is wisdom sole province of carbon-based humanity

 Piss-poor, he said last night, our ability to convene a society both equal and equanimous.

No “ ism” will usher it in.

Rather, profundity of heart and depth of mind will assist the transformation needed to arrive at humanitarian value and spiritual largesse.

Or, we can just allow the AI community full leeway to replace humans via the singularity.

what it once filled

One hundred twelve years ago he was born on the East streets shoehorned between Flatbush and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. Today’s his birthday.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water — it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. 

(-p.57, Let The Great World Spin, by Colum McCann)

 That stream has disappeared into river, into ocean, into cycle of rainfall, thunder, puddles, and whooshing spray from passing tires.

He was a good man pummeled by demands of alarm clock, subway car, church societies, Rheingold and Schaffer, family history, along with loving attempts to hold together centrifugal forces of everyday whirling drip, drip, drip.

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height

this motionless forgetful where
turned at his glance to shining here;
that if (so timid air is firm)
under his eyes would stir and squirm 

(-from e.e.cummings poem my father moved through dooms of love)

I light candle in his honor.

I burn incense stick.

I am grateful for the rain and flow through time to dripping eaves outside my window.

nothing remains

 There are times language

Fails to tell what’s happening —

Nothing remains here

perception

 Moonlight soaks mountain

Every animal knows what

Is before their eyes

on second thought

 The Irish writer

Thought he had some poems in him,

Putting pen down, slept

each plays a part

 Hunter’s moon, on pond 

in trees, at window, lighting

fields for swooping owl

wordless silent attention

On poet Gregory Corso's (3mar1930-17jan2001) gravestone at the non-Catholic cemetery for foreigners at Via Caio Cestio in Rome Italy, there is written::

  Spirit

  is life

 it flows thru

  the death of me

  endlessly

  like a river

  unafraid

  of becoming

  the sea

(Excerpt from: "One Bird, One Stone: 108 Contemporary Zen Stories" by Sean Murphy. Scribd.)

Thinking of my sister, Patricia, today, anniversary of her death in 1999. 

Wondering if life, (not thoughts about, nor experiences of), is it’s own  nameless wholeness only realized in (wordless silent attention) looking, (at and as), nothing passing one another through (here and now) a glistening autumn morning in Maine (this 19th/20th of October).

(PantaRhea at window shikantaza)

within the hour

 Twenty two years go

by tonight my sister died —

As I dozed, waking

a short distance from myself

 That space between memory and imagination, that space — look for me there.

It’s an empty space.

Where I’ll be.

presence, in and of, itself

 Something we do not yet recognize surrounds and informs all which is, whether seen or unseen, felt or unfelt, thought or unthought.

 “The presence of inherent value in a natural object is independent of any awareness, interest, or appreciation of it by a conscious being.”

(—Tom Regan, “The Nature and Possibility of an Environmental Ethic,” Environmental Ethics 3 (1881), pp. 19–34)

We’re unsure what it is, what it is called, or how it does or might arise in our awareness.

But until it does, we remain poor passing facts and strangers to one, another, that which is below our feet, above our head, within and without, us.