come out and play

 Last Monday, Doris sends Hafiz: 

We have not come here to take prisoners,

But to surrender ever more deeply

To freedom and joy.

 

We have not come into this exquisite world

To hold ourselves hostage from love.

 

Run my dear,

From anything

That may not strengthen

Your precious budding wings.

 

Run like hell my dear,

From anyone likely 

To put a sharp knife

Into the sacred, tender vision

Of your beautiful heart.

 

We have a duty to befriend

Those aspects of obedience

That stand outside of our house

And shout to our reason

"O please, O please,

Come out and play."

 

For we have not come here to take prisoners

Or to confine our wondrous spirits,

 

But to experience ever and ever more deeply

Our divine courage, freedom and 

Light!

 

~ Hafiz ~ Persia (Iran)

I appreciate optimism

It beats pessimism

The attempt to see through ink

To circumvent what you think

But we love poetry, 

Doris, and the hopeful --

as I arrive at the town dump

where the sign reads "nope, full"

Perhaps to be disabused

to free someone from 

a misconception, mistaken 

belief, or fallacy

It effectively means 

to undeceive or 

set someone straight (AI)

in a crooked world

when doubt arises from under rock

 It’s amazing

This quiet sense

All will resolve itself

Each creature

Tries to survive until

No longer possible

Someone plucks you

From sea floor and there’s

Nothing you can do 

crustacean and eel

grabbed and hoisted

to human plate

good night stephen

 Thanks —

What a joyful ending!

τί τό όν ή όν

Reading a book by Richardson I bought in Manhattan in 1969. 

And the phrase:

τί τό όν ή όν -- (what is the being of being) --Aristotle, in William J. Richardson’s HEIDEGGER Through Phenomenology to Thought. (1963) 

Although a variant might be -- τι είναι τα όντα ως όντα (what are beings as beings?) 

The "forgetfulness of being" (Seinsvergessenheit) is what Heidegger says we suffer.

Parmenides, born c.515BC, wrote this in his poem “On Reality” --

Now then, I will instruct you; hear what I say:

Two paths are open to investigation.

The first says: being is and non­being is not.

It is the path of certainty, because it follows the truth.

The other says: being is not, therefore non­being is.

This misdirected path, I tell you, cannot lead to a sound conviction

For, if this statement were true, it would not be possible for you to conceive of non­being, nor to

name it.

https://www.stillnessspeaks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ParmenidesOnReality.pdf 

I have lived in this “koan” (if you will) for a very long time.

I cannot conceive of non-being. What would there be if I could? Nothingness?

But what if I said this -- "I am not what I am” -- an admixture of being and non-being.

Some like to say that God is Being.

I’m fairly content to be.

I don’t know.

I forget why.

one child born and a world to carry on

 everything I eat

or drink is not

good for me

every doctor’s visit

tells me I’m going blind

heart giving out

cancer slowing me down

diabetes exhausting me

pancreas more than suspect

why do I bother

everything is killing me

the good news

is when I die I won’t

have to worry about dying

which is, I suppose, a relief

das ende ist nah; lasst uns unser gebet beenden

 I suppose if the south tower on 9/11 has begun to collapse on itself and you are in the stairwell as concrete and steel crash down and crush you, all you can do is recognize that it is happening, utter whatever prayer comes to mind, and disappear.

Living in the United States these days of trumpified dismantling of lawful decency replacing authentic justice with raw corruption and f*ck you immunity from any accountability, it might be time to utter that stairwell prayer and say goodbye to life and conventional unfearful civility as we’ve known it.

The collapse is upon us.

He is gravity pulling everything down.

There’s no one to call, no escape route, the billowing poisonous cloud descends over every inch of ground.

He is the end.

Not Jesus.

Him. 

sicut nos facimus *

 Perhaps freedom

Is the realization

(A bird’s throat)

Things are always

And only

The way they are —

We dwell well

Passing through

The way things are

Still feeling still

Caring with what is

Moving through

As

We

Do*

gehe nirgendwohin, tue nichts, dort – wie jemand ist *

 One is moving through

What is

Presenting Itself

Elie Wiesel said

“God means movement

And not explanation” —

True faith, Meister 

Elkhart said, is Leben ohne

Warum (life without why)

The holy person is a mystic

Moving though what is 

Presenting Itself as God is

Going nowhere

Doing nothing

There — as one is *

pessima tempora

 The good man

Cares and does good

The corrupt man

Doesn’t care and does

Everything for

His own benefit

What a god-awful

Time we live in

nihil absolutum

 Walking Old Orchard Beach low-tide hard-pack sand just steps from my first winter-rental in 1981-82, reading Religion and Nothingness, the template was set for the next 45 years.

Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage is the elaboration of that template.

“Absolute nothingness signals, for Eckhart, the point at which all modes of being are transcended, at which not only the various modes of created being but even the modes of divine being – such as Creator or Divine Love – are transcended. Creator, he says, is the Form of God that is bared to creatures and seen from the standpoint of creatures, and as such is not to be taken as what God is in himself, as the essence of God. It is the same when God is said to be Love or to be Good. The essence of God that renders ineffable each and every mode of being (and each and every Form) can only be expressed as absolute nothingness”  

 

(Nishitani Keiji – Religion and Nothingness pg 61-62).

 I suppose I’m still attempting to fulfill my reception of the Religion Medal graduating 8th grade from St Athanasius Parochial School in 1957.

What do I come away with these 70 years later?

You could say ‘absolutely nothing’.

You could say I am perched on the veritable fulcrum point of everything that seems to have two sides.

You could say these things, but my hearing is compromised.

i’m waiting

 Do you have 

Nothing else to say?

Yes, I do

gott durchschauen

Tell me about God.

What can I say?

Not surprisingly, it is so much easier to say who or what God is not than to say who or what God is. When we eliminate everything and everyone that God is not, whoever remains is God, someone who can never be negated. In impersonal terms, God is the ultimate truth or the absolute reality which is self-evident. Denying God is as laughable as denying one’s own existence.

Whichever way we try to make sense of the various ways God is described, the purpose of all such descriptions is not simply to know who God is but to see God. God is not an idea or a concept that needs to be understood. God is a real being, more real than you and me. God is truth, not a figment of anyone’s imagination. If God truly exists, why should we simply believe in God? Why should God remain only a matter of faith? The journey certainly starts with faith in God, but it’s got to end with a direct experience of God. As Swami Vivekananda said (CW 4. 165), we “must realize God, feel God, see God, talk to God. That is religion.” Nothing short of an unambiguous experience can satisfy us fully.

All expressions that strive to describe God should ultimately help us experience God.

If they cannot or won’t, what’s the point?

-- Swami Tyagananda  2026, Ramkrishna Vedanta Society,  

https://vedantasociety.net/blog/trying-to-express-the-inexpressible 

My favorite part of an Eckhart Tolle talk is when he turns his hands up, raises his eyebrows and asks, “What’s the point?”

My favorite words from John Macquarrie when I studied with him at Union Theological on Heidegger was when all settled around the seminar table and he said, “Well I think we can begin.”

Perhaps it’s not so much to see God, but to see through God.

prends, lis : c'est notre destin

 NYTimes Opinion piece, “Trump Doesnt Know What Power Is” by Lydia Polgreen puts power, strength, and violence into historical perspective.

“We live in a world,” Miller told Tapper, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” The painful fallout of the Iran war provides an eloquent rebuttal. But the Trump administration has done more than misjudge American force and the wherewithal of its adversary. It has fundamentally misunderstood what power is, conflating it with the capacity to inflict violence when the two are, in truth, opposed. (Ibid)

We are distracted by the personal corruption of the president of the United States and overlook the lessons of history.

Thucydides, Hanna Arendt, and any high school student of the Peloponnesian War point out the miscalculations and shortsightedness taking place by deluded men in Washington.

Twenty five hundred years has a long reading list.

I’m glad someone remembers how to read.

je fais, je suis

 You want to know the truth

       I do

You sure you want to know the truth

       I am

not knowing why

 Step into the mirror

No reflection —

It all comes smashing down

las comparaciones son odiosas

Trump is not Hitler 

He is something else 

I can’t put my finger on it

 

But he is not Hitler 

as far as I can tell 

He is Trump

 

A name that will  

be the stuff of future 

preposterous comparisons

 

yes, it’s true -- 

comparisons are 

odious *

rien d'autre

 When I died

There was nothing

I could think to say

I could no longer do

What alive I once did

Funny, eh

How I knew I was dead

Was the way everything 

Stopped being anything else