We love to read poetry at meetingbrook conversations.
They are secret doors into our common intuition.
The doors are unlocked. As is our willingness to walk through
Wednesday, November 05, 2025
Tuesday, November 04, 2025
those who voted today
We vote
to say
we’re here
As long as
voting is allowed
and fair
the ship of state
will not founder
nor smash on rocks
just as absurdity
is not the final chokehold
we will send away the corrupt
the heart of the matter
Outside chapel/zendo
Deer look over shoulders
On Ragged and Bald mountains
Inside chapel/zendo
A different look
No hunting allowed
Monday, November 03, 2025
that-which-is, given
The classic distinction is that only God creates, we invent, organize, or manifest.
And yet if someone were to say “We are creating God”, what would our reaction be?
I think God is creation itself -- both the appearance of what is experienced, and, the process of bringing into being that which was not here before.
In prison today, our conversation.
We wondered what it meant to say “Death is nothing else.” That perhaps the reason we fear death is that we want something else.
We wondered if suicide is deluded thinking that this life will end and something else will replace it.
If death is nothing else, if there is only this, itself, mind, God, now, and the energy moving through everything, through and through, whether in the body or without the body -- is our attention and awareness the apprehension of reality as a whole before thinking about it, measuring it, comparing it, judging it -- a mere presencing, refuging and the intimacy of not knowing?
Mozart is given the music. So too Bach. Beethoven. Every musician, singer, composer, poet, novelist and playwright. Inspiration as that-which-is given.
I am dull. I do not listen. I do not feel. I try to make something happen. Nothing happens.
I am alert. I listen. I feel the stillness. I do nothing. And, of itself, there comes to be that which is revealing itself.
The language and music of God is silence. But we prefer something else. And there is nothing else.
There is much we do not understand about death. When the senses cease to receive what the intellect attempts to find meaning in, we mourn the departure of the visible and sonorous gateway that we call a human life.
Silence and stillness attend us.
Creation detects the heart and mind of invisible wholeness.
There is nothing else.
Live with it and die with it.
It is the coming and going, the one who comes and the one who goes.
Between the coming and the going . . .
Sunday, November 02, 2025
nada más
I think I understand it now.
Understand what?
Death.
You understand it?
Yes.
How so?
Death is nothing else.
Nothing else?
Yes, death is nothing else . . .
extra, extra, walk all about it
We are the Sunday
Morning harbor walkers, we
Nod good morning, cross
Footbridges, inspect
Sailing craft and fishing boats
Place coin on green thwart
Faint chant from France as
Sunday Times, coffee, donut
Replace scripture, new
Testimony to our
World extra church, cant or
The need to atone
merci et auvoir
It’s only a game
Say those who don’t know better —
No, it’s a sorrow
It’s possible I
Might have been disappointed
No matter who won
Saturday, November 01, 2025
zazen by toboggan chute
One after one
Yellow leaves
Fall through air
From their trees
I sit in vigil
With these
My relatives
Returning to ground
Now scurrying
With strong wind
To other location
Enroute elsewhere
私の友人, watashi no yūjin, my friend
Sometimes the reverse of a zen saying works as well:
"Better to hear the name than see the face."
itadakimasu, (we humbly receive)
Sainthood is a mysterious thing.
A soul is a mysterious presence.
So is memory.
I knew her as a Sister of the Assumption. She died this early November date nine years ago. We became friends. I went to Nicolet, Canada for her final profession. We corresponded. She tried to get me to come to Japan to teach. She became a chaplain at Yale. Then she left her order after forty plus years, got married, and lived a different life.
Her husband wrote in her obituary she enjoyed garden parties, shopping on 5th Avenue, staying at the Yale club in NYC, and all things Cambridge UK. But that, I suspect, was how he valued and captured their time together.
The postal office refused to deliver the birthday haiku I wrote to her because I addressed it to her street address in Madison CT and they had a post office box and some officious sorter couldn’t be bothered to drop it there and so returned it to me where it sits unopened over a doorway. She died weeks later.
That’s all. For fifty years we knew each other. Just that.
We were two children in a photograph, one extending arm with flower in hand, the other, also arm extended, open hand toward extended flower, not quite reaching it, suspended in uncompleted nearness, the fragrance and freshness of their lovely gesture forever as it is shown, an invitation, a consideration, a breath between that both take in, separately.
HAIKU
(--for Jo-Ann, 私の友人, Watashi no yūjin, my friend)
child's hand reaches out
yellow daffodil offered
always, almost, held
(d. 2nov2016)
Friday, October 31, 2025
thus come, thus not gone
To notice, go beyond words, and wonder.
This is zen mind, says Shunryu Suzuki.
It’s where we begin, again and again, every instant, every place, with every encounter.
Zen mind is one of those enigmatic phrases used by Zen teachers to make you notice yourself, to go beyond the words and wonder what your own mind and being are. This is the purpose of all Zen teaching—to make you wonder and to answer that wondering with the deepest expression of your own nature. The calligraphy on the front of the binding reads nyorai in Japanese or tathagata in Sanskrit. This is a name for Buddha which means “he who has followed the path, who has returned from suchness, or is suchness, thus-ness, is-ness, emptiness, the fully completed one.” It is the ground principle which makes the appearance of a Buddha possible. It is Zen mind. At the time Suzuki-roshi wrote this calligraphy—using for a brush the frayed end of one of the large swordlike leaves of the yucca plants that grow in the mountains around Zen Mountain Center—he said: “This means that Tathagata is the body of the whole earth.” (-from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.)
About the word:
Tathāgata (Sanskrit: [tɐˈtʰaːɡɐtɐ]), translated into Chinese as 如來 and English as Thus Come One, is a Paliand Sanskrit word used in ancient India for a person who has attained the highest religious goal.[1] Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, used it when referring to himself or other past Buddhas in the Pāli Canon. Likewise, in the Mahayanacorpus, it is an epithet of Shakyamuni Buddha and the other celestial buddhas. The term is often thought to mean either "one who has thus gone" (tathā-gata), "one who has thus come" (tathā-āgata), or sometimes "one who has thus not gone" (tathā-agata). This is interpreted as signifying that the Tathāgata is beyond all coming and going – beyond all transitory phenomena. There are, however, other interpretations and the precise original meaning of the word is not certain [2] -Wikipedia
Zen is the easiest hard thing you’ll ever encounter.
Start there.
And again.
che non distingue
Coming across Hegel, it occurs to me that 'emptiness' might be reflected in the (odd) way I've taken to translate Om mane padre hum, namely "behold what is within without, behold what is without within."
If asked if I think of God, I respond "I think of nothing else."
While Hegel is not buddhist, his take on the void where "nothing is known… because it is defined as the very other-worldly beyond of consciousness…" puts me in mind of "within what-is without, without what-is within" as the void sive what-is, what-is sive void.
Yes within, yes without; no within, no without.
This does not affect the price of a cup of coffee, neither does it perpetrate war or extra-judicial killings, nor hostile kidnappings from city streets by government thugs.
We must not confuse the void with the meaninglessness of a demented mind running away from itself.
"Itself" -- is all there is. It would be considered insanity to try to run away from all that is.
The beyond is the simple turning-away of immediate objective existence from itself. To say that the laws of the world are beyond the immediately sensible world says nothing else than that this immediate world possesses negativity within itself. Immediate objects automatically exclude us from them; further, they (the objects) posit a beyond that mediates the differentiation of themselves. The world immanently excludes itself from itself, positing a beyond of itself from within itself. Thus, this supersensible realm that I must by necessity presuppose is not negatively nothing. It is the positive nothing that belongs to the objective world as such; it is what Hegel calls the “void:”
in the void, nothing is known… because it is defined as the very other-worldly beyond of consciousness… Suppose we are nonetheless to take there to be something in the void after all; this is a void which came about as the void of objective things but which now must be taken both as emptiness in itself, or as the void of all spiritual relations, or even as the void of the differences of consciousness as consciousness – and if the void is taken as this complete void, which is also called the holy, nonetheless there is supposed to be something with which to fill it out, even if it is only filled out with daydreams, or with appearances which consciousness itself creates. If so, then consciousness would just have to rest content with being so badly treated, for it would deserve no better, while daydreams themselves are still better than its emptiness (Hegel 2018: 87). 11
(from, Hegel's Understanding: Absence, Accident, Alienated, by Virgil Lualhati McCorgra, in International Journal of Zizek Studies,)
It is only temporary, but a painful temporary. The cult of insanity and inanity is full on right now. It is fixated on personal desires and the accumulation of raw power, hostile antagonism, and bedeviling logic about the priorities of a once idealist country being turned into an ideologically racist theocracy in the name of Christian Nationalism and Oligarchical Overlords.
I think the world is wrongly understood.
The separation of anthropoids from a cosmos of an inherently inter-reliant void is a mental opinion that creates devastating conclusions. Such as -- kill the aliens, separate out anyone not "us" -- get rid of anyone not sympathetic to our ideology -- incarcerate anyone who we perceive as not in our corner, not loyal to our ascendant stature.
Our appearance is troublesome.
E.M. Cioran wrote:
There is a kind of knowledge that strips whatever you do of weight and
scope: for such knowledge, everything is without basis except itself. Pure to the point of abhorring even the notion of an object, it translates that extreme science according to which doing or not doing something comes down to the same thing and is accompanied by an equally extreme satisfaction: that of being able to rehearse, each time, the discovery that any gesture performed is not worth defending, that nothing is enhanced by the merest vestige of substance, that “reality” falls within the province of lunacy. Such knowledge deserves to be called posthumous: it functions as if the knower were alive and not alive, a being and the memory of a being. “It’s already in the past,” he says about all he achieves, even as he achieves it, thereby forever destitute of the present
Unmaking, decreating, is the only task man may take upon himself, if he aspires, as everything suggests, to distinguish himself from the Creator.
(--in The Trouble With Being Born, ch.1, by E.,M. Cioran 1973, 1976, 2011)
Is this why we seem to love conflict and war so much?
Is our unmaking and decreating of laws, sensible policies, familiar national buildings, and all the agencies with their aid and assistance nationally and worldwide -- is this the only capability that an errant mind and skewed moral compass is able to conjure?
You cannot unmake or recreate the void.
Curiously, to buddhist and non-buddhist alike, the void might be our safest and healthiest refuge.
But we'll have to think about it -- and, then, harder still, unthink about it.
There is a current misanthropic tribe trying to mirror that entity against which the traditional prayer to St Michael pleads to assist us to face and forestall those "roaming the world seeking the ruin of souls."
Look at the faces, listen to their words, watch what they are doing.
They are trying to make something separate, disconnected, alienating.
They are "a-voiding" what is gathered, what is interconnected, of a piece, what is holy.
If you do not yet pray, allow yourself to begin.
Do not a-void wholeness, because as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end -- a prayer that empties out anything other in favor of what-is-Itself.
An undistinguished and non-distinguishing pilgrimage through difficult territory.
Thursday, October 30, 2025
i’m spiraling not relegating
Do not
Suffer
Fools
Gladly
Show sorrow
Be sad
Feel compassion
Learn Christ
Our fate is
In your hands
circumflex
Bending around letters
Not walking into barn door
Morning comes and light hesitates
As tilting earth over broken minds
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
doing this
Sometimes
The only thing
You can do
Is what
You can do
There is
Nothing else
I can do
So help me
Me God
sat,chit,ananda
Mind is emptiness
but my mind is emptying
I feel it draining
Being is bliss
but my fragment of being
is more and more remiss
Time is grand
but my time drips into sand
on a beach I forget where or when
it’s not a problem
being, consciousness, bliss
wending their way away
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
no gaining idea, no following thought
Zazen
Takes place
Every time
You see
What is
Before you
And everything
Is before
You
then, without speaking further, withdraws
Q: Why do you pray?
A: Why?
Q: Yes, why?
A: To be
alone with
The Alone
Q: And are you?
A: Yes,
I am
Q: [looks, silently]
from matutinum, 28 october
(Ps. 3) Dómine, quid multiplicáti sunt qui tríbulant me?
(Ps. 3) O Lord, how many are my foes!
multi insúrgunt advérsum me.
Many are rising against me; 2. Multi dicunt ánimæ meæ:
2. many are saying to me,
Non est salus ipsi in Deo ejus.
“There is no help for you[a] in God.”
3. Tu autem, Dómine, suscéptor meus es,
3. But you, O Lord, are a shield around me,
glória mea, et exáltans caput meum.
my glory, and the one who lifts up my head.
4. Voce mea ad Dóminum clamávi:
4. I cry aloud to the Lord,
et exaudívit me de monte sancto suo.
and he answers me from his holy hill.
5. Ego dormívi, et soporátus sum:
5. I lie down and sleep;
et exsurréxi, quia Dóminus suscépit me.
I wake again, for the Lord sustains me.
6. Non timébo míllia pópuli circumdántis me:
6. I am not afraid of ten thousands of people
exsúrge, Dómine, salvum me fac, Deus meus.
who have set themselves against me all around.
7. Quóniam tu percussísti omnes adversántes mihi sine causa:
7. Rise up, O Lord! Deliver me, O my God!
dentes peccatórum contrivísti.
For you strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked.
8. Dómini est salus:
8. Deliverance belongs to the Lord;
et super pópulum tuum benedíctio tua.
Monday, October 27, 2025
both source and sound
In prison this morning, Lalla Ded. "Lalla, or Lal Ded, was a Kashmiri mystic who lived in the 14th century at the height of Kashmiri Shaivism.” https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/old-school/on-lalla
We speak about:
I'm towing my boat across the ocean with a thread.
Will He hear me and help me across?
Or am I seeping away like water from a half baked cup?
Wander, my poor soul, you're not going home anytime soon.
And:
He who strikes the Unstruck Sound
calls space his body and emptiness his home,
who has neither name nor color nor family nor form,
who, meditating on Himself, is both Source and Sound
is the god who shall mount and ride this horse.
Then:
Gluttony gets you the best table in the town of Nowhere,
fasting gives your ego a boost.
Slaves of extremes, learn the art of balance
and all the closed doors will open at your touch.
Finally:
Now sir, make sure you've corralled your ass.
Or he'll champ his way
through your neighbors' saffron gardens.
No one's going to stand proxy
when it's your neck on the block.
Our conversant there is a devotee of Kashmiri Shaivism and showed great kindness sharing his passion.
These unmatriculated independent open-hearted open-minded conversations done twice weekly at the farm and up the hill at MSP are a fence being painted by thoughtful individuals with generous kindness to elderly pronouncers of the bodhisattva vows.
It is an open practice.
As is, if you will, prayer.
Thus:
"Let your prayers go drifting into space, you never know what will be coming down.” (--from "For a Dancer”, song from Jackson Browne's 1974 album Late for the Sky.)
nominalism, a mere spectre
Dystopian states
Of America
Go ahead, tell me
How dystopia is not
Our new
De-nominalism
Replacing
Anything actual
… … …
dys·to·pia (ˌ)dis-ˈtō-pē-ə
1
: an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives
There's almost a flavor of science fiction to the scenes Chilson describes, as though he were giving us a glimpse into a 21st-century dystopia of mad egoism and hurtling hulks of metal.—Adam Goodheart
Over the course of the movie, the late-60's ideal of togetherness turns into a dystopia of violence, revulsion and finally death.—John Leland
writing a dystopia
… leaping across the century to the 1990's to attempt a dystopia about the disintegration of Australian democracy into startling, irreversible despotism.—Pearl K. Bellhttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dystopia
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