warm sun melts yard snow
trickling mud teeters down mud-
licking winter stones
Tuesday, March 10, 2026
a point of nothingness . . . of pure truth
Who are we
In one another’s life
In prison yesterday
Reading Andy Weir’s The Egg
We’re five expressions
Of one person and one dog
Pondering the ontology
Of such a circle theorum
Where two radii of a circle
Form an isosceles triangle
Lines and angles equal
To each other — the dog
Not having any of it
Stretched on rug between us
back at Ragged Mountain,
I remember Merton’s writing:
AT THE CORNER OF FOURTH AND WALNUT IN LOUISVILLE
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun….
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed….
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our son-ship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.
(Excerpts from Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Part Three, The Night Spirit and the Dawn Air, pp. 156-58, in old Image paperback edition) https://ancientanswers.org/words-to-live-by/thomas-merton/at-the-corner-of-fourth-and-walnut-in-louisville/
Sunday, March 08, 2026
n’autre (no other)
I feel, lately, I have nothing to say.
“Negation is a refusal of existence. By means of it a being (or a way of being) is posited, then thrown back to nothingness.” (--p.11, Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre)
...
Consciousness moreover can not produce a negation except in the form of consciousness of negation. No category can "inhabit" consciousness and reside there in the manner of a thing.
The not, as an abrupt intuitive discovery, appears as consciousness (of being), consciousness of the not.
In a word, if being is everywhere, it is not only Nothingness which, as Bergson maintains, is inconceivable; for negation will never be derived from being. The necessary condition for our saying not is that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunt being. (p.11 ibid)
I dwell in a haunted house of appearances and disappearances.
An hour was lost in the middle of night just gone by.
And the current war?
March 5 - Scores of people have been killed across the Middle East since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, with Gulf states that host U.S. military bases and personnel as well as Lebanon quickly drawn into the conflict.Here are the death tolls from the war as reported by countries as of March 5, the sixth day of the war. Reuters has not independently verified these deaths.IRAN At least 1,230 people killed, including 175 schoolgirls and staff killed in a missile strike on a primary school in Minab in the country's south on the war's first day, according to the non-profit humanitarian group Iranian Red Crescent Society. It was unclear if the overall death toll included Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps military casualties.The Reuters Iran Briefing newsletter keeps you informed with the latest developments and analysis of the Iran war. Sign up here.
ISRAEL Ten civilians killed, including nine people in an Iranian missile strike on Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem on March 1, according to Israel's ambulance service Magen David Adom. The Israel Defense Forces has not reported any military casualties.
LEBANON At least 77 people killed in Israeli strikes, according to Lebanon's health ministry.
BAHRAIN One person killed after fire broke out in Bahrain's Salman Industrial City following missile interception, according to the interior ministry.
KUWAIT Three people, including two Kuwaiti soldiers, killed in Iranian attacks on the country, according to Kuwait's health and foreign ministries.
OMAN One person killed after a projectile hit the Marshall Islands–flagged product tanker MKD VYOM off the coast of Muscat.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Three people killed, according to UAE's defense ministry.
U.S. MILITARY Six U.S. service members were killed in a strike on a facility in Kuwait, according to U.S. Central Command.
SYRIA Four people were killed when an Iranian missile struck a building in the southern Syrian city of Sweida on Saturday, state news agency SANA said.
• IRAQ At least 13 people were killed, according to Iraqi health authorities, including 11 militiamen, one army soldier and one civilian, based on health registration figures.Compiled by Jonathan Allen, Jana Choukeir, Menna Alaa El Din, Maayan Lubell, Pesha Magid and Ahmed Rasheed; Editing by Don Durfee, Cynthia Osterman, Aidan Lewis
These are some instances of refusing existence. The minds of two men at censorious play.
As much as my evaluating and calculating mind might urge the non-existence of Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, and Mohammed bin Salman, and the reconstitution and re-existence of Jamal Ahmad Hamza Khashoggi along with the return of the above referenced de-existence of the war-dead, there seems to be no current physical or spiritual mechanism to reliably effectuate such miraculous apparition.
No one has found the lines of communication once operated by Edgar Cayce and Jesus of Nazareth. Our sick and dead remain sick and dead (as far as we know) for now.
And, up in the Russia Ukraine sorrowful fiasco?
AI Overview
Estimates for the Russia-Ukraine war show significantly higher Russian casualties, with sources like CSIS suggesting Russia has around 1.2 million total casualties (killed, wounded, missing) and 275,000-325,000 killed, compared to Ukraine's 500,000-600,000 total casualties and 100,000-140,000 fatalities; this translates roughly to a 2:1 or 2.5:1 casualty ratio favoring Ukraine, though figures vary, and both nations keep precise data secret, with battlefield losses for Russia estimated at roughly double Ukraine's.
Key Casualty Estimates (as of early 2026):
Russia: ~1.2 million total casualties (killed, wounded, missing), with ~325,000 killed.
Ukraine: ~500,000-600,000 total casualties (killed, wounded, missing), with ~100,000-140,000 killed.
Ratio & Context:
Ratio: Russian battlefield losses are often cited as roughly double Ukraine's, around a 2:1 or 2.5:1 ratio.
Scale: Russia's losses are staggering compared to major conflicts since WWII, exceeding its losses in all previous wars combined, according to CSIS.
Data Challenges: Both sides protect their military data, so figures come from intelligence estimates, independent analysis (like CSIS), and open-source investigations.
In essence, while exact numbers are elusive, reports consistently indicate Russia is suffering disproportionately higher casualties in the conflict.
Also see CSIS, Center For Strategic and International Studies, "Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine”.
I used to think Sartre’s book Being and Nothingness too large and too difficult to navigate, preferring (oddly) Heidegger’s Being and Time for casual reading in my Audible library. I’ve long enjoyed Sartre’s Huis Clos (No Exit) with its “Hell is other people” vibration. Over the years, for those who suspect a cynic’s dépêcher message of misanthropic scorn, I’ve adopted a semantic somersault that posits there are no “other” people and hence no hell.
The n’autre (no other) realization throws all of existence and negation into a new kettle of fish that gurgles on low heat filling kitchen with a new fragrence the ghosts of Sartre and Heidegger take in with their French wine and German beer.
We are killing ourselves. Tell that to Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, and bin Salman. They won’t understand it, They’re counting the money coming through their doors, human life be damned.
They have no consciousness of the not.
And the rest of us? What are we conscious of?
What haunts us?
What haunts you . . .
My friends?
Saturday, March 07, 2026
an eremite, the desert, absorption
Ignore me
I shuffle by
I finish
Nobody’s Girl
The grief
Posthumous
Raw ambiguity
The cost, wrenching
Money money poison
She is alive on last page
But reader knows
Nihil obstat death
In my deep dark basement
I want to slit throats
Climb stairs
Walk away
Sit on harbor bench
No moorings, gull
On piling, just dawning
The impossibility of this
Existence, the ambiguity
Of suicide, whose hand
Whose mind are you out of
Who manipulates the narrative?
A cynic looks, not at anything
Other than despair, the sadness
The long unselfing, the critical
Relentless disappearance
No happy ending, just perpetrators
Snug in their insouciant arrogance
Ticker tape smug, the sadness drips
Through veins, a blur of uncaring
Blindness, a gouging darkness —
An end of night office
Monks absorb world’s sin
Leave sanctuary with her in heart
New and now silent psalm tone
Walks within her each raindrop
Friday, March 06, 2026
nada lo explica, nada lo justifica
We seem to have been a culture of pedophiles for quite a while, what with Epstein and Trump, Maxwell, Prince Andrew and Harvard faculty, unnamed billionaires and powerful business people, priests and ministers, and (no doubt) some rabbis and imams, as well as dads, uncles, and older brothers, not to mention moms and aunts and cousins all. The literature on abuse, trafficking, and horrific behavior is sobering and sickening.
One example:
A blistering report issued Wednesday describes decades of child sexual abuse in Rhode Island’s Catholic churches, documenting accusations against dozens of priests involving hundreds of victims.
The report from Peter F. Neronha, the state’s attorney general, also lays out repeated failures by the Diocese of Providence to remove priests or bring in law enforcement in response to accusations. Instead, investigators working for Mr. Neronha found, the diocese chose to handle reports of abuse internally, primarily by moving offending priests to new parishes.
The diocese transferred at least 30 accused priests to new jobs at least five times each, Mr. Neronha said in a news conference on Wednesday.
“So much hurt and harm could have been avoided” had the diocese removed the priests from their duties, he said. “Nothing explains it, nothing justifies it.”
(Rhode Island Priests Abused Hundreds of Children Over Decades, Report Finds, By Jenna Russell March 4, 2026, Nytimes)
No, nothing does explain nor justify what has become tendentious and horrendous and all too familiarly happenstance. Who hasn’t had an iffy uncle or creepy guy on the street you live?
Sexuality and sexual behavior now fit right in with every commercial advertisement on internet or tv.
These kids, it seems to go, are here for our pleasure.
We become predatory and perverse.
Would that we had a sense of justice and decency to counter our greed and exploitation.
le sens n'est pas ce que vous croyez
waddya mean your life is meaningless?
it’s meaningless.
waddya mean by that?
that it’s meaningless?
yeah, that it’s meaningless?
that it has no meaning.
is that so?
yeah, that’s so.
well, I have to get back to my life.
is it meaningful?
yes, it is, meaningful.
good for you!
and good for you as well.
thank you!
even on its way out
The Mud Season
Patience darling,
it’s still too early
to trust the season
with that tenderness you hold
in your globed hands.
I can feel it, too—
the yearning to plant
your fingers in the warming earth
and release what’s so alive in you
into the scrum of all life.
But the ground’s still frozen
beneath all this mud.
And winter, even on its way out,
will take with it anything
that opens too soon.
So hold your longing a little longer
in the sheltered care of your body,
like soft green starts
on the windowsill of your heart,
seedlings from the tree
of good and evil.
–From book, The Wilderness That Bears Your Name, JAMES A. PEARSON
https://jamesapearson.com/the-mud-season-poem/
Thursday, March 05, 2026
as callous as
Best left without comment:
The United States is at war. Americans, at such a time, might expect their government to speak to them regularly and report on U.S. goals—and casualties—but so far, they have gotten little beyond prerecorded videos of the president and some sound bites from various officials. Even Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has held only a few briefings.
Perhaps the Pentagon chief’s reluctance to speak to the press is just as well, because many Americans would be alarmed to realize that their sons and daughters in combat are being overseen by a person as callous as Pete Hegseth.
This morning, the defense secretary gave a briefing on the war that quickly degenerated into Trumplike bombast. (Wisely, the Pentagon scheduled this at 8 a.m. eastern time, when most of the country is either sleeping or busy starting their day.) Hegseth apparently prefers to sound more like a Call of Duty player leading a raid than a sober and judicious secretary of defense: “Death and destruction from the sky all day,” he said, along with other empty phrases such as “We’re playing for keeps.” (As opposed to what, exactly?)
Most reporters are now accustomed to Hegseth’s drama-laden antics. But even by the low standards he has set, he managed to shock many of them when he cynically used the deaths of U.S. military personnel to air his own grievances with the press.
On Sunday morning (local time), an Iranian drone hit a makeshift operations center in Kuwait. The Pentagon says that six Americans are dead. Not only is this event a tragedy, but it also requires an explanation: The drone reportedly snuck through U.S. defenses without setting off any alerts, and struck a target that now seems to have been unduly vulnerable to aerial attack.
The defense secretary, the man who is supposed to carry this news to the American public and mourn with them, instead whined about the unfairness of it all. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it,” Hegseth told the reporters, military personnel, and civilians gathered this morning in the Pentagon. “The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality. The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. As I said Monday, the mission is laser-focused.”
(--Pete Hegseth Treats Fallen American Soldiers as a PR Problem, from His use of the Iran-war dead to attack the media was disgraceful. by Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, March 4, 2026)
non chiedere
I will go live there
where?
where no questions are asked
where’s that?
you’ll never find it
why not?
don’t ask
integration, samadhi
Something about 4AM
Evokes nocturnes in monastery
The stillness in side chapel
The clear sky as dawn bows
Stepping into deep kinhin
Hands shashou, heart fond
God nowhere
To be, found
Wednesday, March 04, 2026
move over you old bard
That TV host
play-acting
secretary of defense/war:
“Death and destruction
from the skies
all day long”
God, ain’t he
just the best
poet you’ve heard?
at stake today
Let’s get rid of poetry. Let’s get rid of philosophy. We have enough two minute advertisements to fill the gap of the absence of poetry and philosophy. There are enough guys sitting on a chair beside a table with flowers and a glass of water talking spiritual stuff. There are enough bra commercials that tout raised and firm breasts. There are enough erectile disfunction pills and treatments that promise to keep men hard long into their deepest fantasies. Who needs poetry and philosophy?
Who today would claim that he is equally at home in the essence of thinking and in the essence of poetry?
—Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets?” (206)
Is it true? Badiou states: “Since Nietzsche, all philosophers claim to be poets, they all envy poets, they are all wishful poets or approximate poets, or acknowledged poets, as we see with Heidegger, but also with Derrida or Lacoue-Labarthe” (Manifesto 70). This provocation is the least of it, because Badiou’s main thesis is even more disturbing: “I maintain that the Age of Poets is completed” (71); “the fundamental criticism of Heidegger can only be the following one: the Age of Poets is completed, it is also necessary to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition” (74). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe responds gently but in a somewhat panicky tone:
Should poetry cease to be of interest to philosophy? Must we—as a necessity or an imperative—sever the tie that for two centuries in Europe has united philosophy (or at least that philosophy that is astonished at its origin and anxious about its own possibility), and poetry (or at least that poetry that acknowledges a vocation toward thought and is also inhabited by an anxiety over its destination)? Must philosophy—by necessity or imperative—cease its longing for poetry, and conversely (for there is indeed reciprocity here), must poetry finally mourn every hope of proffering the true, and must it renounce?
We would not be asking such a question, or we would be asking it differently, if Alain Badiou had not recently situated it at the very center of what is at stake today in philosophizing—in the very possibility of philosophizing. (Heidegger 17)
(--Alain Badiou’s Age of the Poets: The Desacralizing of the Poem in Volume 31 – Number 3 – May 2021, Alberto Moreiras)
If our contemporary fantasy is only about how hard and long we can go into someone’s orifice, whether human or Middle East country, than we have little need for the thought and insight of poetry and philosophy.
Even prose and poetry scuffle. "Perhaps [a different] Alain said it best for all who hold this view: True prose must be “poetry refused".” (French: La prose est poésie refusée)
(note: Alain is the pseudonym of Émile-Auguste Chartier (born March 3, 1868, Mortagne, Fr.—died June 2, 1951, Le Vésinet, near Paris). He was a French philosopher whose work profoundly influenced several generations of readers. (cf.Britannica)
I refuse poetry. I also refuse prose. I furthermore avoid anyone proclaiming poetry or prose.
We are simple people. Talk to us like simple people. Tell us how to inject ourselves so as to lose 40-50 pounds. Show us how to do tai chi chair yoga so as to look like someone who deserves E.D. pills and grateful women and men. Remind us that we can cash in our longterm insurance policies to help make our current lives more spectacular.
Poetry only gives us something like this:
"Dust of Snow”
by Robert Frost
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Or, in prose: Damned crow shakes snow on back of my neck. Caw caw, cold!
I’m giving up poetry and prose.
I’m taking to my swirl chair by front window where I can watch cars and trucks, chickadee and cardinal go by. Where I can watch my life go by without considering thought or meaning; not the screams of war or the squeals of orgasm covered by last night’s cold snow; not the mute and mutant psyche of a nation free to check the stock market for their true love’s readout.
Alla salute! Saluti a tutti i miei fratelli e sorelle!
melting snow drips from eaves to fresh unsounding snow below
there’s an argument
about God’s silence
it goes
he has nothing to say
another view
is different
she has taken
a vow of silence
God, either way,
is not heard from
is the gap everyone
feels, a bardo, between --
we humans continuing to
pray, listening for God’’s
voice, hearing only absence
and savvy ventriloquists
Tuesday, March 03, 2026
what did you say
One day a year
Americans can practice
Democracy, one day
Vote, they tell us
One day a year — as if
Such silliness is enough
sorcery in a white house
I don’t want to hear that
this place is an illusion
that we’re all One in God
Although six Americans
and hundreds of Iranians
simply disappeared this week
Don’t give me The Disappearance
of the Universe treatment where ego
goes and illusory separation flees --
seems way too odd that God
has nothing to do with what is here
when God is what is here itself
seems war and other murderous tricks
are what ego does best, a magician’s
wand wiping out what ego says must go
Monday, March 02, 2026
for the numb among us
Look at yourself
Now look up
Any bombs falling?
Drop your politics
Your ideology —
Feel life
Whether Gaza, Ukraine
Iran, for God’s sake, for
Life’s sake, feel something
this sickness comes on suddenly
Sunlight
Fills bed
No bombs fall here
Maine
Is exempt
For now from blasts
There
Is a fool in
White House with missiles
Americans
With MAGA hats
[Cough, cough, wheeze, spit]
Sunday, March 01, 2026
in lieu of
It’s true
He can do
Whatever he wants
It’s amazing
Isn’t it, the
Criminality
The massacre
Of school girls
True to his style
the flaw that faces us
war brings death and destruction
school children, citizens, soldiers
bleed out and scream, the despair
of someone's cri de coeur -- war
is no answer to no sane question --
unnecessary decision by flawed
mind and unstable character
punishing everybody
chaos of compassion
zen buddhists chant heart sutra
virginia roberts giuffre’s book is
read over cloud library -- this
sitting, this chant, for her, for
the men and women who used
her, for the rest of us who cannot
remember what justice and decency
could be in human life -- I dedicate
this practice, to save all beings,
to offer a measure of sorrowful hope,
to drown in the chaos of compassion
Saturday, February 28, 2026
mechanizing insanity
I still don’t know
How killing and murdering
With war benefits anyone
It takes a very particular
Delusion to calculate such
Death and destruction
turn around or turnabout
I don't think the president is a pedophile. It's none of my business. And if he is, I was brought up Catholic and understand the theology of the sacrament of reconciliation or plenary indulgences.
Nor am I in law enforcement, nor a member of the Bar where I am duty bound to be concerned with justice and crime.
No, I'm just a zen fool who looks at things trying to see what they really are. When I look at the president I have trouble focusing. Must be the cataracts.
It takes a lot not to judge and condemn. Like the US Congress, it takes a lot to avert gaze and phone for dollars so as to win reelection returning to power so as to avert gaze for another few years.
Some say it is a collapse of morality and ethics. Some say it is a cultural collapse and failure of credible leadership.
Not me.
I think it is something altogether different.
I think it is the deficiency of the mental structure of consciousness we've carried now for almost three thousand years.
That and sports betting, TikTok, and substack.
We've grown to believe our opinion matters.
Someone thinks war will be beneficial. Someone thinks botoxing lips, cheeks, and forehead will be stylish. Someone thinks twenty billion dollars is not enough to retire on. Someone thinks killing their wife or husband would be good to do before the Ides of March.
I have no opinions. That's my opinion, i.e. "a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge."
But if the president were a pedophile, that would matter to the American people. If it doesn't matter to them, then he is not a pedophile. (I failed logic in school.)
It is good form to proclaim one loves their country. As a Buddhist I understand that form is emptiness, and vice versa. ("Versa" in Latin means to "turn around or turnabout.") Emptiness is also form.
It often seems so much of our posturing and proclaiming is empty and without substance, mere propaganda and pretense. Like saying we're a good Christian nation and tossing Jesus into the Schuylkill River, hands tied, feet in cement bucket.
Preachers make millions on televised broadcasts and priests continue to hide their faces in shame over their crimes. Politicians pretend to be deacons of the gospel and federal border patrol are finally permitted to beat the hell out of minorities and immigrants like they've wanted to do since grade school.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will be murdered again. (We've changed the liturgy in America.)
There's no mistaking the new hierarchy in this country. The cabinet is the College of Cardinals. The Pont-Neuf is the president. The Supreme Court are the inquisitors. And we, (God help us), are the mindless and stupid who hold on to the belief that the current president is the savior-in-chief who has buttonholed the ear of the Almighty Creator, unceasingly trying to convince the Sublime Presence that naming rights now belong to the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the soon-to-be new Cathedral of Ballroom Tech and Triumph.
I am a simple monk.
I eat, sleep, and walk mindfully.
I have no opinions, make no judgments, and only lie when I write the first two phrases of this sentence.
I do not ask for forgiveness.
I look forward to being condemned to perdition.
I don't expect I will be seeing you there.
So, good luck!
And thanks for tinning such tasty sardines.
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