losing finds

As long as the dog looks at me with eyes that have lost their sanity, I read:

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.
Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.
Verily, my brothers, with different eyes shall I then seek my lost ones; with a different love shall I then love you.
(Thus Spoke Zarathurstra, “On the gift-giving virtue”)

He tries for third time to climb up on my desk where pencils, cups, and computer sleep.

Enough. I put him out of my room. I latch door.

18
It is only by taking the chance that we might lose our path, will we be taking a chance that
we might find it also. However, there are no guarantees that we will find our own path ever. Perhaps only those of us who have a little sense for their destiny even have the barest chance to find a right and proper path for themselves. Not every one has a destiny to fulfill and even those that do - not all of them have the power to go with the heat, to hear the call and see the signs of the gods. Moria as our life. 

19
Truth is part of the cosmic joke. I maintain truth as an illusion for life, as a small part of a
dream, unknown slipping part of Reality. How could we ever know truth "in itself"? A folly for Sunday morning. 

(—in, Philosophical Aphorisms: Critical Encounters with Heidegger and Nietzsche, by Daniel Fidel Ferrer, 2004)

Yes, he is a sweet rescue Border Collie.

He is idiorhythmic .

He lives in his own monastery, his own world, his out of the ordinary unexplainable mind.

I’m just a passing shadow to his glancing light.

ἕβδομος

hebdomadarian call

iced tips of high branches

moon dipped silver glow

walking crunch crunch

with Manjushri —

our vigil matins 

post debate

Nice job Amy!

nothing near

Something within has gone silent

As though

Nothing there to hear



Dog footsound down stairs

I must not be here

Seed broken open under soil



I am gone

Nothing left —

Gone beyond itself, casing dropped



Empty origin

Present nowhere

Finding nothing near

печаль я чувствую*

It is

Heartsickening

To listen to

The president

Throwing up

On public stage

...   ...   ...

* (the sorrow I feel)

קָדוֹשׁ

Listening to audio book by Karen Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography. The word arises -- qadosh: sacred, holy, קָדוֹשׁ -- and it makes me think.

The events of recent days, accusations, recriminations, mendacity, pusillanimity, abject disappointing weakness of character -- in effect, that which is qadosh: sacred, holy, קָדוֹשׁ.

I think of Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972). He buoys me.

In Heschel’s view, the basic intuition of reality takes place on a “preconceptual” level; a disparity always remains between what we encounter and how we can express our encounter in words. The great achievements of art, philosophy, and religion are brought forth in movements when the individual senses more than he can say. “In our religious situation we do not comprehend the transcendent; we are present at it, we witness it. Whatever we know is inadequate; whatever we say is an understatement…Concepts, words must not become screens; they must be regarded as windows.”  

How can modern man regain a personal awareness of God? A universally accessible feeling is the experience of the sublime—for example, in the presence of the grandeur of nature. A sense of the sublime entails wonder and “radical astonishment” Astonishment is radical because it embraces not only what one sees but the very act of seeing and the very self that is astonished in its ability to see.  

The individual confronts the “ineffable,” that which cannot ever be expressed in words. Heschel insists that the ineffable is not a psychological state but an encounter with a mystery “within and beyond things and ideas” The divine is “within” because the self is “something transcendent in disguise.” The divine is “beyond” because it also is, “a message that discloses unity where we see diversity; that discloses peace where we are involved in discord…God means: No one is ever alone.”  

A second experience that, according to Heschel, awakens the individual to the presence of God is a pervasive, underlying anxiety that he calls “the need to be needed.” Religion entails the certainty that something is asked of man and that he is not a mere bystander in the cosmos. When the individual feels the challenge of a power, not born of his will, that robs him of self-sufficiency by a judgment of the rightness or wrongness of his actions—then God’s concern for his creatures is grasped. 

(-- from, Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Prophet’s Prophet, in My Jewish Learning)

It is suggested that the divine is beyond, that God means No one is ever alone.

Holiness asks for awareness and inclusion. Both are needed.

In the clanging dissonance of what we've heard in the last few weeks, and today going forward, there is a profound longing for what is holy, for what sounds and resonates awareness and inclusion.

I pray for

What Is

Holy.

not any more

Zen poets are zen’y wise.

Why are people called Buddhas 

After they die? 

Because they don't grumble any more, 

Because they don't make a nuisance 

Of themselves any more.  

- Ikkyu (1394-1481) (dailyzen)

But sound foolish.

ah, signora oratore della casa dei rappresentanti

Ti abbraccio! 

Parli bene senza parole.

locating prayer

Here

is my prayer —

May we

Find ourselves

Here

to which its dark side

We turn to Denmark in 1835 to help guide us through this peculiar time in politics when a government body finds a sitting president guilty of the charges against him but refuses to convict and remove him from office.

I suppose those whose interest is compassion, or those whose livelihood depends on his patronage,  might argue that the man is devoid of decency and competency and thus deserves a convoluted mercy based on that congenital lack.

Here's Kierkegaard's further thoughts on resignation: 

Kierkegaard wrote about resignation in 1835. "I have tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge and time and again have delighted in their savoriness. But this joy was only in the moment of cognition and did not leave a deeper mark on me. It seems to me that I have not drunk from the cup of wisdom but have fallen into it. I have sought to find the principle for my life through resignation [Resignation], by supposing that since everything proceeds according to inscrutable laws it could not be otherwise, by blunting my ambitions and the antennae of my vanity. Because I could not get everything to suit me, I abdicated with a consciousness of my own competence, somewhat the way decrepit clergymen resign with pension. What did I find? Not my self [Jeg], which is what I did seek to find in that way (I imagined my soul, if I may say so, as shut up in a box with a spring lock, which external surroundings would release by pressing the spring). — Consequently the seeking and finding of the Kingdom of Heaven was the first thing to be resolved. But it is just as useless for a man to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, to which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize [realisere] its existence [Existents] and letting the rest come of itself."  

 (-- footnote .[9] Journals and Papers of Søren Kierkegaard, 1A Gilleleie, August 1, 1835)  http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Kierkegaard,Soren/JournPapers/I_A.html

What will come of itself is unclear.

I'm unsure whether the US Senate will weather this storm successfully, or whether the astringent Republican Party will self-destruct itself or blow up the whole country.

There is little doubt the Kingdom of Heaven is currently as fictitious as Shangra-La, even in the minds of the most hypocritical fervent Christian Trump supporters.

There is, however, an insidious allure to what darkness might come. The underpinnings of false bravado and triumphalist righteousness in this Western exceptionalism, crumbling capitalist democracy, is electric. 

It is a different experience coming upon a massive highway crash and being in the center of it as it happens.  

The wheel is let go of. Hands are raised to protect what we think of as our face. The first impact and sound of crumpling metal and shattering glass arrives at our ears.

We don't know what it is we are hearing.

It is suddenly dark.

i owe ya, iowa

I see it now.

Trump will declare the 2020 elections to be held in abeyance due to uncertainties over accurate and legitimate caucuses and primaries.

He will be the last elected American president.

Thank you, dear citizens, for a successful end to a silly process of never-ending spending, campaigning, and hope-in-the-future rather than an actual corrective to the political cynicism and absurdity of current governance and its hypocrisy.

Other than that, there’s coffee to be made, toast to be popped, cereal to be banana’d, yogurt’d, and chocolate milk’d.

The morning will be salvaged.

The senate? Not so much.

I’ll re-listen to the powerful summation delivered yesterday by House Manager Rep. Adam Shiff.

after the foot-fall is over

Now we return to our regularly scheduled deprogramming.

As justice and integrity were saying — 

(Where did they go?)

(They’ve walked away!)

all wonder, there

The nurse said “oh” when she came into the room where I’d sat for three hours with a man whose breathing slid to more shallow passage.

The cna came quietly in. They stood, one at side, one at foot. I, off to angle.

Slowly, quietly, one by one, breath followed uncertainly after another breath, until not another came, and what was there was no longer there.

We presented in silence.

Stethoscope listened.

Window allowed opening.

Three of us left.

I stayed with what remained in great silence.

The place of a life.

A stuffed animal on his chest under covers.

Of a Saturday night.

All prayers said, all attention, all wonder, there.