The Church, said Doug, is collapsing. "Did you ever think it would disintegrate in our very lifetime?" he asked at Chase's Daily breakfast last week.

The Boston Globe reports Cardinal Law sent faxes to his priests: "Cardinal Bernard F. Law is cracking down on efforts by lay Catholics to organize in Greater Boston, ordering priests not to cooperate with an evolving coalition of parish leaders." On the Globe website the 27April2002 headline reads, "Law seeks to curb organizing by laity."

The frown becomes scowl. The clergy, good or bad, has given itself the Church.
Laity must now, as in the beginning, give themselves to Christ.
Until they admit their absurd appropriation of what belongs to all Christians, all beings, all nature, the institution with its hierarchical arrogance should be left to flounder and fail.
When Christ is allowed back into the Church the laity will welcome back the clergy

Don’t tell me how difficult the Way.
The bird’s path, winding far,
Is right before you.
Water of the Dokei Gorge,
You return to the ocean,
I to the mountain.
- Hofuku Seikatsu (dailyzen)

Someone I worked with in New York once addressed the behavior of an opinionated school secretary in his employ saying, " She is impertinent." Irrelevant, insolent, no longer worth listening to -- this was his meaning twenty-five years ago in the child welfare agency. It was an icy dismissal, done with an unflinching belief that his characterization would carry the condemnation of opinion and its holder.

The institutional Church in the Globe's story -- and in the pedophilia scandal -- mimics the secretary and the director. Impertinence and, like Toynbee's declining slope of post-creative deterioration, a dominant minority carving stone with dictum better left unworded.

I walk to the mountain. There I find bird path, no other way.

Here is why we are in the world!

Closed out the old year
And held a dream of spring behind
My shut eyes…til now
This morning I opened them to see
It’s really come into the world.
- Saigyo (1118 – 1190)

Nature snowed through the night. As morning middles itself, sun looks at the unlikely spill, melting swiftly. Like last evening's conversation -- nature's urge is to present itself as it is for all to engage.

Separate dissatisfies. Unified releases. In the interim we measure the alleged supposed apparent and believed distance of one from the other. This activity is known in places as "sin."

The days stretch toward 40. There are 13 remaining. What will ascend?

Maria turned 74 Wednesday. We sang to her last evening. A jar of Trappist Apricot Jam curled itself in her hand. She believes in love. Thus she is, loved! Tom smiled with her out the door heading home.

Christ blames no one for the death of Jesus.

No one is converted to truth by means of blame or shame. What moves us to change our way of life is the compassionate revelation that the ignorance, mistakes, and misunderstandings we’ve cultivated can give way to a deep and lovely awakening of our true nature, true relatedness, true being.

Mind's no solid
One can touch or see --
Dew, frost.
(--Dogen)

Ephemeral and beautiful, dissolving and disappointing, impermanent and wistfully watched disappearance.

Once we learn to accept failure, love grows. We do not grow by thinking about it or by wishing for it, but only by the experience of failure. (Thomas Keating ocso, The Mystery of Christ, p120)

These 40 days of prayer, meditation, and conversation about Meetingbrook continue with us. And you too?

In every vocation, events and other people constantly reactivate our emotional programs for happiness, along with the accompanying turmoil that occurs when these programs are frustrated. Such self-knowledge is not a disaster but the necessary condition for changing them. When these have been dismantled, our ministry starts to work of itself because, once freed from the obstacles of pride and subtle forms of selfishness that hold the false-self system in place, the Spirit of God can work in us.
The seventy-two disciples, flushed with success, came to the Lord expecting to get a pat on the back, and all he said was, "Don't get excited about working miracles. Anybody with a little psychic power can do that. What really counts is that you are part of God's plan. The thing to rejoice in is that you are chosen to become divine and to join me in raising the consciousness of the world." (Keating, p.121)

No blame, no shame -- only the new foolishness of sun and mountain, sea and sky.

Like water running brook tumbling down Ragged we smile and wave to each other with passion and passing recognition.

We'll have many things to converse about. If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow, it doesn't matter.

What matters is choosing to be what each truly is, choosing to dwell who we really are.

Dew, frost -- ourselves!

Hawk? Or eagle overhead? The silent walking meditation Lauras itself along Ragged Mountain on Saturday morning.

An enfolding meditation on our retreat day:
1. Zen is looking; Zen is listening.
2. Inviting insight, allowing what is there to reveal itself, as it is.
3. Prayer is gratefulness, trusting what is there to reveal the presence of God. For where is God not?
4. Jumping in, engaging what is there, acting & moving, a transformation which affirms, empties, resurrects, and ascends.
5. At origin, still -- listening, looking, the practice of no barriers.

Brook carries itself before our eyes.

By becoming a human being Christ annihilated the dichotomy between matter and spirit. In the Person of the Divine-human Being, a continuum between the divine and the human has bees established. Thus, God's plan is not only to spiritualize the material universe, but to make matter itself divine. This he has already done in the glorified humanity of his Son. The grace bestowed on us by the Ascension of Jesus is the divinisation of our humanity. (Thomas Keating, in The Mystery of Christ, p.86.)

Sando lay in the brook looking at us, lapping water, and epitomizing the emerging and engaging convergence of our lives. Susan sings a song. We bow to the betweening embodiment, and return to the hermitage for lunch.

The grace of the Ascension enables us to perceive the irresistible power of the Spirit transforming everything into Christ despite any and all appearances to the contrary. (p.87)

The bird overhead, I think, was a hawk. Watching us as we step our prayer mindfully.

Jo is bald like a Zen nun. Head shaved clean as a whistle. So is David's -- but he hasn't just come home from a second bone marrow transplant. On back stoop in the cool of evening Jo asks what is my dream. I tell her to be the monastic I am.

To seek and long for God alone. And since nothing is really separate from God -- to seek and long for each other in our awakening into the realization of God. So many are alone, even alienated, unaware of their true relatedness, their true home. To invite -- quietly, kindly, and compassionately -- oneself and each into their own very nature, this is the practice of contemplation, Zen, and engaged service. To invite Christ, God, Bodhisattvas, holy men and women -- each into the wordless silence of love's simplicity, stillness, and sanctuary.

Empty and desireless,
Cold and thin, simple and genuine,
This is how to strike down
And fold up the remaining habits
Of many lives.
When the stains from old habits
Are exhausted,
The original light appears,
Blazing through your skull,
Not admitting other matters.
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)(dailyzen)

It was 94 degrees at 1:33pm in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. Now, Jo calls down to say "ice cream" -- and in that calling all is for the moment just as it should be.

Someday, David says, illness and disability will be no more. Will that eventuality be a conclusion of courage or a cause for reassessing all valuing?

"To ice cream," says David, going up stairs with his Welsh laughter.

To say it simply -- we might have found ground -- a place for Meetingbrook Hermitage to root.

The seedling these several years searching soil, is, perhaps, ready to enfold, dive deep, and unfold. It's still early. But, something quickens!

On a doorpost in a lovely house in Belfast there is a Mezuzah with the Shema. "Shema" is the word that begins the verse "Shema Israel", "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One". (Deut.6). Upstairs, on the door to a bedroom with a tank of tropical fish, there is a crucifix.

In the readings for this weekend the Jewish Yeshua (Jesus), who had been put to death, is reported to breakfast on the beach with a small group after a fishing encounter that yielded a surprising catch.

These memory devices -- words on doorposts, wood on doors, words on paper -- are set there to remind us of a ground longing to arrive home. The Lord is One. The child of God who died rather than deny that reality. The story of surprise nourishment when we release our controlling will and open to the free and loving wholeness that each is in God. These are fragments of a picture we puzzle to understand.

If you think that you
Have cut off illusory mind,
Instead of simply clarifying
How illusory mind melts,
Illusory mind will come up again,
As though you had cut off
The stem of a blade of grass
And left the root alive.
- Menzan Zuiho (1682-1769)

Our task is to clarify how illusory mind melts. If we allow this clarity to arrive with a still, silent, safe, and aware compassion -- we might be able to simply live with each other as neighbor, friend, and family.

We can't cut each other out. We can't cut each other up. Something else is being called for. We, if we are to live profoundly the gift we each have been given, must listen.

"Listen," says St Benedict in his rule. "Hear," says the Shema. Take root illusion, and watching, let it melt away -- the Zen invitation calls.

The ground is softening. It is mid-April. Smell that ground. Feel it. Love it. It -- everywhere and at every depth -- is our source.

In Belfast this week we found ground. For this next week, we'll watch, listen, and pray.
Soon, we trust, we’ll see!

The windbell rings outside my window over kitchen where Zwiebel Kuchen (onion cake) lofts its scent with breeze moving through bell and open window. Sunlight. Daffodil stalk rises dark green alongside empty birdfeeder. A lovely morning! And yet, will this all one day disappear?

About the mystery that the cosmos has to disappear, Teilhard de Chardin said –
The more I think about this mystery, the more it appears to me, in my dreams, as a “turning-about” of consciousness – an eruption of interior life – as an ecstasy. There is no need to rack our brains to understand how the material vastness of the universe will ever be able to disappear. Spirit has only to be reversed, to move into a different zone, for the whole shape of the world immediately to be changed. (The Future of Man, p.322)

In 1955, 10April, on Easter Sunday, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died. His writings -- a combining of biology, paleontology, philosophy, and spiritual visionary reflection – had to wait until after his death to be published. He was as obedient a Jesuit as he was an unorthodox thinker.

He'd written a reflection finished in Tientsin, on 25 March 1924, titled, "The End of the World." It is found in his book The Future of Man as the final essay. It ends,
When the end of time is at hand, a terrifying spiritual pressure will be exerted on the confines of the real, built up by the desperate efforts of souls tense with longing to escape from the earth. This pressure will be unanimous. Scripture, however, tells us that at the same time the world will be affected by a profound schism -- some trying to emerge from themselves in order to dominate the world even more completely -- others, relying on the words of Christ, waiting passionately for the world to die, so that they may be absorbed with it in God.

It is then, we may be sure, that the Parousia will be realized in a creation that has been taken to the climax of its capacity for union. The single act of assimilation and synthesis that has been going on since the beginning of time will then at last be made plain, and the universal Christ will blaze out like a flash of lightning in the storm clouds of a world whose slow consecration is complete.

…At that moment, St. Paul tells us (1Cor.15: 23ff) when Christ has emptied all created forces (rejecting in them everything that is a factor of dissociation and super-animating all that is a force of unity), he will consummate universal unification by giving himself, in his complete and adult Body, with a finally satisfied capacity for union, to the embrace of the Godhead.

Thus will be constituted the organic complex of God and world – the Pleroma – the mysterious reality of which we cannot say that it is more beautiful than God by himself (since God could dispense with the world), but which we cannot, either, consider completely gratuitous, completely subsidiary, without making creation unintelligible, the Passion of Christ meaningless, and our effort completely valueless,

Et tunc erit finis. [Then it will be finished.]

Like a vast tide, Being will have engulfed the shifting sands of being. Within a now tranquil ocean, each drop of which, nevertheless, will be conscious of remaining itself, the astonishing adventure of the world will have ended. The dream of every mystic, the eternal pantheist ideal, will have found its full and legitimate satisfaction. ‘Erit in omnibus omnia Deus.’ [‘God will be all in all.’)
(The Future of Man, pp322-323)

We are in 'between' time. We’re happy to move along our ordinary lives. But something nags. There is a suspicion that we really don’t have much figured out. But we go on, as we must.

Elsewhere, a web essay looks at Teilhard's thought:
To be fully ourselves, according to Teilhard, we must head in the direction of "convergence with all the rest...towards the other." He puts it grandly: "The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis."

The danger, or the evil, is not so much the ego as it is egocentrism! Teilhard denotes that egocentrism (or egoism) confuses "individuality with personality." Becoming separate, the ego "individualizes itself." It is a fatal move, it is regressive. It seeks "to drag the world backwards towards plurality and into matter."

For Teilhard, the point of the individuation process, or being open to universal insight, is to further the evolution of cosmic (and human) consciousness and creativity.

Teilhard believes that there is an enfolded creative Intelligence within the depths of the cosmos...and that every aspect of human experience can be affected by this creative Intelligence, mainly via a "breakthrough" experience.
("The Cosmic Plenum: Teilhard's Gnosis: Cosmogenesis," by Beatrix Murrell on web Stoa del Sol essays)

The wind picks up. Gale warnings off the coast. White clouds chat against April blue sky. So much on the ground – in Israel and Palestine for example – is besieged by momentary uncertainty, by the nearby dissolution of particular lives. We are no longer that far. Not merely from warfare and terrorism – but we are not that far from the change in consciousness Teilhard speaks about.

This “turning-about,” this “breakthrough” – not that far? Between here and there, between now and then – what fears of ours will have to dissolve?

While we ponder, phoebe, crow, and redwing blackbird sing psalms and antiphons into the wooded wind.

Between you and me, what's going on?
Resurrection might be the beginning. Ascension the continuance. What is the end? And what is between beginning and end?

The season of Easter with another 40 days to wonder and wander -- something dies, something survives and rises, and now the wait. The wait between rising and ascending. Ascending? What does that mean?

What if we were like the zen master who said "Is that so?" each of the times he was slandered and apologized to for the slander? Both times he stated or asked, "So it is!" or "Is that so?"

What if we were like Jesus who when asked if he was who some said he was answered only "You say so!" -- returning to the investigators their own words, their own minds?

The zen master went on living, we suspect, long after his earlier death in the opinion of townsfolk for the (uncommitted) sin of impregnating a young girl. He simply accepted her giving over of the child to him, the scorn of the people, then the apology and acknowledgement many years later he was not the father of the child. He returned the child to its mother with the same words, "Is that so?" with which he received the child those years before.

Jesus returns to life with a similar question. "Is this so?" he asks. Made the object of hope, then the object of betrayal and rejection, he is put to death, a death (not without searing anguish) he accepts. Now -- no longer object -- the empty, stark, unrecognizable, and unfinished reappearance from the tomb. Jesus takes to this hiatus. He is between things. Between places. A kind of thin place that nears and involves.

Julian of Norwich writes:
So in our true Mother Jesus our life is founded in his own prescient wisdom from without beginning, with the great power of the Father and the supreme goodness of the Holy Spirit. And in accepting our nature he gave us life, and in his blessed dying on the Cross he bore us to endless life. And since that time, now and ever until the day of judgment, he feeds us, and fosters us, just as the great supreme lovingness of motherhood wishes, and as the natural need of childhood asks.
(--from Showings, p.304, in Peoples Companion to the Breviary, Easter Monday, c.1997)

So high you cannot
Climb or get close to it;
Raindrops scatter in the flying wind.
The gate is barred with green moss.
Suddenly forgetting thought,
Without attainment,
Only then will you be sure
The gate has been open all along.
- Zen Master T’aego (1301-1382)(dailyzen)

All along? Is that so?
This time wandering the between occupies me. My mind is completely confused. Nothing makes sense. I am lost. My only sanity is the poet's words that say that the forest knows where I am, the song of the bird knows where I am, and the earth I stand on knows where I am.

And in this season of Easter, that too knows where I am, I hope.

Mary Magdalen, who had eyes for Jesus alone, saw him and mistook him for the gardener. Two disciples walked miles with him between Jerusalem and Emmaus, talked hours with him, and thought him a stranger. To recognize the risen Jesus, you would have needed a special grace -- as when Jesus murmured to Magdalene "Mary", or broke bread with Cleopas and his friend at Emmaus. And still, for all the mystery of this new Jesus, at once seated with [God] in glory and moving magically through the barriers of our earth, he is the same Jesus who was fashioned from a teen-ager's flesh, the same Jesus who walked our dust and waked our dead, the same Jesus who hung three hours between two robbers, the same Jesus who, Scripture proclaims, "always lives to make intercession for [us]" (Heb. 7:25). Without so risen a Christ, without so loving a Lord, Christianity is a sham and a scam.
(--Walter J. Burghardt, SJ, Lovely in Eyes Not His Own, pp. 43-44, in Peoples Companion to the Breviary, vol.2, p.208)

"Intercession," (L. inter=between, cedere=to go) might mean more than we have considered. To go between is more than an intermediary task. To go into the between has more of 'a new way of being' quality to it. To live between, to live within the between -- this is so strange a way of dwelling! Are we, unknowingly, residing in that between? And do we do whatever we can, anything we can, to busy ourselves out of that center?

This and that, this or that -- we need hiatus. Where look?

Life from the Center is a life of unhurried peace and power. It is simple. It is serene. It is amazing. It is triumphant. It is radiant. It takes no time, but occupies all our time. And it makes our life programs new and overcoming.
(- Thomas R. Kelly, Quaker Spirituality, p. 305, op.cit.p.202)

This is a time between. Simple grace is to be aware of it. Special grace -- well, there's no telling when that appears -- isn't this so?

Lost, I ask: what is taking place?

The zen master says, "nothing special."
The contemplative says, "special grace."

How peculiar! How particular! Here we are.

[Website was out of commission for a week. Karl has righted. Events and Update will be posted in the righting.]

Back from retreat. Now April. Easter. Forty days of building dwelling within.

If You Meet Inconvenience On The Road, Look For The Rest Of Her Family
(Poem for Robert, Monk)

God is a great Bodhisattva
refusing to budge until son is home.

"Come home, son," God says. But
son stays bread. Son stays wine.

The great Bodhisattva waits at edge
of edgeless space in moonlight. This

inconvenience is God's wife. She feathers
seed for wheat in wide fields. Their daughter --

humanlovingkindness -- plucks grain,
turns butter, fires oven. These kids –-

serving way beyond
morning meal.

(wfh, holyweek poem, 2apr02)

Note: 25Mar-2Apr -- Meetingbrook is on retreat this week. It is Passover. It is Holy Week. The shop is closed, no evening events until Tuesday, 2April2002. (But, the shop will be open Thursday the 28th.)
……………………………….

Life and death attend each other this week. It is a holy week.

We think death is other than life, other than what is. Death is not what we think it is. Death companions the passage to what is fully experienced.

Life faces and engages itself. Life is what is at origin. Life companions death as it moves through all that would stay, separate, annul, and unlove.

What is this companioning passage? If we are willing to say “God,” say it. If we wish to say “Nirvana,” say it. It we decide to say “Nothing,” that too. Names are valuable -- but not as valuable as experience.

The word “companion” is lovely. From Latin com + panis = with + bread. Meaning: thoroughly together with, comrade; rascal; one of a pair of matching things; one who lives with and serves another.

To companion is to be bread for and with each other.

For us, just now, we have some fear of death, but after we resume our true original nature, there is Nirvana. That is why we say, “To attain Nirvana is to pass away.” “To pass away” is not a very adequate expression. Perhaps “to pass on,” or “to go on,” or “to join” would be better. Will you try to find some better expression for death? When you find it, you will have quite a new interpretation for your life. (p.94, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind)

A holy night approaches. One face of night is silence. Another face of night is emptiness. Praying at night is the prayer of silence and emptiness.

1. Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone!
2. They shall see the Lord face to face…The night shall be no more.
3. God has destined us for acquiring salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.
4. Stay sober and alert
5. If you are angry, let it be without sin.
6. May the God of peace make you perfect in holiness.
7. You are in our midst, O Lord, your name we bear: do not forsake us, O Lord, our God.

These seven first lines are from seven Night Prayer readings of The Liturgy of The Hours.
I wonder if #2 might also be read, “The night shall be, no more.” And #3, “God has destined us for acquiring salvation. Passing Through! Just as our Lord Jesus Christ!”

Night is the truest prayer. Moving through night is co-incident with engagement and encounter.

One who has made the passage from origination through separation to the holy name of what is Alone peace, presence, and wholeness, that one – is named Jesus, the Christ.
Passover Angel, Bodhisattva, or Companion – these too take us through this week of deep remembrance and recollection.

Shunryu Suzuki (1905-1971) in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, (c.1970) in a chapter entitled “Nirvana, The Waterfall” says,
Before we were born, we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called “mind-only,” or “essence of mind,” or “big mind.” After we are separated by birth from the oneness, as the water falling down from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life. (pp.93-94)

Water falls, as we fall, through empty space. Best to let the fall be what it is – movement through seeming separate existence, return to flowing companioning continuance, allowing the passage.

If one is a true learner of the Way, one does not search for the faults of the world, but rather speedily applies oneself to attain genuine insight. If one only can see with perfect clarity, then all is completed.
- Rinzai (d.866)

There are some among us who understand intuitively the companioning presence we call God.
It is good to travel near them. This week, as does life and death, let us attend each other.

Listen carefully to the conversation. Set a place for the stranger.

This night is different. Watch through the night. Begin with bitter herbs. Begin with fire. Begin with water. Fall free. It’s only life; only death; only the breaking through and going beyond of humankind’s deepest longing – to see, God!

To talk about it this way is quite easy, but to have the actual feeling is not so easy. But by your practice of zazen you can cultivate this feeling. When you can sit with your whole body and mind, and with the oneness of your mind and body under the control of the universal mind, you can easily attain this kind of right understanding. Your everyday life will be renewed without being attached to an old erroneous interpretation of life. When you realize this fact, you will discover how meaningless your old interpretation was, and how much useless effort you had been making. You will find the true meaning of life, and even though you have difficulty falling upright from the top of the waterfall to the bottom of the mountain, you will enjoy your life.
(p.95, Suzuki)

This holy falling, holy passage, and holy week calls us into companionship.
Behold the lamb, the bread, the wood, the water, and the night.

Attend with attentive presence what is passing through, passing beyond!

Be companion!

Nothing could be further from the truth. For the most part, however, it nestles close.
What is truly real beyond appearance?

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---
-- Emily Dickinson

The local community is astir over a newspaper essay that takes a skeptical, some say downright negative, view of the town of Camden and, by association, its mid-coast extensions. The writer begins with theme bait of a series of suicides over the past year. He proceeds to rhetorically neighbor these occurrences in some literary way to the credit card bank MBNA – juxtaposing bank, town, and suicide with a slant of affluent, manicured attention -- the preference of appearance to reality. (Who would really think that such a clean and well lighted place would enter so darkly, even with their annoying phone intrusions at dinner time, their bait and slap tactic luring new fish with low interest rates then tossing tardy payers into the punitive hold of jacked up rates?) Many on the Internet boards and letters to local community station have taken the bait of both Maine Times headline and cheap money promise.

The intelligent rail, the angry flail, the bruised hardly take time to heal. Those who don’t like the town are told to leave. Those who criticize are mocked with faux lure-lines of genteel first-name admonition. Those who misspell are corrected. And those who are misunderstood retaliate with further ambiguity. One joins the discussion with trepidation.

Then someone will point out what a jolly battle it is -- no one is bloodied, and isn’t this exactly what we fight for worldwide – the freedom to be critical, testy, irreverent, and even wrong. The combatants respite their skirmishes for a relenting while and join in hymns of praise for the friendly and freedom affirming battle.

It’s true. No one has strapped a bomb to their belt to detonate in a busy square, fired a semi-automatic into a crowd, or lobbed grenades into a church gathering. Opinions, even those unpleasant and arrogant, take to the air without intent to kill and maim. It is enough to speak and fume, clarify and expand, belittle or over-reach. There’s a freedom from fear in posting a view that invites the courageous willing-to-be-countered opinion holder.

The cry for truth – if such brazen appeal can be made in our ambivalent, spin driven culture – does have a longing for freedom to it. Seldom agreed upon, but sometimes -- like horseshoes – neared, truth hovers as nothing hovers. We try to grasp and narrow truth -- to bandy it as something we really don’t fear. We try to ignore nothing – maybe side step certain themes as one might shudder with schadenfreude passing a horrible accident or hearing of a sudden stunning death -- a neighbor by his or her own hand.

The experience of nothing – (the stomach wrenching bottom falling out oh my God what is to come of me is this the end) – that experience is closer to the experience of truth than we might comfortably admit.

One of difficulties encountered in contemporary culture exemplified hereabouts is the appearance the writer of the Maine Times article points out. Neat, tidy, organized, pretty, and well endowed is no substitute or hedge for truth.

One truth, if we were to consider the proposed theme of the essay sparking so much response, is that we die. All of us, we die. No matter what religious, philosophical, spiritual, or new fangled belief we have –we each die. Life might just carry on after death in some way we do not truly understand, but death is certainly a punctuation mark in that passage.

The experience of nothing, like the experience of truth, is more common than we admit. Youth, those in middle years, the elderly -- have had the experience. This experience of nothingness --when nothing matters, nothing comforts, nothing seems to loom on the horizon, and nothing can change the situation of our lives (or so we feel and think) – is part of what it means to live, breathe, and have our being. This reality, experienced as nothing, is felt and thought of as the truth.

And, it might just be the truth. We don’t know. In the same way, the experience of truth – one that opens, clarifies, and frees – is often a dizzying liberation from illusions and delusions we’ve carried with us long and without a clue. Truth has a way of insinuating itself without our fully realizing it. Still, in the face of either nothing or truth, we try to help one another feel better, think differently, and get on with life. This is a good thing to do.

Unfortunately, an experiential encounter with nothing, or truth, can be and is often devastating. A woman I knew committed suicide last year. Another woman I know died this week of cancer. Several others I’ve known or heard about from loved ones have gone the same way. This is true. No matter how the post-death appeal is made – gone to better place, not suffering, we’ll all go on here or elsewhere, (even the crass ‘get over it’) – we know deep in our coffee cups that there’s a hole and a whole lot here philosophy or biology courses, religious education or positive thinking affirmations don’t come close to touching.

These women and men are dead. Their bodies deteriorate and disintegrate. What some call “them” or their soul, spirit, or true selves – this has dropped through the center of their being and gone to a truth, a no-thing-ness that I do not yet comprehend. No-thing there -- is that the truth? Sure, there are memories, stories, even a sense of presence – these, too, are good. Still, no one answers the phone or comes to the door in the whereabouts of those dead. Our understanding has not caught up with our experience in these matters.

Our teachers, parents, ministers, priests, rabbis, therapists, writers, business leaders, or politicians in our communities – even the successful ones, no matter how intelligent or opinionated – are all in the same boat. We fish the same waters. Some bait smells more rotten than others. But all are trying to bring up something to take the edge off our hunger to understand that upon which we float, steer, and call our being.

We don’t always have the familiarity or ability to name or help each other through the stark and unsettling times these experiences of nothing or truth evoke. We try. But we usually call the troubling reality something else – like adolescence or middle age, adolescent turmoil or middle age crisis, depression or other clinical diagnosis. Naming it this way seems curious comfort to some. As if a handle makes it easier to carry the fright. Sometimes it does. Often, not. The Zen saying says, “Better to see the face than hear the name.”

Teenagers know nothing. (Make that phrasing a joke or a critical comment if you wish—but it’s not.) The phrasing, “Teenagers know nothing” is also a revelation we need to process. Our culture of appearances cannot fool them. Nor can we fool ourselves – not for long, anyway. Teenagers know, know, that what we genially agree upon as pragmatic continuance of everyday life with values and standards considered good measure for common living – these are agreed upon appearances that soothe and cover another reality.

That truth is known in the bones. Namely – we are impermanent -- we pass. Life (as wonderful as it is) is punctuated by and defined by death. Nothing -- certainly not our fastidious show of good taste, fine joinery, and swept sidewalks -- penetrates the truth of death.

Rather than a straw argument that approaches then withdraws from the subject, are we willing and able to speak both to each other and the issue at hand? How are we to live in the face of death? Is there a truth beyond my capacity to grasp? Appearances to the side – are we able to live and move through this existence in such a way that it matters, really and truthfully, to you, the world, and me? Would it make a difference if we loved each other? Would it help if I were to say aloud, “I love you?”

In paradoxical restatement of that earlier sentence: Nothing does penetrate the truth of death. ‘No-thing’ -- or radical interpenetrating awareness – does penetrate death. Similarly, Jesus was said to be obedient to death. The New Jerusalem Bible translates the Philippians' piece,

Make your own the mind of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in the form of God,
did not count equality with God
something to be grasped at.

But he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
becoming as human beings are;
and being in every way like a human being,
he was humbler yet,
even to accepting death, death on a cross.

And for this God raised him high,
and gave him the name
which is above all other names;
Phil.2:5-9)

Is death, like birth and life, a process of taking from us that which is unnecessary and extraneous – a spirituality of subtraction, not adding? Does death, long considered the enemy of life, serve as the pivoting point for a life willing to turn and free itself from what is not life? That would be an interesting shift – death as teacher of life from birth to birth, or from origination to resurrection. Perhaps one reason why suicide is so distressing is that it stops with ‘no’ -- cuts off the hard learning and continuing evolution within and before us. Death is not ‘no.’ Death is a fuller phrasing.

In its natural revelation death is a gateway to ‘yes’ – a passageway to a truth so alluring that only the prepared can appreciate its appearance. Too precipitous and negating a death, such as suicide, might mean the person will have to continue the work of moving toward ‘yes’ in another dimension, perhaps more slowly, and certainly dependent on the prayers and thoughts of those remembering them as they continue their journey. It’s not so much a matter of wasting one’s life, but more of having to begin again and work it differently than the way afforded by life’s earthly dimension. Those of us still here must remember. Our assistance, along with our own work, matters. We only appear to be separate. The reality, I suspect, is more non-separate.

So too, restating the first question of this piece: “What is truly real beyond appearance?” We arrive at a response to consider, namely: "What is" -- is truly real, and is beyond appearance.

“What is” is elsewhere referred to as “God.” Truth is “what is” revealing itself. And to the slang question, “What’s happening?” (That is: What is happening?) The response might easily be, yes! Whether our language is laced with theological references, philosophical references, or everyday street references -- it doesn’t matter which. What does matter is listening to what is being said. What further matters is the willingness not to separate ourselves or try to separate ourselves from that which we are.(Were we even able to separate ourselves from what we are, we would not be able to finish this sentence.)

Now that you and I have finished it, we can mull the pervasive and improbable ground of our existence. Yes, I am here. Yes, you are there. Yes, we are each and all in this place. And, yes, we are held as one another by something we have not yet been able to name, overcome, transcend, or transform. What is that? “Tat tvam asi,” meaning, “That is you.” The non-dual Advaita tradition of India would answer “there are no unenlightening beings in existence, anywhere, anytime.” The Advaita-Vedanta tradition teaches that the manifest creation, the soul, and God are identical. The latest discoveries of nuclear physics give meaning to this concept of nonduality.

Richard Rohr, Christian author, would add, “Yes, no, yes.” The first ‘yes’ is enthusiastic with promise. The following ‘no’ is necessary to empty our illusions and unnecessary baggage. The final ‘yes’ is mature, without illusion, clear hearted, and willing to move into unknowing trust --what is the nothing other of truth. Then, only following that “Yes!” can we contemplate, converse, and correspond with what is, with each other. The fuller phrasing of death involves this yes, no, yes spoken with, to, and as, what is taking place.

It is our task, sooner or later, to engage “what is” beyond appearance. Death will accommodate the task if we wish to wait. So will despair. So will devastating truth – such as news of a terrorist attack in a near and dear place. We could put it off. And wait. And even pretend we’ll never have to look at the question – that it will happen to us when we’re unconscious, or not there, or…whatever. (“Whatever,” a term so popular today, might be the perfect ambivalent current question/response to troubling encounter with the unknown, death, and truth. Ambivalent because it is the tone and emphasis of its pronunciation that suggests either genuine puzzlement or who-gives-a-shit exasperation.)

Put in terms more familiar to us: God is what is; we are wonderful; life is mystery; we’re not as smart as we think; pretty isn’t perfect; someone needs you; pay attention; pray for awareness; tip generously the waiter and waitress; buy low and sell high but don’t spend too much time thinking it matters; prepare a will; eat chocolate donuts; be kind, mostly, be kind to yourself; and, as Emily Dickinson suggests, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” We’re not meant to clobber each other with the truth we see – just slide it across the table like a matchbook in a movie.

In Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet, Janice D. Willis (editor), in a chapter entitled “Dakini: Some Comments on its Nature and Meaning,” Willis writes,

Herbert Guenther offers the following gloss: “The Tibetan explanation for the word ‘sky,’ ‘celestial space’ is a term for ‘no-thing-ness’ (stong-pa-nyid) (Skt., sunyata) and ‘to go’ means ‘to understand.’ The Dakini is therefore an understanding of no-thing-ness.”

Again, James Robinson, in a description which is perhaps too anthropomorphic (?), comments: “The Tibetans render dakini as mkha’ ‘gro ma, ‘the sky-walking woman’. But the idea of ‘sky’ was interpreted as standing for ‘emptiness’, and ‘walking’ is equivalent to ‘understanding’, so that the dakini is ‘the woman who understands emptiness’, that is to say, the feminine embodiment of wisdom.” (p.62)

The open, empty space of transparent clarity, what is called love, or God, or awakening, or – your very name. Is this what we long for – to hear, to speak – to love our true name?
Wisdom just might be feminine embodiment, one who understands emptiness.

This season of being-birthed, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension is not an isolated or belief-specific season.
It is the season of existence. We’re right there in it. Nothing is more vital than the effort to visit each other, face the truth each longs to reveal, joyfully attend this season of our lives, and accompany each and all in the passage we traverse.

While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
-- William Wordsworth

I end revisiting the article in the Maine Times. This geographical area, Camden and environs, with its magnificent natural beauty, exquisitely wealthy corporation with all the power and willfulness that wealth affords, has indeed had its share of suicide. So too, many experience traveling alone without soul-friend -- too many. Probably the numbers are no more, no less than any other area, rich or poor, well educated or miserably denied. It just happens that concentration of wealth, arrogance of power, belief in security and surety, and the opinion that smarter is superior -- makes the suggestion of causal connection tempting.

Nothing could be further from the truth. For the most part, however, it nestles close.
What is, nevertheless, is truly real, beyond appearance.

Wet snow broke one trunk branch of front cedar this morning. We were on cushions. The crack. The fall.

We cut away many broken limbs. Dragged the pieces back to stone wall near cabin. The fragrance, the red liquid of torn down bark. Sprayed gaping split with protection against water.

Reattached telephone line
Just like that.

Bruises, breaks, and bottoming out come just like that.

The early spring snow melts all day. Electric power returns. Sump pump in basement awakens, grabs inching water by ankles before it reaches bottom step, sends it up through tube, and out window by wood fence along Barnestown Road.

Cedar tree is still. Quiet. Like a patient after sudden accident, it stands in dusky inventory of itself. Something is gone. Much remains.

Like life.

We live, right now. And any sustained accounting or intelligible recounting cannot explain the fact we are alive right now.

COULD HAVE

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.
You were in luck -- there was a forest.
You were in luck -- there were no trees.
You were in luck -- a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant . . .
So you're here? Still dizzy from
another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn't be more shocked or
speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me.
(Poem by Wislawa Szymborska, trans. by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh in Could Have, 1972)

It is the feast of St. Joseph, best known as the husband of Mary – the man who didn’t divorce her or have her stoned for a seeming adultery. He’s also known as the foster father of Jesus – the man who shepherded his family by dreams from country to country in a middle-eastern drama of cloak and dagger.

One wrong turn and she’s dead, he’s dead, or the kid is dead.
Joseph is the wordless one, the silent one, unrecorded in scripture as uttering one quotable sentence. Today at mass cakes at foot of altar. A special blessing and, through the glass in the soup kitchen doors, tables set at St. Bernard’s for coffee and cake.

It is my sister’s birthday. Zazen at dawn with her photo ready for hermitage altar. Her life now silent. We pray by presence, seen and unseen, a sacred appreciation. Patricia, Joseph, Mary, Jesus – the aspiration of unseen, unsaid, intimate appreciation.

The world with its wars and noise, bickering and posturing, demands and ultimatums – the world that newspapers, radio, and television recount as real – the political, economic, cultural, and religious world of contemporary human anxiety – that world – is no longer important…or, is it?

NO TITLE REQUIRED

It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
it’s an insignificant event
and won’t go down in history.
it’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyannicides.

And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.
and since I’m here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.

Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday
its May before June
its horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal’s field glasses might scan.

This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn’t beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.

And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It’s just as grounded, just as definite,
as when migrating races held it captive.

Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.

The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.

When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
(Poem by Wislawa Szymborska, in The End and the Beginning, 1993)

It is the final day of winter. Hosmer Pond ice withdraws from its shore retreating to a centering circle to pause, and disappear. So too the Eucharist this morning – a centering circle, pausing, and disappearing into an unseen, unsaid, intimate appreciation.

As the poet writes, whether winter or Eucharist, it "is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own."

This is how we celebrate passing -- whether of season, or person, or matters of once seeming importance. How? We attend, appreciate, and abandon ourselves in the passing.

Allowing each its own. No one else’s. Each none other than itself.
Happy birthday Patricia! Happy feastday Joseph!

Now, winter. Now, spring.

Saskia told me Bunny is in the health care facility and is dying. Last night at Sunday Evening Practice the question was asked, “When did death become a problem?” Seth reframed the question to, “When did life become a problem?”

At Saturday Morning Retreat, this month Buddhist Lectio, we read the four noble truths “The First Sermon of the Buddha” as translated by Walpola Rahula in book Radiant Mind (ed. Jean Smith). Afterward the talk went to the cycle of arising from origin, flowering, deteriorating, and returning to origin. Elsewhere the cycle is called life and death – born, grow, peak, decline, and die.

Everything seems to travel that circle. Yet, we seem to want something different. Our minds grab on to one point of the circle and claim it as a desired permanent attachment. Our ego says ‘this is me’ and defends against any other interpretation or possibility. Our fear says, ‘ I’m afraid of change, I want it all to stay the way it is.’

When, I wonder, did our consciousness look at this cycle and consider it a problem?

If everything originates, expands, contracts, and returns to origination – then that is what will be with us. In the Christian season of Lent, at Ash Wednesday, the words are “Remember -- dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

Marcus Borg ends a Lenten meditation; ”For Christians, Ash Wednesday and Lent are an invitation to follow Jesus on the path of death that leads to life.” (beliefnet.com)

Perhaps the problem isn’t one or the other – life or death. That is the dualistic way of saying it.
Perhaps what we really are saying is that the problem (of our making) is life/death, life/death, life/death.

Said once or three times, life/death is the inseparable experience of one whole fact. The mind fragments it. The ego prefers one to the other. The fear grabs tight what it wants not to change.

Life/death is the path all in existence take. One is the other. Without the other there is no one. It is what is. There is no other way.

The Buddha said, “I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.” Life is impermanent, conditioned, not completely satisfactory – and attachment is suffering. Craving causes suffering, by greed and thirst. Cessation of suffering is giving up craving, renouncing greed, emancipating oneself, detaching oneself from always wanting something more. The path leading to the cessation of suffering is eightfold – right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

In Mark (8:34) Jesus says, If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” To follow “the way” is to walk the path of seeing without choice. Choicelessness – the acceptance of what is -- is sufficient for Buddha and Jesus. Our problem is the discriminating and divisive mind we apply to what is.

Life is good. Death is good. You are good. We are good. There’s no choice. All is well, and all shall be well.

We pray for Bunny. She used to sit with us at centering prayer. We pray she might easily go where she is going, with love and attention, with our appreciation. With God.

Somebody or something is on thin ice.

Maybe Lazarus. He'd stopped breathing, no coursing blood, tissues gone cold, set in cave tomb for the long haul.
Maybe Jesus. They script him cool and hip to the opportunity to do a media splash and photo-op the glory of God thing now that his friend had died.
Maybe it's the person in Saskia's dream who's on thin ice -- that's the words she was told: Justin is on thin ice.

The ice in mid-coast disappears fast and early this late winter. Chickawaukie Pond, the large body of ice last week along route 17 going into Rockland is completely melted, no ice, open water.

Maybe she got the spelling wrong. Maybe "justice" is on thin ice. And we are calling to help before it sinks out of grasp and we are left to surface views, surface memories, and surface transport -- but no justice.

This week we'll invite some people to speak with each other about justice and what we are learning following the thin ice experience one family is suffering in the larger family of the local Catholic Church.

Jesus fell through the thin ice. Grandstanding be dammed, he abandons the show -- and weeps. He comes to understand (or maybe the writers do) that his life is not a propaganda pamphlet. He is flesh and blood. His friend has died. Many are weeping. He awakens.

When he awakens, Lazarus awakens. So too, the writers awaken. The sisters see their brother through their tears. Jesus and Lazarus, Martha and Mary stand there, the other Jews attending this awakening also stand there. No cameras. No reporter's notebooks. No publicist's bus idling nearby. The scene is cleared. Anyone not belonging in that instant of awakening disappears.

Justice, finally.
From the Sanskrit yos, meaning welfare, L.jus, meaning right, justice -- the right understanding of the well-fare-ing of each in light of all. No one fares well until all fare well. It's not rhetoric. It's what is real -- all the way down.

Lazarus fell through, Jesus fell through, and those attending this love fell through -- all the way through. Maybe there is a correlation between thin ice, justice, love, what we call 'death,' and falling through into a depth of understanding and awakening. It seems our fears keep us on surface. When one who has broken through says, "do not fear," we are invited to go where true justice goes.

Few attend when justice occurs -- real justice is a quiet, almost intimate instance of awakening. Perhaps the "All," or, the glory of God, attends only when justice occurs. And not until.

It is Saint Patrick's Day. The Irish smile. And a sweet celebration that is!
But the ice is thin. Winter wanes. Spring longs for itself from the depths, from underground where water tables wander waking from winter frost.

That we each attend the welfare of all is only right.
Off with you! Save each other. Keep each other in mind and heart. Then, for God's sake and all our family's too -- cry for, and smile with, justice!

Top of the mornin' to us all!

When is two not two, two not one, one not two, and one not one?

We say we are of two minds. That’s mostly true. We’ve grown up with that construct and it helps us, so to speak, navigate our way through a non-corresponding dualistic civilization such as we inhabit.

But like the vertical and horizontal -- what appears to the distant seeing mind as two separate planes and two separate movements, is, to the near seeing mind the place of intersection where one and the other punctuate, pass through, emphasize, and celebrate each other.

The fundamental teaching of Buddhism is nothing but the doctrine of One Mind. This Mind is originally perfect and vastly illuminating. It is clear and pure, containing nothing, not even a fine dust. There is neither delusion nor enlightenment, neither birth nor death, neither saints nor sinners. Sentient beings and Buddhas are of the same fundamental nature. There are no two natures to distinguish them. This is why Bodhidharma came from the west to teach the Ch’an method of “direct pointing” to the original true Mind.
- Han-Shan Te-Ch’ing (dailyzen)

This “direct pointing” might be seen as the intersection wherein we are centric within the expanding realization flowing in every direction from and through the very point of origin – here, now – the crossing embrace of reality itself.

Diane sends me two days running interesting pieces. Yesterday from "The Guardian," -- today from "www.SpiritualityHealth.com -- delivering quotations about Jesus that reveal what writers from many religious traditions love and respect about him." Today's is:

Day 27 of Lent March 15, 2002
MOVE VERTICALLY AND HORIZONTALLY

Contemplation unites us with God at a vertical level where we transcend ourselves, the world and all our problems, and experience oneness with God. It is at the same time a mode of action at the horizontal level by which we go out from the center of peace in God to the whole world. The further we go vertically towards God, the further we can go horizontally towards men.

Jesus is the man who is totally given to God, to the Father, the one who is totally surrendered to the vertical movement, so that the Son always sees what the Father is doing. At the same time he was totally open to all people and to life as a whole. That is the dual movement, vertical and horizontal, of contemplation in action, action in contemplation.
-- Bede Griffiths quoted in "Bede Griffiths" edited by Peter Spink

Bede Griffiths was a Benedictine monk equally at home in an English cloister wearing black robes (20 years) as well as in an Indian ashram wearing the colorful garb of a sunyasin, a holy mendicant (38 years). Both expressions surrender to God, the All. It was in India he deepened his life with a penetrating practice of contemplation that could bow respectfully to two cultures, two religions seated alongside him.

Bede came to the advaitic experience, (non-duality), seeing things whole.

I would like to share with you something of my advaitic experience...I was overwhelmed and deluged with love. The feminine in me opened up and a whole new vision opened. I saw love as the basic principle of the whole universe. I saw God in the earth, in trees, in mountains. It led me to the conviction that there is no absolute good or evil in this world. We have to let go of all concepts which divide the world into good and evil, right and wrong, and begin to see the complimentarity of opposites which Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa called the coincidentia oppositorum, the "coincidence of opposites."
(Quote from a talk he gave in Jaiharikal in May 1991)

Sr. Pascaline Coff, O.S.B. in “MAN, MONK, MYSTIC” tells that "Father Bede Griffiths, Swami Dayananda, died May 13, 1993, barefooted and clothed in the color of the sun, in his thatched hut at Shantivanam in South India."

There is so much to look forward to – so much to look at right here and now. So much longing to be looked at and seen.
But there is another way to say this, an advaitic way, namely – there is so much looking ‘as’ what is looking.

Each place we are -- whether in Maine, Nova Scotia, South England, South India, New York, Delaware, or Texas -- there is always the open invitation we might come to a mind that is not dual or divisive.

This mind, this consciousness, will understand and have compassion. It will remain at peace and loving even when everyone (including ourselves) races and reaches after the dispersing attractive nuisances we call things, possessions, accomplishments, and solutions to problems that our racing and reaching have created.

We will come to rest for a while. This seems a fine prospect! When we simply do what is there to be done. When we merely engage what is there for us to engage – without counting, without fear, without concepts of compulsion.

No doubt we’ll meet each other then. We’ll meet many we thought outside our boundaries. We’ll meet all we’ve not yet even begun to imagine possible.

To the question: "When is two not two, two not one, one not two, and one not one?"
No doubt we’ll say: "What a coincidence!"

Young man comes in, says, “It’s great places like this exist.” He says he needs some peace. He sits at piano, plays his own composition “Bells of Love,” and then makes thunder and delicacy with keys and chords. “What days are you open,” he asks. “You mind if I come around?” Adds, “You don’t mind if I don’t buy anything?” To the last two questions -- “Nope.”

The small cape fills with melodic passion of lone musician.

"Le grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul": the great sickness, said La Bruyère, is the inability to be alone. Solitude was once counted a virtue. These days, recluses are regarded with suspicion. "Loner" is a word reserved for paedophiles and serial killers. Only a special few are allowed to retreat from society: those, like monks and nuns, wearing the proper uniform. The rest of us are expected to surround ourselves with company; only then can we keep the infinite spaces at bay. Even the solitary stroll, traditionally a cure for most things (solvitur ambulando: it is solved by walking), has been abolished, thanks to the personal stereo and mobile phone.

Yet hermits have been around since the first cave. In every culture they can be found heading into the wilderness and living off roots and berries. The novelist Isabel Colegate, author of The Shooting Party, offers a short, idiosyncratic history of the human quest for solitude. She takes her title from Thomas Traherne: "A man that Studies Happiness must sit alone like a Sparrow upon the House Top, and like a Pelican in the Wilderness."
(From review by Blake Morrison, Saturday February 16, 2002, The Guardian, A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses, by Isabel Colegate 284pp)

Robert and Su-Sane stop by a while. We speak of the evolving meaning of ‘hermit.’ The hermit is one able to be alone. To be alone as they are, even with another. To be alone with what one is. To be alone wherever one is.

A hermit is alone with himself or herself. No need to impress, explain, or digress. Each act, thought, prayer, or practice is done for itself. The hermit knows, i.e. sees, that each act carries its own integrity. The hermit’s practice is to allow the fact and sound of that integrity to carry itself.

The realm of
buddhahood is not some
external world where there
is a formal "Buddha."
It’s the realm of the wisdom
of a self awakened sage.
- Ta Hui (12th century)

The musician leaves to go back to the bar down the street. “You’re open tomorrow?” “Yep.”

Six bufflehead land on water out back window. Sun line climbs white wall of Wayfarer across harbor. It shines from 4th window of house behind red building. Converted white lobster boat “Z-2” sits at ease at its float as 3 mergansers pass by its bow.

Saskia arrives back. Jim sits by fire. Thursday evening. Time for Putting on the Mind of Christ.
One loon dives. Kristen says looking out the window, “I vant to be a loon.”

In Jim Marion's book we read the chapter beginning Part IV "The Consciousness of a Human as a Realized Divinity." He writes that " God has never created ex nihilo , but gave (and continues to give) birth out of the Womb of Her Infinitely Creative Self." (p.186) He says the Kogi tribe of Columbia, South America, expresses this same truth as follows:

In the beginning there was blackness
Only the Sea...
The sea was the Mother.
The mother was not people, she was not anything...
She was when she was, darkly.
She was memory and potential.
She was aluna [mind, consciousness].
(Marion,p.187, quoting Alan Ereira, in The Elder Brothers, c.1992)

Which one is it?
Alone; a loon; aluna?

Perhaps our great unease is the unwillingness to stay inside the action, not separate ourselves from the very fact of what we are revealing as causal accomplice to the creation and destruction of the world.

Alone. A loon. Aluna -- mind, consciousness itself.

Here,
we are,
visiting each other.

The Christ and The Bodhisattva: A Symposium!
This might be the origin, focus, ground, and continuing grace of Meetingbrook.

This late winter of 2002 we wander off camping and traveling to Maritime Canada to visit a river and a place that calls for a listen and a look.

In the autumn of 1984 Saskia and I happened onto a public radio announcement as we traveled back from Ottawa through Vermont. The announcement said that a conference at Middlebury College beginning that very day would feature a talk by the Dalai Lama and would have as its theme The Christ and the Bodhisattva: A Symposium. Christian and Buddhist scholars would think together about these two down to earth and extraordinary designations of persons. We pitched our tent and attended.

Sitting on wooden deck at night on river island in Nova Scotia between two flowing expressions of Quinan River eating bread with Brynza cheese, drinking seltzer water with lemon flavor -- we settle into the still moving silence of our lives. Sando is flat out, her nose at edge of deck, waiting treats of biscuits.

Symposium – a lovely word! (From Gk. sym=together with; & pinein=to drink).

This symposium of persons and beings, of longing and surrendering, this sipping together of water flowing on either side or between us – this is what Meetingbrook has been since its inchoate intuition in 1984. A symposium, a free interchange of ideas -- a generous revelation of what each person sees or experiences -- this is our center ground and rising spirit, and what Meetingbrook is attempting since its incarnate experience at Ragged Mountain in Camden in 1991 and marketplace appearance in 1996.

This mediation between expressions of the sacred-natural is where we find ourselves after long hours of road and water crossing.
This meditation of the twoness of one, the oneness of two -- and not holding fast the two or the one, but letting what flows by flow by with our attention and affection, -- this is where we find ourselves after many years clinging and reaching after what appeared to be secure traditional belief or refuge.

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

The stars were out in Quinan for our meal. The moon was off in conversation with rain clouds negotiating timetables and puddle depths for next day. Bubbles of light flowed past wooden platform over river where a single candle burned. Even there, hundreds of road and sea miles away from our inchoate and incarnate origins, we find ourselves in the middle of our practice, in the middle of the symbols and logo of the practice -- two separated flows of living water meeting again at the place watched over by strong, grounded, and rising tree. .

Formed by nature, accompanied by seeing, sacred expressions of the longing to be what is true.
The phrase Zen Contemplative Ecology might mean this – Each itself, looking caringly and carefully, in true relationship with the whole.

Driving out the 4.5 kilometers of dirt road from the 900-acre property we’d camped on, we saw the puddles and deliberation results from prior night’s symposium of moon and clouds. Slowly, carefully maneuvering around places we might get stuck, we make our way out and free. Gale winds tore at flags and made the crossing, Digby to St. John, notable with pitch and yaw.

We were, wouldn’t you know, the last ones to their car, the last ones off the ferry in New Brunswick – all others having departed by and around our seemingly abandoned vehicle as we stood middle-deck noticing this and that, waiting to be called, obviously having missed the one given.

This designation – late and last – seemed appropriate to the theme we so carefully acknowledge. The Christ – the loving one here and now we will all meet together at end. The Bodhisattva – the compassionate one here and now that will not go beyond until all travel beyond together.

When I was in the field of human ecology, engaged in work with youth in care, there was a tension formed by two schools of thought, or beliefs, about what the work was to be done. Some believed it was working with individuals one to one. Others believed it was working with the group as a whole.

Then there was an enlightened view, and wording of it, that grasped the experience as working with the individual in the group.

In one of his short stories Camus describes how a painter who had not much faith in his own talents anyhow, is suddenly besieged by friends and “fans” who successfully prevent him from doing any worthwhile painting at all. In despair he finally retires to an attic where he works at what is to be his masterpiece in complete solitude. Finally he collapses, and the masterpiece is found to be a perfect and absolute blank, except that in the center of it one word is written in a microscopic hand; and this one word was clearly enough written except for one letter. Had he written solitaire or solidaire? (p.40, Zaehner)

In the chapter “Solitary or Solidary,” in his book Matter and Spirit, Their convergence in Eastern Religions, Marx, and Teilhard de Chardin (c.1963), R.C. Zaehner continues,
This is true of religion too. Does it concern itself primarily with individual salvation (however this word is understood) or with that of the “nation,” the “Church,” and beyond that of the whole human race?

One letter difference – and the whole perspective shifts. Solitaire or Solidaire?
What was the artist’s insight?
Alone? All together?

What captures my attention is the beliefs we hold. Beliefs – that which we hold as true -- are usually what separates us from each other: ideas fastened to systems; ideals nailed to floors; received opinions laden with pedigree and family crest. These beliefs are trotted out like cute children at Sunday picnics to prove the fertility and fidelity of their parents.

It seems a strange choice -- we’d rather live by belief than by direct perception or apprehension. My sense is we do fine sipping tea or coffee, noticing the weather, feeling the ground underfoot, touching the arm near us with our extended fingers.

What would life be like experiencing without belief? Or, is everything as it is because we believe it to be that way?

The dirt road, the dog crossing from side to side, the water in the ditch moving downhill – these observations take place in their own light. We, each one of us, take place in our own light. That light, whatever we name its source, is felt belonging.

What shows itself in that light is worth looking at. Never mind trying to fit what you see into a belief that intends to carry experience somewhere else. Each experience belongs where it is, at its originating spot, in its own light.

Solitaire? or, Solidaire? Alone, or, All together?
An enlightened view would see the experience as living alone together, being alone with others.

It’s not a matter of belief. It’s the spirit of felt experience.
See for yourself. Allow what arises to converge.