Today at Meetingbrook: 02/12/2023

Saturday, February 18, 2023

a man to emulate with thoughtful attention

Jimmy Carter enters hospice at home today.

Good for him!

A good man and decent. A president and a former president one could respect and honor.

For you, Mr. President, a good death with much love surrounding!

With U’-we-hno, our thanks and gratitude

Friday, February 17, 2023

with no punctuation

We are — poems — breathed

by someone — else — here we are —

words exhaled — shaped — shown

Thursday, February 16, 2023

some unappealing, some confirming

The woman is saying that infinity is before anything. From which is consciousness. Followed by code.

These words from my younger study -- infinity and eternity -- no beginning and no ending, no time -- and then here we are.

It's 51o in Camden in the middle of February. Bald Mountain across road just sits there, a zen practitioner with no particular agenda other than (as friend and I spoke about yesterday) presence, openness, attentiveness, and acceptance.

As it happens, all attempts to practice fall away and mere practice occurs.

Any sitting is zen sitting. Any walking is kinhin. Any sound is chant. Any question arising is koan study. Any doubting uncertainty is don't-know mind. Any passing truck is letting go by what cannot be grasped. Any FedEx package hanging at gate is deliverance going forward.

I meditate on the phrase, 'Before anything was, I am.' Or is it, 'Before anything was I, Am.'

Every piece of bread is my body. Every glass of water, my blood.

Every newspaper article is scripture -- some unappealing, some confirming.

Every nap is death.

Every alarm wakeup, resurrection.

This room is church, temple, mosque, zendo, synagogue, and holy ground.

The snoring dog is the snoring dog.

I get up. I fall down. I get up. I fall down.

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

(Roethke)

And all is . . .

Well

we don't now and never did lie to each other

Spare us your verse. We’ve a world to dominate. This won't hurt much. Then you’ll sleep. Forever, like love. See how we live without it.

International forensic experts delivered a report to justice officials in Chile today regarding the death of the South American country's famous poet Pablo Neruda — some 50 years ago. A nephew of Neruda tells NPR that scientists found high levels of poison in the poet's remains.

Scientists from Canada, Denmark and Chile examined bone and tooth samples from Neruda's exhumed body. Neruda died in 1973, just days after the U.S.-backed coup that deposed his friend President Salvador Allende.

Rodolfo Reyes — a nephew of the Nobel Prize winning poet who has seen the report — says scientists found high levels of the bacterium that can cause botulism poisoning. He says that proves what he has said for 50 years — that his uncle was injected with the poison at a hospital immediately after the coup.

Scientists from Canada's McMaster University say they couldn't conclude if the bacterium killed Neruda, but did note political prisoners in Chile were poisoned with the same toxin in the 1980s

(npr, 15feb23 )

Neruda knew the rules, the stakes, the broken lines fallen off typewriter onto floor next to grey slipper turned on its side.

Viva Chile! Viva los Estados Unidos!

Nixon’s junta amigo Pinochet didn’t like such a poet and compañero of Allende, poems about dogs, love, or fine wine.

Neruda knew what poets know.

Saludos y agradecimiento por tus palabras!

A Dog Has Died
by Pablo Neruda
My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.
Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.
Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.
No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.
Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.
Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.
There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.
So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

it's hard to follow

"The absurd", Camus*

said true, "is sin without God."

Much absurdity

passes as thoughts, words, of our

bleak minds strange hearts without love

... ... ...
* from The Myth of Sisyphus:

"I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone. I am told again that here the intelligence must sacrifice its pride and the reason bow down. But if I recognize the limits of the reason, I do not therefore negate it, recognizing its relative powers. I merely want to remain in this middle path where the intelligence can remain clear. If that is its pride, I see no sufficient reason for giving it up. Nothing more profound, for example, than Kierkegaard's view according to which despair is not a fact but a state: the very state of sin. For sin is what alienates from God. The absurd, which is the metaphysical state of the conscious man, does not lead to God. Perhaps this notion will become clearer if I risk this shocking statement: the absurd is sin without God."

of course we are only passing through

Are you a student

of zen? Go easy, look hard —

See clearly, move through

what’s that popping in that mitt

Pitchers and catchers

Report to Florida and

Arizona … Thump!

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

call no man father, no woman mother — all are children, all are orphans

The teacher is not

Important, the teaching is —

Taught by each passing

perplexing progeny

Blame the parents of

Republican congressfolk

And senate beggars

They weren’t loved Anouilh, no

Trust in anything not cash

… …. …

I am played in private theaters, so I write for the bourgeoisie. One has to rely on the people who pay for their places; the people who support the theater are bourgeois. But this public has changed: They have such a terror of not being in touch, of missing out on a fashionable event that they no longer exist as a decisive force. I think the public has lost its head. They now say that a play can't be that good if they can understand it. My plays are not hermetic enough. It's rather Molièresque, don't you think?
— Jean Anouilh^{[23] .(Wikipedia.)}