Snow seems sweet and soft this Saturday. All day.

We move things around kitchen.
Saskia finishes at sink. "Ready to go?"
What a choice! Go out to shovel snow? Or, move daybed and table in kitchen?

See, darkness covers the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples; but upon you the Lord shines, and over you appears his glory. Nations shall walk by your light, and kings by your shining radiance. Raise your eyes and look about; they all gather and come to you: your sons come from afar, and your daughters in the arms of their nurses. (Isaiah 60)

If God were to show up, what would we see?
The Feast of Epiphany comes near.

The Magi in the Gospel were looking for something that had been revealed to them. They knew a spiritual truth and they followed it. There is no indication in the Gospels that they ever follow Christ. Their task in the Gospel is simply to point to the divinity of this small child. So it is with many of us: our task is to point to the divine at work in our world without becoming caught up in strife or useless religious arguments.

Christ is born for us! Christ is revealed to us this day. Let us open our eyes and our hearts.
(-- from Epiphany Homily, 2003 The Monastery of Christ in the Desert) (http://www.christdesert.org/news/homily.php)

Appearance with recognition.
What would God see?

What is being revealed to us?
What would any of us be seen as?

At prison Charlie, Shane, Ed, Mike, Paco, Andre, Sonny, Saskia, Vaughn, and I read the Canadian writer's story aloud in circle for 35 minutes.

"I know, Ma," says my father, "I know that and I appreciate it all, everything. It is just that, well somehow we just can't live in a clan system anymore. We have to see beyond ourselves and our own families. We have to live in the twentieth century."
"Twentieth century?" says my grandmother spreading her big hands across her checkered apron. "What is the twentieth century to me if I cannot have my own?"
(p.88, in The Return, (1971), story by Alistair MacLeod in his book Island The Complete Stories, c.2000).

We sit in silence 5 minutes. We let conversation carry us from the writer's Cape Breton to Montreal, then take side trips from New York City to the island of Jamaica, from towns in Maine to Holland, jail cells to childhood everywhere remembered.

I’ve always loved friends of the Way,
Always held them dear.
Meeting a stranger with silent springs;
Greeting a guest talking zen;
Talking about mysteries on a moonlit night;
Searching for truth until dawn,
The tracks of our inventions disappear,
And we see who we really are.
- Han-shan (dailyzen)

Andre's poem, It's Too Late, caps the two hours we spend in Meetingbrook Conversation at Maine State Prison. Poem begins with lines,
I get this gift called life,
but it's like my every breath is through
a shattered wind-pipe,
my speech is quite a whisper,
it's hard to get a listener,
it's hard for insight,
angles of angels get it twisted,

The ten of us are tourists. We travel by word across the table to each other's country. We stay as long as we can. Return fare is letting go what we think we know about the other, paying opinion and prejudice's ticket price back to one's chair, looking out over the landscape passing us, and sorting through what we've become enroute.

I'm so confused in my movement for direction,
I'm so lost, I lose myself, where am I headed?
Good question,
where's my head at, it spreads in sections,
along with my flesh,
never forgetting life and death,
they're both conception.
(from chorus in It's Too Late, poem by Andre H.)

Alistair and Andre convey us through their written words to places we visit with them in our conversing words. We feel a familiar memory. Have we been here before?

Life and death, / they're both conception -- Wherever we arrive, we have been here before.
The grandmother's words bring us to wonder what it is we conceive if we cannot have our own.

This is our own, this is the path we take, where we meet each other.

Charlie said it's something he's been reading about, "empathy."

The sign on door of shop still says, "We're closed a few days. Happy New Year."

"Stormstay," was the word used in a story about Cape Breton in a book about Nova Scotia.

We stormstay at hermitage for rest.

Dew and the moon,
Stars and streams,
Snow on pine trees,
Clouds hovering on the mountain peaks;
From darkness, they all become glowingly bright;
From obscurity, they all turn to resplendent light.
Infinite wonder permeates this serenity;
In this reflection all intentional efforts vanish.
Serenity is the final word of all teachings;
Reflection is the response to all manifestations
- Hung Chih (1091-1157)

Bach plays.We stay put.
We look at things that have been still for a while.

Winter.
Ice over everything.

If anything moves, it must move carefully.

Old year eve sitting with snow fog surrounding cabin wood. New year morning sitting with sunlight permeating cabin windows. This is how the mountains stay so quiet -- they sit looking across each at each.

Happy in the morning
I open my cottage door;
A clear breeze blowing
Comes straight in.
The first sun
Lights the leafy trees;
The shadows it casts
Are crystal clear.
Serene,
In accord with my heart,
Everything merges
In one harmony.
Gain and loss
Are not my concern;
This way is enough
To the end of my days.
- Wen-siang (1210-1280)

Hugh C. from Surry sends this invocation:

INVOCATION FOR THE NEW YEAR

Let us invoke our ancestors,
And our spiritual ancestors,
for we are the sole reason for their existence.
Let us also invoke our children, and their children,
for they are the sole reason for our existence.

Let us invoke the mountains and
the rivers of this great Earth,
and realize that we and they are
part of the great wheel of being
of sentient and insentient life.

The gift of Life is more fragile than
the dewdrops on the morning grass.

So let us vow to heal & nourish,
to love & share,
To alleviate suffering & bondage.

May we come to know Peace & Joy,
wisdom & compassion in the New Year.
(Adapted from the Mayan New Year Invocation)

Each bird and squirrel takes seed, whether from feeder or what is scattered on snow.

So it is to all Mary’s, all mothers, all expressions of God's light -- praise and gratefulness this day!

With two dogs we walk across Hosmer Pond. Shroud of moist air clouds Ragged and Bald Mountains as daylight lowers to white gray silhouette.
"Do you think the ice is thick enough?" is often asked by one of the four.
"Yes!" the repeated answer.

Another year about to end
In my empty mountain abode;
Rivers and clouds,
Their trails indistinct;
Pines and cedars,
Their natures the same.
I arise from my nap
To find the taro roots done;
As the incense fades out,
I finish a scripture.
Who knows that real pleasure
Lies within stillness and silence?
- Wen-siang (1210-1280)(dailyzen.com)

Sign on shop door says, "We're closed a few days, Happy New Year."

Smoke rises from house and cabin chimneys.

Body and breath. Carnal and spiritual. And the dissolving of all that is seen into the unseen.

As calendar year ends, so does all time transmute into no time. In brief: beneath the story we tell about life is life beyond story, among and within what is itself no story.

Have you not seen the idle person of Tao
Who has nothing to learn and nothing to do,
Who neither discards wandering thoughts
Nor seeks the truth?
The real nature of ignorance is
Buddha-nature;
The illusory empty body
Is the Dharma body.
- Yung Chia Hsuan Chueh (665-713)

The story is history. What is now is what?
The open is God Mothering/Fathering. The body is God Christing. The breath is God Spiriting.

Let's call it a day. Let's call it a year. Let's call it a silence.

The words Di sent apply. "Beyond, among, within, beneath" -- is everything -- silence, stillness, solitude, and sanctuary.

In the beginning was the word. At end will be the gaze.

For now, only the open alone invites and conveys body and breath.

As we live and breathe!

In Murder in the Cathedral about the killing of Thomas a Beckett in 1170 in Canterbury cathedral, the chorus intones,
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right thing for the wrong reason."
(--T.S. Eliot)

Jonathan Mondaldo is on New Dimensions Radio talking of Thomas Merton with Michael Thoms this 29Dec., the date Thomas a Becket is traditionally celebrated. Montaldo reads from the Asian Journal a prayer by Merton to God which includes the phrase, "because our being is in your being."

Is our last temptation to do the right thing for the wrong reason? To pretend to be God is most often recognized as madness. To disappear into God is holiness. But the middle path, to recognize what God is recognizing, engaging and enacting our being within the being of God, what is that called?

There is no need to pretend we are God. We are not mad.
There is no need to disappear into God. Everything is revealed as it is with God.
There is no need to look for the middle path. We are the middle path. We are only to look as what is traversing the way of God.

The right thing is to be what, where, and who we are.
The wrong reason is to think we are trying to become, do, or accomplish something else by pretending or practicing that which we aspire to.

As we live, and breathe, we come to see our being in God's being. Merton's prayer in Asia was one he embodied.

No temptation. No treason.

Live. Breathe.

There is no place to hide. Even when we long to disappear it has to be done in plain sight.

The little retreat is to hide
Among wooded hills;
The great retreat is to vanish
In the capital.
- Kanzan

A curious dream. Waking up after dream of a monastic setting and another of beach waves behind sand dunes the idea of consolidation and enfoldment recurs. The woman from Lincolnville comes in and is fired as spiritual director (a self-appointed position that consisted of pizza and advice, both by the slice).

As an ancient Chinese saying goes, 'Mediocre hermitry exists in mountains; real hermitry downtown.' It means ordinary hermits retreat to mountains or forests; great hermits retreat to the center of the city. City life is quick-paced and it is difficult for hermits to find a quiet forest. In Lantau Island one can find a Trappist Haven Monastery, a group of true hermits - the cenobites. If wild life is forced to emigrate from this Concrete Forest, how could there be sufficient space for these cenobites? (on website, Trappist Monastery in Lautau)

What sleeping dream of monastic life and ocean proximity? What retreat does the inner solitary find in outer community?

Great hermits don’t know who should live and who should die. They allow life to see itself through. We need hermits and solitaries that continue to look deeply and long for, at, and as each of us.

There is no place to hide. What really interests is how to be hidden in the obvious. To find oneself out is it necessary to lose no self within?

Today we think of innocents. Those who die -- first in the minds of uncaring people, then physically at the hands of unkind people -- die without being seen by those who profess to know who they are. Their death is an ignorance that causes suffering in the world.

What do we do when we don’t know what to do?

Sit a while. Be unknowing. See what is there. Care for what is seen. Be kind to what is cared for.

Whether ignorant and harmful, or unknowing and hurt – these are two versions of innocence. Perhaps we might learn to look at “wild life” the way hermits look out of solitude. The world longs for what is looking at it with love.

What if innocence was treated with love?

John's words make of the Word a language of love.

Is he "the disciple whom Jesus loved"? Is it because he was loved that, in his words, Jesus the Christ was one who taught we must love one another?

Now whether withdrawn on a mountain,
or retired in a city, the essential
thing is the long maturation.
For this, it is good to keep
the examples of the old masters in mind,
or we will be pulled back into
the dust and delusion of the world.
- Torei (1721-1792)(dailyzen)

A long maturation is needed to learn through dust and delusion the longing of love for itself.
It seems muddled to suggest love has no object. Love has only itself, and itself includes one and all.

John was the son of Zebedee and Salome, and the brother of James the Greater. In the Gospels the two brothers are often called after their father "the sons of Zebedee" and received from Christ the honourable title of "Boanerges," i.e. "sons of thunder" (Mark, iii, 17). (Catholic Encylopedia)

Had mother Salome been the chosen reference, the honorable title for the boys might have been "Rogati Dei," or, "asked of God." They were asked to consider with their lives the question of love.

What is the question of love?
With our lives, in the beginning, we listen to the word.

When word and question become flesh, we'll sit in stillness, move with peace, our long maturation.

Shoveling 20 inches of snow 4 hours places one in prayer.

Christmas night white snow blowing northeasterly stops everything in Maine. Stephen’s Day pulls blanket from manger, covers everything with pause, and drops coat at feet of someone needing new way of seeing.

Where is Christ today?
Is each sculpting act, each falling flake, each wandering thought preparing this one to be the question? Is “this” – each instant as it is – the coming into being of Christ?
Like the words in the story told in Acts 6: "And the high priest said, “Is this so?”
I ask: Is this so?

More than the watchman for daybreak, let Israel hope in the Lord:
for with the Lord there is kindness and abundant redemption.
He himself will redeem Israel from all its transgressions.
(from Psalm 130)

Like the Dalai Lama -- who says that his religion is simple, his religion is kindness -- is the new way of being, “kindness,” replacing religion, as we’ve known it?

Absent all implements and instruments of religion, absent creeds and confessions, pronouncements and pontification, capital building fundraising and hoarded treasures in basement archives -- absent all these, can kindness revive religion? Or, perhaps, can kindness reveal the Itself, God, Ultimate Reality?

Is there a need to divest all extraneous possessions, a divestiture of special symbols, handshakes, & titles on the part of religions in order to restore genuine trust and everyday sacredness to the world?

What is religion holding on to that makes it so reluctant to allow appear the true face of God longing to shine through everything?

The vagaries of life
though painful,
teach us not to cling
to this fleeting world.
- Ikkyu (1394-1481)

Not to cling to this fleeting world, surely, means letting go the ornaments and prized differences so precious to religions. .

It is a terrible thing done in the name of God. Patronizing and murdering, growing rich with divisive rhetorical venom spit at others -- all the "others" -- and calling it entertainment, commentary, ecclesiastical and clerical fatwa, interdict, and casting into the darkness.

No wonder.
No wonder and fear replace wonder and love.
Kindness need not apply.

And as they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”. And he knelt down and cried with a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them”. And when he had said this, he fell asleep. (Acts 7:60)

We're told that Jesus' words and Stephen's words were prayers to absolve those who killed them.
Kindness? No cry for justice. No curse of damnation. No promise of future retaliation or vigilante revenge. No elimination of enemies in the name of God, country, flag, or the deaths of the innocent.

What would the world come to if kindness were our prayer and act?
One need applies to everything, everywhere, everyone, and every time.

Kindness.

Simply.

What is this?

Cesco looks over toward woodpile. We've returned from short walk along Ragged Mountain. I take wood to cabin. Smoke from woodstove chimney. Stillness.

Blue Lincoln pulls in as I sit at desk in house with Mu-ge tossing off, one by one, small things to floor and attempting to do same to words from computer screen.

Betty gets out, walks to cabin, and enters. Some time passes. Later, leaves. Bringing, and leaving with, solitude.

MoGLIAD, (i.e., Mother of God, Light In All Darkness), gift of Betty, icons north gable of chapel/zendo, as does her wooden turning centerpiece on Janet’s hermitage table in dining room

In front room of hermitage, incense burns rising behind clay carrying animal (reindeer? camel? donkey?) from artists Clarity with child in basket on its back.

Arrives child extending into life. Single candlelight glows behind child on animal between sitting Buddha and crucified Jesus. Arrives these two men expanding through death.

The whole season of a person's life celebrated of a day. Our Mother Light issues forth her children. We are gifted and served well!

"This," says song and script, "this, is Christ the Lord."
What is "this?"

I ask this so that we, each and all of us, might have life, and have it abundantly.

A sound! Nuthatch breaks seed on bell pole outside window.

This is good!

We like the invitation of a silent night.

"I'm not there yet," says Jerry from the bench and table by fireplace. He is writing. Cesco sleeps by door.

They shall tear down the Temple to Self for man is an unworthy God when man exalts something and heads into nothing.
There is no higher-minded goal other than love thy neighbor as thyself...otherwise the foundation of man is sand, washing away. Build it on stone so others can stand with you. (Jerry at 4:45pm)

The people from New York finish their coffee and hot chocolate and leave with words of the season. Jerry goes. Sam and Susan arrive. Joan from Northport arrives. I can't imagine why we are open.

"Caring about people who are alone, who don't have much," that's what Joan relates Rev. Susan S. at Lincolnville said at this evening's service. There were four speaking people at four corners of the church and a woman in a gold scarf telling the Christmas story.

Soon solitude will watch doors close and cars disappear. The star atop Mt. Battie tower has focus tonight. Generator filled with fuel. Cold night air. Drivers heading north on Elm Street Route One might pause.

For now, that is all we can do.
Pause.

What is being pointed out?

Stefanie, a student, leads her paper with two quotes:
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.
( -- Albert Einstein, letter dated 1950, quoted in H. Eves’ Mathematical Circles Adieu, 1977)

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
( -- Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, foreword to The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery)

Is birthing Christ a dawning consciousness that recognizes one family?

A holy family? All beings – inanimate to animate, dirt to sentience, all species through human to realms unknown to any of us? Are we ready for this birth?

Another student writes:
I know I won’t emerge from this class as a philosophical scholar. In my “trained” way of thinking, I tell myself that I did not succeed in this class because I can’t put a pretty ribbon around the little box of wisdom that I didn’t gain from this class. Are you following me? Then, I realized that I do not need to because there is no box and no ribbon. There is only philosophy, which leaves things as they are; bare. In the end, I’m still holding onto the ribbon, but I’ve managed to throw the box away! (Josyln)

Perhaps the box is bare, empty. Without box, the empty content, that is, the emptiness that even the idea of box could not contain, much less the greater illusion that a container such as a physical box could contain what is wisdom, spills effortlessly into nowhere.

Put differently – what a lovely ribbon!

Is Christ a lovely ribbon remaining after what we thought we held has disappeared? When nowhere becomes now here?

Is Christ the light illuminating a circle of compassion embracing all and whole?

There is no shopping for this. This is gift given and received once and for all when the first sound resonated from the origin of sound.

Put differently – Let there be light!. (cf. Gn 1:3)

And there was, and is here, and ever will be -- this sacred ribbon.

Still.

Holding.

Haiku for Elizabeth

Wet old apple tree
watching orange sunrise wash
clear cabin window

(wfh, 21dec02)
.........................
Sometimes fire doesn't catch until you leave it alone.
After several attempts, not until returning to house, cabin woodstove chimney dances smoke. Woman arrives, walks mindfully to screen door, and disappears into chapel/zendo.

Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed and through the prophetic writings is made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith to the only wise God be glory for evermore through Jesus Christ! Amen. (Romans 16:25 - 27)

"Now," Paul writes, and "now disclosed." What is constant, and what is evermore constant, is honoring resplendence no longer hidden from our eyes, is born aware presence.

Coming to this, an advent pilgrimage is what is born, within and without.

We must first visit another. They too are near birth.

Visit Elizabeth, a name that means "one consecrated to God."

Aware presence sits in maximum-security prison around table in education. Eight inmates, two visitors, reading at random snippets from The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, pieces from many minds collected by Jack Kornfield. Later we read a piece on history and who we are. We finish with poem by e.e.cummings let it go .

Then Sonny getting up to leave says it. One sentence. It sums up the gathered circle conversation with compact clearness.

Sonny says, "What Jesus was, we are now, if we let it be."

Turning the wheel of the Dharma
is the beginning and end
of the whole training.
With this aspiration one starts
giving one’s whole heart to the training;
with one’s heart in it, one does it.
Depending on it, one looks
for the wonder arousing,
mysterious state behind appearances.
That attained, the transformation
of one’s life has been completed.
- Torei (1721-1792)

Beyond appearances, at center of our very being, Sonny's sentence.

Saskia ends with their nodding affirmation, “May we all be at peace, now.”

What if we've never grasped the incarnation?
Is there an incarnational constant, similar to the cosmological constant?
Creation is God's way of saying, "I am here!"
What if God is, from the first, awareness becoming human?
What if Jesus saw through Christ what God from the beginning is creating?

Who, then, would not celebrate each birth, each awakening, and each leap of light through night to earth?

Christ is now longing to be born. Jesus knew this. And this is what God reveals as truth in time.

Imagine this: religion has done its job, holding sacred sound reverently as time unfolds voice to pronounce its song. Our breath rises in and out the body mother bestowed on one and all.

This. Know this. "This," sounds God, "is my son and daughter in whom I am. Well. Pleased."

Oh dear! Here we are! Thanks be to God!

"People don't write history, historians do."

I remember that line (or one similarly phrased) from a play attended in Callicoon NY in 1964, The troupe of theater players would descend to auditorium under church and rehearse a comedy about somebody's war. Our own war was nascent in Vietnam. Our personal wars with what and how we thought were like rocks in the near flowing Delaware River, temporarily diverting the rush of event and history, a surprising whitewater of resistance that splashed over us before continuing toward Crows Nest, Port Jervis, the Delaware Water Gap, Dingmans’ Ferry, down to Philadelphia, and out into Atlantic Ocean.

Historians have realized for a long time that monks of the eleventh and twelfth centuries invented a past in order to legitimize their claims to the present.
(-- from Introduction, in Monks & Nuns, Saints & Outcasts, Religion in Medieval Society, c.2000)

If I were to invent a past, what would I wish to legitimize as a proper present?

Monastic culture sought to control the future through the proper performance of liturgy. Prayer, for the living and the dead was the primary function of the monastic community, a function understood and cherished by all orders of lay society. Moreover, ritual actions showed the proper social hierarchy, they acted out the proper order of the world, or, when necessary, they dramatized the failure of human society to conform to the divine order.
(-- from ch 1, Monastic Memory and the Mutation of the Year Thousand, essay by Patrick J. Geary, op.cit.)

How would I write it? The divine order, yes, what is the divine order? No matter what anyone else calls it in their version of history, I'd say that the divine order is common use of commonly used property and possessions. A wise person with no personal ambition would be wise counsel to those who gather into communities of common intent.

(Of course there would be the non-gatherers, the non-commoners who would rather think of themselves as special and privileged, who take to themselves honor and rank and assemble under their benevolence minions of fawning prisoners to their control and protection -- not unlike the current day governments with their two party political charade that rivets attention on every proclamation and grumbling complaint to their benevolent patriarchy. But these are not the divine order in the history I write.)

The divine order is a circle, not a ladder, not a straight line. Women and men attend to creation. This might be birds, cats, spiders, clouds, mice, dogs, horses, chipmunks, dust motes, baking flour, branches of trees, elderly people or even children. All creation, once or formerly visible, is the work and leisure of the divine order.

In this history there is no entertainment industry, no recreational industry, no educational industry, no financial industry, no industry whatsoever. There are only people living their lives with nature and unseen nature. The circle of life encounters each and every individual on the circle with attention, respect, and engaging service to the needs of each and all.

Women are neither baby makers nor objects of sexual satisfaction. Men are neither baby makers nor objects of sexual satisfaction. Women and men are the created, creation, and creators in a circle of reverence and love. There is nothing to take and nothing to give -- everything we once thought of as sexual industry is reconsidered in the light of what is calling forth now. Is now a child? Is now a comforting? Is now a coupling? Is now a non-coupling? Whatever emerges will be a result of what now is creating -- and not a result of an industry, whether ecclesial, cultural, or consumer -- for the good of now and forever. What we once called procreation and perpetuation of genetic strain is no longer of interest. What is the divine order that is of interest? Ask yourself.

You alone are the creator, the created, and the creation. In the past we were tempted to say "God created...” When we did say that, we fell deeper into forgetfulness with the use of a word with three letters. Today, now, is the space of remembering. The remembrance we arrive at is the very fact of what we have called incarnation. It is an awkward word. But so is God.

You and I are not God. God is not God. (God is not a word that represents God). Nor is anyone else God. What else can we say?

Go ahead -- say it. It is the present. It is now. God is everywhere present, but nowhere found. And the mystery we call Christ is the realization in Jesus this season that God is now human. It is a curious phrase: God is now human. If such is so, perhaps this is why God is nowhere found. Are we looking in the wrong places? Are we looking in words? In sky? In routines and traditions that have no further role in locating and celebrating God? And is this why we feel so alone and not with God?

There is no need to write history. We are what historians choose to say about us. There is no need to believe what is said. We are condemned to repeat history when it is someone else's telling of history. Forget it. History, far from being a recounting of events gone by, is a story embedded within us right now in our hands and feet. With every move we enact history. Don't let anyone enact your life for you.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
(-- George Bernard Shaw, 1856 - 1950)

Rather, be divine order. Write no history. Be the story of life as it is unfolding right now. Be what we are doing.
Yet the question remains -- If this common gathering is to simplify creation, who are we to say we are?

We are who we are and what we are, when and how we are there, as we are here.
Write this -- nothing other.

Breathe easy. The darkness of history is dying. Light will see us through.

Us. With us. God with us. Emanuel.
Write us -- no -- enact us well.

There's no place to go but home.

Gathering simples, going home
White clouds flying
Mists melt black mountains
And this wandering mystic’s
Wandered astray.
Black apes call and green birds cry
A magic crane goes before me,
Dancing, leads me
To my cave.
- Yun-K’an Tzu

Home is not what we think it is. Home is where no thinking leaves us. After illusions reveal themselves and scuttle off. After long looking down many paths yields an empty road with no encouragement to continue further. After one of the numerous beliefs we've cherished collapses into vacant stare at nothing we can remember. After we discover one more 'friend' has bailed out with oblique words such as, 'There are other things I have to take care of.'

Home begins to take shape when after one or all of the above riddles our lives with disappointment. We realize there has never been a real appointment with any of them -- not illusory perceptions, not the direction of our life, not beliefs we've held with foolish courage, and not the friendships that have been mere convenience, and you and I are now inconvenient.

Home appears when we are looking the other way. It occurs during the dismantling of our special lives. Home is where nothing special takes place with arresting awareness.

A poet who looked the other way with words wrote:

let it go--the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise--let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go--the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers--you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go--the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things--let all go
dear
so comes love

(e.e.cummings, XXIX in 1 X 1)

Being led, dancing, to that cave. Love is where there is no place to go, but home.

"Where there is no one, I am." It was a silent phrasing during 1st sitting in chapel/zendo.

That's what came after arriving at the cabin for Sunday Evening Practice and the woman connected to Tibetan monks asked where she might sit. Moonlight over her shoulder placed window squares on ash wood floor.

The letters "w" and "t" keep phrase from saying, "Here, here is no one, I am."

Pure and fresh are the flowers with dew
Clear and bright is the singing of the birds;
Clouds are calm, waters are blue.
Who has written the True Word of no letters?
Lofty are the mountains, green are the trees,
Deep are the valleys, lucid are the streams;
The wind is soft, the moon is serene.
Calmly I read the True Word of no letters.
- Zenkei Shibayama (dailyzen.com)

Cesco occupies middle blue zabuton below as I sit in loft. In the house Saskia researches music order, Mu-ge races crazily up and down stairs, up and down table, desk, and chair. Sando sighs on bedroom bed with elderly tolerance of the new energy bouncing off the walls.

The day extends. We walk with dogs in state park. Back at cabin as sun sets and darkness curls around bare branches we light oil lamps to begin enclosing porch with clear plastic. When night and cold temperature rendezvous we gather tools on porch for morning and enter chapel/zendo for Vespers.

Prayer is sung in psalm-tone. There is a trust that in ways we cannot fathom what we do matters. We don't know if it does. We just do it with intention to remain in loving attention with all there is and each one there.

We try to do, simply and starkly, what we are doing. When being and doing have little or no separation between them, we begin to disappear. In that disappearance, the one we call God is no longer absent but still invisible, no longer unheard but still silent. In that disappearance there is no knowing.

We know nothing of God. We barely know anything of ourselves. What we do manage to know are odd details of finances, academic test questions, flaws of others, and how to divert ourselves from ourselves by becoming someone. When and if we ever fail miserably and wonderfully at becoming someone, it is there at that ground opening emptiness the one we call God resonates “I am.”

No need asking why and how. No reason, no explanation, satisfies. Just this: Where there is no one, I am.
“I am!” -- There’s that sentence! We are permitted to praise this. And give thanks.

Choose your own silent phrase. Sit with it. Lose track of everything else. Go away. Return home.

Advent in forceful wind.

Phil Berrigan died Friday, Dec. 6. Reading Phil Berrigan’s final words about nuclear weapons, their production, threat, and ultimate use:
Because of myopic leadership, of greed for possessions, a public chained to corporate media, there has been virtually no response to these realities... (“PHIL'S STATEMENT 12/05/02” (dictated the week before Thanksgiving, via Liz McAlister) (http://www.rcnv.org/rcnv/archives/philberrigan.htm)

He died soon after an unfinished sentence in a completed life. Compare Phil’s life with the incomplete lives and finished sentences of profiteers and politicians trying to convince us that destruction and death is good for the economy and our ideals of freedom.

I came late to the dharma,
But each day, deepen my retreat.
Waiting for mountain monks,
I sweep my simple hut.
Then down from cloudy peaks
You come through knee-deep weeds.
We kneel on tatami, munching pine nuts.
We burn incense and study the Way.
Light the lamp at twilight;
A simple chime begins the night.
In every solitude, deep joy:
This life abides.
How can you think of returning?
A lifetime is empty like the Void.
- Wang Wei

Brendan Walsh gave a eulogy for Philip Berrigan. Walsh is cofounder of Viva House, a Catholic Worker house in Baltimore that operates a soup kitchen, food pantry, and free law clinic. He said that during one incarceration, he and Phil lived like monks together in a tiny jail cell for 5 months, eating wonder bread and grape juice for morning Eucharist, doing scripture study during lockdown. Wang Wei's words, "How can you think of returning?” must have been heard by Berrigan each time he did an action he calculated to land him back in jail. He spent over eleven years in prison for civil disobedience acts of opposition to war and destruction of implements of war.

It is mid-Advent in the Christian calendar. The yearly meditation on the coming of Christ into human history is paled by homeland security in America, nostalgia for segregation, privileged rulings for the wealthy, and an odd intensity to rid the world of evil that particularly interferes with the interests of commercial vendors of oil, arms and weapons of mass destruction.

While churches sing and celebrate liturgical sentiments of anticipation of the prince of peace, others plot bomb coordinates, CIA assassination targets, and random terror. This is done in the name of Christian and Muslim causes and values, democracy or holy war. Is the world dangerous? Yes, the world is dangerous.

The wind is a clearer sound. It makes no statement trying to convince anyone of anything other than moving along a course of night, sounding through chimes hanging to record its passing. The wind is a haunting sound. The wind has integrity many long to hear.

Christ is being born. Phil Berrigan has died. Two persons and two sentences that serve to evoke sacred longing and spiritual crisis. There is a skeptical uncertainty initiated by these two moments of appearance and disappearance.

Phil Berrigan was a forceful wind. And so, through this night we wait and watch. We do so with friends whose longing and crises ask us to wait and watch with them.