passing time

 when I awoke

this morning

I fed cats

now

I will feed

dog

soon 

go to

prison

there’s

not much

to tell --

it is

friday,

things

are still

things

still are

new places to live

The elderly nuns (sisters) live in assisted living facilities says nytimes article: 

 

“In the mid-1960s, America was home to more than 180,000 Roman Catholic nuns; now there are only about 35,000, with an average age of over 80. Congregations have had to sell or close their convents, forcing these older sisters to find new places to live.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/nyregion/last-nuns-new-york-city.html

Things change.

Sexual abuse by priests and clergy soured much of the church.

These women remained steadfast. Their schools closed. Their convents sold. They scrambled for living accommodations, for medical care.

Soon no one will know about their work and dedication.

Soon we will forget a great deal as cultures disappear.

when you and me become we

 Do you love God?

     Of course I do.

Show me God,

     Of course you do.

What are you saying?

     Of course we are.

pratītyasamutpāda

Something gave up in me not long ago.

Nothing mattered.

Everything dropped to ground

The fuel in the tea brazier is burnt out,

So I collect pine needles,

The fields of medicinal plants are empty,

So I cut vegetable roots.

Naturally dull, I’ve forgotten Zen activities,

My gate is darkened at noon by

The shade of ancient trees.

White clouds impart a sense of peace

To my Zen meditation,

Green grasses suffice to make a rug for my guests.

What I have collected is a hundred years

Of emptiness.

—Isshi Bunshu (1608-1646)

 I wonder about this nothing. I wonder about this emptiness.

Emptiness, or śūnyatā in Sanskrit, is a central Buddhist concept meaning that all things lack an inherent, permanent, or independent self-nature (svabhāva). It does not mean literal nothingness or non-existence; rather, it describes how everything exists interdependently through changing causes and conditions. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Core Meaning of Śūnyatā

• No Independent Core: People, objects, and mental states possess no separate, fixed identity.
• 
  
• Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda): Everything arises and continues in relation to other factors (e.g., a plant needs soil, water, and sun).
• 
  
• Not Nihilism: Emptiness affirms that things function and exist vividly, just without a permanent essence.[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
• 
  

Philosophical and Practical Significance

• The Middle Way: It avoids the extremes of eternalism (believing things last forever) and annihilationism (believing nothing matters or exists). [1, 2, 4, 5]
• 
  
• Root of Freedom: Clinging to a solid, permanent "self" or "other" causes suffering; realizing emptiness dissolves attachment and fear. [1, 2]
• 
  
• The Heart Sutra: Famous for the paradox "form is emptiness, emptiness is form," showing that the tangible world and its empty nature are inseparable. [1, 2]

-- search, Emptiness in Buddhism

As the story goes, a man in Palestine a couple of thousand years ago looked at bread and thought "this is what i am." 

He was bread.

Today he is in cook-fires, supermarkets, grocery stores, and bakeries across the world.

Just bread.

Our suffering surrounds our desire not to be bread.

Last night I did not eat the piece of bread placed on my plate. My appetite has gone off to visit its cousin in the county. If it returns this morning perhaps I'll dip it in tea and slurp it.

Many people believe the man who is bread is the one who will lead us to enlightenment one crumb one crust at a time.

Nothing would please me more.

I'll originate and depend (Pratītyasamutpāda) on it.

Let's sit together with this!

a matter of time

 This breath

This cough

This one

This distraction

Any day now

I

Shall be

Released

in all ten simultaneously

I enjoy watching snippets of Christopher Hitchens talks. 

There is an anomalous absurdity to just about all the stories about and within the narratives in every religion.

Takuan suggests there might be a sensible explanation for this absurdity. 

Vibrating within

The ear are many voices

But their origin

Has a source which may be called

The sound of no sound.

--Takuan (1573-1645)

The Latin surdus means "deaf", implying stupidity.^[1] Absurdity is contrasted with being realistic or reasonable.^[4]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdity

Perhaps the absurd refers to that which cannot be heard, the no sound beyond language, beyond reason, without explanation. 

For example, it could be said that God is absurd. 

And it takes No-Mind to appreciate this absurdity.

Takuan taught that the Right Mind, which he also called the Mind of No-Mind, is not placed anywhere, but rather moves about freely in all directions, and "neither congeals nor fixes itself in one place."^[5] For Takuan, for the mind to have some place of abiding and stopping is the mind of delusion and the affliction of abiding in ignorance.^[6] According to Takuan, the mind that fixes itself in one place is not able to function freely.^[7] For instance, Takuan points out that if the mind is placed in just one direction, it will be lacking in nine others. But if the mind is not placed in any one direction, it will be in all ten simultaneously, or as Takuan says, "Put nowhere, it will be everywhere."^[8].  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takuan_S%C5%8Dh%C5%8D

 If there was a possibility of religions dropping their tenets, doctrines, and laws there might be a more alluring attraction to the imbedded reality that hides away from detection, away from the appropriated ‘correct’ way of thinking and practicing leading to belonging to the organization that has surrounded and claimed ownership of the unspoken unheard reality.

Or as Takuan says, "Put nowhere, it will be everywhere.”

For everything and everyone.

                                                        Portrait of Takuan Sōhō, by Kimura Tokuō, 17th century

francis was clare's friend

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

Francisco de Zurbarán: Saint Francis of Assisi, 1636

none more, none less

 She followed Francis

And got poor

She wanted contemplation

And got nothing

This someone to love

Clare of Assisi 

11 aug

If your soul

Is capable

Learn from

Clare poverty 

poor soul

 Clare wanted

To dwell with nothing —

What a brave woman!

a plane passes far above

 The thing about

Being a solitary

Is solitude

Nothing else —

Unless you count

Being alone

nothing left, only passing through

 It’s an odd geometry 

Sin took away Jesus

And Spirit moves through sin

when the winds come round

America showed Nagasaki

no mercy, no love

How quaint to think

America could receive either --

look at our fallout

no such thing

Simple words.

Simply true.

 "There's no such thing as dying of old age. Something kills us all." (Grandfather to grandson, S2 E6 "Blood and the Boy," Yellowstone)

Simply words.

A simple truth.

meow, mu-ow

 Cat knows nothing of Buddha

Still, sits on window altar

Looking beyond representation

unearth good

 Terrorism prevails

As long as stupidity believes

Evil is eradicated by killing people.

If anyone is able to overcome

An evil impulse, then there is hope

Good will be unearthed and life honored

The battle isn’t good versus evil —

The war is asking are we willing to let earth

Reveal its deepest source of life, regenerative love

that evening walk at rockport harbor

 I remember

When it was

My birthday

And then over —

Such a calm

And fleeting time

andiamo

“Doxa” in classical Greek, means opinion, not knowledge (which is “episteme”). I have tired of opinions. I long for knowledge.

At its simplest, an opinion is a belief or judgment not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. We express opinions constantly – about the weather, politics, art, or the best way to brew coffee. Yet, in philosophy, particularly within the classical Greek tradition, doxa carries a weightier, more critical connotation. It represents the realm of common belief, popular judgment, or even mere appearance, often contrasted with the more rigorous and stable domain of episteme, or true knowledge. While an opinion might happen to be correct, its correctness often lacks the deep justification and understanding that elevates it to the status of knowledge. 

https://www.planksip.org/the-nature-of-true-opinion-doxa-and-opinion-1761309301427/

When I think about the oftentimes skewed perception and ensuing distortion of higher values in our everyday society and culture, it occurs to me how I’ve come to translate and understand the Tibetan mantra Om Mani Padme Hum.

You can look up its traditional translation (search).

My idiosyncratic translation is “behold what is within without; behold what is without within.”

Within the within is where the darkness of unknowing the unknown resides. This Reality beyond reality, undoubtedly and conceivably the presence of God, might be where what we call Love originates and resounds.

Love might be “all that is” but this isness might be in the dark unmanifest until it is evoked and embodied by individuals who’ve encountered that withinness while longing to make it felt and experienced without.

God might be giving-being, but God might not be a given. In the christian narrative there is a necessary accompaniment of a human co-conspirator to exemplify the within/without, without/within of wholeness/holiness passing through the human condition/causation. 

This death to all that is obvious, material, and askew, this suffering of the reality of human behavior, this descent into the underworld of suffering and despair — and beyond — begins the new understanding of enfleshing God and embodying the spirit of recuperating love and sanctifying grace.

What is within is now capable of being without, what is freshly without is willing to reciprocally recenter within the whole as an offering of communion and commitment.

To behold this, to become this, is a spiritual/physical practice always new and always holy.

It is my suspicion that our contemporary external world will remain dully oblivious to a compassionate internal world until more and more of our fellow aspirants find their way through obtuse ignorance into clear and fearless incarnation of that-which-is, in-itself, of-itself the Reality beyond reality.

Encourage one another!

There is another way of being/living in this world.

Andiamo!

for, four, fore

 when i was born

eights and fours arose

now eight and two appear

dividing into another four

Browning notes then asks: 

Ah, but a man's reach 

should exceed his grasp, 

Or what's a heaven for? 

these are my born days --

these fore whatever heaven is

if I am, undivided, nearing whole

alert, unwilling to ignore

slowly breathe now

 so many are full of conspiracies

nothing is what it seems to be,

everything as perverted presentation

how not despair, we ask in prison

where we are left with the raw rare self

 slowly breathe now beyond we beyond me

in that darkness, that immaterial place

where what we’ve called ‘God’ moves 

silently between breaths toward spiration

alone, nondependent, tathataga

thus-come one, thus-gone one

holiness itself respiring each soul

happy to be back in prison

 Coming from MSP, passing Buldoc Correctional Facility Farm, cloud formation invites imagination.

First time back in over five weeks of absence. First day out in a week.

Long walk in and out.

Welcomed.

Grateful.

if i didn't care

 i didn't know i had left

until i discovered

i was gone

the dark of that pit of hell

The juxtaposition always amazes. Feast of Transfiguration; Feast of Hiroshima, 6August.

The shining through transparence of peculiar atoms and photons and something beyond credulity.

Aghast, the imponderable revelation of two things beyond understanding.

Let Us Be Midwives! An untold story of the atomic bombing

                    --by Sadako Kurihara, translated by Richard Minear

 

Night in the basement of a concrete structure now in ruins.

Victims of the atomic bomb jammed the room;

It was dark—not even a single candle.

The smell of fresh blood, the stench of death,

The closeness of sweaty people, the moans.

From out of all that, lo and behold, a voice:

"The baby’s coming!"

In that hellish basement,

At that very moment, a young woman had gone into labour.

In the dark, without a single match, what to do?

People forgot their own pains, worried about her.

And then: "I'm a midwife. I’ll help with the birth."

The speaker, seriously injured herself, had been moaning only moments before.

And so new life was born in the dark of that pit of hell.

And so the midwife died before dawn, still bathed in blood.

Let us be midwives!

Let us be midwives!

Even if we lay down our own lives to do so.

 

-- Sadako Kurihara (1913 – 2005) 

Site Ed. note: This poem was written in free verse form in September 1945 and appeared in the inaugural issue, March 1946, of a local journal founded by Kurihara's husband, Chūgoku bunka(Culture of Chūgoku Region). It is perhaps the first atomic bomb poem to be published in Occupied Japan. It passed American censorship review in the summer of 1946 and was published again in Kurihara's collection of wartime and early postwar poetry, Kuroi tamago (Black Eggs).

In the 1983 unexpurgated edition of the poem, Kurhara provided the date of the poem and added the note: "This poem appeared first in the inaugural issue of Chūgoku bunka (the special issue on the atomic bomb, March 1946). The cellar in the poem was the cellar of the old post office in Senda-machi." 

 The baby's coming!

The midwife dies.

Equipoise and equinimity. 

One in the advent of light.

The other in throes of darkness.

The perfectly balancing scale.

There are sins, they say, too big for forgiveness, no matter the fabricated narratives of justification. The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are such sins.

America, the midwife of breaching peace, is slowly, surely dying eighty one years later still insisting that murdering innocent people advances our prosperity, wealth, and unassailable power.

The poet had the midwife die. That was poetic license. True or not, the poem, without footnote, is the truer fact.

America knows you can't kill violence, calculated casualties of war and deception, nor cynical narratives that praise the American way.

War is our religious ritual during which the high minister grabs money, praises God, and rubes his followers for his good luck.

Οὔτις μῆτις

There’s a long tradition being no one. 

Those incapable of it, become someone.

Then there are those who become someone special.

They’re the ones to avoid.

In the original Odyssey, Polyphemos talks to Odysseus and his men, and Odysseus tricks him by offering him a skin of fine Ismarian wine. Polyphemos, who has never tasted alcohol, drinks the wine and loves it. He asks Odysseus’s name, and Odysseus replies that his name is Οὔτις (Oútis), which means “No One.”

This pseudonym is doubly meaningful. First, it symbolically represents the fact the Odysseus, who is separated from his home and family, is alienated from his old identity. The second half of the epic, in which Odysseus gradually reunites with the members of his household and the symbols of his identity, represents him regaining the identity that he has lost.

Second, the name “No One” represents Odysseus’s signature trait, which is his cunning, because another word for “No One” in Ancient Greek is μήτις (mḗtis), which is homophonous with the word μῆτις (mêtis), meaning “cunning.” Thus, Odysseus has, in effect, told the Kyklops that his name is both “No One” and “Cunning.”

(--from Tales of Times Forgotten, Making the Distant Past Relevant to the Present Day, An Ancient Historian’s Breakdown of Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’, by Spencer McDaniel)

Put the two Greek words together (Οὔτις μῆτις) and you get “No One Cunning").

A curious yet intriguing identity, a singular way to be.

It’s not something you strive to attain.

It’s what you are.

Without effort.

Or intrigue.

turning of a page

 I suppose it was inevitable

the downslide into narrow cavern

sidestepping along cave entrance

damp ceiling slick stone musty smell

it’s not that there’s nowhere to go

it’s where you find yourself, a cusp

the turning of a page, where once you read

now you scan Greek poetry for dactyls 

an ancient mythic race portending meaning

but offering only shadowy glimpse of ogres

framed by crevace slant of light, unclimbable

escape, wedged in wet incubation of dark promise 

delaying coin

 Mitch is waiting

For Donald

Before paying Charon 

after coffee the smack-down

 Most christian politicians

Don’t want Jesus to come back

Their Donald is their savior

There have been heresies before

But this “corruption and evil are holy”

Is begging God to wake up and smack down

incubation

 This dark time

While stuck in dark

Dark covers readiness

You just have to wait

each time

 Disagree with me

Tell me I’m wrong

You might be right

You probably are

The great gift of colloquy 

Demands scrutiny

A candle and incense 

belief gone, now only

Suspension of judgment

Things and acts only themselves

The entire universe within me

Without me, everything is itself

Everyone is the Genesis story

Everyone the Virgin birth

Everyone Judas’ choice

Everyone an ambiguous resurrection

Go ahead, ply your opinions

Tell me I’m wrong, you’re right

You’re right I’m wrong

“What’s wrong will always be wrong”

(Wrote Richard Hugo)

But what’s right

Is each time

Created new

now i'm invited

 Poems and nuns and ancient times. And the curious statement about karma.

Worldly people who do not understand me

Call me by my worldly name of Old Zhou.

You invite me to a seven-day religious feast,

But the feast of meditation knows no end.               --Huixu (431-499)

Our morning dooryard sit underway. 

Yesterday morning, in torrential rain, I sat in green chair with raincoat and black umbrella in an act of odd continuation of some unexplainable new ritual of idiorrhythmic import, some karmic justification of some previous practice beyond memory.

Attention turns to poet nun.

It appears that there is only one extant nun’s poem that predates the Benxing poems. Interestingly, it also one of the earliest recorded Buddhist death-verses, preserved in the Biqiuni zhuan. In the entry for the nun Huixu 慧緒 (431–499), it is said that when she was sixty-nine she attended a vegetarian feast in her honor, and though she was in good health and spirits she noted that it was a fine occasion to say farewell.37 After brushing the following poem for her royal hostess, she took her leave and died a month later.

世人或不知 People in the world who don’t know

呼我作老周 call me “old Zhou!”

忽請作七日 Now I’m invited to a seven-day [feast],

禪齋不得休 but the feast of dhyāna never ends.38

Both Huixu’s poem and the Benxing poems sound the familiar theme of the evanescence of worldly pleasures. Huixu’s poem, written by a fifth-century nun whose life was punctuated by the effects of regime change, pokes fun at the random nature of worldly disrespect and worldly honor in a jaunty manner. The Benxing poems, written by or for a nun lamented by a bevy of peers with the resources to leave a lasting memorial, are elaborately morose. Let us take a closer look at the rich legacy of doom and gloom that supported the founding and maintenance of the Bao shan site. 

 

Eschatological pessimism was part of the spirit of the Bao shan founder Lingyu’s sixth-century era. During Lingyu’s lifetime there were intermittent civil wars following the break-up of the Northern Wei, the Buddhist persecution (574–577) by Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou, the spectacular Buddhist efflorescence under the Northern Qi, and the wars preceding reunification under the Sui. Lingyu’s Dilun (TenStages) exegetical tradition was centered in the capital of Ye during the short-lived Eastern Wei and Northern Qi dynasties, where there was widespread belief that the power of the teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha were spent and the Dharma had entered its final stage (moshi 末世 or mofa 末法).39

(—from © T’ang Studies Society 2009 

t’ang studies, No. 27, 2009, 40–65

The Literary Lives of Nuns: Poems

Inscribed on a Memorial Niche for the

Tang Nun Benxing

by Wendi Adamek

Stanford Humanities Center, USA 

 

Fifteen hundred and twenty six (1526) years ago, regime change and eschatological pessimism, and yet, and yet, the positing of meditation (dhyāna) as balm and antidote.

In addition, on page 46, this:

In Buddhism, the female body is considered to be the karmic result of past evil deeds manifesting in the particular hardships women endure, namely, leaving her own family to be married, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and the obligation to wait on a man.12 Sengshun’s extreme practices could be understood in this context; women practitioners were assumed to have more karmic residue to clean up, and therefore they had to work twice as hard.13 Though the vocations of all the women memorialized at Lanfeng shan are likely to have been viewed in this light by themselves as well as others, in the other memorials we see different facets of practice emerge. (ibid) 

 

This mythological and morphological observation is intriguing.

As is the historical dance done with real and phantasmic sisters who’ve 

crisscrossed my life and held my affection and love.

 

All the invitations, demurrals, and wind-hovering winging along 

funnels of lift and turns bringing me there then and here now.

Who are we?

Really?