il n'y a pas d'humour dans la folie

 Thunder rolls in distance

Trump is dangerously insane

Two facts

Stubborn things, facts

Insanity is sad

Especially when ignored

Ah, thunder again

Ah, he’s not gone yet

both now sides

All that is knowable 

is known but not 

recognized as such.

Until it is known

the known is

unrecognizable

take a morning room

if you are not there in it

it is unknown to you

once you arrive in it

there is nothing unknown

the dog snores on Patriot’s rug;

along wall on couch stuffed 

monkey tilts against stack 

of books near stuffed reindeer 

stillness looks out

from each work of art

on wall backing barn

qui traverse mon être

I’ve got a theory. 

 Ninety five percent of what we call reality is, right now, unnamed and unknown, says a physicist. 

All the matter we can physically interact with or observe—every star, planet, gas cloud, and human being—accounts for a mere 5% of the cosmos. [1, 2] (NASA)

Let’s call it “through me.”

Reality can be called that which is passing through me.

It rains this morning. Drops of H2O are falling through nitrogen, oxygen, and argon onto my porch roof below. Air also holds tiny solid and liquid particles called aerosols. These include dust, pollen, smoke, ash, and sea salt. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Whatever I am, it all is falling through me.

“What is” whatever that is, is falling through me.

If you are religious, God is falling through you.

Reality is falling through me.

The perforation, permutation, and presentimentation of that-which-is is the unknown making its way through us, me and you, this.

Hence, the phrase “I am only passing through.” 

Perhaps the reason for so much nescience and confusion in our current world is due to a cultivated ignorance and unwillingness to be or become what we are.

We are that which is falling through this right now.

Perceptively, perennially, preposterously.

There you go!

awakening from a dream

 The pattern is the same — pull up covers, sleep, dream, awake to pee, sip some water, pull up covers, sleep, repeat through night.

It’s the dream part that this morning catches my attention. Who went there? Where was there? Fading away what there was there? Sunlight through leaves still holding on after yesterday’s wind.

Friends lay yellow in dooryard. 

Yearning for friends in my rocky cave,

I am captivated by the singing of small birds;

The wind entering deep into the grotto

Mingles with the voice of the stream.

Awakening from a dream,

This hermit exists beyond the world.

A quiet life, off by myself,

Fulfills my spirit.

—Fugai Ekun (1568-1654)

Spirit, a quiet life, off by itself, awakening from a dream.

More and more, it seems to me, what I have naively called ‘me’ is a fluctuating pattern of dreams arising and departing in unfathomable traverse across and through a thin string of awareness untied at both ends. 

Yes, the belt buckle feels solid, the tomato soup creamy, the tonic water cold. The checking account is functionable, the registration sticker is placed on lower right of NOW plate on pickup, night was dark last night, new asphalt roof settles in.

It seems I might be merely passing awareness flowing in and out of physical materiality swirling across an arising landscape twirling October with all its stories of angels and saints, Celtic music in Cape Breton, crossword and wordle, doctor’s appointments and calendar erasures interrupted by naps, blankets, peeing, and the periodic respite of something poetry-like.

All of it…nothing of substance.

All of it…something accidental.

(Thales and Anaximander, Parmenides and Heraclitus, Aristotle and Plato, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.)

Each of them philosophical fiction writers sorting words into puzzles side by side yielding fantasies of thought encircling our longing for pattern.

Buddha and Lao Tzu, Jesus and Paul, Mohammed and Ibn Arabi, Francis and Clare, Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh — depatterning assembled thought into this and this encounter.

Until…I am what is appearing and departing.

A dream that pees and finally takes mercy on the skulking mewing hungry cats this lovely pattern of October morning.

the real meaning of terminal

 Departing?

Arriving?

Neither

Morning is here

Once you are here

There

Is no place to go

avec grand plaisir

 St. Bruno (1030-1101) founder

Of Carthusians, the grand silence

Tonight here in this room, each thing

Articulating God wordlessly 

With great pleasure

going nowhere, doing nothing, just here

 Ah, heating pad on back,

Small respites, small moments —

How lovely to be here

weathering well

 Thunder rolls off west

Monday afternoon — friend

Notes bell — joying back trail

At prison this morning

We are played portfolio

Songs written for Berklee degree

There’s no need for anything

Other than listening to one-another’s 

unknown becoming known

respeculative respecification; revising

 Morning

Shows up

God

Looks through

These words

Sees

You

Looking

If you

Long to

See God

Speculate

Unsounding words

recollection, going forward

 at end of day

one thing matters

one day nothing

will matter

if you understand

it is end of day

origin has a source

 Francis was going blind at end of life

Like Kwan Yin he especially heard the cries of suffering in the world.

Vibrating within

The ear are many voices

But their origin

Has a source which may be called

The sound of no sound.

—Takuan (1573-1645)

No-sound is the mind of creation deeply listening to creation.

Mere presence.

Without anything else.

creation, yes; characterless creature, no

 Rare

Simplicity

Cannot

Imagine

False

Character

Holiness can

Only hear

Twisting

Leaf falling 

Yellow from

 Top branch

chapel/zendo 4oct26

 

morning what is nicely passing

 Forgive me my solitude

It’s all I have and nothing

Sunlight through trees

Cool air through window

I will go out to sit 

with yellow leaves

Keep watching with mountain, 

pray for the passing everything

It is Francis Day

The earth his bible

Each leaf a breath

Reading what is near

retell it in words and in touch

Saint Francis and the Sow 

 

Galway Kinnell

1927 – 2014

 

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don't flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as Saint Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

 

From A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell, published by Houghton Mifflin; copyright © 2000 by Galway Kinnell.

it’s only polite

 If death

Wanders by

Tonight

Tell him

There’s

Chocolate milk

In fridge

It’s his

If he wishes

hola, buen trabajo, amigos

Ecuadorians shingle roof

put new gutter on front of barn

move ladders, play music, 

do fine work for the elderly

who don't climb ladders,  

point chimneys, seal skylights

amicitia praeterita

 thing about friendship is

it slows and fades into

what once was, not now

Gibran wrote “your needs 

answered” and left it at that --

no need to answer, no longer

ad usam

 As a Franciscan

I am not able to

Own what belongs

To Itself

eight hundred years ago tonight

 The premise is Jesus

Someone beyond creation

Becoming creation itself

Then Francis, realizing

Creation, embodying and

Mirroring, imaging itself

The insane replication

Looking into, as, looking

Through What Is Itself