compline, saturday night

When I call

Answer me

O God of justice


In the silent

Hours of the night

Bless the Lord

(--Ps 4; Ps 34)

on learning today that Paula passed away

haiku
        (for Paula)

i see you’ve gone in-

to a view we can’t see -- out

of your words -- clear light

        (wfh/25feb17)

Which is all fine with me, as I tend toward a disembodied existence a few inches above my head and outside my skin. So why not inhabit a story, a history ? Where else is there to go ? Where do 10,000 wordless hours on a zafu bring you but into the silences of your own brain ? Is God or enlightenment there more profoundly than in that which we construe in words ? In the beginning, after all, was the Word which was with the Wordless which, in fact was the Wordless. 

Posted by Paula at Wednesday, October 15, 2014 Paula’s House of Toast 

what he’d say truth was

Like this.

It’s just like this.

That’s what the Zen Master said the truth was -- it’s just like this.

Are you happy with this explanation?

Yes.

It’s true.

Truth is just like this.

ama nesciri

I'm thinking of turning myself in.

crossing rt 161, Aroostook County,
Presque Isle to Ft Kent Maine 22feb17

"The increased threat of deportation has sent many immigrants into hiding." (NYTimes morning briefing, 23feb17)

Presque Isle, Maine, UMPI

I came here from a dark watery place. Before that I was in deep hiding somewhere outside known terrain. I was the conception of two agents intent on snuggling me into this existence before their sleepy cells took to snoring somnolence.

Presque Isle Maine, 22feb17

When I appeared out of the shadows I immediately went into hiding, assuming an identity with pastiche facts and dates and formulas of social incognito that allowed me to move quietly and freely through school corridors and work greetings without being recognized,

Now, some seventy plus years later, I return to the spiritually hidden place of pre-conception.

I look out.  

There are bare trees.

tree, Fort Kent, 8:30am

View from Fort Kent, Maine
over St John River to Clair, NB Canada

Canada is across the road 

Nobody knows my name.

Mt Katahdin, Millinocket Maine, 21feb17

I love 

to be

Unknown.

wisdom seeks for wisdom

Seek.

Rev. Suzuki’s talk
July 22, 1965
We are studying now the sutra of the sixth patriarch, in the evening lecture, and PRAJNA (this is of course Sanskrit word) we mean, wisdom, but this wisdom is not intellect, or knowledge.  This wisdom is so-called our inmost nature, which is always in incessant activity.  Zazen practice is to….wisdom seeking for wisdom is zazen practice, if I use technical term.  Wisdom seeks wisdom is zazen practice, and our everyday life is wisdom.  Realization of our precepts is our everyday life.  When wisdom…When our everyday life is based on wisdom we call it percepts.  When we sit, we do not do anything; we just sit.  There’s no activity of our mind.  We just sit and all what we do is taking inhaling and exhaling.  Sometimes you will hear some birds singing, but that is not actually….you are not hearing.  Your ears will hear it.  You are not hearing it.  Just, you know, sound come, and you will make some response to it, that is all.  This kind of practice is called “wisdom seeks for wisdom”.

Originally offered: July 22nd, 1965 | Modified October 27th, 2009 by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
http://suzukiroshi.sfzc.org/dharma-talks/july-22-1965/#more-225 

And may we find. 

reading paper about sila, pranna, and samadhi

Speed limit is 75 on 95 in northern maine from Benedicta to Houlton,

Then follow 12 wheeler up into Presque Isle.

Arrive tired. A fairly constant condition.

We tossed snow pieces over high banks off helipad at hospital in Millinocket.

Such a good

Dog

evolving out of garbled grunts and groans

In dialogue with a student:

RE: how we might think differently about the election, 
a philosopher’s point of view

COLLAPSE

"Political parties have become the sacred."

"The Dalai Lama discusses ...  how irrational it is that we blame others instead of their words - they are not their words and if they were in a state of happiness they probably wouldn't be speaking in the manner in which they do."(MW)

I like the way you weave our texts through your comments.  The above quotes catch my attention. It is true the political parties have become the sacred -- it helps explain our belief and fidelity to them. Even (one might say) the observation that Mrs. Clinton was anointed by her party to be the ordained candidate without sufficient or honest debate as to her ascendancy.

Like the phenomenon of SBNR (spiritual but not religious) we looked at briefly in class, Mr Trump arrived not really republican and no longer democrat and punched his way through the religious establishment much to the astonishment and (to many) the sacrilege of apostasy against the hierarchy of both parties.

Your statement suggests that this phenomenon of the breakthrough renegade himself mirrors the falling from grace of the traditional churches (Dems/Reps) and an early example of an ersatz new Martin Luther smashing the establishment into a new landscape that is unrecognizable and unpredictable.

And here we can retrieve your second statement -- that it is his words, his manner of speaking, the implications of which make us nervous and wondering where the syntax and tone will shake out and into what new dogmatic or evangelistic pronouncements. Is it possible that we are in a new and uncharted vocabulary that is being sounded into the forming chaos of a type of post big bang? That the man who has emerged with an unrecognized glossolalia is merely echoing the emergence into language as did our ancient ancestors evolving out of garbled grunts and groans up from inarticulate gestures toward articulation and understandable discourse?

(Yes, ok, a bit flowery and far-fetched prose -- but do get the point.) Perhaps the Dalai Lama is saying we might not like the words, but do not condemn the man -- he is trying to come to word.

Coming to word is a mighty accomplishment. Fact, feeling, experience, thought, and possibilities swirl and bump and twist in seemingly random patterns of interaction and diversion until they coalesce around an impulse of expression seeking to find its way into the world as word, as word become speech, word become language, word become flesh, become the spirit of interconnectivity that allows many the opportunity to move together toward ways of acting that recognizes and benefits what might be called community.

Is this the birth pang we are experiencing? Or is it a crapshoot, (an enterprise whose outcome is determined by chance) the rolling of dice that could just as easily become the near-edge of real danger? 

Our ethics begin to take on the role of a young reporter on the beat coming upon an unexpected slowly developing event that resembles something between creation and devastation. She wants to report on what is taking place. She watches. She reports. She is captivated by the fog and mist and the forming creature taking shape behind it all.

She is not the enemy. She does not hate what is trying to form itself. But she is uncertain, and a little frightened. 

Perhaps we all are.

theme: to care is to change

In Canada it is family day.

In America it is presidents' day.

In prison this morning it was Immanuel Kant and J.S.Mill and Nel Noddings, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sam Cooke.

How do you arrive at what’s correct? one man asked. And what about ego?

Kobe Bryant and Lebron James, was one response. Ego and integrated ego. The isolated self and the team player.

If you don't change, you don't care; if you don't care, you don't change.

Philosophy, it can be argued, is a family arête.*

*Note: 

In discussing arête, Plato leads the examination of humankind’s quest for excellence. Henry Marrou describes arête as “the ideal value to which even life itself must be sacrificed.” Although Marrou considers ludicrous the translation of the word from ancient Greek to mean virtue (he prefers valor), virtue is the term used by translator W.K.C. Guthrie in two of Plato’s dialogues to describe this quality that is made and not born in us, the quality of excellence toward which we strive in our daily conduct in society 

.https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/Arete

gracias, tibi

Not in church this morning

Not that kind of church

Dripping roof water, white noise waves, a trilling phone alarm in another room

All the baptisms, confirmations, communion and go-in-peace

Are unwalled, without vestments, no longer arguing pastor or priest, male or female, born once or born again

There is a freedom from that mind and time

Stay-at-home fruit juice and walnut raisin toast sunlight on February porch

I don't know who Jesus was, whether he liked jews catholics or protestants better

I don't know whether accepting him as personal lord and savior punches your ticket to glory

Or if Albert Camus is sitting in Algerian cafe smoking and thinking about absurdity

As the United States sells off sanity and buys crazy

Terrorists storing their dangerous ideas in foldaway tents and going on holiday

Until retirement benefits click in and yield 5.7% on the dollar

And jesus' 21st century caption reads "if you see me, say something" -- an invitation to

Post-prayer non-liturgical unfrocked morning ordinariness with half and half in coffee

As the apocalypse takes shape in idiots' minds looking to buy guns and shorting options

And nothing we know of arrives at end of driveway looking to befuddle us with bagels and donuts

Ita missa est

gracias, tibi

Saecula saculorum

Hoc est enim corpus meum?

Deus ibi est . . . 

breathing, itself, here

Cough from another room.

Furnace blows warm air through vents from basement.

Box of Tylenol opened.

Blood pressure high.

Pain from mouth pervades.

I've been thinking about last nights conversation. How compassion walks down dark alleys. Dumpsters full of debris and detritus call out resentment and condemnation wanting your compliance and complicity.

Instead of sorrow for those hurting as well as those doing the hurting.

Kuan Yin, Bodhisattva of compassion, hears the cries of the world.

Mary, Mother of Sorrows, feels in her heart the distress and difficulties of the suffering.

No blame.

No recrimination.

No protestations of failed righteousness or sinful deviancy.

Rather, attentive presence. Listening awareness.

Rigpa and condolence.

An offer of nearing humanity in an atmosphere of distancing greed, anger, and delusion.

And then, death.

Of self.

Of separation.

Of tendentious opinions signaling arrogant dismissal of other.

Finally.

Face to face with what is the face of oneself.

Without barrier, border, or boundary.

Breathing.

Itself.

Here.

recollection

ji ji mu ge

(Between one thing-event and another thing-event there is no barrier.)

Jijimuge: (Japanese) The doctrine of the Kegon School of the 'unimpeded interdiffusion' of all Ji, things. Apparently the last word in the intellectual understanding of the unity of manifestation. http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/history/glossary_fk.htm

long day

When it

Is time for

Sleep --

Then,

Sleep

here, ever-present origin itself said, I am

If God is presence,
then God is
wherever someone
is present to
another

If we’ve stopped
believing in God
it’s that we
fail to be
present

God is alone; I am, nearly, there

My soul, 

find peace 

in God 

alone

(--psalm 61)

an open gate held by snow

No need to look up names or faces from decades gone by.

When ambulances and police cars speed by, lit up, all that is needed is prayer.

Surely it is someone of ken to someone thinking of them.

where’s the love

The New York Times is only the mess-anger.

“Flynn Is Trump’s Just Deserts”, Frank Bruni  FEB. 14, 2017

I’d rather be sending the Four Bodhisattva Vows to a sister practitioner in Georgia.*

Instead, I comment:

Anybody seen the Republican Party?   

McConnell? Ryan?  

No.   

All they wanted was their meal ticket in the White House. They are beyond being embarrassed. They are like white rich looters during a national catastrophe, like the Wall Street crowd. Their response is, “Hang in there, Mr President, a little longer. We’ve almost got the place cleaned out.”  

It’s hard not to be livid over the cynicism and hypocrisy of our Republican senators and representatives. They turn a blind eye to the radical ideological incompetency of the administration while concurrently blindsiding the American people with a cat-burglary dismantling of every safety alarm to unprotect citizens from an ascendant theft-ridden ideology.  

Have all good ideas and effective leadership abandoned this country and gone to new undisclosed locations?  Is this survival reality show the one program available in actual time? Is active resistance and peaceful non-cooperation our new and only political reality?

(Thanks be to goodness I scored a large Whitman's Sampler for therapeutic calming this Valentine’s Day. I’ll need a rehab stay following the current and coming insanity of our political collapsing dam...and/or chocolate overdose.)

...

*
Four Vows of the Bodhisattva, 

Upaya Zen Center version

Creations are numberless, I vow to free them.

Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to transform them.

Reality is boundless, I vow to perceive it.

The awakened way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.

if words are prelude to action, these words augur frightening acts to follow

 The words he spoke:

MILLER: Well, I think that it’s been an important reminder to all Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become in many case a supreme branch of government. One unelected judge in Seattle cannot remake laws for the entire country. I mean this is just crazy, John, the idea that you have a judge in Seattle say that a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to enter the United States is -- is -- is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.   

The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.  

(--excerpt, Transcript, Face the Nation, comments by Stephen Miller, senior policy advisor to DT/45, 12Feb2017) 

Sounds like?

What’s rolling out

Is nothing

We want to hear

Nor will the people, listening

Abide

via con dios

each breath

God

inside and out

where zen gaze and contemplative listening intersect

THE QUIET WORLD

By Jeffrey McDaniel

In an effort to get people to look 

into each other’s eyes more, 

and also to appease the mutes, 

the government has decided 

to allot each person exactly one hundred   

and sixty-seven words, per day. 

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear   

without saying hello. In the restaurant   

I point at chicken noodle soup. 

I am adjusting well to the new way. 

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,   

proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.   

I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond, 

I know she’s used up all her words,   

so I slowly whisper I love you

thirty-two and a third times. 

After that, we just sit on the line   

and listen to each other breathe.

Jeffrey McDaniel, “The Quiet World” from The Forgiveness Parade. Copyright © 1998 by Jeffrey McDaniel. 

never

What an odd notion, being born.

The same is true of the big bang or the potential end of the universe. Time doesn’t begin or end in an absolute way. It is a convenient way of using words. Time is simply a concept that fits various physical models. But its origin is as much in metaphysics as in physics. When someone believes he will die and go to Heaven for eternity, the typical, casual definition of “eternity” is a long, long time. But that’s not true, because whatever is eternal must be outside time. Ultimately, the only participation we can have in time, outside time, or with a dimension of inconceivable time, occurs in our consciousness. Whatever we can experience determines the nature of time. It is just as true to say that the big bang is occurring right now as to date it back to 13.8 billion years, because only when we think about the event do we draw the big bang into the world of human experience, and thinking happens in the now.   

None of these conclusions are speculative–quantum physics and cosmology deal with them–and cosmologists and quantum physicists argue over them–every day. Without settling the vexing questions of “What came before the big bang?” “Where did time originate?” and “What is the timeless like?” we only want to point out that time has no meaning outside a specific frame of reference. There is no “real” time, only models of time constructed in human awareness. Once we realize this simple fact, the capacity to move beyond all models, to truly lose our fear of death, come alive. The spiritual concept that we were never born and will never die then becomes viable, too.

(--from, What Came Before the Big Bang? A Surprise Answer, about, Reality is Structured Consciousness, by Depak Chopra and Menas KaFatoshttps://www.scienceandnonduality.com/what-came-before-the-big-bang-a-surprise-answer/

What a curious way of thinking, being dead.