what the pandemic teaches

 have we had it wrong?

is the cross compassion? if

we gaze, feeling, see?

divorce separates two, true marriage is triune

Will you marry me?

No! We can only marry 

what is between us

considering the zeitgeist

 I suspect it is

a miracle anything 

persists and survives

four years later, the state shrugs

Ledell Lee would say:

‘I'm an innocent man.’ Seems 

so. Still, we killed him

...

(cf. 4 Years After an Execution, a Different Man’s DNA Is Found on the Murder Weapon, by Heather Murphy, NYTimes, May 7, 2021)

offering

Incense in morning

Sun curls up from desk, there rise

Prayers offered for all

dearmad

To wander need not mean to err.

To think is to wander.

To do philosophy is to vagabond.

Homelessness is a hazard of reflective inquiry.

Words for "error" in most Indo-European languages originally meant "wander, go astray" (for example Greek plane in the New Testament, Old Norse villa, Lithuanian klaida, Sanskrit bhrama-), but Irish has dearmad "error," from dermat "a forgetting."

(—from etymology dictionary)

Sometimes forgetting is the unexpected dwelling of one seeking truth.

Truth — don’t leave home without it.

praesentem

Latin for "In a particular place" -- present.

prae-

                1. before; in front

sum

      1. I am

I am (right) in front of you.

...

This last sentence is what being present means.

It is often a struggle for each of us to be present -- in any of or all its implications.

We wonder if those who've died are still present.

The possibility is that they are, indeed, "still" "present."

The question is laid at our feet: Who sees anything that is still?

So, too, we wonder (even at or after our death) if we are "still here."

what a thought-provoking film might evoke about ethical thinking response

 Three things:

...

1. What comes at you

2. Is what you’ve got

3. To respond to and do what you’ve got to do.

...

Four types and non-rules:

1. Fact-based Ethics.

2. Reality-ground morality.

3, Beyond-principles agency.

4. Gotta-do activity.

...

Five points to ponder:

1. What is thrown at you is not your making.

2. What arrives at your feet was not your stepping choice.

3. What you’ve got to do is not a deliberate choice of options.

4. You are a response to a provoking stimulus.

5. Ethical standards and moral laws are non-applicable to the immediate demands of presenting-reality.

...

Conclusion:

1. Stay awake.

2. Don’t think; look.

3. Take choice-less action.

...

Note: (cf. film "I'm Your Woman," Amazon Original, 2020)

whoa, that’s going nowhere fast

 I can’t go faster

than the speed of light. I’ll just

sit here and think now

recalling coming out of anesthesia

 young woman with co-

vid sings song about Jesus

from deep memory

until things are seen whole, no one is

When she died forty 

years ago no one knew this

squirrel at feeder

,just look at them and sigh

 Mothers teach children

Tell the truth, respect tellers —

It’s a good teaching

simply stated

 That this country is

Mired in the lies of losing

Former president

Signals cynical

Stupidity continues

With republicans

not something we did

From Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, Sunday 2may21:

 Reflecting on trauma has made me think that much of the human race must have suffered from what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It is heartbreaking to imagine, but it gives me much more sympathy for the human person caught in repeated cycles of historical violence.

Could this be what mythology means by “the sacred wound” and the church describes as “original sin,” which was not something we did, but the effects of something that was done to us? I believe it is.

If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows us what to do with our pain. Great religion shows us what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the traumatic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

(- in, What Do We Do with This Pain?)

quo vadis

 The given, or

The arrived at —

Which?

In 12th century

The scholar and the saint

Set terms of battle

Scripture and tradition, or

Thought and insight

Conformity or innovation?

They argued

Monk of mystical inspiration, against

Monk of incohating phenomenology

Robert, (remembering canonical convictions)

Peter

(not forgetting Heloise nuptial connection)

Received and handed on, 

Unveiling and asking into

Paraclete protecting or setting free?

In my dream, in Russia,

Carafe with round energetics, timorous 

We are trying to get somewhere 

Right here, or

(if not)

Ahead of us

spare change

 If you give yourself

To another, what remains?

Nothing worth counting

slicing through simile

 Woman brings soup to

COVID folks up back stairs — as

Man with edger cuts

off the machine

 My patience died try-

ing to breathe through thick obtuse

sludge cynicism

after dawn

 Solo concert done

Songbird enters silence gone

Offstage heart alight

addendum

 Coronavirus

Ain’t over, compañeros —

Don’t listen to fools

move along (now)

 pay

No

attention

(to me)

there’s 

Nothing

there

(to see)

sic et non

I have

Never

been

(happier) 

There is

Nothing 

more

(now)

to

compare

...   ...   ...

Footnote:

Abelard maintains that everything in the world apart from God and angels is either form, matter, or a composite of form and matter. The matter of something is that out of which it is made, whether it persists in the finished product (as bricks in a house) or is absorbed into it (as flour in bread). Ultimately, all material objects are composed of the four elements earth, air, fire, and water, but they do not retain their elemental forms in most combinations. In general, the form of a material object just is the configuration of its material parts: “We call the form strictly what comes from the composition of the parts.” The form of a statue, for example, is its shape, which is no more than the arrangement of its matter—the curve of the nose, the size of the eyes, and so on. Forms are therefore supervenient on matter, and have no ontological standing independent of it. This is not to deny that forms exist, but to provide a particular explanation of what it is for a form to inhere in a given subject, namely for that subject to have its matter configured in a certain way. For example, the inherence of shape in the statue just is the way in which its bronze is arranged. Hence material things are identical with what they are made of—with one exception: human beings, whose forms are their immaterial (and immortal) souls. Strictly speaking, since human souls are capable of existence in separation form the body, they are not forms after all, though they act as substantial forms as long as they are joined to the body.

(--on, Peter Abelard, (1079-1142), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) 

shaliah

 you have been sent, but

You don’t know from whom or to

What. Go on! You’ll see

you night, worker of the revolving earth

 Turn, turn, turn —

 May Day is a public holiday usually celebrated on 1 May. It is an ancient festival of spring^[1] and a current traditional spring holiday in many European cultures. Dances, singing, and cake are usually part of the festivities.^[2] 

In 1889, May Day was chosen as the date for International Workers' Dayby the Socialists and Communists of the Second International to commemorate the Haymarket affair in Chicago.^[3] International Workers' Day is also called "May Day", but it is a different celebration from the traditional May Day.

Wikipedia

and joseph the worker

“Glorious Saint Joseph,
pattern of all who are devoted to toil,
obtain for me the grace to toil in the
spirit of penance, in order thereby to
atone for my many sins; to toil
conscientiously, putting devotion to
duty before my own inclinations;

to labour with thankfulness and joy,
deeming it an honour to employ and to
develop, by my labour, the gifts that I
have received from Almighty God;

to work with order, peace, moderation,
and patience, without ever shrinking
from weariness and difficulties;…”

~Prayer to Saint Joseph [1]

(—from, About Today,  Written by Sarah Ciotti, ,DivineOffice.org)

фестиваль сьомий день *

 It is the feast of

Saturday morning, on which

house cat turns at foot

...   ...   ...

(* Ukrainian for 'festival on the seventh day')

beltaine light

 Midway between win-

ter and summer solstices 

This May first birdsong

listening to you

Responding to NYTimes Do I Really Need to State My Pronouns? by Philip Galanes, April 29, 2021:

...

Haiku  

 

                    (for all my relations)  

 

Don’t call me any-  

 

thing. Only: See me, feel me,  

 

touch me, (and), heal me  

 

                   (with gratitude to The Who)

... 

From you I get the story.

aisle aware

In grocery store

Chocolate milk and yoghurt

Hear my cart approach

next

I live a useless life. That fact neither cheers nor discourages me.  It sits on my desk next to lid from small container of cinnemon apple sauce. Empty, with wooden spoon diagonal, cup tilts away from hobo smiling over tealight flame. On lower part of desk, at foot of mason jar half filled with water, peeled lid lies on its back as though exhausted from holding things in for so long.

We are uncertain what to do with uselessness.

A Useless Life

A farmer got so old that he couldn’t work the fields anymore. So he would spend the day just sitting on the porch. His son, still working the farm, would look up from time to time and see his father sitting there.

“He’s of no use any more,” the son thought to himself, “he doesn’t do anything!” One day the son got so frustrated by this, that he built a wood coffin, dragged it over to the porch, and told his father to get in.

Without saying anything, the father climbed inside. After closing the lid, the son dragged the coffin to the edge of the farm where there was a high cliff.

As he approached the drop, he heard a light tapping on the lid from inside the coffin. He opened it up. Still lying there peacefully, the father looked up at his son. “I know you are going to throw me over the cliff, but before you do, may I suggest something?” “What is it?” replied the son. “Throw me over the cliff, if you like,” said the father, “but save this good wood coffin. Your children might need to use it.” 

(--from, 10 Short Zen Stories, BY SOFO ARCHON, https://theunboundedspirit.com/10-short-zen-stories/ )

One of the perks of aging is the dropping away of illusion. This includes fabricated or exaggerated views on one's life and accomplishments. I look at my background the way the nurse-practitioner looks at me -- a twenty minute appointment, the numbers from lab, brief pleasantries, recommendations for changing diet, adding medication, scheduling next appointment three months hence, amenity goodby, pointing me down hall following arrows on floor, done, gone, over. Like a toll machine, or, now, a turnpike overhead recorder of toll recorded on digital account, my passing by is only a minúte barely notable blip on a computer in a cloud, poof, money paid. Next!

As a useless person, I do not savor photos collecting milliseconds of frozen movement, do not have a curriculum vitae, and do not expect more than a one word epitaph to be spoken when I disappear: "Who?"

For now, I sit silently.

I walk with hiking sticks.

I have a cup of coffee.

Some toast with marmalade and peanut butter.

Cycle a few miles on a loop at snow bowl base of mountain.

Listen to or read medieval classics of Cloud of Unknowing, Sermons of Meister Eckhart, Sekito Kisen's Sandokai, Dogen's Bendowa, and Being-Time.

I watch movies and series that I reconstruct and treat as Lectio Divina.

I nap.

Save the wood.

Retrouver.

Recitativo.

Recombinatie

watch this

We seldom get it right. 

“Errancy is the essential counteressence to the originary essence of truth. Errancy opens itself up as the open region for every counterplay to essential truth. Errancy is the open site for, and ground of, error. Error is not merely an isolated mistake but the kingdom (the dominion) of the history of those entanglements in which all kinds of erring get interwoven. In conformity with its openness and its relatedness to beings as a whole, every mode of comportment has its manner of erring. Error “extends from the most ordinary wasting of time, making a mistake, and mis-calculating, to going astray and venturing too far in one’s essential attitudes and decisions. . .

By leading them astray, errancy dominates human beings through and through.”  

(--Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in: Basic Writings, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1993), 134.)

But we do have poets. 

“At any rate, the vocation of human beings as such would be to bring to articulation the language of Logos as process of Aletheia, a task for which the poets serve as models.”

(--William Richardson, “Psychoanalytic Praxis and the Truth of Pain,” 341.

(--in William J. Richardson, S.J. and the Spelling of Marilyn Monroe: On Truth, Science, and the ‘Unfolding of Man’ in Heidegger and Lacan, by Babette Babich, 2019, Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Heidegger Circle ) p.207

Truth is always emerging for the first time each time it emerges from hiding.

Poets attempt to say what is taking place right now, and each occurrence of right now, as it is appearing to us. 

Watch This

                                  (a haiku error) 

gray cat mutters near

drapes in afternoon sleep, no-

body knows her dream 

                                 (wfh/28apr21) 

greeting

When I first read his book in 1980 it was cold water in my face. Berrigan was always annoying. Here, volunteering with the dying, was another reminder that radical response to peace and community went beyond merely being angry and protesting against the men and ideologies intent on war, cruelty, and suppression of opposition.

This priest poet, Daniel Berrigan, went to the very real.

FROM 1979 TO 1984, Berrigan cared for the dying as a volunteer at St. Rose’s Home in Manhattan. St. Rose’s housed at no charge 50 patients who were terminally ill with cancer and who came to the home to die. In We Die Before We Live: Talking with the Very Ill, Berrigan describes his experiences there, washing bodies, emptying bed pans, feeding the dying, and listening to and praying with and for them.

The staff was dedicated to making people’s lives bearable, comfortable, and lively for as long as they lasted. “No one is forced-fed,” writes Berrigan, “whether on religion, psycho-semantics, or antics” and “there are no state snoops because there is no state money.” St. Rose’s was simply “a laboratory in dying,” a “ship of fools” sailing on heroically while Berrigan and the other orderlies “bail, row, weep, swab the decks, change beds, ferry in the newly arrived near dead, and try to keep sane.”

At St. Rose’s, Berrigan found what he saw as the true church where, enveloped by the ever-present stench of cancer, the gospel was practiced. A mystical union formed between the orderlies and the dying. Berrigan offered consolation and tried to help the dying make peace with themselves and others. Why did he begin volunteering at St. Rose’s? He felt something was lacking in his life of “teaching, writing, and pilgrimaging to the Pentagon to throw ashes and blood at the idols.” He didn’t go to St. Rose’s as a chaplain dispensing the sacraments. He went to “greet” the dying, “hold their hands ... talk to them, learn from them ... dressed in old clothes, ready for whatever service seems required or helpful ... and to be found in the right place when the Lord comes.”  

(--from, Dan Berrigan's Hidden Works of Mercy, by Patrick Henry, May 2021, Sojourners)

This morning after zazen I joined hands and prayed for all the men and women I'd been graced to sit with over the past twenty plus years as a hospice volunteer, and, notable gift, the recent three years at Sussman House in Rockport, a place for the final days of life. Covid-19 has kept volunteers at bay since last March, thirteen months ago. We await the release of Maine Health protocols and the return to Sussman.

Everyone knows that they, too, are dying. Most prefer not to dwell on such knowledge. We just don't know where, or when, or what specific cause. But as we live so are we dying.

I'm ok with that.

I've had my tangerine this morning. I sipped water. There's a mouthful of yesterday's coffee remaining in thermos. An english muffin and marmalade ready themselves to join their peanut butter colleague to fortify my body for recovery from morning walk.

I am one of those fools on that ship of fools making way through waters of unfathomable direction.

Aye aye!

Loose those lines!

there

 Is someone

Who prides

Themself

As 

Being

Smart

The rest

Of us

Are not

For them.

Oh,

What a

Relief to

Not

Be

quid sit

 Thomas Aquinas 

would use the phrase, 

Quid sit, “What is”.

It wasn’t a question

It was declarative *

This is what it is like 

To be a practitioner of

Catholic/Buddhist 

Passing thought, the

Beyond

Accommodating

Christian Zen

...   ...   ...

* Synonyms

• assertion, 
• asseveration, 
• avouchment, 
• avowal, 
• claim, 
• declaration, 
• insistence, 
• profession, 
• protestation

words we don’t use

 From Twitter:

- day before yesterday: ereyesterday

- day after tomorrow: overmorrow

Vocabulary gift. 

what do you do

What is

Going on

between us?

What is

is

Going on 

between us.

(God)

is

What is

Going on

between us.

You do not

have to believe

in (God)

to move through

What is 

going on

between us.

You only have 

to move through

What is

moving through

that which is

between us.

Some call

this

(God)

Some don't

call this 

anything --

they just

listen

Eh? 

what all of it is, not yet, becoming

 God is between every thing and every other thing. 

Not in anything. Between every thing. 

Hence, it is when gelassenheit (tranquil submission, or releasing attachment) prompts us to fall through and from imagined internal residence (in thing, body, soul, psyche) that what we’ve thought of as “I” or “me” — falls away and groks what follows, a new reality occurs.

This, fifty three years ago in a poem written in Washington DC, I called “prescinding-after-the-whole.”

It is not this, not that. It is what insinuates itself as itself, after; after that which was thought or felt or experienced has given way to the aftered intimation of non-distinguishable presence.

It is this prescinding, this leaving out, that beckons what we’ve called the spiritual journey. (But here, in calling it a ‘spiritual journey’, there is a temptation to juxtapose spiritual with material, or corporeal). 

Not the leaves, not the flames, not the smoke, not autumn — but the intimation of what arrives and lingers some distance away that draws you in, that suffuses (and suffices) your attention with this after-the-whole presence passing through awareness.

The hint of.

The ungraspable revelation of what is there, what is here, but within its own intimate Ichigo ichie, the impermanent embrace of that which is, seemingly, already gone enroute elsewhere.

It is in such gelassenheit, such prescinding-after-the-whole, (so it seems this Monday morning), that “God” finds itself moving through itself with the intimation of what we are becoming.

What all of it is, not yet, becoming.

yu-mu

Listening yesterday while walking to a retreat given by a contemporary Dominican, Donald Goergen O.P., which included thoughts about Catherine of Siena (1347-1380). He spoke these words she experienced in a dialogue with God, “I am he who is, you are she who is not.”

This morning I find on a Dominican website, this:

 Catherine initially desired a life of seclusion and lived for many years in a small bedroom in the family home; yet, there came a time when God would call her out to spread the Gospel of Christ to the sick and infirmed of Siena and even to counsel Popes. What was the secret of her spirituality? In the Dialogue God the Father says to Catherine: “Do you know daughter, who you are and who I am? If you know these two things you have beatitude in your grasp. You are she who is not, I AM HE WHO IS.”

We are not; God is. 

This sentence, this picture, used as a portrait encouraging humility, is thought-provoking.

I am not.

God is.

It brings to mind something a fellow sangha practitioner sent yesterday: 

 “Being (yu) corresponds to form and nothing (mu) corresponds to timelessness.....”               (Chris York, 24apr21)

 To which, I replied: 

Now we’ll have to name our next dog  

(a long time from now) 

“Yumu.”

Being and nothingness. Form and timelessness. 

This ungraspable identity of absoluteness and relativity, relatedness and emptiness, form and formlessness,  peanut butter and marmalade. (Just to see if anyone was paying attention.)

These days, on a retreat of sorts, walking and listening, there is a surfeit of silence and shunyata.

Emptiness, that embrace of everything as no-other, hence, as nothing existing apart from itself — continuously eludes conception (on an epistemological level), and continuously undergoes conception (on a cosmological/contemplative level).

Everything arises out of itself, and outside of itself there is nothing that is other than itself.

We’ve grown used to thinking and saying “you and me” — we’ve written millions of songs and poems and novels and psychological treatises on such phrasing.

Now, we’ll have to contemplate what will emerge from a Chris-inspired appellation of “yumu” (or “yu-mu”) in the creative imagination of future love song or shikantaza poetics.

not looking at, but with

Where am I, are you

God, what are we doing here —

Here being God’s sight

vanagon with canoe

 park is crowded, warm

sunny breeze invites Qi Gong

cyclists, kids, tide falls

look under your feet

 Fredlander, in dream

Trying to piece together

What is in a name

A whole novel writes

Itself in fragment, a name

Beyond any other

Tierce at faint daybreak,

η γη, looks to see what is

Being seen, awake

It dawns, this day, bird-

song, tu, solus, dominus,

You, alone, are, God

The ground of being

Look under your feet, freedom

Alone where each stands

yo creo porque es absurdo

 I asked God: “Do you know who we are?”

God said, “I have no idea.”

That’s when I began to believe in God.

carry through the cadence of each step

 She says, 

"What we become by way of the Cloud prayer: Nobody doing nothing nowhere." 

(Kathleen Deignan, Enter the Cloud of Unknowing: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Christians, ch.5of5, Audiobook, 2016)

Mobile crane stretches high and lifts float-docks from grass into water after winter grounding. Neck retracts into sheath, stabilizing legs withdraw back into body-frame, bracing logs restacked on aft-end, one walk about to secure anything not, and engine labors to pull enormous machine up hill leaving marine park. 

Fish say nothing. Last year's hulled shell crop clinging to dried bottoms do not comprehend what this new dunking means. 

Chill wind blows through empty spaces where docks, piled one upon the other, leave yellowed grass for healing sun to green.

Field's Dive Service, ferrying floats to mooring balls scattered in harbor, returns to shuttle another.

Family of cyclists, jacketed in glo-lime, walk their bicycles up the steep incline. after lunching by Andre the Seal marble.

Morning walk of 3.6 miles around hospital grounds gives shape to new medication added to all the others to slow what kills.

This week's retreat-in-place, fast-in-hermitage, zazen-in-cell-room, long walks twice a day, audio books on Meister Eckhart, Cloud of Unknowing, Thomas Merton, Catholicism, and Alan Watts' inimitative observations, carry through the cadence of each step, each thumping clank of hiking poles. I leave ten pounds in the wind.

I study about terrorism, the lead-up to the two attacks on the Trade Center a decade apart, the determination of the antagonists, the despair of those trying to prevent the carnage. 

A confident seagull walks up to green receptacle for its forage, but the town worker has just carted away the pickings, and seagull seems to shrugg.

The water in inner harbor has turned dark green.

There's nothing to see here. 

So, no-one watches.

This recombining landscape.

watching 9/11 on earth day

 sights of planes flying

into tall buildings, that flash,

lives turned into ash 

remember that earth

is what we are and what we

become once again

and if you pray, say

this -- "I am always only

earth on earth as earth"

found haiku *

 A true zen monk has

a mountain hermitage a-

ny place he stands on

...   ...   ...

* (-from talk by Alan Watts, "Four Ways To Center")

가시

 In Korean it 

means thorn. A poet, Su Cho,

placed it in poem *

...   ...   ...

*cf. “Here Are Some Thorns, Splinters, Fishbones”

η αγάπη είναι θεός, η γη είναι ο θεός, και έτσι, αγαπούν τη γη *

Now is here and all

Dwelling here abide as earth

And here as now is

               (wfh/22apr21)

...   ...   ...

* literal translation from Greek:

    love is god, and earth is god, and so, love the earth

rondeau

If now is all there

Is, does that mean that God is

All there is as now

assente

when i look back, there

is nothing to see, i am

no one, gone, not there

the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint

We've gotten the notion of saint wrong.

To be a saint is to be one'self.         (cf. one's self, oneself, one self) 

“The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”      (--Leon Bloy, from La Femme Pauvre)

Derek Chauvin wanted George Floyd to be someone else. Shooters in stripmall, FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis, music concert in Las Vegas, primary school in Sandy Hook Connecticut, High School in Columbine Colorado, Grocery store in Boulder, a Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Spas in Atlanta area, a High School in Parkland Florida, a Walmart in El Paso, and the ever-continuing shootings by police of Black people in parks, alleys, streets and apartments. Shootings in churches in Sutherland Texas and Charleston South Carolina.

All gun violence is wanting those shot to be someone else. All chokings, all violence, is the wanting of someone to be someone else.

We do not want to be saints. We don't want anyone else to be a saint.

 “ For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore, the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.” (T. Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation)

... 

Saying this in another way, Herman Hesse writes: “ Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

(--in Why Not Become A Saint? by Bob Toohey

A saint doesn't eliminate the other. A saint allows the other to be themselves. A saint becomes themself. Saints allow each to be what they are, becoming.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.  (-Ralph Waldo Emerson )

It is a great sorrow not be be a saint.

A great tragedy not to long to be what and who you are. 

We are tempted to ask: What is the opposite of "saint"?

We are tempted to respond: "sinner."

But that's not true.

There is no opposite.

a subdued yes

 Relief, but no joy —

One murderer convicted,

So many suffer

at edge

Schooner Mary Day, 90-foot-long two-masted schooner is uncovered, bow hull being painted by crew. 

Angelique, 130-foot-long gaff topsail ketch, alongside, steel-hulled, patching and scraping.

Smaller, non-commercial Prophet, a Pinky schooner all winter long live aboard, on closer dock, sits relieved the cold blows of winter have gone.

Across harbor backhoe scrapes dirt from demolished buildings for new construction on Lyman Morse/Wayfarer waterfront site. 

A penny is placed on thwart of Sam-n-Susan's green Newfoundland Dory.

In Rockport Harbor mooring balls are plopped into water, chains checked, left to bob in the tide until boaters launch in a few weeks. Loon dives below surface. 

Lobster boat Kerry Ellen arrives at float, amid banter uploads bins with catch to white truck.

Elsewhere, anticipation awaits decision of jury in Minneapolis in trial of officer accused of murder/manslaughter against George Floyd.

Oak shadows fall across asphalt circle at edge of land.

Solo fisherman rows in from tethered boat that grazes on sparkling sunlight looking out to sea.

A three-legged Golden Retriever bounds over grassy stretch, happy, I suspect, to be doing so at all.

As are we all, about almost anything.

morning's at seven

Morning harbor.

Young girl with young puppy on leash walks with father along dew sparkling grass. Fishing boat, Brenda and Lee, slowly moves out channel to open bay beyond Indian Island at entrance to Rockport Harbor.

Boat lift at Rockport Marine swinging cradle slows and stops. Docks are in. Gangplanks set on Marine Park side of harbor head, flags at half-staff waver north to south. Sun holds everything in unclouded embrace. 

 In my view of the world, which is semi-Buddhist, semi-Hindu, the Creator and the Creature are one, and all beings whatsoever are the masks and plays and ploys of the central self, there is just this self, which plays itself through all forms, through all of us, endlessly.

(--in Four Ways to Center, by Alan Watts)

Browning's words in "Pippa's Song" draw attention to a state of being we've come look at skeptically. We want to protest his concluding lines: 

     Pippa’s Song 

THE year ’s at the spring,

And day ’s at the morn;

Morning ’s at seven;

The hill-side ’s dew-pearl'd;

The lark ’s on the wing;

The snail ’s on the thorn;

God ’s in His heaven—

All ’s right with the world! 

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

But why protest? Is it because we see corruption and dangerous points of view emerging? Maybe because just about every day a gunner slays civilians in supermarkets, workplaces, or eating joints? Perhaps because advertisements and propaganda and lies fill airways we thought were for different uses and purposes?

We say, and are confident in our saying, "Things aren't right."

Hard to argue that pronouncement.

But aren't things always both right and not right at the same time? 

Some claim if each of us is playing "itself" in the world, then each of us is determining what is there to be experienced, there to be seen, there to be lived through.

And yet, it is a shared world wherein we dwell.

It is not within the power of a single individual to engineer and set the causes and conditions for everyone else in its landscape. Hence, the difficulty of living in such a diverse uncontrollable ecosystem of mineral, insect, animal, and (so-called) rational animal on the planet. Not to mention Watts' creator, urges and demiurges, all sharing the walkways and trails of countryside.

One being cannot determine One-Being. 

But one person can look out and see the world as it is in itself.

As it is in itself is prior to the determinations made by preference, opinion, and judgment.

We long to know if that ground of being is right, and good, and just. As if such an understanding mind and heart would make it so.

But -- is it so? Right, and just, and good? Is it so in our sight as that which is at ground and that which is coming to be?

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

(--from, Speech: “All the world’s a stage” BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, (from As You Like It, spoken by Jaques) 

The part I play, the part you play -- has someone written it? Or are we part of an improvisation playing off one another creating scene after scene, opening and closing, an open-air theater for an audience on edge of seats ready to jump up and continue the endless scenario of creative discourse and intercourse and recourse to one another in playful, joyful, aesthetic.

Yes, that's it. The play of aesthetic interconnection. That's what we are.

But first -- we have to see it, hear it, feel it, long for it -- as we step on stage to become it.

And we are becoming, (i.e. attractively suitable).

As we become what we are to be.

saecula

 God knows what to

                                  do

With prayer, while I only

                                know

It is time I 

                                pray

drop by drop in america

 Three more shot dead

                             This

Time Texas. Our daily dread

                              How

Long, oh lord, how long?

wiederbelebt plus zwei

 Red squirrel jumps from

                                 Green                                   

 feeder runs under over-

                                 turned

Skiff, yesterday’s 

                                  Sleet

brackish

Watched Frontline’s PBS “American Insurrection” following reporting written and directed by Richard Rowley of Pro Publica.

The threat, he concludes, is not going away.

Chilling and thought-stilling.

sicut eratosthenes in principio

 For now, there is stone

tiredness of the so-called 

world, its, my, premise, 

Just a weariness —

The cant, the can’t, the Kantian

Ought that needs never

haiku liberation assertion

 Poet prefers change

(She doesn’t like seventeen)

Non-numerical 

Free expression, as

Mind would have itself floating

Through formulation

the writer said wisdom is not what you think

It knows difference.

And this awareness is all 

(the) difference. There's

no teaching wisdom 

as long as sameness is our 

cultural blindness.

wahrheitgeschehen, where truth becomes conspicuous

Let us become artists. 

Looking to truth, looking to itself.

Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) writings on art renew the romantic paradigm in the philosophy of art for the twentieth century. Despite all his criticism of the idealist tradition, Heidegger insists with Schelling on art as a Wahrheitsgeschehen, a truth-event, that is, an occasion when truth becomes conspicuous. Still, Heidegger differs from his romantic precursor in that he does not elevate art to that height where it becomes the only access to truth. Rather, he allows for some few alternative events in which truth reveals itself as well. Nevertheless, Heidegger agrees with Schelling insofar as both thinkers place art as an “organon of truth” above the propositional correctness of science and, hence, some versions of philosophy.

(—p.173, In The German Aesthetic Tradition, by Kai Hammermeister, 2002)

 If God is ‘itself’...

Truth reveals itself, 

As.

Well

such an odd way to live

 Oh those lies.

And the liars.

I used to hear lying was wrong.

These days liars are proud politicians and powerful believers in lies and lying.

Isn’t that sum-thin’?

et lux perpétua lúceat eis.

 If God is sanity, there is reason to understand why so many of us are disturbed. 

Yet, it is via this very disturbance that we return to the shape of our lives, having recognized dissonance and divertissement from an underlying harmony and regularity.

Have you an ear for it?

The melodic classical chants in the night?

Cloister semblance.

That resonance from inner portico walking to and from the sober celebration of what is true, right, and just.

Each passage a pilgrimage to the interior.

Step by shuffling step along one’s solitude.

Turning at edge of garden.

We end as we began.

In silence.

Sane, and

Sufficient.

take that insane delusion into silence

My money lives in a hollow in a tree half way up an abandoned trail on the other side of Bald Mountain in a rusted coffee tin alongside a st christopher medal where the child jesus is carried aloft enroute the remaining climb to summit where there is no money, no stocks, no checkbooks, no insurance, no overdraft, no dividends, and no payoff. 

Squirrels, I assume, have shredded the paper tender into nesting material for young offspring as they are taught the down-mountain route, the crossing of downhill road, arriving at hanging sunflower black oil seeds in front yard next to prayer flags and Peruvian brightly colored cross strung along thicket of downed cedar tree from old snowstorm.

I assist auditor reading numbers from spreadsheets with huge payrolls and big salaries, careful to be precise so as not to have to backtrack when bottom lines do not lineup. This exercise of trying to be helpful marks the irony of a seeming detachment and disregard for what might have been called when younger an attraction toward voluntary poverty. Why then do I not rejoice at the lines where individuals post 300, 500, 800 thousand dollars in gross wages alondside others posting 30, 40, 50 thousand in theirs?

One new year's eve day in early 1970's, walking with five colleagues from a child caring institution along a road in a county above new york city, talking about how one of the crowd had left the field to become a stock broker, I made what I thought was an obvious statement that "None of us will ever make more than $20,000 a year." Suddenly I was walking alone, everyone else having stopped in their tracks. One of them said, "Speak for yourself, Harry!" There was an intimation for me in the following silence that I was, in a very lonely sermon, indeed, only preaching an odd eclogue for myself.

Transfixed Francis of Assisi, impoverished Benedict Joseph Labre, and besotted Taneda Santoka -- all paupers, mendicants, wanderers -- were forebears. For them, prayer, poetry, and befuddled idiorhythmics were their temperment and fate. Outcast saints for the spes publica outcasts in our Divina Comedia communities of imagination.

An elderly friar I've know a long time once proclaimed, as if in ecstatic revelation, that "We are a monied economy and society." For him, this proclamation changed everything. I waited for him to say something else. He retreated into silence, stumbling through his insight for the next forty years.

Since central bankers can’t define money anymore, they now have one job: to convince you they still know what they’re doing, so you don’t panic, and so the financial aristocracy hangs onto the legacy system that underpins their ever-growing wealth and assets. Their remaining weaponry is a combination of insincere optimism and linguistic alchemy. As Ryan Gosling’s character in the Big Short says, “Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do. Or even better, for you to just leave them the f*ck alone.” This applies heavily to central bankers too. It disguises their many failures and shows they achieve stability by complexity. Those who have tried to expose the tomfoolery to the masses have had to endure a life of media solitude. Take Jeff Snider, an expert in the deep dark areas of finance. He tells us, quite simply, that most of what central bankers say does not reflect reality. Yet the mainstream press has no interest in publishing any of his work.

The longer they keep up this deception, then the more people will become aware, increasing the chance of a coordinated uprising. The problem is that it’s never happened before, ever. A nation of angry citizens reacts accordingly. Back in 1860, automotive pioneer Henry Ford said, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”Though it rhymes and does not repeat, history shows us a financial revolution remains a pipe dream.

(--in When the U.S. Dollar Collapses, the Majority Will Back the Elite’s New Currency, Not Crypto, in.Concoda, April 2021)

Monks chant as bells toll in French cloister. What do they pray for? Perhaps they pray for what everyone, whether they pray or not, is longing to find, namely, a way through.

Through what? You name it. Just a way through. To what? You name it. Just whatever it is that provides sanity and safety and sincere encounter with what we desire most.

And what do we desire most?

I don't know -- and, so, cannot say.

But if I did know -- just to play this out -- if I did, by some extraordinary delusion of prescience, know -- Ha! -- I'd take that insane delusion into silence, and, apophatically aphasic, would not be able to, thus, could not, say.

 ...   ...   ...

 Haiku

         (per la mia famiglia) 

 

the begger 

                   hands out

what is uncertain, 

                   looking --

what is it 

                   we hold

            (wfh/14april21)