Stepping in front of mirror, seeing no image, such confusion!
Deep among ten thousand peaks
I sit alone cross-legged
A solitary thought fills
My empty mind
My body is the moon
That lights the winter sky
In rivers and in lakes
Are its only reflections.
--Han-shan Te-ch’ing (1546-1623)
Pondering what to do next.
Ah!
silliness about
who knows
God better
no one knows
God, no one --
the silliness,
because God is
unknowable
plain and simple
go on, now,
get out of here
As God did
as God does
every time some fool
pretends he is God
eh presidente --
you silly goose
soon gone
street fighter
badmouths pope
Jesus
hands soap bar
to street fighter
to wash out mouth
as we wash our
hands of cynicism
A Rupert Spira poem:
Every time I open my eyes
every time
I open
my eyes
I invite
the world
to take shape
and every time
the world
takes shape
I am
invited to open
my eyes
and see
the world
raw
and naked
holding out
its hand
calling me
into itself
where I am
taken
into the transparency of things
and find myself
transparent there
standing on the edge
looking
down
and in
to the dark silent pool
in which
the world
is cradled
and I am cradled
there
held
with all things
and hold
all things
in myself
myself
not a thing
in the world
but
this
here
seeing
in which
the world
opens
inviting
and offering itself
and every time
it is seen
it dies
and in dying
holds out its hand
again
asking
to be taken in
and every time
I take it in
I too die
and in dying
become
this
here
seeing
every time
I open
my eyes
…. …. …
https://medium.com/@rupert_spira/every-time-i-open-my-eyes-a-poem-by-rupert-spira-1717507dd541
when did you
give up
surrendering
when are you
leaving
saying goodbye
do you know
the way home
through night
where silence
utters nothing
the apparent
individual
(he is
saying)
is taken
back
to its
essential
nature
(spiraling)
when I died
I couldn’t remember
anything, I was gone
and now? now I find
the nothing I can remember
is that I died
I’m waiting to see
who comes for me --
I expect nothing
in fact, the nothing
I expect has already
disappeared and is gone
At Easter Friday conversation (Saturday for our Philippines participant) of course we spoke about resurrection.
Was there one? If so, what do we understand by it?
In the book God Is No More by Werner and Lotte Pelz, Lippencott (c.1963), this epigraph by William Blake:
If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me
Thou also dwellst in Eternity
Thou art a Man God is no more
Thy own humanity learn to adore
For that is my Spirit of Life
It is from Blake's The Everlasting Gospel.
On pg. 127, under the heading “Resurrection”, this:
It is the revelation -- which comes to us as we ponder the hopelessness of man’s sufferings -- that tragedy is a necessity, since only hope that triumphs over necessity can inspire hope 63. It is the expectation of a repetition of the unrepeatable 64, the promise of a “return”, an incredible “always” and “everywhere 65". It is the challenge to live our lives, to let our life become a source of life to others, to realize that others cannot have what we withhold. The Resurrection is the challenge to take this life and this earth seriously, because everything is a parable, a beginning and not an end in itself.
Then, below this paragraph, this:
* To treat the Resurrection as an historical event is to misunderstand the meaning both of history and Resurrection. History is concerned with the past, the fixed, the dead. Resurrection is concerned exclusively with the future, the moving, the living. And again: to treat the Resurrection as an historical event is to make of it the sign Jesus refused to give, because it would absolve us from looking for significance in this world. The Resurrection, on the contrary, is the formulation of Jesus’ insistence that either everything or nothing on this earth is significant.
There was discussion that, some felt, there was no need for a bodily resurrection that sunday morning. That what continues onward is the spirit of hope and truth that transcends humiliation and failure and mistake.
That looking to our left and our right, looking above and below, is the realized reality of resurrection waiting for our recognition, our realization of what is continuing even unto unfractured now.
The thought-provoking words we are asked to ponder: "because everything is a parable, a beginning and not an end in itself."
A catechesis of presence
Not of words
Tone and melody
Not argument
I don’t know about angels
Nor saints nor presbytery
Just unnamed presence, without title
The way holiness passes through
Sometimes, a real conversation takes place.
Here’s one.
“Happy to get him, to get him to open up a can of pansy ass.”
(--Ben Sasse, ending of conversation with Ross Douthat, "How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying”, The former senator wants to heal the America he’s leaving behind. NYTimes, 9apr26
I don’t expect to meet
Jesus on the road, so
No need to kill him
He’s already been killed
It’s become a ritual, host
And cup, elevation, genuflect
At least, as I recall the liturgy
The world is exhausted by our
Mad priest presiding over
Mass insanity of threats and
Apocalypse with Iran and Hormuz
As world watches like New York
Knife fight outside delicatessen
No passing by on sidewalk until
Someone bloodied someone runs away
Our deranged street fighter runs away
Police know his name, but will not touch
He is mayor, governor, president, commander
Risen unsavory doppelgänger of the gospels
He hides in plain sight, he is legion, everywhere
All the time, pronouncing words of desecration
Disassembling everything not bearing ‘hiss' name
His image — his sordid likeness draped everywhere —
As pusillanimous men and woman bow down and slobber
Their sanctity assured, their loyalty soldered to his backside
Their mad deviance blathering words of sweet sycophancy
They do not know what they are, doing — rich bastards
Breathe in
Breathe out
Yes, and
Yes
Good breathes good
Evil, evil
God moves
Through our
Being
Here
snow showers
an inch they say
this April seventh
once we vowed
life-together, (when’s
Yom Kippur?)
still, on your birthday
my greetings -- we found
life-together apart
in four days
I’ll celebrate paradox
and ambiguity, with cheer
Reading his two volume The Prophets in 1968, I learned something it took me nearly sixty years to understand. As a maladaptive and maladjusted person in this society and culture I have nothing to be ashamed of.
And I have come to see that nothing. That embarrassment of ignorance wherein the nescient intellect uncomprehends skewed and sacrificed knowledge, cultivating idiocy of human ambition and enslaved compassion -- preferring to dominate and destroy, mock and denigrate, accuse and annihilate that which is other than some deranged preferred ego -- is nothing worth affirming, nothing to be admired.
I will not be jaded by incompetent cruelty.
I will be surprised each time.
I would say about individuals, an individual dies when he ceases to be surprised. I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil, I am not accommodated. I don’t accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I’m still surprised. That’s why I’m against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised, not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society. (--Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel )
I would pass an actor’s desk in seminary. I would see Heschel under his lamp.
Six decades later a basketball friend, for some reason, gifted me a small stained glass cross given him by that actor. For whatever reason, he was done with it. It hangs on doorjamb to chapel/zendo across from bookshed/boatshed up from barn.
The thing about Easter is the ambiguity of it.
Had Jesus died? Did he drop-in to hell? Was his tomb vacant that Sunday morning?
Whence absconditus?
I have this image of Jesus as this wandering spirit not unlike what the Greeks said of their unburied warriors felled on battlefield not yet brought in and returned home.
I’m not sure those who call themselves “christian” have yet comprehended the homelessness of Jesus, the wandering restlessness searching for those who would recognize him if looking into his face without introduction.
This easter meditation is not a triumphal celebration of an accomplished story done and copyrighted.
Rather it is a setting-off from comprehension, through a meander of investigatory questioning, coming to rest no-where known and no-place architectured and set in stone.
The Jesus of this Easter is a peripatetic and rootless hobo wandering our inquisitiveness through a sincere abandonment of anything other than a prophetic soul surprised at what reveals Itself.
I sit on porch
this still morning
easter Tuesday --
if walking mountain
there is animal shit
try to step around it
so too trump’s words
try to step around them
my new prescription
time and insects will
see to disappearance
of useless excrement, so
waste dissolves in due time
words with no meaning
are ghouls redeeming no one
it has been excruciating
following the vile droppings
his faux-christian stooges sanctify
盗人に取り残されし窓の月
the thief
left it
the moon at my window
—Ryokan
nusubito ni / torinokosareshi / mado no tsuki
zen buddhist doctor
tells of his time in Gaza --
the quiet of the telling
Zenki is a key term in Zen, especially used by Eihei Dogen, meaning undivided activity, that all phenomena, every moment, every action, and every aspect of reality is part of one seamless, interdependent functioning. From this perspective, we are part of a whole organism that is characterized by impermanence, interdependence, and emptiness of a separate self. Every moment is complete. Every action expresses the whole; there is no fixed or separate self, and each activity is undivided from all other activities. (--Roshi Joan Halifax, “The Life That Is Forever, 16Dec2025)
woman tossed water on me
I should have known
rituals want to be performed
at prison we talk about causes
and conditions, about what we
really think of death, our gone parents;
dog walks in with stern trainer
lays down, lowers head, it's his fate
to do what is asked of him right now
"advaita"(अद्वैत), "not-two"[9][10] or
“one without a second",[10] [wikipedia]
maybe we’re not in a simulation
perhaps theater-pieces, scene after scene
performed, then ended, costumes changed
walking out into night air, stars surprise