what is here

Nothing —

this is

what is

here.

word the origin

The open is the origin.

The more we emerge out into the open, the closer we approach the origin with original experience.

Thought is the way we word the origin.

Silence is how the open manifests itself.

There is a need for original thinkers

of a sunday evening

We sit

We walk

We chant

We set table

We read and listen

We take soup, bread, water in silence

We speak after bell from heart

We have final circle words

We wish all well, hear bell

We extinguish candles

We, too, fade, and go

We’ve practiced

Welcome

count on the new yorker magazine to say something worthwhile

Yes, and it's good writing:

Crucially, when it comes to Trump, Merkel has an unmatched knack for exposing the true meaning of his words. “I have experienced, in my own life, a part of Germany that was controlled by the Soviet Union,” she said in Brussels. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, when she was thirty-five, Merkel was a quantum chemist in East Germany. The contrast is not only between her life experience and Trump’s—or, to put it another way, between her toughness and his bluster—but between her awareness of the shadows of the past and his dangerous ahistoricism. She added, “I am very happy that today we, the Federal Republic of Germany, are united in freedom. Because of that, we can say that we can form our policies independently and make decisions independently.” This time, it was Merkel who, in invoking Russia, seemed to be really talking about something else: about America, a country now captive to Donald Trump. And the truth, in the end, is Trump’s real target. 

(--from, Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, by Amy Davidson Sorkin, in print edition of the July 23, 2018, issue, with the headline “Bad Trips.” )

so as to see, inaudible speech

Just people.

Practicing things that are immeasurable.

Four Immeasurables 

May all beings have happiness and its causes,                                          (Love)
May all beings be freed from suffering and its causes;                             (Compassion)
May all beings constantly dwell in joy transcending sorrow;                   (Joy)
May all beings dwell in equal love for those both close and distant.        (Equanimity)
http://www.gadenforthewest.org/prayers/BuddhistPrayersAndMantras2_4.pdf

Some things are not easy to see.

As man yesterday said at hospice conversation group, that when sitting with an unresponsive patient he practices “inaudible speech” — an inner reaching conversation with someone whose journey to the irretrievably-within has already traveled far and deep. This “inaudible speech” sounds like definition of prayer.

Both close and distant, we look carefully so as to see; listen intently so as to pray.

going, going, gone — when the practice insinuates itself within us.

On 22july18, in each one of us I wrote:
          “As each one of us leaves, there is no leaving, we are simply gone.”

Gone is a good word. It means ‘no longer existing.’

To exist, etymologically, means:

 Latin ex(s)istere to exist, appear, emerge, equivalent to ex- (ex-1) + sistere to stand, (1. ex, a prefix meaning “out of,” “from,” and hence “utterly,” “thoroughly,” and sometimes meaning “not” or “without”...).  dictionary.com

To be gone, here, suggests to no longer be ‘standing out from’ — as in, distinct, separate, objectifiable.

This ‘gone’ suggests a return, if you will, to invisible, non-objective, participative, and, perhaps, fully reintegrative immersion with — (how shall we say it?): Being? What is? Reality-in-itself? Matter? Spirit? God? Nondifferentiated wholeness?

Could we say that: we go into things, or we go into nothing — as our way of saying what, traditionally, we might call heaven?

Is going into things, or, going into nothing, resembled, in existence, as mulling, delving, pondering, contemplating, praying, investigating, meditating, or pure listening, pure seeing?

And is our fear of death also a fear of practicing these ‘going into things, going into nothing’?

To die before we die is to be engaged in such practice.

We’re not used to it.

Except as we near death — when the practice insinuates itself within us.

And that, too, can be love.

Khalil Gibran suggests: “And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”

And there we are. Just about all the time. Whether aware of it, or not.

this

If I may:

It is not easy to be imageless or themeless. As a zen christian at prayer, one might gaze at cat in window, breeze through leaves, hear birdsong out of sight. These are the surround wherein I sit and walk. These are intimations of the God I cannot imagine — but for resonances and stilllife revealing and manifesting Itself as present reality.  

My prayer, if that is what it is, is to look, listen, and learn to respond to this reality with lovingkindness, compassion, engaged humility. If there is any trust or hope it is that a reflective, attentive presence would emerge through contemplative and active service to be what is called for at that moment and the next.

(—in response to How do you picture God in prayer? by James Martin sj, America Magazine. online, 23july18)
 https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/07/23/how-do-you-picture-god-prayer

sicut dixit

dawn

raises

tree

from

night

return your honor

We can’t forget.

There are people trying to convince us that what is there is not there.

Hold them in their potential for Baal teshuvah, and their perversion of truth in contempt.

lowing and mowing

The people are right. Government is obnoxious. Politicians are playthings of graft-mongers and bribe-merchants.

And the antidote called Trump is patently absurd.

Where does that leave us?

Chapter Forty-seven 

Tao exists in one’s own true self.
It cannot be found outside of one’s true nature.
Hence, there is no need to leave the house to take journey in order to know the world. There is no need to look outside of the window to see the nature of Tao.
The further one departs from Tao, the less one will be able to know.
Therefore a saint is wise to know without seeking for It.
He is wise to understand without seeing It.
She is wise to accomplish according to the Natural Way

                                 http://www.with.org/tao_te_ching_en.pdf

But we are not saints. We are other than saints.

Times are tough.

All things end. Things like freedom, conscience, consciousness.

I’m not pleased with the current belief and perception that everything non-Trump is false and fake, and everything Trump is real and true.

It wears on you. The lies. The deceptions. The cocky ascendency of right wing predominance, neo-fascism, and plutocracy.

Maybe that’s what a wrenched back occasions.

Someone’s lawn is being mowed.

each one of us

At hospice house. Weekly volunteering Saturday afternoon/evening. Stepping into a different perspective.

It is a time of novels. After Mary Doria Russell and Julian Barnes, begin Hermann Broch.

Woman on patio of her room says she’s never died before and is not sure how to do it. We watch chipmunks, red squirrel, yellow finch, hummingbird come to edge of split rail and small flower as breeze makes flow thin branches of young tree setting us wondering if birds and branches speak one another’s language while we can only watch with respect and listen in attentive anticipation the colloquy of care given each to each on a patch of July off a room where white cat paws folded blanket at edge of bed in tutorial of transition.

Hermann Broch's disturbing novel The Spell tells the story of a strange, persuasive drifter who arrives in a mountain village and, through his charisma and hypnotic speech, fairly soon brings the population under his sway. Broch corresponded with Gebser, and his novels, especially The Sleepwalkers, are often alluded to as expressions of the new “aperspectival” consciousness structure. (He and Gebser also shared a mutual friend in the cultural historian Erich Kahler.) 

Broch's title The Sleepwalkers itself suggests the dim, ambiguous state of a culture on the brink of collapse. Because of the effort involved in maintaining it, self-consciousness is always in danger of succumbing to the ease and latitude of an earlier structure. Writing of the “magical” effects of Nazi mass propaganda, Morris Berman remarks, “Once we recognize that the human being has five (or more) bodies, and that these can get activated in such a way as to generate spiritual or psychic energy (‘ consciousness’) that can actually float . . . , then continuity via the history of ideas becomes unnecessary. . . . Consciousness is a transmittable entity . . . and . . . an entire culture can eventually undergo very serious changes as the result of the slow accumulation of enough psychic or somatic changes on an invisible level” (my italics). 21
(—p.244, ch.26, Six Structures of Consciousness, in A Secret History of Consciousness, by Gary Lachman)

Down hall three month old nestles between arm and shoulder of one of three women who Sherpa him through this Saturday recollection of interrelationality along muted corridor with sounds of guitar and voice seeping under doors from another woman making of early evening both sides now.

On patio, after long silence, in retrospect, gazing, intimation of song might be helpful for those of us who might not have died before — lyric lifting the likelihood that we are looking at both sides now as we look out from the uncomprehending watchfulness of last things in their ordinariness — each of us a corresponding contemplative conversation: baby, branch, bird, and bodies belonging where they are in summer late afternoon simple solace at what we are experiencing.

   

    [He is pruning the privet]

                 BY JOANNE KYGER

                       He is pruning the privet

                of sickly sorrow   desolation

           in loose pieces of air he goes clip clip clip

       the green blooming branches fall—‘they’re getting out

             of hand’    delirious and adorable    what a switch

                               we perceive        multiple

identities     when you sing     so beautifully     the shifting

       clouds  You are not alone is this world

               not a lone  a parallel world of reflection

       in a window keeps the fire burning

                    in the framed mandala,  the red shafted flicker

               sits on the back of the garden chair in the rain

the red robed monks downtown in the rain  a rainbow arises

                   simple country      practices thunder

      lightning,  hail and rain    eight Douglas Iris

            ribbon layers of attention

              So   constant creation of ‘self’ is a tricky

       mess    He is pruning the loquat,   the olive

     which looks real enough in the damp late morning air

                                                                           (      Poem by      Joanne Kyger       May 15, 1995,   )

As each one of us leaves, there is no leaving, we are simply gone.

Each

           One

                   (Of)

                            Us!