Interruption [of friendship] is disappointing but unavoidable

I have friends I've not seen or spoken to for years. For decades. Some for half a century.

This does not lead me to ask if friendship is friendship if it is not practiced in the open and full of bonhomie with pledges of affection, affiliation, and propinquity. Friendship is equally a thing of quiet and spacious distance whose nearness is the air we breath, the sky we see, the ground underfoot. Connection is everything; and all is connected, at all times, in all places, with the realization no time no space separates what is real. Interruption, yes; irrevocable separation, no!

3. IVO.You are right. I am most grateful to realize that you are concerned about your son. Nothing but the spirit of charity has opened my mind and its thoughts to you. Would that your kindness might grant me this favor, that whenever you visit your sons who are here I might have recourse to you alone just once, with no others present, and lay bare without interruption the ardor of my heart.3 

4. AELRED. I shall gladly comply. I am delighted to see that you are not prone to empty and idle talk, that you always introduce something useful and necessary for your progress. Speak then with out anxiety. Share with a friend all your thoughts and cares, that you may have something either to learn or to teach, to give and to receive, to pour out and to drink in. 

5. IVO. I am ready not to teach but to learn, not to give but to receive, not to pour out but to drink in, as my youth prescribes, my inexperience demands, and my monastic profession counsels. But lest on these distinctions I should unwisely waste the time needed for other matters, would you teach me something about spiritual friendship? What is it? What values does it offer? What is its beginning and its end? Can friendship exist among all persons? If not among all, then among whom? How can it remain unbroken and so without any troubling disagreement reach a blessed end? 

6. AELRED. I wonder why you think I should be asked these questions. Obviously all of them were treated more than adequately by the greatest teachers of old. I wonder why especially, when you have spent your boyhood on studies of this kind and have read Tullius Cicero’s volume On Friendship, where in an engaging style he fully treated everything that seems to relate to friendship and gave a sort of outline of some of its laws and precepts.
(P.56, Spiritual Friendship, by Aelred of Rievaulx)

The unbroken nature of friendship becomes apparent in the longing of heart for the friend. Time, distance, circumstance -- these are accidents of existence that color but do not remove the canvas of friendship once it has been marked. Canvas ages, weathers, dulls, and cracks. Still, what has begun continues in its own hue with its own perspective of changed clarity and shifted stance. Pentimento.

I have loved what I could not sustain and deepen at its time of origin. The tenderness of a friend's eyes, the timbre and tone of confiding voice, the ambling meander of strolling conversation through evolving and deepening spiritual friendship -- these etch themselves on both conscious soul and dormant self. I have been asleep during nascent love, unaware during another's reaching hand, distracted during someone's request for simple presence and honest response. For this, I am sorry. For this disappointment, I relent. For this abandonment, I linger in the solitude of slowly emerging awareness, and silently touch the surrounding forgiving emptiness of repentant recollection.

68. AELRED. Have you forgotten that Scripture says “a friend loves always”?64 As you recall, our Jerome also said, “friendship that can end was never true.”65 Sufficient and more than sufficient proof has also been given that friendship cannot subsist without charity. Since in friendship, then, eternity may flourish, truth light the way, and charity delight, see for yourself whether you should withhold the name of wisdom where these three coexist.69. 

IVO. To what does this lead? Should I say of friendship what John, the friend of Jesus, said of charity,“God is friendship”?66,70. 

AELRED.This is novel indeed and lacks the authority of the Scriptures.The rest of that verse about charity,however,I surely do not hesitate to attribute to friendship, because the one who remains in friendship remains in God, and God in him.67 This you will perceive more clearly when we begin our dialogue on the fruit or value of friendship.Now if in our guileless simplicity we have spoken enough about the nature of friendship, let us reserve for another time the remain ing questions you suggested for consideration.71. 

IVO. When I am so keen to learn, this interruption is disappointing but unavoidable, as I am summoned to supper, which I am not allowed to miss, and you must meet your obligations to the many who wait in line for your attention.
Here Ends the First Book on Spiritual Friendship(P.69, Spiritual Friendship, by Aelred of Rievaulx; translation of De Spirituali Amicitiâ by Lawrence Braceland, sj)

Many ask, 'Why is God so difficult?' Perhaps IVO hints at it when he says, "God is friendship."

And we are neverendingly interrupting God.

We break the continuity, but we cannot sever the reality.

Reality, is, I suspect, that what is, is as it is, eternally and infinitely.

This morning I am here with all friends. Those near, those far.

Still, all here.

This . . . this instills joy!

We/you, we/you, up we/you!

What is love?

Love tries to transform everything into itself by leaving everything as it is.

To extract: Love tries to transform, leaving everything; into itself, as it is.

Love turns everything into itself by leaving everything as it is.

To wit: Love turns everything, leaving everything; as it is, into itself.

Love is what is.

Love is what is itself.

No subject, no object.

Just, and only, merely: Itself.

Go ahead, ask yourself: What am I?

Go ahead, answer yourself: Love is the question/answer.

If we must ask, and we must: Be what you ask; Be what you answer.

... ... ... ... ...

The word "ame" gives a clue. I am me. I ame.

"Ame," in Latin and Old French, means "soul" or "spirit." In Romani it means "we."

We/you, we/you, up we/you!

... ... ... ... ...

Coming at this sideways, there are two songs found on YouTube:

Two different songs; two views of a similar "ame."

Song "Let Me In" sung by the United Pursuit Band.
"Look My Way,
Look My Way,
Look My Way,
Look My Way,
My Love."
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m4vRL_HwhM

Song Let Me In, sung by The Sensations.
"Whee-ooo, whee-ooo
Hoo-whee-oo.
Whee-ooo, whee-ooo, hoo-ooo-ooo, whee-ooo,
Whee-ooo."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjS-_09839E
(Lyrics under video, press ^)

Stepping aside to pray by oneself

From the center of what we call this apparent cosmos emerges mind. And from this mind emerges everything urging itself with imagination.

It is Sunday. Let there be Christian reflection of this imagination. Let it surround terrestrial, celestial, and far-stretching swirling vibration of matter forming stars, planets, suns, and clusters, galaxies and superclusters, all the observable universe, along with the invisible urge of Being to realize Itself in the center of everything, point vierge -- the virgin point of what is now, to be, and always at origin.

We are baptized into this emergence.

Waters of realization.

Through our nature.

Silence. And deep...

Stillness.

Translation, thou art our fate!

Is it: "Peace and good will to men"?

Or is it: "Peace to men of good will"?

The wording of the story from christian scripture (Luke2:14) of the angels announcing to shepherds the news of a birth, the way you translate it, determines your understanding of god, your attitude to other people, and the way you see yourself.

One translation implies that those lacking good will are not wished peace. They are outside the "glory" wished to god or the extension of its reach.

The other translation invites all into peace and good will. No one is outside the "glory" of god, which reaches to embrace everyone in their present and potential condition.

One pericope, two theologies; two versions of god and those who communicate god to humanity.

With one, you are either in or out. With the other, all surround and are surrounded by the invitation to inclusive intimacy.

God is either a rewarding/punishing god right from the get go; or god is gloriously accepting, patient, and suffering of everyone no matter their understanding, behavior, or belief.

The sentence that formed itself in the following expression last month for me arrives again here this morning: God is any act engaged upon with care, compassion, love, concern, or creativity in service to life.

As Christmas slides from consciousness with the ice and thaw of January, we are still busy trying to figure whether Santa Claus and Jesus are fictions of the good-or-bad mental mechanical exclusionary divisive mind; or if they are mythic multipliers of story creating community and inculcating inclusive benevolent compassionate heart.

The whole world is poised on the teetering edge of Luke two fourteen: concordances and dictionaries in hand, Talmudic scholars and Greek etymologists pondering, preachers and poets poring over fragments of feeling, police and politicians preparing arrest and legislation, courts and prisons polishing shackles for transport, psyches and memories lingering ladened with tortured ambivalence.

Meanwhile -- new coffee pot stands on kitchen stove waiting for first run spewing boiling water up through slender tube to saturate grounds dripping back down in an ever deepening fragrant brown nectar for whatever god you have chosen to sit and sip with you.

May your coffee be strong, your coffee klatch be companionable, and your god be the story the world needs!

Meanwhile -- zafu and zabuton prepare for silent conversation with emptiness in preparation for followup pouring of cup into stillness.

Nothing's gonna change . . . my world

Nada Brahman; God is sound.

What is heard is God.

The rest is interpretation and opinion.

Listen, then.

Listen to the sound of what is being heard.

There, there, is God.

The eternal, infinite, ever-present, originally aware reality moving through the cosmos with every aspect of the manifest and unmanifest . . . presence . . . Itself!

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
(--Galileo Galilei)

Nada Brahman; sound is God.

This is what is...

Resounding

If we could only

Hear, Here, Hari

Jai guru deva!

Aum. . .

Looking through itself; intimacy, connected-with: compassion

Sam read Mary Oliver and a spate of Romans. "Interplay" was a word he used. Cosmos' evolution and human evolution interplay with one another.

If there were nothing beyond the psychological, all the saints from Simon Stylites to the Poverello, to Benedict Joseph Labre, to Therese of Lisieux, would indeed make up a fools' parade. Yet there is no area in which the "nothing but," the reductive principle, is more absurd than the life of the spirit. Under that aspect the spirit evaporates, and life itself becomes reduced to a desiccated specimen.
Pascal has said: "Knowledge has two end points which touch one another: one is the pure, natural ignorance which all men have when they come into this world. At the other end are the great men who, after having traversed all human knowledge, know that they do not know, and who come back to their original state of ignorance; this, however, is a knowing ignorance, an ignorance which looks through itself. Those who have abandoned the first state of ignorance, and never reached the second one, have a varnish of saturated wisdom. They play the role of the initiated ones. They are the people who obscure the world. Their judgment is falser than anybody else's." These words are so appropriate whenever one comes across a study in which something which is of the supernatural order is boiled down to its psychological substrate. With few exceptions, most psychological studies which deal with the supernatural bear that stigma. Nevertheless, we have to admit one thing: the psychological plane and the spiritual plane are not independent of each other. On the contrary, they are most intimately connected.
(--pp. 165-166, in The Third Revolution, A Study of Psychiatry and Religion, by Karl Stern, c.1954)

We have to learn to play

With, not against, one another,

On the field of stillness.

When Francis and Dogen lived apart together

To allow. To say "yes." To fall into compassion.

Heart to heart.

Drops away mind.

And body.

No one is to be called an enemy, all are your benefactors, and no one does you harm. You have no enemy except yourselves. 

(--Francis of Assisi, 1181-1226)

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water. Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water. You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky. The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky.

(--Dogen Zenji, 1200-1253)

What is emerging; now

 Perhaps the time for institutions of spirituality has drawn short. If not in general, then, for specific individuals. Remnant and dominant minorities, said Toynbee, exert powerful retentive and retaliatory power.

The clench of no-option grasp has loosened and falls away. A cultural change is underway. Over-worked and under-enriched priests laden with mop-up/patch-up duties try to remember their original calling, and are drenched with waters from Lethe. 

Will there be an aggiornamento, a spirit of change and open-mindedness, that visits the people, bypassing the caste created to run the institution, and weaving a course fresh and fluid down the hill from the contemporary calvary of snuffed inspiration? Is it even necessary to contemplate continuance? 

Or will a mutating creativity launch new phylums of φιλοσοφία (philosophia), which literally means "love of wisdom"?

     Our task and our responsibility are to assimilate the wisdom of bygone traditions and, having made it our own, to allow it to grow. Life is neither repetition nor continuation. It is growth, which implies at once rupture and continuity. Life is creation.

     If creation is an act of contemplation, as Plotinus says, real growth would be to reenact  in a contemplative way our partnership in the very creative activity of reality:

And Nature, asked why it brings forth its works, might answer, if it cared to listen [to our queries] and to speak: It would have been better not to ask but to understand and to be silent just as I myself am silent and have no habit of talking.*

The philosopher goes on, questioning Nature and answering in her name:

And what have we to understand? This; that whatsoever comes into being is my vision, seen in my silence. . . . The geometricians from their vision draw their figures: but I draw nothing: I just contemplate [θεωρoυσης] and the figures of the material world take being as if they fell from my contemplation.*           (*Plotinus, Enneads, III, 8, 4) 

(--from Preface, p.xxvii, The Rhythm of Being, by Raimon Panikkar) 

It's not that I seldom enter a church these days. It's more that there's an empty space beyond those doors  when the worshipful gather in their liturgy of repetitive continuation. Curiously, that same space, when not occupied by the faithfully assembled, serves a different field of emptiness that is rich, still, silent, and profound.

The emptiness of church is an equivocal evocation. It cuts dyadically. Where nothing happens; or, where nothing happens. "Nothing," or emptiness, happens when all expectations of something "other" drop. In that dropping comes connection with ground. Ground of being. Original awareness. Some call it "God." A good word. Especially when not co-opted or patented by any group claiming proprietary exclusivity.

I salute the men and women working to prolong, revive, or serve the structure that has long served and recently dis-served the public. A lengthy failing seems to be stretching onto an unclear horizon. 

I'm not sure those who say it is an unChristian slide and nefarious suggestion that the church grows empty in an unprofound manner. I prefer the possibility that it is an invitation into profundity itself beckoning. The new realization of emptiness signals new readiness to abandon the divisions and divisiveness of duality for a new thing -- for non-dual awareness of origin permeating time and eternity toward realization of non-triadic union: divinity, humanity, and cosmos -- dancing in and out, within and through one another in a compassionate creativity of concern and care, love in service to life. Any act engaged upon with such abandon is the movement of God through, with, and in this emerging now.

This is our life together.

This is our contemplation.

Our correlative conversation.

Activity of creative presence!

It's...complicated

Evening descends. Light crawls under ground snow.

Someone, in conversation, allows as how they'd never heard of Building 7 collapsing on 9/11. Curiously, this does not surprise me. I tell the facts, the fantastic explanations, and the phenomenal ambiguation following the event.

Something unsettling lingers. But time stretches, as they say, forward. There is a dark shadow shading our souls. Disambiguation is drunk and despondent in a dark corner of our mental barroom. It cannot focus. It slurs its thought. It is unsightly.

Time will come when light will illumine the ashes and resurrect our longing for a more coherent conversation about that stumbling September Tuesday.

Darker, still, our civic psyche grows into night.

Epiphany: That which is; showing-through appearance

Long hours of conversation with S and C (recuperating former student, when they return from Tolle talk shown in Camden library), about retrieving original awareness down through ascending accretions of experience, words, concepts, context, conditioning and slanted interpretation, societal and cultural trending, chaotic diffusic survival daily necessity. It is an archeological dig undertaken by remnant of true self looking for its wholeness covered by layers of time, space, and forgetfulness.

Can what is originally there be retrieved? Is wisdom the willingness to see and retrieve what is there?
"What Is, There."

Before the puzzle was boxed and readdressed
To the puzzle shop in the mid-Sixties,
Something tells me that one piece contrived
To stay in the boy’s pocket. How do I know?
I know because so many later puzzles
Had missing pieces—Maggie Teyte’s high notes
Gone at the war’s end, end of the vogue for collies,
A house torn down; and hadn’t Mademoiselle
Kept back her pitiful bit of truth as well?
I’ve spent the last days, furthermore,
Ransacking Athens for that translation of “Palme.”
Neither the Goethehaus nor the National Library
Seems able to unearth it. Yet I can’t
Just be imagining. I’ve seen it. Know
How much of the sun-ripe original
Felicity Rilke made himself forego
(Who loved French words—verger, mûr, parfumer)
In order to render its underlying sense.
Know already in that tongue of his
What Pains, what monolithic Truths
Shadow stanza to stanza’s symmetrical
Rhyme-rutted pavement. Know that ground plan left
Sublime and barren, where the warm Romance
Stone by stone faded, cooled; the fluted nouns
Made taller, lonelier than life
By leaf-carved capitals in the afterglow.
The owlet umlaut peeps and hoots
Above the open vowel. And after rain
A deep reverberation fills with stars.

Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?

But nothing’s lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found—I wander through the ruin of S
Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)
And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory.

(--from poem, Lost in Translation, by James Merrill http://jeremygregg.com/quotes/lost-in-translation-by-james-merrill-poem/

Nothing's lost. "Nothing" is all there is.

From which creation.

With which emptiness.

Through which movement.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced - even a proverb is not a proverb till your life has illustrated it. (John Keats)

About which more later. That "more" being our reaching into original awareness to retrieve the vibrating élan vital of originating dream emergent presence itself.

There.

Here.

Nowhere else.

Epiphany!

Dance, dance, wherever you may be!

"Dwelling within one another," is the meaning of "perichoresis."

Life is a dance.... This choral dance is a combination of harmony and rhythm, Plato says. It reminds us of the Trinitarian perichoresis, the cosmic and divine dance. Siva is Nataraja, the dancing god. The dance is his creation. Dance is practically for all popular religions the most genuine human sharing in the miracle of creation.... We all participate in rhythm because rhythm is another name of Being and Being is Trinity. 

(--Ramon Panikkar, the Rhythm of Being, p.37)

God is emerging now.

God is now being spoken.

At origin, everything is retrievable.

Brook ice

Water flowing down Ragged Mountain shyly passes under cover.

Let us pass so unnoticed.

Flowing, being heard, passing beneath form.

Community means we am I

No one suffers alone.

The illusion is when the thought occurs: "I am suffering."

We are suffering.

Think again.

Cold morning

I see icy window.

What you see is what you'll forgo

According to the readings, 0 degrees or -5 degrees, with wind chill feels like -16 degrees. At 3:42 a.m., another log into wood stove in Wohnkuche. Two dogs and two cats have opted to stay downstairs. That might have to do with their primary caregiver overnighting in southern Maine between visits to work places for numbers.

Working with Thoughts 

It is helpful at the beginning of your meditation practice to free yourself from the idea that in order to meditate properly you must have no thoughts. Instead, establish a different relationship with your thoughts so that over time they can fade more effortlessly into the background. All meditators have thoughts arising during their practice—it’s what you do with them that matters.
(- Bob Sharples, "Do the Thoughts Ever Stop?" In Tricycle Magazine)

Good advice.

Impermanence cares for everything.

There's no place...

Like home.

There's only home.

For heaven's sake, make it so!

The Pasture 

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too. 

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too. 

(Poem by Robert Frost)

We stand together at origin.

What shall we make of it?

Nothing.

Suffering is the sandpaper of our life. It does its work of shaping us. Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.

-- Ram Das 

Thank you for seeing this through!









 For seeing yourself, and me, through!

Poor resolve; little resolution

A Times opinion writer claims our fiscal difficulties are the fault of the voters. I should make a vow no longer to care what politicians and pundits say.
I'll wait for the new year.

Drat those voters!

We can try to make every Middle-East and Western Asian piece of geography into a United States territory by drone and assassination, or we can feed the hungry and care for the aged and infirm in our own country (even helping people elsewhere), but we cannot do both. Opting to colonize and control seems like our current and shaky strategy.

Voters think they are choosing care and compassion. But manipulators of post-election financing of hegemonic bellicosity are giving us war after war after fiscal fiasco.

It's a new year. Time for new vows.

Voters live in neighborhoods and towns in this country, not in voting booths nor in corporations. Time to change the manipulation into maturation and reign-in the money-mayhem crowd and install a new mutation, a dollars-for-decency-services sanity.

Want a new country? Maybe we should rename the one we have and thereby change the direction of our narrowing thought processes. We could call ourselves -- The United Cooperation of Consciousness!

Let's come home to where we live. Re-invigorate our good will. To "vote" is to "vow." Let's vow to care for each other in sickness and health, in good times and bad, until death takes us all.

Eluctable; an elocution with no "in" or "out"

The kabuki players screech to a halt at the preposterous cliff illusion of political theater and everyone is supposed to feel grateful.

There is no attempt to pretend that sham and subterfuge are not the year-end gimmicks permitting butchers' knives to slice away meat from sacred cow bone.

Everywhere anarchists, left and right, grind their teeth, toast the exiting and arriving year with bitter dregs from hollow barrel in damp cellars of the spirit.

Government is fatally compromised; long live the government!

Meanwhile, monks and nuns, hermits and solitaries, turn quietly to face the silence of a still and hospitable emptiness ascending from a cold and hardened ground under a dark and desolate sky reaching infinitely into nothing and nowhere named This Aware and Intimate Reality.

Once it was called "God."

Now it returns to its nameless ineffable indescribability, its clear gaze seeing everything as Itself.

Be at rest. Everything is falling apart. The center cannot fold.

What remains is your guess.

If I had to guess, I'd say "rum fruitcake" and be satisfied with such tasty elocution.

Our times

At end of year, a meditation about guns and preference:

Fear goes ballistic. Love is disarming.
We do not seem to be ready for the profound vulnerability love asks of us. Rather, we arm ourselves with the mistaken belief that murdering another satisfies fear. It doesn't. Fear is unsatisfiable, divisive, violent, and self-justifying. We recognize ourselves in these descriptions. We are a fearful nation poised on the brink of an all-out war waged against ourselves. Love sees this. Love weeps.
I implore the perpetrators of fear to consider their sorry success -- a frightened itchiness to close life in others.
I choose to live vulnerable and disarmed. The real success, I submit, is openness to life, no matter what.

Cat wonders about birds in blowing storm

If nothing
Else
There is this morning
Filled with snow
Warm fire, novel
Sweet lyrics that
Never grow old

End of year confession

No longer interested in things I'm no longer interested in.

Sports. Finance. Politics. Conspiracies. Congratulatory religion. Being saved. Being lost. Lies. Blatant sincerity. Crude disdain. Mollifying coddling. Self doubt. Self confidence. Anything tinged with patent insincerity. Defensive fear. Blustery bravado. Deceptive shuffling. Smart alecks. Hustling competence. Overly compensated puppets.

It snows.

Mountain trees bend white with weight.

I am left alone.

Age alights.

Innocence

Mountain outside window
At dusk
Looks in

Morning after

Ah, warmth in white wrap!

Grounding; departing where thought used to be

White wind carries snow into green cedar branch
Night silences...beyond
There is nothing other than this stillness anywhere

Brightness illumines our heart

Snow keeps quiet.

Furthermore, bringing forth the turning point by using a finger, a pole, a needle, or a mallet, or leading people to enlightenment with a whisk, a fist, a stick, or a shout cannot be understood by discriminatory thinking. How can it be understood by the use of supernatural powers? Zazen is an awesome presence outside form and color. How is it not the path preceding concept?
Thus, do not be concerned with who is wise and who is stupid. Do not discriminate the sharp from the dull. To practice whole-heartedly is the true endeavor of the way. Practice-realization is not defiled with specialness; it is a matter for every day.
- Dogen Kigen 1227

Stays everyone at home.

 This is what we have heard from him,and the message that we are announcing to you: God is light; there is no darkness in him at all. If we say that we are in union with God while we are living in darkness,we are lying because we are not living the truth. But if we live our lives in the light, as he is in the light,we are in union with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son,purifies us from all sin.
(--from Office of Readings, Feast of John the Evangelist)

Wind runs, alone, the mountain.

Break a leg

We rush about with pages of script and swatches of costume.

In the Parade interview, he recalled the hand-to-hand combat. “I was crossing a field somewhere in Belgium,” he said. “A German soldier ran toward me carrying a bayonet. He couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15. I didn’t see a soldier. I saw a boy. Even though he was coming at me, I couldn’t shoot. 

”They grappled, he recounted later — he was stabbed seven or eight times — until finally he grasped a rock and made it a weapon. After killing the youth, he said, he held him in his arms and wept. 

Mr. Durning said the memories never left him, even when performing, even when he became, however briefly, someone else. 

“There are many secrets in us, in the depths of our souls, that we don’t want anyone to know about,” he told Parade. “There’s terror and repulsion in us, the terrible spot that we don’t talk about. That place that no one knows about — horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of that is released through acting.”( NYTimes, Charles Durning, Prolific Character Actor, Dies at 89, Published: December 25, 2012) 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/movies/charles-durning-prolific-character-actor-dies-at-89.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&hp

Let's have less talk. Most of what we say is foolish.

God is silence through act.

Exeunt omnes!

Might, I have this dance, with you

An ordinary day... Christ is
Born in each branch holding
Winter's light... slow return

Word is spoken in each silent act

December 25, light before light.

Grace is silence passing through night

Just us. Just as.

Christmas Poem 

Says a country legend told every year:
Go to the barn on Christmas Eve and see
what the creatures do as that long night tips over.
Down on their knees they will go, the fire
of an old memory whistling through their minds! 

So I went. Wrapped to my eyes against the cold
I creaked back the barn door and peered in.
From town the church bells spilled their midnight music,
and the beasts listened – yet they lay in their stalls like stone. 

Oh the heretics!
Not to remember Bethlehem,
or the star as bright as a sun,
or the child born on a bed of straw!
To know only of the dissolving Now! 

Still they drowsed on –
citizens of the pure, the physical world,
they loomed in the dark: powerful
of body, peaceful of mind, innocent of history. 

Brothers! I whispered. It is Christmas!
And you are no heretics, but a miracle,
immaculate still as when you thundered forth
on the morning of creation!
As for Bethlehem, that blazing star 

still sailed the dark, but only looked for me.
Caught in its light, listening again to its story,
I curled against some sleepy beast, who nuzzled
my hair as though I were a child, and warmed me
the best it could all night. 

(Poem by Mary Oliver)

The justice of it; mere solitude of fire in Waterford. Two cats dozing. Tree outside lighted beyond barn circle of light.

This!

This is church enough.

We do the best we could.

It is time; nearing

Hold off on Santa and Jesus. Just another day. Think of it as earth touching ground. Imagine awareness letting itself be found in everything everywhere.

It is very simple, really.

When we awake we will remember everything.

December 25 is as good a day as any to fall into our ever-present, infinite, and eternal beingness with loving attention given to all.

The ground is frozen. It is winter. 

A woman sang to me from her hospital bed this afternoon. Finnish songs she learnt in school. Now 90, she teaches me a phrase or two so I can say goodbye.

Always goodbye. Always hello. 

This time, Christmas. At another time, a Friday, a sad drama.

Make your way through.

It is time.

If we choose to act

A radical embodiment is needed. Of peace. And sanity.

Not guns. Not fear. Not arrogant shilling for cynicism.

But someone to engage and enflesh what god would be if god were in the world.

No more ideals, ideas, concepts, or plans of action.

Rather, act itself.

Causing to be.

Free...

With

Serving love.

Still, in all...

Perfect is permeable.

It does not mean flawless and finished.

One can move through the perfect. There's a plasticity.

We're all perfect. Moving forward. Causing to be.

Alive for now.

You, you, you, I'm in love with you, you, you

The past is where we are when we are in the present.

Past is prologue, present is logos. Everything is mythos. Voila! It is one-word, creative sound, resonating, music of and as, the spheres, dancing, us, with, in, and through, one-another. Going nowhere; staying now here!

This is an interesting time travel story because it focuses not so much on going back in order to change the past as returning to change the present because you understand the past.(--from book review of An Angel for May by Melvin Burgess,1992) http://www.readingmatters.co.uk/book.php?id=1

When we are In the past, no one is present.

Without time where would we be?

If, as the non-dualist says, god is eternal present awareness, then let god be what god is.

Why do we fuss so much about "my" god?

"You" is the name of god.

Do

you...

 see?

Nothing ends

Ends the teaching for this semester. Ends Wednesday. Ends too many hours awake.

Ends nothing.

Living will

Kefir with pills.

If the world ends Friday, I want to be as healthy as possible.

No more cookies.

So saying, ends the world, as previously known.

Self Portrait 

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat. 

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God. 

(-- David Whyte, from Fire in the Earth, ©1992 Many Rivers Press)

Enjoy yourself, it's never what you think

Rupert Spira ends his writing, "The True Nature of Experience" with the following:

Postscript – Knowledge and LoveTrue knowledge is the experiential understanding that there is only ever-present, unlimited Awareness or Knowing. Nothing other than this is ever known even when it seems that a mind, body and world are known. This ever-present, unlimited Awareness, which is simply the intimacy of our own being, is the fundamental nature of the apparently inside self and its corollary, the apparently outside object, other or world.All religions are founded upon this understanding. In Christianity it is expressed as, “I and my Father are one.” That is, I, Awareness, and the ultimate reality of the universe are one and the same reality. In Buddhism, “Nirvana and Samsara are identical.” That is, the transparent, open, empty light of Awareness which is not made out of any kind of a thing – nothing – is the substance of all appearances – everything. Nothing taking the shape of everything. In Hinduism, “Atman and Param-Atman are one.” That is, the individual self, when divested of superimposed beliefs and feelings of limitation, stands revealed as the true and only self of eternal, infinite Awareness. And in Sufism, “Wherever the eye falls, there is the face of God.” All that is seen is God’s face and it is God that sees it.All these phrases are conditioned by the culture in which they appeared but they all point towards the same unconditional truth – the reality of all experience.The realization of this truth dissolves the beliefs in distance, separation and otherness. The common name we give to this absence of distance, separation and otherness is love and beauty. It is that for which everyone longs – not just those of us that are interested in non-duality but all seven billion of us.In this realization true knowledge and love are revealed to be one and the same – the experiential realization that the true nature of the apparently inside self and the apparently outside world are one single reality made out of the transparent light of Awareness, that is, made out of the intimacy of our own being.This revelation of understanding and love strikes at the heart of the fundamental presumption upon which our world culture is founded, the presumption of duality – I, the separate inside self, and you or it, the separate outside object, other or world. All conflicts within ourselves and between individuals, communities and nations are based upon this presumption alone and all psychological suffering proceeds from it.Any approach to these conflicts that does not go to the heart of the matter will postpone but not solve the problem of conflict and suffering. Sooner or later as individuals and as a culture we have to have the courage, the humility, the honesty and the love to face this fact.The highest purpose of all art, philosophy, religion and science is to reveal this truth in an experiential manner although all these disciplines have temporarily forgotten this in our culture. However, it may not be long. As the painter Paul Cezanne said, “A time is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will trigger a revolution”.This is the only true revolution, the revolution in which our view of reality is turned upside down. Awareness – pure Knowing – is not just the witness of experience. It is its substance, its very nature. Everything changes when we begin to live from this point of view. We realize that what we have always longed for in life was present all along in the depths of our own being. It is always available, never truly veiled. To begin with it is often felt as peace in the background of experience but it cannot be contained and before long it begins to flow out into the world as joy, freedom, love and creativity.

http://non-duality.rupertspira.com/read/the_true_nature_of_experience

The blade of grass, as the blade of grass, knows nothing other than itself as blade of grass.

And, we presume, is happy.

"There is no other..." (Isaiah)

Let the conversation begin, again! 

In her book “The Human Condition,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt states that “violence is mute.” According to Arendt, speech dominates and distinguishes the polis, the highest form of human association, which is devoted to the freedom and equality of its component members. Violence — and the threat of it — is a pre-political manner of communication and control, characteristic of undemocratic organizations and hierarchical relationships. For the ancient Athenians who practiced an incipient, albeit limited form of democracy (one that we surely aim to surpass), violence was characteristic of the master-slave relationship, not that of free citizens.

Liberty entails precisely the freedom to offend. A gun in every pocket would stifle that.

Arendt offers two points that are salient to our thinking about guns: for one, they insert a hierarchy of some kind, but fundamental nonetheless, and thereby undermine equality. But furthermore, guns pose a monumental challenge to freedom, and particular, the liberty that is the hallmark of any democracy worthy of the name — that is, freedom of speech. Guns do communicate, after all, but in a way that is contrary to free speech aspirations: for, guns chasten speech.

(--from THE STONEDecember 16, 2012, 1:00 pm, The Freedom of an Armed Society, by Firmin DraBrander, the New York Times) Firmin DeBrabander is Chair of Humanistic Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/the-freedom-of-an-armed-society/?hp

Holding one another in heart

We want a name for it, the deaths in Newtown Connecticut.

We are restless. we want to place fault somewhere. We want to blame some policy, some concept of chaos. We want, we want, we want.

The quarrels and arguments will take shape.

Here, for now, only stillness in the face of such sorrow.

A Sunday afternoon.

A profound bow to all in deep distress!