Dance, dance, wherever you may be!

"Dwelling within one another," is the meaning of "perichoresis."

Life is a dance.... This choral dance is a combination of harmony and rhythm, Plato says. It reminds us of the Trinitarian perichoresis, the cosmic and divine dance. Siva is Nataraja, the dancing god. The dance is his creation. Dance is practically for all popular religions the most genuine human sharing in the miracle of creation.... We all participate in rhythm because rhythm is another name of Being and Being is Trinity. 

(--Ramon Panikkar, the Rhythm of Being, p.37)

God is emerging now.

God is now being spoken.

At origin, everything is retrievable.

Brook ice

Water flowing down Ragged Mountain shyly passes under cover.

Let us pass so unnoticed.

Flowing, being heard, passing beneath form.

Community means we am I

No one suffers alone.

The illusion is when the thought occurs: "I am suffering."

We are suffering.

Think again.

Cold morning

I see icy window.

What you see is what you'll forgo

According to the readings, 0 degrees or -5 degrees, with wind chill feels like -16 degrees. At 3:42 a.m., another log into wood stove in Wohnkuche. Two dogs and two cats have opted to stay downstairs. That might have to do with their primary caregiver overnighting in southern Maine between visits to work places for numbers.

Working with Thoughts 

It is helpful at the beginning of your meditation practice to free yourself from the idea that in order to meditate properly you must have no thoughts. Instead, establish a different relationship with your thoughts so that over time they can fade more effortlessly into the background. All meditators have thoughts arising during their practice—it’s what you do with them that matters.
(- Bob Sharples, "Do the Thoughts Ever Stop?" In Tricycle Magazine)

Good advice.

Impermanence cares for everything.

There's no place...

Like home.

There's only home.

For heaven's sake, make it so!

The Pasture 

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too. 

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too. 

(Poem by Robert Frost)

We stand together at origin.

What shall we make of it?

Nothing.

Suffering is the sandpaper of our life. It does its work of shaping us. Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.

-- Ram Das 

Thank you for seeing this through!









 For seeing yourself, and me, through!

Poor resolve; little resolution

A Times opinion writer claims our fiscal difficulties are the fault of the voters. I should make a vow no longer to care what politicians and pundits say.
I'll wait for the new year.

Drat those voters!

We can try to make every Middle-East and Western Asian piece of geography into a United States territory by drone and assassination, or we can feed the hungry and care for the aged and infirm in our own country (even helping people elsewhere), but we cannot do both. Opting to colonize and control seems like our current and shaky strategy.

Voters think they are choosing care and compassion. But manipulators of post-election financing of hegemonic bellicosity are giving us war after war after fiscal fiasco.

It's a new year. Time for new vows.

Voters live in neighborhoods and towns in this country, not in voting booths nor in corporations. Time to change the manipulation into maturation and reign-in the money-mayhem crowd and install a new mutation, a dollars-for-decency-services sanity.

Want a new country? Maybe we should rename the one we have and thereby change the direction of our narrowing thought processes. We could call ourselves -- The United Cooperation of Consciousness!

Let's come home to where we live. Re-invigorate our good will. To "vote" is to "vow." Let's vow to care for each other in sickness and health, in good times and bad, until death takes us all.

Eluctable; an elocution with no "in" or "out"

The kabuki players screech to a halt at the preposterous cliff illusion of political theater and everyone is supposed to feel grateful.

There is no attempt to pretend that sham and subterfuge are not the year-end gimmicks permitting butchers' knives to slice away meat from sacred cow bone.

Everywhere anarchists, left and right, grind their teeth, toast the exiting and arriving year with bitter dregs from hollow barrel in damp cellars of the spirit.

Government is fatally compromised; long live the government!

Meanwhile, monks and nuns, hermits and solitaries, turn quietly to face the silence of a still and hospitable emptiness ascending from a cold and hardened ground under a dark and desolate sky reaching infinitely into nothing and nowhere named This Aware and Intimate Reality.

Once it was called "God."

Now it returns to its nameless ineffable indescribability, its clear gaze seeing everything as Itself.

Be at rest. Everything is falling apart. The center cannot fold.

What remains is your guess.

If I had to guess, I'd say "rum fruitcake" and be satisfied with such tasty elocution.

Our times

At end of year, a meditation about guns and preference:

Fear goes ballistic. Love is disarming.
We do not seem to be ready for the profound vulnerability love asks of us. Rather, we arm ourselves with the mistaken belief that murdering another satisfies fear. It doesn't. Fear is unsatisfiable, divisive, violent, and self-justifying. We recognize ourselves in these descriptions. We are a fearful nation poised on the brink of an all-out war waged against ourselves. Love sees this. Love weeps.
I implore the perpetrators of fear to consider their sorry success -- a frightened itchiness to close life in others.
I choose to live vulnerable and disarmed. The real success, I submit, is openness to life, no matter what.

Cat wonders about birds in blowing storm

If nothing
Else
There is this morning
Filled with snow
Warm fire, novel
Sweet lyrics that
Never grow old

End of year confession

No longer interested in things I'm no longer interested in.

Sports. Finance. Politics. Conspiracies. Congratulatory religion. Being saved. Being lost. Lies. Blatant sincerity. Crude disdain. Mollifying coddling. Self doubt. Self confidence. Anything tinged with patent insincerity. Defensive fear. Blustery bravado. Deceptive shuffling. Smart alecks. Hustling competence. Overly compensated puppets.

It snows.

Mountain trees bend white with weight.

I am left alone.

Age alights.

Innocence

Mountain outside window
At dusk
Looks in

Morning after

Ah, warmth in white wrap!

Grounding; departing where thought used to be

White wind carries snow into green cedar branch
Night silences...beyond
There is nothing other than this stillness anywhere

Brightness illumines our heart

Snow keeps quiet.

Furthermore, bringing forth the turning point by using a finger, a pole, a needle, or a mallet, or leading people to enlightenment with a whisk, a fist, a stick, or a shout cannot be understood by discriminatory thinking. How can it be understood by the use of supernatural powers? Zazen is an awesome presence outside form and color. How is it not the path preceding concept?
Thus, do not be concerned with who is wise and who is stupid. Do not discriminate the sharp from the dull. To practice whole-heartedly is the true endeavor of the way. Practice-realization is not defiled with specialness; it is a matter for every day.
- Dogen Kigen 1227

Stays everyone at home.

 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.
(--from Office of Readings, Feast of John the Evangelist)

Wind runs, alone, the mountain.

Break a leg

We rush about with pages of script and swatches of costume.

In the Parade interview, he recalled the hand-to-hand combat. “I was crossing a field somewhere in Belgium,” he said. “A German soldier ran toward me carrying a bayonet. He couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15. I didn’t see a soldier. I saw a boy. Even though he was coming at me, I couldn’t shoot. 

”They grappled, he recounted later — he was stabbed seven or eight times — until finally he grasped a rock and made it a weapon. After killing the youth, he said, he held him in his arms and wept. 

Mr. Durning said the memories never left him, even when performing, even when he became, however briefly, someone else. 

“There are many secrets in us, in the depths of our souls, that we don’t want anyone to know about,” he told Parade. “There’s terror and repulsion in us, the terrible spot that we don’t talk about. That place that no one knows about — horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of that is released through acting.”( NYTimes, Charles Durning, Prolific Character Actor, Dies at 89, Published: December 25, 2012) 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/movies/charles-durning-prolific-character-actor-dies-at-89.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&hp

Let's have less talk. Most of what we say is foolish.

God is silence through act.

Exeunt omnes!

Might, I have this dance, with you

An ordinary day... Christ is
Born in each branch holding
Winter's light... slow return

Word is spoken in each silent act

December 25, light before light.

Grace is silence passing through night

Just us. Just as.

Christmas Poem 

Says a country legend told every year:
Go to the barn on Christmas Eve and see
what the creatures do as that long night tips over.
Down on their knees they will go, the fire
of an old memory whistling through their minds! 

So I went. Wrapped to my eyes against the cold
I creaked back the barn door and peered in.
From town the church bells spilled their midnight music,
and the beasts listened – yet they lay in their stalls like stone. 

Oh the heretics!
Not to remember Bethlehem,
or the star as bright as a sun,
or the child born on a bed of straw!
To know only of the dissolving Now! 

Still they drowsed on –
citizens of the pure, the physical world,
they loomed in the dark: powerful
of body, peaceful of mind, innocent of history. 

Brothers! I whispered. It is Christmas!
And you are no heretics, but a miracle,
immaculate still as when you thundered forth
on the morning of creation!
As for Bethlehem, that blazing star 

still sailed the dark, but only looked for me.
Caught in its light, listening again to its story,
I curled against some sleepy beast, who nuzzled
my hair as though I were a child, and warmed me
the best it could all night. 

(Poem by Mary Oliver)

The justice of it; mere solitude of fire in Waterford. Two cats dozing. Tree outside lighted beyond barn circle of light.

This!

This is church enough.

We do the best we could.

It is time; nearing

Hold off on Santa and Jesus. Just another day. Think of it as earth touching ground. Imagine awareness letting itself be found in everything everywhere.

It is very simple, really.

When we awake we will remember everything.

December 25 is as good a day as any to fall into our ever-present, infinite, and eternal beingness with loving attention given to all.

The ground is frozen. It is winter. 

A woman sang to me from her hospital bed this afternoon. Finnish songs she learnt in school. Now 90, she teaches me a phrase or two so I can say goodbye.

Always goodbye. Always hello. 

This time, Christmas. At another time, a Friday, a sad drama.

Make your way through.

It is time.