their awful and terrifying fantasies

Let's pretend the insufficiently sympathetic and civil-minded disabled among us are only gussying up for Halloween by being thoughtless, unkind, and crass in their attempt to frighten the rest of us and run away with the spoils of the coming election. 

Maybe it is a bad character costume shared and worn by MAGA revelers who've slogged through the poison fog atmosphere of brain-fried besotted monsters who do not care and have no moral foundation to hold them steady.

I trust and pray Mr. Pelosi will recover from his awful experience. 

I'm unsure the flash mob of mindless followers of our current craven right-wing politicians have any hope in the near-time of unearthing the necessary redeeming virtues to bring them back from their awful and terrifying fantasies.

Cf. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/opinion/pelosi-nancy-paul-attack.html?campaign_id=0&emc=edit_cr_20221030&instance_id=0&nl=comments-notifications&regi_id=102424000&segment_id=0&user_id=cbb7512be1ff919e756869ba6d21786b#commentsContainer&permid=121206508:121206508

saturday morning chapel/zendo

As October enters Thin Place.

Saturday morning.  At 7:15am, 35 degrees. 

A chilly sitting, prajnaparamita chanting, liturgical hour of lauds.

Sláinte mhaith agus folláine do gach duine! (Good health and well-being to all!)

s&b

Here is One-
Another Itself
             
meetingbrook 
      hermitage
               בס”ד 

for all the feet in this country

unknown road

today again,

soaking wet

I walk on an unknown road

(Poem by Santoka Taneda)

to deficient pols, cable, and radio hacks

 If violence starts

Everyone is in danger

To those whose rhetoric is

To cause damage — shut up, you

Will not fare well with your mouth

now and zen

It is life and death

Some say no birth and no death

It is beyond me

behind mountain

 Drop everything 

Just look out eastern window —

slant afternoon sun

There are times nothing matters

When silence is only sight

i say to myself

 So, no sleep tonight

But I watch Louis Armstong

Sing Wonderful Life

the stream of her gray hair

Specificity. Last night's conversation seemed to slant toward specificity over abstraction. 

How I Became a Saint 

Some sloppy Googling at the Vatican,
and James Richardson the soccer commentator,
or the JR who builds boats, or some JR
the Internet has never heard of
lost out on an immortal gig:
St. Jim, Patron of Apology.
Sorry, guys: admittedly your Works
were nobler than mine, your Faith purer. 

But as for the required Miracles!
The one with the radiant child, the one with starlings
sweeping away the sky—there were millions
I happened to be present for.
The water a clear stone over stones; the stream
of her gray hair, up close, clear;
how every way you look the fog
is thicker than where you are. 

          (Poem By James Richardson)

 

Or, as someone else wrote: 

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

William Blake 

really empty

The student hiding in closet with classmates speaks like a zen master and christian mendicant combined in his experience of the real and horrifying. 

 “We’re all thinking it’s a drill,” Jawae said. When he got into the closet, Jawae texted his family to let them know that he was safe. Some of his classmates started panicking, he said. They could hear gunshots nearby, but they kept waiting.

“I felt empty, I felt really empty, I had zero emotions going through me,” he said. “I was ready to die.”

While in the closet, Jawae read a verse from the Bible from his phone, John 3:16.

“I understood that if this is my time to go, this is my time to go,” he said. 

Teen and Woman Killed in Shooting at St. Louis High School, Oct.24, 2022, NYTimes

A teacher, a 15yr old student, and the gunman were killed. Seven others wounded. 

The citizens of the United States hardly notice any more.

Why not?

Because it is not their child. Not their spouse.

This is their erroneous thinking.

And the gun has replaced the crucifix as an object of worship. It is a diabolical scam.  Take, take, take. Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. Separate, separate, separate.

No one understands the crucifixion. A fully human person absorbs the suffering of the world. 

The Christ holds everyone close. An intimate sacrifice extruding the inclination to separate and condemn.

The Bodhisattva hears the cries of the world and weeps while gathering unto herself those needing comfort.

 The student hiding from the shooting says:  “I felt empty, I felt really empty, I had zero emotions going through me,” he said. “I was ready to die.” 

A prerequisite for becoming what we never expect to be.

No, not a victim.

Rather, a healing, holy, transformed (go ahead, say it!), saint, for whom caring, compassionate, and loving attentiveness becomes the only reality worth the presence of being-in-the-world.

For all who have suffered the losses, and for anyone realizing what the hidden sorrow betokens -- may you find in the crushing experience a new way of thinking and being in the world!

Truly, a profound and passionate sacrifice crossing our consciousness.

the thing that happened

                  (After poet Jim Harrison)

 In his poem he

Brings flowers to crash scene where

Her head was torn off

A cow watched him in blood grass

His ballad of love

certo che si

 Yes

(Is there anything else?)

No

with someone, they love, abitazione

 I disagree. I'm not going to say yes to everything. I want to argue. Push back. Contend. Dialogue. Dispute.

But, I suspect, I can still love you.

Feel pity, sympathy, fondness, affection.

We are losing the ability and capacity to see things differently and still remain humane, brotherly, sisterly.

We are not here to eliminate one another.

We're here to find one another a place (outside us) and a time (inside us) to reside at home in the world.

In the quiet of this room, sitting alone, I am in community with each one who is one with and within themselves.

Those who are divided and who divide others are not easily associated with a community of complementarity and compassion.

There are those who know better, think they are better, strut and pretend there is no better than them.

No matter who is near them, they are lonely and isolated. And they want to make everyone else lonely and isolated.

One can sit alone in a room and be with everyone. Even with those who make themselves and others lonely and isolated.

Mendicants, perpetual pilgrims, hobos, transients, solitaries, wanderers place to place, time to time, thus come, thus gone.

Among us, these peripatetic dreamers who know they are dreamers in a landscape of hallucination, in a duration of timelessness, in a form garbed with the formless, accompanying us, in our surround, most likely a subtle smile of recognition felt from their ungraspable presence.

 No fixed home, set address, unchanging domicile. It’s  not homelessness. It's just that "home" is not what nor where we think it is.

If we can learn that love (there, the word appears) is no opposition, no division, no separation -- then we are both always alone and never alone at the same time.

Alone.

With others.

Alone.

Together.

And if you dare to turn around and glance there...

Alone with the Alone.

It's a closer look at the lyric of the Ed and Patsy Bruce song "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" -- the line that says: 

"'Cause they'll never stay home and they're always alone

Even with someone they love".

We are not alone. We are with the Alone. Not two. Not one. Just...

With someone

We love

Abitazione — Dwelling

then we covered dinghy with canoe and tarp

 Loading lumber up

to crossbeams from cabin loft —

Meditating planks

when in doubt be still

No division

Nor derision

Merely morning