will they help me to notice

This, from “Fragility and Repetition: On the Poetry of Robert Lowell,” by Katie Peterson, November 1, 2017, in American Poets:

The events of Lowell’s actual biography made him give up a sense that his life would be either healthy or straightforward. His imagination enabled him to create work that still matters to us, none of whose lives seem, at this point, to be easily recognizable as either. His poems about mental illness anticipate a twenty-first-century culture in which having a diagnosis has become as overstated and necessary as having a college degree. In the best of these, illness refuses to pigeonhole itself as a disability or dramatize itself as a privilege of the artist. “Notice,” from Day by Day, passes into the twenty-first century familiar to anyone who’s ever mistaken a medical professional for someone who can tell you the meaning of life:

The resident doctor said,
“We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm—
how can we help you?”
I asked,
“These days of only poems and depression—
what can I do with them?
Will they help me to notice
what I cannot bear to look at?”

A poem like this doesn’t only anticipate a world in which no “normal” exists, either in psychological condition or in life plan: it imagines a world in which the idea of “the normal” has been almost forgotten. Nowhere is this understanding more moving than in Lowell’s treatment of his complicated family life, in Notebook, For Lizzie and Harriet, and especially The Dolphin, with his last two marriages braided together in time with children and stepchildren and across an ocean. Don’t we all wish we—or someone—could have planned our lives better? Lowell admits that feeling and lets it go. He stands vividly in the midst of experience, when all we’d thought we’d known demands to be known again. The final lines of “Notice” remind us how bravely Lowell stood in his own discomfort: “Then home—I can walk it blindfold. / But we must notice— / we are designed for the moment.”

---

This essay originally appeared in the Fall-Winter 2017 issue of American Poets, the biannual journal of the Academy of American Poets. Copyright © 2017 by the Academy of American Poets. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/fragility-and-repetition-poetry-robert-lowell

out of darkness

da
wn’
s

ear
ly

li
ght
is

si
len
ce

mer
ly

a
ri
sing

ev
er
y

th
in
g

wi
th
in

i
tse
lf 

remembering Abbot Robert OCSO from Berryville Trappists

A year on since his death, I remember sitting in parlor across from Fr. Robert in the late 90’s when I stayed as guest in community. 

In our conversations he showed me a real monk — joy amid doubt, trust within discouragement, wisdom wandering edges of nescience. 

Reading James’ words reflects a clear black and white portrait.

My time with Robert and the community was sufficient to ease me into renewed life as hermit in the world and monastic in service to fellow and sister sannyasa in hospital, hospice, nursing home, prison, and house of prayer.

I remain fond of Robert, Benedict, Mark OCSO’s— each gone beyond — and all the Trappists met. 

Gassho!

echo

when it

is time

tell me

your name

and I

will tell

you mine

it falls apart at end

it is
difficult

listening
to

bu
ll

sh
it

yet it
has

beco
me

what is
heard

everyday
from our

so-called
le

ade
rs 

let’s pay attention

If you think funding and economic capitalism is merely a kabuki dance, remember:

The First World War ... 1914–18. In those years, more than 15 million men of the major nation-states massacred each other in the interests of their respective capitalisms.   

(—in, Introducing  Heidegger, A Graphic Guide, by Jeff Collins)

There’s more at issue here than the posturing rhetoric suggests.

in process, étude-en-silence

Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svaha  (from Heart Sutra)

Traditionally translated: gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, awake, oh joy!

Conversation with J in reception area, mango-peach walls surrounding the quiet of large room with center fireplace on Saturday night, speaking about death, heaven, what we hold as true (for now) where we think of what happens with death.

Every conversation is open invitation to go beyond what we know. It is revelation of what is within what appears to be.

We so often think of death as a going somewhere, somewhere else, without body, no longer in time, to what some call heaven. We say we leave the body, going out, rising to celestial embrace, returning home, with the Lord, or, in the bardo, free from mortal core, released and at peace, enroute new beginning.

This morning, yule tree still on sun porch, still lighted, electric candles yet in windows, recent snowfall dripping from roof, house quiet, humming choir in ear, breathing at ease, something occurs to me.

Perhaps there is no out there.

What we call body is the exterior expression of interior manifestation.

Breath is connective energy keeping inner and outer in same place. As a lamp gives light when plugged in and switched on, so too, breath is how our body lights physical space for particular moments of time.

Breath, (spiritus, pneuma, prāṇa, rûaħ), is the invisible energy (except in freezing Maine mornings, when seeing ones breath means put your good wool hat on). 

Breath makes visible that through which it breathes.

And here we are!

But when breath ceases to breathe the exterior expression of interior manifestation, where does it go? Where does body go? And where does the invented or formulated “I” that has become associated with that bodily expression go?

Can we say that everything returns to the completely within?

Breath, (spiritus, pneuma, prāṇa, rûaħ), is the manifesting origination of everything that is, everything that has come to be, the creating touch moving out into existence.

And when we ‘die’ — what happens?

Perhaps return to inner source.

Breath unbreathes us from visibility. We return to invisibility, our senses or skandas disappear from view. 

We go within.

We go completely within.

And am “I” there?

“I” has been the particular form consciousness of the undivided and original awareness that resides nowhere with nothing outside itself. In death the “I” -- the external particular thinking feeling form -- goes, and is gone, beyond. 

Beyond, at or to the further side, or what Keiji Nishitani called, the absolute near-side. This beyond is the nothing we do not know. Buddhists call this emptiness, itself. In Hebrew scripture, I submit, it was called the ’no other.’ (How often is it read: “I am the Lord, and, there, is -- ’no other’.”

Contemplatives abandon themselves to the interior life. Zen practitioners sit in silence, as do Quakers, Sufis, and poets at the revelation of word-at-source.

Monks, monastics, mystics and other fools for wholeness, somehow understand the paradoxical call to die daily, to live with death as invitation to the radiant silence of the wholly other near side within which all belongs to itself, and nothing else is.

Nothing else is.

I don’t think we can easily (or hardly) grasp this. Hence the prayerful mantra/koan, “What Is This?”

J and I finished our conversation in the grand room of Sussman House, the peach-mango walls quietly surrounding, she behind desk, I in rocking chair, as both nurse and cna pass by and smile.

I return through corridor, pass to other side of swinging doors, and chat awhile at nurses’ station. 

The two patients I’d sat with, my teachers in breath, were now with family or friend. The unexplainable admixture, sorrow of heart and peace of mind, rapt me.

The hours or our holy étude-en-silence together tonite yields a deep quiet that walks out front door through refreshing cold to black truck parked under two flagpoles at edge of trees.

I turn and deep bow gasshō* toward the sacred space and holy individuals within.

It is a silent drive, a left, two rights, and straight northeast.

The zen master’s words background: only go straight -- don’t know!

...   ...   ...

* gassho A position used for greeting, with the palms together and fingers pointing upwards in prayer position; used in various Buddhist traditions, but also used in numerous cultures throughout Asia. It expresses greeting, request, thankfulness, reverence and prayer.

whose breath is it, anyway

does body
leave breath

or breath
leave body —

at hospice
tonight

question is
very near

as we
share breath

in dimly
lit rooms

where fabric
needles and

cat behind
fridge

are out
of sight

‘tis of thee

one year

later —

it’s not

too late

ji-ji-muge*

my room 

Is silent

as is

the house

waking up

to no 

one

here

...   ...   ...

* According to the Kegon teachings, when applied to human activity ri-ji-muge denotes seeking for the Buddha in the mind. The ji-ji-muge concept denotes looking for the Universal Buddha in the body. Following out the former idea, the flesh is regarded as a shackle imprisoning the enquiring spirit, so that by retiring from the world one should reduce it to proper submission and thereby obtain enlightenment. With the ji-ji-muge concept, however, illumination can be found only through perfecting flesh by bringing out its latent potentialities and thereby uncovering the Buddha hidden in the human heart. When applied this concept to the Mahayana schools of Buddhism, one may say that ri-ji-muge is the Way of Sitting (Zazen in Soto), while Ji-ji-muge is the Way of Moving in the World.  

(see P.K. Eidmann’”The Lion Roar”, Jodo Publishing, 1947 also various books by Kegon scholars such as Shinya Kasugai, Ryosho Takamine) 

(—from, Ji-ji-muge and Economics of Enlightenment, Chris J. Czerkawski, (Received on April 1, 2005, Hiroshima Shudo University Repository)

happy birthday, 1/2 dogen & francis hermitage lineage

Dōgen Zenji (道元禅師; 19 January 1200 – 22 September 1253), also known as Dōgen Kigen (道元希玄), Eihei Dōgen (永平道元), Kōso Jōyō Daishi (高祖承陽大師), or Busshō Dentō Kokushi (仏性伝東国師), was a Japanese Buddhist priest, writer, poet, philosopher, and founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan. (—Wikipedia)

If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it? [Dogen] 

Do not fragment your attention but see what each moment calls for. [Dogen] 

Old buddhas and new buddhas reveal their bodies and expound dharma. [Dogen] 

Use your own hands, your own eyes, your own sincerity. [Dogen]

Take continuous care. [Dogen] 

http://oaks.nvg.org/dogen-quotations.html

prelude to new ethos

1. Challenge:

In the premodern world, ethics received its authority from cosmology. The sacred order of the cosmos dictated the right order of society and the normative virtues for individuals. Each society thought its way of life reflected the universal and sacred natural order of things. With the emergence of the comparative study of cultures, through modern historiography and the social sciences in the nineteenth century, the cosmic world-views of all cultures were relativized. At the same time philosophy, which had already declared its independence from religion, attempted to find a new authoritative ground for ethics in the Enlightenment ideal of a universal rationality independent of any given culture. We now live in a time when this modern attempt is widely viewed as having failed. Indeed, Jean-François Lyotard suggests, in The Postmodern Condition,4 that a key indicator of the emergence of our postmodern situation is the collapse of all metanarratives, whether the ancient cosmic religious stories or modern cosmic stories of universal rationality and scientific progress.

According to the metanarrative of the Enlightenment, in the ancient childhood of the human race people lived by stories (myths), then in the medieval adolescence of the human race, humans embraced rationality (logic and speculative metaphysics). Finally, in the modern adulthood of the human race, humans learned to think for themselves, threw off their childish and adolescent ways and embraced empirical scientific rationality and technological progress. “Man” had “come of age” and no longer needed story – or so the story goes. Contemporary narrative theorists like Stanley Hauerwas 5 and Alasdair MacIntyre 6 have pointed out that even the modern claim of the narrative independence of rationality is dependent on a narrative – the story of the three ages of the human race. They have rightly argued that all rationality is narrative dependent. If this is the case then our postmodern situation is that, on the one hand, our metanarratives (grand stories) have been relativized and, on the other hand, we cannot escape narrative. So with what are we left?

(—from, Teaching Comparative Religious Ethics Online and in the Classroom, Introduction, For the second edition of: Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics, (2011) by Fasching, deChant, Lantigua), Wiley Instructor Companion Site

2. Response:

I would have said, “So what are we left with?” But I suspect, “So with what are we left? is better grammar. Still, the question is good — do we have a story that makes sense today?

I love stories. Here’s what I’m left with: You and I are stories being written. The old stories are there for us to read. The many stories of many people are here for us to listen to. We are left with one another. And what are we? And what are we doing?

My story says we are ever-beginning. You and I, so too our culture, era, and community, come alive to the extent we speak with and listen to one another. Talking about ethics together is part of ever-beginning.

I like the word ethos. The Oxford Dictionary defines it: “The characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations.”

heading out of town

Shared psychosis.

That’s what a psychiatrist said happens to those who get close to someone who is powerful and needy.

Something odd is taking place in Washington DC.

Best to stay away.

Anyway, I’m not that good at sharing.

op cit

“Monastics and hippies and poets . . . we’re deliberately irrelevant.” (Thomas Merton)

Anything I could say about Merton’s quote wouldn’t matter.

‘cuse me while I disappear

Friend in Mexico writes chapters of autobiography. Tells of recent gift of wall mirror. Giver wants nothing further to do with him. He wonders why.

It will snow tonight in Maine. I take to bed to rest under congestion and cough in hopes of sleeping it away. A gift a nice lady in narrow office area gave me last week.

It is tiring watching the tedious drama of Washington DC play out in endless scenes of infuriating lack of courage. If missiles fly or palace intrigue beheads unsuspecting necks it seems a natural outcome of current duplicity, pettiness, and embarrassment.

How would you want to study ethics? I would want to learn the fascinating ambiguity of my life. How my being and the manifestation of culture, era, and community all intersect as trampolene springing foreword.

Mirrors reflect what is presented to them. They show what stands behind us. They give a room broader boundaries. We are not meant to occupy a mirror. We either step aside and view what surrounds, or we take a more radical action.

We step into the mirror.

No reflection.

Just disappearance.

when the male in charge is nothing like the one we need

Nietzsche says that opposition is necessary.

If that is true, we have what is necessary.

Opposition seems to be the political weapon of choice.

The content of our character, that which is beyond behavior, is our destiny.

In the United States, on this feast of Martin Luther King, our destiny currently feels to be crude, cynical, and cantankerous.

Help us, O spirit of courage and good words, to find the opposite of our current destiny!

itinerary

Here comes Monday!

One minute at a time, and it will go by.

Do nothing. Go nowhere.  Love each step!

ontology as erasure

bent back
      new yorker

louis menand
     piece, comment

words of the
     year, 8jan18

“fake” is now
     used to mean

“I deny
     your reality.”

It is a new year,
     a new fear

snow machine and hospice room

night belongs to groomers on mountain

and those that barely breathe in beds —

both laboring for smooth passage, one more

fond transformation

Where does breath go when it ceases the body?

A woman at Friday evening conversation said it disperses the individual ego and becomes diffuse entropy insinuating itself throughout what has no known boundary.

If so, then, what is it dying individuals see nearing their moment of ceasing breath?

Perhaps the apparition of resembling form suddenly sketched by departing consciousness with brushstroke of  swirling spirit on passing page of fond transformation.

A sumie zen flash of inspired jotting, an ink-wash chiaroscuro of gratitude to guide us beyond.

A touch,

and go!

whenever a casual lie happens

 I’ve looked at the menu.

Not much seems appealing.

When all is said and done, I have more than one face. I don’t know which is laughing at which.  

Love is so excessive a feeling that I prop my head up in my hands. 

Arising from the passions, this realm of dreams isn’t fundamentally a domain of lies. In the end the face is dispersed. In the place where the fabric of things rips open - in the lacerating rip - nothing remains but a person introduced into the fabric’s texture.  

Layers of dead leaves aren’t steps ascending to a throne, and tugboat hoots disperse illusions of enchantment.  

Though still, what would correspond to the magnificence of the world if no one spoke to us and communicated a (no doubt indecipherable) message: ‘As to this fate that befalls you, this fate you consider yours (the fate of the human being you are) or that you consider the destiny of existence generally (of the immensity you form part of), nothing allows you to reduce it to the poverty of things that remain only what they are. On the contrary, whenever a casual lie happens, or whenever something is transfigured, don’t you hear an appeal which must be answered? You can’t claim you wished for the journey, only that you are it. And who would challenge the utter distance, the extremity, the desirability of the way? Desirability?! Am I the measure of mysteries? If, perceiving me, you hadn’t chosen an unreachable goal, you wouldn’t even have approached the mystery!’ 

--Georges Bataille, p95, The text appeared in translation as chapter 5 of the ‘February-April 1944’ section of On Nietzsche , tr. Bruce Boone (Paragon House, New York, 1992), pp. 68-71.https://archive.org/stream/BatailleTheBatailleReader/Bataille%20-%20The%20Bataille%20Reader_djvu.txt 

One mystery we live with is the current president of the United States.

When folks wonder how the people of Germany could have allowed their leader to be so obscene and despicable, they will have to look at a different country currently with blinders about its leader.

Perhaps impotency is the new political chic.

Perhaps decadence is the new patriotism.

It is a meal that turns rancid and unappealing.

I resign from this table.

Check please!

ayuh

We in Maine feel Haitians and Africans are wonderful people and are welcome here. We also think that the president is mistaken in his attitudes toward those from away. Maine folk would rather sit on their front porch in a -2° blizzard than sit inside listening to dumb ignorance.

the hour is getting late

Where have we gone? We don’t seem to be at home. Certainly not at home with ourselves. More-so, not at home within ourselves. So, where are we? Where have we wandered? Have we gone so far from our true selves that we have become permanent refugees and nomads? Where do we begin to look for this lost and confused expatriate?

Poet Gary Snyder suggests, at end, a task for us these days:

I came back to myself.
To the real work, to
“What is to be done.”

There is a corruption of identity that is profitable to those trafficking in dissemblance and intentional manipulation of ordinary and (perhaps) unaware populations -- (unfortunately, most of us).

Even, and perhaps (sorrowfully) mostly, the leaders of America during this misfortunate time.

I Went into The Maverick Bar  
                        --by Gary Snyder

I went into the Maverick Bar

In Farmington, New Mexico.

And drank double shots of bourbon
backed with beer.

My long hair was tucked up under a cap I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay by the pool tables,

A waitress asked us

where are you from? a country-and-western band began to play “We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie” And with the next song, a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances in the fifties;

I recalled when I worked in the woods

and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness— America—your stupidity.

I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders— under the tough old stars—

In the shadow of bluffs

I came back to myself.

To the real work, to

“What is to be done.”

(--from, Not Here Yet, BY GARY SNYDER|  MARCH 30, 1994, Remarks by Gary Snyder on Buddhism, Ecology & the Poetics of Homelessness.     https://www.lionsroar.com/not-here-yet/        

There has been a three-card monte game dealt by sophisticated cons who deceive marks with promises of power while sucking away any residual rights the marks have in the name of bettering their lives and ridding them of others who do not have their interests at heart. It’s a double switch -- take away what is promised to you by giving it to those who are actually taking it away from you.  Enemies are fabricated. Belittling names are manufactured for those enemies. Phony outrage is displayed when anyone questions the cons’ motives or blatant hypocrisy.

It is a shadow of bluffs we are seeing as it envelopes the country.

Perhaps we are merely waking up.

The freeway beckons.

Bob Dylan helps:

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief  

“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief  

Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth  

None of them along the line know what any of it is worth” 

(--from, All Along The Watchtower WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN)  https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/all-along-watchtower/ 

Dylan ends by telling us: “So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”.

Yeah. 

It is. 

dooryard

too tired

to sleep

off road

crossing prayer

before dawn

whispering train whistle

hints at approach

as we go by

An old friend’s house

Brief beach walk

Train whistle down hill

solitude empowers

To live a contemplative life is to allow long loving looking.

Just that.

Nothing else.

No-other mind.

In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.

(—from, Before you can be with others, first learn to be alone, by Jennifer Stitt, on Aeon, 11 July 2017).       https://aeon.co/ideas/before-you-can-be-with-others-first-learn-to-be-alone

 I sit with firebox in wohnkuche since 4am watching extra log put in at 3:20am doesn’t exceed its reach. It is a nervous instinct that worries about what to do if chimney fire jumps out of box constraint and screams freedom to a frozen sky. Radio station from Finland automatically goes on at 5am playing classical pieces.

Hot chocolate, oikos yogurt, and raspberry breakfast bar carry me into dawn.

Fresh inch of snow at first light.

Monday looks over mountain.

I suspect if we are to make it through this night, we have to carefully watch what is taking place.

And be ready, when necessary, to open mouth both to say something and partake in communion.

augury

if

in a storm

you cry out

be prepared

to leave

that place

en- + theos

Some write about the Holy Fool.

For example, Simeon.

Simeon the Holy Fool (Abba Simeon, Saint Simeon Salos or Saint Simeon Salus, for ancient Greek Σάλος, “stir”) was a Christian monk, hermit and saint of Byzantine-Syrian origin, who lived in the sixth century AD. He is venerated by the Eastern Orthodox Church and Roman Catholic Church as one of the first "yurodivy" ("fool for Christ").... 

The only person in Emesa with whom Simeon did not play a fool was deacon of the church in Emesa, his friend John. One time Simeon saved John from execution when he was falsely convicted. Shortly before his death Simeon, by the illustration of Leontios of Neapolis said to John:

I beg you, never disregard a single soul, especially when it happens to be a monk or a beggar. For Your Charity knows that His place is among the beggars, especially among the blind, people made as pure as the sun through their patience and distress. . . . [S]how love of your neighbor through almsgiving. For this virtue, above all, will help us on (the Day of Judgment).^[4]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_the_Holy_Fool 

I suppose there are fools and there are holy fools.

The fool for Christ, or Holy Fool, is similar to a biblical prophet, prescient, but more importantly able to reveal truths. As one church hymn has it, the yurodivy (holy fool in Russian) strives “with imaginary insanity to reveal the insanity of the world.” He not only fights the insanity of everyday sins but the crimes of the mighty as well.

 https://www.rbth.com/literature/2013/06/06/russian_umberto_eco_demystifies_the_holy_fool_26401.html

Crazy is crazy.

If the presumption is that a God-imbued person is wandering the streets, and there are people willing to give benefit of doubt to the enthusiasm* experienced, something good is afoot.

*Origin and Etymology of enthusiasm, Greek enthousiasmos, from enthousiazein to be inspired, irregular from entheos inspired, from en- + theos god.      (Merriam-Webster)

My suspician is that to be full of God is the default state of being each being in existence dwells as.

That we deny this state and proceed to establish erroneous substitutes devoid of the perichoretic circumincessional interpenetrative inchoateness which is our origin and our originality — is our peculiar insane and destabilizing fate.

In short, we short-shrift authentic holiness for facsimile popularity masked as devotion.. This displays itself as fawning sycophantic opportunism, a loyalty of convenient reward, instead of real humility of unknowing fidelity to the emerging manifestation of sacred reality in everyday disclosure.

In Christian lore the Epiphany is seen as acknowledgement of God-imbued presence in the world.

It’s a crazy idea.

The idea of God.

Only a fool would accept such an idea as real.

And practice its presence.

ahead of you

Finding, among those who died in 2017, poet Joanne Kyger.

From her obituary:

“The shape of the day, the words of the moment, what’s happening around me in the world of interior and exterior space — these are my writing concerns,” Ms. Kyger explained in a statement to the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York in 2005.
In her “Night Palace,” from 2003, she wrote: 

“The best thing about the past
is that it’s over”
When you die.
you wake up
from a dream
that’s your life.
Then you grow up
and get to be post-human
in a past that keeps happening
ahead of you

...

“My own interest in Zen came about because I had been studying Wittgenstein and Heidegger in Santa Barbara,” Ms. Kyger told an interviewer. “Their philosophy just comes to an end saying you just have to practice the study of nothing.”

(- New York Times  Joanne Kyger, Zen-Infused Beat Generation Poet, Dies at 82A Buddhist and author and one of the few female members of the male-dominated post-World War II cultural movement.April 07, 2017 - By SAM ROBERTS - Books - Print Headline: "Joanne Kyger, Zen-Infused Beat Generation Poet, 8)

As only poets, mystics, and other unexplainable insights confer.

cluck and moo

the egg farmer

at 96

retired last year —



chickens and

cows

behind him

as is

Epiphany is the contemplation of the word “as”.

“As” is the word used to embody “is”.

And so, today we see “as is” in a whole, new, light.

to visualize or interpret as, epiphany

    Epiphany as . . .

At times, words speak for themselves.

From Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Definition of epiphanyplural epiphanies1capitalized  : January 6 observed as a church festival in commemoration of the coming of the Magi as the first manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles or in the Eastern Church in commemoration of the baptism of Christ 2: an appearance or manifestation especially of a divine being  

3a (1) : a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something  

(2) : an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking  

(3) : an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure

b : a revealing scene or moment
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epiphany 

Origin and Etymology of epiphany
Middle English epiphanie, from Anglo-French, from Late Latin epiphania, from Late Greek, plural, probably alteration of Greek epiphaneiaappearance, manifestation, from epiphainein to manifest, from epi- + phainein to show — more at fancy
Definition of fancyfancied; fancyingtransitive verb1: to have a fancy (see 2fancy 1) for : like  

• He's all right, I suppose, but I can't say that I fancy him.
 

2: to form a conception of : imagine  

• fancyour embarrassment
 

 

 
• Just fancy my surprise when I heard that he was getting married.
 

 

3a : to believe mistakenly or without evidence 
b : to believe without being certain  

• she fancied she had met him before
 

 

 
• real or fancied wrongs
 

4: to visualize or interpret as  

 
• fancied myself a child again

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fancy

facts

-2°

10:47pm

Winter,

Maine

to dwell as what we are

We make of nihility one more thing to conquer, substitute for, or use as means for profit.

From Keiji Nishitani's perspective a culture of self-centeredness has developed out of the inability of many people to move beyond a sense of nihilism in their lives.
(—in, Keiji Nishitani and Karl Rahner: A Response to Nihility, by Heidi Ann Russell)

Nishitani would have us consider falling through relative nihility into absolute nihility where we’d come to dwell in nothing other than what is itself.

Instrumentality, substitutive retrieving, and mechanistic manipulations would be set aside in favor of abandoning ourselves through the empty fullness of coming to dwell as what we are — nothing other.

Imagine; nothing other!

res ipsa loquitur — listening to what is taking place

 It is a tense time for the republic of America.

res ipsa loquitur, (rayz ip-sah loh-quit-her) n. Latin for "the thing speaks for itself," a doctrine of law that one is presumed to be negligent if he/she/it had exclusive control of whatever caused the injury even though there is no specific evidence of an act of negligence, and without negligence the accident would not have happened. Examples: a) a load of bricks on the roof of a building being constructed by Highrise Construction Co. falls and injures Paul Pedestrian below, and Highrise is liable for Pedestrian's injury even though no one saw the load fall. b) While under anesthetic, Isabel Patient's nerve in her arm is damaged although it was not part of the surgical procedure, and she is unaware of which of a dozen medical people in the room caused the damage. Under res ipsa loquitur all those connected with the operation are liable for negligence. Lawyers often shorten the doctrine to "res ips," and find it a handy shorthand for a complex doctrine.

http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1823 

It is the time of bricks and nerves.

They are falling and fraying.

Be careful!

wording trump

Words matter.

What’s the matter with Trump?

No words about him come near truth.

No words by him appear to have any stability.

His words don’t matter.

They are less than noiseless phantasm.

They are anti-matter.

“Stable antimatter does not appear to exist in our universe.” (New Oxford American Dictionary)

I can’t hear what he is...

(just) saying...

I can’t hear him.

jitai, じたい

Absolute nihility, according to Keiji Nishitani, is when everything is empty of anything other than itself.

I have nowhere to go with this.
copied  Russell, Heidi Ann. “Keiji Nishitani and Karl Rahner: A Response to Nihility.” Buddhist-Christian Studies, vol. 28, 2008, pp. 27–41. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30152926.

and then it is tuesday

What is alone?

Is God the Alone?

“Bells are meant to remind us that God alone is good,”  (-Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude) 

That God, alone, is good.

No wonder so many fear God!

Who wants to be alone?

Who wants to be with the alone?

Hmmm...

I do. 

new year night

moonlight on

clear white snow

squeaks stepping cold

start again

New Year’s Day!

ANTHEM

                                 by Leonard Cohen

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government --
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring ...

You can add up the parts
but you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.


Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That’s how the light gets in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wRYjtvIYK0

Then, like some Zen master, Christian mystic, or Tibetan Rinpoche insinuating reincarnation, rebirth, or resurrection, the artist poet Leonard Cohan says to the assembled: “Thank you so much for your kind attention! We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

And so

it is ...

what is

itself 

goes on

to, with, as

At hospital

as patient visitor

this afternoon

Each one

speaks the here

of their being there.

From book tonight at practice:

Creation is the voice of God!

The crisis of the Word is a crisis of theology -- literally -- “God talk.” We have lost a Christian theology that adequately conveys the idea that creation is God speaking to us.”
  (--p.9, Care For Creation, [a franciscan spirituality of the earth], by Ilia Delio, Keith Douglass Warner, and Pamela Wood

We grow despondent as

a people, not knowing

what we are to be

listening

to, with, as

saturday night

Buttermilk.

That’s what she sipped.
Ice water too.

Did I want coffee, she asks?
No, thanks, I say

Just someone rounding eights,
Warming her hands in mine

In hospice room