Katrina and God! Within each we long to see what is taking place, and who we are.

ACT OF GOD - A natural event, not preventable by any human agency, such as flood, storms, or lightning. Forces of nature that no one has control over, and therefore cannot be held accountable.
This phrase denotes those accidents which arise from physical causes, and which cannot be prevented. (http://www.lectlaw.com/def/a011.htm)

Is that what we conceive God to be: not preventable by any human agency; that which no one has control over; and that which cannot be held accountable?

They call it an "Act of God." Which is curious. I'd rather it was said: "What is taking place is a direct result of what is, given and found, within the whole of life and existence, there and then, experienced and responded to."

Could it be that's what God is? If God is "What Is Taking Place" -- what do we "human beings" respond to what is taking place? Call longs for response; appearance longs for realization. There are no isolated, unrelated events. What arises longs for whole response and wholesome effect. What arises and what responds in this process of wholeness is akin to reciprocality.

Reciprocality is defined as "interchangeable; complementary; alternating." The Way of reciprocality is a Way of Being, a way of God, a way of existence, a way of human and all sentient being. If we are to come to appreciating and dwelling in wholeness, we must consider and follow this way.

What is taking place -- for wholeness -- is dependent on where, when, how, and who is the reciprocity and dynamic interdependent co-origination of what is taking place. In other words, the Alone involves Everyone. That which is Itself is nothing other. What you see is what you get. This calls for opening our eyes to see what is there -- something very difficult, so it seems, for many of us to do.

Perhaps, as an aside, if put in computer terms, we'd come closer to getting the process of coming to any wholeness, temporary or final:
WYSIWYG (pronounced "wizzy-wig", "wuzzy-wig" or "wissy-wig") is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and is used in computing to describe a seamlessness between the appearance of edited content and final product.
The phrase was originated by Jonathan Seybold and popularized at Xerox PARC during the late 1970s when the first WYSIWYG editor, Bravo was created on the Alto. Seybold and the researchers at PARC were simply reappropriating a popular catch phrase of the time originated by "Geraldine", a character on The Flip Wilson Show, (1970-1974). In addition to "What you see is what you get!" This character also popularized "The Devil made me do it!" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG)

Flip -- was he being flip? Or was he flipping the way we think on its head? If what we see is what we get, it is vital to see clearly and openly. If we fail to see what is there, or if we perceive incorrectly what is taking place -- is that when we mutter the phrase "The devil made me do it" and hide in our blindness? Is what we call the "devil" a co-origination of our unwillingness or inability to see with awareness and clarity?

Buddhists help with another perspective:
The doctrine of dependent origination is the key insight upon which the entire teaching of the Buddha rests. The Buddha even went so far as to equate the Dharma itself with dependent origination. "Now this has been said by the Blessed One: 'One who sees dependent origination sees the Dhamma; one who sees the Dhamma sees dependent origination.'" (Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, p. 284) An understanding of dependent origination is integral to having a clear understanding of Buddhism.

Put simply, dependent origination means that all phenomena arise as the result of conditions and cease when those conditions change. The general theory of dependent origination was taught by the Buddha as follows: "When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases." (Connected Discourses, p. 575) So nothing exists as a static, isolated entity. Everything arises and ceases depending on causes and conditions which themselves arise due to causes and conditions. There is no ultimate ground or primordial cause, but a network of causes and conditions. This undercuts the view of a metaphysical selfhood, fixed entity, or substance underlying the constant change which is life.
Dependent origination can be summarized in a few words, but truly understanding what it means and the profound implications of it is something else altogether.

And:
We may be the products of causality but we are also the producers of the very causes which will determine whether we perpetuate suffering or attain liberation. The Buddhist vision of dependent origination is a vision in which sentient beings are not determined by forces beyond their control, but rather are fully integrated in the co-arising of all things and as such are able to take responsibility for themselves and create better conditions for themselves and others by making better causes informed by an awareness of the way things arise in mutual dependence. ("On Dependent Origination," by Ryuei Michael McCormick, http://nichirenscoffeehouse.net/Ryuei/depen-orig.html)

If we were to speak of God, the use of the words "God is love" is a good way of speaking. Perhaps we do not comprehend "love" -- but in that non-comprehension I continue to find it difficult to listen when some, bizarrely, perhaps bitterly, suggest the death and devastation of hurricane Katrina is something fore-ordained and approved by "higher powers" to "cleanse and purify" a region of the world. (These comments are heard about natural disasters, wars, and diseases. Presumably something, according to these proclamations, needs "cleansing and purifying" -- euphemisms for death and destruction.) It is hard to understand such rationalizations.

Rationalizations usually emerge equally from those who descry "intellectual" inquiry as insufficient to their "spiritual" understanding. There is a touch of cynicism in the failure of the mental structure of consciousness to comprehend the myth of God. The reality of God, if I understood it, would take the myth to a further consciousness, beyond mental, and surround it with a new wholeness. Of course, words cannot hold the fullness of anything. They point. So do the words "myth" or "reality" only point toward what is taking place in that which we call "God."

The fire pit is cold
The stone bed like ice
The clay censor died
Before the end of night
The world of sound is
Silent, my mind
Completely still
And now it seems
My body exists inside
- Han-shan Te-ch'ing (1546-1623)

A disaster is a disaster. They prove unfortunate in many ways: the act itself, the aftermath, and the explanation. We have grown accustomed to blaming and shaming any and all associated with the events undergone -- from looting to lawsuits, from inadequate fore-knowledge to inappropriate response, from sex to sickness, from desire to survive at the expense of others to believing the egoistic delusion that might is right, or, finally, from fear of goodness to love of power. Disasters all. Disaster begins when we move awareness away from the stars, the planets, the suns and vast beyondness of deep and incomprehensible Being. Disaster begins when we reduce Being to personal desire.

Some say global warming factors in. If so, fie on those who know better yet refuse for political and economic reasons to act responsibly to carefully study and assess the matter, and urge changing our way of life when results call for it.

There isn't much that can be said of God. (If my intent in saying the previous sentence is honorable, the emphasis should be more on what cannot be "said" and less on there cannot be "God.")

Our hearts open and stay open for all touched by the hurricane and its aftermath. Our hearts do likewise for all those in Iraq suffering death and pain resulting from the no-act-of-no-God awfulness of invasion, war, and aftermath. Our hearts remain open and prayerful for these as well as all suffering ravages of disease, e.g. AIDS in Africa, alcoholism, cancer, and depression world-round.

For anyone interested in God, a re-reading of Han-shan is called for. Perhaps, using literary transparency, Han-shan might be God telling us of God's whereabouts:
The world of sound is
Silent, my mind
Completely still
And now it seems
My body exists inside

At this time, in this place, we look, openly.

Inside.

Out.

All around.

What are we at heart?

Whenever you seek Zen,
your mind ground must
be even and straight,
and your mind and speech
must be in accord.
Since your mind and speech
are straightforward,
your states are thus
consistent from start to finish,
without any petty details.
- Foyan (1067 -- 1120)

As things become clearer, it is more obvious that nothing matters more than spirit -- and that spirit and matter are not separate. If there is an attraction to monastic life it is because it is a life of wholeness. However attractive the alternative of cutting oneself off from the wholeness of life, it is not the way of monastic life. Wholeness is found in a humble affirmation of one's own wholeness. The dark and the light, the inner and the outer, the knowing and the feeling, the divine and the earthly, finally, the true self and the not-yet self.

A Trappist Abbot speaks about being momentarily surprised by God:
In fact, aren't such surprising moments what all our spiritual practices are meant to prepare us for? Not in any causal sense of making something happen, but in the sense of opening our inner experience, our inner senses to God's presence - God's loving ownership and personal desire for each one of us.

THE LORD SHALL BE YOUR LIGHT FOREVER, YOUR GOD SHALL BE YOUR GLORY. Isaiah 60.19

I am convinced that this is what monastic life is all about. Fundamentally, all the monastic practices and discipline are aimed at a continual availability to be surprised by God's overwhelming, erupting desire for us. And such eruptions are by no means limited to formal times of prayer. God can catch us off guard (in fact being "off guard" is really another name for this availability) anywhere and anytime - while praying, reading, working or relating with the brothers.
(Fr. Damian, Abbot, St. Joseph's Abbey, Spencer MA)

In Meetingbrook Hermitage's circumambulation, men and women, sentient beings, matter itself -- all manner of earthly reality -- turn around a center which sustains and nourishes its surroundings. Holy Spirit is true-center of spiritual life.

In constant reference to that center, and in hopeful connection with that center, we walk about our days and nights. The monastic heart and mind in the world has as its practice the remembering, embodying, and ultimate dissolving surrender to the Holy Spirit as it is in this present reality.

This dissolving -- i.e. the passing into, releasing into, and emptying into the root reality of our spiritual life -- is a daily practice that calls for constant and connected awareness of sacred reality passing through, releasing into and through, and emptying out from and through this being we refer to as our self. "Self" is a convenient word -- it is not something that exists apart from its ground. We might be distinct, but we are not separate. (We might distinguish one from another, but not disunite.)

A woman at the shop will often say that spiritual reality is changing everything -- not what we think. She emphasizes spiritual reality over intellectual matters. If we have argument, it is based on wishing not to separate biological, social, and intellectual functions from spiritual. There's a temptation, I sense, to emphasize one above the others -- in her instance, the spiritual. In my instance, there is an attempt to see how all our functions are integral to one another. "Spiritual" is not a separate, not a desired end at the expense of the biological, social, and intellectual. (We'll be reading Robert Pirsig's Lila in ethics class. He'll rake our confusion over the coals of insight.)

At heart we are here and now. At heart we are "this."

If we are to live the life of the heart, we must allow our heart to be surprised by the holy spirit -- that is, the wholeness of life shone through with light and love.

We need to stop worrying whether we are coming to life or beginning to die. We are doing both at the same instant and in this very place.

It is the monastic call to dwell in the house of God. Teresa of Avila tells us the light of God is the center of who we are. It is the longing of the monastic to allow that light to shine through to every place light can reach.

There is no place light is unwilling to reach through the heart open to compassion.

It is the monastic call to have the heart for it.

Practice, prayer, and perseverance.

From start to finish.

Off guard.

The vet says it is time to spoil Sando. Her cancer returns and this time will go away with her. She's a good dog.

Yesterday Sando, Cesco, along with the cat Mu-ge, walked the mountain path. This is just the second time the cat made the round with us.

We walk together. When walking is finished, and I think back, I'll remember that we walked together.

This moment, and this, then this. The simple and mere fact of being alive.

This morning before prison, before donuts, communion at St Bernard's, Rockland.

The simple, and mere, fact of it.

Let's doubt anyone calling themselves Christian.

Many people wear a sign saying "I am a Christian" or call out loudly "I am saved, born again, washed in the blood of the lamb" -- and expect others to stop dead and listen to the next set of words they proclaim following presentation of their credentials. There's a better way to recognize a Christian. That way is less obvious and less noisy.

Reading Stanley M. Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University, writing in Time Magazine just before the invasion of Iraq in the March 3, 2003 issue: "No, This War Would Not Be Moral" (a companion article to 'Yes, a War Would Be Moral' by Andrew Sullivan)

Hauerwas wrote:

March 3, 2003
By: Stanley Hauerwas (in Time Magazine/Time.Com)

No, This War Would Not Be Moral
(a companion article to 'Yes, a War Would Be Moral' by Andrew Sullivan)

The impending war against Saddam Hussein seems morally coherent to many because Saddam is "evil." After all, who in the world is against eliminating evil? Well, I am, if war is the means for its elimination. I am an advocate of Christian nonviolence, but I don't think that means I have nothing to say about the war fever gripping much of America. I believe that Christians, of all people, should worry when the President of the United States uses the word evil to justify war.

I have no doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator. And I am well aware that he has failed to live up to the conditions of the 1991 truce. But I doubt that any of this makes him more "evil" than a number of other current officeholders around the world. Nor do I understand why President George W. Bush thinks it is the job of the U.S. to eliminate brutal dictators. America's foreign policy has often supported these same brutal dictators -- including Saddam -- when they have been on "our side." Bush's use of the word evil comes close to being evil -- to the extent that it gives this war a religious justification (which Christians should resist). For Christians, the proper home for the language of evil is the liturgy: it is God who deals with evil, and it's presumptuous for humans to assume that our task is to do what only God can do. Advocates of "just war" should be the first to object to the language of evil because that characterization threatens to turn war into a crusade.

Does that mean there is nothing we can do? No, I think that a lot can be done -- once we free our imaginations from the presumption that the only alternative is capitulation or war. Nonviolence means finding alternatives to the notion that it is ultimately a matter of kill or be killed. Christians might consider, for example, asking the many Christians in Iraq what we can do to make their lives more bearable. A small step, to be sure, but peace is made from small steps.

At the same time, we must insist on being told the truth about why this war seems so inevitable. The moral justifications for war against Saddam would surely lack any persuasive power had Sept. 11, 2001, not happened. As Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has rightly observed, any attempt to sustain truthful speech was lost as soon as the word war was used to describe the events of Sept. 11. What happened on that day was not war; it was murder. In his rush to assure the American people that everything could return to normal, President Bush declared a "war on terrorism." Oddly, knowing we are at war makes many Americans feel safe. Thus the metaphorical wars against drugs and crime are now stretched beyond all sense to become a war on terrorism. It's not clear, however, what it means to fight a war against terrorism. How do you fight a war against a phantom?

What a gift Bush gave Osama bin Laden. Prior to the President's declaration of war, bin Laden had been a murderer. But Bush's response made bin Laden what he so desperately wanted to be -- a warrior. And by declaring war against terrorism, Bush was able to fight an undeclared war against Afghanistan. Now his Administration is trying to justify an impending war against Iraq as a continuation of the war against terrorism.

G.K. Chesterton once observed that America is a nation with the soul of a church. Bush's use of religious rhetoric seems to confirm this view. None of this is good news for Christians, however, because it tempts us to confuse Christianity with America. As a result, Christians fail to be what God has called us to be: agents of truthful speech in a world of mendacity. The identification of cross and flag after Sept. 11 needs to be called what it is: idolatry. We are often told that America is a great country and that Americans are a good people. I am willing to believe that Americans want to be good, but goodness requires that we refuse to lie to ourselves and our neighbors about the assumed righteousness of our cause.

That the world is dangerous should not be surprising news to Christians who are told at the beginning of Lent that we are dust. If Christians could remember that we have not been created to live forever, we might be able to help ourselves and our non-Christian brothers and sisters to speak more modestly and, thus, more truthfully and save ourselves from the alleged necessity of war against "evil."
(Stanley Hauerwas is a professor of theological ethics at Duke University Divinity School)

Someone has said there was only one Christian (Jesus) with two or three who've come close (Francis? Gandhi? Teresa? the man or woman you know who just might be?) Everyone else has filled out a form, paid a fee, and gotten a membership card. Membership is no guarantee of belonging or owning. Like a lottery ticket, you pays your money and you takes your chances -- but as with most lotteries, chances are you won't get it.

No, it is doubtful anyone can call themselves Christian.

What then? How do we come to being, to becoming, Christian?

I don't know. But I'll venture a guess.

When someone sees Christ through you. When someone hears Christ through you. When someone feels Christ through you.

Maybe that's what we're looking for. When someone calls Christ through you. It is not something you do; it is something you are without knowing. The matter is relational.
Christ is related through us without our impeding or imposing.

To "relate" is to establish or demonstrate a connection between.

Christ is relative. Christ is the between. You and me.

War blinds its authors, they do not see the evil they unleash; in their blind groping the authors of war and assassination do not see Christ, nor is Christ seen through them.

Doubt gives pause, as we look though.

May we be relatively transparent so as to be seen through.

When we live in the open, there is no protection nor worry. We are life's carefree and uncertain reality. If you want security, there is none here. At this news, we can either dance or weep. Let's do both.

feather, leg on trail
cat has eaten yellow finch --
nothing moves -- raindrops
(-haiku, wfh)

I have fallen into retreat. Bob would say, "Why not go forward?" He's like that.

Ordering books for ethics course at the prison. I choose four novels, Kristof Kieslowski 10 video Decalogue, Plato, Aristotle, G.E. Moore, Emerson, James, and much more. Someone said that teaching ethics in prison would be interesting. Anytime anyone thinks about ethics, without rote or retaliatory emphasis -- that's interesting. Most like right or wrong, black or white. Few seem willing to look directly into the ambiguity and uncertainty of human existence.

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)

Chickadee on cedar branch -- soaking open sunflower seed.

Reading Karl Stern on Descartes, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, and Goethe. Reading Jean Gebser on the aperspectival, on the concretion of the spiritual. Thinking of other course on art, being, science, living -- whether and how self is discovered.

Something breaks open. Or, perhaps, burns away. At least, turns in. If the quiet was any quieter, even with splashing sounds of tires and eaves drippings, there would be no need of anyone standing out from reality itself.

Elsewhere, there is gunfire and shouts of fear -- decisions whether to kill immediately figures approaching, or the click of detonating explosives screaming out their woeful cry, "I kill you!"

There is no security. Not a moment's worth. Still, we dance as well as weep. We pray as well as sleep.

We watch. Breaking open. Burning away.

barn's burnt down
now
I can see the moon
(Haiku by Masahide, tr. by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoti)

See through. Be free from time. Decree oneself inseparate from the whole of it.

Consciousness itself surrendering to what is in the world.

This time, with love.

Nothing on the inside; nothing outside. Sometimes it all just disappears.

Untitled

Each time I go outside
the world is different.
This has happened all my life.

*
The clock stopped at 5:30
for three months.
Now it's always time to quit work,
have a drink, cook dinner.

*
"What I would do for wisdom,"
I cried out as a young man.
Evidently not much. Or so it seems.
Even on walks I follow the dog.

*
Old friend,
perhaps we work too hard
at being remembered.
(From Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser. c.2003 by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser.)

What I remember from the time before disappearance is less than you'd think.

Try this: open your hand. Now the other hand. Look at your palms. The nothing there is what we have given, and what we receive.

There's nothing to hold on to. Nothing to let go. Drop that too.

God give you pardon from gratitude
and other mild forms of servitude

and make peace for all of us
with what is easy.
(poem by Robert Creeley)

Then, they say, comes prayer. Then, they also say, comes mere watchfulness.

The unseen God is seeing itself. No looking for gratitude.

Forget everything. Remember this.

Let me stumble into
not the confession but
the obsession I begin with
now. For you

also (also)
some time beyond place, or
place beyond time, no
mind left to

say anything at all,
that face gone, now.
Into the company of love
it all returns.
(from poem "For Love" by Robert Creeley)

For all those who no longer find it important to show up, to be remembered, or say anything at all -- try this.

Be easy with yourself.

Make peace.

Watch.

Standing alone, smoke rising from incense stick in hand, four bows in four directions. Three bells, sitting begins.

Flat Lake cold penetrates
Water-lily clothes
The mountain by the lake
Is neither right nor wrong
Dusty tracks all end, and
The world is far away.
White clouds and gulls
Have no hidden plans.
- Han-shan Te-ch'ing (1546-1623)

Two women, one man, two dogs, and a cat.

Warm damp fog drapes Ragged and Bald Mountains.

If there was anything to say it would probably not need saying. Cat mewed and was let out. Dog barked and was rolled a zafu. Heart Sutra chanted with help of voices in moderate pace. Candles extinguished. Windows closed. Cabin screen door held by roller latch.

Now, hours later, Sando gets medicine.

Day closes itself with night.

It is merely practice.

Chaos and emptiness, says the once radical now neo-conservative man on C-Span. He is recovering from prostate cancer. He finds a new perspective on life. He thinks conspiracy theories are just attempts to impose order and control on the world. So too is the activist imposition of one's own ideology on matters. He's an agnostic. Others, he says, prayed him through.

I like it when one-sided thinkers fall over into the other side. They leap the middle as through there were none.

He said that a religious thinker told him: "Believer and non-believer stand together, neither see God."

Earlier the doctor who passionately warns against the real dangers of nuclear weapons and possible use of them said: "It is intrinsic in every soul -- that's where we know the right thing to do."

For these two, without postulating a God (separate or out there), there is that of God in everyone and everything.

She says we must not practice psychic numbing, rather, we ought to be psychologically uncomfortable with the way everything is endangered and all powers of destruction are on the table.

All sentient beings are essentially Buddhas.
As with water and ice, there is no ice without water;
apart from sentient beings, there are no Buddhas.
Not knowing how close the truth is,
we seek it far away

--what a pity!
(- Hakuin)

The heavy-headed sunflowers are held aloft by yellow cord around slats encircling birdfeeder.

What has been given, gives back.

What are we...

Giving?

A light frost, he said in his call, covered his field, away in the county last night.

Becoming a buddha is easy
But ending illusions is hard
So many frosted moonlit nights
I've sat and felt the cold before dawn.
- Shih-wu (1272-1352)

Diversion. To divert is to turn aside.

Inversion. To invert, to turn inside out or upside down.

The current coldness in the world precedes what soon will dawn.

Conversation. It dawns on us during the turns we take and exchanges we make while in one another's company.

Real prayer whiles away, sits till bedtime, finally bows, closes eyes.

Falls into oneself.

There's nothing romantic about being homeless. The tragedy is rife in cities everywhere. But some additional homeless consideration occurs when we allow the don't-know mind to wander unfamiliar roads.

And Jesus said to him,
"Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests,
But the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head."
(Luke 9:58)

Belief is an unfamiliar road. We wander belief hoping it will lead us home. It is a road, only a road, and not to be confused with home itself. Once we pass through the doorway -- what happens then? Can we be home and on the road at the same time?

The substance of a sage
Is nameless and cannot be spoken of;
The empty door of truth as it really is
Cannot be tarried in.
- Pai-chang (720-814)

Home is a nameless place.

Yet, even when we imagine we are home, there is still work to do.

from "Album"

My son has built a tent-cabin
in the front room and invited the dog.

He has constructed an imaginary machine,
with an invisible lever, for catching the fog.

Fallen clouds drifting through the valley
along the river bottom, up and over the lines

and folds and contours of the hills, coulees
and benches, combed by cottonwoods and pines,

breaking softly against the windows
like thought or breath, then passing on,

flowing, opaque body of air, and we are both
caught up in this elemental conversation

of house and fog. The fog got in the house,
he says. I am catching it with this.
(Poem: from "Album" by Greg Pape, from American Flamingo. © Southern Illinois University Press.)

The empty door of truth is passed through and through.

For some, road is home.

For others, home is where we always are, enroute elsewhere

We need to welcome one another -- right where each is.

This hospitable welcoming is home itself.

Taize chant: Kyrie Eleison!

When and how is something itself?

News comes into the middle of that question:

Taize founder killed

Aug. 17 (CWNews.com) - Brother Roger, the founder and leader of the ecumenical Taize community, was killed by a knife-wielding attacker during a prayer service in France on August 16.

A Protestant theologian, Roger Schutz was 25 when he first set up an ecumenical house of prayer in Taize, a village near Cluny in eastern France, in 1940. At first the community was a haven for refugees-- particularly Jews escaping the Nazi regime-- during World War II. Over the years, the Taize community became established as an ecumenical monastery, with Brother Roger as its prior, and more than 100 members, including both Catholics and Protestants. The Taize community, dedicated to reconciliation among Christians, attracts thousands of visitors each year, and Brother Rogers' books of prayers and meditations have proved popular among Christians of many different denominations.

A man at the shop last evening was making the case that all these things that occur -- war, killings, disturbances -- don't matter. In his worldview too much is made of human activities. I'm sure he was trying to look from a detached viewpoint -- but I don't see it; I don't see from that kind of detachment. It is my sense that we are embodied, intimate, and, thereby, inseparate.

I listen to Taize chant. The simple tone and repetition! Perhaps Brother Roger has fallen into water of spirit, and is now spirit of water.

Dogen Zenji reflects on water, on mountain:
Long ago, when the Preceptor Decheng suddenly left Yueshan and went to live on the river, he got the sage of Huating River. Is this not hooking a fish? Is it not hooking a person? Is it not hooking water? Is it not hooking himself? That the person got to see Decheng is [because he was] Decheng; Decheng's accepting the person is his meeting the person.

It is not the case simply that there is water in the world; within the world of water there is a world. And this is true not only within water: within clouds as well there is world of sentient beings; within wind there is world of sentient beings; within fire there is world of sentient beings; within earth there is world of sentient beings. Within the dharma realm there is a world of sentient beings; within a single blade of grass there is world of sentient beings; within a single staff there is a world of sentient beings. And wherever there is a world of sentient beings, there, inevitably, is the world of buddhas and ancestors. The reason this so, we should study very carefully.

In this way, water is the palace of the "true dragon"; it is not flowing away. If we regard it only as flowing, the word "flowing" is an insult to water: it is like imposing "not flowing". Water is nothing but water's "real form just as it is". Water is the virtue of water; it is not flowing. In the thorough study of the flowing or the not-flowing of a single [drop of] water, the entirety of the ten thousand things is instantly realized. Among mountains as well, there are mountains hidden in jewels; there are mountains hidden in marshes, mountains hidden in the sky; there are mountains hidden in mountains. There is a study of mountains hidden in hiddenness.

An old buddha has said, "Mountains are mountains and waters are waters."

These words do not say that mountains are mountains; they say that mountains are mountains. Therefore, we should thoroughly study these mountains. When we thoroughly study the mountains, this is the mountain training. Such mountains and waters themselves become wise men and sages.
(Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma, Book 29, Dogen Zenji's The Mountains and Waters Sutra (Sansui kyo), Presented to the assembly, eighteenth day, tenth month, first year of Ninji (1240), at Kannon Dori Kosho Horinji)

"O Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom," repeats the chant on this summer afternoon.

Each person, each thing, is itself. When not, there is suffering. Anytime someone takes or abuses what is not theirs, absence prevails. Suffering is the absence of itself, that is, we cause suffering when we do not honor another's integrity. Most interference that is aimed at partializing another causes suffering. Each must be honored as itself.

"Monks, do not have deluded notions. Heaven is heaven, earth is earth; mountains are mountains, waters are waters; monks are monks, laymen are laymen."
(a saying of the early tenth-century figure Yunmen Wenyan)

The International Herald Tribune reports that, according to the accounts of some, a woman wielding a knife surged out of the crowd and attacked the 90 year old Brother Roger. People in the crowd grabbed the woman, described as a Romanian, and turned her over to police. Brother Roger's throat was cut and he bled profusely and died 15 minutes after the attack.

We share our sorrow for this death. We share our sorrow for the deaths yesterday and today in Iraq, and elsewhere.

Where and how is something itself? This question provides a place to look.

I take walk with the dogs, with the mountain, with the water.

Even if we have what we want, we still have to want what we have.

Girder

The simplest of bridges, a promise
that you will go forward,

that you can come back.
So you cross over.

It says you can come back.
So you go forward.

But even if you come back
then you must go forward.

I am always either going back
or coming forward. There is always

something I have to carry,
something I leave behind.

I am a figure in a logic problem,
standing on one shore

with the things I cannot leave,
looking across at what I cannot have.
Poem: "Girder" by Nan Cohen, from Rope Bridge. )

Of course everything is what it is.

I've been wondering -- if absence of time is presence, how is it someone who has no time for anyone is not there at all?

It is the time of summer the impulse to run away is strong. It is the feast of St Stephen of Hungary. I'd like to go east of St Stephens N.B. CA today. It's running away without going too far.

Not leaving; not having.

Perfectly (oddly put) poised.

"Bodies belong where words are" -- wrote poet Dan Berrigan.

This is a Feast of Assumption meditation.

Whatever happens to our bodies? In Christian tradition, Jesus' went missing. So did Mary's. Where does a body go when it simply disappears? Where will ours go?

My hut settled among neighbors,
I ignore the noise of horses and carts.
You ask how I get along --
My mind remains wide,
So my place is naturally remote.
- Tao Yuan Ming (365 -- 427)

August 15th celebrates, among other things, the Catholic Feast of the Assumption of Mary into heaven, the birthday of Sri Aurobindo, the 5th anniversary of the death of our friend and elder Janet Rhodes, and one final salute on this day to Jo-Ann as she moves into new form of Assumption.

The belief in the corporeal assumption of Mary is founded on the apocryphal treatise "De Obitu S. Dominae," bearing the name of St. John, which belongs however to the fourth or fifth century. It is also found in the book "De Transitu Virginis," falsely ascribed to St. Melito of Sardis, and in a spurious letter attributed to St. Denis the Areopagite. If we consult genuine writings in the East, it is mentioned in the sermons of St. Andrew of Crete, St. John Damascene, St. Modestus of Jerusalem and others. In the West, St. Gregory of Tours (De gloria mart., I, iv) mentions it first. The sermons of St. Jerome and St. Augustine for this feast, however, are spurious. St. John of Damascus (P. G., I, 96) thus formulates the tradition of the Church of Jerusalem:

"St. Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, at the Council of Chalcedon (451), made known to the Emperor Marcian and Pulcheria, who wished to possess the body of the Mother of God, that Mary died in the presence of all the Apostles, but that her tomb, when opened, upon the request of St. Thomas, was found empty; wherefrom the Apostles concluded that the body was taken up to heaven."

Today, the belief in the corporeal assumption of Mary is universal in the East and in the West; according to Benedict XIV (De Festis B.V.M., I, viii, 18) it is a probable opinion, which to deny were impious and blasphemous. (Catholic Encyclopedia, The Feast of the Assumption, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02006b.htm)

The word "Blasphemy" (Greek "blaptein," "to injure", and "pheme," "reputation") signifies etymologically gross irreverence towards any person or thing worthy of exalted esteem. In this broad sense the term is used by Bacon when in his "Advancement of Learning" he speaks of "blasphemy against learning". St. Paul tells of being blasphemed (I Cor., iv, 13) and the Latin Vulgate employs the word blasphemare to designate abusive language directed either against a people at large (II Kings, xxi, 21; I Par., xx, 7) or against individuals (I Cor., x, 30; Tit., iii, 2). (Ibid)

Reputations are fragile and ephemeral things. More valuable than protecting or controlling the doctrine is allowing the insight and intuition to penetrate our minds and hearts. There is much to learn. We ought not injure the willingness to investigate and learn from what we cannot understand. No matter who brings the intuition or how the gift arrives before our consciousness, it is the gift itself that needs to be honored. We feast the gift of seeing things through.

Another saint, John of the Cross (1542-1591), had his own particular celebration of August 15th:
The friars of the house who deliberately came close to St. John's cell to torment him with their conversations hit upon a strategy that undoubtedly had a great effect on him. They said, "Let's throw him in a well and no one will ever see him again." While this, no doubt, had an initial depressive effect upon him, for it confirmed his fears about their wishes for his death, it also might have helped stimulate his desire for escape. He could not help but remember the incident in his childhood in which he had fallen into the pool and would have drowned save for the appearance of the beautiful lady. As the summer wore on, he received interior impulses urging him to escape. His first biographer states that this came in the form of a vision of the Blessed Virgin. Will the beautiful lady again play a role in extracting him from an impossible situation? On the Vespers of the feast of the Assumption he was praying in his cell with his head to the ground, and his back to the door, when the superior unexpectedly entered and kicked him since he had not immediately arisen. The prior asked what he had been thinking about, and John told him how much he would like to celebrate Mass on the Feast of the Assumption. The prior brusquely refused, and left. John was going to have to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption in his own way. After making careful preparations, one night during the octave of the Feast, he forced his door, carefully crept from his cell and lowered himself on a rope he had made from his torn-up blanket, and dropped into a courtyard. He had acted and made a definitive move, but his problems were not automatically solved. He discovered that the courtyard belonged to a neighboring convent of nuns, and he was filled with despair because he was afraid of the scandal that would be given to people if he were discovered there in the morning. He almost gave up and called to his captors to come and get him, but somehow he overrode this scrupulosity and hypersensitivity and managed to scramble up one of the walls. Ragged and dirty, he wandered through the streets of Toledo "at an hour when the life of all cities is mysterious and strange."(13) The vegetable women saw him passing through the plaza as they arranged their wares for the market, and thinking he was coming back from some revel, shouted out dirty words to him. Finally, he found refuge for the remainder of the night in the vestibule of a house, emerged in the morning and made his way to the Discalced Convent of sisters, and they hid him within the cloistered walls.

Finally his ordeal was over, and he made his way back to his own world. Almost literally the first thing he did, despite his weakness and the aftereffects of his physical and psychological trials was to recite his poems to the sisters. We have a moving picture of him barely able to stand, softly uttering for the first time to other human beings the essence of his prison experience.
(from St. John of the Cross and Dr. C.G. Jung, Mysticism in the Light of Jungian Psychology, Part III: A PSYCHOLOGICAL LIGHT ON JOHN OF THE CROSS AND THE LIFE OF PRAYER, CHAPTER 6: A TYPOLOGICAL PORTRAIT OF ST. JOHN) By James Arraj. 208pp, C.1986)

Thomas Merton writes about John of the Cross:
The last place in the world where one would imagine the Spiritual Canticle to have been written is a dungeon!

I will try to translate a little of it:

My Beloved is like the mountains.
Like the lonely valleys full of woods
The strange islands
The rivers with their sound
The whisper of the lovely air!

The night, appeased and hushed
About the rising of the dawn
The music stilled
The sounding solitude
The supper that rebuilds my life.
And brings me love.

Our bed of flowers
Surrounded by the lions' dens
Makes us a purple tent,
Is built of peace.
Our bed is crowned with a thousand shields of gold!

Fast-flying birds
Lions, harts and leaping does*
Mountains, banks and vales
Streams, breezes, heats of day
And terrors watching in the night:

By the sweet lyres and by the siren's song
I conjure you: let angers end!
And do not touch the wall
But let the bride be safe: let her sleep on!

* (Merton says, "I lift this line bodily from the translation of Professor E. Allison Peers.")

Only the saint and God can tell what distant echoes of an utterly alien everyday common life penetrated the darkness of the jail cell and the infinitely deep sleep of the peace in which his soul lay hidden in God. "Touch not the wall . . ." but the religious police could not disturb the ecstasy of one who had been carried so far that he was no longer troubled at the thought of being rejected even by the holy!
(http://www.cin.org/saints/jcross-merton.html)

Wherever the body goes, and whatever proclaimations made about the disappearances, may not be as interesting as the question whether true freedom, and true God, is being born through these mysteries.

Sri Aurobindo, in his book-length poem, writes:
This earth is full of labour, packed with pain;
Throes of an endless birth coerce her still;
The centuries end, the ages vainly pass
And yet the Godhead in her is not born.
The ancient Mother faces all with joy,
Calls for the ardent pang, the grandiose thrill;
For with pain and labour all creation comes.
This earth is full of the anguish of the gods;
Ever they travail driven by Time's goad,
And strive to work out the eternal Will
And shape the life divine in mortal forms.
His will must be worked out in human breasts
Against the Evil that rises from the gulfs,
Against the world's Ignorance and its obstinate strength,
Against the stumblings of man's pervert will,
Against the deep folly of his human mind,
Against the blind reluctance of his heart.
The spirit is doomed to pain till man is free.
There is a clamour of battle, a tramp, a march:
A cry arises like a moaning sea,
A desperate laughter under the blows of death,
A doom of blood and sweat and toil and tears.
Men die that man may live and God be born. ..." '
(Savitri -- A Legend and a Symbol, Pages: 442-4 ff.)

Finally, this meditation on August 15th turns to Dogen Zenji, founder of the Soto School of Zen. When someone is capable of seeing clearly, whatever their insight and intuition looks on -- that itself -- is seen clearly.

Genjo Koan, (an excerpt)

Firewood turns to ash, and does not turn into firewood again,
But do not suppose that ash is after and the firewood is before.
We must realize that firewood is in the state of being firewood,
And it has its before and after.
Yet despite this past and future,
Its present is independent of them.
Ash is in the state of being ash,
And it has its before and after.
Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash,
So after one's death, one does not become life again.
Thus, that life does not become death
It is an unqualified fact of the Buddhadharma;
For this reason, life is called the non-born.
That death does not become life is the Buddha's
Revolving of the confirmed Dharma wheel;
Therefore, death is called the non-extinguished.
Life is a period of itself.
Death is a period of itself.
For example, they are like winter and spring.
We do not think that winter becomes spring,
Nor do we say that spring becomes summer.
(Written in mid-autumn of the first year of the Tempuku Era (1233 A.D. by Dogen Zenji)

Where do bodies go?

Watch carefully.

As we escape, revolve, long, belong, and become poetry through life -- we see ourselves through death and disappearance, entering the Invisible Itself, finally, with love.

Happy feast!

Time goes by.

A Camden woman's parents die within three months of each other. Elsewhere, a divorce is decided, but the kids haven't been told yet. A woman who's been a Catholic Sister for over forty years will marry a British chemist in a few weeks on the Connecticut shore. A younger couple from Bucksport have a baby shower at the shop today, they are expecting their first child. A couple in their fifties from Lincolnville return from China with a 10-month-old girl they've adopted. Hummingbird outside kitchen window browses buttercup.

Hidden birds sing as cool and clear
As a bamboo forest.
Between swinging willows sun beams glimmer
Like golden threads.
Clouds return to this calm valley.
The winds carry the fragrance of almonds.
By sitting alone all day long
I clear my mind of a thousand thoughts.
To speak of this is beyond our words;
Only by sitting under the quiet forest
Can we ever understand.
- Fa Yen (885-958)(DailyZen.com)

There's much I do not understand. Not the war. Not greed. Not love. Not even how electricity, x, or radio waves, much less micro waves, make their way into and through our homes and bodies. I don't understand the way most folks think about God. Nor do I understand why we place so much energy into time. Time is not nearly as interesting as the stillness that precedes tropical rain.

That odd statement -- "time is money" -- is incomprehensible to me.

The absence of time is presence. Presence has nothing to lose. Is that the vow of poverty? Is presence the promise of contemplation?

From Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac for Sunday, August 14, 2005:

Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is the 60th anniversary of the day on which President Harry Truman announced that the Second World War had come to an end. You might argue that more human beings were happy on this day in 1945 than on any other day in history.

It was the worst war in history. An estimated 60 million people died; about two-thirds of them were civilians. In the United States, the war had been going on for three years and eight months. About one in every eight Americans served in the war—more than 16 million American soldiers. Virtually every American family had at least one member overseas. With 400,000 Americans killed, most families knew somebody who had died in the war, and the most American casualties had come in the last year of the war.

Most Americans had believed that the war was far from over. The first few battles on Japanese islands had been some of the bloodiest battles of the war. Military analysts were projecting horrific losses, casualty estimates in the hundreds of thousands. But after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese suddenly accepted terms of complete surrender. And the announcement was made on this day at about 7:00 p.m. The newswires carried the headline, "Japan Surrenders."

There were spontaneous celebrations and parades in every major city in America. In New York City, more than a million people filled the street, overflowing Times Square, the crowd stretching from 40th all the way up to 52nd streets. Factories blew their whistles. Air raid sirens went off. Ships and trains and cars honked their horns. Churches tolled their bells.

Americans had been living under strict food and gas rationing, and once the news arrived, people went to the gas stations, filled up their cars and went riding around for the fun of it. Throughout the war, people had tried to keep their lights off after dark to save energy, but on this night, people turned on their lights and left them on all night. Some children who'd grown up during the war saw the streets lit up with lights for the first time.

And one thing that commentators noticed at the time was that nobody shouted, "We've won the war!" or anything about triumph. They simply shouted, "The war is over!"

My friend, soon to be married former sister, stopped running and darting as Paul appeared.
My friends, crossing old bridge and soon new bridge, come well to term.
My friends, back from China, nestle Ya Jia into her new home.
My friend, daughter without parents, sits on porch at sunset with their silence.
My friend, soon to move out of his home, holds open potentialities even as one actuality closes.

A melody floats without sound through the woodland.

"As Time Goes By"
(music and words by Herman Hupfeld)

[This day and age we're living in
Gives cause for apprehension
With speed and new invention
And things like fourth dimension.

Yet we get a trifle weary
With Mr. Einstein's theory.
So we must get down to earth at times
Relax relieve the tension

And no matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed.]

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.

And when two lovers woo
They still say, "I love you."
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.

Moonlight and love songs
Never out of date.
Hearts full of passion
Jealousy and hate.
Woman needs man
And man must have his mate
That no one can deny.

It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

Oh yes, the world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.
(© 1931 Warner Bros. Music Corporation, ASCAP)

Welcome -- all of us!

As time goes.

Bye.

We have to leave home. Home is where old familiar patterns of thinking and behavior hold us fixed.

Wherever and whenever
The mind is found
Attached to anything,
Make haste to detach
Yourself from it.
When you tarry for
Any length of time
It will turn again into
Your old home town.
- Daito Kokushi

The young man 15 years ago who borrowed my book about the old home town died that year of a drug overdose before he could give back the book. He could have kept it and read it again and again. But he went for something quicker.

Losing ego is often slow and undramatic. The suicide of ego by too much too pure a substance taken into body has high drama.

Michael tried and often succeeded in making people laugh. Tonight, watching Stephen Walker on C-Span book conversation talk about his new book Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima , I think of Michael, the Zen book, and Hiroshima. The combination stifles laughter.

I didn't laugh in 1945. I didn't laugh in 1990. The deaths were not funny.

The Zen book, on the other hand, was very funny. It pointed out how hilarious we really are.

Not really hilarious -- we're odd.

We know prayer, and don't.

Not yet.

Pray.

Now.

I've been thinking about Iraq. It is a shame.

George W. Bush has no strategy, no real plan, for winning the war in Iraq. So we're stuck in a murderous quagmire without even the suggestion of an end in sight.

The administration has never been straight with the public about the war, and there's no reason to believe it will start being honest now. There is a desperate need for a serious national conversation about alternatives to the Bush approach in Iraq, which is tantamount to a permanent American military presence in that country.

The president, ensconced in a long vacation, exemplifies the vacuum of leadership on this crucial issue, which demands nothing less than the sustained attention of the wisest men and women the U.S. has to offer. They could be politicians, academics, civic or religious leaders, corporate executives - whoever. The longer they remain on the sidelines, the longer the carnage in Iraq will continue.
(--from: "No End in Sight in Iraq," By Bob Herbert, Published: August 10, 2005, N.Y.Times)

When R.D.Laing, in his Politics of Experience, wrote about the distinction between being "out of formation" versus "off course" he gave shape to the current situation. Mr. Bush and his administration's policies are (in general, in my opinion) off course.

Off course, and heading for a greater disaster than already occurring. It no longer matters that the nation was deceived in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq; what matters is to cut off the deception as it hurdles to a more profound destruction. It doesn't matter that some think Mr. Bush's intentions and motivations are not honorable; what matters is to cut off unworthy foolhardiness from extending any further. It doesn't matter that some are only now figuring out that neo-con stated and written strategy to redo the Middle East was in fact a plan of attack; what matters is the necessity of stopping these people from carrying out their brazen and irresponsible behavior in the name of American democracy.

I'd rather we simply relieve them of their office -- put them out to retirement to spend their war profits away from the sight of our children.

There is no honor perpetuating shame by continuing off course just because you are already off course.

Psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote about schizophrenia in a way that might have relevance for the no place to go, no move to make check-mate position we find ourselves in when looking at the bizarre behavior of this administration and experiencing wild bewilderment at it:
"It is the fact that man does not experience himself as the active bearer if his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished "thing", dependent on powers outside if himself, onto whom he has projected his living substance."

The validity of a definition is ultimately determined by the identity of the one who is defining. It is in this context that Laing argues: "There is no such 'condition' as 'schizophrenia,' but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event." Seen from this radical perspective, all our definitions may have to be turned upside down and inside out. "What we call 'normal' is", according to Laing "a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.... It is radically estranged from the structure of being." No wonder, then, that "the condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man." On the other hand schizophrenia may be seen as an alienation from this alienation, where, "even through his profound wretchedness and disintegration", the patient may be "the heirophant of the sacred". Finally, "madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death."
(from "R.D. Laing:The Politics of the Mind," by Peter Levine; http://laingsociety.org/colloquia/peaceconflict/divisions.levine.htm)

We've got to get out of this place!

Someone has to wake up.

We must befriend Being.

Endgame, anyone?

Even Clare of Assisi, whose feast is celebrated today, confronted the powers that took lives and threatened the well-being of innocent people.

Clare loved music and well-composed sermons. She was humble, merciful, charming, optimistic, and chivalrous. She would get up late at night to tuck in her sisters who'd kicked off their covers. She daily meditated on the Passion. When she learned of the Franciscan martyrs in Morocco in 1221, she tried to go there to give her own life for God, but was restrained. Once when her convent was about to be attacked, she displayed the Sacrament in a monstrance at the convent gates, and prayed before it; the attackers left. (CLARE of Assisi, http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/saintc03.htm)

Today the living theater of peace and justice is still active. A mother whose son died in Iraq waits to speak with the man who sent him there. She camps out down the road from the ranch of George W. Bush in Crawford Texas.

It is an important conversation she wants to have with the politician and commander in chief. She wants to further explore the thinking and intent that sent her son to die. It is necessary for her and Mr. Bush to explore her son Casey's whole life -- and George Bush's whole life.
"When a man dies, it's not only of his disease; he dies of his whole life." (-Charles Peguy)

Dear Cindy Sheehan,
In the morning we silently sit in our meditation cabin, then chant morning prayer.
You are in our silence and our prayer. As is your son.

Thank you for presenting yourself, You inspire us with hope.
We wish you well in your vigil. Stay as long as your heart allows.

Then return home, at peace.
With our gratitude,

Bill and Saskia
Meetingbrook Hermitage
Camden, Maine

Sheehan writes from Crawford:
We are working for peace with justice. We are using peaceful means and the truth to do it. I guess the truth frightens people. It frightens them so much, they have to resort to telling lies to rebut my arguments.
The Peaceful Occupation of Crawford (Day 5); -- a message from Cindy Sheehan, Crawford, TX

Last year, this:
Cindy Sheehan Is Working To Bring Our Troops Home: "Mr. President. You have daughters. How would you feel if one of them was killed?"
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
Casey Sheehan re-enlisted with the Army in August of 2003, knowing that his unit would eventually be deployed in Iraq. Casey, a Humvee mechanic with the 1st Calvary, was killed in Sadr City on April 4th of this year. He was only 24 years old. He is and forever will remain an American hero.
Casey's mom, Cindy Sheehan, is a hero too. Angered that her son was sent to fight and die in an unjust war for reasons that have proven to be lies, Cindy is speaking out about the Iraq invasion. Cindy has joined other moms and families who have lost loved ones in the conflict to tell Americans about the true costs of the war. (October 7, 2004)

Three days ago, this:
CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 7 - President Bush draws antiwar protesters just about wherever he goes, but few generate the kind of attention that Cindy Sheehan has since she drove down the winding road toward his ranch here this weekend and sought to tell him face to face that he must pull all Americans troops out of Iraq now.
(August 8, 2005, "Of the Many Deaths in Iraq, One Mother's Loss Becomes a Problem for the President," By RICHARD W. STEVENSON, The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/politics/08crawford.html)

It is a profound hope, and an emerging realistic expectation, that truth and transparency will become the prevailing way of being in the world. Why not -- it is the way freedom and love emerge into the world -- and we want freedom and love, truth and transparency. Don't we?

Like the little stream
Making its way
Through the mossy crevices,
I, too, quietly
Turn clear and transparent.
- Hakuin (1686-1768)

Clare, Cindy -- help us, too, quietly turn clear and transparent.

Show us the monstrance of sacred presence.

You could be led to believe it is a normal day. Red Sox win. Yankees lose. Four soldiers and a marine killed in Iraq. Oil company gets millions in tax breaks after a 7.64 billion profit this quarter.

Each night I gaze upon a pond,
A Zen body sitting beside a moon.
Nothing is really there and yet
It is all so clear and bright
I cannot describe it.
If you would know the empty mind
Your own mind must be as clear and bright
As this full moon upon the water.
- Chiao Jan (785--895)

It is an odd war. Only our soldiers are at war. The rest of America goes on vacation. The president refuses to speak to a mother of a soldier killed in Iraq. She camps by his ranch.

Let's stop it. War and the pretense of war cannot be accepted as normal. It is anything but normal. Let's stop pretending the unlovely is lovely.

Let's be rid of unlovely pretense.

Sit Shiva. Resurrect love. Remember when we cared about truth.

The sky holds both clear mind and clouded mind.

The Feast of Nagasaki. I am thrown into solitude. There, innumerable (though silent) imprecations come as faint breeze on hot afternoon to this mind. Alternately, alone, the sense that imbecilic impulses pull the world to pick at scar-tissue scabs, threatening to up the ante of posturing again with nuclear weapons.

The concurrent brook-beds, dry and unmoving this hot August, take my attention -- namely, monastic creation mind, over against, military destruction mind.

Don't say that only clear water mirrors the moon.
Muddy water also reflects the sky.
Watch, after wind has settled and the waves are calm,
For a wonderful moon, as lovely as before.
- Lin Chi Chung (1119)

Mac, a Trappist monk, tells a guest at his monastery about the tension and spectrum in monasteries between solitude and solidarity. "God plants the seeds of a monk in everyone's soul at the moment of creation." The visitor writes about movements throughout history, whether Buddhist, pre-Christian, Jewish, Pythagorean, or Christian -- that proves Mac's point.

In Mac's opinion, those manifestations proved the existence of a universal monk, an archetype that exists in every human being. Everyone experiences the call to solitude. Sometimes, Mac said, God calls softly, as on those occasions we might simply feel a casual craving for time alone. "Why do you suppose those moments of solitude offer us such relief?" Mac asked. they give us a chance to simply be ourselves, to enjoy what and where we were, to savor just being. Alone with God, we feel no need to perform, to do. The pressure is off. That good, refreshing feeling is nothing less than an experience of God's accepting love. It is the healing power of an eternal passion that is consummated in the reunion of creature and Creator. God is delighted by our act of will in which we love and place ourselves in his presence."
"That devine-delight is the lover who draws each of us back and forth between two poles, the loving opportunities of solitude and solidarity. Sometimes God recharges our batteries one-on-one, in solitude. Other times, he kindles our longing for him in the rest of creation and we wind up falling in love, or elbow-to-elbow with our fellow humans, awash in the joy of a celebration with friends or family. He pulls us to him in either circumstance for however long he believes is necessary.
"Alone with him in solitude, we see and learn what we uniquely are,and how that is all we ever need be. Nothing more. We grow secure in the understanding love that self-knowledge represents."
(pp.33-34, chapter entitled "The Monk in Us All," in Voices of Silence, Lives of the Trappists Today, by Frank Bianco, c.1991)

Because we do not know ourselves -- real knowledge of real self -- we continue to attempt to destroy those who do not think like us, indeed, are not us.

We need a more profound myth about who and what we are.

"Every thought system has at its core a guiding myth not a myth in the sense of a lie but of an imaginative vision, a picture which does indeed `express its appeal to the deepest needs of our nature'" (p. 200; in Mary Midgley's Science and Poetry; quoting E.O.Wilson).

The Feast of Nagasaki confronts an old myth, an old lie.

On August 9 1945 an American B-29 Bockscar aircraft dropped a 4.5 tonne bomb on the city, killing at least 80,000 people in the world's second nuclear attack.

Three days previously, the US air force had dropped a similar device on the city of Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the immediate blast and in the following months from radiation sickness. Japan surrendered on August 15 1945, bringing an end to the second world war.

After the minute's silence today, Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, laid a wreath at the monument to the dead. "This is an occasion to remember the victims, and pray for world peace," he said.

The mayor of Nagasaki, Iccho Itoh, then made an angry appeal - aimed particularly at Washington - for a global ban on nuclear weapons.

"We understand your anger and anxiety over the memories of the horror of the 9-11 terrorist attacks," he said. "Yet, is your security enhanced by your government's policies of maintaining 10,000 nuclear weapons, of carrying out repeated sub-critical nuclear tests, and of pursuing the development of new 'mini' nuclear weapons?"
Fumie Sakamoto, a representative of the survivors of the Nagasaki bomb, said: "Together with some 260,000 survivors ... I swear in the presence of the souls of the victims of the atomic bombing to continue to tirelessly demand that Nagasaki be the last A-bomb site."

Ms Sakamoto, 74, was a junior high school student when Nagasaki was bombed. The blast destroyed her home, throwing her 10 metres into the air. She landed in her garden. "As far as I could see, everything had been reduced to rubble," she said.
Following the bombings, many hibakusha - a Japanese term for "bomb affected people" - suffered the effects of radiation exposure, including malignant tumours, leukaemia, and keloid scars.

Nagasaki was not intended as the original target for the atomic bomb. The US bomber had been heading to Kokura, but the city was covered with thick cloud on the day. The plane circled three times before changing course for Nagasaki.

When it arrived, Nagasaki too was covered in cloud. With dwindling fuel supplies, the pilot was about to turn back when a break in the cloud appeared.
(from "Nagasaki remembers" in Guardian Unlimited, Staff and agencies, Tuesday August 9, 2005)

The clouds of Kokura saved the city. Were some leaving their houses that morning unhappy that there were clouds?

Muddy water also reflects the sky. Clouds, whether physical or metaphorical, keep the mind humble -- causing it to ask: What is this? Are we safe? Or in danger? Are we who we are?

Clouds shape the sky as they do the mind.

Hegel wrote: Dass das Sein Denken ist ("Being is thinking"), that "the spiritual alone is the real," and that only those generalities with which we deal in thinking actually are. (In Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind, by Georg Hegel)

These visitors are spiritually here. Today, the Feast of Nagasaki, like the Feast of Hiroshima, brings them to mind, to being -- here.

We wander Kokura -- in solitude and solidarity -- mostly sunshine, yet still (happily), clouds. This is the tension and the spectrum of being-in-the-world, and, thinking the world into being.

The Japanese word said before meals applies to this meal of ambiguity we partake -- Itadakimasu -- "All this I will gratefully receive".

Domo Arigato Gozaimasu!

Not knowing is a way of life. On the other hand, birth and death are familiar.

In the winter of 1916 I found myself in St. Petersburg with a forged passport and not a cent to my name. Alexey Kazantsev, a teacher of Russian literature, took me into his house. (Opening lines of "Guy De Maupassant," 1932 short story by Isaac Babel, trans by Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Solski.)

In the summer of 1944 I don't know where I was. Katherine and Frank lived with Sarah and Tom who'd opened their house on 69th street to Nellie and Jim. Patricia was two when I moved in -- or fell through -- at Israel Zion on 48th street and 10th avenue.

Maimonides Medical Center began as a small community hospital in 1911. At the time, a farm region known as New Utrecht was on the way to becoming a residential neighborhood called Borough Park. To care for the medical needs of local residents, neighborhood women founded the New Utrecht Dispensary. In 1918, Jewish-sponsored medical facilities in the area consolidated. As a result, United Israel Zion Hospital was formed laying the foundation for the creation of Maimonides Hospital of Brooklyn in 1947.
In 2004, the hospital had approximately 80,000 ER visits, 33,000 inpatient discharges, and delivered over 6,400 babies, the most of any hospital in New York State. (http://www.drgnyc.com/current_searches/printsearch.cfm?jobID=158)

Frank and Kay's boy joined the household on Bay Ridge Avenue where Staddy smoked White Owl cigars sitting on his wood chair in back yard in front of former barn; Nellie whirled her sewing machine in upstairs back room overlooking white DeSoto in yard; Sadie stirred and heated kidney stew in basement kitchen like a grandmother conductor coaxing in stray notes; Tom sharpened his Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen pencils from his Pennsylvania Railroad days; and Pat skipped rope with the girls on the block until it was time for supper.

In 1966 Jo-Ann was sitting on the ground in a circle of sisters and brothers in a schoolyard in Portsmouth N.H. when her face shone love to any eyes looking. Mine were. I was transfixed.

Inside the sacred fence
Before which I bow
There must be a pond
Filled with clear water;
As my mind-moon becomes bright
I see its shadow reflected in the water.
- Daito Kokushi

Everything goes its own way to wind up where it will be. I don't know where I will be. The moon and water, I suspect, always show up and disappear -- just in time to be seen in passing by someone looking at something else. I was there outside the circle, outside the fence of who I thought I was, when she smiled. That fence collapsed. Dew took to morning grass, moon to other side of world, and smile embedded itself in forty years of fondness. I must have thought, "I know where you will always be, but I don't know where I will be."

Last evening five humans, two dogs, and a cat sat, walked, chanted, read, silented, ate, and spoke aloud at Sunday Evening Practice. The loveliness of bringing back those gone or gone beyond was acknowledged with tenderness and love. Julian told a story told him by a Benedictine Prioress about an unvisited gravesite of a sister whose many years before her death were spent in a psychiatric hospital. Saskia spoke about how we bring back into wholeness those we remember in presence. Tina spoke of spiritual pregnancy and the curious mystery of what might be born from it. Sylvia spoke of the need to share our thinking so as not to be burdened alone with its weight -- a midwifery of community.

In middle autumn of 2000, when Pat gave over her breath, my early household was now all gone.

Just before we began last evening, Jo-Ann called to say she will be married. (This morning the cat, on my lap, stretches with closed eyes, does not let on whether he hears the bird chirping on cedar branch outside the window.) I let on -- I delight in my friend's revelation.

Still, I don't know where I am. It is the birthday of my parent's only son. I join the quiet celebration.

Of birth, of death -- with these I am familiar.

Of life -- of this fantastic dwelling -- I am in awe.

We are taken, in and through, this house.

First holding. Then unholding.

Finally, beholding.

The hour is sticking so close above me, so clear and sharp, that all my senses ring with it. I feel it now; there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things and they come towards me, to meet and be met.

No thing is too small for me to cherish and paint in gold, as if it were an icon that could bless us, though I'll now know who else among us will feel this blessing.
(from poem of Rilke's, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Now knowing, as well, is a lovely way.

What is our true sound?

Is it possible we have not yet even begun to hear our true sound, the sound of authentic being? Does this hearing impairment hinder us from listening to others? Can we hear anything real without an intense longing and effort to try?

One and the same breeze passes
Over the pines on the mountain
And the oak trees in the valley;
And why do they give different notes?
- Shinkage-ryu school of swordsmanship

This weekend bridges the two dates, August 6th and August 9th, of the two Atomic Bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. In Hiroshima and in Nagasaki we learned that there is no limit to what some people will do to others to cause pain, suffering, and death. We no longer believe the rationale. There is no reason that adequately excuses the unleashing of such destruction. Those offered over the years -- end war, minimize invasion casualties, show Russia our weapon, do it because we could, -- these are vacant rationalizations with heartless consequences.

The Official Homepage of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum contains the Peace Declaration, August 6, 2005. Here is a fragment:

This August 6, the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing, is a moment of shared lamentation in which more than 300 thousand souls of A-bomb victims and those who remain behind transcend the boundary between life and death to remember that day. It is also a time of inheritance, of awakening, and of commitment, in which we inherit the commitment of the hibakusha to the abolition of nuclear weapons and realization of genuine world peace, awaken to our individual responsibilities, and recommit ourselves to take action. This new commitment, building on the desires of all war victims and the millions around the world who are sharing this moment, is creating a harmony that is enveloping our planet.

The keynote of this harmony is the hibakusha warning, "No one else should ever suffer as we did," along with the cornerstone of all religions and bodies of law, "Thou shalt not kill." Our sacred obligation to future generations is to establish this axiom, especially its corollary, "Thou shalt not kill children," as the highest priority for the human race across all nations and religions. The International Court of Justice advisory opinion issued nine years ago was a vital step toward fulfilling this obligation, and the Japanese Constitution, which embodies this axiom forever as the sovereign will of a nation, should be a guiding light for the world in the 21st century.

Unfortunately, the Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty this past May left no doubt that the U.S., Russia, U.K., France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and a few other nations wishing to become nuclear-weapon states are ignoring the majority voices of the people and governments of the world, thereby jeopardizing human survival.

Based on the dogma "Might is right," these countries have formed their own "nuclear club," the admission requirement being possession of nuclear weapons. Through the media, they have long repeated the incantation, "Nuclear weapons protect you." With no means of rebuttal, many people worldwide have succumbed to the feeling that "There is nothing we can do." Within the United Nations, nuclear club members use their veto power to override the global majority and pursue their selfish objectives.
(http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/declaration/English/2005/index.html)

The sound of green on leaf this summer's day. The sound of birdcall in wooded shade. The sound of breeze crossing mountain top in high sunlight.

When we pray, words carry the watchful sounds of many who have suffered and died.

So it is we sit with silence. So it is we humbly dare to give voice to word.

So it is we profoundly ask all-that-is to help one another, to be safe, to allow each to dwell at home with peace.

To each, with love, their true sound.

A reverent silence.

It's hard to believe what you see. It's hard believing anything. Most things turn out to be somewhere between no-way and get-lost.

He was still speaking when suddenly a bright cloud covered them with shadow, and from the cloud there came a voice which said, "This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour. Listen to him." When they heard this the disciples fell on their faces overcome with fear. But Jesus came up and touched them. "Stand up," he said "do not be afraid." And when they raised their eyes they saw no one but only Jesus. (from Matthew 17)

Jesus seen through. Japanese seen through. The odd juxtaposition of August 6th -- Transfiguration, and Hiroshima Atomic Bomb blast. The transparency.

ii

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasped no more --
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
(Poem: excerpts from "In Memorium" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

What's odd is the emptiness.

Holding my jacket and facing the fragrant peony,
I sense how different our viewpoints are.
Someday our hair will turn gray,
Yet the flowers will be this red each year;
Following the morning dew, each blooms gorgeously
Then their sweet scent is chased by the evening winds.
Why wait till they have withered and fallen
To understand such emptiness?
- Fa Yen (885–958)

To see through and be seen through is to be empty.

The beauty of the memorium and the ugliness of so many incinerated -- stuns mind into emptiness.

The oddity that one of us is God -- that each one of us just might be -- shuts down comprehension.

It is not enough to hate the mind that chooses, and the act that commits, murder.

We look on ourselves, in each form, and weep.

Love the emptiness.

For sixty years a belief there was no alternative to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.

I don't share that belief. Absent this non-believer. A child nearly one year old, the feeling of horror found its way to Brooklyn streets.

If your ears see,
And eyes hear,
Not a doubt you'll cherish
How naturally the rain drips
From the eaves!
- Daito Kokushi

That long ago remains close tonight. If my hand could I would stay the order, un-push the button, and find some hint of genuine compassion for those below a terrible idea.

I call off the bombing of Hiroshima sixty years ago.

Tomorrow will be a day of grace and kindness.

A toast -- to you, my brothers and sisters!

Communion is a better idea.

Itadaki-masu!

It is hard to tell if anyone is saying anything anymore.

So many listening ears, so many watching eyes. It hardly seems necessary to explain why the teaching someone follows needs to be spoken aloud. If the teaching isn't in his or her silence, what use sounding it?

Soundless Sound

I like bamboo as the symbol of constancy and simplicity.
I built my house deep within the grove.
Do not strike my bamboo with a piece of brick.
Perhaps the sound might be heard by other Zen monks
And cause trouble.
- Jakushitsu (1290 - 1368)

I suspect a time approaches when even the most garrulous will comprehend the uselessness of the words and sounds made to convince others of the insight and advancement of the speaker. (Some say there is no advance, there is no place to be gotten to quicker; there is only here. There is nowhere to go. Each is already in their own place.)

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
(--Jean Arp (1887 - 1948), French-German artist, poet. "Sacred Silence," On My Way, ed. Robert Motherwell (1948).)

As that day approaches, silence will allow man to go his noisy way. With man gone off to the extreme edges of deafening polemic, there remains in the center silence in every sound. Even in the soundless pause between sounds -- a rich quietude resides in interim.

Preserve silence.

Observe it visiting here.

As it is...on its way...nowhere else.

Chapels are places for prayer and respite.

Before the night is even through,
I rise and sit,
Watching fireflies.
The night air clear as water,
The meditating mind
Is light as a reed.
The moon outlines
Trees on the western ridge;
A bell rouses
Home up above.
There may be those in the dark
Who know just how fine
Is what I have found.
- Wen-siang (1210-1280)

I fall from the odd news of the world. What sense there is in the ways of the world -- escapes me these days.

Francis was now attracted to a tiny chapel known as St. Mary of the Portiuncula, belonging to a Benedictine monastery on Monte Subasio. It stood in the wooded plain, some two miles below Assisi, forsaken and in ruins. Francis rebuilt it as he had done the others, and seems to have thought of spending his life there as a hermit, in peace and seclusion. Here on the feast of St. Matthias, in 1209, the way of life he was to follow was revealed to him. The Gospel of the Mass for this day was Matthew X, 7-19: "And going, preach, saying The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.... Freely have you received, freely give. Take neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses . . . nor two coats nor shoes nor a staff.... Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves...." These words suddenly became Christ's direct charge to him. His doubts over, he cast off shoes, staff, and leathern girdle, but kept his rough woolen coat, which he tied about him with a rope. This was the habit he gave his friars the following year. In this garb he went to Assisi the next morning and, with a moving warmth and sincerity, began to speak to the people he met on the shortness of life, the need of repentance, and the love of God. His salutation to those he passed on the road was, "Our Lord give you peace." (http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/FRANCIS.htm)

Lets make chapels our first visit. Make chapels of ourselves.

Make bells the threshold of silence.

Of loving prayer.

After silent sitting, meditative walking, and chanting of Heart Sutra, we bow and prepare to leave the chapel/zendo.

Extinguishing the candle that lights the icon of Mary and Jesus in the cabin after first part of Sunday Evening Practice, I think of the insight during a half-hour cycling exercise in front room of hermitage facing similar icon while listening to Dalai Lama healing chant from middle room. I am suddenly aware that the words below cabin icon – “Mother of God, Light in all Darkness” – have a reference I’d not thought of before.

The reference is to the combination of Mary and Jesus – not to Mary alone, as if Jesus were a prop for purposes of lending legitimacy to the woman and mother. No, the icon is of both of them, equally chosen and equally represented as relational iconography. Is this an icon of a new reality? This reality emerges by means of pregnancy, birth, and offspring. This new reality is interim. It is the middle emergence that holds and permits continuance through an unbroken and unceasing wholeness that involves each of us and everything going on.

The icon invites the observer, especially the praying observer, into the sequential circumference of pregnancy, birth, and offspring as center, radial energy, and spiral wholeness.

The “Mother of God” in this observation is the relational sequence of Mary/Jesus. This sequence of Mary/Jesus is the Mother of God. It is also the sequence of each of us as we attend prayerfully that-which-is unfolding in this existence. I say “in this existence” because we begin where we are and we need to be here while we are here.

The wording of threes, namely: “that-which-is”, or, things “as-they-are”, or, something “as-it-is” – begins to emerge more and more frequently as descriptive of simple and ultimate reality.

To investigate that-which-is invites inquiry and experience to encounter what is there with willing mind and open heart.
To face things as-they-are is to face reality without illusions.
To accept someone or something as-it-is is to surrender to and into the reality before us.

A monk from a Catholic community of hermits visiting at table said that Marian devotion had changed in that he had a strong understanding of Jesus the Christ as mother. A woman who had attended a Bat Mitsva the day before related that the Rabbi (a woman) said that the Hebrew word for “compassion” and “mercy” was the same as for “womb.”

It is here the sequence takes shape and makes sense. There has been a tension in Catholic theology as to the place of Mary. There have been impulses to have her take on the role that the Goddess plays in spirituality. There have been attempts to define her role as co-redemptrix, mother of God, or even the feminine third person in the metaphor of the Trinity. It seems Catholic Christians are never quite sure what to think of their Marys.

But in the quiet evening cycling, and in extinguishing cabin candle, it occurs that part of the mystery is in the threefold sequence of pregnancy, birth, and offspring -- a sequence which is a never-ending revelation spiraling up from and beyond things as-they-are. It is the way earthly existence and human emergence contribute to the coming to be of consciousness relating to the reality of what is called God.

Jesus/Mary is the Mother of God.

Like a Zen koan – not one, not two – only, Jesus/Mary.

Father is Life Itself.
Mother is Jesus/Mary.
Spirit is Making-Its-Way-Through-Us.

The question emerges -- Who are we in this revelation?

A circumference "carries round."

The soup and bread, as usual, were delicious.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, as usual, were nourishing.

The simple circle of mindful gatherers was, as usual, blessing.

Sunday morning news programs do not encourage. Congress passes legislation that makes us long for individuals now that most grease, pork, and boons go to corporations and their lobbying legal partners and patrons. So much talk; so little said.

I might have to listen more closely to those who say it doesn't matter. Even the most conservative and most liberal of folks hereabouts are beginning to look at government and realize the so-called red-blue (conservative-liberal) split so touted and loved by politicians and commentators is illusory -- a public deception. It is not a war of ideas, nor a war between religions that is being fought. It is a matter of money. Who has it, who wants it, who has the power to keep it where it is? Sometimes money has a hard sound to it.

When a country is in harmony with the Tao,
the factories make trucks and tractors.
When a country goes counter to the Tao,
warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.

There is no greater illusion than fear,
no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,
no greater misfortune than having an enemy.

Whoever can see through all fear
will always be safe.
(#46, Lao Tzu, in Tao Te Ching, trans. by Stephen Mitchell)

I don't think it is a matter of money. I think it is something else. I think we have forgotten what it means to be. Being, to be at all, is a silence with remarkable sounds and stillness.

It is a matter of Being. And we have forgotten Being. For religious folks, this translates that we have forgotten God. So many for so long have gotten used to fighting over the ideas and their political implications we have about God, fighting about a notion of God that arranges power and control in the hands of those for whom power and control are the only things of true value. God Itself -- with nothing added -- has been forgotten.

Some say it would be good if we forgot about God entirely. Forgot about religion. Forgot about anything that is not real, here, and now.

The Master has no mind of her own.
She works with the mind of the people.

She is good to people who are good.
She is also good to people who aren't good.
This is true goodness.

She trusts people who are trustworthy.
She also trusts people who aren't trustworthy.
This is true trust.

The Master's mind is like space.
People don't understand her.
They look to her and wait.
She treats them like her own children.
(#49, Lao Tzu, in Tao Te Ching, trans. by Stephen Mitchell)

The heart does not break when we look at suffering. The heart deepens into Itself.

Silence

Sometimes we don't say anything. Sometimes
we sit on the deck and stare at the masses of
goldenrod where the garden used to be
and watch the color change from day to day,
the high yellow turning to mustard and at last
to tarnish. Starlings flitter in the branches
of the dead hornbeam by the fence. And are these
therefore the procedures of defeat? Why am I
saying all this to you anyway since you already
know it? But of course we always tell
each other what we already know. What else?
It's the way love is in a late stage of the world.
(Poem: "Silence" by Hayden Carruth, from Collected Shorter Poems ©. Copper Canyon Press.)

We need to turn again.

To Being.

And ask, with silence: How should I be?