Returning with earth, walking with Rokpa

A friend writes from Liberty, Maine. He sends Richard Rohr.

"How we do anything is finally how we do everything. (Rohr)

No explanation, embodiment

Wind blows prayers from prayer-flags over sprig-green field,

Cosmos, intelligent beyond knowing, finds solace in thoughtfulness of remembrance.

The language of cemeteries is stone silence.

Meet me there.

Wordless.

In the woods on the mountain

Spring comes and dogs walk with man and woman on zig zagging trails.

You see, everything is between what it has been and what it will be. 

We are the movement of transforming emptiness as it becomes the next form moving through the between into new emptiness entering form again on its way through between-time morphing another appearance.

So lovely, light, and steep.

So far we've gone, and so asleep.

Would that we soon awake!

He watches the flowers and birds outside

He said his name was Lawrence.

That's all he remembered.

That's enough, don't you agree?

Do you remember your name?

Write it down.

Lose the paper.

Who put sleeping powder in the eggs?

At Sunday morning hospitality a bunch of sleepy animals.

A distribution of provisions from breakfast plate wakes up the room.

And if the barn were to give itself to living quarters, who would take the lower level? 

Guests who feed the animals get first choice!

No replacing, no restricting: where religion next resides

All that is needed is a name.

No, not a name. 

A gaze.

One without nothing within.

Saturday morning

Passing through.

Leben ohne warum

If I ask why, I am on the outside.

There is no why if we are on the inside.

One with.

Way home

Host of God.

Is that it?

What we are?

Final class, ethics

Each speaks own mind.

Upon missing by 30 seconds...

...the comments (closed) for:

OP-ED Columnist, RELIGION BEYOND THE RIGHT, by Frank BruniPublished: May 6, 2013, The New York Times 

Excerpt:As the Boy Scouts of America reassesses its ban on gay scouts and leaders, we’re hearing a lot about the organization’s need to remain sensitive to people whose religions condemn homosexual behavior. Their morals must be properly respected, their God aptly revered.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/opinion/bruni-religion-beyond-the-right.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Too-late comment:
It's not about being gay.

 It's about being able to tell people they are wrong, perverse, outsiders, and illegitimate in the eyes of a God closely held and guarded by the condemnation squad.

Let's face it -- there's a new movement to purify others according to the standards of the purifiers. Institutions, churches, clubs, schools, the Senate and House of Representatives --  all have a purity & condemnation agenda that is not only annoying, but frightening.

Today's gay is tomorrow's non-fundamentalist religious follower, is next week's member of the Democratic Party, is next month's non-Caucasian, is next year's non-millionaire.

May the god of heterodox unions and humans have mercy on we the non-purists and non-condemnatory! Amen! Or: Hey-humanity!

I'll have the nothing special

Winnie dies. The sign of the unicorn is no longer readable. Nothing special.

Everything slows. Finish reading penultimate papers for ethics course. Final class Wednesday night.

Brain stalls. Time comes round to circumferential swirl. Nothing stretches. Pinpoint.

Maybe Christ is metaphor for emerging engagement with evolving experience. We live. We die. We return. Eternally recurring.

It doesn't matter. Not any of it. There's this...collapse.

Meanwhile, ordinary.

Nothing special.

Thanks Winnie!

As, In The Upper Room, Ballet for Chamber Ensemble, by Philip Glass, plays

Sunday morning , cat saunters into room. Sun daze early on winter-beaten mountainside.

The overwhelming variegation of people! Watching New York Times short videos -- seltzer man, poets in unexpected places, architecture of Bowery, fashion hats in Manhattan, street duds in Bronx, biker club in Queensboro.

This mind attending has slowed. Either it empties out by dint of early dementia or burrows into emptiness with late awareness.

Either way, it recognizes complaints of body, underground subway system groaning wheels as curving rails lift passage of millions of neurons to other places. It's a big unknown territory -- the territory of dark intelligence, dark knowing that never sees outer day, relegated to loam and root-systems of psyche's sparking synapses sending syncopating sorrow and solace through (now) violin strains of Going Home.

I don't live in New York City --- not for a long stretch of years -- but I did, once, turning keys to locks in Brooklyn and Bronx, visiting foreign lands of Staten Island, Manhattan, and Queens, as well as extra-terrestrial New Jersey address for the senseless span of heart's rambling pilgrimage.

I found home with zafu and zabuton in solitary practice a hermit's passing along village sidewalks and rural roads now in Maine these thirty two years.

My mind is not right. It belongs to a mysterious conclave of perennial, perpetual inquiry into language and symbol, vibrating truth and indecorous lies. But now, blessed relief, without feeling the urge to judge, need to justify, or purpose of explanation -- a coursing stream of attention-specific-reordering.

Everything is itself.

No more.

No less.

All...

Itself.

Nowhere to be found!

Screen

Peering through.

Joan will be leaving soon

Elderly friends spoke about the poem. About "alone."

They had much to say.

ALONE
"When I'm alone"—the words tripped off his tongue
As though to be alone were nothing strange.
"When I was young," he said; "when I was young..." 

I thought of age, and loneliness, and change.
I thought how strange we grow when we're alone,
And how unlike the selves that meet and talk,
And blow the candles out, and say good night. 

Alone... The word is life endured and known.
It is the stillness where our spirits walk
And all but inmost faith is overthrown.

(Poem by Siegfried Sassoon, 1886-1957)

All but...

Say goodnight!

May flowers

In Montpelier Vermont, at the end of the street where a fellow I know lives, police detonate a suspicious-looking box found on a sidewalk near a bank.

It contained, they discovered after the blast, home-school materials.

It is Thursday night in early May.

And we are a troubled people.

You?

Ursula K. LeGuin wrote the short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"in 1973.

It needs reading.

One commentator wrote:

The main point, I think, is slightly hidden near the end. As the narrator describes the people who decline the bargain, she mentions the place to which these people go. It is a better place than Omelas; she says, almost in passing, "I cannot describe it at all." 

Recall -- and this is the thing that would be easy to miss -- that this same narrator just spent the beginning of the story describing a city of perfect happiness to us. And she did it very well. She did not introduce the tragedy, the price, the child, until later on. And yet here she is, now, saying that she cannot describe this place that is better than Omelas, at all. One would have thought that the better place would simply be like Omelas, minus the hidden room, minus the tormented child. But the narrator could have described that; in fact, she did. So the place to which the decliners go must be some other sort of place, entirely. 

The point here is very deep. I think the idea of the story is that the narrator cannot violate the logic of human happiness, which requires a price, a flip-side. Our very conception of happiness, perhaps, has built into it a notion of the impossibility of perfection. This being the case, the fact that there must be a price of some sort -- not so dramatic or singular as the price of a tormented child in a locked room, but a price none the less -- seems inescapable. The place where the people who decline the bargain of Omelas go must therefore be a place where something other than happiness reigns; a place where some other inconceivable concept applies.                 http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/01/25/688925/-About-That-Kid-in-Omelas#

The inconceivable concept other than happiness -- interests me.

You?

Sitting

New season returning to chapel/zendo.

Ragged Mountain, Haiku

Late afternoon yurt
resting inside sound of brook
Buds today open

Coming round

Back in the cabin, repaired, painted, and cleaned, for Sunday Evening Practice. Then, afterwards, compline.

The question arises, again: remain a hermit? or, throw hat in ring for full time position?

Searching out "no" answers. None forthcoming. Will have to take another tack.

The question arises: Where do you want to die?

That answer is easy: nowhere.

Then, just do
what I am
doing.

Only moreso.