Relative

Imagine being delighted it is 18 degrees.

a...b...c... (let's start at the very beginning)

Remedial.

"The doctors said they think he went into a coma while he was driving, went off the road, ran the car into one of your road signs. Too lazy to look at where you are, to read the mountains and the clouds, you people need road signs everywhere."
(--Whiskey Jack to Shadow, p.512, American Gods, by Neil Gaiman)

Something important to think about.  We've forgotten how to read.

Remediate remedial reading.

  riˈmēdēəl / adjective 

1. giving or intended as a remedy or cure

Dawn, minus eight degrees

Is dawning.

Where am I?

Dawn is dawning.

Of itself

Not one thing is true; it’s all true

At end, life seems a curious exposition of images conjured from dream-state narratives running concurrently on two dozen neural pathways hitchhiking backcountry on currents of snowy breeze.

“None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you — even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.
Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.
So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Not a word of it is literally true. Even so, the next thing that happened, happened like this:” 

 (p.508, American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, 2001)

 In the dream a friend is shot through the right side of torso. I hide behind counter of coffee shop. Earlier, another friend is shot dead on a Mexico beach trying to convince some men not to take his backpack. That, as the perennially confused say, actually happened. Later again, near Pittsburgh, a woman who knew the man in the first dream died of lung cancer in her late forties after many cigarettes and a lot of dancing.

I think of them the way water thinks of icicles as unending stability.

Phenomenology, on the contrary, seeks to show that the everyday world is as self sufficient, and self-intelligible  as the objects of theory. It cannot and need not be made intelligible in terms of anything else; rather, it can account for the possibility and place of theory. The world is what we directly understand and in terms of which one can see how nature, equipment, persons, etc. fit together and make sense. Thus worldliness and Dasein’s correlative understanding of being are the proper themes for ontology. 

(p.122, Being-in-the-World, A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, by Hubert L. Dreyfus, 1991) 

Dead? What does that mean? 

In the world of dream and imagination it has no particular relevance. In the realm of God death is unaccountably irrelevant. It seems one possible reason many have trouble with God is they believe in death.

Blondel’s style of reading is to read a text through fully, eschewing polemics and taking of reified positions until the doctrines advanced in a text have been adequately understood. Then he proceeds to develop these doctrines or theses to their fullest extent, acting as if they were true in order too see what sort of consequences they would have for the thinking and acting subject. The aim is to assess the adequacy of the doctrines as the representation of a philosophical position, and this consists in two parts. First, there is the question of the adequacy of the representation. Second there is the question of the adequacy of the developed philosophical position itself. The goal of such a reading is to allow a doctrine or philosophical position to provide evidence of its own inadequacy on its own grounds, by indicating to us the extent to which it is true and able to provide an account of itself immanently, and by thereby indicating to us the extent to which it is only relatively true and insufficient, without thereby being simply false.
(-about Maurice Blondel, 1861-1949, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) http://www.iep.utm.edu/blondel/

 Death is the meditation of unimaginative functionalism.

Sure, biological functions that sustain a living organism cease.

But energy and matter seem to have a different contemplation in their imagination. We humans seem more constrained in our comprehension.

Consider differently: A pause. A caesura. A comma.

A gassho, a bow, an asperative prayer.

Then, the next thing happens, with or without recognition by that which we like to call “ourselves” -- this carbon-based consciousness.

I would be willing to attest solemnly to this as long as you are willing to consider “Not a word of it is literally true.”

But that it is all true.

Before sleep

-37 wind chill in Maine. 

Poor dears and deer 

and small critters

 in arctic cold tonight. 

May each find safety, 

warmth, and shelter!

Now, when nothing appears, we can see...

No one there.

No one here.

No.

One is never not anywhere.

Retrieving

To sit in God with silence.

To sit with silence.

To sit with.

To sit.

Is all.

Is, all.

Is silence with.

Is silence with God.

Is sitting silent in God.

Is silently sitting as God is.

Of God, Mary, Mother: An Experience of Apposition

Be apposite of what we think we are.

aujourd’hui

V: Domine labia mea aperies. 

     V: Thou O Lord wilt open my lips. 

R: Et os meum annunciabit laudem tuam. 

     R: And my mouth shall declare thy praise. 

V: Deus in adiutorium meum intende. 

     V: Incline unto my aid O God. 

R: Domine ad adiuvandum me festina. 

     R: O Lord make haste to help me.               

Let’s be of God, as Mary, Mother!

De Dieu, Marie, Mère.

We must consider first what it means to be "of" something.

The suggestion is origin, source, participation, identity, apposition.

Mary is “of God" mother as you are "of God" apposite.

ap·po·site  adj.

 Strikingly appropriate and relevant. ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from Latin appositus, past participle of apponere 'apply,’ from ad- ‘toward’ + ponere ‘put.’ apt in the circumstances or in relation to something: an apposite quotation | the observations are apposite to the discussion.1. well suited for the purpose; appropriate; apt
[C17: from Latin appositus placed near, from appōnere, from pōnere to put, place]  { dictionary.com + Apple}

Be Mother of God, Mary!

Be apposite of God, friends!

(From FREELANG - HAPPY NEW YEAR in many languages): 

DUTCH gelukkig nieuwjaar
ENGLISH happy new year
FRENCH  bonne année
FRISIAN lokkich neijier
GERMAN   Frohes neues Jahr / prosit Neujahr
GREEK  Καλή Χρονιά (kali chronia / kali xronia) / Ευτυχισμένος ο Καινούριος Χρόνος (eutichismenos      o kainourgios chronos) 
HEBREW    שנה טובה (shana tova)
IRISH GAELIC   ath bhliain faoi mhaise
ITALIAN   felice anno nuovo / buon anno
JAPANESE  あけまして　おめでとう　ございます (akemashite omedetô gozaimasu
LATIN felix sit annus novus
PERSIAN   سال نو مبارک (sâle no mobârak)
RUSSIAN С Новым Годом (S novim godom)
TIBETAN tashi delek / losar tashi delek

http://www.freelang.net/expressions/newyear.php

 It is a new time for new seeing and new being

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!