you must travel the path alone

Reading The Bible With and Without Jesus, How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently • by Amy-Jill Levine & Marc Zvi Brettler, 2020. 

It does seem that the world is begun and sustained by stories. That which is told about somethings is often that which is believed. For better or worse.

And if the narrators-in-chief wield enough power and exercise the greatest threat of punishment for disbelief, that narrative has staying power.

Follow the opportunity to seek out perception,

But you must travel the path alone.

If you have not found illumination,

Go where you may achieve completion.

    --Ch’en Hsien (1634- 1654)

Chen Xian [Ch’en Hsien] 陳賢

(1613?-1672?)

“Guanyin” 1661

觀音

Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper

112.3 x 40.8 cm. (44 1/4 x 16 1/8 in.)

 

A single figure of the Bodhisattva Guanyin sits on a strongly patterned rug, with shoes in front, sutras placed to one side, and holding a fly-whisk. The image is distinctly feminine, as is usual for the later periods of Buddhism, and much attention was given to the creation of a lovely and attractive image. The painting is signed in the lower right, Chen Xian, with one seal reading Songqi, “Pine River,” while the colophon by the artist is signed Songqi, Jian, perhaps an alternate name meaning “durable” rather than “virtuous.” 

 

Maybe that’s why zen stories seem so cryptic and off-center, challenging the reader to dare make sense of them. 

Cultures and societies, institutions and smaller units of identity-making organizations, write mission statements, offer rationales, histories, identity narratives, proclamations, and “abouts” on Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs, Instagram, and ’take your clothes off and act sexy’ apps.

Everyone says ‘believe my telling.’

Governments add ‘or else.’ As did dominant institutions like nations and churches and corporations.

Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, hears the cries of the world. Often it is the cries of those whose stories do not add up, who suffer the telling of other’s stories decimating their lives.

Maybe that's why I prefer metaphors. They're shorter. They suggest and infer. They don't try to overpower or control.

The one simple thing about metaphor is that it moves

us from one place to another, the word itself of restless

parts, from buried Greek meta meaning “over, across,

behind” and phoreo – “to bring, bear, carry.”

--Marianne Boruch

These days I seem to sit alone and watch the tone of branches moving on the mountain. 

You could say they're going nowhere but where they are with grace. But neither am I. And I ain't got much grace.

If you're going to tell me stories, be brief, and add question marks at end of each paragraph.

Is God is an incomplete haiku unconcerned about how many syllables remain?

holy hush of ancient sacrifice

Mostly, if I had to admit it, I’d rather not know.

A living nescience seems refreshing. But an attentive living nescience. Not one of those ignorant boorish types of dullardry wherein stupidity masquerades as premium sophistry and pronounces itself the wisest most accomplished being ever conceived by woman. Our current instance of such proclamation is insufferably obvious and lives between Lake America and the Gulf of America 

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degreeshttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prolixity of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

― Richard P. Feynman

 People want to know if I am well. 

I don’t know. I can’t tell. And good intentions pave all the way to hell.

Although I am surprised whenever one additional breath follows another.

My new motto is “One nap at a time.”

There, at least, preludes of unknown travels speed by without coherence or prolixity.

Hence, a modest aphasia and dizzying circumlocution sweeps the path with straw broom leading to latch of hermitry gate.

resolved

 Sometimes a lot of things hurt.

When so, then so, let them.

tat tvam asi and bohm’s ‘implicate'

Peer Gynt Suite, No. 2, Op. 55 Part 1. The Abduction of the Bride, Ingrid’s Lament, plays. 

A good background to the prattle of pundits trying to find new ways to tell us about the most absurd man ever to hold public office and his idiotic actions and rantings intended to foist his will and wealth into greater magnitude.

Gynt’s Arabian Dance prances across air waves. Earlier I watched documentary about the reintroduction of Przewalski's horses into China's Jungar Basin and Gobi Desert which, remarkably, helped revive dead soil, return native vegetation, and slow desertification.

“What is the ground of everything?” asks the Upanishads. 

“Brahman!”

Brahman, in the Upanishads (Indian sacred writings), the supreme existence or absolute reality. The etymology of the word, which is derived from Sanskrit, is uncertain. Though a variety of views are expressed in the Upanishads, they concur in the definition of brahman as eternal, conscious, irreducible, infinite, omnipresent, and the spiritual core of the universe of finiteness and change. Marked differences in interpretation of brahman characterize the various schools of Vedanta, the system of Hindu philosophy based on the writings of the Upanishads.  (https://www.britannica.com/topic/brahman-Hindu-concept)

“The individual is where the whole becomes local,” says the documentary on David Bohm and the Upanishads, about the "implicate order.” 

The notion of implicate and explicate orders emphasizes the primacy of structure and process over individual objects. The latter are seen as mere approximations of an underlying process. In this approach, quantum particles and other objects are understood to have only a limited degree of stability and autonomy.^[3]

Bohm believed that the weirdness of the behavior of quantum particles is caused by unobserved forces, maintaining that space and time might actually be derived from an even deeper level of objective reality. In the words of F. David Peat, Bohm considered that what we take for reality are "surface phenomena, explicate forms that have temporarily unfolded out of an underlying implicate order." That is, the implicate order is the ground from which reality emerges.^{[4] wikipedia}

It seems hard to understand. We are not part of it. We are it.

I reread the Chandogya Upanishad

The Chandogya Upanishad is one of the oldest and most important Upanishads, belonging to the Sama Veda. It explores profound spiritual ideas through stories, dialogues, and philosophical teachings. A central theme is the concept of “Tat Tvam Asi” (“That Thou Art”), expressing the oneness of the individual soul (Atman) with the universal soul (Brahman). The text emphasizes the power of meditation, sound, and knowledge, especially the sacred syllable Om. It includes lessons on ethics, self-discipline, and the pursuit of ultimate reality beyond material existence. Through symbolic narratives, it guides seekers toward liberation and inner realization.       https://vedantastudents.com/chandogya-upanishad/

The whole cannot be analyzed. Only dwelt-as.

God cannot be understood.

Rest in the unknowing incomprehension of the unknowable.

There, right there.

Here, only here.

to be free

 Listening to songs

Their simple narrative

Singer with raspy voice

Became so familiar

Success is a funny arc

When it comes it comes

Mostly it stays off shore

Drifting away, nothing more

new chaplain recognizes tau on my hat

In prison one of the men worries. He feels that with Dolly and Tim in their eighties, and me older than them, it won’t be long and I’ll be missed and he feels it could be soon. Another guy agreed as he read a collaborative poem he partially authored. The tall Black Jew entered wordlessly, sat beside me, opened his new tallit, put it over his head, bowed in his chair, got up, walked out, left his ID badge on the chair, wordlessly.

The way to true spirituality
Cannot depend upon others;
One instant of enlightenment
And I go beyond body and self.
The myriad and profound virtues
Are complete;
Anywhere in the universe is now my home.

—Mokuan (1611-1684)

We fret over a Creeley poem as I have been for decades. We’re uncertain about it. Much like being 82 as Shabbat nears and my tall friend ghosts us having abandoned his carceral identity.

Song

God give you pardon from gratitude

and other mild forms of servitude 

 

and make peace for all of us

with what is easy.

     (—poem by Robert Creeley)

One of the men is painting a canvas of a Sadhu toking ganja. It looks like he is singing into a hand microphone.

I’m not so sure about death, old age, conversion to Judaism (as another tall inmate has done), gratitude and other mild forms of servitude, or what I’m doing anymore.

The day inside and outside goes by. 

Another man from India is shy about some sly undertaking he’s about. Said he’ll be in next week. 

We walk the mile out.

It’s been a lot of years.

good lad

Coming up stairs

Night 

Takes to bed

Quietly

what is longing to be-with-us as nothing-other is with us.

So many so often consider “mystical union” to be some sort of fireworks and transcendental out of body experience.

Odds are, it’s not.

It is quite possible it is a different sort of nearness. A nearness that feels like no other, or, in different words, a no-other feeling that does not register as an experience. 

Rather, an unremarkable reality that so infiltrates one’s being that it doesn’t feel like anything else -- just what is taking place at any given moment.

The unio mystica—the “union” between “God” and the “human being/self”—in its most popular meaning might seem to refer to the vague and subjective feeling of “proximity” periodically felt by certain individuals (mystics) toward some higher “reality”. Experts in mysticism today no longer believe the naïve view that the term refers primarily to an “experience” of that reality, one characterized by “ineffability” and the loss of individual awareness in the face of that overwhelming “presence”.13 In fact, there is nothing at all vague or subjective about the unio mystica, which has been explained in rigorous detail by Religions 2025, 16, 94 4 of 27 the great theorists of the Abrahamic traditions and surely by theorists of other traditions as well. Since the expression—“union” or the “unio mystica”—finds its origin and development in Western Christian sources, we should not be surprised to see that specialists of that tradition have most thoroughly developed its meaning.

Scholars of Christian mysticism—e.g., the Benedictine monk Sebastian Moore, the Dominican scholar Louis Roy, and the Chicago Divinity School historian of religions, Bernard McGinn—have presented in some of their writings, an approach to the unio mystica grounded in a theory of consciousness, specifically in what some of them have termed the mystical consciousness. 14 

In other words, they have explained the meaning of “union” between “God” and the “human being/self” as a meeting (“uniting”) of “human consciousness” with “divine consciousness”,15 and the overcoming of the former by the latter (“identity”). Their discussions of the unio mystica also draw from and seek to coherently and self-consistently explain the multitude of statements of Christian mystics16 pertaining both to the pole of “uniting” as well as to the pole of “identity”.

Bernard McGinn presented a useful summary of a theory of the mystical consciousness in his 2008 article-length study, “Mystical Consciousness: A Modest Proposal”. As he clarifies there, the mystical consciousness is characterized by a continual “uniting” with “God” the unitas spiritus),17 the latter understood as a “co-presence” found within the mystic’s consciousness; or rather as a kind of “consciousness-beyond” or “meta-consciousness” (to use a term offered by Thomas Merton) (McGinn 2008, pp. 44–63 at 47, 48). Whereas ordinary human consciousness involves acts of loving and knowing together with the self-awareness (and intentionality) of the human subject who acts and knows, the mystical consciousness adds a further element, namely an “infinite other”, who/which is not grasped as another object of consciousness18 but an “infinite ground”19 of knowing and an endless source of loving that transforms the mystic’s consciousness and becomes evident in his actions. 

(McGinn 2008, pp. 47, 51–53; Roy 2003, p. xv).

(--from Rethinking the Unio Mystica: From McGinn to Ibn Arab¯ by Arjun Nair, pp. 3-4https://www.academia.edu/127122244/Rethinking_the_Unio_Mystica_From_McGinn_to_Ibn_Arab%C4%AB?email_work_card=view-paper

Perhaps it is the Nothing Special (by Charlotte Joko Beck), Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (by Shunryu Suzuki), or Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychoanalysis (by Barry Magid), or The Experience of No-Self (by Bernadette Roberts).

We so want something to happen. Something to radically upset our familiar way of seeing things.

But what if the unio mystica is just our ordinary life without perversion, delusion, or grasping?

When the Buddha said we are already enlightened, when Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, when Robert Lowell wrote “we are poor passing facts / warned by that to give / each figure in the photograph / his living name” (poem, Epilogue) -- we are invited into everyday/ordinariness without making anything other of it.

Then there is the difficult counterintuitive poem Song by Robert Creeley that challenges our understanding and causes us to ponder:

God give you pardon from gratitude

and other mild forms of servitude 

 

and make peace for all of us

with what is easy.

Perhaps we think that God is hard, demanding, a harsh judge, uncompromising, unappeasable, and a miserable absent tyrant.

Or, perhaps, despite any reconcilable evidence that God is loving and kind in a world that provides mayhem and terror, war and despicable behavior in our midst, we implore protection and solace.

We ask “where is God?”

It seems to me we are missing something vital and important.

Maybe God is nothing other than where we are who we are. 

Something is longing to be-with-us as nothing-other is with us.

What do those words say? 

            Be Still and Know I Am (God)

            With You Always

knowledge thus attained

Just because we behave stupidly by allowing stupidity to rule our country, there might be yet a little room left to repent and remove stupidity from his golden pretentiousness.

 Look up to heaven and down on earth, and they will remind you of their impermanency. Look about the world, and it will remind you of its impermanency. But when you gain spiritual enlightenment, you shall then find wisdom. The knowledge thus attained leads you to the Way.

—Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

We do not have to remain stupid.

Or allow the stupid to remain in control.

What knowledge will we need to accomplish this? 

we wonder about our ability to love or do good

 …and then there was Dolly Parton!

Thank you!

assorting

 divinity seems

to be lost on us

this god talk

and after life

miracles faith 

and good works --

these days my

attention slows

when christians

jews or muslims

proclaim their belief

to be sole and true

I’d rather not

vote who’s right

who gets the prize

for best story or hype

and rely on what we

know best, human oddness

stories and videos and films

about our bizarre ways

the repercussions and 

ripples circling out into

a never-ending flood of

anguish and dread trying

to survive what nature and

nasty folks have foisted

so, tell me, about your

difficulties and periodic joys

the things you dream and things

you suffer on the way to oblivion

and I will feel with you your life --

but spare me your belief in some

divine accountant or testicular

tyrant enslaving and salvifically

releasing peons and populace

whimsically whoring themselves

for favor and fantasy akimbo --

no, not for me, an onlooker

Rather --to sit on sunporch

heat in a silent stillness, with

no expectation or hope, someone

asking do I feel ok, which feels

an absurd question -- of course

I feel ok, whether sickly or well --

what else is there at my age but

the feeling of feeling as I do --

it all could end today, or in another

month or year or decade -- all by

itself whether any of us feel fine or 

suffer the way we each do everyday --

we get up, put one foot in front of

the other as best we can, and while

the time away. Why calculate? Why

strategize, why complain, why try

to rationalize a purpose for the theater

of absurdity we tread and pivot and sing --

give me nothing and I will have nothing, 

something and that something will fade

dogs will get biscuits, cats their cans 

and French toast suddenly appears

and it will set itself free

 its silly

to wonder

if today

is last

sun rises

over mountain

cars pass

to town

in youth

i'd bicycle

to church

for mass

now I

turn face

to wall

close eyes

the ritual

turns itself

to mind

remembering

that once

anything

appears it

beckons God --

take and

receive

this 

truth

become

gloriously

unnoticeably

transparent

what is normal mind

Is it possible?

Are we by nature the Way? The Way without cultivation? 

The Way does not need cultivation;

Just don’t pollute it.

What is pollution?

As long as you have a fluctuating mind,

Creating artificialities and pursuing inclinations,

All is pollution.

If you want to understand the Way directly,

The normal mind is the Way.

What is normal mind?

It has no artificial contrivance,

No right or wrong, no grasping or rejection,

No ordinariness and no sanctity.

-- Ancestor Ma (709–788) 

Mazu Daoyi (709–788) (Chinese: 馬祖道一; pinyin: Mǎzǔ Dàoyī; Wade–Giles: Ma-tsu Tao-yi, Japanese: Baso Dōitsu) was an influential abbot of Chan/Zen Buddhism during the Tang dynasty. He is known as the founder of the Hongzhou school of Chan. The earliest recorded use of the term "Chan school" is from his Extensive Records.^[1]

He is most famously known for his two teaching statements: "This Mind is Buddha" (ji xin shi fo 即心是佛) and "Ordinary Mind is the Way."^[2]

It is hard to conceive.

It is hard to believe.

One foot in front of another.

One step then one step then one step. 

antagonism

 Snoring dog

silent room

sipping coffee milk

red robe

if you see me

I’m still not here

neither each nor all

High above

Airplane passes

No one in there

Knows I am here

So it is

With the gods

We’re too small

To mattter

But the One God

Who knows no other

Feels Itself

In each of us

i’ve not been out walking

These days it’s hard to know where to look.

When I see

The purity of

The lotus flower,

Then my heart

No longer is stained.  

—Mokuan (1611-1684).                                           

                          

These days there’s so much I forget to do.

la parole, (wording)

 Many acquaintances 

Are in for murder

We are alike

We sit together

I must have

Murdered long ago

It’s what we did

It’s what we do

calculus of the undivided

at heart

love

good place 

to start

at worst

sick selfishness

me me

me me me

what is seen is what is quiet glory

 I prefer to think

of Siddhartha walking

town to town

I prefer to think

of Jesus walking 

town to town

talking about weather

children with mothers

stones untripping feet

two men five hundred

years apart -- good men

with good eyes -- looking

at what is there

a benevolence passing by

everyone better for it

Buddha, Christ --

these titles had feet

look under yours

first without a second

 in and out of planet fitness

in tank tops and sweats

next to Spectrum next to

Maine Health quick care 

as dog and I walk behind

building waiting on quick stopee

I read Robert Lowell back in car

this line: “O that morning might

come without the day--“ (from

Ulysses and Circe) and it sounds

right, surmising I’m the only one

reading Lowell in this parking lot.

Test is inconclusive, I’m told as

we drive to ABC bakery for coffee,

cinnamon cruller and bathroom --

the harbor is busy, sail and power

boats coming to dock, marine patrol,

small craft enter and leave --

It is morning that feels holy, day

devolves into purpose and errand

like having to write some other lines

after a particularly good one, knowing

no duplicate will distract those first 

slanting beams of emergence from sleep;

Lowell on Marlborough Street book-worming,

in West Street Jail lower Manhattan, then, later,

mid-town, in back seat of taxi, his writing ends

In time of trouble

 One of the men

Wanted to heal me

This morning

Thank you, I said,

No need. I’ve lived

A long life, long enough.

He was resigned but not

Happy. He’s been in prison

Thirty years. We like him

But if he healed me

I’d have to keep going on

Trying to stand on one foot

If I ever had to take a sobriety

Test. I practiced in the lobby

And wobbled. When another 

Man came in to talk about

Mother Mary and seeing God

It seemed natural. I’d been

Listening to Ramakrishna talk

About the Divine Mother earlier

And his seeing God so it didn’t 

Seem too far-fetched. It is prison,

After all, a place of anomaly and 

stretched imagination to be heard.

So we read two poems about

Grandmothers, dreams, grinding pits

& berries, remembering motion of love

in prison today

 Grandmother

            by Grace Cavalieri

                for Graziela Zoda

What is the purpose of visits to me twice since you’ve

        died?

Downstairs near a woodstove I hear you

in motion, always working,

a long silken dress—

tight sleeves at your wrist, soft above the elbow

wide top at your shoulder for free movement.

When we were young you didn’t visit—

you never baked a cake that I remember

or babysat or held me in your lap.

you were in the men’s part of town running a man’s

        business

calling the world to order,

seven children behind you

raised singlehandedly in your large house. You were

moving, always moving.

When I kept losing things like my parents,

        my children, money

my time and health

why did you appear in my room with gifts painted

red, yellow, blue,

brilliant colored toys. What

essential fact did you want me to know,

that the body is the essence of spirit and so

must be in motion?

Now that I’ve lost my foothold, my direction, my way,

what is your message, strong spirit,

strong Grandmother,

what is the meaning of your dream-present,

a bright clock shaped like a train—

                        simply that it moves?

— Poem by Grace Cavalieri.(1932 -). Grace Cavalieri is an American poet, playwright, and radio host of the Library of Congress program The Poet and the Poem. In 2019, she was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of Maryland.

...   ...   ...

Tawkwaymenahnah

by Denise Lajimodiere

I walk around the small tribal
welfare cabin Kookum
had lived in, searching
for her grinding stones.

On hot August days
we would sit for hours grinding
chokecherries, pits and all.
She would hum or sing
softly in Cree, put the mash
into small patties on cookie sheets,
cover them with screens
to keep the birds out,
set them on the cabin’s low roof
to dry in the hot North Dakota sun.

In the dead of winter, she would soak
the dried patties overnight,
then fry them in bacon grease,
add flour and sugar,
the small shack filling with a tangy
sweet scent, and summer
flooded my every pore.

I take my grandkids berry picking,
they complain of heat, mosquitoes, ticks,
twigs catching their braids.
I wear my apron, make a pouch
to pick the low hanging berries
with one hand and toss them in
like Kookum did.

Kneeling before the flat rock,
braids tied back,
smaller rock clasped in hand,
I pound the fresh berries
pits and all.
Grandkids want to try,
and soon the rock is singing
my grandmother’s songs.

Copyright © 2021 by Denise Lajimodiere. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 24, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poet Laureate of North Dakota, 2023–2025

Denise Lajimodiere is an Ojibwe poet and the author of Stringing Rosaries (North Dakota State University Press, 2019), the recipient of a Gold Medal from the Midwest Book Awards, as well as a Silver and a Bronze Medal from the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Lajimodiere lives on Turtle Mountain Reservation, in North Dakota. In 2023, she was appointed poet laureate of North Dakota.