mono no aware

This from Wikipedia:

Mono no aware (物の哀れ), literally "the pathos of things", and also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence (無常 mujō), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life. 

The phrase is derived from the Japanese word mono (物), which means "thing", and aware (哀れ), which was a Heian period expression of measured surprise (similar to "ah" or "oh"), translating roughly as "pathos", "poignancy", "deep feeling", "sensitivity", or "awareness". Thus, mono no aware has frequently been translated as "the 'ahh-ness' of things", life, and love. Awareness of the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty, and evokes a gentle sadness at their passing. In his criticism of The Tale of Genji Motoori noted that mono no aware is the crucial emotion that moves readers. Its scope was not limited to Japanese literature, and became associated with Japanese cultural tradition (see also sakura).^[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_no_aware 

This from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

2.  Mono no aware: the Pathos of Things 

The meaning of the phrase mono no aware is complex and has changed over time, but it basically refers to a “pathos” (aware) of “things” (mono), deriving from their transience. In the classic anthology of Japanese poetry from the eighth century, the Manyōshū, the feeling of awareis typically triggered by the plaintive calls of birds or other animals. It also plays a major role in the world's first novel, Murasaki Shikibu's Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), from the early eleventh century. The somewhat later Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike Clan) begins with these famous lines, which clearly show impermanence as the basis for the feeling of mono no aware: 

The sound of the Gion shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sōla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind. (McCullough 1988)

And here is Kenkō on the link between impermanence and beauty: “If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty” (Keene, 7). The acceptance and celebration of impermanence goes beyond all morbidity, and enables full enjoyment of life:

How is it possible for men not to rejoice each day over the pleasure of being alive? Foolish men, forgetting this pleasure, laboriously seek others; forgetting the wealth they possess, they risk their lives in their greed for new wealth. But their desires are never satisfied. While they live they do not rejoice in life, but, when faced with death, they fear it—what could be more illogical? (Keene, 79)

Insofar as we don't rejoice in life we fail to appreciate the pathos of the things with which we share our lives. For most of us, some of these things, impermanent as they are, will outlast us—and especially if they have been loved they will become sad things: “It is sad to think that a man's familiar possessions, indifferent to his death, should remain long after he is gone” (Keene, 30). 

The well known literary theorist Motoori Norinaga brought the idea of mono no aware to the forefront of literary theory with a study of The Tale of Genji that showed this phenomenon to be its central theme. He argues for a broader understanding of it as concerning a profound sensitivity to the emotional and affective dimensions of existence in general. The greatness of Lady Murasaki's achievement consists in her ability to portray characters with a profound sense of mono no aware in her writing, such that the reader is able to empathize with them in this feeling.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-aesthetics/#2

How we go on!

Axe Handles

          BY GARY SNYDER

One afternoon the last week in April

Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet

One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.

He recalls the hatchet-head

Without a handle, in the shop

And go gets it, and wants it for his own.

A broken-off axe handle behind the door

Is long enough for a hatchet,

We cut it to length and take it

With the hatchet head

And working hatchet, to the wood block.

There I begin to shape the old handle

With the hatchet, and the phrase

First learned from Ezra Pound

Rings in my ears!

"When making an axe handle

                 the pattern is not far off."

And I say this to Kai

"Look: We'll shape the handle

By checking the handle

Of the axe we cut with—"

And he sees. And I hear it again:

It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century

A.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in the

Preface: "In making the handle

Of an axe

By cutting wood with an axe

The model is indeed near at hand."

My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

Translated that and taught it years ago

And I see: Pound was an axe,

Chen was an axe, I am an axe

And my son a handle, soon

To be shaping again, model

And tool, craft of culture,

How we go on.

Gary Snyder, "Axe Handles" from Axe Handles. Copyright © 1983 by Gary Snyder. 

as we are being, created, in each instance

The bicyclist sipped tea and spoke of existentialism after morning meditation practice.

His cohorts have been wondering about the ground of ethics.

I told him the only ground of ethics was underfoot.

No signposts, maps, marching orders, or wishful thinking will give us a landscape of moral behavior we should or must follow.

Underfoot is the ground we walk.

What shows up as we step is what we are presented with -- to face and to respond to.

Our response is our ethical and moral ground.

Our relational response to what is presented before us is the practice of ethics.

Is there an ought? Only that we ought to respond from our inner compass of care and compassion.

Is there an absolute and relative criterion to our actions? Only a relational response to immediate appearance.

No concept. No ideology. No recipe for right versus wrong action. No normative checklist.

Only this, and this, and this. And our response to this, and this, and this.

Only our relational response to this, and this, and this -- attended to with care, attended to with compassion.

Attended to with our feet and eyes, ears and hands, internal organs and interior life  -- an ephemeral engagement, an existential immediacy -- in the face of which we seek to encounter the exhausting outcome of what is best for the moment, the situation, the personnel, and the sense of justice embedded in the manifest emergence of the surround-itself.

This, this, is our body.

This, this, is our cosmos.

This is also our Buddha.

This is also our Christ.

And the wholly unknown source of our very being.

As we are being, created, in each instance.

at twig, at tree, at earth

Cat arrives on morning schedule, rasping throat signaling some rhetoric my semiotic awareness does not translate, turns and takes measure of brown blanket, crook of knee, potential of duration, and settles.

Friday morning. Will to prison. Fog along road. Warm temperature. It will not snow. 

Student last evening connected non-acceptance with greed.

Another suggests evil is greed paying for happiness.

A third says we have to live in the grey where black and white overlap and good and evil are not separated.

The crow has flown away: 

swaying in the evening sun, 

a leafless tree                          

             (-- Natsume Soseki)

At alarm cat gets up and goes off to her chores.

Morning news is all about circus act in nation's capital.

Rolling chime of insistent watch rolls over Irish tweed cap beside bedside.

As Rilke wrote, "Simply give away your beauty / without talk or reckoning".

An undivided self, an integral soul, an accepting gaze -- buds look out at twig, at tree, at earth, at entirety of itself through morning awakening.

after Parmenides* and Majjhima-Nikaya**

we are here

as is

the world

whatever else

you think 

remember this 

no one --

no one else --

sees this

as you

do

now  

...   ...   ...
...   ...   ...

Commentary:

From, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, On Parmenides:

* "You must needs learn all things,/ both the unshaken heart of well-rounded reality/ and the notions of mortals, in which there is no genuine trustworthiness./ Nonetheless these things too will you learn, how what they resolved/ had actually to be, all through all pervading." (Fr. 1.28b-32)

The governing motif of the goddess’ revelation is that of the “ways of inquiry.” In the all-important fragment 2, she specifies two such ways:

Come now, I shall tell—and convey home the tale once you have heard—/just which ways of inquiry alone there are for understanding:/ the one, that [it] is and that [it] is not not to be,/ is the path of conviction, for it attends upon true reality,/ but the other, that [it] is not and that [it] must not be,/ this, I tell you, is a path wholly without report:/ for neither could you apprehend what is not, for it is not to be accomplished,/ nor could you indicate it. (Fr. 2)

The second way of inquiry is here set aside virtually as soon as it is introduced. The goddess goes on to refer back to the first way of inquiry and then speaks of another way as characteristic of mortal inquiry:

It is necessary to say and to think that What Is is; for it is to be,/ but nothing it is not. These things I bid you ponder./ For I shall begin for you from this first way of inquiry,/ then yet again from that along which mortals who know nothing/ wander two-headed: for haplessness in their/ breasts directs wandering understanding. They are borne along/ deaf and blind at once, bedazzled, undiscriminating hordes,/ who have supposed that it is and is not the same/ and not the same; but the path of all these turns back on itself. (Fr. 6, supplementing the lacuna at the end of verse 3 with arxô and taking s’ earlier in the verse as an elision of soi, as per Nehamas 1981, 103–5; cf. the similar proposal at Cordero 1984, ch. 3, expanding parts of Cordero 1979.)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/ 

...   ...   ...

From, The Majjhima Nikaya, or "Middle-length Discourses" of the Buddha, is the second of the five nikayas (collections) of the Sutta Pitaka. https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/index.html

** Mahamati, the buddhas of the past, present, and the future teach that all that exists does not come about of itself. The reason for this, according to the buddhas' view, is that there is no existence or nonexsistence and there is no coming into being or becoming extinct. On the other hand the unenlightened and ignorant tend to distinguish between existence and nonexistence, and furthermore, become attached to them. Majjhima-nikaya, https://www.dailyzen.com

as without light

It's hard to know what to pray for.

Harder to know where to send the prayer.

Clearly we have come upon disturbing times.

5
It is time for the invocation: 

Kali, be with us.
Violence, destruction, receive our homage.
Help us to bring darkness into the light,
To lift out the pain, the anger,
Where it can be seen for what it is—
The balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love.
Put the wild hunger where it belongs,
Within the act of creation,
Crude power that forges a balance
Between hate and love. 

Help us to be the always hopeful
Gardeners of the spirit
Who know that without darkness
Nothing comes to birth
As without light
Nothing flowers. 

Bear the roots in mind,
You, the dark one, Kali,
Awesome power.

(--from poem, The Invocation to Kali,  by May Sarton)

Kali seems the right one to invoke for these times.

Kali, (Sanskrit: “She Who Is Black” or “She Who Is Death”) in Hinduism, goddess of time, doomsday, and death, or the black goddess (the feminine form of Sanskrit kala, “time-doomsday-death” or “black”). Kali’s origins can be traced to the deities of the village, tribal, and mountain cultures of South Asia who were gradually appropriated and transformed, if never quite tamed, by the Sanskritic traditions. She makes her first major appearance in Sanskrit culture in the Devi Mahatmya (“The Glorifications of the Goddess,” c. 6th century CE). Kali’s iconography, cult, and mythology commonly associate her not only with death but also with sexuality, violence, and, paradoxically, in some later traditions, with motherly love. 

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Kali 

Me?

No prayer but poetry.

To see the Way with your own eyes 

quit agreeing and disagreeing. 

The battling of likes and dislikes 

that's the disease of the mind. 

                       - Seng-ts'an (606) (Dailyzen) 

Like John Cage composition, the unregulated cacophony of everyday noises rising and lowering is the unexpected score played without notes or musical instrument. A cat stretching on red rug.

No prayer visits.

Just silence.

I enter here. 

would you like a cup of tea

If and when I reach his age, I'd probably like to say "Enough!" as well.

“I greatly regret having reached that age. I would much prefer to be 20 or 30 years younger,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. When asked whether he had a nice birthday, he told the news organization: “No, I’m not happy. I want to die. ... It’s not sad, particularly. What is sad is if one is prevented.” 

“My feeling is that an old person like myself should have full citizenship rights, including the right of assisted suicide,” the 104-year-old added. 

Goodall is set to travel more than 8,000 miles this week to Switzerland. That country, like most others, has not passed legislation legalizing assisted suicide, but under some circumstances its laws do not forbid it. 

It’s there, in northwestern Switzerland, where Goodall plans to die. 

(--from,A scientist just turned 104. His birthday wish is to die.Washington Post,  By Lindsey Bever April 30 at 2:40 PM)  

If the mystery of existence ever walks the road by my front porch, I hope it looks through the open gate and sees an empty rocking chair under prayer flags just above sleeping cat alongside tea cup.

Then, this:

My whole life long I've sharpened my sword 

And now, face to face with death 

I unsheathe it, and lo -- 

The blade is broken -- 

Alas!

(Poem by Dairin Soto. Died on the twenty-seventh day of the first month, 1568, at the age of eighty-nine. p.94, Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death,by Yoel Hoffmann, c1986

I am because you are

The beauty of the whole is contrasted with the troublesome fragmentation of our divisions.

In our world of scientism, smartness rules and wisdom is neglected. Pallas Athena (or her early Eastern Christian counterpart, Sophia) is either dead or sleeping, We, the living, prefer to think with Dr. Stern that "the heart open to infused wisdom remains the heart of immutable virginity” and hope that this essential, eternal femininity is only sleeping behind the seemingly impenetrable thorny walls of aggressive intolerance, im- personal power struggle and poisonous indifference. The question for us, the living,and for the future of humanity is this: Will the miracle recur? Will the mystery be re- enacted? Will Prince Charming come in the glory of his strength and tenderness and cut through the thicket to kiss Sophia, the sleeping beauty, into awakening?    

Will Kalokaguthia rise again?                

Reviewed by Z. JOHN LEVAY M.D. --from, Man, Woman, and Person, The Flight from Woman, by Karl Stern, M. D., New York: Farrar, Straus & GirOUZ, 1965. 310 pp. $4.95.  In, Modern Age, A Conservative Review, WINTER 1966-67 - VOL. 11, NO. 1 https://isistatic.org/journal-archive/ma/11_01/levay.pdf 

Stern, in The Fright from Woman, wrote, "All being is nuptial." It occurs to me, only now, how important that observation.

I am because you are.

kalokagathia

Noun

1. A Platonic teaching based on philosophy of a bodily, moral and spiritual whole.

Origin, From Ancient Greek καλοκαγαθία (kalokagathia, “nobility, goodness”), from καλός (kalos, “beautiful”) και (kai, “and”) ἀγαθός (agathos, “good”).  http://www.yourdictionary.com/kalokagathia

what are we I am

Here's who we are.

Awareness and realization of interrelation reality in response to the questions 'Who am I?' and 'Who are we?'

We are relational being.

We are not so much a being, as we are relational being.

The fog is our attempt to define ourselves as distinct and separate beings over against other distinct and separate beings.

So, to the question:

Who am I? 

Is the response:

I am what we are!

exhaling

Cosby is convicted.

Trump, not yet.

Jesus, the woman said, might not have died on the cross.

Paul Ryan fires the Catholic chaplain for praying that the poor also benefit from the tax gift to the wealthy and corporations.

North and South Korea leaders meet at 38th parallel and shake hands, each stepping over the line.

The original inspiration experience of root and holy reality remains available eternally and immediately to everyone everywhere.

Republicans will have to answer the judgement of history about their cynical blindness to the distortive and disreputable manipulation of the US constitution, representative governance, and due diligence for the proper carrying out of justice across the board.

Democrats will be remembered for their terminal diagnosis and hospice stay.

Inmates in prison meditate in silence.

A inmate from a class I taught dies suddenly from medical difficulty of an afternoon.

Black men and women are violently arrested and videos of the violence are watched by millions.

Millions who watch violence by serve and protect personnel don't know what to think of the trend.

American ordnance is used by Saudi Arabia in bombing of wedding party in Sana, Yemen, killing over 21 and wounding over 50 people.

In his poem, Elias — Variations on a Theme, by Thomas Merton, section IV:

Under the blunt pine
Elias becomes his own geography
(Supposing geography to be necessary at all),
Elias becomes his own wild bird, with God in the center,
His own wide field which nobody owns,
His own pattern, surrounding the Spirit
By which he is himself surrounded: 

For the free man';s road has neither beginning nor end.

April begins to exhale.

no stealing Itself

All commandments can be synthesized to one: You shall not steal.

How come?

Because stealing is basically and ultimately not necessary.

No one owns anything. Not really. Everything belongs to itself.

Hence, everyone participates in the shared existence of everything. Some call it communism, some compassion.

It is not about deserving, or being worthy, or earning what is here.

What is here is what-could-be-called God. God is here. Or, God is "Here." Call "God" whatever you wish. I say Here. I say Itself.

Here itself.

Everything belongs to itself.

The reason we are so harsh toward those who steal is because we know, in our deepest knowing, that you cannot steal what belongs to you.

You are itself.

That knowledge is too dangerous to be allowed into open forum.

So we agree to say, "You shall not steal.":

where are you

Everything Is Waiting for You

              BY 

DAVID WHYte

After Derek Mahon

 Your great mistake is to act the drama
 as if you were alone. As if life
 were a progressive and cunning crime
 with no witness to the tiny hidden
 transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
 the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
 even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
 the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
 out your solo voice. You must note
 the way the soap dish enables you,
 or the window latch grants you freedom.
 Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
 The stairs are your mentor of things
 to come, the doors have always been there
 to frighten you and invite you,
 and the tiny speaker in the phone
 is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
 conversation. The kettle is singing
 even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
 have left their arrogant aloofness and
 seen the good in you at last. All the birds
 and creatures of the world are unutterably
 themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

---

post hoc

when I die

if Jesus is there

welcoming me

I will know

then

what now is

then comes harmony of emptiness

one foot

then another --

walking path

each other

muddy

walking mountain

new trails

going nowhere

this, as it is

Vishnu is sleeping in the waters on a floating serpent.

He dreams the world.

Is the earth, the cosmos, the visible expression of an invisible reality sustaining everything with nothing other than mere creative awareness of what is true beyond belief?

Resurrect, reincarnate, revive, reconstitute, rebirth, reintegrate, reconcile, and realize.

Let stupidity, anger, greed, violence, and impertinance fall away. Let opinion, erroneous self expression, false belief and certainty about the unknown dissolve into fecund emptiness.

This, this, is Monday morning!

Let your prayers go drifting into space, the songwriter/poet wrote, you never know what will be coming down. Don't let the uncertainty turn you around. Go on and make a joyful sound.*

Vishnu's recitative is -- See me! Feel me! Touch me! Heal me!**

It is the gaze -- pure, simple, and loving -- that sees what is seeing and seen.

For with you is the well of life

and in your light shall we see light.  (Ps. 36)

Your eyes are the light through which the world is seen as it is -- as it is -- with awakening invitation surrounding everything.

And what will we see when the sleeper awakes?

This, we will see this, as it is!

...

* Jackson Browne
** The Who

it's complicated

It occurs to me that if we are not awake we will never know God.

Further, that when we wake up we'll understand God cannot be known.

Thus, it seems, it is better to be awake and nescient than asleep and ignorant.

Companioning

Were there bread, and if we could
we would eat together

if we knew where we were going
we would set out with confidence

as it is, our only bread is breath
and our going is uncertain.

Four mourning doves and ground
hog inch along split rail fence

outside doors of hospice room
as wind rustles limbs of trees in

late April. We'll call her Josephine
she doesn't see this, her eyes fixed on

nothing I can see from her bed
where last payments of breath

are slid across room like
discards waiting for new hand.

Daffodils bowing in glass vase
near her head. This breath is bread,

we break pieces the way purple
finch on feeder, alone, harvests dusk

seeing what is seen

To articulate original love -- the creative energy act manifesting integration -- is to converse with what we have called God.

This, what some call prayer, is the opening of the heart and raising of the mind toward God.

When this happens, the manifest world is touched by the unmanifest and made more vibrant and alive.

Life has no opposite. 

Death is the opposite of birth, not life.

Prayer is the interchange of life for life.

Death is the completion of birth.

Here's what I think. And by thinking (seeing) here I look with what is seen into what is seeing what is seen.

If life has no opposite, death of form is a passageway through to life in its formless non-manifestation.

No one has ever seen God.

Formless non-manifestation is life itself without opposite.

Life itself.

Articulate original love.

shikantaza

Walking down stairs, legs a wee wobbly, two days of teaching, reading papers, constructing container, listening, and connecting.

If you want to sit with God, just sit.

a shared freedom sighting interrelational glance and gaze

When off the road, nothing moves under you, no rain blinds in front of you, and all is still surrounding.

What do we make of the first line of John Fowles' novel Daniel Martin?

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

What do you make of Daniel Martin’s enigmatic first sentence? What is meant by "whole sight"? Is whole sight even possible? Also, what does "desolation" mean in this context, and "all the rest"? The rest of what? Is desolation the only alternative to whole sight? 

These weren’t questions I was asking when I first read the novel 25 years ago. Instead, I was caught up in the plot, wondering how things would work out for Daniel and the other characters. It took me a while to realize how the book's opening philosophical premise is bound together with the ensuing narrative. 

In Daniel Martin Fowles explores the concept of “whole sight” in a variety of ways. Sometimes he uses direct discourse. At one point the character Anthony tells Daniel,

"I'm still defeated by the conundrum of God. But I have the Devil clear." 

"And what's he?" 

"Not seeing whole."

From this we might infer that “seeing whole” can be linked to God, godliness, or the divine. 

In the novel's last sentence, the narrator describes the book's first sentence as “impossible.” Here and elsewhere in the book, Fowles invites skepticism about the notion of whole sight. However, he’s not like some postmodernists, for whom skepticism about such things has become a dogmatic creed. (In 1979 Jean-Francois Lyotard defined postmodernism as an "incredulity toward meta-narratives." Since then, it seems that for many people incredulity or doubt toward meta- or "grand" narratives has hardened into prejudice, an unwillingness to engage.) 

(--from, What is "whole sight"? by drkellyindc on Fri Jul 25, 2008 8:59 am
https://www.fowlesbooks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=49

Joseph Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI, noted "being from" and "being for" in an article written about him in America magazine:

But Ratzinger did more than earn the right to say “I told you so” for having arrived earlier at conclusions voiced by today’s chattering classes. His historical experience and rootedness in the Christian tradition allow him to chart the path for a return to “reality-based” thinking that is both more consistent and less naïve. 

To take one example of Ratzinger’s greater consistency, we might compare Andersen’s and Ratzinger’s respective attitudes toward abortion. Andersen considers the legalization of abortion to be one of the healthy innovations achieved when the “reality-based left” was still culturally ascendant. Ratzinger, in stark contrast, takes the defense of the right to abortion to be a paradigm case of flight into subjectivist fantasy. In Truth and Tolerance (2003), he meditates at length on pregnancy, because there the “basic shape of human freedom, its typically human character, becomes clear.” No one is more dependent on another, more undeniably a “being-from,” than a child in utero. And no one is more oriented toward another, more obviously a “being-for,” than a pregnant mother, whose very bodily equilibrium changes to welcome the stranger. If we are honest, Ratzinger continues, we never outgrow this interdependence. Our nature is such that we exercise our agency only within a “network of services”—a freedom received “from” others on whom we depend and a freedom lived “for” others who depend on us. Summing up his reflections, Ratzinger observes: 

It has thus become fairly clear that freedom is linked to a yardstick, the yardstick of reality—to truth. Freedom to destroy oneself or to destroy another is not freedom but a diabolical parody. The freedom of man is a shared freedom, freedom in a coexistence of other freedoms, which are mutually limiting and thus mutually supportive: freedom must be measured according to what I am, what we are—otherwise it abolishes itself.

The first good to be sacrificed to the idol of limitless freedom, in other words, will be reality-based thinking, which will invariably be followed by the immolation of freedom itself. The Catholic author Flannery O’Connor summed up the dynamic even more succinctly: “When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.”  

(-from, Did Benedict XVI predict the rise of Trump and fake news? by Aaron Pidel,  4/16/18https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/04/16/did-benedict-xvi-predict-rise-trump-and-fake-news# 

O'Connor's words, at end, draw my attention.

Does anything, severed from source, remain alive and function as beneficial toward others? Or even oneself?

Pregnancy as fact, pregnancy as metaphor, reveals a new lens with which to consider interdependency with both a relative glance and absolute gaze.

A shared freedom sighting interrelational glance and gaze.

going my way

Better to wake up with Thích Nhât Hanh than remain asleep with surly men posturing as important.

Practice until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner. Continue until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop. Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. See and listen with the whole of your being. If you are fully present, the rain of Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.         (— from, Teachings on Love, byThích Nhât Hanh pp.74,75)

Today I will not run the Boston marathon.

I know this will disappoint no one.

Still, in Thây's universe, I am cold raindrops falling on running shoes just east of Hopkinton Massachusetts on a day just before the end of the world as we know it.

I am also the day after that curious day the world looked around and saw it was far away from nearly everything.

I'll need a ride.

Number of superclusters within 1 billion light years = 100

Number of galaxy groups within 1 billion light years = 240 000

Number of large galaxies within 1 billion light years = 3 million

Number of dwarf galaxies within 1 billion light years = 60 million

Number of stars within 1 billion light years = 250 000 trillion http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/superc.html

Going my way?

No?

OK, I'll just walk!

the silence

In the dream it was nice to see my mother.  She was tired. It was Brooklyn.

No one ever leaves home. That’s because we don’t know where home is. So we are always there by not knowing where it isn’t.

Dawn woodpecker works tree. Trees are aliens with superior intelligence. That’s why they don’t talk.

Once, in silence, I grasped everything I could not possibly know. I looked around. I had no home.

If you want to see the world as it is, look down a tree lined road. Look across a field with fallow corn husks in neat lines. Look at crumbled ruin of some stairs and foundation at sandy high tide of Narragansett Bay.

Me, I’ll take bread stick with grapefruit seltzer at bedtime after rambunctious family gathering at which I am outsider curiosity best left to silent smiles and passing reference.

I love this existence. I love that it will end. I love that nothing will follow. I love that the current president is an anarchist anachronistic idiot savant with megalomaniac delusion leading a people with no reason to trust him except for the extended middle fingers everybody gets to raise against everybody else, pure middle school after math class and before sneaking off to smoke whatever substance you are prohibited from using.

It is Sunday. Let God have say. Let freedom ring. May there be coffee and dialogue about nothing followed by nothing with a bow on it.

It’s ok! It’s all ok. And what’s not ok no longer exists. It will all be sorted out, and nothing will come of it.

It’s for the best.

It’s always for the best.

Ask Alice. Or Molly. Or, even better, don’t ask — there’s no answer to any of the questions.

I like it like that.

The silence!

no cure for that

An Irish, Zen, peace practitioner sends some quotes by Samuel Beckett (playwright, born Dublin, Ireland on April 13, 1906).

1. "The end is in the beginning and yet you go on." 

2. "There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet."(Waiting for Godot, 1953.) 

3. "No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business.... 

4. “We are all born mad. Some remain so.”(Waiting for Godot, 1953.) 

5. “I can't go on. I'll go on.”(Waiting for Godot, 1953.) 

6. “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” (Worstward Ho, 1983.) 

7. “You're on Earth, there's no cure for that!” 

8. “Birth was the death of him.”

Seems right to consider the words of a Theatre of the Absurd playwright as chemical weapons, missiles, bombs and bombast fly through air in Syria, Middle East, Europe, and the United States this weekend.

Since making peace with the Absurd over a half century ago in my life, I have found the deafness of many of our leaders and the ludicrousness of more than a few to be common fare and a wee bit beyond sad.

This is what we have. These actors on proscenium may strut and squawk in our name but they remain crazed alone in anechoic chambers trying to mimic a mad mongoose attacking a venomous snake at the edge of a canyon cliff.

(Sounds of rocks careening down stone walls into deep and dark bottomless cavern of mental dullness.)

bombs

"Pope Francis has called for an end to bloodshed in Syria, for increased “humanitarian assistance” and “a political solution to the crisis.” President Trump is proud of his skills as a “deal maker,” skills that are sorely needed to end this conflict. The president and the pope should use this moment to press for a ceasefire. Even imperfect ceasefires save lives. More bombs will help no one." 

(--from, More U.S. bombs in Syria will help no one, Maryann Cusimano Love, April 09,2018, in America, The Jesuit Review)

washington fact

When rain falls

stepping outside

wet head

and some look into the darkness, stunned

Some weep.

Syria, Total Death Count Due To Conflict: 500,000+ 

(Estimates include civilians, fighters on all sides, and others who have lost their lives as a result of fleeing the conflict) 

Syria In 2017 

The Syrian Network For Human Rights (SNHR) reports the death tolls for 2017 in Syria. A total of 10,204 civilians have been killed including 2,298 children and 1,536 women.  

2018 Civilian Death Count: 3,404 

(--from website "I Am Syria")

Some fume. 

And some look into the darkness, stunned.

vespers

Dog with stick in mouth

Walking road at snow bowl

Late Tuesday afternoon sun

if you hold out your hand with sunflower seeds in it, does that make you nuts

 It becomes less interesting that the current president appears to have an enormous deficit of ability to be Chief Executive, Commander in Chief, and Model of Moral Integrity to his country and the world.

What is interesting is that the people of the United States seem to want him to be their ideal of America

Perhaps we're not very fair, just, moral, kind, faithful, humble, considerate of others, level-headed, or believable.

So, this morning, I read the New York Times.

First Krugman:

From the beginning, Republicans hated Obamacare not because they expected it to fail, but because they feared that it would succeed, and thereby demonstrate that government actually can do things to make people’s lives better. And their nightmare is gradually coming true: Although it took a long time, the Affordable Care Act is finally becoming popular, and the public’s concern that the G.O.P. will kill it is becoming an important political liability. 

What this says to me is that if Republicans manage to hold on to Congress, they will make another all-out push to destroy the act — because they’ll know that it’s probably their last chance. Indeed, if they don’t kill Obamacare soon, the next step will probably be an enhanced program that lets Americans of all ages buy into Medicare. 

So voters are right to believe that health care is very much an issue in the midterm elections. It may not be the most important thing at stake — there’s a good case to be made that the survival of American democracy is on the line. But it’s a very big deal. 

(--from, Obamacare’s Very Stable Genius, by Paul Krugman, 9apr18, NYT

Then Brooks:

WACO, Tex. — Over the past year, those of us in the anti-Trump camp have churned out billions of words critiquing the president. The point of this work is to expose the harm President Trump is doing, weaken his support and prevent him from doing worse. And by that standard, the anti-Trump movement is a failure. 

We have persuaded no one. Trump’s approval rating is around 40 percent, which is basically unchanged from where it’s been all along. 

We have not hindered him. Trump has more power than he did a year ago, not less. With more mainstream figures like H. R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn gone, the administration is growing more nationalist, not less. 

We have not dislodged him. For all the hype, the Mueller investigation looks less and less likely to fundamentally alter the course of the administration. 

We have not contained him. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is complete. Eighty-nine percent of Republicans now have a positive impression of the man. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 59 percent of Republicans consider themselves more a supporter of Trump than of the Republican Party.   

(--from, The Failures of Anti-Trumpism, by David Brooks, 9apr18, NYT)

 The Christian and Orthodox churches proclaim Christ is Risen!

Those of Jewish faith have celebrated Passover.

In Maine, temperatures are below freezing in the 20s overnight. There are remnants of accumulated snow in lee of buildings and trees. Ticks are confused about their onslaught.

Smoke rises from stovepipe chimney.

Let's trust all will be ok.

If we trust, at least, there, we will find it.

evening prayer

eating an orange after supper

one section then another

light steps out of darkened room

no sound

anechoic mind

source silence

comes nothing

legend = the wording on a map or diagram explaining the symbols used.

legend:

• being 
• apeiron (ἄπειρον) (boundless)
• becoming 

legend 2:

• source
• embodying
• moving on

legend 3:

• creator
• sustainer
• transformer

legend 4: 

• oriri
• instantia
• potentia

legend 5:

• = father/mother 
• = son/daughter
• = holy/spirit

legend 6:

• silence
• word
• inspiration

legend 7:

• here
• now
• this

legend 8:

• unity
• diversity
• appreciation

legend 9:

• theos
• kristos
• kosmos

legend 10:

• contemplation
• conversation
• correspondance

sicut dixit

we were never
here

only
near here

we were never
God

only
near God

if we were
to become

merely
this

then, the
trinity

will be
embodied

now

words

Poetry is where spirituality goes on retreat.

aspettare

Silence of white border collie with black spot on back on grey rug in hermit’s room on Thursday

morning early April between two mountains near pond four miles from bay to open ocean.

Yes things fall apart get broken make no sense only looking back and marveling anything even stands

 after what can go wrong does, the way we adjust, in news squirrel with rolling bar wheels prosthetic.

Seven am and sun comes up over Melvin heights on other side of Barnestown road grey suv rolling

toward molyneaux road furnace cuts in hot air but not in this room, scompigliato, tutti quanti

Panti, the smaller cat, wanders in on morning rounds, steps over dog, exits again, clocked in, finito

This haze brightening ove porch roofgre blanket on shoulders reluctant to get to desk, reluctance

Has become the air I breathe, cat back in window, dog moves, cat jumps down, rubs his muzzle

There is nothing clear on clearest day, wind rattles chimes down by bird feeders near barnside

Aspettare, si, 

È abbastanza

looking back

fifty years ago

I drove a small green school bus

across Washington DC to assist

as volunteers ravaged neighborhoods

as pockets of the broken hearted

raged against the killing of Dr King

a stone or glancing bullet smashed

against windshield as I gripped

steering wheel; in rear view mirror

not one head to be seen above seats

I learned the loneliness of driver’s

role to hold course, keep on, stay

up and not imagine 50 years down

road the profound sadness that sets in

looking back

where politics ends

Rain dripping from roof.

Yes, there is something real we can actually listen to!

Nothing other than what is actually happening.

a 50 year lesson learned

when Dr.King was shot

we learned

how white power

trumps justice

a little off

deep rest

when nothing feels right

emptiness left