The four horses need to ride together side by side like a team attached to stage coach. Body, spirit, emotions, mind. The Pale, white, black, and red assemble in creative strokes of nameless artist.

All external conditions have no immutable forms of their own. Right and wrong, becoming and disbecoming are all only from the mind. If one is able to attain no-mind, he will not be hindered by dharmas. If one's mind does not mind anything, who will distinguish right from wrong? If rights and wrongs are all negated, all forms of things will be peaceful forever. Because dharmas and the ten thousand delusions are all like the Principle of Suchness.
- Tun-huang manuscript 2

I have considered the way of war. I reject it. And all its ugliness. And all its false promises.

I cry for those dead in war. I lament the lies and fools sending them to their deaths.

But today is autumn. Overnight, leaves turn colors. Suddenly, a chill wind blows under full moon.

Ask questions.

Become a skeptic without judging.

See things.

As they are.

The seal, the island, the zazen seiza in peapod coming back to inner harbor.

Brewing Tea

Green clouds spiral and twine,
Are drawn into the wind in a long stream;
On my cup's surface the faces of
White foam flowers are cool;
The mountain moon comes into my window;
Plum tree shadows move;
Pouring again and again into my unglazed cup
I sip the lingering fragrance.
- Betsugen Enshi (1295-1364)

I cannot separate mind and body.

I will let death pretend to do that.

Until then, mind is body, body is mind.

The whole earth is eucharistic.

The whole day is shunyata.

I bow and gassho to you.

And you.

In Genesis the repetitive phrase: "Let there be...".

It is spoken, we are to assume, by "Here." By Presence Itself.

Project your meditational concentration into everything that you think or do and make everything subject to meditational concentration.
- Shosan (1579-1655)

"There" comes to be by means of "Here" withdrawing itself for the sake of what is to be there.

Here is there with emptied self.

This "t" is how we come to be.

We are crucified into here in order to be there.

Dasein, the German word for there-being. For man.

Follow your heart there to embody here.

.......

Pachamama gathering tonight.

This is my haiku for 100 years hence:

2010-2110

We do what is right

and reverent, not waste and junk --

Thus we are happy

There is no other place to be.

There's only 5 billion years, give or take a billion, left in the sun. When it goes, earth goes. Our progeny will be far away across the expanse of what we call space by then. I probably won't be around. You?

It puts things in perspective.

Zen is to make one believe, practice, and realize the principle of without thought, without cultivation. What matters is the direct pointing to the true nature of your mind. Therefore, in the five divisions of the teachings there is also, besides the scriptural teachings, mind-to-mind transmission. Worshipping Buddha statues is nothing more than resorting to an expedient for those who do not understand true nature. However many scriptures you have finished reading over the many years, I think you will not understand through them the way of mind-to-mind transmission.
- Toui (d.825)

I drift around the universe of mind.

I drink water and eat chocolate Vienna ice cream on Dutch apple pie. The evening passes after spaghetti with sausage.

Maybe it's advancing age. But, everything seems without border or boundary. Like a Japanese saying there's no barrier between one thing and another one thing.

We walk Ragged Mtn and see the sun climb Bald Mtn while it simultaneously descends the far side of Ragged out of view.

There's really no place to go.

We're here.

For now.

Soon we won't.

Summer's lease is soon up. It will move out into stories. It's stay this year was as full of loveliness as was spring's. Maine was blessed.

Two musicians visited yesterday and left two albums of theirs. Last evening, rowing around island at dusk, a harbor seal accompanied me. I felt accompanied.

Can this matter of Zen be understood or not?
If you say that it can be explained and understood,
Then you are attaching to words and concepts
And miss the basic fact.
On the other hand, if you say
It cannot be understood,
Then how can the Zen Dharma be taught to all beings?
What can you do?
Look clearly!
A crow's head is black
A crane's head is white.
- Ma-tsu (709-788)

At Sunday Evening Practice, reading from Ibn al Arabi (1165-1240), we consider the experience of God to be the experience of our conversation at table. Incomprehensible; still, occurring.

There is no substitute for this experience.

I'm going there.

You come to.

Hear this!

No vows. No promises. No oaths.

Rather, remaining in the one we are within.

Be that without wording something other.

Whether meditating or in times of turmoil, the true is his basis. Vast and clear is his wondrous wisdom. His words are silent and his actions untrammeled. In emptiness he does not lose illumination. (-- Ch'ing-liao, 1088-1151)

Changing mind.

Listen; hear.

Gazing; see.

Be-coming; free.

Zen points to what is here.

It is Yom Kippur.

Now. Here. This.

Perhaps God is the experience of life.

Many do not believe in God.

They prefer the allure of death over life.

The morning glory
Seems transient enough, but
More transient is the
Dew that falls from its petals
Shattered and scattered.
- Japanese Folk Zen saying

No need to believe in God.

Live life.

Life is the experience of God.

Life is love when it is seen as what it is.

The experience of life believes in you and me.

It offers itself to us with every breath, with every encounter, with every 'practical contact with and observation of facts or events' -- that is, with every experience.

Trust your experience.

Trust your life.

Trust your experience of life.

Enlighten God!

Walking carriage path above Eagle Lake with white Border Collie.

Listening to Entitled Opinions podcast on Martin Heidegger.

Greeting each passing person.

Even profound concepts are ultimately empty: the Ultimate Path is wordless, and if we speak, we go astray from it. Though we may characterize the fundamental basis as "empty by nature," there is no "fundamental basis" that can be labeled. Emptiness itself is wordless: it is not a mental construct.
- Records of the Lanka

There is no place else I want to be.

Ever.

Sure, things fall apart.

There's no self and no person,
How then kinfolk and stranger!
I beg you, cease going from lecture to lecture;
It's better to seek truth directly.
The nature of Diamond Wisdom
Excludes even a speck of dust.
From "Thus have I heard," to "This I believe,"
All's but an array of unreal names.
- Layman P'ang (740-808)

Let them.

It's how we go on.

It is time to wake.

"This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."
~ George Bernard Shaw

Awaken to the earth, God-self, our humanity.

It's time.

The only real intelligence is living in the present.

Moment.

All else never has been nor ever will.

This is why so few intelligent.

Beings.

Can be found.

As is.

Said.

Originally.

In this assembly, no one is absent and no one is ignorant. This is a gathering of the Buddha-mind that is given to us at birth. When you return home, be mindful of all your daily matters, just the way you are listening to the teachings now. Then you'll be just living with unborn Buddha-mind. Because of desire, we become stubborn, self-centered, and deluded. This way we move away from Buddha-mind, and become foolish. Originally, no one is deluded.
- Bankei

No one is.

Deluded. Only,

Delighted.

It is time.

Not to say.

Anything.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. ( -- #7, in TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, c.1922)

Morning sounds.

Silences, our desire for them and our desire to fill them, emerge as one of Dunn's motifs in this book. Sometimes the silences are unwanted and elusive, as in "Turning to the Page":

I learned there's nothing more shaming
or as memorable as an intimacy
unreturned. And turned, therefore,
to the expected silence of the page

Dunn's pages are sometimes quiet, but never silent. He concludes this same poem by writing that after turning to this "expected silence of the page," the page replies:

Bring to me, it said, continual proof
you've been alive.

Such discourse is the essence of the poems contained in this volume: whether the dialogue is between two lovers, the page and the poet, or the warring factions of one's own psyche, these are poems about the conversations and silences, the stories and transformations at the heart of poetry itself.

One final silence notable in its breeching here is Dunn's reticence to write poems about 9/11. Dunn's poem "To a Terrorist" from the 1988 book Between Angels was frequently reprinted in the aftermath of the attacks of that day, yet he himself reasoned that it was impossible for the conscientious poet to write a poem about those events without appropriate distance, chronological and psychological. In The Insistence of Beauty, Dunn finally breaks his silence on 9/11 with several poems, including the title poem which invokes in its closing lines the fortifying power of storytelling and poem-making:

When word came of a fireman
who hid in the rubble
so his dispirited search dog
could have someone to find, I repeated it
to everyone I knew. I did this for myself,
not for community or beauty's sake,
yet soon it had a rhythm and a frame.

This is what we have after everything else, the poet says. A rhythm and a frame. Dunn knows of the passions such rhythms and frames can ignite and inspire, writing in "in the Land of the Salamander,"

When we returned to shore, you allowed me
to speak of barracudas and bananafish, knowing
I loved words more than anything I might have seen.

The poems contained in The Insistence of Beauty are indeed about love: of words, of what is lost to the past, of what salvation a new love might bring us. Dunn's poems reveal a mind alive within its own inner-circlings, the transforming power of loss, the fictions that lead to the core of our truths, the possibility and reality of loving another again.

(-- from Stephen Dunn, The Insistence of Beauty, in Literary Review, Wntr, 2005 by R.G. Evans)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2078/is_2_48/ai_n8692130//

I remain silent.

In the transforming power of loss.

In the fictions.

In the possibility and reality of loving.

Good fireman!

Good Dog!

Silent



God

Don't call 9-11 a conspiracy. Call it mass murder.

Turn around the light to shine within,
Then just return.
The vast inconceivable source
Can't be faced or turned away from.
Meet the ancestral teachers,
Be familiar with their instruction,
Bind grasses to build a hut,
And don't give up.
- Shitou

Rather, Eid. Rather, Rosh Hashanah. These delight.

Rather, a terrible day of murder and destruction. This devastates.

We are humans.

We want to know what happened and who did what.

We don't give up inquiry.

We will one day know.

Murder asks to be unmasked.

If faith comes from hearing, it depends on what we choose to hear. Can we hear the movement of love beneath the shouting idiocy of hatred and bias?

Can we hear what another sees beyond the stubborn facts of division?

http://www.raimon-panikkar.org/english/videos.html

The movement of love is what is passing over and through every interaction. If we choose to feel it so.

Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage

I've built a grass hut
Where there's nothing of value
After eating, I relax and enjoy a nap.
When it was completed, fresh weeds appeared.
Now it's been lived in
Covered by weeds.
The person in the hut
Lives here calmly,
Not stuck to inside, outside,
Or in between.
Places worldly people live,
He doesn't live.
Realms worldly people love,
He doesn't love.
Though the hut is small,
It includes the entire world.
In ten square feet,
An old man illumines forms
And their nature.
- Shitou

Va bene.

Go well. Pass well.

Porous passage permeate.

Dialogue
is
wisdom
passing
through

Summer's end. Labor Day.

Cricket chants midday salute. Cars drive south to toll booth. Sails fold around masts of small boats on lakes and harbors. Breeze waves green leaves along Ragged Mountain.

As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck'd,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

O baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth,
Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I
have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and
bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single
object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart
upon me and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.

(--from poem, As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life, by Walt Whitman)
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/soundings/ocean.htm

When the man in his late 80s asked me if I was happy as I helped him into the passenger seat of his car, I said "Yes" without hesitation. There was no need to deliberate. I was happy to be asked.

In this world of dreams,
Dozing off still more;
And again speaking
And dreaming of dreams.
Just let it be.
- Ryokan

Last night at Harbor Park, just above high tide, sitting on rock by American Boathouse listening to Gorden Bok and the January Men (and Then Some) sing kindly seafaring songs, I glance about at schooners, children, faces of those attending, night sky with distant stars, and felt the fondness and generosity of all of it. Walking closer I stood beside Ed and Silvia as they took leave toward their "Fitzy" car up by street and we share a passing instant of simple greeting with each other.

I, too, leave just as fireworks begin in outer harbor. Their sound follows me. I leave their sight to others. I drive back to this valley content at having rowed so far in whitecap swell and wind this morning and having listened so near beside becalmed sea and sky this evening.

I do so love wharves and harbors, boatyards and oarlocks, the stillness and silence of solitude in community.

I am happy to be alone. I am shy about being with others, but I am happy to be so when I am.

Every other concern falls away. This behavior, that behavior, this attitude, that memory, this desire, that regret -- all these have little power when placed alongside the middle phrase of the statements above.

That phrase is "happy to be."

Which.

With great gratitude.

I am.

If we make distinctions, let them be distinctions without separation or assigned hierarchy.

Panikkar understands what pluralism means and what it can offer us -- in his language, he is attuned to the "myth" of pluralism -- without succumbing to it as another "ism." His working proposition is that for modem persons of any persuasion "isolation is no longer possible and unity is not convincing since it destroys one of the parties." The embrace of pluralism "implies that the human condition in its present reality should not be neglected, let alone despised in favor of an ideal (?) situation of human uniformity. On the contrary, it takes our factual situation as real and affirms that in the actual polarities of our human existence we find our real being." This is the problem, so much discussed today, of the other as other, taken here with great seriousness and made the central challenge to human growth, and indeed to human survival.

Each of us represents in his or her uniqueness an irreducible quantum of lived experience. In order to claim this experience fully, however, and to discover the presence of God in that experience, each of us requires the presence of others; to be in Christ through our own experience, each of us needs the other. That statement can sound like just another call to community until one realizes how fundamentally Panikkar means it. Why such a mutual being-present with one another is so necessary, how such a presence can be brought to pass, and what it might mean for a deeper commitment to Christian faith, are questions that have absorbed Panikkar for years. He is convinced that this kind of pluralism constitutes the kairos of our times, a special opportunity given by God. Pluralism is the sociological "blessing" of the late 20th century, a true providential novum in which old forces of domination are collapsing.
(--from Raimundo Panikkar: Pluralism Without Relativism, by Peter Gorday, originally published in The Christian Century, 1989.) http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=914

Do not let the sun go down on our popularity contests before we acknowledge the inauthenticity of self-congratulation.


Two facts are two facts. They are not only one fact. Nor shall we make one true and one false.

Being present and being good is also being exactly what one is even when two is what is there.

As a Catholic Buddhist, or, Buddhist Catholic I shall not try to answer any questions except for the one asking why the chicken crossed the road.

But I cannot answer while I am on the road.

We cannot kill that which we love.

"Meletato pan" -- Cultivate the whole. Thats how Raimon Panikkar quoting Periander of Corinth began the Introduction to his The Rhythm of Being, The Gifford Lectures (1988, c.2009). "Take into care beings as a whole."

For half a year just having rice
And sitting on Wan Peak.
This sitting cuts off misty clouds,
Thousands of layers.
Suddenly the sound of roaring thunder.
Sacred village's spring activity
Apricot blossoms are red.
- Rujing

What do you love?

Raimon Panikkar died at home in Tavertet, Spain on 26Aug2010. He was a true philosopher of religions. He was ready.

Tavertet 28/01/2010

Dearest Friends,

I would like to communicate to you that I believe the moment has come, (put off time and again), to withdraw from all public activity, both the direct and the intellectual participation, to which I have dedicated all my life as a way of sharing my reflections.
I will continue to be close to you in a deeper way, through silence and prayer, and in the same way I would ask you to be close to me in this last period of my existence.
You have often heard me say that a person is a knot in a network of relationships: in taking my leave from you I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for having enriched me with the relationship I have had with each of you.
I am also grateful to all of those who, either in person or through association, continue working to spread my message and the sharing of my ideals, even without me.
Thankful for the gift of life which is only such if lived in communion with others: it is with this spirit that I have lived out my ministry.

Raimon Panikkar

http://www.raimon-panikkar.org/english/saluto.html

I have read him and will continue to read him.

“The whole history of Christianity is one of enrichment and renewal brought about by elements that came from outside itself,” Mr. Panikkar told The Christian Century in 2000, adding, “If the church wishes to live, it should not be afraid of assimilating elements that come from other religious traditions, whose existence it can today no longer ignore.”

(--from Obituary, in New York Times, 5Sept2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/us/05panikkar.html?hpw

Va bene! All right!

Thank you, Raimon!

Maybe they're right.

Maybe the world is wrong perception.

Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you.
--Sheng-yen

If so, I leave the world.

And enter here.

Where only love sees what is real.

Itself.

Love.

Hurricane approaches slowly.

Now, all ancestors and all buddhas who unfold buddha-dharma have made it the true path of enlightenment to sit upright practicing in the midst of self-fulfilling samadhi. Those who attained enlightenment in India and China followed this way. It was done so because teachers and disciples personally transmitted this excellent method as the essence of the teaching.

In the authentic tradition of our teaching, it is said that this directly transmitted, straightforward buddha-dharma is the unsurpassable of the unsurpassable. From the first time you meet a master, without engaging in incense offering, bowing, chanting Buddha's name, repentance, or reading scriptures, you should just sit wholeheartedly, and thus drop away body and mind.
- Dogen

Everything else is as it is as well.

August 31 has long been New Year's Eve to me. Tomorrow is the first day of a new year. September begins anew a new season.

Obama Says Iraq Combat Mission Is Over

WASHINGTON — President Obama declared an end on Tuesday to the seven-year American combat mission in Iraq, saying that the United States has met its responsibility to that country and that it is now time to turn to pressing problems at home.

(By HELENE COOPER and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, Published: August 31, 2010, New York Times)

For seven years insanity ruled as war in Iraq.

I watch it go.

No joy.

Only . . . the feeling that comes when insanity recognizes itself in mirror.

They're thinking of building windmills for the top of Ragged Mountain. Someone put my name in for opposing the idea.

I won't let even the Buddha and Patriarchs
Through my gate,
So I never thought
To welcome some guests
And roll my eyes at others
I open the gate a little
To thank you for your visit
And at once the mountains
And the rivers stand up
And start the famous dance.
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)

There's a hurricane moving in the direction of Maine. But not for 4-5 days.

I wonder: What is life really about?

And why do we even ask?

Watch the weather. Watch the stars.

Watch the way you watch and pray.

Thanks for the visit!

Two fragments written in chapel/zendo during silent sitting:

1.
Being ever Becoming
Itself
Here
And so, we are now
invited to
Repose Here Awhile

2.
Sacred Presence Reposition
where
We find ourselves
and lose our self
as one

becomes Itself

To repose also means to remain still or concealed.

Like the depths of consciousness. Or sacramental presence . Or Buddha mind. Or the mind of Christ.

We do not yet know the depths of mind. We skate the surface. We swim the surface. We see only the surface of planets, stars, galaxies, meaning, sentient feeling.

O eternal Truth, true Love, and beloved Eternity, you are my God, and for you I sigh day and night. As I first began to know you, you lifted me up and showed me that, while that which I might see exists indeed, I was not yet capable of seeing it. Your rays beamed intensely on me, beating back my feeble gaze, and I trembled with love and dread. I knew myself to be far away from you in a region of unlikeness, and I seemed to hear your voice from on high: “I am the food of the mature: grow, then, and you shall eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food; but you will be changed into me”.
Accordingly I looked for a way to gain the strength I needed to enjoy you, but I did not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who is also God, supreme over all things and blessed for ever. He called out, proclaiming I am the Way and Truth and the Life, nor had I known him as the food which, though I was not yet strong enough to eat it, he had mingled with our flesh, for the Word became flesh so that your Wisdom, through whom you created all things, might become for us the milk adapted to our infancy.
Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!
Lo, you were within,
but I outside, seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made
I rushed headlong – I, misshapen.
You were with me, but I was not with you.
They held me back far from you,
those things which would have no being,
were they not in you.
You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;
you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you;
I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I burned for your peace.
(--from, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, bishop)

This prospect that we are surface dwellers -- cheers. I'm pleased to consider my ignorance and the depths yet to be discovered.

I visit that which reposes.

And, for a time, a brief time, I allow what is completely beyond me and everything I know to reside in repose before me.

Sacramentally, consciously, reverently.

Serving life in practice -- silent life of presence.

Sigh.

Deep breath. Exhale

Sigh -- for the seen and unseen.

What is your Name?

You don't recall?

Lord, you are in our midst, we are called by your name. Do not desert us, O Lord our God!
(Jeremiah 14:9)

Here, says the One-Who-Is-Here, I will share mine with you.

Here, in that name, we are made whole.

It is enough to pray without ceasing. There's no end to prayer.

Prayer is the perennial source of the world.

Without which nothing is.

I have said to the Lord
“You are my Lord,
in you alone is all my good.”
(--from Psalm 15

Merton said he was in the monastery because he believed in intercessory prayer.

Saskia calls the cat in the dooryard.

At the same time there is something about prayer. For some, there is nothing to prayer.

And you can get there from here.

We practice Lectio Divina mid-day.

Drenching rain throughout.

Emptiness is a name for nothingness,
A name for ungraspibility,
A name for mountains, rivers, the whole earth.
It is also called the real form.
In the green of the pines,
The twist of the brambles,
There is no going and coming;
In the red of the flowers
And the white of the snow,
There is no birth and no death.
-- Ryusai

I decide to drop the word "spirituality."

Instead "slip slop."

Serving life in practice. Silent life of presence.

Slip slop.

Perhaps our logo should include a damp floor mop.

It is a matter of ideas. The idea of freedom and common benefit of compassion. And the contrary idea of control and secure manipulation with power. These two ideas must face each other in the open forum of debate and deliberation, not in back rooms and hidden away alliances of profit besotted with disdain for the ordinary person.

Sages since time immemorial have only explained the problems of pollution. If one does not have all that false consciousness, emotional and intellectual opinionatedness, and conceptual habituation, one is clear as autumn water, pure and uncontrived, placid and uninhibited. Such people are called Wayfarers, or free people.
- Kuei-Shan (771-854)

Jesus had a mind of non-division. The Tao does not know division. Buddha taught unitary consciousness.

If you hear someone speaking about division, divisiveness, and separation -- you know you are listening to someone asleep.

We might not feel it yet. But some day it will occur to us that we have let ourselves go. Did not see neighbor as who they were. Missed what was right before our eyes.

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

(Poem by W. S. Merwin, “Separation” from The Second Four Books of Poems , Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993).

Let yourself be sewn back together.

I know people who are Muslims.

I know people who are Christians.

I know people who are Jewish.

And I know people who find each of the above peoples and traditions threatening, terrorizing, and evil .

These people intentionally cultivate fear encouraging us to live in fear peddling fear so as to profit from fear.

Pay attention to them. They are dangerous. They are also impertinent.

Human nature is developed
By profound serenity and lightness;
Virtue is developed
By harmonious joy
And open selflessness.
When externals do not
Confuse you inwardly,
Your nature finds the condition
That suits it;
When your nature does not
Disturb harmony,
Virtue rests in its place.
- Huai-nan-tzu

Pray for sanity.

Pray for people of all traditions.

Pray for me.

And I, you.

Some say it is not enough to pray. They say someone has to slap the purveyors of fear, anger, and hate in the face and smack them upside their heads until they agree to stop their stupidity.

I don't know. Once that anger is released, where's the stopping?

For much of American history, demagogues have manipulated irrational fears toward people of minority religious beliefs, particularly Catholics and Jews. Many Americans once honestly thought that Catholics could not be true Americans because they bore supreme loyalty to the Vatican.

Today’s crusaders against the Islamic community center are promoting a similar paranoid intolerance, and one day we will be ashamed of it.
(--from OpEd, Taking Bin Laden’s Side, by NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Published: August 21, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22kristof.html?_r=1&hp

It stops here.

We're all temporary. Even the loudmouthed culture-baiters. They will soon die, as too will I. Perhaps not before they sow seeds of fear and error. Their error is calculated and scripted cleverly so as to pivot at the last instant to avoid incitement to murder or mayhem. May they be ashamed and made to regret their foolish and cowardly rhetoric!

Dogen distinguishes between two perspectives: the inauthentic or selfish view, which negates or overlooks impermanence and presumes the stability of worldly concerns; and the enlightened standpoint of non-ego, in which a person's awareness of the fleeting quality of time transmutes into a resolve for perpetual training. an authentic view of impermanence, according to Dogen, leads one to identify practice and realization with the holistic moment that encompasses self and other, as well as the three tenses of time. Transiency is seen not as a barrier or obstacle to attainment but as the vehicle by which enlightenment is realized and renewed.

In Shobogenzo "Bedowa" (Discussing the practice of the Way) he maintains: "Even if practiced by only a single person at one time, zazen imperceptibly reverberates throughout every dharma at all times. Therefore, it ceaselessly transmits the Buddha's teaching in the past, present and future of the entire unlimited universe." Impermanence as the very structure of reality must not be resisted but embraced through a sustained awareness of the formlessness of all forms.
(pp. 46,47 in The Zen Poetry of Dogen, Verses from the Mountain of Eternal Peace, by Steven Heine, Tuttle, c.1997)

I prefer and choose contemplative thinking. There's enough inner turmoil to busy me for a long time. Creating outer turmoil is the business of those unwilling to do the inner work.

John Ruskin wrote -- "All one's life is music, if one touches the notes rightly and in time."

Even my kazoo attempts to help and calls my lips.

Away, I'm bound away.

We stand outside Belfast Co-op talking, the Franciscan Sister hermit, the Buddhist woman priest, the two monastics of no other with their dog, Rokpa, as a rock and roll band pounded notes loudly across the parking lot. It was unlikely.

Yet there we were. The sardine parade went to the footbridge after The January men (and others) followed by the Belfast Fiddlers sent good music over the harbor.

The new day deepens what has already and unfolds what is surprising, unpredictable, and creative. You may wish to change your life, you may be in therapy or religion, but your new vision remains merely talk until it enters the practice of your day.
(p.129, Anam Cara, by John O'Donohue)

Rokie got two leftover hamburgers from the grillman and shared part of one with us.

Comprehending the fundamental,
Embracing the spirit,
Roam the root of heaven and earth,
Wander beyond the dust and dirt,
Travel to work with noninvolvement.
Take care not to let mechanical
Intelligence burden your mind;
Watch what is not temporal
And remain unmoved by things.
- Lao tzu

We watch the film Fetching Cody and wonder whether we might move around time more than we know.

If freedom entails setting someone free even from our love, then the way of love recognizes no person but only sees itself beyond and through each one along the way.

"The world of the past is gone. . . . Behold I am making all creation new." (God, in the Book of Revelation, quoted by O'Donohue)

Nothing of the old.

Something in the new.

Four conversations today. Two in prison. One in old age home. Lastly, at hermitage. In each one, practicing presence and respect with listening and responding.

It is an act of creation that we are too close to see. We are mere bristles in an artist's brush crossing a canvas in a motion too subtle to detect.

Each one is necessary. Each a unique and gifting presence.

Sages lean on a pillar
That is never shaken,
Travel a road that is
Never blocked, are
Endowed from a
Resource that is never
Exhausted, and learn
From a teacher that
Never dies.
They are successful
In whatever they undertake,
And arrive wherever they go.
Whatever they do, they
Embrace destiny and go along
Without confusion.
- Wen-tzu

What is being written? What is being painted? What is being heard?

Yes. And yes. And, finally, yes.

The day practices presence and we are merely within the day.

Being practiced.

The sea is just the sea. Fish swim in it. Men die in it. Life depends on it.

"Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

The wind is just the wind. Birds fly with it. Clouds float on it. Women turn their heads to face it.

La Mer is mother. Le Vent is father.

That's the whole of it.

There is no word for greater than the whole.

Don't take what you want. Rather, don't want, and take what is left.

Ten thousand rows of bamboo reach my door,
Bearing a clean wind and harp music
In every season.
Heaven's will travels freely in the thick grove;
Shadows sweep the yard;
The dust remains.
- Naong Haegun (1320-1376)

What-is will always be left.

Good doesn't triumph over evil.

Good merely remains after evil has destroyed itself -- to set things right, again, for a spell.

Awakening is a never-ending narrative. There's no end to it.

No boredom. No accomplishment. No place to begin.

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

Every layer penetrating awareness within opens a corresponding layer widening the expanse of awareness without.

Universal solidarity supersedes yet involves typical group solidarity.

Compassion longs for nothing outside itself.

Because there is nothing outside.

Jack loans his Shaw & Tenney oars for our evening row. They are light and lovely.

I am corresponding with a man in California about his oars for sale.

Chop and swells around Curtis Island tonight. Dee emerges along with 4 or 5 children from lighthouse residence to wave to us. The kids jump up and down while waving.

Vast and far-reaching
without boundary,
secluded and pure,
manifesting light,
this spirit is without
obstruction.
Its brightness does not
shine out but can be
called empty and
inherently radiant.
- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091-1157)

The sea is a good home.

It holds us up, and teaches how to balance

"Assume your nature as yourself" -- wrote Charles Olson in his poem "Love."

As we gather into ourselves what once was scattered anon and elsewhere as other and others, we begin to dwell in the middle of our being-in-the-world, we begin meaningful life.

"If I find Him with great ease, perhaps He is not my God. If I cannot hope to find Him at all, is He my God? If I find Him wherever I wish, have I found Him? If He can find me whenever He wishes, and tells me Who He is and who I am, and if I then know that He Whom I could not find has found me: then I know He is the Lord, my God: He has touched me with the finger that made me out of nothing." (--Thomas Merton)

The Assumption of Mary is the belated recognition of earth and woman rejoining kosmos and man. It is the unsplitting of the atom.

I like the phrase "Sailing by Ash Breeze." It refers to self reliance. In the golden age of sail it was a "tongue-in-cheek" reference to pulling the ship when becalmed. With no alternative power and total dependence upon the wind, a ship was helpless when it found itself in total calm. In most instances the crew could do nothing but wait for a breeze. But in the case of an emergency, as coming under attack for example, a crew would secure lines to the bow of the ship and to the boats. They would pull on the oars of the boats in order to move the ship. Because oars were made primarily of white ash, the term "sailing by ash breeze" was born.

I like the term and find examples in my life when I either have or should have sailed by ash breeze.

(--from WetDog Blog, http://wetdog-sailor.blogspot.com/2007/01/sailing-by-ash-breeze.html)

Jim's mom, Janet, and Heather's dad, Richard, died on this date. I visited a loved one in Nicolet, Quebec who took vows a long time ago. The turn of summer pivots here and runs toward the ending of a season. You can feel it.

We chant Night Prayer after evening practice ends and participants leave. The candle stays lighted before Mary's icon. Myth, mystery, and metaphor dance in shadows thrown by flame.

While some Protestants pulled back from the declaration as hardly conducive to ecumenical relations, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung considered it the most important religious declaration of the twentieth century. As a master of the mythological river that nourished what he termed our “collective unconscious,” Jung grasped the profound and fitting symbolism of such a declaration at mid-century.

The world had already turned its attention toward the endless vistas and wonder of space and astronauts would leave boot marks on the moon’s surface a generation later. The Swiss scholar sensed that the Assumption symbolized the mystery of human destiny and the end of the pre-Copernican era at the same time. The Assumption was a mythological and therefore a spiritual symbol of a Mystery in which we are still caught up. There was another numinous layer beyond the celebration of Mary and the confirmation of human dignity.

The Assumption proclaimed the Mystery of the century, the return of Mother Earth to the Heavens and the end, therefore, of the split between Earth and Heaven and all the divisions, such as between flesh and spirit, that flowed from that. It heralded the unity of the universe and the unity of human personality. That is the richest and perhaps least plumbed aspect of this feast. The wonder is that the Assumption is rich and deep enough a Mystery to accommodate these various levels of understanding all at the same time. Midsummer allows us to savor its Mystery in many ways and to understand how much we lose when we limit our religious understanding only to the concrete literal level.

( Eugene Cullen Kennedy, emeritus professor of psychology at Loyola University, Chicago. --from, What are we to assume about the Assumption? http://ncronline.org/blogs/bulletins-human-side/what-are-we-assume-about-assumption)

By assuming our nature as ourselves we step out of the separation into the distinct wholeness of solidarity with what is here.

And here is what time is now.

Heaven-earth as it is assumed.

Gathering into itself what is here.

Life is all over the place.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought. (-- Basho)

As we are, all over the place.

LORETTA I'm freezing to death.
RONNY Come upstairs. I don't care why you come. No, that's not what I mean.
Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is and I didn't know this either. But love don't make
things nice, it ruins everything, it breaks your heart, it makes things a mess. We're not here to make things perfect. Snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. We are here to ruin ourselves and break our hearts and love the wrong people and die! The storybooks are bullshit.
Come upstairs with me, baby! Don't try to live your life out to somebody else's idea of sweet happiness. Don't try to live on milk and cookies when what you want is meat! Red meat just like me! It's wolves run with wolves and nothing else! You're a wolf just like me! Come upstairs with me and get in my bed! Come on! Come on! Come on!

[Loretta follows Ronny into his building.]
(-- Dialogue, Ronny and Loretta in film Moonstruck, 1987

In the film's final scene everything is clarified and settled around the kitchen table.

They are family.

We are family.

An imperfect compendium.

We grow old. We fade. We teeter between dream and dizzy wakefulness.

Suddenly, we die.

But death isn't something up ahead around the bend off in the future. Death accompanies life. My life. And yours. It is companion.

And as all that is not life itself begins to fall away -- control, plans, ego, blame, time, and rationales for actions -- so then does death fall away.

Leaving life alone.

A person's life? Empty water bubbles.
Eighty years passed in a dream.
Now I throw away my leather sack,
The wheel of the red sun sinks in the West.
- Taego Bowoo (1301-1382)

Life alone -- that rare experience devoid of diversion, distraction, division, and distortion -- knows nothing other than itself.

Jesus extended one's neighbor to include one's enemies. He could not have found a more effective way of shocking his audience into the realization that he wished to include all men [and women] in this solidarity of love. The saying is almost unbearably paradoxical: the natural contradiction between neighbor and enemy, between outsiders and insiders must be overlooked and overcome so that enemies become kinsmen and all outsiders become insiders!
(--p.61, in Jesus Before Christianity, by Albert Nolan, Orbis, 1978)

To know nothing other than itself is to dwell with joy in wholeness where no mistake is recognized as mistake and nothing matters other than life itself.

Each life.

Within each.

Neighbor!

Being a hermeneute is close to being a hermit.

One can only hope to listen carefully and receive gracefully the empathetic consciousness of the world, which is meaning itself.

Evening meditation,
Enfolded in mountains,
All thoughts of the
World of people dissolve.
Quietly sitting on my cattail cushion
Alone, I face the empty window.
Incense burns away,
As the dark night deepens,
And my robe is a single fold,
As white dew thickens
Rising from deep meditation,
I stroll in the garden,
And the moon is already above the highest peak.
- Ryokan

To have faith is to be open to the open way which is dwelling before each face.

We're not strangers here; we are what is here.

Don't try so hard.

Candle burns before icon of Clare of Assisi. Off in corner, statue of Francis has small flower in hand. It's Clare's day. Perhaps when no one is looking he'll give it to her.

"What if you slept? And what if, in your
sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your
dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a
strange and beautiful flower? And what if,
when you awoke, you had the flower in
your hand? Ah, what then?"
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We need our directions recalibrated, our bearings straightened. We might be able to categorize and analyze our wrong understanding, but we should not become attached to it.

New Religion

This morning no sound but the loud
breathing of the sea. Suppose that under
all that salt water lived the god
that humans have spent ten thousand years
trawling the heavens for.
We caught the wrong metaphor.
Real space is wet and underneath,
the church of shark and whale and cod.
The noise of those vast lungs
exhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.
Heaven's not up but down, and hell
is to evaporate in air. Salvation,
to drown and breathe
forever with the sea.
(--Poem, "New Religion," by Bill Holm, from The Chain Letter of the Soul: New & Selected Poems. © Milkweed Editions, 2009.

The wind blew and tide churned southeast rounding of Curtis Island this morning. The sea whispers its secret. I wave to the lighthouse keepers breakfasting outside the door of their keeper's house. In what might be the final August of his duties, the man who has stopped treatments continues to wave. I let go of oar again and wave to his good continuation.

Megan's inscription to us inside her book reads, "May you gaze lovingly upon each other and all beings!"

May Clare's life illuminate your heart as you seek your own love, the love of God and companion, and the creation of a loving community. May we all learn from her wisdom, and her simple message of love and compassion, and know that we too can live in this way, bringing the manifestation of love into a lived reality in our world. As Ann Johnson has written in Miryam of Jerusalem, "God creates each one of us as endless community." Now is the time of sacred companions and sacred community.
(--p.xxiii, Introduction to Sacred Companions Sacred Community, Reflections With Clare of Assisi)

In the chapel/zendo the candle has kept well its vigil as the waving man his watch.

We chant Compline. Then leave.

We are blest.

Spirituality isn't a profit and loss spreadsheet.

Still, we take notice when we are about to lose something.

I tell you, most solemnly,
unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies,
it remains only a single grain;
but if it dies,
it yields a rich harvest.
Anyone who loves his life loses it;
anyone who hates his life in this world
will keep it for the eternal life.
If a man serves me, he must follow me,
wherever I am, my servant will be there too.
If anyone serves me, my Father will honour him.
(-John 12:24-26)

'My' life is fraught with ego, complaint, and judgment. Maybe, even though it is too strong a word, it is these three collateral aspects of my life that I 'hate.' If I 'love' these aspects of my life, I'll probably be saddled with them for all of time for all of eternity. The current culture of hate and intolerance is predicated on the dismissive and disapproving mind that carves life into in and out, good and bad, useful and useless, friend and enemy. These painful cuts leave pain and scars in their path.

We are beings whose nature is service to one another: each to each, each to all, all to all, all to each.

Let's look at this from a contemplative view.

If someone loves their life, it is lost. Love and lose. By this we can suggest that one's life does not belong to them any longer. It has gone into the undifferentiated whole where what is unique and different is celebrated as being-itself, and is given up and out to the service and empathy surrounding what could be called others, but might also be called each-in-all.

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

I love, I lose 'my' life in that it belongs, profoundly, to each of you, to thou, to earth, to kosmos,

In its most general sense, a cosmos is an orderly or harmonious system. It originates from a Greek term κόσμος meaning "ordered world" and is the antithetical concept of chaos. Today the word is generally used as a synonym of the word Universe (considered in its orderly aspect).

In theology, the term can be used to denote the created Universe, not including the creator. The Septuagint uses both kosmos and oikumene for the inhabited world. In Christian theology, the word was also used synonymously with aion to refer to "worldly life" or "this world" as opposed to the afterlife.

The philosopher Ken Wilber uses the term kosmos to refer to all of manifest existence, including various realms of consciousness. The term kosmos so used distinguishes a nondual Universe (which, in his view, includes both noetic and physical aspects) from the strictly physical Universe that is the concern of the traditional sciences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos

We're not meant to hate life here. Not meant to hate our profound and unique life. When we hate we hold tightly to what we hate. We need to let it go.

When we love everything is given to itself. Everything belongs to Itself.

We, as separate, isolated, and warring beings -- disappear. We're lost. Gone. Into the evening mist and fog on the buoyant waters.

Dusty tracks all end
The world is far away. (--Han-Shan)

Here is where I love you.

Here, not afraid.

Nothing left to lose.

Invisible service; indistinguishable honour.