A woman at Friday evening conversation said it disperses the individual ego and becomes diffuse entropy insinuating itself throughout what has no known boundary.
If so, then, what is it dying individuals see nearing their moment of ceasing breath?
Perhaps the apparition of resembling form suddenly sketched by departing consciousness with brushstroke of swirling spirit on passing page of fond transformation.
A sumie zen flash of inspired jotting, an ink-wash chiaroscuro of gratitude to guide us beyond.
When all is said and done, I have more than one face. I don’t know which is laughing at which.
Love is so excessive a feeling that I prop my head up in my hands.
Arising from the passions, this realm of dreams isn’t fundamentally a domain of lies. In the end the face is dispersed. In the place where the fabric of things rips open - in the lacerating rip - nothing remains but a person introduced into the fabric’s texture.
Layers of dead leaves aren’t steps ascending to a throne, and tugboat hoots disperse illusions of enchantment.
Though still, what would correspond to the magnificence of the world if no one spoke to us and communicated a (no doubt indecipherable) message: ‘As to this fate that befalls you, this fate you consider yours (the fate of the human being you are) or that you consider the destiny of existence generally (of the immensity you form part of), nothing allows you to reduce it to the poverty of things that remain only what they are. On the contrary, whenever a casual lie happens, or whenever something is transfigured, don’t you hear an appeal which must be answered? You can’t claim you wished for the journey, only that you are it. And who would challenge the utter distance, the extremity, the desirability of the way? Desirability?! Am I the measure of mysteries? If, perceiving me, you hadn’t chosen an unreachable goal, you wouldn’t even have approached the mystery!’
One mystery we live with is the current president of the United States.
When folks wonder how the people of Germany could have allowed their leader to be so obscene and despicable, they will have to look at a different country currently with blinders about its leader.
We in Maine feel Haitians and Africans are wonderful people and are welcome here. We also think that the president is mistaken in his attitudes toward those from away. Maine folk would rather sit on their front porch in a -2° blizzard than sit inside listening to dumb ignorance.
Where have we gone? We don’t seem to be at home. Certainly not at home with ourselves. More-so, not at home within ourselves. So, where are we? Where have we wandered? Have we gone so far from our true selves that we have become permanent refugees and nomads? Where do we begin to look for this lost and confused expatriate?
Poet Gary Snyder suggests, at end, a task for us these days:
I came back to myself.
To the real work, to
“What is to be done.”
There is a corruption of identity that is profitable to those trafficking in dissemblance and intentional manipulation of ordinary and (perhaps) unaware populations -- (unfortunately, most of us).
Even, and perhaps (sorrowfully) mostly, the leaders of America during this misfortunate time.
I Went into The Maverick Bar --by Gary Snyder
I went into the Maverick Bar
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap I’d left the earring in the car.
Two cowboys did horseplay by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
where are you from? a country-and-western band began to play “We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie” And with the next song, a couple began to dance.
They held each other like in High School dances in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness— America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.
We left—onto the freeway shoulders— under the tough old stars—
There has been a three-card monte game dealt by sophisticated cons who deceive marks with promises of power while sucking away any residual rights the marks have in the name of bettering their lives and ridding them of others who do not have their interests at heart. It’s a double switch -- take away what is promised to you by giving it to those who are actually taking it away from you. Enemies are fabricated. Belittling names are manufactured for those enemies. Phony outrage is displayed when anyone questions the cons’ motives or blatant hypocrisy.
It is a shadow of bluffs we are seeing as it envelopes the country.
Perhaps we are merely waking up.
The freeway beckons.
Bob Dylan helps:
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”
To live a contemplative life is to allow long loving looking.
Just that.
Nothing else.
No-other mind.
In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.
I sit with firebox in wohnkuche since 4am watching extra log put in at 3:20am doesn’t exceed its reach. It is a nervous instinct that worries about what to do if chimney fire jumps out of box constraint and screams freedom to a frozen sky. Radio station from Finland automatically goes on at 5am playing classical pieces.
Hot chocolate, oikos yogurt, and raspberry breakfast bar carry me into dawn.
Fresh inch of snow at first light.
Monday looks over mountain.
I suspect if we are to make it through this night, we have to carefully watch what is taking place.
And be ready, when necessary, to open mouth both to say something and partake in communion.
The only person in Emesa with whom Simeon did not play a fool was deacon of the church in Emesa, his friend John. One time Simeon saved John from execution when he was falsely convicted. Shortly before his death Simeon, by the illustration of Leontios of Neapolis said to John:
I beg you, never disregard a single soul, especially when it happens to be a monk or a beggar. For Your Charity knows that His place is among the beggars, especially among the blind, people made as pure as the sun through their patience and distress. . . . [S]how love of your neighbor through almsgiving. For this virtue, above all, will help us on (the Day of Judgment).[4]
I suppose there are fools and there are holy fools.
The fool for Christ, or Holy Fool, is similar to a biblical prophet, prescient, but more importantly able to reveal truths. As one church hymn has it, the yurodivy (holy fool in Russian) strives “with imaginary insanity to reveal the insanity of the world.” He not only fights the insanity of everyday sins but the crimes of the mighty as well.
If the presumption is that a God-imbued person is wandering the streets, and there are people willing to give benefit of doubt to the enthusiasm* experienced, something good is afoot.
*Origin and Etymology of enthusiasm, Greek enthousiasmos, from enthousiazein to be inspired, irregular from entheos inspired, from en- + theos god. (Merriam-Webster)
My suspician is that to be full of God is the default state of being each being in existence dwells as.
That we deny this state and proceed to establish erroneous substitutes devoid of the perichoretic circumincessional interpenetrative inchoateness which is our origin and our originality — is our peculiar insane and destabilizing fate.
In short, we short-shrift authentic holiness for facsimile popularity masked as devotion.. This displays itself as fawning sycophantic opportunism, a loyalty of convenient reward, instead of real humility of unknowing fidelity to the emerging manifestation of sacred reality in everyday disclosure.
In Christian lore the Epiphany is seen as acknowledgement of God-imbued presence in the world.
Finding, among those who died in 2017, poet Joanne Kyger. From her obituary:
“The shape of the day, the words of the moment, what’s happening around me in the world of interior and exterior space — these are my writing concerns,” Ms. Kyger explained in a statement to the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York in 2005. In her “Night Palace,” from 2003, she wrote:
“The best thing about the past is that it’s over” When you die. you wake up from a dream that’s your life. Then you grow up and get to be post-human in a past that keeps happening ahead of you
...
“My own interest in Zen came about because I had been studying Wittgenstein and Heidegger in Santa Barbara,” Ms. Kyger told an interviewer. “Their philosophy just comes to an end saying you just have to practice the study of nothing.”
(- New York Times Joanne Kyger, Zen-Infused Beat Generation Poet, Dies at 82A Buddhist and author and one of the few female members of the male-dominated post-World War II cultural movement.April 07, 2017 - By SAM ROBERTS - Books - Print Headline: "Joanne Kyger, Zen-Infused Beat Generation Poet, 8)
As only poets, mystics, and other unexplainable insights confer.
