A hermeneutic:

In the beginning earth breathing wholeness is monotheism's awakening.

Then, embodying wholeness is God become human.

Know the essence of mind.
Its intrinsic essence is pure clarity.
It is essentially the same as a Buddha.
Know the functions of mind.
Its functions produce the treasury of teachings.
When its activity is always silent,
Myriad illusions become suchness.
- Tao-hsin (580-651)

When no longer angered or disturbed by the reality of what is taking place around me, I surrender to the wholeness.

This is the course of Oneness -- of monotheism -- moving through Judaism, to Christianity, to Islam.

Fragmented and scattered mind finds Itself.

In whole-sight.

What needs doing...

Is being done.

Have you affirmed the Charter for Compassion yet?

http://charterforcompassion.org/

There's no purpose. We're useless.

And we love it.

The Zen Master asks, "But, what is 'it'?"

"And, irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed."
(--Gaston Bachelard in La formation de l'esprit scientifique, 1934)

Everything is itself. Everything is done for itself. No other purpose. No other reason.

Stop trying to be something. Or to do something.

As long as we insist that meditation must be meaningful, we fail to understand it. We meditate with the idea that we’re going to get something from it—that it will lower our blood pressure, calm us down, or enhance our concentration. And, we believe, if we meditate long enough, and in just the right way, it might even bring us to enlightenment.

All of this is delusion.
- Steve Hagen, from “Looking For Meaning,” Tricycle, Fall 2003

A man stops by. His wife has entered an Alzheimer's unit. He misses her. I feel for them.

Words and presence are the manifest realities of true silence and inseparate wholeness.

It grows starker these nights.

It is clearly, coldly, November.

Men and women who've served in the military -- especially those who experienced combat circumstances -- are to be acknowledged and thanked.

Those responsible for the stupidity of war are to be held accountable for their actions.

War is the one insult to human intelligence that human intelligence has not yet figured out.

The great way of the buddhas is profound, wondrous, inconceivable; how could its practice be easy? Have you not seen how the ancients gave up their bodies and lives, abandoned their countries, cities, and families, looking upon them as shards of tile? After that they passed eons living alone in the mountains and forests, bodies and minds like dead trees; only then did they unite with the way. Then they could use the mountains and rivers for words, raise the wind and rain for a tongue, and explain the great void, turning the incomparable wheel.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

However much we hate war, we have compassion for those suffering it -- combatants and civilians.

IX
Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered: "It had to be!"
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, "Why?"
(- final stanza from poem, And There Was a Great Calm, by Thomas Hardy)

The spirit of compassion, even pity, must be responded to.

We're not sure what to do with life or death.

Sniper Who Killed 10 Is Executed in Virginia
By IAN URBINA 1 minute ago; New York Times, 10Nov09

John A. Muhammad, whose murderous shooting spree in the fall of 2002 left at least 10 people dead, was executed on Tuesday night at a Virginia state prison.

We might be safer with him dead.

But we're not any wiser; not any better. Do we even want to be?

There is more to desire than just suffering. There is a yearning in desire that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. […]

As the well-known contemporary Indian teacher Sri Nisargadatta, famous for sitting on a crowded street corner selling inexpensive bidis, or Indian cigarettes, once commented, “The problem is not desire. It’s that your desires are too small.” The left-handed path means opening to desire so that it becomes more than just a craving for whatever the culture has conditioned us to want. Desire is a teacher: when we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame, or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.
(- Mark Epstein, from “In Defense of Desire,” Tricycle, Spring 2005)

We are so many dead men walking around no longer breathing -- but not willing to close eyes and exhale.

Tide out.

We hardly want to know what we truly desire.

But we are just.

We can kill.

Legally.

No need to be afraid of knowledge.

No need to be afraid of uncertainty.

Hospitality, conversation, and meditation are good examples of small ways available to us to affirm the simplicity of service, silence, and stillness.

I don't for a minute think that an empty room is empty of all the beings once occupying it.

Zen is the practice of seeing this emptiness through.

What is Ultimate Reality? It is what-is without the blade of thought to cut it.

There is only Ultimate Reality. All thinking that severs and divides is illusory thinking.

Imagination draws its energy from a confrontation with desire. It feeds off desire, transmuting and magnifying reality through desire’s power. Fantasy does the opposite; it avoids desire by fleeing into a crude sort of wish-fulfillment that seems much safer. Fantasy might be teddy bears, lollipops, sexual delights, or superhero adventures; it also might be voices in one’s head urging acts of outrage and mayhem. Or it might be the confused world of separation and fear we routinely live in, a threatening yet seductive world that promises us the happiness we seek when our fantasies finally become real. Imagination confronts desire directly, in all its discomfort and intensity, deepening the world right where we are. Fantasy and reality are opposing forces, but imagination and reality are not in opposition: imagination goes toward reality, shapes and evokes it.
(- Norman Fischer, from “Saved From Freezing,” Tricycle, Spring 2005)

Karl sends postcard from Village Soup with photo of us at the shop by the harbor. He says,"This photo always brings back fond memories...".

We imagine a new reality. Evoking it.

Shaping it.

Becoming it.

No teacher. Everything teaches.

No religion. Everything holds together.

No God. Everything resounds of God.

A Buddhist Retreat Behind Broken-Mountain Temple

In the pure morning, near the old temple,
Where early sunlight points the tree-tops,
My path has wound, through a sheltered hollow
Of boughs and flowers, to a Buddhist retreat.
Here birds are alive with mountain-light,
And the mind touches peace in a pool,
And a thousand sounds are quieted
By the breathing of a temple-bell.
- Ch'ang Chien

Nothing to hold on to. Everything falls.

Only silence. Everything vibrates.

Loss and emptiness. Everything comes alive.

UPROOTED

The artists painting Cuba from memory
or from photographs, from family stories
of the exodus, from dreams, know
their bloodlines are not clear. The work
is mongrel, neither Cuban nor American.

They paint masks, figures floating, palm
trees set on pedestals. They sculpt women
locked in birth. What they want is a particular
place. What they find is borrowed space.
In hand-colored gelatin silver prints or wood

with oil and gold leaf or oil on linen or on
masonite or on carved locust bark, they discover
new rooms, dream landscapes, regions of origin
as small as phone-booths, as expansive as cane
fields, rented, tenanted, temporary.

—Interprete mi silencio—, one says.
They are like poets scratching out their
metaphors sideways on pieces of lined paper,
crossgrain, drafting possibilities,
unsettled, undecided.

These artists ask and never receive replies,
remember without mementos, feel without touching.
They have heard of the royal palm, seventy feet tall
and seek its landscape. How odd its trunk
is almost hollow, its roots mere threads.

(Poem by Jill Peláez Baumgaertner )

Gertrude wondered where Louise had gone with the poem Gertrude wrote about her husband. Her memory isn't so good. Louise steps off the elevator with the original and the copy she made for the poetry folder in the library of the Assisted Living Facility in Camden. Gertrude was a native of Brooklyn. Me too. Park Slope and Bensonhurst. She wondered if she'd passed my on the bus going to Brooklyn College. There in the foyer outside Suzanne's office we spoke waiting for the poem to reappear. When it did she was pleased. Louise put the copy in the red folder and said goodbye. Gertrude began her walk down corridor to room. It would soon be the evening meal. We go down the stairs.

Poetry has a way of reappearing just when you thought it gone.

She is a good listener.

To ask if we believe in the Bible is to ask if we believe in the fact of humankind. Do we believe we are alive? Do we think there is a mind? And what does any of it have to do with what we call "God?"

Beginning with Abraham, the Hebrew experience has resulted in the evolutionary unfolding of the human psyche. The Bible is the living record of this development, and therefore it has maintained its validity throughout the ages, up to and including the technological age of our own time.
(from p.69, in The Structure of Biblical Myths, The Ontogenesis of the Psyche, by Heinz Westman)

Present open thought. Here everywhere all dimensions. (Not being a marijuana smoker, still, the acronym is "pot head" for the prior sentences.)

The Course in Miracles circles through this issue:

The self you made is not the Son of God. Therefore, this self does not exist at all. And anything it seems to do and think means nothing. It is neither bad nor good. It is unreal, and nothing more than that. It does not battle with the Son of God. It does not hurt him, nor attack his peace. It has not changed creation, nor reduced eternal sinlessness to sin, and love to hate. What power can this self you made possess, when it would contradict the Will of God?
Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. Over and over this must be repeated, until it is accepted. It is true. Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. Nothing can touch it, or change what God created as eternal. The self you made, evil and full of sin, is meaningless. Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God, and light and joy and peace abide in you.
Salvation requires the acceptance of but one thought; - you are as God created you, not what you made of yourself. Whatever evil you may think you did, you are as God created you. Whatever mistakes you made, the truth about you is unchanged. Creation is eternal and unalterable. Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. You are and will forever be exactly as you were created. Light and joy and peace abide in you because God put them there.
(from Lesson 93, ACIM)

Let's not argue whether there is a God. Let's discuss whether you and I are here. Here and not perpetually absent. Missing. Nowhere to be found.

Westman says that Abram is told by the Lord to "Go from your country...into the land of your own becoming."(p.71)

What about you?

You want a special engraved eviction notice?

An inmate had a line in his poem today something to the effect: We are holding on even though we are already gone.

Anybody here?

Who's there?

Too many words about God. Let's keep still. And silent.

On Going to see a Taoist Master

A dog barking and the sound of water;
Peach blossoms heavy with dew.
In these deep woods, deer can be seen;
At noon along the stream, I hear no bell.
Wild bamboo divides gray clouds;
Waterfalls hang from blue peaks.
No one knows where you’ve gone;
Disheartened, I lean against a second,
Now a third pine.
- Li Po

Like the weather: falling cold rain, darkness too soon, an empty landscape.

Maybe up is down. Or, no up, no down. Maybe, up is up, down, down. However said, there is no opposite.

Living is joy, but death can only weep. You see in death escape from what you made. But this you do not see; that you made death, and it is but illusion of an end. Death cannot be escape, because it is not life in which the problem lies. Life has no opposite, for it is God. Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life. Forgive the world, and you will understand that everything that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real. In this one sentence is our course explained. In this one sentence is our practicing given its one direction. And in this one sentence is the Holy Spirit's whole curriculum specified exactly as it is.

What is the peace of God? No more than this; the simple understanding that His Will is wholly without opposite. There is no thought that contradicts His Will, yet can be true. The contrast between His Will and yours but seemed to be reality. In truth there was no conflict, for His Will is yours. Now is the mighty Will of God Himself His gift to you. He does not seek to keep it for Himself. Why would you seek to keep your tiny frail imaginings apart from Him? The Will of God is one and all there is. This is your heritage. The universe beyond the sun and stars, and all the thoughts of which you can conceive, belong to you. God's peace is the condition for His Will. Attain His peace, and you remember Him.
(--from ACIM, Manual for Teachers, http://courseinmiracles.com/teachers_manual/what_is_the_peace_of_god20.htm/

God's will is wholly without opposite.

What must it be like to be all alone?

All.

Alone.

Election Day.

We like to think each vote counts. It does.

Evening mountains veiled in somber mist;
One path entering the wooded hill:
The monk has gone off locking his pine door.
From a bamboo pipe a lonely trickle of water flows
- Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672)

Cedar shingling north wall of book shop/shed.

Just that.

And hopes for equality and compassion.

Men and women in harm's way in war zones deserve our support. They live in hell.

Those who start wars deserve that hell, not those they send to fight.

What is the test of truth? The Buddha offers a simple formula: Test things in terms of cause and effect. Whatever is unskillful, leading to harm and ill, should be abandoned; whatever is skillful, leading to happiness and peace, should be pursued. Apply the test of skillfulness to all teachings in all your actions. Where is this teaching taking you? Is it moving you in a direction that is wise and kind? One quick test isn’t enough, you know.

You have to keep at it, so that your sensitivity to the results of your actions grows more and more refined with practice. When you’ve done the hard work of asking these questions, then you can decide for yourself whether a teaching, or a teacher, is worth following. And at the same time, you’ve also taught yourself how to live—a learning that can bring with it joy and the energy to go even deeper.
- Larry Rosenberg, from “The Right to Ask Questions,” Tricycle, Fall 2003

Watched "Operation Homecoming" and was touched by the reality they described. Watch this film. It sobers.

It is All Soul's Day.

About war...

Apophasis!

Bright full moon. Older Canadian Buddhist cardiologist stumbles in to dimly lighted cabin after sitting under weigh. He plops cushion down just shy of dog center circle rug. Moonlight gave shape through shadow soon.

Right among the people coming and going
I have a place to stay
I shut the gate even in the daytime
And feel as though I had bought
Wo-chu the great mountain
And had it with me in town.
Never since I was born have I
Liked to argue, mouth full of blood.
My mouth is made fast to heaven and earth
So the universe is still.
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)

At table he tells us of Catholic Bishop in Antigonish resigning then arrested for bringing child pornography into Canada. When interviewed on television the elder Buddhist said the man was probably in hell these days and there was probably a need for compassion.

The Dalai Lama said his religion is simple -- his religion is kindness.

We should drop everything and forget everything but kindness.

i would opt for religious life with such a rule.

When someone sparks and sees through the veil, that person sources and is called a founder of something

By myself I remember

Not to seek mind;

The green lamp has already illumined

My lone lamp heart.

Whether in clamor or silence,

I have a clear mirror:

It thoroughly discerns

Pure hearts among humans.

It is not something existing,

That anyone can see and know,

Nor does it not exist:

Such is the lamp of truth.

- Shiba Sonome (1664 – 1726)

We say: They're not from around here, are they?"

They are, indeed, from around here.

"Around here" is exactly where they are.

So are they known as 'saints.'

Enough about us. What can we say about life itself?

Vast and spacious, like sky and water
Merging during autumn, like snow and moon
having the same color
this field is without boundary,
beyond direction,
magnificently one entity
without edge or seam.
- Hongzhi (1091-1157)

Clocks will change. There's worry about Seasonal Affective Disorder. That and H1N1. Not to mention ordinary flu. Then there's the Yankees. So much to fret over!

Despair is marked by a desire to get rid of the self, an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are.
Called “the Fork” as a child because of his uncanny ability to find a person’s weaknesses and stick it to them, Kierkegaard’s lapidary “Sickness Unto Death” is a study of despair, which in the Danish derives from the notion of intensified doubt. Almost as a challenge to keep out the less than earnest reader, Kierkegaard begins “Sickness” with this famous albeit slightly ironic bit of word play:
"A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation relating itself to itself in the relation."
(from October 28, 2009, 9:30 pm, Kierkegaard on the Couch, By Gordon Marino, New York Times, Opinion)

Who am I, fundamentally, if I am not a fundamentalist?

And I'm not.

Does that mean I am not?

Soren? Soren?

Now I am dispair-rest and depress-air.

That's the best thing about care.

The first coming of Christ is the sudden awareness of one-mindedness as experienced by a particular individual -- any individual -- whether you, or me, or Jesus, or Francis, or Dogen, or your mother, or your brother.

The second coming of Christ will be the awareness on the part of each one of us that we have the awareness of one-mindedness -- everyone -- and that there is a choice to be made.

What choice? The choice will be whether to recognize, accept, and act on the awareness of unity-consciousness, or, to opt to remain in the clutches of the illusory ego-self and to fight against the communion of creation as a singular yet particular revelation of truth, love, and service.

It will be the mythic choice of Eden.

A man of the Way comes rapping
At my brushwood gate,
Wants to discuss the essentials of Zen experience.
Don't take it wrong if this mountain monk's
Too lazy to open his mouth:
Late spring warblers singing their heart out,
A village of drifting petals.
- Jakushitsu Genko (1290-1367)

I don't know why the notion continues that what we've called the Godhead, with Trinitarian or Unitarian expression, should be considered to be other than the corpus of human existence. Even in the metaphor of Gospel lore there was a birth into humankind of the very creator of the world. God becomes human.

GENESIS --POEM

The dust has no time to settle.

It is doing creation's work,

becoming all the air there is,

sucking itself into the vortex,

the universe filled with powder.

The light begins to flood fields,

to bring the flowers into focus

in the dusky air that with each moment's

clearing becomes more invisible.

But now the blues darken with rain,

the whites become emphatic,

the leaves' sharp outlines the dawn.

And Adam rises from the mud,

whole, moving his feet slowly

through the clay, as it sucks and

pulls him back, not yet ready to

give him up. His legs move

and then he stands as still as stone,

exhaling what God has breathed

into him, the mud drying on his arms

as he watches himself and wonders

where he was before these arms

were his, these legs, this mud, and each

finger's evidence of particularity.

Had he been there always stirring

the mind of God, waiting for the mandate

to rise from His mesh of images,

to conform to flesh? Adam stands,

warming, thinking his way into the world.

He is the only one, symmetrical,

sufficient, the crux of matter,

the focal point. What does breathing

have to do with it, he wants to know

as he begins to think fox, lynx, otter,

mistle thrush, marmoset. Words

without contexts, names he mouths

as fast they come to him: fairy

shrimp, lark, tamarin, sturgeon.

His respiration fills with utterance,

his mind with images of skunk,

pigeon, ibex, wallaby. Trapped

in the rhythm of naming, he seeks

the spaces between syllables,

desires respite from the phonics'

tumble. The words' roll unthroats

him, makes him listen for inflections

to meet his in more than an echo.

He leans back into the cumulus

of grass and dreams images of hair,

eyes, skin, thinks when he awakens

that his dreams have made her up.

Eve knows she has been there always,

kindling his mind, teasing the hairs

on his arm. She says skitter, punt,

hedge, fleece, speckle. That words

are acts had not occurred to him.

She says jostle, dice, pepper, twine.

When she says stick, pedal, march,

he is stirred to reciprocity, sensing

rationale, antecedent, cogitation. Eve

gazes at the fading sunlight and sees

God above and through. Adam sees

the dust on fire with twilight. His fingers

seek hers. She raises his palm and with

her finger spells her love inside it.

He moves close for her interpretation.

(Poem by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner, in The Christian Century, C. 1996 The Christian Century Foundation, C.2004, Gale Group)

I'm not wed to belief. Beliefs come and go. The reality of holiness is not dependent on statements of intellectual holdings, but on the partnering middle way, that place where everything intersects and moves through one another in a creativity of wholeness.

I hammer nails. I lay roofing tiles on boardwalk. I close up openings between roof and framing of the cabin completed (so we thought) six years ago.

Nearing midnight. Prison in AM. Saskia grounds hazelnuts for tomorrow's baking.

I would like to see, and be seen by, Christ. Christ-mind. Christ-reality.

It's only Zen that keeps faith from becoming anachronistic.

This seeing faith is unretrogressive faith.

Be perfect, (that is, make one's way through), as your heavenly Father is making 'itself' a way through.

Itself, being itself, is a way through.

Dinner/conversation with Tom and Maria last night. Read Nan Merrill's version of Psalm 71. Then from Steven Harrison's book "Being One."

We are, of course, not two.

It has been asked,
"How should those who enter the
path apply their minds?"
All things are originally uncreated
And presently undying.
Just let your mind be free;
You don't have to restrain it.
See directly and hear directly;
Come directly and go directly.
When you must go,
Then go.
When you must stay,
Then stay.
This is the true path.
A scripture says,
"Conditional existence is the site of enlightenment,
insofar as you know it as it really is."
- Niu-t'ou Hui-chung (683-769) Dailyzen

If you say, "I'm going to bed," it's best to do so.

The world isn't an illusion. What we think of and project on to the world is illusory.

While the world our mind projects is pure illusion, life itself is not.
We still must live.
(P.3, Being One, Finding Our Self in Relationship, by Steven Harrison c.1999)

You are real.

Be real.

Don't think about reality.

Be it.

Looking out from 2nd story of building-in-progress at Bald Mountain I think about the dwelling of hermits.

My hut isn't quite six feet across
Surrounded by pine, bamboos, and mountains,
An old monk hardly has room for himself
Much less for a visiting cloud.
- Shih-wu (1272-1352)

Being a hermit is a mask I wear. I speak from behind it.

Orpheus

When I wrote of the women in their dances and
wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone
down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from
myself.

There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued
child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies!

Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.
(Poem by Muriel Rukeyser)

We lay cut green shingles on boardwalk to cabin to counter morning frost sending morning feet sliding off their meditation.

Tom and Jay work the inner framing of book shed while Eric does roofing. Saskia and I pull nails, clean the cut pieces from ground, lay them on walkway to cabin. We get closer to something we cannot name.

It's not enough to be nobody. You also have to renounce being nobody. At Sunday Evening Practice we remember times in our lives when being nobody was more a chore than now. Now it is a great generosity.

Climbing Beech Hill in lovely autumn clarity this morning we decide along with silent sitting and open conversation we would continue to cultivate a cosmotheandric eco-spirituality.

Nature is the ground. God is the breath. All living beings and every moment of existence share the devotional ritual of deep respect and willing compassion.

In other words, there is no containing the mind and heart of being-in-this-world.

No church, temple, synagogue, mosque, or meeting hall can possibly approach that which is in itself the visiting cloud of ordinary life.

We are happy to be laypeople, non-experts, non-official, no-credentials, useless, outsider, nobodies.

We breathe in. We breathe out.

This breath is all there is.

This breath is all we need.

For now.

It often strikes me I don't know how to pray. One of the students in prison during midterm mentioned atheism -- he said what others call prayer he calls surrounding what is there around you with attention.

The Spirit comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words.

('Noon reading (Sext) Romans 8:26 )

It sounds like a zen response to an incomplete koan asking, "If there is no God, what is prayer?" Derek might respond, "I am surrounded with what is; I ask no-God around me to permeate my attention with no barriers, no boundaries, and no other. I long to find what is truly there with compassionate, loving attention."

Stripped of reason my mind is blank
Emptied of being my nature is bare
At night my windows often breathe white
The moon and stream come right to the door.
- Shih-wu (1272-1352)

'God' is not some other being in some other place. God is no other being right here, attending with surrounding awareness what is revealing itself in our presence.

'God' has never been other than what God is. God ever-sounds, and if we hear, we hear: "I am and will be there as who I am shall I be there."

What is there and here, what we have tried to encapsulate with the word 'God,' is a reality surrounded by and beyond which nothing else can be said or understood.

God is not where I am. God is not where you are. (It might be rather that God is the 'where' you are, the 'where' I am. Someone said (I forget who): God is not in us, we are in God. When we exhaust trying to be where or as God is, when the effort to restrict, replicate, or replace God disintegrates -- all that remains is what is of itself as it is.

What is it of us that has to disappear? What are we cultivating that is in the way as an impediment because of which we cannot take a step? And yet, don't we want to step through?

There is nothing wrong with me or you. What impedes are the opinions, thoughts, beliefs, conditioned responses, patterned behavior, attachment to name, form, and press clippings, lack of appreciation for the ineffable metaphors of mind and heart, inability to penetrate and integrate the mystery of cohesion concretizing and constanting this very Kosmos and the beings dwelling therein.

We are not wrong. We're simply not here.

We get lost trying to control and manipulate what is being created in the surround of awareness.

There is what might be called Notyetness or Soontobeness that surrounds our being.

So as Derek wondered, and I conjoin: How to pray? Toward what direction? What for?

The Psalmist helps to begin:

Out of the depths I cry to You,... hear my voice.

Let Your ears be attentive to my voice in supplication. (Psalm 129 {130})

A moment of silence.

A beginning.

Ever-present.

Source.

Inspires.

Unknowingly.