as is, love

In ca. 1221 he was born, in 1274 Bonaventure died at the Council of Lyons.  Peregrinus of Bologna, Bonaventure's secretary, in his chronicle which has recently (1905) been recovered and edited, noted the saint was poisoned.

Saint Bonaventure, O.F.M., born Giovanni di Fidanza, was an Italian medieval scholastic theologian and philosopher. The seventh Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor, he was also a Cardinal Bishop of Albano. (Wikipedia)

The church overlooked the poisoning. It was practiced in both overlooking and overseeing. Bonaventure had successfully scrubbed the crazed intensity and remarkably chaotic divine insanity of founder Francis from the Franciscans. Today he'd be called a 'cleaner.'

Two additional mad saints who, I suspect, would prefer Francis' company to that of Bonaventure are Merton and Lowell.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.--Thomas Merton

 And:

“No weekends for the gods now. Wars 

flicker, earth licks its open sores, 

fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance 

assassinations, no advance. 

Only man thinning out his own kind 

sounds through the Sabbath noon, 

the blindswipe of the pruner and his knife 

busy about the tree of life... 

Pity the planet, all joy gone 

from this sweet volcanic cone; 

peace to our children when they fall 

in small war on the heels of small 

war - until the end of time 

to police the earth, a ghost 

orbiting forever lost 

in our monotonous sublime.”  

― Robert Lowell, from "Waking Early Sunday Morning"

The trouble with official "saints" is the hagiography is as often covering press release rather than what generously could be called truth.

 Lowell wrote in "Day by Day" --

All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?"

I'll take my saints unofficial. The poets and artists, madmen and women, gentle wonderers and fierce skeptics undeterred by those paid to edit and censure.

I'm sure Bonaventure had his moments when he wasn't torturing inspiration. Just as I'm sure George Zimmerman has been kind at times to friends and furry critters. One doesn't just only kill 17 year olds on rainy nights with an itchy trigger racial profile.

It is a staggeringly convoluted and complex existence, this.

Pay it no mind.

Receive the right change.

Empty your pockets.

Be mad with love as is God!

nothing...going on

Comes dawn, sunrise, cooing of dove, call of birds.

Today is the last day of the past.

It's all gone.

Yes, there are photos, memories, and scraps of evidence pointing to something before this, but only 'this' is passing here on its way to this revealed and unconcealed glimpse.

What've we got?

Nothing...going on!

Rest in Peace, Trayvon Martin; Go home, be free, George Zimmerman!

Trial is over: Not guilty!

So are we all.

So it goes.

Sleep well, all!

trials

During deliberations of the Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman trial.

Bottom line: the State has frightening power to convict and place an innocent man in prison; the Defense has awesome power to acquit and free a guilty man into society. Both these prospects are sobering and worth the careful attention of a fairly and justly run trial. Watching this trial has sensitized me to the terrible importance of our system.

BeWithing itself.

Here's a translation/reading hermeneutic of Trinity:

God is BeWithing Itself.

    What is called Father is Beyond.

     What is called Son is Between.

      What is called Holy Spirit is Becoming.

The doxology -- "Glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen" -- might be looked at in this way:

BeWithing Itself is the ever-present origin: as is the beyond, so is the between, incessantly becoming itself.

This cosmotheandric circumincessional interpenetration is the beyond betweening and becoming what is itself. 

The movement of god is BeWithing itself.

 

This, now, here, is our prayer, journey, and continuing practice.

Meetingbrook observes this 'umwelt' with quiet gratefulness.

     (Formulated today, 11july2013, feast of St. Benedict of Nursia, Abbot, 480-557ce).

following one and many

The one and the many could be looked at as this particular individual or instance and that which is everything everywhere through all time and beyond time.

God is that which is that which is beyond telling or seeing.

We are that which is here and now. 

For god to enter here and now god has to involve or become that which is here and now.

To 'forgive' is to allow god to become what we are not. For us to become what we are not we must empty or be emptied of what we think we are.

Hence, what is beyond space becomes empty space. What is beyond time becomes no time.

No time is what is occupied by no space.

God, thus, is nowhere to be found.

Which is, it follows, where to look.

And so we pray to forgive and be forgiven our trespasses.

Trespass is god's hidden and undisclosed pilgrimage.

relsecgov, a proposal

Here's what I wrote:

Perhaps an immediate worldwide sit down between religionists and secularists should be called. Representatives of every religion must reveal their foundational tenets and protocol, the rock bottom intent of their faith and activity to make it real. The secularists would do the same -- name the political philosophy and root beliefs behind their wanting power, who's excluded from their method of governance, who and how would be cared for, and what actions demanding conformity would they exercise.
After long and perhaps insufferable presentations, let the immense gathering choose which pairs of religionist/secularist mission statements/modus operandi would be willing to dwell together. New nations, countries, states, provinces, regions, even continents could be set aside for the implementation of this new "relsecgov" experiment. No more imperial-colonial, terror-sacrifice, my-way-is-better-than-your-way, spy-and-assassinate methodologies would be agreed upon with an ecumenical/international circle of wise elders keeping watchful counsel and prayerful wisdom for the sake of all.
Or, we could continue our primitive belief in biological eradication and excruciating militant bigoted destruction, make suffering the world-wide prize that everyone vies for and no one escapes from sanely.
I'd attend such a conference. As long as others are willing, we might all learn to live in peace differently rather than kill for sameness in the name of god and polity.

(A proposal in response to Thomas Friedman column, 10July2013, The New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/opinion/friedman-egypt-at-the-edge.html?hp

beyond us

Horace, Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Robert Creeley -- their words at Rockport Opera House of a Tuesday morning.

Telling the tale of our looking to find our way through this world, this life, this battlefield love knows as beyond us.

Nunc ipsum, solus!

 "Prayer is the only miracle. We pray. If our words become prayer, God will come." 

(--from novel, Catholics, by Brian Moore)

Stripped of any affiliation or belief system, some words stand by themselves as truth itself.

Words seeking sole origin.

Origin without a within.

Itself alone.

Sunday patient visiting

At hospital, visiting, we give one another the impression we'll be going on.

28. As they approached the village to which they were going, he gave the impression that he was going on farther. 

29. But they urged him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. 

30. And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. 

31. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight. 

(--Luke 24:28ff)

But we pause, speak a bit, they in bed or  chair, me standing at foot or by wall. Just talking to each other.

Then there is a vanishing from sight.

We do go on.

Wishing well.

Good healing

too many hermits

Today is a good day to die.

Nimium Minus Solus Quam Souls 

The days were delightful and the hours were light,
Particularly when one was on one's own
And woke up in the middle of the night
Never less alone than when alone. 

Reconciled to solitude, despite
The machinations of the telephone
That tempt the air with tenderness and spite,
Never less alone than when alone. 

Mornings which dawned dim but not quite white,
If paler than paper, ivory or bone,
Promised the gorgeous sights of trite daylight,
Never less alone than when alone. 

The shape of the day, its realistic rite,
Depends upon which way the dice are thrown,
From right to left, or it might be, left to right,
But never less alone than when alone. 

Conceived in the depths but born upon the height
Where the mountains of tomorrow shone,
The soul may take its solitary flight,
Never less alone than when alone.  

(--Poem by Daryl Hine, from, A Reliquary and Other Poems)

I abandon the hermitage. Hermits descend and inhabit the empty space until it is full of hermits and devoid of space.

I hide in garbage. Inside yellow bags. Traveling to transfer station (aka, dump) with no recyclables. I want nothing coming back today. I imagine I drop the plastic in recycling bin and by the time I clear the gate by EBS it has been refashioned into fruit smoothie container, filled, delivered to grocery store, and waiting for me to pick it from refrigerated unit inside left of new entrance by bank down from training drill ignited burnt down Chinese restaurant along Route 1.

I remember reading a novel with the wonderful title, I Have Come here to be Alone, (by Ingrid Bengis). I live in a hermitage for the same purpose (or no purpose). But some days, such as this weekend, the traipse is tripped and one by one they come to hermitage.

Some pretend to build a room, some pretend to read, or meditate, or pray. Some sip coffee, turn down note-proffered scone, wonder why the grass isn't cut, look at the place for the last time, play with the dog, or try to decide who wants to be dead.

Death gets too many false ratings. It is a caricature of itself. Its mourning rites all too predictable. Its sway over unconscious psyches of too many of us, hyperbolic. It is time to rebel. Take death and leave life. No fret, bother, worry, or last words.

To be alone is to bypass death.

There is no other side. Just one side. Reflecting back. A snowy weekday. Cold. Maine. Only the blackbird's eye moving.

We live inside a poem. (It might be why so many dislike poetry.)

We are caesuras between breaths turning into other lines with no sense of irony or scanned horizon.

neither here nor there

"Come, let us worship God who brings the world and its wonders from darkness into light."

(Invitatory, Divine Office, Saturday, 6July2013 of the 13th week of Ordinary Time)

Is this what God does? Is this what God is?

Is God the movement from concealment to unconcealment? When we pray are we praying for diaphaneity? For clarity of vision taking us from delusion and unsight to truth and clear sight?

When someone says they do not believe in God, are they saying their experience of truth (the unconcealed) is unconvincing or not readily revealed in present existence?

Given the awkward, skewed, manufactured, and manipulated state of contemporary culture, world geopolitics, and religious legislative tensions over sperm, egg, and women's reproductive theater -- it is increasingly difficult to see clearly the desired course of human everyday integrity. It would seem the weight of attention is on rape, pregnancy, abortion, and the effort by certain legislators to firmly set rules for women's bodies and medically allowable legally permissible options.

That, and the ability of same sex individuals to marry and enjoy the same legal benefits of other sex relationships, occupies attention. The Supreme Court in the US has ruled in favor of expanded inclusion.

Meanwhile, the government continues surveillance of its citizens and the whole world. War continues. Financial fraud and embezzlement is rife. Most everyone suffers theft and intimidation. Between church and secret agencies, criminal organizations and black-market drug, organ, sex and slave cartels, there is much suffering and degradation in our common experience.

Not to mention ordinary disappointment, sickness, incapacity, and death!

Before I Leave The Stage  

Before I leave the stage
I will sing the only song
I was meant truly to sing. 

It is the song
of I AM.
Yes: I am Me
& 
You.
WE ARE. 

I love Us with every drop
of our blood
every atom of our cells
our waving particles
-undaunted flags of our Being-
neither here nor there.    

(Poem by Alice Walker)

I return to the invitatory of this morning's prayer. There's something there that rivets my attention. 

Something about God.

About you.

About me.

About, ultimately, truth/love in a vacant and difficult time.

I hear, again and differently, the invitation: "Come, let us worship God who brings the world and its wonders from darkness into light"

The being is the message

Charlie wanted to know what he'd be missing not reading the great classics of literature.

Prison conversation.

So we read a poem by Alice Walker.

And imagine he is gracefulness itself leaving and wanting to leave something behind.

Remembering the name "Charlie" is not sufficient. Describing his experience, creativity, stance in the world, with words others might experience -- that would be a kindness, a fragment of soul, walking into obscurity an echo heard in passing.

dusking independence

I'm reminded I live in a hermitage. Dog barks from down road. Sky darkens. Dooryard looks left and right seeing no one.

It's because there's no one there. 

Poetry editor (Wiman) quotes theologian (Meister Eckhart) saying something about you can pray to god to be rid of god. 

Is there a benefit to distance and absence?

Is waiting for god the best activity never fulfilled but for the waiting?

The dooryard is empty. Silence is empty of noise. Dog bark is surrounded by no response. All is well!

We know this by forgetting this. Know god by forgetting god. Know love by ungrasping it.

Nothing is near. God is gone. What is beyond is what is beyond. No use trying to call it close, name it near, word it now.

Remember to forget.

Undisappearing

Thomas the skeptic, pray for we the confused!

If Christ is to be seen these days she will be the woman bruised by heavy hands. He will be the man bloodied by an exercise of deliberate power.

It is time to look hard at where christhood disappeared.

And believe it back into the room.

to discover summer and know it: giving itself to itself.

Summer ants crawl over desk, books, computer and pencil They are way up here on 2nd floor. 

Reading about Simone Weil:

Simone Weil’s legacy as a philosopher has remained uneasy; with a public reputation situated somewhere between mystic saint and madwoman, it is only recently that her work has been systematically examined from a philosophical perspective. More influential, and surprisingly unremarked, has been the adoption of Weil as an avowedly secular patron saint of modern metaphysical poetry. The incorporation of Weil into a poetic canon of reference deserves all the more attention because of the widespread reluctance to take her work seriously as philosophy. This reticence has come about largely because of the difficulty of separating Weil’s philosophical writings from her own life. 

 Later in article:

As Simon Critchley summarizes Stevens’s thesis: ‘God is dead, therefore I am. The problem is that it is not at all clear who I am’ (Critchley 2005: 43). Or as J. Hillis Miller expresses it: ‘God is dead, therefore I am. But I am nothing. I am nothing because I have nothing, nothing but awareness of the barrenness within and without’ (1990: 35).    

It is only in the death of God that the rest of the world is now revealed as unknowable and thus it is only when God is nothing that ‘man’ too may be revealed as nothing. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes: ‘“God”, the motif or theme of God, the question of God, no longer means anything to us. Or else – as is all too obvious to an unbiased eye – what the theme of God might mean to us has already moved or been carried entirely outside of him’ (1991: 112). God has been replaced in the human imagination by the larger created world, but without God the creation of the world is a mystery, and the stance of the individual in relation to that world is even more elusive. The problem, as Stevens phrases it in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, is that we are caught between a world revealed and understood through individual sight and the fear that this world is something which precedes us: ‘we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves’ (Stevens 1976: 102). Decreation is ‘a seeing and unseeing in the eye’ (Stevens 1976: 104); it is what allows the poet not to make the world, but to discover it:

[…] to impose is not 

To discover. To discover an order as of 

A season, to discover summer and know it,  

To discover winter and know it well, to find, 

Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, 

Out of nothing to have come on major weather, 

It is possible, possible, possible. It must 

Be possible.             (Stevens 1976: 125) 

The task of decreative art, for Stevens, is to discover the world without imposing on it, to encounter the world as it is created and, knowing the impossibility of creation, still see the world to be what it is. Poetry is no longer, in the words of mid-period Martin Heidegger, ‘the act of establishing by the word and in the word’ (1949: 304). Poetry cannot impose or establish. It is instead the act of revealing what has been uncreated: it sets out to discover, in a world in which godly creation seems impossible, what it is that remains. 

(--from article in Culture, Theory, & Critique, Volume 47, Issue 2, p.133-147 (2006)) http://www.joriegraham.com/baker_2006

From Rockland to Camden Route 1 is filled with cars. Locals take to back roads. Rain refuses to move on.

When emptiness inserts itself between thought and reality we are left with an open question. What, we ask, is God?

And where?

And how do we even begin to imagine there is something to see, something to hear?

Not long ago someone was accused of proselytizing the practice of silence leading to thinking. It was an odd thing to suggest was out-of-bounds in higher education. They felt it was prayer. It is instructive that thinking through silence would be considered a religious and prejudicial act. My opinion is that both silence and thinking are dangerous precedents in higher education. Imagine, if you would, an educated populace that knew both how to think and keep silent -- two skills capable of breaking through the dull drone of meaningless chatter and thoughtless speech.

Poetry, "revealing what has been uncreated," is birthed by thinking and silence.

Uncreated and unborn.

The fascination of imagination giving itself to itself.

one day

In the early nineteen sixties in a poem published in a magazine, some lines approximating these were written:

Is truth to be forgot when the mighty challenge the low? 

Where does one go to re-begin, to prove one's lot, to shed one's skin? 

(wfh)

Life, as we learn in the George Zimmerman trial, comes and goes.

Mr. George Zimmerman has his life -- though it will certainly change.

Mr. Trayvon Martin has his death -- which has already changed everything.

These flowers blossom only for one day.

hermit discourse

Man stops by. He says a hermit with great tact makes people feel at home even though he wishes they were.

We laugh.

thinking/feeling is heart/mind here/now

You pray?

For what?

(Fair enough questions, each.)

I pray for insight and courage to take the next step; to navigate and negotiate what will be presented before me; to do and to be faithful to the wholeness longing for true expression in the realm of appearance.

I pray as if to be the wholeness remembering itself.

As if to do what is asking into what is true in this existence.

As if recognizing the real was the important antidote to falling into the illusory, even as I fall into illusion -- to see it for what it is -- not deluding myself that it is not what it is.

I pray, as if I knew why I pray, to ground my being in Being as it becomes Becoming.

On the way, there and from, to you asking this and every question -- because it matters what we see, what we say, what we are, and what we know and do not know.

It matters that we feel and what we feel.

We are, after all, here.

So, why not be what we are, enquiring?

Engaging.

All, before and after?

the next view

Male and female he made them.

"The war between God and the Devil usually goes on in both psychic entities. That's as it should be. Schizophrenics tend to separate good and evil altogether, but in more balanced people, God and the Devil fight not only in Alpha, but in Omega as well." 

"There seems to be endless capacity for strife in your system." 

"Of course there is. Doesn't that fit human nature?" 

"Well," I said, "I still can't see why the Creator desired such a complicated design." 

"Because he wished to give us free will," she said. "I agree with Hugh on this as well. Free will amounts to giving the Devil equal opportunity." 

"How can you know that?" I blurted out. 

(--from p.175, Harlot's Ghost, by Norman Mailer; conversation between Harry and Kittridge)

Neither dualism nor monism -- but union with diversity.

We are as alike as unlike.

But, note this, it is the engagement, the differentiation of view held within a singular jousting turn of perspective -- suggests a resolution of continuance.

We agree or disagree and go on.

Only the fool or idiot refuses to move through to the next view.

incompatible with life

The EMT/firefighter testified that she found the indications of heart monitor placed on Trayvon Martin "to be incompatible with life."

Only George Zimmerman knows what happened.

The sweet anticipation of truth unconcealing itself.

Justice sips coffee at corner table.

Waiting.

yes, yes, yes, yes

In Maine State Prison an inmate kills another inmate. Both were in for murder. That's what they arrived at.

I've begun to wonder at our society and culture. Surveillance and fear, imprisonment and torture, belief in something better and arrival at injustice all around.

Counting The Mad 

This one was put in a jacket,  

This one was sent home,  

This one was given bread and meat  

But would eat none,  

And this one cried No No No No  

All day long. 

This one looked at the window  

As though it were a wall,  

This one saw things that were not there,  

This one things that were,  

And this one cried No No No No  

All day long. 

This one thought himself a bird,  

This one a dog,  

And this one thought himself a man,  

An ordinary man,  

And cried and cried No No No No 

All day long. 

(Poem by Donald Justice)

I don't have the courage not to be a hermit. So I hide in the open. I nod and say hello. I ride my bicycle here and there. I walk to town. I watch the trial of the man who shot Trayvon Martin.

I pass churches, town offices, schools, and shops. Aside from coffee and scone I have no transport through these doors. I have grown wary of all ideologies/ideologues and anti-ideologies/anti-ideologues. I prefer poets to politicians or priests, artists to arhats or arsonists.

I read these days. I go off alone. I wake early and catch up on news and essays. I calculate times for naps and miss the appointed times. I hide out. I pray. For what, to what, I'm unsure.

It is late June. The peapod is in dry dock.

So is my soul.

All day long.

outcasts

Trial in Florida continues. Mr. Zimmerman shot Mr. Martin on a drizzly evening. Counsel asks what was seen, what heard, where the witness was, what were they doing before and after, and other details enough to implant the impression that nothing seen or heard, assumed or recollected stands a chance under repeated questioning and pointed scrutiny.

One thing is known, No, two things. Treyvon Martin was shot and killed. George Zimmerman is on trial for 2nd degree murder.

Be Nobody's Darling

Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.
Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.
Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
 Or line the crowded
River beds
With other impetuous
Fools.  

Make a merry gathering
On the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave hurt words
They said. 

 But be nobody's darling;
 Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.  

(Poem by Alice Walker)

These days I feel qualified to live among the dead. As, indeed, I do.

The dead are about.

I don't know where; I don't know how; I don't know any details, theories, or wherefores.  But the dead are about.

Between this and that. Between here and there. In no form I would recognize. No special communication, nor sign, nor extraordinary revelation.

I listen to the young woman who last spoke on phone to Mr. Martin before his death. She cries, is soft spoken, and will face cross-examination.

About.

Us.

The joy of being released . . . The end of the known

Listen to the sound of what is 

being said.

Right now. Is your name being...

pronounced in mere silence?

Be safe! Such a journey is

gratitude and astonishment.

Alone, no, more

She took promises in the local Episcopal church to be a solitary religious. We attended her words. We continue to listen; her solitude and silence deepens with her death.

 Good company to you!

 

Suzanne, your reclusive prayer will whisper through midcoast.

Smooth, not blocked

Gary and I played basketball at PS205 after school in the 1950s together in the low-ceiling'd gym.

Born in Brooklyn on June 25, 1944, Mr. Goldberg was known as Gary as a boy. He began using his middle name, David, as a professional affectation. “If I could get rid of it, I would,” he said. 

Gary and his brother, Stanley, grew up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood. 

Gary David Goldberg, Television Writer And Creator of ‘Family Ties,’ Dies at 68. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/arts/television/gary-david-goldberg-creator-of-family-ties-dies-at-68.html?hpw&_r=0

He was left-handed and had the sweetest drive and fade banking shot impossible to stop. He was a kindly young man who, though much better, played well with the rest of us.

Thanks Gary! And happy birthday!

butterfly

At edge of flowerpot.

Summer Sunday.

You have to say something, the zen master said

Just open your mouth.

Say it.

Anyone Can Sing 

Anyone can sing. You just open your mouth,

and give shape to a sound. Anyone can sing.

What is harder, is to proclaim the soul,

to initiate a wild and necessary deepening:

to give the voice broad, sonorous wings

of solitude, grief, and celebration,

to fill the body with the echoes of voices

lost long ago to bravery, and silence,

to prise the reluctant heart wide open,

to witness defeat, to suffer contempt,

to shrink, lose face, go down in ignominy,

to retreat to the last dark hiding-place

where the tattered remnants of your pride

still gather themselves around your nakedness,

to know these rags as your only protection

and yet still open - to face the possibility

that your innermost core may hold nothing at all,

and to sing from that - to fill the void

with every hurt, every harm, every hard-won joy

that staves off death yet honours its coming,

to sing both full and utterly empty,

alone and conjoined, exiled and at home,

to sing what people feel most keenly

yet never acknowledge until you sing it.

Anyone can sing. Yes. Anyone can sing.

             (Poem by William Ayot)

Nothing at all.

To say.

Then, say it.

Summer start

(haiku for first day)

Alice Walker poems
at prison, elderly inn --
don't fix the broken

(wfh, nunc ipsum)

LeBron

(haiku for basketball player)

That's it for season --
Done. Body gonna rest. (smiles)
Breathe . . . inspiration

(wfh, nunc ipsum)

Let's not say 'God is one': rather: 'Each itself is god.'

I've been thinking about insanity -- mine and yours.

Perhaps a lighted candle will help us both.

Toward sane retrieval in a world gone mad.

I'll rest here for a moment.

As at 4AM you might think to pray for everyone.

To become, one (might say) itself.

Dooryard grief

(a late spring haiku)

Churning garden hose

Lawn mower fractures nozzle

Water pump weeps crush

(wfh, nunc ipsum)

Within this

To sit in darkness and silence is to sit in the acceptance of light and sound. In cabin tonight, single vigil candle hanging from front crossbeam, I sit in the unknowing some call meditation, some call God, some have no name for it.

Dusk lowers.

Back to wohnkuche.

I remember times when there were words for what was believed.

Now there is only remembrance.

Quinoa with stir fry veggies.

Without belief, just this.

Sitting and looking practice, Tuesday evening

The flowers are given to the earth. And we give earth flowers in return. No holding back.

"Giving" means nongreed. Nongreed means not to covet. Not to covet means not to curry favor. Even if you govern the Four Continents, you should always convey the correct teaching with nongreed. It is to give away unneeded belongings to someone you don't know, to offer flowers blooming on a distant mountain to the Tathāgata, or, again, to offer treasures you had in your former life to sentient beings. Whether it is of teaching or of material, each gift has its value and is worth giving. Even if the gift is not your own, there is no reason to keep from giving. The question is not whether the gift is valuable, but whether there is merit.
When you leave the way to the way, you attain the way. At the time of attaining the way, the way is always left to the way. When treasure is left just as treasure, treasure becomes giving. You give yourself to yourself and others to others. The power of the causal relations+ of giving reaches to devas, human beings, and even enlightened sages. When giving becomes actual, such causal relations are immediately formed.(--from, Bodhisattva's Four Methods of Guidance, BODAISATTA SHISHŌ-HŌ, This was written on the fifth day, fifth month, fourth year of Ninji (1243) by Monk Dōgen, who transmitted dharma from China..Translated by Lew Richmond and Kazuaki Tanahashi)
http://www.zenonderdedom.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Dogen-Bodhisattvas_Four_Methods_Of_Guidance.pdf

 Humans evaluate. That's what we seem to do best. Calculate. Evaluate.

Earth just gives. No calculation. No evaluation.

Imagine that.

Nongreed.

You watchn' me?

Call me doubtful! 

Here's what will continue to happen: surveillance, surveillance, and (you got it) surveillance.

There will be no stopping, no diminishing, and no vague possibility the data will not be used and abused by both "good guys" and "bad guys." It will be used to whatever ends the user wishes. 

Where's the upside? Will we suddenly turn all moral and law abiding and say "let 'em see what they want"? Will we arm ourselves to the teeth, shoot down backyard spy-drones; send saintly elderly religious sisters to deface CCTV lenses countrywide; or set up camp in town squares with burgers, buns, and banners decrying lost anonymity while our neighbors in police uniform try to decide whose legs to baton first, or, perhaps, which friend to bring a blanket to ward off the evening chill?

I'm agnostic as well as skeptical. The coin has been thumbed upward and flips head over tail in a parody of where this "watching over" will hit ground: a benign divine care-driven attentiveness? or, a desperate fear-driven mistrusting destructiveness?

I'm just going to make a pot of coffee, dive into Drift, Harlot's Ghost, Chain of Command, and War in Heaven -- toast some Parmesan-Pepper bread from the local bakery, and leave the anguishing to 1984 scholars, climate-change rubes, and banks-are-our-buddies enthusiasts.

Bill Keller, in his nytimes editorial, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/opinion/keller-living-with-the-surveillance-state.html?hp&_r=0 , 
has laid out the conversation. I'm skeptical there is any moderation or keen-eyed regulatory apparatus to salvage an Emily Dickinson veil of discreet unsurveilled reclusivity.

I will become a hermit-in-the-open. I'll take my chances and my refuge in the dormant and deliberate decency deep within each person -- that quality of awareness that holds each sentient being in high and holy regard and wants no harm for anybody. 

We'll, no doubt, see each other some day. Nod twice and wink once in my direction when you pass me going along like a pilgrim toward the wholly-disclosed-other, which is our journey toward a communion of compassion, an intended consequence of actually caring for one another! 

Do we have a choice?

 Really?

Nothing you can identify

The dialogue at end of murder mystery series reflects the curious ambiguity of some crimes, namely, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No evil intention aforethought, no way to correct the wrongs that follow. "We got the bad guy," one detective says to the other. "Yea? Who?" answers the other, posing a koan for the ages: Who, actually, is the 'bad guy'?

It is fruitless at times to suspect you know what's really going on.

The Greek word deployed by Plato in “The Cave” — aletheia — is typically translated as truth, but is more aptly translated as “disclosure” or “uncovering” —   literally, “the state of not being hidden.”   Martin Heidegger, in an essay on the allegory of the cave, suggested that the process of uncovering was actually a precondition for having truth.  It would then follow that the goal of the truth-seeker is to help people in this disclosure — it is to defeat the illusory representations that prevent us from seeing the world the way it is.  There is no propositional truth to be had until this first task is complete.
(-- THE STONE June 14, 2013, 12:00 pm, The Real War on Reality, by Peter Ludlow, in NYTimes)  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/the-real-war-on-reality/?src=recg.   

There's no knowing.

Best to let the unconcealed stand by itself.

 Look at it!

Allow it to be, in its chaos and inarticulable non-sequiturs, itself.

The hardest knowledge to seek is that of something being itself nothing you can identify.

meetingbrook zen, to see what is in the middle: mono / mesa

meetingbrook (zen) hermitage

monastics of no other 

meeting experience simple awareness 

stillness imagines: contemplation 

silence interiorizes: conversation 

seeing initiates: correspondence 

mono / mesa: si, si, si.

(A journey taking each turn!)

mesa

The new expression of contemplative christianity and meditative buddhism and mere attention with nature is rounded into a circle of seeing: christ-mind, buddha-nature, gaia-life.

It is america's zen.

The table, mesa; the middle, mesa; the inside, mesa.

We are invited to see what is in the middle.

It is now, always has been, will always be -- unknown, unknowable, and unknowing-itself.

Whatever you are looking for, it is there.

Do I dare forget myself and enter this place?  

Mille o tante grazie, Antonio, amico, compagno!

Anthony of Padua, who helps (some say) find things, might help find sanity in a world gone insane with trivia, titillation, and tattle.

Perhaps we think that by embracing our insanity everything would be fine.

Embrace 

You know the parlor trick.
wrap your arms around your own body
and from the back it looks like
someone is embracing you
her hands grasping your shirt
her fingernails teasing your neck
from the front it is another story
you never looked so alone
your crossed elbows and screwy grin
you could be waiting for a tailor
to fit you with a straight jacket
one that would hold you really tight.  

(Poem by Billy Collins)

Ok, so we look a little odd when looked upon straight on. But, in review, from the other side, it always seems different.

People fear Martial Law. People fear Terrorist Attack. People fear their own Goverrnment. And Government, naturally, fears the People.

Is it possible not to fear? Not anything?

Where The Mind Is Without Fear  

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high 
Where knowledge is free 
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments 
By narrow domestic walls 
Where words come out from the depth of truth 
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection 
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way 
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit 
Where the mind is led forward by thee 
Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.  

(Poem by Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1941)

Yes, I worry about my sanity. I worry about my country's sanity. Fear has a way of making us insane.

I wonder if, metaphorically, we were to substitute the word "insane" for "sin" in Holy Writ -- would we look on our "morality" differently?

Is insanity a chemical imbalance? Is mental illness a failure to see things with a clear and unperverted gaze?

Do we engage in a looking that sees good and calls it good, sees wrong and calls it wrong, hears cacophony and winces, hears beautiful melody and smiles?

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -- 

Success in Circuit lies 

Too bright for our infirm Delight 

The Truth's superb surprise   

As Lightning to the Children eased 

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually 

Or every man be blind -- 

(Poem by Emily Dickinson)

Once all the whistles have blown, the tales tattled, the hidden revealed, and the mistruths straightened into fessed-up straight-up straight-answer-club simplicity, we in this country will breathe a sigh of relief and look at each other again with a long desired affection.

We will be able to face each other again.

Something lost will be found.

We will look to the brown-robed paisan over in the corner, wink, nod, and say: 

Mille o tante grazie, Antonio, amico, compagno!

Wouldn't it be comforting to be companion to truth?

not that far; not that long

Frail friend in pain taken to emergency room and back home again.

One  step, another minute, a lifetime in a millisecond.

Like a prison guard said last week: inches and seconds! That's the difference between being in prison and working at a prison; inches and seconds.

Not much.

live today

Tomorrow is no home.

unconcealment

Let's try this: Truth, simple unconcealment, is a better option than lies, deceit, and secrecy.

It is a radical consideration.

Do we dare face it?

Making sure.

Our face.

Is, seen.

doctor my eyes

Someone's watching.

As a child growing up in Brooklyn's Catholic Culture, I learned that everybody was watching. From Mrs. Goldberg to Grandpa Bellantoni, from the creepy guy with cigar in his mouth at 2nd floor window to Officers Whatstheirnames in the black and white cruiser rolling passes the driveway.
Not to forget to mention the priest's insistence the the Good Lord Himself was all-seeing me wherever I was whatever I was doing. Of course his consecrated daughter-in-religion, Sister M. Nazareth, saw everything from her office as principal around corners in basements and five blocks of city streets away. I know what being watched looks like.

These days, though, it feels different. God is dead. So is Sister. So are all the Bensonhurst neighbor watchers. (About God, I have to clarify: the misperceptions and concepts bandied about God are dead or mostly all dead. God Itself is another consideration.)

Here's what feels different:
It's not the surveillance as much as it is the vacuum of trust. The government doesn't trust the American people, nor do the people trust the duplicity followed by rationalization by the government.
The vacuum of trust is where terror breeds.
It seems we're all breeders now.
A new celibacy of just saying "no" to seductive fearmongers is needed.

Back in childhood Brooklyn (mostly) everyone was looking out for you. Today it is a "Watch out for him!" wariness.

We need to change mistrusting spying into caring gazing. 

See one another.

With loving.

Joy.