one way or the other

 yes

if you can

yes

if you can't

and if you 

aren't sure

…yes?

yes!

readying ourselves to emerge wholeheartedly

 I suppose it is possible that we don’t know what is really helpful or really hurtful. So much has to do with convention and liberation. (Cf Ajahn Chah (1918-1992) in Daily Zen)

Likewise, the swings and contortions of contemporary culture and politics arising from some basement of inarticulate blithering. It is like some poorly conceived “reality show” whose sole purpose is to hawk product and sell to our subconscious. It is a devastating inconvenience to try to punctuate exactly what is wrong with every sentence spoken every snark and cynical utterance mouthed.

I fear some maddened grammarian, some deranged connoisseur of correct communication will snap and attempt to mow down the errant weeds out of our front lawn of decency and democracy.

Politics and political chicanery have been substituted in and are replacing authentic and believable leadership. Madmen and delusional fabricators of falsity occupy the halls of power and the communication airways of silly propaganda.

There’s no hiding, no safe house to while away this next duration of silly and stupid.

There’s no meditation or sacred word that will cover our heads as this contamination and infecting virus pervades the very air needed to breathe.

The convention is we let the script unroll and speak our lines as good and dutiful citizens. The liberation is we see and say and act on what perverts decent community and compassion, becoming something we’ve left to others handle for us.

Satyagraha, our new intent.

Satyagrahi, our new marching orders and commission.

And a longer elaboration on satyagraha in britannica.com:

 https://www.britannica.com/topic/satyagraha-philosophy 

In prison yesterday we spoke of this satyagraha. The men feel that one remaining dignity available to them is to seek out truth and attempt to take up residence therein. 

They have taken up residence in authentic inquiry and respectful deep listening and loving speech. They pursue something deeper within yet greater than themselves.

They are a joy to join in conversation.

Where freedom resides.

When convention changes its clothes and steps out into dignity and respect.

at day’s end

 Tired.

For ten miles the mountains rise

Above the lake. The beauty of

Water and mountains is

Impossible to describe.

In the glow of evening

A traveler sits in front

Of an inn, sipping wine.

The moon shines above

A bamboo fence that descends to

The water. I chat with an

Old man about work and crops.

Maybe, when the years have come

When I can lay aside my

Cap and robe of office,

I can take a little boat

And come back to this place.

Chu His (1130-1200

Once anywhere, we never really leave.

Are we not everywhere we’ve ever been?

Like, for instance, tired? 

injecting insolence, the new protocol

 I’m sure there’s a good

Reason to outlaw vaccines —

polio, measles 

To upend the science, risk

Everything for politics

the signs of the day are good

What is it that "reads" us?

Walking Ensō across double foot bridges over double forks of Hosmer Brook, our meeting-brook, leaves and twigs form dam at end of second crossing. With walking stick given at 80th celebration, I poke and pick to un-dam the buildup. Then up to spinnaker on Ragged Mtn, a silent climb with brown and white sweet dog.

Trees and fallen acorns, roots and stone walls, the unspeaking articulation of voiceless voice, we climb path to open view of pond and sun and rain-beaten piles of machine-made snow re-gathering their poise in morning after 24hour downpour.  

Humans, as beings, are necessarily separate from Being insofar as they must constantly be referring themselves to it in order to partake in its essence. As a linguistic sign has no meaning (except that which it receives from the real-world object to which it points), humans must constantly refer themselves to Being, and, in this way, they must reinforce their essential separation from it. In other words, like any sign, humans receive their meaning only by virtue of their separation from their signifier—Being. We are a sign that is not read.

Of Hölderlin’s statement, however, what is even less clear is what might read this “human sign”, and how it is to be done. Heidegger, in discussing the movement of Being as either drawing toward, or away from, human beings, appears to suggest that to ‘read’ a sign is to engage with it on a fundamental level. Heidegger invites this broad interpretation of the word “read,” as he refers to a sign beyond an image or a written word, such as items of thought or beings who “point” in their relation to Being. For one to read a sign like a road sign—that is one thing. To read a sign that is a human being pointing toward Being in its essential nature—that is another. 

(--in LANGUAGE AND SIGNS In Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking, by JON STUART VICTOR)

Am I being read? (Am I Being-read?)

 Surely we are not an unwritten and unpronounced semiotic drifting formless and soundless in an echoless antechamber of some pre-existence? Which is a rich notion. That here, even now, after decades of accumulated experience and felt sensation, I remain an unarticulated and unread being overlooked by Being because I have not yet come-to-be.

What does it mean to come to be?

Perhaps, full disclosure?

To recognize we are hidden (or hiding) is to realize that emergence is possible. If we've pretended we've been out in the open and fully apparent along the horizon of what-is-here, speaking and acting as would a human being in the midst of other human beings, the deliverance from delusion will be more difficult.

Is "to be human" a matter of "being-read-by-Being"?  (And this without lips moving, breath sounding through vocal cords, audial resonance in open theatre?) In other words, to be is to be, in essence and existence, silent, as is Being silent.

Heidegger believes in humanity’s ability to reach Being, and to receive meaning from the thing that gives us our essence, insofar as we point toward it. Indeed, he reinforces this hope through his constant assurances that we are still not thinking, rather than just not thinking. Heidegger also does not think that our inability to reach Being is entirely our fault either, stating, “that we are still not thinking is by no means only because man does not yet turn sufficiently toward that which, by origin and innately, wants to be thought about since in its essence it remains what must be thought about. Rather, that we are still not thinking stems from the fact that the thing itself that must be thought about turns away from man, has turned away long ago.”4 This idea reinforces the dual aspect of our search to find Being, as it requires a bidirectional relationship: as humans point toward Being, so too must Being point toward us. Heidegger could build on Hölderlin’s verse, in saying that we are a sign that is still not read, even though, perhaps, we once were.

(--John Stuart Victor) 

And here, Hölderlin, in his poem, writes:

But what of love? We see  

Sunshine on the ground and dry dust,  

And the forests deep with shadow, and smoke  

Blooms on the rooftops, in the old crowns  

Of towers, peacefully; the signs of the day  

are good, that is, an immortal wounded  

the soul by contradicting it. 

(--from Mnemosyne) 

I take off my reading glasses

Make tea

Readying for what is coming...

to be.

Perhaps a prayer life

 is looking forward

 to being seen... 

inter-directionally toward

plain simple

 Answer me this —

             Ok, this

Alright then, we done

in the current

Reading Everett’s new novel. Sitting in new chair by front window out onto barnestown road and bald mountain across. Cars and birds go by, rain falls, furnace cuts in blowing hot air over left shoulder. Ensō  on rug waits for meatlog to thaw for breakfast portion.

I’ve, happily, stepped out of the road leading elsewhere, except for twice weekly conversations at nearby maximum and minimum security Maine prisons. That, and three times a week conversation/practice in the evenings via zoom, and I am in a different “current" than James and Huck.

“Soon we were away, and in the current”. (James, narrating, in novel "James” by Percival Everett).

 The current I drift -- for the time-being -- in is a slow moving quiet current. Twigs drift alongside. Twigs of books, newspapers, poetry, films, liturgy of the hours, writing, walks, zazen, assisting another by reading numbers, feeding dog and cats, looking out at drops of water strung like beads on winter branches — and various meditative/contemplative slowdowns — I concur, as Wallace Steven’s poem “Sunday Morning” says:

“I am content when wakened birds,

Before they fly, test the reality

Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; …

It’s hard not to ease out into the current. As it is difficult to bob in the current of one’s idiorhythmy.  (Cf. p.8 of 12, or pg 672 of The rhythm of place, and the place of rhythm: arguments for idiorhythmy, by Tim Cresswell)

“Living by one’s own rules” is a variegated phrase. On the surface it suggests an autonomous lifestyle self-determined by individual preferences. A different color emerges when "one's" is considered as the unity of difference emerging from "One's" all-inclusive diversity.

One size does not fit all. But the enormity of One embraces and accommodates all.

Hence, a community is the diversified assemblage of différance* in a unity of difference.

* Différance is a French term coined by Jacques Derrida. It is central to Derrida's concept of deconstruction, a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning. Roughly speaking, the method of différance is a way to analyze how signs (words, symbols, metaphors, etc) come to have meanings. It suggests that meaning is not inherent in a sign but arises from its relationships with other signs, a continual process of contrasting with what comes before and later. That is, a sign acquires meaning by being different from other signs. The meaning of a sign changes over time, as new signs keep appearing and old signs keep disappearing.

However, the meaning of a sign is not just determined by the system of signs present currently. Past meanings leave "traces", and possible future meanings "haunt". The meaning of a sign is determined by the interaction between past traces, future haunts, and the system of signs present right now. (wikipedia)

These words, "The meaning of a sign is determined by the interaction between past traces, future haunts, and the system of signs present right now." remind of Hölderlin's opening line of his poem “Mnemosyne” (1803) quoted by Heidegger in "What Is Called Thinking" -- "We are a sign that is not read."

We seem, as individual persons, to have become this unread sign -- but, rather, becoming a statistic or data group, a consumer category or focus study subsumed under the advertising or electioneering subset of population metrics there for the influencing or propagandizing.

Perennially, it seems, we must relearn how to read.

A sign that is read is an undivided and idiosyncratic irregular one-off not easily subsumed into the "They" the "Herd" or Das Man.**

 ** Yet the framework of Being and Time is suffused by a sensibility—derived from secularized Protestantism—that stresses the paramountcy of original sin. Emotionally laden concepts such as “angst,” “guilt,” and “falling” suggest that worldliness and the human condition in general are essentially a curse. Heidegger, it seems, had implicitly adopted the critique of “mass society” set forth by 19th-century thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, a perspective that was well established within Germany’s largely illiberal professoriate in the early 20th century. That theme is illustrated in Being and Time’s treatment of “authenticity,” one of the central concepts of the work. Heidegger’s view seemed to be that the majority of human beings lead an existence that is inauthentic. Rather than facing up to their own finitude—represented above all by the inevitability of death—they seek distraction and escape in inauthentic modalities such as curiosity, ambiguity, and idle talk. Heidegger characterized such conformity in terms of the notion of the anonymous das Man—“the They.” Conversely, the possibility of authentic Being-in-the-world seemed to portend the emergence of a new spiritual aristocracy. Such individuals would be capable of heeding the “call of conscience” to fulfill their potential for Being-a-self.  

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Heidegger-German-philosopher#ref822956

The "call of conscience" is a small faint voice in a large loud world that is growing increasingly, meaninglessly, cacophonous. 

For us, the easing drift over to respite shallows signals a longing to be not carried tumbling downriver by sweeping currents of cacophony. At the same time, we are in the river. We are not immune from the rapids that dislodge dwellings from their foundations in their swell and sweep.

The contemplative/meditative life is not separated from active/involved living. 

And yet, and yet -- A twig is a twig is a twig. 

I must learn how to read.

We must, thereby, read ourselves well.

three promises of meetingbrook monastics of no other (m.o.n.o.)

 These are renewed yearly on December 10th

Meetingbrook: the Three Promises:

Contemplation,  Conversation,  Correspondence.
...as held by Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage“m.o.n.o.”(monastics of no other).

• Contemplation  is the promise of simplicity.

It is a gift of poverty inviting open waiting, receptive trust, attention, and watchful presence. It is a simple Being-With. 

 

It is attentive presence.

• Conversation  is the promise of integrity. 

It is a chaste and complete intention to listen and speak, lovingly and respectfully, with each and all made present to us. It is a wholeness of listening and speaking. 

 

It is root silence.

• Correspondence  is the promise of faithful engagement.  

It is responsible attention and intention offered obediently to the Source of all Being, to the Human Family, to Nature. It is a faithful engagement with all sentient beings, with this present world, with existence with all its needs & joys, sorrows & hope. 

 

It is transparent service. 

 

…………………………………………………………………

Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage invites & welcomes individuals interested in the practice of these 3 promises in their life. Whether the interest is in conversing, praying, deepening, learning, or even holding these 3 promises, we invite you to enter the inquiry and stillness. May the loving light and the compassionate peace of the Christ and the Bodhisattva accompany and support the efforts of each one!

………………………………………………………………..

Quotes: 

1.  We are going to have to create a new language of prayer.  (Thomas Merton, Calcutta 1968)

2.   When you go apart to be alone for prayer…see that nothing remains in your consciousness mind save a naked intent stretching out toward God. Leave it stripped of every particular idea about God (what he is like in himself or in his works) and keep only the awareness that he is as he is. Let him be thus, I pray you, and force him not to be otherwise.   (Anonymous)

3.   I long for a great lake of ale. / I long for the men of heaven in my house. / I long for cheerfulness in their drinking. / And I long for Jesus to be there among them. (Brigid, Celtic saint)

4.   It is not by closing your eyes that you see your own nature. On the contrary, you must open your eyes wide and wake up to the real situation in the world to see completely your whole Dharma Treasure, your whole Dharma Body. The bombs, the hunger, the pursuit of wealth and power - these are not separate from your nature….You will suffer, but your pain will not come from your own worries and fears. You will suffer because of your kinship with all beings, because you have the compassion of an awakened one, a Bodhisattva. (Thich Nhat Hanh)    

5.   He who truly attains awakening knows that deliverance is to be found right where he is. There is no need to retire to the mountain cave. If he is a fisherman he becomes a real fisherman. If he is a butcher he becomes a real butcher. The farmer becomes a real farmer and the merchant a real merchant. He lives his daily life in awakened awareness. His every act from morning to night is his religion.  (Sokei-an)

and you make me happy

“Nikki Giovanni, the charismatic and iconoclastic poet, activist, children’s book author and professor who wrote, irresistibly and sensuously, about race, politics, gender, sex and love, died on Monday in Blacksburg, Va. She was 81.” 

 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/obituaries/nikki-giovanni-dead.html

My House

    by Nikki Giovanni

i only want to

be there to kiss you

as you want to be kissed

when you need to be kissed

where i want to kiss you 

cause its my house and i plan to live in it

i really need to hug you

when i want to hug you

as you like to hug me

does this sound like a silly poem

i mean its my house

and i want to fry pork chops

and bake sweet potatoes

and call them yams

cause i run the kitchen

and i can stand the heat

i spent all winter in

carpet stores gathering 

patches so i could make

a quilt

does this really sound

like a silly poem

i mean i want to keep you

warm

and my windows might be dirty

but its my house

and if i can't see out sometimes

they can't see in either

english isn't a good language

to express emotion through

mostly i imagine because people

try to speak english instead

of trying to speak through it

i don't know maybe it is

a silly poem

i'm saying it's my house

and i'll make fudge and call

it love and touch my lips

to the chocolate warmth

and smile at old men and call

it revolution cause what's real

is really real

and i still like men in tight

pants cause everybody has some

thing to give and more

important need something to take

and this is my house and you make me 

happy

so this is your poem

a mere bagatelle on merton

Five easy pieces surrounding Merton:

• An excerpt from Thomas Merton's final address before moving to his hermitage.

• An interesting last thing to speak: Marxism and Monastic Perspectives – Thomas Merton’s Final Lecture, Bangkok, December 10th, 1968

• Bishop Barron on Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master

• THOMAS MERTON'S LIFE AND WORK

• About Thomas Merton NYC 

into a worldview of kin-dom and compassion

 Tonight at Tuesday Evening Conversation we’ll recite the yearly renewal of our meetingbrook promises of contemplation, conversation, and correspondence first pronounced in 1998 on the anniversary of Thomas Merton’s death.

It was delightful to read the Center for Action and Contemplation meditation yesterday:

Ecotheologian Sallie McFague calls on us to construct new images and metaphors that are relevant to our lives and time in history. For us, living in this century, metaphors for God must somehow experiment with metaphors other than the royalist, triumphalist images, which are clearly inappropriate. They must, she insists, express the ecological interdependencies of life. [1]  

Loorz reflects on an image of God inspired by John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word.”  

I offer another relevant metaphor for our time, yet rooted in a forgotten tradition: Christ as Conversation. Christ as Conversation says to me that the oak tree and that deer in the meadow are not God. And I’m not God. But we [each] carry the Christ, the Logos, the Tao, the spark of divine love within us. And the conversation between us: thatis the manifestation of the sacred, moving forward the evolving kin-dom of grace. The wild Christ….   

Jesus as the Christ embodies that in-between presence between the Creator and the created. Between the transcendent and the incarnated. But not just Jesus. All of us. Even the trees and the microbes and the stars are made and imbued with and held together by Conversation. Christ is dynamic, abundant relationship, a cacophony of interrelated connections navigated by conversation. Christ is the opposite, in fact, of a static word, a single utterance controlled by powerful men....

What would a wild Christ—a Conversation who is the intermediary of love between all things, whose divine presence connects wild deer with my own wild soul—evoke in our world? Is it possible to imagine the worldview of kingdoms and empires transforming into a worldview of kin-dom and compassion? Imagine how different life would be right now if Christianity could become a place for sacred conversation: a place to explore possibilities and express doubts and disagree and encourage voices on the edges. Imagine the church honoring sacred conversation by lifting up the voices shut down by empire. Imagine the reconciling role the church could offer in bringing together opposite forces to remember that we are all interconnected.  

 https://cac.org/daily-meditations/in-the-beginning/

solitude outside geography

Thomas Merton (31jan.2015 -- 10dec.1968): 

“Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.”

 –Thomas Merton, Journal, October 2, 1958

"Here or there makes no difference. Somewhere, nowhere, beyond all 'where.' Solitude outside geography or in it. No matter."

--ibid, 1996

1. “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.” Consider all that we do, often daily, even more often than that, not to engage with who we are truly meant to be. Simply on a physical level—we use entertainments, food, sex, overwork, stimulants and other things to evade our true selves.

2. “This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him.” While doing those illusory things, we think we are happy, but we are not. Most important, God does not know the person who is evading and escaping. God knows who we truly are.

3. “To be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.” The false self leads us to being alone without being unique, without discovering how each one of us is, in some vital and real ways, singular before God.

(--New Seeds of Contemplation, cf. https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/05/21/four-thomas-merton-books-read-jon-sweeney-240722)