Can you see the other side?

Endings and passings.

All souls and sensibilities.

We're looking at next year's new soil scattered colorfully into rust brown all through woods and mountain.

Say Yes Quickly
 
Forget your life. Say God is Great. Get up.
You think you know what time it is. It’s time to pray.
You’ve carved so many little figurines, too many.
Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar.
Reach your long hands out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, “How are you?”
and no one says “How aren’t you?”

Tomorrow you’ll see what you’ve broken and torn tonight,
thrashing in the dark. In side you
there’s an artist you don’t know about.
He’s not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you’re causing terrible damage.
If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love,
you’re helping people you don’t know
and you have never seen.

Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
if you know, if you’ve known it
from before the beginning of the universe.

(Poem by Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi )

holiness

Holiness consists of being oneself.

Happy All Saints' Day!

Be what, who, how you are!

no cell is not waiting

Time of the Thin Place.

Saints and Spirits preserve us!

Against Certainty                 

There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us.
Each time I think “this,” it answers “that.”
Answers hard, in the heart-grammar’s strictness. 

If I then say “that,” it too is taken away. 

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
When the cat waits in the path-hedge,
no cell of her body is not waiting.
This is how she is able so completely to disappear. 

I would like to enter the silence portion as she does. 

To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live,
one shadow fully at ease inside another.

  (Poem by Jane Hirshfield)

Time to disappear.

Taking away certainty, only what is real remains.

Baseball season ends in Boston

Learned meetingbrook alumnus died last Saturday.
He mumbled to himself.
We wish him rest

Sam's question

Hello anger my old friend.

Because we imagine anger is never a good thing, it is easy to think we should practice simply not being angry. But that approach is too general and abstract. It’s important for each of us to be precise, to be real, to be personal and honest, to find out exactly what my anger is. To do that we need to ask ourselves lots of questions about its actual nature.   (--Nancy Baker, “Precious Energy” in Tricycle)

Anger visits often. But it doesn't arrive kicking and sputtering and punching. That's what occurs when it is not received and welcomed as a stranger, invited to sit a while, brewing tea or coffee, asking What's up? How have you been? What are you working on these days?

Anger is the remedy for realization something is being violated. It is first responder first out the door making present the demand for attention the need for something to happen.

Anger is not by nature violent. Not irrational. Not cruel. Not ipso facto destructive. Anger is alarm clock calling us into stark show-up.

Many people dress up their anger in costume. They paint smiley faces on masks and pretend to be sweetness or reasonableness or, noblesse oblige, a superior view patronizing or posturing.

Some people go all religious and righteous and forgive you or themselves before even addressing why anger has shown up and what it wants. The don't want equilibrium, they want exceptionalism.

Others pretend there is no anger, only correction of erroneous attitudes and perceived injustice by means of vigilante psychological or physical violence. These are dangerous members of our human family.

These days anger sips coffee from Canada and waits for English muffin to darken in toaster. 

In the sipping silence I hear Sam Manning's signature question: "So, what are you working on these days?"

Sam always cheers me. As does his question. So does the chance to listen quietly to the dialogue ensuing.

Dwell poetically! 

Invite each stranger into the conversation. 

Feast together.

This is what is happening; let us be glad and rejoice in it(self)

Sounding morning from cat in litter box bus on Barnestown bird in dooryard. There is a space we call world a time we know as today a sense that complexity of personage and perception is unfolding continuity from this to this to this.

Each person falls from sleep into mythology that carries them from covers to contradictions to bathroom functions to considerations of next and next and next.

Whether empty house empty cardboard box empty narrative or empty mind, each moves into stare of morning back from night.

If you plot revenge if you plan to get somewhere on time if you pray toward some mystery or watch from window the coming to be of chilly autumn air we are just this moment attending the disclosure of light in an unknowing time.

As October so November the naming distinctions that seem to collect recollection and storyline for busy and engaged people off to do or meet or plan or fix or stare into nothing other than what is what is what is. 

Coffee. Yes brew coffee. Try to recall what you used to think used to think was the purpose the end aim the meaning of waking in the morning. Does coffee help? Meaning no longer does.

Does anything replace meaning?

No.

Absent meaning comes bare attention to what reveals itself.

What reveals itself?

Only bare attention only wondering attention only mere attention only alert attention only loving gaze without expectation without knowing.

Morning belongs to itself. Day belongs to itself. Morning is itself. Day is itself.

Once, a very long time ago, people longed to be favored by god to be helped by god to be allowed to look on god and be free of cares woes fears and disease.

Today is once become itself.

Today is itself becoming once upon a time.

Today is upon us we are upon today.

"Itself" finds itself in everything it sees feels tastes smells hears.

Only itself is nothing else.

Only itself is nothing else is.

Find itself musician and you will be what you in ended search playfully see.

Seeing perhaps God as mystery is mystery itself something difficult or impossible to understand or explain. Nor needing to.

Itself is mystery of god present without knowing otherwise.

To be otherwise is to be what you see without thinking it or you to be other.

Wisdom resides in nothing other.

Than this.

Itself.

finally

Night

Darkens,

Quietly.

then, is heard, no more

Evening nears.

I realize, like most everybody,  I am insane.

C. G. Jung once had a patient who believed she lived on the moon. So Jung met her there. As she realized he took her experiences as valid, she told a sad tale of vampires and isolation. Eventually, this woman who'd been abused as a girl made her way back to earth. Patients like her had taught Jung that the fact of a person’s madness did not in any way invalidate the richness and authenticity of their personal mythology. 

(--Craig Chalquist, PhD, from Amazon Review of documentary film, Jupiter’s Wife, {1995}, by Michel Negroponte, about Maggie Cogan)

That’s not it exactly. Not merely insane. Rather, caught inside a story.

Told by a fool.

Full of sound and fury.

You know the rest.

MACBETH 

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. 

(--from Act 5, Scene 5, The Tragedy of Macbeth, by William Shakespeare)  

 As Shakespeare elsewhere writes, the rest is silence.

gathered, then, dispersed

Morning becomes afternoon.

Quakers come.

The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness. In the distant past, this recognition already came to a few individuals. A man called Gautama Siddhartha, who lived 2,600 years ago in India, was perhaps the first who saw it with absolute clarity. Later the title Buddha was conferred upon him. Buddha means “the awakened one.” At about the same time, another of humanity’s early awakened teachers emerged in China. His name was Lao Tzu. He left a record of his teaching in the form of one of the most profound spiritual books ever written, the Tao Te Ching. 

To recognize one’s own insanity, is of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence. A new dimension of consciousness had begun to emerge on the planet, a first tentative flowering. Those rare individuals then spoke to their contemporaries. They spoke of sin, of suffering, of delusion. They said, “Look how you live. See what you are doing, the suffering you create.” They then pointed to the possibility of awakening from the collective nightmare of “normal” human existence. They showed the way. (--from chapter 1, The New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle) http://res.allpdftools.com/allpdftools/pdf-download-resources/A_New_Earth.pdf

Quakers go.

Blessed be the name of silence!

Sunday morning; the songs they were, singing

Sunday morning.

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them” 
(― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island)

A good time to step outside our demands.

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”     

 (--Thomas Merton, The Letters of Thomas Merton)

A good time to sit inside life's suchness.