and you, what do you think

 Yes?

       I think so.

Good.

        Yes!

I, too, think so.

dark with sky filled stars.

Co-monastic sends Saturday morning meditation: 

 The Sacred Pulse of Night and Day

“Dark and light work in a reciprocal relationship to affirm true nature… the divine darkness may be our greatest ally rather than a danger to be feared.”

– Deborah Eden Tull

Words she finds in Dewdrop, 17nov22.

“In the dark, the activity of the conscious mind was composted and what remained was a vast empty expanse for integration, regeneration, serenity, and other forms of knowing.”

The monastery in the Sierras was fully removed from society and city lights, so once again the night sky confirmed my tiny place in the vast universe. I was completely alone in the night, accompanied by only the spirit of darkness and my own thoughts. In the nocturnal darkness, there was nothing to do but be in open space. At first, I had to face my tendency to fill this empty space with thought, as in sitting meditation, I gradually began to let that go, however, and surrender to empty space. In the dark, the activity of the conscious mind was composted and what remained was a vast empty expanse for integration, regeneration, serenity, and other forms of knowing. I became keenly aware of my dream activity and the gestation and deeper communication that seemed to occur in the solitude of the night. 

(xcerpt from D. Tull's book! Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown.)

An added couplet completes:

awakening early these days this speaks volumes.

and walking dog late in day now dark with sky filled stars.

(/s)

when metaphors sit with hands on face

 Light, the

Obvious

Showing the

Oblivious

acknowledgment — anerkennung

Reading proposal from MSP resident for course on Existentialism and Aletheia (disclosure/truth)

He left the book selection for Hegel unfinished. 

 Like Kant, Hegel thinks that one’s capacity to be conscious of some external object as something distinct from oneself requires the reflexivity of self-consciousness, that is, it requires one’s awareness of oneself as a subject for whom something distinct, the object, is presented as known (a result emerging in Chapter 3). Hegel goes beyond Kant, however, and expanding on an idea found in Fichte, makes this requirement dependent on one’s recognition (or acknowledgment—Anerkennung) of other self-conscious subjects as self-conscious subjects for whom any object of consciousness will be thought as also existing. One’s self-consciousness, in fact, will be dependent on one’s recognition of those others as similarly recognizing oneself as a self-conscious subject. Such complex patterns of mutual recognition constituting objective spirit thereby provide the social matrix within which individual self-consciousnesses can exist as such. It is in this way that the Phenomenology can change course, the earlier tracking of shapes of individual consciousness and self-consciousness effectively coming to be replaced by the tracking of distinct patterns of mutual recognition between subjects—shapes of spirit—that forms the ground for the existence of those individual consciousnesses/self-consciousnesses.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/

 Perhaps Phenomenology of Spirit (1806).

Consciousness and Spirit -- worthy of investigation.

some good writing here

Michael Gerson,  (May 15, 1964 – November 17, 2022) (Rest in Peace)

Speechwriter and Washington Post Opinion writer. He gave a talk in 2019.

Here’s his talk at the National Cathedral: February 17, 2019: Sunday Sermon by Michael Gerson, National Cathedral

https://youtu.be/xYu4xKGRi8Q

impossibility of becoming what you think you are

 Become your self? But

There is no separate self

Become no other

No need to cultivate what

Cannot stand in for Itself

η σοφία είναι το έδαφος kαι nα εισαι αυτό κάθε αυτό*

                    * wisdom is the ground of existence and Being Itself  

 All sapience here

Obvious to everyone

An open clear source 

Any mind could see and grasp

Direct, unveiled, revealing 

                     η σοφία είναι το έδαφος και είσαι όλο αυτό**

                      **wisdom is the ground and you are all of it    

(*+**/wfh)

on the one hand

I'd like to say thank you to the decent and kind living in our midst.


You make life a little bit more accommodating and peaceful.


Something to look forward to.

I suspect we’ll be entering the time of irrelevant theatrics and posturing political harlequins with the new house majority.

Too bad.

It would be a great time to ensure service and protection to a decent, yet uneasy, populace. 

who are you

 I am not now

Nor ever have I been

A member of 

Anything demanding

I relinquish (yes) you

the operation was a success, but our patience is dying

Some would say that to know what is good you have to know what is not good.

I’m glad to listen to the political crazies as they announce this and that, warp truth, and rail at reality.

They will invite, unintentionally, the good to be known.

forks in sink until tomorrow

 Apple-blueberry 

Pie box folded into bag

To be recycled

Like criminal former guy

Scamming another payday

don't throw it out, own it

shadow work is this:

to undivide by owning 

everything there -- you

podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrá detener la primavera. (pablo neruda)

There is a faith deeper than any religion's.

It dwells in the experience of poetry.

Which, in itself, is neither aesthetic nor literary.

Rather, ontologically sensible, neurologically ecstatic, deathly revealing.

As we face our own era of rising authoritarianism and new sets of complexities and injustices to resist, the question remains: Does poetry have the power to effect change? We can write “drop poetry not bombs” on fliers, but the hard truth is that one poem alone cannot protect dreamers from being deported or restrain an unfit president. And yet, Neruda illuminates how poetry’s poignant nature—its unique power of distillation—can create change through a cumulative, collective effort: one by one, like gathering drops, each time a poem comes into contact with a person’s consciousness—whether read by a 1930’s Spanish Republican soldier or heard on the radio or penned afresh—it incites the possibility for a shift in perspective or an urge toward action. Poetry can energize, inform, and inspire. This alone won’t stop bombs, but when taken together with all the direct actions of a social movement—marches, relentless grassroots organizing, seven thousand shoes placed on the U.S. Capitol lawn—Neruda has shown us how poetry can be an emotionally potent ingredient in the greater transformative efforts of resistance.

The effectiveness of Neruda’s poetry is proven by its endurance, how often people reach for and evoke his works as a tool to galvanize, to awaken, to sustain. In San Francisco, during the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Neruda’s words were draped on banners over the streets: “Tyranny cuts off the head that sings, but the voice at the bottom of the well returns to the secret springs of the earth and out of the darkness rises up through the mouth of the people.” Nearly a decade later, the Egyptian art historian Bahia Shehab spray-painted Neruda’s words on the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring: “You can cut all the flowers, but you can’t stop spring.” Five years later, during the January 2017 Women’s March, those same words of Neruda that had appeared in Cairo would grace posters bearing the original Spanish:“Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrá detener la primavera.”

Instances of social injustice, war, and the los of liberal democracy call us off the sidelines and into action. Neruda drastically adapted his poetry in response to crisis. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, he abandoned his desolate, introverted experimental poetry in favor of a decisive style, one that would compel others into action.

Whether we’re poets, teachers, readers, activists, or ordinary citizens who care about the world, we, too, can transform the way we express ourselves. In the era of social media, we don’t need to make pulp out of flags to transmit our message to the troops of resistance. We can all speak. We can all be part of the dialogue. And poetry can be part of the collective way we, in Neruda’s words, “explain some things.” From Neruda and others we can see how the act of expressing ourselves, and the act of hearing, are core components of resistance—and of poetry’s unique, enduring power.

(--from, What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistance, by Mark Eisner , The Paris Review, March 26, 2018)

Many people I know dislike poetry

Or they patronize it

Like collectors of tusk or horn from large slaughtered beasts

They have not found poetry in the darkness of their unknowing sleep

Or in unforgiven protestations of an innocence that does not belong to them

No...

Poetry

has not yet

slit their throat

slaying separative

distance from one's own true word

cat, in from cold porch, settles on lap

 It is too dark too soon

this middle november

too cold of a sudden

late afternoon drear

i want to climb into bed

fall asleep under comforter

Instead, vespers from France

by way of tune-in on old mac

this hermitage of splayed 

imagination where medieval

consciousness senses hut

with cookfire tomato soup

monk meditating on mysteries

too subtle for his intelligence

an inner voice too indecipherable

an understanding far too obvious

one by one they drop away

interests in anything outside

leaving me inside everything

where nothing is its own

completely so

and anything not nothing

cannot sustain externality

falling back into nothing there  

inside, out

 God 

Is not

Outside

You

Are 

inside

God

(As it

were, as 

You are)