about afterthought, dialogue with student

JH,

  

Final Discussion

COLLAPSE

I still find Four Thousand Days and Nights to be the most fascinating poem. I still think there is supposed to be a kind of inverted irony. Instead of a poem coming from the deaths of so many, so many died for the poem. And even further, it was only for one child, one bird, and one dog. 

The final stanza:

To give birth to one poem
we must kill the things we love
This is the only road to take to resurrect the dead
This is the road we have to take

Reminds me of the final lines of one of Shakespeare's sonnets: "so long lives this, and this gives life to thee". The only way we can keep those we love among us is through art. This is the only way to "resurrect the dead". The poem exists to keep those we lost alive by not forgetting them. 

...   ...   ...

William Halpin INSTRUCTOR MANAGER 

RE: Final Discussion

COLLAPSE

"...so many died for the poem"
"The only way we can keep those we love among us is through art."(jh)

...

Yes, I agree. There is something that holds my attention about the poem and those four lines.

It is intriguing what you say.  So what is it?  Are we killing the idea we have of things? The idea we have of people? And only when that "killing" takes place are we left with the stark and unadorned thing-itself? The un-opinioned and un-categorized person-themselves? And in that starkness is revealed a bare reality looking at us, asking, "what will you do?"

And is that potential doing which arises from barrier-less presence the prelude to art?

And, finally, is the poem that which arises after? As well as the core of ethical action -- that which is thought about afterthought, that action which arises of itself from our bare attention?

--bh

incarnation emerges

I hereby announce the creation of a new revolutionary movement: Stat Virtus.

Derived from the saying In medio stat virtus (virtue stands in the middle).

For members of Congress, the Executive, and the Judiciary, the invitation to engage in revolutionary behavior and wander to Stat Virtus.

There, away from separated edges, in the focused surround of centered middle, work will be done to pragmatically attend to problems and questions related to citizens of their country and citizens of the world.

There, transformation takes root.

A new birth occurs.

Incarnation emerges.

We are saved from unthinking ideology.

A heartbeat of necessary creation is felt.

This feeling-thinking is how truth moves within us transforming everything it touches in extension.

transforming mind

Happy unbirthday!

...when we talk of nirvana we imagine that there is such a thing...as in the case of a table or a book. Nirvana, however, is no more than a state of mind or consciousness when we actually transcend relativity—the world of birth and death. 

.- D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966)

Happy undying 

life! 

are we nearly there

“When you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn

qui tacet consentire videtur

 The value of words in the world of this administration has mouths uncertain whether or what to pronounce.

I should never have learned words
how much better off I’d be
if I lived in a world
where meanings didn’t matter,
the world with no words 

(-Ryūichi Tamura in poem “On my Way Home”)

So it is when mendacity is the weapon of top officers in any branch of government.

No words suffice...

But I might be out of touch.

There was a time when facts were considered to be truth. Then it became that interpretation of facts might be considered accurate or inaccurate, hence, truthful or untruthful. Now, it seems, that truth is dependent upon the forceful persuasive opinion of those espousing a particular point of view.

The zen master says that "Truth...is just like this." But the meditation of the practitioner is asking the question, "What is this?"

Things are further compounded by the realization that things are seldom what we think they are.

What am I left with?

No words suffice!

thanks louie

Thomas Merton died 51 years ago today.

"[A publisher asked me to write something on 'The Secret of Success,' and I refused.]
If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. ... If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. If a university concentrates on producing successful people, it is lamentably failing in its obligation to society and to the students themselves."

(--from posthumous publication, 1980 Love and Living, Thomas Merton, a collection from his writings.

We're no longer certain about the circumstances of his death.

Recently he's been called a martyr.

 As Bob Dylan wrote: "There's no success like failure / and that failure's no succes at all." (in Love Minus Zero/No Limit, 1965)

cages, where our morality has disappeared

This on twitter today:

This is the Nativity display outside the Claremont United Methodist Church in California.
It's making some people very upset. And it should.

https://twitter.com/breznican/status/1203762299653128192

Now.

It’s all happening now.

monday morning, advent, this poem

 For a New Beginning,

            by John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

https://thevalueofsparrows.com/2012/12/12/poetry-for-a-new-beginning-by-john-odonohue/

nothing’s gonna change my world

👏🏽   Και συνάγεται, (And, it is gathered!)

This mendicant day begging for interconnection.

Buddha’s enlightenment day...and the immaculate conception of Mary.

Two wonderful examples of being free from barrier and boundary.

Mary conceived as such.

Buddha becoming suchness.

👏🏽

And, with equal note, the anniversary of John Lennon’s sudden and shocking moving through perceived barrier and boundary at the hands of a very harsh teacher in 1980. such as it was.

How remarkably and unexpectedly beneficial, beyond our comprehension, that we have been given the ability to both remember and re-member such gifts as these along our expansion across time and across the universe!

OM...

For our teachers...

✨

With profound gratitude!