dreaming across the water a bright path.

The Secret History of ISIS, a Frontline Documentary, May 2016, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-secret-history-of-isis/

With wet cloth on head, deep chills, self imposed quarantine, aspirin, kombucha, two triscuits as meal, getting updated on Middle East sorrow and tragedy,

It is possible that terror and clashes of cultures have become steady state in a world gone unsteady in its spinning.

In the USA the politics of upcoming elections play out like a television reality show between two damaged candidates. In the background, organizations such as CIA, FBI, NSA, Military Intelligence Agencies, and local clairvoyants either don't see anything useful, or, seeing it, cannot share well with others to arrive at meaningful activity.

It is a hard time for the world. Our leaders have not been impressive with their decisions -- from Bush and Cheney to Obama and their cabinets and councils.

One of the benefits of not feeling well is a latitude for discouragement. And yet it seems that petty, personal, bourgeois fixations on the cult of personality and celebrity -- to even the smallest degree -- is a bland treachery of disproportionate ignorance as to what and how being in the world might possible mean. To see the bombs, beheadings, and blowhards masquerading as business as usual is disappointing.

I'm tired of all the God talk. It falls flat on my ears.

I turn to an O'Donough poem:

Swanlight
— John O’Donohue © 2001 

If it could say itself January
Might brighten its syllables on the frost
Of these first New Year days whose cold is blue. 

Meanwhile in this corner of its silence
A weak winter sun lowers down behind
The moor that rises away from the lake. 

Beyond reach of light, the shadowed water
Succumbs to this darkening of spirit
That would deny the bog today’s twilight. 

All of a sudden something else breaks through
To appear at the far end of the lake
In two diagrams of white, uneven light. 

I have never seen white so absolute
And alone, glistening in awkward form
Dreaming across the water a bright path. 

As it stirs and changes I see what it is:
Two swans have found the mirror in the lake
Where a V of horizon lets light through 

To make them light-source and light-shape in one.
Now they swim and fade through windows of reed
And disrobe the lake of apparition. 

I look and look into their vanishing
See nothing. Departing that perfect ground
I knew I had been hungry for a blessing.

                             (--Poem by John O’Donohue) 

We have need for a blessing.

I can’t quite fathom what that might look like.

men at war

Danish film, Krigen.

A war.

The complexity.

hard telling

Watching, during quarantine of weakened sudden bodily discomfort, several programs on Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, and the escalation of terror from the 70s to current.

“The writers task...is based on two commitments: the refusal to lie about what one knows; and resistance to oppression.” (--Albert Camus)

Shallow breaths and constant naps carry through 3 days of "what the heck is this?"

As for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a larger regimen of shallow breathing and more frequent naps should help moderate the belief that non Islam people should be killed.

Chiara

Grazie per essere un amico di Francesco.

creare ex nihilo alius

Yes

Tucked inside a several hour conversation she said, "consciousness corresponds with reality."

We'd exhausted the medical data, the complications and head scratching intricacies of possible solutions that crashed up against current knowledge base and mechanical contrivance capable of immediate implementation by even the most skillful hands on the delicate anatomy of compromised skeletal neck stem slippage.

Over the mysterious hundreds of miles allowing a conversation with no wires, only tumbersaulting nonlocal arising of words and sounds up east coast corridor assembling into the phrase -- consciousness corresponds with reality.

The limits of consciousness often dead end into belief. We are more used to the understanding that consciousness grasps reality, and makes of it something useful to the structures of society wherein the  grasper/maker has residence. In this case "reality" is circumscribed and fashioned into the operative thought structure of those grasping it.

But is there another way to see this?

What if what is calling to us is, not a grasping, but a corresponding?

Instead of setting reality into the current strictures of known experience, consciousness is invited -- called --  to ride with reality beyond current formulation, to co-respond, as the human mind, material elements, and creating imagination journey an unforeseen and unforeseeable continuing new emergence of knowledge and act, theoria et praxis, comparable and corresponding to the unveiling nature of creare ex nihilo alius (bringing forth out of nothing other).

To bring forth, or to create, is to correspond with what-is. It is to move through, move beyond, transcend, overcome, ascend, and allow the unknowing mind to engage a way of being in the world that calls for an interrelationality that cannot be grasped.

This creare ex nihilo alius (bringing forth out of nothing other) has implications for a whole bevy of disciplines. In theology, we don't try to grasp God. Rather we correspond with God. We learn with God, as God with us.

Overall, there is no separate anything. Everything is interrelational correspondence.

We go on.

We don't know how, we don't know why. We go on.

This not-knowing going on is a kind of trust that what will emerge in authentic interrelational correspondence will be sufficient for both the moment and the moving through the moment.

We have not yet.

We have not yet seen.

We have not yet seen what is emerging into our seeing.

We have not yet seen what is emerging into our seeing and (let's say it) loving correspondence with that which is nothing other.

at Sunday evening practice, the thought: is this my life

Views from various cushions, that is, before, eyes are lowered for Shikantaza.

In reality

there

is no

one

here

We sit to sit.

Breathe to breathe.

This is my life.

time moving

there it was

now

not

small flame in red glass

candle

suggests light

cares about birth

continuing through night

8.8

Katherine and Francis made it possible to say this: Katherine and Francis made it possible to say this.

With gassho I bow in their direction.

Which is, as we know, every which way looking over fingertips.

We've got 

to look 

out

after one 

another

what needs be said

White dog wanders into front room. Nestles between two chairs.

Package on sun porch says save one until Monday. New York bagels wait for cream cheese and lox and white fish in fridge.

Coffee made, two canisters and black machine.

Then I remember, everyone's away, no one is coming this morning.

Now that it is August it is more civilized. Breeze feels fresher. Brooks are bone dry. Sun is hot.

Visitors to Maine arrive at coast for swan song to summer, or so it seems..

Where do things go when they disappear?

“Almost nothing need be said when you have eyes.” (― Tarjei Vesaas, The Boat in the Evening)

It is summer.

Nothing need be said.