Missing practice

Where'd they go?

Sitting solo.

Cave sage.

Habits of Saturday morning.

First sunlight over Dean's off to Melvin Heights.

Down to kitchen. Grind coffee beans for after morning practice.

Rokpa, our practice Jikido, watches for next meditation practitioner to show themselves coming through middle room.

Suddenly, light!

What appears will guide us to zendo, cushion, incense, bell, and silence.

Uh oh  --  our idiorhymic little one comes to greet and distract Border Collie.

Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva has begun in their greeting a joyful chant.

It is time to process over boardwalk to cabin.

Whence? Hence; comes morning!

First sun leaps from wood stove chimney.

Lighting us on our way.

Wage snoozing; eschew losing what is valuable!

Please advise Syria and other parties wondering if it is possible, this dog and cat are navigating a negotiable peace.

Looking for a solution entails waiting for your primary love to return home. The dogs of before (not the dogs of war) are looking for what will arrive after. It is the 'looking for' that is pivotal.

It's not difficult to wage war. Determining what you really love is the difficulty. So many will try to divert, demonize, or distract you.

Sometimes a good snooze with help sort things out. 

Assuage war!

Engage peace!

You are under beauty! Hands up!

Thursday morning rain. As Lincolnville hermit travels to her vet's crematory with departed dog accompanied by distaff meetingbrook monastic.

On Silence 

Those who are fond of retreats—writers, ecstatics, parents with young children—often comment on the silence such time away allows. Silence becomes something present, almost palpable. The task shifts from keeping the world at a safe decible distance to letting more of the world in. Thomas Aquinas said that beauty arrests motion. He meant, I think, that in the presence of something gorgeous or sublime, we stop our nervous natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues. Whatever that fretful hunger is, it seems momentarily filled in the presence of beauty. To Aquinas’s wisdom I’d add that silence arrests flight, that in its refuge, the need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes. We let the world creep closer, we drop to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground. 

(—From Stirring the Mud by Barbara Hurd.)

Beauty arrests motion, indeed!

Morning 4 Sept

After hard rain, brook runs back to school.

Sun wishes well waning days of summer.

Green warmth dances on stretching leaf watching mountain runoff pass below.

Arresting silence, releasing joy, openly gazing.

How odd are we?

When someone fancies principle and law over experience and felt connection, that person is a believer who does not have faith.

Better to have the orientation and horizon faith opens than to have the objects and certitudes belief shuts in.

Jesus, that annoying Jewish peasant, trusted the experience and reality of individuals and avoided the fixed rituals and moralistic judgments of institutions.

If someone listens to you, feels sympathetic sorrow or joy with you, and devotes their attention to being of service to those needing service -- trust that person. Avoid those who care what others think, what others feel, what others might do -- all that to the detriment of the felt, present, and real experience of the one before them.

So odd, we are.

An existential interest

Existence / Exegesis : Education

...

Entrance, Encounter, Engagement, Experience, Embodiment, 

Experiment, Emerge, Evolve, Extrapolate, Exeunt.

Ora et Labora

September's Labor Day.

Cars point south and west heading out of Maine.

Rain thumps to earth understands there's nowhere to go.

And goes.

what is itself; transforming

Let's not quibble. Nor miss the point. All learning is about awareness, consciousness, self-knowledge.

The crisis is a crisis in consciousness, a crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient traditions. 

And considering what the world is now with all their misery conflict, destructive brutality, aggression, and so on, man is still as he was: is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive, and he has built a society along these lines. 

...

“You know, if we understand one question rightly, all questions are answered. But we don't know how to ask the right question. To ask the right question demands a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity. Here is a question, a fundamental question: is life a torture? It is, as it is; and man has lived in this torture centuries upon centuries, from ancient history to the present day, in agony, in despair, in sorrow; and he doesn't find a way out of it. Therefore he invents gods, churches, all the rituals, and all that nonsense, or he escapes in different ways. What we are trying to do, during all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are, nor revolt against them. Revolt doesn't answer a thing. You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything. And to understand is to transform what is. 

I think that will be enough, won't it?” 

(--Jiddu Krishnamurti, cf. The Real Revolution, J. Krishnamurti Online) http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-video/the-real-revolution--1.php

 What is what is?

The profound What Is might be different that the quotidian what is.

We are called to relationally transmute  what is so that the profound ground reality -- probably called Being/Consciousness/Joyful Engagement -- might become itself again and again in a worrisome world constantly enticing us to mimic something else.

We are nothing else.

We are what is itself.

A hurry through

An Irish poet dies of a Friday at end of August through which, poet and month, "known and strange things pass."

Perhaps it is gift of time grown hazy, space full of mute friends, that stills and changes perspective into shutterblink nostalgia.

Postscript 

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(Poem by Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013, from THE SPIRIT LEVEL (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)

So it is given us to dwell "neither here nor there" but in curious shade of movement flickering rainy morning cedar tree holding silver ladder dripping now one drop from patient rung aside the house.

There's coffee to be made.

Maybe later tea.

Quaff.

Sole ascent.

No . . . hurry.