these are our relatives

 Bagpipes Cape Breton

Listening from hundreds of

Miles in New Brunswick

Rainy windswept night on hill

So many people and dogs

the dog with me greets the god with you

Ensō, our St Bernard/Border Collie mix, does profound bow in the direction of all-that-is. Paws out straight, shoulders ruffled, back arched, head lowered between elbows, rear end staunch and strong centering his prostration.

He does the world honor presencing gratitude and fidelity to whomever and whatever is about him.

Bowing is a very serious practice. You should be prepared to bow, even in your last moment. Even though it is impossible to get rid of our self-centered desires, we have to do it.

Our true nature wants us to. Sometimes the disciple bows to the master, sometimes the master bows to the disciple. A master who cannot bow to his disciple cannot bow to the Buddha.

Sometimes the master and disciple bow together to the Buddha. Sometimes we may bow to cats and dogs.                                     ———Shunryu Suzuki (1904-1971)

Bow well.

Bow (wow).

Toss off the bowline.

It is thanksgiving in Canada.

chartreuse

 Bruno founded the

Carthusians, hermits living

in community

that's it, nothing else to say

he's probably watching now

a pit of fire

 Don’t mind me.

Life’s fortune and misfortune are caused entirely by the mind. Shakymuni said:

“A burning desire for gain is a pit of fire, and an indulgence in greed is a sea of suffering. Once our mind is purified, a flame is turned into a pool; and once our mind awakens us from a dream of worldliness, our ship of life is anchored along the shore of the Great Beyond.”

Hence, a slight change of the mind can suddenly make a different situation. Should we not be careful?

Hung Ying-ming 1596

One perception that falls off the counter and smashes onto floor will take a while to clear up.

Yes, we should, be careful. 

in the dream, circum-locution, deus solus

 I am … passing through … 

this … Yes … I am …so…what is 

This … is … what is … here

the feast of francis -- haecceity*

It occurs to me that Francis of Assisi's cosmological grasp of the Christ Reality goes deeper and beyond the sweet animals and flora of the countryside. 

Francis is presented only as deep and visionary as the writers and commentators taking up his persona and relaying it to us. 

Then, of course, there's our ability to comprehend the austere significance of mystical intuitions held by an Italian peasant seemingly breaking away from daddy and tumbling into the cloaking mother church in order to divest himself from all that was not himself in order to grok the swirling transmission of matter itself exchanging itself with the itself within and without him.

And if Francis was intuited as being the speculum christi, (the mirror of Christ), what inner grasp was effectuated by his spiritual charism flowing from him to the myriad stand-abouts over centuries of contemplation who identify with the appellation "franciscan" for reasons they cannot comprehend?

You’re referring to Information, Physics, Quantum, Wheeler’s 1989 essay propounding the idea that the physical universe arises from information, which he dubbed “it from bit.” Why were you reading it?

I’m trying to learn about what people are trying to say with the phrase “it from qubit.” Wheeler talked about “it from bit,” but you have to remember that this essay was written probably before the term “qubit” was coined and certainly before it was in wide currency.

Reading it, I really think he was talking about qubits, not bits, so “it from qubit” is actually just a modern translation.Don’t expect me to be able to tell you anything useful about it — about whether he was right. 

When I was a beginning grad student, they had a series of lectures by faculty members to the new students about theoretical research, and one of the people who gave such a lecture was Wheeler. He drew a picture on the blackboard of the universe visualized as an eye looking at itself. I had no idea what he was talking about. It’s obvious to me in hindsight that he was explaining what it meant to talk about quantum mechanics when the observer is part of the quantum system. I imagine there is something we don’t understand about that.

(--from, A Physicist’s Physicist Ponders the Nature of Reality, By NATALIE WOLCHOVER, Quanta Magazine) "Among the brilliant theorists cloistered in the quiet woodside campus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Edward Witten stands out as a kind of high priest." 

Yes, we say, the animals! The countryside, the clouds, the oddly described stigmata wherein replication of physical morphological episodes of experienced fact re-emerge centuries later in some quantum entanglement internexus suggesting a greater familiarity and intimacy between particular beings than previously thought. Is this the franciscan charisma?

Is it a felt interbeing (thanks Thây) that spans the illusions of time and distance to suffuse all physicality, all spirituality, so as to ground us as fellow beings, familial relatives, non-dual moments-of-existence so ensconced in the reality of one another that the words sympathy, empathy, and morphic resonance are pale expressions of the fact-being-undergone?

The franciscan way of being/becoming has long been a mystery. Pious raconteurs, perhaps, were ill-equipped to transmit the mysticism of Francis' seraphic experience. The light, ardor, and purity of the transcending inner grasp is difficult brushwork for an invisible canvas.

The information emanating from (what might be called) real presence is, perhaps, untranslatable to any idiom we might admix in our lexicon of spirituality.

But we posit this: If there was a christ, and there was a francis, and there is a cosmos, as well as a population of interested and curious individuals as to the core reality of being, existence, cosmos, life, and emerging humanity amidst soil, plant, animal, and human expressions of same -- then, well, here we are...

Francis, the story goes, would often say to his companion, "Write this down, Brother Leo! Leo, as a good scribe, would write the fabled communiques he heard that hagiographers would echo in delightful little flowers easily replicated over eleven centuries. 

I wonder. 

I wonder if Leo and the other fraticelli missed the subjective hortatory of his request. 

Was Francis saying "Write This down!" 

This!

The ever-present origin and foundation of the underlying reality of existence-itself, This.

This knitting-together and nuptial expression of what it is to be in this world with what is here and with whom we dwell.

It is the feast of Francis. Our fêted inter-being mirroring what-is-truly, our-very-reality. 

And so, we pray!

May this be so!

Statue of Francis, 

(gift from Janet Rhodes delivered to meetingbrook from Beach Island after her death 15August2000)

...   ...   ...

* Haecceity (/hɛkˈsiːɪti, hiːk-/; from the Latin haecceitas, which translates as "thisness") is a term from medieval scholastic philosophy, first coined by followers of Duns Scotus to denote a concept that he seems to have originated: the irreducible determination of a thing that makes it this particular thing. Haecceity is a person's or object's thisness, the individualising difference between the concept "a man" and the concept "Socrates" (i.e., a specific person).^[1] In modern philosophy of physics, it is sometimes referred to as primitive thisness.^[2] 

Haecceity is a Latin neologism formed as an abstract noun derived from the demonstrative pronoun "haec(ce)", meaning "this (very)" (feminine singular) or "these (very)" (feminine or neuter plural). It is apparently formed on the model of another (much older) neologism, viz. "qui(d)ditas" ("whatness"), which is a calque of Aristotle's Greek to ti esti (τὸ τί ἐστι)^[3] or "the what (it) is."

--wikipedia 

ex-press-ion

Good words. 

"I made a fateful decision that I was going to devote my life to human expression not human perfection." (--Yo Yo Ma, in trailer for Master Class)

Wonderful talent. 

then, do the next loving thing

 compassion ain't hard --

just give up ego-self, die

to illusion, say

"yes" in your heart every 

minute, pray only prayer

fullness is emptiness

 do you wish simple

life? uncomplicated days?

try silence -- listen

peace and all good, 4 october

 pax et bonum

speculum christi

Francis of Assisi

magna gratia

handsome is as handsome does

 Russia is killing Ukrainians. Should we care? Yes. 

Who could stand next to a thug beating up someone  and not be moved to help the victim?

It is always dangerous to intervene in violence. 

Donald Trump is threatening officers of the courts mandated to try cases where laws have been abused and broken. 

No one can stand by watching and listening to abuse rendered.

We used to say that stupidity is stupidity. Today stupidity is lucrative. People send money to the stupid and consider themselves smart for doing so. 

It’s a curious time. 

testimony of a scrabble player

L          S

I           I

S          L

T          E  

E          N

N         T

In prison yesterday one of the men pointed out that the words “listen” and “silent” are comprised of the same letters.

I’d not noticed that. It was news to me. 

The joy of being a student is the willingness to be surprised.

So it was. So it is.

far behind

 My home is a square inch on four sides surrounding me.

I’ve left the world far behind,
My robe is covered with moss;
A small bundle of firewood burns,
Brightening the night.     

Ryokan (1758-1831)

One day I will gather up these inches, look around, and become the sky kissing ground where once someone sat in silence.

sandbox tantrum

 A pathetic man

Who does not know how to lose

Tears down his country

Whining and threatening all

Who dare see him a loser

these intelligences are angels

  From sunday evening practice last evening: 

If the transfer of thoughts can happen faster than the speed of light, then the whole question of interstellar and intergalactic communication looks very different, as it does when we broaden our thinking about intelligences elsewhere in the cosmos. Instead of confining our attention to minds of biological organisms, suchas ourselves, living in technological civilizations, we can explore the possibility that planets, stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters also have a kind of consciousness. 

This is where the traditional understanding and experience of cosmic intelligences may be able to help us, and especially the angelology of Dionysius the Areopagite, Hildegard of Bingen, and Thomas Aquinas. 

Consider, for example, the possibility that the sun is conscious. This is not a very far-fetched idea, even in terms of the standard materialistic assumptions of orthodox science. Materialists believe that our own mental activity is associated with complex electromagnetic patterns in our brains. These patterns of electromagnetic activity are generally assumed to be the interface between consciousness and the physical activity of our brains. Consciousness is somehow supposed to emerge from these patterns. But the complex electromagnetic patterns in our brains are as nothing compared with the complexity of electromagnetic patterns in the sun. 

The sun is a fireball of plasma assumed to be fuelled by nuclear fusion reactions. A plasma is an ionized gas, and it is highly sensitive to electrical and magnetic influences. The sun is the theater of extremely complex, rhythmic patterns of electromagnetic activity, with an underlying cycle about twenty-two years long. About every eleven years the magnetic polarity of the sun reverses: its north magnetic pole switches to the south, or vice versa; after another eleven years, the poles return to their previous positions. These reversals correspond with cycles of sunspot activity, great flares on the surface of the sun. This reversal of polarity is connected with complex harmonic cycles of vibration, swirling resonant patterns of electromagnetic activity. 

If people are prepared to admit that our consciousness is associated with these complex electromagnetic patterns, then why shouldn’t the sun have a consciousness? The sun may think. Its mental activity may be associated with complex and measurable electromagnetic events both on its surface and deeper within. If there’s a connection between our consciousness and complex, dynamic electromagnetic patterns in our brains, there’s no reason that I can see for denying the possibility of this connection in other cases and especially on the sun. 

If the sun is conscious, why not the other stars too? All the stars may have mental activity, life, and intelligence associated with them. And this is, of course, precisely what was believed in the past—that the stars are the seat of intelligences, and these intelligences are angels.  

(—Rupert Sheldrake, in The Physics of Angels:  Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet, with Marrhew Fox, Introduction, c.1996, 2014)

Today in Catholic tradition is the feast of guardian angels.

 What haven’t we been thinking about?

Before bed last night the household stood by gate near road and looked up at moon, stars, and clouds framed by spray of leaves overhead.

To whom

God's love

commits me

here.

october