Rice cooks

Bu Ji : Nothing doing.

Merton is read.

Dusk is falling.

Dog chases green ball.

Cat wrestles with ball of paper.

Thursday evening conversation.   

Wu Wei : no effort

9/11

Morning comes .

And evening wanes.

We wander in new day.

We walk mountains.

Not to care is also caring

Fog sets in.

Dusk approaches slowly,

Daylight fades,

Nothing but...

 If Jesus was Christ, and Christ is God, what do we see of God?

A man. A man who found himself in the hands of unkind powerful men who tortured then murdered him.

Sound familiar?

Yeah.

To contemplate one must first be able to gaze, not to stare at something or merely see with the physical eye, but to penetrate with the heart what is ordinarily missed by the eye. The eye of the heart must be opened by grace, enlightened by knowledge and strengthened by love. For Clare the eye of the heart learns to see rightly in the mirror of the cross.
(--p.56, in Clare of Assisi, A Heart Full of Love, by Ilia Delio osf, c.2007)

That cross crosses time. It appears in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, China, America, Russia. You name it, it appears there.

What are we to think?

The cross is human suffering, especially suffering caused by other humans for reasons spurious and specious. In other words, ignorant. There's something they want. Something they believe in. Something better than what you are thinking, feeling, doing. And they know that something better.

What they don't know is nothing.

The nihility of 'creatio ex nihilo' may be spoken of as a simple relative nothingness, the existence that comes about on the ground of that nothingness can ever be truly independent. Truly free existence can only be posited on and rooted in absolute nothingness. This, it seems to me, is the kind of nothingness Eckhart has in mind when he says, "The ground of God is the ground of my soul; the ground of my soul is the ground of God."
(--p.68, in Religion and Nothingness, by Keiji Nishitani, c.1983)

 Is nothing God?

Out of nothing doesn't come something; out of nothing comes the ground of being, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

Is God nothing or nothing God?

We are a bit puzzled by the question: Why is there something rather than nothing?

John Leslie in his book Infinite Minds might have answered the question with the words from "The Sound of Music":

 Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good

(--from Something Good, in Sound of Music)

(Here's a review of Leslie's view: (http://www.academia.edu/481771/BOOK_REVIEW_John_Leslie_INFINITE_MINDS),,)

Nothing is what we have to look at, look forward to, and look back on.

If there is something it is because nothing has stepped aside, disappeared, gone missing.

Mystics and contemplatives from all times have had nothing to say listening to nothing with nothing to show for it.

Choose your life; I, mine.

God forgive us, there's nothing but...

Forgiveness! And reconciliation. With nothing better to do.

Except, maybe, to continue, to show up again.

Glancing

September.

Nosing into breeze.

There's a long drop from there to here

Drop the "t" -- you can't get here from here.

You're already here but (for thinking) you're not.

Unthink that thought.

Drop into where you are.

Here?

T-less.

25 consonants and vowels to go!

But thee and me; and I am not sure of thee

When chance for solitude comes, disappear.

Choose your own version of insanity; leave others theirs. They so want to give you theirs.

Every Time a Good Time
A hundred flowers blossom in spring, the moon shines in autumn, there is a fresh breeze in summer, and there is snow in winter. If your mind isn’t occupied with trivial matters, every time is a good time.
(--Wumen Huikai, "Zen Basics")

When a thing appears as it is, with no metaphor or simile, it appears as it is, sui generis.

As itself.

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and -- in spite of True Romance magazines -- we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely -- at least, not all the time -- but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” 

(― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967)

The abyss doesn't look back at you when you gaze into it. That's literary conceit. No, something else occurs.

You come to see no one else, nothing else, only the looking itself.

The looking itself.

As itself.

You might say:

Gone.

Grammar, (from Greek, feminine of 'grammatikos', 'of letters')

No silence is God.

No silence; is God?

No, silence is God.

Seeing things this way

What, the question asks, if this is it?

Exegetical wisdom consists in reading the signs and symbols presented by the immediate and immanent.

What if reality, call it the universe or existence, were presenting what is true and truly mystery in every phenomenon and appearing disclosure of felt, sensed, intuited, and obvious things in our experience?

Welcome the stranger!

It's not that the ugly and perverse isn't ugly and perverse. It's more that our mind/heart sees what things really are and is still willing to hold what is there with kind, thoughtful, appreciation toward the transformation needed for everything.

Doors open with a mind that is open.

Windows are seen through with a heart willing to look.

Difference is not difficulty. Difference is only difference.

Seeing things this way is a step toward sanity.

Missing practice

Where'd they go?

Sitting solo.

Cave sage.

Habits of Saturday morning.

First sunlight over Dean's off to Melvin Heights.

Down to kitchen. Grind coffee beans for after morning practice.

Rokpa, our practice Jikido, watches for next meditation practitioner to show themselves coming through middle room.

Suddenly, light!

What appears will guide us to zendo, cushion, incense, bell, and silence.

Uh oh  --  our idiorhymic little one comes to greet and distract Border Collie.

Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva has begun in their greeting a joyful chant.

It is time to process over boardwalk to cabin.

Whence? Hence; comes morning!

First sun leaps from wood stove chimney.

Lighting us on our way.

Wage snoozing; eschew losing what is valuable!

Please advise Syria and other parties wondering if it is possible, this dog and cat are navigating a negotiable peace.

Looking for a solution entails waiting for your primary love to return home. The dogs of before (not the dogs of war) are looking for what will arrive after. It is the 'looking for' that is pivotal.

It's not difficult to wage war. Determining what you really love is the difficulty. So many will try to divert, demonize, or distract you.

Sometimes a good snooze with help sort things out. 

Assuage war!

Engage peace!

You are under beauty! Hands up!

Thursday morning rain. As Lincolnville hermit travels to her vet's crematory with departed dog accompanied by distaff meetingbrook monastic.

On Silence 

Those who are fond of retreats—writers, ecstatics, parents with young children—often comment on the silence such time away allows. Silence becomes something present, almost palpable. The task shifts from keeping the world at a safe decible distance to letting more of the world in. Thomas Aquinas said that beauty arrests motion. He meant, I think, that in the presence of something gorgeous or sublime, we stop our nervous natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues. Whatever that fretful hunger is, it seems momentarily filled in the presence of beauty. To Aquinas’s wisdom I’d add that silence arrests flight, that in its refuge, the need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes. We let the world creep closer, we drop to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground. 

(—From Stirring the Mud by Barbara Hurd.)

Beauty arrests motion, indeed!

Morning 4 Sept

After hard rain, brook runs back to school.

Sun wishes well waning days of summer.

Green warmth dances on stretching leaf watching mountain runoff pass below.

Arresting silence, releasing joy, openly gazing.

How odd are we?

When someone fancies principle and law over experience and felt connection, that person is a believer who does not have faith.

Better to have the orientation and horizon faith opens than to have the objects and certitudes belief shuts in.

Jesus, that annoying Jewish peasant, trusted the experience and reality of individuals and avoided the fixed rituals and moralistic judgments of institutions.

If someone listens to you, feels sympathetic sorrow or joy with you, and devotes their attention to being of service to those needing service -- trust that person. Avoid those who care what others think, what others feel, what others might do -- all that to the detriment of the felt, present, and real experience of the one before them.

So odd, we are.

An existential interest

Existence / Exegesis : Education

...

Entrance, Encounter, Engagement, Experience, Embodiment, 

Experiment, Emerge, Evolve, Extrapolate, Exeunt.

Ora et Labora

September's Labor Day.

Cars point south and west heading out of Maine.

Rain thumps to earth understands there's nowhere to go.

And goes.

what is itself; transforming

Let's not quibble. Nor miss the point. All learning is about awareness, consciousness, self-knowledge.

The crisis is a crisis in consciousness, a crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient traditions. 

And considering what the world is now with all their misery conflict, destructive brutality, aggression, and so on, man is still as he was: is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive, and he has built a society along these lines. 

...

“You know, if we understand one question rightly, all questions are answered. But we don't know how to ask the right question. To ask the right question demands a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity. Here is a question, a fundamental question: is life a torture? It is, as it is; and man has lived in this torture centuries upon centuries, from ancient history to the present day, in agony, in despair, in sorrow; and he doesn't find a way out of it. Therefore he invents gods, churches, all the rituals, and all that nonsense, or he escapes in different ways. What we are trying to do, during all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are, nor revolt against them. Revolt doesn't answer a thing. You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything. And to understand is to transform what is. 

I think that will be enough, won't it?” 

(--Jiddu Krishnamurti, cf. The Real Revolution, J. Krishnamurti Online) http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-video/the-real-revolution--1.php

 What is what is?

The profound What Is might be different that the quotidian what is.

We are called to relationally transmute  what is so that the profound ground reality -- probably called Being/Consciousness/Joyful Engagement -- might become itself again and again in a worrisome world constantly enticing us to mimic something else.

We are nothing else.

We are what is itself.

A hurry through

An Irish poet dies of a Friday at end of August through which, poet and month, "known and strange things pass."

Perhaps it is gift of time grown hazy, space full of mute friends, that stills and changes perspective into shutterblink nostalgia.

Postscript 

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(Poem by Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013, from THE SPIRIT LEVEL (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)

So it is given us to dwell "neither here nor there" but in curious shade of movement flickering rainy morning cedar tree holding silver ladder dripping now one drop from patient rung aside the house.

There's coffee to be made.

Maybe later tea.

Quaff.

Sole ascent.

No . . . hurry.