Lost our way?

Last night at Sunday Evening Practice we read of Mary of Bethany and her perfume. "Let her have her way," was what Jesus supposedly said when the men groused about her display of love and respect.

When Jesus said elsewhere, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," he invited anyone interested in their way, the truth they seek, and the life they live to pass through the Christ that Jesus was passing through.

For the set and satisfied believers in Jesus it is sufficient to state that Jesus was the Christ, and that's the truth, you're not, and we'd better change our lives to follow Jesus. While there is merit to this formulation, it doesn't satisfy all of us.

"Let her have her way," might be a colloquial version of "G'wan, lighten' up." But something about the context and texture suggests he meant what he said, he was observing and approving her way as her way.

Today has been curiously quiet at the hermitage. Morning Eucharist at OLGH, the book order behind 'closed' sign, donuts and juice at Rockport Harbor, hurting back and nap, sitting in cabin, reading about Iraq and Bush, corn, quiche and cookies with well-water.

Calendar celebrates Nativity of Mary, Jesus’ mother, this 8th of September. Two women said rosary after service. Man watered flowers. Hiker Bill left quietly as I sat with silence a while.

It could be the 11th nears. A quiet drapes as it does when too much is heard. As if overhearing a conversation or solo lament unaware you are privy to secret utterance. The space around you becomes very still. You want to back away. Every breath is too loud. Surely you will be found out as having lost innocence.

Innocence is lost. Long lost. We have heard the braying and bantering. The behind the drapes conspiratorial plotting emerges to front step soapbox. Theses are nailed to doors of perception. Uncleansed, our sight sees only the finite details of doubtful doublespeak.

William Blake understands absence of innocence – and we live with the absence of infinity trying to see through snarling greasy panes of ass’s views about the world they desiccate and desecrate every day.

Weariness insinuates and mutes mind. It cries, ‘Away, away,’ turning this way and that to catch glimpse of finger pointing the way away. None. Just noiseless open eyes registering nothing while confronted with what is there?

War, this war, has darkened my perception. I am left prayer. So I pray: for the woman who directed adult education Midcoast; for the man who chaired St. Bonaventure University’s trustees; for thousands of Americans and thousand of Iraqis murdered, for those in Chile, Nicaragua, Palestine, Israel, Liberia, India, El Salvador, and all the myriad places chosen to be killing grounds for killers.

Thomas Keating writing in The Mystery of Christ speaks of all being, everything in the cosmos, now the residing place of Christ-Reality.

It’s not that everyone should embrace the Christian faith, not at all. It’s just that those who claim to do so should at least try to comprehend what being Christian means. Not the stupid finite fallacies of personal agenda and myopic greed -- but a cleansed view that sees through each action and thought into infinite presence suffused with what we long for most, ordinary love.

Don’t let those miserable know-it-alls divert you, Mary. Break that alabaster jar. Make a lovely stink.

Have your way.

Each our way.

Christ.

Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage
Update, September 2003

Theme: And there was a new voice

To think and to let learn is the greatest teaching.

I

I've been thinking about metaphor.

What does it mean to tell? To think?

In Martin Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking (translated by J. Glenn Gray, c.1968), he writes:
For Holderlin uses the Greek word “Mnemosyne” as the name of a Titaness. According to the myth, she is the daughter of Heaven and Earth. Myth means the telling word. For the Greeks, to tell is to lay bare and make appear – both the appearance and that which has its essence in the appearance, its epiphany. “Mythos” is what has its essence in its telling – what is apparent in the unconcealedness of its appeal. The “mythos” is that appeal of foremost and radical concern to all human beings which makes man think of what appears, what is in being. (Heidegger, p.10)

Thinking, for Heidegger, is our response to the call that issues from the nature of things, from Being itself.

Memory is the gathering of thought. Thought of what? Thought of what holds us, in that we give it thought precisely because It matters what must be thought about. Thought has the gift of thinking back, a gift given because we incline toward it. Only when we are so inclined toward what in itself is to be thought about, only then are we capable of thinking.
In order to be capable of thinking, we need to learn it first. What is learning? Man learns when he disposes everything he does so that it answers to whatever essentials are addressed to him at any given moment. We learn to think by giving our mind to what is there to think about.(Heidegger, pp.3-4)

“Most thought-provoking,” to Heidegger, “is that we are still not thinking...”

II

How do we think of What-Is-Called-God?

"Christ is What Is...Being...Created." That's what was said last night in the circle. It was said, perhaps, without the ellipses or the capitalization. (Still, authorship, like parenting, only brings the issue into our midst; what occurs following initial arrival is open, and beyond our control.)

We are reading Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ by Andrew Harvey at Thursday Evening Conversation. Harvey is passionate and his words take long turns in dance hall length sentences.

The central benefit of Zen,
in the context of ordinary
ups and downs of life,
is not in preventing the minus
and promoting the plus,
but in directing people
to the fundamental reality
that is not under the sway of ups and downs.
- Muso Kokushi (1275-1351)

This fundamental reality is what some call God. For some there is no call to name or to assent. And for others, there is a gathering of thought that longs to remember something very basic and original, but mostly forgotten and ignored.

From a Trinitarian metaphor, if Christ is being created, (or Being Created), then the Supreme Being (often called 'Father'or 'Father/Mother') is Being Itself, and the third aspect of the Trinity (or that which transcends notions of 'one' and 'two') is Suffusing Truth Breathing Through Each and Every Being.

Too complex?
Let's say: Being Itself, Creating, Inspiriting.
Or: Being Source, Being Born, and Being Breathing Through.

Heidegger says we have forgotten Being.

III

"Logic is a very elegant tool," he [Gregory Bateson] said, "and we've got a lot of mileage out of it for two thousand years or so. The trouble is, you know, when you apply it to crabs and porpoises, and butterflies and habit formation" -- his voice trailed off, and he added after a pause, looking out over the ocean -- "you know, to all those pretty things" -- and now, looking straight at me [Capra] -- "logic won't quite do ... because that whole fabric of living things is not put together by logic. You see when you get circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living world, the use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes." ...

He stopped again, and at that moment I suddenly had an insight, making a connection to something I had been interested in for a long time. I got very excited and said with a provocative smile: "Heraclitus knew that! ... And so did Lao Tzu."

"Yes, indeed; and so do the trees over there. Logic won't do for them."

"So what do they use instead?"

"Metaphor."

"Metaphor?"

"Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive."
(From Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with remarkable people (1988) Bantam, New York [page 76-77])

I’ve been trying to remember a quote heard once about metaphor and attributed, I think, to Allie Light, the Filmmaker and Director of Dialogues with Madwomen. Something to do with everything being itself and more than itself, and that we'd better learn about metaphors, or go mad.

"The logic of the emotional mind is associative; it takes elements that symbolize a reality, or trigger a memory of it, to be the same as that reality. That is why similes, metaphors and images speak directly to the emotional mind. ... If the emotional mind follows this logic and it's rules, with one element standing for another, things need not necessarily be defined by their objective identity: what matters is how they are perceived; things are as they seem. ... Indeed, in emotional life, identities can be like a hologram in the sense that a single part evokes a whole. "
(From Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (1996) Bloomsbury, London [p. 294])

IV

Two years ago men flew planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon building. Last year and this year men sent bombers and military combat troops to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill and maim thousands named by them ‘enemy’ and ‘terrorist.’ So many young people broken and buried by violence and destruction. It is hard to think of these actions. They lack a clear call, or, the call they send forth has not been heard nor reflected upon with awareness and responsibility.

Reaction, yes: thought, no.
Ideology, yes: responsive action, no.

What is most thought provoking about the current bellicose state of the world is that we, the great majority of us, are not yet thinking.

V

"Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.

The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.

It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors. " (From James Hillman, The Soul's Code (1996) Random House [pages 39-40])

We need new teachers. We need teachers who will let us learn from the call that sounds from each event, person, and thing. We need to dismiss those who claim to know better than us, who decide for us, and who pursue their own fixed ideas with our resources,

The trees are not being heard. Soldiers and citizens of this and other countries are dying in hostile encounters. The metaphors of war, terrorism, payback, and self-preservation at any price no longer speak to us. They no longer speak to those in the world listening for the sounds of sanity and sensibility to reveal themselves through thinking men and women.

VI

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin thought about complexity and consciousness.

Teilhard felt that the spark of divine life he experienced in the Egyptian desert was a force present throughout the evolutionary process, guiding and shaping it every bit as much as the material forces described by physical science. Teilhard would later codify this force into two distinct, fundamental types of energy - "radial" and "tangential." Radial energy was the energy of Newtonian physics. This energy obeyed mechanistic laws, such as cause and effect, and could be quantified. Teilhard called radial energy the energy of "without." Tangential energy, on the other hand, was the energy of "within," in other words, the divine spark.

Teilhard described three types of tangential energy. In inanimate objects, he called it "pre-life." In beings that are not self-reflective, he called it "life." And in humans, he called it "consciousness." As Teilhard began to observe the world described by science, he noticed that in certain things, such as rocks, the radial energy was dominant, while the tangential energy was barely visible. Rocks, therefore, are best described by the laws that rule radial energy - physics. But in animals, in which tangential energy, or life, is present, the laws of physics are only a partial explanation. Teilhard concluded that where radial energy was dominant, the evolutionary process would be characterized by the traditional scientific laws of necessity and chance. But in those organisms in which the tangential energy was significant, the forces of life and consciousness would lead the laws of chance and natural selection.

Teilhard then moved this insight forward. As the balance of tangential energy in any given entity grew larger, he noticed that it developed naturally in the direction of consciousness. An increase in consciousness was accompanied by an increase in the overall complexity of the organism. Teilhard called this the "law of complexity consciousness," which stated that increasing complexity is accompanied by increased consciousness.

Teilhard wrote, "The living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in flesh and bone." He argued that the primary vehicle for increasing complexity consciousness among living organisms was the nervous system. The informational wiring of a being, he argued - whether of neurons or electronics - gives birth to consciousness. As the diversification of nervous connections increases, evolution is led toward greater consciousness.

As Abraham points out, Teilhard's complexity-consciousness law is the same as what we now think of as the neural net. "We now know from neural-net technology that when there are more connections between points in a system, and there is greater strength between these connections, there will be sudden leaps in intelligence, where intelligence is defined as success rate in performing a task." If one accepts this power of connections, then the planetary neural-network of the Internet is fertile soil for the emergence of a global intelligence.

Teilhard went on to argue that there have been three major phases in the evolutionary process. The first significant phase started when life was born from the development of the biosphere. The second began at the end of the Tertiary period, when humans emerged along with self-reflective thinking. And once thinking humans began communicating around the world, along came the third phase. This was Teilhard's "thinking layer" of the biosphere, called the noosphere (from the Greek noo, for mind). Though small and scattered at first, the noosphere has continued to grow over time, particularly during the age of electronics. Teilhard described the noosphere on Earth as a crystallization: "A glow rippled outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever-widening circles, he wrote, "till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence."

His picture of the noosphere as a thinking membrane covering the planet was almost biological - it was a globe clothing itself with a brain. Teilhard wrote that the noosphere "results from the combined action of two curvatures - the roundness of the earth and the cosmic convergence of the mind." (from "A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain," by Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg, Wired Magazine Jun 1995, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/teilhard.html?topic=&topic_set=)

VII

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.
- Mary Oliver

VIII

So much depends on felt thought, that which embraces or at least recognizes the movement toward what is whole.

Perhaps it comes time to abandon the teachings of those whose minds have shriveled to the size of “I” and “mine” and “me.”

Perhaps it is now our job to let learning happen of itself.

To now remember being. To now enter creation. To now breathe in and out the inspiration of truth suffusing each and every being, everything that is.

I will think about this now new trinity of simplicity/complexity, silence/sound, and service/transparency.

There is no end to love. We need only learn to let it be -- to begin, be heard, and then be seen.

We need to learn to think.

To let learning create.

One another.

Thirty one years later he eats breakfast burrito in Union cafe. Coffee good. Waiter a gem.

Tonight 2nd installment of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue.

We hug, say goodnight. A kiss on stubbled cheek. I'm glad he was born.

Magnificat Anima Mea Dominum.

Mu-ge scratches something under rug.

Met Waldoboro hermit.

There are many joys!

Becoming oneself, one forgets self.

57.
A realm is governed by ordinary acts,
A battle is governed by extraordinary acts;
The world is governed by no acts at all.
And how do I know/
Act after act prohibits
Everything but poverty,
Weapon after weapon conquers
Everything but chaos,
Business after business provides
A craze of waste,
Law after law breeds
A multitude of thieves.
Therefore a sensible man says:
If I keep from meddling with people, they take care of themselves,
If I keep from commanding people, they behave themselves,
If I keep from preaching at people, they improve themselves,
If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves.
(from The Way of Life according to LaoTzu, Translated by Witter Bynner)

If you were asked to prove you were human, what would you do? If asked to present your credentials as a member of a particular denomination, church, religion, or belief system – how would you display your integrity with that reality, without trying to convince someone you are indeed that reality? If someone stood in front of you asking you if you actually exist, if you were there as who you are, what might you possibly respond that would be of any worth to the questioner and the questioned?

It is most urgent that you seek real, true perception,
So you can be free in the world
And not confused by ordinary practitioners.
It is best to have no obsessions.
Just don’t be contrived.
Simply be normal.
You impulsively seek elsewhere,
Looking to others for your own hands and feet.
This is already mistaken.
- Linji (d. 867)

Recently someone wondered if my credentials to be who I am were good enough.

I wrote something in response that becomes for me a meditation.
In the Zen tradition there's a tricky phrase that goes, "Don't make two;
don't make one." The instant we think something is outside something else,
we make two. And when we try to fit it back in, we make one. So, the saying
"Don't make two; don't make one" suggests the suffering we create and
contribute to when, in our minds, we fail to grasp the original reality.

What is the original reality? And why is it that nothing can separate us
from it?

In our Christian tradition, the original reality is that nothing exists
apart from God, who/which, we say, is Love Itself. We say: God created the
world, and everything that is exists because of creation. Further, as
Catholic Christians, we hold the idea of the Trinity. The Trinity suggests
that the creator, creation itself, and the life-energy inspiring and
sustaining everything (what we call the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit) are distinct, involved, and inseparable from one-another.

In other words: God is love. We are in God. God is in us. And the Spirit of
Truth suffuses us, even if we think otherwise.

Many of us as Catholics look at the mystery of creation, incarnation, and
resurrection with a pious devotion that veils a cautious and skeptical mind.
The mystery involving Jesus’ saying, “I and the Father are one,” and then,
holding bread and wine, saying, “Take and eat, this is my body, this is my
blood,” is often far, far beyond our imagination and/or comprehension. The
Holy Spirit is, for many Catholics, something to do with charismatic and
evangelical expressions of prayer, or the episcopate’s kindly slap at
Confirmation, and less to do with the Spirit of Truth undergirding the very
ground of being.

Francis, I suspect, grasped the unity without trying to make it one. It is
my suspicion Francis saw everything and everyone in its original reality,
that is, in the light of God. Thus, when the crucifix at San Damiano was
experienced as saying, “Repair my church,” Francis grasped without thinking
the full spectrum of the experience.

Stone by stone, person by person, Christian by Muslim, Francis saw the light
of God illuminating each being. This “church,” this expression of love --
unconditional and nonjudgmental – needed again to be prepared (L.‘re-parare').
As John the Baptist, and Isaiah before him, cried out to us, “Prepare
the way of the Lord, Prepare the way for the Lord!”

Francis was not distracted by names, or categories, stipulations, or
anything suggesting that God was not in the particular being encountered in
his or our daily life. Open-minded Buddhists bow with reverence to Francis’
love, respect, and reverence for all beings, sentient or not. Perhaps this
is how we are to care for this world.

Everybody likes the stories of the wolf, the leper, and brother sun sister
moon. And yet, the ground of being that is the inspiration and sustenance of
those stories, the insight and stewardship that interpenetrate daily
responsive behavior following from dwelling in, and indwelling of, the
reality of God – -- is a story hard to hear, and harder yet to embody.

Thanks be that Jesus embodied so wonderfully the story. Thanks be that
Francis mirrored that embodiment so remarkably. As for the rest of us, it is
a joy that we have the story repeated so often to us. Again. And again.
Perhaps, soon, we’ll hear it, and hear it whole, and thereby embody it with
graceful and gracious humility. In a process of sacred realization, we’ll be
Franciscan, we’ll be Christian, and we’ll be “en famille Dieu.”
(from letter to D.L. from Camden, 28aug03)

It is the joy of questions to find their own answers.

"It's prison."

That's how he summed it up this morning. He lives there. I just visit for conversation.

The worthies of old all had
means of emancipating people.
What I teach people just requires
you not to take on the confusion of others.
If you need to act, then act,
without any further hesitation or doubt.
- Lin Chi (d 867?)

It was one of those situations where there were punches, then a hitting with blunt object, blood, teeth knocked out, the impulse to destroy the other, then -- by mutual convenience -- a tacit understanding to let it be, no charges or counter-charges. "Least said, soonest mended."

Prison.

We read Eckhart Tolle's first chapter in Stillness Speaks. It begins:

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.

Justin and Paco, Sonny and Joe, Jeremy and myself shared stillness in prison this morning.

Even with no escape, freedom is speaking with stillness.

At Camden Harbor tonight, Windjammer Weekend fireworks begin at 9pm.

Brad's here, Miles too, Sam, Sheila, Dori, Theresa, and the Victory Chimes three-master gather dockside with larger numbers milling near -- this array of celebration.

Pizza arrives.

Monica yesterday. Augustine today.

Last night Trungpa's comments about the "sore spot," the open vulnerability that allows in the germ of compassion.

Over the ages you have followed objects,
Never once turning back to look within.
Time slips away;
Months and years are wasted.
- Kuei-Shan (771-854)

Alaya is the abode of home, before "I" and "other" became separated in our minds.

My homeless spirit is months and years wandering town to town. Like avowed Indian in the words of The Sanyasin's First Day (a children's book by Ned Shank, 1999):
"It was the sanyasin's first day. He sat in the shade of a tree beside the busy road with his walking-stick, dressed in his brand new orange cloth. He had given away everything he owned to lead the holy life of a sanyasin, to do nothing but pray, and walk from town to town, begging for just enough rice to fill his bowl."

My courage is not so specific. I often ignore my heart. Thus, as Augustine said, it is restless. And remains restless until it rests in what is supreme, utmost, clear light reality, God.

Jesus said, “Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the householder had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have watched and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect. (Gospel Matthew 24:42 - 51)

Thieves have taken from me everything I thought important -- dreams, hopes, plans, and understanding.

1, Thus says the LORD: The heavens are my throne, the earth is my footstool. What kind of house can you build for me; what is to be my resting place?
2, My hand made all these things when all of them came to be, says the LORD. This is the one whom I approve: the lowly and afflicted man who trembles at my word. (Isaiah, Chapter 66)

Mostly I shudder. Or is it shrug? What kind of house is this empty place where what I thought I was moves out and the space widens with unknowing?

The ground before I and other?

Holy ground?

Creation itself...

May all beings come to dwell in their true home!

Alaya is a Sanskrit word meaning "abode," or "basis," or "home," or "ground."

Every day priests minutely examine the Dharma
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.
Before doing that, though, they should learn
How to read the love letters
Sent by the wind and rain,
The snow and moon.
- Ikkyu (1394-1491)

'Himalaya,' means abode of snow.

The love letters sent to us, the love letters we sent to others, these are cricket song, breeze through leaves, and sun on windowsill.

We are at home when nothing comes between us and what is the ground of our being.

Where is home to you and me?

What is home…

The bookshop/bakery is closed today.

Though we’ve been dwelling together,
I don’t know his name:
Going along accepting the flow,
Just being thus,
Even the eminent sages since antiquity
Don’t know him.
How could the hasty ordinary type
Presume to understand?
- Shitou

He is solitude; she is silence. Today they separately obey the command of sanctuary.

If there is to be a sane world full of sane people, it must begin with cricket sound in August's exhalation.

When friends these days wonder whether we are disappearing, I can only listen to hear how far I am from cricket sound.

Today I am far away. Today I am at the outer echo of morning chant crickets sing in praise of outer edges.

Far off. Going adrift. Unable to recognize the faces and voices of the country once my home.

Ordinary.

Aslant.

Who can hear such silence?

The wholeness of life has, from of old,
Been made manifest in its parts;
Clarity has been made manifest in heaven,
Firmness in earth,
Purity in the spirit,
If rim and spoke and hub were not,
Where would be the chariot?
Who will prefer the jingle of jade pendants
If they once have heard the stone
Growing in a cliff?
- Lao Tzu

When desperate, eye sees and ear hears.

When distracted, jingle diverts attention.

I have forgotten so much for so long.

Breath prays looking without hope.

Crickets!

Some days, just looking at trees, or roots along hilly path, is all you can do.

I have come to profoundly dislike the path America's leaders walk.

It is time for change.

The heart and the cross in chapel/zendo are silent signs of this contemplative time.

Some days a heart broken by lies and deception, along with a cross on which hangs suffering worldwide community -- is a sight too hard to look at.

Some friends persist in senseless arrogance grousing slogans about freedom and patriotism.

Some friends bleed out and expire hope that some dark conspiracy has not numbed a naive country, a conspiracy of proportions unimagined seeping from what once was known as the People's House.

As for me, today, I can only look at trees. I look at roots along hilly path.

I disbelieve.

We are passing.

There is a point of correspondency
between two views which is
called the pivot of the Tao.
As soon as one finds this pivot,
she stands in the center of the
ring of thought where she can
respond without end to the changing views;
without end to those affirming,
and without end to those denying.
- Chuang Tzu

Just see what is passing...
...by(e).

David S., from Antigonish Nova Scotia, brings gift of 2nd calligraphy.

First one was Tibetan characters of male and female -- protectors of Sangha. This second one is open heart compassionate heart -- dripping of Bodhichitta.

We'll find frames. Something to hold for meditation Sangha and Bodhichitta. Tomorrow evening he'll lead Wednesday Evening Conversation with comments on Buddhist Meditation as Christian Practice.

Keep to unity without shifting.
With constant presence,
Whether active or still,
The student can see the Buddha nature clearly.
- Tao-hsin (580-651

Yesterday to Corner Shop for breakfast, to Rockland starting process for ID card for Jon. Get oil change. Then get Tibetan incense and holder from Bijou's shop on Main Street.

Barbara writes her father died on 4July. At Saturday retreat day a young man tells of his father's death when he was ten. At Saturday morning conversation man from New Bedford has to pass book unable to read after speaking about his father's last few days before death. So many fathers -- so many deaths!

Unity without shifting is constant nearness of all who’ve touched us, participated in our coming to birth in this existence, and departed back into the invisibility following death that each of us once emerged from at birth.

Constant presence is what accompanies and permeates what we call being-in-the-world.
All are right here. When we go elsewhere, there is where here is. Fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, children and relatives from every direction -- all of these are near and aware of our veryness and passage-making through the hours and minutes of this passing-through mysterious world.

Buddha nature enlightens sangha, opens hearts with compassion, and makes prayer to rise like incense of a morning's meditation.

I drive Jon to Portland. He's off to Boston to ready for moving there. I am his father.

For now, in this Tuesday dimension, we travel in each other's sight.

Whether active or still, we practice this seeing.

With presence it becomes permeable.

Root unity, even through shifting.

Transparent.

Where go when there's no where to go?

Salt-water farm on North Harbour on Aspey Bay, Cape Breton? Or Inn, shop, and house in quiet town on Broad Cove in Lunenburg County Nova Scotia?
Bayview and Barnestown Camden?

Time is passing every moment;
How can you be complacent and waste it,
Seeing death is but a breath away?
- Kuei-Shan (771-854)

One breath away, one breath near.
Breath alone along the way.

It's the birthday of beat poet Lew Welch, born in Phoenix, Arizona (1926). He's the author of many collections of poetry, including Hermit Poems (1965) and At Times We're Almost Able To See (1965). He said, "Seeking perfect total enlightenment is like looking for a flashlight when all you need the flashlight for is to find your flashlight." (from The Writers Almanac, 16Aug, by Garrison Keillor)

Each place is now here.

Charlie and Sonny wondered warily if one were being diss'd by the other.

If I simply say what I see, without making it a dart at the other, then the other is invited to say what they see -- unpunctured.

Constantly be aware, without stopping.
When the aware mind is present,
It senses the formlessness of things.
Constantly see your body as empty and quiet,
Inside and outside communing in sameness.
Plunge the body into the realm of reality,
Where there has never been any obstruction.
- Tao-hsin (580-651)

Life in prison is testy. Like outside life in the world, only more so, everyone is doing time, and hardly anything said or seen is what it seems to be.

We were talking about the Christian feast of the Assumption of Mary -- reading Jean Guitton. Something about the obscure distance or mysterious space that occurs at death but before completion of movement to another dimension. Ryan wondered about standing in the river with Heraclitus. Charlie about the middle of extremes -- as when an immovable object is met with an unstoppable force. Michael said he gravitated to extremes. Sonny described at his near-death experience looking down and realizing he had no body -- but was there.

Where it went testy was the way Sonny and Dick sounded to Charlie and Ryan -- like they ...knew...and the others didn't. That's always a difficult presentation to sit through. Charlie balked. Sonny cut short. Vaughn was silent.

Saskia had the final word as trumpet sounded retreat to cell at end of rec and work period. She told of how we often hear everything through the conditioning we carry with us -- that she does -- gets defensive and reactive, and forgets that the other is just saying what and how they see what is there for them.

Conditioning is a volume knob on the sounds coming through our psyche.

Later Dick thought he might have said aloud what he 'd been thinking -- that his life is fact, like a book you read. The book has it there and down as it is. The reader takes it in, agrees or disagrees, sees or doesn't, tosses it away or keeps on going. That's how he talks his life.

Sometimes, we say, it feels testy.

It all seems testy these days.

We've got to say what we see.

The task is to take the testy and go on.

Go on, and go on, until we are gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond. Awake.

Awake from the nightmare of antagonism, through the dream of recombination, into the reality Assumption invites – One’s Body – undifferentiate, indistributive, and resolute.

Finally become Yes!

We are home.

Even so, we ask again and again, 'Where is home?"

My home is a cave, without a thing in it.
Pure and marvelously empty,
As bright and clear as the sun.
A dish of mountain vegetables is sufficient,
And a patched cloak is plenty of cover for me.
Let a thousand wizards show up to grant me any wish!
I already have the Supreme Buddha
In my possession!
- Ryokan Taigu (1758-1831)

Some 1400 miles whirlwind driving, winding through New Brunswick -- St Stephen and St. Andrews, through St. John and Moncton -- to Nova Scotia.
To Cape Breton Island. To Cape North. To a screened porch on North Harbour. Looking around. Wondering, "Is this retreat home?"

Vespers at St. Joseph's after crossing Mackenzie Mountain from Gampo Abbey. The openness of an unlocked church. Stained glass narrative of the sea through life, death, and resurrection.

When we arrive home we find there is no other place than home.

All there is -- is home.

Welcome home.

There.

Interview Questions for Buddhists in Maine:
(sent by Holly N. of Windhorse Project)



Do you consider yourself a Buddhist?

Yes – In the way I consider myself human and alive for now.



Have you formally taken refuge?

There are two of us – Saskia and I – that I here refer to.

Yes – We have pronounced the 3 Refuges aloud and in public hearing.



If yes, when and with whom?

After studying and practicing for nearly 30 years I spoke aloud the refuges in mid-nineties with Saskia in the presence of several people at Meetingbrook.

In addition, Saskia pronounced them at a retreat with monks of the Order of Interbeing.

So too, we have formulated and pronounced in public our own Meetingbrook promises. These are promises of Contemplation, Conversation, and Correspondence.



Is this person still one of your teachers? How often do you see them?

Thich Nhat Hanh is a wonderful teacher for us. We see him through his writings as well as those who trust him. We passed each other 20 years ago, bowed in silence, alone together in an alley between buildings at Smith College where he sat on steps in solitude before his talk. Not since.

In addition, each person we listen to or speak with is for us the person of the teacher, the Buddha. In our Christian monastic tradition and metaphor this would be similar to receiving each as Christ.


Do you have other teachers? Are they from different lineages?

Yes. Many teachers, many lineages.


Who are your favorite Buddhist teachers/authors?

Shunryu Suzuki, Thich Nhat Hanh, Denys Rackley, Jack Kornfield, Larry Rosenberg, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, D.T.Suzuki, Pema Chodron, Chogyam Trungpa, Joko Beck, Sokei An, Keiji Nishitani, Maseo Abe, Seung Sahn, Dalai Lama, Barbara Rhodes, Dogen Zenji, Bankai, Toni Packer, Ryokan, Basho, Ikkyu, Issa, Siddhartha Gautama, and many others.


Do you feel that mingling Buddhist traditions can strengthen practitioners or become an obstacle to serious practice?

Strengthen.

Would you recount your interest in Buddhism chronologically?

In 1966, while in a contemplative year of prayer and study with the Franciscans, I picked up and read the book “Beyond East and West,” by John Wu. That was my beginning. Thomas Merton was my bridge and D.T. Suzuki was the stepping-stone from the bridge. In 1974/75 I began attending retreats, public lectures, Dharma talks in the city. I sat zazen with Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn and associates in Cambridge, Providence, and New York. While caring for a friend after surgery in the mid-eighties I sat with Eido Roshi and experienced the Japanese tradition.

As a solitary I practiced zazen alone for 20 years following.

Two 10-day Buddhist/Christian retreats, in 1980 and 1990, led by a Catholic Carthusian monk, knit nicely the common silence of Buddhist Meditation Practice and Christian Contemplative Prayer. This monk, Denys Rackley, is someone to whom my gratitude continues to flow. He died in 1998 at age 76.

From 1990 we intentionally began to consider what emerges as Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage.

Now we silently sit and converse with practitioners from various traditions -- inter-religious and non-religious -- whoever longs to practice what is true and loving.

We practice between traditions, not only Buddhist, but also Christian. We consider ourselves Catholic/ Buddhists open to all authentic expressions of faith, knowledge, practice, & inquiry. (With regard to the “Buddhist/Catholic” designation, we find ourselves most often in the “/” – the slash/place, the between/connection place.)

Saskia’s introduction to Buddhism came in 1984. In 1990 her first 10 day retreat was done with Denys Rackley, (a Carthusian Monk) whose practice was Catholic /Vipassana. Her Buddhist/Christian practice continues as such.


Would you recount your interest in Buddhism geographically?

Every place I am. Every place there is. Every place we are.

Where do you live now?

Camden, Maine.


Are you part of a study group or a Sangha? How many people are in it?

We belong to Meetingbrook Hermitage with its bookshop/bakery.

There is a core group of several dozen people who, in lesser groups of 3 to 15 attend one or the other of the evening conversations at the bookshop. There are a few who attend once in a while the daily practice times held at the hermitage.

There is no fixed residential community aside from the two dogs, a cat, and us. There is no pledge of affiliation to Meetingbrook encouraged, nor any pledged affiliation with any other or outside organizations. We are independent. When our practice deepens, we'll fall into interdependence.

As in our initial description, so we remain -- “Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage intends to serve a loosely knit association of individuals who travel the meditative & contemplative road from dependence to independence to interdependence in their spiritual lives. Providing a forum and place for solitaries, hermits, seekers & contemplatives, the hermitage invites anyone interested in silence, simplicity, stillness, or times of solitude to deepen their spiritual life in their own locations, and, by day visits, writing, overnight stays, individual and group sitting, listening & learning -- to experience Meetingbrook.” {http://www.meetingbrook.org/about.htm}


Do you feel there are adequate resources for your practice here in Maine? Please explain.

Yes. Everywhere is Buddha-nature. Everyone is Buddha-nature. Practice is everywhere available.

We have only to open our eyes, ears, mouth, mind, and heart. When we engage with compassion each and every being, each and every situation – we are practicing.

There is much to practice!

It is, in my view, important to locate practice in the ordinary, everyday, non-scripted realities right in front of us – the ones life presents itself through, and in, and as.

It is lovely to have formal practice centers and retreats. It is equally lovely to realize that each one of us is the practice itself.

My prayer is that when we meet each other we come to see there is no other.

Practice, in this view, is the process of enlightening that prayer and experience with one another. From this emerge simplicity, integrity, and faithful engagement.

We’ll know we are practitioners when there is seen attentive presence, root silence, and faithful engagement.

…………..

Holly asks:
Please pass this survey onto to any Buddhists you know in Maine.

Please send it to holly@windhorseproject.org

Or the Windhorse Project, 226 Ludwig Road, Hope, Maine, 04847. Many thanks!
………….


Thanks Holly,

Bill Halpin & Saskia Huising

It can equally be said this birthday is the first and it is the last.

Heavy rain and fog -- this morning -- dawning.

The moon is a house
In which the mind is master.
Look very closely:
Only impermanence lasts.
This floating world, too, will pass.
- Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481)

Leaving shop last night, high tide just outside door of small cape on harbor, Jon asks if there is anything special about 59. "No," I answer. He nods. Says goodnight. I say, "I love you." Door closes. We rush off to Graves Market for chocolate with only a few minutes before 9pm closing.

Advice to a Girl

No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed;
Lay that on your heart,
My young angry dear;
This truth, this hard and precious stone,
Lay it on your hot cheek,
Let it hide your tear.
Hold it like a crystal
When you are alone
And gaze in the depths of the icy stone.
Long, look long and you will be blessed:
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed.
(Poem by Sara Teasdale from Mirror of the Heart, Macmillan).

The definition of the word possess, "to have as one's own property," must be seen through. We normally think ownership, as in materially, legally belonging to the occupying person and none other.

The "One" is all there is.

Property, "the sum total of items owned; possessions collectively," can be looked at as that which belongs to One, that which is near and dear to all.

When we see what is near, when we see through the eyes of what-is-called-God, we see all there is.

Our brothers and sisters in Islam Surah 112, Say: He is Allah, the one and only God the Eternal, the Absolute He begot none, nor was He begotten and there is none comparable to Him.
A commentator goes on to say: The Arabic term "Ahad" used here to refer to the unity of Allah.
The unity of Allah is such that there is no reality and no true and permanent existence except His. Moreover, every other being acquires what ever power it possessed from the effective power of Allah which rules over this world. Nothing else whatsoever plans anything for the world nor decides, for that matter, anything in it. (Commentary, Surah 112, Purity of Faith - al Ikhlas, http://www.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/tafsir/syed_qutb/Surah_112.htm)

Metaphysicians from earliest Greece say, Being is, non-Being is not.

Our brothers and sisters at their thresholds say Sh'ma, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

Jesus said, The Father and I are one.

Siddhartha Gautama said at end of his life, "From now on, brothers and sisters, you are on your own."

What does it mean to be on one's own? What does it mean to be one with the Father? What does it mean to Be? What does it mean that nothing else is? What does it mean to hear One?

Perhaps it means, one and all, this Friday is our birth.

Can we see, can we possess, this?

"Long, look long and you will be blessed," said Sara.

Watch and pray,
first and last,
for – this -- blessing!
(wfh)

Love what is...our very own.

Questioning is a particular spiritual practice.

We engage what is presenting itself when we ask into it. By asking into, or questioning something, we expand the boundaries of our perceived proscribed self.

That self, when absorbed by a question into unknown possibilities of response, ceases to exist as a separate detached self. It never was separate, not for an instant. And yet, the felt experience of the vast majority of us is separate, detached distance from another or others.

Nor are there any others – not on the field of unity. True, on the field of utility, each is distinct, localized, and bearer of specific identification or drivers license number.

Here in a thatched hut
Hidden among mountain peaks,
With barely room for one,
I’m suddenly invaded
By wandering white clouds.
- Koho Kennichi

With gratitude to my mother and father, grandparents, ancestors and predecessors as far back as back can go – I acknowledge that somewhere in the procession of being a human being was born with the name I carry even until today.

Coming-into-being-seen!

Happy the day!

Gratefulness!

Is love itself what is grounding us as oneself?

Parthenogenesis [Greek = virgin birth], far from being an aberration, might be the mystery of love’s substance finding itself through oneself.

Only when we love the mother can we love the father.

Thereby loving oneself.

I face the 8th joyfully!

We're uncertain how surprised Jesus was when he experienced himself transfigured before the eyes of Peter, James, and John. It's good to have community or sangha around when something unusual happens to you,

To be aware when your mind is going astray
Is indeed a good thing.
Then you must focus your attention
And gather it in and not let
It run off anymore.
This is the meditation work of
Taking charge and preserving the mind
Of reverence.
If your mind does not know where it is,
And everything is vague and uncertain,
What kind of meditation is this?
- Hu Juren (1434-1484)

It is unusual to have dead people appear, to have your clothes turn dazzling, and to hear the voice of an unseen being announce you as someone to be listened to.

While he was praying, his face changed its appearance, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly two men were there talking with him. They were Moses and Elijah, who appeared in heavenly glory and talked with Jesus about the way in which he would soon fulfill God's purpose by dying in Jerusalem. Peter and his companions were sound asleep but they woke up and saw Jesus' glory and the two men who were standing with him. As the men were leaving Jesus, Peter said to him, 'Master, how good it is that we are here! We will make three tents, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.’ He did not really know what he was saying. While he was still speaking, a cloud appeared and covered them with its shadow, and the disciples were afraid as the cloud came over them. A voice said from the cloud, 'This is my Son whom I have chosen--listen to him!" (Luke 9:28-35, from the New Catholic Bible)

What could he have thought? Perhaps he was uncertain, "And everything is vague and uncertain, / What kind of meditation is this? "

Perhaps his mind did not know where it was.

With no mind, one must be right where one is.

In Hiroshima on this date 58 years ago -- a mindless slaughter. On Mount Tabor longer than that ago -- a command to listen.

Today I listen. Not three tents. Not one tent. No tents.

Only listen.

Says who?

Ask! Question without hope of answer.

A voice? Whose?

We're uncertain.

Good.

Lately, there's a curious moving about in mind and with feet.

Many are expressing a desire to change their way of living. Some say they want more simplicity. Some, community. Some want to change their lives by finding out and releasing who they really are. Others are wandering about on vacation, while still others meander vacant and confused.

In addition, an unusual number of people are interiorly packing and ridding the unnecessary for an exodus not yet fully understood.

To nurture this mind,
The most important work
In everyday activities
Is not to be overcome
By things.
- Wu Yubi (1391-1469)

Is the most important work to undergo what is -- here -- in heart and eye?

The Wild Geese

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
(Poem by Wendell Berry from Collected Poems 1957-1982, North Point Press).

"Here" is a hard place to dwell. So many feel that life is elsewhere. I once did -- perhaps still do -- feel that the lives some of us live are separated from what we imagine to be Life Itself.

Surely, the terror and suffering inflicted daily around the world by war, famine, disease, and accidents have a feel of anomaly and exception about them. If so, what constitutes harmonious, peaceful, non-disastrous life in this world?

Dare we ask? Dare we listen for response?

He was found among the teachers, and we are told he was 'listening to them and asking them questions,' the thing that is most difficult of all in human conversation. What man can really listen to others and ask questions? But there are children who can, for they are not encumbered by prejudices, they go to the heart of the mystery. An intelligent child is a metaphysician: in the presence of the doctors of the Law, he is outside the Law, he is all spirit. That alone would have been enough to explain the 'quick understanding' that amazed them in his answers.
(pp. 41-42, from section The Independence of the Son, in The Blessed Virgin, by Jean Guitton, 1949)

Quick understanding eludes. In its place are bromide, spin, and obfuscation of spurious motivation.

We must ask. We must listen.

What must we do to see eternal life?

This question, here, is ancient and timely.

I am…listening.

Why is silence so vital?

Does language, when overused, fail to hold true to what is conveyed through it?

Meaning to get away from intellectualization
And avoid word traps,
I sailed across the sea to search for the
Transmission beyond the teachings;
Went on pilgrimages till my sandals broke
And found water in the clear stream,
The moon in the sky.
- Kakua (1143 - ?)

Today water falls from sky; moon hides under stone in stream.

Sylvia looked at two of us on Saturday and said: "You say 'I don't know anything,' and John says, 'We know everything.' -- which is true?"

She's right about what was said. I don't know anything. We know everything.

Ego is clueless. Sangha is wise.

Silence is vital. Silence reveals community.

Community is vital silence.

Right now, Buddhists sit at Molyneaux Yoga-barn. Quakers sit at Vesper Hill Children's Chapel, and various Christian denominations listen to scripture readings and remember the life of Jesus.

Sunday morning attentiveness!

Old cedars and ancient cypresses impale rosy mists,
Through huge boulders and hanging vines
A small path winds;
Even monkeys and cranes won’t
Come to a mountain this desolate.
Only the wind-borne cassia pods
That fill my thatched hut.
- Tesshu Tokusai (? – 1366)(dailyzen)

At hermitage, birds trill expanding silence with their sound, Saskia slices mushrooms and beans for soup (nicking thumb in process), and I read the scriptures of daily postings from newspapers and websites about secrets and mysteries of human behavior, incomprehensible political maneuvers, and the common experience we mostly all have to make sense of the odd goings-on in the world.

It occurred to me yesterday that I seldom say to individuals, "I'd love for you to be part of what we love to imagine as community dwelling in simplicity, peace, and service -- sweetness grounded in prayer, contemplation, and meditation."

This insight came when earlier in the day a woman left the shop and the feeling remaining was, "Are we being excluded? She doesn't seem to include us in speaking or thinking about things she knows we too are interested in." It had to do with co-housing exploration. About community. The sense of seclusion sometimes lingers like an echo in a large empty room.

There's the mirror!

Whatever we think about another must be thought about oneself. Whatever is said about another must be said about oneself.

Until it dissolves, my ego sees itself as organizing someone in solitary seclusion. It matters not at all that the majority of time is spent in the ready presence of others coming and going, sitting and seeking, conversing and reflecting. Still, the image is of someone in hermit solitude with: Only the wind-borne cassia pods / That fill my thatched hut.

I would love for many individuals to be part of what we love to imagine as community dwelling in simplicity, peace, and service -- sweetness grounded in prayer, contemplation, and meditation.

There. I've said it.

May I be forgiven my excluding ego.

It is, after all, Sunday.

All exclusions herewith exempt.

Right?

Now?

Yes!

We know little.

We suspect there’s much we don’t know.

But it's what we don't know we don't know that's most intriguing.

Not a clue. Not an inch closer to the far side of the edge of what we suspect is the limit of possible knowledge.

One minute of sitting, one inch of Buddha.
Like lightning all thoughts come and pass.
Just once look into your mind-depths:
Nothing else has ever been.
- Manzan (1649 – 1709)

We don't know what we are doing. We have no idea why we've made it to our 8th year at the harbor. No understanding why we sit in prison every other Friday having each time the best conversations that can be had.

Some embryo nourishes itself within the glimpse each emits toward the other around the table. No explaining. Mere re-presenting one in the other.

To conform one's will completely to the template of divine love is a spiritual practice that [Jacob] Boehme refers to as "putting on the body of Christ.
(p.39 in Love Is Stronger Than Death, The Mystical Union of Two Souls, by Cynthia Bourgeault)

Second body? Mystical body? Embodiment?

Who knows?

Surely some know?

No.

One.

Knows.

Richard says keep it spiritual, not political.

He has separated and subtracted heaven from hell and called the remainder earth.

Beware of gnawing the ideogram of nothingness:
Your teeth will crack.
Swallow it whole, and you’ve a treasure
Beyond the hope of Buddha and the Mind.
The east breeze fondles the horse’s ears:
How sweet the smell of plum.
- Karasumaru-Mitsuhiro (1579–1638)(dailyzen)

The time has come to re-unite and recover heaven and hell with earth.

Incarnation demands it. Enlightenment will have it no other way. Resurrection concretizes the retrieval. Final liberation empties the distinctions and trinitizes the reality of heaven/hell/earth in one's own bodily reality.

Every day bodies are deadened in Iraq. It becomes increasingly evident shortsighted and narrow-thinking warmongers are bamboozling America and the world. The sorrow is not only personal and particular for families and loved ones of those daily killed; it is also devastating for the safety of the soul of clear-hearted and clear-minded people everywhere.

The ideogram of nothingness sloppily drawn by the Bush administration is cracking and rotting teeth.
The ideogram of nothingness treasured by mindful practitioners of clear seeing is the integrity of authentic souls responding faithfully to what is right there in front of them.

In other words, one and the same reality can be the damnation of some and the salvation of others. So much depends on whether truth is how we scold each other, or truth is how we hold each other. Scolders damn. Holders save.

And letting each go their own way -- held in prayer, not fear -- is how we pass through the body of what is called God.

I am sorrowed by war. I am also sorrowed by arrogant unawareness posing as cocky certitude.

Richard will have to wait. Heaven/hell/earth will not be separated in the name of easing people quietly past the disturbing ugliness of war and posturing pretense of patronizing power.

Instead, in the morning he Saskia and I will go into the prison to be with each and everyone arriving at table for conversation. We might talk about the threats of bodily harm by frustrated cowards sucker-punching someone's teeth out. Or we might talk about the intense and beyond-death love between a monk and a hermit-priest. Maybe we'll explore how science is replacing religion in hosting our awareness of God. Who knows?

For this night, July's end is chilly. August brushes off its jacket.

How sweet the fragrance -- the silence of life indivisible.

We're losing the connection.

As Congress goes on vacation for a month I propose a vacation for our troops in Iraq.

How is it that officials in government go off to play and rest while men and women in the military stare down bullets and grenades in Iraq?

Those who sent American forces into harms way should remain at their jobs until our military is brought home.

The flowers, the maple leaves in autumn,
And the wintry snows covering
The field all white.
How beautiful they are
Each in its way!
I fear my attachments
Still did not go beyond
The sensuous, for I now
Know what Reality is.
- Daito Kokushi (1282-1334)

Who knows what Reality is?

Who knows what is taking place?

Reality is what is taking place. No explanation, defense, or apology can do anything to Reality but dress up or camouflage what is taking place.

These days I am attached to the suspicion we Americans are in a foreign country shooting and killing citizens of that country because we feel that we can. This suspicion suggests we are blindly following leaders who trample people's lives to enact their political and ideological purposes.

At Tuesday Evening Conversation, reading a Buddhist Vipassana practitioner, it occurs to me that at center there must be wholesome, fearless, and forgiving Reality. "We" do not forgive. Rather "we" step out of the way and allow forgiveness, i.e. Reality Itself, to take place. Our task is to recognize whenever fractured, fearful, vengeful behavior is interfering with the free expression of Reality.

It is not possible to replicate freedom using enslaving, eradicating behavior as means –- means of murder and assassination. It is not patriotic to send men and women to murder and maim citizens of another country in the name of eradicating evil and demolishing terrorism. Terrorism has many costumes worn by many ideologies.

What is taking place from the hands of our Executive Branch of government is beginning to resemble something dark and dead. What this administration identifies as evil falls prey to naked aggression and terrible killing of human beings that resembles the evil so glibly denunciated.

Our "patriotic" reaction to the cruel criminal acts of 9/11 has been to behave like war-crazed hornets throwing themselves madly against anything perceived disturbing the security of the home nest.

We are retaliating without the safeguards of democracy and decency America has traditionally come to demand in all aspects of American involvement with its own and other people.

My attachment to my suspicions becomes more noticeable. A dull, flat, colorless fear arises – one that suspicion detects is a goal of retaliatory justice.

I fear my attachments. I dislike my suspicions.

Are we falling from the center? Is the center beginning to crumble?

Do unreflective and terrifying men loose mere anarchy on the world?

Is the true center -- at heart of everything -- Reality?

If the center is Reality, this Reality is wholesome, fearless, and forgiving. We must not allow fractured, fearful, vengeful men to break our connection with our very heart, Reality Itself, and substitute falsity, lies, and invented explanations.

We must return to center.

Detach from separating inventions.

Face True Reality. Not the invented, hijacked fears planted by twin-terrified actors -- criminal Al-Quaeda, and retribution-minded U.S. administration.

See the many faces Reality asks us to recognize, love, and forgive.

Recognize How beautiful they are / Each in its way!

Only connect.

Sparkle green.

Something is wrong.

Sitting in the Mountains

Rock slab seat
Legs folded
Sitting alone
Not loathing noise
Not savoring silence
The carefree clouds concur.
- Jakushitsu (1290–1367)

Someone is stealing our country.

Count me out. Recount the constitution. Something is missing.

I give no permission to kill in my name. Yet, many die, supposedly that I might live in a free country. But free countries do not lie and kill the way tyrannical countries do. My country lies and kills in the very name of freedom.

What's the difference?

God is badly served by lies and men that lie.

Even the mountains hide their faces in grief and shame.

I support the resignation of men that lie, wage war, and erode freedom.

Who will lead us returning what was lost to its rightful place?

Have we lost our way?

Spiritually.

Come home!

Live alone? With others? Live alone together? Live as one is in community?

Standing alone beneath a solitary pine;
Quickly the time passes.
Overhead the endless sky
Who can I call to join me on this path?
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

This is why we search, smile, and seem foolish to so many.

"We do what only lovers can: make a gift out of necessity." (Leonard Cohen )

What is the necessity?

Draw nearer.

Listen.

Breathe.

Live.

Death gives us pause.

Life looks both ways -- toward birth and death -- and moves on.

Here you can rest and become
Clean, pure, and lucid.
Bright and penetrating,
You can immediately return,
Accord, and respond to deal with events.
Everything is unhindered,
Clouds gracefully floating
Up to the peaks, the moonlight
Glitteringly flows
Down mountain streams
- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091–1157)

Brooks dry up this July end.

On Zafu this morning, the sheer silence and stillness of wooden floor!

Openness to others -- this is not only an attitude toward death but also toward people and toward truth. Love and knowledge are the two supreme forms of openness to otherness. Love and knowledge are therefore our "rehearsal for Death."
(cf. Plato Phaedo 64a)* --p.42, from Love is Stronger that Death, by Peter Kreeft

[64a] when he is to die, and has strong hopes that when he is dead he will attain the greatest blessings in that other land. So I will try to tell you, Simmias, and Cebes, how this would be.
“Other people are likely not to be aware that those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead. Now if this is true, it would be absurd to be eager for nothing but this all their lives, and then to be troubled when that came for which they had all along been eagerly practicing.”

And Simmias laughed and said, “By Zeus,
(* Phaedo, Plato)

We eagerly practice.

Pausing.

Prayer.

(Silence -- conversing openly with others).

Folks from Findhorn find the shop this Friday. Married there, they return to Maine. They look for community.

A piece of mind as clear as the sky
Where clouds float freely into all.
This quiet night I do not lean toward sleep
But listen for leaves falling in my yard.
- Kuo-Yin ( c. 1111)

Robert and Su.Sane sit with Sam and Susan a while. The first two will do an art show at the library in autumn. The second two show tool sharpening skills at Rockland Apprenticeshop this afternoon.

Joanie's leg goes flex and flatten on machine in bed. Saskia's LCD computer screen goes kaput in southern Maine during a workman's comp audit. Barbara H will leave Camden in a few days after several years for New York State. Richard O' returns south to Florida after vacation.

The little boy was drawing when his mother noticed and asked, "What are you drawing, Jimmy?"
The little boy, without looking up, answered, "A picture of God."
"But Jimmy," his mother replied, "Nobody knows what God looks like."
"They will once I'm finished."
(p.55, in Doing Nothing Coming to the End of the Spiritual Search, by Steven Harrison)

God is not what we think God is. Nor are we who we think we are.

So -- What is God? And -- Who are we?

At Times I Have

At times I have happy ideas,
Ideas suddenly happy, in among ideas
And the words in which they naturally shake free ...

After writing, I read ...
What made me write that?
Where have I been to find that?
Where did that come to me from? It is better than
me ...
Shall we have been, in the world, at the most, pen
and ink
With which somebody writes properly what we here
jot?...
(18.12.1934) (--from 'Selected Poems' translated from Fernando Pessoa by J.Griffin.)

Tom and Lloyd, Saskia and I read Pessoa and Bozarth, Cummings and Basho for poetry at Friday Evening Conversation.

Friedrich Nietzsche asked the obvious question: "Which is it -- is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's blunders?" (p.56, Harrison)

I prefer poetry.

There, it is neither question nor answer that matters.

Rather, poetry moments us.

Summering leaf holds in heat and sudden shower.

No blunder.

Left alone, Cesco ate cherry Kuchen piece of cake in van while Sando and we visited Joanie in Windward Gardens.

Talent discarded
wisdom wiped away
you return to foolishness
No desire to leave traces of bungling
to a world of dust.
(-- Jakushitsu)

At Meher Baba conversation Wednesday evening Ken spoke of the silence and the veil of ignorance. Saskia's insight was that breaking the silence is lifting the veil of ignorance.

It's not a matter of words or wordlessness.

You were saying?

No trace.

Speaking Now into Being is entering Sacred Silence.

Nothing prepares us for the loss of meaning.

Petals drop from flower like words from language -- and we are bare -- ready realization of empty presence.

I watch a teacher lecture on the sutras
His eloquence flows like running water.
Expounding on the five stages
And the eight categories,
He explains them with unequaled cleverness.
They proclaim themselves masters
And others believe it.
However, question them about the essence of Zen
And they have no useful answer.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

The essence of Zen?

He who truly attains awakening knows that deliverance is to be found right where he is. There is no need to retire to the mountain cave. If he is a fisherman he becomes a real fisherman. If he is a butcher he becomes a real butcher. The farmer becomes a real farmer and the merchant a real merchant. He lives his daily life in awakened awareness. His every act from morning to night is his religion. (Sokei-an)

We didn't open the shop yesterday. We instead worked all day and night on codes and numbers for the other work Saskia does in order to support the shop. It was nice to be away from the crowds that a busy summer weekend of craft fairs and wooden boat shows and harbor festivals that Camden, Rockland, and Belfast hosted this sunny mid-summer. We're the only shop in the area in high summer that has to close its doors in order to make some money.

At Evening Practice we read from Speaking of Silence, Christians and Buddhists on the Contemplative Way. Participants in a forum talk about monasticism and the changing dynamics East and West for new populations wishing to engage and encounter the mysteries of God and Bare Reality.

Jim says something about the need for a new organic expression of the spiritual life.

We're ready for such an organic change.

Our every act, from morning to night, is our religion.

Blessed be the presence.

The reality.

Of this.

It is our body and blood.

Christ.

Nearing, and nearly empty of any other meaning.

Now seeing us as no useful answer.

Seeing Itself?

Charlie and Joe sit with Cheryl and I in education room in prison.

"Look around, see what is about you as you move to what is in your sights -- this is how we keep balance," says Joe.

In a pellucid ocean,
Bubbles arise and dissolve again.
Just so, thoughts are no different
From ultimate reality,
So don’t find fault; remain at ease.
Whatever arises, whatever occurs,
Don’t grasp-release it on the spot.
Appearances, sounds, and objects
Are one’s own mind;
There’s nothing except mind.
- Niguma

Charlie was called to the hospital.
Soon we'd have to leave early due to administrative special circumstances in the close (maximum) security unit.

Joe said, "What you are seeing -- it's all about balance."
It occurs he might be saying:
"What you are,
seeing --
it's all about,
balance."

Cheryl says, "If we read someone else with grace, and let others read us with grace, we allow graciousness to dwell in our midst."

This is what we want -- patience. (L. patior = to suffer, permit, or allow.)
To listen is to suffer what is heard.

We're in prison. We listen to each other. Suffering is shared. Patience is practiced.

Joe says that when he is leaving someone he says, "Keep in touch with yourself."

If we are what we wish to learn, then there is no teaching, only presence learning from itself.

Last night Joanie calls from hospital, she'd fallen, breaking her leg. We visit after leaving razor-wire fence. She's in surgery.

We pray for her, and for Eleanor and Douglas, and all suffering the conversation with age and frailty.

One breath at a time -- we touch one another -- with presence.

Remain at ease

Innocence.

Not knowing.

Buddhists are asked to have great faith, great doubt, and great effort.

When I went to meditate in mountain-range solitude,
I briefly encountered realization of mind itself.
When I practiced without distraction,
A continual understanding arose.
Now it doesn’t depend on a state of mind.
I’m content with resolution in a birthless state.
I wander in mountain-range solitude,
Or else perform seated retreat in a cave.
Or in the midst of an assembly;
This current continues without interruption.
- Godrakpa (1170-1249)

Walking into the barn last night Cisco stops, listening. I stop, listening. To the left of the door leading from barn to mud room the white and black of a skunk.

We exit. Leave the skunk be. Enter house from dooryard. No stink, no fuss, turn around, go another way. Good we were silent.

What do we know? We have stories we tell about ideas or experience. Some stories we believe. Some we reject. Sometimes we follow stories down the road. Sometimes we find ourselves in a beautiful clearing. Sometimes we fall into a ditch.

Cheryl talked about intention, then eurhythmic "ah" from a Steiner workshop she attended. Sylvia read from a book about dreams -- how they are a place we go for learning. David said, "No judgments." Saskia spoke of sailing, of not trying to impose your will on the wind and water.

We are asked to be attentively and alertly aware of what is passing through us. Allowing passage, constructing no barrier to what is passing through.

Cheryl's brother Kirk sent this poem:

LESSON #1

It is as simple as this
If I wake in the morning
I get up
If I die before the dawn
I don't
Everything else
is story.
(--Kirk, c.2003)

Nature, that which is of itself so (tzu-jan), follows its course spontaneously.

Two stories pass through today:
1. War is a loud lie enacted for all to hear and see.
2. Truth, that which is just like this, quietly finds its own way out into clear light.

In this truth there is great faith. In the lie of war there is great doubt. In natural innocence revealing itself through our lives, there is great effort to simply allow artificial barriers dissolve and genuine sacred openness flow through.

Water seeking lowest place. Water source of life. Of itself flowing through.

Humility.

Full moon over cabin.

Earlier, smell of skunk through kitchen window.

God, embodied in the world, drives away in Subaru wagon and BMW motorcycle from Sunday practice.

Earlier, Sue and Peg returned to dock and took off in their Ford 250 turbo-diesal.

We must replace those who unworthily distort truth. The living and the dead deserve a truth-telling for which to live and to die.

The universe is very, very large.

Earlier, we thought everything passes away.

Truth, as it is, allows passage through.

Moving through what is true we embody what is found there.

Our prayer is for all to travel well through each.

Prayer embodies each passing through all.

We are to travel light.

Spare us!

Everything belongs to itself.

It is no longer possible to take sides and limit the appearance of anything. Categorization and claims of ownership are beginning to be seen not as the skill of intellect or wealth of proprietary economy. Rather, consciousness itself is beginning to grasp the startling realization that no one owns anything, everything belongs to itself.

Don’t be surprised,
Don’ be startled;
All things will arrange themselves.
Don’t cause a disturbance,
Don’t exert pressure;
All things will clarify themselves.
- Huai-nan-tzu

Aseity and Tao -- for example.

[Aseity, (Latin: a, from; se, self) The property by which a being exists of and from self, a property belonging to God alone, who exists without other cause than Himself, who is independent and self-sufficient; regarded by many Fathers and theologians as the best way of expressing the very essence of God.
New Catholic Dictionary - Catholic Encyclopedia, God: His Knowability, Essence, and Attributes, Saint Louis, 1921 (ed.)]

Call God 'God', if we wish, but what is 'God' but that which is of itself. That which "of-itself-is" (Chinese, tzu-jan) is What-Is, happening.

Tao means basically "way", and so "course"; the course of nature. Lao-tzu said the way of the functioning of the tao is "so of itself"; that is to say it is spontaneous. Watch again what is going on. If you approach it with this wise ignorance, you will see that you are witnessing a happening. In other words, in this primal way of looking at things there is no difference between what you do, on the one hand, and what happens to you on the other. It is all the same process. Just as your thought happens, the car happens outside, and so the clouds and the stars.

When a Westerner hears that he thinks this is some sort of fatalism or determinism, but that is because he still preserves in the back of his mind two illusions. One is that what is happening is happening to him, and therefore he is the victim of circumstances. But when you are in primal ignorance there is no you different from what is happening, and therefore it is not happening to you. It is just happening. So is "you", or what you call you, or what you will later call you. It is part of the happening, and you are part of the universe, although strictly speaking the universe has no parts. We only call certain features of the universe parts. However you can't disconnect them from the rest without causing them to be not only non-existent, but to never to have existed at all.

When a one experiences oneself and the universe happening together, the other illusion one is liable to have is that it is determined in the sense that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why obviously not, because if you are really naive you see the past is the result of what is happening now. It goes backwards into the past, like a wake goes backwards from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing finally, they go away, and away, and away. And it is all starting now. What we call the future is nothing, the great void, and everything comes out of the great void. If you shut your eyes, and contemplate reality only with your ears, you will find there is a background of silence, and all sounds are coming out of it. They start out of silence. If you close your eyes, and just listen, you will observe the sounds came out of nothing, floated off, and off, stopped being a sonic echo, and became a memory, which is another kind of echo. It is very simple; it all begins now, and therefore it is spontaneous. It isn't determined; that is a philosophical notion. Nor is it capricious; that's another philosophical notion. We distinguish between what is orderly and what is random, but of course we don't really know what randomness is. What is 'so-of-itself,' sui generis in Latin, means coming into being spontaneously on its own accord, and that, incidentally, is the real meaning of virgin birth.

That is the world, that is the tao, but perhaps that makes us feel afraid. We may ask, "If all that is happening spontaneously, who's in charge? I am not in charge, that is pretty obvious, but I hope there is God or somebody looking after all this." But why should there be someone looking after it, because then there is a new worry that you may not of thought of, which is, "Who takes care of the caretaker's daughter while the caretaker is busy taking care?" Who guards the guards? Who supervises the police? Who looks after God? You may say "God doesn't need looking after" Oh? Well, nor does this.
(from Taoism, by Alan Watts)

What will happen if and when all things are allowed to be what they are?

Nature is tzu-jan, it of-itself-is.

In prison yesterday Jeff kept relating his life in prison to the plant Josh brought in and set at the center of the table. The soil, the roots, water, light, and relatedness to all else around it and him -- the need to be in harmony. Charlie quoted someone who wondered whether we have to see in order to believe, or believe in order to see. Duke, Ritchie, Nancy, Saskia, and I surrounded these observations and questions.

Each is of-itself-so.

Each is all. All in each.

Greet God!

It was the combination of reflection about evil and asking how we practice through this thing called evil that was Wednesday Evening Conversation.

It was the curious question about self and no-self that made the column by James Carroll interesting.

It is the sadness felt by many for the current situation of death and disorder in Iraq that permeated the conversation.

Bush's war against evil
By James Carroll, 7/8/2003

IN THE GOTHIC splendor of the National Cathedral, that liturgy of trauma, George W. Bush made the most stirring - and ominous - declaration of his presidency. It was Sept. 14, 2001. ''Just three days removed from these events,'' he said, ''Americans do not yet have ''the distance of history.'' But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.''

The statement fell on the ears of most Americans, perhaps, as mere rhetoric of the high pulpit, but as the distance of history lengthens, events show that in those few words the president redefined his raison d'etre and that of the nation - nothing less than to ''rid the world of evil.'' The unprecedented initiatives taken from Washington in the last two years are incomprehensible except in the context of this purpose.

President Bush, one sees now, meant exactly what he said. Something entirely new, for Americans, at least, is animating their government. The greatest power the earth has ever seen is now expressly mobilized against the world's most ancient mystery. What human beings have proven incapable of doing ever before, George W. Bush has taken on as his personal mission, aiming to accomplish it in one election cycle, two at most.

What the president may not know is that the worst manifestations of evil have been the blowback of efforts to be rid of it. If one can refer to the personification of evil, Satan's great trick consists in turning the fierce energy of such purification back upon itself. Across the distance of history, the most noble ambition has invariably led to the most ignoble deeds. This is because the certitude of nobility overrides the moral qualm that adheres to less transcendent enterprises. The record of this deadly paradox is written in the full range of literature, from Sophocles to Fyodor Dostoyevski to Ursula K. LeGuin, each of whom raises the perennial question: What is permitted to be done in the name of ''ridding the world of evil''?

Is lying allowed? Torture? The killing of children? Or, less drastic, the militarization of civil society? The launching of dubious wars? But wars are never dubious at their launchings. The recognition of complexity - moral as well as martial - comes only with ''the distance of history,'' and it is that perspective that has begun to press itself upon the American conscience now.

Having forthrightly set out to rid the world of evil, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, has the United States, willy-nilly, become an instrument of evil? Lying (weapons of mass deception). Torture (if only by US surrogates). The killing of children (''collaterally,'' but inevitably). The vulgarization of patriotism (last week's orgy of bunting). The imposition of chaos (and calling it freedom). The destruction of alliances (''First Iraq, then France''). The invitation to other nations to behave in like fashion (Goodbye, Chechnya). The inexorable escalation (''Bring 'em on!''). The made-in-Washington pantheon of mythologized enemies (first Osama, now Saddam). The transmutation of ordinary young Americans (into dead heroes). How does all of this, or any of it, ''rid the world of evil''?

Which brings us back to that Gothic cathedral of a question: What is evil anyway? Is it the impulse only of tyrants? Of enemies alone? Or is it tied to the personal entitlement onto which America, too, hangs its bunting? Is evil the thing, perhaps, that forever inclines human beings to believe that they are themselves untouched by it? Moral maturity, mellowed across the distance of history, begins in the acknowledgement that evil, whatever its primal source, resides, like a virus in its niche, in the human self. There is no ridding the world of evil for the simple fact that, shy of history's end, there is no ridding the self of it.

But there's the problem with President Bush. It is not the moral immaturity of the texts he reads. Like his callow statement in the National Cathedral, they are written by someone else. When the president speaks, unscripted, from his own moral center, what shows itself is a bottomless void.
To address concerns about the savage violence engulfing ''postwar'' Iraq with a cocksure ''Bring `em on!'' as he did last week, is to display an absence of imagination shocking in a man of such authority. It showed a lack of capacity to identify either with enraged Iraqis who must rise to such a taunt or with young GIs who must now answer for it. Even in relationship to his own soldiers, there is nothing at the core of this man but visceral meanness.

No human being with a minimal self-knowledge could speak of evil as he does, but there is no self-knowledge without a self. Even this short ''distance of history'' shows George W. Bush to be, in that sense, the selfless president, which is not a compliment. It's a warning.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 7/8/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

We have much to reflect on.

We have much to question.

We have much sorrow to move through.

Learned friends,
When you hear me speaking
Of the void, please do not
Grasp the void.
The first thing is not to grasp
The void.
If you sit in meditation
With an empty mind,
You will grasp the
Unrecordable voidness.
- Altar Sutra

I asked Annie what an alternative was to grasping the void.

She repeated the question, and then paused. She remained paused. She was looking through the windows toward Mt. Battie.

However stained, clouded and smoky the windows, she continued to look through without words.

Fog over coast all day.

Words and speech, fine concepts
If pursued, will lead us astray.
Let us leave these behind
And nothing is closed to us.
The moment we are illumined within
We bypass all barriers.
- Seng-ts-an (d.606)(dailyzen.com)

Tonight it rains.

The great thing is not things but God Himself Who is not things but ourselves, and the world, and everything, lost in Him Who so fully is that we come closer to Him by imagining He is not. (from letter to John Harris from Thomas Merton, May 5, 1959, in The Hidden Ground of Love, The Letters of Thomas Merton, c.1985)

The Buddhist teacher told Betty Ann even the Buddha spoke about the relative and the unconditioned world. That's how self and no-self were to be considered.

Sando lay stretched on dirt and gravel in parking lot at shop by harbor.

Imagine God not?

Joan has a new silver Toyota pickup. And a zafu. Dick helped tie rope around world war two surplus climbing rungs used as fence on patio. Brad watched quart of oil poured into van crankcase.

Pizza in harbor room while Jon's in Boston.

Ourselves.

Lost.

The war continues.

Man on aircraft carrier with grand statements how we won, people freed -- he's gone on to next agenda.

One by one soldiers are being killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their families ask why.

The next agenda keeps those who might be able to answer very busy. Money being raised. Political strategy being planned.

What's wrong with war is the way it goes on.

War is the belief someone else must die for our plans. Every war sets ideology and plans above ordinary life.

End war today.

No ideology.

No plans.

Just...

life.

A hermit lives as-one-is.

Alone with others, there is no difference.

Merton's closet friend is now a friend of mine and lives on Patmos. Robert Lax is a hermit in society, perhaps pointing the way ahead for today's contemplative. He is a poet who lives alone and yet loves people. Everyday he walks in the streets and talks to many friends he has made in thirty years on the island and to any strangers he thinks may need help. He is concerned, compassionate and sensitive. He is a close and loyal friend and will say that friendships are an important part of his life, but every evening he returns to an empty house and centres himself within its silence as he has for over forty years. Out of that silence and solitude emerge the insights of his poems and the revelations of his conversation on being alone in the world today. (Pp.xv-xvi, in Hermits, The Insights of Solitude, by Peter French c.1996)

There’s a mistaken belief that hermits live cut off from other people away from human contact. It is an ingrained belief somehow connected to the point of view that God is separate from ordinary life, or, that there is something special about undergoing suffering in order to placate, and place oneself nearer, God.

Zazen is the practice of stilling body and mind. When body/mind is allowed to drop façade and frantic business and busyness a restful release occurs.

Set aside all involvements and let myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavor. It is not introspection. Do not desire to become a Buddha; let sitting or lying down drop away. Be moderate in eating and drinking. Be mindful of the passing of time and engage your self in zazen as though saving your head from fire. On Mt. Huangmei the Fifth Ancestor practiced zazen to the exclusion of all other activities.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

We need not sit and face a wall for years. We need not sever parts of our bodies to prove dedication. And we need not slavishly follow the teachings of someone else even though they reached their goal.

When each person is himself or herself they are practicing as-one-is. When each thing is itself the Itself is found.

In Christian terms, when Jesus became fully who he really was, God was no other place.
We are ‘saved’ when all we think is not God dissolves into simple realization – as one might hear bird-call of a warm afternoon.
The very breath of that singing is in and through our own ears and nostrils.

Zazen is the no-mind breeze of which one is aware.
Without expectation, without explanation – each is itself – and the next thing that occurs, occurs of itself.

Engage your self in what you are aware of.

Forget your self.

What-you-are-aware-of, that is the practice of zazen.

A hermit lives as-one-is. What one is aware of -- that is where we are alone with others.

Poem
writes
itself --
every
single
one-of-them.
(wfh)

Unhiding.