what time is it

Yes.

Snow and ice on roof

Water in walls

Fire in wood stove

What to do what to do

With water

Get wet

With fire

Get warm

With self

Get lost

Yes

in the waiting

In prison today we speak about allowing experience to leap from awareness and fall back into it without any cognizing. 

How to navigate a dualistic world with nondual glimpse, allowing experience its very loneliness enroute becoming Aloneness.

Kneeling

BY R. S. THOMAS

Moments of great calm, 

Kneeling before an altar 

Of wood in a stone church 

In summer, waiting for the God   

To speak; the air a staircase   

For silence; the sun’s light   

Ringing me, as though I acted   

A great rôle. And the audiences   

Still; all that close throng 

Of spirits waiting, as I, 

For the message. 

                         Prompt me, God; 

But not yet. When I speak,   

Though it be you who speak   

Through me, something is lost.   

The meaning is in the waiting.

(R. S. Thomas, "Kneeling" from The Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000. Copyright © 2004 by R. S. Thomas.)

This is what we do. We sit in silence with one another. We do walking meditation in slow circle. Then we converse. That's it. Simple and sweet.

We conclude it is the attention each places on each place, each moment, that begins the unrestrain which invites thought its unconstrained dissolution into pure experience.

"Do you embrace the emptiness or rush to fill it?" (--from intro to The Philosophy of Emptiness, by Gay Watson)

 The ordinary, it is the ordinary, practiced with non-cognized attentiveness.

A shovel with snow. Cup with tea. Dog with blue handball. Man with James Carroll book. Another repairing chain on meditation stick and bell. 

"Hic" of human realization that "this" -- here--  is everything we are.
"Haec" re-emphasizes what silence could not hold.
"Hoc" concurs we have to say something, but giggles quietly in the saying.

"Gib deine Schönheit immer hin"

When someone hands you knife pay attention to which way the blade is facing. 

Nor do you have to receive every gift offered. 

That being said, I am willing to receive the knife you offer even though it is extended blade first.

No need for wrapping.

I choose what is gift.

It will help spread butter and honey on rye toast.

Initiale 

Gib deine Schönheit immer hin
ohne rechnen und reden.
Du schweigst. Sie sagt für dich: Ich bin.
Und kommt in tausendfachem Sinn,
kommt endlich über jeden.  

(--poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, Das dichterische Werk von Rainer Maria Rilke)

Umwelt

I'm not sure

That's all I've got

Going forward

neti neti

Reuters reports: Islamic State shows burning of hostage, Jordan vows revenge

BY SULEIMAN AL-KHALIDI, AMMAN Tue Feb 3, 2015 2:27pm EST

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/03/us-mideast-crisis-killing-idUSKBN0L71XE20150203

Elsewhere, viewing responses to the news, an offering:

Meetingbrook Hermitage · Works at Mendicant 

Ok. Enough with the Muslim/non-Muslim, religion/ideology talk. 

It is more about a type of decadent rational consciousness that makes an arbitrary assessment of who/what is valuable and not so. It is a phase of consciousness that we’ve wallowed in for thousands of years. Fanatics only heighten the awareness of a moribund mental state.  

These examples are only the most recent ones. Cf. the Bible, Hiroshima, Spanish inquisition, Rwanda, My Lai, Mexican desert, spousal abuse. 

When our minds are stuck in either/or thinking, many suffer. When we embrace a wholeness that does not see “other” -- that sees only transparent holistic value in each thing, each person, itself, we are beginning a new consciousness called by Jean Gebser “Integral” consciousness.  

We can only prepare and hope for this mutation into whole-sight to take place.

high drift snow

morning after

He thinks he understands how the elderly die in flu season. After chills and fervor, when cough hurts and breathing comes in fits and starts, and say you cross the dooryard with orange toboggan to load wood from pile and ferry it back to barn, taking blue sled-shovel to remove snow from path to meditation bookshed,

the blowing wind and piercing cold already numbing hands, returning to house after that short time, inside, a flush of nausea seizing body, pulling off hat, coat, boots, gloves, flannel pants, now upstairs, dizzy with heart and stomach       a-twist, kneeling on bathroom rug, head on floor between hands, grasping for labored breaths,
fervent like a Muslim at prayer, bent body and focused mind, until waves of pious pranayama stabilize pulmonary fibrillation, returning to bed, warm dark brown blanket overseen by red white and gray sleeping bag, turn face to icon’d wall, and fall into rhythmic sleep, again.







The woman, later, who was working in the upper front room, said she'd come into the room to see if the person there was still breathing. Satisfied, she said, she left. No one heard her come and go.














Like the watchful gaze of life with death, coming and going, no fanfare, no explanation, no say in where or when.
















 
Simply, “Oh!"









Like passing lights

of moving car

in high drift snow

on rural road.

falling through love

Presentation. Purification. Candlemas. 

Archetypic mythic collective unconsciousness mother son birth light.

It doesn't matter whether one believes or doesn't believe. What matters is falling through empty awareness falling without fear through all possibilities of what presents itself. Falling through purifying release of opinion, concepts, preference and prejudice. Falling through illumination and insight opening heart/mind toward ineffable revelation of what is true, what is good, what is light.

If you want to call it love, ok. But it is love without ground. It is love itself. It does not belong to you, you do not deserve it, earn it, demand it. It is love itself.

We fall through it. We don't fall into it. We fall through it.

Glance and feel the passage.

when monks meander middle of night

The events in Phoenix the last two weeks, the game and hoopla yesterday, the celebrity, capitalism, and consumerism -- all seem like some odd aberration of high kitsch culture in a cabaret of circus sideshow irrelevance. But that's probably the flu talking.

Othello:
My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs;
She swore, in faith 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange;
'Twas pitiful. 'twas wondrous pitiful,
She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd
That heaven had made her such a man,

     Othello Act 1, scene 3, 158–163

Marshawn Lynch, not given the ball the final play, had nothing to do with the interception, did not score, and an alternate narrative is told today.

What does this narrative have to do with prayer?

We have little time existing. Little place in cosmos. Little understanding and little ability to think. It's what makes us so strange.

Passing.

Strange.

as well as can be unexpected

Celebrities gather at super bowl. Skiers gather at snow bowl. Churchgoers gather at preachers' reach for souls. In this room polyphony and c-boost occupy my retiro ermita.

Some of us withdraw from view. We are whatever names pronounced at our idiosyncrasies.

Mostly, the eremitic life, in relative or stark seclusion from society, is suspect. I am suspect. I suspect myself.

Congress, Executive, and Supreme Judiciary seek to protect the American way of life. Police forces militarize to beat down anyone in vocal assembly disagreeing with the approach to implement that way.

In my hermetic aging I find the trend toward militarism and corporate oligarchy difficult to warm to.

Football players, ski sprayers, and church pray-ers all worship at their cathedrals of public joy and ceremony.

In this small room time ignores inquiry into any measurement other than this inhalation, this exhalation, this glance, this listening.

Complacency of the timeless watchful falling away of anything I’ve thought anything I planned anything other than this, and this, and this.

“All that we ever know of the physical world is an inference from our experience.” (--Peter Russell, Reality of Consciousness, SAND Dialogue), http://www.scienceandnonduality.com/the-reality-of-consciousness-peter-russell/

One day, as if by magic, there will be no awareness of this. What occupied this space typing words will cease and disappear. They will say, "he died." Words of that sort. Not much will follow. Just as not much preceded.

I wonder at this world and this existence. I've stopped asking "why?" and can hardly remember if I ever did ask such a question. (Of course I did.)

How and when I will die is stillness to be seen.

For now, medieval music of a Sunday morning.

All is, (well), as it is.

as dog climbs stairs, thudding down next to bed

How wonderful 

to be no-

body!

To find no-

mind where-

in to dwell.