all falling things

A writer had asked whether Hitler could be included in any thinking about acceptance or compassion.

The oak leaves put me in mind of those who fell/jumped on 9/11.

As I walked the Trappist abbey road, the experience of how falling might be viewed appeared.

The connective interrelationality was an immediate glimpse.

along road, Trappist Abbey, Spencer MA

Haiku

     (for 9/11 jumpers and Hitler) 

Would that all falling things
Could drift to earth
As delicately and softly
As oak leaves in gentle breeze 

(--wfh) 

"In the beginning," Buber writes, "is the relation."

It was the phrasing. It was Buber’s, quoted by Rohr in Divine Dance. I traced it and found these words in an article:

Martin Buber's work marks the beginnings of a philosophical movement including thinkers like Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas that criticizes objectivity as the first or only way of understanding reality. These thinkers emphasize relationality and dialogue over empiricism and objectivity, arguing that objectivity must be understood as a secondary or contrived way of relating to the world. These thinkers critique the modern, Enlightenment understanding of the subject as a separated, substantial, rational entity opposed to a world of 'things in themselves.' The ego, the "I," before it is a separated entity capable of understanding, using, or willing objects, is dependent upon a relation to an un-objectifiable Other. 

For Buber, to be is to be in relation, in dialogue. "In the beginning," Buber writes, "is the relation[5](p 18)." This beginning is also a saying. To be a human being, for Buber, is to hold oneself in an attitude of relation by saying a "basic word." There are, Buber insists, two basic words, I-Thou and I-It. One cannot say the word Iwithout relating to a world outside the self. These two basic words mark two ways of being in relation to the world. I-It relationships are characterized by experiencing and using objects. These are one-way relationships. The I of I-It relations understands and experiences the world as one composed of objects locatable in space and time. This way of relating to the world makes no distinction between people and things. It is the domain of determinative causality. These relationships are constituted within the horizon of objective temporality, understood as a network of moments passing from future, to present, to past.

I-Thou relationships, on the other hand, are two-way relationships based in dialogue. One being encounters another with mutual awareness. I-Thou relationships are characterized by what Buber calls presentness. For Buber the present is not "the abstract point between past and future," but "like the eternal now of the mystic, it is the present of intensity and wholeness" and "exists only insofar as meeting and relation exist[6](p 58)." While the It of I-It relationships is determined by objective temporality, the Thou of I-Thou relationships resists being ordered in space and time. Buber writes, 

"The Thou appears in time, but in that of a process that is fulfilled in itself-a process lived through not as a piece that is a part of a constant and organized sequence but in a 'duration' whose purely intensive dimension can be determined only by starting from the Thou[5](p 30)."

(--from, Healing relationships and the existential philosophy of Martin Buber, by 

Scott, Scott, Miller, Strange, Crabtree, 

https://peh-med.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1747-5341-4-11  

  Then, Dogen Zenji, from the Genjo-koan the first chapter of the 75-volume version of Dogen Zenji's Shobogenzo.

(Text: section 8)  

Firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot turn back into firewood again. However, we should not view ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the dharma position of firewood and it has its own before and after. Although there is before and after, past and future are cut off. Ash stays at the position of ash and it has its own before and after. As firewood never becomes firewood again after it is burned and becomes ash, after person dies, there is no return to living. However, in buddha dharma, it is a never-changing tradition not to say that life becomes death. Therefore we call it no-arising. It is the laid-down way of buddha's turning the dharma wheel not to say that death becomes life. Therefore, we call it no-perishing. Life is a position at one time; death is also a position at one time. For instance, this is like winter and spring. We don’t think that winter becomes spring, and we don't say that spring becomes summer. http://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Dogen_Teachings/Genjokoan_Okumara.htm

In summary:

What is  

between 

 us

(nb: this is less a question than it is an answer only fit for haiku)

spare long thoughts

Someone wrote: “Fear of rejecting what is constantly affirmed to be true. Afraid of blasphemy.”

To which, four offerings:

   
      Blasphemy haiku

Nothing I say 

Will turn God away 

From turning to see 

How to get closer to me

  Blasphemy haiku 2 

God leans in 

As I lean in 

Seeking one another

Blasphemy haiku 3

Everything swirls crazy  

Outside and around me -- 

All I have is what is at center  

Holding still waiting my return

 Epilogue blasphemy

Do not mistake 

how metaphors Change

(an unchanging heart) 

Longing to hear response

In summary: Haiku-esque responses spare long thoughts.

(Who brings their computor to a silent monastic retreat?)

others' wise prayer

All Saints: all in heaven, known and unknown.

All Souls: all who've died, wherever they are.

For these, our attentive wish for their well-being.

Otherwise known as -- our prayers.

trappists, monks’ hour

3:30am listening to vigils in shaded side chapel
4:30am shikantaza on wood bench
5:am 28degrees touching frost on car window

you stand, you sit, you bow
there’s nothing to stand, sit, bow for --
it is just done, with awareness

favorable disposed toward

Some say God is in community.

Others look and listen long and hard and say God is community.

I contend we are a reluctant community.

Hence, God becomes our disinclination.

The very mystical Cappadocian Fathers of fourth-century eastern Turkey (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, and Basil of Caeserea) eventually developed some highly sophisticated thinking on what we soon called the Trinity. It took three centuries of reflection on the Gospels to have the courage to say it, but they circled around to the best metaphor they could find, and the Greek word they daringly came up with was perichoresis, or circle dance.

Whatever is going on in God is a flow, a radical relatedness, a perfect communion between Three—a circle dance of love. God is Absolute Friendship.

God is not just a dancer; God is the dance itself.

(--Richard Rohr, http://wmpaulyoung.com/god-is-a-dance/ 

I  long

to be 

inclined

"Ambiguous undulations as they sink," (--from poem, Sunday Morning)

(I'll take it from here, Wallace)

Pain comes and pain goes

Blessed be the name of the load

Some carry through the day

At blurry edge of discomfort

Looking anywhere to find relief

Distraction from diffident decay

...

(Above lines are not from Wallace Stevens poem which can be found here:) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/13261