There’s plenty to ponder.
The stock market is drowning. (I own no stocks). The Middle East is ablaze. Executives in the corporate world tank their companies and escape with hundreds of millions as reward. The President and Vice President try to be scolds, but like parents who use illegal drugs lecturing their children not to, Bush and Cheney must be alternately giggling and looking over their shoulders with nervous paranoia.
AIDS is creeping under every nation’s bedspread. Anger and rage ride in the fast lanes and crowded streets of our urban sprawl. Priests nationwide are either seen as predators or looked at by new squinting eyes to be likely suspects for that type of thing. Even the prior administration’s harshest and purest critics are pausing at the confessional doors uncertain whether their newly uncovered sins of cruelty or the sexual sins of their priests take precedence in the box.
It seems that kind of day -- gray, chilly, without promise.
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)
I visit Sr. Bette at her yurt further down east along the coast bringing her two books in which she is profiled. We chat in her damp yurt. Books, flyers, pages from retreats, and all sorts of references to things she’s been doing stack the small opening on table between us where mosquitoes hover and breakfast dishes contend with death notices.
At Hermitage, Paul and Jim screen porch of cabin. Sando and Cisco find tennis balls for mother and son at Snow Bowl where a wedding party is unfolding. Saskia is closing doors of shop. Di opened, Cheryl covered until I got back, and Saskia came in from baking and working with Paul, and I left with the dogs because I was feeling like something the dogs leave on their walks.
Yesterday an accounting type said that after the conversation about a Laura Common (where the thought was expressed that we might want to rely on gift and grace) – it has begun to seem more than he wished to consider – concerning sound financial footing. He thinks, for reasons known and unknown, he might not be able to consider with us any longer.
Nova Scotia feels like a good choice right about now. Sooner than later a contemplative life as hermitage wants to be seed in ground.
Sr. Bette says that everything is meant to teach us something we need to learn. Tommy didn’t believe me yesterday when I told him what a dunce I was in school. “Nah,” he said. “Oh yeah,” I said. “I don’t believe it,” he said.
“Oh, yeah!” That’s what I say about then – and now.
There’s plenty to ponder.
Friday, July 19, 2002
Mini the cat is first to zabuton this morning. She faces hibiscus tree as Saskia lights incense and candle. Sando comes in. Cisco comes in. Bell is sounded.
Light rain, the mountain forest
Is wrapped in mist,
Slowly the fog changes
To clouds and haze.
Along the boundless river bank,
Many crows.
I walk to a hill overlooking the valley
To sit in zazen.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)
Susan arrives to accompany Saskia and Mini to vet in Augusta. Mini may be in renal failure. A homeopathic attention will be explored.
During sitting Cisco sniffs closer to Mini. The Border collie is ever interested in smaller animal. Mini looks over shoulder. She doesn't swat at his curiosity. Either trust or weakness to bother presides.
Bell sounds. Bows. Rubbing and strokes for all. Psalms. Intercessions for all. Final pealing of Angelus bells.
Friday takes shape.
(Later) Saskia calls from road. Vet says her body language says Mini is not ready to go, yet.
So, we stay together as long as we can.
Listening to sounding bell, we continue returning home, a lovely surrounding silence.
Light rain, the mountain forest
Is wrapped in mist,
Slowly the fog changes
To clouds and haze.
Along the boundless river bank,
Many crows.
I walk to a hill overlooking the valley
To sit in zazen.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)
Susan arrives to accompany Saskia and Mini to vet in Augusta. Mini may be in renal failure. A homeopathic attention will be explored.
During sitting Cisco sniffs closer to Mini. The Border collie is ever interested in smaller animal. Mini looks over shoulder. She doesn't swat at his curiosity. Either trust or weakness to bother presides.
Bell sounds. Bows. Rubbing and strokes for all. Psalms. Intercessions for all. Final pealing of Angelus bells.
Friday takes shape.
(Later) Saskia calls from road. Vet says her body language says Mini is not ready to go, yet.
So, we stay together as long as we can.
Listening to sounding bell, we continue returning home, a lovely surrounding silence.
Thursday, July 18, 2002
In a Laura, the footpath you follow leads back to your own dwelling. If you visit another, it is only to find your way back to yourself. If you visit a central place to converse or practice with others, you return to your pathway home with whatever gifts found with others to take refuge there in your own home ground.
Practice isn't interested in creating something new. Practice invites disappearance. When we completely practice, there is no other way -- there is only the way. We are not the way, the way is us. In prison several months ago Harold said it this way -- "We are not God; God is us."
Tricky business, talking about God. Buddhist’s help other religions by not using a name (God) but describing the reality: “What Is,” or “This One,” or “The Itself.”
There is also the rich question that is itself a practice, “What is this?”
All along the trail of moss,
I followed your wooden shoeprints.
White clouds hung around your little island
Where spring grass hid your unlocked door.
I enjoyed the colors of pines after rain
And reached the river’s source
Along the mountain trail.
Facing the stream and the flowers
I came inside a sense of Zen,
Yet cannot find the words.
- Liu Chang Ching (709–780, dailyzen)
Last night at the Hermitage Harbor Room there was the first of three Wednesday Evening Conversations on the Laura Common. Today Dana sent an email:
(for me) The MOST important thing that the subscription gets the
subscriber is the knowledge that we are supporting something of unique
and intrinsic value to us and others: the continuation of the
Meetingbrook Harbor Site. A gathering place in Camden that is not about
commerce, tourism or money, but about support, growth, and
conversation. For the same reason I give to Habitat for Humanity,
etc...it's not about what's in it for ME. It about what's in it for US.
How's that for "Substance"?
Dana
The word 'coalesce' came up three times. Coalesce, (from co = with, together; and alescere == to grow) means to grow together, to unite into a whole.
We become whole when we realize that wholeness is not other than us. When we experience our lives as broken, incomplete, or separate we might choose to enter a practice that heals, wholes, and unites. Silence with intent to heal helps. Solitude with intent to whole helps. Simplicity with the intent to common unity helps.
Whatever form our spiritual, religious, contemplative, meditative, or interactive practice takes -- when we dedicate it to the well-being of all beings, and we long that the graciousness of love be experienced in everything -- we have entered the Laura trail that visits with God, neighbor, all creation, and our own true self.
The above list is divides one reality with many words. So too, the reality of God is one reality with many expressions. We live in a dualistic experience of one reality. Practice invites us to gracefully live in and through that experience of many. Practice also invites us to live in and through the experience of one. Between us, God willing, we'll realize what is to be done in this existence.
Laura Haiku
Between us – is God
willing -- what is this willing
not… but between us
(wfh18july02)
Practice isn't interested in creating something new. Practice invites disappearance. When we completely practice, there is no other way -- there is only the way. We are not the way, the way is us. In prison several months ago Harold said it this way -- "We are not God; God is us."
Tricky business, talking about God. Buddhist’s help other religions by not using a name (God) but describing the reality: “What Is,” or “This One,” or “The Itself.”
There is also the rich question that is itself a practice, “What is this?”
All along the trail of moss,
I followed your wooden shoeprints.
White clouds hung around your little island
Where spring grass hid your unlocked door.
I enjoyed the colors of pines after rain
And reached the river’s source
Along the mountain trail.
Facing the stream and the flowers
I came inside a sense of Zen,
Yet cannot find the words.
- Liu Chang Ching (709–780, dailyzen)
Last night at the Hermitage Harbor Room there was the first of three Wednesday Evening Conversations on the Laura Common. Today Dana sent an email:
(for me) The MOST important thing that the subscription gets the
subscriber is the knowledge that we are supporting something of unique
and intrinsic value to us and others: the continuation of the
Meetingbrook Harbor Site. A gathering place in Camden that is not about
commerce, tourism or money, but about support, growth, and
conversation. For the same reason I give to Habitat for Humanity,
etc...it's not about what's in it for ME. It about what's in it for US.
How's that for "Substance"?
Dana
The word 'coalesce' came up three times. Coalesce, (from co = with, together; and alescere == to grow) means to grow together, to unite into a whole.
We become whole when we realize that wholeness is not other than us. When we experience our lives as broken, incomplete, or separate we might choose to enter a practice that heals, wholes, and unites. Silence with intent to heal helps. Solitude with intent to whole helps. Simplicity with the intent to common unity helps.
Whatever form our spiritual, religious, contemplative, meditative, or interactive practice takes -- when we dedicate it to the well-being of all beings, and we long that the graciousness of love be experienced in everything -- we have entered the Laura trail that visits with God, neighbor, all creation, and our own true self.
The above list is divides one reality with many words. So too, the reality of God is one reality with many expressions. We live in a dualistic experience of one reality. Practice invites us to gracefully live in and through that experience of many. Practice also invites us to live in and through the experience of one. Between us, God willing, we'll realize what is to be done in this existence.
Laura Haiku
Between us – is God
willing -- what is this willing
not… but between us
(wfh18july02)
Monday, July 15, 2002
In the deep recesses, is the snow still deep? Meetingbrook tries to find its way.
Which way
Did you come from,
Following dream paths at night,
While snow is still deep
In this mountain recess?
- Ryokan (1758-1831
MEETINGBROOK LAURA COMMON (A draft proposal for further conversation)
1. FINDING COMMUNITY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE
Q: WHAT IS MEETINGBROOK LAURA COMMON?
A: Meetingbrook Laura Common intends to be a community of individuals engaged in their own practice/prayer/study alone or with others.
Q: WHAT IS A ‘LAURA?’
A: ‘Laura’ is from a Greek word meaning foot trail, lane, or path. It represents the worn trails we travel between dwellings.
Q: WHO CAN BELONG TO THE LAURA?
A: Those identifying themselves as practitioners of a spiritual or religious discipline might wish to be part of a loosely knit association of individuals who intentionally choose to
· 1. Deepen their practice,
· 2. Share the delights & difficulties of their practice with another or others in soul-friend (1x1) conversation and circle (group) conversation,
· 3. Invite an openness of practice/prayer/study in one's own particular tradition or discipline so as to encourage others theirs.
Q: WHY CONSIDER BEING PART OF A LAURA?
A: In an age of many religious traditions and spiritual practices, there is often a lack of exposure to and conversation about the practice individuals actually engage in to deepen their practice/prayer/study.
Q: IS THERE A GOAL?
A: The goal to encourage each other to have a chosen practice, to actually practice, to share the experience of practice, to ask questions that arise from it, to invite others into the experience and questions so as to create a community, a sangha of practice/prayer/study that is available to enrich each other and visitors to the process.
Q: IS THERE A FEE OR COST INVOLVED?
A: No and yes.
Q: NO?
A: All events at Meetingbrook are free, open, and informal.
Q: YES?
A: Meetingbrook Bookshop and Bakery on Camden Harbor is the central clearinghouse and space for gatherings, conversations, information, and study – these things are part of our practice, that is, Bill and Saskia at Dogen & Francis Hermitage.
We are inviting the wider community, if they wish, to become subscribers to Meetingbrook to help pay the costs of rent, utilities, and meeting space.
Q: WHAT DOES THE SUBSCRIPTION GET THE SUBSCRIBER?
A: A forum, a place, a retreat room, an on-line and bi-annual journal, a community of practitioners that is willing to openly support each other in their practice. O yeah, free coffee, tea, summer sails with Saskia, and the (oftentimes) looniest bunch of people your tolerance can take.
Q: DO I HAVE TO GIVE UP MY CURRENT AFFILIATIONS?
A: No. The purpose of the Laura is to be a resource to all people of practice, prayer, and study. The goal is to deepen and share individual journeys. Then, to go back to our individual practices, or religious/spiritual affiliations and deepen one’s life in that setting if that is the call. The Laura Common wishes to be a common space where everyone with an intent to draw closer to their own truest reality – natural, divine, human, -- might find others similarly engaged and practice/pray/study with each other.
Q: WHERE DOES THE ‘LAURA’ NOTION COME FROM?
A: A “Laura” is a series of trails that lead from one's dwelling place to another's dwelling, to a common meeting place, and back again. Historically it is associated with what is called 'a laura of hermits.' These are individuals who have chosen to live an intentional life of solitude and community.
Some might live alone. Some might live alone with another. Some might live alone with others. Those who are part of a Laura are part of a larger community of individuals dedicated to living a life of contemplative, meditative, mindful, engaged, and loving service to self, each other, the world as we find it, and the ground of all being – known to some as True Self, God, Christ, Buddha, or Love Itself.
Q: DO YOU HAVE TO BE CHRISTIAN OR BUDDHIST TO BELONG?
A: No. At Dogen & Francis Hermitage Saskia and I practice in our root Catholic tradition as well as in the tradition of Zen Buddhism – but that is our practice, not the standard for anyone else. Each is meant to bring their root and/or current tradition to the Common and learn deeply there.
2. CHOOSING LAURA MEMBERSHIP
Membership suggests responsibilities and benefits.
Responsibilities include:
1) Daily Practice: Maintaining a (daily) practice/prayer/study engaged alone or with others.
2) Weekly Recording: Journal, letter-write, voice/video tape an entry concerning some delight or difficulty of your practice/prayer/study. This is for your own use.
3) Monthly Soul-friend 1x1 conversation: Willingness to regularly (monthly) speak with another person about matters of practice/prayer/study.
4) Monthly Community Conversation: Attend (monthly) a conversation conducted by another on some aspect of their practice/prayer/study.
5) Quarterly Invitation to Practice: 4 times a year extend an invitation to others to visit your practice in your own dwelling or in a common location.
6) Bi-annual Convening of Conversation: Twice a year convenes a conversation open to other Laura members and/or public on any chosen aspect of your practice/prayer/study.
7) Annual Retreat: Attend (yearly) a retreat of several days, or week in a setting honoring the simplicity, silence, and service in the tradition of your practice/prayer/study.
Benefits include:
1) Participate in an intentional community of practitioners where your particular expression of practice/prayer/study is respected and deepened.
2) Have abundant opportunities to share your personal practice/prayer/study with others.
3) Have forum to experience a variety of spiritual and intellectual traditions and disciplines and the personal encounters of others in that forum.
4) Utilize a network of individuals willing to practice non-judgmental and open loving speech and deep listening.
5) Have an ongoing online and bi-annual printed journal to read and contribute one's reflections and observations about their practice/prayer/study.
6) Utilize retreat resources for quiet and solitude. There is a meditation cabin at Ragged Mountain and a Harbor Room at Meetingbrook's two locations. Other retreat rooms might be available at other Laura member's dwellings.
7) Participate in volunteer service to the greater community where you live, or in the mid-coast area. There are prison conversations, community bakery visits to homebound and nursing facilities for recipe and hospitality purposes, and opportunities to be a resource for respite retreat and support for those experiencing the need to have a time-out because of life situations.
3. LAURA SUPPORT
Meetingbrook invites a subscription membership to help pay rent and keep going the programs begun there. While there is no fee to be part of Meetingbrook's Laura Common, donations and gifts for the ongoing costs and support of Meetingbrook are both welcome and needed.
4. BECOMING A SUBSCRIBER/MEMBER OF MEETINGBROOK
There is a yearly overhead of $18,000 to lease and maintain the cape on the harbor currently housing the bookshop/bakery and hermitage harbor room. This building is used for conversations, study groups, meditation practice, and retreat stays. It too will become part of the Hermitage non-profit organization so that all donations will support the practice/prayer/study that takes place there as well as the volunteer programs centralized there.
We’re thinking of 36 donors @$ 500 each to begin the first year. Nevertheless, all and any donation will be gratefully received.
Meditating deeply
Reach the depth of the source.
Branching streams cannot
Compare to this source!
Sitting alone in a great silence
Even though the heavens
Turn and the earth is upset,
You will not even wink.
- Nyogen Senzaki (1876-1958)
5. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: WHAT IS THIS?
To the question, "What Is This?" -- the Laura Common might wish to respond, "This is our practice, prayer, and study -- to present with simplicity & attention, integrity & silence, faithful engagement & transparent service -- who we are and what we do in each moment and situation we encounter."
At a recent Sunday Evening Practice someone pointed out there are three aspects of practice to consider for the Laura Common:
1) Personal Practice - that which an individual routinely engages in for his or her own practice, prayer, study.
2) Household Practice -- that which a household, (where two or more persons dwell together), regularly sets as a time to practice, pray, study together.
3) Community Practice -- that form wherein many people gather together outside the home (whether church, sangha, or other community) to practice, pray, or study.
These three forms connect with a larger understanding of the balance we try to maintain between solitude, intimate sharing, and broader community. The Laura Common intends to be just one of many other vehicles to encourage contemplation, conversation, and correspondence. This, and the engaged service of mindful compassion and awareness, is what practitioners offer to each and all. As individuals with a practice we choose to inform each other of what it is we do, keep all beings in mind and heart as we do our practice, and invite anyone who wishes -- whether new beginner or old beginner -- to be part of a wide and varied community of practice.
May all beings be happy! May all beings be safe! May all beings come to dwell in their true home -- with wisdom and compassion. And may the love of God, This One, help us 'reach the depth of the source!'
We'll have 3 weeks of Wednesday Evening Conversation (17, 24, 31July, 5:30-6:30pm) about the Laura.
[wfh/11July2002, Feast of St. Benedict]
Which way
Did you come from,
Following dream paths at night,
While snow is still deep
In this mountain recess?
- Ryokan (1758-1831
MEETINGBROOK LAURA COMMON (A draft proposal for further conversation)
1. FINDING COMMUNITY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE
Q: WHAT IS MEETINGBROOK LAURA COMMON?
A: Meetingbrook Laura Common intends to be a community of individuals engaged in their own practice/prayer/study alone or with others.
Q: WHAT IS A ‘LAURA?’
A: ‘Laura’ is from a Greek word meaning foot trail, lane, or path. It represents the worn trails we travel between dwellings.
Q: WHO CAN BELONG TO THE LAURA?
A: Those identifying themselves as practitioners of a spiritual or religious discipline might wish to be part of a loosely knit association of individuals who intentionally choose to
· 1. Deepen their practice,
· 2. Share the delights & difficulties of their practice with another or others in soul-friend (1x1) conversation and circle (group) conversation,
· 3. Invite an openness of practice/prayer/study in one's own particular tradition or discipline so as to encourage others theirs.
Q: WHY CONSIDER BEING PART OF A LAURA?
A: In an age of many religious traditions and spiritual practices, there is often a lack of exposure to and conversation about the practice individuals actually engage in to deepen their practice/prayer/study.
Q: IS THERE A GOAL?
A: The goal to encourage each other to have a chosen practice, to actually practice, to share the experience of practice, to ask questions that arise from it, to invite others into the experience and questions so as to create a community, a sangha of practice/prayer/study that is available to enrich each other and visitors to the process.
Q: IS THERE A FEE OR COST INVOLVED?
A: No and yes.
Q: NO?
A: All events at Meetingbrook are free, open, and informal.
Q: YES?
A: Meetingbrook Bookshop and Bakery on Camden Harbor is the central clearinghouse and space for gatherings, conversations, information, and study – these things are part of our practice, that is, Bill and Saskia at Dogen & Francis Hermitage.
We are inviting the wider community, if they wish, to become subscribers to Meetingbrook to help pay the costs of rent, utilities, and meeting space.
Q: WHAT DOES THE SUBSCRIPTION GET THE SUBSCRIBER?
A: A forum, a place, a retreat room, an on-line and bi-annual journal, a community of practitioners that is willing to openly support each other in their practice. O yeah, free coffee, tea, summer sails with Saskia, and the (oftentimes) looniest bunch of people your tolerance can take.
Q: DO I HAVE TO GIVE UP MY CURRENT AFFILIATIONS?
A: No. The purpose of the Laura is to be a resource to all people of practice, prayer, and study. The goal is to deepen and share individual journeys. Then, to go back to our individual practices, or religious/spiritual affiliations and deepen one’s life in that setting if that is the call. The Laura Common wishes to be a common space where everyone with an intent to draw closer to their own truest reality – natural, divine, human, -- might find others similarly engaged and practice/pray/study with each other.
Q: WHERE DOES THE ‘LAURA’ NOTION COME FROM?
A: A “Laura” is a series of trails that lead from one's dwelling place to another's dwelling, to a common meeting place, and back again. Historically it is associated with what is called 'a laura of hermits.' These are individuals who have chosen to live an intentional life of solitude and community.
Some might live alone. Some might live alone with another. Some might live alone with others. Those who are part of a Laura are part of a larger community of individuals dedicated to living a life of contemplative, meditative, mindful, engaged, and loving service to self, each other, the world as we find it, and the ground of all being – known to some as True Self, God, Christ, Buddha, or Love Itself.
Q: DO YOU HAVE TO BE CHRISTIAN OR BUDDHIST TO BELONG?
A: No. At Dogen & Francis Hermitage Saskia and I practice in our root Catholic tradition as well as in the tradition of Zen Buddhism – but that is our practice, not the standard for anyone else. Each is meant to bring their root and/or current tradition to the Common and learn deeply there.
2. CHOOSING LAURA MEMBERSHIP
Membership suggests responsibilities and benefits.
Responsibilities include:
1) Daily Practice: Maintaining a (daily) practice/prayer/study engaged alone or with others.
2) Weekly Recording: Journal, letter-write, voice/video tape an entry concerning some delight or difficulty of your practice/prayer/study. This is for your own use.
3) Monthly Soul-friend 1x1 conversation: Willingness to regularly (monthly) speak with another person about matters of practice/prayer/study.
4) Monthly Community Conversation: Attend (monthly) a conversation conducted by another on some aspect of their practice/prayer/study.
5) Quarterly Invitation to Practice: 4 times a year extend an invitation to others to visit your practice in your own dwelling or in a common location.
6) Bi-annual Convening of Conversation: Twice a year convenes a conversation open to other Laura members and/or public on any chosen aspect of your practice/prayer/study.
7) Annual Retreat: Attend (yearly) a retreat of several days, or week in a setting honoring the simplicity, silence, and service in the tradition of your practice/prayer/study.
Benefits include:
1) Participate in an intentional community of practitioners where your particular expression of practice/prayer/study is respected and deepened.
2) Have abundant opportunities to share your personal practice/prayer/study with others.
3) Have forum to experience a variety of spiritual and intellectual traditions and disciplines and the personal encounters of others in that forum.
4) Utilize a network of individuals willing to practice non-judgmental and open loving speech and deep listening.
5) Have an ongoing online and bi-annual printed journal to read and contribute one's reflections and observations about their practice/prayer/study.
6) Utilize retreat resources for quiet and solitude. There is a meditation cabin at Ragged Mountain and a Harbor Room at Meetingbrook's two locations. Other retreat rooms might be available at other Laura member's dwellings.
7) Participate in volunteer service to the greater community where you live, or in the mid-coast area. There are prison conversations, community bakery visits to homebound and nursing facilities for recipe and hospitality purposes, and opportunities to be a resource for respite retreat and support for those experiencing the need to have a time-out because of life situations.
3. LAURA SUPPORT
Meetingbrook invites a subscription membership to help pay rent and keep going the programs begun there. While there is no fee to be part of Meetingbrook's Laura Common, donations and gifts for the ongoing costs and support of Meetingbrook are both welcome and needed.
4. BECOMING A SUBSCRIBER/MEMBER OF MEETINGBROOK
There is a yearly overhead of $18,000 to lease and maintain the cape on the harbor currently housing the bookshop/bakery and hermitage harbor room. This building is used for conversations, study groups, meditation practice, and retreat stays. It too will become part of the Hermitage non-profit organization so that all donations will support the practice/prayer/study that takes place there as well as the volunteer programs centralized there.
We’re thinking of 36 donors @$ 500 each to begin the first year. Nevertheless, all and any donation will be gratefully received.
Meditating deeply
Reach the depth of the source.
Branching streams cannot
Compare to this source!
Sitting alone in a great silence
Even though the heavens
Turn and the earth is upset,
You will not even wink.
- Nyogen Senzaki (1876-1958)
5. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: WHAT IS THIS?
To the question, "What Is This?" -- the Laura Common might wish to respond, "This is our practice, prayer, and study -- to present with simplicity & attention, integrity & silence, faithful engagement & transparent service -- who we are and what we do in each moment and situation we encounter."
At a recent Sunday Evening Practice someone pointed out there are three aspects of practice to consider for the Laura Common:
1) Personal Practice - that which an individual routinely engages in for his or her own practice, prayer, study.
2) Household Practice -- that which a household, (where two or more persons dwell together), regularly sets as a time to practice, pray, study together.
3) Community Practice -- that form wherein many people gather together outside the home (whether church, sangha, or other community) to practice, pray, or study.
These three forms connect with a larger understanding of the balance we try to maintain between solitude, intimate sharing, and broader community. The Laura Common intends to be just one of many other vehicles to encourage contemplation, conversation, and correspondence. This, and the engaged service of mindful compassion and awareness, is what practitioners offer to each and all. As individuals with a practice we choose to inform each other of what it is we do, keep all beings in mind and heart as we do our practice, and invite anyone who wishes -- whether new beginner or old beginner -- to be part of a wide and varied community of practice.
May all beings be happy! May all beings be safe! May all beings come to dwell in their true home -- with wisdom and compassion. And may the love of God, This One, help us 'reach the depth of the source!'
We'll have 3 weeks of Wednesday Evening Conversation (17, 24, 31July, 5:30-6:30pm) about the Laura.
[wfh/11July2002, Feast of St. Benedict]
Sunday, July 14, 2002
Walking from shop to grocery store Saturday night I see doors of Catholic Church open. I enter. I'd stayed away from this particular parish church since before Ash Wednesday. I'd spent the duration going to church in the towns north and south of ours. The local pastor had, in my and other's opinion, abused the power of the pulpit for personal reasons. He only apologized to the people he'd been unkind to after 4 months of sorrow and fretting on their part when he left recently for 6 months of residential therapy.
The inside of the church was quiet and vacant, but for a lone man in third pew. He turned and noted my entering. Gregorian chant sounded gently the silent interior.
This morning the substitute priest, a chaplain at the State Prison we also visit, said he'd opened the church last night as he will every Saturday night 8-10pm for quiet contemplation.
He said one or two had stopped by the night before, no doubt surprised to see the church doors open.
Do we not cherish the
Infinite brightness
Of the one bright pearl?
Who can surpass
The virtue of this
Brilliant, radiant pearl
That covers the universe?
The essence of causality
Never ceases and
The pearl is always bright.
It is our original face and enlightened eye.
- Dogen (1200-1253)(dailyzen)
Doors are made of spirit as well as wood. It delights that these doors are open again.
Open doors reflect a bright pearl. We long to see our original face in this silent hospitality.
The inside of the church was quiet and vacant, but for a lone man in third pew. He turned and noted my entering. Gregorian chant sounded gently the silent interior.
This morning the substitute priest, a chaplain at the State Prison we also visit, said he'd opened the church last night as he will every Saturday night 8-10pm for quiet contemplation.
He said one or two had stopped by the night before, no doubt surprised to see the church doors open.
Do we not cherish the
Infinite brightness
Of the one bright pearl?
Who can surpass
The virtue of this
Brilliant, radiant pearl
That covers the universe?
The essence of causality
Never ceases and
The pearl is always bright.
It is our original face and enlightened eye.
- Dogen (1200-1253)(dailyzen)
Doors are made of spirit as well as wood. It delights that these doors are open again.
Open doors reflect a bright pearl. We long to see our original face in this silent hospitality.
Monday, July 08, 2002
EVE, MOTHER'S BIRTH
(for Catherine)
When my mother was born
whole reaches of universe came to be
when she died, so many coffee cups
beer glasses stay dry in cupboards --
still the universe drinks
without pouring a single drop
from what is not open.
When mothers are born
every point of light spouts itself
over and open over again
a wondrous thirst never slaked,
each word mothers our creation.
(wfh)
(for Catherine)
When my mother was born
whole reaches of universe came to be
when she died, so many coffee cups
beer glasses stay dry in cupboards --
still the universe drinks
without pouring a single drop
from what is not open.
When mothers are born
every point of light spouts itself
over and open over again
a wondrous thirst never slaked,
each word mothers our creation.
(wfh)
Sunday, July 07, 2002
There is no news in silence. Nothing is revealed with possessions.
Clear the land, thatch the rush for roof,
All around cherish the empty, the pure.
Mountain blossoms fall by a secluded door,
Within, one who has forgotten the world’s schemings.
Concern with existence needs no possession,
Comprehending the void does not wait upon reason,
All things are of conditions born,
Profound is the silence in the midst of clamor.
A person’s mind is very much the same;
A bird in flight, leaving no tracks behind.
- Liu Zongyuan (773–819) (dailyzen)
Dead chipmunk killed by cat is left out in open for crows. Government leaders plan similar scenarios for enemy leaders of countries considered threat to our way of life.
Women with cancer visit. Their chemo regimen balds heads and frightens hearts -- they reappraise what is dear to them.
The world is dizzy with greed and criminality on the part of heads of corporations. In America the sickness of excess and deception nauseates those who cause the infection and those suffering the received infection.
Diogenes, Socrates, Buddha, Christ, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Francis, Benedict, Teresa, Dorothy, and many others -- all search and seed the ground of earth/being for what is honest, true, and loving.
Concern with existence needs no possession…
Profound is the silence in the midst of clamor.
The emptiness of our arrival and departure seeks middle emptiness that trusts without grasping.
Birdsong and clanging bell attest to silence.
What I love about this life is simple awareness excluding nothing.
What I love about silence is what is included.
There is no news anywhere that is not in silence. If I learn to read the emptiness appearing around me, if I learn to hear the news of silence – then -- I will cherish and understand what and who I am.
Then, as now, I will leave no tracks, no trace.
Simply, one in flight.
Clear the land, thatch the rush for roof,
All around cherish the empty, the pure.
Mountain blossoms fall by a secluded door,
Within, one who has forgotten the world’s schemings.
Concern with existence needs no possession,
Comprehending the void does not wait upon reason,
All things are of conditions born,
Profound is the silence in the midst of clamor.
A person’s mind is very much the same;
A bird in flight, leaving no tracks behind.
- Liu Zongyuan (773–819) (dailyzen)
Dead chipmunk killed by cat is left out in open for crows. Government leaders plan similar scenarios for enemy leaders of countries considered threat to our way of life.
Women with cancer visit. Their chemo regimen balds heads and frightens hearts -- they reappraise what is dear to them.
The world is dizzy with greed and criminality on the part of heads of corporations. In America the sickness of excess and deception nauseates those who cause the infection and those suffering the received infection.
Diogenes, Socrates, Buddha, Christ, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Francis, Benedict, Teresa, Dorothy, and many others -- all search and seed the ground of earth/being for what is honest, true, and loving.
Concern with existence needs no possession…
Profound is the silence in the midst of clamor.
The emptiness of our arrival and departure seeks middle emptiness that trusts without grasping.
Birdsong and clanging bell attest to silence.
What I love about this life is simple awareness excluding nothing.
What I love about silence is what is included.
There is no news anywhere that is not in silence. If I learn to read the emptiness appearing around me, if I learn to hear the news of silence – then -- I will cherish and understand what and who I am.
Then, as now, I will leave no tracks, no trace.
Simply, one in flight.
Saturday, July 06, 2002
Yearning is the only trail between what we’re not and what is really there -- what we really are.
If you meet a fencing master on the road,
show him your sword,
If you meet a poet,
offer her your poem.
When you meet others,
say only a part of what you intend.
Never give the whole thing at once.
- Mu-mon (1228)
Do we hold back our gifts because experience indicates many people will glance at them, shrug, and turn away to something else?
Everyone is poet. The ability to see what is really there -- the dance of energy passing through myriad forms – belongs to anyone willing to pause, look, and listen.
Everyone wields a sword forged in fires of their own perceptions. We fence with real and imaginary opponents, ones we perceive encroaching beyond boundaries considered sacrosanct. The sword we use – taken from the scabbard of self-image – should only be carefully shown, if at all.
At Lectio this morning Matthew’s words about Jesus’ yoke being easy, his burden light. This union (yoke, yoga) is easy. The task (burden, focus) is light. Ease and light – (letting go, passing on) – governs the simplicity of response impermanence evokes.
Yearning is the trail we travel between arrival and departure. This footpath connects us to all that is. It is not acquisitive. It is releasement.
Gifts imply what is given and what is giving. To hold back a gift is to have only shattered promise in one’s hand. To refuse a gift is to fist approaching kindness.
When we yearn for and show carefully what we are, we create a trail for others to explore. Processing along the trail will be discovery for creator and pilgrim -- holy communion with each we meet, poetic realization with all we see.
Yearn deeply. Learn phenomenally. Cut illusion with the sword of awareness. Enjoy the hike.
Wednesday, June 26, 2002
When prayer finds me I am always surprised. I'm not always aware I'm lost. Like a friend appearing in a summer morning's playful tag, prayer taps shoulder with "you're it" and scoots away behind birdcall.
I found my way up
Yoshino’s precipice-hung
Path and into its
Past, seeing there the blossoms
I sought that spring – ages ago.
- Saigyo (1118 – 1190)
Ages ago there was only linear time. Long straight extension from an unimaginable past stretching to an unimaginable future. Then arrives prayer.
Prayer encircles. It enfolds. What seemed once to be a line straight and narrow becomes a round return, origin to origin.
If I pray for a happy life and happy death for those who come to mind, I am praying for their happy life and death at the very moment of their life and death. It doesn't matter that they've been dead in linear time's measurement for 30 years or 3 days. Prayer reaches into the instant of that person's life, the instant of their death, and touches them there.
Prayer is eternal presence. This eternal presence consists of the one praying, the one prayed for, and the One Presence encircling and enfolding each in prayerful round return.
Each and any prayer is eternally real. It is, as well, felt presence in time. It acknowledges and participates in the creating life of the whole family of Being -- humanity, all sentient beings, matter itself, divinity itself. (What we call non-divinity, or non-being, or some, evil -- might be the separating, non-inclusive, fragmenting, othering, and divisive intent/activity to avoid and deny what is whole -- causing harm and suffering.)
Prayer heals and wholes that which has been broken by those of us not yet ready for love, not-yet ready to be Love's dwelling place. When I'm tagged by prayer in my forgetting, touched by presence when I'm lost -- suddenly I remember -- be prayer, say prayer, long for what I am.
God is the longing that inspires prayer. We are God's longing to inhabit and transform this sacred family.
Prayer is surprising. Let's surprise each other!
I found my way up
Yoshino’s precipice-hung
Path and into its
Past, seeing there the blossoms
I sought that spring – ages ago.
- Saigyo (1118 – 1190)
Ages ago there was only linear time. Long straight extension from an unimaginable past stretching to an unimaginable future. Then arrives prayer.
Prayer encircles. It enfolds. What seemed once to be a line straight and narrow becomes a round return, origin to origin.
If I pray for a happy life and happy death for those who come to mind, I am praying for their happy life and death at the very moment of their life and death. It doesn't matter that they've been dead in linear time's measurement for 30 years or 3 days. Prayer reaches into the instant of that person's life, the instant of their death, and touches them there.
Prayer is eternal presence. This eternal presence consists of the one praying, the one prayed for, and the One Presence encircling and enfolding each in prayerful round return.
Each and any prayer is eternally real. It is, as well, felt presence in time. It acknowledges and participates in the creating life of the whole family of Being -- humanity, all sentient beings, matter itself, divinity itself. (What we call non-divinity, or non-being, or some, evil -- might be the separating, non-inclusive, fragmenting, othering, and divisive intent/activity to avoid and deny what is whole -- causing harm and suffering.)
Prayer heals and wholes that which has been broken by those of us not yet ready for love, not-yet ready to be Love's dwelling place. When I'm tagged by prayer in my forgetting, touched by presence when I'm lost -- suddenly I remember -- be prayer, say prayer, long for what I am.
God is the longing that inspires prayer. We are God's longing to inhabit and transform this sacred family.
Prayer is surprising. Let's surprise each other!
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
The strawberry moon came full over Curtis Island. Tom O'D alerted us, took zoom lens and camera to edge of Waterfront patio and clicked away at it. The new waitress from Colorado, then kitchen crew, customers, all stood in a silence of liturgical vigil at its rising.
If your mind is fixed on a certain spot,
It will be seized by that spot and
No activities can be performed efficiently.
Not to fix your mind anywhere is essential.
Not fixed anywhere,
The mind is everywhere…
The Original Mind is like water which flows freely
Whereas the deluded mind is like ice
There is a passage in the Diamond Sutra that says:
“The mind should operate without abiding anywhere.”
- Takuan (1573-1645)
The universe in a rounded moon, and St. John's Day to boot. The sky resplendent, conversation in open air, a sense of loss and gain all at once.
We will stay where we are at Ragged Mountain. The moon is familiar there too.
If your mind is fixed on a certain spot,
It will be seized by that spot and
No activities can be performed efficiently.
Not to fix your mind anywhere is essential.
Not fixed anywhere,
The mind is everywhere…
The Original Mind is like water which flows freely
Whereas the deluded mind is like ice
There is a passage in the Diamond Sutra that says:
“The mind should operate without abiding anywhere.”
- Takuan (1573-1645)
The universe in a rounded moon, and St. John's Day to boot. The sky resplendent, conversation in open air, a sense of loss and gain all at once.
We will stay where we are at Ragged Mountain. The moon is familiar there too.
Sunday, June 23, 2002
When I die will the world still exist?
This is a spiritual question. If God Alone Is, and I die -- does the world still exist?
Although the marvelous
Lines are difficult to trace,
Still I can make out
Several layers of mountains,
A jumble of peaks,
Like shell-spiraled locks of hair.
Faraway streams and mountains,
Peaks swathed in clouds,
Just like a painting,
Have captured the essence.
Gazing into emptiness,
I long to ask the monk about it.
If I don’t learn the meaning
Of the reclusive life,
I can but sigh with regret until the day I die!
- Su Shih 1073 (dailyzen)
The reclusive life is returning to what alone is.
The novelty of Christianity from the sociological standpoint, as compared with other religions, lay in breaking down all imperative relationship between religion and the family, clan, nation or empire, giving it a personal basis in conscience. (opening line in Church and State c.1939, by Luigi Sturzo)
Perhaps the reason prayer is vital is in its personal basis. What we call 'conscience' is the dwelling place of what is and can be known, seen, and intuited -- the apparent and the hidden -- residing in the very essence of each individual. Prayer -- or the meaning of the reclusive life -- is enfolding conscience resting in itself, in what is true and loving. Prayer asks into and invites what is there to see and know with (i.e. to dwell as conscience). Prayer resides within a common wholeness. Prayer engages what is there.
What alone is! All else is dispersion, diffusion, and dissimilation.
If I recall, e.e.cumming's words go something like: Better worlds, I suggest, are born, not made -- and begin with the birthdays of individuals. Let us pray, therefore, not for better worlds, but for individuals.
In response to my first question above, I suspect the world will still exist when I die. The mystery of appearance and disappearance is more than one person's biographical terminus. Still, there is something to contemplate here that corresponds to the meaning of the reclusive life. If God alone is, and I have died into Christ's mysterious passage -- through creation, through life, through death, into what is alone God -- then, what else is there?
As I live and as I die -- I'll be gazing into this emptiness -- knowing the sight of God is what is looking through me. This will be my prayer.
One day I'll no longer sigh with regret at what I no longer am.
This is a spiritual question. If God Alone Is, and I die -- does the world still exist?
Although the marvelous
Lines are difficult to trace,
Still I can make out
Several layers of mountains,
A jumble of peaks,
Like shell-spiraled locks of hair.
Faraway streams and mountains,
Peaks swathed in clouds,
Just like a painting,
Have captured the essence.
Gazing into emptiness,
I long to ask the monk about it.
If I don’t learn the meaning
Of the reclusive life,
I can but sigh with regret until the day I die!
- Su Shih 1073 (dailyzen)
The reclusive life is returning to what alone is.
The novelty of Christianity from the sociological standpoint, as compared with other religions, lay in breaking down all imperative relationship between religion and the family, clan, nation or empire, giving it a personal basis in conscience. (opening line in Church and State c.1939, by Luigi Sturzo)
Perhaps the reason prayer is vital is in its personal basis. What we call 'conscience' is the dwelling place of what is and can be known, seen, and intuited -- the apparent and the hidden -- residing in the very essence of each individual. Prayer -- or the meaning of the reclusive life -- is enfolding conscience resting in itself, in what is true and loving. Prayer asks into and invites what is there to see and know with (i.e. to dwell as conscience). Prayer resides within a common wholeness. Prayer engages what is there.
What alone is! All else is dispersion, diffusion, and dissimilation.
If I recall, e.e.cumming's words go something like: Better worlds, I suggest, are born, not made -- and begin with the birthdays of individuals. Let us pray, therefore, not for better worlds, but for individuals.
In response to my first question above, I suspect the world will still exist when I die. The mystery of appearance and disappearance is more than one person's biographical terminus. Still, there is something to contemplate here that corresponds to the meaning of the reclusive life. If God alone is, and I have died into Christ's mysterious passage -- through creation, through life, through death, into what is alone God -- then, what else is there?
As I live and as I die -- I'll be gazing into this emptiness -- knowing the sight of God is what is looking through me. This will be my prayer.
One day I'll no longer sigh with regret at what I no longer am.
Friday, June 21, 2002
Have you ever wondered what time is? Ever thought it is only an agreed upon convenience serving to keep events, places, and autobiographical incidents separate and sequential?
Time seems to be the mask Now wears so not to frighten us. Seeing or doing all at once hardly allows for a change of clothes.
Time is a wardrobe stagehand backstage assisting the changes we think we must make before appearing again before others.
We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It is a question of time, not motive.
(p70, in novel The Holder of the World, by Bharati Mukherjee)
News comes we might not get the farm.
I trust the nexus, the transition from one thing to another thing. Spring becoming summer; something held as possible becoming the possible itself holding nothing.
I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven....I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event. (Harold Brodkey "Manipulations" in Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, p217)
I trust what is wanted, not always what we want. A difference? I don't know.
The Manifestation
Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming
Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,
A seed pushing itself beyond itself,
The mole making its way through darkest ground,
The worm, intrepid scholar of the soil--
Do these analogies perplex? A sky with clouds,
The motion of the moon, and waves at play,
A sea-wind pausing in a summer tree.
What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
(Theodore Roethke)
This warm afternoon breeze moves through wind chimes, cars up Barnestown Road, sun streaks through bamboo slats at window facing barn. Each doing what it should.
And us?
It is a question of time.
For now -- I think we're out of it.
Time seems to be the mask Now wears so not to frighten us. Seeing or doing all at once hardly allows for a change of clothes.
Time is a wardrobe stagehand backstage assisting the changes we think we must make before appearing again before others.
We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It is a question of time, not motive.
(p70, in novel The Holder of the World, by Bharati Mukherjee)
News comes we might not get the farm.
I trust the nexus, the transition from one thing to another thing. Spring becoming summer; something held as possible becoming the possible itself holding nothing.
I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven....I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event. (Harold Brodkey "Manipulations" in Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, p217)
I trust what is wanted, not always what we want. A difference? I don't know.
The Manifestation
Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming
Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,
A seed pushing itself beyond itself,
The mole making its way through darkest ground,
The worm, intrepid scholar of the soil--
Do these analogies perplex? A sky with clouds,
The motion of the moon, and waves at play,
A sea-wind pausing in a summer tree.
What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
(Theodore Roethke)
This warm afternoon breeze moves through wind chimes, cars up Barnestown Road, sun streaks through bamboo slats at window facing barn. Each doing what it should.
And us?
It is a question of time.
For now -- I think we're out of it.
Thursday, June 20, 2002
Suddenly solitude. A sequestering silence. Dusk at Ragged Mountain.
In quiescence I hear the
Cinnamon blossoms fall.
When night comes,
The Spring mountains are silent.
Suddenly the moon appears
From behind the clouds
And startles the young birds;
By the mountain stream they chirp and chirp.
- Wang Wei (701–761)
If I were to be asked right now what is Meetingbrook -- I would have nothing to say.
This nothing is best unsaid but better sounded by Oriole and Grosbeak, Finch and Nuthatch, Chickadee and Sparrow.
If we say nothing, can anything come of it?
Green stillness.
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Poetry and Psalms make secular and sacred life more tolerable.
Today is the feast of St Romuald. "St. Romuald lived and worked during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. He fully realized in his own life the spirit of the Rule, and he wisely reinterpreted it, emphasizing the solitude of the hermitage. St. Romuald wanted the hermitage to be characterized by a greater simplicity and a more intense penitential and contemplative practice." (from Introduction to the Rule for Camaldolese Benedictine Oblates)
St. Romuald's Brief Rule
Sit in your cell as in paradise;
put the whole world behind you and forget it;
like a skilled angler on the lookout for a catch
keep a careful eye on your thoughts.
The path you follow is in the psalms -- don't leave it.
If you've come with a novice's enthusiasm and can't
accomplish what you want, take every chance you can find
to sing the psalms in your heart and to understand them
with your head; if your mind wanders as you read
don't give up but hurry back and try again.
Above all realize that you are in God's presence;
hold your heart there in wonder as if before your sovereign.
Empty yourself completely;
sit waiting, content with God's gift,
like a little chick tasting and eating nothing
but what its mother brings.
The monk's cell and the inmate's cell have much in common. One of which is time for considering what poetry and psalms open into.
In the Maine State Prison last Friday -- where we returned for twice-monthly conversations after a lengthy hiatus due to the closing of old prison in Thomaston and moving into new prison in Warren -- we spoke about the first few pages of Socrates Cafe and an essay in The Poet's Work (edited by Reginald Gibbons).
Christopher Phillips' Socrates book, subtitled "A Fresh Taste of Philosophy," begins with a lead line quoting someone saying, "Psychiatry is the rape of the muse." We conversed about this opening salvo for a while. The second piece, entitled "Why Write" (1972) by Gunter Kunert contained the following:
The more I tried, as I wrote, to dissolve into what I was writing, the more severely the number of themes and subjects was reduced (as if that were the price) -- however inexhaustible I had formerly believed them, as others believed in the diversity of life. With increasing identity of text and author, the author's role as clown or teacher ends; every mortal impetus loses its imperative aspect and becomes viewpoint and style, the frequency of the literal essence into which the author withdraws. The lack of freedom in every literary effort increases proportionally, and variability decreases, because all that succeeds is what promotes transformation; everything else comes about halfheartedly or not at all. (Kunert, p137, in The Poet's Work)
Chris said that insanity is that which transcends contemporary thought. Sane acts we understand; insane acts we don't understand. "The insane is where thought cannot go," he added.
Paco thought that by lumping the not understandable into categories with labels and diagnoses, we are able then to dismiss the person and hold onto the label. Paco then went on to say that considering the practice of Meetingbrook to come into prison for no other reason than to have a conversation - no pay, no other obvious agenda, nothing but the conversation -- was most likely considered crazy by a vast majority. (He added a great compliment -- "You guys are freaks!")
Ed spoke of Viet Nam experience -- finding wallet and pictures of a dead enemy soldier's family -- as a blinding light in 1972 for him. (We'd been talking about the Leonard Cohen lyric that went something like; "There is a crack in everything, that's where the light comes in.")
Aren't we all trying to retrieve the original felt experience when we write, speak, converse, or even care about anything? To say, as above, that poetry and psalms make secular and sacred life more tolerable, is not to say there is no pain or depth of anguish. It does, however, remarkably, free us.
Joe wondered, "Can an insane person describe insanity?"
Paco described what must be one of the most punishing aspects of residing in prison, namely, you never know in any prison conversation whether it is a mask you are talking to -- or through. "We're so great at adapting," he said.
I've heard Paco's observation before. It is not restricted to those behind walls of an official prison. There are other prisons of subtler walls. But the suspicion that the person we think we are conversing with is either not really there, playing us, or is masking a role that might or might not be authentic -- that is a prison conversation. That is one of the real deprivations, the absence of freedom to be ourselves.
At end of this conversation at prison, there is poetry. Andre, Joe, and Mike had one of theirs. Cheryl had one by Hafiz.
The minds
Depict me tribal,
Religiously contradicting myself,
Reading script from the Bible
with visions homicidal.
Beauty is deprived with my eyes open.
I keep my eyes closed, and dream of butterflies
until they end up my size,
flying with knives trying to slice throats.
Decisively my mind chose to find
a place safe in the Devil's oasis.
There's nothing he doesn't cater.
Every acre is filled with temptation,
intoxication and riches major.
It makes me hate to sleep or wake up.
One world is degrading, one world is fake.
But they both have plenty snakes,
and spiritually my boundaries won't let me
reach a space where all is sacred.
I stuck on a globe with open drapes,
my mind naked.
Praying what I state or what I think
can change created fates we make up
and let penetrate us.
At any rate when we keep faith and
learn that when we're sleep we're awake,
Both worlds will hate us.
(Andre)
And,
Seg
Sitting here time goes passing,
Past and present keep on clashing
The present goes off into the past.
The future is here present at last
(Mike)
Hafiz gets the last word:
God wants to see more playfulness in your eyes.
If you pray, somewhere in the world some good will happen.
We try to be, secular and sacred, more tolerable with each other in this way, in this life.
Today is the feast of St Romuald. "St. Romuald lived and worked during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. He fully realized in his own life the spirit of the Rule, and he wisely reinterpreted it, emphasizing the solitude of the hermitage. St. Romuald wanted the hermitage to be characterized by a greater simplicity and a more intense penitential and contemplative practice." (from Introduction to the Rule for Camaldolese Benedictine Oblates)
St. Romuald's Brief Rule
Sit in your cell as in paradise;
put the whole world behind you and forget it;
like a skilled angler on the lookout for a catch
keep a careful eye on your thoughts.
The path you follow is in the psalms -- don't leave it.
If you've come with a novice's enthusiasm and can't
accomplish what you want, take every chance you can find
to sing the psalms in your heart and to understand them
with your head; if your mind wanders as you read
don't give up but hurry back and try again.
Above all realize that you are in God's presence;
hold your heart there in wonder as if before your sovereign.
Empty yourself completely;
sit waiting, content with God's gift,
like a little chick tasting and eating nothing
but what its mother brings.
The monk's cell and the inmate's cell have much in common. One of which is time for considering what poetry and psalms open into.
In the Maine State Prison last Friday -- where we returned for twice-monthly conversations after a lengthy hiatus due to the closing of old prison in Thomaston and moving into new prison in Warren -- we spoke about the first few pages of Socrates Cafe and an essay in The Poet's Work (edited by Reginald Gibbons).
Christopher Phillips' Socrates book, subtitled "A Fresh Taste of Philosophy," begins with a lead line quoting someone saying, "Psychiatry is the rape of the muse." We conversed about this opening salvo for a while. The second piece, entitled "Why Write" (1972) by Gunter Kunert contained the following:
The more I tried, as I wrote, to dissolve into what I was writing, the more severely the number of themes and subjects was reduced (as if that were the price) -- however inexhaustible I had formerly believed them, as others believed in the diversity of life. With increasing identity of text and author, the author's role as clown or teacher ends; every mortal impetus loses its imperative aspect and becomes viewpoint and style, the frequency of the literal essence into which the author withdraws. The lack of freedom in every literary effort increases proportionally, and variability decreases, because all that succeeds is what promotes transformation; everything else comes about halfheartedly or not at all. (Kunert, p137, in The Poet's Work)
Chris said that insanity is that which transcends contemporary thought. Sane acts we understand; insane acts we don't understand. "The insane is where thought cannot go," he added.
Paco thought that by lumping the not understandable into categories with labels and diagnoses, we are able then to dismiss the person and hold onto the label. Paco then went on to say that considering the practice of Meetingbrook to come into prison for no other reason than to have a conversation - no pay, no other obvious agenda, nothing but the conversation -- was most likely considered crazy by a vast majority. (He added a great compliment -- "You guys are freaks!")
Ed spoke of Viet Nam experience -- finding wallet and pictures of a dead enemy soldier's family -- as a blinding light in 1972 for him. (We'd been talking about the Leonard Cohen lyric that went something like; "There is a crack in everything, that's where the light comes in.")
Aren't we all trying to retrieve the original felt experience when we write, speak, converse, or even care about anything? To say, as above, that poetry and psalms make secular and sacred life more tolerable, is not to say there is no pain or depth of anguish. It does, however, remarkably, free us.
Joe wondered, "Can an insane person describe insanity?"
Paco described what must be one of the most punishing aspects of residing in prison, namely, you never know in any prison conversation whether it is a mask you are talking to -- or through. "We're so great at adapting," he said.
I've heard Paco's observation before. It is not restricted to those behind walls of an official prison. There are other prisons of subtler walls. But the suspicion that the person we think we are conversing with is either not really there, playing us, or is masking a role that might or might not be authentic -- that is a prison conversation. That is one of the real deprivations, the absence of freedom to be ourselves.
At end of this conversation at prison, there is poetry. Andre, Joe, and Mike had one of theirs. Cheryl had one by Hafiz.
The minds
Depict me tribal,
Religiously contradicting myself,
Reading script from the Bible
with visions homicidal.
Beauty is deprived with my eyes open.
I keep my eyes closed, and dream of butterflies
until they end up my size,
flying with knives trying to slice throats.
Decisively my mind chose to find
a place safe in the Devil's oasis.
There's nothing he doesn't cater.
Every acre is filled with temptation,
intoxication and riches major.
It makes me hate to sleep or wake up.
One world is degrading, one world is fake.
But they both have plenty snakes,
and spiritually my boundaries won't let me
reach a space where all is sacred.
I stuck on a globe with open drapes,
my mind naked.
Praying what I state or what I think
can change created fates we make up
and let penetrate us.
At any rate when we keep faith and
learn that when we're sleep we're awake,
Both worlds will hate us.
(Andre)
And,
Seg
Sitting here time goes passing,
Past and present keep on clashing
The present goes off into the past.
The future is here present at last
(Mike)
Hafiz gets the last word:
God wants to see more playfulness in your eyes.
If you pray, somewhere in the world some good will happen.
We try to be, secular and sacred, more tolerable with each other in this way, in this life.
Tuesday, June 18, 2002
Monetary life or monastic life?
We live in a moneyed economy. It buys rhetorical persuasion. It can even buy an unseemly silence - with hush money. It builds cathedrals of corporate power -- whether for the aggrandizing of human or divine beings. It feathers nests. It creates tomes of binding contracts, inheritance dispersions, and tax laws. Money is our secular scripture.
Likewise, what used to be Holy Scripture has given way to fundamental literalists on one side and deconstructive allegory on the other. Where do we find the middle road -- where written word mingles with inspired thought -- leading to personal insight while conserving original text?
What would it look like to live sacred poverty?
Devote yourself to the Absolute Emptiness;
Contemplate earnestly in Quiescence.
All things are together in Action,
But I look into their Non-action,
For things are continuously moving, restless,
Yet each is proceeding back to its origin.
Proceeding back to the origin means Quiescence.
To be in Quiescence is to see “Being-in-itself.”
- Lao tzu (dailyzen)
Though he was in the form of God,
Jesus did not deem equality with God
something to be grasped at.
Rather he emptied himself
and took the form of a slave,
being born in the likeness of men.
(Philippians 2:6-7)
When Jesus "emptied himself" becoming Christ; when a Buddha puts Nirvana on hold to return to the dwelling place of someone still suffering, becoming Bodhisattva -- am I attentive to their embodiment of poverty?
Most often not.
The moneyed way is norm. Poverty is either failure to carry one's weight in the eyes of those who can -- or poverty is practice seldom attempted, even by those who profess it for religious or spiritual purposes.
As the world experiences detonation of its unreflective acceptance of the moneyed way, I ask: Is the monastic way retrievable and meaningful for individuals residing in our contemporary culture?
If God is One and we long for that Oneness to be what we are, is poverty a requisite practice of One?
Devotion to "Absolute Emptiness" (Lao tzu) or to "the form of a slave" (Paul) invites us into the mystery hiding in existential human life. This devotion pivots on the question: What is the longing at root of my existence?
What and how we respond to this question will shape the form of the world in which -- and as which -- we live.
Do we Christians have it wrong? Not yet trying poverty -- do we consciously postpone Christ-life?
Do we Buddhists (and other religions) have it wrong? Not yet recognizing that any suffering is shared suffering -- do we elongate illusion? Is life able to be simplified with its root longing?
Wasn't the inability to simplify life a Turgenev character's reason for suicide?
When we kill ourselves, are we not also really killing Oneself? By failing to simplify our lives are we, wittingly or unwittingly, contributing to the postponement of Oneness and the prolongation of suffering in the world?
Monastic poverty is the simplification of one's life.
Monastic poverty allows Life-Itself to resource the lives of all. By choosing moneyed life over monastic life I choose what can be bought and sold in this conditioned world over what can be shared and given in unconditional freedom.
This choice asks: Being-in-itself? Or, beings-for-your-use? The first requires contemplation to embody. The second merely requires our willingness to reach out and take for our own whatever we want. The first is what we truly are when we finally see our inner true nature. The second is what we manipulate and accumulate as our external net worth.
This Being-in-itself -- whether Christ-Life or Buddha-Life -- is a dimension of love and compassion that is the essence of holy poverty and sacred scripture.
Imagine choosing the form of a slave? Imagine longing to simplify and not knowing how to?
I ask myself: What is this one longing? What devoted form of service am I willing to disappear into?
We are each one in this longing.
Monastic life is longing for what Alone is.
Wednesday, June 12, 2002
Here is what birth is.
When here we birth what is here, we birth what we are.
Today is Saskia's here-day.
We each and all are birthed in her birthing here.
We are told to realize that
Not a single thing exists.
In this field birth and death
Do not appear.
The deep source,
Transparent down to the bottom,
Can radiantly shine and respond
Unencumbered by each speck of dust
Without becoming its partner.
- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091–1157)
No dust, no encumbrance, no birth no death --
Only partnering what is within without becoming partner.
Happy Saskia Day Here!
Tuesday, June 11, 2002
Tuesday night rain cloaks everything with its sound.
We are fortunate to hear this sound, to say so, and to praise both its origin and destination.
Our worst worry is not dirty bombs or other forms of terror.
The worry worth our attention is not to hear, say, or appreciate the sound of rain.
“From the very beginning
All things are in nirvana”
Here’s spring with its hundred blossoms,
A yellow warbler singing in the willow.
- Anonymous(dailyzen)
Mini the cat licks herself. Saskia talks with her mother by phone.
Fifty years ago tonight they both prepared to receive and give birth. It was received. It was given.
Rain is birth cloaking everything with its receiving giving sound.
We are fortunate to hear this sound, to say so, and to praise both its origin and destination.
Our worst worry is not dirty bombs or other forms of terror.
The worry worth our attention is not to hear, say, or appreciate the sound of rain.
“From the very beginning
All things are in nirvana”
Here’s spring with its hundred blossoms,
A yellow warbler singing in the willow.
- Anonymous(dailyzen)
Mini the cat licks herself. Saskia talks with her mother by phone.
Fifty years ago tonight they both prepared to receive and give birth. It was received. It was given.
Rain is birth cloaking everything with its receiving giving sound.
Sunday, June 09, 2002
The taste of spring lingers in opening ground, nature, and faces.
Three sisters (from Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia) visit and appear to be three appreciating angels at the shop. Dana arrives and confirms their appreciation of Meetingbrook.
Hugh and Virginia (now famous with article written on their Poems/Pictures book in local paper) came to visit the ordinary working class on their rounds,
Silvia says Mercury is in direct following retrograde -- ("Don't sign any contracts during retrograde," she chirps.).
Later at food market I tell Nancy about the Mercury news. She asks if that's good or bad. I tell her I haven't a clue. (She buys spring water; I buy seltzer). We laugh.
In a grove of tall bamboos
Beside an ancient temple
Steam rolls from the brazier
In fragrant white clouds.
I’ll show you the path of Sages
Beyond this floating world,
But will you understand
The lasting taste of spring?
- Baisao (1675-1763)(dailyzen)
Charlotte and friend borrow canoe to paddle the harbor. (Sando walks her home and stays for two hours with her ball-throwing friend.)
Barbara returns for naturalist week on the ketch Angelique. She's been doing Yoga down south and readying to teach it. (She took bus up from Carolina; her body is unfurling.)
Tenzin the dog was in with Holly the Tibetan Rug specialist. (Cisco kept the younger pup in his sights with low growls each time the tailless one approached.)
Kristen stopped in the day after her triumphant return to stage in The Apple Tree at civic theatre. (Word is she can really act and sing.)
Schooner Susan drops off copy of her first cd, Water Meets Sand. (She's gone to meet the cover creator in Lincolnville.)
Saskia naps under eaves, tired from all she does to bail the bilge and maintain freeboard on the good ship she has poured herself into. (She's a courageous captain!)
A fishing boat in the afternoon carried wedding party from town landing to yacht club reception passing shop with calls of celebration from harbor side. (We are all at the beginning of nuptiality.)
Who was it said, "All Being is Nuptial"?
It is.
Three sisters (from Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia) visit and appear to be three appreciating angels at the shop. Dana arrives and confirms their appreciation of Meetingbrook.
Hugh and Virginia (now famous with article written on their Poems/Pictures book in local paper) came to visit the ordinary working class on their rounds,
Silvia says Mercury is in direct following retrograde -- ("Don't sign any contracts during retrograde," she chirps.).
Later at food market I tell Nancy about the Mercury news. She asks if that's good or bad. I tell her I haven't a clue. (She buys spring water; I buy seltzer). We laugh.
In a grove of tall bamboos
Beside an ancient temple
Steam rolls from the brazier
In fragrant white clouds.
I’ll show you the path of Sages
Beyond this floating world,
But will you understand
The lasting taste of spring?
- Baisao (1675-1763)(dailyzen)
Charlotte and friend borrow canoe to paddle the harbor. (Sando walks her home and stays for two hours with her ball-throwing friend.)
Barbara returns for naturalist week on the ketch Angelique. She's been doing Yoga down south and readying to teach it. (She took bus up from Carolina; her body is unfurling.)
Tenzin the dog was in with Holly the Tibetan Rug specialist. (Cisco kept the younger pup in his sights with low growls each time the tailless one approached.)
Kristen stopped in the day after her triumphant return to stage in The Apple Tree at civic theatre. (Word is she can really act and sing.)
Schooner Susan drops off copy of her first cd, Water Meets Sand. (She's gone to meet the cover creator in Lincolnville.)
Saskia naps under eaves, tired from all she does to bail the bilge and maintain freeboard on the good ship she has poured herself into. (She's a courageous captain!)
A fishing boat in the afternoon carried wedding party from town landing to yacht club reception passing shop with calls of celebration from harbor side. (We are all at the beginning of nuptiality.)
Who was it said, "All Being is Nuptial"?
It is.
Thursday, June 06, 2002
We ask each other: What is it our hearts long for?
A regular life. Full of the liturgy of the hours, zazen sitting, hospitality, conversation, stillness, and silence. And solitude. Especially what Henri Nouwen calls 'solitude of the heart.'
Thinking is not the perseverating noise that rattles inside people's heads. Thinking is watchfulness. It is a seeing that allows what is there to be seen. Thinking is not worrying. Thinking is not analyzing or judging. Thinking is seeing itself.
"There is a pleasure in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the course necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain." (Durant)
"To be a philosopher," said Thoreau, "is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a love of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust." (in The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant)
South and north,
Sharing a single mountain gate,
Above and below,
Two temples both named T’ien-chu.
Dwelling therein is
An old dharma master,
Built tall and skinny
Like stork or swan.
I do not know what
Practice he engages in,
But his green eyes
Reflect the mountain valleys.
Just looking into them
Makes one feel fresh and pure,
As if all one’s baneful
Vexations had been cleansed.
- Su Shih (1073)
When we see what is there, we are not other than what is there. Green eyes reflect the mountain valleys.
This afternoon the harbor is calm and sky is cloud gray.
When we see, will we see what we see?
What is it our hearts long for?
A regular life. Full of the liturgy of the hours, zazen sitting, hospitality, conversation, stillness, and silence. And solitude. Especially what Henri Nouwen calls 'solitude of the heart.'
Thinking is not the perseverating noise that rattles inside people's heads. Thinking is watchfulness. It is a seeing that allows what is there to be seen. Thinking is not worrying. Thinking is not analyzing or judging. Thinking is seeing itself.
"There is a pleasure in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the course necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain." (Durant)
"To be a philosopher," said Thoreau, "is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a love of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust." (in The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant)
South and north,
Sharing a single mountain gate,
Above and below,
Two temples both named T’ien-chu.
Dwelling therein is
An old dharma master,
Built tall and skinny
Like stork or swan.
I do not know what
Practice he engages in,
But his green eyes
Reflect the mountain valleys.
Just looking into them
Makes one feel fresh and pure,
As if all one’s baneful
Vexations had been cleansed.
- Su Shih (1073)
When we see what is there, we are not other than what is there. Green eyes reflect the mountain valleys.
This afternoon the harbor is calm and sky is cloud gray.
When we see, will we see what we see?
What is it our hearts long for?
Sunday, June 02, 2002
Absurdity -- the unsound and stupid -- postures as power and wealth in our culture. This is unfair.
The sound and wise invest money and rule confidently the institutions of learning, government, religion, and financial matters. They are not the absurd ones.
Real absurdity hides in simplicity and poverty. Within or without awareness – in Spirit, Truth, and Love.
Though night after night
The moon is stream-reflected,
Try to find where it has touched,
Point even to a shadow.
- Takuan (1573–1645)
It cheers to think we no longer know the whereabouts of our priests, roshis, rabbis, sages, and saints. They are hidden within the ordinary sound of birdsong. They are felt in the passing fragrance of mowed field. They reside in the silence of cloud-break sunlight on scarred wood desk. They wander without knowing the pathways the rest of us wander.
It is not the lies, deceit, greed, nor even pretense of good intention that disturbs about the culture of professional political and private-public power grabbers -- it is the absurdity masked as the American Way, Capitalist Way, Plutocratic Way.
Absurdity -- the unsound and stupid -- belongs instead to a different segment of our world. Absurdity belongs to the fools whose lives are lost in the sacred silence of stillness, solitude, and simplicity.
Ridiculous, unreasonable, and incongruous -- radical holiness -- the foolish way of one lost in God.
This one does not kill, substitute the unreal, take from another, lie, or pretend the unlovely is lovely.
Somewhere this morning there are Buddhists reciting precepts. Somewhere there are Christians praying promises. Jews saying a blessing. Muslims proclaiming the greatness of God. Hindus making vows real. Native Americans chanting the earth and sun into being. Atheists and agnostics caring for loved ones and the earth.
Somewhere -- absurdity is regaining its correct domain. Those who grab power, money, influence, and control of who lives and dies -- they should not be allowed to appropriate the alias absurdity -- they should be given a name resembling something less valuable: like stocks, lawyer's bills, and success.
Absurdity belongs with the lovers of the earth, sentient beings, human family, and divine guest. These failures, chaotic expressions, and imperfections are what is now and ever sacred. The sacred – the unpretentious absurd – our lives.
Absurd. Seem strange?
"Try to find where it has touched" -- and heal within that place.
The sound and wise invest money and rule confidently the institutions of learning, government, religion, and financial matters. They are not the absurd ones.
Real absurdity hides in simplicity and poverty. Within or without awareness – in Spirit, Truth, and Love.
Though night after night
The moon is stream-reflected,
Try to find where it has touched,
Point even to a shadow.
- Takuan (1573–1645)
It cheers to think we no longer know the whereabouts of our priests, roshis, rabbis, sages, and saints. They are hidden within the ordinary sound of birdsong. They are felt in the passing fragrance of mowed field. They reside in the silence of cloud-break sunlight on scarred wood desk. They wander without knowing the pathways the rest of us wander.
It is not the lies, deceit, greed, nor even pretense of good intention that disturbs about the culture of professional political and private-public power grabbers -- it is the absurdity masked as the American Way, Capitalist Way, Plutocratic Way.
Absurdity -- the unsound and stupid -- belongs instead to a different segment of our world. Absurdity belongs to the fools whose lives are lost in the sacred silence of stillness, solitude, and simplicity.
Ridiculous, unreasonable, and incongruous -- radical holiness -- the foolish way of one lost in God.
This one does not kill, substitute the unreal, take from another, lie, or pretend the unlovely is lovely.
Somewhere this morning there are Buddhists reciting precepts. Somewhere there are Christians praying promises. Jews saying a blessing. Muslims proclaiming the greatness of God. Hindus making vows real. Native Americans chanting the earth and sun into being. Atheists and agnostics caring for loved ones and the earth.
Somewhere -- absurdity is regaining its correct domain. Those who grab power, money, influence, and control of who lives and dies -- they should not be allowed to appropriate the alias absurdity -- they should be given a name resembling something less valuable: like stocks, lawyer's bills, and success.
Absurdity belongs with the lovers of the earth, sentient beings, human family, and divine guest. These failures, chaotic expressions, and imperfections are what is now and ever sacred. The sacred – the unpretentious absurd – our lives.
Absurd. Seem strange?
"Try to find where it has touched" -- and heal within that place.
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