Now that it is spring,
ants make their way to kitchen --
dishes slant in sink.

Real haiku is the soul of poetry. Anything that is not actually present in one's heart is not haiku. The moon glows, flowers bloom, insects cry, water flows. There is no place we cannot find flowers or think of the moon. This is the essence of haiku. Go beyond the restrictions of your era, forget about purpose or meaning, separate yourself from historical limitations -- there you'll find the essence of true art, religion, and science.
(- Santôka Taneda - tr. John Stevens)

Change your mind and change
everything present and past --
the whole world still here.

The retired psychologist said, "I am in love with solitude."

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
(-- Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Real solitude allows spiritual gift to be shared by everyone. That's how we know it is spiritual, not material, gift. Material gift is particular, localized, and finite. Spiritual gift is without barrier or boundary.

The elderly man is right about solitude.

Let it be over everything that breathes.

Love alone.

Attend to this.

There is nothing else like this.

"Muddy water becomes clear while flowing." (Santoka Taneda, 1882 - 1940)

What is beyond awareness?

Just this, and this.

And this.

See here.

I find myself whispering his name.

Goethe wrote that: "Names are but Noise and Smoke, Obscuring Heavenly Light" (in Faust, I). Even so, heavenly light makes its own way through obscurity.

I've decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
(-- Martin Luther King Jr.)

It was 1968. I was studying philosophy in Washington DC when, on April 4th, Martin Luther King Jr. entered everywhere at once.

His doing so was too much for people. A tornado of grief, anger, and confusion swept DC and took away philosophy, replacing it, instead, with a susurrus of chaotic compassionate service.

No assassin really silences the sound of someone's truth-telling. No matter how surrounded and veiled with dissemblance, the center where truth dwells is an ever-present origin always coming to word.

You guard a spiritual thing: it isn't something you could make, and it isn't something you can describe. In this ground of ours, there is no Buddha, no nirvana, and no path to practice, no doctrine to actualize. The way is not within existence or nonexistence. What method would one then practice? This abundant light, wherever you are, in every situation, is itself the great way.
- Tan-hsia (739-824)

What was it happened? It wasn't that some conspirators, (or, if you wish, lone American-style gunman), were once again able to kill someone who threatened power with truth. It was the sudden quake of love released from containment that drove us crazy that week. This happens whenever form suddenly becomes emptiness. In 1968 it led us to reflect new brother and sisterhood. These 37 years his voice and words are what poetry would be if poem found itself reflected through every thing coming into its own.

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you!
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.
(from poem, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" by William Carlos Williams )

I think we move too quickly to reach for meaning -- in poems and in life. We might wish to consider staying with confusion and shocking unknowing fact -- the immediate experience moment after moment lays before us. It is in the immediacy of revealing reality that news presents itself to us -- not yet filtered and packaged for a more subdued, civilized consumption.

It is prior to rational and reasoned response that the raw experience of revelation enters our psyches. Mostly we receive what custodians of truth and love parcel out in mealy ration to subdued and processed receptacles we once remember calling mind, we once remember feeling as heart.

Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
(-- Martin Luther King Jr.)

April 4th is a poem whose meaning eludes. I am left with thoughts of service along with feelings of shudder and sorrow.

Asphodel, in Greek poetry and mythology, are the flowers of Hades and the dead, sacred to Persephone.

The world under this world, and the world just off another dimension alongside this world -- through which so much passes without explanation or understanding -- at times parts veil and shows us something of a depth of thought and feeling we can only blankly stare, experience ourselves nearing nothingness, nearly shrugging off body and mind, as if afloat and without any sense of who once we were.

I cannot love assassination. I cannot hate assassins.

A Birthday Poem

Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.
(Poem by Ted Kooser)

I stand in the empty center of thought and love and whisper his name.

Something great wells up and through spirit.

This time, and in this form -- "Martin!"

Mu-ge misses in attempt to jump to top of desk. Falls to floor. He retires to bed to re-think his dignity.

In tune with the moon and clouds twenty years
To find myself old is hard
Crows wait for food at the ledge
A monk returns with an empty bowl
Others drag surf for clams and shrimp
I swing a hoe in the mountains
When solomon-seal's gone, there's pine pollen
And a square inch free of care.
- Stonehouse

The cat goes on his way. He leaves desktop the chaos it is. Fog slips down mountain after long rainfall. Water empties itself into crevice and valley. On cushions four sit silently; on rug three stretch their four legs in silent laydown. Seven sentient beings taking time to be still as fog looks in window..

A woman quotes Trungpa Rinpoche saying, "Enlightenment is ego's greatest disappointment."

Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa writes :
1.
I do not know who I am, what soul I have.
When I speak with sincerity, I do not know what sincerity I am speaking with. I am varyingly someone other than an "I" of whom I do not know if he exists (if he is those others).
I feel beliefs which I do not hold. I am ravished by passions I repudiate. My constant study of myself is constantly pointing out to me breaches of faith by my soul toward some character which perhaps I never had nor does it think I do have.
I feel multiple. I am like a room with innumerable fantastic mirrors that distort by false reflections one single pre-existing reality which is not there in any of them and is there in them all.
As the pantheist feels he is a tree[?] and even the blossom, I feel myself as different beings. I feel myself living alien lives, in me, incompletely, as though my soul shared in all human beings, incompletely, through a sum of non-"I"s synthesized in an afterthought "I."

2.
Be plural like the universe!
(from "Toward Explaining Heteronymy," in The Poet's Work, 29 Masters of 20th Century Poetry On The Origins And Practice Of Their Art, edited by Reginald Gibbons)

We are different beings. A new form of spiritual practice emerges with community as teacher, teacher as learner, and learner as community.

One recalls W.C. Williams writing, "A new world/ is only a new mind./ And the mind and the poem/ are all apiece." Olson valued immensely what he spoke of as "mindedness." I would take his sense of one's "second birth," that coming into the world as fact of oneself, to be the possibility inherent, "that we are only/ as we find out we are."
("On Charles Olson"--by Robert Creeley, January 2000)

We sit, we converse, we write to find out.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
(from poem "Ars Poetica?" by Czeslaw Milosz)

We are not singular.

We are plural.

Empty bowls.

Disappoint!

On cushions this afternoon, candles and incense, we sit with death of Pope John Paul II; his silence through our lives.

The face of the soul.

Some say a new reality emerges. It's called diaphaneity.

It means to show through, to be transparent. Like transparencies used on overhead projectors for lecture presentations, one transparency is laid over another and over others so that each one shows through with their particular imprint to reveal a whole for all to see.

Seeing the evolution of events,
Keep to the source.
Fixing the attention internally,
Understand calamity and fortune
In the context of unity.
Sit unconscious of doing anything,
Walk unconscious of going anywhere.
- Lao tzu

The source is light. The activity is attention.

What concerns us about death? There is, of course, the sense we are losing something, the familiar is disappearing, and we are uncertain -- we plain don't know -- what, if anything, follows. Even for those with faith, life after death is a dimensional leap of consciousness more easily speculated about than part and parcel of confident experiential facticity. There's just not much verifiable data. But then what's faith for if certainty presides?

You have been taught and you are firmly convinced that what looks and tastes like bread and wine is not bread and wine but the body and the blood of Christ. You know also how David referred to this long ago when he sang: Bread gives strength to man’s heart and makes his face shine with the oil of gladness. Strengthen your heart, then, by receiving this bread as spiritual bread, and bring joy to the face of your soul.
(From the Jerusalem Catecheses, Office of Readings, Easter Saturday)

This Easter Saturday a foggy chill rain in Maine. Even here, in the very sentence written, you can have the name of a feast (Easter) a day of the week (Saturday), an atmospheric condition (fog), a watery transfer from sky to ground (rain), and a geographical locale (Maine) where, signs proclaim, it is "The way life should be." Each of these distinct bits of information, description, or wishful thinking are in themselves distinct yet interconnected in portraying a picture of reality no one of them alone could convey.

THE INNOCENCE

Looking to the sea, it is a line
of unbroken mountains.

It is the sky.
It is the ground. There
we live, on it.

It is a mist
now tangent to another
quiet. Here the leaves
come, there
is the rock in evidence

or evidence.
What I come to do
is partial, partially kept.
(poem by Robert Creeley)

Bread is bread as wine is wine. Body is body as blood is blood. Jesus is Jesus as Christ is Christ. The seeing-through of each is and as brings diaphaneity and transparency revealing a picture no one could, isolated, convey.

The underlying reality of this existence might just be the conveyance of what-is-called Father, through the Spirit-field of Itself, revealing what-is-called Christ in-is-as each one of us, in-is-as each and every sentient being, elemental matter, and nascent aspect of becoming.

For the time/being/becoming within which we experience in/is/as let us wander through this curious new word as we wander to this Easter new reality.

This new reality dissolves the too much anger that hides, enclosed and incommunicado, behind walls of not-supposed-to-feel-what-you-feel. As this new reality the diaphanous feels its way through to the open. For too long stifled feeling has suffered stiff compacting critical time-bomb status with igniting fuse naked to both self or other spark.

6
All you say you want
to do to yourself you do
to someone else as yourself

and we sit between you
waiting for whatever will
be at last the real end of you.
(final stanzas from poem, ANGER, by Robert Creeley)

It is not certain that death is the real end of us. The "real end of you" might be what yearns to be revealed through such seasons as Easter.

In is as: What is within is transformed as revealing diaphaneity. Source is presence; Itself is field of conveyance; Light is evidence.

"Inisas" becomes a new meditation within a new reality. One could say it has always been this very reality in which we dwell, only absent our awareness. Throughout human history a rare few have seen and been enlightened with this conveyance of light; these have tried to teach and embody what they have received to pass on.

It is what we long to see. It is the joy that does not disperse.

For all who this day approach final breath in this dimension -- we pray -- as we do every day, for your conveyance to your source.

It is the face of your soul.

The context of unity.

Inisas.

The Pope is making inquiry. We pray for him as he dies.

From the old temple
On Cold Mountain
A soft breeze carries
The sound of a far bell.
The tolling subsides
In the stirring of moonlit trees;
Dies in the frost-streaked sky.
In this long night
Of Zen meditation,
When the clear bell sounded
It was my mind.
- Chiao- jan (730-799)

This Easter Friday in Rome and churches everywhere bells wait in silence for tomorrow morning's toll. The bells will toll for John Paul. His given name will be called three times -- Karol? Karol? Karol? When the Pope dies, the Cardinal Camerlengo must verify the death, traditionally by calling the Pope three times by his name without response.

Here in Maine, draped over a roadside sign down from a church on Route 17 in Rockland is the word "Rejoice." Showing from under the yellow banner is line on original sign that says "For additional information inquire within."

Within, tonight, Pontiff inquires who might be calling, and why he makes no response.

We're told to "Rejoice" at birth and death.

Bell sounds through silence in mind.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Resonant silence.

Viva il Papa!

As it is, just the way it is, the fact of it.

Theresa Marie Schiavo dies. Pope John Paul will soon die.
Poet Robert Creeley, who wrote:
One thing
done, the
rest follows.
-- also died far away from New England in a re-write named Texas.

It is a tricky question, a kind of Zen Koan, to ask someone what they really want, what they are willing to ask for.

and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down--
but still they asked for nothing

but the difficult life
which they had already.
And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.
(From poem "Mockingbirds," by Mary Oliver)

Then I'll die. You will too. And the people we pass on the street.

It is Easter Thursday. It is a good day to die. As is tomorrow. As will be the day following.

That's just the way it is.

The fact of it.

Now, then...

About Easter--

One Rising! We think Easter is about the Risen One. And it is. But the Rising One? Are we almost ready?

Such was the prayer Christ made to the Father while he was still on earth: Father, I desire that where I am they also may be, those who have come to believe in me; and that as you are in me and I in you, so they may abide in us.
(From an Easter homily by an ancient author, Office of Readings, Easter Wednesday)

Almost.

First we have to drop all the reasons why the Christic Reality is beyond ordinary people. There's a solipsism in limiting access to some privileged few who know secret password and special handshake. Jesus thought his teaching had deflated such elite puffery. He'd prefer we'd just try to walk into and through his words to the silent beauty of the Rising One.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.
It has been found difficult; and left untried.
(from chapter V, The Unfinished Temple, PART ONE: THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN, in WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD, by G.K. Chesterton,
1910)

"Don't go there," is the warning of those who would never think of going there. Christ is there.

My hut's on Redcloud Summit
Few visitors brave the cliffs
I haul wood to market and slip where there's moss
Drip with sweat lugging rice back up
With no end to hunger less is better
And limited time why be greedy
I don't want to spoil your fun
Only help you let go.
- Stonehouse

It is Easter Wednesday. There is no battle nor any crusade necessary for us to don armour. That's the illusion introduced to deflect us from the Way. Rather, dona amor, give love! Give what you are until there is nothing left.

What happens when there is nothing left?

Is it difficult? Or easy? Try it.

Don't make difficult, and don't make easy.

Try it.

Easter the silent beauty of the Rising One.

Note: Busy at other work. The Bookshop/Bakery will reopen Easter Saturday, 2 April. Conversations will resume then.

Easter Tuesday. Raw rain slows as snow melts from hillside beyond kitchen window.

Solitude takes hostages this side of window. Mu-ge rolls on rug by refrigerator, scratches at papers by door complaining that now he’s eaten he’ll return to the barn, thank you! Sando stretches on daybed under window. Cesco keeps counsel quietly in winter zendo under Paschal Candle beside white-draped bronze tree-cross.

Hostage isn't the right word. We're not kept here against our will. Maybe sanctuary or consecration are better words. Then: Solitude takes sanctuary; Solitude takes consecration. Nevertheless, everywhere, Swat-Teams surround solitude attempting to break through antechamber in order to extricate from sanctuary or consecration someone considered to be wrongly ensconced.

Finding one's true place is fraught with diversion.

"God has to work pretty hard sometimes before we recognize what he's trying to do and begin to cooperate. First he has to get through to us so we listen to him. Second, he's got to help us turn off everything our society will say in opposition."
In his experience as vocation director and as abbot, Mac had frequently witnessed this struggle when a monk-to-be first became aware of his vocation. The "call" itself was often as vague and difficult to describe as it was compelling. (In fact, Mac believed the vague calls were the strongest vocations, the ones likeliest to survive.)
(p. 27,Voices of Silence, Lives of Trappists Today, by Frank Bianco, c.1991)

The more time we spend at Maine State Prison the more the metaphor of monasticism arises. Last week a former inmate stopped by shop and spoke about his time inside. I asked about the metaphor. Without hesitation he affirmed he felt like a monk -- writing, thinking, time in segregation, even praying (if latitude is given to 'prayer'). We agree we'd both choose not being an inmate in prison. He's still writing about his time. We're still visiting those doing time.

Are new forms of monasticism extending beyond cloister? Sure they are. But, like the demons of desert father Antony and the distractions haunting modern souls, we are besieged by forces intent to drag us off into noise and social pressure -- into the dispersion and diversion the so-called 'world' incites. That world has the capacity to aim at commonweal, should the effort be so directed. It is, it seems, a direction not easily traveled.

The world needs monastic presence. It is an idiorhythmic presence. It can take root and flower anywhere. This presence offers silence, prayer, interior insight, meditation, contemplation, empathic understanding, and simple hospitality. Monastic presence and contemplative life do not battle the world; they disappear into the world and invite the source of life to flow through them into that world.

The work of God the Father and our cooperation with it take place in the "now" of the present, as well as in the "not yet" of openness to the future. The Father is already at work, which explains the urgent importance of the present moment. However, his action has not yet displayed all its power, since this will only be shown when the Risen One breaks into human history and establishes his full kingdom once and for all. The utopia of Christian and monastic life is situated between these two moments. It opens out toward the future promise from the realism of the here and now.

I conclude by recalling for you the words of Pope John Paul, when he described the Church's program for the new millennium: our Christian communities must become genuine "schools" of prayer, where the meeting with Christ is expressed not just in imploring help but also in thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening and ardent devotion, until the heart truly "falls in love."... Christians who have received the gift of a vocation to the specially consecrated life are of course called to prayer in a particular way: of its nature, their consecration makes them more open to the experience of contemplation, and it is important that they should cultivate it with special care. (Novo Millennio Ineunte 33-34).

The Our Father, when it is prayed in spirit and in truth, is a seal of the person's Christian identity. It is the meeting place of prayer and action, the source of evangelization, the antechamber of what we hope for, the threshold leading into mysticism. This prayer of the Lord lets us taste the joy of witnessing to the Good News of the Kingdom and escorts us into the mysteries of the King.

With deepest fraternal affection in Mary of St. Joseph, Bernardo Olivera, Abbot General O.C.S.O., January 26, 2005, CIRCULAR LETTER 2005, Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance {Trappists)

The Trappists hold dear the space for the rest of us to glance at and visit. Hermits provide the same inspiration, only less visibly. Both practice living with a broad community of beings spanning depths of nature, and depths of prayer -- whether cataphatic or apophatic. Their way is to live, simply, contemplative life.

Meetingbrook is grateful for all contemplatives. We ask for the grace to participate, alone or with others, in contemplative dwelling. We ask, in our wording, to be dwelling place for contemplative practice, conversation of presence, and correspondence between variety of paths seeking wholeness of life. Whether this grace is to be carried out alone or with others remains in prayer.

The Our Father asks for daily bread. We ask for open hearts and minds to respond to this grace. If resurrection, sanctuary, and consecration were to be gifted and welcomed, then let courage also attend.

Perhaps the reason resurrection is such a pivotal mystery is that the only way it is recognized is by fruits of healing, "thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening and ardent devotion, until the heart truly 'falls in love'...." We like these words. We note an additional caveat: these fruits cannot be owned or manipulated -- they are only tasted when authentic humility and mere presence gift them.

Is this the singular assertion of Christ moving through the event we've come to call Resurrection? Is this what the ineffable mystery is -- an unnameable Wholeness of life...Being here...As we are...Now?

No wonder embodiment of God, at root the Christian Incarnation, has been forgotten; along with the Christing of human beings, the revelation of Resurrection. If we were to emerge the Risen One -- in our midst -- both birth and death would drop off, fall away, and we would "fall in love."

It is Easter Tuesday. There's fire in wood stove. Some coffee left in pot. On hillside, wind shimmies remaining oak leaves hanging, resolutely, to their source of life, all the way through this hard, long, winter.

Like dreams and death -- some go early, some go hard, and some continue on beyond expectation.

Ask a hermit for directions to uncertainty, and the answer they give is "Pull up a chair."

Ask a mirror to verify your presence and what you get is reflective silence.

"This is what you must say, 'His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep'."
(from Matthew 28)

A cold rain falls in Mid-Coast Maine.

Resurrection, rain, and mirror embody a shared reality -- about which nothing in particular is said.

If anyone is looking for the body of a man believed to have been killed two thousand years ago there's no indication where they are looking. There's six days until the Final Four college basketball teams meet in St. Louis. Fewer days until Terri Schiavo breathes her last in Florida. And in Italy the Pope's days linger uncertainly in front of him. When a hermit passes a mirror he looks into it to see if anything's still there.

Back then, after Jesus' death, the phrase "habeas corpus" ("you have a body") was hard to come by. It took decades for the official investigation to issue reports. These reports did not close the question. Ask any mirror. Your question will yield silence. Does the mirror "have" your body?

Mirrors only have and hold as long as what they are given keeps giving. Otherwise, mirror goes blank, content to mindlessly return what is mindlessly there as background surrounding. Jesus had an odd relationship with mirrors. His mirrors were the children, men and women who came before him, those before whom he showed.

Rain, too, has a mute relationship with the earth. It falls, saturates, sinks to unseen levels, finds its way to "mer" "mare" "maria" -- by any other name, sea.
Mary births; Mary attends; Mary hears name called.

What of resurrection? The same nascence, silence, watchfulness, and listening? Of course.

For Christ's sake, say you were asleep if you saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, or gave nothing to reflection. Take a bribe. Skew the report. Spin the data. Close tight ranks around whatever power you claim is yours. Ice-out opposition.

It is Easter Monday. If you are unwilling to let mirror, rain, or resurrection seep into your being -- then, make up a story and go on with it.

But if you have any passing familiarity with a hermit, take a cue from what hermits do.

Don't walk past a mirror and look in -- rather, step into the mirror and disappear.

Don't look at the rain and wish for sunshine -- instead, lose yourself in the sound saturating your being.

And don't wonder about the metaphysics and theology of resurrection -- alternately, turn every which way and see what you see.

In contradistinction to Maine scuttlebutt which says, "You can't get there from here," -- you might hear a hermit say, "There's nowhere to go."

A local man charges one hundred twenty dollars an hour to consult with him about matters he knows some about. A local woman is beginning her run down this road announcing she has an introductory offer of sixty dollars for ninety minutes of conversation. You gotta admire their ingenuity. Soon folks will be charging by the word.

I'm glad to dwell at the cross-section of solitude and silence.

Hear here -- it rains.

Small mirror atop bookshelf sits empty -- eye-wash and eye-drops stand in lower right.

Word that found itself resurrected through deep and diaphanous night turns and turns by threes and sees what is there to see.

Footprints in snow by Ducktrap River. Once Saskia had a dream about the rock in river by monastic learning center. Today three dogs wandered length of late afternoon learning flow.

Some ask whether Jesus rose from the dead. I have no idea. I'm told that's what faith is -- continuing to look through uncertainty while holding at bay judgment and conclusion. Ice melts as river passes through.

"A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations."
-- Paul Valéry (1871-1945), French poet, essayist. "Recollection," Collected Works, vol. 1 (1972).

Today, wandering inconclusively through dream of transformation; Christ!

A very silent, very still, resurrecting breath dreams through this Easter mind.

God our Father, creator of all,
today is the day of Easter joy.
This is the morning on which the Lord appeared to men and women
who had begun to lose hope
and opened their eyes to what the scriptures foretold:
that first he must die, and then he would rise
and ascend into his Father's glorious presence.
May the risen Lord
breathe on our minds and open our eyes
that we may know him in the breaking of bread,
and follow him in his risen life.
Grant this through Christ our Lord.
(Alternative Prayer, Office of Readings, Easter Sunday)

I who am life itself am now one with you.

Saskia has placed a stone on center altar at window to mountain view in winter zendo. A vigil candle with single attending flame in front of stone. Silence, but for bird sound, surrounds the stone. The resident bronze cross -- one side body of Jesus, other side tree of life -- is gone. Gone from view. As is so much today.

Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but I will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God.
(From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday, in Office of Readings)

No special deal being God. Not any more. Hard to understand those who want to "play God." They think it is about power. It's not. It's about street talk, about "being played." Those wanting to play God want to play us -- just to get their way. Naive play has been stolen by cynics and become a spectacle of minds deteriorating in quest of fruitless power. Often they get their way -- causing so much suffering.

Holy Saturday invites us to look at the mind of God. When the cycle of this day completes itself, we will be compelled to look as the mind of God. This odd viewpoint, (it must be acknowledged), is nothing special, is no special deal. In fact, to tell the truth, we'd probably say it would be better if God kept God's own mind and left us alone.

Instead, God does not leave us alone. The mind of God is this moment revealing itself. If we dare enter this moment, we enter the mind of God and we are what is being revealed.

The Goose
Do you want to know why I am alive today?
I will tell you.
Early on, during the food-shortage,
Some of us were miraculously presented
Each with a goose that laid a golden egg.
Myself, I killed the cackling thing and I ate it.
Alas, many and many of the other recipients
Died of gold-dust poisoning.
(Poem: "The Goose" by Muriel Spark)

The poet reveals a mysterious liturgy. Eat body, drink blood -- do not seek the fruits. Become the reality; do not attempt to benefit from or manipulate the reality.

Another ancient writing said we should have in us the mind that was in Christ Jesus:
5 Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
7 But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
8 And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
(from Philippians 2)

This is what went wrong with golden-egg-seeking politicians. As Terri Schiavo's life (sorrowfully, in our mind) approached death, they wanted the egg; they did not want to become one with the goose. They thought they could rob death, restore life, and benefit their coffers with golden rewards.

Paradoxically, they (we?) have left Terri Schiavo alone. We treat her as an object, a cause, an agenda -- she is not seen as who she is right now in the moment of her transformation. We keep our own minds, staying in the thought we could play God -- "give life/take life, condemn to death/punish others" -- this is what our thoughts say God is about.

Instead, as it is, this empty Holy Saturday, a greater, more mysterious reality is unfolding. Even as we long for life and cling to life, we are longing and clinging to life as we think it is. Meanwhile death, as it is, occurs.

We must become Terri Schiavo in her ambiguous unfolding reality. Seeing as God, we must see her through.

Seeing through means penetrating birth/death to what is beyond.

Those who wish to make judgmental comparison of Terri Schiavo with Jesus of Nazareth fail to see the comparative reality through. The judgmental mind wishes to condemn and punish those perceived as the enemy; those on both sides of the comparison considered to be doing something wrong. But what is this mind missing? Is there a place we are invited to go beyond dualistic thinking that operates along lines of judgment and comparison?

Is there a reality, a sacred reality, beyond comparison, beyond judgment? Is there a way of seeing and dwelling that transcends calculation, that does not negotiate the world into an either/or choice? If we consider this question for even a little while -- our minds go blank, we come up empty. We might mutter formulas and rote statements learned in religious education or during other intellectual inquiry -- but, mostly, we don't know. If we authentically investigate, this "don't know" is where we are likely to arrive.

Spending any time in this "don't know" we are likely to feel empty and unmoored. Some call this -- "emptiness." In our minds and in our culture we are uncomfortable with emptiness. We think it contradicts everything held valuable in our upbringing -- namely, certitude, security, positive comprehension, affirmative identification, and something material and solid that is there to hold us up.

Jesus emptied himself. Self-emptying is at the heart of the Sacred Triduum. Emptiness opens to the Itself; to no-other. This Kenosis (self-emptying) is what is between Friday and Saturday. There is no Sunday without this long, empty, unknowing Saturday.

We look and look for something to carry us beyond this awkward ambiguity. We look for something to see us through. Is emptiness that which we must get through? Or is emptiness that which sees us through?

This Holy Saturday is emptiness itself. It is a between of no mind, no moment. The death of Jesus, in this metaphor, is the revelation of Christ. Between Jesus and Christ is no moment. It is pause of emptiness.

Christ is now. There's no special deal here. Christ now is what is becoming of God.

This is the emptiness of today. Today is the between. Between Jesus and Christ. Between God and us. Between then and now. Between birth and death. Between death and birth. Between life and life-itself.

So empty -- this between!

Emptiness is what is now revealing itself as it is.

Gone is what we know. Gone is what once was. Gone is the convenience of something other to blame, someone other to cling to. Gone, gone, gone.

Beyond?

Emptiness?

What is beyond emptiness?

I who am life itself am now one with you.

We are on retreat. Bookshop/Bakery closed til Tuesday. No conversations Friday nor Saturday.

Who will die today?

So many possibilities. Will Terri Schiavo's heart give out? Will an Iraqi woman wander too close to frightened soldiers or determined insurgents? Will a man in Palestine be falsely tried and condemned for insights neither state nor religious authorities wish to consider. Will it be an African child with AIDS? Will it be you? Will it be me?

In the stillness
A hawk cries
From the apricot trees.
In the deserted
Peach orchard,
A dog barks
I stroll
Among fragrant plants
And fallen flowers,
Then find, among ten thousand
Valleys and a thousand peaks,
Your closed door.
- Liu Chang-Ch’ing (710-787)

The death of Jesus is singled out this Friday. No one is sure why. Some think Jesus was the creator of all creation born in human form. Some hold he was God incarnate come to show humankind the way to live true life. Others contend he was some sort of willing hostage in a ransom drama exchanging sin and suffering for payoff forgiveness and escape to heaven for grateful unworthies.

Jesus is an inkblot test that every variety of perception draws interpretative conclusions based on either personal insight and experience or prejudiced unawareness and ideology.

There are few interpretations worth attention. Fewer still worth imitation. Hardly one worth killing for. None worth the hatred, intolerance, and ignorance associated with claiming to know the mind of God.

We do not know the mind of God. Jesus didn't. Something else is called for. Especially today. This Friday -- the first of a three day meditation.

The mind of God is this moment revealing itself. There is no knowing it. There is only attending the reality revealing itself in our presence and awareness. Attending with awareness and presence is the transfiguration of one and another into one and another.

I attend Terri, the soldier, the Iraqi woman, the insurgent, the African child, the Palestinian man standing silently before his executioners.

Their names, all their faces, deserve our attention. Sit, kneel, or stand as they pass through our awareness. Allow yourself unknowing reverential participation in the reality we are.

We are each one of them -- each one of one another.

People kill for ignorance of this. People go mad for absence of this awareness.

Today, Friday, let us practice together.

Practice together silently, without knowing, the mind of God.

With whole hearted gratefulness.

The form of a slave.

If you want to understand Zen,
Understand it right away without deliberation,
Without turning your head this way or that.
Zen teaches us to go beyond logic
And not to tarry even when we come
Up against the things which are not seen.
- D.T. Suzuki

I've never seen God.

So I serve human beings.

Do this, remember this, said Jesus. Don't hold on to what you think I am, he said.

Christians don't hold on to Jesus. Christians do what any authentic human being does -- serve one another.

Noli me tangere -- Don't cling to me, said Jesus to the woman in the garden, I've not yet returned to the Father.

Wholeness longs for Itself. Jesus, coming through death, knows what he didn't know.

Form, emptiness -- not two.

Remember?

Love the contemplative life?

David Whyte tells the story: “Why are you unhappy?” asks the ancient Chinese poet Wu Wei We. And he answers his own question: “Why are you unhappy? Because 98.98% of everything you do and all that you say is for yourself, and there isn’t one.”

At Wednesday Evening Laura Conversation at the bookshop tonight it was suggested that when we arrive at authentic question, it contains its own answer. When answer breaks through, question is abandoned.

Love -- the contemplative life.

So too, self. When self is authentically arrived at, it contains within itself everything it is. When this inner expanse is seen and realized, self disappears. It is as though what we call "self" never existed -- but to reveal all that is arising within.

When Jesus came to the end of his days -- comes to the end of his self -- Christ is revealed.

It is a long curiosity why Christians cling to Jesus. Is it similar to the act of clinging to self?

As the week follows itself day by day into Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday -- we step into metaphor and mystery so intimate we forget our own name.

It is the 1.2% invitation.

One's passion.

Inside out.

"I'm tired," Saskia says as she herds the dogs out door through barn to go for walk with Annie and her dog. She is tired; and the bag of birdseed has not been taken from back of car. The one-dog-too-many staying with us these three weeks creates dyadic crabbiness.

Sun arrives earlier, stays later, is warmer. On zafu during quiet this morning spectral light dots room through hanging glass sliced into triangular segments of globe at window.

David Steindl-Rast converses with Ken Wilber about Gratefulness as Great Fullness.
Belonging is established with gratitude and trust.

Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father.
(John 13:1)

There is often ambivalence about "this world." Stay or go? Good or bad? Save or let rot? Use up or respectfully preserve? In the text we are told Jesus knew his time in this world was at its end. The text says "to pass...to the Father."

Passing to the Father is passing through this world with gratefulness. "Father" -- however else we conceive that referential word -- is perfect equanimity.

Wilber says, "The mirror loves all of its objects equally."

Like the mirror mind -- we love equally what presents itself before us -- seeing each as is.

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

Loving each as is -- equaling what is in our seeing.

Jesus is the mirror. Christ is the mind.

Mirror mind looks out through us.

Be nowhere to be found.

No confusion.

Act.

President Bush relents and repents. He begins to see beyond ego and beyond politics.

The Congress and President have passed legislation to keep a woman in Florida alive. "Culture of Life" is their way of saying that all life is sacred and should not be taken away.

I like this notion.

President Bush will soon announce that he was wrong to allow over one hundred executions of death-row inmates while he was governor of Texas. He will apologize for bombing and killing innocent men, women, and children in Afghanistan and Iraq. He will sign a letter of sorrow stipulating he did not know what he was doing when he authorized the taking of life from poor disabled persistive vegetative people in Texas; the taking of anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 civilian lives in the Middle East; and the taking of life in the name of interrogation at holding facilities during America's time of honoring the 9/11 victims.

He and his newly awakened political colleagues are a courageous flock. His remorse and their conversion come during a holy week in the Christian faith.

Kuei-shan was asked, "Is there any further cultivation for people who have suddenly awakened?" He replied, "If they awaken truly, realizing the fundamental, they know instinctively when it happens. The question of cultivation or not is two-sided. Suppose beginners have conditionally attained a moment of sudden awakening to inherent truth, but there are still longstanding habit energies that cannot as yet be cleared all at once? They must be taught to clear away streams of consciousness manifesting habitual activity. That is cultivation, but there cannot be a particular doctrine to have them practice or devote themselves to."
- Kuei-Shan (771-854)

By clearing away longstanding habit energies whose activitiy kills those who are alive, I am confident that President Bush, as witnessed by his signing of the Schiavo Law, is setting a long needed example for this country.

If abortion is wrong, so is capital punishment. If murder is wrong, so is collateral damage in warfare. No excuse given will be accepted -- not "I didn't know the gun was loaded;" not, "We didn't intend to kill civilians;" not, "We only do God's work when we judge and murder evil people." If 9/11 was wrong, so is blasting bodies to death and gunning down whole neighborhoods in Middle East countries.

Mr. Bush, with his new declaration proclaiming the sanctity of life, is happily admitting he wants to correct any wrong he has participated in perpetuating, especially the habit activity cultivating and enabling a culture of death that haunts his presidency.

Rather than lowering his head to remember Jesus' death during this yearly memorial, he will do well to look straight ahead at the faces and eyes of individuals demolished by policies of death. Rather than caving in to nominally religious political financial supporters, he would do well to climb out from the hole dug by behavior that denies sacred life. Rather than an insincere "Thank you, Jesus for helping me kill and eliminate evil-doers", Mr Bush would come to stand silently in the presence of Christ, experience authentic compassion, and see the face of forgiveness contemporary Christianity has hooded and forgotten.

Let's not worship history. Let's honor, love, and respect all life -- right here, right now, right away.

That would be a holy week!

That would be Terri Schiavo's gift.

Does Mr. Bush see this?

Do any of us?

It's not whether Jesus dies or lives, goes away or comes back, resurrects or disappears in plain sight. The matter is whether he abandons his self to the consciousness of Christ.

Jesus is liturgically welcomed as messiah today. In a few days we will scripturally allow him to die again with full anticipation of a dawn resurrection three days hence. There's no need to tease the drama beyond formulations carried forward two thousand years. He will die. Emotions will relay sorrow. A day of emptiness will be followed by a retelling of mythic memories from creation's garden through sunrise narrative where new creation calls Mary by name generating revelation of transformed theology.

There will be a suitable period of awe followed by unaccountable materialization -- peripatetic pedagogy, bread breaking beholding, biological beckoning of finger and fist to unveil and prove that what could not possibly have happened did indeed take place. Death, it is asserted, has been penetrated and passed-through.

Then Jesus said to them, "You will all lose faith in me this night, for the scripture says: I shall strike the shepherd and the sheep of the flock will be scattered, but after my resurrection I shall go before you to Galilee." (from Matthew 26)

Of course we lose faith in Jesus. Why not. After palm fronds fall to the dirt, the man himself in a few days will be stepped on and abandoned. His Father in heaven has nothing to say. It is a script we know by heart.

You live beyond
The wards of Blue Gate;
Walking or sitting,
There's South Mountain view.
A safe distance
From the general hubbub,
I'm sure you're at peace
When day ends.
Below the fence
Frogs are calling;
Grass greens
The entrance to your door.
I'm fond of passing by your residence;
It's only sad I must return
At dusk alone.
- Chang Chi (776-829)

This is only Act One. Like most initial impressions and political immaturity there is enthusiasm for heady ideology that goodness triumphs over duplicity, awareness over unconsciousness. We like that prospect.

The week dashes hope that good intention yields good outcome.

The metaphor of a man forced to abandon his self to what itself resides between creation and return.

Jesus goes nowhere. Christ emerges from there alone.

I would like to applaud the United States' effort to keep the Florida woman alive.

Now, if only they felt similarly about not killing women, children, and men in Iraq and Afghanistan -- some real revelation would be at hand.

We can hope and pray for those this nation kills; and those it demands stay alive.

Politics and morality are such difficult choices.

Let's give up both.

Consider, instead, this.

What does paramita mean?
It is an Indian word and means in
Chinese "reaching the other shore."
It is interpreted as freedom from birth
And death.
Attachment to externals produces
Birth and death,
Just as water rises in waves;
This is called "this shore."
Detachment from externals
Ensures freedom from birth and death,
Like water which flows freely
And uninterruptedly;
This is called the "other shore."
- Altar Sutra

Choose neither birth nor death

Practice no-choice.

Near other shore.

Irish celebrate St. Patrick's Day. He lived during 4th/5th century.

We are all born mad. Some remain so. (-- Samuel Beckett, in Waiting for Godot)

My family on 69th street loved celebrating this day. They've gone to the invisible. They drank a beer or two, boiled corned beef, tolerated cabbage, told stories, and shook their heads at lies heard. Lies are what we tell when threatened by the truth. I've told plenty. Some lies were longer and more hurtful than others. I, then and now, dislike lies. Whether or not forgiveness enters the equation, we are desolate liars. Who are "we"? -- someone will ask. That person, asking, is a liar.

Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.
(Beckett in Molloy, Part I)

I believe him, I know it's my only chance to -- my only chance, I believe all I'm told, I've disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallow everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I'm not sure of it.
(Molloy, Part I, major prose narratives, 1951)

I fancy madness in the way poet Theodore Roethke does. He asks:
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance?
(from poem "In a Dark Time")

The circumstance of contemporary culture in the world is maddening. Perhaps it is a good thing. Maybe as we move to what some call transparency we will more easily be able to see what we couldn't before -- namely, the wall of deceit and falsity created by those who benefit by deceit and falsity. Moving to transparency means passing through cutting shards hanging where wall disintegrates.

I like Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). I grew up with his absurd take on things and life. The way he describes those who don't think as I do:
His plan therefore was not to refuse admission to the idea, but to keep it at bay until his mind was ready to receive it. Then let it in and pulverise it. Obliterate the bastard.
(in More Pricks Than Kicks)

Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down.
(in More Pricks Than Kicks
(The volume More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) contained 10 stories describing episodes in the life of a Dublin intellectual, Belacqua Shuah)

I note that Patrick of Ireland suffered what has become an American tactic.
The defining event of Patrick's life was his abduction. Ripped from a comfortable upbringing and forced into servitude, Patrick never recovered from the trauma. Upon his return to Britain many of his friends had gone on to fine educations and prominence whereas Patrick, an outsider as a slave in Ireland, became an outsider in his home society. To his dismay, Patrick was neither a great orator nor did he have a facility with the written word. He wrote late in life "that is why I am now ashamed and am seriously afraid of revealing my unskilfulness, the fact that I cannot hold forth in speech to cultivated people in exact language." As an older man he still regarded himself as a "poor ignorant orphan" and an "exile and refugee" who was "very little educated". After returning as Bishop to the land that had once considered him a slave, he never left again, becoming more closely identified with the Irish people than the British.

As a man, Patrick was devastated by captivity. In his years of slavery he developed a deep faith and sense of conviction in his God which provided him tremendous missionary zeal. Perhaps finding more acceptance among the society of his captors, Patrick dedicated his life's energy to the Irish christian mission and he died there around 460 A.D. with no ordained successor.
As a saint, Patrick is larger than life for those who need him to be. Perhaps this March 17 we can forgo the green beer and the snake charming and remember just the man who overcame great odds to carry out his life's work on the beautiful and cruel island of Eire. (in SAINT PATRICK The man and the myth -- by C. Austin)

In our country we learn how to get along. We worry that what we say will be taken by the government as oppositional, and thereby, dangerous.
If I have said anything to the contrary I was mistaken. If I say anything to the contrary again I shall be mistaken again. Unless I am mistaken now. Into the dossier with it in any case, in support of whatever thesis you fancy.
(in The Unnamable, L'Innommable,1953)

I watched last night Frank McCourt's visit back to Limerick Ireland where he grew up after moving there from Brooklyn. He's amazed how prosperous and happy everyone seems to be. He'd been poor and miserable. The Irish have a curious relationship with hope.
Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken. Company too up to a point. Better a sick heart than none. Till it starts to break. So speaking of himself he concludes for the time being. For the time being leave it at that.
(in Company, composed between May 1977 and August 1979, is a Beckett lengthy prose fiction)

So much of contemporary history is bald-face lie. Or is it better called farce?
I say farce deliberately, in the hope of covering up for you. That's what our best authors do, they call their most serious works farces, in case no one is prepared to take them seriously.
(Beckett in Eleuthéria)

It is difficult to read the farce of political governance these days. But we might wish to learn how to read through and beyond the words. It might affect our sanity.

And when we become mad, or return to madness, we might find our house empty and friends departed.

Once, we believed we had friends in reporters and journalists -- surely they would tell the truth, investigate through the deception, and champion justice.
...when it comes to those bastards of journalists, I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. That's for those bastards of critics.
(Beckett, in Letter to Alan Schneider, 1957)

It is a good day to be Irish. So much blather and blarney!

If I was dead, I wouldn't know I was dead. That's the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death. That's where liberty lies: to see oneself dead.
(Eleuthéria)

There's something resonant here with what Ken Wilber said about ego. He said that a good definition of the ego is "The capacity in us to deny the obvious."

Death of the ego, therefore, might result in seeing and engaging the obvious.

There are probably at least two sources for the snakes which Patrick "drove" out of Ireland. A symbol for the goddess worship practiced in Ireland prior to Christianity was the snake or serpent. The conversion of Ireland to Christianity symbolically banished the "snake" from the land. Secondly, the bloody cult of Crom Cruaich in County Caven demanded human sacrifice to a serpent deity and the dismantling of this cult by Christianity is now remembered as the "snakes being driven from Ireland."
(From SAINT PATRICK The man and the myth -- by C. Austin)

Snakes abound in this country. We'd better pray to Patrick.

To drive them out.

Take their green.

Un-metaphor.

Remain mad.

Cat is crazed. It's only energy. It will subside. Everything subsides. But while here, it is a fullness unto itself.

At a place deep
In green trees,
A lamp’s light
Burns long.
Spring pilgrims
Make their way to the temple;
Blossoms fall
At a monk’s closed gate.
In the mind, the ten
Thousand doctrines are still;
A clear, lone spring
Purls over rocks.
We do not ask
About our lives, our work,
And the silence between us
We keep.
- Ch’i- Chi (864-937)

This late winter has been one of depleted energy poured into demands of work and time. Nature's explosions of winter weather have diverted energy to plow and shovel. In the realm of what used to be called "news" -- now "crazed events" -- are reported regularly as judicial murders, political wars, propaganda posing as news, assassinations, silent coup d'etats that have shifted power without fanfare, and the ongoing collapse of systems by corrupt swindlers rewarded for their chicanery. It is nearly too much to take in -- not the superfluity of data -- but the brazen subterfuge and moral erosion that despoils contemporary polity and culture. It is a cynic's breeding ground; but most of us do not recognize that the instant of conception is the beginning of cynicism's slow gestation intent on corrupting life.

As Holy Week in the Christian metaphor approaches, it is useful to remember the Philippian ancient formula. It warns us about false equations attempting to yield false yet absolute answers. Jesus would have no part in establishing arrogant and despotic power -- certainly not the way contemporary men attempt to shill and spin their actions as those of Jesus and God -- that perennial lie of power by delegation and association with divine ordination so loved by today's politician/pundit/lobbyist impostors. Which of them would empty themselves?

Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality
with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the
form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on
a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the
name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee
should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and
every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the
Father. (Philippians 2:6-11)

As you see, it's been a long, hard winter. But -- a more dangerous time is approaching. The process promising end or emergence from a dark time portends its own danger. Like coming up from ocean depth, a slow ascent must be made. Coming from a dark cave, a gradual introduction to light is necessary. Sanity is a careful step-by-step reconstruction of integrity from the dregs of despair and disintegration. This dangerous time occurs as snow melts, sun warms, and people begin to believe things haven't been as bad as they actually have been. Longing to believe is stronger than skepticism and careful scrutiny.

Something has gone away. Something is lost.

To N, in absentia

I do not know how you went out of my life
or when exactly. The leaves of the Norway maple
are beginning to turn yellow, fall has come.
I last saw you on an evening at the end of July
but I think you were already gone then,
I think by then you had been gone for a long time.

And so it seems meaningless to count the days
yet still I count them, August, September,
October now half over, terrible days,
And I do not know where you are
or when I may have news of you again.
But I remember as if yesterday the day
you came out of my body into this world,
a fine splash in full midsummer, a small cry
like the meow of a Siamese cat,
your eyes wide open and looking all around;
remember how in the early hours of that morning,
before you arrived, I heard pass down our street
(as I had heard each morning that summer
of my thirtieth year) the clopping sound
of a lone horse pulling a calèche,
his sleepy driver bound for the road
that climbs Mount Royal's slope.

No one can take away that morning
or the exactness of its place in time.
I go there often.
I visit it like a temple.
(Poem by Robyn Sarah, from A Day's Grace.)

As a nation, the United States must confront diminishment of the very thing it says it is exporting to the Middle East: freedom and sanity; truthful expression and vox populi (voice of the people); credibility and justice.

It is dangerous to believe the feel-good exhortation to simply trust your betters -- an invitation issued by those wanting you to believe that they are your betters. It is also dangerous to unconsciously follow the hypnotic decals of folded ribbons pasted on cars; clucking commentators telling you that "we are right and they are wrong"; servile ministers, clergy, and preachers suggesting that God somehow has decided a hit-list for murders and executions and we must bow down to God's political will.

It is not only the cat that is crazed. I'm there too. But feeling crazed is no negation of the fact that what crazes us is itself crazy.

I less and less like the world men are making in their own greed-crazed image.

I'm inclined to love the world that God suffuses with God's authentic reality. ("God," that is, what used to be called God when God belonged only to God and humans hadn't concieved the skills of advertisement, public relations, and persuasion). The word, name, and notion "God" has itself been stolen from its sanctuary, reconstituted, and re-introduced into the marketplace as a
modifier of ambition and insincere self-importance. This ersatz God suffers greed in the forms of government, media, sports, corporate profiteers, corrupt law enforcement, and imprecations to trust, trust, trust.

A more radical consciousness is called for in order to save, to retrieve from desolation, our true nature.
#36. My God struggles on without certainty. Will he conquer? Will he be conquered? Nothing in the Universe is certain. He flings himself into uncertainty; he gambles all his destiny at every moment.
#37. He clings to warm bodies; he has no other bulwark. He shouts for help; he proclaims mobilization throughout the Universe.
#38. It is our duty, on hearing his Cry, to run under his flag, to fight by his side, to be lost or to be saved with him.
#39. God is imperiled. He is not almighty, that we may cross our hands, waiting for certain victory. He is not all-holy, that we may wait trustingly for him to pity and to save us.
#40. Within the province of our ephemeral flesh all of God is imperiled. He cannot be saved unless we save him with our own struggles; nor can we be saved unless he is saved.
#41. We are one. From the blind worm in the depths of the ocean to the endless arena of the Galaxy, only one person struggles and is imperiled: You. And within your small and earthen breast only one thing struggles and is imperiled: the Universe.
(from THE ACTION, The Relationship Between God and Man, in THE SAVIORS OF GOD, SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, by Nikos Kazantzakis, Translated by Kimon Friar)

Are we up for it?

Do not believe those-who-pretend-God.

Enter true relationship.

Make this our meditation.

Someone writes, asking: "Forgetfulness of 'What'? That is the question. Can you answer this?"

The German word "Seinsvergessenheit" means "forgetfulness of being."

Introduction
One of the most serious charges that Heidegger leveled against the entire history of Western philosophy is Seinsvergessenheit or the oblivion of Being. This oblivion of Being is very evident in the philosophical field called metaphysics. It is rather quite paradoxical that metaphysics whose subject matter is Being can be forgetful of Being. However, according to Heidegger, it is precisely because Western metaphysics is concerned with the difference between Being and beings that metaphysics has forgotten that which grants the difference. It is the dif-ference that grants the difference between Being and beings that Heidegger says is and should be the concern of thought. In Heidegger's reckoning only the Pre-Socratics came close to thinking about this dif-ference and after them the entire history of Western philosophy has not thought about this dif-ference.
(from The Oblivion of Being: An Overview of Metaphysics and Mysticism in Aquinas, Eckhart and Heidegger, by Ernesto A. Lapitan Jr., O.P.)

Mu-ge the cat tears at papers under boots next to woodstove. Sando sleeps on daybed. Britta (visiting German Shepherd) lays down behind my chair as the tearing begins. Cesco is in middle room in front of last night's cooled ashes. David Steindl-Rast converses with Ken Wilber about "Evolutionary Panentheism: A Godview for Today's World."

The fire in woodstove is slow to take hold. So too is a Godview that empowers. One's "ultimate concern" is one's Godview.

If people want to do the finest thing in the world, nothing compares to learning. If they want to be the best of learners, nothing compares to learning the Way. Master Zhu said, “Learning is for seeking the Way; what is the use of learning otherwise?”
- Anon

What have we forgotten? Heidegger says "Being." What is Being? (A fine tautological question!) Being is what is holding us as we ask the question. Being is what is, as it is.

I might not always like what is. That is part of my argument with God and my argument with myself. I want "what is" not to be all of what is, but an edited and tidied version of the whole picture.

A woman and son stop by for tea and playtime with dogs. The boy and dogs play hard outside and in with snow and tennis balls. She and I talk about her mother who receives hospice care, and her father recovering from heart attack. She tries to make sense of all the confusion -- long trips to their residence several states away, medical information, wanting mom to speak more about the critical brevity of time remaining, seeking solace and companionship in the process.

It is the relationship that counts. Not the words, not the neat schedule, not even settling on a location for care. It is the relationship between daughter and parents at this time, during the confusion, in the face of uncertain outcomes -- the relationship, the being-there through this time that matters most. Everything else is whiskbroom sweeping up details.

Rabbi Marc Gafni, talking with Ken Wilber, speaks of being "on the inside of God's face" and "fullness of presence," "participating in the yearning force of being," and "the experience of interconnectivity, the all in the all." He calls this The Erotic Essence of Existence.

This inner yearning fullness experience -- this, I submit, is remembrance of Being.

Mothers, fathers, lovers, and children -- all in all -- are the "What?" that forgetfulness tries to erase from eros and awareness.

We are meant to live inside Being, an erotic inner life that realizes the relationship of each to each as it is occurring.

The woman and boy have gone. Mu-ge sleeps on my lap; Sando on bed, Britta on floor to my left; Cesco on rug behind chair. The energetic boy has worn them out.

John Macquarrie, Mystical Theologian, has said that God is Reality.

Remember this. This is the lovely face of God. We dwell therein.

Silent sitting in cabin tonight was silent and still. Four of us. Sitting, walking, chanting. Bell chant at end.

Walking snow path to house, collecting lanterns, hanging them on beam in barn.

Reading Thich Nhat Hanh and Ayya Khema. Nhat Hanh writes:
To shed light on all things? This is the point of departure. If I live without mindfulness, in forgetfulness, I am, as Albert Camus says in his novel The Stranger, living "like a dead person." The ancient Zen masters used to say, "If we live in forgetfulness, we die in a dream." (--in "Necessary Awareness")

Ayya Khema writes:
The emotional aspect of ourselves is of such great importance that its purification is the basis for a harmonious and peaceful life, and also for good meditation.
(--in "Heart Essence")
Our thinking, she says, is dependent on our feelings.

Soup and bread with ten minute silence. Then we talk.

What we say is about our practice. Personal, public, practice.

Each time I go upstairs or come down stairs I bow in the direction of front window altar.

Bowing to that which is within, I make the bow exterior.

In this way, in each bow, nothing is forgotten.

Snow is white whale.

The westering sun
Flares in the willow silk;
The river meanders far off
From the hushed pavilion.
Who, after parting,
Will comfort the weary traveler?
There is only spring wind rising
Where the road forks.
- Chiao-jan (730-799)

Snow dominates mountains and flattens concave bowl between. No chasing nor finishing this fish. He swims the slender valley into Hosmer Pond without touching water. Plows push him thither, yon, and laughably scar small segments of skin.

J.D. McClatchy says that Herman Melville made $556.37 in his lifetime from his novel Moby Dick.

"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true." (--HACKLUYT, in Moby Dick -- or The Whale, by Herman Melville, ETYMOLOGY.)

In prison yesterday we conversed the struggle of learning. We pondered a quote Jacob Bronowski used in The Ascent of Man, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." (quoting Oliver Cromwell, English general & politician, 1599 - 1658). Charlie and Michael are struggling to reframe their thoughts as representatives of the NAACP chapter so to negotiate through institutional seas. Greg, Saskia, and I joined them in Bronowski's meditation at Auschwitz.

In the chapter "Knowledge or Certainty" Bronowski says:
"I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people." (in the 1973 BBC series "The Ascent of Man,")

Certainty stops thinking. Knowledge continuously explores possibilities. We spoke of the need for continual compassionate invitation of those in institutional power to actively engage those seeking to learn. Charlie said, "What I hear is that although we might not be compatible, we can be compassionate."

"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great wales." --GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON. in Moby Dick -- or The Whale, by Herman Melville, EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).

The fable takes place in a Warren pond, with pods for men who've learned to kill. They too know snow. They are in the belly of snow. Melville and Ishmael strain to see the sea as it is, and find a way to swim away with mind and heart, life and limb, still intact.

There is no in or out. Both inmate and outmate undergo snow storm. Does each settle into separate sea? Or are we mates all? No longer in thrall -- but, partnering through a squall?

White wale -- can we faintly hear "Thar she blows!"?
["Wale" = One of the heavy planks or strakes extending along the sides of a wooden ship. Or, A mark raised on the skin, as by a whip; a weal or welt. American Heritage Dictionary]

It is a conceit to note snow, prison, concentration camp, and learning -- alongside one another.

The mistakes we make and the mistaken responses taken as result are often twisted like ropes securing us to uncertain and submerged consequences.

Snow covers everything this late winter Saturday.

Spring, they say, soon will surface.

Snow will swim to deeper place.

Water waits under all.

Retrieve "H" -- add to "elp", "oly", "ospitality", and "eaven"

We have to touch people.

The question Gale poses at the end of her new book is a good place to begin. She asks:

and
what
is

BEYOND
our
Universe,

our
Matrix
of
light?
(- Gale Albury)

If we would learn to live in this contemporary existence, we would do well to dwell awhile within this question. "What Is" is our meditation -- our inquiry, our beginning, our dwelling place, and our destination.

Looking for Immortals

At the stream’s source,
The path leads on
To gray cliffs.

Everywhere,
Among blossoming apricot trees,
Dwell immortals.

A hermit says,
“More can be found
on West Peak,

and two or three
have their home
in the clouds.”
- Chang chi (776-829)

These immortals are about us everywhere. They sit where they are, reading this. They stand to get water. They ask, "Am I an immortal?" They turn around to see if anyone else has heard them ask. They leave their house, walk across sun-bright ground-snow, and wander off into their day.

Gale has written in Memories of MU:
Once we sang to each other empathically. Once we had no names, no identities, and yet we knew each other intimately. Once we understood each others' hearts, thoughts, and emotions.

Identity was not important to us back then. We were individual; autonomous. We worked singularly and together. Our awareness' were at times singular and at times collective. All experiences were revelations. We reveled in the sights, sounds, and smells of Earth. She filled our senses to overflowing and we beamed in our happiness.

So, identity being so unimportant, we focused our attention all around us, watching carefully to see where and when our energies were needed. Our experience came from the end results of the energy influences around us. We lived to enhance the life of Mother Earth.
(from Memories of MU, By Gale Albury, c.2004, TEA Printers and Publishers, Rockland, Maine)

As spring tarries weaving her way toward Bald Mountain, chickadee, nuthatch, bluejay, and mourning dove, come for seed over deep snow through clear sunlight.

Our Matrix --
["A surrounding substance within which something else originates, develops, or is contained. The womb." (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)]

Of light.

"Self and society," wrote Charles Horton Cooley, "are twin-born."

Why are hermits so few? Even those who are hermits -- why are they so suspect?

As Sherlock Holmes would say, "It is simplicity itself." (Umberto Eco points out that nowhere in the corpus of Arthur Conan Doyle is the phrase "It's elementary!" used.)

Hermits hide from mankind
Most go to the mountains to sleep
Where green vines wind through woods
And jade gorges echo unbroken
Higher and higher enraptured
On and on simply free
Free of what stains the world
Minds pure like the white lotus
- Han shan

While enjoying a measure of solitude and slow return to better health I read a play written by someone who attends conversations at the shop. It speaks of unfamiliar knowledge about history, money, power, and those who know the seldom explicated rule of how the world is negotiated and those who do it well generations apace.

That doesn't happen in this hermitage. Here, this morning, wind rattles bellchime out barnside window, nuthatch lands on screen to drink from icicle hanging in sunlight from gutter above dooryard window, and, I don't care if I ever emerge from seclusion into a more socially understandable set of occurrences. Here the world is not negotiated -- the world is seen as a river might be seen following its impulse, flowing past a hollow from which mere watchfulness blesses with noting attention what is passing enroute elsewhere.

The hermit, in this hollow, can only marvel at the breadth and enormous diversity that passes on each floe toward the far sea. Everything, in time, will reach the sea. No need board any passing ice-floe to ride the length of passage. The hermit does not make the overt trip -- he retains the hollow as his dwelling.

"Self and society," wrote Cooley, "are twin-born." This emphasis on the organic link and the indissoluble connection between self and society is the theme of most of Cooley's writings and remains the crucial contribution he made to modern social psychology and sociology.

Cooley argued that a person's self grows out of a person's commerce with others. "The social origin of his life comes by the pathway of intercourse with other persons." The self, to Cooley, is not first individual and then social; it arises dialectically through communication. One's consciousness of himself is a reflection of the ideas about himself that he attributes to other minds; thus, there can be no isolated selves. "There is no sense of 'I' without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they. (-- Charles Horton Cooley, 1864-1929) http://www.bolender.com/Sociological%20Theory/Cooley,%20Charles%20Horton/
cooley,_charles_horton.htm

There are no isolated selves. Whether rushing headlong across some track of chosen commerce, or nestling quietly in watchful stillness -- no one is separate from another. It is noteworthy that our common experience is separation. The world of appearance seems to yield feelings of distinct and isolated existence in the world even though we exist alongside each other and engage in efforts to bridge the distance and make inroads for intimacy and community.

The hermit learns midwifery. What comes into being via hermit ministration is a new incarnation of that which is twin-born. Self and society reflect one another. What the maieutic hermit allows to emerge is a beginning embodiment that is itself a reflecting place. When we think of a reflecting place we imagine a mirror, or plate glass into which we gaze and receive back what has been given there. The hermit, as reflecting place, is not that type of image-throwing object.

The hermit is the looking-place. The hermit, watching from itself, lets pass through the singularity of each being there. Nothing is thrown back; nothing is held back. Nor is there any subject/object dispersion. Rather, the looking-place which is the hermit resembles no notion we know. Conceive, if you will, a looking-place wherein there is no looking out nor any looking in -- instead, there is only looking-itself. Looking "as" replaces looking "at."

Charles Horton Cooley said, "The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse."

This is the mind of the hermit. Arrivals and departures are noted well. The hermit's mind is what is passing through this.

This. And this. Even, this.

There...is no place to go.

This is why I am staying here.

Mind...World -- not two things.

If one would attain the perfection of purity,
One must purify one’s mind.
As one’s mind is purified,
So the buddha-land is purified.
- Vimalakirti Sutra

If you want to know the condition of the world, look at the condition of your mind.

Tonight in Maine howling wind, snow, and ice. A raw raging emptiness as winter nears end.

There is no saving the world. There is only clearing one's mind. When mind becomes clear, world becomes transparent.

Are we clear about this?

Willing to see this world...through?

If we wake from a bad dream, will we be willing to soon dream again?

"There is a quick reliance on the use of lethal force." That's what the man in Seattle said on the News Hour tonight about military fire at checkpoints in Iraq.

Here's the thing about this war in Iraq -- the United States military have taken to themselves the power over lives of anybody at any time in any place in that unfortunate country. It's a heady power. It is often described as arrogance, the same arrogance rife within the American administration. It reminds one of an old and antiquated notion held about God.

In my dream I saw
The spring wind gently shaking
Blossoms from a tree;
And even now, though I’m awake,
There’s motion, trembling in my chest.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

We must wake up. We must enter a new understanding of dream.

The God of arrogant absolute power is a notion of deity falling into decay. So too, the behavior of nations -- whether in the name of dictatorship, democracy, or demagoguery -- is decadent remnant of a theological position. That position claims that whatever is done in the name of good is permissible; whatever undertaken in the name of God is right. God and good are co-opted. So now there is a choice: rehabilitate a decaying notion of God and attempt to convert believers in a corrupt interpretation to a more humane view of human existence; or allow the deterioration of a self-destructive concept of God and state to collapse under its own instability and concentrate energy on creating a new experience of human life and moral agency based on a more foundational reliance on ontological and existential ground.

Would it be too radical an experience to let all concepts and notions of God go? And turn instead to open encounter with the reality of what-is? This encounter would be completely reliant on direct intuitive experience of what is actually there, unencumbered by interpretative theological formula, yet open to careful scrutiny and intelligent investigation. Let's not call this view the substitution of theology with science. Let's think of it as a dreaming poetry of illuminative intuitive seeing.

At one moment in Identitat und Differenz --unique, so far as I am aware, in Heidegger's whole writings --the master concedes with brusque humor that the ontological quest, the attempt to separate Being from beings, is a sort of futile game, a circular catch-as-catch-can. Even this, of course, would not necessarily mean that the game had not been worth playing, that it did not engage the most bracing and ennobling of human impulses. But it would be a bleak tally.
There can, however, be another approach to the tautological core of Martin Heidegger's philosophy of Being. Sein ist Sein and the rejection of paraphrase or logical exposition have their exact precedent in the ontological finality of theology. Formally, as we have seen, they are the absolute equivalent to the Self-utterance and Self-definition of the Deity -- I am that which I am -- and to the refusal, as complete in Kant as it is in the Old Testament itself, to anatomize, to decompose analytically the transcendent oneness of the divine. Heidegger is determined to think outside theology. He insists that his fundamental ontology is extratheological, that it has absolutely nothing to tell us, either way, of the existence or attributes of God. It is, however, my own experience that Heidegger's paradigm and expression of Being, of the ontological cut between Being and beings, adapts at almost every point to the substitution of "God" for the term Sein. This does not prove that such substitution is latent in Heidegger's design. He would repudiate it. But it does mean, to this reader at least, that the philosophy, the sociology, the poetics and, at some opaque level, the politics of Heidegger embody and articulate an "after," or "post-theology."
(pp.155-6, in Martin Heidegger, by George Steiner)

Perhaps the usurpation of deity is a common flaw of human ambition. It is misdirection to 'myself' what belongs only to 'itself.' Appropriating power is the beginning of the illusion of ownership. Whole swathes of men periodically fall into the desolating crevice of false accomplishment thinking they are on the brink of ambitious success. Their fall is far and fierce, trailing behind them tears and sorrow of many who thought them great. The grief of nations is predicated on the foolish arrogance of unrestrained ideologues and messiahs. What we need is something more ordinary. We need poets and artists, musicians and craftspeople, thinkers and generous bestowers of hospitality. We need powerful dreamers -- not dreams of power.

Dreams of spring blossoms.

A heart-felt experience.

Something that is itself.

Well within itself.

Call this into Being.

We need facts more than faith. More than facts or faith, we need a deeper spirituality of question.

It is time to uncover the mind. Faith has often been used as a cover over the mind. This must change.

If we want to throw open the road ahead,
We must first push down the wall that's facing us.
What wall is this?
The wall is in our minds.
If our minds are not covered over,
Then all affairs are open to investigation.
When our intent has been made genuine,
Then our minds are broad and
Our bodies are at ease.
- Hong Yuan (~1533)

For several thousand years we still are not certain what "mind" is and what it does. The Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras lived c. 500 BCE; c. 480-79 BCE. He focused on mind (in Greek, Nous).
We see, then, that the differences which exist in the world as we know it are to be explained by the varying proportions in which the portions are mingled. 'Everything is called that of which it has most in it', though, as a matter of fact, it has everything in it. Snow, for instance, is black as well as white, but we call it white because the white so far exceeds the black. As was natural, the 'things' Anaxagoras chiefly thought of as contained in each 'seed' were the traditional opposites, hot and cold, wet and dry, and so forth. It is of these he is expressly speaking when he says that 'the things in one world are not cut off from one another with a hatchet' (fr. 8). Empedocles had made each of these four opposites a 'root' by itself; each of the 'seeds' of Anaxagoras contains them all. In this way he thought he could explain nutrition and growth; for it is clear that the product of a number of 'seeds' might present quite a different proportion of the opposites than any one of them if they were taken severally.

The other problem, that of the source of motion, still remains. How are we to pass from the state of the world when all things were together to the manifold reality we know? Like Empedocles, Anaxagoras looked to the microcosm for a suggestion as to the source of motion, but he found one such source sufficient for his purpose. He called it Mind (nous) -- pure, passionless reason. It is the source of motion as well as of knowledge in us. He did not, however, succeed in forming the conception of an incorporeal force. Mind, as the cause of motion, is a sort of 'fluid'. It is 'the thinnest of all things' (fr. 12), and, above all, it is 'unmixed', that is to say, it has no portions of other things in it, and this is what gives it the 'mastery', that is, the power both of knowing and of moving other things. Further, it enters into some things and not into others, and that explains the distinction between the animate and the inanimate. At first the seeds lay mingled without order; but nous set the unarranged matter into motion, and thereby created out of chaos an orderly world. The way in which it separates and orders things is by producing a rotatory motion, which begins at the center and spreads further and further. That is really all Anaxagoras had to say about it. Like a true Ionian he tried to give a mechanical explanation of everything he could, and, when once he had got the rotatory motion started, he could leave that to order the rest of the world. (from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/a/anaxagor.htm)

It leads to the question: Does each thing have a mind of its own? In addition, does freedom and truth have to do with the ability to see through one's mind the reality appearing before us, and to act with an engaged integrity with it?

Anaxagoras accepts Parmenides' view that what is, or Being, neither comes into being nor passes out of being. Like Empedocles, Anaxagoras holds that becoming is the result of the combining and separation of imperishable elements. He says in Fr. 17:

"The Hellenes follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation." (Fr. 17)

What appears to be the coming into being and passing away of things is really only the mixture and separation of "things that are," eternal, unchanging elements. Although no statement to this effect is found in the fragments, probably Anaxagoras rejects that idea that nothing can exist, so that there can be no void or empty space.
http://www.abu.nb.ca/Courses/GrPhil/Anaxagoras.htm

We come together and we go apart. This mixture and separation, repeated regularly, fashions and transforms the landscape of human experience. It is a constant flow through Being into Becoming -- over and over again.

In effect, nothing changes.

We can write Sein: Nichts, says Heidegger. But this question is not negative. The Nichts is not nihil. Nothingness is not negation of Being. The very word teaches us that: no-thing-ness signifies a presentness, an existential "thereness" which is not naively enclosed in or circumscribed by any particular extant, specific object. "Das Nichten des Nichts 'ist' das Sein": "the negation of nothingness 'is' Being."
(p.154, Steiner)

We are what we are.

Because Heidegger has been among us, the notion that the asking of questions is the supreme piety of the spirit, and the uncanny idea that abstract thought is man's pre-eminent excellence and burdon have been affirmed.
(p.157, in Martin Heidegger, by George Steiner)

So we ask, again and again: What are we? Who are we? What are we meant to be doing in the world?

We need facts more than faith.

More than facts or faith, we need to question deeply the profound.

For, if we enter the profound with a spirituality of question, something mysterious occurs.

The mystery that occurs is the transformation of the presenting question into seeing presence.

Seeing...Presence!

No other...Nothing more.