Shoveling 8.8 ton of crushed stone today.

17, 660 lbs of it.

With wings, I'll fly in the sky,
Like a fish, I'll dive into deep waters.
Only a fool reads his dream in a dream!
He doesn't know his body's in the furnace.
- Jungkwan Haean (b 1567)

You do things when you have to.

Everything hurts.

Tomorrow, on Pentecost Sunday, we'll dedicate the Thomas Merton Bookshed Retreat.

We'll wish upon a stone. We'll be blessed by it.

Between the stone and the ground there's nothing to be said by anyone not one or the other of them.

There's only the story told by the hearts of the falling stone and the receiving ground.

Creative blest. Take up thy rest.

What is the Holy Spirit?

Passion for creative truth?

The mind of a Wayfarer is plain and direct, without artificiality. There is no rejection and no attachment, no deceptive wandering mind. At all times seeing and hearing are normal. There are no further details. One does not, furthermore, close the eyes or shut the ears; as long as feelings do not stick to things, that will do.
- Kuei-Shan (771-854)

What if the Holy Spirit is the absence of fear? What if the absence of fear is no judgment? What if no judgment is love?

If love is freedom and truth with compassion is love, then the Holy Spirit is what you are when no one other is home.

Consider being awake and being asleep. Consider the world of illusion and the world of enlightenment. Consider form and emptiness.

There is nothing in-between.

That nothing is the Holy Spirit.

One and the other have no separation.

This no separation is nothing in-between.

See this, see the Holy Spirit.

Pentecost approaches.

Guilt is when we think we are responsible for things not being the way we think they should be.

The point is that things are always and only the way they are.

Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.
(-- from Existentialism Is a Humanism, by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1946)

The antidote to guilt is awareness.

To live without fear is to live with no judging.

To relinquish judgment is to live without fear.

That would be freeing.

The earth is already awake. It is man that sleeps.

Cut and drilled into, the blue cliff
Has lost its original beauty,
And frightens the birds,
And spills dirt into your eyes.
Nirvana has nothing to do with stones.
Enlightenment isn't limited to man.
Mountains, water, and earth
Are the Buddha's bodies.
- Jungkwan Haean (b 1567)

When man awakens, earth will take its long deserved rest.

Ground receives all patiently.

It is the intention to live aware of the movement of God through the distortions, distractions, and diversions which occur to the contemplative in the midst of the matrix seething with seeming and dissimilation. That intention is the heart of the spiritual life.

That intention is what some have called 'faith' without knowing that their term 'faith' might not be faith at all, but control in costume and disguise.

There is only uncertainty. That's where faith resides undetected by policy, police, and authority in any guise.

Evening mountains veiled in somber mist,
One path entering the wooded hill:
The monk has gone off, locking his pine door.
From a bamboo pipe a lonely trickle of water flows.
- Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672)

In the Benedictine tradition seven times a day there is a stopping to remember the intention to live in God even through chaos and even though creeds and critics say, "No, not here, somewhere else, look there, wherever that is."

As I ponder Merwin, a collaborating student sends me Eliot:

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment

Not a moment too soon.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
(--from poem, East Coker, by T.S. Eliot)

New and shocking valuation. Every moment. We refuse God when we try to sit God in some place we can explain.

TERM

At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through
all its uses and circumstances to
utter at last that meaning of its own
for which it had long been the only word
though it seems now that any word would do
(Poem by W.S. Merwin)

I remember poet Richard Hugo's valediction: "Take my word, it's been fun."

He never said which word. But we took it, whichever it was.

And are grateful for it.

Poetry, like our life, is...in a word, periphrastic.

(Dictionary: ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek periphrastikos, from periphrazein ‘declare in a roundabout way.’)

Do you think?

Metaphors annoy some folks. They're so... associative.

His disciples said to Jesus, ‘Now you are speaking plainly and not using metaphors! Now we see that you know everything, and do not have to wait for questions to be put into words; because of this we believe that you came from God.’ (from John 16:29-33)

Heidegger said the past is before us. Not prior to, but stretching ahead of us. Funny thought, eh?

Jesus answered them:
‘Do you believe at last?
Listen; the time will come – in fact it has come already –
when you will be scattered,
each going his own way and leaving me alone. (Ibid)

Maybe Jesus wanted to be left alone. I like the idea he might have said, "Leave me alone!"

Scatter. Go your own way. Believe at. Last.

Once you've heard the word 'what-is' (German 'was ist') -- what is 'vorhanden' ('right there') -- there's no one to lead nor anyone to follow. Christ knew what he was... saying what is right before us.

Know one thing, know everything. Even as it comes to be before and beyond us.

Seek your own Buddha within.

No need to ask others about your father.

If you glimpse your mother's original face,

You'll know everything is Buddha.
- Jaewol Kyunghun (1542-1632)

Associate with peacemakers.

I belong to the HERE Church. It exists between my Catholic Christian Contemplative practice/faith and my Buddhist Engaged Meditative practice/faith. HERE stands for "Help each revere each."

There's only one requirement: You have to be there to be here.

Be human. Dasein.

Here there.

We are being spoken.

"It is not we who speak language, but language which speaks us." (George Steiner quoting Martin Heidegger)

Say what you will, we remain what God is speaking.

Every sound, beat, and arrhythmic fluttering skip.

Ellipses in a kindred loving sentence...

Speech and act reveal our fate.

Tonight we watch the 1997 Academy Award-nominated documentary directed by William Gazecki, Waco: Rules of Engagement, as well as final segments of MSNBC's The [Timothy] McVeigh Tapes.

Horrible and horrible. (Not the film or tapes, both were engaging, but the underlying deception of the ATF and FBI in the first, and the course of stated/actual response by McVeigh in the second.)

The government and the former soldier.

It's little wonder trust -- as well as language -- has been pulverized.

Augustine of Hippo said:

"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."

(As quoted in Spirituality and Liberation: Overcoming the Great Fallacy (1988) by Robert McAfee Brown, p. 136)

Thomas Merton said,

"But first we realize that we are going to have to create a new language of prayer.'

(from closing statements and prayer from an informal address delivered in Calcutta, India (October 1968), from The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, 1975)

Trust no one?

No, trust the one not asking for trust. One displaying authentic words not trying to convince, excuse, or explain. Language must be allowed to speak for itself and thereby act for itself. We know true sound.

Trust the one whose acts are right and true in harmony with wholeness of sight. No cameras, no payoff, no applause, no promotion or public relations coup attached. We know correct action.

Our time is out of joint. It is halved and quartered. What we know in our profound and hidden center of being is flayed and minced by opportunistic, heartless, and core-less demagogues.

It is a harsh and dangerous time. Nevertheless, we must be prepared for larger and more devious lies.

But, take heart.

Silence originates authentic speech.

Stillness is ever-present origin of healing act.

Prayer pushes through the hardest ground, springing a deeper more redolent hope.

From down the hall in emergency room last evening a lament of tears that continued for a while.

In the sound of this weeping there is for me only the act of prayer.

The Strangeness of Mountains after Rain



When rain-washed coils of mountain

Appear in the sky


A refreshing wind sweeps away


The fog and clouds. 

Where did you acquire the mastery

Of Yongmyon


To paint exquisite beauty

Beyond human art? 

- Jaewol Kyunghun (1542-1632)

Perhaps the Ascension is the realization nothing remains as it was, there's a need to transcend into the facticity of the sacred -- human, natural, everyday reality. Where kindness is kindled.

We are grateful for relief from any suffering and sorrow.

The heart grows weary only when it forgets compassion.

I've thought about this.

consequence [ˈkɒnsɪkwəns]
n
1. a result or effect of some previous occurrence
2. an unpleasant result (esp in the phrase take the consequences)
3. (Philosophy / Logic) significance or importance it's of no consequence a man of consequence
4. (Philosophy / Logic) Logic
a. a conclusion reached by reasoning
b. the conclusion of an argument
c. the relations between the conclusion and the premises of a valid argument
5. the relation between an effect and its cause
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/consequence

Contemplate 'not.'

Not a result. Not unpleasent. Not by reasoning. Not a conclusion. Not a syllogism. Not cause and effect.

God is what is God.

Questions accepted.

No one here.

No one there.

Still, God is.

Every.

Where.

Is.

Inconsequential. That's what we are. Inconsequential.

Nothing to follow.

I can't sleep on the pavilion,

With the lonely lamp burning

On the wall. 


An occasional breath of air 

Outside the window, 


The falling sound of

Pine cones in the yard.

- Jungkwan Ilson (1533-1608)

Perhaps God is inconsequential.

Nothing follows God.

Nothing before, nothing after.

Nothing other. No other.

God.

Of which.

We are.

Monastics.

Just keep moving. Of course you can't go home again. You've never left. You are your home. There is no old neighborhood.

People of the way journey through the world

Responding to conditions,

Carefree and without restraint.

Like clouds finally raining,

Like moonlight following the current,

Like orchids growing in shade,

Like spring arising in everything,

They act without mind,

They respond with certainty.

- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091–1157)

I'm certain the nostalgia and shivers thinking back to the streets of my youth and the subway cars of my schooling are crumpled wax paper with olive oil drippings better tossed into corner trash cans. The football player who had to sideline with a heart murmur retires from NYPD after 20 years then dies in 1984 from heart attack, says a Bay Ridge Forum. We'd be on the same train until 59th Street when he'd exit for the 4th Avenue Local. We travelled to 186 N. 6th Street in Williamsburg. For unknown reasons I sign into alumni site of my high school. Drifting. Backwards. Fifty years.

Days of 1964

By James Merrill

Houses, an embassy, the hospital.
Our neighborhood sun-cured if trembling still
In pools of the night’s rain . . .
Across the street that led to the center of town
A steep hill kept one company part way
Or could be climbed in twenty minutes
For some literally breathtaking views,
Framed by umbrella pines, of city and sea.
Underfoot, cyclamen, autumn crocus grew
Spangled as with fine sweat among the relics
Of good times had by all. If not Olympus,
An out-of-earshot, year-round hillside revel.

I brought home flowers from my climbs.
Kyria Kleo who cleans for us
Put them in water, sighing Virgin, Virgin.
Her legs hurt. She wore brown, was fat, past fifty,
And looked like a Palmyra matron
Copied in lard and horsehair. How she loved
You, me, loved us all, the bird, the cat!
I think now she was love. She sighed and glistened
All day with it, or pain, or both.
(We did not notably communicate.)
She lived nearby with her pious mother
And wastrel son. She called me her real son.

I paid her generously, I dare say.
Love makes one generous. Look at us. We’d known
Each other so briefly that instead of sleeping
We lay whole nights, open, in the lamplight,
And gazed, or traded stories.

One hour comes back—you gasping in my arms
With love, or laughter, or both,
I having just remembered and told you
What I’d looked up to see on my way downtown at noon:

poor old Kleo, her aching legs,
Trudging into the pines. I called.
Called three times before she turned.
Above a tight, skyblue sweater, her face
Was painted. Yes. Her face was painted
Clown-white, white of the moon by daylight,
Lidded with pearl, mouth a poinsettia leaf.
Eat me, pay me—the erotic mask
Worn the world over by illusion
To weddings of itself and simple need.

Startled mute, we had stared—was love illusion?—
And gone our ways. Next, I was crossing a square
In which a moveable outdoor market’s
Vegetables, chickens, pottery kept materializing
Through a dream-press of hagglers each at heart
Leery lest he be taken, plucked,
The bird, the flower of that November mildness,
Self lost up soft clay paths, or found, foothold,
Where the bud throbs awake
The better to be nipped, self on its knees in mud—
Here I stopped cold, for both our sakes;

And calmer on my way home bought us fruit.

Forgive me if you read this. (And may Kyria Kleo,
Should someone ever put it into Greek
And read it aloud to her, forgive me, too.)
I had gone so long without loving,
I hardly knew what I was thinking.

Where I hid my face, your touch, quick, merciful,
Blindfolded me. A god breathed from my lips.
If that was illusion I wanted it to last long;
To dwell, for its daily pittance, with us there,
Cleaning and watering, sighing with love or pain.
I hoped it would climb when it needed to the heights
Even of degradation as I for one
Seemed, those days, to be always climbing

Into a world of wild
Flowers, feasting, tears— or was I falling, legs
Buckling, heights, depths,
Into a pool of each night’s rain?
But you were everywhere beside me, masked,
As who was not, in laughter, pain, and love.

(Poem by James Merrill, “Days of 1964” from Collected Poems. Copyright 2001 by James Merrill.) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179111

Some people are love. When we see that, we are lucky. Then, of course, we have to recognize that observing is being observed. I have not always observed well.

We have not looked at Iraq carefully. It is in pain today.

Coordinated Attacks Kill More Than 100 in Iraq
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: May 10, 2010
BAGHDAD — A series of attacks in Baghdad and other cities across Iraq on Monday struck police and army checkpoints, as well as markets, a mayor’s office and a textile factory. The violence appeared to be a coordinated rebuttal of assertions by Iraqi and American commanders that Al Qaeda in Iraq and other extremist groups had suffered debilitating blows in recent weeks.

The attacks, which killed at least 101 people and wounded hundreds more, occurred amid a protracted dispute over the results of the country’s election more than two months ago. Even as the violence continued to unfold across the country through the day, officials blamed the political impasse for creating a security vacuum that extremists hoped to exploit. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html?hpw

Elections -- those fragile attempts to clarify leadership. It is disheartening to read of the number of casualties since 2003 in Iraq. As the United States changed administrations and those responsible for the initial incursion retire with hefty pensions, the attitude of incensed antipathy shifts to expectancy of withdrawal. With little hope of any change there, US forces pack up for Afghanistan or return home with uncertain understanding of what has occurred, inconclusive appreciation of the pain and disaster in the wake.

Casualties of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (beginning with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and continuing with the ensuing occupation of Iraq coalition presence, as well as the activities of the various armed groups operating in the country) have come in many forms, and the accuracy of the information available on different types of Iraq War casualties varies greatly.
The table below summarizes some of the Iraqi casualty figures.
Source Iraqi casualties March 2003 to...
Iraq Family Health Survey --151,000 violent deaths. -- June 2006
Lancet survey -- 601,027 violent deaths out of 654,965 excess deaths. --- June 2006
Opinion Research Business survey -- 1,033,000 violent deaths as a result of the conflict. -- August 2007
Associated Press -- 110,600 violent deaths -- April 2009
Iraq Body Count -- 95,888 – 104,595 violent civilian deaths as a result of the conflict. -- April 2010

For troops in the U.S.-led multinational coalition, the death toll is carefully tracked and updated daily, and the names and photographs of those killed in action as well as in accidents have been published widely. Regarding the Iraqis, however, information on both military and civilian casualties is both less precise and less consistent. Estimates of casualty levels are available from reporters on the scene, from officials of involved organizations, and from groups that summarize information on incidents reported in the news media. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

I look out at spring new-green leaf growth on old and tired trees surprised by what they bring forth from within them. This chilly day. This reviving New England earth.

We pray. With chant. To the open. To what is true within and without.

It is a small thing.

Prayer.

It is one of the places love goes when it has no place else to go.

When hearts groan with brokenness and lament.

At Rockport Harbor this morning with coffee and muffin reading New York Times as dogs on other side of Goose Fare run across Marine Park and wind blows clear and bright.

Front page story about "Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric, [who] has become a central figure in the luring of Western Muslims to violent extremism."

It is one of those stories we're invited to ask how it is a moderate Imam American citizen can turn into an America hating advocate of violence. It would be standard fare -- Who can trust a Muslim? -- except for a nagging question between sips of Dark Roast Sumatra and bites into berry muffin.

That question asks: When is it that ordinary people who have grown tired of the dual citizenship demarcating the rich and powerful -- (Insurance, Wall Street, Banks, Corporations, Legislators, Justices, Executives, Celebrity News Guys and Gals and Entertainers, Pentagon Military and Private Contractors, not to mention the Hierarchy in Churches and other segments of the American Culture that Lord it over the ordinary citizen, common man and woman, main street people, lay persons of every stripe, hoi polloi, the rest of us, we citizens, nobodies, children of life, of god) -- what was I saying? -- oh yes, how is it there's not more of a ruckus of rebellion against the heavy-handed, sweet-talking, there-thereing, false dualisms that contend there is no real problem, only a disagreement between two factions of anything -- left/right, conservative/liberal, haves/have-nots, professionals/amateurs, sophisticates/rubes, the health-insured/the uninsured.(?) (It was, I think, intended as a question.)

These distracting dichotomies serve stasis well. Divisions manage to cement fractures permanently.

BREAKAGE

I go down to the edge of the sea.

How everything shines in the morning light!

The cusp of the whelk,

the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened, blue mussels,

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,

dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

(Poem by Mary Oliver)

So bombs and bullets won't work because innocent people tend to get hurt and, let's face it, who can have more bombs and bullets than a power structure whose very economy is based on bombs and bullets. No, something more effective must be found to counter-balance the terror of extremists and governments.

Both are bullies. Both demand absolute control. Punishment prevails. Secrecy and submission is sacred demand. Nature has been replaced by profit, love by national security, and realization of God replaced by conformity to rote and rite.

The mind of the sage is
Empty and calm,
Profoundly calm,
Dealing with the world
Harmoniously
Like bellows taking in air,
Like pipes containing music.
- Chen Ting-Van

I'm no sage.

Disquiet palpitates like Sunday afternoon restless winds where everything appears to be uprooting with passing uncertainty and systems of vagrant restlessness.

For balance some choose suicide. Others self-sacrifice. (A curious distinction made by the subject of the Times story.) One can't be condoned. The other is tribute.

Trappist Thomas Keating when asked about the beginnings of his vocation demurred with the statement he was trying to forget his self and thus would have to think a bit harder to answer the question.

We're all terrified. Either by mass murderers wearing religious insignias or mass murderers wearing military patches. Ordinary Americans are unsure whether to more fear foreign terrorists or their own government. Yet, everyone has a rationale, a creed, a policy, or a self-serving belief they are right in killing and bullying people to advance agendas that make sense only to them and those they pay handsomely to vote or trigger with their views.

This is what we have heard from him,
and the message that we are announcing to you:
God is light; there is no darkness in him at all.
If we say that we are in union with God
while we are living in darkness,
we are lying because we are not living the truth.
But if we live our lives in the light,
as he is in the light,
we are in union with one another,
and the blood of Jesus, his Son,
purifies us from all sin.
If we say we have no sin in us;
we are deceiving ourselves
and refusing to admit the truth;
but if we acknowledge our sins,
then God who is faithful and just
will forgive our sins and purify us
from everything that is wrong.
To say that we have never sinned
is to call God a liar
and to show that his word is not in us.
(--from 1 John 1:1-10)

There are times the words of Christian scripture annoy me as well as their oft-quoting followers. Then there are times they seem to nail the problem squarely into our barn doors.

So much is wrong.

What is right?

We must begin, slowly, to pause a while, to read the whole story.

The story of the Cosmos. The story of God. The story of Humankind. It is our own story.

Then to read the fractured syntax and corrupted phrases, the mad rantings and the sickly-liquored contortions of thought we are given instead of sane, clear, sensible, conversation about our lives.

This too is our own story.

We've got to enter the telling.

We've got to learn how to speak.

Green leaves give cover to earth and landing pad to sky. Rain nudges new canopy. Green seclusion. Light wanders off to resting place.

This stillness soothes.

Fallen leaves hide the mountain path.

No one around to ask directions. 

An old monk sweeps the ground.

A novice rushes up to greet me. 

- Jungkwan Ilson (1533-1608)

We're thinking of conducting a new set of meetings. They'll be called, "Talking of Death," (ToD). We'll talk of death, our own and other's. Nothing fancy. Just talking.

We'll try it in a Pilot to Practice series at Tuesday Evening Conversations.

In his book How We Die, Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland writes, "Death belongs to the dying and to those who love them." Clearly, it should. But it doesn't. It belongs to doctors and hospitals and drug manufacturers and insurance programs and policy-makers, all of whom drive the direction of our care and treatment. They own our final days and months. They own our dying. They own it because, over the past several decades, we have turned it over to them. We have ceded control, and now we don't know enough about the process to redirect it or regain control over it.

It doesn't have to be this way. We can reclaim death. We have the power to change it, to make it ours again.

(--Excerpted from Talking About Death Won't Kill You. Copyright 2001 by Virginia Morris.)

Death is personal.

Intimate.

Deserving our words.

Like light nearing dusk in heavy rain.

We can lose our soul.

If we do not use awareness to recognize our soul surrounds us, we lose both awareness and soul.

Time for a walk in the world outside

And a look at who I am

Originally I had no cares


And I am seeking nothing special


Even for my guests I have nothing

To offer except these white stones

And this clear spring water.

- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)

O'Donohue suggests the body is in the soul.

If we are aware of what surrounds us and that of which we are part, we help create soul as the whole of re-integration of inner and outer.

We save our soul.

Hal.

Lelu.

Jah.

Parker Palmer speaks of the soul as being shy, original, wild, natural, and elemental best glimpsed by silence and stillness.

Deep hearing, then, is not just an auditory sensation, involving the ear, but a matter of the whole . 'Deep hearing of the Dharma' means embodying the Buddha Dharma, an experiential awakening of the total self, conscious and unconscious, mind and body.
-Rev. Taitetsu Unno "Sound Meditation" (Fall 1999) Tricycle

The ground of Being is compassion, love, forgiveness, and equality. Do you want to use the word "God"?

Call it what you will. The name doesn't matter.

What matters is that you are what those words indicate.

What matters is the activity of Being.

Doing what words are.

Embodying them.

Souling.

Stillness.

In act.

Final class. Final course...
Heart shouts. Mind quiets. Things pass --
Something about mother 29 years Cinco de Mayo

Of course you can't change the past. You can only change your mind. Once the mind changes, there is no past.

The wind in the pines

Cleans one's ears, 

The song of the stream

Invokes the spirit of a dream.

After the prayer for the dead,

I drink a cup of tea, 

The wind and the moon

Always befriend me.

- Jungkwan Ilson (1533-1608)

Of course I am dying. I can only change my thinking. Once thinking changes, there is no death.

  The world of dew  

is the world of dew,    

      And yet, and yet-- 

--Kobayashi Issa, (1763-1827)

Life has been good. The 85 year old man said he was closer to death than I was. Nah, I said, it happens in a flash, with each breath. He was just shutting down quicker with age. Death is not concerned with age.

Marching

At dawn I heard among bird calls
the billions of marching feet in the churn
and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet
still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid,
and very old halting feet, the feet
of the very light and very heavy, all marching
but not together, criss-crossing at every angle
with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump
into each other, walking in the doors of houses
and out the back door forty years later, finally
knowing that time collapses on a single
plateau where they were all their lives,
knowing that time stops when the heart stops
as they walk off the earth into the night air.

("Marching," from Jim Harrison's "Saving Daylight" 2006)

I'm not much interested as to where things go from here. Time is borrowed. I don't like loans.

The world no longer makes sense. There's not much sense heard in political, economic, religious, or academic corridors. Niches are carved. Wallets are stuffed. Ballots are bought. Concepts are bandied.

Hello must only be hello. Goodbye, goodbye.

It's hard to figure out what the fuss is.

Here's my mind. Lose it, please.

Better still, ignore it.

What is in where? Who is in whom? When are we in the place we are?

The questions have ramifications. I am caught wondering if the woman at reception desk, nurse at station, man in wheelchair rolling down corridor for lunch -- (all three in Belfast)-- whether these are contemporary expressions of someone named Siddhartha in India, Kuan Yin in China, or Jesus in Palestine.

What is in each? What is each in? In the realm of unknowing mystery and benevolent ignorance, who can claim to know what cannot be known?

the great advantage of being alive

the great advantage of being alive
(instead of undying) is not so much
that mind no more can disprove than prove
what heart may feel and soul may touch
--the great(my darling)happens to be
that love are in we,that love are in we

and here is a secret they never will share
for whom create is less than have
or one times one than when times where--
that we are in love,that we are in love:
with us they've nothing times nothing to do
(for love are in we am in i are in you)

this world(as timorous itsters all
to call their cowardice quite agree)
shall never discover our touch and feel
--for love are in we are in love are in we;
for you are and i am and we are(above
and under all possible worlds)in love

a billion brains may coax undeath
from fancied fact and spaceful time--
no heart can leap,no soul can breathe
but by the sizeless truth of a dream
whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea.
For love are in you am in i are in we

(Poem by e. e. cummings)

Reading about the Benedictine way of living at table during Sunday Evening Practice. The author wrote: "Existence cannot be understood, only experienced." (p. 68 in Always We Begin Again, by John McQuiston)

When mind changes, world changes. What you see is what you get. When you see, nothing is hidden, all is transparent.

Dutch tomato soup with garlic bread while watching a sting film about a con man getting conned. Everyone is in on it, but you only find out in the end.

In the end we'll find out. Until then, we're stuck in ignorance.

Happily, they say, some have seen through.

Stories worth hearing.

Like love, in, through, out.

Are in you am in I are in we.

Blessed words, blessed poet!

Written be you and me.

Morning prayer and remembrance. It is Sunday at hermitage. Turn of mind, words from Merton and scripture, bite of bread, sip of wine, spate of silence, toll of bell, bowing before exiting.

The sign on cabin porch reads, "We begin here...We begin now."

The words of James read:

Religion pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to give aid to orphans and widows in their tribulations and to keep oneself unspotted from this world. (James1:22-27)

Here's the way a hermit hears these words:

• Religion is "this".
• Help those who are no longer attached the way they once were.
• Keep your self out of sight; don't be spotted anywhere.

Many people prefer to be out in the open. I prefer to be within the open. Like the Trappist monk who said his life was "in God," (a phrase to sit with), the preference to be within the open out of sight completely connected to "this" is s heartfelt sense of religion I can assent to this 1st Sunday in May, 5th of Easter, and a morning on which the Market Basket on the corner of Rts 1 and 90 have a special of coffee and muffin for one dollar.

Calvin's Theory of Predestination

Some people will be chosen
for the job, the Wednesday night poker game

for the limited number of spaces
available in heaven. Only so many

spoons fit in one drawer your mother
would say

and the same is true for clothes
and closets

shelves and cans and let's be honest
hearts and loves.

I cannot love you because I love another
is a problem

that sometimes gets admitted
over wine

in a restaurant
filled with people choosing

this dish over that meat
choosing something that will fill

the middle of their beings
or leave them slavering like a cheetah

who missed and pass that
would you? and let's be friends. Yes

let's drink to being friends
and then we can all go on our way

remembering the best part
about being chosen is that

you do not have to stop
for anyone along the way.

( Poem, "Calvin's Theory of Predestination," by Betsy Johnson-Miller, from Rain When You Want Rain. © Mayapple Press, 2010. http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/)

I sit in the loft of the meditation cabin. The wohnkuche is filled with coffee and tea drinkers, omelet and salad and potato eaters, apfel kuchen nibblers, and war story tellers. The bookshed is used by those needing respite from the crowd. But no one else would climb the tricky ladder to the loft of the chapel/zendo to feel the solitude of silence and feel the fresh air of the askance window looking out to Sally's land.

I am unspotted. The drifted away are happy with one another.

The phoebes work on their nest under the eave outside the left window down below.

I find "this" glorious.

Gift.

A gratefulness for all.

Of this.

I am.