A saint is with what is here, now, this. God is, so, with each in this way

Mit-Sein (with-Being).

Mit-Gott (with-God)

"Today is the Solemnity of All Saints, a holy day of obligation. The Church honors all those who are with God, the innumerable men and women who chose fidelity to Christ." (--from Divine Office, About Today, Feast of All Saints)

"Obligation" is our being tied together. It is our responsibility to our brother and sister beings.

"Christ" is the creative, loving, assisting manifestation of God.

This is what a saint is, one who is with God.

And all of us, each of us, is with God.

We might not yet realize it.

But it is true.

We are.

Look at this truth.

This will be seen.

All, hallows

The situation, occurring, gives words to the poet to tell of the occurring situation.

Hence, the poem.

A saint is one gathered from two enacting and embodying what is meant by being in the world.

fading calls for help

Domestic violence, men drugging women then sexually taking advantage, or, punching and bullying, these are indicators something is very wrong with our men, our culture, our way of life.

Frankly, I think it is high time that these violent crimes begin to cost men something. And that might mean that it has to cost those of us who love them something as well. I have shared in these pages before that I do not romanticize patriarchal families because I did not grow up in one. My father was a complicated, brilliant, hilarious and violent man, and my home life and childhood were infinitely better after he left our home. His leaving and his alcoholism cost me a father. But it saved me a mother. 

It is high time that we decide as a nation that the symbolic slaying (and perhaps the actual locking up) of some of our most beloved men is an entirely reasonable price to pay for creating a world safe for women and children, a world where we don’t accede to narratives that convince us yet again that predators are really “good guys.”

(-- in Salon, by Brittney Cooper, The Terrible Truth About Bill Cosby, October 29, 2014.)  http://www.alternet.org/terrible-truth-about-bill-cosby?page=0%2C0&akid=12419.268057.TpRu90&rd=1&src=newsletter1025176&t=10 

Wealthy athletes, politicians, corporate bigwigs, and celebrities can pay off the offended parties or prey on the pass given to the notorious and famous so as to avoid career ending penalties. But the majority of women are left to cower under threat and indifference.

Stupidity is one thing. Ignorance, another. But society’s belief in the untoward and unkind as a matter of course is an arrogance of significant weight leaning heavily on the fragile bridge of authentic connection between one another.

When that falls, we will hear the fading calls for help disappear in a deep darkness we have created.

persevere and insist

There's an election next week. 

Telephone rings with long messages touting candidates who either want to combat those currently in office, or, become the focus of next disenchanting election.

So many words.

What changes when we free the monastic vocation from the attitude of mono-cultural dominance? Nothing and everything. Let me give three examples of traditional values of the religious, East and West, that can be reinvigorated by the encounter of monks in dialogue qua monks. Paradoxically enough, the first, the classical contemptus mundi of the monk, today takes a new and more subtle turn: not abandoning the world (which is practically impossible), but swimming against the current, like living fish in the rivers, without rage or violence, but with poise and elegance, that is, with love and patience. “La paciencia todo lo alcanza,” used to say Teresa of Avila. Patience does not give up, rather, it perseveres and insists. It never gets discouraged, because it does not believe that a single individual, system, doctrine, or religion has the total answer. Humility, to me, means the courage to be imperfect, not finished.Secondly, the monastic vocation has meant “solitude.” But solitude does not mean isolation. On the contrary, solitude demands that I be truly myself so that I may share without encumbrances solidarity with the entire reality: Buddhakaya, karma, mystical Body, universal love. The greatest scandal of human history is religious wars—be they explicitly or implicitly religious. Even the fact that sometimes they can disguise themselves under the cloak of religion shows our responsibility: “Not of the world,” but in the world—which the “Father” loved so much.Thirdly, the monastic “calling” is ever new. It does not repeat itself, and it has no blueprint; it is not prescribed by any law. It needs to be not just discovered, but created by our cooperation with the very dynamism of reality, by holy “obedience,” that is, by attentive listening (obaudire) to the “divine” Voice—which is the Hindu name for revelation (sruti). It is not enough to “imitate” the Buddha, Christ, God. We have to become the Buddha, Christ, God—without asking like Peter, “What about John?” “You follow me” was the answer. 

(--From “The New Monk” by Raimon Panikkar)

The first thing to realize is silence.

After that realization, the eloquent emptiness will approach and introduce you to no meaning beyond the origin of meaning -- the ever present origin without parallel or perimeter.

Rowing around Curtis Island today, Saskia speaking on phone with woman several states away about the troubles she tries to navigate in her life. A maritime colloquy replete with passing tugboat and wind-pushed swells. The phonecall ends as we come into territory of no channel buoys, empty moorings, and floats on the hard.

The woman several states away has the answer already.

What must follow is courage to live it in her own life.

We tie up at dock, the only small boat remaining on the expanse of empty length.

Home from the sea.

Home is for all to see.

Prayer for her and all like her in troubled waters. 

Insisting silence, persisting, persevering prayer.

is love seeing practice through

A monk is one among many.

One who looks.

Seeing what is there is the practice of monastics.

As love is practicing the monk with being seen.

renew, face, earth

twilight before dawn

slim cat jumps to windowsill

fresh air fills night room

will do, now, through and through

Tires role Barnestown Road. Winds chant late October. Chimes tell their fidelity sounding what passes through them.

I will sit in zendo. Last night compline was sung in candlelight. That’s what occurs.

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]; July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, just the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is “The map is not the territory”.    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

We follow clues. They call us nearer what we think we are looking at. Our mind jumps to opinion, conclusion, and sets up rules regarding what appears to threaten our temporary belief. We become miserable with held opinions.

“The map is not the territory"

The expression "the map is not the territory" first appeared in print in a paper that Alfred Korzybski gave at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1931:^[1] In Science and Sanity, Korzybski acknowledges his debt to mathematician Eric Temple Bell, whose epigram "the map is not the thing mapped" was published in Numerology.^[2]

• A) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory...

• B) A map is not the territory.

The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves"^[3] in a number of paintings including a famous work entitled The Treachery of Images, which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe"). In The Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan rehashed the argument— that all media are "extensions" of our human senses, bodies and minds.
This concept occurs in the discussion of exoteric and esoteric religions. Exoteric concepts are concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and languageconstructs, such as mathematics. Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) can that experience be fully understood.
Lewis Carroll, in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), made the point humorously with his description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile". A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
Laura Riding, in her poem "The Map of Places" (1927), deals with this relation: "The map of places passes. The reality of paper tears."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map–territory_relation

Downstairs, yesterday’s coffee will do.

Wood is stacked solidly out by cabin.

God is the silence beneath silence.

Neither map, nor territory, God is the saying of such and such, thus and so, without space, without end, without and within.

Saying with and without words or sound.

I love God.

Here.

There.

And, now, through and through.