everything I eat
or drink is not
good for me
every doctor’s visit
tells me I’m going blind
heart giving out
cancer slowing me down
diabetes exhausting me
pancreas more than suspect
why do I bother
everything is killing me
the good news
is when I die I won’t
have to worry about dying
which is, I suppose, a relief
I suppose if the south tower on 9/11 has begun to collapse on itself and you are in the stairwell as concrete and steel crash down and crush you, all you can do is recognize that it is happening, utter whatever prayer comes to mind, and disappear.
Living in the United States these days of trumpified dismantling of lawful decency replacing authentic justice with raw corruption and f*ck you immunity from any accountability, it might be time to utter that stairwell prayer and say goodbye to life and conventional unfearful civility as we’ve known it.
The collapse is upon us.
He is gravity pulling everything down.
There’s no one to call, no escape route, the billowing poisonous cloud descends over every inch of ground.
He is the end.
Not Jesus.
Him.
Perhaps freedom
Is the realization
(A bird’s throat)
Things are always
And only
The way they are —
We dwell well
Passing through
The way things are
Still feeling still
Caring with what is
Moving through
As
We
Do*
One is moving through
What is
Presenting Itself
Elie Wiesel said
“God means movement
And not explanation” —
True faith, Meister
Elkhart said, is Leben ohne
Warum (life without why)
The holy person is a mystic
Moving though what is
Presenting Itself as God is
Going nowhere
Doing nothing
There — as one is *
The good man
Cares and does good
The corrupt man
Doesn’t care and does
Everything for
His own benefit
What a god-awful
Time we live in
Walking Old Orchard Beach low-tide hard-pack sand just steps from my first winter-rental in 1981-82, reading Religion and Nothingness, the template was set for the next 45 years.
Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage is the elaboration of that template.
“Absolute nothingness signals, for Eckhart, the point at which all modes of being are transcended, at which not only the various modes of created being but even the modes of divine being – such as Creator or Divine Love – are transcended. Creator, he says, is the Form of God that is bared to creatures and seen from the standpoint of creatures, and as such is not to be taken as what God is in himself, as the essence of God. It is the same when God is said to be Love or to be Good. The essence of God that renders ineffable each and every mode of being (and each and every Form) can only be expressed as absolute nothingness”
(Nishitani Keiji – Religion and Nothingness pg 61-62).
I suppose I’m still attempting to fulfill my reception of the Religion Medal graduating 8th grade from St Athanasius Parochial School in 1957.
What do I come away with these 70 years later?
You could say ‘absolutely nothing’.
You could say I am perched on the veritable fulcrum point of everything that seems to have two sides.
You could say these things, but my hearing is compromised.
Tell me about God.
What can I say?
Not surprisingly, it is so much easier to say who or what God is not than to say who or what God is. When we eliminate everything and everyone that God is not, whoever remains is God, someone who can never be negated. In impersonal terms, God is the ultimate truth or the absolute reality which is self-evident. Denying God is as laughable as denying one’s own existence.
Whichever way we try to make sense of the various ways God is described, the purpose of all such descriptions is not simply to know who God is but to see God. God is not an idea or a concept that needs to be understood. God is a real being, more real than you and me. God is truth, not a figment of anyone’s imagination. If God truly exists, why should we simply believe in God? Why should God remain only a matter of faith? The journey certainly starts with faith in God, but it’s got to end with a direct experience of God. As Swami Vivekananda said (CW 4. 165), we “must realize God, feel God, see God, talk to God. That is religion.” Nothing short of an unambiguous experience can satisfy us fully.
All expressions that strive to describe God should ultimately help us experience God.
If they cannot or won’t, what’s the point?
-- Swami Tyagananda 2026, Ramkrishna Vedanta Society,
https://vedantasociety.net/blog/trying-to-express-the-inexpressible
My favorite part of an Eckhart Tolle talk is when he turns his hands up, raises his eyebrows and asks, “What’s the point?”
My favorite words from John Macquarrie when I studied with him at Union Theological on Heidegger was when all settled around the seminar table and he said, “Well I think we can begin.”
Perhaps it’s not so much to see God, but to see through God.
NYTimes Opinion piece, “Trump Doesnt Know What Power Is” by Lydia Polgreen puts power, strength, and violence into historical perspective.
“We live in a world,” Miller told Tapper, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” The painful fallout of the Iran war provides an eloquent rebuttal. But the Trump administration has done more than misjudge American force and the wherewithal of its adversary. It has fundamentally misunderstood what power is, conflating it with the capacity to inflict violence when the two are, in truth, opposed. (Ibid)
We are distracted by the personal corruption of the president of the United States and overlook the lessons of history.
Thucydides, Hanna Arendt, and any high school student of the Peloponnesian War point out the miscalculations and shortsightedness taking place by deluded men in Washington.
Twenty five hundred years has a long reading list.
I’m glad someone remembers how to read.
Trump is not Hitler
He is something else
I can’t put my finger on it
But he is not Hitler
as far as I can tell
He is Trump
A name that will
be the stuff of future
preposterous comparisons
yes, it’s true --
comparisons are
odious *
When I died
There was nothing
I could think to say
I could no longer do
What alive I once did
Funny, eh
How I knew I was dead
Was the way everything
Stopped being anything else
Food has no taste these days, only
Seltzer, orange juice, coffee milk, ginger ale
water —
Fading into nothing at all —
Simple joy of diminishment
Lad calls. We catch up. Something about UVA graduation day. I'm a little vague about what there is to remember, except their graduation is today. Seems right, remembering what may or may not have taken place four decades ago.
The real way circulates everywhere;
how could it require practice or enlightenment?
The essential teaching is fully available;
how could effort be necessary?
Furthermore, the entire mirror is free of dust;
why take steps to polish it?
Nothing is separate from this very place;
why journey away?
—Dogen 1227
I never became a zen master. Never a zen priest. Never a zen monk. Never belonged to any zen organization. No particular zafu has a permanent imprint of my butt. Every gassho I do is an independent contractor wandering back alleys looking for discarded loaves of bread.
As a homeless and idiorrhythmic monastic in the non-existent catholic-zen buddhist semiliniage of roninesque mythology, I keep my options open and serve everyone. It’s what we do.
It was a good phonecall.
Nothing is separate from this very place;
why journey away? *
Ensō and I walk stretch
Of mountain
Come back sit by cemetery
Strong flow of brook
Tops of trees sway new leaves
Hold light green sun over water
I look at the standing wood trunks
From green plastic chair
As doggy on leaves looks down path
Just quiet Saturday morning
As much religion and spirituality
I need, an old man and mild mannered
Dog on mountainside with diminished
Energy, faint measure of breath
Asking nothing of holy present beauty *
For prison today, the Somali poet Hadraawi:
Let me tell the whole truth,put into wordsthe essence of our charge:while hunger grips like a strong youth,is impregnable as a sturdy wall,and those who grab and gather wealth,who love to lick their lips at it –while this type is springing up all over,doers of ill who demand the best,hoarding all there is;while the poor suffer,are pushed over, helpless,and everyone is divided into high or low,don’t hope that tribalismwill fade and wither:the facts oppose you.Anyone who wants this lifeto be serene,to have savour and feel sound,there is a path to follow:people, you prosperas one unit, as you share inyour shouldering of the burden –that’s the only balm.If it weakens in one wingthen its whole end is woe.Is there any advice better than this,any further examples you needbeyond this ample explanation,or do you have some countering case?
--excerpt from Daalacan (Clarity), ORIGINAL POEM BY Somali poet Maxamed Ibraahin Warsame ‘Hadraawi’ (1943-2022), TRANSLATED BY Said Jama Hussein (1979-80) https://www.poetrytranslation.org/poem/clarity/#translated-poem
also, cf: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bulletin-of-the-school-of-oriental-and-african-studies/article/abs/ali-mumin-ahad-somali-oral-poetry-and-the-failed-shecamel-nation-state-a-critical-discourse-analysis-of-the-deelley-poetry-debate-19791980-society-and-politics-in-africa-24-306-pp-new-york-peter-lang-2015-7145-isbn-978-1-4331-2515-7/4CF26E587C4C301608DAF76B08071AE4
Clarity.
In a hard time, in a dark time, one can attempt clarity.
Or do you have some countering case?
I’ve never been accused of knowing too much.
Teachers would wonder if I knew anything.
Too much knowledge leads to overactivity;
Better to calm the mind.
The more you consider, the greater the loss;
Better to unify the mind.
Water dripping ceaselessly
Will fill the four seas.
Specks of dust not wiped away
Will become the five mountains.
—Wang Ming (6th c.)
The more cluttered this room gets the less chance I have to escape a fire or corral a cogent thought. Not that either of those things carries any attraction.
Seas and mountains are depths and heights unto themselves.
I’ve no idea what I am unto myself.
This room stares at me. *
When I lost
My mind
I looked
In kitchen
Food scraps
Empty cat cans
Pile of unread
Mail and magazines
It was not there
It had been recycled
Dumped in bin
At transfer station
Waiting to be
Taken elsewhere
Living without
A mind is ok
No one looks at you
You become nameless
If you happen outside
Squirrels jump off feeder
Birds fly off waiting for
New seed, grass stretches
Sky hangs cloud laundry
Port-a-potty passes on truck
But no mind
Not anywhere to be found
Only walking sticks
Leaning by barn door
Talking to each other of
once-were’s and used-to-be’s
Their rubber tips
Not nearly worn through
Where some mind on a mountain
Might have dropped a thought
Some passing hiker’s boot nudged
It under damp leaves by rivulet *
Caring for health.*
“I think that being scared is a sign of being sane.” (Line from series taking place in Spain spoken to detective with paranoid schizophrenia in his family.)
Hantavirus isn’t a worry for another pandemic, Malignant narcissism and besotted egomania is more the fear of the remaining sane population. The greed and criminal insanity of the head of the Executive Branch has a viral effect on each person under his malevolent shadow. We are a nation under threat of infected imprinting spiralling down the social/cultural genomes of a weakened biological/spiritual population.
Being angry is a false-positive.
Being scared might be the route to sanity.
Just like, long ago, the fear of the lord was the beginning of wisdom.
Now, fear of our insane chief executive might trigger a latent immune system to produce antibodies and creative cells to replicate a clear and healthy body-politic going forward.
We need a sane, clean, and healthy new patient-zero from whom to begin the immunisation and recovery of an informed, justice-bitten, and resolved populace committed to not being sick.
Are you the one?
Buddha sits on box in window
No temple, no altar, no rinzi or soto
No academic degree or political pac
No office seeking or board of directors
He sits there, rain behind him
No scandals threatening to topple him
Oh, the freedom of it — being nobody
Going nowhere, free from history
Isolated from opinion and scrutiny
The little bronze Buddha leaning back
Facsimile of someone long gone
Something of itself merely there —
If you want to practice Buddhism then
Practice Buddhism, a good enough choice
There are worse things to do — I’ll not mention
Them — these days I have chosen solitude
A reclusive consciousness behind closed doors
A stretch of road going nowhere, cars gliding by
Every apology is an admission of defeat. Some people never apologize. It doesn’t mean they are not defeated; it means they are dead to their circumstances and oblivious to whatever reality wherein they stand. These are dangerous people. They believe they are never wrong. That belief proves they are dead inside, and their outside is a grave danger to anyone near.
Since my will broke down
I now have a clearer view
of the leafing roadside trees
(wfh, with apologies to Mizuta Masahide)
In Hemingway’s words:
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
From Mirriam-Webster:
cf “will”:
: mental powers manifested as wishing, choosing, desiring, or intendingb: a disposition to act according to principles or endsc: the collective desire of a group, the will of the people5: the power of control over one's own actions or emotions, a man of iron will6a: something desired, especially : a choice or determination of one having authority or powerb (1) [from the phrase our will is which introduces it] : the part of a summons expressing a royal command
Blossoms bring the Spring.
Spring doesn’t take them with it
When it goes.
Clouds flow upon the stream.
The stream cannot hold them.
I’d ask why that is,
But no one’s here, but
This tall tree,
Beneath which I will idle
Pondering
The place,
The Spring,
The clouds.
Yuan Mei (1716-1798)
Yuan Mei proposed xingling as necessary for poetry.
The literary theory of xingling (“soul”) is an early category in the history of Chinese literature, which was first proposed by the famed Buddhist literati Fan Tai, Xie Lingyun, Yan Yanzhi, He Shangzhi and other figures during the Southern Dynasties, Liu and Song periods, and broadly applied by figures such as Liu Xie, Zhong Rong and Yu Xin to esthetic theory and poetry criticism. There are chiefly two aspects to the origins of the literary theory of xingling in Buddhist philosophy: The first is the idea of foxing (“Buddhatā, Buddha-nature”) within teachings on nirvana in Mahāyāna Buddhism, and the second is the idea of shishen (“vijñāna, consciousness”) in Hīnayāna Buddhism. After being introduced into China, the theories of “Buddha-nature” and “consciousness” were ingeniously combined with the concepts of guishen (“supernatural beings”) and linghun (“spirit”) in the native Chinese tradition. “Buddha-nature,” “consciousness,” and shenling (“divinity”) were organically integrated, forming the basic content of the Buddhist theory of xingling, which referred not only to a constant and immutable, supremely powerful, and mystical force intrinsically possessed by all living creatures (sentient beings), but also to a foundational energy that filled the cosmos and obliterated differences. This provided a profound and substantial philosophical basis for the literary theory of xingling by Liu Xie, Zhong Rong, Yu Xin and other figures, imbuing xingling with the status and power of a universal center with supreme sublimity and matchless energy.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00094633.2023.2180210
Upon further consideration, that which is core within us is care. Those with damaged souls (core) do not actualize care. They suffer this lack as do those near them or those under their supposed care.
We have a Republican administration suffering an absent core of care. So too Legislature. So too Supreme Court. So too Republican majorities and governance in Red states.
They are killing us.
Like serial murderers not yet apprehended they elude accountability and avoid justice.
We are besieged and distraught.
Still, in the Northeast, blossoms bring the Spring.
A clear view of what is flowering helps heal what is broken.