a false positive

 when I died

I couldn’t remember

anything, I was gone

and now? now I find

the nothing I can remember

is that I died

I’m waiting to see

who comes for me --

I expect nothing

in fact, the nothing

I expect has already

disappeared and is gone

come to think of it

 Und soweit ich sehen kann …

bist du.

spirit of life

 At Easter Friday conversation (Saturday for our Philippines participant) of course we spoke about resurrection.

Was there one? If so, what do we understand by it?

In the book God Is No More by Werner and Lotte Pelz, Lippencott (c.1963), this epigraph by William Blake:

 If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me

Thou also dwellst in Eternity

Thou art a Man God is no more

Thy own humanity learn to adore

For that is my Spirit of Life 

 It is from Blake's The Everlasting Gospel.

On pg. 127, under the heading “Resurrection”, this:

It is the revelation -- which comes to us as we ponder the hopelessness of man’s sufferings -- that tragedy is a necessity, since only hope that triumphs over necessity can inspire hope 63. It is the expectation of a repetition of the unrepeatable 64, the promise of a “return”, an incredible “always” and “everywhere 65". It is the challenge to live our lives, to let our life become a source of life to others, to realize that others cannot have what we withhold. The Resurrection is the challenge to take this life and this earth seriously, because everything is a parable, a beginning and not an end in itself.

 Then, below this paragraph, this:

* To treat the Resurrection as an historical event is to misunderstand the meaning both of history and Resurrection. History is concerned with the past, the fixed, the dead. Resurrection is concerned exclusively with the future, the moving, the living. And again: to treat the Resurrection as an historical event is to make of it the sign Jesus refused to give, because it would absolve us from looking for significance in this world. The Resurrection, on the contrary, is the formulation of Jesus’ insistence that either everything or nothing on this earth is significant.

 There was discussion that, some felt, there was no need for a bodily resurrection that sunday morning. That what continues onward is the spirit of hope and truth that transcends humiliation and failure and mistake. 

That looking to our left and our right, looking above and below, is the realized reality of resurrection waiting for our recognition, our realization of what is continuing even unto unfractured now.

The thought-provoking words we are asked to ponder: "because everything is a parable, a beginning and not an end in itself."

unnamed movement

 A catechesis of presence

Not of words

Tone and melody

Not argument

I don’t know about angels

Nor saints nor presbytery

Just unnamed presence, without title

The way holiness passes through

what americans choose these fifty days

I wonder about Jesus

this one man

whose name is everywhere

How one other man

tries to out-pronounce 

the name of Jesus with his name

The ubiquitous donald

tries to figure out how to die

without ceasing to breathe

One was a very great man

The other is what that great man

tried to shield us from

This 2026 it is a crapshoot

which man will prevail -- 

who gets the most airtime

how would you live if you knew when you were going to die

Sometimes, a real conversation takes place.

Here’s one.

 “Happy to get him, to get him to open up a can of pansy ass.” 

(--Ben Sasse, ending of conversation with Ross Douthat, "How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying”, The former senator wants to heal the America he’s leaving behind. NYTimes, 9apr26

with ensō

 I look toward brook

Toward sky — turn back 

to barn, back inside

order me a reuben and a seltzer

 I don’t expect to meet

Jesus on the road, so

No need to kill him

He’s already been killed

It’s become a ritual, host

And cup, elevation, genuflect

At least, as I recall the liturgy

The world is exhausted by our

Mad priest presiding over

Mass insanity of threats and

Apocalypse with Iran and Hormuz

As world watches like New York

Knife fight outside delicatessen

No passing by on sidewalk until

Someone bloodied someone runs away

Our deranged street fighter runs away

Police know his name, but will not touch

He is mayor, governor, president, commander

Risen unsavory doppelgänger of the gospels

He hides in plain sight, he is legion, everywhere

All the time, pronouncing words of desecration

Disassembling everything not bearing ‘hiss' name

His image — his sordid likeness draped everywhere —

As pusillanimous men and woman bow down and slobber

Their sanctity assured, their loyalty soldered to his backside

Their mad deviance blathering words of sweet sycophancy 

They do not know what they are, doing — rich bastards

through and through

 Breathe in

Breathe out

Yes, and

Yes

Good breathes good

Evil, evil

God moves

Through our

Being

Here

these april days

 snow showers

an inch they say

this April seventh

once we vowed

life-together, (when’s

Yom Kippur?)

still, on your birthday

my greetings  -- we found

life-together apart

in four days

I’ll celebrate paradox

and ambiguity, with cheer

we must learn how to be surprised

 Reading his two volume The Prophets in 1968, I learned something it took me nearly sixty years to understand. As a maladaptive and maladjusted person in this society and culture I have nothing to be ashamed of. 

And I have come to see that nothing. That embarrassment of ignorance wherein the nescient intellect uncomprehends skewed and sacrificed knowledge, cultivating idiocy of human ambition and enslaved compassion -- preferring to dominate and destroy, mock and denigrate, accuse and annihilate that which is other than some deranged preferred ego -- is nothing worth affirming, nothing to be admired.

I will not be jaded by incompetent cruelty.

I will be surprised each time.

I would say about individuals, an individual dies when he ceases to be surprised. I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil, I am not accommodated. I don’t accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I’m still surprised. That’s why I’m against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised, not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society. (--Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel )

I would pass an actor’s desk in seminary. I would see Heschel under his lamp.

Six decades later a basketball friend, for some reason, gifted me a small stained glass cross given him by that actor. For whatever reason, he was done with it. It hangs on doorjamb to chapel/zendo across from bookshed/boatshed up from barn.

The thing about Easter is the ambiguity of it.

Had Jesus died? Did he drop-in to hell? Was his tomb vacant that Sunday morning? 

Whence absconditus?

I have this image of Jesus as this wandering spirit not unlike what the Greeks said of their unburied warriors felled on battlefield not yet brought in and returned home.

I’m not sure those who call themselves “christian” have yet comprehended the homelessness of Jesus, the wandering restlessness searching for those who would recognize him if looking into his face without introduction.

This easter meditation is not a triumphal celebration of an accomplished story done and copyrighted.

Rather it is a setting-off from comprehension, through a meander of investigatory questioning, coming to rest no-where known and no-place architectured and set in stone.

The Jesus of this Easter is a peripatetic and rootless hobo wandering our inquisitiveness through a sincere abandonment of anything other than a prophetic soul surprised at what reveals Itself. 

sed libera nos a malo

 I sit on porch

this still morning 

easter Tuesday --

if walking mountain

there is animal shit

try to step around it

so too trump’s words

try to step around them

my new prescription

time and insects will 

see to disappearance

of useless excrement, so

waste dissolves in due time

words with no meaning

are ghouls redeeming no one

it has been excruciating

following the vile droppings

his faux-christian stooges sanctify

there is here, here is there

盗人に取り残されし窓の月

the thief

left it

the moon at my window

—Ryokan

nusubito ni / torinokosareshi / mado no tsuki

zen buddhist doctor

tells of his time in Gaza --

the quiet of the telling 

easter monday

Zenki is a key term in Zen, especially used by Eihei Dogen, meaning undivided activity, that all phenomena, every moment, every action, and every aspect of reality is part of one seamless, interdependent functioning. From this perspective, we are part of a whole organism that is characterized by impermanence, interdependence, and emptiness of a separate self. Every moment is complete. Every action expresses the whole; there is no fixed or separate self, and each activity is undivided from all other activities.  (--Roshi Joan Halifax, “The Life That Is Forever, 16Dec2025)

 

woman tossed water on me

I should have known

rituals want to be performed

at prison we talk about causes

and conditions, about what we

really think of death, our gone parents;

dog walks in with stern trainer

lays down, lowers head, it's his fate

to do what is asked of him right now

"advaita"(अद्वैत), "not-two"^[9][10] or 

“one without a second",^{[10] [wikipedia]}

maybe we’re not in a simulation

perhaps theater-pieces, scene after scene 

performed, then ended, costumes changed

walking out into night air, stars surprise

i dunno, it’s a training

 I wonder

If being

Resurrected

Is like

Waking up

After anesthesia

You know you've

Been gone

But that’s it

Maybe I’ll feel

That way

After a dream

I am wearing

A tuxedo at an

Italian something

Happy, I suppose,

To be there, and

Of some service

Without a clue

What, where

Or why

morning meditation

"The Exultet"

 https://youtu.be/YETnSx9HuMo?si=nIEyVhzBYebDZoHE

"Namo Avalokiteshvara"

https://youtu.be/IZkjX_c4hm4?si=WA2CHL7xxFbecFG_

(vertikalität), easter with wittgenstein

1

Denk nicht nach – schau hin.

                             Don’t think, look.

2.

Worüber man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.                                                                   

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence

3.

Die Unruhe in der Philosophie rührt daher, dass Philosophen die Philosophie gänzlich verkehrt betrachten und sehen – nämlich gewissermaßen in (unendliche) horizontale Streifen zerlegt, anstatt in (endliche) vertikale Streifen.(1) Diese Neuordnung des Verständnisses bereitet die größte Schwierigkeit.

  

                                 Unrest in philosophy comes from philosophers looking at, seeing, philosophy all wrong, i.e., cut up into (infinite) horizontal strips, as it were, rather than (finite) vertical strips.(1) This reordering of understanding creates the greatest difficulty,

….  …   …

In other words:

1. See what is there/here.

2. Revere authentic silence.

3. However difficult, chin up, look up.

something right

 Play me

Music

Make a

Good

Ending

Of it