“To meditate is to be aware of what is going on.” (Thich Nhat Hanh)
Thanks Thay!
I’ll keep a look out.
“To meditate is to be aware of what is going on.” (Thich Nhat Hanh)
Thanks Thay!
I’ll keep a look out.
One zen master said
To another zen master
How come your koans
Make no sense?
The second zen master
Said to the first zen master
Don’t ask!
They looked at each other
And both were swept away
Glad the pope told prime minister of Israel to not bomb Catholic Churches
If only pope understood that every home is the home of Christ
But that kind of spirituality takes time, fasting, and prayer
Heart doc asks if I’m unhappy being tired and low energy.
I tell him, nah, it’s all good.
The stress echocardiogram showed some constriction.
He explains the narratives of possible catherizations.
Nah, I say, I’m happy rope-a-doping from time to time.
Beside, who’d-a-thunk I’d live to this age.
He smiles.
Ok, he says, forget about heart surgery. Go live your life. Don’t worry about a heart attack. He explained how constriction influences these things.
Off in the corner, behind charts of internal organs, messiur de cor deflop peeks out at our conversation, saying nothing.
Unsaid is —If you have one, fine. No need to fret about it.
That’s my kind of cardiologist.
See you in six months?
Ok!
Cheers.
Chris Hedges in conversation with Nick Bryant, journalist and author.
Bryant says: “There are three things that make people really stupid: greed, arrogance, and sex.”
Can we say there are three other things that help people become wise? Namely: frugal generous poverty, realistic humility, and right respectful relationship.
We try to understand what is right and proper and what is wrong and improper.
Once you are compromised, you can’t get off the yacht in the middle of the ocean. (Bryant)
Hedges has always appeared to me as a fierce journalist and commentator.
Besides, Hedges was close to the fierce and poetic activist Daniel Berrigan, with whom I walked in demonstration protest in Norristown PA in 1981 during one of his trials.
when I went
from peripatetic mendicant
to sedentary reclusive idiorrhythmic *
I discovered God is not
where you might expect
Instead God is the respect
(the looking again) through
whatever is there
whenever and wherever
you are there
. . .
* It was the original form of monastic life in Christianity, as exemplified by St. Anthony of Egypt (c. 250–355) and is the opposite of cenobitic monasticism in that instead of communal ownership, the monk lives alone, often in isolation. Philosophically it consisted of a hermit's total withdrawal from society, usually in the desert, and the constant practice of mental prayer.[2] The word idiorrhythmic comes from two Greek words, idios for "particular" and rhythmos for "rule", so the word can be translated as meaning "following one's own devices".[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiorrhythmic_monasticism
I love comedy as much as anyone
I was listening to Donald Trump
talking about his uncle and the Unabomber
then saying his maga followers are stupid
I don’t know
Where’s George Burns when you need him?
(Oh God!)
. . .
From: Ante-nicene Fathers
(1) The text includes the phrase 'Arise, O God! judge the earth,' which is a plea for divine judgment.[7] (2) O God is a direct address used in the Psalm, indicating a prayer or supplication to the divine, expressing a plea for attention and assistance.[8]
https://www.wisdomlib.org/christianity/concept/o-god
Not me.
Who would have expected that theSelf nature is fundamentallyPure and clean?Who would have expected that theSelf nature is fundamentallyBeyond birth and death?
--Altar Sutra (dailyzen)
Not ever.
Anything else you want to say?
I don’t know what he is talking about
when he calls everyone ‘evil’
it seems to me you see the world
through the lens you are
the world is the world
it becomes, for you,
what you are
looking through
* you say it
you become it
old monk walks mountain
hot July day, little water in brook
every step a prayer, each breath
brings earth through slow body
When I first read Robert Haas, I came across his 1979 book of poems “Praise.”
He stopped me cold with his epigraph.
When I think of what is happening today with the current force emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I see how prescient and applicable the epigraph was and is.
We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
“I think I shall praise it.”
(Robert Haas. Epigraph to his second book of poems, Praise: 1979)
Members of the Legislative branch, University presidents, Media companies, Law firms, Supreme Court, Tech companies, Investment firms, Banks, Churches, Government programs, visitors and residents from away, and anyone else you can think of -- all have taken to cowering behind utterances of praise and physical kowtows to the large, terrifying, and unpredictable chief executive and commander in chief of the United States.
Praise.
Praise?
No admiration or adulation based on merit or effective mentorship -- but fear and apprehension, cowering nervousness based on chaotic and vengeful bullying toward anyone not a sycophant or lemming.
Later, Haas wrote this poem.
You can listen to Robert Haas reading the poem here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48851/faint-music
Faint Music
by Robert Haas
Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.
When everything broken is broken,and everything dead is dead,and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,and the heroine has studied her face and its defectsremorselessly, and the pain they thought might,as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselveshas lost its novelty and not released them,and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,watching the others go about their days—likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—that self-love is the one weedy stalkof every human blossoming, and understood,therefore, why they had been, all their lives,in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—except some almost inconceivable saint in his poolof poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automaticlife’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.As in the story a friend told once about the timehe tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perchhe’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelpalong the coast—and he realized that the reason for the wordwas crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwisethe restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled upon the girder like a child—the sun was going downand he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jackethe’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railingcarefully, and drove home to an empty house.There was a pair of her lemon yellow pantieshanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.A faint russet in the crotch that made him sickwith rage and grief. He knew more or lesswhere she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tearsin her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.“You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”“Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,“I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while—Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,and go to sleep.And he, he would play that sceneonce only, once and a half, and tell himselfthat he was going to carry it for a very long timeand that there was nothing he could dobut carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listenedto the forest in the summer dark, madrone barkcracking and curling as the cold came up.It’s not the story though, not the friendleaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”which is the part of stories one never quite believes.I had the idea that the world’s so full of painit must sometimes make a kind of singing.And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.
(Poem by Robert Hass, “Faint Music” from Sun Under Wood. Copyright © 1996 by Robert Hass.)
Haas, like Leonard Cohen, has a cold-eyed appreciation of praise, gratitude, hallelujas, and grace.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it does rivit attention.