unfinished justice, lost sanity

Thinking about 9/11.

Thinking about the US invasion into Iraq. Thinking about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Pearl, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet, et al.

It is a curious world where so much can happen that is filled with poisons.

At the root of human misery, Buddhism sees three destructive impulses: greed, anger and foolishness, which it terms the "three poisons." These are the essence of all the delusions and negative workings of life that impede the realization of our full potential for happiness and creativity. 

Of the three, foolishness is most fundamental, as it facilitates greed and anger. Foolishness here means ignorance (passive or willful) of the true nature of life. It is blindness to the reality of our interrelatedness--not merely our connectedness to and dependence on each other, but the connectedness of the unfolding of each of our lives to the unfolding of the very life of the universe; the fact that each of us is a vital component of life itself and a nexus of immense possibilities. Because it obscures life's true, enlightened nature, this ignorance is also referred to as "fundamental darkness."

(--from, Three Poisons --The Source of the Problem) 
http://www.sgi.org/buddhism/buddhist-concepts/three-poisons-the-source-of-the-problem.html 

So many dead. So many crippled. So many dispossessed. So much suffering and unfinished justice.

What has been the cost of the Iraq War? In strictly American terms, 4,486 U.S. military personnel died there (plus another 318 from Coalition allies); the dollar tab for the war is reckoned in the trillions. And in Iraq—how many people died as a result of the American-led invasion? That’s a harder question than it might seem. 

A new study with a controversial back story attempts to provide a good answer. Writing today in the journal PLOS Medicine, the University of Washington’s Amy Hagopian and 11 co-authors estimate that roughly 461,000 Iraqis died as either a direct or indirect cause of the war and subsequent military occupation. But reflecting the tortured effort both of getting good numbers from a war zone and the history of controversial past counts, by the time all their calculations had settled the researchers put their “confidence interval” for possible excess deaths between March 2003 and June 2011 at between 48,000 and 751,000.

(--from, A Better Stab at Estimating How Many Died in the Iraq War, by Michael Todd,, October 15, 2013, in Pacific Standard, The Science of Society)
 http://www.psmag.com/navigation/politics-and-law/better-stab-estimating-many-died-iraq-war-68419/  

How will we ever return to or find sanity again? 

God is: No idea; felt, in fact.

I place hands together and bow when passing cemeteries.

Time, you could say, does not have anything to do with that which is out-of-time.

The dead have just died. Always, just died. I greet them as they are transitioning through that timeless portal between now and now.

I say to them: God be with you!

I greet them in their new acclimation.

At Existentialism conversation Friday evening Willow said, "God is 'experiencing reality'."

No idea; felt, in fact.

Or, seen differently: Reality is no ideal felt in fact.

Too cold

Just too cold.

Coming back with very cold fingers

When walking mountain is too cold for nerves and bones in face.

Brook closes into itself.

January stands like yurt at turn of water -- empty and alone.

building dwelling mercy

Poets think being into existence.

Words become disclosure of existence.

Says Heidegger:

It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language's own nature. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man's subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his
nature into alienation. That we retain a concern for care in speaking is all to the good, but it is of no help to us as long as language still serves us even then only as a means of expression. Among all the appeals that we human beings, on our part, can help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first.

What, then, does Bauen, building, mean? The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in a place. The real meaning of the verb bauen, namely, to dwell, has been lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbor. The neighbor is in Old English the neahgehur; neah, near, and gebur, dweller. The Nachbar is the Nachgebur, the Nachgebauer, the near-dweller, he who dwells nearby. The verbs buri, büren, beuren, beuron, all signify dwelling, the abode, the place of dwelling. Now to be sure the old word buan not only tells us that bauen, to build, is really to dwell; it also gives us a clue as to how we have to think about the dwelling it signifies. When we speak of dwelling we usually think of an activity that man performs alongside many other activities. We work here and dwell there. We do not merely dwell-that would be virtual inactivity-we practice a profession, we do business, we travel and lodge on the way, now here, now there. Bauen originally means to dwell. Where the word bauen still speaks in its original sense it also says how far the nature of dwelling reaches. That is, bauen, buan. bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. it means to dwell. The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word barren however also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine. Such building only takes care-it tends the growth that ripens into its fruit of its own accord. Building in the sense of preserving and nurturing is not making anything. Shipbuilding and temple-building, on the other hand, do in a certain way make their own works. Here building, in contrast with cultivating, is a constructing. Both modes of building-building as cultivating, Latin colere, cultura, and building as the raising up of edifices, aedificare -are comprised within genuine building, that is, dwelling. Building as dwelling, that is, as being on the earth, however, remains for man's everyday experience that which is from the outset "habitual"-we inhabit it, as our language says so beautifully: it is the Gewohnte. For this reason it recedes behind the manifold ways in which dwelling is accomplished, the activities of cultivation and construction. These activities later claim the name of bauen, building, and with it the fact of building, exclusively for themselves. The real sense of bauen, namely dwelling, falls into oblivion.

(--In Basic Writings, Martin Heidegger, pp.348-350, from "Building Dwelling Thinking" in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans Albert Hofstader, 1971)

I heard a young woman yesterday speak of the "outlaw" point of view. How the belief that one or two or dozens of the imperfect members of the human race who are chosen to be our leaders and tell us what we can and cannot do -- how foolish we to believe they are actually for all the members of the human race who invite them into office, or even those they limit their attentions to. Governors, government, and governesses are there at the bidding of those who pay to protect private interests, property, and power. The unmonied and unpropertied are not to be trusted. Their protest and free speech is more and more seen to be dangerously unpatriotic and threat to the new narrow definition of national security -- anyone who disagrees with those who make the rules and have armed protection against those who disagree.

So much to think about.

So many poems to sit with.

So curious we are in such an atmosphere of fear, repression, and preparations provoking the populace into inauspicious unintelligent panting after the inappropriate as permanency.

Si culpare velis, culpabilis esse cavebis;
Dagma tuum sordet cum tua culpa remordet. 

(If others you wish to blame,
Take care you have no cause for shame;
Your dogmas are filthy and thin
If your own crimes gnaw you within.) 

(--p,96, from Passus 10, Piers Plowman {c.1367-1385} by William Langland, Wordsworth Classics, 1999)

As for temporary solution? Bach: Mass In B Minor, BWV 232 - Kyrie: Kyrie Eleison 1.

Mercy -- for everyone! 

Happy (for us your) birth...

... day (is celebrated), Martin!

Step, step, turn, step

At practice table last night we found a way to describe the tension satori brings between samsara and nirvana.

Nirvana fuses.

Samsara confuses.

In the first, one is in one and all alone as one.

In the other, each is in one together, bewilderingly so.

Or: I have no feet; versus: Did I just step on your foot?

When snow stopped falling...it revealed nothing in no new way

Why not poetry?

Why not zen?

        Not, adv.

In no way; to no degree. Used to express negation, denial, refusal, or prohibition: 'I will not go. You may not have any.'

-- the Free Dictionary

Poetry says nothing well.

 Zen is no way to be.

It's just a passing thing

The organism is fragile.

Pain diverts attention.

Eyes narrow and droop.

This, too, passes.

Matt calls; his father, Don, has died

Double Haiku 
(for Pat, after Don)


After the impish

twinkle in his eyes I think

I’ll remember most




The gate of his walk --

with such fond recall I find

I imitate it.

Drop ego, pick up the real. Understanding is overrated

He said Heidegger went over his head.

I said, "Good! That's where your imagination and heart are, over your head."

He looked at me, and took another piece of celery dabbing it into spinach avacado humus.

Then we read Pablo Neruda's poem:
(Two versions from the Spanish)

Parthenogenesis.

Day by day all those who used to give me advice get crazier and crazier. 

Luckily, I paid no attention  

and they took off for some other city 

where they live together 

swapping hats with each other. 

They were praiseworthy types, 

politically astute,so that all my ineptitude 

caused them great suffering: 

The got gray-haired and wrinkled, 

wouldn’t stomach their chestnuts, 

and finally an autumnal depression 

left them delirious.  

Now I don’t know which way to be- 

absent-minded or respectful; 

shall I yeild to advice 

or tell them outright they’re hysterical? 

Independence as such gets me nowhere, 

I get lost in the underbrush, 

I don’t know if I’m coming or going. 

Shall I move on or stand put, 

but tom-cats or tomatoes? 

I’ll figure out as best I can 

what I ought not to do - 

and then do it: 

that way, I can make a good case 

for the times I got lost on the way; 

if I don’t make mistakes 

who’ll have faith in my errors? 

If I live like a savant 

no one will be greatly impressed. 

Well, I’ll try to change for the better: 

greet them all circumspectly, 

watch out for appearances, 

be dedicated, enthusiastic- 

till I’m just what they ordered, 

being and un-being at will 

till I’m totally otherwise. 

Then if they let me alone, 

I’ll change my whole person, 

disagree with my skin, 

get a new mouth, 

change my shoes and my eyes- 

then when I’m different 

and nobody can recognize me 

-since anything else is unthinkable- 

I’ll go on as i was in the beginning.

(-- Poem by Pablo Neruda)  

...   ...   ...

Parthenogenesis

All those how used to give me advice are crazier every day.

Luckily I ignored them and they went on to another city

where they all live together constantly swapping sombreros.

They were worthy subjects, politically thoughful, 

and every fault I committed caused them such suffering

that they turned grey and wrinkled, gave up eating chestnuts, 

and an autumnal melancholy finally left them delirious.

Now I don't know what to be, forgetful or respectful; 

continue to give them counsel or reproach them for their madness. 

I cannot claim independence.

I am lost in so much foliage-

should I leave, or enter, 

travel or linger, 

buy cats or tomatoes?

I will try to understand what I mustn't do, then do it, 

and so be able to justify the ways which might escape me, 

for if I don't make mistakes, 

who will believe in my errors?

If I go on being wise, no one will notice me. 

But I will try to change, 

offer greetings with great care

and look to appearances with dedications and zeal, 

until I am all that they wish, 

as one might be and another might not, 

till I exist only in others. 

And then, if they leave me in peace

I am going to change completely, 

and differ with my skin; 

and when I have another mouth, 

other shoes, other eyes;

when it is all different, 

and no one recognizes me, 

since anything else is beyond me, 

I shall go on doing the same. 

--Pablo Neruda

When we will be what we see

If we were able to breathe, if able to pronounce a word, to create with the cosmos the cosmos itself -- would we not?

It is, I suspect, ours to do.

It is, I suspect, ours to be.

I ask you? No; just the asking

No wonder we don’t pause to look intently at what is revealing itself before us.

Much of our talk circled, appropriately enough, around nothing. In speaking of the Zen conception of the self, Nishitani quoted his favorite saying of Saint Paul: “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” “Who is speaking here?” is then his question -- one he has been asking himself for decades. It is evidently not the “I” or the “me”; nor does it appear to be Christ either. Who, then, is it? “Just who is this self?” 

Later in the evening, the question recurred in a different form. Always in this room, it seems, there ids a single rose in a bamboo vase that stands on a shelf above a table. A piece of tape covering a crack in the bamboo contributes somehow to the “rightness” of the ensemble. Looking over at the rose, Nishitani asked in quiet puzzlement, “Where is the flower blooming? What about the locus of the unfolding of this rose? Where does it bloom from?” He went on to muse upon the notion of nature, especially in Spinoza’s sense of natura naturans.

(--from p.xxvi, Introduction by Graham Parkes to The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Keiji Nishitani, Setsuko Aihara, SUNY series, c.1990)  

The self-causing activity of nature obviates the notion of a separate self doing the looking at some objective thing from some subjective thing.

The rose, the Christ, the self -- just who, what, or where is this . . . looking?

Glistening

Nature

Happy Birthday Martin!

Fog and

Rain all the way to Lewiston and back.

comes Monday

Let us pray --

Attend to the pleas of your people with heavenly care, 

O Lord, we pray, 

that they may see what must be done 

and gain strength to do what they have seen. 

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, 

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, 

one God, for ever and ever. 

– Amen.   

(--prayer ending Office of Readings, Monday 13Jan2014)

What they have seen.

That they may see!

Recompense

Please, pay me no mind.

What he sees breaks his heart

heartbreaking                

       (a haiku for D.) 

when heart sees itself — 

enormous chunks of ice fall 

to flowing water 

-wfh, 12jan14

life (between us)

Nigel Warburton, virtual philosopher, does the podcast Philosophy Bites with David Edmunds. He is leaving his academic position at the Open University and is interviewed by The Philosophers Magazine, The Philosophers’ Magazine on the web. An excerpt:

So, does his interest in introducing ideas to people who might not know much about philosophy have something to do with this convoluted journey? It wasn’t easy for him to make his way into philosophy, so is he trying to make it easier for others? 

“No, that’s just the nature of philosophy. It’s always difficult – though nothing like as difficult as theoretical physics. If you’re not having trouble then you probably don’t really understand what’s going on. Many people seem not to have trouble, but I know from doing these interviews that if you ask them direct questions in ordinary language some can’t answer without jargon and mystification. 

“A lot of professional philosophers lack the imagination required to think about what it’s like not to understand something. Some have got into a complacent habit of speaking to each other in a kind of technical language, which is almost at times the avoidance of doing philosophy. They’re part of a culture of people who always say the same things and make the same moves: just making finer and finer discriminations between whether they’re a particular kind of materialist or a particular kind of functionalist. People stake out little claims. When faced with the need to explain what they’re doing and why it should be of interest to anyone at all outside of that culture, many flounder. 

“Not the best ones, interestingly. The really significant philosophers are able to explain with superb clarity precisely what it is that matters about a topic. Not just for others with similar interests but for anybody who might be concerned with philosophy at all. Weaker philosophers hide behind a series of coded nods and winks to each other. This often betrays a lack of clarity of thought.”

Nigel Warburton, co-presenter of Philosophy Bites, is interviewed by TPM’s editor, James Garvey. This article appears in Issue 61 of The Philosophers’ Magazine. Posted May 28, 2013
 http://philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1159

The way, I suspect, to teach philosophy is to think along with others -- carefully, with authentic interest, open mind, a playful humor at the turns, dead ends, rest areas, and engaged interaction along the journey.

Presence is gift extended, gift received -- ultimately, gift we give ourselves. What is is always there. We, on the other hand, often don’t show up.

So, show up!

See, and listen to, whatever else is there.

Converse.

It makes for interesting life.

Life between us.

His cancer, he said, spreads

Dogen heard, “Dropping off mind and body,” and he took notice.

As we all.

Must.

Coincidentia oppositorum

When we no longer think in terms of opposition.

When meeting place is ground of intersection and coincidence.

My one companion is darkness.

Nobody else's footprint

The difficult part, they say, is to stay in your own footprint.

“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.  

They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint. For many absurd reasons, they are convinced they are obliged to become somebody else who died two hundred years ago and who lived in circumstances utterly alien to their own. 

They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems or possess somebody else's spirituality.”

 (--p.98, Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation)

If you want to find out where you've been or where you're going, pause a minute and -- look under your feet.

Exactly, see what is there.

in all creation

Ethical study belongs to all of us about all if it for all times in all places.

If Sophia is God’s world as eternally conceived in his Logos, and if divine humanity is the crown and consummation of creation, and if then this world in its every order is an aspiration to that divine world, then any ethics worthy of Christian culture will be one of whose concern is total: it must proceed from a rationale found not merely in the conscience or dignity of the autonomous subject, nor in a gross estimation of material goods and desires, nor in a purely social economy of civic duty; it will have the form of service to the entire cosmos as summed up in and brought about through human action. It is through humanity that the glory of God will be revealed in all creation, as Paul says, and this truth is the principle that governs Solovyov’s ethical philosophy. Not that -- in The Justification of the Good -- this is by any means immediately obvious.
(pp.xlii-xliii, Foreword by David Bentley Hart to The Justification of the Good, An Essay on Moral Phiosophy, by Vladimir Solovyov, c.1897 in Russia, trans. by Nathalie A. Duddington,M.A. 1918; 2005 ed.)

It might not be obvious, but it is worth the inquiry. 

here, then, we are, well

What do you believe?

(No, that's not the question.)

Where do you locate whatever belief you have?

(Yes, I'll try that question.)

I used to try to fit what I held as true into a formulation that squared with a particular system or context of recognizable sanction by an organization itself recognized as a verifiable corporate entity with provenance and resume and references eliciting nod and verification stamp of authenticating approval.

I now see less and less need for pinpoint and justification. What is true often eludes enclosure. Truth itself is more the whole of it all than a fragment of evidence proving a hypothesis.

Did I love such and such a person? Yes, I believe so.

Did I wrong that person? Yes, I admit so.

Does the wronging disprove the loving? No, they both exist. One In the other and through the other.

Until, looking from a vantage point neither inside nor outside the experience, one and the other are no longer two, separated, nor counterpoint. They fall into the whole of experience which is our common residence.

Experience is our common residence, not thought.

Thought is what the mind does with experience, real or imagined.

I no longer hold any belief.

I no longer hold anything true. Not anything. Everything falls that I try to hold.

I am, rather, held in the ambience of faith and trust that what is is what is.

I am held by the open and uncontainable truth which is the whole of everything and that which is beyond anything conceivable.

I have fallen into this place.

I am fallen into this open falling.

(Is this the description that many have attempted to fit into the metaphor of “sin" by saying, "I am a sinner!"?)

I am the experience of falling through this open falling.

Don't look for me there, there is no there there.

Rather, look at yourself. Look here and here and here.

How fares this here with us?

Well, then, here we are!

perplexing the human race

Coming to end of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a nascent compassion for my fellow beings.

Kobold 

Grimm has provided one of the earlier and more commonly accepted etymologies for kobold,[3] tracing the word’s origin through the Latin cobalus to the Greek koba'los, meaning "rogue". The change to the word-final -olt is a feature of the German language used for monsters and supernatural beings. Variants of kobold appear as early as the 13th century.[18] The words goblin and gobelin, rendered in Medieval Latin as gobelinus,[19][20] may in fact derive from the word kobold or from kofewalt.[16][21] Related terms occur in Dutch, such as kabout, kabot, and kabotermanneken.[12] Citing this evidence, British antiquarian Charles Hardwick has argued that the house kobold and similar creatures, such as the Scottish bogie, French goblin, and English Puck, all descend from the Greek kobaloi, creatures "whose sole delite consists in perplexing the human race, and evoking those harmless terrors that constantly hover round the minds of the timid."[22] In keeping with Grimm's definition, the kobaloi were spirits invoked by rogues.[23] Similarly, British writer Archibald Maclaren has suggested that kobold beliefs descend from the ancient Roman custom of worshipping lares, household gods, and penates, gods of the house and its supplies.[24].                                                         

(--from Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobold

Looking at the terrors that hover round our minds.

And those who marshal their agendas through such consternation.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets. 

(--from site, The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, By Naomi Klein) http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

“Watch this,” said Hinzelmann to Shadow.

As witnesses, I suspect, we must. 

closer to ground

We're a worried people. The excessive vitriol of fevered minds spew crazy analyses of domestic or world events with a political carving knife sharpened to blood-searing manic telling without coherent connection to measure or proportion.

The right wing is becoming a new strain of contemporary fascism.

The left wing becomes a mirror of the bitter cold winds outside thin windows.

Minds are maddened with disturbing thoughts mutating into unrecognizable opinions spoken cynically into microphones, cameras and written into pixels, typeprint, and placards like billboards announcing the end will be bloody, cruel, and perpetrated by seemingly well-meaning assassins who yesterday were your coworkers, uncles, elected officials, and financial sector advisors.

Sound like a bad movie?

It is.

It is life at the beginning of 2014.

Last night at practice we watched a segment of Tibetan teachers speaking about the mind and light. How consciousness is beginningless. How disturbing thoughts divert awareness into agitation and anger.

We're a worried people. And worried people worry others whose narrow focus is to clear the streets of worrying people so that those who own the street can continue their unworried march toward peopleless legislation, banking, solocracy, control, wealth, and elimination of worrisome inequity by removing the unequal from the equation.

In my dream through the night I was handed a math test that I did not take. I was not able to discern what the test was for. I walked out without considering or recording a single answer to unread questions.

What alerts me is the possibility that thoughts are becoming the destruction of the mind.

Mind is the whole. Thoughts are carving up the whole into slices of opinion, judgment, and ideological waste that are fed to partializing operatives intent on confusing and contorting the fragmented into pawns of political players to funnel power to manipulating ambition.

I'm going to the mattresses.

Boil up a large pot of soup.

Grind coffee beans. Fill percolator with water. Stoke stove. Await the fragrance.

Meanwhile, in our own domestic chaos, two cats methodically prowl the house through the night knocking off whatever they can from shelves, desks, and tables in hallways, bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchen.

Breathing in, I know something else will fall.

Breathing out, I know, now, that everything tumbles closer and closer to ground.

being, speaking, and thinking

Here is how Panikkar writes about being, word, and speaking:

...In this context, I would like to make the far-reaching distinction between terms as used in scientific language and words as symbols as used by authentic philosophy. It is from this point that I have worked out the quaternitas perfecta of the word, the fourfold aspect of the word: the speaker, the spoken to (the addressed), the spoken about (that of which is spoken), and the spoken with, language (by means of which is spoken); in other words, the I, the Thou, the It (meaning, idea), and the Whereby (matter). 

   (h) With that, another connection unfolds: The word reveals reality’s cosmotheandric nature. By means of the polarity between being and speaking, the word overcomes the tension between being and speaking, the word overcomes the tension between being and thinking (the tension, forming the basis of western self-understanding -- and the foundation of modern science). Being speaks. Our ultimate task is not to think being, thereby hoping to arrive at the truth; instead, it is to enable being to speak by means of an active listening and obedience on our part (obedience and listening are related in english [ob-audire] and in german: Gehorsam and hören). In place of the polarity between thinking and being emerges now the triadic relation of being, speaking, and thinking. We not only say what we think but also what we are. Being is not only thought of; it also speaks.
(p.98, in A Dwelling Place for Wisdom, by Raimon Panikkar) 

 We are invited to learn how to listen.

Two plus two

Four?

No, two plus two remains nothing other -- just two plus two -- eh, Noah? Was that it? Nothing other?

one’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one:  

one’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one: 

which halves reintegrating, shall occur 

no death and any quantity; but than 

all numerable mosts the actual more  

minds ignorant of stern miraculous 

this every truth-beware of heartless them 

(given the scalpel,they dissect a kiss; 

or,sold the reason,they undream a dream)

one is the song which fiends and angels sing: 

all murdering lies by mortals told make two. 

Let liars wilt,repaying life they’re loaned;

we(by a gift called dying born)must grow 

deep in dark least ourselves remembering 

love only rides his year. 

All lose,whole find

                         (--poem by e.e. cummings)

A last line worth being called that.

A whole poem worthy of such a last line.

Wind and fog

Rain and whitecaps in Rockport Harbor.

The oddity of 60 degrees temperature swing in two days.

In gale winds Timberwind strains to hold.

No dinghies. No skiffs. No sloops.

la atención la atención si se quiere...

Richard liked to remind us,"What you put your attention on, you become."

The three wise men or kings or visitors from the East read the stars and discerned where to travel resulting in their finding, the story goes, the baby with its mother and father in humble circumstances. Once there, they gave presents, attended to the appearance of this curious ordinariness, then departed with whatever it was they experienced, returning home, avoiding the authorities, settling, one supposes, back into their everyday routines with little further chronicling of their curiosities.

Traveller, There Is No Path                                by Antonio Machado: Everything passes on and everything remains, But our lot is to pass on, To go on making paths, Paths across the sea. I never sought glory, Nor to leave my song In the memory of man; I love those subtle worlds, Weightless and graceful, As bubbles of soap. I like to watch as they paint themselves In sunlight and scarlet, floating Beneath the blue sky, trembling Suddenly then popping… I never sought glory. Traveller, your footprints Are the path and nothing more; Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking. By walking the path is made And when you look back You'll see a road Never to be trodden again. Traveller, there is no path, Only trails across the sea… Some time past in that place Where today the forests are dressed in barbs A poet was heard to cry "Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking…" Beat by beat, verse by verse… The poet died far from home. He lies beneath the dust of a neighbouring land. As he walked away he was seen to weep. "Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking…" Beat by beat, verse by verse… When the goldfinch cannot sing, When the poet is a pilgrim, When prayer will do us no good. "Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking…" Beat by beat, verse by verse. (Translated by Asa Cusack)

At practice last night we also read from Panikkar.

Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010) wrote:

I have given myself nine rules, or sutras: 

1. Begin with myself (not trying to change others).  

2. Begin within myself (hence, without impetus from outside). 

3. Open myself to the whole of reality (not a 'specialized' spirituality). 

4. Begin where I myself am...no waiting for the ideal point of departure. For eg: once I have money, once I get married etc... 

5. Do not consider the consequences. Here one needs a pure heart: otherwise one will be afraid. No one can calculate all consequences ahead of time, not even a computer.  

6. Be in solidarity - hence not in isolation. Solitude need not mean isolation. Solidarity can mean group, family, friends, whatever. 

7. Be self-motivated - hence, without outside help, without predetermination, without a fixed goal. The true self can never be motivated by a goal! 

8. Be non-violent - not straining the will, not wanting to overcome anything. Otherwise one is merely repressing constantly. 

9. Always make a fresh start.  

(--from A Dwelling Place for Wisdom, by Raimon Panikkar p.156)

It is an epiphany of the Epiphany we long for.

A good day to watch. A good day to listen.

Twenty degrees

What once would be thought freezing is today felt as heat wave.

Funny how the body adjusts to winter!

Manifestation, Epiphany

It is said when something appears to our consciousness that it came from nowhere, and, bingo! There is is!

Not unlike the immense, intense, and intimate Cosmos -- which is the realizing presence/absence of The Whole, apparent/hidden, deeply within and completely beyond what we call Being, Existence, Becoming Itself. Similar to the Christ  -- which, it might be said, is the Cosmos manifesting its divine source of inner energy, Love Itself. Not unlike the subtle evanescence and mysterious permeation of this felt intuition, recognizing spiritual companioning, ungraspable insinuating connectivity, that we sometimes call (I don't know) Presence Itself.

Being, Existence, Becoming Iteslf.
Love Itself.
Presence Itself.

This, all this, as they say: Showing Itself.

THE MANIFESTATION  

Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming

Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,

A seed pushing itself beyond itself,

The mole making its way through darkest ground,

The worm, intrepid scholar of the soil --

Do these analgies perplex? A sky with clouds,

The motion of the moon, and waves at play,

A sea-wind pausing in a summer tree. 

What does what it should do needs nothing more.

The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.

We come to something without knowing why. 

                                                                             (--Poem by Theodore Roethke, 1904-1963)

It is the Feast of Epiphany (typically on the 6th, Little Christmas, but reformatted to fit the Sunday-Spirituality Roundup).

Roethke grasped it. His final three lines a koan of unceasing contemplation.

Of course everything, the universe, existence, being, becoming, love, presence -- are all strange to us. We long, exquisitely long, for each of them, each of these manifestations.

But so is "God" strange. Our longing, our desire to realize the incomparable gaze of kindly belonging, is the stuff of inconsolable beauty and irreparable stillness.

Today is the day to consider the untouchable desire to realize what we are, what this is, what child is this of our acquainting encounter.

And pause a while.

A little while longer.

Ah, yes, another few seconds.

To quietly gaze at the nothing we are, the everything we are, the showing of oneself to itself as itself.

Happy, (profoundly trusting), Epiphany!