Maybe the Trinity is best represented by the three stages of awakened being/doing spoken about by Eckhart Tolle. The three modalities are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm.

Because Zen and Doctrine
Have the same origin and taste,
Don't judge them bitter or sweet
According to your own lights.
If you chase after heaving waves,
You'll probably have to ask
Directions to the ferry.
- Soyo Taeneung (1562-1649)

Acceptance is the source and father/mother.

Enjoyment is the expression, the Christ-manifestation of origin.

Enthusiasm is the Holy Spirit, the inspiration through which source manifests.

Accept faith. Enjoy hope. Love enthusiastically.

Be poor, chaste, and obedient.

Contemplate. Converse. Correspond.

There's nothing like what once we thought was.

Everything is new and fresh and beyond itself.

Three is the new one.

Be what and where God is.

Be what is spoken here.

The folksinger schooner deckhand writes telling about her returned interest in Soto Zen and Buddhism. I'd been thinking of her when today walking the float where the J&E Riggin ties up readying for its first meet and greet of the season.

There's only so far down the road you can go with what is not zen.

I wandered for many years
After leaving the dusty world,
Then built a cozy home
On the blue mountain.
Loving fidelity, I plant a
Thousand bamboos
And a hundred foot pine
As symbols of my integrity.
I plant mums around the wall,
I'm comfortably secluded;
I recite poems in the moonlight;
The sound is crisp and clean.
There's no pleasure like growing
Old on the mountain.
Why should I go crazy
When the road is blocked?
- Buhyu Sunsoo (1543-1615)

Memorial Day Weekend begins Maine's season of travelers. We watch the film "11 Minutes" and consider the odd nature of time.

I am happy to be a near-hermit. There's nothing to it. All you have to do is be what you are. With. No expectations. No celebrity. No explanations.

Merely going to sleep, waking up, walking, listening, eating, conversing.

This breath is the first. This breath is the last. This breath is the first. This one will be the last.

picking
the nameless flower
I offer it to buddha
(-santoka taneda)

I counter:

leaving the name
the buddha
is the flower
unpicked
(--wfh)

Rokpa carried home a lacrosse yellow ball from our walk.

We'll return it to the field tomorrow.

...........................

Breathe.

Root with ground.

Forget the illusory ways of men and the state.

To live without a chief, without a ruler is anarchy.

anarchy |ˈanərkē|
noun
a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority : he must ensure public order in a country threatened with anarchy.
• absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via medieval Latin from Greek anarkhia, from anarkhos, from an- ‘without’ + arkhos ‘chief, ruler.’

No need for bombs. I prefer breath, radical seeing, and remembering what is true.

It's Better To Live

It's better to live, Licinius, neither
always pressing out on the deep nor, trembling
and cautious, hugging overly close to the
dangerous shoreline.

Whosoever cherishes the golden mean
safely avoids the squalor of a hovel
and discreetly keeps away from a palace
that excites envy.

Most often it's the huge pine that is shaken
by the wind, and the highest towers that fall
the greatest fall, and the tops of mountains that
attract the lightning.

Hopeful in adversity, apprehensive
in prosperity is the heart that prepares
well for either fate. Zeus brings the winter, but
also takes it back.

Even if times are bad, they won't always be so:
for Apollo doesn't always tense his bow,
but sometimes inspires the silent Muses.

When the straits are narrow, show yourself to be
undaunted and bold — yet wisely tuck your sails
when they're swelled by too strong a following wind.
(--Horace, c.27 BCE)

We can retrieve any original event in our lives, bring it to the present, and heal it with clear sight, forgiveness, and surrender.

We can only do it alone.

We can only do it together.

Only the solitude of community heals.

Up until the end, it is real.

At end, it is real.

Going on, without knowing, it is real.

If you return to the Truth,
To the emptiness of delusion,
You'll know that Buddha and man
Are not different.
Delusion is a butterfly
Plunging into the fire,
Enlightenment, a crane flying
From its cage.
- Buhyu Sunsoo (1543-1615)

From the beginning, it is real.

At origin, it is real.

Ever-present, originating source, is what is real.

See a smattering of photos from Sunday's dedication of The Thomas Merton Bookshed Retreat.

http://meetingbrookhermitageupdate.blogspot.com/2010/05/pentecost-dedication-of-thomas-merton.html

...........

We meet for first conversation in lower level of bookshed. It is the 6th and final session of premier Pilot to Practice about Benedictine Spirituality, Always We Begin Again.

Yesterday so many pitched in to complete walkway, set chairs, put out food, play music,read words A man with sturdy base voice, mowing lawn in front of chapel/zendo, raised his arm and declared, disproportionately, "We're going to make this look like the best goddamn monastery in the world."

The person who is free and easy
Beyond every boundary, is enlightened.
He doesn't hoe much,
But there are no weeds in his field.
- Jungkwan Haean (b 1567)

We're thinking the next PTP (Pilot to Practice) sessions might be called TOD (Talk of Death). For three or four weeks we'll talk of death, in general, experiences we've had with it, and feelings and thoughts of our own death. There's not enough talk about death. It might just be prelude to a richer experience of life.

Outside in the wind in the pines
The night air is cold,
And the sound of the well
Rises up and down.
I sit quietly, seeking Mind-in vain;
A serious disease struggles to comfort my mind.
- Jungkwan Haean (b 1567)

Maybe we are moving from old mind to new mind. It's possible. No longer seeing in fragments and opposites, antagonisms and antitheticals. Maybe not. Maybe it's wishful thinking.

Walking road past golf course by ocean in Rockport, it doesn't occur to watch out for tee shot danger having to overfly road to green by shore. I figure somewhere there's a sign telling me it will be my own fault if I am hit walking a public road.

I know what Middle Eastern men feel like stepping into any street where any discharge of weapon in their direction is their own fault for interfering with a super-power's task of making their land safe for our democracy.

No golf ball hit me. I listen to a short story about a Yiddish writer.

Lauds and nesting Phoebes occurred together this morning.

Prayer is love seeking no other place.

Deep white clouds blanket the ragged roof
Grateful for this old Zen friend's visit
I send him off at the gate
Both of us silent
Standing under the shade of the tall pine
Lingering.
- Jakushitsu (1290–1367)

Reading is entering the other with nothing in-between.

Entering the other with holy spirit is dwelling whole, still honoring the unique itselfness of the other, surrendering to idiorhythmic awareness emerging in its own time.

They will see the face of the Lord, and his name will be marked on their foreheads. There will be no more night: they will not need sunlight or lamp-light, because the Lord God himself will shine upon them.
(-- Apocalypse 22:4-5; from Sunday Compline)

Face to face sees no name. Nothing other than one's own reflective face. Brings light.

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and strength, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of God came down upon the Lord, ...
(--from A treatise "Against the Heresies" by St Irenaeus, The sending of the Holy Spirit)

The gift is not to fear God. The gift is to fear what God fears.

What would God fear?

That anyone would harm themselves, another, the earth, any animal. That anyone would fall into illusion and begin to believe they were separate and detached from anything in the world, from any person, from one's self, from God. This is what God fears. Because when someone starts to believe the delusion of detachment there is a corresponding harm that slices across the body of being.

Mindlessness easily injures. Mindfulness helps heal.

The gift is to begin to dwell in the awareness of the Holy Spirit. There is nothing in-between. The Holy Spirit dwells as interconnective porous empathy filling what is there with creative truth and loving action.

Trust the face of the one before you.

Let heart be filled with nothing other than what it truly is: presence without distance, wholesight, and wise understanding.

It is Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is nothing in-between, making no-other a realization of love-itself.

The Thomas Merton Bookshed Retreat was dedicated today.

Stones fell to earth filled with prayer.