the perennial invitation

 Full bright moon through trees

Shines on best and worst of us —

Light finds its way through

do you think eighty is old

Once out of our mind

We will be the earth, this rock

Four billion years old

something not clearly heard

 Two by Merton, helping to clarify:

"The language used by Zen is therefore in some sense an antilanguage, and the “logic” of Zen is a radical reversal of philosophical logic. The human dilemma of communication is that we cannot communicate ordinarily without words and signs, but even ordinary experience tends to be falsified by our habits of verbalization and rationalization. The convenient tools of language enable us to decide beforehand what we think things mean, and tempt us all too easily to see things only in a way that fits our logical preconceptions and our verbal formulas. Instead of seeing things and facts as they are we see them as reflections and verifications of the sentences we have previously made up in our minds. We quickly forget how to simply see things and substitute our words and our formulas for the things themselves, manipulating facts so that we see only what conveniently fits our prejudices. Zen uses language against itself to blast out these preconceptions and to destroy the specious “reality” in our minds so that we can see directly. Zen is saying, as Wittgenstein said, “Don’t think: Look!”"

(-Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, pp. 48-49)

And:

"You have made us together, you have made us one and many, you have placed me here in the midst as witness, as awareness, and as joy. Here I am. In me the world is present and you are present. I am a link in the chain of light and of presence. You have made me a kind of center, but a center that is nowhere. And yet I am 'here,' ... 'here' under these trees, not others. The prayers of your friends and my own prayers have somehow been answered, and I am here ... My being here is a response you have asked of me, to something I have not clearly heard. But I have responded, and I am content ...." (--Thomas Merton, Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander)

Content, yes, to look.

And be what I am looking at.

around eight minutes before

After a while, it feels silly, what I don’t know or can’t conceptualize in such a way that I could say,“Yeah, I understand that.”

Standing near midnight down by wood gate at end of driveway at Barnestown Rd, I look up over Bald Mountain at night sky at what I’m told are stars, other suns, billions of miles away as Ensō stands and stares at hedge off to the side mulling his doggy mulls.

 However you slice it, 13.8 billion years is very old indeed. By  comparison, the sun and the solar system formed around 4.6 billion years ago, life on Earth emerged 4 billion ago, our planet’s first  multicellular organisms 1.7 billion years ago and modern animals 550 million years (or, 0.55 billion years) ago, while the first modern humans (the species Homo sapiens) didn’t walk the planet until just  200,000 years ago – that’s just 0.0002 billion years back, or around a hundred-thousandth of the age of the universe.  

 

Put another way, if the history of the universe could be condensed into a year, with the Big Bang taking place just after midnight on 1 January, and the present day corresponding to midnight on 31 December, then humans arose around eight minutes before the end of the year. Modern science all happened in the last 1.4 seconds. All the timescales that we’re familiar with from everyday experience are utterly dwarfed next to the gargantuan age of our cosmos. 

(—in, The Beginning and End of Everything: From The Big Bang to the End of the Universe, by Paul Parsons, 2018)

 But, then again, I cannot comprehend the neuroscience of my brain synapses and electrical pulsations between hemispheres of my brain. I don’t know what and how the universe is, nor do I know what and how I am here or anywhere.

My zen studies suggest none of that is a problem. That the “don’t know mind” is a good one to have. And yet, that curiosity and inquiry are healthy activities to nurture.

I do my traveling from inside. Having become a reclusive and stationary abgrund-wanderer, watching concentric circles at pond on windless morning ruffle reflections of sky into wavering abyss deep below surface.

I think: here I am!

I feel that I am here — disheveled and uncertain— but here, cool air pushing through window, sunlight (8.5 minutes away from its source) on wavering branches tenuously holding pale green, orange, and red leaves.

And there is coffee to be made.

Walk to be taken.

Crossword and wordle to be figured.

Amazement that this pericope of consciousness is still able to gaze out into the existent cosmos, through the wohnküche, out barn door at patient rowboat still roped to bookshed ridgepole.

For now.

the heart of a heartless world

We seem to want joyful outcomes but not difficult journeys. We think something is wrong when things are difficult. Why, we ask, should I suffer? Why should anyone?

 Reading Caputo:

The cross is not magic. It does 

not magically dispel the course of evil, or stop glob- 

al warming, or alter the laws of thermodynamics. 

The cross is an event in which the difficulty is not 

dispelled but disclosed, not extinguished but ex- 

posed, not crossed out but made visible. The cos- 

mos at large shares the same fate as the body of 

Jesus. What mortal hand has framed the fearful 

symmetry of the crucified body of Jesus, of the 

crucified body of the cosmos, of the crucified body 

of God? The body of Jesus is a figure of both a 

human and a cosmic outcome, an icon through 

which we could catch sight, sub contraria specie, of 

the glory of God and of the world rising up from the 

difficulty. 

The difficulty is that the truth is bittersweet and 

the glory transient. Life goes hand in hand with 

death, a deeper joy with suffering and mortality. 

Only when we come face-to-face with the difficulty, 

without illusion, without compromise, without call- 

ing a good thing bad, is it possible to affirm the 

genuine glory of the world—and to do so uncondi- 

tionally, with nothing up our sleeve. I have had a 

lifelong love of mystical theology but not of the 

Neoplatonic metaphysics that back it up. At the 

heart of the dark night explored here is the Deus ab- 

sconditus who unnerved Luther himself, where both 

reason and revelation are crucified. Instructed by a 

world that as far as we can understand exists “with- 

out why,” the difficult lesson of the cross is to learn 

to live “without why.” Love is an expenditure made 

without the expectation of a return, without support 

or guarantees. Love is the heart of a heartless world, 

the difficult glory of a crucified world. 

(from, Cross and Cosmos, A Theology of Difficult Glory, by John Caputo, 2019) 

In prison today reading an excerpt from Indigenous Americans: Spirituality and Ecos, by Jack D. Forbes in Daedalus (Fall 2001), we wondered whether there is consciousness in a rock.

You might as well ask if there is consciousness in yourself.

The (proposed and nascent) law of interrelational complementarity requires a “yes” to both considerations. 

To suffer is to consequence the ignorance or denial of the realization of interrelational complementarity.

The cross is the harsh symbol of putting to death the erroneously held belief that we are separate from and not incorporated with all that is in Being.

The narration that Jesus died on such a cross is an act of love incarnating consciousness with anatta (no separate self) thus “saving” us from ignorant and harmful belief and action punishing all “anothers” as “others.”

We can, as perhaps Jesus did, come down from the cross of ruptured humanity and fragmented creation/nature so as to dwell wholly and holy in the world.

It is, after all, October. Nearing the time of the thin place.

Where wholeness and holiness reside inter-dimensionally.

Heartfully conscious of one-another.

the most dangerous person to this country

 This upcoming election should not be this close.

“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.” 

This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council, described former president Donald Trump to veteran journalist Bob Woodward. Trump appointed Milley to that position.  (—in Letters from an American, by Heather Cox Richardson, Oct.13, 2014)

Yet it is.

And that is beyond worrisome. 

would we were in cape breton once again

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

Happy Celtic Colours!

Cheers,

https://celtic-colours.com/

https://www.youtube.com/live/ao8bbdv2mgE?si=57Q43iNEZ2rzwpYu

all is tender and mild

At times, a surprising clarity.

“I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page,” said Anne Carson to Will Aitken in her Art of Poetry interview, which was published in issue no. 171 of the Review. “It is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.”  (--from Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry, Interviewed by Will Aitken, issue 171, Fall 2004)

Watching season one episode ending of "House" -- he is playing piano, a meditative rendition of "Silent Night."

It occurs to me that current spiritual/meditative inquiry and scholarship looks to silence/stillness as foundational to an essential concretion of urgrund reality in human experience.

I look up lyrics and get a semiotic glimpse of word/reality so often blurred by unreflective familiarity.

Silent 

Holy night

 

Calm and bright 

All is

 

Tender and mild

The peace of

 

Heavenly

Sleep

Sometimes there is a call inviting a descent into the interior of logos where resides the energy of origin re-constituting itself (Itself) in constantly new creation and meaning.

Perhaps a transcendence beyond our religious encasements of the emergent birth of what is our referent experience.

It represents a gratitude of attention.

Something worth paying.