Let no one call war, or killing, or greedy injustice the 'human condition' or any other dismissive false explanation

"Amongst the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. 

"Awareness of the divine begins with wonder. It is a result of what man does with his higher incomprehension. The greatest hindrance to such awareness is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental cliches. Wonder, or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite to that which is." 

-Abraham Joshua Heschel (quoted in Louie, Louie, 11june2014) http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/2014/06/radical-amazement.html

Sorrow has one more spelling

INTERNATIONAL

Names of the Dead

The Department of Defense has identified 2,311 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations. It confirmed the death of the following American recently:

WALKER, Matthew H., 20, Pfc., Army; Hillsboro, Mo.; 101st Airborne Division.

(New York Times, 11june2014)

Din

Another day, another school shooting. Or Las Vegas shooting. Or Afghanistan ‘friendly fire’ killings.

It is quite a din.

In Isaiah 45:7 the Lord declares: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil". Kabbalists have interpreted this to mean that light and peace were already part of the divine, but that darkness and evil were not, and that the fundamental creative act was a withdrawal of God to create the possibility of distinction, of separation, and definition. This idea is paralleled in Genesis 1, where God manifests Light, and then separates Light from Darkness. 

This primary duality has a technical definition in Kabbalah. Light is the power of life, giving, mercy, loving-kindness, and water, and is called Chesed. Dark is the power of death, taking, separation, distinction and constraint, boundaries and fire, and is called Din. 

The diagram above attempts to condense several key ideas in Kabbalah. Light is separated from darkness, creating a space where the power ofDin predominates. Light (divine creative energy) enters this space, and forms ten progressively attenuated "layers" (i.e. sefirot), which shield the primordial intensity of the light. No part of the Light has autonomous existence. The structure of layers is created through the interaction of Light with the power of Din, so that reality emerges from the interweaving. 

The Tree of Life embodies these ideas in the form of the interaction of the Pillars of Mercy and Severity.
(--from, The Tree of Life, in Hermetic Kabbalah), http://www.digital-brilliance.com/themes/tol.php

We have become separated from the equanimity of wholeness included in choosing the right thing to do the right person in the right situation.

 What emerges is our doing.

Doing

what is

right.

when thinking goes, we wonder

how

did

everything
                   get
                           so


small?

Post-Pentecost prelude

God

Is 

Becoming

Itself

pentecost; trois mots

create;

seeing

itself

Pentecost; quatro palabras

Deep seeing

Becoming speech

Pentecost; simplex obligatio

After 50 days mulling unknown in death of known, a thought:

what if this spirit of mulling IS what becomes of God, 

seeing deep 

holding all?

*(simplex obligatio:  L; an unconditional bond — compare 1simple 7c, cf Merriam-Webster)

There

is nothing

between you

and God

so many years late

Allen Iverson today.

Not seeing it before.

His cross over.

When in doubt, sit

Still

Doing nothing.

precipitation

birds sing mourning

trees prone across ground

wet faces

                   (--wfh, nunc ipsum)

fallen trees; fruitless commerce

Snow Bowl Recreation Area fells large trees. Many, many, huge grandmother trees. Saskia grieves.

“The trees block the snow from falling on the ski run,” the man at the place says.

She looks at him. Twenty years of walking in the snow under the trees perplexes her.

I’d like to think he is really kidding, goofing her, toying with her, trying to be funny.

But he’s a man with salary and a job to do.

Our dogs mark their territory.

He marks his.

letting fall what is seeking ground

Drip...drip...drip...

Just as being truly compassionate doesn’t mean always being sweet and nice (sometimes it means being cold, harsh), being truly honest doesn’t mean speaking your thoughts and feelings as they arise. Other awarenesses and intention must be at work—and a recognition that the truth is not solid.   (—Susan Piver Browne, “Right Speech")

Leaky faucet --

truth

drops

over

everything.

“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” (-- Dalai Lama XIV)

In it, the room, a hospital bed, with green striped sheet, a lanky teenager, periodic sound of pump sending pain medication to do its work, goldfish circumundulates round bowl, mother holding water cup, spoon with mashed chicken potato bean under his unseeing eyes recently dimmed by concealing circumambulating cancer its own blind pathway through mysterious brain where what we know we don’t know all at same time.

It is monday afternoon. I sit in chair by window near lake only recently released from long winter’s icy hold.

Some call it hospice.

Unscripted presence.

LIVING ROOM 

I’ve heard him coughing hard since four. 

Sometime later he’s dragged his chair 

across the floor to sit and watch 

the sunrise, a half-filled cup of pitch- 

thick coffee steadied on his thigh. 

He doesn’t say the light is gathering 

in the eyes of children not yet born, 

that dawn’s the time to call the Lord, 

before the whole world wants to. I’ve heard 

both before. In the space he makes 

for me against his chest I drift away 

for what seems like years to me. I wake 

into the life another day brings 

and the heartbeat in my ears is deafening. 

(Poem by Christian Wiman)

Screen door returns from transplant operation at route 90 surgical where white parrot outside cage gave perspective to huge block and tackle its three wheels setting above sturdy hook like old-timer in country store waiting to be asked the work he’s done.

All work is work until it ends.

Architecture and therapeutic massage give way to tender turning of offspring towards less discomfort in quiet afternoon room.

In that one act all thought abandons its history and arrives in love for son whose diploma and yearbook, cap and tassel rest like accomplishments without comment on table at edge of mantel where Dalai Lama’s words carry signature smile to smoothing wrinkles of rearranged bedding as time goes by.

We don't have a schedule, said mother to son as hospice visitor listened

Morning with inmates at prison discussing Adam’s Kaballah difficulty solving koan “MU” by choosing handy nearest separate Shekinah instead of the whole contemplation of all emanations of Divine Psyche mulled in Karen Armstrong’s chapter 6 of The Bible, A Biography chapter on Lectio Divina.

Afternoon with dying high school graduating lad in and out of sleep.

Thinking of young woman after spine fusion in Maryland.

Spy series this evening after rice and vegetables with tamari sauce.

A single candle burns in dark chapel/zendo for all in throes of living-through faith.

Living-through.

Is faith.

Enough...

without what? where?

 This is beginning to sound true.

Wanting nothing with all your heart, stop the stream
When the world dissolves everything becomes clear.
Go beyond this way or that way,
To the farthest shore where the world dissolves,
And everything becomes clear.
Beyond this shore and the farthest shore,
Beyond the beyond,
Where there is no beginning, no end,
Without fear, go.  

(-- Buddha, from the Dhammapada)

And that is good enough for me for now.

comes june haiku

no, you, may
not

where’d he go?

nowhere --

(between you and me)

Three haiku; ok -- four

1.

New fountain pen --

What resides within

Waiting wording?

2.

Charissa will sleep

In "why not now?"

Will awaken creative newness

3.

I see prayer

Differently -- on earth

As-it-is          in heaven

4.

Mary and Elizabeth,

Two friends, discover

Where heaven is -- within

So much Mu

Doris spends her last day volunteering at Maine State Prison. She is moving to another state.This 85 yr old bodhisattva brings and reads Cheslaw Milosz as her parting gift.

On Prayer 

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not. 

All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge 

And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,  

Above landscapes the color of ripe gold 

Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun. 

That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal 

Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is' 

Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned. 

Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,  

Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh 

And knows that if there is no other shore 

We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.  

(Poem by Czeslaw Milosz)

Doris...thank you.

So.

Mu...

ch.

Speaking of love without subject verb object

Wana Giwu Love

Means:

We are not alone, God is with us, Let our verition emerge!

What happens when researching a Gebserian word, "verition"

Lengthy excerpt from blog entitled footnotes2plato follows:

THE ANGEL OF DEATH AND THE COMING OF CHRIST

The debilitating anxiety of the mental-rational ego in the face of death prevents it from becoming aware of the ever-presence of origin, effective in both the life- and death-poles of the soul. Catherine Keller, another contemporary Whiteheadian, evinces the psychic demand of the integral structure of consciousness by comparing the finite ego’s relationship to the universe with the book of Job. Job, the archetypal human of the post-fall phase of creation, is called by YHWH to intensify the symbolic “horizon of what our little body-brains can know”:

“The limits of our knowing, like the limits of our lives, trap us within an often tragic finality. Yet here shadows of ignorance begin to suggest the bottomless mystery not only of death but of life.”51

Keller attempts to draw our attention both to the mortal limits of rational knowledge and the immortal reaches of aperspectival faith. She suggests that YHWH “is challenging Job’s readiness to stir the destructive forces of chaos”52 in service of the ongoing transformation from a suffering organism into a living symbol of origin, from flesh into Word. Job’s is the story of the initial emergence of the unconscious spirit buried in the primal depths of the universe into concrete and personal presence.

Indeed, says Keller,

“Job already whirls toward an ecological theology of the Whiteheadian sort, in which human becoming looks cramped and cancerous–unless we collude more wisely with the elements, the plants, the beasts and each other.”

In learning to “become-with” the threads of life the bind the world into a whole, Job redeems his fallen state.

“Where were you,” asks YHWH of Job,

“before I laid the foundation of the world…when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? [Did you] enclose the sea with doors when, bursting forth, water went out from the womb; When I made a cloud its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and placed boundaries on it and set a bolt and doors, and I said, ‘Thus far you shall come, but no further; and here shall your proud waves stop.’?”53

Gebser points to the symbol of Christ as the first answer to YWHW’s call, representing immunity to resubmergence in the tumultous and anxiety-ridden animality of the depths of thesoul.54 In Christ, the Creator becomes conscious of the life of its own creation, the poet aware of his craft. YHWH enters into space and time, is crucified as Jesus, and reborn as the living symbol and original organism of creation.

Jesus said: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.”55

Gebser marks water as the symbol of the life-pole of the soul, while the “siren-like angels” of Rilke’s poetry are its death-pole.56 Christ integrates the creativity of the former with the “perpetual plenitude” of the later, allowing the poet to both drink the wisdom of the past and “ware” the wisdom of the present.57 Rilke writes of Christ, who for the ego appears indistinguishable from the siren-like angel “deep inside the doors of the dead,” that “he obeys, even as he oversteps the bounds” of space and time.58

I quote Rilke’s poem Sonnets to Orpheus at length, for these words mark a crucial event in the dateless history of spirit’s creativity:

“To praise, that’s it! Called to praise, he came like ore out of the silence of stone. Oh, his heart’s a perishable press of a wine that’s eternal for men…Only one who’s also raised the lyre among shades may return unending praise with warning…Look at the sky…Even the linking of stars is a lie. But for a while now let’s be happy to believe the symbol. That’s enough…Hail to the spirit who can link us: because we live in symbols, really. And with tiny steps the clocks walk beside our primal day…Dare to say what you call apple. This sweetness that condenses first so in the taste that’s so tenderly intense it may become awake, transparent, double meaning, clear, bright, earthly, ours–O knowledge, feeling, joy–immense!…Deep down, the oldest tangled root of all that’s grown, the secret source they’ve never seen…Branch pushing branch, not one of them free…One! oh, climb higher…higher…Yet they still break. But this top one finally bends into a lyre…Do you hear the New, Master, droning and throbbing? Its prophesying promoters are advancing. No hearing’s truly keen in all this noise; still, now each machine part wills its praise. See, the Machine: how it spins and wreaks revenge, deforms and demeans us. Since its power comes from us, let it do its work and serve, serene…Even if the world changes as fast as the shapes of clouds, all perfected things at last fall back to the very old. Over what’s passing and changing, freer and wider, your overture is lasting, god with the lyre. Pain’s beyond our grasp, love hasn’t been learned, and whatever eliminates us in death is still secret. Only the Song above the land blesses and celebrates…But you O divine one, resounder to the end, when the swarm of unrequited maenads fell upon you, o beautiful one, you over sung their cries with order, your edifying song rose from the destroyers. No one was present who could crush your head and lyre, no matter how they struggled and wrested. And all the sharp stones they threw at your heart, on touching you, became tender and gifted with hearing. Finally they tore you, impelled by vengeance, while your sound still lingered in rock and lions, in trees and birds. You still sing there now. O you lost god, you endless trace! Only because in the end hate divided you are we now nature’s mouth and listeners…Breath, you invisible poem! Steady sheer exchange between the cosmos and our being. Counterpoise in which I rhythmically become.”59

CONCLUSION

While mental philosophy demands explanation (literally, spatialization, or laying out on a plain so as to expose), poetic statement integrates the dimensionality of space and time by making the whole transparently present. Poetry awakens us to origin without the need of argumentation or systematic conception. It “[steadies the] sheer exchange between the cosmos and our being,” as Rilke says. In such verse, the ego-fixed soul find’s its way through the mystery of death and is born again into the eternal life, now not of the waters, but of the spirit. Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” 60

(--from,  The Spirit of Integral Poetry: “Waring” the Symbolism of Organism, by Matthew David Segall, posted Dec.13, 2011, http://footnotes2plato.com/2011/12/

I was all right for a while...I could smile...

At end of film there is a hand. It reaches and grasps another hand. Fade to credits. Is he saved? Or is it a dream, the last hope of imagination?

Henri Nouwen is spoken about in a sermon preached by a preacher in Arkansas in 2008. 

http://www.stpaulsfay.org/id300.html

One day while he was sitting with Rodleigh, the leader of the troupe, Henri fell into a discussion with him about flying. The acrobat told Henri this: "As a flyer, I must have complete trust in my catcher. The public might think that I am the great star of the trapeze, but the real star is Joe, my catcher. He has to be there for me with split-second precision and grab me out of the air as I come to him in the long jump." 

Henri asked him to explain how it works. "The secret," Rodleigh said, "is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything. When I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me and pull me safely over the apron behind the catchbar." 

"You do nothing!" Henri said, surprised. "Nothing," Rodleigh repeated. "The worst thing the flyer can do it to try to catch the catcher. I am not supposed to catch Joe. It's Joe's task to catch me. If I grabbed Joe's wrists, I might break them, or he might break mine, and that would be the end for both of us. A flyer must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with outstretched arms, that his catcher will be there for him." (Writings Selected, p. 55; originally from Our Greatest Gift, p. 66)      

Elsewhere there’s a photo of a man sitting zazen on a flat stone surrounded by water. The caption reads: “Don’t worry, nothing is under control.”

Don’t bother catching me, cosmos, I am falling through you with no end, no bottom, no hand, no hope of anything other than falling through.

The hand is falling with me. The anchor line is not tied as it slips through the hawsehole. Turtles all the way down.

Doing nothing!

Nothing at all.

Enjoy the ride.

tohu bohu: of, course

Is nothing sacred? Because if there is nothing, what does that make everything?  Is everything merely what we think it to be? What our hands form it into? What our imagination dances with? A disheveled mind uncertain what is underfoot? Whether what is underfoot is earth, emptiness, or elohim*? (* Elohim (אֱלֹהִים) is a grammatically singular or plural noun for “god” or “gods" in bothmodern and ancient Hebrew language.) (wikipedia) 

Tidy this thought up.

Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhak, known as RaSHI (1040-1105) . . . noticed, for example, that bereshit, the first word of the first chapter of Genesis, could mean ‘In the beginning of’, so the sentence should read: ‘In the beginning of God’s creation of heaven and earth, the earth was a formless void (tohu bohu).’ This implied that the raw materials of the earth were already in existence when God started his creative work, and that he simply brought order to tohu bohu.(p.133, in The Bible, A Biography, by Karen Armstrong)

I always found it interesting that the bible begins with phonic bear-shit (i.e. bereshit).

Being a slave to our concerns is like being in debt to them. When we're in debt, we have no real freedom in our hearts. The more we pay off our debts, the more lighthearted we'll feel. In the same way, if we can let go of our various worries and cares, peace will arise in our hearts. (—Ajaan Lee, “Sowing the Seeds of Freedom”)

Squirrels consider the new placement of bird feeder. Buddhist from half mile toward town walks up dooryard rutted drive to meditation cabin. Birds flutter past window through damp air.

I am as I tell myself I am. Yesterday’s reheated coffee and Thomas’ toasted muffin in upstairs retiro remove, morning cars at end of barnestown hill level off toward hosmer pond.

I tell myself I have no idea whether I am mournful sad or marvelously empty. All feels still within. For these days dress uniform is solitude and seclusion. The recluse is in the house.

Conversation            

           By AI             

                    for Robert Lowell 

We smile at each other 

and I lean back against the wicker couch.   

How does it feel to be dead? I say. 

You touch my knees with your blue fingers.   

And when you open your mouth, 

a ball of yellow light falls to the floor   

and burns a hole through it. 

Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.   

Did you ever, you start, 

wear a certain kind of silk dress 

and just by accident, 

so inconsequential you barely notice it,   

your fingers graze that dress 

and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,   

you see it too 

and you realize how that image 

is simply the extension of another image,   

that your own life 

is a chain of words 

that one day will snap. 

Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,   

and beginning to rise heavenward 

in their confirmation dresses, 

like white helium balloons, 

the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning, 

and above all that, 

that’s where I’m floating,   

and that’s what it’s like 

only ten times clearer, 

ten times more horrible.   

Could anyone alive survive it?  

(Poem by Ai, “Conversation” from Vice: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1999)

Barbara’s ashes will be spread from the Angelique out in Penobscot Bay this morning. Pirate personnas will playact obsequy of obfuscating obviousness into obscurity. She remains the hoofer upon boards of deep disappearance.

panta rhei wondering about screens

“… I think it’s what Merton is saying about prayer, - whatever it is, anything in it that is an impurity, that is anything but the act itself, which is practically unnamable. And if it is what it should be, then the poetry is prayer, the acrobatic act is prayer. 

“Pure act, I think it’s a metaphysical concept starting with Aristotle and flowering in St. Thomas that God is pure act and that there is no POTENTIA in Him. But that almost everything else in the universe is IN POTENTIA, it’s on its way to being pure act, on its way to unity with God. But only God is pure act. And that made me think about a lot of things. One of them is that business of the purity of an acrobatic performance, of any performance, at the point where it becomes really pure, is at its closest to the divine and closest to that unity.” 

“Throwing everything away except the act itself, and I think at that point it also joins with the ideas of Zen, that everything is right here in this moment, and all those same things are being thrown away in what they describe as the Zen act. So if you were living in that kind of purity or call it action, it would be close to the kingdom of heaven.          (p. 437-438)

  (--from “When Prophecy Had A Voice”, interview between Robert Lax and Arthur Biddle; in beth cioffoletti’s blog “ louie, louie”)   

               http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/2014/05/spontaneity.html?  

               utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LouieLouie+%28louie%2C+louie%29, 

Skidder on mountain begins in earnest dismantling of towline stanchions and, (unfortunately), trees  in the way of recreational ambition.

Formless void -- the beginning of, the commencement of, what is of, this moment of -- no birth/no death.

Of.

Exactly.

As you.

See.

jamais plus la guerre

We honor, recall, and pray for

all dead and deadened

by war.

meetingbrook     stand and gassho*         keep mouth shut      war dead silence 5/26/14, 6:09

*Definition: Gassho is Japanese for “palms of the hands placed together.” The gesture is made as a greeting, in gratitude, or to make a request.In the most common form of gassho used in Japanese Zen, hands are pressed together, palm to palm in front of one's face. Fingers are straight. There should be about a fist's distance between one's nose and one's hands. Fingertips should be the same distance from the floor as one's nose. Elbows are held slightly away from the body.Holding the hands in front of the face signifies nonduality. It signifies that the giver and receiver of the bow are not two. Gassho often accompanies a bow. To bow, bend only at the waist, keeping the back straight. 
http://buddhism.about.com/od/buddhismglossaryg/g/Gasshodef.htm

In

"On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you." (--john 14:20, sixth sunday of easter)

In

In

In

hospitable to nothing.

There are times when everything goes flat. 

Nothing seems to reflect meaning or consequence.

Today that time visits.

Is welcomed. As it devastates.

the illusion of passing time

“What is the truth of all religions?” asked inmate at morning prison conversation.

"Respectful audience,” the woman said at evening hermitage conversation.

Suffering is moving through life this moment

We take Thursday Evening Conversation to Augusta.

With chicken soup.

And Bart Ehrman.

After walking breakwater in Rockland

Maybe it is a dream.

Just an experience of mind.

A passing phantasm.

Mere allusion.

This life.

Wu Wei

Twilight birds 

before dawn 

monastery

made of coming light

morning sound

Merely

Your color

This May afternoon

what shall I call you?

If Silence knew

its first name

It would be called 

at last "Now"

letters, we have letters

Grades submitted.

I wonder if the Almighty anguishes similarly.

Half our sand

In zendo 

hourglass

silence --

nothing moves

What, in the name of what is holy, is truth?

The war raging in America is between those who know what is certain and those who don't know what might be.

Both truth and lie associate with unpleasant companions.

But it is the lie that attracts most attention. Truth stays in the shadows.

If the mind congeals in one place and remains with one thing, it is like frozen water and is unable to be used freely: ice that can wash neither hands nor feet. When the mind is melted and is used like water, extending throughout the body, it can be sent wherever one wants to send it. This is the Right Mind.  

(—Takuan Soho, “The Right Mind and the Confused Mind)

Racism, sexism, elitism -- these lies are belief systems too powerful to overturn.

Watching the 2013 "Let the Fire Burn" on Independent Lens about Philadelphia 1985 confrontation with MOVE. Sorrowful. And discouraging.

Those that pray and meditate are residents of the unknown and uncertain.

Religions cannot abide those that pray and meditate.

They are dangerous.

The see what is wrong.

They see the lie of the war.

They long for truth to be felt and followed.

In the name of what is holy.

Had I known this sooner...

The future is god.

Who believes in god?

The earth is Christ.

It suffers for us; it suffers us.

God is the meaning of the future.

May

Ticks.

Ugh!

What is the sound of wholeness moving through reality?

At practice, we sit for 30 minutes, then read from What’s Next After Now, Post-Spirituality and the Creative Life, by Steven Harrison. The chapter “Surrender to What?”

This is the nature of dialog. It takes place when we’re talking with each other from a shared, open space. The language that comes out is infused with that totality. Dialog is not a debate. It’s not a philosophical discussion. And so it goes directly into our lives. Dialog means relationship, contact, and community. It means deep feeling with no escape. If dialog is anything, it is the expression of wholeness moving through reality, each of us engaged with the other.
The brilliance of wholeness is that it does innately express itself; it even expresses the inability to express. The expression may be silence. It may even be, on rare occasion, philosophical discussion. (pp.34-35)

He’s writing about quantum reality, life itself, infinite possibilities, unmanageable appearance.

Like being told that a young man with brain cancer, grandson of a practitioner friend, has little time left.

We leave a vigil candle lighted in the chapel/zendo.

In prison this morning, approaching Bible Literature as two questions:

• Have I got your attention yet?
• Are you listening?

Wholeness moving through reality.

The sound of it!

monday yurt spring

A hermitage

a place where silence and solitude

reside, at home, dwelling.

where things go when they fall

Sitting with Quakers

         Earlier

                 Spring finally

                          Life seeps out

                                      Birdsong

thirty years ago in a small movie theatre on Exchange Street Portland Maine

A woman I’d not met in a blue suit asked if I’d be watching the final two installments of the five night Berlin Alexanderplatz.

I said yes.

“Would you tell me about them when I get back from a business trip?”

I said yes.

I did. And did.

Thirty years ago today.

tell your friend if he’s died that he’s died

Shippee dies.

You’ve died.

“Really?” I hear him say.

Yeah, David, really.

“Perfect,” he says.

Eyebrows raised, he moves on.

Ha...fooled again

There is nothing outside.

Because.

There is no outside.

leaving room

Room empties. Semester final class at university; reams of papers to sort through. Close light.

I thought I’d die before completion of course.

For the Anniversary of My Death  

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day   

When the last fires will wave to me 

And the silence will set out 

Tireless traveler 

Like the beam of a lightless star  

Then I will no longer 

Find myself in life as in a strange garment 

Surprised at the earth 

And the love of one woman 

And the shamelessness of men 

As today writing after three days of rain 

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease 

And bowing not knowing to what 

--Poem by W. S. Merwin, “For the Anniversary of My Death” from The Second Four Books of Poems (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993).

They leave one by one turning in self-assessment. Their presentations symbolize in obvious narrative sensitivity to one another’s voice. They are ethically attuned. Kant and Bentham are left to their deliberations; these students (as Nick said) have embodied the teaching therefore they’ve learned nothing. 

Heads up: it’s not the head that learns.

I arrive home with semi-annual vow: that’s it, no more teaching for me!

Quickly, I remind myself, read their papers, my anniversary approaches.

The surprising earth, a reverent bow, leaving room.

To listen is to be humbled

Batteries are recharged.

On wall, in socket, no light.

Maybe humanity will not destroy the earth and itself.

Especially not, upon reflection, Itself.

Long breath, short breath; feeling as unforgetting

Face silence with another silence.

Reflecting over and over mirror images of wordless, soundless love.

In water flowing downhill over stones in dark.

my darling nobody; my nobody darling

What does it mean to be dead?

It is to have given one-self for another's well-being.

Be dead in life; be alive in death!

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.  

On the bank 

Where thousands perished 

For brave hurt words 

They said.  

Be an outcast. 

Qualified to live 

Among your dead. 

Make a merry gathering 

But be nobody's darling;  

Be an outcast.  

Qualified to live Among your dead.

                   (--poem by Alice Walker)

Walking Ragged Snow Bowl in early morning. Sitting zazen in bookshed retreat while another practitioner sat in zendo. Reading Office of Readings, slowly, after.

No one dead; no one alive.

White dog on pallet outside door.

The sitters, one by one, leave their sitting.

One, by one, the curious experience of being (alive).

The odd monk's life -- following Isaac, Esau, and Jacob -- the undead deceptions of ongoing narrative.

Nobody knows -- the rubble -- we've seen.

The wind full of outer space

Is it easier for lovers? 

             Ah, they only manage 

                          by being together

to conceal each other's fate! 

           You still don't know? 

                     Throw armfuls of emptiness 

out to the spaces 

            that we breathe --  

                         maybe the birds 

Will sense 

               the expanded air 

                             flying more fervently.

(--from First Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. David Young, 1976)

Thirty three years ago, Katherine gave herself to death.

"Pay your sacrifice of thanksgiving to God." (Ps. 50)

"Offer to God the sacrifice of praise." (Antiphonal 2, Office of Readings)

Qui tacet consentire!

Don't bother, I'll see myself out

One can only wonder if there is any chance to rein in the shadowy shenanigans of slippery power off to the side in this country.

Or maybe the nature of political life is deception and further deception.

It's hard to decide whether it is stupidity or sedition at play.

Beyond my pay grade. Which, by the way, is below poverty. Happily, for a mendicant.