where monks go to meditate

 Mice graveyard

Behind hall boxes

Charnel smells

popinjay

 Reading about Irish crime family 

Doing billion dollar cocaine business

Money laundering, ocassional hits

Sometimes prison, the danger and

Glamor of it all

I realize I’m way out of my depth

Criticizing the first family of crime

In the U.S., as though nobody knew

Of their shenanigans, their popinjay

Struts, smiles, sneers, brazenness

New Yorker article (when do I ever

Open the magazine?) reads like a

Netflix movie causing me to 

Remember what an old shit I am

Poking my nose into someone’s

Corrupt but powerful, maybe necessary

Business this time of the world. That’s

Why we watch the telly, to be entertained

By cruel crime and corruption— best to

Leave the real criminality to itself

I look around at books by my chair — 

Philo the Jew, Changing Light at

Sandover, Latin American Poetry, 

The Journal of Religion — out of date

Sunday New York Times — Ilia Delio —

It has always been this way, nobodies

Like me wander about the edges of 

Culture curious about things they’ll never

Comprehend, and the real players, smug

And untouchable, sitting at center, parrots

4 am

Late do I finish night prayer.

Late do I have any idea what I am doing. 

1. Te lucis ante términum,

   1. Before the ending of the day,

Rerum Creátor póscimus,

   creator of the world, we pray

Ut solíta cleméntia

   that with thy wonted favor thou

Sis præsul ad custódiam.

   wouldst be our guard and keeper now

…   ….  …

Salve, Regína, mater misericórdiæ:

   Hail holy Queen, Mother of mercy,

Vita, dulcédo, et spes nostra, salve.

   our life, our sweetness, and our hope.

Ad te clamámus, éxsules, fílii Hevæ.

   To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.

Ad te suspirámus, geméntes et flentes in hac lacrimárum valle.

   To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping In this valley of     tears.

Eia ergo, Advocáta nostra, 

   Turn then, most gracious Advocate,

illos tuos misericórdes óculos ad nos convérte.

   thine eyes of mercy toward us.

Et Jesum, benedíctum fructum ventris tui,

   And after this our exile show unto us

nobis post hoc exsílium osténde.

   the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

O clemens! O pia! O dulcis Virgo María!

   O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary. 

….  …   …

Upon reflection, there’s no place else I’d rather be, nothing else I’d rather be doing.

Hic et nunc!

Hic et nunc!

bedtime

 It’s just pain

It’s not like it’s something important 

It’s just pain

ah ee i owe you

 Fewer words

Tell more

night office

 Earth doesn't tire

Turns, spins revolves, floats — tell me

What are you, doing

We are this cosmos

Dangling emptiness watching 

Itself — sees nothing

This look through night chant

Monastic choir rising

Falling into God

and a one and a two and a three

 Feels like each breath is

Practicing to be final

One —a rehearsal 

ecoutez bien

Perhaps it is listening itself. 

The body does not know how to discourse or to listen to a discourse. This which is unmistakably perceivable right where you are, absolutely identifiable, yet without form, this is what listens to the discourse.

—Rinzai (d.867) dailyzen

Drop the”I” drop the “you”, try not to think about it. 

Can you hear it?

(Me neither.What now?)

I don’t know.

Where do I go from here?

I don’t know.

(pause, pause...)

...   ...   ...

Or this:

“The body,” Rinzai (d. 876) tells us, “does not know how to discourse or to listen to a discourse ... This which is unmistakably perceivable right where you are, absolutely identifiable yet without form - this is what listens to the discourse.” Here the Chinese master, along with Kabir and the rest, is echoing the Surangama Sutra (a pre-Zen Indian scripture) which teaches that it’s absurd to suppose that we see with our eyes, or hear with our ears: it’s because these have melted together, and vanished into the absolute Emptiness of our “original bright and charming Face,” that experience of any sort is possible.”

― Douglas E. Harding, On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious

prelapsarian

 This place

So much the way it is

No reactivity,

No wanting something other

hodie si vocem dei audiveritis, nolite obdurare corda vestra

God, I’m told, is here.

I am here, I’m told. You’d think

These tellings matter

dharma study

 Sound of icy road

Gusty wind through bare branches —

Purring cat on chest

refuge

 Deer dooryard forage

Little one limps behind mom

Sound of gun, distance

just noting

 Body pain

Snowy night

Cold outside

Thank you

Veterans 

a gap, missing part, or void in something, such as a manuscript, logical argument, or a physical space

We are living under the rule 

of a man who doesn't care.

It’s unusual to be so damaged, 

We suffer his lacunae.

referential unveiling of everything, all at once, simultaneously coming to be

 Eyes must be open to see coming to definition shapes of civil dawn occurring outside window.

Revelation of what is there seems like creation out of nothing dark and unshapen.

There but not yet apparent.

We’ve called it creation, from nothing.

Appearance requires the availability of someone to perceive it.

Nothing is unpercieved. 

Something is when what is there is seen by someone there to see it.

Readiness is all.

What’s right is each instant revealing itself in vicinity of an awareness available to allow and acknowledge what is coming to be sustained by necessary attention willing to take in and allow to be the thing itself as it is.

Way I see it, wrong has no way of sustaining itself. No one is actually there to sustain what is not there for any length of time absent the vivifying nurturance of actual care. 

What is wrong has no nurture in nature to thrive beyond false positive.

So, we stay close to what is right, wait for it to rub sleep from eyes, stretch our limbs, and walk out into light. 

Take heart! What’s right and what’s true will prevail — only with creative presence revealing itself to itself.

If you will. If we will. If I will.

Freely assent to it all.

Dwell with wisdom and love surrounded by what is here.

Coming to be with it as parent, as apparent participipant in whole process of revelation.

We are creating the cosmos, the universe, the coming-to-be of what-is, always and only here, and, now.

Can you see, 

what I am,

 referring to

As

Who I am

Coming to be 

With 

Care

betcha tomorrow never comes

 Comes midnight

All bets are off

Tomorrow dies

Into today

from where (the cosmos) to where

 In prison today

Bonaventure’s center

everywhere periphery

nowhere —  quantum

God, nirvana, aesthetic

thislife not afterlife

double speak

 Listening to radio play 1984

Like reading New York Times 

Front page

every now is not then

 Mindfulness is reincarnation

To dwell in present moment is to not be dead

Here and now is the only thing that is

feel better as a human being

In a conversation On Time, Mystery, and Kinship, An Interview with Jane Hirshfield  in Convergence magazine, October 24, 2024, Hirshfield says:

 JHIt’s only like four lines. So I probably have it by heart, but I’m going to find it in the book that I have, because then I won’t be nervous about getting a word wrong. What I was perplexed by was, how can anyone who has children or grandchildren or imagines the future, how can anyone not behave—2004, remember?—as if global warming is established fact, and as if we might need to do something to prevent its getting worse? And so I’ll read you the poem and then I’ll say why this introduction led to this poem.

Global Warming 

 

When his ship first came to Australia,

Cook wrote, the natives

continued fishing, without looking up.

Unable, it seemed, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.

Now that’s a true story, and I found it in the historian Robert Hughes book about Australia. But why this poem led to this title and this framing—why that story led to this—is it helped me find compassion for the climate deniers. And I want to find compassion. I do not want to be angry, and I do not want to be totally bewildered, which is how I was feeling, and say, How can anyone—said the indignant, leaping little Jane inside of me, How, how, how?And when I found this story, I understood how: “unable to fear what was too large to be comprehended.” And, you know, right or wrong, I’m sure there were some people who understood just fine and decided to be short-term greedy over long-term concerned. But I feel better as a human being if I can find compassion. —Ibid

 . . .

There are many things too large to be comprehended. 

I go about my fishing.

. . .

I also read Stephen Batchelor’s After Buddhism, Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age (2015).

He is interested in translating suffering as reactivity.

Non-reactivity is the experience of nirvana -- not reacting, but responding.

The transpersonal unity that is God, this is an arrival, he says, worth our interest.

He writes:

Consider how Gotama understands the Indian metaphor of rivers losing their identity when they pour into the ocean. The Muaka Upanishad says: “As the flowing rivers disappear into the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man, freed from name-form, goes to the Divine One.”[54] Here the aim of human life is to lose one’s identity as a person differentiated by name-form and merge into the transpersonal unity of God. For Gotama, however, the ocean becomes a metaphor for his dharma and the community of those who practice it. “Just as the great rivers on reaching the ocean lose their former names and identities, so also those of the four castes—nobles, brahmins, merchants, and workers—having gone forth from home to homelessness in the dharma and discipline, abandon their former names and identities and are just called ‘wanderers, followers of the Sakiyan Son.’”[55] Instead of losing oneself in mystic union with the Absolute, one loses one’s class identity in order to practice the dharma as a free, self-creating person.

        --Stephen Batchelor, Ibid, 7. Experience, (7) 

. . .

My dharma room is quiet. 

Everyone is here. 

Practice continues. 

There is a fishing pole leaning behind door.

There’s no bait and no hook at end of line.

redecorating

 When absurdity reveals its face 

take down all mirrors 

look away do something else

No image means 

no issue to face

We are free when

Invisible

Say good

Bye