i know things about pigeons, lily

 At best, we're asked to do the things given us to do.

No more, no less.

My job today is to take late afternoon walk to snowbowl listening to Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World by John Philip Newell, (2021).

Credits roll of In the Line of Fire, the 1993 film with Clint Eastwood. My cousin, whom I've never met, was not Script Supervisor for the film. In our family lore, the best kind of family relationship -- never meeting.

Solitude is like that. Never meeting. Surrounded, yes. Permeated, yes. Suffused, also yes. But never meeting.

How is that?

Meeting entails separation overcome.

No separation, no meeting.

Of course, such an attitude of mind might merely indicate some perverse detachment syndrome, a pathological distancing that  . . .

Never mind. That's a side street better not walked in city dusk.

No. Trust solitude that is itself, not a condition of anything else.

When perversity and dedication meet and look into one another's eyes, it is best to allow the gaze to remain without description, like ruffling leaves in late afternoon breeze. Just the fact of it.

What are we asked to do?

What are we given to do?

The Russian dancer's daughter is wedding the Russian prince's son today. The ceremony is undoubtedly over and they are in the backyard celebrating with the many cakes the Dutch/Austrian/Canadian aunt made over the last three days.

Mazel tov!

The communitarians gather, as they must, to make merry and congratulate the newlyweds, their families, and the greater rejoicing world. It is as it should be.

I go walking learning about Pelagius, Brigid of Kildare, Duns Scotus, John Muir, and Teilhard de Chardin.

There are things we know about, but don't know we know about.

inside out

 That which is within

The real beyond real awaits

Call to emerge through

the sixth element

 The Native American man at this 

morning’s conversation was vibrant.

We spoke about the “within.”

How the “within” presents the world.

a visible symbol of the reality

I don't know what it means to be assumed into heaven.

Mary, it is said, had an Assumption.

Ok.

If so, then so.

Ex opere operato.

Perhaps the the traditional understanding of 'sacrament' is not, as yet, completed.

A sacrament is a Christian rite that is recognized as being particularly important and significant.^[1] There are various views on the existence, number and meaning of such rites. Many Christians consider the sacraments to be a visible symbol of the reality of God, as well as a channel for God's grace. Many denominations, including the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican, Methodist, and Reformed, hold to the definition of sacrament formulated by Augustine of Hippo: an outward sign of an inward grace, that has been instituted by Jesus Christ.^[2][3][4][5] Sacraments signify God's grace in a way that is outwardly observable to the participant.^{[5]. (wikipedia)}

Perhaps sacrament is the coming-to-be-seen of the invisible reality of God. A never-ending process.

Buddhist 'Mind' might equivalate Christian (Jewish, Muslim, Hindu) 'God.'

The core, creating, (caring?), coming-to-be of what-is, in it's foundational, determinative, and random/chaotic manifestation of that-which-is underlying and permeating all possible and probable emergent emanations of the One True Being slowly ripening into appearance (and yet) still beyond our grasp and understanding.

In other words -- The Holy as Mind would Reveal It.

Thanks, Mary, for this transcending emergence!

We do not understand what it is that has happened.

We only gasshō, and turn to our day.  

see how fragmentary everything has been

I suspect there's something we don't understand.

We prefer to edit, sort, and categorize; file into some recognizable plus or minus, good or bad, the angels or the demons, karma reward or punishment.

Seldom do we drop into "What Is" as a mysteriously hospitable place.

Whatever did not fit in with my plan did lie within the plan of God. I have an ever deeper and firmer belief that nothing is merely an accident when seen in the light of God, that my whole life down to the smallest details has been marked out for  me in the plan of Divine Providence and has a completely coherent meaning in God’s all-seeing eyes. And so I am beginning to rejoice in the light of glory wherein this meaning will be unveiled to me… When night comes, and you look back over the day and see how fragmentary everything has been, and how much you planned that has gone undone and all the reasons you have to be embarrassed and ashamed: just take everything exactly as it is, put it in God's hands and leave it with Him. Then you will be able to rest in Him—really rest—and start the next day as a new life.

    

--SAINT TERESA BENEDICTA OF THE CROSS (EDITH STEIN) 

 We feel it might be delusion, the suspicion that underlying all the muck and mire of human folly and false aggrandizement there might be an underlying sunrise of bright radiance and colorful sunset of placid serenity.

That undergirding all of it is sustaining joy and comforting intimate inclusion into a good that surpasses our understanding.

Saints and mystics take refuge there. They extend a hand to draw the rest of us into safe harbor and protected embrace. Even so, we typically resist, flail, and scuttle off.

It takes a curious and profound desire to ready oneself for the unexpected touch of what Stein calls the plan of Divine Providence.

What does the feast of the Assumption mean? To be drawn in? To be lifted through? To be alighted and accompanied?

Surely, some revelation is at hand.

Some seconds of coming to be redounds and becomes consequent.

When life is crackling lightning and bursting thunder a split second apart.

The force of irrepressible awe.

don’t wish to be celebrity

Zoo animals don’t 

Expect anything special —

Nor would you either

The thing about collections

And being kept — the posing

ratio decidendi, autem, obiter dicta

 God is Now!

(Literally, specifically, ontologically, phenomenologically, existentially.)

God is Now!

like a cow without a bell

Reading novel while listening to book by Wayne Teasdale A Monk in the World: Cultivating a Spiritual Life (2003). You'd be right in thinking neither the reading nor the listening could be done well. But I also gaze at the vase on kitchen table with yellow, orange, purple, and blue flowers from last week's celebration of birth, family, and continuance.

Cats and dog have been fed. VW off to Rockland, then to return to bake for family wedding two hundred miles away. Solitude will descend, again, over silence wandering through barn and mountain.

In her saner moments, which were very rare since the day Moses’s master bought her, Alice could describe everything about the Sunday the mule kicked her in the head and sent all common sense flying out of her. No one questioned her because her story was so 

vivid, so sad—another slave without freedom and now she had a mind so addled she wandered in the night like a cow without a bell. 

(--from novel, The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, 2003)

No need to signal one's arrival. Nor departure. 

Neither, any insertion into the telling of what wants to be told. No names. No need. No acknowledgment.

Mind has never been seen.

Mind's name has never been pronounced.

Mind is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral.

Mind is mind.

Like the Franciscan friar whose whole sermon in 1965 went: "Mary's not God. Mary's Mary. God is God. God bless you!" His words were a zen teisho -- only, without zen, and without being a teisho. 

teisho A presentation by a Zen master during a sesshin. Rather than an explanation or exposition in the traditional sense, it is intended as a demonstration of Zen realisation

Japanese: 提唱 teishō

Cat comes up from basement and time under porch in green wired-in area. No furtive announcement. No chipmunk or small rodent in her mouth. Good. I don't have to grab hand net to chase down her gift and let it out again.

We are wanderers through the Reality we are, like cows without bells. 

Unlocatable, still there, wandering through nescience.

government folk are suspect, except when not

 Say it one more time —

Organized morality

Is no doubt corrupt

she didn’t keep house

 It’s silly to tear

Up, she died months ago down

Florida, yeah, there

dans un endroit perdu

 In a lost place

Along boomerang road

Morning comes

Cat jumps to bed

Sunlight through window

In a lost place

Nothing is ever gone

Nothing remains behind

If you think God 

First thing awakening

There is a monk

Inside that thought

in a deep cloud

Where are you? 

I see your face, but where are you? 

I hear your voice, but where are you? 

Seeking But Not Finding the Recluse

Under the pine
I ask the boy;
He says: “My Mistress is gone
To gather herbs.
I only know
She’s in those mountains,
In those deep clouds,
But I don’t know where.”      

--Chia Tao 賈島 (779-843)

No one can find the recluse.

Even in plain sight, they are invisible.

Don't bother trying to speak to them, they are soundless. 

how signing nothing nears us to god

 You cannot 

serve two

Masters

Prefer 

nothing to

God

This is

Worth

Considering

Nothing to

God is

Under this

Sign

When read —

Care fully

you are not lonely, if this is true

 This is not a poem

This is this

Poems are about

This and that

That is not

What I think

I think this

Is enough

That’s that

I love you

nearer my hiking stick to thee

 Politics Monday morning

Juvenile wild-mouth candidate

Mocks everyone, everything

Mentally unbalanced creepy

Man — 

Unfair unfair unfair

Victim victim victim

Projecting own flaws

Onto everyone else

(This is not a screed

This is a compassionate 

Plea to his loved ones

To intervene, pull him aside)

Save his life

Save our lives

Save the life of the child

Who floats invisible waiting

To become the cosmos 

Emerging the

Way

We

Wish to

Walk

Wobbily

With

Wisdom

belaying across rough terrain

 In the beginning was the worse, and the worse wishes to begin again.

No, I say, no.

Get the worse out of here and begin again. Begin again to be kind.

Be generous, courageous, compassionate.

Go ahead!

I’ll wait here. For you. To return. To sanity.

You can do it. We can do it. I will do it.

Let solitude be your companion.

Silence be what is said.

Stillness our dance.

Sky is clear and full tonight.

Imagine!

a whistle on blatant and crass foolishness

The United States 

is good at basketball -- now

let crass fools foul out

when the image of being something is absent

It's not who we think we are. It's who we are.

It's who we are, lived with simplicity and modest humility.

It's not making any kind of deal about who, how, and what you are. 

    While in India, you found a teacher with whom you studied for a number of years. What is the value of a teacher for the spiritual life? 

A teacher is one who lives free from the idea or image of being somebody. There is only function; there's no one who functions. It's a loving relationship; the teacher is like a friend. 

    Why is that important for someone on the spiritual path? 

Because generally the relationship with other people involves asking or demanding – sex, money, psychological or biological security. Then suddenly you meet someone who doesn't ask or demand anything of you; there is only giving. 

A true teacher doesn't take himself for a teacher, and he doesn't take his pupil for a pupil. When neither one takes himself to be something, there is a coming together, a oneness. And in this oneness, transmission takes place. Otherwise the teacher will remain a teacher through the pupil, and the pupil will always remain a pupil. 

When the image of being something is absent, one is completely in the world but not of the world; completely in society, but at the same time free from society. We are truly a creative element when we can be in society in this way. 

(--from, December 30, 2020, Be who you are: An interview with Jean Klein) 

My teachers didn't know they were teachers.

No special robes, no zen master sticks, no honorific titles nor finger rings to negotiate.

They walked down the street. The sipped coffee in cafe. They read newspaper on subway train. They sat and listened while cohort students spoke. They walked by windows, waving in, while passing to some other room some other task.

Just as Kahlil Gibran said that "Your friend is your needs answered," we might say that "Your teacher is your inquiry responded to."

Those of us who love learning know where to find our teachers.

May it always be so!