who, or what, do you take after?

The Japanese word, "narau," I'm told, means "to take after, to learn." Similarly, "naru" means "to become."

The question for educators is -- what are students taking after or becoming? Indeed, what do we need to learn?

My preference is the combining: "narau desu naru" -- to learn is to become. If we become what we learn, it seems to me we ought to be modeling freedom and creativity of thought with a solid grounding in skeptical questioning. 

This ought to be done in the proximate presence of one another.

We need both evidence and experience with intuition. Too easily are students led through someone else's agenda and curriculum. Too seldom are they encouraged to think and question what is presented as pure history and undeniable canon.

Two ways of learning -- calculative thinking and contemplative thinking -- must come face to face in an environment of engagement.

Put differently, there must be conversation, open and probing conversation. Perhaps such "taking after" will obviate the model of secrecy and surveillance in our contemporary culture and encourage a pathway of diaphaneity and pure gaze.

(Commenting on "The Two Cultures of Educational Reform," The New York Times, by Stanley Fish, 26August2013)  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/the-two-cultures-of-educational-reform/?comments#comments

facing each way; each falling away: no name's

"All lose,whole find" wrote e.e.cummings.  http://poems.writers-network.com/printview/printview-582.html

Something becomes clearer . . .

"Family," they say. "Don't mess with my family!" Pictures with faces smiling forward. 

As though that explained everything.

I look around. Can we see what is here?

Neighbor in distinct high-pitch voice, calls her cat. Out, no doubt, all night. As cats will do.

Maybe that's the clue.

No one left out, everyone called in, is family.

Sight moves through face, unbeginning, unending. Infinitely from within; eternally into outer.

No boundary. No barrier.

"Family" devoided, reconsidered as now-here-this, wherever you are!

Koan practice:

Question: What is the sound of one, family, gathering?
Response: Where are you?

Find out.

Allow in.

Gathering as no name's. 

Of a Monday afternoon

Woman from New York traveling down from Nova Scotia stops by. She is in Shambhala tradition. She practices in Vermont. She lights charcoal on sand in porcelain bowl, sprinkles juniper on it, fragrant smoke rising, she goes from building to building, room to room, counterclockwise, and blesses, chanting the following chant:

Invocation for Raising Windhorse 

om ah hung  The assembly of the three jewels-Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. 

The three roots-Guru, Deva and Dakini; gods and sages; 

The three protectors-mahasattvas-Manjushri, Avalokiteshvara and Vajrapani; Jayadeva, PadmaTöterang and the vidyadharas of India and Tibet; 

The glorious protector, Ganapadi with the divine armies of dralas        

The five patron gods

The great being Gesar, and so on 

All those gods of the cosmic lineage who command coincidence,

To all of those, I offer clouds of real and imagined good offerings, I supplicate you: with kindness, please grant your blessings.  

Curses, spells, burial sorcery, döns, obstructing spirits, obstacles and so on. May all these signs of the weakening and corruption of windhorse be pacified.  

Strife, enmity, scandal, warfare, lawsuits, recurrent calamity and so on, 

Pacify all such obstructing discord. Multiply the power and strength of the virtuous windhorse, the four legged miracle.  

Please accomplish the spiritual and temporal, supreme and ordinary siddhas.  

And without exception, whatever mind desires. 

om wagi shwari mum 

om mani peme hung 

om vajrapani hung 

om ah hung 

om ah hung vajra guru pema siddhi hung 

om ham ksha ma la wa ra ya ha ha hi hi he he ho ho sarwa vijaya siddhi hung 

tak seng khyung druk di yarkyé 

Gather all, sarwa, gather gather hoRouse all our life, virtue and glorious windhorse, higher and higher!

Karma Choling (Barnet VT) Shanbhala Shrine

(Photo by Michael Davis)

Workman framing door in upstairs bathroom wondered, he said later, what the heck scent was poked through the door and chanted at his back. But figured he was at meetingbrook where little makes sense.

Then we have cucumber and tomato salad with parmesan peppercorn bread. White haired man with walking cane pulls in, Saskia gets him a coffee, and he sits a spell near porcelain bowl at table in front of book shed.

You just never know who or what will present itself.

We receive this gift with gratitude.

Ki ki so so!

No one says anything; nothing is heard: Sunday afternoon

Chuang Tzu lived in fourth century BCE.

"All men know the utility of useful things; but they do not know the utility of futility." (Chuang Tzu)

"Wander where there is no path. Be all that heaven gave you, but act as though you have received nothing. Be empty, that is all." (Chuang Tzu)

For those of us now living in 21st century CE, these words are befuddling.

Except if you hear them from inside their spelling without any exterior sound.

"almost transparent, almost nonexistent"

 An actor who showed how.

The playwright John van Druten, who adapted Christopher Isherwood’s novel “Goodbye to Berlin” into the play “I Am a Camera,” the show that made Ms. Harris a star in 1952 (and later became the source material for the musical “Cabaret”), referred to her in a 1955 interview with The New York Times Magazine, as a glass pitcher. 

“You pour in red wine, the pitcher looks red; pour in crème de menthe, it is green,” van Druten said. “When she’s by herself, Julie’s almost transparent, almost nonexistent.”  

(--from, New York Times, Julie Harris, Celebrated Actress of Range and Intensity, Dies at 87, by Bruce Weber, 24Aug2013. She died on the 24th)

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/arts/julie-harris-celebrated-actress-of-range-and-intensity-dies-at-87.html?hp 

 Good zen teaching.

What is this? Joy

Canada Geese went by on the 6:12 this morning.

Where I was in dream is now fallen into filing system folder labeled forget.

Car sounds itself up Barnestown Road, another down.

It is Sunday morning. Like communicants approaching and receding from altar, geese and cars take on the circumincessional interpenetration of divine-human recourse. It is left to unchurching semi-apostates to remember the pilgrimage they once took but now leave walking sticks leaning against tree or wall ungrasped.

For who can grasp the whole?

Rituals recede into mixed blessing of memory.

Holy scripture is replaced by the new faithful with Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Email, those trinitarian testaments of touching temporality transient and tempting.

This morning I am nontheistic agnostic -- I don't know if there is not a God.

Glimpses of light lead me to suspect there is a star burning 93 million miles away, exploding and violent, mildly coloring faces of sailors on sailers where wind slides between sheets on reach to nowhere.

This ending of summer has been the beginning of other endings beginning in circular infinity.

Whoever I was has checked out of the hotel of fixed recognition and taken coastal bus heading toward unrecognition miles away from anywhere at the border of amnesia neighboring Alois Alzheimer in pasture waving in bucolic loss of presence.

Its not that the ability to think has been lost, its more that what is there to think about has taken a nap, off and away, in a niche hard to find nor wanting to be found.

I become the unfinding path -- the one lost and disoriented not receiving nor emitting appearance or intent -- but winding itself through everything.

Rather, this peregrinating everything becomes what it is without explanation, excuse, understanding, defense, or justification. No words occupy the path. Silence steps along. Memory is unfocused glance into middlespace. No apology forms with formlessness.

Oremus. Flectamus genua. Levate! 

Prayer is perception leaning on creative intimation. Consciousness kneels as radiating silence encircles. 'Yes' arises in solitude and wanders off alone. Nothing else emerges and sets about setting up camp with no tent, no site, no ground, and no person wishing to camp.

Joy is itself . . .  and does not need optimism to be itself.

This is.

What is.

Here.

remedial reading

Doing nothing, going nowhere.

This is the current condition of salvation. Not salvation in the churchy sense. But salvation in the preservation, reclamation, lifeline sense of continuing to move through this world without succumbing to insanity, distraction, dissolving of decency, and loss of grounding in what is real.

Human beings slowly become inconsolably unkind and unmoored. Taking from others to benefit only you and yours. Stopping others from exercising freedoms and rights. Numbing and hallucinating mind and body with merde and mindlessness. Full of going places, doing things, collecting prizes, causing suffering.

There is another way. Wu Wei. Learn and know when to act and not to act.

Do nothing.

Go nowhere.

Find way through the insanity of our age.

We know how.

How?

Begin to feel again.

Feel the connection.

Each person each being is a word ready to be read.

Learn to read; begin to see.

Let one move within and through what is there to move within and through.

Tolle Lege, Take and read, this is word! This, what you see!

First: 

Is there no way to cast my hook  

Out of this dynamited brook? 

The Fisher's sons must cast about 

When shallow waters peter out.  

I will catch Christ with a greased worm, 

And when the Prince of Darkness stalks  

My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . .  

On water the Man-Fisher walks.    

 (--from, "The Drunken Fisherman," by Robert Lowell)  
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15278

And: 

     ... It is true you are

now alone in your adversity in the company of Christ

only, but the people of God shall also remember that

your misgivings have become Sacred ...

        Your uncertainty

has become certain, a source of sacred dread to others,

but to you a kind of hell in which absurdity itself is

an earnest of salvation.

(--from, "Rites for the Extrusion of a Leper," by Thomas Merton)
http://www.thomasmertonsociety.org/altany1.htm

Early departure

Canada Geese catch 6:13 overhead

Chattering stories of their stay

Cat at window turns from station

Wait for next train

Vocational training

A lock picker I know learned his skill undoing the chain and padlock his parents wrapped him in as a kid after they went to bed drunk and left him around a pipe below the kitchen sink.

A useful skill.

See what can be, seen; then look away

One, more, beginning.

Sun rises from boy's picture holding shell in Haskell Cove many years alighting.

The simplicity of it

Water.

Is life.

I sip.

Iter, itirneris; Itinerary; quid est enim novi

There's no place else to go.

Besides, who is it that wishes to go anyplace else?

I look around. Everything there is here.

Turn this way or that way, walk in a straight or wobbly line in either direction, you'll probably find yourself returned right back here.

Like Loon hanging from hibiscus branch in midday warmth looking out over garden bench, I take my going slow, learning from stillness where I do not need to go.

 Quid est enim novi hominum mori, cujus tota vita nihil aliud quam ad mortem iter est? (Seneca)

(What new thing is it then for a man to die, whose whole life is nothing else but a journey to death?)

Ya Na; attending, another, alone, aware

 We need poets. We need mystics. We need monastics.

The world is too mean without these types. The temptation to loot, steal, murder, drug ourselves silly, become petty and pitiable, stay in illusion, perpetuate delusion, use people, claim "it's to protect family,"  dissociate and dissemble, and mostly -- to lose trust, genuine affection, and integrity -- these temptations are too powerful for 98% of human beings to resist. All, it seems, fall under the wheels of this impossible to resist train.

Today is the feast of Bernard of Clairvaux, Abbot, Theologian, and Poet, 20 August 1153: 

Bernard, third son of a Burgundian nobleman, was born in 1090. His brothers were trained as soldiers, but Bernard from youth was destined for scholarship. One Christmas Eve as a child he had a dream about the infant Christ in the manger; and the memory of it, and consequent devotion to the mystery of the Word made flesh, remained with him throughout his life. 

Bernard had good prospects of success as a secular scholar, but he began to believe that he was called to the monastic life, and after a period of prayer for guidance, he decided at age 22 to enter the monastery of Citeaux (Latin Cistercium, appearing on modern maps as Corcelles-les-Citeaux, 47:10 N 5:05 E), an offshoot of the Benedictines which had adopted a much stricter rule than theirs, and became the founding house of the Cistercian (Trappist) order. (Actually, the Trappists are a reformed (i.e. stricter) offshoot of the Cistercians, who are a stricter offshoot of the Benedictines.) He persuaded four of his brothers, one uncle, and 26 other men to join him. They were the first novices that Citeaux had had for several years. After three years, the abbot ordered Bernard to take twelve monks and found a new house at La Ferte. The first year was one of great hardship. They had no stores and lived chiefly on roots and barley bread. Bernard imposed such severe discipline that his monks became discouraged, but he realized his error and became more lenient. The reputation of the monastery, known as Clairvaux (48:09 N 4:47 E), spread across Europe. Many new monks joined it, and many persons wrote letters or came in person to seek spiritual advice. By the time of his death, 60 new monasteries of the Cistercian order were established under his direction.

http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/232.html

As a monastic of no other I attempt in ragtag dishevelment to follow the promptings of life to live it in a manner consistent and commensurate to the co-equal promptings of Benedict of Nursa, Francis of Assisi, Claire of Assisi. Dogen Zenji of Eihei, Basho, Han Shan, Hui Neng, Santoka Taneda, Pema Chodron, Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan, Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Day,  Catherine de Hueck Doherty,  John O'Donohue, Mary Oliver, Shunryu Suzuki, Thich Nhat Hanh, Seung Sahn, Gary Snyder, Naneo Sakaki, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Heidegger, Jean Gebser, Raimon Panikkar, Adam, Eve, Mary, as well as Siddhartha Gautama (called the Buddha) and Jesus of Nazareth (called the Christ.)

After a fashion, in erratic and chaotic manner, a daily life is lived under the guide-points of contemplation, conversation, and correspondence. These also translate from poverty, chastity, and obedience into another triadic: watching, listening, silence.

Perhaps: idiorhythmic, idiosyncratic, idiomatic.

Bernard wrote:

• “There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is Curiosity.
  
  There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is Vanity.
  
  There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love.” 
  ― Bernard of Clairvaux

• “What we love we shall grow to resemble.” 
  ― Bernard of Clairvaux

• “What I know of the divine
  science and holy scripture,
  I learnt in the woods and fields.” 
  ― Bernard of Clairvaux

So, we are grateful for this man, for all the men and women who have touched and transmitted something of truth, love, peace, service, learning, and joy.

It is a practice we gladly practice: attending, another, alone, aware.

It is a matter of conjoining "yes" and "no."

YA! NA!  -- You are not alone!

IAHWY: I am here with you.

May each of us be and become: bewithed and bewithing!

PRAYER 

O God, by whose grace your servant Bernard of Clairvaux, Kindled with the flame of your love, became a burning and a shining light in your Church: Grant that we also may be aflame with the spirit of love and discipline, and walk before you as children of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. (Ibid)

Cicadas

The mathematician conceives the name of god with numbers.

I eat ice cream.

Moon nears full.

republicans want to cut out the core

In New York Times:

E. D. Hirsch, an advocate of the Common Core whose Core Knowledge Foundation distributes a widely used curriculum, warned in an interview that if the standards were not carefully implemented, schools could still end up emphasizing “mindless test prep” over substance. 

“The Tea Party’s worried about the federal government,” he told me. “What they should be worried about is the education school professors and the so-called experts.” 

But — as with that other demonic federal plot, Obamacare — the Republicans aren’t interested in making reform work. They just want it dead. 

“Conservatives used to be in favor of holding students to high standards and an academic curriculum based on great works of Western civilization and the American republic,” two education scholars, Kathleen Porter-Magee and Sol Stern, wrote in National Review Online. “Aren’t they still?” 

Good question. 

(--from, OP-ED COLUMNIST, War on the Core, by Bill Keller, Published: August 18, 2013) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/opinion/keller-war-on-the-core.html?hp 

In response:

It's just a phase. Republicans will emerge into mature, caring, intelligent, useful contributors to the health and well-being of the citizenry and country.

(Glad I got that out while my mind is still alert! Back to my studies: Mexico is the capital of Italy; Clinton was president of Wyoming; The road to Heaven is paved with no intentions of helpful lobbyists; The old Soviet Union is currently hidden in a warehouse in the District of Columbia. 

Boy, is history fun! )

as we are is

Student reads philosophy paper about Wabi-Sabi on porch of cabin Saturday afternoon. 

Conversation stretches.

I write four phrases she is stitching:

• "This" is what I am realizing.
• "God" (or Father) is this saying: "I am here for you."
• "Jesus" was the is (incarnating) coming to be.
• "Spirit" is silent effortless energy moving through and between us becoming what is to be itself.

Ours is the ongoing, ever-present, origin revealing itself, moving through nothing we know, through the somethings we don't know, toward the "is" --  unconcealing, coming to be, from the nothing it was toward the nothing it already is.

Imperfect.

Impermanent.

Incomplete.

Unfinishing.

As is, we are.

As we are is!

When God disappeared, this occurred

Of course there is the question: What is this?

Walking mountain with Rokie and Cody comes four words to describe four noble truths:

1. Suffering

2. Desiring

3. Releasing

4. Realizing.

Suffering is from desiring; releasing is through realizing.

 

This is how we move. Into now. For now.

noise and smoke, Goethe said, obscuring heavenly light...

"I am here for you."

Or is it "with you?"

This is a realization and a koan worth contemplating.

...Is what names are.

dust cloth

Sunlight on green leaves in afternoon breeze!

Woman leaves St Vincent's medal in cabin. It hangs from window.

In prison this morning we read from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance":

My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm

Afterwards we read a few poems by Naneo Sakaki (1923-2008)

This one for example:

In The Next Life I Will Be

Wiping the windowpanes of my humble shack,
a dirty dust cloth in my hand,
endless blue sky over my head.

At the forest edge
where narcissus are already in all their glory,
where wild boars bite off various trees' roots every so often,
where I stand, piss, and murmur.

In the next life I will be a dust cloth
lapis lazuli colored.

As a dust cloth, making myself dirty
I clean up windowpanes, kitchens and toilets,
and I also wipe out discrimination and wars.

If ever the world really exists
I start polishing it from my tiny corner.
If ever eternity really exists
I make it brilliant at every moment.

The more I work, the more I become
pure lapis lazuli color
just like today's sky.

Ten days after winter solstice
the mother sun is shining bright.

All of a sudden, a gust of north wind
blows the dead leaves from the trees.

Look, something coming down!
With our luminous star behind
red wings flutter.

What is that? Hawk? Flying goblin? UFO?
Wow! On the palm of my hand
I catch the monster -
a withered red leaf of oak.

Living in the flower garden of the sun's red corona
biting off the rainbow's roots forever
someone murmurs

In the next life I will be....
Jan 2, 1998/ Izu Peninsula, Japan
Nanao Sakaki

Deano thought that if everything is itself, then the dead will also share in awakening whenever anyone awakens. The movement, he thought, is the movement of what we call God between us.

The substance abuse counselor joined the conversation at end and dropped a novelty pile of dogshit next to his chair with which he got my attention and silent pledge of payback.

Rokie, of course, was not fooled.

Some sorrows...

Like bird, dead on stone outside door, somber beginning to morning.

Our cats are indoor cats.

Something else must be looked at.

Adios, compañero!

dear friend

It is all story.

And when a part of story ends, it is best to let it go.

Once.

A time.

Upon. . .

Is gone.

The 15th of August

A world of subjects. Of intimacy; no secrets.

Taken up.

Found ground.

Where is the separation in wholeness?

Who is identified as included or not included?

MU!

Everything, heaven and earth, not two not one.

temporary consideration; at this point

Eric Holder and the Justice Department are talking about drug-related prison sentencing reform. Say "Good!" quickly. Then consider the long sorrow.

I think of all the poor saps behind bars for insignificant drug infractions, then I think of all the criminals in lucrative private and public service servicing greed and self-interest, and I am saddened.

The thing that burdens most is everyone knows the unequal treatment and inequitable standards when considering who should populate our prisons, who is of little worth, not to be missed, chum for big fish to devour.

The history of the "drug war" like all "wars" is diversionary.

Until a more balanced, equitable, and civilized standard of human expectation and communal behavior is arrived at --namely-- the rich and powerful dealt the same surveillance and indictment efficiency as the poor and powerless, we will continue to pantomime and pretend a just society while perpetuating a decadent one.

Absent a transformation of human heart and mind, equitable treatment might be all we could hope for at this point.

bad is not opposite of good; each is itself, as is . . .

It is irrelevant whether you call something good or bad. These terms are not fixed and final in place. In fact, it is disturbing to contemplate that these terms are masks for intentions remaining undisclosed and facts without verification. The world is full of illegal, immoral, criminal, and perfectly respectable rascals who double as good, moral, upstanding, and perfectly duplicitous individuals.

What then is to be done?

Tea, chai, with raw milk, helps.

A piece of chocolate. Ginger cookies. 

Something to read.

A story perhaps.

Trust, also, helps.

Walking earlier, fingering beads, I pray for all my brothers and sisters, that they get free from bondage.

That they become happy. Safe. Free.

And come to dwell in their true home.

No need to try to right wrong.

Keep it simple.

Rather, try to be what you are. 

What you really are.

Owls Head

Fog comes in.

Fog horn and border collie sound at same

time.

Big ship sounds single blow out in deep fog.

taking notice

I've begun to notice people are not living forever. They're dying. At all ages.

Obituaries, New York Times: 

• Eydie Gorme, Voice of Sophisticated Pop, Dies at 84 

• William P. Clark, Influential Adviser in Reagan White House, is Dead at 81 

• John Reilly, 74, a Champion of Documentary, Dies

It suggests to me that I will do the same.

At any time.

"my son, my son," dented engraving says

Too many words.

The Gate of Not-Okay

The only thing that can make us uncomfortable with being alone is not liking who we are. That’s what we do when we face the wall: we face who we are. Being okay with however that arises is the most compassion and the most honesty you can ever offer yourself—to just accept yourself as you are. Even if you don’t like it, that’s okay, because not-okay is always a practice gate. We can always include what we don’t like in ourselves. But letting go of worrying about having to become perfect: that’s a gift that we give to ourselves.

- Merle Kodo Boyd, "Okay As It Is, Okay As You Are." Tricycle

Perfect.

Just make your way through yourself.

In dark dooryard on wood Adirondeck chair in front of bookshed under spreading universe of faint light last night round midnight looking up seeing nothing other than what was there as what is there in soundless watch.

Then, comes morning.

Going nowhere; moving through this and that no more

Disappear into act. Where being becomes act. Stillness is act within itself.

Meditation becomes reengagement as what is itself. This is the task: to become what one is, the act of moving, unmoving act, nowhere to go, no one to be.

To become what one is is allowing each arising thought and errant wish to fall away without clinging to them as they go.

What remains?

What remains is what is becoming itself.

Never other. Merely itself. No additions nor subtraction.

Excuse me?

No, excuse is not necessary.

No excuse is necessary.

Go on.

Disappear.

Not to have a relationship; but to disappear into a relationship

Clare to Francis: I am here.

Counting Umwelt

One trillion stars, count them, one trillion stars are said to be within our closest galaxy neighbor, Andromeda. One trillion!

There are, say astrophysicists, at least 100 billion galaxies. Or 176 billion. (Perhaps, some speculate, nearing one trillion galaxies.)   

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/10/10/how-many-galaxies-are-there-in-the-universe-the-redder-we-look-the-more-we-see/#.Ugd3u8u9KSM

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” –Joseph Campbell

This new portrait of the Andromeda Galaxy, or M31, was taken with the Subaru Telescope's new high-resolution imaging camera, the Hyper-Suprime Cam (HSC). 

Credit: HSC Project/NAOJ.  http://www.space.com/22177-andromeda-galaxy-photo-hsc.html

And yet...it is all as close and intimate to us as the coffee beans dancing in grinder, person sitting beside you, green grass underfoot, sunshine on hand. As near as god, as near as truth, as near as mere simple 'hello, good morning' to visitors in wohnkuche. We are terribly close to and intimate with all of existence all of Being all of raisin English muffins, organic, this holy instant.

The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years from Earth in the Andromeda constellation. Also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224, it is often referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older texts. Wikipedia Distance to Earth: 2,538,000 light years, Age: 9 billion years, Stars: 1 trillion Constellation: Andromeda, Apparent mass: ~1,230 billion M☉ Coordinates: RA 0h 42m 44s | Dec 41° 16.152'

It is estimated the universe is 93 billion light years across large. And that there are one septillion stars in the universe -- ( that's 1 to the 24th, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)

http://www.universetoday.com/102630/how-many-stars-are-there-in-the-universe/

It is Sunday morning. Birds on branches and rolling tires on Barnestown Road sound the space surrounding this spate of light.

Man who will be getting out of prison finished quiche and salad at Janet's table yesterday. His 20+ earth ordinary years in prison wouldn't measure that far even in our Milky Way galaxy. Nor would the man sitting one space of chair away from him who blew out torte-cake candles on his entering 70th year look back and see much behind him.

We stumble into the abyss and stumble out of the abyss -- Campbell was right. It is what we see and what we hear, what we feel and what we are capable of learning, this that we find makes up one more world, one more galaxy of perception too minuscule to be measured -- yet, ours.

Count that.

Umwelt.

It counts.

As you, count.

Milky Way Galaxy, NASA