ordinary life lived with quiet awareness and listening openness.

The elderly priest moves on leaving his blessing in place.

It is a long journey, it seems, home.

We need help.

Perhaps a blessing.

And a hug.

On our way.

If someone says something critical or demeaning to you, wonder why they do not accept themselves.

Then change, with humility, what with you needs to change. This helps your being you, their being them.

Some folks do not yet understand 'good enough.' Nor non-localized self. We are not other than every place we've been, every one we've been near.

You are, and I am, good enough. As is the universe. And being itself.

"Out beyond ideas of
right doing and wrong doing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there."
~ Rumi

And if I'm late, will you wait?

Little by little there's less and less reason to step outside the hermitage. Even when I do, eyes practice custody. There's scant need to see anything other than what's under foot.

You who seek the Way
You waste your spirit searching
We all have something wondrous
Unmarked and unnamed
Called, it answers clearly
It doesn’t stay in hiding
Guard it well I pray
Don’t let it get scratched up
- Han shan

There might have been a time when I enjoyed being out in public.

I can't imagine when.

I don't imagine why.

Life without why.

Is a better way.