As if?

As if?

When your original reason
For studying Zen is not right,
You wind up having labored
Without accomplishment.
This is why ancients used
To urge people to study Zen
As if they were on the brink of death.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

It's not a question of what to do.

It's a matter of how to be.

Brink...?

...Nothing!

To study zen is it.

The song was right:

" Everything is beautiful
In its own way."

Only this:
To see

Through life,
Life.

Hugh Gumpel dies.

"There is," someone says,
and we stick to that "there is."
See there's nothing—
Only the sound
Of the pine wind from the beach.
- Japanese Folk Zen saying

His painting of blue-green rudder graces the bookshed.

This misty rainy night.

Don't tell me that all is well now that our military has shot a man in the face.

The company of all the dead that I include in prayer merely increases.

I'm pleased so many are relieved.

Me?

There's no joy in anyone's murder -- no matter what narrative is pinned on it.

The idea of friendship is true, is real.

In prison this morning Saskia, Charlie, Doug & I talk of Kant, Montaigne, and Aristotle.

No, that's not it. We are talking about ourselves.

We approach one another.

As friends do.

Let there now begin a healing and retrieving of virtue and dignity, respect for human life, justice, and friendship.

We have been haunted, hunting, and hunted for a long time.

Some different grace and way-of-being is now invited by us and is now inviting us.

Let us lead. Let us follow. This emerging truth sustains.

And so it is.

Osama Bin Laden, says President Obama, is dead.

As Sunday gives way to Monday.

We settle things by an ancient, obsolete, and uncertain ritual -- murder for murder, death for death.

We'll continue to try to transcend, and will, someday, find a new way.