4:15am

 There they are

Dawn birds

Their song

Then

Silence

follow your prayer

 Do you pray?

        I pray all the time.

How so?

     I breathe.

Is breath prayer?

     Without ceasing

moverse a través de la creación

 as everything

disappears

what does

it mean

to move

through you

one more thing

 temporary 

loss of hearing --

sound of hardly 

anything

the body moves

(though awkwardly)

toward 

nothing at all

movement through

 it occurs

dropping mind

and body

there is no

experience, only

expression

aphasia

 I have gone loopy

A strange silence adheres

Ask me nothing

I’ll tell you no, (lies)

cat buddha hobo askance bamboo, παιδαγωγία*

 Green leaves

Still in sunlight

Wednesday morning 

Between two mountains

Nothing to  remember

nothing to forget

with no body

and no mind

everything is known

absent pedagogy*

if you dream

 Sleep

Alone

Satisfies

curriculum vitae

 am I buddhist?

    no, i practice meditative compassion

am I catholic?

    no, i practice contemplative universality

am I agnostic?

    no, i practice shunyata-kenosis not-knowing

am I atheist?

    no, i practice looking through God

yes?

    no! 

of course 

    not; mu

wherein to dwell

We look at one of the leaders (so-called) of the free world (so-called) and we think, “He don’t speak so good!”

There has been a deterioration of the language into mocking insults, grandiose proclamations of superiority, and simplistic non-verifiable statements of dubious falsity pattered absurdly pretending to be sensible facts accepted by everybody. It has become a drivel of non-sequiturs delivered with an idiotic smile and ‘what me worry’ inflection.

This country becomes a day school of toddlers spitting gibberish in sandpits with no adult supervision.  

Sociolinguistics

7 Language, Culture, and Ideology 

 

Another important strand of sociolinguistic research which can be traced to the influence of American anthropological linguists is the quest for a solution to the conundrum of the relationship between language, culture, and thought. Edward Sapir and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf developed the hypothesis that language influences thought rather than the reverse. The strong form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis claims that people from different cultures think differently because of differences in their languages. So, native speakers of Hopi perceive reality differently from native speakers of English because they use different languages, Whorf claimed. Few sociolinguists would accept such a strong claim, but most accept the weaker claim of linguistic relativity, that language influences perceptions, thought, and, at least potentially, behavior. 

 

More recently, sociolinguists such as Fairclough (1995) and applied linguists such as Pennycook (1994) have in quite different ways developed this approach. Fairclough's research uses a CDA approach to identify and expose the ways in which ideology and power are constantly instantiated and enacted in the familiar discourse of the media and of everyday interactions. Others have examined such issues as the continuing and increasingly subtle ways in which sexism, in the form of the derogation of women, or racist suppression or misrepresentation of ethnic minorities, are sustained through the ways language is used in the media or in public documents. Pennycook's controversial research also emphasizes critical awareness; he argues that the imperialist expansion of the English language has been at the cost of local languages in many countries. Not surprisingly, his views have been contested by those who regard the development of a wide variety of Englishes around the world as evidence that English no longer belongs to the English—nor even to the Americans.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/sapir-whorf-hypothesis 

A man from the Netherlands used to ask the young lad with whom I share familiar lineage from Massachusetts what foreign languages he was studying in school. Every time asked was every time answered -- ‘none.’ But now, decades later, that answer seems distracting. The only language and foreign language he was studying was English. The dialects, the regional distinctions, the relative simplicity or sophistication of intended meaning, nuance, emphases.

As I review my university teaching, I slowly learned that cursive was becoming extinct. For years some students receiving my comments on their college papers that I wrote in cursive did not let me know of their inability to glean my finely-turned reflections on their work. My flaw was not asking them to read my responses aloud until one day I did and learned of the one-sided non-dialogue we were having.

Today I read this:

Yes, cursive is still taught in schools, and its presence in the classroom has made a major comeback. More than half of U.S. states have passed laws requiring cursive instruction, with states like California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Kentucky bringing it back to ensure students can read historical documents and sign their names. 

While it faded from many curriculums in the early 2010s when Common Core standards prioritized keyboarding, state-level mandates have steadily reversed that trend. 

• Mandated States: Over 27 states (such as California, Florida, Virginia, and Texas) require cursive instruction, typically introduced in 2nd or 3rd grade. 
• Local Control: In other states (such as Maine and Montana), the decision to teach cursive is left up to individual school districts.
• The "Why": Educators and researchers cite its benefits for fine motor skills, brain development, and the necessity of learning a fluid signature for official legal documents. 
• 
  

Because rules vary by region, you can check your specific local requirements by consulting the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation or your local state department of education website. search 

 

It seems the current leader of the country geographically below Canada and above Mexico learned only how to speak grandiose hyperbole and write me-me-me, numbers-numbers-numbers, drivel-drivel-drivel.

Thus the thought proceeding from these fitbits of language that track the depth and repetitive usefulness of meaningful communication has been put on hold for the time being. We are in a desert of communicative thirst crawling through mirages of false nourishment arriving at the feet of some deranged ozymandias 

whose brain has turned to sand and whose delirium slips awkwardly through the fingers of our culture.

Our language is our thought in the same way, as Amos Wilder said, “Our language is our fate.”

Or "It is no nation we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native tongue is our true fatherland.” (--from Emil Cioran, Romanian philosopher.)

Or “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”(— Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Or, (in deference to the Netherlander), “He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.”(— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

As for me, I am learning how to speak.

I need to learn how to listen to the sound of what is being said.

I am looking for a new country of inspiration, meaning, and understanding wherein to dwell.

A migrant with an expiring passport.

the birds

 They sing

At 4:13AM

For God

centering

 June sees

What has been

What will be

And says nothing

a stranger to such distress

We’re not looking for agreement. We’re looking for understanding. 

 The crisis today is not that of one country, one model, one regime; it is a crisis of humanity. A council should be opened whose concerns would no longer be interecclesial — dealing with priests, bishops, women’s ordination and so forth — but would center on far more essential problems. Three quarters of the world’s population live under inhuman conditions. Humanity is in such great distress and insecurity that its leaders believe they must keep 30 million men in arms! The church cannot be a stranger to such distress, to such institutionalized injustice. It cannot remain deaf to the cries of the people, especially of the humble and the poor. The council I propose would certainly not be exclusively Christian but ecumenical, in the sense that it would give a hearing to other cosmologies and religions. Its purpose would be to determine how the Spirit is inspiring humanity to live in peace, and to bear the joyous news of hope.

(--from, Eruption of truth: An interview with Raimon Panikkar: On inter- and intrareligious dialogue. 

He gave this interview to Henri Tincq, religion editor of the Parisian daily Le Monde. The interview has been translated by Joseph Cunneen, coeditor of Cross Currents.)

To say, “I am looking for God” does not mean I am looking for God as though God is somewhere outside. Rather it suggests “I am looking for God” as meaning I am looking on behalf of God, or, I am as God looks through the world. 

It is possible that there is no outside, that “outside” is illusory. Everything is within and through what is within.

經行 *

 If i were to become

Wholly human

Imitating Christ

Kind and compassionate

Would i have become

What God has become

Invisible and completely

Within everything 

As breath is within

without within without

A kinhin* slowly turning

Circles of understanding

Traveling through where you

Are to who you are encircling all

miss doris missive

 Understanding 

The student at Harvard suggested

A place between

seagulls, channel buoy, at sunrise

 Nos da esperanza

     (it gives us hope)

                        

always the sunrise

with someone seeing the light

may you float well there

                (for Suse, her chaplaincy graduation)

me, ow

 Cat in window

Looks past Buddha

At Dawn

And it

Dawns

On me

Nothing that

I do equals cat

Equals buddha

Only if i see 

What i see can i

Realize this

before bed

 Cut grass 

Fragrance 

As night cools

quiesence

As if on a Saturday afternoon at Rockport Harbor some raindrops. Two women on wharf take photos and point to this and that in their violet tops and sneakers.

All those buddhas 82 years ago landing on Normandy beaches. So many killed immediately.

A quiescence. 

Buddha is like empty space,
free of comings and goings.
He manifests in response to conditions
and yet does not abide anywhere.

Thus, the nature of the sage
in the world is that of utter quiescence
and empty non being.
He is free of clinging and contentiousness,
leads, yet never initiates;
responds but only when moved to do so by another.

She is like an echo
sounding in a deep valley
or an image reflecting
in a clear mirror.
Encountering a sage,
you do not know from where they come.
Following a sage,
you do not know where they might go.       --Chao lun (378-414) 

Sages who have come and gone. Their lives perfect. 

We think of them today.

Echoes in our hearts and minds.

whether your destiny is glory or disgrace

In prison this morning, after one of the men talked about Kashmir Shaivism, we read and conversed about these Jami poems:

Jami (1414 - 1492 ce)  (Nur al-Din 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Ahmad al-Jami) commonly called the last great classical poet of Persia, saint and mystic, composed numerous lyrics and idylls, as well as many works in prose.  His Salaman and Absal is an allegory of profane and sacred love.  Some of his other works include Haft Awrang, Tuhfat al-Ahrar, Layla wa -Majnun, Fatihat al-Shabab, Lawa'ih, al-Durrah al-Fakhirah.  

https://wahiduddin.net/sufi/sufi_poetry.htm

~~

Who is man? 

        The reflection of the Eternal Light.

What is the world? 

        A wave on the Everlasting Sea.

 

How could the reflection be cut off from the Light? 

 

How could the wave be separate from the Sea?

 

Know that this reflection and this wave are that very Light and Sea.

     -- Jami, Diwan, tr by W.C. Chittick

~~

     Hidden behind the veil of mystery, Beauty is eternally free from the slightest stain of imperfection.  From the atoms of the world, He created a multitude of mirrors; into each one of them He cast the image of His Face; to the awakened eye, anything that appears beautiful is only a reflection of that Face.

    Now that you have seen the reflection, hurry to its Source; in that primordial Light the reflection vanishes completely.  Do not linger far from that primal Source; when the reflection fades, you will be lost in darkness.  The reflection is as transient as the smile of a rose; if you want permanence, turn towards the Source; if you want fidelity, look to the Mine of faithfulness.  Why tear your soul apart over something here one moment and gone the next? 

      --Jami, translation by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut - 'Perfume of the Desert' 

~~

Whether your destiny is glory or disgrace,

Purify yourself of hatred and love of self.

Polish your mirror; and that sublime Beauty

From the regions of mystery

Will flame out in your heart

As it did for the saints and prophets.

Then, with your heart on fire with that Splendor, 

The secret of the Beloved will no longer be hidden. 

     -- Jami, translation by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut - 'Perfume of the Desert' 

It refreshes, these topics, these words. 

1968, 1963, 2026

 ticks

crawling everywhere

pants leg

forearm

back

of neck

this anniversary

of RFK shooting 

untrustworthy narratives

of his and JFK murders

corpus christi -- iterum incipe, iterum fini, o tu manifestans creatio!

breeze rustles green new growth

comes through window across my face

the only scripture I need is creation

the only liturgy the patterns of nature

if you say christ is dead is risen I say

his body his blood is earth is air is water

Iterum incipe, iterum fini, o tu manifestans creatio!

Begin again, end again, O Manifesting Creation!

benedite mihi, amici, quia defeci

 When I was a boy I learned about truth, fidelity, and courage. 

I have never really followed up that education by being truthful, faithful, or courageous. 

An ignominy hard to escape. 

A confession for which I will have to seek reconciliation, a sacrament of admission, contrition, and forgiveness.

Where will this happen?

How will this happen?

To whom do I address this abnegation?

I look around -- trees, sky, grasses, birds.

I bow my head.

Supplicating the ground, mountain, ocean, lake and pond.

Benedite mihi, amici, quia defeci. (Bless me, friends, because I have failed.)

ukraine’s moment of daily silence

Щоденне вшанування пам'яті загиблих в Україні

(daily commemoration of the dead in Ukraine)

https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000010925753/ukraines-daily-moment-of-silence.html?smid=url-share

stepping back

What is it that comes? What is it that goes?

Who is it that comes? Who is it that goes? 

When you look closely,
you see that people of the present
are none other than people of old,
and the functions of the present
are none other than the functions of the past;
even going through a thousand changes
and myriad transformations,
here it is just necessary
for you to recognize it
first hand before you can attain it.

--Foyan (1067-1120)

I pass myself on the road every day. While walking edge of roadbed , many cars speed past. They are going someplace. I’m not going anywhere. They know this; thus they do not hit me as they pass. 

I visit myself in prison. We speak of this and that -- old growth trees, dog training, E.M..Cioran, Peter Wohlleben.

I sell me coffee milk and muffins. I exit doors that pull open as I approach. I walk shopping-carte to corral.

I will settle something for you right now: the ultimate rule is to see your own mind clearly. An ancient said, "The mind does not know itself, the mind does not see itself." So how can you see it clearly? Mind does not see mind; to get it, you must not see it as mind.  

Do you want to understand? Just discern the things perceived; you cannot see the mind itself.  

All that is necessary is that there be no perceiver or perceived when you perceive [no separation of perceiver and perceived], no thinker or thought when you think [no separation of thinker and thought]. Buddhism is very easy. Just let go, then step back and look.  

(--from, Sermons by Chinese Zen Master Fo-yen Ching-yuan (1067-1120): (excerpts),  Thomas Cleary, "Instant Zen: Waking Up in the Present". North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 1994 )

These days I sit and look. In chapel/zendo yesterday, mouse-droppings and dust on floor. Lighted candles and burning incense by cross and buddha. Branches outside windows flower green. The seat I sit in is empty. Border-collie/St.Bernard mix (Ensō) on floor hears pickup drive in. He looks at me. 

His meditation is quietly fulsome.

It is June.

calling to mind today

 in chapel/zendo

remembering the dead

their names

sitting in silence

A single deer

Back by brook

testing the reality

It’s not hard to understand the Trinity or circuminsessional interpenetration. The trick is wanting to.

If we become curious as to who we are in relation to anything and everything else in the world, we might find our curiosity is circumincessionally interpenetrating. We are looking into what is looking into us.

[Keiji] Nishitani develops his own view of the interpenetration of all things in the Section VI of the “Standpoint of Sunyata,” as an elaboration on his characterisation of the mode of being of the “middle.” He writes: “That beings one and all are gathered into one, while each one remains absolutely unique in its ‘being', points to a relationship in which all things are master and servant to one another. We may call this relationship, which is only possible on the field of sunyata, ‘circuminsessional’” (RN 148).

Nishitani explains: “To say that a certain thing is situated in a position of servant to every other thing means that it lies at the ground of all other things, that it is a constitutive element in the being of every other thing, making it be what it is and thus to be situated in a position of autonomy as master of itself. It assumes a position at the home-ground of every other thing as that of a retainer upholding his lord” (RN 148).

Nishitani further defines “circuminsessional interpenetration” in the following terms: “All things that are in the world are linked together, one way or the other. Not a single thing comes into being without some relationship to every other thing … On [an] … essential level, a system of circuminsession has to be seen here … In this system each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself … To say that a thing is not itself means that, while continuing to be itself, it is in the home-ground of everything else. Figuratively speaking, its roots reach across into the ground of all other things and help to hold them up and keep them standing. It serves as a constitutive element of their being so that they can be what they are, and thus provides an ingredient of their being. That a thing is itself means that all other things, while continuing to be themselves, are in the home-ground of that thing; that precisely when a thing is on its own home-ground everything else is there too; that the roots of every other thing spread across into its home-ground” (RN 149).      https://buddhism-thewayofemptiness.blog.nomagic.uk/circuminsessional-interpenetration/

I like Keiji Nishitani, Kitarō Nishida, and Hajime Tanabe. I mentored a university independent study (UMA) with a student at MSP a while back. Now a student at UMA has submitted her 38 page final project from a course in East Asian Philosophy begun in 2012 and interrupted by a difficult illness. 

We have looked at the stance that "each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself …”. 

We have pondered what it suggests to be “through, with, and in” unity as all moving through one and the other distinctly and uniquely.

These days, it seems, my teaching days are over. It’s hard to imagine undertaking the tasks of teaching again. I prefer sitting in this chair, going to two prisons each week for open-topic conversations, and three evening zoom conversation/practices a week. Otherwise, I withdraw into a mild reclusively that takes naps, sips coffee-milk, makes seltzer, and unwraps small cinnamon coffee cakes pretending to be what some call a meal.

I am, nonetheless, not outside anything. The within-ness of interpenetrating presence awareness situates residence “in, with, and through” that which is, was, and will be.

Each time the intuition of death passes through my body/mind I quietly say my goodbyes into a plethora of useless shrugs, closing eyes, napping, and (so far, at least) waking up to surroundings of unwashed dishes and grass needing mowing. 

And I hear again:

That a thing is itself means that all other things, while continuing to be themselves, are in the home-ground of that thing; that precisely when a thing is on its own home-ground everything else is there too; that the roots of every other thing spread across into its home-ground.

自体

Jitai

Itself 

It is enough to reflect on some lines of the poet:

She says, “I am content when wakened birds,

Before they fly, test the reality

Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;

But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields

Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”

(--from poem “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens)

how long and how far does prayer extend

 Saicho, twelve hundred years ago,  made a request:

Oh Buddhas

Of unexcelled complete enlightenment,

Bestow your invisible aid

Upon this hut I open

On the mountain top.

--Saicho (767-822)

And, as well, for those of us at bottom of mountain these years later.

The invisibility of enlightenment!

feeling it

 any day now

any hour now

perhaps 

in a minute

I shall be

released

trouble? what trouble? (jeremiah johnson)

 In prison this morning we look at E.M.Cioran (1911-1995):

“Meditate but one hour upon the selfs nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man.” said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sea to a Western visitor.

Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over the world’s unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything.

…

Instead of clinging to the fact of being born, as good sense bids, I take the risk, I turn back, I retrogress increasingly toward some unknown beginning, I move from origin to origin. Some day, perhaps, I shall manage to reach origin itself, in order to rest there, or be wrecked.

 …

X insults me. I am about to hit him. Thinking it over, I refrain.

Who am I? which is my real self: the self of the retort or that of the refraining? My first reaction is always energetic; the second one, flabby.

What is known as “wisdom” is ultimately only a perpetual “thinking it over,” i.e., non-action as first impulse.

…

If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable of all.

…

Amid anxiety and distress, sudden calm at the thought of the foetus one has been.

…

At this precise moment, no reproach proceeding from men or gods can affect me: I have as good a conscience as if I had never existed.

…

It is a mistake to believe in a direct relation between suffering reverses and being dead set against birth. Such opposition has deeper, more distant roots, and would occur even if one had only the shadow of a grievance against existence. In fact it is never more virulent than in cases of extreme good fortune.

…

Thracians and Bogomils—I cannot forget that I have haunted the same whereabouts as they, nor that the former wept over the newborn and the latter, in order to justify God, held Satan responsible for the infamy of Creation.

…

During the long nights in the caves, how many Hamlets must have

murmured their endless monologues—for it is likely that the apogee of metaphysical torment is to be located well before that universal insipidity which followed the advent of Philosophy.

…

The obsession with birth proceeds from an exacerbation of memory, from an omnipresence of the past, as well as from a craving for the impasse, for the first impasse. —No openness, hence no joy from the past but solely from the present, and from a future emancipated from time.

…

For years, in fact for life, to have meditated only on your last moments, only to discover, when at last you approach them, that it was of no use, that the thought of death helps in everything save in dying!

…

It is our discomforts which provoke, which create consciousness; their task accomplished, they weaken and disappear one after the other.

Consciousness however remains and survives them, without recalling what it owes to them, without even ever having known. Hence it continually proclaims its autonomy, its sovereignty, even when it loathes itself and would do away with itself.

…

According to the Rule of Saint Benedict, if a monk became proud of or merely satisfied with the task he was performing, he was to forsake it then and there.

One danger not dreaded by the man who has lived in the thirst for unsatisfaction, in an orgy of remorse and disgust.

…

If it is true that God dislikes taking sides, I should feel no awkwardness in His presence, so pleased would I be to imitate Him, to be like Him, in everything, “without opinion.”

…

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.

I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of

ataraxy.

Nietzsche’s great luck—to have ended as he did: in euphoria!

…

Endlessly to refer to a world where nothing yet stooped to occurrence, where you anticipated consciousness without desiring it, where, wallowing in the virtual, you rejoiced in the null plenitude of a self anterior to selfhood….

Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!

…

(—from The Trouble with Being Born, by E.M.Cioran, 1973)