Can you see the other side?

Endings and passings.

All souls and sensibilities.

We're looking at next year's new soil scattered colorfully into rust brown all through woods and mountain.

Say Yes Quickly
 
Forget your life. Say God is Great. Get up.
You think you know what time it is. It’s time to pray.
You’ve carved so many little figurines, too many.
Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar.
Reach your long hands out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, “How are you?”
and no one says “How aren’t you?”

Tomorrow you’ll see what you’ve broken and torn tonight,
thrashing in the dark. In side you
there’s an artist you don’t know about.
He’s not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you’re causing terrible damage.
If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love,
you’re helping people you don’t know
and you have never seen.

Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
if you know, if you’ve known it
from before the beginning of the universe.

(Poem by Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi )

holiness

Holiness consists of being oneself.

Happy All Saints' Day!

Be what, who, how you are!

no cell is not waiting

Time of the Thin Place.

Saints and Spirits preserve us!

Against Certainty                 

There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us.
Each time I think “this,” it answers “that.”
Answers hard, in the heart-grammar’s strictness. 

If I then say “that,” it too is taken away. 

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
When the cat waits in the path-hedge,
no cell of her body is not waiting.
This is how she is able so completely to disappear. 

I would like to enter the silence portion as she does. 

To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live,
one shadow fully at ease inside another.

  (Poem by Jane Hirshfield)

Time to disappear.

Taking away certainty, only what is real remains.

Baseball season ends in Boston

Learned meetingbrook alumnus died last Saturday.
He mumbled to himself.
We wish him rest

Sam's question

Hello anger my old friend.

Because we imagine anger is never a good thing, it is easy to think we should practice simply not being angry. But that approach is too general and abstract. It’s important for each of us to be precise, to be real, to be personal and honest, to find out exactly what my anger is. To do that we need to ask ourselves lots of questions about its actual nature.   (--Nancy Baker, “Precious Energy” in Tricycle)

Anger visits often. But it doesn't arrive kicking and sputtering and punching. That's what occurs when it is not received and welcomed as a stranger, invited to sit a while, brewing tea or coffee, asking What's up? How have you been? What are you working on these days?

Anger is the remedy for realization something is being violated. It is first responder first out the door making present the demand for attention the need for something to happen.

Anger is not by nature violent. Not irrational. Not cruel. Not ipso facto destructive. Anger is alarm clock calling us into stark show-up.

Many people dress up their anger in costume. They paint smiley faces on masks and pretend to be sweetness or reasonableness or, noblesse oblige, a superior view patronizing or posturing.

Some people go all religious and righteous and forgive you or themselves before even addressing why anger has shown up and what it wants. The don't want equilibrium, they want exceptionalism.

Others pretend there is no anger, only correction of erroneous attitudes and perceived injustice by means of vigilante psychological or physical violence. These are dangerous members of our human family.

These days anger sips coffee from Canada and waits for English muffin to darken in toaster. 

In the sipping silence I hear Sam Manning's signature question: "So, what are you working on these days?"

Sam always cheers me. As does his question. So does the chance to listen quietly to the dialogue ensuing.

Dwell poetically! 

Invite each stranger into the conversation. 

Feast together.

This is what is happening; let us be glad and rejoice in it(self)

Sounding morning from cat in litter box bus on Barnestown bird in dooryard. There is a space we call world a time we know as today a sense that complexity of personage and perception is unfolding continuity from this to this to this.

Each person falls from sleep into mythology that carries them from covers to contradictions to bathroom functions to considerations of next and next and next.

Whether empty house empty cardboard box empty narrative or empty mind, each moves into stare of morning back from night.

If you plot revenge if you plan to get somewhere on time if you pray toward some mystery or watch from window the coming to be of chilly autumn air we are just this moment attending the disclosure of light in an unknowing time.

As October so November the naming distinctions that seem to collect recollection and storyline for busy and engaged people off to do or meet or plan or fix or stare into nothing other than what is what is what is. 

Coffee. Yes brew coffee. Try to recall what you used to think used to think was the purpose the end aim the meaning of waking in the morning. Does coffee help? Meaning no longer does.

Does anything replace meaning?

No.

Absent meaning comes bare attention to what reveals itself.

What reveals itself?

Only bare attention only wondering attention only mere attention only alert attention only loving gaze without expectation without knowing.

Morning belongs to itself. Day belongs to itself. Morning is itself. Day is itself.

Once, a very long time ago, people longed to be favored by god to be helped by god to be allowed to look on god and be free of cares woes fears and disease.

Today is once become itself.

Today is itself becoming once upon a time.

Today is upon us we are upon today.

"Itself" finds itself in everything it sees feels tastes smells hears.

Only itself is nothing else.

Only itself is nothing else is.

Find itself musician and you will be what you in ended search playfully see.

Seeing perhaps God as mystery is mystery itself something difficult or impossible to understand or explain. Nor needing to.

Itself is mystery of god present without knowing otherwise.

To be otherwise is to be what you see without thinking it or you to be other.

Wisdom resides in nothing other.

Than this.

Itself.

finally

Night

Darkens,

Quietly.

then, is heard, no more

Evening nears.

I realize, like most everybody,  I am insane.

C. G. Jung once had a patient who believed she lived on the moon. So Jung met her there. As she realized he took her experiences as valid, she told a sad tale of vampires and isolation. Eventually, this woman who'd been abused as a girl made her way back to earth. Patients like her had taught Jung that the fact of a person’s madness did not in any way invalidate the richness and authenticity of their personal mythology. 

(--Craig Chalquist, PhD, from Amazon Review of documentary film, Jupiter’s Wife, {1995}, by Michel Negroponte, about Maggie Cogan)

That’s not it exactly. Not merely insane. Rather, caught inside a story.

Told by a fool.

Full of sound and fury.

You know the rest.

MACBETH 

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. 

(--from Act 5, Scene 5, The Tragedy of Macbeth, by William Shakespeare)  

 As Shakespeare elsewhere writes, the rest is silence.

gathered, then, dispersed

Morning becomes afternoon.

Quakers come.

The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness. In the distant past, this recognition already came to a few individuals. A man called Gautama Siddhartha, who lived 2,600 years ago in India, was perhaps the first who saw it with absolute clarity. Later the title Buddha was conferred upon him. Buddha means “the awakened one.” At about the same time, another of humanity’s early awakened teachers emerged in China. His name was Lao Tzu. He left a record of his teaching in the form of one of the most profound spiritual books ever written, the Tao Te Ching. 

To recognize one’s own insanity, is of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence. A new dimension of consciousness had begun to emerge on the planet, a first tentative flowering. Those rare individuals then spoke to their contemporaries. They spoke of sin, of suffering, of delusion. They said, “Look how you live. See what you are doing, the suffering you create.” They then pointed to the possibility of awakening from the collective nightmare of “normal” human existence. They showed the way. (--from chapter 1, The New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle) http://res.allpdftools.com/allpdftools/pdf-download-resources/A_New_Earth.pdf

Quakers go.

Blessed be the name of silence!

Sunday morning; the songs they were, singing

Sunday morning.

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them” 
(― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island)

A good time to step outside our demands.

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”     

 (--Thomas Merton, The Letters of Thomas Merton)

A good time to sit inside life's suchness.

Returning home after a medical day with someone forgetting

Are all opinions simply the illusions of mind?

The vagaries of life 

though painful, 

teach us not to cling 

to this fleeting world. 

              - Ikkyu (1394-1481)

Not all.

Not at all.

Some are necessary failures.

Happy faults.

We'll some day remember.

"Nying je chenmo," says the Dalai Lama, "great compassion," will have significant impact on our outlook.

All things must pass.

Whether they must or not, they do pass.

Saturday morning practice passes into itself, nowhere else.

Sit where you will no one can take your place.

Even in absence, presence.

There's nowhere to go. But, don't let that stop you.

Is that so

We don’t understand. We think we have something to gain. Someone else will have to lose. It will benefit us.

This is the thinking of insecure people wanting to get ahead.

They are wrong.

There is no getting ahead. There is no winning. Everyone loses when any one loses.

I’ll get his job, they think. I’ll get her job, they speculate. It will all work out for the best in the end.

They’re wrong. It won’t work out well. This is what they don’t know.

At prison, Doris broke silence with these verses:

The great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. Let go of wanting and avoiding, and everything will be perfectly clear. But make the slightest distinction and heaven and earth are set infintely apart.   

If you want truth, don't be for or against anything. The idea of good and evil is the primary disease of the mind. If you don't grasp the deeper meaning, you trouble your minds complacency. The infinite is perfect and lacks nothing. But because you select and reject, you can't perceive the true nature of existence.  

Don't be entangled in the world; but don't lose yourself in emptiness. Be at peace in the oneness of things and all errors will disappear by themselves. 

 (-- By Seng-ts’an, Third Zen Patriarch)

Letting go self is important. Nothing to gain, nothing to lose.

There’s only no self. And everyone distinctly has nothing to lose, nothing to gain.

One word says it all!

As, itself

When we speak into that middle separation between me and not me, between reality as composed by me and reality disclosing itself -- we speak being-in-truth, an opening, where what collapses is subject/object, inner/outer, self/other.

In that opening all dualities collapse into one another and what was antagonistic opposition opens  as self-disclosure/reality-disclosure.

Like zen, which is this moment revealing itself, what is being revealed is presented as what is being revealed in and to and through itself.

Speak the truth!

Opening everything as itself.

the world, he says, is pure statement

Go ahead, say it!

The means of knowing and knowledge itself become integral aspects of Gebser's methodological approach. The mere illumination of what was not previously known and understood, that is philosophy, must then yield to eteology, or being-in-truth. "The Greek word eteos means 'true, real'; as an adverb, eteon means 'in accord with truth, truly, really' and comes from the root se:es, meaning "to be.”[30]*

…Eteology must replace philosophy just as philosophy once replaced the myths. In the eteologemes, the eteon or being-in-truth comes to veracity or statement of truth, and the "wares" or guards verity and conveys the "verition" which arises from the a-waring and imparting of truth. Eteology, then, is neither a mere ontology, that is, theory of being, nor is it a theory of existence. The dualistic question of being versus non-being which is commensurate only with the mental structure is superseded by eteology, together with the secularized question as to being, whose content -- or more exactly whose vacuity -- is nothing more than existence.Every eteologeme is a "verition," and as such is valid only when it allows origin to become transparent in the present. To do this it must be formulated in such a way as to be free of ego, and this means not just free of subject but also free of object; only then does it sustain the verity of the whole. This has nothing to do with representation; only in philosophical thought can the world be represented; for the integral perception of truth, the world is pure statement, and thus "verition."[31] 

 We can see, then, that this approach places great demands upon us all. It is not sufficient to merely describe or approximate, rather we are required to show what is in its fullest essence. This has, I believe, far-reaching ramifications for science and its allocation of recognition and funding. The actual contribution of knowledge, its freedom from the constraints imposed upon the researcher due to fiscal, economic, academic or political reasons must all be let go in favor of a direct, revelation of truth. This will not be an easy task for many, especially those who are bound to what is "right" as opposed to what is "true." We see this reflected in all aspects of our societal lives. Eteology is an approach of liberation. 

* [EPO, p.312, note 4]  (from, THE PRIMORDIAL LEAP AND THE PRESENT: THE EVER-PRESENT ORIGIN - AN OVERVIEW OF THE WORK OF JEAN GEBSER, by Ed Mahood, jr)  http://www.gaiamind.org/Gebser.html

 wary

adj warier, wariest

1. watchful, cautious, or alert

2. characterized by caution or watchfulness

[from ware² + -y¹]

warily  adv

wariness  n

Aware, be wary, care!

Everything, everything is conversation.

Let’s.

Liberate.

feasts, fathers, and flowers

The magical spell-casting motif only works within the tribe sharing the belief of magical spell-casting.

I prefer poiesis.*

 Poïesis (Ancient Greek: ποίησις) is etymologically derived from the ancient termποιέω, which means "to make". This word, the root of our modern "poetry", was first averb, an action that transforms and continues the world. Neither technical production nor creation in the romantic sense, poïetic work reconciles thought with matter and time, and person with the world.It is also used as a suffix, as in the biological term hematopoiesis, the formation of blood cells.  (--Wikipedia)

my father moved through dooms of love

34 

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height

this motionless forgetful where
turned at his glance to shining here;
that if(so timid air is firm)
under his eyes would stir and squirm

newly as from unburied which
floats the first who,his april touch
drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates
woke dreamers to their ghostly roots

and should some why completely weep
my father's fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry
for he could feel the mountains grow.

Lifting the valleys of the sea
my father moved through griefs of joy;
praising a forehead called the moon
singing desire into begin

joy was his song and joy so pure
a heart of star by him could steer
and pure so now and now so yes
the wrists of twilight would rejoice

keen as midsummer's keen beyond
conceiving mind of sun will stand,
so strictly(over utmost him
so hugely) stood my father's dream

his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:
no hungry man but wished him food;
no cripple wouldn't creep one mile
uphill to only see him smile.

Scorning the Pomp of must and shall
my father moved through dooms of feel;
his anger was as right as rain
his pity was as green as grain

septembering arms of year extend
yes humbly wealth to foe and friend
than he to foolish and to wise
offered immeasurable is

proudly and(by octobering flame
beckoned)as earth will downward climb,
so naked for immortal work
his shoulders marched against the dark

his sorrow was as true as bread:
no liar looked him in the head;
if every friend became his foe
he'd laugh and build a world with snow.

My father moved through theys of we,
singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
danced when she heard my father sing)

then let men kill which cannot share,
let blood and flesh be mud and mire,
scheming imagine,passion willed,
freedom a drug that's bought and sold

giving to steal and cruel kind,
a heart to fear,to doubt a mind,
to differ a disease of same,
conform the pinnacle of am

though dull were all we taste as bright,
bitter all utterly things sweet,
maggoty minus and dumb death
all we inherit,all bequeath 

and nothing quite so least as truth
--i say though hate were why men breathe--
because my Father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all 

(Poem by e.e.cummings) 

Nothing quite so least as truth.

October's feasts, fathers, and flowers. 

Monday afternoon

Schooners wrapped. Season end.

Ducks don't read, thus hope doesn't end.

Sheets pulled in taken down.

Sticks and lines bereft.

Late October, orange, Mt Battie

The day itself.

Begins to wane hunter's moon.

At table, reading Berry

To live graciously with one another -- that's what Thomas Berry says is our goal.

At least, in metaphor and as well as paraffin, vigil candle light shines.

Fourteen years later, my sister, glad for home port, finds harbor in fair weather and calm seas.

TERMINUS
by: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

T is time to be old,

To take in sail:--

The gods of bounds,

Who sets to seas a shore,

Came to me in his fatal rounds,

And said: 'No more!

No farther shoot

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.

Fancy departs: no more invent;

Contract thy firmament

To compass of a tent.

There's not enough for this and that,

Make thy option which of two;

Economize the failing river,

Not the less revere the Giver,

Leave the many and hold the few.

Timely wise accept the terms,

Soften the fall with wary foot;

A little while

Still plan and smile,

And,--fault of novel germs,--

Mature the unfallen fruit.

Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,

Bad husbands of their fires,

Who, when they gave thee breath,

Failed to bequeath

The needful sinew stark as once,

The Baresark marrow to thy bones,

But left a legacy of ebbing veins,

Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--

Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,

Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.'

 

As the bird trims her to the gale,

I trim myself to the storm of time,

I man the rudder, reef the sail,

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:

'Lowly faithful, banish fear,

Right onward drive unharmed;

The port, well worth the cruise, is near,

And every wave is charmed.'