on taking down a tweet

 If you’ve got nothing to say, don’t say it.

I’d rather hear night asleep in the field than listen to some braggard telling how it was his idea to sell sand to the Pacific Ocean.

it looks very discouraging

It is worrisome 

that rightwing 

radical fundamentalism 

is becoming the political 

stance of choice of

both US congresspeople 

and white nationalist citizens. 

There appears to be 

a worldwide festering 

of bellicose intolerance. 

Or are we now 

relegated to being

a reality TV audience 

for performing egoic 

cabaret clowns?

infra

 reading Rodriguez

internal memo 

after resignation

on vince

foster's death

and circumstances

the repeated

see infra

suggesting

(yes) see

below

also infers

see 'below'

the details as

though a

phenomenologist

ciphering there is

much to see

under the aletheia

(Ancient Greek: ἀλήθεια)

where every

disclosure is

correspondingly

a covering over

hence the plea

to see under

(our inconsolable

inability to get to

the bottom of

anything)

the slippery

substance of

human subterfuge

needs no theories

no conspiracies

but merely any

articulation winds

around itself until

disentangling is

hopeless

we are left to 

ourselves

with nothing

more than 

vapors

and incense 

smoke

curling into 

obscurity

going

away

drops roof fall

 It doesn’t 

matter

if rain

finds earth

at bottom

of birdsong

Saturday

morning

Maine 

holiday

weekend

cowardly shame ends badly

 Republicans vote down January six commission.

It is a small victory for small-minded remnant of a once important political party.

It is a shame.

It will hasten demise of the Republican Party.

And beyond that, who knows?

A shameful, cowardly, small way to end.

he said: the unanswerable question i live with

To a sangha practitioner:

 Heard richard rohr in one of his books say, (approximately):

    — Faith implies doubt and uncertainty. Evil is always certain and uncompromising.— 

And so, living with unanswerable questions sounds like the right balance of great faith and great doubt.

We share the dharma the way May shares green deepening trees on mountainside.

let your words be

  Yes, Yes

No, No

Easy as that

Go ahead

Try it

the restless removal of distances

We’re no nearer.

These words about technology: 

Introducing the Bremen lectures, Heidegger observes that because of technology, “all distances in time and space are shrinking” and “yet the hasty setting aside of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in a small amount of distance.” The lectures set out to examine what this nearness is that remains absent and is “even warded off by the restless removal of distances.” As we shall see, we have become almost incapable of experiencing this nearness, let alone understanding it, because all things increasingly present themselves to us as technological: we see them and treat them as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” supplies in a storeroom, as it were, pieces of inventory to be ordered and conscripted, assembled and disassembled, set up and set aside. Everything approaches us merely as a source of energy or as something we must organize. We treat even human capabilities as though they were only means for technological procedures, as when a worker becomes nothing but an instrument for production. Leaders and planners, along with the rest of us, are mere human resources to be arranged, rearranged, and disposed of. Each and every thing that presents itself technologically thereby loses its distinctive independence and form. We push aside, obscure, or simply cannot see, other possibilities.”

(—from, Understanding Heidegger on Technology )

 The proleptic character of technology.

We are fabricating untouchability.

to be in question

I no longer wish to be deceived.

Nor do I want some other thing. 

 ",,,truth is loved in such a way that those who love some other thing want it to be the truth, and, precisely because they do not wish to be deceived, are unwilling to be convinced that they are deceived."

(—St. Augustine, Confessions (10:23), Fifth Century)

Neither strident nor acquiescing, I wander in bewildering silence through today and today’s tomorrow.

"I am more and more impressed by the fact that it is largely futile to get up and make statements about current problems.  At the same time, I know that silent acquiescence in evil is also out of the question."

(—Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence,1968)

Where is it that prayer and fasting lead? 

no agenda

 Annual hibernation from news in small bits, twitter, cable, other cracked shell discarding 2 minute pieces off prompter.

Time for more thoughtful writings, books, heft, details of phenomenologic observation, necessary questioning.

It was too hot yesterday.

Inhaling nontraditional pizza topping nearly suffocates my choking throat last night.

This morning.

Personalities, celebrities, broke-down politicians, mass murdering shooters, hawkers of products, spewers of rabid right wing drivel, or conjunctive left wing drivel, preachers of hellfire, or capitalistic rewards religions, for me, are incapacities.

Cedar tree outside window, branches curling upward, is zen teacher with no agenda.

flaps down

 Single engine plane

Flies over house middle night

Mountain landing strip

can you hear me major tom

 Perhaps we've 

never been close

paint on wall

paw on floor

rolling up

winter comforter

stuffing in

closet

something's wrong

we've floated

away from 

simplicity

here am I

no longer

connected to

any tether

recognizable

even desireable

looking over

pollen dust

on kitchen 

skylight, pale

green hue 

not planet blue

sicut est, ita est

 As it is:

In a statement issued Tuesday evening, Trump called the seating of the grand jury “a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in American history.”


“This is purely political, and an affront to the almost 75 million voters who supported me in the Presidential Election, and it’s being driven by highly partisan Democrat prosecutors,” Trump said. “Our Country is broken, our elections are rigged, corrupt, and stolen, our prosecutors are politicized, and I will just have to keep on fighting like I have been for the last five years!”


A spokesman for Vance (D) declined to comment.

(—from, Prosecutor in Trump criminal probe convenes grand jury to hear evidence, weigh potential charges, By  Shayna Jacobs and David A. Fahrenthold, May 25, 2021 at 8:52 p.m. EDT, Washington Post)

So it is. 

let

Our Tuesday evening conversation: 

Let Evening Come

 

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving   

up the bales as the sun moves down.

 

Let the cricket take up chafing   

as a woman takes up her needles   

and her yarn. Let evening come.

 

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned   

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

 

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.   

Let the wind die down. Let the shed   

go black inside. Let evening come.

 

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop   

in the oats, to air in the lung   

let evening come.

 

Let it come, as it will, and don’t   

be afraid. God does not leave us    

comfortless, so let evening come.  

                                         Poem by Jane Kenyon

And may morning follow.

With joy.

as a transitory dwelling-place.

 Carl Gustav Jung’s words.

A morning meditation:

 “The individual ego is the stable in which the Christ-child is born.” – Collected Works Vol. 11 

“The highest and most decisive experience of all . . . is to be alone with . . . [one’s] own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation.” – Psychology and Alchemy 

“The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration.” – Alchemical Studies

“The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.” – Mysterium Coniunctionis 

“On the level of the Son there is no answer to the question of good and evil; there is only an incurable separation of the opposites. . . . It seems to me to be the Holy Spirit’s task and charge to reconcile and reunite the opposites in the human individual through a special development of the human soul.” – The Symbolic Life 

“[There is a] . . . continued and progressive divine incarnation. Thus man is received and integrated into the divine drama. He seems destined to play a decisive part in it; that is why he must receive the Holy Spirit. I look upon the receiving of the Holy Spirit as a highly revolutionary fact which cannot take place until the ambivalent nature of the Father is recognized. If God is the summum bonum, the incarnation makes no sense, for a good god could never produce such hate and anger that his only son had to be sacrificed to appease it. A Midrash says that the Shofar is still sounded on the Day of Atonement to remind YHWH (God) of his act of injustice towards Abraham (by compelling him to slay Isaac) and to prevent him from repeating it. A conscientious clarification of the idea of God would have consequences as upsetting as they are necessary. They would be indispensable for an interior development of the trinitarian drama and of the role of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is destined to be incarnate in man or to choose him as a transitory dwelling-place. ‘Non habet nomen proprium,’ says St. Thomas; because he will receive the name of man. That is why he must not be identified with Christ. We cannot receive the Holy Spirit unless we have accepted our own individual life as Christ accepted his. Thus we become the ‘sons of god’ fated to experience the conflict of the divine opposites, represented by the crucifixion.” – The Symbolic Life

 (—from, these things inside, Jung on the Christian Archetype)

Then there’s this:

“God is reality itself.”

“God is a psychic fact of immediate experience, otherwise there would never have been any talk of God. The fact is valid in itself, requiring no non-psychological proof and inaccessible to any form of non-psychological criticism. It can be the most immediate and hence the most real of experiences, which can be neither ridiculed nor disproved.”

“All modern people feel alone in the world of the psyche because they assume that there is nothing there that they have not made up. This is the very best demonstration of our God-almighty-ness, which simply comes from the fact that we think we have invented everything physical – that nothing would be done if we did not do it; for that is our basic idea and it is an extraordinary assumption. Then one is all alone in one’s psyche, exactly like the Creator before the creation. But through a certain training, something suddenly happens which one has not created, something objective, and then one is no longer alone. That is the object of certain initiations, to train people to experience something which is not their intention, something strange, something objective with which they cannot identify.

“This experience of the objective fact is all-important, because it denotes the presence of something which is not I, yet is still physical. Such an experience can reach a climax where it becomes an experience of God.”

(Jung quotes from: The Visions Seminars, Answer to Job, Jung Letters, Vol. 2, and the December 1961 issue of Good Housekeeping.)

(—from, these things inside, Carl Jung says God is reality itself,)

Reality itself. 

There’s something to ponder.

This sunny birdsong cool breeze morning.

I think I’ll walk the dog. 

the sight of it

 Underground water

Earth tears the sight of human

Unreadiness drips

monday after pentecost, look again

 It seems, like ocean tide, the phases of mythology rivet our attention on primordial in and out, arrival and departure, appearance and disappearance.

So too in Christian undulation mysteries:

Birth, emergence

Death, cessation

Burial, disappearance

Resurrection, reappearance

Ascension, emptiness hiatus

Pentecost, fullness via illumination and clarification.

Ordinariness, revisiting, reappraisal, inchoate insight. 

His Holiness The Dalai Lama describes the Mahayana Heart Sutra in terms of personal spiritual development as a continual spiraling through the five stages represented by the final mantra "GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA" in his talk (cf especially time from 8:50 to 19:04).    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej0_39J4yts&t=1201s. 8:50 to 19:048

If we think we've arrived, we haven't.

We are always beginning again.

Why not laugh through it.

It's a healthy way to practice.

Look again.

the lady with the umbrella said she never explains anything

There's something to be said for explanation.

Don't! 

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible. 

(-Eugene Ionesco, Decouvertes (1969))

Point out, if you must. 

Intimate, imply, hint -- even better.

Explanation, especially overexplanation, is where innovative insight goes to die.

destroyed and vanished into the oblivion of human history.

What a phrasing!

The oblivion of human history. Where Salome danced. Where John was beheaded. Where you and I read this.

Early Roman Period 

 

44 A.D.: After the death of King Herod Agrippa I in 44 A.D., when the ruined Machaerus together with Perea, came under the control of the Roman Prefectus Judea in Jerusalem, a military garrison stronghold was formed for the Roman army on the ruins of the original Machaerus citadel. 

66 A.D.: The citadel was taken over by the citizens of its lower city and later reinforced by the Zealot rebels. 

71/72 A.D.: After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Romans—for the third time—conquered Machaerus by order of Emperor Vespasian through the Legion X Fretensis, under the commandership of LuciliusBassus, the Roman Legatus of Judea Province. The fortress of Machaerus was destroyed and vanished into the oblivion of human history. 

 

Modern Period 

 

1807 (January 17): Ulrich Jasper Seetzen identified the Machaeruscitadel.
   

1909 (January 1): Fr. Félix-Marie Abel OP identified the Machaerus lower city.
   

1965–1974: August Strobel surveyed and published the Machaerus circumvallation wall.
   

1968–2019: Archaeologists excavated the Machaerus citadel. 

(—Machaerus Through the Ages, Győző Vörös   November 13, 2020 , Biblical Archeology Society)

day by day, this day

Per síngulos dies* 

      benedícimus te

et laudámus nomen tuum in sæculum,*

      et in sæculum sæculi.

Dignáre, Dómine, die isto*

      sine peccáto nos custodíre.

Miserére nostri, Dómine,* 

      miserére nostri.

Fiat misericórdia tua, Dómine, super nos,*

      quemádmodum sperávimus in te.

In te, Dómine, sperávi:*

      non confúndar in ætérnum. 

…  …   …

Day by day 

     we praise you:

     

we acclaim you now 

     and to all eternity.

In your goodness, Lord, 

     keep us free from sin. 

Have mercy on us, Lord, 

     have mercy.

May your mercy always be with us, Lord,

     for we have hoped in you.

In you, Lord, we put our trust,

      we shall not be put to shame. 

(—ending verses of Te Deum, in Office of Readings, from Feast of Pentecost)