There is revelation in words that transcend the sentence they comprise.

Take Martin Luther's reputed words ending his argument with the Roman Church delivered at Diet of Worms in 1521. In German: "Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders." Translated: "Here I stand; I can do no other."

The words reveal more than his unwillingness or inability to recant and alter his way of thinking grown contrary to the Roman Church. The words actually encapsulate a position of independence.

He says: "I can do no other."

"No other" is a point of view that is not dependent on "other" -- on a church, tradition, creed, or God "out there" or "above" or in a "heavenly afterlife." As it is, he might not have been aware of the insight the words themselves invited.

Does Luther realize that he can do "no other" -- that he is able to dwell in the undifferentiated suchness (as Buddhists say) which is the ground reality of existence?

"Here," he says, "I stand." Luther expresses the absolute near-side of presence -- he stands "here" where there is nowhere else. His words indicate an appreciation of the perception that "Here" is "no other." The sole reality is here, and he can do "no other" -- a non-dualistic activity that is not predicating, nor predicated on, anything else, other, or absent. (Far from being a solipsism, this is front porch to egolessness.)

I like this as a useful apperception of the reality of God passing through as well as dwelling within and around everything.

When we became monastics of no other we were not aware that Martin Luther's insight would take so long to reach us. (It is quite astonishing what the man Martin Luther, and his words, unleashed.)

Now it is here.

We, too, can do it.

(Almost.)

Apperceptive dwelling in itself.

Perceiving the inner meaning of no other.

Jump?

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

(There's something about that phrase -- "as it is.")

"Thy will" might refer to that which is true, lovely, and compassionate. The words need not refer to something other than what is deeply inherent within the core of each and every being. If grace is gift, if God is creating love, and if ego is the sometimes necessary but often deluded impression that it is in charge of what happens -- then the prayer "Thy will" is prelude to surrender to what is true, lovely, and compassionate.

Avoid Doing Harm
If you wonder whether evil karma can be neutralized or not, then know that it is neutralized by desire for goodness. But they who knowingly do evil deeds, exchange a mouthful of food for infamy. They who knowing not wither they themselves are bound, yet presume to pose as guides for others, do injury both to themselves and others. If pain and sorrow ye desire sincerely to avoid, avoid, then, doing harm to others.
(--from W.Y. Evans-Wentz, in Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa)

Caring and careful watchfulness is our constant meditation. We watch everything within and without us. We watch with attention; and we watch with an open and (prayerfully) wise awareness when to, and when not to, engage. There is often a mysterious gap between active engagement and active surrender. Many experience themselves in that gap, betwixt and between -- unsure whether to jump or to jump,(that is, jump headlong into the engagement, or jump out of the way and settle temporarily into stillness and non-engagement). (Ask Arjuna.)

Overnight At a Mountain Monastery
Massed peaks pierce
The sky’s cold colors;
Here, the trail junctions
With the temple path.
Shooting stars pass
Into sparse-branched trees;
The moon travels one way,
Clouds the other.
Few people come
To this mountaintop;
Cranes do not flock
In the tall pines.
One Buddhist monk,
Eighty years old,
Has never heard
Of the world’s affairs.
- Chia Tao (779-843)

I've heard of the world's affairs. They are complicated and dizzying. Engaged or non-engaged -- most of us are not neighbors of that monk on his mountain top. Only in our inner vastness can those of us in the world come close to what we might call 'loving non-engagement' with the affairs of the world. We ordinarily live very close to the necessities and consequences of proximate experience living with the difficult realities of this material/temporal existence. Suffering is observed and felt. If our eyes and heart are open, suffering is observed and felt.

Jung used the term individuation “to denote a process of becoming a psychological ‘individual,’ that is, a separate, indivisible unity or whole.” To individuate is to gradually actualize our innate capacity to live as a unique individual. Jung recognized that there would be times on this journey when we are challenged to surrender the central dominance of ego to the deeper significance of what he called the “Self.” For Jung, “Self ” refers to the center of our totality--a deeper seat of wisdom that holds a sense of our innate potential as we unfold in our lives. He was not implying that the Self had some kind of ultimate existence, but that it is nevertheless experienced as a center of wholeness, just as the ego is experienced as a center of consciousness. The Self individuates us--that is to say, its “intention” is that we evolve in such a way that the relationship between the ego and the Self matures. At certain times on our journey, the ego begins to realize that it is not the prime mover, that there are forces at work that have far greater influence. The Self asserts a kind of psychological pressure on us to change and become whole, a pressure that can be extremely disquieting as the ego loses its safe, familiar ground. A major aspect of this undercurrent of change is the need to shift our understanding of what is really at the center of our lives. The shift of emphasis from the ego to the Self has been described as the shift from “I will” to “Thy will be done.” While as a Buddhist I find the notion of a Thy somewhat untenable, I have always found the sentiment of letting go to some deeper sense of purpose profoundly meaningful.
(-- from The Solace of Surrender, February 6, 2007 , By Rob Preece, in Tricycle)

What is really at the center of our lives? What is experienced as a center of wholeness? What is the shift from ego to Self? How do we move from our experience of and belief in careless separateness, to the understanding and embodiment of a core caring oneness?

One of my favorite lines in the Course, which really is a perfect definition of a miracle even though it does not use the word, says that "the holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love" (T-26. IX.6:1). Someone whom we hate, hatred being the ego's way of looking, becomes someone whom we love, and that vision of love is given to us by the Holy Spirit. What we are talking about are two different ways of looking at the world and, more specifically, looking at the relationships in our lives. One is the ego's way of looking, which is a way of seeing more and more separation, anger and guilt, justifying our anger, and making sickness real here in the body. All these perceptions really reinforce the basic ego premise that we are separate from each other and from God. The correction for that is to go from the ego's way of looking to the Holy Spirit's way of looking, and it is that shift from the ego to the Holy Spirit that is the miracle. The identical word for that process of shifting from the ego's perceptions of someone else to the Holy Spirit's, is "forgiveness."
(--from pp.6-8, in The Fifty Miracle Principles of a Course in Miracles, by Kenneth Wapnick. C.1992.)

There's something here.

One way, or another, we are asked to leap.

Compelled to leap.

Any tasty berries at hand?

Word is our landlord at the harbour shop wants the building for his brother and other purposes.

A blustery wind blows through phone calls.

Is it time to become a mindless piece piece of wood? Or would a slingshot be handier? (Ask David.)

Like A Mindless Piece Of Wood
Shantideva... mentions specific instances when it is advisable to remain like a mindless piece of wood. We can do this when our mind is very distracted or when the thought arises to belittle, slander, or abuse others. If pride, haughtiness or the intention to find fault with others arises, we can also remain impassive until our deluded motivation fades. Feeling pretentious, thinking to deceive others and wishing to praise our own qualities, wealth, or possessions are all occasions when it is wise to pretend that we are made out of wood. Whenever we have the desire to blame others, speak harshly or cause disruption we should practice this technique of non-reaction.
(--Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Meaningful to Behold)

Eleven years has been a good run. It's always a wonder the way wind moves things around.

Time to think about packing up the odds and ends that accumulate over time. Endings are beginnings seen through back of mirror.

Our vocation is to let blustery winds blow themselves out, pick up fell wood, and stack for future warming stove fire.

Brethren, how fine a thing it is to move from festival to festival, from prayer to prayer, from holy day to holy day.
(--From an Easter letter by Saint Athanasius, bishop)

Day by day.

Holy way.

(I bow.)

(As best can be done.)

How lost is lost?

Sitting in screened porch of meditation cabin for an hour last night in cold moonless silence of Ragged Mountain, nothing comes to mind. I sit in the emptiness of my life. Up path, across frozen footprints, pieces of bark from broken and fallen tree lay on icy indentations. Out behind barn, where white-lights circle on front red sliding door, ashes from once burning wood stove fire settle stiff in plastic bag by sawn harbor pilings under crusted snow. According to Hsuan-sha, that's where I might be found.

The way of buddhas is wide open, without any stages. The door of nothing is the door to liberation; having no intention is the will to help others. It is not within past, present, and future, so it cannot rise and sink; setups are counter to reality, because it is not in the realm of the created. Move, and you produce the root of birth and death; be still, and you get drunk in the village of oblivion. If movement and stillness are both erased, you fall into empty annihilation; if movement and stillness are both withdrawn, you presume upon buddha nature. You must be like a dead tree or cold ashes in the face of objects and situations while acting responsively according to time, without losing proper balance. A mirror reflects a multitude of images without their confusing its brilliance; birds fly through the air without mixing up the color of the sky.
- Hsuan-sha

Nothing makes sense. Wind blows through it. Bell-chime moves vibration through it without hindrance. Morning fragrance of something in kitchen oven downstairs comes through open door over wool socks without permission. Low rumble-groan of basement furnace says to no-one in particular that, although it is calendar spring, it is not time yet to stay unbidden and unmoving.

It is time of weakening spirit.

Come quickly and hear me, O Lord,
for my spirit is weakening.
Do not hide your face from me,
do not let me be like the dead,
who go down to the underworld.
Show me your mercy at daybreak,
because of my trust in you.
Tell me the way I should follow,
for I lift up my soul towards you.
(--from Psalm 143)

It has been a question since I first looked out over stair-shed in Bensonhurst backyard at white DeSoto near patch of grass bordered by hydrangeas. Will someone tell me the way? Or is the way looking out from the question over slanted shingled roof?

So many of my dear brothers and sisters offer, and want to tell us, the way. Some have wanted to beat it into us. Others shake their heads and say, "You are lost!" I've been grateful both for their caring and their conclusion.

Hsuan-sha's One Bright Pearl

(Dharma Discourse by John Daido Loori, Roshi. See at http://www.mro.org/zmm/teachings/daido/teisho05.php
True Dharma Eye, Case 15, Featured in Mountain Record, Fall 1996.)

The Main Case

The great master Hsuan-sha was once asked by a monk, "The entire world of the ten directions is one bright pearl.1 How can I understand the meaning of this?"2 Hsuan-sha said, "The entire world of the ten directions is one bright pearl. Why is it necessary to understand the meaning of this?"3 On the following day Hsuan-sha said to the monk,4 "The entire world of the ten directions is one bright pearl. How do you understand the meaning of this?" 5 The monk replied, "The entire world of the ten directions is one bright pearl. Why is it necessary to understand the meaning of this?"6 Hsuan-sha said, "Now I know that you are living inside a cave of demons on the black mountain."7

The Commentary

When our lives are not free of fixed positions we drown in a sea of poison. Following after another's words and mimicking others' actions is the practice of monkeys and parrots. Zen practitioners should be able to show some fresh provisions of their own. Be that as it may, you should understand that even in the cave of demons on the black mountain the one bright pearl's radiance is not diminished.

The Capping Verse

The question came from the cave of demons--
The master answered with a mudball.
Beyond telling, absolutely beyond telling,
Ultimately we can only nod to ourselves.
(--True Dharma Eye: Master Dogen's Three Hundred Koans, is a complete, modern English translation of Master Dogen's Three Hundred Koan or Chinese Shobogenzo.)

I notice this practice of nodding. When walking aisles of grocery market, when passing individuals along town streets, when looking into zendo, chapel, or cemetery, I nod, or bow -- sometimes slightly, other times profoundly -- at my companions, visible or invisible. It is beyond telling, this companioning realization.

Dear Reader

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can't help traveling together.
(--Billy Collins, The Art of Drowning, University of Pittsburgh Press)

We are composed in the open field of this...

This...what?

This lost...

(How lost?)

And...found --

Traveling together.

How lost is lost if there is only "Being!...Alone?" If nothing is between the statement and the question -- then we travel together, one by one, through this open field.

Nodding, affirming, what is here and there, in our midst.

Ultimately, (one bright rosary of circling light), we can only nod, to ourselves.

It grieves me that I have approved torture. It saddens me that my spirit is damaged by the torture I have encouraged.

"There is no such thing as a little bit of torture."(-from HBO Documentary, "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib")

We do not seem to understand how torture deteriorates and destroys the human spirit of both tortured and torturer. If anywhere in the world torture is used against other human beings, the torturers and tortured experience diminishment and horror. If America approves and condones torture, then the human spirit of Americans is deteriorating.

Our government does our bidding. And yet, by approving torture -- by allowing my representatives in the executive and legislative branches of American government to speak for me to legalize and employ torture -- I choose to abuse my spirit, doing so as the bodies of perceived enemies are abused. Is this self-abuse one of the byproducts of not recognizing my self -- not being aware of true self? If so, there is a great distance yet to traverse before coming to genuine self-knowledge and self-awareness.

Skillful Versus Unskillful
Rather than dividing thoughts into classes like "good" and "bad," Buddhist thinkers prefer to regard them as "skillful" versus "unskillful." An unskillful thought is one connected with greed, hatred, or delusion. These are thoughts that the mind most easily builds into obsessions. They are unskillful in the sense that they lead you away from the goal of Liberation. Skillful thoughts, on the other hand, are those connected with generosity, compassion, and wisdom. They are skillful in the sense that they may be used as specific remedies for unskillful thoughts, and thus can assist you toward Liberation.
(--Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English, from Everyday Mind)

We have been living in an age where private armies and mercenary forces acting with no oversight or accountability are used as substitute for US military to fight wars and carry out the wishes of powerful men often using means and tactics under deep cover and with no checks and balances. We are becoming what we fear -- lawless and unaccountable.

Return to me, says the Lord of Hosts, and I will return to you. Do not be like your ancestors, to whom the prophets in the past cried ‘Turn back from your evil ways and evil deeds’ but they would not listen.
(--Zechariah 1:3 - 4)

The morning in Maine is glowing. Today is the first day of spring. Sun shines brightly. Nature turns on its axis of retrieval.

We can, and must, retrieve our dignity. We the torturers and the tortured must work to retrieve the spirit of wholeness and compassion available to us by the grace of wholeness and the practice of compassion.

Write down how many things you want.
Meditate on how many things you need.
When you write them down
You will see
That you want millions of things.
When you meditate
You will notice
That you need only one thing
And that is God the Compassion,
God the eternal Compassion.
(- Sri Chinmoy)

Notice this need. Notice sunlight turning warmer, daylight turning brighter. Notice our spirits longing for return. Longing for a retrieving, renewing, wholeness.

I confess my unskillful acts.

I watch for -- and hope to notice -- the change.

I research antonyms of torture.

I need to practice antonymic connection with both tortured and torturer -- namely: alleviation, contentment, happiness, relief.

Let us.

Return.

And retrieve.

Wisdom attends when asked to. It demands we attend, first and foremost, in our passing through.

[1] Agaphsate dikaiosunhn oi krinonteV thn ghn fronhsate peri tou kuriou en agaqothti kai en aplothti kardiaV zhthsate auton (SOFIA SALWMWN, Wisdom of Solomon - Septuagint, 1:1)

(1: Love righteousness, ye that be judges of the earth: think of the Lord with a good (heart,) and in simplicity of heart seek him. (King James Version. Wisdom of Solomon, 1:1)

The news report says the former vice president of Iraq is hung to death from gallows for crimes committed against humanity during wartime footing, for his role in the 1982 killing of 148 Shiites. The vice president of the United States has legal protections should any future reversals or judicial inquiry implicate him in recriminations about Iraq invasion -- decisions, behaviors, and actions during that footing. America has a lot to reflect on.

An inquiry into wisdom might prove worthwhile. But wisdom, whether conventional or sacred, is itself asked to go beyond and deeper. Mystery -- radical and radiant visage of God-seeing, an openness to core and caring true reality -- is the profound longing of human heart and soul; a soul-friendship with the Lovely One with its Realization, and Engagement.

Don’t love sagehood; sagehood is an empty name. There is no special truth but this radiant spiritual openness, unobstructed and free. It is not attained by adornment and cultivated realization. From the buddhas to the Zen masters, all have transmitted this teaching, by which they attained liberation.
- Te-shan (d. 867)

What will make humanity safe from humanity is radiant spiritual openness. We listen for strains of this sound in our contemporary existence.

It still makes sense
to know the song after all.

My wiseness I wear
in despair of something better.

I am all beggar,
I am all ears.
(--from poem The Song, by Robert Creeley)

'Something better' is incarnate incorporation between/with and as what-is-revealing-itself in this world at this time with love and compassion.

I am lonely as a pelican in the wilderness,
as an owl in the ruins,
as a sparrow alone on a rooftop:
I do not sleep.
(-- from Psalm 102)

There are innumerable pilgrims walking unnoticed in the world -- praying, longing for, practicing, and encouraging one another quietly -- to come to realize, with wisdom, radiant spiritual openness.

“Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.
“Each of you must respect his father and mother.
(--from Leviticus 19:1 - 3)

Father and mother here might be wisdom and compassion. Our biological parents tried in their own way to respect their father and mother. We must also.

Do not be put off giving by a lack of resources. A generous spirit is itself great wealth, and there can be no shortage of material for generosity where it is Christ who feeds and Christ who is fed. His hand is present in all this activity: his hand, which multiplies the bread by breaking it and increases it by giving it away.
(--From a sermon by Pope St Leo the Great, in Office of Readings, Tuesday of the 4th week of Lent)

Let's be bread for one another. Bread, not gallows. Let us feed, and be fed by, one another.

There is no shortage of material for generosity. The means of delivery is radiant spiritual openness.

We with grace can become pilgrims carrying through this lovely conveyance.

Durch und durch!

(Through and through!)

Nota Bene: We note with unpassing sorrow the 4th anniversary of armed conflict between the United States and Iraq. We pray for those killed and wounded during this terrible time, and for all the families of those killed and wounded -- Iraqi, American, (and others from away). If prayer has any force, we pray for sanity, sanctity, and safety. If peace has any cogency, we extend our hands for peace.

Soft blue gray dawn on snowfell hillside this feast day of Joseph and birthday of Patricia.

St Joseph
Nothing is known of St Joseph except what is said of him in the Gospels. He was a carpenter; he accepted the will of God; and he supported Mary and brought up Jesus. From the human character of his son we can see that he was a good and responsible father. Although he is not officially a patron saint, he is widely venerated as a patron of artisans who honourably do good work with the gifts God has given them, and of workers in general. (-- from Universalis.com)

Patricia shared our mother and father. I miss asking her questions about the tucked away facts and stories of family she carried.

The learning of the sages
For a thousand years
Is just recognized in a moment
Of spiritual illumination.
- Wang Ji (1498-1583)

I pray their names today. Something about making home with hospitality and unknowing care of God-gift.

Making a Fist
by Naomi Shihab Nye

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist.

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
(--From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye.)

At the end Patricia's hand lay open on white spread that hospital midnight. And Joseph? His hands we cannot see but for tools and wood, his likenesses in churches.

Light lays quietly on hill.

Recognize this moment.

As oneself.

Vorhanden.

How we see.

Vision. Vision is how we see. Not what we see, but how. Without vision there is no seeing.

How do we see from the reality and place we are? It is an important question. Face it!

There is no other task but to know your own original face. This is called independence; the spirit is clear and free. If you say there is some particular doctrine or patriarchy, you’ll be totally cheated. Just look into your heart; there is a transcendental clarity. Just have no greed and no dependency and you will immediately attain certainty.
- Yen-t’ou (828-887)

I like the prospect that the only thing we can be certain of is our original face. This is an interesting thought -- so many of us are certain -- yet cannot face ourselves, do not see the faces of others, or...have no face.

To 'lose face', defined, is: lose face -- to do something which makes other people stop respecting you. 'He refused to admit he made a mistake because he didn't want to lose face.' (--in the Free Dictionary)

We can never lose our original face. We can only lose the face we pretend is ours, one crafted by conditioning, politics, fear, greed, lies, or dishonesty. And that face is not real, is artificial, does not really see, nor care to see the plaintive presence presenting itself before us.

To see God as He is in Himself, this is the essence of perfect happiness.
(--p. 159, from My Way of Life, Pocket Edition of Saint Thomas, The Summa Simplied for Everyone, by Walter Farrell O.P, and Martin Healy)

We get to see God by seeing what is in God's eye; we see what God is looking at by looking through our original face. God is what is looking through.

Original face is to be shown through and through moment to moment.

All that can be annihilated must be
annihilated...
the Reasoning Power in Man
This is a false Body; an Incrustation over my
immortal
Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off &
annihilated always
To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by
Self-examination.
(- William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 142
Chan Buddhism and the Prophetic Poems of William Blake)

When we observe carefully or critically, when we inspect something that captivates our attention, we open eyes and mind to what is presenting itself.

So it is we face one another.

With itself in our midst.

Enlightening...how we see.

We wake and Saskia is thrilled reading from Raimundo Panikkar's The Cosmotheandric Experience. Outside this morning snow after six inches turns to six hours of flooding, teaming rain.

Someone writes of him:

Panikkar is no obscurantist or anti-intellectualist, however, for he stresses that we must communicate what we experience. Experience must be interpreted, otherwise "myth and faith would perish the moment that the innocence of the ecstatic passes away." In fact, experience is inchoate even to the subject until it is captured first at the level of mythic expression, much of which is nonverbal, then in mythologies which cast myth into the form of narrative, then in fully conceptualized systems. where mythos, to use his term, has become logos.

Given the mythic formulations in which communication is carried on, Panikkar argues, the process must become a critical one. We must critically analyze one another’s mythologies across our cultural and religious differences in order to lay bare their roots in our experience of our differing truth claims. In this kind of dialogue, the parties must maintain their respective commitment, but they must also recognize that the ways in which they express those commitments are something less than, or a distorted picture of, the truth contained in experience itself. With this recognition comes a recovery of the humility about oneself and the veneration for the absolute transcendence of God that pluralism requires.

One assumption Panikkar makes -- one that reveals the Thomistic strain in his thought (he is a Roman Catholic priest, trained in Madrid and Rome) -- is that everyone has an experience of God (even the secularist, especially the secularist) and that everyone seeks God in the form of some absolute. This absolute is embodied in each individual’s experience in some concrete way; indeed, it can be experienced only in that particular embodiment. Thus, Panikkar insists that religious particularities cannot be dispensed with; they can be critiqued, but not discarded. Any attempt to abstract the absolute out of the concreteness of experience is doomed to fail; it is a destruction of experience itself, an intellectualizing destruction that reduces the living God to an object.
(--in, "Raimundo Panikkar: Pluralism Without Relativism," by Peter Gorday, an Episcopal priest, from article in the Christian Century, December 6, 1989.

We talk about pictures on wall, how zen dharma combat would demand something real be said about the experience in one's eye, then we follow words about the experience of meetingbrook and how it wishes to become real once more.

Rain slows. Roads wash out. Bridge across 2nd brook is 6 inches under torrent flow.

Saskia says, "Raimundo Panikkar says it for us." And he does.

His gift words our picture with Catalan Christophany.

All is between/with.

Gale gusts between mountains. Snowstorm on way. Wind chimes call to each other with news of what each one of them (and trees near by) already knows -- the wind, she blows!

All things are free-flowing, untrammeled. What bondage is there, what entanglement? You create your own difficulty and ease therein. The mind source pervades the ten directions with one continuity; those of the most excellent faculties understand naturally.
- Tzu-hu (800-880)

Thirteen gathered for Thursday Evening Conversation, ongoing Course in Miracles, about there's only one will, God's. Jack helps us through. Tom and Maria were up. (Her new valve and bypass work healing well.) The conversation and inquiry penetrates name of God, what is meant by 'will', the human response to 'what is', the ego-self and the 'higher-self', as well as how clear acknowledgment and aware surrender to what is, with compassionate engagement, is what some might call 'doing the will of God.'

To Hold

Before I left for camp, my mother sewed my name
with a firm stitch into everything I owned.
She even looped a string of nametapes
through the scissors I keep to this day on my desk.

She wanted to be sure, when she sent me into the woods,
she'd get the right child back at summer's end,
that I'd not be left in the laundry drum
like an unmarked sock. Others—

careless lazy mothers-favored marking pens,
illegible black letters bleeding into stain.

My mother knew nothing was permanent.
She'd seen how fast a child could disappear:
her two dead sisters with names like flowers:
Lily, Rose, their summery smells, indelible voices.

That's why she sewed my name so tight
on all four sides, double-knotted the knots.
So I wouldn't forget when she sent me off
into the wet, the dark, the wild: I was hers.
(Poem: "To Hold" by Jean Nordhaus, from Innocence. The Ohio State University Press.)

Deb and Diane arrived at end with 3-legged Chance the hungry dog. Deb argued that we need clear-eyed ability to judge; we discern and deliberate with the ability, even as she suggested that animals choose with swift immediacy the course of action they will take.

There's an impulse we humans have to put God elsewhere managing the details of this life imposing 'his' will on the mechanisms of this existence. I sometimes start with the phrase "what is is what is" and, from that, or with that, it seems that human beings there and then enter 'what is' with either compassionate engagement or contentious opposition. The 'will of God', then, is a co-creative communication between what is taking place with what is engaging what is take place.

If we highlight two words -- 'between' and 'with' -- from the previous sentence, I think we begin to connect what cannot be disconnected. In the 'between/with' dwells the interconnectivity of our human dwelling/divine reality. When we rhetorically or really wonder about God, we are always asking 'where' God is, and 'what' God is, even, 'whether' God is. For this morning, it seems to me, that God is between/with. The intimacy of humanity/divinity is as close and undifferentiated as intimacy of animate/inanimate, materiality/spirituality, and self/other -- all of which presents itself whole to our experience moment to moment everyday as we live and breath. (I do not know and cannot say what takes place when life and breath no longer appear in this realm whereof we now speak.)

One of the scribes who had listened to them debating and had observed how well Jesus had answered them, now came up and put a question to him, ‘Which is the first of all the commandments?’ Jesus replied, ‘This is the first: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: You must love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.’ The scribe said to him, ‘Well spoken, Master; what you have said is true: that he is one and there is no other. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and strength, and to love your neighbour as yourself, this is far more important than any holocaust or sacrifice.’ Jesus, seeing how wisely he had spoken, said, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God’. And after that no one dared to question him any more.
(--Mark 12:28 - 34, Friday Gospel, 3rd Week of Lent)

If we dared, what would we now ask?

I would ask: "Would you say more of what is 'not far'?"

He'd, no doubt, say, "What is, is 'not far'."

"No?" (And then) "Yes?" (I'd ask.)

"Yes," he'd say, "'What is' is only and all there is; 'What is' is only and all here is."

"Where is 'what is'," I'd ask.

"Who is it wants to know?" he'd ask.

He'd look at me. I'd look at him.

And there we'd be -- between one another, with one another -- the answer in the very fact and facticity of it. Question dissolves.

(Another question inevitably arises: Do we love what is between and with us? Inevitably, even this question fades. Yes?)

Only between/with one another.

Really -- that's all there is...right...here.

What-is.

Between/with.

One-another.

Learning to think comes first.

The human mind is
Empty and illuminated:
Its essence is profoundly clear.
Originally it is leaping
With life:
How could it be held fast?
- Wang Ji (1498-1583)

Learning to feel is thinking with bodies.

Philosophy is but the conscious and critical accompaniment of Man's journeying towards his destiny. This journeying is called religion in many cultures.
...[P]hilosophy, [is] that human activity which asks questions about the very foundations of human life under the heavens and on earth.
(-- Raimon Panikkar. in Religion, Philosophy and Culture )

Learning presence and compassion is thinking/feeling becoming human.

Becoming human was good enough, Christians say, for God.

Maybe you and I should try it.

Sitting on porch of meditation cabin with cat at cloudy sunrise, red squirrels jitterbug their territory near seed mesh holder hanging from tree. Inside, incense, offered to ancestors and all who have taught us hope, compassion, and charity, swirls to the guidance of breeze. Only breath. Rising. Falling. Temperature has gone from -5F to +50F in a matter of a week.

I've been reading the tale "Geser of Ling." It is fantastical legend -- the things Geser is able to do with his body and image of body during his adventures up to the age of 16 when he becomes king, are the stuff of fantasy and metaphoric excess. The imagination has to work hard to keep going with the narrative. (But, then, the fantastic does not always coincide with laws of reason and logic.)

Not so with the news report from further down-east Maine. Authorities think they know the identity of the 17 year old reported missing from home and school.

Divers end search for body of Prospect bridge jumper,
By Walter Griffin
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 - Bangor Daily News
Three witnesses saw the boy jump off the Prospect side of the bridge at approximately 7 p.m. Monday, March 5. They said the boy was not wearing a shirt and had been seen walking down the center lane before going over the side.

One witness told authorities he was driving west toward Prospect and saw a young male without a shirt lying down in the median between the lanes. The man said he stopped his vehicle and watched the youth get up and walk toward the guardrail.

Keating said the witness got within a few feet of the boy and by that time he was on the outboard side of the railing. He said that when he told the boy not to jump, the boy let go. The travel deck of the bridge is 155 feet above the river at high tide, which was at 11:55 p.m. Monday.

The Marine Patrol, U.S. Coast Guard and Bucksport Fire Department rushed to the scene and began a rescue operation. They searched up and down the river for about four hours before suspending the operation. Subzero temperatures kept searchers off the water for the next few days until the weather improved over the weekend.

We learn the height of bridge above water as well as time of high tide that evening of March 5th. We do not learn, by any external observation, what the young man was jumping from or toward. 'Bridge' and 'water' are names -- geographic references. But we cannot discern yet the mind of the lad, the history of inner thoughts, the moment of decision, the insights during flight.

We are troubled by suicide. Each one of us knows it is an option. We might be saying: "Not for me it's not!" We might note there's good reason for the strong moral and spiritual prohibition -- yet, still, we are riveted by the examples of suicide we so frequently hear about.

For now -- we pray. For him. Family. Peers. Ourselves. For all human beings distraught, for all sentient beings unsafe.

Sarvajnamitra Stansa
Some see Your form as red like the sun, with rays that are
redder still than the red of minium or red lac;
Others, as beautiful intense blue like a powder of splintered
fragments on the precious stone, sapphire;
Others again as shining like gold, or dazzling white, surpassing
the milk when the Ocean of Milk is churned.
It is a universal form, varied like crystal, since it changes
according to circumstance.
- Sarvajnamitra
(--from Poet Seers. Sarvajnamitra lived in Kashmir in the 8th Century AD. He was a Tantric Buddhist.)

Back in my room in solitude, the book on Tibetan Folk Tales falls open to a familiar story with capitalized final line cautionary note.

The Monkeys & the Moon

Once, in the distant past, there was a band of monkeys. They lived in a forest, and in the forest was a well. One night, the leader of the band of monkeys peered into the well, and seeing the reflection of the moon in the water, said:

"Look! The moon has fallen into the well; we ought to get it out or our world will be without a moon."

The other monkeys looked into the well and saw that it was indeed so. "Yes," they agreed. "We should certainly get the moon out of the well."

So the monkeys formed a chain, each holding onto the tail of the one before, while the monkey at the top of the chain held onto a branch to support them.

The branch began to bend under the weight of the monkeys as they lowered themselves into the well, and soon began to crack. The water was disturbed and the reflection of the moon disappeared, the branch broke, and the monkeys tumbled headlong into the well.

WHEN THE UNWISE HAVE AN UNWISE LEADER THEY ARE ALL LED TO RUIN. (--p.96, in Tibetan Folk Tales, by Frederick and Audrey Hyde-Chambers, c.2001)

Ours is a curious and disturbing time. Our time, with its distraught and dismayed populace either receiving the pain of war, or giving it -- with terrifying examples of destruction and corruption -- begs for, longs for wisdom. We need wisdom to emerge from our distracted and distant attention to assist us on our pilgrimage.

Some think that everything is a political wager -- a sides-taking gamble where, if the horse you back comes in first, that's all that counts. (Go to window, collect your winnings, no need to question anything.)

Our experiment with democracy delimits to questions like: Who will win? Who will assert power? Who will emerge with the prize?

Representational government (a good notion) devolves into cash and carry -- whoever pays the most money wins favor, (despite popular call to work and legislate equally on behalf each and all.) Even our image of a Supreme Court has become clouded by leftright leftright leftright appointments with pre-set ideology, and not on intelligent, sagacious, and pragmatic consideration of the matters brought for deliberation.

It is time to attend to a spiritual need more profound than the petty scorecard we keep by our chairs as we spectate the turns and flats of horse races. From premature presidential campaigns to troublesome presidential pronouncements about ghastly circumstances in a war maiming and killing without sane end in sight -- we are bombarded with political (and only political) handicapping -- and all too seldom with insightful and judicious conversation extending beyond pithy talking points of the day. We, the citizenry, are under-willed. We are wanting in the arenas of civics and governance. We are equally wanting in the realms of spirituality and personal depth.

Pundits, whether political or pastoral, want to tell us what to do. They often fail to invite us into who we are. We need to step aside -- we need to consider carefully the alarming and liberating mystery of who we are and what we are doing. It is a quest into the heart of being.

Some of the anger foisted against anyone questioning the current warlike behavior and continuing presence of the US in Iraq appears to resemble the anger we experience when we know death is coming and we feel a need to lash out at everything and everyone near the news of it.

That anger is also sorrow -- a sorrow we might have been wrong. There is (or should be) an equal sorrow we might have been right, but, O, the suffering involved! There is no joy with war. Even the most hard-bitten among us know that only sorrow and loss result from war. No ideology softens suffering. We have to travel to a more profound place -- a path leading to deep roots in dark ground of human experience -- only there do we get an inkling of authentic heart/mind .

From the book addressed to Autolycus by Saint Theophilus of Antioch, bishop
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God
If you say, “Show me your God”, I will say to you, “Show me what kind of person you are, and I will show you my God”. Show me then whether the eyes of your mind can see, and the ears of your heart hear.
It is like this. Those who can see with the eyes of their bodies are aware of what is happening in this life on earth. They get to know things that are different from each other. They distinguish light and darkness, black and white, ugliness and beauty, elegance and inelegance, proportion and lack of proportion, excess and defect. The same is true of the sounds we hear: high or low or pleasant. So it is with the ears of our heart and the eyes of our mind in their capacity to hear or see God.
(--from Office of Readings, Wednesday of the 3rd week of Lent)

The hermit's vocation is to enter the heart of being. It is sometimes a fearful visitation. Noise fades. Distinct sound emerges. Each thing, each being is clearly itself. The business (and busyness) of distraction is set aside for a while. We are faced with something clear. The experience is more like no-experience. More like actual...conveying.

There is a stillness that is a keyhole. You are the key.

What does it mean to enter the heart of being?

Turn yourself slowly.

Feel the tumbler fall.

Take a breath.

Now...

We begin this Tuesday Evening Conversation the reading and conversation flowing from Pema Chodron's No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva, a line by line study of "The Way of the Boddhisattva," by Shantideva, 8th century Indian Buddhist sage. We'll inquire into 'bodhichitta' -- awakened heart/mind.

Bodhichitta is essentially a quality of warmth, an experience of our connection with all beings and with all things. It's said traditionally that it's expressed as a wish or an aspiration, initially expressed as a strong longing or wish that nobody suffer, and that we could in some way in the course of our lifetime, as much as possible, help to alleviate suffering in the world.
(--Pema Chodron)

So much suffering.

So few awakened.

So...we look to it.

The new battle is between certainty and inquiry. It rages in government. It rages in religion. It is how people are now classified -- those who are certain and have faith, and those who are skeptical and must rely on inquiry.

For the followers of certainty, there is no doubt, they just follow the law of attraction -- if they want something, it is...and they are... right. For the proponents of inquiry, everything must be questioned -- if you seek clear and distinct facts or evidencing, you...and what you believe or hypothesize...might be wrong. In the mythology of contemporary leadership -- both in government and in religion -- the thought of being wrong is anathema, is treasonous, a betrayal of trust and loyalty.

For these brothers and sisters -- being right is the only religion, being right is the only political reality.

Thinking or feeling otherwise is like trying to imagine non-existence.

''Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it,'' the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in ''Tragic Sense of Life.'' ''The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.''
(from "Darwin's God," by Robin Marantz Henig, Published: March 4, 2007, in The New York Times)

To not exist hardly wins polling points or popularity contests. 'Worth' is predicated on existing, after all -- so too is wealth, health, and a high school diploma. Most everything becomes redundant if we might not exist. Who could buy your vote, or your house -- who would attend your yard sale, or play the notes to a favorite hymn. (Whose favorite?)

Innate knowledge is vast and great
And lofty and clear.
Originally it has no false thoughts
That can be removed.
As soon as there are false thoughts,
We have already lost the vast and great,
Lofty and clear essence.
Right now just wake up
The fundamental essence,
And the many falsities will
Dissolve away by themselves.

- Qian Dehong (1495-1574)

Our false thoughts seem to be those predicated on something wanted for partial benefit of a particular and limited constituency. These are thoughts that try to carve out some segment of populace that might threaten full benefit for 'ourselves,' exclusively.

Juxtaposed to false thoughts, innate knowledge might be conceived of as seeing things whole -- a non-separating comprehension that factors all into the course of action, and acts for the good of all, inclusively. It is possible to hear the mind of a person in their words -- some speak narrowly and negatively about almost anything appearing as threat to their particular security; others speak openly and with concern about everything involving us all. 'All' -- no exceptions.

Blood
by Naomi Shihab Nye

"A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,"
my father would say. And he'd prove it,
cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.

In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.
I changed these to fit the occasion.

Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn't have one.
After that, my father told me who he was,
"Shihab"--"shooting star"--
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, "When we die, we give it back?"
He said that's what a true Arab would say.

Today the headlines clot in my blood.
A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.
Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root
is too big for us. What flag can we wave?
I wave the flag of stone and seed,
table mat stitched in blue.

I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?

(From 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East by Naomi Shihab Nye)

To be civil is to share citizenship based on laws and customs.

For me, today, the law is 'true nature' and the custom is 'respect for the true nature of each.'

The arguments society seems to like most are no longer over such questions as 'What is right?' and 'What is wrong?' It is more personal. We now label a person right or a person wrong -- and if they are, they are right or wrong about everything.

It is becoming a frustrating and entrenched conflict between those who claim certainty, and those who clamor for inquiry. Anyone not certain is refuse, (a word played both ways).

Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says: ‘Hearing you will hear and shall not understand,
And seeing you will see and not perceive;
For the hearts of this people have grown dull.
Their ears are hard of hearing,
And their eyes they have closed,
Lest they should see with their eyes
and hear with their ears,
Lest they should understand with their hearts
and turn,
So that I should heal them.’
(--from Matt 13:10-15)

It is an ironic hearing that first catches our attention, and then sets about mending what is unclear to us. The endgame is not certainty -- at least I don't think it is. I think the endgame is doorway out from derision and division, and doorway through into appreciation for the unfathomable and unending open horizon of heart and mind.

We can become clear and concerned about one another.

I'm not certain we will.

But I'll continue to ask, to graze into the opening.

In the story, a wife is narrating about Chernobyl, the fire, and radiation -- (Lyudmilla Ignatenko’s “A Solitary Human Voice”).

(Downstairs, the sound of feet kicking slush from shoes -- meditation practitioners returning from cabin for middle room reading, silence, soup, and sharing. I am idiorhythmic, far off in shadow of solitude.)

Later the quote, " A man in motion has a chance." (--Sherman Alexie, after the reading of his story “Do You Know Where I Am?” quoting Norman Mailer)

Not knowing where I am, I have no chance. (An hour later, tires crush melting ice driving out dooryard.)

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
(-Oliver Cromwell, English general & politician, 1599 - 1658)

I am mistaken. Mistakes, not unlike lies, make fall down in fragments what once we thought whole and unbreakable. At our feet, shards and splinters form own pattern as by invisible hand. We, mistakenly, believe we have to sweep away, or pick up and reconstruct the original as good as once was. That's not it. The fragments and the pattern of fragments are at origin -- a splay of sound and color ready for new creative hand to lift.

The Poem as Mask

Orpheus

When I wrote of the women in their dances and
wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone
down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from
myself.

There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued
child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies!

Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.

(Poem by by Muriel Rukeyser, from Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems)

In the story, the man lied. His girlfriend, later as wife, also lied. Together, with blue collar effort, they work the broken.

"People never know what people need to know." (Lily, to interviewer, about appreciatory note sent to former teacher on behalf a friend now dead from knife attack; on This American Life, with Ira Glass, 11Mar07)

We need to know the truth. But it can never be told. It can only be felt. No words contain truth. But...truth makes its own way through words with feeling. We feel the truth long before it is assented to by the mind.

Jesus answered her and said: If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, perhaps you might have asked him and he would have given you living water.
(--John 4:10)

The gift of God is felt truth. (It's not only about Jesus, or Rabbis, not only about Ministers, Mullahs, or Teachings.)

Truth is about the felt reality of what is true.

Fragments -- joining within -- their own music, their own shapes.

Muriel, in her poem, says: No more masks! No more mythologies!

Listening to each solitary human voice -- with bare attention -- we serve, we drink.

Form is emptiness.

There are days I can't abide the put-down. (Not of me; not necessarily.) But any put-down. any defamation. These days it is becoming the national sport to put-down and defame. Men and women touted as leaders and iconic celebrities in arenas of news/entertainment/commentators (or politics, or religious theater) are the stars of slander, snarling insults, cruelly cutting pathological swath, sickly sweet personality vivisection. Done with smiles. To applause. For money. Lots of money.

Don’t seek a Buddha, don’t seek a teaching, don’t seek a community. Don’t seek virtue, knowledge, intellectual understanding, and so on. When feelings of defilement and purity are ended, still don’t hold to this nonseeking and consider it right. Don’t dwell at the point of ending, and don’t long for heavens or fear hells. When you are unhindered by bondage or freedom, then this is called liberation of mind and body in all places.
- Pai-chang (720-814)

Where the "not necessarily" comes in is the consideration that whatever is said of anyone is said of me. Or you. It is a felt realization. One and one do not make two. One and one remain one and one. Each one is one. No matter what mathematical or ontological solution we think will result -- no numerator nor denominator will ever reveal the heart's profound silence, the mind's exquisite unknowing. The soul's empty abundance lays bare with light the Lovely One's listening.

Put-downs put me in mind of death. Is reluctance to mock, to snigger at another's oddity, a sign of reluctance to die? Is all mockery -- on tv cable or radio -- merely today's humor, today's version of dodge-ball, where for sport another is thrown at to be rid of them?

Today I die (a while) without the grace exhibited by masters who've worded their transition.

Inhale, exhale
Forward, back
Living, dying:
Arrows, let flown each to each
Meet midway and slice
The void in aimless flight --
Thus I return to the source.
(Gesshu Soko, died January 10, 1696, at age 79)

Today I've had enough of killing civilians in Iraq. I'm done with strapping bombs to my body and walking into the marketplace. I can't again deploy with my comrades with automatic weapon ready to lay cover-fire on anybody we even slightly fear might be thinking harmful thoughts toward us. Today I will no longer smile at the camera and call insult to those who want the presidency, or have the presidency, or conceive the presidency as their private plaything.

Something dies in us each time someone (including me) slips knife between ribs slicing open heart with ripping steel coldly watching with dead eyes the suffering of another.

Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going --
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
(Kozan Ichikyo, died February 12, 1360, at 77)

A few days before his death, Kozan called his pupils together, ordered them to bury him without ceremony, and forbade them to hold services in his memory. He wrote this poem on the morning of his death, laid down his brush and died sitting upright.
(from J a p a n e s e D e a t h P o e m s, Salon.com)

How does that joke go? "What does the upside-down flying duck do?" ... "Quack-up!"

Mine is a pathetic quack-up today.

A little weary of intolerance, I cannot abide (i.e. tolerate) intolerance today.

O

(Shinsui, died September 9, 1769, at 49.)
During his last moment, Shisui's followers requested that he write a death poem. He grasped his brush, painted a circle, cast the brush aside, and died.)

The circle is one of the most important symbols of Zen Buddhism. It indicates void -- the essence of all things -- and enlightenment.

I'll keep you informed.

Keep me informed.

Absolutely!
No one will find this form after today --
No...One will!
(-wfh)

If we keep one another "in-formed," will we learn what circle originates?

Let's keep one-another informed.

Emptiness in form.

(Is.)

On Friday's C-Span Washington Journal with Brian Lamb (thanks be for him) -- Pamela Hess of UPI passionately recounts her recent visit to Iraq. She says that no matter how wrong the initial invasion might have been, right now our soldiers are fighting to protect human beings -- Iraqis -- from very evil torturers and murderers in an insane environment. She cries. (She says she is tired from jet-lag, lack of sleep, and her return two days ago from 4th trip there.) She is compelling. Callers, as is to be expected, support and don't support her narrative and conclusions. No one doubts her very personal passion based on direct experience with soldiers in-country relating their day to day lives there.

"What's wrong," (wrote poet Richard Hugo opening his poem 'Villager'), "will always be wrong." It's hard to counter that the invasion, its rationale, and strategic decisions accompanying, were terribly and tragically flawed. "What's right," (I submit), "is each time created new." It is beyond ripeness to admit the flaws and join creatively the (absurdly) contentious political opposition, and to submit to a sane and sensible next step in the attempt to heal the ugly wound made septic in Iraq.

I'm not sure "truth" -- certainly not any definition of truth -- is the issue here.
What is here for us to look at and engage is compassion. Compassion for the people of Iraq, for the dutiful military there, and for the millions of people in the world deeply disturbed over the course of events and incidents of horror taking place there.

Thus the Diamond Cutter Scripture says, “Do not grasp truth, do not grasp untruth, and do not grasp that which is not untrue.” It also says, “The truth that the buddhas find has no reality or unreality.”
- Pai-chang (720-814)

What is unlovely is unlovely -- we must not pretend otherwise, must not call the unlovely lovely. Nor is it ours to call the what is lovely...unlovely. Perhaps what we must learn is how to engage what is there directly, without concepts or ideology, but with engaged compassion for (and with) what is there.

Jesus: "Everyone on the side of truth listens to me."
Pilate: "What is truth?"
(--from John 18: 37-38)

Jesus speaks for all beings when he says "Listen to me."
Pilate helps Jesus' plea with not so much a delaying question or feigned ignorance -- but rather with a request coming from an intuitive grasp of what Jesus is revealing. Pilate is asking, saying: "When you say 'truth' you mean 'What-is' truth, don't you?"

Pilate and Jesus are two characters in a divine dramatic dialogue pointing to the real unveiling reality of what is taking place, right there, right then -- immediate and concrete.

What happens for us -- as the zen head-shaking experience attests -- is we look at the fingers that are pointing, and not at what the fingers are pointing to. We want to 'know' what truth is (in this case, the pointing fingers of the dialogue), instead of entering and engaging the reality of what is taking place (what the fingers point to).

In the dramatis personae of Jesus and Pilate, it was (as often and insufferably repetitious as continues today) the punishment and torture of innocent beings for political, economic, or personal gain of the perpetrators. Jesus' story in this beloved narrative is the story of the history of humankind. It is less (one might say) about the redemption of man from sin -- as it is about the entering with, identification with, and engagement with of the reality at hand in a humble presencing of compassion.

Dishwater

Slap of the screen door, flat knock
of my grandmother's boxy black shoes
on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep
of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride
out to the edge and then, toed in
with a furious twist and heave,
a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands
and hangs there shining for fifty years
over the mystified chickens,
over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,
the clay slope down to the creek,
over the redwing blackbirds in the tops
of the willows, a glorious rainbow
with an empty dishpan swinging at one end.
(--Poem: "Dishwater" by Ted Kooser from Delights and Shadows.)

We've dirty dishes in our sinks -- here in Camden, Maine -- and here in the hidden kitchens of the halls of power. There is wash-up to do.

One of the tasks of Lent in the Christian metaphor is to attend to the matter at hand and make the attempt to see it as it is. This, and the further attempt to recognize the loveliness that resides at center. This penetrating gaze necessitates a non-denying, authentic appraisal and admission that whatever is blocking or obfuscating the clear manifestation of loveliness must be attended to without hesitation, without explanation, and without blame.

It is quite possible that we are made and we are here for light and loveliness and compassion.

Pardon me my opacity.

Help me make peace.

With what I am.

Here.

For.

I don't know the Name of the Most High. Some claim they do.

"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so."(--Mark Train)

Some pronounce the Name of the Lord: "Death to infidels" Some, "War on Terror." Others say it is: "You're wrong! I'm right." There are some men in the United States who think the name of god is "I am the commander in chief. I do not have to obey any laws I wish not to obey." This last name is particularly repugnant.

I've wondered about this name for a long time. I've long wondered why so many have such odd pronunciation. I wonder what it is about religion that deafens many to the true and lovely sound which is The Name Itself.

First, it was more about mystery than about trying to get us to behave. Whichever, we're still in some lonely cave, not far from that moment a lightning storm or a sunset drove us to invent the upper reaches of the sky. Religion is proof that a good story, well-told, is a powerful thing. Proof, too, that terror makes fabulists of us all. We're pitiful, finally, and so oddly valiant. The dead god rising into ism after ism-that longing for coherence that keeps us, if not naive, historically challenged. To love Christ you must love the Buddha, to love Mohammed or Moses you must love Confucius and, say, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as well. They were all wise and unsponsored and insufficient, some of the best of us. I'm saying this to myself: the sacred cannot be found unless you give up some old version of it. And when you do, mon semblable, mon frere, I swear there'll be an emptiness it'll take a lifetime to fill. Indulge, become capacious, give up nothing, Jack my corner grocer said. He was pushing the portobellos, but I was listening with that other, my neediest ear.
("Religion," prose poem by Stephen Dunn, in American Poetry Review, Mar/Apr 1998)

This week I heard the Name. Here's how I pronounce what I heard:

"Father/Mother God" is "This Lovely One."

"Son/Christ" is "This Realization of Loveliness in All Beings, Places, and Things."

"Holy Spirit" is "This Inviting Creativity to Practice and Engage This Realization of Loveliness with the Lovely One."

Dunn nails it: “...the sacred cannot be found unless you give up some old version of it. And when you do,...I swear there’ll be an emptiness it’ll take a lifetime to fill."

Do you know how to fill emptiness?

Right.

You don't.

(Don't try to fill emptiness, that is.)

What is passing through has nothing to do with full or empty. What is passing through is the sound of the name everyone longs to hear.

Sweet, sweet listening to us all!

We see what the sun sees before we see the sun.

Bald Mountain is seen by sun and wakes to sunlight descending from its peak. It is said the sun rises. Living with mountains, we learn that sun sleeps at night in mountain cave hidden by trees. At sundown dusk sunlight climbs Bald trailing shadow of Ragged like child dragging blanket and disappears. At sunrise dawn sunlight stretches at top of Bald, looks about, shakes itself from reveries, and climbs down mountain to backyards and dooryards, kitchen windows and zendo floors where ceder incense (in its own oblation of praise remembrance) curls aloft with joy in its gifting intention honoring ancestors, loved ones (known and unknown), a prayer for those suffering, good journey to those transitioning from this life, imploration of forgiveness, acceptance, and understanding nascent in all beings, and (finally) -- with humility -- assenting presence (given and received) in the sacred name of the Lovely One in our midst, a not-knowing trust we shall come to serve and see what This Lovely One longs to have us serve and see.

One another.

In dark night live those for whom
The world without alone is real;
In night darker still, for who
The world within alone is real.
The first leads to a life of action,
The second to a life of meditation.
But those who combine action with
Meditation cross the sea of death
Through action and enter into
Immortality through the practice of
Meditation.
So we have heard from the wise.
- Isha Upanishad

White rope is tied between top-carriers on blue beetle VW by barn door. Sunflower seed pours from saucepan to mesh feeder up from meditation cabin. Old dog slips and sits on icy crusts up path to unmoving brook leaving droppings of good food gone through. Cabin is empty quiet with bare attention.

Parents

What it must be like to be an angel
or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.

The last time we go to bed good,
they are there, lying about darkness.

They dandle us once too often,
these friends who become our enemies.

Suddenly one day, their juniors
are as old as we yearn to be.

They get wrinkles where it is better
smooth, odd coughs, and smells.

It is grotesque how they go on
loving us, we go on loving them.

The effrontery, barely imaginable,
of having caused us. And of how.

Their lives: surely
we can do better than that.

This goes on for a long time. Everything
they do is wrong, and the worst thing,

they all do it, is to die,
taking with them the last explanation,

how we came out of the wet sea
or wherever they got us from,

taking the last link
of that chain with them.

Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling,
to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren.
(Poem: "Parents" by William Meredith, from The Cheer.)

My parents have gone up mountain and decided to remain there, hidden, these many years. They found a place to slumber and awaken where sun goes at night, that fantastical middle ground heaven of transparent invisibility we, in our seeming solidity, pass through, unknowing, every breath and every step we take. This is, I suppose, as it should be -- our given task to make our way through everything so to arrive at the very place we now are.

So, too, with This Lovely One (once called "God"), and what we have called the "Son" -- (now, The Realization of Loveliness in All Beings, Things, and Places).

Namely: We see what the Lovely One sees before we see the Lovely One.

We see what the Son sees before we see the Son.

We are invited to look. We are encouraged to see. We are graced with the never-ending hospitality of the ever-arriving Realization of Loveliness in All Beings, Things, and Places.

Dandle us, O Lovely One -- move us (we small children) up and down on your knees and in your arms in a playful way!

No explanation. No last link. No comprehending need to wrap up the Mystery in yesterday's newspaper and toss it in the corner.

Rather, walk us up and down the mountain -- as we, each and every one of us, do -- one step at a time, one fall, one getting up, one smile of silent companioning through and with one another making way. We walk with mountain as we walk (or roll, or sit, or bed) through each breath, one inhalation one exhalation at a time, one face at a time, one bite of breakfast, one sip of awareness at this time.

(Cat rushes in from -1 below zero cold barn. Wood burns in black wood stove. Smoke glances every direction rising from chimney, dances shadow sunlit snow on shy hill outside kitchen window. Solitary Nuthatch on tree trunk converses with sunlight about this and that.)

This is the way to go.

So we have heard from the wise.

(Sound of drape being opened from front room after steps announce a friend.)