You have to say something, the zen master said

Just open your mouth.

Say it.

Anyone Can Sing 

Anyone can sing. You just open your mouth,

and give shape to a sound. Anyone can sing.

What is harder, is to proclaim the soul,

to initiate a wild and necessary deepening:

to give the voice broad, sonorous wings

of solitude, grief, and celebration,

to fill the body with the echoes of voices

lost long ago to bravery, and silence,

to prise the reluctant heart wide open,

to witness defeat, to suffer contempt,

to shrink, lose face, go down in ignominy,

to retreat to the last dark hiding-place

where the tattered remnants of your pride

still gather themselves around your nakedness,

to know these rags as your only protection

and yet still open - to face the possibility

that your innermost core may hold nothing at all,

and to sing from that - to fill the void

with every hurt, every harm, every hard-won joy

that staves off death yet honours its coming,

to sing both full and utterly empty,

alone and conjoined, exiled and at home,

to sing what people feel most keenly

yet never acknowledge until you sing it.

Anyone can sing. Yes. Anyone can sing.

             (Poem by William Ayot)

Nothing at all.

To say.

Then, say it.

Summer start

(haiku for first day)

Alice Walker poems
at prison, elderly inn --
don't fix the broken

(wfh, nunc ipsum)

LeBron

(haiku for basketball player)

That's it for season --
Done. Body gonna rest. (smiles)
Breathe . . . inspiration

(wfh, nunc ipsum)

Let's not say 'God is one': rather: 'Each itself is god.'

I've been thinking about insanity -- mine and yours.

Perhaps a lighted candle will help us both.

Toward sane retrieval in a world gone mad.

I'll rest here for a moment.

As at 4AM you might think to pray for everyone.

To become, one (might say) itself.

Dooryard grief

(a late spring haiku)

Churning garden hose

Lawn mower fractures nozzle

Water pump weeps crush

(wfh, nunc ipsum)

Within this

To sit in darkness and silence is to sit in the acceptance of light and sound. In cabin tonight, single vigil candle hanging from front crossbeam, I sit in the unknowing some call meditation, some call God, some have no name for it.

Dusk lowers.

Back to wohnkuche.

I remember times when there were words for what was believed.

Now there is only remembrance.

Quinoa with stir fry veggies.

Without belief, just this.

Sitting and looking practice, Tuesday evening

The flowers are given to the earth. And we give earth flowers in return. No holding back.

"Giving" means nongreed. Nongreed means not to covet. Not to covet means not to curry favor. Even if you govern the Four Continents, you should always convey the correct teaching with nongreed. It is to give away unneeded belongings to someone you don't know, to offer flowers blooming on a distant mountain to the Tathāgata, or, again, to offer treasures you had in your former life to sentient beings. Whether it is of teaching or of material, each gift has its value and is worth giving. Even if the gift is not your own, there is no reason to keep from giving. The question is not whether the gift is valuable, but whether there is merit.
When you leave the way to the way, you attain the way. At the time of attaining the way, the way is always left to the way. When treasure is left just as treasure, treasure becomes giving. You give yourself to yourself and others to others. The power of the causal relations+ of giving reaches to devas, human beings, and even enlightened sages. When giving becomes actual, such causal relations are immediately formed.(--from, Bodhisattva's Four Methods of Guidance, BODAISATTA SHISHŌ-HŌ, This was written on the fifth day, fifth month, fourth year of Ninji (1243) by Monk Dōgen, who transmitted dharma from China..Translated by Lew Richmond and Kazuaki Tanahashi)
http://www.zenonderdedom.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Dogen-Bodhisattvas_Four_Methods_Of_Guidance.pdf

 Humans evaluate. That's what we seem to do best. Calculate. Evaluate.

Earth just gives. No calculation. No evaluation.

Imagine that.

Nongreed.

You watchn' me?

Call me doubtful! 

Here's what will continue to happen: surveillance, surveillance, and (you got it) surveillance.

There will be no stopping, no diminishing, and no vague possibility the data will not be used and abused by both "good guys" and "bad guys." It will be used to whatever ends the user wishes. 

Where's the upside? Will we suddenly turn all moral and law abiding and say "let 'em see what they want"? Will we arm ourselves to the teeth, shoot down backyard spy-drones; send saintly elderly religious sisters to deface CCTV lenses countrywide; or set up camp in town squares with burgers, buns, and banners decrying lost anonymity while our neighbors in police uniform try to decide whose legs to baton first, or, perhaps, which friend to bring a blanket to ward off the evening chill?

I'm agnostic as well as skeptical. The coin has been thumbed upward and flips head over tail in a parody of where this "watching over" will hit ground: a benign divine care-driven attentiveness? or, a desperate fear-driven mistrusting destructiveness?

I'm just going to make a pot of coffee, dive into Drift, Harlot's Ghost, Chain of Command, and War in Heaven -- toast some Parmesan-Pepper bread from the local bakery, and leave the anguishing to 1984 scholars, climate-change rubes, and banks-are-our-buddies enthusiasts.

Bill Keller, in his nytimes editorial, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/opinion/keller-living-with-the-surveillance-state.html?hp&_r=0 , 
has laid out the conversation. I'm skeptical there is any moderation or keen-eyed regulatory apparatus to salvage an Emily Dickinson veil of discreet unsurveilled reclusivity.

I will become a hermit-in-the-open. I'll take my chances and my refuge in the dormant and deliberate decency deep within each person -- that quality of awareness that holds each sentient being in high and holy regard and wants no harm for anybody. 

We'll, no doubt, see each other some day. Nod twice and wink once in my direction when you pass me going along like a pilgrim toward the wholly-disclosed-other, which is our journey toward a communion of compassion, an intended consequence of actually caring for one another! 

Do we have a choice?

 Really?

Nothing you can identify

The dialogue at end of murder mystery series reflects the curious ambiguity of some crimes, namely, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No evil intention aforethought, no way to correct the wrongs that follow. "We got the bad guy," one detective says to the other. "Yea? Who?" answers the other, posing a koan for the ages: Who, actually, is the 'bad guy'?

It is fruitless at times to suspect you know what's really going on.

The Greek word deployed by Plato in “The Cave” — aletheia — is typically translated as truth, but is more aptly translated as “disclosure” or “uncovering” —   literally, “the state of not being hidden.”   Martin Heidegger, in an essay on the allegory of the cave, suggested that the process of uncovering was actually a precondition for having truth.  It would then follow that the goal of the truth-seeker is to help people in this disclosure — it is to defeat the illusory representations that prevent us from seeing the world the way it is.  There is no propositional truth to be had until this first task is complete.
(-- THE STONE June 14, 2013, 12:00 pm, The Real War on Reality, by Peter Ludlow, in NYTimes)  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/the-real-war-on-reality/?src=recg.   

There's no knowing.

Best to let the unconcealed stand by itself.

 Look at it!

Allow it to be, in its chaos and inarticulable non-sequiturs, itself.

The hardest knowledge to seek is that of something being itself nothing you can identify.