Saturday Morning Practice, bell chant

• Into 

• As 

• With

Three options.

Which one fits between:

“Seeing”

      
 (and)

“One’s true nature”?

lament

(From Wikipedia)

lament or lamentation is a passionate expression of grief, often in music, poetry, or song form. The grief is most often born of regret, or mourning. Laments can also be expressed in a verbal manner, where the participant would lament about something they regret or someone they've lost, usually accompanied by wailing, moaning and/or crying.^[1] Laments constitute some of the oldest forms of writing and examples are present across human cultures. 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lament

Lament we do.

can fools be turned around

this country

suffers

sloof

gladly

what we spoke of in prison today

As it is
contrasts
As we are

until

As it is
and
As we are

coincide.

(Ah, kensho!)

on thich nhat hanh, love, from brain pickings, maria popover

Echoing legendary Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki’s memorable aphorism that “the ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow,” Nhat Hanh considers how the notion of the separate, egoic “I” interrupts the dialogic flow of understanding — the “interbeing,” to use his wonderfully poetic and wonderfully precise term, that is love:

Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower can only inter-be with all of us… Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that his suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is his own happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering.

The remainder of How to Love explores the simple, profoundly transformative daily practices of love and understanding, which apply not only to romantic relationships but to all forms of “interbeing.” Complement it with John Steinbeck’s exquisite letter of advice on love to his teenage son and Susan Sontag’s lifetime of reflections on the subject, then revisit the great D.T. Suzuki on how Zen can help us cultivate our character.

(—from Brain Pickings, Maria Popova) https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/31/how-to-love-thich-nhat-hanh/

silence of

road empty

reading Friday

middle night

cool temperature

I note

I have

nothing to

say only

the silence

of it

what’s left us

Paul Simon wrote, ’Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.’

Big and bully seem to have become standard in our culture and country these days.

I remember

other

wise

the circumstance, poetics, and semiotics of living/dying

At hospice gathering yesterday we speak about what might be called the semiotics of living/dying.

       *semiotic

/ˌsɛmɪˈɒtɪk; ˌsiːmɪ-/ adjective1. relating to signs and symbols, esp spoken or written signs2. relating to semiotics 3.of, relating to, or resembling the symptoms of disease; symptomatic             Word Origin C17: from Greek sēmeiōtikos taking note of signs, from sēmeion a sign Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Cite This Source 

Word Origin and History for semiotic adj.1620s, “of symptoms, relating to signs of diseases,”from Greek semeiotikos "significant," also "observant of signs," adjective form of semeiosis "indication,"from semeioun "to signal, to interpret a sign," from semeion "a sign, mark, token," from sema "sign" (see semantic). Its use in psychology dates to 1923. Related: Semiotical (1580s). Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
Cite This Source

Our culture is reluctant to observe the signs of dying and death. 

In hospice we learn from the poet Hölderlin and philosopher Heidegger:

In "What Calls for Thinking" Heidegger describes our concealing linguistic familiarity as "common speech" and implicitly proposes that poetic language steps toward resolving that problem by using uncommon speech. According to him, “We meet [the common speech] on all sides, and since it is common to all, we now accept it as the only standard.”21 When this common speech becomes “current speech” by invading the consciousness and the communication of the species we begin to conceal, to seal off options. That is part of the cost of quick, efficient communication: we no longer have to think very deeply about the words themselves. We rarely have to think deeply at all because the prosaic nature of our language does not call for it. Continuing the previous thought, Heidegger says this split from true thinking comes, “as soon as we regard the common as the only legitimate standard, and become generally incapable of fathoming the commonness of the common.”22 

Holderlin interested Heidegger particularly because his poetry uses uncommon speech to depart; “to inhabit the formerly habitual proper speaking of language.”23 Along the lines of Heidegger’s previous claim that the pre-Socratics used aletheia more as uncovering than truth, Heidegger thinks that humans used to speak much more carefully and properly in their communication. Referring back to Plato’s fateful truth-as-supremacy turn, Rorty says that Heidegger wants to “direct our attention to the difference between inquiry and poetry, between struggling for power and accepting contingency.”24 Heidegger sees the Greeks as doing philosophy as much in the poetry of the language they used as in anything else. They had no previous tradition on which to draw, no “accepted” terminology about which to debate, so their language had to be particularly meaningful, particularly poetic. 

In light of this, Holderlin’s lines from a draft of “Mnemosyne” are particularly meaningful:

We are a sign that is not read, 

We feel no pain, we almost have  

Lost our tongue in foreign lands.

Common language does not require us to read signs very deeply, whether those signs be beings in the world or other humans. Heidegger sees us as losing “our tongue in foreign lands.” We still communicate, certainly, but our tongue and heritage are not often enough the aletheia of the pre- Socratics, the tongue that spoke in the world instead of breezing over it. (—from,  Poetic Uncovering in Heidegger, by Ben Rogers)

We are the signs that are not read.

We do not feel the pain of others in our surround who undergo the oblique approach of death.

We have almost lost our ability to gracefully speak with one another about the circumstance, poetics, and semiotics of uncovering and presencing one another’s real meaning.

* yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella  no me salvo yo.  (I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save  it, I do not save myself.)                   —Jose Ortega y Gasset We are still infants in our abilities to see and speak what is here. We continue to refuse wisdom because we do not like where it comes from. Is reference to that which is yet beyond us while residing within us something we still cannot recognize? Domine, labia mea aperies.- Et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.  (Lord, open my lips.— And my mouth will proclaim your praise.) (--Invitatory) It is time to begin to read the sign we are and the sign that surrounds us as well as the sign that appears before us in the poetics and circumstance of one another. From Rachel Naomi Remen: The Buddhists talk about samsara, the world of illusion. It is the place that most of us live. Mistaking illusion for reality is said to be the root cause of our suffering. Yet in some immensely elegant way suffering itself can release us from illusion. Often in times of crisis when we reach for what we have considered our strength we stumble on our wholeness and our real power. How we were before we fixed ourselves to win approval. What has been fixed is always less strong than what is whole. In a time of real need we may remember and free ourselves.  ......... Actually, we are all more than we know.  Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten. Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves : it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about  who we are and ways we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to “fix” ourselves  to know who we genuinely are. Even after many years of seeing, thinking , and living one way, we are able to reach past all that to claim our integrity and live in a way we may never have expected to live.  (--in, kitchen table wisdom, pg 105ff) (recommended here by a chemo patient between drips)  Let us speak with one another!  The entire world awaits being revealed in the conversation.

it won’t be; long now

Waning moon up over east this 10/10

Time for sleep

Let the world go away

two trillion galaxies — to become feeling and aware

At Sunday Evening Practice we read from:

What is Aboriginal spirituality? (Creative Spirits):

Everything is connected 

For the Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal people from north-west South Australia the law of Kanyini implies that everybody is responsible for each other. [10] It is the principle of connectedness that underpins Aboriginal life. [11]. And because of connection, Kanyini teaches to look away from oneself and towards community: “We practise Kanyini by learning to restrict the ‘mine-ness’, and to develop a strong sense of ‘ours-ness’,” explains Aboriginal Elder Uncle Bob Randall [21]. 

Uncle Bob continues: “We do not separate the material world of objects we see around us with our ordinary eyes, and the sacred world of creative energy that we can learn to see with our inner eye. …. We work through ‘feeling’, what white people call intuitive awareness.” [12]. “White people,” he says, “separate things out, even the relationship between their minds and their bodies, but especially between themselves and other people and nature… [and] spirit.” [13] 

Aboriginal spirituality sees the interconnectedness of the elements of the earth and the universe, animate and inanimate, whereby people, the plants and animals, landforms and celestial bodies are interrelated. These relations and the knowledge of how they are interconnected are expressed in sacred stories. These creation stories describe how the activities of powerful creator ancestors shaped and developed the world as people know and experience it. [14] 

Those sacred Aboriginal stories (also known as Dreamtime, Dreaming stories, songlines, or Aboriginal oral literature) find expression in performances within each of the language groups across Australia [15]. 

What Mudrooroo and Uncle Bob Randall are referring to when they use the terms ‘feelings’, ‘inner eye’ and ‘intuitive awareness’ are ‘things’ that cannot be defined by words and thoughts because they are beyond the mind. Only by negation – what they are not – can we start comprehending what they might be. 

https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/spirituality/what-is-aboriginal-spirituality

It was Canadian Thanksgiving weekend and while we were not in Cape Breton this year, we hear the roots of all cultures in music, story, and felt awareness.

How lucky to hear the results of Hubble’s discoveries:

An international team of astronomers, led by Christopher Conselice, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, have found that the universe contains at least 2 trillion galaxies, ten times more than previously thought. The team's work, which began with seed-corn funding from the Royal Astronomical Society, appears in the Astrophysical Journal today. 

Astronomers have long sought to determine how many galaxies there are in the observable universe, the part of the cosmos where light from distant objects has had time to reach us. Over the last 20 years scientists have used images from the Hubble Space Telescope to estimate that the universe we can see contains around 100 - 200 billion galaxies. Current astronomical technology allows us to study just 10% of these galaxies, and the remaining 90% will be only seen once bigger and better telescopes are developed.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-01-universe-trillion-galaxies.html#jCp

That’s a lot of stories, songs, and things with which to become feeling and aware!

from dépêcher "to dispatch,"

We’re alone.

God is the Alone.

We are alone with the Alone.

Forgive me — I don’t understand what I am nor where I am.

This odd and crowded world!