comes midnight

What a lovely moon!

So; much: lighter

A man writes cancer has spread to his liver. He will cancel surgery scheduled to obviate and forestall. 

"Like anything unwanted, carrying this news feels heavy and burdensome. It feels so much lighter to accept it, turn it over, and breathe fresh air. The sea, the beauty of the land, and the love of my friends in Nova Scotia have nourished me to stand straight, look at reality face to face, and claim my health and wholeness."     (His words; 16sept13.)

Correspondences present us with choices.

To face—with open hands—armed, shielded, gas-masked riot police is the greatest form of courage. Non-violence is how you expose the violence of the system, and not seeing as “other” those charged with carrying out physical violence is how you communicate with them directly.     (-- Paul Hawken, from "Upsurge") 
http://www.tricycle.com/feature/upsurge

Dawn.

Praying itself.

As this.

Realizing itself.

Morning seminar

Coming to order.

Of course there's always a late arriver.

Pensée Universelle

I want to see

Love grow in me

Through this.

                       (merton bookshed,15sept2013, edited, nunc ipsum)

This pensée arrives in midst a universal plea as unseen mystery shining light across path before us.

The tears in things

The roots were stronger.

Anonymous Four sings Sweet Hour of Prayer as mountain brook outside yurt makes tumbling turn toward Hosmer Pond. It is that hour on that day when, bidden or unbidden, sounds of beckoning transcendence call to quiet hearts.

Skittering shadows of stretching morning sun call from over stirring hills and wooded dampness as dogs' collar tags tell approach of sweet company chiding stealth ascent past outhouse and path debris of recent storm.

AFTER THE DIAGNOSIS

No remembering now   

When the apple sapling was blown

Almost out of the ground. 

No telling how, 

With all the other trees around, 

It alone was struck. 

It must have been luck, 

He thought for years, so close 

To the house it grew. 

It must have been night. 

Change is a thing one sleeps through 

When young, and he was young. 

If there was a weakness in the earth, 

A give he went down on his knees 

To find and feel the limits of, 

There is no longer. 

If there was one random blow from above 

The way he’s come to know 

From years in this place, 

The roots were stronger. 

Whatever the case, 

He has watched this tree survive 

Wind ripping at his roof for nights 

On end, heats and blights 

That left little else alive. 

No remembering now… 

A day’s changes mean all to him 

And all days come down 

To one clear pane 

Through which he sees 

Among all the other trees 

This leaning, clenched, unyielding one 

That seems cast 

In the form of a blast 

That would have killed it, 

As if something at the heart of things, 

And with the heart of things, 

Had willed it. 

(--from every riven thing, by Christian Wiman)

What entrances about screen doors is the enchantment of what is presented with inside out outside in.

Ours has a tear.

Nothing ventured nor gained; forgives

Nothingness, Chuang Tzu said, had the night-colored pearl. Not Science, not Analysis, not Logic.

Nothingness had it.

The two cats weren't at practice in the zendo earlier. 

They're not interested in Thomas Merton's "readings" of Chuang Tzu. 

I don't know, exactly, what they're interested in.

It is Yom Kippur.

A day to take note.

The Yellow Emperor said: 

"Strange, indeed: Nothingness 

Who was not sent 

Who did no work to find it 

Had the night-colored pearl!"     

(-From, The Lost Pearl, p.74, in, The Way of Chuang Tzu, by Thomas Merton)

How find the lost in the obvious?

Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha'olam asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu l'hadlik neir shel (shabbat v'shel) you hakippurim. 

After the candles are lit, the Shehecheyanu prayer is recited.
The evening service that begins Yom Kippur is commonly known as Kol Nidre, named for the prayer that begins the service. “Kol nidre” means “all vows,” and in this prayer, we ask G-d to annul all personal vows we may make in the next year. It refers only to vows between the person making them and G-d, such as “If I pass this test, I'll pray every day for the next 6 months!”
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/holiday4.html

If I say "I'm sorry!" -- will that unlock the prison door?

The concluding service of Yom Kippur, known as Ne'ilah, is one unique to the day. It usually runs about 1 hour long. The ark (a cabinet where the scrolls of the Torah are kept) is kept open throughout this service, thus you must stand throughout the service.  

There is a tone of desperation in the prayers of this service. The service is sometimes referred to as the closing of the gates; think of it as the “last chance” to get in a good word before the holiday ends. The service ends with a very long blast of the shofar. (Ibid) 

Lock the door behind me. 

There is nothing remaining to enclose.

Conscious awareness

Wallace wishes us way more than luck.

Even now, it is heartfelt.

His words.

don't say it

Looking at news write-ups

So little to see

Turn away

Fall into silence

Rice cooks

Bu Ji : Nothing doing.

Merton is read.

Dusk is falling.

Dog chases green ball.

Cat wrestles with ball of paper.

Thursday evening conversation.   

Wu Wei : no effort

9/11

Morning comes .

And evening wanes.

We wander in new day.

We walk mountains.

Not to care is also caring

Fog sets in.

Dusk approaches slowly,

Daylight fades,

Nothing but...

 If Jesus was Christ, and Christ is God, what do we see of God?

A man. A man who found himself in the hands of unkind powerful men who tortured then murdered him.

Sound familiar?

Yeah.

To contemplate one must first be able to gaze, not to stare at something or merely see with the physical eye, but to penetrate with the heart what is ordinarily missed by the eye. The eye of the heart must be opened by grace, enlightened by knowledge and strengthened by love. For Clare the eye of the heart learns to see rightly in the mirror of the cross.
(--p.56, in Clare of Assisi, A Heart Full of Love, by Ilia Delio osf, c.2007)

That cross crosses time. It appears in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, China, America, Russia. You name it, it appears there.

What are we to think?

The cross is human suffering, especially suffering caused by other humans for reasons spurious and specious. In other words, ignorant. There's something they want. Something they believe in. Something better than what you are thinking, feeling, doing. And they know that something better.

What they don't know is nothing.

The nihility of 'creatio ex nihilo' may be spoken of as a simple relative nothingness, the existence that comes about on the ground of that nothingness can ever be truly independent. Truly free existence can only be posited on and rooted in absolute nothingness. This, it seems to me, is the kind of nothingness Eckhart has in mind when he says, "The ground of God is the ground of my soul; the ground of my soul is the ground of God."
(--p.68, in Religion and Nothingness, by Keiji Nishitani, c.1983)

 Is nothing God?

Out of nothing doesn't come something; out of nothing comes the ground of being, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

Is God nothing or nothing God?

We are a bit puzzled by the question: Why is there something rather than nothing?

John Leslie in his book Infinite Minds might have answered the question with the words from "The Sound of Music":

 Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good

(--from Something Good, in Sound of Music)

(Here's a review of Leslie's view: (http://www.academia.edu/481771/BOOK_REVIEW_John_Leslie_INFINITE_MINDS),,)

Nothing is what we have to look at, look forward to, and look back on.

If there is something it is because nothing has stepped aside, disappeared, gone missing.

Mystics and contemplatives from all times have had nothing to say listening to nothing with nothing to show for it.

Choose your life; I, mine.

God forgive us, there's nothing but...

Forgiveness! And reconciliation. With nothing better to do.

Except, maybe, to continue, to show up again.

Glancing

September.

Nosing into breeze.

There's a long drop from there to here

Drop the "t" -- you can't get here from here.

You're already here but (for thinking) you're not.

Unthink that thought.

Drop into where you are.

Here?

T-less.

25 consonants and vowels to go!

But thee and me; and I am not sure of thee

When chance for solitude comes, disappear.

Choose your own version of insanity; leave others theirs. They so want to give you theirs.

Every Time a Good Time
A hundred flowers blossom in spring, the moon shines in autumn, there is a fresh breeze in summer, and there is snow in winter. If your mind isn’t occupied with trivial matters, every time is a good time.
(--Wumen Huikai, "Zen Basics")

When a thing appears as it is, with no metaphor or simile, it appears as it is, sui generis.

As itself.

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and -- in spite of True Romance magazines -- we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely -- at least, not all the time -- but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” 

(― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967)

The abyss doesn't look back at you when you gaze into it. That's literary conceit. No, something else occurs.

You come to see no one else, nothing else, only the looking itself.

The looking itself.

As itself.

You might say:

Gone.

Grammar, (from Greek, feminine of 'grammatikos', 'of letters')

No silence is God.

No silence; is God?

No, silence is God.

Seeing things this way

What, the question asks, if this is it?

Exegetical wisdom consists in reading the signs and symbols presented by the immediate and immanent.

What if reality, call it the universe or existence, were presenting what is true and truly mystery in every phenomenon and appearing disclosure of felt, sensed, intuited, and obvious things in our experience?

Welcome the stranger!

It's not that the ugly and perverse isn't ugly and perverse. It's more that our mind/heart sees what things really are and is still willing to hold what is there with kind, thoughtful, appreciation toward the transformation needed for everything.

Doors open with a mind that is open.

Windows are seen through with a heart willing to look.

Difference is not difficulty. Difference is only difference.

Seeing things this way is a step toward sanity.

Missing practice

Where'd they go?

Sitting solo.

Cave sage.

Habits of Saturday morning.

First sunlight over Dean's off to Melvin Heights.

Down to kitchen. Grind coffee beans for after morning practice.

Rokpa, our practice Jikido, watches for next meditation practitioner to show themselves coming through middle room.

Suddenly, light!

What appears will guide us to zendo, cushion, incense, bell, and silence.

Uh oh  --  our idiorhymic little one comes to greet and distract Border Collie.

Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva has begun in their greeting a joyful chant.

It is time to process over boardwalk to cabin.

Whence? Hence; comes morning!

First sun leaps from wood stove chimney.

Lighting us on our way.

Wage snoozing; eschew losing what is valuable!

Please advise Syria and other parties wondering if it is possible, this dog and cat are navigating a negotiable peace.

Looking for a solution entails waiting for your primary love to return home. The dogs of before (not the dogs of war) are looking for what will arrive after. It is the 'looking for' that is pivotal.

It's not difficult to wage war. Determining what you really love is the difficulty. So many will try to divert, demonize, or distract you.

Sometimes a good snooze with help sort things out. 

Assuage war!

Engage peace!

You are under beauty! Hands up!

Thursday morning rain. As Lincolnville hermit travels to her vet's crematory with departed dog accompanied by distaff meetingbrook monastic.

On Silence 

Those who are fond of retreats—writers, ecstatics, parents with young children—often comment on the silence such time away allows. Silence becomes something present, almost palpable. The task shifts from keeping the world at a safe decible distance to letting more of the world in. Thomas Aquinas said that beauty arrests motion. He meant, I think, that in the presence of something gorgeous or sublime, we stop our nervous natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues. Whatever that fretful hunger is, it seems momentarily filled in the presence of beauty. To Aquinas’s wisdom I’d add that silence arrests flight, that in its refuge, the need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes. We let the world creep closer, we drop to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground. 

(—From Stirring the Mud by Barbara Hurd.)

Beauty arrests motion, indeed!

Morning 4 Sept

After hard rain, brook runs back to school.

Sun wishes well waning days of summer.

Green warmth dances on stretching leaf watching mountain runoff pass below.

Arresting silence, releasing joy, openly gazing.

How odd are we?

When someone fancies principle and law over experience and felt connection, that person is a believer who does not have faith.

Better to have the orientation and horizon faith opens than to have the objects and certitudes belief shuts in.

Jesus, that annoying Jewish peasant, trusted the experience and reality of individuals and avoided the fixed rituals and moralistic judgments of institutions.

If someone listens to you, feels sympathetic sorrow or joy with you, and devotes their attention to being of service to those needing service -- trust that person. Avoid those who care what others think, what others feel, what others might do -- all that to the detriment of the felt, present, and real experience of the one before them.

So odd, we are.

An existential interest

Existence / Exegesis : Education

...

Entrance, Encounter, Engagement, Experience, Embodiment, 

Experiment, Emerge, Evolve, Extrapolate, Exeunt.

Ora et Labora

September's Labor Day.

Cars point south and west heading out of Maine.

Rain thumps to earth understands there's nowhere to go.

And goes.

what is itself; transforming

Let's not quibble. Nor miss the point. All learning is about awareness, consciousness, self-knowledge.

The crisis is a crisis in consciousness, a crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient traditions. 

And considering what the world is now with all their misery conflict, destructive brutality, aggression, and so on, man is still as he was: is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive, and he has built a society along these lines. 

...

“You know, if we understand one question rightly, all questions are answered. But we don't know how to ask the right question. To ask the right question demands a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity. Here is a question, a fundamental question: is life a torture? It is, as it is; and man has lived in this torture centuries upon centuries, from ancient history to the present day, in agony, in despair, in sorrow; and he doesn't find a way out of it. Therefore he invents gods, churches, all the rituals, and all that nonsense, or he escapes in different ways. What we are trying to do, during all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are, nor revolt against them. Revolt doesn't answer a thing. You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything. And to understand is to transform what is. 

I think that will be enough, won't it?” 

(--Jiddu Krishnamurti, cf. The Real Revolution, J. Krishnamurti Online) http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-video/the-real-revolution--1.php

 What is what is?

The profound What Is might be different that the quotidian what is.

We are called to relationally transmute  what is so that the profound ground reality -- probably called Being/Consciousness/Joyful Engagement -- might become itself again and again in a worrisome world constantly enticing us to mimic something else.

We are nothing else.

We are what is itself.

A hurry through

An Irish poet dies of a Friday at end of August through which, poet and month, "known and strange things pass."

Perhaps it is gift of time grown hazy, space full of mute friends, that stills and changes perspective into shutterblink nostalgia.

Postscript 

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(Poem by Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013, from THE SPIRIT LEVEL (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)

So it is given us to dwell "neither here nor there" but in curious shade of movement flickering rainy morning cedar tree holding silver ladder dripping now one drop from patient rung aside the house.

There's coffee to be made.

Maybe later tea.

Quaff.

Sole ascent.

No . . . hurry.

continuation day

The lad in Vermont celebrates his birthday.

A rose to his mother.

In words.

mind your life

People cry at loss of family member. Or friend. There's no containing emotion when it gets caught in thicket of memory.

Bennacht / Blessing   

On the day when 

the weight deadens

on your shoulders 

and you stumble, 

may the clay dance 

to balance you. 

And when your eyes 

freeze behind 

the grey window 

and the ghost of loss 

gets in to you, 

may a flock of colours, 

indigo, red, green, 

and azure blue 

come to awaken in you 

a meadow of delight.   

When the canvas frays 
in the currach of thought 
and a stain of ocean 
blackens beneath you, 
may there come across the waters 
a path of yellow moonlight 
to bring you safely home.   

May the nourishment of the earth be yours, 
may the clarity of light be yours, 
may the fluency of the ocean be yours, 
may the protection of the ancestors be yours. 
And so may a slow 
wind work these words 
of love around you, 
an invisible cloak 
to mind your life.   

 (Poem by John O'Donohue)

To "mind a life" is to bring awareness to senses. With death the senses come up empty. Not like coffee sipped at edge of cup, or coconut vanilla ice cream on lips.

Death takes a different flavor. Call it dry stillness.

Like zazen.

A stark dry stillness where everything is allowed to be what it is.

Sometimes it is called kindness. Othertimes is is called death. At times it is called just sitting, shikantaza.

In  a circle of recollection, in meditation hall or common room of home for the aged, it is the practice of kindness and death that we find ourselves encircling.

Mind your life, Elizabeth!

Mind ours, the rest of us!

the mystery we share; with one another

Canada Geese go by at 6:23am. Must've had a slow start. Someone forgot their lunch.

The thing about repeatable regularity is adjustments have to be made. Like rebirth or reincarnation. Things turn up with small differences. As in dreams. Such as the one I wake from this morning. Sitting on hillside. Chairs, actually, not rock and soil, as large group of people, adults and children, climb up behind and off to side. I am missing someone. I realize this strongly. I am, as usual, out of place.

Summer Night 

                         by Connie Wanek  

The street lamp looks down; 

it has dropped something

and spends the whole night 

searching around its feet. 

The rumble of a jet, and the fast road 

blocks away, roaring like a cataract. 

The scent of mown grass, 

and of the body that mowed it. 

The sidewalk, made of warm squares 

heaved by maple roots, 

covered with hieroglyphs in chalk. 

A maple sapling, its trunk 

wrapped to the knee 

like the legs of a racehorse,  

galloping straight up. 

At dawn the prodigal sun returns 

accompanied by equatorial birds 

and a floral entourage. 

What good has it done us to labor so 

when all are rewarded? 

Let the spade fall, then, 

and join the feast. 

(--poem, "Summer Night" by Connie Wanek, from Hartley Field. © Holy Cow! Press, 2002.)

I imagine Elizabeth and the 151,650 (approx) people who die each day have that experience. Pleasant but fluid, quite reasonably there but uncertain where, recognizing faces but unsure of context, altogether irrepeatable yet still able to manage the encounter.

We live this way this side of death. Everything seemingly repetitive yet rifled with unpredictability.

Every time I meet someone that is how it feels: familiar yet lacking a pattern of equilibrium. We are always moving -- mentally, physically, spiritually. We are not who we were an hour ago. And in the next hour ... who knows who or what we will be.

Unnerving? Or comforting?

“...if I do not take my intellectual vocation seriously, putting it before everything else even at the risk of appearing inhuman, then I am also incapable of helping people in more concrete and proximate ways. Conversely, if I am not alert and ready to save people from a conflagration, that is to say, if I do not take my spiritual calling in all earnestness, sacrificing to it all else, even my own life, then I shall be unable to help in rescuing the manuscript. If I do not involve myself in the concrete issues of my time, and if I do not open my house to all the winds of the world, then anything I produce from an ivory tower will be barren and cursed. Yet if I do not shut doors and windows in order to concentrate on this work, then I will not be able to offer anything of value to my neighbors.”                ― Raimon Panikkar, The Vedic Experience: Mantrama~njari: An Anthology of the Vedas for Modern Man and Contemporary Celebration

Open the door. Let this and that enter or leave.

What any of us are doing here is an experiment.

It doesn't matter what we think is occurring or taking place -- what matters is that what is taking place or occurring is doing so with a mind that is open and a heart that is willing.

An open mind and a willing heart might be all that we can present in this nearly absurd existence we have with one another.

But I suspect it is not merely good enough and sufficient, but sacred and holy, the beginning and the end of the mystery we share named presence, awareness, this moment.

was, or will there be, resurrection?

As a young white seminary student in 1963 it was a remarkable sight from the bucolic grounds of Callicoon NY to see what was taking place in Washington DC.

That civil courage made public needs resurrection now that forces conspire to block voting, felonize whole generations of people of color, hold hostage people needing health and financial stability, slyly mock the president of the nation for his race, and rig the odds against women who are seen by them as fertility robots delivering the unintended to term.

Protests are too easily seen these days as threats to the security of the nation, criminal conspiracy, or cause for more intense surveillance.

We desperately need a new civil courage fortified by compassion and justice, a courage rooted in an interreligious wholeheartedness that recognizes every human being and all sentient beings as family.

May it be so! Freely, and lovingly, so!

(-- Commenting on The Ideas Behind the March, By DAVID BROOKS, Published: August 26, 2013,http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/opinion/brooks-the-ideas-behind-the-march.html?comments&_r=0

Room 118 is now, empty

As of 8:15pm last evening, Elizabeth follows her breath invisibly elsewhere.

Good . . . For you, friend!

Room 118

Elizabeth breathes her last dozens of breath. Millie plays harp. Jane sits by her side.

This is what end of life sounds like.

This is what we give ourselves to.