Dance, dance, wherever you may be!

"Dwelling within one another," is the meaning of "perichoresis."

Life is a dance.... This choral dance is a combination of harmony and rhythm, Plato says. It reminds us of the Trinitarian perichoresis, the cosmic and divine dance. Siva is Nataraja, the dancing god. The dance is his creation. Dance is practically for all popular religions the most genuine human sharing in the miracle of creation.... We all participate in rhythm because rhythm is another name of Being and Being is Trinity. 

(--Ramon Panikkar, the Rhythm of Being, p.37)

God is emerging now.

God is now being spoken.

At origin, everything is retrievable.

Brook ice

Water flowing down Ragged Mountain shyly passes under cover.

Let us pass so unnoticed.

Flowing, being heard, passing beneath form.

Community means we am I

No one suffers alone.

The illusion is when the thought occurs: "I am suffering."

We are suffering.

Think again.

Cold morning

I see icy window.

What you see is what you'll forgo

According to the readings, 0 degrees or -5 degrees, with wind chill feels like -16 degrees. At 3:42 a.m., another log into wood stove in Wohnkuche. Two dogs and two cats have opted to stay downstairs. That might have to do with their primary caregiver overnighting in southern Maine between visits to work places for numbers.

Working with Thoughts 

It is helpful at the beginning of your meditation practice to free yourself from the idea that in order to meditate properly you must have no thoughts. Instead, establish a different relationship with your thoughts so that over time they can fade more effortlessly into the background. All meditators have thoughts arising during their practice—it’s what you do with them that matters.
(- Bob Sharples, "Do the Thoughts Ever Stop?" In Tricycle Magazine)

Good advice.

Impermanence cares for everything.

There's no place...

Like home.

There's only home.

For heaven's sake, make it so!

The Pasture 

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too. 

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too. 

(Poem by Robert Frost)

We stand together at origin.

What shall we make of it?

Nothing.

Suffering is the sandpaper of our life. It does its work of shaping us. Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.

-- Ram Das 

Thank you for seeing this through!









 For seeing yourself, and me, through!

Poor resolve; little resolution

A Times opinion writer claims our fiscal difficulties are the fault of the voters. I should make a vow no longer to care what politicians and pundits say.
I'll wait for the new year.

Drat those voters!

We can try to make every Middle-East and Western Asian piece of geography into a United States territory by drone and assassination, or we can feed the hungry and care for the aged and infirm in our own country (even helping people elsewhere), but we cannot do both. Opting to colonize and control seems like our current and shaky strategy.

Voters think they are choosing care and compassion. But manipulators of post-election financing of hegemonic bellicosity are giving us war after war after fiscal fiasco.

It's a new year. Time for new vows.

Voters live in neighborhoods and towns in this country, not in voting booths nor in corporations. Time to change the manipulation into maturation and reign-in the money-mayhem crowd and install a new mutation, a dollars-for-decency-services sanity.

Want a new country? Maybe we should rename the one we have and thereby change the direction of our narrowing thought processes. We could call ourselves -- The United Cooperation of Consciousness!

Let's come home to where we live. Re-invigorate our good will. To "vote" is to "vow." Let's vow to care for each other in sickness and health, in good times and bad, until death takes us all.

Eluctable; an elocution with no "in" or "out"

The kabuki players screech to a halt at the preposterous cliff illusion of political theater and everyone is supposed to feel grateful.

There is no attempt to pretend that sham and subterfuge are not the year-end gimmicks permitting butchers' knives to slice away meat from sacred cow bone.

Everywhere anarchists, left and right, grind their teeth, toast the exiting and arriving year with bitter dregs from hollow barrel in damp cellars of the spirit.

Government is fatally compromised; long live the government!

Meanwhile, monks and nuns, hermits and solitaries, turn quietly to face the silence of a still and hospitable emptiness ascending from a cold and hardened ground under a dark and desolate sky reaching infinitely into nothing and nowhere named This Aware and Intimate Reality.

Once it was called "God."

Now it returns to its nameless ineffable indescribability, its clear gaze seeing everything as Itself.

Be at rest. Everything is falling apart. The center cannot fold.

What remains is your guess.

If I had to guess, I'd say "rum fruitcake" and be satisfied with such tasty elocution.

Our times

At end of year, a meditation about guns and preference:

Fear goes ballistic. Love is disarming.
We do not seem to be ready for the profound vulnerability love asks of us. Rather, we arm ourselves with the mistaken belief that murdering another satisfies fear. It doesn't. Fear is unsatisfiable, divisive, violent, and self-justifying. We recognize ourselves in these descriptions. We are a fearful nation poised on the brink of an all-out war waged against ourselves. Love sees this. Love weeps.
I implore the perpetrators of fear to consider their sorry success -- a frightened itchiness to close life in others.
I choose to live vulnerable and disarmed. The real success, I submit, is openness to life, no matter what.

Cat wonders about birds in blowing storm

If nothing
Else
There is this morning
Filled with snow
Warm fire, novel
Sweet lyrics that
Never grow old