Ask, if you wish, of nothing else

Look through this and
Listen closely --
There is nothing else but this
About which
I am
Certain.

"ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise"

Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. was 68, had a heart condition, and was shot and killed in his apartment by White Plains police after he inadvertently pressed his medical alert alarm and they responded along with an ambulance.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/nyregion/fatal-shooting-of-ex-marine-by-white-plains-police-raises-questions.html

What Kind of Times Are These
BY ADRIENNE RICH

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

(Poem, “What Kind of Times Are These”. © 2002, 1995 by Adrienne Rich, from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001.)

Outside window by this desk, a tree stands in early spring cold and last night's light snow.

More details are revealed about the Trayvon Martin killing in Sanford, Florida.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/video-shows-george-zimmerman-arriving-at-police-station-trayvon-martin/?scp=4&sq=trayvon%20martin&st=cse

It is becoming clearer that trees might be the only beings worth speaking about, or with.

People are disappearing.

Thank you, Adrienne, for your poetry!

And, nature with earth, for trees.

"tonight no poetry will serve"

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
by Adrienne Rich

Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid

later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere

Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb    disgraced    goes on doing

now diagram the sentence


(Poem by Adrienne Rich, 2007)
(May 16, 1929 -- March 28, 2012)

this news is not; overwhelming

The world is full of lies and greed. Ordinarily this news is not overwhelming. Then, at times, it feels it is.

To find a buddha,
all you have to do is see your nature.
Your nature is the buddha.
And the buddha is the person who's free,
free of plans, free of cares.
If you don't see your nature
and run around all day looking
somewhere else, you'll never find a buddha.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)

A lie wants you to believe to be true what is not.

Greed wants you to take what is not needed.

Not true, not needed.

Not me.

coincidentally...of course

Cold, sunny, windy morning scolds those lulled into pre-summer fantasies. Maine's fierce independent unpredictable nature wanders into town after a short nap up in the hills.

I prefer the notion of panentheism. But, on second look, the dialogue between pantheism and panentheism is worth listening to.

Panentheism (from Greek πᾶν (pân) "all"; ἐν (en) "in"; and θεός (theós) "God"; "all-in-God") is a belief system which posits that God exists, interpenetrates every part of nature and timelessly extends beyond it. Panentheism is differentiated from pantheism, which holds that God is not a distinct being but is synonymous with the universe.[1] 

Simply put, in pantheism, God is the whole; however, in panentheism, the whole is in God. This means that the universe in the first formulation is practically the whole itself. In the second formulation, the universe and God are not ontologically equivalent. In panentheism, God is viewed as the eternal animating force behind the universe. Some versions suggest that the universe is nothing more than the manifest part of God. In some forms of panentheism, the cosmos exists within God, who in turn "pervades" or is "in" the cosmos. While pantheism asserts that God and the universe are coextensive, panentheism claims that God is greater than the universe. In addition, some forms indicate that the universe is contained within God.[2] Much Hindu thought is highly characterized by panentheism and pantheism.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panentheism

Heraclitus (circa 500 BCE) contributes:

When Heraclitus speaks of God, he doesn't mean the Greek gods, neither a personal entity. Instead he thinks that God is living in every soul and even in every material thing on earth. The fiery element is the expression of God in everything, thus he is in every sense a pantheist.

Another of Heraclitus' main teachings can be called the "unity of opposites". The unity of opposites means that opposites cannot exist without each other - there is no day without night, no summer without winter, no warm without cold, no good without bad. To put it in his own words: "It is wise to agree that all things are one. In differing it agrees with itself, a backward-turning connection, like that of a bow and a lyre. The path up and down is one the same." Comparing the convergence of opposites with the contrary tension of a bow and a lyre is perfectly in harmony with his theory of flux and fire.

From a modern perspective it seems trivial to state that opposites are the same, yet to the Greek it was not entirely obvious. Hot and cold can both be expressed as a degree of temperature, dark and bright as a degree of light. Nonetheless, the Heraclitean theory of perpetual flux and universal transformation goes far beyond what was obvious to the ancients:

"Science, like philosophy, has sought to escape from the doctrine of perpetual flux by finding some permanent substratum amid changing phenomena. Chemistry seemed to satisfy this desire. It was found that fire, which appears to destroy, only transmutes: elements are recombined, but each atom that existed before combustion still exists when the process is completed.
(--from, Heraclitus [Ephesus, around 500 BC]
http://www.thebigview.com/greeks/heraclitus.html)

Then, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464):

Nicholas held that the Absolute Infinite cannot be conceived by finite thought. Hence, in theology, only negations can be assumed as true. Although positive theological statements are inevitable in order to think about God, they are inadequate. Paradoxically, one can reach the incomprehensible God only by knowing his incomprehensibility. This is the meaning of the term “learned ignorance.” In the end, both negative and positive theology must be dissolved into inexpressibility; God is ineffable beyond all affirmations and negations. This is the extreme climax of a philosophical theology where the infinite distance between God and the finite has come to a head. More exactly, human beings cannot touch God through knowledge at all, but at the very most only by our yearning for Him. 

Nicholas of Cusa calls infinity “absolute,” as it must be understood in a full and unrestrained sense. Hence, the sphere of an independent and self-sufficient finite cannot exist beside it, otherwise infinity itself would actually be finite and restricted. “There cannot be an opposite to the ineffable Infinite,” says Nicholas. “It is also not the whole, to whom a part could be opposed, nor can it be a part… The Infinite is above all that.” (De Visione Dei, VIII[1]) Above all opposites, the Infinite—God—is beyond all multitude as well. Thus, Nicholas calls Him the “Absolute Unity and Oneness,” which is prior to all and includes all. In this sense, he speaks of God as the “coincidence of opposites.” 

Everything is enveloped in God and developed in the universe, though God must not become mingled with the finite reality in any way. “You, O God, are the antithesis of opposites, because you are infinite; and because you are infinite, you are infinity. In infinity, the antithesis of opposites is without antithesis… Infinity does not tolerate any otherness beside itself; for, as it is infinity, nothing is external to it. The Absolute Infinite includes all and encompasses all.” (De Visione Dei, VIII)

(--from, Nicholas of Cusa: His Idea of the Coincidence of Opposites and the Concept of Unity in Unification Thought, Written by Klaus Rohmann, Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 3, 1999-2000 - Page 117)
http://www.journals.uts.edu/volume-iii-1999-2000/87-nicholas-of-cusa-his-idea-of-the-coincidence-of-opposites-and-the-concept-of-unity-in-unification-thought.html

There's something attractive thinking about God as Coincidentia Oppositorum (coincidence of opposites, or, unity of opposites). It brings to mind the Middle Way of Buddhism, and "In medio stat virtus" (Virtue stands in the middle) of Horace and Aristotle.

Season change sets me on edge. Everything reconsiders the relative benefit of living long or dying short when seasons change. It is the nature of seasons to invite our attention to the fluctuations of creative and destructive impulse.

Contentment

Fragile, provisional, it comes unbidden
as evening: the children on the block
called in to dinner that for tonight
is plentiful, as if it had cost nothing
either in money or worry about money.

Then evening deepens and the street
turns silent. There may be disasters
idling in driveways, and countless distresses
sharpening, but all that matters
most that must be done is done. 

(Poem, "Contentment" by Michael Ryan, from This Morning. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.)

Truth be told, I am interested in God. Perhaps, more, I am interested with God. "Interest," to be between, in the middle of, coincidentally -- of course.

The most difficult hazard of being interested are the believers who laboriously and tediously put God here or there in opposition to others' putting God there or here.

As for me,
this morning,
I know not where...

I am.

"...to speak from God's eternal birth"

Then, this, by Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), Russian Religious Philosopher, an excerpt:

"Im Wasser lebt der Fisch, die Pflanzen in der Erden,
Der Vogel in der Luft, die Sonn im Firmament,
Der Salamander muss mit Feur erhalten werden:
Und Gottes Herz ist Jakob Boehmens Element".

["In water lives the fish, the plant in the ground,
The bird in the sky, the sun in the firmament,
The salamander must with fire be sustained,
And God's Heart is Jacob Boehme's element".]
Angelus Silesius

I.

Jacob Boehme has to be termed the greatest of Christian gnostics. The word gnosis I employ here not in the sense of the heresies of the first centuries of Christianity,2 but in the sense of knowledge basic to revelation and dealing not with concepts, but with symbols and myths; contemplative knowledge, and not discursive knowledge. This is also a religious philosophy or theosophy. Characteristic for J. Boehme is that he had a great simplicity of heart, a child-like purity of soul. Therefore before death he could exclaim: "Nun fahre ich in's Paradeis" {"Now I journey on into Paradise"}. He was not learned, not bookish, not schooled a man, but rather a simple craftsman, a shoemaker. He belonged to the type of the wise-seers from amongst the people. He did not know Aristotle, he did not know Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite, he did not know the Medieval Scholasticism and mysticism. In him it is impossible, just as it is for the larger part of Christian mystics, to discern any direct influences of Neo-Platonism. He found his sustenance first of all in the Bible3 and beyond this he read Paracelsus, Sebast. Franck, Weigel, Schwenckfeld. He lived within the atmosphere of the German mystico-theosophic currents of his time. Boehme was not a philosopher in the academic school sense of this word, he was first of all a theosophist, a visionary and myth-creator, but his influence on German philosophy was enormous. His thinking was not by calculated and clear concepts, but by symbols and myths. He was convinced, that Christianity had become distorted by the learned and by the theologians, by the popes and the cardinals. Boehme by faith-confession was a Lutheran and he died with the final unction of a pastor. But the Lutheran clergy vexed and harassed him, and forbade him to publish his works. This is a phenomenon typical to all faith-confessions. And just like with the greater part of mystics and theosophists, he was supra-confessional. It is possible to discern in him strong Catholic elements, despite his extreme hostility to papism. The origin from which the knowledge of Boehme derived -- is a very complex problem. This problem involves the possibility of a personal gnostic revelation and enlightening, by a special cognitive charism. At present they tend to think, that Boehme was more widely read, than earlier was thought, but certainly least of all can the teachings of Boehme be explained by borrowings and influences (an explanation unbecoming for such an original and remarkable thinker). Eckhardt was a man learned and bookish, he knew Aristotle, Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite, Thomas Aquinas, the Medieval Scholasticism and mysticism. Boehme however was self-made, and with him undoubtedly were primal intuitions. Boehme himself says about the sources of his cognition: "Ich brauche ihrer Art und Weise und ihrer Formeln nicht, weil ich es von ihnen nicht gelernt habe; ich habe einen andern Lehrmeister, und der ist die ganze Natur. Von dieser ganzen Natur mit ihrer instehenden Geburt habe ich meine Philosophie, Astrologie und Theologie studirt und gelernt, und nicht von oder durch Menschen" {"I use not their art and wisdom and their formulas, since from them I have learned nothing; I have an other Master-Teacher, and this is the whole of nature. From this whole of nature with innate birth I have studied and learned my philosophy, astrology and theology, and nothing from or through man"}.4 There is here a sense of the Renaissance reaction against the Scholastics and a reorientation towards nature itself. Moreover, Boehme was convinced, that his knowing was not by his own human powers, but with the help of the Holy Spirit. "In meinen eigenen Kraeften bin ich so ein blinder Mensch, als irgend einer ist, und vermag nichts, aber im Geiste Gottes siehet mein eingeborner Geist durch Alles, aber nicht immer beharrlich; sondern wenn der Geist der Liebe Gottes durch meinen Geist durchbricht, alsdann ist die animalische Geburt und die Gottheit ein Wesen, eine Begreiflichkeit und ein Licht" {"In mine own ability I am as blind a man, as is anyone, and am capable of nothing, but in the Spirit of God throughout all stands my inborn spirit, but not always unwaveringly; but when the Spirit of the love of God is focused through my spirit, then is the creaturely birth and the Godhead one essence, one understanding and one light"}.5 Sophia assists him in the perception of the very mystery of God. He believes, that God "wird dich zum lieben Kinde annehmen und dir ein neu Kleid der edeln Jungfrauen Sophiae anziehen, und einen Siegelring (Mysterii Magni) an deine Hand des Gemueths stecken; und in demselben Kleide (der neuen Wiedergeburt) hast du allein Macht, von der ewigen Geburt Gottes zu reden" {"wilt adopt thee as a beloved child and clothe thee in the new garb of the nobly virginal Sophia, and a signet-ring (Mysterii Magni) upon thine hand of mind wilt set; and in the selfsame garb (the new birth-anew) hast thou alone the power, to speak from God's eternal birth"}.6
(-- from, N. A. BERDYAEV (BERDIAEV)
STUDIES CONCERNING JACOB BOEHME 1
Etude I. The Teaching about the Ungrund and Freedom
(1939 - #349)
http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1930_349.html
© 2002 by translator Fr. S. Janos -- with the great and gracious assist of Fr Michael Knechten in correction of the German portions of the original Put' text, and his intensive review with the translation from German.

In its own way, the Christian Church calendar celebrates today the feast of The Annunciation, a calling to mind "the new birth-anew" (der neuer Wiedergeburt) announced nine months (giving mythic time it's temporal due) prior to Feast of Nativity.

There are so many riches of contemplative invitation for us to respond to with our widening heart!

So, let it be unto us according to your Word-widening-wonder!

And we, wonderers of generative silence -- may we return by way of falling forward to your piety, pieta, and provocative promise begun in our rendezvous with time, today, with gracefulness!

Looking this way

At Quaker Meeting I am looking at rug in Merton Retreat.

I am thinking: What is silence is what God is seeing.

I am thinking: Silence is intersection.

I am thinking: There is denseness and there is diaphaneity.
-- Christ is diaphaneity.
-- Everything else is denseness.

When we practice together we practice the intersection of silence and diaphaneity, seeing through denseness, listening into the soundless.

Jakob Boehme comes to mind:

One of Boehme's most daring conceptions was that God's emergence out of pure Oneness into differentiated actuality required a confrontation with contrariety and opposition. It was out of this creative struggle that the sensible universe issued forth. Boehme held that it was inevitable and even desirable that conflict and suffering should have arisen. These negative elements were the motivating spurs that stimulated the production of all the manifold phenomena of nature. Moreover, it was solely through the struggle with negativity that the minds of finite creatures could become aware of themselves, their world, and ultimately God:
If the natural life had no opposition (Widerwaertigkeit), and were without a goal, then it would never ask for its own ground, from which it came; then the hidden God would remain unknown to the natural life . . . there would be no sensation, nor will, nor activity, nor understanding (SS, vol. 4, Weg zu Christo, "Von Goettlicher Beschaulichkeit," ch. 1, #9; cf. Way to Christ 196).
If the hidden God, who is but a Single Essence and Will, had not of his own will gone forth out of himself, if he had not issued out of the eternal knowing . . . into a divisibility of the will (Schiedlichkeit des Willens), and had not the same divisibility into comprehensibility (Infasslichkeit) conducted to a natural and creaturely life, and were it not the case that this same divisibility in life consisted in strife -- how else then could he have wanted the hidden will of God, who in himself is but One, to be revealed? How might a will within a Single Unity be a knowledge of himself (Erkenntnis seiner selber)? (ibid., #10)
In God's quest for self-manifestation, however, there lurked an implicit dilemma. On the one hand, his eternal purity and freedom consisted in the condition of the Ungrund, which transcended all limitations. On the other hand, the very absence of oppositions within this Ungrund meant that it was incapable of either manifesting or apprehending itself -- it was, in fact, a "nothingness" (ein Nichts).

Then, further in the writing:

Boehme's speculations led him to the idea that the first schism within the will of God had to materialize in the form of a concrete self-alienation. He argued (in effect) that there must be a transition between (1) the potential polarity involved in positing an unmanifest non-being's need to become manifest to itself, and (2) the coming-into-existence of a being that was manifest, and yet also contrary to itself. The unmanifest Godhead was prior to all existence and as such absolutely homogeneous; and yet -- this was the first paradox -- it included an inherent tendency to differentiate itself into contraries. Thus the undifferentiated unity passed into the self-differentiating unity. The latter, like the Logos of Heraklitus, contained 'in posse' the germs of a balance of opposites, whose hypothetical contrariety was of such a kind -- and this was the second paradox -- that their transition into concrete actuality was necessary. In this way, the hidden dialectic of God issued forth into the manifest dialectic of nature, and with that, the sensible universe was created.

Evaluation

If one makes allowances for the fanciful quality of Boehme's modes of expression, one can see him wrestling with a classic philosophical problem: namely, how to understand the relationship between God's timeless unity and the multiplicity of the actual universe. Part of what made this problem so formidable was that it involved trying, in a way, to "conceive" of a connection between the conceivable and that which (by hypothesis) is inconceivable.

Since God was the inconceivable essence par excellence, it was a riddle to comprehend how or why this essence could have rendered itself understandable, even if only to a degree. The question was, why should the Deity not far rather remain inscrutable, forever wrapped in absolute mystery? The originality of Boehme's approach consisted in giving the problem a self-referential twist -- in the claim that God would have no knowledge of himself if he did not reveal himself to himself. Inasmuch as revelation consists in a kind of experience, it must require a structural subject-object polarity. Hence, it would follow that God's self-revelation simultaneously implied the existence of a creation and creatures to whom, and through whom, the revelation would take place.
(-- Excerpted from article about Jacob Boehme, Copyright © 1995, by Edward A. Beach. See,)
http://users.erols.com/nbeach/boehme.html

At Evening Practice we read Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche on meditation.

Each direction we look is only one turn in a compass of many indicating directions we look. There are so many ways to turn and look.

A precipice of sorts; waiting

It's the story we tell about things, not the thing itself, that defines something.

That's the way the world comes about the way it is. A story is told, attention, then facts, are gathered to it, and it becomes an ongoing tale being told to continue its emerging reality.

If we want to change the world, tell a new and different story about it.

Once upon a time there was no time, and everything hung on a precipice of sorts waiting for the next phrase.

Do you have anything to say about this?

we are being...asked

If my heart were whole. If my mind were whole. If my being we're whole.

Would I love you?

And everyone.

As my self?

Still, in all, no matter

For me, it is occupying one's body. Even if you are not there to silently experience your absence.

To the Bardo

I dreamed I finally got through to C on the phone
he was whispering
I couldn't make out the words

he had been in the hospital
and then in a home
M was sick too

You know how in dreams you are everyone:
awake too you are everyone:
I am listening          breathing your ashy breath

Old Chinese poet:
fire:
to see the way

(-- Poem by Jean Valentine, in Door in the Mountain: New & Collected Poems)

Everything you've ever thought has been a waste if time.

Don't think.

(Wttgenstein said.)

Look!

showing itself; even one word is too much

The emptiness of spring has emptied me of anything not itself spring. A large hole has opened and I have fallen through. One would have preferred a large whole. But I fail to notice the difference. So, I've asked friends to say what I cannot.

Zen Moments

(Quotes from The Little Zen Companion.)

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.
- Paul Valery

With the evening breeze the water laps against the heron's legs.
- Buson

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
- Ursula K. Le Guin.

If you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
- Nietzsche.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.
- Tao Te Ching.

If you could understand a single grain of wheat, you would die of wonder.
- Martin Luther

To be a man of knowledge one needs to be light and fluid.
- Yaqui Mystic

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
- Zen saying.

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Water which is too pure has no fish.
- Ts'ai Ken T'An.

To set up what you like against what you dislike -- this is the disease of the mind.
- Seng-T'San.

It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning around.
- Thoreau.

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still...
- Joseph Conrad.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
- Goethe.

Those who want the fewest things are nearest to the gods.
- Socrates.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the old; seek what they sought.
- Basho.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
- Tom Stoppard.

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.
- Friedrich von Schiller.

Whoever knows himself knows God.
- Muhammad.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
- Kahlil Gibran.

The aim of life is to live and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
- Henry Miller.

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.
- Dogen.


The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.
- Albert Einstein

If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.
- St. John of the Cross.

Lovely snowflakes, they fall nowhere else!
- Zen Saying.

It is good to have an end to journey toward;
but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
- Ursula K. Le Guin.

Everything the same; everything distinct.
- Zen Proverb

When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough.
When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much.
- Fen-Yang.

Our life is frittered away by detail . . . Simplify, simplify.
- Thoreau.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
- G.K. Chesterton.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
- John Lennon.

Men argue, nature acts.
- Voltaire.
(-- from, The Little Zen Companion, compiled by David Schiller, 1994)

Blue light of dawn surrounds room making windows visible.

Finally, there is so much to see, and --what once was thought to be -- 'I' -- has nothing to say.

All that remains shows itself without explanation. Inexpressible, incomprehensible, with nothing left, there is only disappearance within this immense silencing gathering revelation.

Spring!

about ourselves; a deeper darker colloquy

It breaks my heart that a young teenage man, Trayvon Martin,  can be murdered in Sanford Florida and the police and legislators had let it pass as legitimate run-of-the-gun behavior. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/us/justice-department-opens-inquiry-in-killing-of-trayvon-martin.html?_r=1&hp)

It grieves me that a US soldier could massacre 18 people, many women and children, and America feels bad for the killer but loves the occupation.

WORDS 

I don't take your words
Merely as words
Far from it.

I listen
to whatever makes you talk -
Whatever that is -
And me listen.

(Poem by Shinkichi Takahashi)

We're not yet talking about the things that must be talked about.

The blather and the blarney depresses my spirit and threatens whatever sanity remains in our collective fragile psyches.

Yes, we speak of things that matter,/ With words that must be said,/ "Can analysis be worthwhile?"/ "Is the theater [or God] really dead?"  (-from Simon & Garfunkel's The Dangling Conversation)

I go with silence, with the Border Collie, to the dump, to the sea.

To a deeper, darker, colloquy.

out window (Monday haiku)

morning, we name it --
still, cedar tree, with no words
sits zazen to north

(nunc ipsum, wfh)

nothing, and nothing left out

See tree, and see ancestor, neighbor, long distant friend, all angels, source of being, and true self. That's a lot to see in and through the silent branches sketching sky and waving in morning breeze. As winter opens valise and begins to fold away wardrobe of ice and snow, chill freezing wind and short hours of light into neat squares before final closing of zipper, we look up at gray-brown mountainside, bare limbs and naked rocks, remembering those who courageously agreed to travel the winter passage into invisible presence.

Thank you! We will learn to feel you in new ways beyond confused senses.

 

Compassion without the understanding of emptiness easily becomes selfish attachment, while understanding emptiness without compassion can also become selfish, one-sided, and limited. In order to avoid those dangers, it’s very important to understand the unity of emptiness and compassion. Your naked, present ordinary mind is the door to this unity of compassionate emptiness.

Right now this door is closed by our preoccupation with an almost uninterrupted string of thoughts. But if we allow just one gap between one thought and the next, we may glimpse the naked ordinary mind, self-existing awareness. Then the door is opened right there, to reveal compassion and emptiness united. It is a timeless moment.

The great wisdom qualities of the Buddha-mind - that wisdom that sees the innate nature as it is and the wisdom that perceives all possible things - are blocked again and again, almost continuously, by the concepts that we form. These concepts are actually temporally based; they are, in essence, time. The moment we start to allow gaps in this flow of concepts, the innate qualities of the awakened state begin to shine through.
(--from, Tricycle Magazine, Spring 1999, DISSOLVING THE CONFUSION, by Tsoknyi Rinpoche)
http://www.tricycle.com/dharma-talk/dissolving-confusion?page=0,2

Final day of skiing season at Snow Bowl. Mountain shrugs off its thin white blanket and studies patches of bent stalks sleep-waking from these three months. Ice on Hosmer Pond rolls from shore and will dive under released water like strong lover letting up grip on what it held down. Sun takes walking stick, rubs forehead, and wanders north thawing frozen ground leaving soft mud at edge of driveways for tires to sign signature treads leaving yard. We turn our inner bodies back to lower thermostats and lighter sweaters as dooryard unveils all the dropped and covered things needing to be picked and tidied as new season of revelation lays open our lives.

End of Winter

Over the still world, a bird calls
waking solitary among black boughs.

You wanted to be born; I let you be born.
When has my grief ever gotten
in the way of your pleasure?

Plunging ahead
into the dark and light at the same time
eager for sensation

as though you were some new thing, wanting
to express yourselves

all brilliance, all vivacity

never thinking
this would cost you anything,
never imagining the sound of my voice
as anything but part of you—

you won't hear it in the other world,
not clearly again,
not in birdcall or human cry,

not the clear sound, only
persistent echoing
in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye—

the one continuous line
that binds us to each other.
(Poem by Louise Glück, “The End of Winter" from The Wild Iris. 1992)

Silence does not have to say "All is love," nor does it have to say, "Everything is stupid." Silence permits everything to be as it is.

As it is, when we look at what is taking place we, with silence, completely accept without judgment that what is taking place is, indeed, taking place.

This kind of silence embraces the reality of the unfolding present moment with a breathing equanimity of active non-interference and contemplative whole-sighted restfulness.

Knowing, in some unexplainable way, that this is our life. This is the seasoning transformative gift of being alive.

Knowing that...is knowing this: nothing, and nothing left out -- completeness beyond comprehension.

We people and wee people

Even St. Patrick's Day has become merely and delightfully March 17th. Penny Whistle on WERU.FM and traditional Irish melodies on Pandora following morning practice in bookshed/retreat. Incense in streams of sunlight kept low across room, like crawling escapee from burning reminder we are being transformed as we remain still and silent in the presence of what-is-here.

I expected to see only pink blossoms,
But a gentle spring snow has fallen
And the cherry trees are wearing a white coat.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

Yesterday's steady rain gives way to today's sunny breeze and warming air.

We'll go to breakfast, walk dogs, bail peapod, and breath the day with gratitude for just this morning, this day, this meditation.

Watched part two of Mythos with the incisive words of Joseph Campbell at Friday Evening Conversation. He brings "feeding the fire" right into the front room, as did Dean, pizza. It is communion, relational transforming elemental interpenetrating communion, we seek. Of course there is only communion.

A new understanding is afoot. Some receive communion with worthy gratitude. Some ignore it with unworthy disregard and disrespect. But there is, always and only, communion.

Churches and religion do not own communion. They do, at times, attempt to help us see and understand it according to their lights. But our task is to own communion according to our lights. In older days someone would ask church relatedly, "Did you receive communion today?" These days, the chickadee and yellow finch look over at us and invite us into communion. We either give and receive communion -- presence, participation, and particular realization of our interconnection -- or we remain not yet aware of our true nature of unified non-separate interpenetrating with all that is.

I Ask You

What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside--
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it's all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles--
each a different height--
are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.
(Poem by Billy Collins)

The words are helpful, only, they should not have been appropriated so exclusively: "This is my body!"

Can you feel it?

Can you take it?

Will fear flee?

Yes, to all the questions. We will feel our singular and distinctive body. We will take what is given with gratitude and respect. We will present our fragile reluctance to the open and loving spirit of wholesome benevolence and compassion without fear for what follows.

Today is St. Paddy's Day.

Take the high road, take the low road. Arrive at the sunny, Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond.

We people and wee people all together!

Memories of Basketball in New York

I was in my grandmother's room
The year St Bonaventure played
Ohio State on New year's Eve, 1960,
That Holiday Festival. I think of
Orrie Jirele today. They lost in
Overtime by 2 points.
What a game 51 years ago!


(nunc ipsum, wfh)

question for screwtape

if war is hell
why do we go to hell
so often

(nunc ipsum, wfh)

Shojo no shu

To see clearly let
illusion fall fully flat
bottom mind body

(nunc ipsum, wfh)

"...important in a human way"

Pakistan. Afghanistan. Israel. Syria. Iran. Vatican City. The United States.

Dangerous countries?

For now, I’ll try to draw our attention back to a question that’s behind so much recent history – so far behind that it usually goes unasked: Do we Americans want to have a relationship with the rest of the world, or do we just want to use other societies and nations for our own purposes?... 

Todd Shea, a high-school dropout who has lived and worked in Pakistan providing disaster relief and health care since the earthquake that killed 80,000 people there on October 8, 2005, and who has never been invited to contribute to Foreign Affairs, has an answer to Thornton that resounds with tragic echoes of what might have been. Here’s what Todd said to me in July 2009 (I quote this passage in my new book Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti):

I believe that it was a direct recognition that in the eyes of the U.S. leaders at the time, they were barbarians, subhuman, not worth it. And I would submit that they are human beings, that if U.S. leaders had treated them as important in a human way, then society in Pakistan and Afghanistan would be far further along today, because we would have helped them avoid all the things that are happening now. If you remember, at the time, we were loved. Both countries were in such a state of need, and then we just left. “We got rid of our big enemy, let’s get outta here,” and boy, wasn’t that a strategic error. When the [Berlin] Wall came down and we were waving flags and saying “America, America,” why weren’t we waving Pakistani flags? I remember seeing the Wall come down and all that, and I don’t remember hearing anything about Pakistan.

And yes, it has everything to do with Vietnam, with which American society never did come to terms. As an older friend once told me, what the Sixties were about was how “the blood of the war got on everyone’s hands, and we couldn’t wash it off. It’s still all over the place.”(-- from, What does Afghanistan have to do with Vietnam? Posted by Ethan Casey on March 11, 2012) http://www.ethancasey.com/2012/03/what-does-afghanistan-have-to-do-with-vietnam/

Asked today whether the slide toward right wing and ultra right wing notions and behavior was something reversible, I heard myself say that, no, it will continue and spread and people will take up the banner of militant intolerance and things will get uglier. Watch for arrogance, unbridled wealth, power, and devious cunning masked as good business, religious correctness, or political ambition, and there is danger of manipulative hostility to ensure acquisition or continuation of narrow ends that exclude wider population.

What is there to be done?

Don't Go to War

We come upon our greediness, jealousy, or impatience, and the next impulse is to go to war with it. We don’t realize that all the while we’re strengthening the thing we’re fighting against. It’s like trying to push a beach ball into the water. Holding it down requires a huge amount of energy, and inevitably it pops back up with equal force, taking an unpredictable direction. But if you give the beach ball space and let it be, it will float effortlessly along the surface.
(- Aura Glaser, "Into the Demon's Mouth") http://www.tricycle.com/dharma-talk/demons-mouth?page=0,0

It is difficult to recognize that what is seen in the world is what is taking place within you and me.

I do not yet know how to synthesize the news that the arrogant trickster operative tearing down his enemies... is me. How the haughty multi-millionaire ripping off ordinary people with banking and insurance scams... is me. How the corrupt politician pretending to love Jesus and hate evil while doing everything in his power to foment lies and cynically manipulate the system to his personal benefit... is me.

While spiritually intriguing and mystically enticing, the prospect that I am everything I dislike is, at best, unnerving and disturbing. The work, it is suggested, has to, therefore, take place within me first.

It was so much easier to think that all that was necessary to do was to bring down those others who were bad and thereby stop them from their nefarious deeds.

 

I found my way up
Yoshino's precipice-hung
Path and into its
Past, seeing there the blossoms
I sought that spring ages ago.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

I've got to find my way back to that garden place where we hadn't been fooled into thinking the world into two.

Where one was not an issue.

Where we had to look into each other's eyes without bodyguards, police, military, surveillance, pundit interviewers, or legal shenanigans -- and speak to one another as if each person mattered, as if each person was brother or sister, as if the anguish involved in seeing our way through together was worth the effort of being and becoming human.

"God" was companioning. We were interested in love and truth and wisdom and understanding. Then we got this idea. The idea that there was an "other" and that "other" was there to be fooled, used, killed, disgraced, robbed, and distanced.

We were "right." They were "wrong."

What is there to be done?

Tuesday morning: 3 haiku

1.
Wake up, brew coffee,
lace sneakers, walk to Snow Bowl,
listen to good words.

2.
Dog chases green ball,
happy zen practice running
here to there to here

3.
It is not enough
to love god, we have to give
both away -- sunrise!

(nunc ipsum, wfh)