Reading papers.

Last day of year.

A clean slate?

Certainly, icicle!

No better advice

Back of envelope for 2014 prescription drug plan:

A good motto!

Just this, just that

Minus one degree.

Furnace blower at 

bottom of stairs under 

register hums steadily.

If this were a real poem

its next line 

would tell something

personal.

It's not

It doesn't

Just the temperature

Just the furnace.

Bare

"Gesundheit," comes the voice from another room.

"Danke," the return.

There it is. 

The whole of communication in two words.

Final dialogue in final play at end of year

"'Nothing...'

Say it!"

"No."

Morning prayer

Stillness

and silence

and family of the holy

now,

and forever

Yes!

Not only don't we see what's there, we don't see what's not there

There's always another story.

At Last the Secret is Out

At last the secret is out,
as it always must come in the end,
the delicius story is ripe to tell
to tell to the intimate friend;
over the tea-cups and into the square
the tongues has its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear,
there's never smoke without fire.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir,
behind the ghost on the links,
behind the lady who dances
and the man who madly drinks,
under the look of fatigue
the attack of migraine and the sigh
there is always another story,
there is more than meets the eye.

For the clear voice suddently singing,
high up in the convent wall,
the scent of the elder bushes,
the sporting prints in the hall,
the croquet matches in summer,
the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
there is always a wicked secret,
a private reason for this.

(Poem by WH Auden)

There's more than meets the eye.

Always.

What is it to live between

Mountains, for example

Buddha and Christ, for example

Dream and sleep, for example

Inspector Bellamy and the solving of a mystery, par example...

Zen Master Bassui (1327-1387) speaks of Jizo bodhisattva.

Jizo is the guardian of children, travelers, and other voyagers.

Jizo stands for the mind-nature of ordinary people. Ji (the character for earth) is the foundation for the mind. Zo (the character for storehouse) is the storehouse for Buddha nature). It is in this Buddha nature that all the virtue of ordinary people is contained.
 (-- from book by Jan Chozen Bays)  http://books.google.com/books?id=rR4cBxpWPRUC&pg=PA239&lpg=PA239&dq=jizo+talk&source=bl&ots=xVVNuAW25L&sig=NYhepsajY6qkekXACqYnYQyEj18&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Ma6-UvnnC8_lsATq2oGoDQ&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=jizo%20talk&f=false

May all children be safe!

It is the feast of holy innocents.

Open your storehouse, O earth, and let the virtues of compassion of protection of gathering for good seed our heart/minds growing there light and sympathetic joy!

Sound it through: What Is, coming to be! A Christmas Meditation

Christus natus est nobis (Christ is born to us)

Breviarium Romanum - In Nativitate Domini, ad matutinum

Antiphona ad invitatorium

(Roman Breviary, antiphon and invitatory, Matins, Nativity of The Lord)

...

A Meditation, In middle of night

Christus natus est --

Inter nous

Internus

In terrae noos

Christ is born --

Between us

Within

In mind of earth

This is what we do at 2:22am?

Hear that?

What about this?

Psalm 18 (19) Praise of God the creator 

The skies tell the story of the glory of God,    

the firmament proclaims the work of his hands; 

day pours out the news to day,    

night passes to night the knowledge.  

  

Not a speech, not a word,    

not a voice goes unheard. 

Their sound is spread throughout the earth,    

their message to all the corners of the world. 

At the ends of the earth he has set up    

a dwelling place for the sun. 

Like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,  

it rejoices like an athlete at the race to be run.

It appears at the edge of the sky,  

runs its course to the sky’s furthest edge. 

Nothing can hide from its heat. 

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit,    

as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,    

world without end. Amen.

Between this and that...

Is,

where;

we live!

On the feast of Stephen; hold no one's coat

Walk and listen. This is my end of year conclusion. It is the only gift I can think of that bridges the material and spiritual edges between which so many for so long have created a bottomless chasm of separation.

"Gods are great," said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. "But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return...."
(p.417, in American Gods, by Neil Gaiman)

Walk and listen...and nap.

While it snows.

And read.

While still...able.

As dusk walks down mountain

We return our descent.

It occurs, perhaps...

God is the whole of everything as well as the everything we cannot conceive.

And Christ is the Cosmos beyond imagination.

And earth is Gaia, mother, birthing one by one, each incarnation, each expression and manifestation of source itself.

As was Jesus.

As are you.

Today, when earth gives a particularly enlightened being to us, why not converse with insight, enthusiasm, and energy the nature of this gift?

Here is how it begins

Awake.

Bring in firewood.

Christmas morning. 

Only candle flame, wood stove, sunrise.

No other power.

And old reheated coffee.

Earth born

Earth rise.

NASA image AS8-14-2383, taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission, 24Dec1968)

Earth wise.

Christus natus est!

In the middle off the night

Rokie, the white border Collie, barks.

In the middle of the night we call your name.

Jitai, (自体 = itself)

This. Itself.

How near?

The absolute near-side.

So close

Earth sees.

So near.

Winter

Ice

Snow

Mute Rockport Harbor.

Dancing herein, therein, and therefore

Something's coming.

“… somewhere in the last 50 years we have crossed a mysterious limit set by Providence and have entered a new era. We have, in some sense, passed a point of no return, and it is both useless and tragic to continue to live as if we were still in the nineteenth century. Whatever we may think of the new era, whether we imagine it as the millennium, the noosphere, or as the beginning of the end, there has been a violent disruption of society and a radical overthrow of that modern world which goes back to Charlemagne.”  

(p. viii, Introduction by Thomas Merton, from THE PRISON MEDITATION OF FATHER DELP, Herder and Herder New York, 1963.) http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/2006/12/prison-meditation-of-father-delp.html

A creative resolution, a creative tension.

 The issue of interhuman tension is secondary to earth-human tensions. If humans will not become functional members of the earth community, how can humans establish functional relationships among themselves? It is not exactly the question of whether the nations can survive each other, nor is it even the question of whether intelligent beings can survive the natural forces of the planet; it is whether the planet can survive the intelligence that it has itself brought forth. 

My proposal is that the cosmology of peace is presently the basic issue. The human must be seen in its cosmological role just as the cosmos needs to be seen in its human manifestation. This cosmological context has never been more clear than it is now, when everything depends on a creative resolution of our present antagonisms. I refer to a creative resolution of antagonisms rather than to peace in deference to the violent aspects of the cosmological process. Phenomenal existence itself seems to be a violent mode of being. Also, there is a general feeling of fullness bordering on decay that is easily associated with peace. Neither violence nor peace in this sense is in accord with the creative transformations through which the more splendid achievements of the universe have taken place. As the distinguished anthropologist A.L. Kroeber once indicated: The ideal situation for any individual or any culture is not exactly “bovine placidity.” It is, rather, “the highest state of tension that the organism can bear creatively.”           

(-- from final chapter, "The Cosmology of Peace" in "The Dream of the Earth" by Thomas Berry, c.1988)

 That middle, that middle place, that middle way, that place the gospel refers to when it cites Jesus as saying "The kingdom of heaven (the kingdom of God) is between you." (Cf. John1:26, Luke 17:21) -- it is there that peace is found, not off and away and not oblivious to the push and pull of this and that in the ubiquitous and perennial vying for dominance and bettering. Step, rather, into the between, the center, the middle, the heart of what is being revealed in our midst.

The Pax Gaia is earth and all beings with and through earth coming into proper and true relationality.

Step out.

Step in.

Step between.

Dance herein, therein, and therefore encircle the center of existence.

Listen!

Something's near!

Revealing, itself.

morning after Handfasting

Newlyweds toboggan down from yurt laughing.

They kiss outside barn.

Everything is ice and grey.

Except their laughter. 

Breathing meditation

Sound of cat jumping to floor. Moving something not nailed down.

Puzzling episodes

As solstice gives itself on earth to early darkness, still, only now with the increase of returning light.

JE: OK, thanks for the interview Malcolm. I love the revival of Lewis / Tolkien’s theology of imagination, and their sense of the power of story, metaphor and myth to transform us. But it seems to me that way of thinking can end up in the postmodern idea that everything is a story or metaphor, that the gospels are just another inspiring myth. We just need to find some ‘sacred fiction’ that works for us, whether that’s Star Trek, Doctor Who or Lord of the Rings (which by-the-by was voted the most popular book of the 20th century, and is obviously much loved by non-Christians.) 

MG: That’s the opposite of what Lewis and Tolkien were saying. The point is, it’s about the re-marriage of the divorced parents – Imagination and Reason. It happens that it was our mother, Imagination, rather than our father, Reason, who’s been absent, and who we need to get to know again. But the point of bringing them together – the reason, for CS Lewis, why coming to Christ was so transformative – was that he loved myth, but as long as it was just myth, however moved by it he was, he didn’t feel he could re-connect it to Reason. The problem with Reason by itself was that as long as it was devoid of resonant story, it was just facts without meaning. The point about the Christian story was not simply that it was mythically resonant, but also that it was (they believed) historical fact. Tolkien said Lewis should think of the Gospels as a great myth written by God in the material of history. The previous poets had used language to tell a story, while the Author of the cosmos was able to tell a story in and through the actual material fabric of what happened. 

JE: But it sounds like Lewis was saying ‘there’s various different myths, of Dionysus, Oedipus, Balder the Brave etc but my myth is true’. 

MG: Well he’s not simply saying it’s true, he’s also saying it’s the truth of all the other myths as well, it’s the one that gives the other ones their grounding. It would not be sufficient to say ‘we all need a story to live by’, because someone could come back and say ‘you’re just making it up’. If you can show that something actually happened, which seems to make sense of all these other myths….There’s a great essay of Lewis’ called The Grand Miracle, in which he refers to the life, death and resurrection of Christ as like a missing chapter in a great work, the great work being the Cosmos. He says ‘if someone proposes to me that there is a missing chapter to a book I know very well, they’d have to show not only that it’s in the style of the rest of the novel, but that it makes sense of otherwise puzzling episodes’. And that’s exactly what he thinks the resurrection did.

(--from  "Malcolm Guite on poetry as a door into the dark" at the Website of Jules Evans, Philosophy for Life) - See more at: http://philosophyforlife.org/malcolm-guite-on-poetry-as-a-door-into-the-dark/#sthash.CVKdhm47.dpuf

So it is incremental anticipation holds still in exchange a pivoting intuition into its own rediscovery.

Turning light

“silence is the language of god, 
all else is poor translation.” (-Rumi)

and the wisdom to dwell in the difference

Alone, we can do nothing.

Another instance of Heidegger's use of the hermeneutic circle occurs in his examination of The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–1936). Here Heidegger argues that both artists and art works can only be understood with reference to each other, and that neither can be understood apart from 'art,' which, as well, cannot be understood apart from the former two. The 'origin' of the work of art is mysterious and elusive, seemingly defying logic: "thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift or a defect. To enter upon the path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of thought, assuming thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles this circle. In order to discover the nature of the art that really prevails in the work, let us go to the actual work and ask the work what and how it is."[2]^:18 

(--Wikipedia, re. Hermeneutic circle) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutic_circle

Together, there’s something.

O come all ye lightfilm

Short day-

light, long dark- 

night; winter sol-

stice rain and

ice: moving

picture

Listening Itself

At first poetry seemed precious.

Then it became interesting.

Now, it is the creative energy of existence.

My word! (As the saying goes.)

Prelude to final class

It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

(--from "The Opening of Eyes," poem by David Whyte)

Night prayer

Here.

Alone.

Words, too, stretch morning exercise

The quote arrived in this form:

"Only in God is man capable of living fully." (p. 35,  Fr. Alfred Delp SJ, “The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp”, 1963 Herder and Herder, New York)

It thought about transforming into: Only God! Only Cosmos! Only all existing beings and things! Only this awareness will allow life to fully be capable of meditating within itself.