haiku

The old man

cannot think of any

reason to die

at poetry yesterday in quarry hill, Ted read his poem about Bach played in Winchester Cathedral

Change

And everything changes

Night turning toward twilight

Sky showing moon, planets, stars and silence

Perhaps what we call God is longing for God, longing of God for us, longing of what we call creation for God with us

Thomas Merton's definition of contemplation as prayer "centered entirely on the presence of God." 

Clarity

Compassion

Creativity

Abiding kindness

Light below surface

To be seen

everything becomes enchanting with true sight

Yes.

To everything.

The Christian vision is that the world is a temple. If that is true, then our enemies are sacred, too. Who else created them but God? The ability to respect the outsider is probably the litmus test of true seeing. And it doesn't stop with human beings and enemies and the least of the brothers and sisters. It moves to frogs and pansies and weeds. Everything becomes enchanting with true sight. One God, one world, one truth, one suffering, and one love. All we can do is participate. I hope you enter the New Year with this awareness and an intention to join in with all your heart, mind, and body! 

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Perhaps the "image of God" is the form, semblance, appearance that we blithely call the world, or existence, or this reality.

We are created into this reality.

We come into the image of God yet do not comprehend what we are where we are.

We stand and sit and have our being within the standing and sitting and being of God. There is nothing other. This is what is, in place, in time, in imagination.

This world, however we understand it in perspectival, referential mode of calculation, is an appearance for contemplation.

Contemplation -- Imago Dei -- awareness activated.

Do I see? Do you see?

Do we see one, another?

If you woke from sleep this morning, you are the active contemplation of God locating Itself right where you are, I am.

There must be some egg nog in the fridge, don't you think?

William Carlos Williams said it for us

–Say it, no ideas but in things–
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident–
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained–
secret–into the body of the light! 

(--from, Paterson: Book I, William Carlos Williams)

that covers it

Haiku, by Chogo

I long for people --
Then again I loath them:
End of autumn.

Hito koi she  / hito mutsukashishi  / aki no kure 

(--death poem, by Chogo, died 3sept1806, age 45; in Japanese Death Poems, c.1986, Charles E Tuttle Company, p.153)

da sein, kein ende

The year, you say, is ending? 

No. 

Thursday will become Friday just as you and I become you and I. 

There being no end. 

Just becoming itself.

after stacking 3 cord of wood in 19 degree cold before first snowstorm

There is no one place.

Mind as Water, Mind as Ice
The Right Mind is the mind that does not remain in one place. It is the mind that stretches throughout the entire body and self. The Confused Mind is the mind that, thinking something over, congeals in one place.
(—Takuan Soho, "The Right Mind and the Confused Mind")

Find yourself there wherever you lose yourself.

No place to rest your head.

Mind has no rest.

It has only what it sees wherever it finds itself.

Itself -- such as it is.

Such, and nothing else.

the poem begins inside the imagined arrival looking back to the idea of starting out

Followers of the poor man from Assisi seem to point to a way back home that seems worth traveling:

We have heard this phrase so often that we don't get the existential shock of what "created in the image and likeness of God" is saying about us. If we could believe it, we would save ourselves ten thousand dollars in therapy! If this is true--and I believe it is--our family of origin is divine. It is saying that we were created by a loving God to be love in the world. Our core is original blessing, not original sin. Our starting point is positive and, as it is written in the first chapter of the Bible, it is "very good" (Genesis 1:31). We do have a good place to go home. If the beginning is right, the rest is made considerably easier, because we know and can trust the clear direction of our life's tangent.  

 The great illusion we must all overcome is the illusion of separateness. It is the primary task of religion to communicate not worthiness but union, to reconnect people to their original identity "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls this state of separateness "sin." God's job description is to draw us back into this primal and intimate relationship. "My dear people, we are already children of God; what we will be in the future has not yet been fully revealed, and all I do know is that we shall be like God" (1 John 3:2).

(--Richard Rohr OFM)  http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=2a176d2f-7dd7-4ad8-9c30-9945fe81e555&c=4d6fbfb0-7972-11e5-9400-d4ae529ce120&ch=4d742c80-7972-11e5-9400-d4ae529ce120

It's not what "I" have to reveal, but what "it" has to reveal.

The road reveals.

Each one step after another.

The intimate relationship.

MR. MULDOON: At least they weren’t speaking French 

when my father sat with his brothers and sisters, two of each, on a ramshackle bench 

at the end of a lane marked by two white stonesand made mouth music as they waited, chilled to the bone 

Fol-de-rol, fol-de-rol, fol-de-rol-di-oh 

for the bus meant to bring their parents back from town. 

It came and went. Nothing. One sister was weighed down 

By the youngest child. A grocery bag from a town more distant still, in troth.What started as a cough 

Fol-de-rol, fol-de-rol, fol-de-rol-di-oh 

would briefly push him forward to some minor renown 

then shove him back, oddly summery, down 

along the trench 

to that far-flung realm where, at least, they weren’t speaking French. 

(--from poem by Paul Muldoon, "At least they weren't speaking  French", from transcript to "on being" with Krista Tippet)  http://www.onbeing.org/program/paul-muldoon-a-conversation-with-verse/transcript/8282

It rains in Maine this morning. We've gotten through Christmas -- the culture of creating a dimension unseen but in fantasmic making -- time without appearance.

The way we see one another in heartbreaking appreciation.

When the World Says Hello

Imagine for a moment that everything you see, hear, smell, touch, and taste is your very best friend. The spoon in your hand and the distant sound of traffic; the raindrops running down your back and the smell of dirty laundry; the blue sky and the flavor of cumin—these are not mere passing encounters with two-dimensional items. Instead, imagine for a moment that everything you are experiencing is your very, very best friend saying hello.

—Michael Carroll, "Gently Bowing"