first snow

We were never not having the conversation at nurses station at hospice house.

Nor were we never not having the cogent conversation at hospital in s.c.u. room with man whose brain tumors scholarize science for him, who sees patterns of sound in vibrative light.

It is an eternal conversation. It is about living and dying, the co-creating collapse of the possible into the actual moving into the improbable.

Hours go by.

As snow falls.

And the feast of Thomas Merton’s dying day walks formless the cloister corridor of fond recollection.

I drive home from hospice and hospital in silence.

Conversation is all we know of heaven and what we’ve forgiven of hell.

The radical proposal is to trust one another with what we call our lives.

today’s threefold inspiration

Buddha’s enlightenment day. Being awake is becoming aware.

Immaculate Conception of Mary. From the get-go, no barriers to realizing whole truth within one’s own incarnation.

John Lennon’s death. Words cannot tell what a poet reveals in song.

docta ignorantia,

Looking at the emergence of a new energy of dissolution and decomposition in body politic and cultural spirit, a change in sensibilities, a diminution of civility, and a distortion of attitudes -- is what we see.

A hardening disregard of what some feel is antiquated and naive humility or kindness.

Like Reinhardt’s paintings, Jerusalem in 2017 refuses easy categorization or blithe comparisons. Christian mysticism and Reinhardt’s Zen Buddhism both name my experience as what the late medieval theologian Nicholas of Cusa called “docta ignorantia,” “learned ignorance.” Indeed, Reinhardt cited Cusa in some unpublished notes: “How needful it is to enter into the darkness and to admit the coincidence of opposites, to seek the truth where impossibility meets us.” Cusa was talking about our knowledge of God, but we can be similarly ignorant of God’s people. 

We in the United States, and we in the Christian church and other religious communities, owe Jerusalem enough sustained attention for it to reveal itself to us. Sometimes that will require action, speech, and political movements, and that action can’t be put off forever, but such action needs to be rooted in patient attention to the Holy Land’s sparks of light and color, and to the depth and complexity of its darknesses.  (—from, REINHARDT IN JERUSALEM, October 20, 2017, by Brian Flanagan)  https://dailytheology.org/2017/10/20/reinhardt-in-jerusalem/

We need these opposites.

So as to, coincidentally, erase them. 

known in passing

I didn’t recognize him
three weeks later
moving from scu
to Med-Surg

to hospice house
where I sat with him
nearly two hours
until daughter came

In wohnkuche this
St Nicholas day
I read obituary
cobbling recall

my first threefold
encounter, as it is,
an ending uncertainty 

thank you

Justice
rarely visits

It does
send regrets

condolences
to victims

mere gaze

It was his breath. It was thin.

He was going deeper and deeper within.

I sit with him. I look. I breathe.

And I wonder —

Is this simple act, being present with another, our true nature?

And is an act of prayer, is a life of prayer, the willingness to approach our true nature alone as well with another?

Alone and another — wholeness and no-other — the prayer of seeing what is within all (swiwa).

When I left he was sleeping, I hope you run into him soon.

giving is receiving

The new template seems to be: down is up, sleaze is purity, lies are truth, treason is patriotism, sexual assault is ok, evil is the new pragmatism.

The Republican Party morphs into a raping army vanquishing the enemy, who, by any other definition, is the American people.

If you want to hear a spiritual message, here it is: May they receive what they are giving!

The curious fact is that when love and kindness is given, so it is received. When greed and self-serving is given, so it is received.

It is a difficult lesson to learn — that we are not two.

Nor are we one — until we come to see.

And when we see what is within all (swiwa) we’ve entered prayer — the place of ineffable transformation where the between allows what was thought of as separate to reveal the true intra-diaphanous inchoate.

Seeing-though ever-present origin!

1st advent

Om mane padme hum

Swiwa

See what is within all