Rokpa born on St Francis Day

Five years ago

Giovanni Francesco d'Assisi - Va Bene!

Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) thought that ignorance was tightening around knowledge, compressing and shrinking the sphere of knowledge with wide and suffocating squeeze.

He wasn't pessimistic about this. He thought it was the expected contraction which will lead to an extraordinary expansion effecting a shift toward supra-mental insight and truth building upon clarity and truth.

But, the interim closing-in and choking intentional ignorance is daunting. From presidential kabuki debate to prevarication system-wide in institutional solipsism spreading in corporate structures, we are looking to the metaphorical falling sky with cringing worry aliens have dropped into a no longer recognizable horizon.

I could look away. Or look within. Let me think about it.

A Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock  

The houses are haunted 

By white night-gowns. 

None are green, 

Or purple with green rings, 

Or green with yellow rings, 

Or yellow with blue rings. 

None of them are strange, 

With socks of lace 

And beaded ceintures. 

People are not going 

To dream of baboons and periwinkles. 

Only, here and there, an old sailor, 

Drunk and asleep in his boots, 

Catches Tigers

In red weather.  

(--Poem by Wallace Stevens)

There's the word, 'ceinture' -- a reminiscence of sacerdotal vesting when as an altar boy I would hold out braided rope for priest to cinch liturgical vestment costume to perform ritual of death and resurrection, the distribution of sustaining sacrament in bewildering metaphorical solemnity.

Priest after priest backed away from vesting table over decades of disappointment and disillusionment. Ceintures hung from hooks in closets long after anointed hands ceased reaching in to garb the girth of a distracted church whose hosts and wine began to stale in autumn pale.

But there is always Francis. 

Open-doored and earthen-hued, Francis, like Siddhartha Gautama, touched the earth, tasted lack, and called us back.

Back to what? (This revelation might help my hurting back.)

Back to Being. Being here. As earth. Is here. As it is. Heaven as earth.

With as much kindness as befits.

The great miracle is to walk the earth.

With all that is...

accompanying. For now.

Until,  no...

More...

seeker of truth 

follow no path
all paths lead where 

truth is here 

(Poem by e.e.cummings)

Would you throw your vote if you knew it wouldn't be counted?

Do you take this man to be your democrat-chosen candidate?
Some do.

Do you take this other man to be your republican-chosen candidate?
Some do.

Where are the green, libertarian, or justice candidates?
They are excluded.

I now pronounce this debate to be too narrow and too stylized.

You may now kiss off the pretended theatre piece simulating open democracy.

Don't bother with the rings. They're already in bed with each other.

Alone with my own sound

Bard Owl repeatedly asks his question in dark mountain wood.

I translate it according to my diffuse misunderstanding.

"Who speaks for you?"

Everything, Mr. Owl, and everyone.

But I am very often not able to hear, deaf with inattentive inanity.

Hence I prattle idiocy left to myself.

And cannot bear what I hear.

I don't want to think it's too late; do you?

I've been thinking about 9/11.

About thermite, controlled demolition, and whether the American people are worthy and capable of hearing the hitherto unexplained causes of the devastating destruction occurring that day.

I think we are. Worthy and capable. Some disagree. It is a mindset. Fixed? Or, growth?

Look at your mind. I will mine. Let's see what we are capable of seeing.

Truth, it is said, can be terribly unsettling. A startling awakening.

Untruth, it is said, can put us into a deep and untroubled sleep.

Today, I have been chloroform saturated, falling into soporific incredulity.

I'd rather be properly informed, being elevated into clear and unadulterated transparency.

Science, engineering, physics, chemistry, and reasonable hypotheses and evidence lead to consequential though unproven conclusions.

I'll start there.

Architects and Engineers, 9/11 Explosive Evidence, Experts Speak Out
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=YW6mJOqRDI4&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DYW6mJOqRDI4

Ignorance: Some days the broken breaks your heart

Avidya.

6,572 U.S. service members have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom    http://apps.washingtonpost.com/national/fallen/

 Avidya.

At least 132,000 civilians have died from 10 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new study by Brown university. And that’s a conservative estimate. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/afghanistan-iraq-wars-killed-132000-civilians-report-says/

Avidya

Avidya is like a deeply rooted tree with four thick branches. The first branch is called asmita, or Ego. This is the part of us that seeks its own interests. It considers itself better than others, is bruised when it does not get its own way, and generally causes us to identify with this earthly body and the life it is living. It has no wider perspective than that. 

The second branch is called raga and is best translated as Desire or Attachment. This is the part that constantly wants what it does not have. It desires what it does not really need and seeks to accumulate merely for the sake of it. It makes us unsatisfied and causes us to continually compare ourselves unfavorably with others. If we are wealthy, we are unhappy because somebody else is wealthier still. And so on.... 

The third branch is called dvesa or Refusal. This is like the recoil response. Whatever negative experiences we have had in life make us afraid of repeating them again in case the same result occurs. It can make us reject people, situations and possibilities that just might cause us pain again. In one person, it may be the fear of forming relationships with the opposite sex. In another, it may be a fear of public speaking as a result of negative childhood experiences.

The fourth and last branch on the tree of Avidya is called abhinivesa or Fear. These are specifically fears that are not caused by previous experience. For example, we may fear change, or growing old, or that we may lose everything we worked so hard to earn. In other words, things we may never have experienced before.

Avidya, in all its subtle forms, works within us constantly to root us in our habitual ways and make improvement difficult or impossible. The more we indulge Avidya, the stronger it becomes. Eventually, we feel that we are no longer the doer of these things; they simply happen to us. A person can attract one disastrous relationship after another, or continually experience uncontrollable rage under certain stimuli and feel that it is nothing directly to do with them. It is just bad luck. The person fails to see that there is only one person responsible for everything that happens!

 http://www.adishakti.org/_/avidya.htm

Ignorance, Avidya, is the cause of suffering and pain. 

No ant realizes its origin

At the end of his life he craves tuna fish.

That, and the knowledge one person, alone, learning with compassion, sets a tone for reincarnation many will find soothing.

The Tibetan Lama gathers to himself four lineages. The homeless nobody, beginning a tuna on whole wheat, offers bite to companion.

What follows is a world of incalculable understanding suddenly streaming -- a five minute window where eyes look around for the source of such sweet and fleeting joy.

His death is no battle. Not even a chore. It is a final crumb falling to ground vaguely scented with distant sea.

Where did you say to meet you

I hear a man I know suffers a new condition.

Elsewhere I hear it said that when mind conforms to the conditions of the body there is peace.

Origin, it is said, is where everything abides in creative abandon.

We'll meet there, I submit, at origin.

From one to one; to one as one

It's different from not believing in God in the sense people mean when they ask if you believe in God.

You could say I don't believe in God, but that's not it.

I don't believe in belief.

You could say I dwell in God the same way fish dwell in the sea and earthworms in soil.

Belief has nothing to do with it.

When someone asks, I pray for them. I pray -- not to God -- but, within God.

Ah, you might be tempted to say, then you do believe in God. No, not so. (Mu?)

I call upon what is the reality of their being to be the wholeness which is their true origin and home.

Return, I pray, to the home you are before birth after death during life.

That which is by any other, certainly by no other, name -- the one we call from and to and as -- God.

Good health to you, my friend and friends!

However and wherever and whoever -- you are.

Wholly at home.

Where, then, would it be?

When is a backache not a backache?
When it's not in your back.

Poems are sweet scripture

Not in a garden. Not on a crowded avenue.

One's eyes are for you.

Millions of stars go by.

You are here. And so am I.

We are so fortunate!

The song said: "I want to know what love is. I want you to show me."

Love is the quality of being.

If you are, you are love.

Show up. Be as you are.

Manifest one another.

Is it time for breakfast or supper? She asked.

In the hospital the women suffer the first day of autumn with iv's, pain meds, Alzheimer's, and pneumonia. I stand by beds and talk with them. About blue jeeps, wild turkeys outside window, deceased husbands, good children, and the way things used to be.

It is Saturday evening. They are gracious.

One person at a time.

Just that

In prison today, zazen.

In true freedom.

Then, around the table, conversation.

To be -- or not -- to be. This is not the question.

All mythology, the man said, has its origin in the belief there is something behind this visible appearing world.

Behind, in a quasi spatial sense. And behind, in a quasi temporal historical sense.

An invisibility. An emptiness devoid of any separative distinctions or descriptions. Just as the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao. And the God spoken of in the Jewish scriptures is a no-name God.

I bicycle to town on borrowed bike. Then row the harbor. I cycle home. 

Investigate everything. I suspect we find everything incredible. Then, don't believe anything, investigate it. And when you alight on something you feel you can hold on to -- drop it, let it go, investigate the release.

I will say this: the Open is the only non-place to be.

The question is: what is seen by the no-self non-dual whole-sight?

Only you...

Provide what is said next.

Goodnight, darling

The papyrus suggests Jesus had a wife.
The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is. It’s that you can see the world as it isn’t.” (Kathryn Schulz)Mozel Tov!

Emptiness is no views

What goes round is what is round.

See it; have no view.

It is seeing you.

Not a single body which is not me

Some realizations are a complete surprise.

“The whole universe in all ten quarters is the whole body of a mendicant monk.” (--from, Shōbōgenzō: On the Whole Universe in All Ten Directions  http://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Dogen_Teachings/Shobogenzo/058jippo.pdf

Some, more surprising than that.

EDITORIAL 

Death at Guantánamo Bay 

Published: September 15, 2012

Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni citizen and one of the first detainees sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2002, died there earlier this month. There is no official autopsy report yet, but in his decade in prison he had gone on hunger strikes and made several suicide attempts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/opinion/sunday/death-at-guantanamo-bay.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

I died this month in Guantanamo.

Do not send flowers.

Do not cry.

Rather, wonder why you, my friends, think you are still alive.

Look around. Learn from what you see.

As for me, I would prefer to look at what is...

 here...with no illusions.

“In the whole universe in all ten quarters, there is not one single person who is not the True Self.”  (Shobogenzo, Op cit.)

Let day-old coffee and fresh cream of wheat be your teachers

Morning appears as undifferentiated flow of September brook and slanted sunlight.

The death of expectation blends with an absence of belief in anything other than green silence with open mind.

Someone comes, sits in zendo, leaves. Tires roll over rutted stones onto Barnestown Road.

I abjure all but this unfolding extension of what is revealing itself.

I am

Passing

Away

Into

Breakfast.

I can't see DC from my porch

Somebody will calculate the upside to anti-American turmoil in the Arab speaking world. It will have to do with oil or votes or getting the stranger out of the White House. There's joy behind closed doors among the plotting class.

Flotsam from Bush and Bush years are raising glasses to the brilliance of their time in office. Money managers prime for Monday markets. Press releases are readied for distribution.

There is a corner that has been turned.

No one pretends any longer venality is not the operative motif. Stud and slut stand smiling at their front door saying goodnight to Johns and Jills sliding into limousines fresh from brandy and coffee laced with cynicism and smug retro-rancor.

Here in Maine it grows chilly.

Back hurts.

Delusion.

Hurts.

If Christ met Krishna...

What would they talk about?

Let's suggest an alternate question: If you met yourself, how would the greeting sound?

There is only one sound in the cosmos.

Do you hear it?

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"