we don’t yet know

 Don’t be a poet. You’ll have to wander through firewood past it’s usefulness and sit next to overturned rowboat beneath single lightbulb halfway up cedar shingles.

 “We turn to the arts in order to learn what we don’t yet know. We practice the arts to find that which we don’t yet know.” 

(—Jane Hirshfield in How Poetry Can Transform Our Lives, New Dimensions)

I don’t know why there are so many races, languages, customs and outskirts of villages and towns over and over in dusk light when full moon is fazed by smoke from faraway fires.

Gate at end of day is closed and sentinel to road where so very few passing cars go into night.

Do not write poems. 

Instead mutter prayers you cannot believe in. They will sustain you with their orphaned intimation of a once pious sense that all is connected and some knew such an intuition to be true. 

Link opeRoger Housden

he was a hermit-scholar wandering through words

 God is God.

Good is Good.

You are You.

I am I.

God is Good.

You are I.

ONE is One.

Two is Nuptial.

Do we see?

Do we see?

God is God.

We are We.

God becomes We.

We become God.

ONE is No-Other.

No-Other are We.

We are This.

Here we Are.

Whom shall I send?

Send me!

ABBA

FATHER

Translate us,

Jerome, translate us . . .

the renown of the inchoate re-known

 A new dialectic:

The known

The unknown

The re-known

 To cycle through the reading of that which presents itself to us is to converse the utterance of the emerging appearance with the reserved silence of that which is not yet manifest within itself.

Our need for one another is great.

not every message can be read

 archangels about

today they are honored -- shhh --

dog and cat listen

sell, sell, sell

Sad advertisements

Buy, buy, buy — America’s

Only skill belief

as does his silence

 For a short while we live in-between words. When words weary and close their eyes things go silent. It is a time full of reminiscence with eyes looking out over empty space.

The writer is situated in his time;

every word he utters has reverberations.

As does his silence. 

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Then words wake up and reach out to touch ground and sky and bodies no longer breathing are waiting to be taken to a new view of nothing seen before.

The dead walk through everything and touch nothing. They don’t need words. Their language is silence and their pronunciation impeccable. Only the keenest ears hear and the sharpest minds interpret the colloquy with grace and compassion.

We reverberate one another whether with linguistic resonance or susurring soundlessness.

On rare occasions there are phrases that slip between known distinctions and wraith-like make their way past vigilant awareness to sit beside us in motionless company as if in zazen sesshin when no thought bothers mind no movement stirs body no question remains unanswered because no need to ask.

Write this if you can. 

I can’t. 

This seems beyond me. 

Which prospect cheers.

still with you

 If you believe the human brain is a minuscule transmitter whose primary function is to keep out the overwhelming flood of information, raw data, electrical impulses, collective memories, and billions of subatomic particles crowding the foyer seeking entry into a particular consciousness, you might be on to something.

Just as our iPhones are external hard drive brain-transmitters carried in pockets, the biological cranium brain has a limited gigabyte capacity limiting both speed and room for that which traverses the visible and invisible cosmos.

This morning the sun is an orange ball crossing tree limbs and bamboo slats through cloud curtain allowing it to appear like a full moon in an autumn crossing.

The Sun is a 4.5 billion-year-old yellow dwarf star – a hot glowing ball of hydrogen and helium – at the center of our solar system. It’s about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth and it’s our solar system’s only star. Without the Sun’s energy, life as we know it could not exist on our home planet. 

From our vantage point on Earth, the Sun may appear like an unchanging source of light and heat in the sky. But the Sun is a dynamic star, constantly changing and sending energy out into space. The science of studying the Sun and its influence throughout the solar system is called heliophysics. 

The Sun is the largest object in our solar system. Its diameter is about 865,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers). Its gravity holds the solar system together, keeping everything from the biggest planets to the smallest bits of debris in orbit around it.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/

Compared to earth:

Its diameter (the distance from one side to the other through Earth's center) is 7,926 miles (about 12,756 kilometers). Earth is slightly smaller when measured between the North and South Poles which gives a diameter of 7,907 miles (12,725 kilometers).  diameter of earth

The sun fits inside the perspective of the brain. The brain is a drop of individual consciousness inside the mind. 

The mind is the encircling surround encompassing the whole of matter and spirit comprising the cosmos, the minuscule and maximal reality of the cosmos and the whole of being/nonbeing, potential and imagined manifestation of whatever there is that is yet coming to be.

And you, as Alan Watts would point out — You are it!

You and I are all of it. Whatever resides anywhere resides within us. Such knowledge is too wonderful and too beyond us.

Psalm 139

For the director of music. Of David. A psalm.

1You have searched me, Lord,

and you know me.

2You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.

3You discern my going out and my lying down;

you are familiar with all my ways.

4Before a word is on my tongue

you, Lord, know it completely.

5You hem me in behind and before,

and you lay your hand upon me.

6Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,

too lofty for me to attain.

7Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

8If I go up to the heavens, you are there;

if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

9If I rise on the wings of the dawn,

if I settle on the far side of the sea,

10even there your hand will guide me,

your right hand will hold me fast.

11If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me

and the light become night around me,”

12even the darkness will not be dark to you;

the night will shine like the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

13For you created my inmost being;

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

14I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

your works are wonderful,

I know that full well.

15My frame was not hidden from you

when I was made in the secret place,

when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

16Your eyes saw my unformed body;

all the days ordained for me were written in your book

before one of them came to be.

17How precious to me are your thoughts, ^a God!

How vast is the sum of them!

18Were I to count them,

they would outnumber the grains of sand—

when I awake, I am still with you.

19If only you, God, would slay the wicked!

Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty!

20They speak of you with evil intent;

your adversaries misuse your name.

21Do I not hate those who hate you, Lord,

and abhor those who are in rebellion against you?

22I have nothing but hatred for them;

I count them my enemies.

23Search me, God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

24See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting. (NIV)

At a loss for how to think about the isomorphic and interrelational nature of reality we stand in awe-stunned confusion as to the confines and defines of our existential situation within and without the anthropological and cosmological conceptualization of what is both apparent and nonapparent.

A profound and abiding nescience overtakes. And when we find we must say something, we say "God."

That which is within and without in the same instant. Above and below. Immanent, transcendent, and surrounding all at once.

We have no other name for it. Some point out that it has no name. Or its name is above and beyond all and any name. Nameless ubiquity. Some try out -- "God."

Goethe wrote that "names are but noise and smoke obscuring heavenly light."

We are "poor passing facts." (Lowell)

Our form is emptiness, our emptiness form. (Heart Sutra)

We go on, not knowing.

Good for you!

Good for us!

God is good.

Good is good.

As is all of it.

Try this on for size.

This is all we have -- this is all there is.

not(e) what you see

 It’s a crapshoot. Not being a criminal. Luck of the draw. Not killing someone. Not defrauding. Not breaking arms and legs.

It is no accomplishment. It is luck. That’s it. Luck.

We’re all a little crazy. All creepy. All a little unsavory.

Try not to make too much of your innocence. It’s not that big a deal. It can disappear in a minute.

Hell is not an idea. Not some theological fabrication. It is where grace exhausts itself and runs.

If I am not in prison it is no accomplishment. If I am not in a monastery it is no deficiency.

Lowell wrote that we are poor passing facts.

Watch yourself.

You are passing alongside yourself.

Listen carefully.

Watch.

we know it when we hear it

 Listen to brave voice

Saying what heart knows is true, 

We’re better for it

what we are, given, when present

 No worries about

What to say — all words reside

in situ — listen 

enough, she says

 A young woman writes

Book about men she worked for —

Former president

Unworthy, unethical

We listen — words — frightening 

as the people say goodbye to their country

 The news channel folks

Excoriate Trump et al

Such dangerous men

Burning down their own house for

money, bragging spew, and hate

without strings

 I thought you’d never ask.

Most people can read a book with words, but not one without words, and they can play a lyre with strings but not one without strings.

How can they derive tranquil pleasure from a book or lyre, when they exercise their intelligence only on the material, but not on the spiritual aspect of things?   Hung Ying-ming (1596)

And yet, and yet, and yet . . .

I have no answer to give. 

a creative moment

A good way of seeing what is beyond seeing.

As part of his study of mysticism, Howard Thurman attended Quaker meetings and sat in the silence that characterizes unscripted forms of Quaker worship. In a 1951 sermon on the strength of silence in corporate worship ... Thurman speaks of his personal experience of group silence during a traditional Quaker meeting:

Nobody said a word … just silence. Silence. Silence. And in that silence I felt as though all of them were on one side and I was on the other side, by myself, with my noise. And every time I would try to get across the barrier, nothing happened. I was just Howard Thurman. And then … I don’t know when it happened, how it happened, I wish I could tell you, but somewhere in that hour I passed over the invisible line, and I became one with all the seekers. I wasn’t Howard Thurman anymore; I was, I was a human spirit involved in a creative moment with human spirits, in the presence of God. [2] 

 

—from, A Sense of Presence, CAC, https://email.cac.org/t/d-e-vtuhjhy-tlkridklo-e/

 Of a Monday morning. 

too close to call

 Frog in high grass jumps

away from sneaker footstep

walking to fire pit

be well

 At conversation last evening talk about where we've come from and, perhaps, going.

As a cultural catholic and zen buddhist I am going nowhere. 

As some point out, we're already in hell, a place where disconnective ambition dissects proper relationally into fragments of dissociative meander. A forgetfulness of primordial wholeness and preference for individualistic hoarding of resources, material, and even spiritual interconnectivity.

Hell is other people, Jean Paul Sartre wrote. And making other is the work of self-absorbed narcissistic personalities intent in excluding, shaming, and cancelling fellow human beings-in-waiting from advancing and arriving at their true home.

Traditionally this has been called sin. 

Even those who claim that to sin is to sin against God, there is much to look at here.

If the metaphoric narrative concerning the one we call God is looked at outside the discreet beliefs of organized religions, we might point to the following:

• God is what is.
• What is is reality.
• Reality is that which is emerging from, through, and into presence itself

A question often asked is -- Is reality good?

False reality is not good.

Authentic reality, true reality, let’s say, is good.

We ask: Can we infer that all-that-is is, ultimately, good-in-itself?

And is the In-Itself that which can be called God?

And, further, do we understand that that which comes from the in-Itself is of-Itself, belonging to-Itself and, hence, nothing other than Itself?

Nothing can separate us from the well-being of Itself (God).

It is given to us to make the journey from that which is not itself to that which is itself, through the jungles of other, toward the clear and open landscape horizon of no-other.

Seeing no-other is what we have called heaven.

Seeing oneself in and as another is the gateway to the vision of God. "No-one has seen God and lived" is a way of saying that when we dwell in the horizon of no-other we are no longer severing or separating reality according to our personal interests. Rather, we surrender, sacrifice, surmount, and survive into what is always and ever the sustaining ground of Being wherein that which we call God surrounds, interpenetrates, embodies, and manifests all-that-is in-and-beyond-Itself,

Christ is the journey through unrealized reality to realized reality. Christ is our journey. It is God to God, human to human, creation to creation.

There is nothing alien to God, not a thing outside God, no-one other than the One/God.

We might be given to say that Christ is emergence. “Christ” is not owned by any religion, not what we think it is. Christ is the moving-through this incomplete reality toward we-know-not-what. This not-knowing is our guiding navigation. 

Because God cannot be known. 

God can only be and become reality. And reality is to be experienced, cared for, seen through, and embodied.

We are often deluded by false proclamations of self-absorbed individuals selling themselves as substitutes for the Reality of One/God. Don't believe them. They will fade away into a deeper realization when all their delusions tire and collapse into something truer, more compassionate, and kinder reality ready to receive their collapse and hold them in comforting acceptance, flaws, failings, and falseness included.

It is Sunday. Tonight Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur. Today zazen and grateful thanksgiving, nature's courageous turnaround, breakfast with family, dozing cat on lap.

Alls well that ends well -- if it's not well it's not the end. (Who said that?)

Be well! 

what shall we call you

 Don't call me.

no promises, just presence

 Not to be bound by 

vows — my words drift away from

mind and body — I

can only stand like a child

in presence — of God — true, mute

….  …   … 

Kol Nidre

Aramaic Text

English translation

כָּל נִדְרֵי, וֶאֱסָרֵי, וּשְבוּעֵי, וַחֲרָמֵי, וְקוֹנָמֵי, וְקִנוּסֵי, וְכִנוּיֵי, דִנְדַרְנָא, וּדְאִשְתַּבַּעְנָא, וּדְאַחֲרִמְנָא עַל נַפְשָׁתָנָא. •מִיוֹם כִּפּוּרִים שֶׁעָבַר עַד יוֹם כִּפּוּרִים זֶה, וּ־־• ♦מִיוֹם כִּפּוּרִם זֶה עַד יוֹם כִּפּוּרִים הַבָּא עָלֵינוּ לְטוֹבָה.♦ בְּכֻלְהוֹן אִחֲרַטְנָא בְהוֹן. כֻּלְהוֹן יְהוֹן שָׁרָן, שְׁבִיקין, שְׁבִיתִין, בְּטֵלִן וּמְבֻטָלִין, לָא שְׁרִירִין, וְלָא קַיָמִין. נִדְרָנָא לָא נִדְרֵי, וֶאֱסָרָנָא לָא אֱסָרֵי, וּשְׁבוּעָתָנָא לָא שְׁבוּעוֹת.‎

All vows, and prohibitions, and oaths, and consecrations, and konams and konasi and synonymous terms,[5] that we may vow, or swear, or consecrate, or prohibit upon ourselves, •from the previous Day of Atonement until this Day of Atonement and ...• ♦from this Day of Atonement until the [next] Day of Atonement that will come for our benefit.♦ Regarding all of them, we repudiate them. All of them are undone, abandoned, cancelled, null and void, not in force, and not in effect. Our vows are no longer vows, and our prohibitions are no longer prohibitions, and our oaths are no longer oaths.