Friday, July 18, 2025

continuer

 “To meditate is to be aware of what is going on.” (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Thanks Thay!

I’ll keep a look out.

don't discard me just because you think

 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

soon, one can hope, soon

 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 to heart

 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.

off east, accelerating motorcycle

 Behind bamboo slats

Small Buddha on window rim

Morning sun on back

Thursday, July 17, 2025

cielo astuto

Fox in yard

Calling kits

Barn light

Switches on

As night 

Sits mountain —

Such a sly sky

the law of threes

 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.

il y a là où il y a ici

 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


oh mon dieu

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

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

aspetta un minuto

Not me. 

Who would have expected that the
Self nature is fundamentally
Pure and clean?
Who would have expected that the
Self nature is fundamentally

Beyond birth and death?  

 

--Altar Sutra (dailyzen)

Not ever.

Anything else you want to say?

νοητικός *

 this body

gets craggy


my soul

is naggy


what mind 

remains


is antag-

monistic


so many

many angles


so very

few angels

. . . 

Etymology

From νοητός (noētósconceivable, perceptible, intelligible, comprehensible) +‎ -τῐκός (-tĭkósverbal adjective suffix).

lo dices, te conviertes en ello *

 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

dog slurps at watering hole

old monk walks mountain

hot July day, little water in brook


every step a prayer, each breath

brings earth through slow body

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

the argument from water

 Cold water

In clear plastic

By bed


You cannot

Tell me

God is not

and then the singing

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 defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has 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 stalk
of 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 pool
of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic
life’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 time   
he 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 perch
he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,   
scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp
along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word   
was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise
the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,   
and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up   
on the girder like a child—the sun was going down
and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket   
he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing   
carefully, and drove home to an empty house.

There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties
hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.   
A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick   
with rage and grief. He knew more or less
where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.   
They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears   
in 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 scene
once only, once and a half, and tell himself
that he was going to carry it for a very long time
and that there was nothing he could do
but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened   
to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark
cracking and curling as the cold came up.

It’s not the story though, not the friend
leaning 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 pain
it 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.