rēs ipsa loquitur

 I’m here — the phrase holds

Everything that could be said

Itself being true

rapprochement

 After zazen, the Heart Sutra and the Sandokai chants.

And, in colloquy, it seems a rapprochement arises between sandokai and catholic theology.

"Father" is the absolute.

"Son" is the relative.

Holy Spirit is the energetic wholeness encompassing and vivifying absolute/relative, father/son.

It is cosmotheandric complément.

to stave off the loneliness

 Sometimes a paragraph jumps out at you.

Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where he was supposed to go. He stayed where he was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.

(pg.20, from Let the Great World Spin, novel by Colum McCann, 2009)

As it applies to each human being. 

is good for the soul

 I know what’s missing ..

The grace of admission, un-

veiling the hidden

Revealing and bringing in

what longs to be the open

pu trid

 Sometimes politics

Skunk smell everywhere, today

Is one of those days

sefer

 The records show names

the human race across years

adam, enosh, you

she was an elegant principal

 Owl at dawn wakes me

Reporter’s notebook jotting

Hoot research in dream

who is like god

 Celebration of 

Archangels — powers not

Understood —  surround 

having the touch

Have we lost our sense of taste? 

Become tasteless?

 Central to the interpretation of embodied life is evaluation.

 The ancient term for wisdom, sapientia, comes from sapere, to taste. Sapere-savourer-savoir. This etymological line speaks legions, reminding us that our deepest knowing is tasting and touching. We first sound the world through the tips of our tongues, discerning between savory and unsavory.

Living well is a matter of “savvy,” as we say. Ordinary language knows this, and philosophical language is no more than an extrapolation of what we already know “deep down.” Wisdom, in the end, is about taste and tact. That’s what we mean, isn’t it, when we say that someone sensible is someone sensitive: they have “the touch,” as healer, teacher, artist, lover. They are attentive, careful, tentative. They get it. To have the right touch is to touch and be touched wisely. Touching well is living well.

Hermeneutics begins there: in the flesh.

(--from, What is Carnal Hermeneutics, Richard Kearney, 2015, Academia) 

Perhaps we need to interpret our lives with less analysis and more imagination.

Wisdom invites imagination into its room to sit and speak.

What’s wrong isn’t that something is wrong. Rather, it is the unwillingness to say, yes, that’s wrong, and get on enacting what’s right without fear or remaining mired in shame.

“What’s wrong will always be wrong” (Richard Hugo) — but what’s right is each time created new.

Keep in touch.

listening to the news

 Are you worried about the COVID variant?

Do you think the right wing Republicans are really out to cripple all government?

Is it inevitable a militant violent few will begin to execute politicians outside their narrow ideology?

It is, it seems, a dark time.

The worry, the thought, the inevitability all seem a depressing reality on the horizon.

Short term and long term prognoses fail the test of imagination.

A collective deflation of hope.

Those who pray are losing faith.

The rabid nihilists abandon charity.

powód bycia

Doris, our elder, sends her Monday poem.

Today the final two lines catch my attention:

I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility 

that existence has its own reason for being.

              (—from poem, “Possibilities” by Wislawa Szymborska)

Raison d’être! 

Such an intriguing phrase. 

Such a ponderable possibility.

when one’s name is its reality

 Alone-with,

God

just this

 Resurrection is

The realization of 

the True Self — just this

oremus pro invicem

 Sunday morning pray-

er, oh god, make us your own

sheer, invisible

Nothing to cling to, nothing

To let go — merely what is