car parked in middle of dooryard tire tracks

Did he create the conversation?

Did she?

Or did the conversation create them?

Hardly anything is what it seems to be.

You don’t have to know.

You just have to be there.

A chocolate chip cookie helps.

and word, I imagine, becomes flesh

Last night’s conversation took place between bookshed and meditation cabin around fire pit with Thai pizza and a visiting repairer of rocking chair.

This morning two pictures pop up.

I must go to zendo to sit with memory-presence of young bodhisattva off on his journey to see everything and everyone just as they are.

good company

all that’s needed is

We’ve forgotten

Love is the air

We breathe —

Remember

desire and lack

 Of course

Justice is wanted

Of course

Yes, it is

Wanting

dereliction and democracy

There is serious concern that the election will be the moment of decision everyone points to as the way democracy chooses their president.

If that exercise cannot be trusted, we are in a difficult and dangerous circumstance.

Impotence and skepticism hang out on front stoop and step up to knock at doors.

I cannot imagine what will happen when the front door is opened and despair looks these visitors in the eye.

śruti and ausculta

Yes

Vox Dei calls invitation to gather for śruti and ausculta 

to listen and to listen attending

this morning practice

for which

I am

here

pray and practice

 Buddhist practitioner reminds us at Tuesday Evening Conversation that emptiness, impermanence, and no-self are the absolute reality grounding all existence. Not relative truth, but absolute truth. Shunyata, anicca, and anatta. 

No separate existence, no permanent and fixed reality, no self that is isolated from everything that is.

The reality is that we are in this together.

Not seeing this is not seeing what is real.

Hence the condition of our country and world.

We must practice what is real and true so as to be what is real and true.

Pray that the illusory and the false fade and disappear.

Pray and practice, the fellow in Augusta said.

Good words.

where there becomes here

 If you are a nihilist, this is a good time for you.

If you used to be a citizen of the United States, I welcome you to what was once the United States.

If you don’t know where you are, you are in the middle of a bad movie starring diseased actors propped in  front of podiums megaphoning nothing recognized as true.

Pack your rucksack, grab hiking sticks, take snacks, don’t bother locking your door.

We’re all refugees now. We have no country, and no other country will have us. There’s no place to call home and no leaders interested in you.

Where to go?

Here’s a hint.

Go inside. Go within. Go where no one can track you down.

When you enter that transparent and invisible center, dwell there.

The world doesn’t turn there. There is where everything is the still point.

It is a place where no fools can enter.

Don’t be fooled.

Don’t be anybody’s fool.

Find yourself there.

Alone with everyone.

the least that could be done

The death of decency precedes the death of the indecent. 

For those of us still actively interested in practicing decency, let us pray for those who are diving into their desolate demise.

rokpa, one year gone today

 

 

 

A good dog!

let’s not lie

True words designed to

Create action — Rhetoric —

Say it. Act on it.

something is being said about love

From The Fantastics: 

Love! You are love!

Better far than a metaphor

Can ever, ever be.

Love! You are love!

My mystery of love!

If the world was like an iceberg,

And everything was frozen,

And tears turned into icicles in the eye!

And snow came pouring

And sleet and ice

Came stabbing like a knife!

Then you are heat!

A fire alive with heat!

A flame that thaws the iceberg with its heat!

Repeat!

You are heat!

Ah ah ah ah aaaaaaaaaaa!

Love! (I am love!)

You are love! (I am love!)

Better far than a metaphor

Can ever, ever be.

Love! (I am love!)

You are love! (I am love!)

My mystery (His mystery)

Of love!

(Excerpt from Metaphor lyrics, The Fantasticks)

And this from e.e.cummings:

 

the great advantage of being alive 

                    —by ee cummings

the great advantage of being alive

(instead of undying)is not so much

that mind no more can disprove than prove

what heart may feel and soul may touch

— the great (my darling)happens to be

that love are in we, that love are in we

 

and here is a secret they never will share for whom create is less than have

or one times one than when times where —

that we are in love,that we are in love:

with us they’ve nothing times nothing to do

(for love are in we am in i are in you)

 

this world(as timorous itsters all

to call their cowardice quite agree)

shall never discover our touch and feel

–for love are in we are in love are in we;

for you are and i am and we are(above

and under all possible worlds)in love

 

a billion brains may coax undeath

from fancied fact and spaceful time–

no heart can leap,no soul can breathe

but by the sizeless truth of a dream

whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea.

For love are in you am in i are in we

le matin, joie

 La vie est drôle!

One morning I won’t wake.

One morning there will be headlines Donald Trump died during the night.

Each morning I look to see if it is that time.

This morning I listen to the monks of L'Abbaye de Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux.

When morning bamboo slats are rolled up, there is the hanging cross from Trappist casket-makers in USA.

One morning I will be dead.

One morning Trump will be dead.

In the morning, joy. 

Le matin, joie.

I will be in the joy of the morning.

Je serai dans la joie du matin.

Of course I write about death in the morning beaucoup des temps.

On a morning uncertain I will no longer do so.

Alors, bon matin...