he preferred chevys

At Saturday morning practice four letters arise.

But, at night, I cannot remember them.

The man at hospice told me his cardiologist said there’s nothing he can do for him.

He didn’t expect to hear that.

crush and obliterate the image

It is often difficult to discern the figure on the cross. What is the import of this symbol of cruel torture and death?

Is the material cosmos itself disgraced when we supplant grace it’s wholeness by injecting shattering egoistic craving and selfish ambition?

But why dig up all this old scenery and reconstruct the stews of my own mental Pompeii after enough years have covered them up? Is it even worth the obvious comment that in all this I was stamping the last remains of spiritual vitality out of my own soul, and trying with all my might to crush and obliterate the image of the divine liberty that had been implanted in me by God? With every nerve and fibre of my being I was laboring to enslave myself in the bonds of my own intolerable disgust. There is nothing new or strange about the process. But what people do not realize is that this is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and the freedom of His grace, and who deny Him. 

(—Excerpt from: "The Seven Storey Mountain" by Thomas Merton. Scribd.
https://www.scribd.com/book/249309404)

I hold the Irish string of green beads opposited by empty circle at one end and Celtic cross at other. Zero zen itself wholeness at one end. Whole Christ stretched suffering on shorn tree in full sight of unlooking inner conscience on the other end.

I’ve been there. And carry the obliviousness of truncated time and fractured space against a disappearing integrity I’ve refused to acknowledge.

In christian metaphor, I’ve sinned.

In zen metaphor, I’ve seen nothing and not cared.

What now?

Now I hold the empty circle and circle the empty cross wondering where the Christ of that Jesus has been resurrected and made manifest in the ongoing realization of our nascent and latent holiness wandering in the footsteps of our step by step ordinary day by day passage through this moment and this moment and, yes, again and always new, this moment.

Now

Hear

This

knowing nothing

Something about today — the quiet of it.

        15Woe to those who go to great depths

to hide their plans from the Lord,

who do their work in darkness and think,

“Who sees us? Who will know?”

16You turn things upside down, 

as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!

Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,

“You did not make me”?

Can the pot say to the potter,

“You know nothing”?

(—NIV translation)

details

What are you thinking?

In 1925, Einstein went on a walk with a young student named Esther Salaman. As they wandered, he shared his core guiding intellectual principle: "I want to know how God created this world. I'm not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are just details."(—Einstein's Quest to 'Know God's Thoughts' Could Take Millennia, By Don Lincoln June 04, 2019 Strange News)

Quantum thinkers are concluding there is no space, only quantum entanglement.

I hadn’t given it much thought.

Hence, I’m lost in a space that doesn’t exist sharing that emptiness with an interconnected everything.

Thus, as a solitary, periodically delighted to be alone, I am completely with everything, each as itself, universes beyond number, within and without, wholly distinct..

the truth about anything

This is the daze that decries our souls.

The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything. 

(—Excerpt from: ch.1, "The Seven Storey Mountain" by Thomas Merton. 1948  Scribd.)

 If we were to call it evil, where good is distorted and made absent by lies, then the daze of these days is making stupidity loud and maddeningly perduring and perjuring from the highest podia of the nation’s bad dream.

Please, sir, might we have some morsel of integrity or kindness for which to be grateful?

rain on roof

There are times when silence

Is the only sound

Able to be

Heard

new being interrelationality

I am I no longer.

Nor am I you.

Let's meet between who we thought we were.

And speak ourselves, round and round, into new being interrelationality.

Words — our witnessing — can kill, says Kieslowski, but they can also bring healing and a restoration to life.    - 

-from review of  Dekalog: Eight,  Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski, in Spirituality and Practice 

We'll meet there.

And see what is coming to be. 

if seeing were prayer

The gaze of the tailor at end of Dekalog VIII by Kieslowski.

Looking through years of mistrust.

At two women's audacity of reconciling interrelationality.

Through his lonely enclosure.

Lockboxed.

Wonder.

not my childhood bicycle

At practice, sitting, these letters:

SHWWIN

Sit here with what is now.

Sit

Here

With

What is

Now.