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]

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

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.

scene

 I’m not stupid

       You’re not?

I know you're lying

       You do?

You're a pedophile

       I am?

And I don’t care

       You don’t?

No, I don’t 

       Why not?

You're my saviour

       You think so?

Touch me bless me

        (See, how easy?)

…   …   …

[Announcer: if this had been a real dialogue

You would have been instructed to give up

All principles and worship pedophilia, 

All its perversions, and all its perverts.]

casus belli

 War is

The pedophile’s way

Of saying

“So what

If I raped and abused

That child”

Stand back

The adults are showing

You what power means

morning travels

 Walking through the mythic structure of consciousness

We enter a large monastery, a temple where we meditate

Study the four bodhisattva vows, converse about bees

In the mental structure we are in prison Friday morning

Wondering if we will get to Sherman Alexie poem (we

don’t), some final words about integral structure and Ramadan 

where a former student checks me in

 At lab today five

Large vials of blood taken —

Exsanguination

show and tell

So much about the Epstein Files and Donald Trump.

Things appear. If I’ve learned anything teaching philosophy over the years is that if something is there it will ultimately appear. 

I have no doubt truth, as they say, will out. 

Yes we grow impatient, doubtful, even cynical. 

But some FBI agent, some DOJ staff person, some personal lawyer, some family member, some victim, or someone else belittled by the abuser will spill the beans, leak what has been hidden, and exercise their troubled conscience. 

So, too, here. 

He won’t get away.

Time will tell.

We’ll be listening

here's a responsibility

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) once wrote, "Better the world should perish

than I or any other human being should believe a lie."

Let's hope the world doesn't perish.

I know we're tempted, but...

Don't believe what is not true.

of deceiving someone in me

Something from E. M. Cioran, (1911-1995) 

     2

If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could

avoid canonization.

                                        #

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from

which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither

to accept nor to reject.

                                        #

It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating

by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the

jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything

their incompatibility and their intolerance.

                                        #

It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should

avoid simulacra and even “realities;” you should take up a position external

to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live,

according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a “solitary elephant.”I forgive X everything because of his obsolete smile.

                                        

                                        #

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

Only what you hide is profound, is true. Whence the power of base feelings.

                                        #

Ama nesari [sic], says the Imitation of Christ. Love to be unknown. We are

happy with ourselves and with the world only when we conform to this

precept.

                                        #

The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its

subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the

manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the

infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.

                                        #

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of

belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity …

                                        #

Negation never proceeds from reasoning but from something much more

obscure and old. Arguments come afterward, to justify and sustain it. Every

no rises out of the blood.

                                        #

 With the help of the erosion of memory, to recall the first initiatives of

matter and the risk of life which followed from them …Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

                                        #

There are nights that the most ingenious torturers could not have invented.

We emerge from them in pieces, stupid, dazed, with neither memories nor

anticipations, and without even knowing who we are. And it is then that the

day seems useless, light pernicious, even more oppressive than the darkness.

(--from The Trouble With Being Born, by E. M. Cioran, 1973, trans 1976) 

"[F]rom something much more obscure and old. ... Every no rises out of the blood."

The complications we encounter in interactions with difficult persons, ourselves or others, introduce wariness and remembrance of past traumas.

So it goes. 

facing lies

 At  after-party

Someone said

Nice speech

     I was lying

     He said

That doesn’t matter

Truth doesn’t matter

Only you matter

     I am lying

     He said

That’s ok

We only care about

Power, not truth

     These fools

     Believe my lies

That’s what makes

You great, makes

US great, your lies

     I guess I am great

     Look at my face

the few sheep pastured there go “baaa, baaa"

                             (--from poem “Cape Breton” by Elizabeth Bishop)

 i'd rather be

doing what

I am

doing

reading introduction

to Words In Air: The

Complete Correspondence 

Between Elizabeth Bishop

and Robert Lowell -- an

intelligent and creative

engagement, rather than

listen to the blathers and

blithers of that fellow who

sometimes sleeps in White

House with white nationalist

dreams and perfect 

accomplishments -- may we 

not wander in to skunk hours

and armadillo meanderings full

of self inflation and flatulence

the suspiration, the uninterrupted news

Perhaps I am dead.

I'm no angel unsure whence I move among the living or the dead.

It seems strange to see so much injustice while flittering off to nap through night or day as the gyroscope of slumber and falling into it after arising out of it teeters on edge of room where my tutors, two cats and dog, practice flawlessly their temperaments of nod and doze, turn and absent their waking duties.

Although I suspect I'll know I'm actually dead when, with mouth open no sound emerges, or when fingers move along spectral keyboard no letters appear anywhere. Those clues might instruct me of my incommunicative status and untransmittable intuitions out beyond the desire to do so.

Voices, voices. Hear, O my heart, as only

saints have heard; heard till the giant-call

lifted them off the ground; yet they went impossibly

on with their kneeling, in undistracted attention:

so inherently hearers. Not that you could endure

the voice of God—far from it. But hark to the suspiration,

the uninterrupted news that grows out of silence.

Rustling towards you now from those youthfully-dead.

Whenever you entered a church in Rome or in Naples

were you not always being quietly addressed by their fate?

Or else an inscription sublimely imposed itself on you,

as, lately, the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.

What they require of me? I must gently remove the appearance

of suffered injustice, that hinders

a little, at times, their purely-proceeding spirits.

True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,

to use no longer customs scarcely acquired,

not to interpret roses, and other things

that promise so much, in terms of human future;

to be no longer all that one used to be

in endlessly anxious hands, and to lay aside

even one’s proper name like a broken toy.

Strange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange,

to see all that was once relation so loosely fluttering

hither and thither in space. And it’s hard, being dead,

and full of retrieving before one begins to espy

a trace of eternity.—Yes, but all of the living

make the mistake of drawing to sharp distinctions.

Angels, (they say) are often unable to tell

whether they move among the living or the dead. the eternal

torrent whirls all the ages through either realm

for ever, and sounds above their voices in both.

--from The First Elegy, in The Duino Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke, (1912-1923), (translated from German by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender)

We become a people of whispers and susurrent sibilance hissing our unhappiness with the dominant political culture stomping roughshod over decency, human feeling, and nascent longing for justice. 

Bullies bellow and belch out their disdain for weak nobodies with little wealth, hispanic accents, browned skin, and little access to competing power. These arrogant politicos simply do not care for the citizens and longing-to-be-citizens living outside their gates of power and influence.

Of course I am dead.

If I were alive I'd do something with meaning and substance to turn the indifference and disdain into caring and helpful assistance. But I seem to be floating in some anachronistic simulation of indecipherable spiritual realm where prayer, meditation, contemplation and intellectual life effectively could influence the bare material, mechanistic, digital, and (these days) mostly mendacious realms of pernicious power greed.

Rilke says it:

Strange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange,

to see all that was once relation so loosely fluttering

hither and thither in space.  (op cit)

At least it seemed to me, perhaps in my fugue incomprehension, "that all was once relation," that there was some sort of mystical body that enigmatically held all of conscious and pre-conscious life together in an indecipherable trinitarian unity -- the flowing life of what we casually called "God" coursing through everything, no matter how confusing and distracting the behavior of so many could be.

Bob Dylan's line applies: 

"But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." (--from "My Back Pages", 1964)

 Joan Baez's words apply even more: 

Now you're telling me 

You're not nostalgic 

Then give me another word for it 

You who are so good with words 

And at keeping things vague 

'Cause I need some of that vagueness now 

It's all come back too clearly 

Yes, I loved you dearly 

And if you're offering me diamonds and rust 

I've already paid

(-- final verse, "Diamonds and Rust" 1975, by Joan Baez) 

 When I open my eyes, I look around and am uncertain what temporal space I occupy. I can recall the younger man rapt in the attraction of participating with the whole gathering of community intent on manifesting an Ekklesia: 

ekklesia: (or ecclesia) is a Greek term, translated as "church," referring to an assembly or congregation of people "called out" for a specific purpose. Rooted in ek ("out of") and kaleo ("to call"), it describes a gathered, purposeful community rather than a physical building. Biblically, it signifies people called by God to be his body.  

(--Ekklesia, AI search) 

 

I also look around and can recall the diminishing of that rapt attention with the energy of this body/mind going off into the foggy erasure of all physical and temporal (shall we say) reality. (I grow old, I grow old,

Thoughts and cuffs of pants roll in different directions.)

Time, some say, goes by. 

I'm not sure of that. 

I'll take a bit of a think before I let you know what I actually think.

dijeron que siguieron al amante

 He went to cabin

To meet his lover

The Mexican drug-

lord, stepped into

Death, this is how

Much we know of love

go to bed

 When tired

Stay up later

I know

It makes no sense

Two AM

Too tired

vedere attraverso le cose, vedere le cose attraverso

 buddha sits and watches

Jesus hangs and watches

what they see, I’m sure, 

disappoints

but they watch all the same

buddha asks Jesus if he sees

what he sees --“yes”

buddha gets up from cushion

Jesus comes down from cross

un abbraccio, 

they are men of honor

they will turn what they see into

something filled with joy and 

justice  -- they know how to do 

that -- they feel reality from within,

and this feeling -- a quiet delight

changing the exterior chaos into

inner peace -- the knowledge of

something worth watching for 

worth seeing through

in mind, a monastery

this winter, snow

over and over, everyday

maine, as it was

can i offer you another fig

 In Assisi, nytimes writes, they are displaying the bones of Francis.

Ok. Something to do.

My response:

We named our hermitage after Francis and a Japanese zen master contemporary of his. Francis was an intense mirror of Christ.  

 

Still, I can imagine Dogen Zenji looking across time at the relics of Il Poverello and saying “Drop the bones, the mind and body, and enjoy a fig and mineral water with the poor surrounding you!” 

 

Ciao Francisco, sei bellissimo!