This is, and

1st day of new year.

In hospital for visiting tonight.

Immortal means no time. Which means no death. Which means no birth.

I don't know why abortion is such a big deal. Is not being born the same as being unborn?

I build boardwalk toward new yurt.  I trust you realize the futility of trying to make sense of what republicans are talking about.

Then will come the democrats.

It doesn't matter. Really, it doesn't.

Just this is; nothing else is.

Joyful duration

For forty years

The lad

Has been son.

Perfect saying

Francis de Sales said: "Ask for nothing and refuse nothing."

Log, zzzs

Building boardwalk leading to center path up to yurt.

Vipassana meditator visits for Tuesday Practice.

Finish generic conversation brochure for prison(s), hermitage, nursing home, and hospital.

Sleep.

Plaintive

I'm sure there's something good to be said about political conventions.

There must be.

No?

O eternal Truth, true Love, and beloved Eternity, you are my God, and for you I sigh day and night. As I first began to know you, you lifted me up and showed me that, while that which I might see exists indeed, I was not yet capable of seeing it. Your rays beamed intensely on me, beating back my feeble gaze, and I trembled with love and dread. I knew myself to be far away from you in a region of unlikeness, and I seemed to hear your voice from on high: “I am the food of the mature: grow, then, and you shall eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food; but you will be changed into me”.
(-- Augustine of Hippo, in The Confessions)

There's bound to be...

Something.

Nothing, more, to say

I can't tell the future. There is no future. I can't recall the past. It's gone. But I can see, now.

Call it what you will. The infinite possibilities and potential permutations, combinations, and calculations of the net of now presenting everything and everywhere in its true context, that context you and me aware, without  question or explanation, as just this, here, in all its inclusive and idiorhythmIc transitory hide-n-seek manifestations.

Notch the arrow of emptiness 

To shoot the hawk of ultimate meaning;

If you're not right on target, 

You will be deceived by this barbarian monk. 

-- Fugai Ekun (1568-1654)

Meanwhile the men of the grand old party become more and more stupid about vagina, womb, sperm, egg, consenting relationality, and offspring. They are making women into body parts and legislative language that men own and operate.

Let me, despite what I've said, tell you the future.

Leonard Cohen said it starkly: "I've seen the future, brother: it is murder." (--from, The Future, song by L.C) 

Abortion and rape, they figure, are isolated and a-relational events having nothing to do with a woman, except that she just happens to be in attendance to their enactment.

Not-being born and Bankai's "unborn" are curious considerations in a world mind-set of dualism and linear historicity. We're tied, it seems, to notions of "born" and "died" -- the words populate all our documents and obituaries.

What if we saw things differently? The physics and spirituality of appearance and disappearance, form and emptiness, energy and matter and the transformation of them -- the understanding of unfolding and multidimensional synchronicity interweaving through our consciousness the variegated multiplicity of an integral and real universe -- the net of now -- beguiles.

A deranged or, even, barbarian monk would have nothing more to say.

Mind before thinking is the unborn

Close the gate. There's a hermit lurking!

The fuel in the tea brazier is burnt out,
So I collect pine needles;
The fields of medicinal plants are empty,
So I cut vegetable roots.
Naturally dull, I've forgotten Zen activities,
My gate is darkened at noon by
The shade of ancient trees.
White clouds impart a sense of peace
To my Zen meditation,
Green grasses suffice to make a rug for my guests.
What I have collected is a hundred years
Of emptiness.
- Isshi Bunshu (1608-1646)

Emptiness, like enlightenment, is not what you think; it is!