Shocking flaw; a cynical war

Iraq. 

Ten years ago the disturbing beginning of a terrible course of action. An inappropriate, unnecessary, and cynical war. 

Ten years of upsetting revelation! 

Where does one go for justice and decency? Nowhere it seems. Where does the outrage surface? Maybe it surfaces in random killing sprees by those carrying the zeitgeist inheritance of the war's parents. For the rest of us, it is time to refill our prescription sedatives.

Bremer, Bush, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld et al -- will never admit their ignorance or mistakes because they made no mistakes. They did what they set out to do and were successful. Their destabilization of both Iraq and the United States is a strategy of de-governance made signature by right-wing ideologues intent on shifting power and resources into the control of private enterprise.

Blackwater mercenaries, Haliburton private contracts, freewheeling banks, and bid-rich defense suppliers replace the once publicly accountable executive, congress, senate, and supreme court as America's new upper echelon running the company store.

They're not wrong. They've succeeded. The politician gatekeepers are generously tipped for their unlocking of the gate, looking away, and abandoning their posts.

We, the people, are merely asleep. The infiltrating surveillance is in our houses.





The Iraq War is over, it is said. Maybe, over there.  Mere chaos lingers.

For us, the Iraq war comes home. 

And we are losing, piece by piece, the country we thought we lived in.

It is a sad, disturbing, justice-deprived anniversary. To messers Bush, Cheney, Bremer, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Powell, ms Rice and the many complicitious corporate media and financial institutions -- it is a celebration of ideological tactics and un-governance toward the deconstruction of decency and democracy at home.

On such an anniversary, what do you give to the celebrants who have taken it all?



It is spring. Winter, on its final day, leaves a gift.

Nature seeks to soothe.

Pat, I can see the pond from here

She was my sister.

 In 1999 she closed her eyes. 

Today is the anniversary of her coming into this world seventy one years ago.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh sí. [Gaelic]

"May she be at the right hand of God."

Lá breithe shona duit!

(Happy Birthday!)

Spring approaches the cabin. It is at the threshold. One small step remains.








This final winter storm has to drop,      let go, and pass.

Why silence knows no...distance

She was with her friend when death came. Last night she sat zazen in Merton Bookshed. San Francisco is just time away. Her friend is closer than that. Only, less easy to arrive at.
Words do not cover the distance.

Sure and begorrah -- would you look at that!

Myles sets up ladder on kitchen island, on plywood on blanket, sets out mudding palette, cat sniffs broad putty-knife, as Saskia readies frying pan for eggs.

Susan comes. Coffee pours, eggs scramble, questions about Liberation Theology and new Pope's tenure during 1970's in Argentina crisscross room as organic raisin English muffins toast and fill room with burning fragrance of crumbs given to red coils.

Then the fix-em-up department decides tomorrow would be a better day to mud and paint, so the ladder, plywood, and blanket are deconstructed and stowed in barn. Susan leaves with Lucy the rescue dog, only one of them thrilled about the pontiff's potential.

The day has crumpled into an Irish blessing.

I light a candle for those whose memory lingers like fragrant toast gone from wooden bowl this 17th of March.

Die Sonne scheint

There is an unseen place, somewhere between silence and speech, where word dwells in stillness.

When the heart/mind soundlessly calls into stillness, when awareness turns its non-judging gaze to empathic embrace of what is taking place before it, an invitation resonates through clear emptiness -- this invitation is attentive, wordless, and dawning contemplative prayer.

Contemplative prayer calls voicelessly into soundless Being, asking with pure gaze
what-is-yet-to-be-disclosed to remain within the unfolding as it unfolds as the presence of this present moment.

Being waits to be called.

What is Being called for? What is being-called for?



You are being called.

So, too, earth and sky, animal and plant, known and unknown -- each and every thing which is, has been, or is to come -- all being called from and into Being, as it is, as each is, difference and uniqueness, to be here.

We are called to be here.

What is here?

Nothing else. Nothing more. Nothing less. Nothing itself.

Pure subjectivity as revealed difference of common idiosyncrasy diversified beyond calculation in this fertile, fecund, and ferocious world.

It is each being, made visible in its unique evolvement, that emerges prayer from its hidden sleep into invited appearance as threshold, prelude, and ready-nearness.



Why does anything pray?

Each being prays for what-is-to-be.

Each being, by its very nature, evokes Being to be in a way wherein each is complete within itself.

The "Itself" is what is becoming itself.

And so, become yourself as Itself in the world. There is no-other like you, no other than you in your present emergence as who and what you are in this called-Being.

The world waits for you to create the world. The world listens for your voice to sing it into Being. The world watches to see its coming to be.

Who are you? And what is prayer?



I don't know!

I do not yet exist. I am waiting for you to call. We are all waiting for you to look into this empty ineluctibility.

Everything is poised and ready for your call.

Sound us, sound all existence into Itself, whole and entire, a celebration of contemplation, conversation, and correspondence.



Love -- compassion itself!

Is Being being-called?

Allie Light said that everything transcends what the reality of it is. You either learn about metaphor, or you go mad. (Cf. Thorazine Shuffle)

"Silence is referee!" I wrote to the university dean. This, for me, is the metaphor.

What does silence point to?

What is its discerning gaze seeing?

What is it calling?

Is Being being-called?

I end there.

With what-is here.

Silence -- an intimate unknowing

With his wife dead and buried the elderly man seems to find only half the poem readable. The second half of poem loses its words in his loneliness.

There is an interesting word used by the late Heidegger, which is not used in everyday German, it is 'Erschweigen', the preposition 'Er' means usually: making something more intensively (I need help from Michael Eldred now! my English is very poor...), and is different, for instance, from 'Verschweigen' (that means: keeping something for yourself that you should have said) and it is different from 'just' 'schweigen' (not talking). So 'erschweigen' takes place in a dialogue, such as the one between Heidegger and the japanese, where both talk to each other 'on' something without making an 'object' of it. In this dialogue Heidegger makes a difference between talking 'about' (ueber) and talking from (von). Language, not being an object, can only be approached if we talk 'from' it. This is a distinction you can find in Wittgenstein in his famous dictum:Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen.                                                            ["Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent."]

(Online response by Rafeal Capurro, 1997,  http://mail.architexturez.net/+/Heidegger-L/archive/msg18006.shtml,)

 Silence is referee.

There's the metaphor.

Heidegger wrote "Die Sprache spricht, nichts der Mensch" (Language speaks, not humans.)  

See what you say; say what you see: be spoken sight

How are we to understand the following sentence:
I    am    creating    God.

Who is speaking?

Who is
doing
what is
being
said?

Choose to see this differently.

Become the wording now!

Buona fortuna

Francis!
Francisco...
¡Felicidades!

Would only...

Epikeia. It is Greek. It translates, literally, as unassignable, uncountable. Aristotle, then Aquinas, considered it a virtue. Know the law, break the law; for a more universal good, a more important accomplishment, a kinder truth.

There's a pause on world stage.
All actors freeze in place.
A pope is under election.
Could there be any meaningful change?
Is the Christ-reality a vague moribund memory or a contemporary living force?

Could the scuttle-threatened empty barque on vast desolate sea be salvaged, re-timbered, sanded fine and put to use again to buoy hearts and spirits in once but now forgotten joy-in-truth, service, and retrieved love?
Does this transition matter?

Bakerwoman God

Bakerwoman God,
I am your living bread.
Strong, brown Bakerwoman God,
I am your low, soft, and being-shaped loaf. 

I am your rising bread,
well-kneaded by some divine
and knotty pair of knuckles,
by your warm earth hands.
I am bread well-kneaded. 

Put me in fire, Bakerwoman God,
put me in your own bright fire.
I am warm, warm as you from fire.
I am white and gold, soft and hard,
brown and round.
I am so warm from fire. 

Break me, Bakerwoman God.
I am broken under your caring Word.
Drop me in your special juice in pieces.
Drop me in your blood.
Drunken me in the great red flood.
Self-giving chalice swallow me.
My skin shines in the divine wine.
My face is cup-covered and I drown. 

I fall up
in a red pool
in a gold world
where your warm
sunskin hand
is there to catch
and hold me.
Bakerwoman God,
remake me. 

(Poem by Alla Renee Bozarth, from, Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey, Paulist Press 1978, rev. ed. Luramedia 1988, distributed by Wisdom House)

Would only. . .

At end

Joe-Pete stops by.

He's beginning anew.

Sounds right!

being, rolled away

We have, the song said, all been here before.

Yet, everything is happening for the first time.

As in the religious story: The stone is being rolled away. Many wish to say the resurrection was a once and forever historical event. Today, here, at this blink of awareness, the stone is "being" itself rolling away.

Rolling away what? From where?

History disappears.

There is only myth -- story -- which begins, "In the beginning..." and concludes, "Ever after."

But what if there really is only origin? And never conclusion? Only being itself? And that, withdrawing, dropping into emptiness? Would there be found each thing as itself?

The stone is, being, rolled away.

This life is a cave, a tomb to some, enclosing and stifling. Yet, to others, this life is a sunny breeze ascending a sweet mountain.

The mind of Christ is emptying itself. It is being emptied of all that is not itself, which is itself being emptied.

What remains?

What is there is what is here and everywhere.

Think of the resurrection as the kenotic (self-emptying) mind which is beyond birth and death.

Until such is our aware home-ground, we slog along, hastily, with busy hands, continuously readying our demise, toward our going, our being rolled away. 

We're meant to...go.

let it go - the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise - let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go - the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers - you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go - the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things - let all go
dear

so comes love

(~ e. e. cummings ~ Complete Poems 1904-1962) 

I have nowhere to go. Nothing to do. No-one to be.

So, what's my hurry? The season of careful looking is upon us.

Festina lente!

 

...   Note: 

[Festina lente or σπεῦδε βραδέως (speude bradeos) is a classical adage and oxymoron meaning "make haste slowly" or "more haste, less speed".]

Oh...

There's not much time left.
What do you mean?
I mean, there's not much time left.
Something's going to end?
No, nothing's going to end.

What time will this occur?
No time left.
And...?
It's already happened.
I don't see anything different.

Exactly!

to give up...illusions; to pluck the living flower

Here's what Karl Marx actually wrote:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.  

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.   

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. 

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.[1] 

^ Marx, K. 1976. Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Collected Works, v. 3. New York.1. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people#cite_note-1  

 Much deeper, I would say, that the oft-quoted epigrammatic dismissal.

stepping aside

Francis is taking his head out of the snow. It's about time. And time changes this weekend.

Lin Chi said the the shout is meant to break the idea in our head. It's a zen karate chop. Don't put forward the idea about the thing, present the thing itself.

I recall someone saying that not to judge is to know enlightenment. It is to be not burdened with the weight of discriminating and apportioning things and beings from their aseity.

Leave thing alone.

Leave beings alone.

Leave it all alone.

Don't be snowed. Empty a-head!

Koan

Why be

someone

who prays

found in prayer

To pray is to commit to the inclusion of everything and everyone.

No one is excluded from authentic prayer. No one.

It's why prayer is rare. And feared by many. Who choose "Gimme, gimme" braying.

Prayer is the giving away of self. To be found in others. In everything.

Contemplation

In the middle of the night, I fall into your name.

Unpronounced. Because unknown.

Hearing nothing. Mere silence. Home.

Be common

You're not crazy.

You're unhappy.

There's a difference.

Streaming elsewhere

Hugo Chavez dies. Rest well!

Elsewhere -- more thinking than necessary. I respond to student:

Parent Post
"...you are stopping the cycle of life for that being."(CC)
...
Your post sent me thinking about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,S.J., a paleontologist who thought wildly creatively. He had a theory about nature's suppression of the peduncle. In brief, something original (or originating, perhaps, like a fetus) if suppressed, finds its way through in another lifestream of emergence. What if we have become too black and white? What if an originating life is never finally eliminated, only suppressed and redirected into different opened path of birth? 

Would this (stretching the point, and reaching for a metaphor, I admit) be like telling someone that if they did not take our directions to a party they would not be invited? Or, if you do not marry your first sweetheart your life will be catastrophic? (Maybe sadder; but, maybe not.) 

You've introduced me to the notion that, eternally, there is no finality -- nor do things have to have the identity we think they should have. 

What I'm trying to think about here is the possibility that each aborted fetus remains unborn until such opportunity it re-enters the birthing-stream with its urge-to-birth and comes to term(s) with its new emergence. And is born. And lives. Until returning to the unborn through the portal we call death.
.
As Teilhard de Chardin writes:
Man is psychically distinguished from all other animals by the entirely new fact that he not only knows, but knows that he knows. In him, for the first time on earth, consciousness has coiled back upon itself to become thought. To an observer unaware of what it signifies, the event might at first seem to have little importance; but in fact it represents the complete resurgence of terrestrial life upon itself. In reflecting psychically upon itself Life made a new start.3 

Life's new start was momentous but not immediately noticeable. Indeed, like all other advances in evolution, this threshold disappears under the weight of the past.4 

I Ibid., p. I80.
2 Ibid., p. I65.
3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, New York, I964, p. 293. 

4 Teilhard de Chardin, as an apologist for evolution, often makes reference to what he calls the suppression of the peduncles. At every critical stage, the earliest transitionary forms are the most fragile and vanish under the weight of history. This is true biologically even as it is technologically; where, he asks, are the very first buggies? Who was the first Greek or Roman? Cf. The Phenomenon of Man, pp. I20-I22. 

47 "Man came silently into the world," says Teilhard de Chardin.I We must not make the mistake of treating this remarkable new human being as something other than a part of nature. The same play of tangential and radial energy that brought into existence the first crystals, the first plants, the first animals, here brought to birth the first occurrence of mind. In short, humanity is a natural phenomenon, the latest of life's successive waves.2
http://www.memoireonline.com/02/10/3198/m_Panmobilism-and-optimism-in-teilhardian-humanism10.html

Nunc dimittis!

I am dismissed!

Dash

The affected retired corrections captain in Werner Herzog's 2011 documentary "Into the Abyss" spoke at film's end of living the dash. That's all he wants to do now. That dash between your date of birth and date of death on your tombstone.
He'd worked death row, escorted, strapped down, and witnessed over 125 executions in Texas prison. Now, after saying no more, he wants to watch the birds. "Hummingbirds...there's so many of them," he says.

Where else? When other?

Bangor, 12:39pm, wet snow.

A student writes about Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People":
"I think finding a random person who has that quality of contentedly doing the right thing even though it will cost you just about anything is hard to come by now of days." [sic]

I like the "now of days."

Doing the right thing is the only now.

And today is Monday.

Con permesso

Unbeknownst, the Trappist monastery sends postcard for me to confirm Holy Week slot for stay/retreat. This was the year I was not planning to attend. Out of the so-called blue, with no request, the invitation. I guess it addresses the question: Who else will sit in the darkened side chapel at 3:30am to 4:45am listening (sleepily, emptily) to psalms and prayers and silence until faint rapping on wood signals end of zazen from cavernous stillness?

With That Moon Language 

(By Hafiz)

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

It doesn't matter who becomes pope. It is the ones who walk in selfless recollection of true nature that enliven the kinship and connection of all beings.

All we can do is take one step then another with another quietly passing through the illusions woven by mind and mayhem until we come to see no one walking through no door before complete absence profoundly bowing in the instant to the radiant radical wholeness encapsulating no name in no place attended by nothing other than itself.

Incipio de novo in silentio infrequentia solitas incomitatus!
(Begin again, in scant silence, the solitude -- unfollowed, unaccompanied, alone!)
...
(Con permesso:
Scusa bastardo Latino -- Io nato, vano, interno Brooklyn, uno dei quartieri della città di New York.)

{With apologies to grammatists everywhere, especially ancient Rome and contemporary Italy!}

It is all -- always, and only -- about connection and relationship -- isn't it?

Upon considering my net worth; nothing

Of course I'm naive.

I have no wisdom, experience, or judgment.

Wisdom suggests something that does not belong to earth. Experience believes there are objects to be experienced and a subject to experience. Judgment implies a calculating rational mind and a scale to analyze and evaluate.

Not me. Not here. Not now.

When I look at the foolish template of progress based on technical and economic advancement I can only look without understanding.

When I see any suffering ignored or deprivation manipulated I can only look without understanding.

Where to look?

I look into silence and mere connecting and I begin to see that there is a great mistake being made by myself, my brothers and my sisters.

We have forgotten what it means to be in the world together.

Money and power, progress and security, certainty and ideology -- these are coordinates of the mistake continually plotted.

"Look around," the quiet room says to me.

"Look within," the stillness whispers to me.

"Look out," the smiling monk glances without words.

Naïveté wanders the lane by itself; footprints following no pattern.

I am lost.

Only the empty everything surrounds, accompanying the no one along the pathless open.

There is no way for me.

No way out, no way within, no way around.

generous koan; cheerful contemplative realism

In America Magazine this week, an intelligent and thought-provoking article:

The Shape of the Church to Come, by James Hanvey S.J.  -- Reflections on where we are going.   http://americamagazine.org/issue/article/shape-church-come#comment-58170 

As light snow falls and painful back slowly returns to functional capability, soft-boiled egg settles into strained mid-section, accompanied by green tea with honey and ginseng, I send a response comment:

From a similar darkened, hidden, and discarded place James Hanvey refers to, I read his article with reluctant cheer. I have so wanted to feel part of the community dear to my history and heart, the Catholic Church, but it has been remarkably difficult in the interstice between the Aggiornamento of the early 1960s and the Absurdity, (read: ridiculously incongruous or unreasonableness), of Church governance and awkward theology in this nascent 21st century. 

Augustine recollecting the angel's words, “Why seek the living among the dead?” -- might have been a converting impetus for him, but resonates today as a departing trope for the disaffected leaving the empty tomb of Jesus and empty seat of Peter for more reasonable, accepting, and compassionate spiritual environs.

That said, I agree with the template of acknowledging desolation, moving through new sensibility, and standing at the unknown but heuristic emergence of a self which is willing to incorporate the mystery, mysticism, and mindful awareness of what is coming to be unconcealed. 

The catch, and it is an important one, is that this emergence, this Christ-Minding and kenotic resignation might not need the ancient structure and archaic mindset of our hierarchical prelatry. 

A Trappist monk once said to me: “Cheer up, Bill, things are only going to get worse!” It was a generous koan he offered me from the depths of his cheerful contemplative realism.

Hence, the abandoning exodus of the faithful to other horizons, where similar experiences of desolation, revived sensibility, and prayerful emergence will, no doubt, recur. But the experience, tried and suffered, will be without the heavy burden of disappointment that is an unhearing institution -- a weight disturbing enough to extend the stations of the cross and innumerable fallings of the suffering servant beyond their typical end.

Still, I remain, poised and open, in the dark.

...

Birds in cedar tree snowy branches are audienced by Panta Rhea at window. Then she turns her attention to more immediate, accessible options.

As do we all.

Then, say it...

Ευχαριστώ!

It's the right thing to say.

Vatican vacancy; a long while

Now that Peter's seat is vacant, a recent New Yorker poem seems timely:

TAKING A WALK IN THE WOODS AFTER HAVING TAKEN

A WALK IN THE WOODS WITH YOU

Now I cannot not see

the blight everywhere

                                          (--Poem by Maureen N. McLane)

It is the pause, like Camus' Sisyphus as rock rolls downhill, and before beginning the shoving labor uphill again, it is the pause . . . wherein wonder arises.

Non habemus papam

Arrivederci Papa!

May what follows assist light in the world!

Being me what is not available

Young woman in Maryland has another spinal fusion. She is weary of her many surgeries.

Class cancelled tonight; snow, sleet, rain.

Physical fragility visits this front room. Cars barely make hill outside. Liquids.

The world becomes encrypted. No one knows the code. It is random, unstable, and with no extant key to unlock.

Welcome to technical being!

Would you like to sign in?

weary; traveling

Where we come from appears once we've been there.

Where we are going is sometimes scouted by members of our animal family.

We walk, appearing our presence, no trace of us before us, following tracks. 

Sometimes, there's no place to go.

Over-looking winter harbor on mount desert island

Being, says Heidegger, withdraws from us.

Technology makes things available to us.

Thinking looks to what is beyond us, beyond the graspable.

Thought captures what we know and, invariably, freezes it.

Poetry gives us, in words, what we cannot have. It creates a longing and insight, saying, "Look!" The trace of what is beyond it is intuited; the unnaming following loss enters silently. Uselessness, a sacrifice of words to unknowing nearness, twilights a fullness of holiness for each at hand.

Listening to Heidegger conversation.

Light, I am; of the world, compose a new way of being

Robert Lowell in his poem "Epilogue" wrote: "All's misalliance. / Yet why not say what happened?"

It's what Camus said of Sisyphus and what survivors say of war. The fatal casualties of war say nothing.

We have to find an earlier creative voice -- learn to become poets of life, and peace, and human service -- a preemptive sound antidote to the absurdity of war.

hay in field, hole in ground; moving through experience, seeing oneself here

We try to avoid what will accompany us through.

We are being conveyed and carried. It's ok not to know where we are going. It's good enough to realize we are here.

Epochs of great confusion and general uncertainty in a given world contain the slumbering, not-yet-manifest seeds of clarity and certainty. The manifestations of the aperspectival world... show that these seeds are already pressing toward realization. This means that we are approaching the "zenith" of confusion and are thus nearing the necessary breakthrough.
(--Jean Gebser, 1953; The Ever-Present Origin)

Driving as child with parents the roads before Catskills turning to Delaware River above Port Jervis, Shohola, Barryville, Callicoon. Hay fields through northern New Jersey ringed with wire fence or split rail. Cows loll afternoon laze near lone tree far from road.

Pastures in Brooklyn were different. Rusting iron with pointed tops circle brick building, trucks parked like civilian armory transports, empty weekend factories. Walls with squares, strike zone for stickball, fast pitching in white paint, 'Strike! You are out!' Stand ready.

I went heying in city streets. "Hey, Bobby! Hey Joey! Hey Geraldine!" To the schoolyard, sandlot, sewers in center of asphalt streets; punchball, touch football, bounce stickball. Our liturgy of experience!

Bundled papers bicycle delivery as cloth man's harnessed nag clopped down bay ridge avenue grandfather cupping Chesterfield at front green fence by maple tree.

Later great hole in wall led to walking out of church. Falling through hole in ground.

Walking into great whole as partial falls away. Feeling no partiality as awareness, plena gratia, embraces all, gazes with compassion. The whole watches you tumble with nothing to hold -- you fall, falling through all you think will buoy you up. Thought doesn't. Nor dogma. Neither constriction. Not anything -- but love seeing us through.

I loved the quiet of the unknown. Now I love the silence of unknowing.

All around are purveyors of certainty and security. They do not interest me.

From early years it has been the unseen unheard unexplainable presence without shape or form. No definition, no explanation, no reasonable proof moves my curiosity -- rather, magnetic dissonance turns me around, dizzying, looking up: unfathomable distance of enormous space; looking down: unquenchable delicious nearness of brown earth under white snow.

God is Being Itself.

Being seen through.

Are you yourself?

Am I myself?

Do we see God? Believe in God? Touch the wounds of each and every being? Thing? Idea? Experience?

Gaze and blink. It's all here, no matter what we think.

This snowy morning in Maine!

Think of the Via Crucis as entering and departing separation

I listen to lectures on Martin Heidegger while inputting numbers in bookshed all afternoon. In 1969 I studied with John Macquarrie on Being and Time at Union Theological in NYC. I was hooked then. Still being pulled aboard four decades later.

Dr. Macquarrie wrote about two dozen books. Reviewing one, “Paths in Spirituality,” for The New York Times Book Review in 1972, Nash K. Burger wrote that “unlike some modern theologians, John Macquarrie writes about God as though he believes in him.”
The God in which Dr. Macquarrie believed was Being itself, a definition that to him made it meaningless to suggest that God was dead or did not exist. In this, he adopted aspects of Heidegger’s search for the meaning of being, although he eschewed Heidegger’s pro-Nazi views.
Dr. Macquarrie wrote that all language about God was symbolic and not to be taken literally. But it must be taken seriously. To him, what separated believers from nonbelievers was that believers had experienced the revelation that the creation and its existence are good.

“Faith’s name for reality is God,” Dr. Macquarrie wrote in “Paths in Spirituality.”
(from obituary, "Rev. John Macquarrie, 87, Scottish Theologian, Dies,"), by Douglas Martin, published June 3, 2007, New York Times)

 God as Being itself. That must have been ground zero for theological preference and philosophical intuition.

I order another hardcover of Zein Und Zeit. Mine is boxed away somewhere. Besides, some kindred mind might wish to break on it someday.

It's not everyday the core of thought collapses at your feet.

Or the Open reveals itself as empty and promising project.

Would you like another? No thanks. Not even the one.

No one can help him. He's alone. There's no place for him to go.

I crossed seas and rivers, climbed mountains, and
Forded streams in order to interview the masters,
To inquire after Truth,
To delve into the secrets of Zen;
And ever since I was enabled to recognize the path.
I knew that birth and death are not
The things I have to be concerned with.
For walking is Zen,
Sitting is Zen,
Whether talking or remaining silent,
Whether moving or standing quiet,
The Essence itself is ever at ease;
Even when greeted with swords and spears,
It never loses its quiet way,
And all that befalls cannot perturb its serenity.
- Yoko Daishi

I knew a drunk who never stopped being a drunk. He's a sober drunk. He just got tired of lying.

Seeing myself doing what my self cannot see

Another you? In a parallel life, another you?

When the thinking mind takes a break for even a few seconds, a kind of relaxed awareness replaces the usual stream of thoughts. We need to encourage this and not fill this space with anything else; just let it be.
- Tsultrim Allione, "Feeding Your Demons"

It's not esoteric.

Only recognition there is awareness behind action, seemingly separate from it.

The act goes by.

You remain.

Without doing anything.

Just aware you are doing and not doing anything.

Tricky, eh?

When distance does not appear as measurement

Maggie dies.

Margaret Ray Eddy

December 17, 1920 - February 18, 2013 

Good journey Maggie! We have been so fond of your and Walt's many year participation in Poetry, Tea, and Thee at Quarry Hill. Your kindly spirit and keen listening gave the gatherings a deeper feel for the words everyone read. To Walt and the family: our gratitude for Maggie! Continue well in her memory!

Soon, a few feel, there will be no death.

I wonder.

Camden to Fort Kent to Presque Isle to Camden. Three days, 600 miles.

How far do you travel, dear Maggie?

Free the worms!

Glorious day in Fort Kent. We have to depart early for Presque Isle. Ten to twelve inches of snow will begin this evening.

I'm concerned for the worms.



Walking with Rokie earlier this morning at UMFK, this sign. I don't feel it is fair to worms that they cannot dig in the earth. The sign excludes no one else. They must have had difficulty with overachieving worms in the neighborhood. Another man-made rule.

I can see the worms carrying signs quoting Psalm 22:6, King James Version (KJV):

⁶ But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.

No doubt, Obama had something to do with this. Get me the Republicans on the line. Just one more thing!

Where are you; going

Route 11 to Fort Kent. White out blowing snow across roadway. We walk campus for evening stroll.

In room we watch the debacle a decade ago leading up to Iraq war. Such a sad and distorting group of  bellicose prevaricators! It is astounding no one answers to war crimes.

Is awareness disappearing? Is opening presence the horizon? Will our ignorance be penetrated?

Father, Son, Spirit.

Mother, Daughter, Spirit.

Metaphors all.

Take us beyond ourselves!

A human being is the universe seeing itself.

Dark matter, the space scientist said, is like love.

At table someone quoted an astronomer saying that God is the boundary of the unknown.

Someday we'll learn about both.

Love; the unknown.

It is a very very huge canvas.

Step back; look carefully.