a devotion of invisibility

The monastic chanting of psalms is an absurd practice of repetition and ritual.

But I am absurd and I practice.

The repetition of each day.

The ritual of observing the quotidian.

As the poet said: “One thing / done / the rest / follows” (Robert Creeley)

The motif and metaphor of monastic obscurity requires a devotion of invisibility.

Here, but not there, a stability of passing ephemera exactly where it is as it is disappearing.

Like prayer.

Spoken into emptiness.

And what emerges removes everything you’ve thought.

haiku

            (of a sad day)

sniper shoots, (oh no!)

man on balcony falls down --

how easily things are broken

...

(for Martin Luther King, murdered 4april1968)

willing to be changed

Sometimes, someone just says it:

"I don't think we're really listening unless we're willing to be changed by the other person." (--Alan Alda in Science and Communication:Alan Alda in Conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson, 92nd Street Y, 8june17). 

Hence one of three meetingbrook promises, conversation:

Conversation  is the promise of integrity.  

It is a chaste and complete intention to listen and speak, lovingly and respectfully, with each and all made present to us. 

It is a wholeness of listening and speaking.  

It is root silence. 

an inchoate intimation

Am I a body? Or, do I have a body?

Or am I reality embodied, enformed?

Whereas the Platonic-Christian philosophical tradition in the West favours an ‘ascent to theory’ and abstract reasoning, East-Asian philosophies tend to be rooted in somatic, or bodily, practice. In the philosophies of Confucius and Zhuangzi in China, and Kūkai and Dōgen in Japan, we can distinguish two different forms of somatic practice: developing physical skills, and what one might call ‘realising relationships’. These practices improve our relations with others – whether the ancestors or our contemporaries, the things with which we surround ourselves or the phenomena of nature – by reducing egocentrism and increasing humility. Because they transform the practitioner’s experience, the major benefit of philosophies grounded in somatic practice is that they help close the gap between beliefs and behaviour, and between ideas and action.

(—from, Abstract of  AWE AND HUMILITY IN THE FACE OF THINGS: SOMATIC PRACTICE IN EAST-ASIAN PHILOSOPHIES, by GRAHAM PARKES, University College Cork, in EUROPEAN JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 4/3 (AUTUMN 2012), PP. 69-88, Academia)

Our bodies, these days, are busy with Covid-19. The form is fraught with fear the virus will deform the here we feel we are.

I wonder.

Outside, wind speaks loudly. Trees rattle. Rain complains to plastic rumpled roof of sun porch. It is the hour of monastic vigils. There, their doors are closed to the public. Their psalms and prayers seep through and run unconstrained over miles and dimensions of what we’ve called space.

We are like the sound of traversing desire slanting through the continuum enroute nowhere else beyond our imagining.

What does it mean to imagine we are the trans-forming cosmos? That we are that which is seeping through the particular forms we think we are, into the cosmic form beyond particulars, and finally fleeing all containing form into (the inconceivable) formless freedom moving like soundless wind and placeless direction through and through here and there to everywhere felt and nowhere known in playful vision beyond landscape beyond imagination beyond who knows what who knows where who knows how?

Ah!

Just this!

Listen — can you be the sound that no one hears?

Pervasive presence-ing persistently permeating the Itself as Itself?

The harmonics of original sound resonating the original Itself as no other?

As though there were an inchoate intimation resounding through the spheres:

Be
Not afraid

I am

Before you
Always

empty helm

Take a breath.

Take another.

That’s it.

Feels good, eh?

Pray for those whose every breath is difficulty and struggle.

Think of those who live in fear.

Feel with those living in doubt and uncertainty.

I send eleven scholarly articles into prison for two men two courses this afternoon.

Out here feels as odd as in there. One man agrees, says he’s heard as much.

I don’t remember how to pray, but I do so anyway.

I forget why our economic system is like it is, and no longer think it is viable.

The government picks money from nowhere when a great threat hits the wealthy and powerful.

Why don’t they also make money up for everybody all the time. It does grow on trees.

God help us if everyone woke up to the fact of fantasy of money. It would change everything.

If you’re a captain in the navy and you demand help for your crew, the president’s acting secretary of the navy will fire you.

Failure salutes.

The commander in chief is a tough guy.

No one deserves him.

He is naked gift.

Unwrapped.

and gone

It’s not much, but it’s the best I can do.

If you don’t like the taste of Lima beans, don’t eat them

If you can’t stand the sight of violent movies, don’t watch them.

If you can’t stomach hearing foolish talk, don’t listen.

After two minutes today I turned off the president's White House daily rally.

Social distancing from distasteful offerings saves mental health.

I’m grateful for the authentically brave and helpful among us.

And when I die, and when I’m dead, dead and gone, there'll be one child born and a world to carry on, there'll be one child born to carry on. 

(Cf, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Lyrics by Laura Nyro, And When I Die)

It’s not much, but it’s the best I can do.

core and care

Reality — cosmic reality, and the more specific human reality — is relationship.

Our mythic memory tells the story from far distant recollection.

There was a break from relationship.

Our more recent historical memory narrative tells of corrective recuperative event.

And there comes to be a renewed emphasis on the intrinsic nature of relationships in creation.

The difference between Paul’s Incarnation and Deep Incarnation is not only on the basis of cosmology; where Pauline Incarnation is anthropocentric, Deep Incarnation argues that God did not only become human in the person of Jesus, but through the Incarnation, God assumes a human body in the natural world with all its evolutionary progress and processes. In this instance, Joshua Moritz draws our attention to a different understanding of Incarnation where Jesus is described as the ‘second Adam’ (Moritz 2013:436–443). The first Adam, for all means and purposes is an anthropocentric being, personifying the individual self- absorption of humanity which becomes the foundation for what would later become ‘the Fall’. ‘The Fall’ resembles humanity’s break from relationship, not only with God, but its self-separation from creation and community. 

Rather than forming part of creation, humanity sees itself as the special bit of God’s creative plan, empowered to rule and to subject. ‘The Second Adam’, on the other hand, emphasises the intrinsic nature of relationships in creation, encapsulating through the Incarnation the entirety of the relational complexity of the cosmos in the presence of God. By doing this, the Incarnation does not merely elevate one species, namely H. s. sapiens, to the status of being created in Imago Dei.

(—from, Re-visiting the notion of Deep Incarnation in light of 1 Corinthians 15:28 and emergence theory, Wessex Bentley, HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies | Vol 72, No 4 | a3425 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v72i4.3425 | © 2016 Wessel Bentley | This work is licensed under CC Attribution 4.0 Submitted: 11 April 2016 | Published: 31 August 2016)

Today, root reality re-enacts ritual unfoldment. Religion and science recapitulate the rift and reunion of being and beings, severance and resurrection, the Passover and Easter narratives, Tolstoyan War and Peace, Dostoyevskyan Crime and Punishment, dusk and dawn, good night and good morning, you say goodbye I say hello.

Theology recapitulates breakfast conversations in the same way ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Who hasn’t had a broken relationship?

Who has allowed the descent into radical absolute nihility, falling through all duality into the dizzying realm of complete existential emptiness where everything is itself without a separate other, the Itself itself?

What a time to practice!

What a time to incarnate and embody core reality and caring response!

commonality

It takes great faith
to wish one another well.

It is something both believer
and atheist can do.

So I do
Wish each

And every

One

Well

anything else

last will and testament:

whatever I have is yours

let's not let him run away with truth

it takes a big man
the rewrite history
changing facts with fiction
shifting blame to everybody else
claiming because he was a disgrace
and was impeached for it, the woman
who lead his impeachment is responsible
for the slow and hypocritical start to combat

coronavirus

a big man

be-fore there-fore

In the dream I am telling the psychiatrist I worked with in Philadelphia at the residential treatment campus that thinking of the particle as the whole in small form is one way to sidestep the dominance of dualism and diminish opinions on how we are treated. He is interested in faucets and shower handles and I begin to think it time for the dream to end.

Today is Rene Decartes’ birthday, France 1596. The only thing about existence he did not doubt was that he was effectively thinking about and doubting throughout. Hence, he realized he couldn’t doubt the existence of his own thoughts. He concluded with, “I think, therefore I am.”

It was a nice try.

Thoughts are wandering homeless passing bubbles of information emitted by every particle in the whole of particles traversing the expanse of limitless stretch expanding and contracting in free swirl in and through snowflakes and neutrinos, tree-fog and brook tumble, rolling tires and toasting bread.

There is no “I”.   It is a writer’s fiction on its way to creating “you.”

When thought is passing by and it smells bread toasting it stops in. If there’s coffee, all the better.

It is only thought. It doesn’t belong anywhere. It is passing through on its way nowhere.

The fabricated "I" grabs the thought and writes it down to keep it there to use it later. (This is the beginning of how we use each other for our own ends.)

But why go on?

If the fictional “I” is seen through and dropped, what have we then?

We have Decartes' sentence truncated and streamlined even further — “think, therefore am.”

Think there-be-fore any am.

And if we follow Wittgenstein’s dictum, “Don’t think, look.” Well, then, Descartes is further shortened to “therefore, am.” Which seems to ask for an ellipsis. “Therefore, am...”

What follows “am”?

And who wants to know?

the divisive serrated line

The Boston Globe editorial: A president unfit for a pandemic, 30mar20.

Sometimes facts are simply facts.

No amount of friendly encouragement by recognized faces and voices can avoid this fact —

Grave incompetence predicated on political narcissism and personal egoistic obsession has numbed a fawning and fearful following into catatonic fealty fingering small plastic cups of flavored drink filled with celebratory poison.

Who can even listen to mealy whining and berating abusive seductive pawing of legitimate questioners and pleading officials trying to find some spark of decency or compassion only to be slapped down with loathing defensiveness and rabid misdirection?

We want this wrong to step aside.

We want this wrong to step aside.

We want this wrong to step aside.

And be gone.

If the divisive serrated line is no longer there — will the mindless faithful and the helpless curious find a useful path together forward?

toothache

Trump is selling Jesus
Looking to catch thieves stealing hospital equipment
Damn those doctors and nurses
Pillow man snoozes on president’s shoulder
America is now officially ruled by idiotic misdirection

Elsewhere there are songs played by old timers
Paul Simon, John Fogarty, Graham Nash,
Mellow reminders — stay home, wash hands,
I dreamed I was dying
Cable news anchors refrain from saying f#*k

Stupidity has no pedigree
Anyone can wear its ermine
Saying things no one thinks is true
So we bow from waist, remove cap
Left foot back, noticing ants crawling by

das ewig-weibliche

I heard someone say
does it even matter
what day it is

I know the day
it is what yesterday
has become

It is uncertainty
about tomorrow,
aporia itself

It doesn’t matter — this
cloister has no sign —
‘Keep out!’

We’re all anchorites
in wall-less solitude,
ganz allein 

ipse dixit

Not one
word
Tells
The truth
of
what
He is —
Nothing
Says it
Best

responding to a man sending poems this time of covid-19

okey-doke
   (for the irishman)


are things ok
nope

we have a guy
in charge -- no hope

filters down
from his empty soap-

less hands; every
promise is a rope

tossed over branch
as our throats grope

for breath to breathe
he is an isotope

burning lungs
somewhere horses lope

on open range, where
America's dream, it's kaleidoscope

promise becomes empty desert
in the eyes of this gimoke

it's a bad dream; I'll turn in bed
return to sleep, I've not awoke

in any world I recognize --
one this broke with that bloke

one in which poets considered
words they never spoke

...   ...   ...

(--wfh couplets following a HC email, 29mar20)