as near as near can be

The elderly man is growing afraid of more and more things. He doesn't leave home. His wife is unsure she can care for hisself without exhausting herself. Their longtime house guest pitches in. There's only so much can be done. Full Alzheimer's is near as noon to morning.

This is everyday. Everywhere. With so many.

Loving God means trusting what is taking place.

Trusting what is taking place is near to God.

Not far.

Near.

An old man's love of dogs near.

he says there's a straight line from schools to prisons

A man I know worries that police are acting out the fear that underlies the current insecurities of this country.

He thinks we no longer believe our best interests are important to law enforcement and political/corporate types who are acting from their own fears and ambitions.

I tell him he might be right.

And there we are.

Stuck in the middle of a sinking boat far from shore in a turbulent sea.

It is night.

Dawn, a long way off.

And in the end...

Golden Slumbers,  Carry that Weight, The End

Once there was a way,
to get back homeward,
Once there was a way,
to get back home

Sleep pretty darling do not cry,
and I will sing a lullaby
Golden slumbers fill your eyes,
smiles awake you when you rise

Sleep pretty darling do not cry,
and I will sing a lullaby

Once there was a way,
to get back homeward,
Once there was a way,
to get back home

Sleep pretty darling do not cry,
and I will sing a lullaby

Boy you're gonna carry that weight,
carry that weight for a long time
Boy you're gonna carry that weight,
carry that weight for a long time

I never give you my pillow,
I only send you my invitations
And in the middle of the celebrations,
I break down

Boy you're gonna carry that weight,
carry that weight for a long time
Boy you're gonna carry that weight,
carry that weight for a long time

Oh yeah, all right,
are you gonna be in my dreams tonight?

Love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you
Love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you
Love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you
Love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you
Love you, love you, love you, love you, love you, love you

And in the end,
the love you take,
is equal to the love you make,
Ah

Songwriters
LENNON, JOHN WINSTON / MCCARTNEY, PAUL JAMES
cf. video: Song, Paul McCartney, Golden Slumbers , Carry That Weight , The End

questioning...what you are...seeing

We all look.

Some come close to seeing what they are looking at.

A rare few see what is actually there.

ASK A SAGE 

Question: Is it within my power to discover something new? 

Erwin Schrödinger replies: “The task is . . . not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”   

(--from, Irish Times, Unthinkable: Are there truths that can’t be spoken? Cultivating ‘a sense of wonder that the world exists’ is central to Wittgenstein’s philosophy)   http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/unthinkable-are-there-truths-that-can-t-be-spoken-1.2347315  

 This is practice and mystery worth contemplating.

as water through the best-laid roofs

Paschal Foley ofm in 1966 was right to interrupt his peregrinating peripatetic philosophy lecture a block from the beach in New Hampshire to tell us that when all else fails in life, "Try philosophy."

This Franciscan priest alluded to faith failing, relationships failing, career failing, and inevitably, health failing. He suggested, like Camus of Sisyphus, it is the pauses of thought thinking itself in the midst of numbing senseless world-wearying shenanigans that we might find an oasis insight of passing sanity in the parched sands of contemporary culture.

I liked him for that. Then. And now.

People often wonder why there appears to be no progress in philosophy, unlike in natural science, and why it is that after some three millenniums of philosophical activity no dramatic changes seem to have been made to the questions philosophers ask. The reason is because people keep asking the same questions and perplexed by the same difficulties. Wittgenstein puts the point rather directly: “Philosophy hasn’t made any progress? If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress?” Philosophy scratches at the various itches we have, not in order that we might find some cure for what ails us, but in order to scratch in the right place and begin to understand why we engage in such apparently irritating activity. Philosophy is not Neosporin. It is not some healing balm. It is an irritant, which is why Socrates described himself as a gadfly. 

This is one way of approaching the question of life’s meaning. Human beings have been asking the same kinds of questions for millenniums and this is not an error. It testifies to the fact that human being are rightly perplexed by their lives. The mistake is to believe that there is an answer to the question of life’s meaning. As Douglas Adams established quite some time ago, the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything will always be “42” or some variation of 42. Namely, it will be something really rather disappointing.  

The point, then, is not to seek an answer to the meaning of life, but to continue to ask the question. This is what Frank did in his life and teaching. David Ellis tells a story of when Frank was in hospital, and a friend came to visit him. When the friend could not find Frank’s room, he asked a nurse where he might find Professor Cioffi. “Oh,” the nurse replied, “you mean the patient that knows all the answers.” At which point, a voice was heard from under some nearby bedclothes, “No, I know all the questions.”  

We don’t need an answer to the question of life’s meaning, just as we don’t need a theory of everything. What we need are multifarious descriptions of many things, further descriptions of phenomena that change the aspect under which they are seen, that light them up and let us see them anew. That is what Frank was doing with his quotations, with his rich variety of particulars. They allow us to momentarily clarify and focus the bewilderment that is often what passes for our “inner life” and give us an overview on things. We might feel refreshed and illuminated, even slightly transformed, but it doesn’t mean we are going to stop scratching that itch. In 1948, Wittgenstein wrote, “When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.” 

(--from, THE STONE, There Is No Theory of Everything, By SIMON CRITCHLEY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2015 2:30 PM, NYTimes)http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/there-is-no-theory-of-everything/?emc=eta1&_r=0 

On Friday we had the final forum of our course on Philosophy and Code of the Warrior with men at Maine State Prison. Chris' shakuhachi flute opened the session toward silence. Four men presented their thoughts and findings. Discussion and personal experience followed.

Including, from Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995), this fragment:

Spiritual exercises are required for the healing of the soul. Like the Stoics, the Epicurians advise us to meditate upon and assimilate, "day and night," brief aphorisms or summaries which will allow us to keep the fundamental dogmas "at hand." For instance, there is the well-known tetrapharmakos. or four-fold healing formula: "God presents no fears, death no worries. And while good is readily attainable, evil is readily endurable."                             (Hadot, p.87)

Philosophy is not the knowing of truth; it is the love of wisdom.

Wisdom goes through uncertainty and failure as water through the best-laid roofs, until it comes to rest on our willingness to speak to one another with an open trying to find our own way through everything we see.

No theory.

Just our experience of everything.

reading zen master on prayer at practice tonight

Remembrance

Means

Embodying 

What comes to mind

Now and forever

Happy New Year!