Companioning

Were there bread, and if we could
we would eat together

if we knew where we were going
we would set out with confidence

as it is, our only bread is breath
and our going is uncertain.

Four mourning doves and ground
hog inch along split rail fence

outside doors of hospice room
as wind rustles limbs of trees in

late April. We'll call her Josephine
she doesn't see this, her eyes fixed on

nothing I can see from her bed
where last payments of breath

are slid across room like
discards waiting for new hand.

Daffodils bowing in glass vase
near her head. This breath is bread,

we break pieces the way purple
finch on feeder, alone, harvests dusk

seeing what is seen

To articulate original love -- the creative energy act manifesting integration -- is to converse with what we have called God.

This, what some call prayer, is the opening of the heart and raising of the mind toward God.

When this happens, the manifest world is touched by the unmanifest and made more vibrant and alive.

Life has no opposite. 

Death is the opposite of birth, not life.

Prayer is the interchange of life for life.

Death is the completion of birth.

Here's what I think. And by thinking (seeing) here I look with what is seen into what is seeing what is seen.

If life has no opposite, death of form is a passageway through to life in its formless non-manifestation.

No one has ever seen God.

Formless non-manifestation is life itself without opposite.

Life itself.

Articulate original love.

shikantaza

Walking down stairs, legs a wee wobbly, two days of teaching, reading papers, constructing container, listening, and connecting.

If you want to sit with God, just sit.

a shared freedom sighting interrelational glance and gaze

When off the road, nothing moves under you, no rain blinds in front of you, and all is still surrounding.

What do we make of the first line of John Fowles' novel Daniel Martin?

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

What do you make of Daniel Martin’s enigmatic first sentence? What is meant by "whole sight"? Is whole sight even possible? Also, what does "desolation" mean in this context, and "all the rest"? The rest of what? Is desolation the only alternative to whole sight? 

These weren’t questions I was asking when I first read the novel 25 years ago. Instead, I was caught up in the plot, wondering how things would work out for Daniel and the other characters. It took me a while to realize how the book's opening philosophical premise is bound together with the ensuing narrative. 

In Daniel Martin Fowles explores the concept of “whole sight” in a variety of ways. Sometimes he uses direct discourse. At one point the character Anthony tells Daniel,

"I'm still defeated by the conundrum of God. But I have the Devil clear." 

"And what's he?" 

"Not seeing whole."

From this we might infer that “seeing whole” can be linked to God, godliness, or the divine. 

In the novel's last sentence, the narrator describes the book's first sentence as “impossible.” Here and elsewhere in the book, Fowles invites skepticism about the notion of whole sight. However, he’s not like some postmodernists, for whom skepticism about such things has become a dogmatic creed. (In 1979 Jean-Francois Lyotard defined postmodernism as an "incredulity toward meta-narratives." Since then, it seems that for many people incredulity or doubt toward meta- or "grand" narratives has hardened into prejudice, an unwillingness to engage.) 

(--from, What is "whole sight"? by drkellyindc on Fri Jul 25, 2008 8:59 am
https://www.fowlesbooks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=49

Joseph Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI, noted "being from" and "being for" in an article written about him in America magazine:

But Ratzinger did more than earn the right to say “I told you so” for having arrived earlier at conclusions voiced by today’s chattering classes. His historical experience and rootedness in the Christian tradition allow him to chart the path for a return to “reality-based” thinking that is both more consistent and less naïve. 

To take one example of Ratzinger’s greater consistency, we might compare Andersen’s and Ratzinger’s respective attitudes toward abortion. Andersen considers the legalization of abortion to be one of the healthy innovations achieved when the “reality-based left” was still culturally ascendant. Ratzinger, in stark contrast, takes the defense of the right to abortion to be a paradigm case of flight into subjectivist fantasy. In Truth and Tolerance (2003), he meditates at length on pregnancy, because there the “basic shape of human freedom, its typically human character, becomes clear.” No one is more dependent on another, more undeniably a “being-from,” than a child in utero. And no one is more oriented toward another, more obviously a “being-for,” than a pregnant mother, whose very bodily equilibrium changes to welcome the stranger. If we are honest, Ratzinger continues, we never outgrow this interdependence. Our nature is such that we exercise our agency only within a “network of services”—a freedom received “from” others on whom we depend and a freedom lived “for” others who depend on us. Summing up his reflections, Ratzinger observes: 

It has thus become fairly clear that freedom is linked to a yardstick, the yardstick of reality—to truth. Freedom to destroy oneself or to destroy another is not freedom but a diabolical parody. The freedom of man is a shared freedom, freedom in a coexistence of other freedoms, which are mutually limiting and thus mutually supportive: freedom must be measured according to what I am, what we are—otherwise it abolishes itself.

The first good to be sacrificed to the idol of limitless freedom, in other words, will be reality-based thinking, which will invariably be followed by the immolation of freedom itself. The Catholic author Flannery O’Connor summed up the dynamic even more succinctly: “When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.”  

(-from, Did Benedict XVI predict the rise of Trump and fake news? by Aaron Pidel,  4/16/18https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/04/16/did-benedict-xvi-predict-rise-trump-and-fake-news# 

O'Connor's words, at end, draw my attention.

Does anything, severed from source, remain alive and function as beneficial toward others? Or even oneself?

Pregnancy as fact, pregnancy as metaphor, reveals a new lens with which to consider interdependency with both a relative glance and absolute gaze.

A shared freedom sighting interrelational glance and gaze.

going my way

Better to wake up with Thích Nhât Hanh than remain asleep with surly men posturing as important.

Practice until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner. Continue until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop. Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. See and listen with the whole of your being. If you are fully present, the rain of Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.         (— from, Teachings on Love, byThích Nhât Hanh pp.74,75)

Today I will not run the Boston marathon.

I know this will disappoint no one.

Still, in Thây's universe, I am cold raindrops falling on running shoes just east of Hopkinton Massachusetts on a day just before the end of the world as we know it.

I am also the day after that curious day the world looked around and saw it was far away from nearly everything.

I'll need a ride.

Number of superclusters within 1 billion light years = 100

Number of galaxy groups within 1 billion light years = 240 000

Number of large galaxies within 1 billion light years = 3 million

Number of dwarf galaxies within 1 billion light years = 60 million

Number of stars within 1 billion light years = 250 000 trillion http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/superc.html

Going my way?

No?

OK, I'll just walk!

the silence

In the dream it was nice to see my mother.  She was tired. It was Brooklyn.

No one ever leaves home. That’s because we don’t know where home is. So we are always there by not knowing where it isn’t.

Dawn woodpecker works tree. Trees are aliens with superior intelligence. That’s why they don’t talk.

Once, in silence, I grasped everything I could not possibly know. I looked around. I had no home.

If you want to see the world as it is, look down a tree lined road. Look across a field with fallow corn husks in neat lines. Look at crumbled ruin of some stairs and foundation at sandy high tide of Narragansett Bay.

Me, I’ll take bread stick with grapefruit seltzer at bedtime after rambunctious family gathering at which I am outsider curiosity best left to silent smiles and passing reference.

I love this existence. I love that it will end. I love that nothing will follow. I love that the current president is an anarchist anachronistic idiot savant with megalomaniac delusion leading a people with no reason to trust him except for the extended middle fingers everybody gets to raise against everybody else, pure middle school after math class and before sneaking off to smoke whatever substance you are prohibited from using.

It is Sunday. Let God have say. Let freedom ring. May there be coffee and dialogue about nothing followed by nothing with a bow on it.

It’s ok! It’s all ok. And what’s not ok no longer exists. It will all be sorted out, and nothing will come of it.

It’s for the best.

It’s always for the best.

Ask Alice. Or Molly. Or, even better, don’t ask — there’s no answer to any of the questions.

I like it like that.

The silence!