ways to climb the mountain

On days when I don’t feel so good, reminders come of, let’s say, difficult times running through body and mind that point out what wasn’t right.

The body remembers and the mind forgets what needs to be remembered and forgotten. 

 Many indeed are

The ways to climb

The mountain,

But it is the same moon

That we see over the peak.

        

          --Ikkyu (1394-1481)

I once taught a Philosophy of Work course with another guy in an upstart small boatbuilding college located on a quiet harbor in Maine. Today is the anniversary of that guy’s death in 2020. We’d become estranged for about ten years. Then we met by chance in a Belfast bakery, standing in the middle of the busy swirl, talking for some twenty minutes. He’d had serious heart sickness, nearly died twice, but was of good cheer among the good smells of passing coffee.

There are still things of his he stored in the Southwest loft of the barn. 

Perhaps illness and dissatisfaction are the body’s way of processing what has not gone well over years of passing through this indecipherable life.

My body is doing some serious recounting these days. The “self” within the body feels weary and irresolute.

And in the larger body -- Mitch McConnell, they say, is brain dead in Kentucky. Graham Platner, Senate candidate in Maine, faces another sexual abuse accusation. Donald Trump continues as a corrupt and ignorant version of occupant of highest office in the land. Maga-republicans are odd and curious non-leadership politicians who have carjacked the country and refuse to drive anywhere.

My body tells me all this.

It wants to go back to bed.

Ikkyu is right. 

We’re all on this mountain,

We see the moon.

We stumble over roots and branches in our dizziness, we fall, and sometimes don’t want to get up, our faces in the ground.

I have several sumie works from my friend’s hand hanging in the house.

I liked him. He was ok!

The body is happy to note his scrolls.

all I need to know

 Water

Fire

 Earth

Air

The Classical Elements

Rooted in ancient Greek philosophy by thinkers like Empedocles and Aristotle, this model was used for centuries to describe the physical universe: [1]

• Earth: Represents solidity, stability, and the foundation of matter.
• Water: Symbolizes fluidity, emotion, and adaptability.
• Air: Represents breath, movement, intellect, and communication.
• Fire: Associated with energy, light, passion, and transformation. [1, 2]( AI)

tan enloquecedor

 It's maddening 

Sexual predation

so rampant

Maddening

So many

suffer

so maddening

so maddening

so maddening

pourquoi pas

 Once I wanted

To be

A monk

Now

I can’t

Remember why

Not

Wanting

Anything else

Than what I am

A monk

With no why

no need for a search party

 Truth is an honorable destination

I think the leadership

In Washington is lost

what being alive is like

Reading poet Joanne Kyger book of poems, As Ever. 

Could not find online poem in book, "12.29 & 30 (Pan as the Son of Penelope)" by Joanne Kyger, and too long to type. But came across this:

 Night Palace 

 

"The best thing about the past

                                                is that it's over" 

                                 when you die.

                you wake up

 from the dream

                                                   that's your life.

 

Then you grow up

                         and get to be post human

                      in a past      that keeps happening 

                 ahead of you

(--Poem by Joanne Kyger, OCTOBER 2003

Learned she was married to Gary Snyder from 1960-65 and wrote alongside the Beats (Ginsburg, Creeley, Kerouac, Whelan).

This from a literary magazine:

In person, Kyger offers wide-ranging and inspired conversation. Through years of practice of poetry and Zen, as well as attending the manners and courtesies of village life in Bolinas, she has managed to compress in pragmatic fashion questions or statements that clear the air in an instant. “I don’t care what someone ‘knows’ or ‘feels,’” she said to me once in conversation about poetry, “I want to know what’s happening.” I repeat this because it impressed me deeply, and because it reveals much that is true of the new narrative forms that came out of the 1960s and ‘70s in and around Bolinas. Particularly, the statement draws attention to Kyger’s own careful, perceptive nature, and her uses of poetry. She exemplifies a faith in the life-long process of self-relation, trusting in the poem and its instantaneous recognition in the projective field articulated by Charles Olson. Unlike Olson, however, she focuses on events and happenings, moving herself out of the way as a kind of recording instrument. Philip Whalen, from whom she learned much too, created a similar ethos of detachment in his work. His finished poems, however, are more like seamless, well-crafted collages from notebooks. They are full of humor and detached observations of diverse physical and creative environments inter-textually stitched to delight and tease readers with exemplary wisdom and bardic aplomb. Kyger’s work by contrast is personally intimate, faithful to specific moments in time and attendant to the many spirits or moods of landscape. The real difference, perhaps, is the frame of attention, and the spirits guiding it. Whalen’s genius for quotation and for extending the context of the poem contrasts starkly with Kyger’s bright and socially centered attention to the immediate context of composition, as it is known through her words rather than through the quotes of others.

^

Her attention to place makes her an intimate observer of every day life in her beloved Bolinas. Her engagement with organic life processes is mirrored by the visual construction of her poems on the page, where lines often are set out into the space of the page rather than stacked along the left-hand margin. In this sense visually she is close to Pound and Williams, using the page as a kind of painting or glyph for the ease and pleasure of the eye. “I saw the page as some kind of tapestry and voice glyph,” she said in a 1997 interview,[12] echoing concerns for the poem that have been with her from her first book, The Tapestry and the Web. “When you move your line to the right, the lesser the impact of the line, the voice. The whole movement and rhythm on the page give us instruction as to voice and phrasing and import of what’s going on.” These concerns for her own creative environments reveal an openness to phenomena, an openness that withholds judgment in order to experience the moment through several perspectives. She is adamant too in stressing that anything can become part of a person’s poetic practice. “Your dreams are important,” she said, “your humorous life is important, your cooking life is important, your friendships, the dialogues you assume, the news that comes from within, the news that comes from out there. There’s such a wide variety of ‘things’ that go on. It’s important not to get stuck on any one of these as being the ‘I’ that writes. Being able to report, as it were, from all these areas of life and see that they’re equally ‘valid’ and ‘important.’ Nothing is more or less important than anything else. An egalitarian sense of what it’s like to be a human. What being alive is like.

—from  Joanne Kyger and the Narrative of Every Day, by Dale Smith, Jacket Magazine, October 2007

 http://jacketmagazine.com/34/kyger-by-smith.shtml

that's that

Are we done here?

Are the candles blown out?

Can I go to bed now?

variability, volatility, vacillation, fitfulness, irregularity, tendency to blow hot and cold

 Today, for we medievalists, Elizabeth of Portugal. 

(Elisabet in Catalan, Isabel in Aragonese, Portuguese and Spanish; 4 January 1271 – 4 July 1336), also known as Elizabeth of Aragon, was Queen of Portugal from 1282 to 1325 as the wife of King Denis. She is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, under the name Saint Elizabeth of Portugal or Queen Saint Elizabeth (Rainha Santa Isabel in Portuguese).

After Denis' death in 1325, Elizabeth retired to the monastery of the Poor Clare nuns, now known as the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Velha (which she had founded in 1314) in Coimbra. She joined the Third Order of St. Francis, devoting the rest of her life to the poor and sick in obscurity.^[8][4] During the great famine in 1293, she donated flour from her cellars to the starving in Coimbra. She was also known for being modest in her dress and humble in conversation, for providing lodging for pilgrims, distributing small gifts, paying the dowries of poor girls, and educating the children of poor nobles. She was a benefactor of various hospitals (Coimbra, Santarém and Leiria) and of religious projects (such as the Trinity Convent in Lisbon, chapels in Leiria and Óbidos, and the cloister in Alcobaça).^[10]

She was called to act once more as a peacemaker in 1336, when Afonso IV marched his troops against King Alfonso XI of Castile, his nephew, to whom he had married his daughter Maria, and who had neglected and ill-treated her. In spite of age and weakness, the Queen-dowager insisted on hurrying to Estremoz, where the two kings' armies were drawn up. She again stopped the fighting and caused terms of peace to be arranged. But the exertion brought on her final illness.^[4] As soon as her mission was completed, she took to her bed with a fever from which she died on 4 July, in the castle of Estremoz. She earned the title of Peacemaker on account of her efficacy in solving disputes.^[

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_of_Portugal#:~:text=During%20the%20great%20famine%20in,the%20children%20of%20poor%

Ah, the 13th and 14th centuries!

America was indigenous. There were no 4th of July parades. No Bitcoin. No Supreme Court or Imperial Presidency. No reflecting pool between monuments of important centuries ago presidents. No rulings that corporations were people. 

Elizabeth tried to feed people. She fraternized with Franciscans. She advocated cease-battles. She asked "Can't we all just get along?"

I spend my Independence Day in the 13th century with Francis, Dominic, Elizabeth, and Dōgen.

Still, I'll finish the hotdog and beans I started last night. 

I'll take some time to sit still and empty this cacophonous brain. 

I'll bow to statue of Buddha, Thich Nhat Hanh, Mother and child, odd fellow hanging on cross for whom I have the most profound curiosity, Kuan Yin seated on sliver moon inscribed with Heart Sutra, light incense, listen to Benedictines chanting divine office, finger mala, say my beads, walk kin hin, and try not to fall down again as I did earlier stepping up to deck by bird feeder crock catching on top step while looking at Ensō dug in under yew.

It's not easy for us to remember there were different times with different histories before our times.

Less mechanical. Fewer gigabytes of storage, less ram, no spam or fund-raising emails.

I have almost lost my mind. In both a secular sense and spiritual sense it is not what I 

thought it was. 

Nor is our culture, society, corporate or religious structure what once it was. We pretend once we were great, that we should make ourselves great again. The gaslighting is enormous and infuriating. Devious men and women argue against the best interests of the many and the many shout 'sh*t yeah' and tuck themselves in behind the charlatans.

An elder used the word Wankelmut the other day -- fickleness. 

Some German synonyms:  Variabilität, Veränderlichkeit, Flüchtigkeit, Wandlungsfähigkeit, Unstetigkeit, Unbeständigkeit, Flatterhaftigkeit, Launenhaftigkeit, Wandelbarkeit, Sprunghaftigkeit, Lebhaftigkeit

And English definitions of fickleness

Noun:1

changeability, especially as regards one's loyalties or affections.

“the fickleness of youth”

Synonyms:

capriciousness, changeability, variability, volatility, vacillation, fitfulness, irregularity, tendency to blow hot and cold, disloyalty, undependability, inconstancy, instability, unsteadiness, infidelity, unfaithfulness, faithlessness, irresolution, flightiness, giddinesss, kittishness, impulsiveness, unpredictability, unpredictableness, randomness, technical: lability, literary: mutability.

 It's the ancient tension identified by Parmenides and Heraclitus -- Being: the changeless; Becoming: change. One or the other, they argued.

Up through Plato (/ˈpleɪtoʊ/ PLAY-toh; Ancient Greek: Πλάτων , Plátōn; born c. 428–423 BC, died 348/347 BC); Aristotle^[A] (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, romanized: Aristotélēs;^[B] 384–322 BC); Augustine of Hippo (/ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/ aw-GUST-in, US also /ˈɔːɡəstiːn/ AW-gə-steen;^[22] Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430)^[23] ; Thomas Aquinas (/əˈkwaɪnəs/ ^ⓘ ə-KWY-nəs; Italian: Tommaso d'Aquino, lit. 'Thomas of Aquino'; c. 1225 – 7 March 1274); to Martin Heidegger^[a] (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976);  Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (/ˈvɪtɡənʃtaɪn, -staɪn/ VIT-gən-s(h)tyne;^[5] Austrian German: [ˈluːdvɪç ˈjoːsɛf ˈjoːhan ˈvɪtɡn̩ʃtaɪn]; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951); Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994); Thomas Samuel Kuhn (/kuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996); Alfred North Whitehead (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947); Bernardo Kastrup (born 21 October 1974); among many others -- who've thought about the being/becoming tension.  (Cf. Wikipedia)

And that does not include the ancient and modern thinking out of China, Japan, India, etc.

Here's what I think.

Literally, "here."

Think about what is here. Feel what is here. Let what is here speak to and listen to you. Converse what is here.

Sit with this for a while. Sit with that.

When you stand up, try not to fall. Bruises and scrapes will follow if you fall.

ne choisissez pas entre les deux ; fiez-vous à ce qui est visible.

 Give me liberty or give me death. (Orator)

                I will give you both. (Creator)

(Mulling) 

I’ll have a double chocolate donut instead.

midafternoon, midcoast

 dog to go to pond

his breathing is labored

time for cooling

glad he has good mistress

can you see

 Maybe a hotdog 

some baked beans

Ginger ale

Yogurt and rhubarb kompot

Nothing special

A Saturday 

Daddy has been

Unfaithful

He embarrasses

The family

And yet and yet

Sunday will dawn

air

 Dog breathes hard 

this hot night

I turn fan on for him

friends

 Enjoyed listening to Christopher Hitchens.

Enjoyed listening to Thich Nhat Hanh.

Enjoyed listening to Thomas Keating.

Call me old fashioned

Intelligence and articulateness

Are pleasing companions

"wakámigenokan ôlósamek"

 I suppose joy is the unquestioning appreciation of life and the world as it is.

To give up opinions and preferences is probably the clearest and safest way to live.

Perhaps to see the good or the possibility of good in everything.

To allow the possibility that, at core, everything is love.

I will walk that circle, I will try, as my Native friend says, to walk in peace. ("Wlakámigenokan ôlósamek)

Saying "walk in peace" in the Western Abenaki language (spoken by the Abenaki people of the Northeast) combines specific verbs and adverbs to express the idea of living in harmony. In this language, peace is more than the absence of violence; it is an active state of tranquility and "making good kin" with others and the land. [1, 2, 3] 

Here is how you say it:

"Wlakámigenokan ôlósamek" 

 

Breakdown of the phrase:

Wlakámigenoka: To make peace.

Ôlósamek: To walk or to continue along. [1, 2] 

 

(AI overview) 

stultitia humana nihil est quod rideatur*

 I’ve not grown tired 

looking at mountain across road

I’ve never found Jesus or God

If you remember my name

Try not to pronounce it

I’ve gone incognito

I do not stand on capital steps

Calling for impeachment

Only an Air Force hero does that

I am an imposter

Disguised and not distinguished 

Someone without much courage

I would never say “Impeach the guy!”

Never call for him to go to prison —

Never wish him ill-health

I am a civilised imposter

I recognize an authentic

Historical anomaly, a one-off

Someone who was in our time

So damaged he takes down the country

 By sheer disingenuous dangerous ignorance

And we

Got to get to

See it happen

* Human stupidity

 is nothing 

to laugh at.

not a crowd

 One two

One two

Three?

No, 

One

Two

joyeuse fête du Canada

My favorite neighbor --

Something about Canada

Evokes joy

this Canada Day

vimalakīrti speaks of the fundamental existential malaise of all sentient beings

Scholars generally agree the Vimalakirtinirdesa Sutra text was composed between the 1st century BCE and the early 3rd century CE.

 

 If you want to go to the pure land,

Then purify your mind. 

When your mind is pure,

Then whatever you see will be pure

And wherever you go

You will find the Buddha realm.

-- from Vimalakirtinirdesa Sutra

 --About Chapter 4

The bodhisattva Mañjuśrī (conventionally understood as the embodiment of supreme wisdom) is persuaded by the Buddha to visit Vimalakīrti, albeit with some difficulty. Vimalakīrti miraculously transforms his apparently narrow and humble abode into a vast cosmic palace, thus creating enough space for the throng Mañjuśrī has brought with him. Vimalakīrti explains his illness in spiritual terms, equating it with the fundamental existential malaise of all sentient beings. According to this discourse, the true cure for all ills is also spiritual, and involves the achievement of states of non-self and non-dualism.  wikipedia, Vimalakirti Sutra

In the VIMALAKIRTI NIRDESA SUTRA, Translated by Robert A. F. Thurman, this fragment from chapter 4:

Then, the Buddha said to the bodhisattva Maitreya, "Maitreya, go to the Licchavi Vimalakirti to inquire about his illness."  

 

"'Therefore, Maitreya, do not fool and delude these deities! No one abides in, or regresses from, enlightenment. Maitreya, you should introduce these deities to the repudiation of all discriminative constructions concerning enlightenment. 

 

"'Enlightenment is perfectly realized neither by the body nor by the mind. Enlightenment is the eradication of all marks. Enlightenment is free of presumptions concerning all objects. Enlightenment is free of the functioning of all intentional thoughts. Enlightenment is the annihilation of all convictions. Enlightenment is free from all discriminative constructions. 

 

Enlightenment is free from all vacillation, mentation, and agitation. Enlightenment is not involved in any commitments. Enlightenment is the arrival at detachment, through freedom from all habitual attitudes. The ground of enlightenment is the ultimate realm. Enlightenment is realization of reality. Enlightenment abides at the limit of reality. 

 

Enlightenment is without duality, since therein are no minds and no things. Enlightenment is equality, since it is equal to infinite space. 

 

"'Enlightenment is unconstructed, because it is neither born nor destroyed, neither abides nor undergoes any transformation. Enlightenment is the complete knowledge of the thoughts, deeds, and inclinations of all living beings. Enlightenment is not a door for the six media of sense. 

 

Enlightenment is unadulterated, since it is free of the passions of the instinctually driven succession of lives. 

 

Enlightenment is neither somewhere nor nowhere, abiding in no location or dimension. 

 

Enlightenment, not being contained in anything, does not stand in reality. Enlightenment is merely a name and even that name is unmoving. Enlightenment, free of abstention and undertaking, is energyless. There is no agitation in enlightenment, as it is utterly pure by nature. Enlightenment is radiance, pure in essence. Enlightenment is without subjectivity and completely without object. 

 

Enlightenment, which penetrates the equality of all things, is undifferentiated. Enlightenment, which is not shown by any example, is incomparable. Enlightenment is subtle, since it is extremely difficult to realize. Enlightenment is all-pervasive, as it has the nature of infinite space. 

 

Enlightenment cannot be realized, either physically or mentally. Why? The body is like grass, trees, walls, paths, and hallucinations. And the mind is immaterial, invisible, baseless, and unconscious.' 

 

"Lord, when Vimalakirti had discoursed thus, two hundred of the deities in that assembly attained the tolerance of birthlessness. As for me, Lord, I was rendered speechless. Therefore, I am reluctant to go to that good man to inquire about his illness."

https://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln260/Vimalakirti.htm

It’s lucky I am not enlightened. 

I stumble around in the dark.

My illness is mundane and uncomplicated.

I’m comfortable with no arrival and no departure.

While researching Vimalakirti I am listening to a book. 

The book is After (A Doctor Explores What Near Death Experiences Reveal About Life and The Beyond), (2021) by Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson MD. 

(About which more later.)

I listen to birds between Ragged and Bald Mountains,

A slight breeze --

This first of July.