The shipwrecked, said Jose Ortega y Gasset, listen to them!

Rilke's Fourth Duino Elegy for conversation tonight, completing a two week reading and reflecting.

Who’ll show a child just as it is? Who’ll place it within its constellation, with the measure
of distance in its hand? Who’ll make its death
from grey bread, that grows hard,—or leave it there, within the round mouth, like the choking core
of a sweet apple? . . . . . . Minds of murderers are easily divined. But this, though: death,
the whole of death,—even before life’s begun, to hold it all so gently, and be good:
this is beyond description!
(--final lines, translated from German by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender)

Refusing the bitter, metaphor of Jesus refusing the gall on the cross, preferring to receive the offer of the pure event.

Nothing added; nothing taken away.

As fire listens with us to dusk and darkness under sky on earth with each other.

“The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic “ideas” [about his own character and identity] and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. And this is the simple truth – that to live is to feel oneself lost - he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.”

(--Jose Ortega y Gasset, from, The Revolt of the Masses)

Seeing from every side.

From within.

Everything.

Perfectly; as it is!

What is the sound of one bicycling monk returning to the road?

Click, click, click...

...gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā!

Thank you, 감사합니다 (kamsahamnida), Daeung Sunim, for gracing us with your visit!

Itself; changing

Soup and send off.

We are all going to suffer our losses. How we deal with these losses is what makes all the difference. For it is not what happens to us that determines our character, our experience, our karma, and our destiny, but how we relate to what happens.
- Lama Surya Das, "Practicing With Loss"

It's about impermanence.

Change itself.

Does a dog have Buddha-Nature, or...

...the nature to play stick-throw with visiting Buddhist monk? 

Rokpa and Cody play with Daeung Sunim after morning sitting in chapel/zendo. They sat in silence with us, claims Rokie, now the pay-off ... run, play, run!

The morning is quiet with remembrance of another September 11. We listen to the resonance of calls from place to place. The calls ask: Are you listening?

One monk makes his pilgrimage of soul through the souls of others he meets bicycling through countries, provinces, states, and other more subtle borders.

I like the phrase, "to connect with awareness." Perhaps it is suggesting that it is not 'awareness' we are aiming for, but "connect with." Beyond that, this "connect-with" might actually be what awareness is.

Thus, connect-with is awareness.

Completely (ok, even partially) connecting-with is the practice of awareness.

Awareness might not be awareness of something or someone. Rather, awareness is being-connected, whether or not we are aware of it.

On the mountain top one thatched hut, Thirty li from roads.  Knock on the door: no disciple to answer;  Look in: only a table for tea.  The firewood cart is covered;  Have you gone fishing in the autumn stream?  I look among the pools, but miss you;  I try but fail to pay you my respects.  Grass shines in the fresh rain;  Pines murmur at evening windows.  Here at this moment a harmony,  Profound and unrivaled;  The self completely cleansed,  The heart, the ear.  Although there is no guest or host as such,  I'm able to intuit your pure thought.  Purpose fulfilled, I head back down the mountain.  No need now to wait for you.  

--Ch’iu Wei (8th c)

We greet the greeting of the calls, the visiting monk, the September sun and breeze, and all the lovely eyes and feet visiting along this mountain!

Resting

Korean Buddhist bicycling monk sleeps in Morning Call Yurt this chill night with down comforters.

We go for volunteer training in southern Maine prison tonight.

Advaita teacher said at library this noon: "Meditation is allowing what is to be without resistance."

Staying awake all the way home on dark roads is great gift.

Bicycle, after over five thousand miles, (so far), rests in barn.

Thou shalt remain; nameless

There's nothing out there anymore.
It's all in the middle of no place between two things not there.

Still, the chicken soup is tasty. Fresh bread also. Bishop's cake of a piece.

It is curious, this sense of the momentous as merely a momentary mirage. And yet, gratefulness. For all of it. The pathetic. And the privileged.

To be here with it.

As it takes place.

As who we are.

Visiting patience in hospital beds

Bankai's zen at practice this morning.

Unboring.

Tonight, tropical moisture wrapped in eerie wind; crickets reminisce.

Take your time

We sat a spell in a room with the place Norman had lived his bodily life. Gone beyond, now, body left remaining, his wife and another sat with us as we sat with his passing.

Profound bow to once and always.

Time takes what nothing else wants-- formless presence.

Presiding Old Ama

Love, ancient and true, present and new, be with us, and with our kin and kindred.

Amen!

Let the voters register and vote!

And may the best in man and woman see light and gaze with care on it!

It's academic...

Two.
Many.
Syllabi.

I don't know; you?

 Divine Ground, vibrating breath.

The Vedas contain several creation hymns, some of which describe the universe as a great egg from which everything comes (Rig Veda 10:121). Other hymns describe it as the product of a grand architect (Rig Veda 10:82). In the creation hymn below, on a literal level, the author depicts the original state of the universe as a formless void of neither existence nor non-existence. Through heat, the one primordial existence arose. From this, desire emerged which, in turn, generated mind. The author concludes, though, that we can never know the exact process of creation since no one was around to witness it, including the gods. Even the highest divine creative force may or may not know how it all started.

Then there was neither the non-existent nor existent. There was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What was concealed, and where? And what gave shelter? Was there any water of unfathomed depth?There was no death then, nor was there any immortality. There was no torch of day and night. There was that One, which breathed mindlessly by its own nature. But apart from it there was nothing whatsoever.First there was only darkness concealed in darkness. All was undiscriminated water. That One, existing in a formless void, was born by the great power of heat.After that, Desire arose in the beginning — desire, the primal seed and germ of Mind. Sages who searched with their heart discovered the existent’s kingship in the non-existent.Across this they extend their dividing line: what was above it then, and what below it? There were originators, and there were mighty forces. Free action was here and energy was up there.Who truly knows and who can here declare from where it was born and from where this creation comes? The gods came later than the production of this world. Who knows then from where it first came into being?He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it; whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he truly knows it, or perhaps he does not know. [From the Rig Veda, 10:129]

 http://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/vita/teaching/eastphil.htm

Exhalation; great stillness.

Over hills; and daily

Listening to Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell in my ear.

The world is more unknown than felt.

Wonder wanders without destination.

God, it is said, is good!

Following itself

Maybe I live in 2032 and only seem to be living in 2012. Computer simulation will befuddle us all.

We read Elizabeth Johnson at Sunday Evening Practice. We consider the continuous, the cruciform, and the promise embedded in panentheistic divine reality.

I could be living in 564BCE and think I am in 12th century Assisi. Perhaps I am the 85th word of the Tao Te Ching imagining I am a phrase in William Carlos William's "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower."

I'm not now
Nor
Have I
Ever
Been certain
Of anything.

Wave and particle, wave and tide, wave and say goodbye -- it all befuddles.

Same river different country, same shoe different step, becoming is the novelty/vitality of consciousness.

Who do I say I am?

Don't ask.

I can't be trusted to know how to answer.

The chicken soup followed by peach blueberry cake was delicious.

Practice follows itself perfectly.

This is, and

1st day of new year.

In hospital for visiting tonight.

Immortal means no time. Which means no death. Which means no birth.

I don't know why abortion is such a big deal. Is not being born the same as being unborn?

I build boardwalk toward new yurt.  I trust you realize the futility of trying to make sense of what republicans are talking about.

Then will come the democrats.

It doesn't matter. Really, it doesn't.

Just this is; nothing else is.

Joyful duration

For forty years

The lad

Has been son.

Perfect saying

Francis de Sales said: "Ask for nothing and refuse nothing."

Log, zzzs

Building boardwalk leading to center path up to yurt.

Vipassana meditator visits for Tuesday Practice.

Finish generic conversation brochure for prison(s), hermitage, nursing home, and hospital.

Sleep.

Plaintive

I'm sure there's something good to be said about political conventions.

There must be.

No?

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”.
(-- Augustine of Hippo, in The Confessions)

There's bound to be...

Something.

Nothing, more, to say

I can't tell the future. There is no future. I can't recall the past. It's gone. But I can see, now.

Call it what you will. The infinite possibilities and potential permutations, combinations, and calculations of the net of now presenting everything and everywhere in its true context, that context you and me aware, without  question or explanation, as just this, here, in all its inclusive and idiorhythmIc transitory hide-n-seek manifestations.

Notch the arrow of emptiness 

To shoot the hawk of ultimate meaning;

If you're not right on target, 

You will be deceived by this barbarian monk. 

-- Fugai Ekun (1568-1654)

Meanwhile the men of the grand old party become more and more stupid about vagina, womb, sperm, egg, consenting relationality, and offspring. They are making women into body parts and legislative language that men own and operate.

Let me, despite what I've said, tell you the future.

Leonard Cohen said it starkly: "I've seen the future, brother: it is murder." (--from, The Future, song by L.C) 

Abortion and rape, they figure, are isolated and a-relational events having nothing to do with a woman, except that she just happens to be in attendance to their enactment.

Not-being born and Bankai's "unborn" are curious considerations in a world mind-set of dualism and linear historicity. We're tied, it seems, to notions of "born" and "died" -- the words populate all our documents and obituaries.

What if we saw things differently? The physics and spirituality of appearance and disappearance, form and emptiness, energy and matter and the transformation of them -- the understanding of unfolding and multidimensional synchronicity interweaving through our consciousness the variegated multiplicity of an integral and real universe -- the net of now -- beguiles.

A deranged or, even, barbarian monk would have nothing more to say.

Mind before thinking is the unborn

Close the gate. There's a hermit lurking!

The fuel in the tea brazier is burnt out,
So I collect pine needles;
The fields of medicinal plants are empty,
So I cut vegetable roots.
Naturally dull, I've forgotten Zen activities,
My gate is darkened at noon by
The shade of ancient trees.
White clouds impart a sense of peace
To my Zen meditation,
Green grasses suffice to make a rug for my guests.
What I have collected is a hundred years
Of emptiness.
- Isshi Bunshu (1608-1646)

Emptiness, like enlightenment, is not what you think; it is!

Et habitavit in nobis

Sitting in four rooms in hospital with four different patients we talk about remembered lives, moving place to place, elopement, taverns, acting, hospital as permanent residence, the healing work needed, and school yard football.

Just talking.

A simple act.

Verbum caro factum est!

Love love me true

So less interested in what is not true.

I cannot imagine wanting to remain in the false.

I'm not that creative.

The ordinary I find more interesting.

Then, where?

Don't look for me here. I'm not here.

It's a staggering notion, one I hope to outgrow.

With gratitude and watchful gaze

Morning-Call Yurt's first day of solitude.

More about its name to come.

Penalty and pain; promise and healing

The land of abandoned gods is a quiet place where mull the once adored in muted light just outside the busy and distracted attention of weekday people.

Gods have given way to things with circuitry and bytes. Even the One-God has retreated to the center of everything. No longer the recipient of bowing bodies and wispy incense this One-God recognized falling stock prices and insurance payouts enough to place remaining wealth offshore beneath deep waters in secret caves near dateline meridian where Tuesdays cannot imagine Saturdays nor nine comprehend fourteen.

Krishna and Christ adorn walls near Bodhidharma and African Goddess just above New York Times and New Yorker with their sultry models and buffoonish politicos in election year. "All," as the ending of the bard's play ruminated, "are punish'ed." All know penalty and pain.

Tear and smile -- the fluctuations of any family, any relationship, any gathering of people for social, economic, or religious reasons. Disappointment and fond recollection.

As a solitary this all applies, all of it, without exception

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

Still, we each prefer our way of life no matter the conditions or circumstances.

The hard learning is respect for the other, even if your preference is the belief there is no other.

From kitchen the expectant father says he'd like to name his daughter 'Althea' -- a name meaning in Greek 'healer.'

Healing is our fondest wish.

For one.

For all.

Sea me...

Monday morning.

"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me."(--lyrics from 'Tommy' by The Who, 1969)

I leave coins on buoys for travelers, in realm of the living, or the realm of the the fantastically probable, to use for whatever purchase seems seemly to them.

In this way, I am content to contribute.

Comes slowly quiet

Sunday ends.

Love is strong as death,
jealousy as relentless as Sheol.
The flash of it is a flash of fire,
a flame of the Lord himself.
Love no floods can quench,
no torrents drown.
(--Song of Songs 8:6-7)

Note: occupy meetingbrook

There will be no Sunday Evening Practice tonight (19Aug12) due to a family gathering retreat occupying meetingbrook. Regular practices will resume Tuesday.

All lose... what? Is, found

Driving home from visiting patients in hospital.




The day ebbs.








One woman sang me a song in her room.

Another, in intensive care, told me about her family.

Daylight at its edge.

That's odd

Some salute the flag. Honorably.

Some curse the day they were born.

Me, it's hard to explain.

I prefer odd moments.

Like...wood shavings on wet mulch at dusk.

A little distance from yourself

"Para" = side by side with. 'Beyond' also works.

"El" means "God" -- and so, the word "parallel."

What is your parallel existence?

Poustinia (пустынь) at meetingbrook

Janet. JoAnn. Mary.

A trinity of the 15th of August.

With gratitude for each.

Morning-Call Yurt is just about completed. Hang door in the morning.

Arms, shoulders, back -- exhausted.

Desert stillness.

Pardon me, but surely we have...

How many parallel lives are lived every day without our being aware we are living them?

Worldly people who do not understand me
Call me by my worldly name of Old Zhou.
You invite me to a seven-day religious feast,
But the feast of meditation knows no end.
- Huixu (431-499)

The 15th of August has long been heart notable. In a parallel world I am with a dear friend in the middle of nowhere.

And where is nowhere?

Just that place from which you have stepped from where you thought you were but have never been but in the dream of faint recollection as unexplainable wisps of familiarity brush by like fog on summer night.

Love, being whole, splits easily into many parts -- all of which contain complete and fleeting glimpse of what cannot be grasped.

Mountain to sea

      Work continues.

You ask where I live?

Issa wrote:

(tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara)

This dewdrop world,
is a dewdrop world,
and yet
(Kobayashi Issa, 小林 一茶?, June 15, 1763 - November 19, 1827)

The final words are my final dwelling: "and yet"

one plus two equals three

Origin, expression, convergence.

Contemplation, conversation, correspondence.

Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva.

It seems that what we have here is a failure to collate!

Collation and recollection into reconciliation.

At the hospital tonight the visits were
wonderful.

As all are...well.

Collectivity, complexity, convergence consciousness

In prison this morning Doris and I, waiting for Buddhist sitting to gather, talk of radial energy -- what we referred to as benevolent intention of presence, no matter who showed up, no matter who stayed.

Later, adjoining to the room where meetingbrook conversation was to take place,  Everett said to me that Tony had told him to stay in case I would be alone there -- a mission of pity for the volunteer if Tony noticed Doris to be alone in another room. Such kindness on their part! We laugh about it during the conversation attended, ultimately, by seven of us.

Tonight, at Friday Evening Conversation, Tom shows us the latest photo of a crop circle in England -- a Celtic knot, it seems, of 'no beginning/no end.' I mention radial energy, we look it up, and read the selection from The Cosmic Plenum: Teilhard's Radial Energy on the Stoa del Sol website:

"By death, in the animal, the radial is reabsorbed into the tangential, while in man it escapes and is liberated from it. It escapes from entropy by turning back to Omega: the *hominisation* of death itself... The universe is a collector and conservator, not of mechanical energy...but of persons. All round us, one by one, like a continual exhalation, 'souls' break away, carrying upwards their incommunicable load of consciousness. One by one, yet not in isolation. Since, for each of them, by the very nature of Omega, there can only be one possible point of definitive emersion--that point at which, under the
synthesizing action of personalizing union, the noosphere...will reach collectively its point of convergence--at the 'end of the world.' "
[Teilhard de Chardin, Phenomenon of Man, p. 272.] http://www.bizcharts.com/stoa_del_sol/plenum/plenum_2aa.html

Earlier, Saskia finishes her audits from July group. I have coffee with Ruth, my patient visitor compañera, at Highlands Cafe in Thomaston, our inaugeral tete-a-tete in this new venture.

At dust we walk the snow bowl with dogs aware how fortunate we are to share conversation, hospitality, nature, service, and time-itself together with our larger community.

"I would say there were a good many ways for a being to have a 'within.' A closed surface, irregular at first, may become *centered.*
A circle can augment its order of symmetry and become a sphere. Either by arrangement or the parts or by the acquisition of another dimension, the degree of 'interiority' of a cosmic element can undoubtedly vary to the point at which it rises suddenly on to another level. "
[Ibid, p. 89.]
"The essence of the real...could well be represented by the 'interiority' contained by the universe at a given moment. In that case evolution would fundamentally be nothing else than the continual growth of this 'psychic' or 'radial' energy, in the course of duration,
beneath and within the mechanical energy I call 'tangential,' which is practically constant on the scale of our observations..."
[Ibid, p. 143.] (from The Cosmic Plenum)

It seems we all suffer (patiently) from an interiority complex.

So it is, we sit and wait.

We stand and move.

Forward.

1945; one year, one day; august summer

Nagasaki.

Horror.

Shame.

molto gratitudine

We are born every day. Some days the numbers have particular historical resemblance.

Misalliance aside, ours is to fall groundlessly through radical trust that all shall be well, all manner of things -- all though the falling free upholding intervals of loving gratitude for what has been, what now is, and what will come to be -- completamente bene!

Epilogue 

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

(--From Day by Day by Robert Lowell)

Lowell is a good place to start for all us, poor and passing, facts. Then, welcoming:

Thoughts come and go. Feelings come and go. Allow yourself to experience the transient nature of thoughts and feelings, welcoming everything that arises as Just this, not me, not mine. (--- Sandra Weinberg, "Eating and the Wheel of Life")

 Grazie, mio madre e padre -- intero famiglia -- amore, ciao!

Once cleared, everything...

Hate holds on. Love lets go.

Let it go. Let it go.

Unhold everything.

Once, I thought something and believed it.

Now, I believe nothing.

Other than this.

Simple and stupid -- clear everything else out.

Lauding holy now here

Peter said, "Lord, it is good for us to be here." it was, they say, a transfiguration.

When we forget, it will be easier, having seen the enormity and infinitesimal, to recall and this revisit
the holy here.

In Hiroshima, this day and month 1945, it is difficult to laud "here" amid nuclear bomb, death and destruction.

Still, we gaze at awful history, and at awe-full story, and remain human in our gaze.

Willing to be, trying to be, an insightful and compassionate place of (yes) ...peace.

Francis of Assisi knew he was a fool

So hot, so dry, so many places -- so few, with money and power, see any problem. Here's a point of view: if there was not such a fear of not having so much money, would they care enough to admit what is real and true? Pick up mindful mendicancy. Drop mendacity. Trust and act.

Evangelical poverty is a foolish act.

Buckled naming itself; plus a snoozing pup

After a full day shoveling dirt, carrying beams, losing strength to hot sun, helping to construct platform for yurt donated to us, I go to first evening visiting as patient visitor at local hospital.

Ten rooms. Ten patients, conversations on ten topics. Such a lovely beginning. Great way to spend Saturday night.

If tired had legs they would be buckled by its own name.

Nothing's gonna change; my world

Christ, the Cistercian writer wrote, is peace.

At conversation tonight someone said Christ brought eternity into time.

It will come that "now" will extend to and encompass everything.

Peace is eternity now. Christ is eternal now. This is all we can hope for.

Now here this!

Being here, for this

Young bird on doorstep of chapel/zendo, eyes not opened, hole in neck from talon of predator, dropped in flight from deadly predation. We have no cat. No need, just now, for ambiguous feelings. Just this surprise and sorrow for the coming and going of living beings. And why, even, these feelings? Because they are, and I am, and impermanence in this form, while understandable, bears weight of ambiguity.

The trees and leaves are dusky still as I move the bird to a quiet spot by standing trees near mossy stones.

The images of peace hearts taken just before discovering the fallen bird ask new questions after the discovery. The template of peace does not exclude, as yet, death. Will it, can it, should it some day render death obsolete? How would such a prospect present itself to our minds? Without opposition would peace reconcile comings and goings into a seamless flow of a creating energetic wholeness?

Sitting in fading light of diminishing breath of expiring bird I hear a lonely call from canopy of motherhood through realization of loss.

I have been here for this.

All will be

It is easy to remind someone needing reminding that all is well because...it is, as each is, well, with our love.

May Lugh be with you...in light!

What are you for now

I'll probably have to define terms. Someone will ask what I mean by the words. It will take time to assure no offense meant, no harm intended.

Just the following: most everything is both simple and stupid.

Simple is as simple does what it does as it does it.

Stupid doesn't know what or why.

It used to worry me that I was these things -- simple and stupid.

Now I do not worry being this.

Being this is fine with me.

Find me doing what I am doing.

Leave me not knowing what nor why.

Simply and stupidly I am here!

For now.

That which radiates through is of god

Some say angels. Some say demons. I say Klondike ice cream watching British crime drama. Tangled webs.

Rowing with Saskia around Curtis Island moon nearing full sunset colors over mount Megunticook tide coming in from bay.

July wanes.

Oars pivot and pull.

I feel further and further into simple love of place. No drama, no apprehension. Place itself.

Like monastery to monk, sea to seaman, mystery to mystic.

If you look, really look into your life, you see through appearance and gaze as one in love with what is seen.

Ad maioram dei gloriam!

Don't speak my name; show me...your face

If we want a better world we're going to have to learn how to speak, pronounce words, enliven them, embody them. Or, maybe, just keep silence.

What do you say?

He eventually argues that it is the prime business of philosophy to make new words -- this is how it changes our world. (p.3, in Introduction, Heidegger, by John Richardson, c.2012)  

                                           

Richardson later writes:

In "Origin"[The Origin of the Artwork, 1935-36] Heidegger gives one of his rare examples in a famous account of a Greek temple:

The temple-work first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline win for the human essence the shape of his destiny. ...The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to humans their outlook on themselves. [OA (W 20-21)]     (--pp.294-95, Richardson) 

 This might be why silence is so valuable.

What is created by non-pronounciation of any words at all?

Here, listen to this...