God is beyond me. I have no idea who, where, what, or how God is.

I’m happy with the everyday way
Like the mist and vines in these rock-strewn ravines
This wilderness is so free and vast
My old friends, the white clouds, drift idly off
There is a road, but it doesn’t reach the world
Mindless, who can be disturbed by thoughts
At night I sit alone on a stone bed
While the round moon climbs the face of Cold Mountain
- Han Shan (c 730)

Times when desolation vacuums any bit of understanding from within and leaves not a trace of comprehension or ability to locate oneself, such as now, serve to remind how pervasive the impermanence and unknowing of this being in the world.

I am long unseeing. I have not yet learned the order of things. So encrusted in illusion and ignorance I have not begun to shake free into seeing a thing as it is and entering authentic not knowing.

[P]henomenology means letting things become manifest as what they are, without forcing our own categories on them. It means reversal of direction from that one is accustomed to: it is not we who point to things; rather, things show themselves to us. This is not to suggest some primitive animism but the recognition that the very essence of true understanding is that of being led by the power of the thing to manifest itself.... Phenomenology is a means of being led by the phenomenon through a way of access genuinely belonging to it.
(Richard E. Palmer, quoted in The Word's Body, An Incarnational Aesthetic Of Interpretation, by Alla Bozarth-Campbell, c.1979, p.6)

I, unfortunately, forget this revelation. I run, instead, to search out some set teaching, a string of beliefs passed on to those of us unwilling to allow things their own being, things continuously revealing themselves. I have failed to disavow either institutional or personal soporific stupor. Days come when feeling devoured by diffidence is the only sweetness alienation affords. The absurdity of clinging to what is not there, the disappeared specter of illusory autonomous self, that delusion of separateness held sacred and special by this mercantile world.

"I have ascended to the highest in me, and look!
The Lord is towering above that.
In my curiosity I have descended to explore my lowest depths,
yet I found God even deeper.
If I looked outside myself,
I saw God stretching beyond the furthest I could see;
and if I looked within,
God was yet further within.
Then I knew the truth of what I had read,
'In God we live and move and have our being.'"
(Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Author of the 12th Century)

These words mystify. How can we see beyond that which we can see? The illimitable above, unfathomable depth, the inaccessible within, the unreachable without -- the measureless omni-directional empty vastness -- that which we call the Reality of God, is that with which we live and move and have our being. Who can approach this reality? Who can avoid it? Reality is reality; it is what is. There is only reality. We are not other than reality. Or, do we think we are?

We are of a piece in this existence. Whatever way we verbalize this absolute truth, we are an interconnected wholeness. We depend on one another, materially and morally, to dwell in this world. We are interdependent. It is the absence of this realization -- the realization of who and how we are in this world -- that causes forgetfulness. Forgetfulness brings with it the perception that “others” are out to harm us, take from us, and even eliminate us from the unified whole that is our true dwelling place. With deficient mentation, this forgetfulness, comes the impetus to strike out against any real or perceived hostility, and act to remove the enemy. Not seeing our real face, not engaging one another in healing reparative interaction, leaves us with surface or shallow impulses of retribution and revenge that trigger violence, warfare, and desolation.

A quote attributed to Nietzsche says, “The most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do. “ (Friedrich Nietzsche)

I forget what we were trying to do. In this state of affairs, I feel stupid. I cannot remember who I am and what I am doing here.

EPILOGUE

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(Poem from Day by Day by Robert Lowell, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1975, 1976,)

This is our task and our penance – to see each face, acknowledge names, and go on living as though this occupation were enough for the time being. All the while, down below and far beyond this occupation, suspecting a far odder fact of life undergirds the fact of this world.

In the beginning was the Word;...
The Word was made flesh, and lived among us,
and we saw Its glory...

Indeed, from Its fullness we have, all of us, received.
(John 1:1,14,16. Paraphrased from The Jerusalem Bible by Bozarth-Campbell)

There is a Zen koan that goes, “Show me your original face, the one you had before your mother and father were born.” After many blank stares some conclude the question absurd. The effect feels something like the Cheshire Cat, appearing and disappearing with and without body, its head and face fading in and out of the storyline. There is a sympathetic feeling of phantom-face, not unlike an amputee, or even the split second following beheading. There is a sense of trauma.

We must be gentle with trauma. The trauma we face is the disappearance of our own face. In time, our face dissolves. Out of time, a variant seeing takes place with no referential viewing point to call one's own. What we call our 'viewpoint' collapses into mere view without subject viewing or object viewed. There is only what is, what is as what is, neither here nor there -- merely itself in every manifestation. To face reality, we believe, we must have a face over and against this reality. But what if “reality” was its own face? Would that realization change our minds from holding a separate, dualistic construct of reality -- to one that is everywhere seeing what is there to see?

What is merely itself in every manifestation could easily be another attempt to name the unnamable, to specify God.

Let's leave it saying: What is merely itself is What Is Merely Itself. Tautology dressed in capital letters, a mimesis reviewing something seen with emphasis on sacral seeing.

V
The dangers are everywhere. Auxiliary verbs, fishbones, a fine carelessness. No one really likes the odor of geraniums, not the woman who dreams of sunlight and is always late for work nor the man who would be happy in altered circumstances. Words are abstract, but 'words are abstract' is a dance, car crash, heart's delight. It's the design dumb hunger has upon the world. Nothing is severed on hot mornings when the deer nibble flowerheads in a simmer of bay leaves. Somewhere in the summer dusk is the sound of children setting the table. That is mastery: spoon, knife, folded napkin, fork; glasses all around. The place for the plate is wholly imagined. Mother sits here and father sits there and this is your place and this is mine. A good story compels you like sexual hunger but the pace is more leisurely. And there are always melons.
(from poem "The Beginning Of September" by Robert Hass in his book of poems entitled Praise, c.1979)

In the U.S. Senate today there is strong vocal opposition to a procedural maneuver by the majority leader to limit amendments to a bill that has reached the floor. Words make laws. Laws govern a country. What we say matters. What we do matters. What matters becomes our very lives. Words, therefore, are incarnational. We are embodied word. Thus embodied, each act is an expression, whether silent or articulated, of what we are. We exist as a liturgy of incarnation in the midst of the world.

The presence of the poem as an incarnate being has power over those who perceive it, as the presence of the Incarnate Word was shown to have power over those who saw and heard Christ. The Spirit, according to biblical theology, is manifested as the power of love between the Creator and the Christ, overflows into creation, and touches human life directly, to transform it as if by breathing a new life into human beings. The Spirit and the Word move together to change the quality of -- to redeem -- human lives. There is a power manifested in the event of interpenetration if all factors combine to reveal the communion that exists between the poem and the interpreter. This power forms what has been called in this study a circle of energy, and the audience, if the kairos of the performing poem has come, is taken up into this circle in the transforming experience of communion. The visible utterance of the incarnate word in the spirit-charged power of performance can have the effect of breathing new life into those who participate in its moment of revelation.

The incarnational aesthetic of interpretation presented in this study acknowledges the phenomenon of interpretation to be a creative metaphor, enacted through the at-onement between the poem as a speaking-subject and the performer as an embodying-subject. The environment created by their communion is a result of a complex process of dialogue, embodiment, and participation. The artistic event of interpretation as the revelation of presence in performance combines the dynamics of creation, incarnation, and transformation, as a poem, performer, and audience are brought together in the moment of clarity and power that is communion.

...Through its incarnate presence in performance the word interprets human life and speaks forth a new existence that includes those who see and hear it. The poem makes us, and it makes us new. In the ideal performance, the performance that the serious interpreter always strives for and frequently can attain, the experience of the poem is full and complete. From its fullness "we have, all of us, received."
(pp.142,3,4 in The Word's Body)

What have we received?

What's There
When the small hulking rock on my path through the early morning dark
started
To be the skunk it really was and waddle an undulant shuffle away from
me, showing
Its chiaroscuro self by the luminous leftovers of a full moon and stars, I
was startled
For a second or two, brought up short by the uncertain solidity of a
world that keeps
Falling back to a fluency that's just the simple fact of things being clear
as day and
Enigmatic — that transparency we say we see in Being, being just
opacity itself inside it
But seen clearly for a moment and telling no lies about itself, clean as
the swooplines
A suspension bridge has: such solid mystery they make and we walk on
water. Water
Too, is like that, hitting the back of your throat with nothing but its wet
cool, nothing else
In or beyond it — distinct as the invisible dawn bird or a voice inside a
voice, informing you.
(poem by Eamon Grennan in "The Hudson Review," Volume LVII, Number 1, Spring 2004 )

The day has grown hot. Sando pants on floor. Cesco snoozes quietly. Earlier Mu-ge pee'd on couch. We suspect he did it in a fit of pique over not being let out. He’s out now. From time to time squirrel chatters in complaint. Birds are more wary approaching feeder.

I don't know.

It's all beyond me.

I’ve come to an end.

It's a place to start.

Hillside walk through woods quiet morning of quiet day. Dogs wet from fog moist grass.

Those who are pure in heart and single in purpose are able to understand the most supreme Way. It is like polishing a mirror, which becomes bright when the dust is removed. Remove your passions, and have no hankering, and all will be revealed to you.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

Those hankering to lead country are poised to run at each other now that the foursome is in place. They will try to discredit each other. For the next 120 days America will be subject to a theatre déclassé substituting sideswipe for civil discourse and talking point monologues for enlightening debate. We might ask them to speak to each other about how best to lead the country and share with us their good insights. We might invite them to suspend attacks and divulge their personal fears and hopes about this great nation. We might find them tired of disingenuous rhetoric and willing to say “yes, yes” or “no, no” when asked questions. We might ask them to help us heal the sores and cracks laid on the body politic by false biography.

If we continue to cultivate acrimony and arrogance as our biographical narrative it will affect the biology of this nation and its citizens. We might inadvertently become pinched, vindictive, and sullen -- suddenly and physically -- experiencing a mutation of body and spirit that will shock us.

Caroline Myss says biography is biology.

Michael Toms: Caroline, one of the principles you wrote about in Anatomy of the Spirit is that "biography becomes biology." What does that mean--that our past somehow relates to our health?

Caroline Myss: Imagine that you have a hundred circuits of life-force energy coming into the top of your head. This life-force is the pulsating energy behind cell mutation and division, behind the heartbeat, behind the functioning of the body. This electromagnetic energy is also the energy that you invest into memories, thoughts, attitudes--into your history.

When I do a reading on somebody, I go after where you've invested those circuits; I go after every investment you have that is not in present time. I begin to pull your traumatic memories, your negative attitudes and self-image. So I'm looking at your biography. These are the biographical events that leave biological debt factors.

Imagine that, when you get up in the morning, you have a hundred dollars' worth of energy coming in. And you have a memory that's costing you sixty dollars a day to finance, and an attitude that's costing you twenty-five dollars a day. By the time you're done, you've got three bucks left over to manage your biography today!

What I recognized is that your biography becomes your biology--you are one and the same with your life and your history. Events that you have not yet reconciled, haven't forgiven, haven't let go of, are carried as that debt in your cell tissue.
(Excerpted from New Dimensions, YOUR BIOGRAPHY IS YOUR BIOLOGY, with Carolyn Myss,
Program #2576.)

The debt of the Iraq war -- the manner with which it was initiated, conducted, and profiteered – is heavy. The health of the nation – weakened by deception, abuse, and denial – borders on serious to critical. The story of America’s constitutional amnesia – a biography of ill sounding explanation – threatens to weaken a once healthy resolve toward justice.

We are still evolving. What we might become is uncertain. So much is in our hands. Do our hands welcome or dismiss? Do they touch with tenderness or launch explosives intent on destruction? Do they open wide in a gesture signifying abandonment of all pretenses to control, or do they clench and clutch imposing their will on those in their way?

There are very few people
who realise what God would make of them
if they abandoned themselves into his hands,
and let themselves be formed by his grace.
(St Ignatius)

Grace is a crucial necessity. Grace is God-life felt and manifested in ordinary human behavior. With grace we behave honorably and kindly toward one another. Without grace we attack and injure each other.

Nicole stops in to the shop just before Buddhist Conversation. This young woman says I don’t look so good. I tell her I don’t feel so good and that I am writing about how mean and intentionally hurting rhetoric or act cause us all to fall into ill-health. She thinks it is gloomy. I say I agree. She smiles. It is a brief flash of sunshine.

Is it so with God? Is that what happens when God-life suddenly appears through the veils and curtains that cloak and shield?

It’s not that illumination comes from somewhere else. It’s more that our realization of what is there dissolves the hindrances and lifts the bushel basket allowing the light to shine through.

The realization of ‘what is there’ is God-life freed into the world.

If all ideology were suddenly abandoned, all rhetoric suddenly silenced, if hearts and minds were suddenly free to reveal themselves as they are, would these four men -- would we – recognize each other as the light of God-life, illuminating one another and all who come to see what is there?

The most supreme Way seeks to find its way through us.

It is the story of our life, indeed, very life itself we gesture and articulate with each movement, with each syllable. We must move carefully. We must speak with care.

We must care. Even as we ask –“Who cares?”

Very life itself listens for our response.

Gracefully.

If America chooses the way of war, religion factors.

Americans are a religious people. The toughest thing to decide is what religion this war is fighting under. Is it fought in the name of God? Or is it a more secular invocation, fighting in the symbols and power of a state religion?

It is hard to know whether the wagers of war try to hasten some apocalyptic end time prefaced by chaotic warfare and unsettling devastation. The alternative explanations of empire or greed or even retaliation seem saner than the Armageddon fundamentalist fervor seems to welcome. Jesus, they say, is coming back to save the righteous and damn the sinner. The Middle East seethes again with portents.

Ahead, the green creek sparkles as it flows
Toward the cliff, a huge rock
With a good edge for sitting
My heart is like a lone cloud,
With nothing to depend on
So far away from the world’s affairs
What need is there to search for anything?
- Han Shan (~730)

I don't know about theories of devastation. Here's what I do know -- rain has begun to fall outside my window. Cut grass parallels the earth. Psalm tones float away over hills we walked this afternoon. The silence we sat with has disseminated through trees and over trails to nestling sanctuaries.

Michael says prophets' messages are always perverted.

On C-Span today a panel replay about war:
1. "What is war? The essence of war is death. It is the most powerful narcotic invented by humankind. Every war is ultimately about betrayal. In wartime everyone becomes objects." (Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, at Los Angeles Times Festival of Books)

2. "The mission of war is simple: it is to find other people and kill them." (Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, at Los Angeles Times Festival of Books)

3. "Chicken hawks are not militarists, they're religionists." (James Hillman, author of A Terrible Love of War, at Festival)

On the News Hour clip, when the President mentions the word "God" to the crowd of people on a campaign stop, there are cheers and applause. "The dead," he says, "will be mourned forever." The people cheer. He mentions Saddam Hussein in prison, the crowd cheers. He mentions "terrorists are running out of places to hide, they do not love freedom, that freedom has the power to change the world -- God bless America!" The crowd cheers. John Kerry finishes his comments at a gathering with an invocation for God's blessing on country and world. The crowd cheers.

The question of religion and politics is not the same as the question of church and state. Failure to make this distinction results in confusion. The problem of church and state has to do with institutions and the spheres of action that are appropriate for each. Here the concept of separation is valid. Thorny problems arise in two particular areas. 1. The first involves trying to steer between avoiding an establishment of religion and permitting its free exercise. Prayer in public schools and is among the most contentious. 2. A second range of problems arises when religious belief and practice conflict with secular law.

The problem of religion and politics defines another set of issues. Church and state deals with the relationship of institutions that are independent of each other. Religion and politics has to do with two spheres of activities in the life of the same persons. Citizens who belong to religious groups are also members of the secular society, and this dual association generates complications. Religious beliefs have moral and social implications, and it is appropriate for people of faith to express these through their activities as citizens in the political order. The fact that ethical convictions are rooted in religious faith does not disqualify them from the political realm. However, they do not have secular validity merely because they are thought by their exponents to be religiously authorized. They must be argued for in appropriate social and political terms in harmony with national values.

In both cases, we should be prepared to deal with complexities, ambiguities, and overlapping realms in which practical discernment must find workable principles to guide us that are as compatible with fundamental Constitutional imperatives as human reason can devise.
(Brief summary of essay by Kenneth Cauthen from chapter in his The Ethics of Belief: A Bio-Historical Approach, 2 vols. (Lima, OH: CSS Publishing Co., 2001)

Somewhere recently I read of how church was used in one person's memory -- "to hatch, match, and dispatch."

The times I've sat in monastery church or our chapel/zendo have been sufficient to indicate that, by preference and personality, it is the stillness and silence of God's presence that gathers my attention.

There's not much that needs saying.

It is the manner of movement.

Absence of name.

Glance of eye.

Says it all.

Let's reframe Independence into Interdependence.

An antidote to feeling stuck where you are is to reframe the picture.

If you endeavor to embrace the Way through much learning, the Way will not be understood. If you observe the Way with simplicity of heart, great indeed is this Way.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

Staying in the one place we are, do we find ourselves by sheer stillness?

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here
(poem by e.e.cummings)

Like Wallace Steven’s jar on a hill in Tennessee, does one become a compass point simply by placing oneself where one is? (Yesterday Lloyd spoke about a magnetic centering place. I felt I was due nowhere.)

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
(from poem, "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens

Perhaps religion falls away in July. The mysteries of Christianity, so celebrated at Christmas and Easter, seem unsponsored and ambiguous. In America the 4th of July feels like broken straw from a broom on floor following sweep-up after barroom brawl. It is the combination of secular polity gone cynical and sacred religion gone impertinent that colors summer solitude.

It’s not that nothing satisfies, nor that hopes and expectations seem fizzled, but rather it feels like both religion and politics are sinking “downward to darkness on extended wings “ Not only is there nothing to hold on to, there is no place to escape to.

all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
but winter's not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then?

all history's a winter sport or three:
but were it five,i'd still insist that all
history is too small for even me;
for me and you,exceedingly too small.

Swoop(shrill collective myth)into thy grave
merely to toil the scale to shrillerness
per every madge and mabel dick and dave
--tomorrow is our permanent address

and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do,
we'll move away still further:into now
(poem by e.e.cummings)

The thought of escaping into now has a delicious ironic summer drowse to it. Is it possible to be here and not here at the same time? Is now the end of then and beginning of when? Or is now a sliver of emptiness without comparative reference or promise of retrieving temporal measurement?

Still

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled though transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!
(poem by A.R. Ammons)

If we admit that nothing is lowly, will we also allow as how nothing is above another – except, maybe, in the evaluative calculations of measuring minds intent on securing a higher place for themselves by dint of their assessments?

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
-electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born-pity poor flesh

and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if-listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go (
poem by e. e. cummings)

If our religion becomes kindness, such as the Dalai Lama’s statement of his religion, will we practice kindness the way leaves play with the wind? Whenever the wind shows up, leaves practice correct relationship with it. They move and turn, sway with unresisting accompaniment. And when it is ripe, they fall to earth and find themselves there for another transfiguration.

Let’s fall to what is now here.

Let others believe the beliefs they hold and follow the paths they follow. Let others decry and deny, dissemble and resemble the images they hold to be true. Let others condemn and expel, contemn and resell their version of grand divine plan.

If what is here and what is now is not imbued with the fullness of what some call God and others call True Reality – then, I’ll have no part of here and now. I’ll take the whole of it by no other name than what appears as how and where and when and with what face it appears.

Religion and politics be shelved for July. It is the season of a switch.

The picture is of itself.

Unframed.

As it is.

Free.

We must become mystics.

We must come to seeing directly and being directly in contact with God, or the very principal fact of life, or absolute reality.

Despite the obstacles,
I pursued the great monk
The misty mountains a million layers high
He pointed to the road back home
One round moon, lantern of the sky.
- Han Shan (c 730)

Something about the sadness of not deepening and following the spark, the prophetic insight, the unbroken wholeness of authentic religion, no matter what the cultural denomination.

The mystic remains at home in touch with original source. The mystic is at home in any reality because the reality they understand is not broken into fragments of good or evil, true or false, mine or yours.

The great monk points to the road back home.

Every light guides us there.

So it is we come to see.

Hush and see.

We read and spoke about Holy Ignorance Wednesday evening. Thursday it was how, when real, we do not mind hurt. Hurt is hurt. It needs no narrative.

In the green creek, spring water is clear
At Cold Mountain, the moon’s corona is white.
Silence your understanding and,
The spirit of itself is enlightened.
View all things as the Void and,
This world is even more still
- Han Shan (c 730)

There is a hallow hollow at center of each work of art. A poem or painting tells the sacred experience of someone. That experience is non-transferable and non-duplicable. Emptiness cannot be mimed.

When the poet or artist presents their experience expressed in a work, all we can do is enter the empty whole of it and emerge with our own unique insight -- not a replica of that which created the transforming empty space.

It is the fact of it, the mere visitation to an authentic place, that evokes hush and seeing. The aesthetic becomes existential.

Those who dredge up stories of the past without insight are only filling time. Those who long for insight and wisdom are emptying now into its sensory dwelling.

There is no duplication or repetition. Each act, each breath, each aspect and instant belong to itself. This is how we learn who we are and how we become who we are.

Fog saturated harbor as evening sent sun enwrapped west.

Fog is fog as each thing is itself.

None need cumbersome narrative.

How will we know? Each is as each is.

Handsome is as handsome does.

By their fruits we'll know.

Hush and see.

God is what is seeing through us.

We do not see God. Perhaps God does not see us. These two sentences imply distinct and separate realities, distanced and instrumental one to the other.

Is there an understanding that allows a nondual transformative interpenetrative, interconnective, isomorphic, flow of what is thorough what is?

Who would have expected that the
Self nature is fundamentally
Pure and clean?
Who would have expected that the
Self nature is fundamentally
Beyond birth and death?
- Altar Sutra

What we mean by 'nature' is the 'what-is-ness' of what is there. It has been called essence. It has been called the 'itself.'

Some feel a profound change occurring. This takes the form of a shift of perspective and perception. We are not only looking at and seeing objects. We are now beginning to realize we are being looked at and seen by objects.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
(--poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Rilke's final two lines startle. We are an interchange of seeing. Neither subject nor object we are the flow of perception and perspective through itself.

The question arises for us, -- "What is itself?"

A woman who attends conversations at Meetingbrook writes:
It is my belief that we are small energy creatures in a big energy world, and that there are hundreds or thousands of other energy forces everywhere around us. God is not energy, my dear husband M. always says and I agree with you "God just is".
To me love is energy, so are also hate, fear, and compassion or perhaps I should say, so are all of our emotions. The heart is the big energy center and we all have our free will, and therefore we are also responsible for what energies we allow to flow through our hearts. If we choose to love our selves and other people (or a cookie, ha ha) then we open our heart for the love energy so that it can fill our body and send out love to the people or things we love and care for.

...I think the problem in this society is that too many are being taught the game of deception to reach power and/or the big bucks. To blame others instead of taking responsibility for own actions. Living a safe life is to be told what to do or to following someone else’s advice. By living a life this way you avoid your own pain and emotions and you totally block out all the positive energies just outside your own heartdoor, just waiting for the invitation. (Words from P., 29June04)

I like the phrasing, "just outside your own heartdoor, just waiting for the invitation." It resonates with her earlier, "God just is." I hear the use of the word "just" as a name of God, maybe a most important name of God.

The dictionary says "just" (from Latin jus = right or law) also means immediately, directly, only, merely, quite, very. The Sanskrit yos means welfare.

To fare well, to dwell well-being -- these are illuminations of 'just' at heartdoor, 'just' waiting for the invitation. This perception and perspective of God is a just view, one that tells us, with the poet, to change our lives.

"What's this?" -- asked Mark from back of shop when asked for comment during final circle Tuesday evening. Heather had been speaking about the space surrounding a clay handle, as example of Pessoa's words, "Nature has no inside." These visitors from Ontario, Canada just danced through their first conversation at the bookshop after an afternoon's row around the island with Sam and Susan and the celebration of our just being here.

What is this?

Just this.

Seeing.

Seen.

Nine years ago today Meetingbrook Bookshop & Bakery opened.

Never ask your teachers to explain. But when your activity of mind is exhausted and your capacity for feeling comes to a dead end, if something should take place not unlike the cat springing upon the mouse or the mother hen hatching her eggs, then a great flash of livingness surges up. This is the moment when the phoenix escapes from the golden net and when the crane breaks the bars of its cage.
-- Hakuin

Phoenix and crane gratefully visit.

As visits balloons, flowers, and torte for everyone.

Our's is an intuition of gratitude.

Thomas Merton writes:
The importance of this Zen intuition of reality is, in my opinion as a Catholic, its metaphysical honesty. It refuses to make a claim to any special revelation or to a mystical light, and yet if it is followed on, in line with its own vast and open perspectives, it is certainly compatible with a revelation of inscrutable freedom, love, and grace. In point of fact, we must always remember that Zen is situated in the religious context of a Buddhism which seeks the “salvation” of all creatures by insight.
(p.254, Mystics and Zen Masters, by Thomas Merton, c.1966)

Our's is the insight of gift and grateful receptivity.

With mere reciprocity.

We begin 9th year.

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 today.

If anyone is capable of transcending politics, there are only tears of sorrow, laughter at absurdity dressed in Orwellian phrases, and anger at the foolish arrogance perpetrated on Iraqi and American citizens.

Evening mountains
Veiled in somber mist,
One path entering
The wooded hill:
The monk has gone off,
Locking his pine door.
From a bamboo pipe
A lonely trickle of water flows.
- Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672)

Bypass the commentary if you wish, but do not take your eyes off the faces of the men and women in the film. Do not turn attention from the anguish and grief in face and voice telling their experience.

No matter our politics, if we do not listen to one another, if we do not watch with one another, then we are vacant opinions posing naked and spewing mocking farce. There must be better ways of serving each other than serving sewage that tries to pass as noble act, confident ideology, or patriotic pride.

I recommend the documentary.

Let's learn to feel again.

Let's laugh, and cry, and be angry, and finally pray for the men, women, and children who suffer.

Let's find a way through and beyond this troubling entourage who have sidetracked sense and sanity into a dark, sullen alley.

Let's leave stupidity behind.

Let's try intelligent reflection.

And be courageous.

Heart-feeling.

Lloyd read a Fernando Pessoa line Saturday that went, "Nature has no inside." It was from a poem in the Portuguese poet's book The Keeper of Sheep. Pessoa lived 1888-1935 and wrote under four names.

The poet Fernando Pessoa...puts us on the right track when he observes in his work how the layman and the scientist look at the world and collect knowledge about it in a fundamentally different manner. A layman, argues Pessoa, notices the complexity of nature and man from the outside. The expert, on the other hand, will brush aside the exterior as a distraction from a deeper-rooted order; an order that is essentially simple and unchangeable. Pessoa, for his part, would appear to prefer to look through the eyes of the layman, for he understands Nature on the outside, as Nature has no inside: only poets will dream of this and only philosophers have something like this in mind.
(from "Public Participation In Decision-Making On Technology: A Challenge For Citizens And Experts" -- Lieve Goorden and Joke Vandenabeele, STEM (Study Centre Technology, Energy and Environment) University of Antwerp, 27-11-2002)

Does having no inside erase the outside of things? Or is it a matter of transparency? Or the mere 'fact' of a thing?

Seven at Sunday Evening Practice. Reading letter from C.S. Lewis in A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken. Is it the unwillingness to assent to each moment of life that diverts life from us? Is the attempt to parcel and appropriate bits and fragments of life that which deadens us to the vibrancy of life passing through us on its way through and through?

"Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse." "To sail is necessary; to live is not necessary." (-Gnaeus Pompeius)

Destination is fictitious. The sail is the thing itself. To navigate through ever-changing sea is continual course correction. We calculate and plot, take sightings and record in log the day's movement taking place between sleep, coffee, and looking through all manner of weather. In fact, we remain exactly where we are at any instant.

Practicing one's life relinquishes the inside and abandons the outside.

Really -- what is flowing through everything with no inside and no outside?

We sail through this question with no expectation of answer.

That's our nature.

Sourcing.

Mother Purple Finch flies to feeder.

Young one follows noisily. On wet ground outside kitchen window three small chipmunks forage fell-seed in newly shortened grass.

A man of the Way comes
Rapping at my brushwood gate,
Wants to discuss the
Essentials of Zen experience.
Don’t take it wrong if this
Mountain monk’s too lazy
To open his mouth:
Late spring warblers
Singing their hearts out,
A village of drifting petals.
- Jakushitsu (1290 –1367)

Grey rainy summer's day. I turn around to see where I've come from. Nothing there.

As they were proceeding on their journey someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus answered him, "Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head." And to another he said, "Follow me." But he replied, "Lord, let me go first and bury my father." But he answered him, "Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." And another said, "I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home." To him Jesus said, "No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God."
(from Luke 9:51-62)

I don't fit anywhere it is suggested one might, or might not, fit. The road-less road the homeless travel seems a fit-less footloose flight.

On the day before Thomas Merton retired to his hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani he used an apt metaphor to describe for his novices the new dimension of life as a monastic hermit. The date was August 20, 1965--the eve of the feast of the great early Cistercian, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). No doubt with Bernard (the reformer and creative thinker) in mind, Merton reclaimed the essence of every monk's vocation. Only three short years would intervene before his journey to Asia where he invested himself in dialogues with Buddhist and Hindu monks. Yet on that late summer day in 1965 Merton articulated for those novices a bold imperative when he said:
"At this particular point in the monastic life people need real evidence that it is possible to go further than just simply the convoy of routine work: everybody travelling at the speed of the slowest ship."
(from ‘When the Heart is Right,’ Thomas Merton's Contemplative Contribution to Interreligious Dialogue," by George A. Kilcourse, Jr., Parliament of World Religions)

The hermit conveys nothing. The convoy inches through surface pitch and yaw mapped for some destination. The hermit has no destination. The hermit knows it is the thinnest of upholding engineering that floats the convoy ships above unfathomed depths. The hermit has already sensed the sinking helplessness of slipping below surface.

It is a solitary and uncharted descent. No provision is made for return. No return is conceived. Jesus would be surprised to learn there was a return ticket for him.

It is a Saturday afternoon filled with chirping birds, purring cat on lap, three dogs snoozing in tossed dischevel on floor.

Too lazy to open mouth, this ill-fitting hermit silence floats on precarious wave of empty listening. It is the open alone, with little understanding, conveys the silence of God passing through this, this now here, and this nowhere. This -- without end. This – without beginning.

This, our attentive presence.

Drifting petals.

Real evidence.

This morning, Billy said that in prison you are prey, predator, or you swim in your own pond.

In the awakened eye
Mountains and rivers
Completely disappear.
The eye of delusion
Looks out upon
Deep fog and clouds.
Alone on my zazen mat
I forget the days
As they pass.
The wisteria has grown
Thick over the eaves
Of my hut.
- Muso (1275-1351)

In Guantanimo, prey and predator are interchanged.

According to The Washington Post, the U.S. Vice-President tells a U.S. Senator to "Go fuck yourself."

Several guys in Maine State Prison used the "F" word today describing their point of view about the chaos and control, the discomforting of the environment, and pervasive tension of prison life. We'd been reading Robert Lax on learning to live on a Greek island.

At conversation on Islam at shop this evening a woman suggested that Islamic punishment that cuts off finger, hand, or foot might be more effective and kinder than America's ten to thirty years behind bars with the predation, fear, and warping of men's minds by fear and resentment -- especially when they might carry their lessons learned with them when they walk out and return to the streets.

"Pan metron ariston" is Greek for "all things in moderation."

We need to moderate the excesses of war and the regressive paralysis of hopelessness. We need to moderate extremes of division fomented by political factions racing to far right and left with nasty rhetoric and behavioral incivility.

It is good to visit prison for conversation.

It is like mystery. The more we understand about a mystery the deeper the mystery becomes. There's no end to the depths of mystery.

Passing through prison with heart and mind a little more open is like passing through mystery with new appreciation even the smallest understanding brings.

Billy, Rusty, Chris, Ryan, Saskia and I passed through today.

Our small understanding, shared each with each around table, deepens the mystery of who we are and what God is in our moderated midst.

And Harold visited with Erika in another part of the mystery this morning.

"That big something else," is what one of the guys said of God.

The personal and the political are not separate in our spiritual lives.

1.

I fear George Bush and his Republican frost will prevail in November. His reign is a desiccated flower which, come November, should not be seen following the icy glare of public reflection about him and his term in office.

Good deeds stand tall
Like a green pine,
While evil deeds
Bloom like flowers
It seems the pine is not
As brilliant as the flowers.
When the frost comes,
The pine will still stand tall,
While the flowers, withered,
Can be seen no more.
- Anon

Now that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Department Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have taken to unsaying what they deceptively mis-said about Iraq, Al Quada and war, it is time for us to listen more clearly and more honestly as citizens claiming to love freedom.

2.

The institutional church, as it declines and reconfigures itself, must come to dialogue and interact with other forms of religion and spiritual inquiry. People in pews are not exposed to or benefiting from open exchange of philosophical and theological conversation.

The faithful are seldom invited by their churches to plumb the difficult questions about belief and doubt, perennial truths and multiplicity of explanation, or disturbing compromises and affronts to genuine colloquy impeding open-hearted inquiry into the intuited reality of what is called God.

There are choices. Among them: We could take refuge in emerging and ongoing revelation of what is true in all its expressions; Or we could be laid bare in the frozen doctrines of former ages and left to icy sleep as capillaries and cells constrict and die.

Religion is not historical study and reenactment of what has been signed and sealed. Religion is inquiry into and celebration of what is flowing and emerging at this moment in this place through reverential attention.

This inquiry is not an unquestioning affirmation, but is, rather, an unending willingness to call into question and maturely respond to each revelation and fact as it appears.

God could never belong to any one church or even the aggregate of them. God belongs to what God is. God belongs to God Self -- whether revealed, evolved, or emerged -- wherever and to whomever God Self comes clear.

3.

We think God is love. We think God is truth. We think God is life.

These are suitable thoughts about God. They might not be all of it, but enough to keep us asking what they mean and what else is there.

Whenever love is missing or perverted, wherever truth is distorted or flat-out ignored, however life is murdered, abused, or degraded -- it is there and then God is hated, God is made a lie, and God is tortured to death.

If politicians do this, we as citizens are in great trouble. If we allow the politics of hate, lies, and death to continue -- we are lost. If the behavior of perversion and deception is our personal behavior, we as individuals and everyone we touch are vulnerable to annihilation if we do not reconnect to the vital and retrieving source of our being.

The political and the personal are not separate.

4.

Like green pine standing tall, we must take heart.

No matter how cold.

Look beyond.

See more.

We are shocked at beheadings.

Contemplate the mind;
This king of emptiness
Is subtle and abstruse.
Without shape or form,
It has great spiritual power.

It can eliminate all calamities
And accomplish all merits.
Though its essence is empty,
It is the measure of dharmas.
- Master Fu (497-569)

1.

No need to go anywhere.

Where else is there?

A common failing of practice is the phrase, “I am not like that.” The practice of (what is called) enlightenment is seeing the embodiment of truth in what is revealed in each moment in each person.

When the Zen Master says that, “Truth is just like this,” or, “Truth is just like that,” what they are saying is, “Look here, there you are, you are just like what is appearing, just like what is being revealed.”

All knowledge is self-knowledge. We are the beheaded. We are the beheaders. We are the righteous indignation claiming superiority over bloody-handed terrorists. And we are the fractious thinking that believes something useful is accomplished by murderous deeds.

If you think it is awful beheading people, don’t do it. Factually or actually, do not cut a person’s head off. But more than that -- figuratively or metaphorically, do not “take someone’s head off.” Nations and/or corporations that behead other nations, peoples, or adversaries by means of political or economic cutting-blades, perpetuate the terrifying act. Personal anger and frustration often lead to ripping another apart with cutting words or emotional severance.

Shunryu Suzuki, in the reading leading to last evening’s conversation, suggested that each is the only one. Each is Buddha-nature. Practice is this realization. Enlightenment is this practice. There is no one without the other -- and there is no other with the one.

There is no eliminating an enemy we perceive to be outside us, or other than us.

It is thinking that makes one an “other”.

It is awaking that sees one another.

2.

The executioner's argument was, that you couldn't cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn't going to begin at HIS time of life.

The King's argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren't to talk nonsense.

The Queen's argument was, that if something wasn't done about it in less than no time she'd have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.)
(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll from Chapter 8: The Queen's Croquet-Ground)

3.

We need to contemplate beheadings.

In the world of Zen not having a head means seeing with one’s whole being. No-mind, no-self, no-body, no-head are ways of saying no-divide.

In a more prosaic formulation, the notion of no-head is saying that rational enumeration of rights and privileges which separate out one group from another and posit some as worthy of reward and some to be deprived of it. — is unbecoming of our true nature.

Calculated, logical, and rational discrimination based on a system of value which excludes “others” from participation in good and goods because of their “otherness” – is a product of “head” analysis. “Head” analysis has as its operating system a dualistic mechanism the prime task of which is to divide into two, decide what portion of resource goes to which, and create categories of worthiness based on arbitrary priority to be evaluated by self-interest and inbred perpetuation of a narrow focal point of restricted ownership.

The metaphor of beheading is chilling. It suggests something wrong with the larger metaphor of head-hunters and head-honcho, as well as heads-of-state and heads-of-industry.

Heads are often disdainful of bodies at the same time as they are fed by and dependent on bodies..

4.

There is no need to sever head from body.

If we look, just look, and see what is there to be seen – we begin the contemplative life of just-seeing.

"My soul thirsts for God, the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?" (Ps 42:2)

“The living God” is the heart’s way of saying/seeing, “What is whole and complete.”

Keep on -- by emptying mind.

Today it is silence. We can seek with words or seek with silence.

You are a seeker.
Delight in the mastery
Of your hands and your feet,
Of your words and your thoughts.
Delight in meditation and in solitude.
Compose yourself, be happy.
You are a seeker.
- Buddha in the Dhammapada

It is twenty-nine years my father died on this date. The telephone call. Sitting with still and cooling body on bed in small room mine once where inverted lampshade over clothes hook was basket to rolled sox those playing days.

Rain finally drenches mountainside after dogs and I finish walking slowly short loop then settle on cabin porch and now rest in house.

My son arrives from away. A time will come when he will reflect the death of his father. Some detail will stay with him. Some recollection floating over dripping leaves near a place prayer allows the word open. Today he is happy to stay over shop where sea and mountain both welcome rain.

Father's day is an easy celebration. As is mother's. Both near my parent's deaths in May and June.

In this solitude and silence, we are composed.

In this collation and recollection, we are happy.

Mu-ge leaps to belly and chest, purring. The sudden always-surprising arrival of anything at all!

Yawning as water splashes from rolling tires outside window.

"Zenshi Ichimi" is a Japanese phrase meaning - "Poetry and Zen are one."

This body’s existence is like a bubble’s
May as well accept what happens
Events and hopes seldom agree
Who can step back doesn’t worry
We blossom and fade like flowers
Gather and part like clouds
Worldly thoughts I forgot long ago
Relaxing all day on a peak
- Stonehouse

Annie, Joanie, Erika, Saskia, Lloyd, Pia, Mike, and I gathered for poetry Saturday afternoon. Rilke, Schwartz, Pessoa, Whyte, Bozarth, and Connelly were there in words they wrote.

It is the moment. The moment poetry captures. The moment Zen sees. These moments gathered in small bookshop alongside small harbor in Maine of a rainy afternoon at end of spring with fire waning in fireplace.

One week ago a young man hung himself one block inland. Today poems find their way as if epitaphs for his death and all our deaths. In the poems, not specifically written for him, but written for each one passing through this way, whether alone or with others, we attend to the sound of the moment as it passes. In this attention no one is lost, no one left out. No sorrow dismissed. No hope abandoned.

Events and hopes seldom agree.

Every conflict looks for amicable environment to be fully heard and brought to safe resolution.

So, we read poems, listen to poetry clamber our awkward incline, and lend attention to the sound of what is being said.

We might not be able to divert death. We might, however, be capable of allowing life a longer hearing.

This is the practice of poetry.

This, the practice of zen.

Blossom and fade.

Gather and part.

Say and see.

Each one.

Islam believes in charging no interest.

The depression and crisis in trade mostly results from the payment of high rate of interest. The socialists have wrongly attributed such crises to capitalism. In fact interest is the greatest evil of capitalism and it is rather the worst form of capitalism, The Islamic economy which accepts a form of capitalism without interest has almost eliminated its harmful aspects. The Holy Prophet of Islam has advised Muslims to avoid seven harmful things and the third among these is interest, He stated,' Although interest brings increase, yet its end tends to scarcity'. The Holy Quran says, "That which ye give in interest in order that it may increase other peoples' wealth hath no increase with God; but that which ye give in growth tax, seeking God's countenance hath increases manifold" (XXX-39).
(--Economic System of Islam, http://www.netmuslims.com/info/economic.html)

Reading The Heart of Islam by Seyyed Hossein Nasr at Friday Evening Conversation, we spoke of money. It is money, always, that evokes passion in politics and religion. Too much, too little, unfairly taken, profligately spent -- money is the measure of personal blessing and political value in our culture.

Have it or not, like it or not, concerning the who, why, when, and where of death -- money's hand determines who lives and who dies in the world.

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

While nature offers us all the abundance we need, we seek wealth in all the wrong places.

Jesus Christ, although he shared God's nature, did not try to seize equality with God for himself; but emptied himself, took on the form of a slave, and became like a man -- not in appearance only, for he humbled himself by accepting death -- even death on a cross.
-- Philippians 2

Christianity is a forsaken religion because it asks us to empty ourselves and to unclutch our grasping hands from that which we consider secure wealth -- so as to move freely through life of Christ-reality with nothing for the journey.

Then he said to all, "If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it."-- Luke 9

There is no system better than others to cement a true relationship with money, with one another, and with wholesome equanimity. More than a system, we need a sense of clear light -- one that allows us, not to stare at the opacity of monied self-definition, but to see through the medium of money and rest gaze on the many who inhabit this world with us.

Money has been and still is a difficult koan. The sound of one hand full of money is not going to clap -- not with joy, and not with the other hand fending off those who pose a threat to the money hand. So too, there are few hands motionless in casket that have tucked in them folded tens, twenties, fifties, or hundreds -- but rather, empty hands, done with scratch for gaining ground, fold finished with whatever work they found to be in their interest.

Thus the Islamic economic principles if strictly followed would eliminate the possibility of accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and would ensure the greater circulation of money as well as a wider distribution of wealth. Broadly speaking these principles are (1) Zakat or compulsory alms giving (2) The Islamic law of inheritance which splits the property of an individual into a number of shares given to his relations (3) The forbiddance of interest which checks accumulation of wealth and this strikes at the root of capitalism.

The sound economic system evolved by Islam if given a fair trial would solve the basic economic problems which have been troubling the modern world.
(-- Economic System of Islam, http://www.netmuslims.com/info/economic.html)

There is a different and deeper 'interest' needing attention. Disparity and divisiveness have made us all indigent. Greed and dispassionate scorn have shown us the dim colorless and dismal trouble disproportionate hoarding makes of the world -- a gloomy and dangerous place.

Our interest, I submit, might better be what is taking place between us. To be between one another is to live in touch with the center place from which all life originates, and through which all life gravitates.

There is an unending between, a shared homeground -- where the human/divine sees through one set of eyes, and hears through one set of ears, the sound of one hand noiselessly alongside another hand in the eternal instant of correspondence -- the one just before arriving, and just after leaving.

Right there. The crossroad.

Blood and water.

One's heart.

Watching "Frontline" on PBS -- "The Plea" -- about justice or the lack of it in our judicial system.

One could weep at the suffering of the guilty and their victims. One also weeps for the suffering of the not guilty and the price we pay to have our integrity so abused.

There is no cowardice like refusal to admit mistakes. Or to hide behind false assertion so as to bolster the pretense of strength. This is compounded in the readying report of the 9/11 Commission.

Buddhas don't save buddhas. If you use your mind to look for a buddha, you won't see the buddha. As long as you look for a buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the buddha. And don't use a buddha to worship a buddha. And don't use the mind to invoke a buddha. Buddhas don't recite sutras. Buddhas don't keep precepts. And buddhas don't break precepts. Buddhas don't keep or break anything. Buddhas don't do good or evil.
- Bodhidharma (d. 533)

The system we swear by is conditioned by dualistic evaluation wherein there must always be the innocent and the guilty, the saved and damned, haves and have nots, and the wealthy and the impoverished.

This evening's conversation wondered about the metaphor of Jesus being the worded embodiment of divine life, the metaphor of crossroad wherein one stands still at center of many separate directions. This is where the divine and the human intersect -- at the heart where the visible and invisible exchange points of view -- the place where Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama suddenly disappear and the Christ and the Buddha emerge.

Two resigns. One carries on. But not the one one was. That one is gone. One still remains.

Run with eager desire to this source of life and light, all you who are vowed to God's service. Come, whoever you may be, and cry out to him with all the strength of your heart. "O indescribable beauty of the most high God and purest radiance of eternal light! Life that gives all life, light that is the source of every other light, preserving in everlasting splendour the myriad flames that have shone before the throne of your divinity from the dawn of time! Eternal and inaccessible fountain, clear and sweet stream flowing from a hidden spring, unseen by mortal eye! None can fathom your depths nor survey your boundaries, none can measure your breadth, nothing can sully your purity. From you flows 'the river which gladdens the city of God' and makes us cry out with joy and thanksgiving in hymns of praise to you, for we know by our own experience that 'with you is the source of life, and in your light we see light'."
(From Office of Readings, Feast of the Sacred Heart, by St Bonaventure,"With you is the source of life ")

Morning turns attention to Sacred Heart.

I bow to each heart. I bow to each crossroad where stillness and depth root the disappearance of each one dropping through circumstances and conditions of their lives. It is time to abandon rhetoric, to leave the deceptive reasons and narrative we tell and think to be our identity.

It is the still, profound place of heart -- heart calling us to be our truth -- that transmutes us from what once we were into what now we are.

What we call heart is the only sound the silence of God recognizes.

This silence is the loving stillness of God detected in our heart.

Follow only what heart hears, heart says, and what heart is doing.

Shut up. Listen. Go home.

Live life well.

Just before coming out from wooded path on eastern side of morning walk along Ragged, a white board with black letters leans between branches of young tree. The words on it are: “Out of Bounds”.

In this small hut
Are worlds beyond number
Living here alone
I have endless company
Already I have
Attained the essence
How could I dare
To want something higher?
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)

Earlier, reading snippet from Theological Dictionary of New Testament, the word for “heaven” transliterated from Greek as “ouranos.”

‘Ouranos,' in classical Greek almost without exception in the singular, always means “heaven.” The word always has a double reference. Heaven is the firmament, the arch of heaven over the earth. But it is also that which embraces all things in the absolute, a “Theion.” (p.497, Vol.V, Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, Editors)

“Theos” in Greek is God.

Theion is divine fire: (brimstone, divine incense, because burning brimstone was regarded as having power to purify, and to ward off disease).

It was Cesco, Britta and I today.

“Out of Bounds” resounded on the walk. Heaven is out of bounds -- meaning, when free of what binds and closes us, we enter heaven.

Where is that heaven?

It is the place which embraces all things in the absolute. The ‘absolute’ is that which has “no restriction, exception, or qualification.” (Webster’s Seventh, p.3)

Whole.

When that which is unnecessary, binding, limiting, and fragmentary has been burnt away by fires of longing for what is whole and complete -- we glimpse heaven.

Today, we suffer the partial and incomplete. In the transformative light of alert and aware heart/mind we do the work of allowing what has been broken to be refashioned and reimagined into its primary state of wholeness within all beings.

Heaven is out of bounds.

Profound -- the unending between which flows in and through each and every being in existence .

The profound is what is. The profound is all encompassing.

Meet one another there.

Make it here.

Pema Chodron wants us to consider the non-grasping mind. Open mind. The mind that finds its capacity to let go and relax into its true nature.

Inbreath and outbreath.

We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. - (from "In the Gap Between Right and Wrong" by Pema Chodron)

Two parents come into the shop worrying about the draft -- will it be re-instituted? They have two sons -- and two daughters -- of an age that would be affected.

Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.

This place, if you can touch it, will help you train yourself throughout your life to open further to whatever you feel, to open further rather than shut down more. You'll find that as you begin to commit yourself to this practice, as you begin to have a sense of celebrating the parts of yourself that you found so impossible before, something will shift in you. Something will shift permanently in you. Your ancient habitual patterns will begin to soften and you'll being to see the faces and hear the words of people who are talking to you.
- (from "In the Gap Between Right and Wrong" by Pema Chodron) http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/dailylife/pema01.html

Yesterday and today there has been much talk of Ronald Reagan's week of tribute and funeral. It occurs to me that the nation needed a time to mourn, and former President Reagan's death served to provide that time for mourning. The deaths we experience worldwide. The loss of trusted community. The country needed to mourn even if it didn't know why. It feels better today.

This morning our trusted community of two doggie companions allowed a visiting third, Britta, to wander Ragged. It is her first visit to the hermitage. This long-haired black German Shepherd, Britta, dwells with Saskia's mom, who visits her daughter on this her giving-birth day and her daughter's receiving-birth day.

So many at Meetingbrook sign a book to be given to Saskia on her birthday.

The book is by John O'Donohue and is called Beauty: The Invisible Embrace.

With which we have been graced by Saskia.

What do we see when we cease halving life?

"I can't see you with me." That's what Ben said in prison conversation today. "Me" has to diminish for any "you" to be seen.

What is between me and you?

Ben came in at end. Jason, Billy, Rusty, Ben, Saskia and I read some from John O'Donohue's book Beauty. He wrote about betweenness.
We wondered what was there between us.

White stones glow in Chaste Tree River.
With the cold sky, red leaves thin out.
No rain on the mountain path
Yet greenness drips on my clothes.
- Wang Wei (699-759)

The thing about prison is the attempt always to get something on or from someone else. More intense than life on the street, but similar in culture, what imprisons us is the constant attempt to drive wedges, set apart, set up debtor relationships, call in favors owed, establish top force, use whatever you've got on someone to your advantage.

The notion of "anam cara" or soul friend, someone to open heart, mind, and soul with, is a miraculous thing in prison. In talking of the miracle you could feel the longing.

As Bo Lozoff's book title says it -- "We're All Doing Time." As the six of us looked at today, so much depends on how we transform and are transformed by each now. A slight can become bright; pain can become gain. Doing time can become being just now. "Now" is beyond time. It is without half.

When we help one another see, say, feel, and think about the whole of it, the whole of life -- we are beginning to live now.

Unhalf yourself.

Be what we are in that shared reality between you and me, between each and all.

Unsay the narrative line that puts us away from what is wholly together.

Our own, one's own.

"What is" -- between you and me.

Beauty.

Five lobsters are sent from Maine to Ronkonkoma NY.

A man is dying. He said on phone he’d have some. They will give their lives for him and his family. He has lent his life to his family and the family of all beings. “The machine is breaking down,” he said. His body closes. We say goodbye on the phone.

No form, no sound.
Here I am;
White clouds fringing the peaks,
River cutting through the valley.
- Daito

The nature of everything in existence is to pass through.

We greet with love each one passing through.

From Maine, with love, Frank!

Word is birdsong and baking fragrance.

If you understand the first word of Zen
You will know the last word.
The last word or the first word,
Is not a word.
- Wu-men

Two dogs snooze on mattress and floor. Earlier five of us (with cat in and out) took to stillness in chapel/zendo for 40 minutes. Candles before Buddha and Icon of Mother/Child move incense smoke through swirl of flame funnel.

Four did mindfulness walking beyond brook up Ragged Mtn stopping at tumbling falls, through wooded path, down runway to Snow Bowl parking lot, over to Hosmer Pond where two ducks nonchalance dog's arrival for brief swim.

We are mendicant monastics wandering hillside with begging souls. The mountain opens heart and drops sweet green bud, moist brown trail, birdsong, broken twig, last year's leaves, and stately quiet -- drops all this and more into our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hands. Fingers climb and fall beads. We are filled with gifts given wanderers.

Mu-ge is stretched in front of barn when we return. The three four-legged animals line up at kitchen door like livestock at feeding time, patter in together and go to respective flopping places.

Sun is warm. Birdsong strong. Silence surrounds. Prayer hides within everything.

There's no urgency to uncover prayer and make it speak -- not the way we've tried to torture out the secrets of nature, or torture out fragments of intelligence from so-called enemies. Prayer's hiding place must be left alone.

Where prayer hides is where God cannot be seen and never will be seen. Prayer is the place from which each sound springs and to which all noise falls. The ground of prayer is not to be found by any searching we can do or science we can know. Prayer is beyond us.

Prayer is the unseeable face of God.

God is wisdom itself. We cannot see wisdom. We might be able to hear the sound of wisdom. We might be able to touch the fruits of wisdom. We might be able to see the path leading to and emerging from the residing place of wisdom. But wisdom itself? Wisdom itself is hidden in its own home ground.

To our eyes the home ground of wisdom is groundless.

All we can do is pass -- pass by it and pass it by -- open and empty as the begging bowl of the soul.

We will not know what has been dropped in that bowl. We'll not be able to evaluate its worth, or count it, or bank it, or buy anything with it. What we are given will remain as unknown to us as green is to pine-tip bud.

It is not ours to see. As God's face has no specific and exclusive location, the grace we receive from openly passing through the dwelling place of God is meant only to pass through us and fall into others only when need is present, open, and unexpected.

Beggers, they say, can't be choosers. To walk the mendicant path near and through the hidden reality of God is to follow the laura footpath of no-choice. It is to wander, unknowing and unknown, the pathless path to and from, in and out this wondrous, incomprehensible moment, this place through which we pass.

Games with God

I played, a child both wild and meek,
with God at games of hide-and-seek.
I searched in vain the usual places
and found a thousand saddened faces.

"Your God is hidden in heaven," they said;
"You'll see him only when you're dead."
How could I make them understand
God often took me by the hand?
Then as my tears began to fall
I felt his touch and heard his call,
"I never hid from you at all."

I played with God a game of tag,
his mantle flying like a flag.
I gave my God a good head start
but caught him running in my heart.

I played with God the game "I Spy,"
but lost him with my fading eye,
till playmate God in his pure kindness,
printed his image on my blindness.
(poem "Games with God," by Virginia Hamilton Adair, from Beliefs and Blasphemies, as found in The Writer's Almanac, Sunday, 6 June, 2004, with Garrison Keillor)

Singing chorus from tree branches.

Saskia bakes in kitchen.

Calling in.

Some say God is not to be thought; but what is actually felt.

Do we think that if we penetrated the mystery of the Trinity in our theological history we would change our thinking about each other and change our behavior toward each other?

And if we actually felt that which is our very life on this earth -- would anything change?

Preserve both mind and objects
This means that when we are practicing, mind remains in its place and objects remain in their place. If there is a time when the mind and the objects come in contact with each other, then the mind does not grasp at the objects and the objects do not intrude upon the mind. If neither of them contacts the other, then, naturally, deluded thoughts will not arise and there will be no obstacles to the path.
- Chinul (1205)

The following excerpts from thinking on the Trinity in the Christian tradition and of Circumincessional Interpenetration in the Buddhist tradition are examples of the path thought takes attempting to enter into and through the curious existential intuition of three-and-one.

1. What is the Trinity?
It is a doctrine formulated in the 4th century to describe the view of some leading churchmen concerning the nature and relationship of God, Jesus and the holy Spirit. It was enunciated in a series of creeds: The Nicene Creed (325 ad), The Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381 ad), and the Athanasian Creed (ca. 5th century ad). It took various forms and used multitudes of words so complex and enigmatic it is incomprehensible. Some Christians consider "trinity" simply to imply belief in God, Jesus and the holy Spirit — a broad platform all Christians can endorse. Differently, but still quite simply, the first use of this word in early Christian writings referred merely to the existence of "God, his Word, and his Wisdom" (Theophilus of Antioch, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 2, page 201). But as the doctrine evolved in the 4th-6th centuries, it became much more mysterious. It asserted that God is actually composed of three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all co-equal and co-eternal.
The Scriptural truth, on the other hand, is neither mysterious nor incomprehensible: God is one person, his son Jesus is a second person, and the holy Spirit is not a person at all. It is the spirit, power and influence of God. Jesus is subordinate to his Heavenly Father. God existed from eternity, but there was a time before the creation of his son Jesus when God was alone.
http://members.aol.com/SDBible/sdbs1.htm

2. Keiji Nishitani on Circuminsessional Interpenetration

All things that are in the world are linked together, one way or the other. Not a single thing comes into being without some relationship to every other thing. Scientific intellect thinks here in terms of natural laws of necessary causality; mythico-poetic imagination perceives an organic, living connection; philosophic reason contemplates an absolute One. But on a more essential level, a system of circuminsession has to be seen here, according to which, on the field of shunyata, all things are in a process of becoming master and servant to one another. In this system, each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself. Its being is illusion in its truth and truth in its illusion. This may sound strange the first time one hears it, but in fact it enables us for the first time to conceive of a force by virtue of which all things are gathered together and brought into relationship with one another, a force which, since ancient times, has gone by the name of 'nature' (physis).
To say that a thing is not itself means that, while continuing to be itself, it is in the home-ground of everything else. Figuratively speaking, its roots reach across into the ground of all other things and helps to hold them up and keep them standing. It serves as a constitutive element of their being so that they can be what they are, and thus provides an ingredient of their being. That a thing is itself means that all other things, while continuing to be themselves, are in the home-ground of that thing; that precisely when a thing is on its own home-ground, everything else is there too; that the roots of every other thing spread across into its home-ground. This way that everything has of being on the home-ground of everything else, without ceasing to be on its own home-ground, means that the being of each thing is held up, kept standing, and made to be what it is by means of the being of all other things; or, put the other way around, that each thing holds up the being of every other thing, keeps it standing, and makes it what it is. In a word, it means that all things 'are' in the 'world'.
To imply that when a thing is 'on its own home-ground, it must at the same time be on the home-ground of all other things' sounds absurd; but in fact it constitutes the 'essence' of the existence of things. The being of things in themselves is essentially circuminsessional. This is what we mean by speaking of beings as 'being that is in unison with emptiness', and 'being on the field of emptiness'. For this circuminsessional system is only possible on the field of emptiness or shunyata.
(adapted from Religion and Nothingness, by Prof. Keiji Nishitani, translated with an introduction by Prof. Jan van Bragt, and with a foreword by Prof. Winston L. King, 1982, Berkeley 1983)
http://www.euronet.nl/~advaya/excerpts.htm#nishitani

3. Teilhard DeChardin on the Trinity

The time comes, however, when God, speaking through the prophets or his Son, allows his influence to be openly apparent. He manifests himself as living and personal at once one and three. Faith comes by hearing. At that moment, if the soul holds to its faith, its hitherto vague desires embody themselves around the new truth. Accompanying faith in the revealed dogma, it feels coming down into it a clearly defined, conscious need for that dogma. All revealed truth, accordingly, including even the distant Trinity, is seen by the soul henceforth to be indispensable to its beatification. … …It is, therefore, a mistake to distinguish in man two different attractions that influence him: one, towards a hypothetical natural end of the cosmos, and the other towards the supernatural end that awaits us in the presence of God. There is only one single centre in the universe; it is at once natural and supernatural; it impels the whole of creation along one and the same line, first towards the fullest development of consciousness, and later toward the higher degree of holiness: In other words towards Christ Jesus, personal and cosmic.
(DeChardin Teilhard 1973. The Prayer of the Universe; In the Form of Christ pages 23 & 24. Paras. 3,4 & 5.)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/dechardin.html

4. Alan Watts on the Holy Trinity

Worship is the action in which man is drawn into the vortex of love which revolves eternally between the Persons of the Trinity. In the Mass, the congregation becomes God the Son speaking to the Father with the words of the Spirit, and therefore the saying and singing of these words should forbid the intrusion of personal idiosyncrasies. This is why the Gregorian chant has been the most perfect vehicle for the Western liturgy, since it is entirely free of military bombast and personalized sentimentality. It is pre-eminently the music of contemplation, and of a majestic serenity that has no need for pomp. Yet even in its most triumphant moods it is profoundly and marvelously sad, because it is the music of God in exile, and thus of the human ego possessed with a longing which is as deep as it is undefined.
(Watts Alan (1964). Beyond Theology; The Art of Godmanship. Page 164)

For as soon as religion begins to think about the one God existing prior to the universe, it begins to slip into monism. Here is the one God all by himself with no reality other than his own essence. Is not this the purest monism? If God becomes Love and Consciousness only by finding the necessary object for loving and knowing in his created universe, we are making the universe necessary to God, and is not this the purest pantheism? The idea of the Trinity saves Christianity from the monistic predicament. It gives God significance even prior to the universe, because he always contains both the subject and the object of his own love, the everlasting I-Thou relationship of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit of love. Thus the Trinity comes as close as the language of religion permits to the doctrine of non-duality, for the One is seen as including Three, the Unity as not opposed to diversity.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Pages 69 & 70)

This view of the function of evil in the finite order is, however, profoundly consistent with such truly fundamental Christian dogmas as the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. The God-man Christ on the cross is without doubt our most eloquent religious analogy of the infinite as the experiencer of all human pain and evil. And if the universe is a finite image of the Trinity, it must express, in the successive order of time, both the union of the Son with the Father and the distinction of the Son from the Father—the latter as the fall of man from God in Adam, and the former as the union of man with God in Christ, the Second Adam. It throws light, too, on the great ‘dark saying’ of Jesus, ‘It needs be that offences must come, but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh’, a saying that calls to mind the problematic role of Judas, whose betrayal of his Master precipitated the Redemptive Sacrifice.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 116)

For Berdyaev, as for the Christian mind in general, there can be no significant relation between man and God which is not free on both sides, and where there is not an ontological distinction between the two. While he has seen that pure monotheism is substantially monism, and that the significance of God can only be vindicated by the doctrine of the Trinity, he does not apply the logic of the relations between the Persons of the trinity to the relation between God and man. If man and God cannot have a true relation without the ontological distinction, and without a freedom of man distinct from the freedom of God, it must follow that a true and significant relation is impossible between the persons of the Trinity. ‘The mystery of the unity between two persons finds its solution in the ......... The kingdom of Love in freedom is the kingdom of the Trinity. The experience of freedom and its inherent tragedy bring us to the Trinity. . . . Absolute monotheism is always despotic, for it regards God as an absolute monarch and leaves no place for freedom. Only the religion of God in Three Persons succeeds in definitely getting past this monarchist or imperialist conception of God by revealing the life of God as a divine Trinity and thus vindicating liberty." But if the idea of the Trinity vindicates liberty within God, if the fact that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all God does not deprive them of significance and freedom, there is likewise no deprivation if man’s Self and the infinite, atma and Brahma, are also distinct and yet one. For the same reason, as has been shown, there is also no monarchist or imperialist tyranny of God over the human puppet.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page118)

That this process may be understandable to finite thought, the supreme Self must be regarded under two aspects. To one aspect, both phases are simultaneous because the eternal and omniscient viewpoint is never actually lost; the infinite remains infinite however much it may identify itself with the finite. To the other aspect the phases are successive, because, while remaining infinite, the Self becomes voluntarily subject to space and time. These two aspects are analogous to the Father and the Son in the doctrine of the Trinity. The first phase, involution, manifests in finite form the Son’s distinction from the Father; the second, evolution, manifests his union with the Father. The infinite, in the act of manifesting and identifying itself with the finite, is the formative logos, God the Son, whose image is the entire finite order considered simultaneously, 'sub specie aeternitalts'. Although we speak of the infinite as having two aspects, one in eternity and the other in time and space, one omniscient and the other taking finite viewpoints, this is simply a concession to the inherent dualism of human thought. In reality the infinite remains undivided, but the idea of the double aspect is a symbol for its non-duality, its ability to be at once infinite and finite, itself and another, one and many, without the slightest contradiction.’
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 142)

It is for this reason that Catholic doctrine has always maintained that true prayer is not simply man relating himself to God, but rather something which God is performing in and through man. Prayer has its origin, not in the soul, but in the indwelling Holy Spirit, and thus prayer is man’s participation in the interior life of the Holy Trinity—even in its most stumbling and rudimentary form.
(Watts Alan (1973). The Supreme Identity. Page 173)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/trinitywatts2.html

5. Thomas Merton on the Holy Trinity

Furthermore it is highly significant that a Japanese thinker schooled in Zen should be so open to what is basically the most obscure and difficult mystery of Christian theology: the dogma of the Trinity and the mission of the Divine Persons in the Christian and in the Church. This would seem to indicate that the real area for investigation of analogies and correspondences between Christianity and Zen might after all be theology rather than psychology or asceticism. At least theology is not excluded, but it must be theology as experienced in Christian contemplation, not the speculative theology of textbooks and disputations.
(Merton T. 1968 Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Page 58)

St. Paul compares this knowledge of God, in the Spirit, to the subjective knowledge that a man has of himself. Just as no one can know my inner self except my own "spirit," so no one can know God except God’s Spirit; yet this Holy Spirit is given to us, in such a way that God knows Himself in us, and this experience is utterly real, though it cannot be communicated in terms understandable to those who do not share it. (See I Cor. 2:7-15.) Consequently, St. Paul concludes, "we have the mind of Christ." (I Cor. 2:16)… …We cannot push our investigation further here, but it is significant that Suzuki, reading the following lines from Eckhart (which are perfectly orthodox and traditional Catholic theology), said they were "the same as Prajna intuition." (D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p.40; the quotation from C. de B. Evans’ translation of Eckhart, London, 1924, p. 147) "In giving us His love God has given us the Holy Ghost so that we can love Him with the love wherewith He loves Himself ." The Son Who, in us, loves the Father, in the Spirit, is translated thus by Suzuki into Zen terms: "one mirror reflecting another with no shadow between them." (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 4!)
(Merton T. 1968. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. pages 56 & 57)
http://users.senet.com.au/~presence/SitePages/SecretsOnWheel/CelestialWheel/StructureAtHub/trinitygate/tmerton.html

Beyond the barn, cooing of Mourning Dove. Fire in middle-room fireplace after mid-day brunch. Raw chill day. Sando on mattress in upstairs study. Mu-ge pulling stick-string toy in hallway. Cesco not far from hearth.

Saskia told the story last evening of sitting next to Methodist man at ordination of Catholic deacons. At time of eucherist she left to receive communion, the man stayed where he sat. Later he told her he was a Minister. that he'd been the last professor of the final course these candidates took prior to their special day. Yet, while he was there to honor them, he knew he was not invited to the table, he was not permitted to receive communion in the Catholic ceremony. He told the story with simple narrative, She heard the story with attentive presence.

What use the thought of communion if the feeling is exclusion?

The real ordination took place off to the side. It was the trinity of the man, Saskia, and the inside/outside story they shaed with each other.

God is not to be thought. God is what is felt.

Ordinary. Today. Here. And now.

Feeling and telling communion.

One with another.

Steady awareness helps.

Jory says he dreamt of Kapleau Roshi. Even in his fading from view with death, he assists a former student. Delia is a threaded needle moving through the many churches in the area, sewing gem of awareness to each Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist and Buddhist celebration. Saskia returns from Bob C's ordination to deaconate at Catholic cathedral in Portland.

What we call God is in attendance everywhere. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) said, "God is like an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,"

All day long people repeat the
Word prajna aloud,
But do not know their
Self-natured prajna.
They are like one who
Cannot satisfy their hunger
By only talking about eating.
Just talking of voidness
Will not enable one to
Perceive one's nature for
Myriads of eons, and there
Will be no advantage in the end.
- Altar Sutra

June 6 -- the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's death by assassination at age 42 in 1968, feels more moving than the death at 93 of former president Ronald Reagan. We are often struck by what might have been. The 60th anniversary of D-Day Normandy Invasion is celebrated by world leaders and surviving civilian and military personnel. War is forever an open parenthesis, murder a sorrow without surcease, and dementia by alzheimer's a long irretrievable goodbye.

We think things should be other than they are. We want things to be other than they are. But if practice and steady awareness show us anything, it is that things are exactly what they are. Further -- about this "other" we want things and people to be? -- the paradoxically tough but tender realization is that there is no other. Everything is what it is -- and we are invited in particular to that embodying realization.

"The only field in which this [oneness] is possible is the field of sunyata [emptiness] which can have its circumference nowhere and its center everywhere. Only on the field of sunyata can the totality of things, each of which is absolutely unique and an absolute center of all things, at the same time be gathered into one."
(-- Keiji Nishitani, 1900-1990, in Religion and Nothingness, c.1983.)

Forms change. Old forms deteriorate. Surprising replacement forms arise. Some forms continue, reform, and endure. It is the emptiness that permeates and sustains form that seems ever unchanging. Emptiness centers the spinning world of changing forms on an axis of transparency.

In On Cause, Principle, and Unity, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) wrote:
This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts. There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the centre of things.

We are incessantly related.

One and one and one -- some say make three. Today is feast of Trinity in Christian metaphor.

But one and one and one really reveal the one that each is, incessantly relative each to each, unendingly between and center to the revelation of each and all.

Who can begin to grasp and embody this center without periphery?

Steady awareness helps.

Let service begin.

With us.