leave the mud, stand up

We are encouraged to stand up.

It takes effort.

Blowing through the heaven and earth, and in our hearts and in the heart of every living thing, is a gigantic breath — a great Cry — which we call God. Plant life wished to continue its motionless sleep next to stagnant waters, but the Cry leaped up within it and violently shook its roots: ‘Away, let go of the earth, walk!’ Had the tree been able to think and judge, it would have cried, ‘I don’t want to. What are you urging me to do? You are demanding the impossible!’ 

But the Cry, without pity, kept shaking its roots and shouting, ‘Away! Let go of the earth, walk!’ 

It shouted in this way for thousands of eons; and lo, as a result of desire and struggle, life escaped the motionless tree and was liberated…. 

Animals appear—worms—making themselves at home in water and mud. “We’re just fine here,” they said. “We have peace and security; we’re not budging!”

But the terrible Cry hammered itself pitilessly into their loins. “Leave the mud, stand up, give birth to your betters!” 

“We don’t want to! We can’t!”

“You can’t, but I can. Stand up!”

And lo! after thousands of eons, humans emerged, trembling on their still unsolid legs.

The human being is a centaur; our equine hoofs are planted in the ground, but our body from breast to head is worked on and tormented by the merciless Cry. We have been fighting, again for thousands of eons, to draw ourselves, like a sword, out of our animalistic scabbard. We are also fighting—and this is our new struggle—to draw ourselves out of our human scabbard. Humanity calls in despair, “Where can I go? I have reached the pinnacle, beyond is the abyss.” And the Cry answers, “I am beyond. Stand up!” All things are centaurs. If this were not the case, the world would rot into inertness and sterility.

(--in, Report to Greco, by Nikos Kazantsakis, 291-292) 

As the nation hears tonight one man's version of the State of the Union, hundreds of millions who sit skeptically at the edge of their seats, ready to rise, quietly pray --

“Leave the mud, stand up, give birth to your betters!”  

nothing of the already made

What we think of God, what we think God is, is not God.

We cling to the already. God is not yet.

Approaching God is a process of movement, action, and contemplation.

Ours and God's.

Everything is obscure in the idea of creation if we think of things which are created and a thing which creates, as we habitually do, as the understanding cannot help doing. We shall show the origin of this illusion in our next chapter. It is natural to our intellect, whose function is essentially practical, made to present to us things and states rather than changes and acts. But things and states are only views, taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, there are only actions. More particularly, if I consider the world in which we live' I find that the automatic and strictly determined evolution of this well-knit whole is action which is unmaking itself, and that the unforeseen forms which life cuts out in it, forms capable of being themselves prolonged into unforeseen movements, represent the action that is making. itself. Now, I have every reason to believe that the other worlds are analogous to ours, that things happen there in the same way. And I know they were not all constructed at the same time, since observation shows me, even to-day, nebulae in course of concentration. Now, if the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether it is that which is unmaking itself or whether it is that which is striving to remake itself, I simply express this probable similitude when I speak of a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fire-works display-provided, however, that I do not present this centre as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus defined, has nothing of the already made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely. 

(--Henri Bergson. "On the Meaning of Life -- The Order of Nature and the Form of Intelligence", Chapter 3 in Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell, Ph.D. New York: Henry Holt and Company (1911): 186 - 271. 

A lecturer told about the dark night of the spirit.

It is when what we imagined and thought God to be disappears.

We are left with nothing familiar, nothing resolvable, nothing at all.

Then, you can say, begins prayer. 

s w i g

At Sunday Evening Practice, in the quiet composure of a roomful of shikantaza practitioners sitting at hermitage, the following occurs to mind as what we are doing:

sitting

with--

in

god 

Reading the room, and following the words, slowly and carefully, a few times -- a revelation of various things.

It's what practice does. 

alea iacta est

Now that America's most solemn, hermeneutically analyzed, and religious event of the calendar year is over --

Go in fervor!

for their new Han

Haiku

       (welcoming neighbor)

Standing at barn door —
From across mountain foot water
Insistent call from cousin wood
To practice morning

hospice

“Who knows anything?”

“I do,” says Place looking at Time.

Time says nothing.

Looks at Place, looks away, and does not stay.

only for a while

Overheard words from hospice nurse to respite care person unhappy to be there:

You're not going to be here forever. 

Only for a while. 

Then you will go home.

Those words could be a card sent to every human being showing up on earth in this existence.

Sounds right to me.

Wherever home is.

present itself; a presentation of presence

Gospel 

LK 2:22-40 

When the days were completed for their purification
according to the law of Moses,
Mary and Joseph took Jesus up to 
to present him to the Lord,
just as it is written in the law of the Lord,
Every male that opens the womb shall be consecrated to the Lord,
and to offer the sacrifice of
a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons,
in accordance with the dictate in the law of the Lord. 

Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon.
This man was righteous and devout,
awaiting the consolation of Israel,
and the Holy Spirit was upon him.
It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit
that he should not see death
before he had seen the Christ of the Lord. 
He came in the Spirit into the temple;
and when the parents brought in the child Jesus
to perform the custom of the law in regard to him,
he took him into his arms and blessed God, saying:

"Now, Master, you may let your servant go 
in peace, according to your word,
for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you prepared in the sight of all the peoples:
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and glory for your people Israel."

The child's father and mother were amazed at what was said about him;
and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother,
"Behold, this child is destined
for the fall and rise of many in Israel,
and to be a sign that will be contradicted
Band you yourself a sword will pierceB
so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed."
There was also a prophetess, Anna,
the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher.
She was advanced in years,
having lived seven years with her husband after her marriage,
and then as a widow until she was eighty-four.
She never left the temple,
but worshiped night and day with fasting and prayer.
And coming forward at that very time,
she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child
to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem.

When they had fulfilled all the prescriptions
of the law of the Lord,
they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.

The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom;
and the favor of God was upon him.

...   ...   ...

Comment:

What is the mystery of presence? 

When that-which-is becomes what-is-itself in ordinary immediacy.

Without the hoopla, Groundhog Day and the feast of the Presentation collapse wonderfully into seeing the next face that appears and nears us

words just show up

Something haunting and delightfully solemn about traditional Latin Compline.

APERI, Dómine, os meum ad benedicéndum nomen sanctum tuum: munda quoque cor meum ab ómnibus vanis, pervérsis et aliénis cogitatiónibus; intelléctum illúmina, afféctum inflámma, ut digne, atténte ac devóte hoc Offícium recitáre váleam, et exaudíri mérear ante conspéctum divínæ Majestátis tuæ. Per Christum Dóminum nostrum. R. Amen. 

Dómine, in unióne illíus divínæ intentiónis, qua ipse in terris laudes Deo persolvísti, hanc tibi Horam persólvo. 

V. Jube, Dómine, benedícere. 

Benedictio:  Noctem quiétam, et finem perféctum concédat nobis Dóminus omnípotens.  R. Amen. 

Lectio brevis, 1 Petri 5, 8-9
FRATRES: Sóbrii estóte, et vigiláte: quia adversárius vester diábolus tamquam leo rúgiens círcuit, quærens quem dévoret: cui resístite fortes in fide.  Tu autem, Dómine, miserére nobis.  R. Deo grátias. 

V. Adjutórium nostrum in nómine Dómini.  R. Qui fecit cælum et terram.

(--Compline (Latin) · The Monks of Prinknash Abbey) youtube

I must concede the saying that showed up at my feet a long time ago:

on revient toujours a son premier metier 

As did this fragment:

hasta esto momento nohay absolutimente cambio alguno 

Words, in whichever language, just show up when aware or unaware, listening or ignoring.

They stay.

These two instances, over life span decades wandering, aporia wondering, alone-with-others eremetic communality, are proof positive of the unfathomible creatus/creans of the ineffable and wholly effective utterance of word.

when does the first become the one

February one --

will greed-hogs see

their portfolio reflection

in eyes of poor brothers/sisters

then tuna on cheese bread

poet sends winter hokku —

white dog in freezing wind

carries brown stick to black car

what do you see

The Italian speaker says we are not our body. We are not our brain.

We are the extended physicality — we are relative consciousness.

He says: "We are the world we perceive.' (—Riccardo Manzotti)

as snow falls

Yoghurt at 2am

Wood into stove

500mg acetaminophen with water

time will tell

Maybe this will pass.

What is this?

an excerpt

pain is tedious
like sleepless hours
middle of night —
staying put

objectless awareness

Bell is invited.

<<<   b o n g   >>>

Everything is born.

Reverberation fades.

>>>   s i l e n c e   <<<

Everything dies.

Still, the bell is still here as it was before being invited and after reverberation fades.

To return to your original state of being,
You must become a master of stillness.
Activity for health’s sake,
Never carried to the point of strain,
Must alternate with perfect stillness.
Sitting motionless as a rock,
Turn next to stillness of mind.
Close the gates of the senses.
Fix your mind upon one object or,
Even better, enter a state
Of objectless awareness.
Turn the mind in upon itself
And contemplate the inner radiance. 

- Anonymous (dailyzen.com)

Bell is life itself.

No birth, no death.

Sound when it sounds, silence when it falls silent.

morning light, dawning

In prison yesterday remembering a card with four squares and the words “you are not alone.”

How the first letters (ya na) seem to ask question, “yes?”, “no?”

And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone. (—Matthew 14:23)

The thought occurs— you are not alone, god is alone.

If we elide “alone” from either side of the comma, it reads— you are not, god is.

You are not — alone is.

Only alone.

So it goes!

Perhaps this is why so few people have faith in god, so few people actually believe, and move, and have their being in god,

God is all there is. God is “here.” Here is all there is.

I hear, differently, Gertrude Stein’s “There’s no there there.” Every there becomes here to someone thinking they’re going there.

Every child on a trip, so goes the meme, asks “Are we there yet?” Parents lie and say, “Almost!” Or “Soon!”

But there is no-there there. Here is no-there.

Or, perhaps, “here is not-here.”

The absence of god becomes clearer.

The death of god, to our thinking, becomes present.

God is present in this absence.

We are all alone; we are not alone.

We are all; we are not.

The objective disappears.

Nothing other appears, and there is nothing to be seen.

Matthew says, “...he was there alone.”

And so, you are not alone. You are not there.

Jesus did there in.

You are here.

“Here” is the name of god.

Goethe wrote: Names are but noise and smoke / Obscuring heavenly light.

Outside this window, morning light, dawning!

announcing temporary end to senseless shutdown

Wallman perseverates

his repetitive
his repetitive
his repetitive

wall-points

again
and again.

God help us, this is so tedious!

friday afternoon haiku

Winter tree —

Scarf of snow wrapping trunk

Bare ground, January thaw

lies and liars

Thinking about mendacity and this country's leader(s):

Big Daddy: Now, why do ya drink?!   Brick: Give me my crutch.  .Big Daddy: Tell me first.   Brick: No, you give me a drink first and I'll tell ya.   Big Daddy: Tell me first! First you gotta tell me!   Brick: All right, disgust!   Big Daddy: DISGUST WITH WHAT?   Brick: You strike a hard bargain.   Big Daddy: Boy, do you want liquor that bad?   Brick: Yes, sir. I want liquor that bad. [Big Daddy hands him his crutch]           Big Daddy: Now tell me, what are you disgusted with?   Brick: Mendacity. You know what that is. It's lies and liars.   Big Daddy: Who's been lyin' to ya? Maggie? Has your wife been lyin' to ya?   Brick: No. Not one lie, not one person. The whole thing.          Big daddy: Mendacity. What do you know about mendacity? I could write a book on it...Mendacity. Look at all the lies that I got to put up with. Pretenses. Hypocrisy. Pretendin' like I care for Big Mama, I haven't been able to stand that woman in forty years. Church! It bores me. But I go. And all those swindlin' lodges and social clubs and money-grabbin' auxiliaries. It's-it's got me on the number one sucker list. Boy, I've lived with mendacity. Now why can't you live with it? You've got to live with it. There's nothin' to live with but mendacity. Is there?   Brick: Oh, yes sir. [Lifting his glass] You can live with this.   Big Daddy: That's not livin', that's a-dodgin away from life.       Brick: I want to dodge away from it.   Big Daddy: Then son, why don't you kill yourself?   Brick: 'Cause I like to drink.   Big Daddy: I can't talk to you.  Brick: I'm sorry.

(--from Cat on the Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams) http://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof/quote_4980.html 

It is a despicable time of American presidency. 

this existence brings

We are all afraid. We don’t know.

The only choice is to be frozen stiff with fear, or

Move step by step through fear to the next arriving place.

To move is to exercise faith.

To remain frozen is to enshrine fear.

This is our fate.

What to do with the fear being alive in this existence brings?

how is the patient

"The bomb can't be used unless civilization dies first." (--in Harlot's Ghost, by Norman Mailer, ch.33)

that which is moving and adopts

What endures?

Bergson suggests, our self.

As the new school year of 1901-1902 began, their desperate search was rewarded when Charles Peguy led them across the street from the Sorbonne to the Collège de France to hear Henri Bergson lecture, and in Bergson's elegant lectures they heard the beginning of the message they had been waiting for. When they listened to him they understood him to say, as Raissa put it, "that we could truly, absolutely, know what is." That Bergson was speaking not of the intelligence or reason, but a faculty that he called intuition that was opposed to the intelligence and its concepts did not matter to them then, but later it was to become a critical issue. No doubt they were hearing words like the inspiring words that were to fill Bergson's essay, "An Introduction to Metaphysics" which was to appear in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in January of 1903: "...an absolute could only be given in an intuition, whilst everything else falls within the province of analysis. By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible. (9) ... There is one reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing through time - our self which endures. (10) ... What is relative is the symbolic knowledge by pre-existing concepts, which proceeds from the fixed to the moving, and not the intuitive knowledge which installs itself in that which is moving and adopts the very life of things. This intuition attains the absolute." (11) 

(--Arraj, James (2011-11-06T22:58:59). MYSTICISM, METAPHYSICS AND MARITAIN: On the Road to the Spiritual Unconscious . Inner Growth Books and Videos, LLC. Kindle Edition.) 

 Yes, Bergson's words :"...intuitive knowledge ... installs itself in that which is moving and adopts the very life of things."

All aboard! 

after the religion medal at 8th grade graduation at St A's

An excerpt, sixty two years later:

EMPTINESS IS 'I' 

 It is not that "I am empty," but rather, that "emptiness is I" (Masao Abe, Zen and Western Thought, 13) 

To be religious is to live from the standpoint of emptiness

Carter [Robert E. Carter, in The Nothingness Beyond God] quotes the following well-known epigram by the 9th century Chinese master Qingyuan Weixin: 

Thirty years ago, before I began the study of Zen, I said, ‘Mountains are mountains, waters are waters.’After I got an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, I said, ‘Mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters.’But now, having attained the abode of final rest [that is, Awakening], I say, “Mountains are really mountains, waters are really waters.” 

At first, mountains and waters are just mountains and waters, real objects out there in the world. Then, they are no longer mountains and waters, just names. For the awakened, mountains and waters are again mountains and waters, but “lined with nothingness.” Both real objects and names at once, to be seen through the “double aperture,” which is two and at the same time one. This again is the meaning of the title Carter chose for his book on Nishida: The Nothingness Beyond God. The reference here is to Meister Eckhart, whom Nishida read, along with the most significant Christian thinkers, who posited a Godhead he saw as nothingness above God the Creator, acknowledging a deeper Dao-like source of non-being out of which God created the world of being. Nishida’s disciples, Nishitani, Keiji and Ueda, Shizuteru regarded Eckhart as close to Buddhism in his interpretation of Christianity. Ueda spent time in Germany to write a doctoral dissertation on Eckhart. In his last writings, Nishida seems to have hoped that the West finds its own way to his philosophy of nothingness through a recovery of its own religious tradition. He suggested parallels between Christianity and the Pure Land School of Buddhism, which are both devotional, that is, relying on the “other power” of a deity. In Japan, the two paths, Zen’s reliance on “own power,” and Pure Land’s reliance on “other power,” are seen as equally able to lead practitioners to awakening. Could Christianity learn to see itself as the same as Zen? Could philosophy and science see being and reason as enveloped by a broader “religious” logic of the place of nothingness? I wish I could believe that it can happen. The East, however, which has mastered Western ontology and objective thinking, while most of the West is still happy to remain ignorant of Asian nothingness and the concrete experience of actual reality in the present moment, will most probably get there before the West does!

(--by Nick Bea, from Kyoto School of Philosophy website,) https://thekyotoschoolofphilosophy.wordpress.com/emptiness-is-i/ 

It has always intrigued me, the question: What holds us together?

Now, nothing.

who will care for the baby

Red hats
Native American drums —
many versions Rashômon the air

Looking and listening
silently —
what a fool I am

can nothing be something

There's missed calls everywhere

black men shot by police

banks taking homes from poor


women overpowered by men

bodies defeated by cancer

institutions crushing individuality



     a missed call in a championship football game



what's not right is never made right, not

by assertion or saying what's done is done

nothing's done


it all slip-slides down the road

folded paper in back pocket

documents placed in courthouse folders



     there is no defense for what's not right



what's right

is each time

created new


when what may be

comes about

in our seeing



     what has never been



become  

what is  

now here


where faith

reduces everything

to unknowing yet caring gaze

shall we look to the future this snowy sunday

no
practice
today

this is true face

Morning practice at hermitage.

After sitting and chanting, this:

A Teaching from Zen Master Jinen, 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APjXpUnHw20

Original face is just this.

Truth is facing this without concept.

iiwwii

What once was called marrying God, or called heiros gamos, or called becoming a bride of Christ, or any other designation of mystical union with the divine -- was the longing to overcome the perceived and felt separation/alienation common to the experience of distracted, disorientated, or dispersed human beings. It occurs when subjects became objects, and thinking objectification became rife in everyday experience.

Last evening's conversation brought us to the primacy of listening, the primacy of pure looking.

This morning: iiwwii 

intimate  

interrelationality 

with  

what  

is  

immediate.

Another way to imagine one's way into that which is correlationally, authentically, inchoately whole within and without.

That which is, I suspect, original and current real reality before belief in artificial separation.

absurd: (surdus=deaf, dull)

We're meant to listen to one another in the same way we are meant to listen to the resonant energy flowing -- which we call God.

Listen up!

Don't be dull!

Ecoutez-bien!

and the music...

"Faith is twenty-four hours of doubt and one minute of hope." (--from film, "The Innocents")

Stark, haunting, and heartbreakingly beautiful.

And the music...

he preached himself through the fear of death

Between 15jan (MLK birthday) and 4apr (MLK deathday) I find a new interstice of holy and intense wonder.

This piece was 11 years ago.

'He Took Us to the Mountaintop'"Many of us, grown men, were crying," Kyles tells Renee Montagne. "We didn't know why we were crying. We had no way of knowing that would be the last speech of his life. And then he took us to the mountaintop ..." 

 "Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life — longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.                                                (— the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.)

Kyles says he's "so certain" that King "knew he wouldn't get there, but he wouldn't tell us that. That would have been too heavy for us, so he softened it." 
Afterward, "we had to help him to his seat behind that powerful, prophetic speech,"Kyles says. "He preached himself through the fear of death," Kyles says. "He just got it out of him. He just ... dealt with it. And we were just standing there. It was like, what did he know that we didn't know?" 

A Dream Partially Fulfilled
Kyles, who still preaches in Memphis, says that while much of King's dream has been realized, there's much more to do.  

When he speaks to people who were not alive or too young to remember King, Kyle says he tells them, "we're not going to get to the place where we can say, 'Dr. King's dream has been realized. Now we can go to the beach.' That's not going to happen. Much of it has been realized, but there is so much to do. But each generation will have its portion, and that helps to keep the dream alive."  

(--from, King Remembered on 40th Anniversary of Death, April 4, 2008, 4:00 PM ET, Heard on  All Things Considered)

life’s victories of doubt

On Frost:

I read “Directive” as one of those few rare poems that are, by Frost’s definitive hope, “a momentary stay against confusion.” The margin of “a momentary stay” is the saving grace of “Directive” and, greatly, its theme. Whoever demands a more ample margin had better be guided up Billy Graham’s public aisle; whoever can exist without metaphor had best forget Frost. But whomever “Directive” privately converts (Frost asks no less) can find his margin roughly extended in that strangely unknown Frost poem, “An Empty Threat”: 

     Better defeat almost,
     If seen clear,
     Than life’s victories of doubt
     That need endless talk talk
     To make them out. 

Terribly though doubt assailed him, nowhere in his work is Frost defeated by it. Skeptically as a lot of poems talk, nowhere in them is doubt victorious. Nor is there any poem that argues “almost better defeat," whether seen clear or not. What must be seen clear is the poised sequence of those words I’ve just disordered. My misquote, “almost better defeat," is narrowly, but wholly and perfectly, different from “better defeat almost.” The difference is as great as one man’s life might be from another’s; the distinction in order is, as Frost would have it, of the order of the distinction between prose and poetry. Defeat-almost was the ordeal of Frost’s life; it is the narrow victory his major poems dramatize, and the human margin of their greatness. As it climbs to marginal redemption through a myth made local by image, through an ordeal heightened by metaphor, “Directive” is one of the greatest. It stays defeat by bettering being lost.

(--from, Robert Frost’s Prime Directive, by Philip Booth. Originally appeared in Master Poems of the English Language, edited by Oscar Williams (Pocket Books, 1966). Reprinted in Trying to Say it: Outlooks and Insights on How Poems Happen by Philip Booth (University of Michigan, 1996). on poets.org)

This frosty morning.

Following Mary Oliver's death. 

looking up ἄξιος, finding it a good word

Sometimes, just to luxuriate in a word:

axios: of weight, of worth, worthy

Original Word: ἄξιος, ία, ιον
Part of Speech: Adjective
Transliteration: axios
Phonetic Spelling: (ax'-ee-os)
Definition: of weight, of worth, worthy
Usage: worthy, worthy of, deserving, comparable, suitable.

HELPS Word-studies

514 áksios (an adjective derived from aksō, "to weigh") – properly, to weigh in, assigning the matching value ("worth-to-worth"); worthy, i.e. as the assessment in keeping with how something "weighs in" on God's balance-scale of truth. 

514 /áksios ("weighed-in") "properly means, 'drawing down the scale' hence 'weighing as much as,' 'of like value, worth,' befitting, congruous, corresponding" (J. Thayer).

[514 (áksios) is the root of the English term, "axis." This also refers to a balance-scale, operating by off-setting weights.]

(--from, Strong's Concordance, https://biblehub.com/greek/514.htm)

faith is where your ass is at!

Epigraph to Norman Mailer's "Harlot's Ghost":

Ephesians 6:12 New International Version (NIV) 

12  For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

And yet, it seems there's lots of help from Washington Republicans, Banking Industry, Corporations worldwide, White Nationalists, Sex Traffickers, Drug Cartels, Liars of all stripes, Police excesses, Defense industries, the perduring Unawakened Ignorant,  and (let's face it)  me (dammit) -- all the contributors to the less-than-glorious potential of life-in-the-world as realized by loving, caring, and compassionate beings.

Some words by Daniel Berrigan:

"If you are going to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood." 

"No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being. 

"The gift we can offer others is so simple a thing as hope." 

"One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the U.S. around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better." 

"Faith is rarely where your head is at. Nor is it where your heart is at. Faith is where your a-- is at!" 

"The Jesuits I know who have died and all their lives were great teachers, they're the least remembered people." 

"You have to struggle to stay alive and be of use as long as you can." 

"Because success is such a weasel word anyway, it's such a horribly American word, and it's such a vamp and, I think it's a death trap." 

"You can't bank on the outcome." 

https://www.ibtimes.com/daniel-berrigan-famous-quotes-renowned-jesuit-priest-poet-peace-activist-dies-94-2362192 

gratitude for a real poet

Thank you, Mary Oliver! 

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder 

if I have made of my life something particular, and real. 

                     (--from, “When Death Comes,” poem by Mary Oliver)

(Born: September 10, 1935, Died: January 17, 2019)

where once becomes

That was then.

Once there was a way 

To get back homeward. 

Once there was a way 

To get back home. 

(--from, Golden Slumbers, by JOHN LENNON, PAUL MCCARTNEY

This is now.

Stay with this.

Where once is all there ever is.

within/without seminar

A glimpse, at times, is all you get.

Sometimes, it's all that's needed.

The Red Wheelbarrow                

so much depends
upon 

a red wheel
barrow 

glazed with rain
water 

beside the white
chickens.

(--Poem by William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963)  

At prison graduation ceremony yesterday an unconsummated moment when an unfinished carved book (they say) was not presented to me upon the rumor I was finished teaching for the university (and/or) at the prison. I could neither confirm nor deny the rumor beyond my typical end of term "I'm done!"

Speaking to a former graduate about his spirits and feelings I see he (and others) might benefit from a post-grad seminar-of-sorts set up to involve members of the outside community and men on the inside reading agreed upon texts, writing pieces about their thought/feeling/experience, exchanging them inside/outside, commenting, dialoguing, and philosophizing into the next piece of reading/writing. This would be an open support-learning community done within and without to deepen the core reality of our being-with one another and lernen-lassen (letting learning happen).

We could resurrect the title of our year long meetings with individuals at the prison begun in 2015, and expand it -- ILU COTO.

Here's how we described it:

 ILU COTO

individual learning       understanding       conversation together
(ilu coto translates as: the illusion of barrier, opening beyond preserve/reserve)
1x1 conversation, contemplative, meditative, corresponding   

ilu coto is the invitation to converse with one another about things that open us to what is present, and what is beyond our ordinary awareness. 

And so, this:

A New Seminar 

there's
so much 

at 4AM
silence reveals 

as darkness
retiring 

slips away 

within
without 

notice

     (--wfh, 16jan19)

being led out

In the Maximum Security Prison twenty men today received either an AA or BA degree from The University of Maine at Augusta.

We were there.

Good for the soul, it was.

It was.

Yes.

awakening reveals

No other.

Ultimately, morality, wisdom, and meditation are equally vital aspects of the Way that mutually condition one another. Awakening reveals the no-thingness of things—that no thing is apart from all other things. To realize truly that there is only this nature, with no “other” outside us, is to naturally want to refrain from causing harm, just as we refrain from doing harm to one of our own limbs or eyes. The Ten Cardinal Precepts then articulate how to live up to this vision of things as they are—as one. Conversely, by upholding the precepts even before awakening, we are allowing the afflictions that obstruct that experience to loosen and dissolve. And since the precepts collectively may be seen as a description of enlightened conduct, in harmonizing with them we are actualizing our buddhanature.
(--from, Pain, Passion, and the Precepts, In upholding the precepts, we actualize our buddhanature, By Bodhin Kjolhede, WINTER 2011)

If no other, then, love one an other.

meshugas

Soon, someday, the current president will no longer be president.

It will be nice to not be surrounded by ludicrous and meshugas.

It remains to decipher how and why he happened.

the essence of existence is the out-standing standing within the essential separation

Researching hypokeimenon, (because we are reading Nishida Kitarō tonight), I find the following:

1. 
   

The Hypokeimenon Story.         

Modernism also gave new meaning to what it means to be a subject, and the primary source of this innovation was the ego cogito of Descartes’ Meditations. The pre-Cartesian meaning of subject (Gk. hypokeimenon; Lat. subiectum) can still be seen in the "subjects" one takes in school or the "subject" of a sentence. In this ancient sense all things are subjects, things with "underlying [essential] kernels," as the Greek literally says and as Greek metaphysics proposed. (As opposed to substance metaphysics, the process view of this pansubjectivism makes all individuals subjects of some sort of experience.) After Cartesian doubt, however, there is only one subject of experience of which we are certain--viz., the human thinking subject. All other things in the world, including persons and other sentient beings, have now become objects of thought, not subjects in their own right. Cartesian subjectivism, therefore, gave birth simultaneously to modern objectivism as well. With the influence of the new mechanical cosmology, the stage was set for uniquely modern forms of otherness and alienation. https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/ngier/hypokeim.htm

And this:

    2.

Hypokeimenon (Greek: ὑποκείμενον), later often material substratum, is a term in metaphysics which literally means the "underlying thing" (Latin: subiectum).
To search for the hypokeimenon is to search for that substance which persists in a thing going through change—its basic essence.  (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypokeimenon

Finally, this:

   3.

20. In his broader “history of being,” Heidegger traces “subjectivism” back to Plato, whose doctrine of the ideas begins a movement whereby truth is no longer understood solely in terms of the manifestation of entities themselves but, instead, becomes a feature of our own “representational” capacities. In this way, truth becomes a matter of the way we secure our knowledge of entities rather than of the prior way entities disclose themselves to us. (On this “displacement of the locus of truth” from being to human subjectivity, see Thomson 2005, p. 160.) 

21. The modern prejudice that (to put it simply) all meaning comes from the human subjectreaches its most powerful apotheosis in Nietzsche and Freud. From Heidegger's perspective, however, this phenomenologically mistaken view misses (and subsequently obscures) the fact that meaning emerges at the prior practical intersection of human beings with their worlds (as well as in our engaged negotiations with one another). Heidegger is thus an ethical realist, one whose phenomenological investigations led him to recognize that the world is no mute partner but, rather, actively contributes to our most profound sense of what matters (see below and Thomson 2004). 

22. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger again presents his phenomenological conception of “existence” as a way to undercut and transcend the modern subject/object dichotomy: “In existence, however, humanity does not first move out of something ‘interior’ to something ‘exterior’; rather, the essence of existence is the out-standing standing within the essential separation [i.e., the ontological difference between being and entities thought in terms of the essential strife that joins “earth and world”] belonging to the clearing of beings.” (PLT 67/GA5 55)  

23. As this suggests, Heidegger's later work is dedicated to detecting, resisting, and, ultimately, transcending what he took to be the core of the Nazi ideology. For a justification of this admittedly provocative claim, see Thomson 2011, Ch. 7. On Heidegger's attempt to transcend aesthetics from within, see also Sallis 2008, Ch. 8. 

(--Notes to Heidegger's Aesthetics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger-aesthetics/notes.html

There you are!

While I like "the essence of existence is the out-standing standing within the essential separation," (cf.3: 22 above), I also like the pre-Cartesian "subjects in their own right." (cf.1, above).

By-and-by, if I open my mouth beyond Nishida, we should all be asleep by 7:29pm.

surcease solemnity of 3AM

With undulating chant

voices find narrow passage

through inner darkness --

 out-breath opens emptiness

follow; closely

God does not care for you. 

There's no subject/object here. 

God is care itself. 

And you are nothing other than; God.

six degrees; the nothingness beyond, god

Our yearning to care in a world yearning for care.

At times we don't care.

A coincidence of opposites.

as monks chant prime

Morning covering of snow.

Spring flowers, autumn moon, 

Summer breeze, winter snow 

When the mind is free from 

Unnecessary thoughts, 

Every season is just perfect! 

                 -- Ekai. (DailyZen)

Morning purring of cat.

first love

1 Jn 4:19-5:4

Those who love God must also love their brother and sister.

A reading from the first Letter of Saint John

Beloved, we love God because
   he first loved us.
If anyone says, “I love God,”
   but hates his brother, he is a liar;
   for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen
   cannot love God whom he has not seen.
This is the commandment we have from him:
whoever loves God must also love his brother.

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten by God,
   and everyone who loves the father
   loves also the one begotten by him.
In this way we know that we love the children of God
   when we love God and obey his commandments.
For the love of God is this,
   that we keep his commandments.
And his commandments are not burdensome,
   for whoever is begotten by God conquers the world.
And the victory that conquers the world is our faith.

(--from Readings, Thursday after Epiphany)

through chaos reaching

His name was Duffy in the book. 

 "He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses." (--from, A Painful Case, by James Joyce, in The Dubliners)

Elsewhere, say, in Washington, another man wanders through chaos reaching for anyone nearby to cling to something solid.

We can only hope he, not the man in the story, moves further and further away into some enclosed setting where his grabbing hands find no one to drag down. 

not necessary to continue in the same direction

Listening to man who wants to build a wall. He is a mountain, not unlike the mountain of refuse at our town dump.

山不转路转 

Shān bù zhuǎn lù zhuǎn  [shan bu zhuan lu zhuan] 

A mountain cannot turn, but a road can 

It is not necessary to continue in the same direction, there are other alternatives to avoid an obstacle 

There's more than one way to skin a cat

mountain no turn road turn

http://www.chinasage.info/proverbstrive.htm 

Surely there is a road the rest of us can peregrinate.

Wave to that man.

He, or we, must leave this place. 

illimitably, through earth

A day will come when everyone will figure out that stupidity is no way to negotiate the needs of the world.

Whirled by the three passions,

One's eyes go blind; 

Closed to the world of things, 

They see again. 

In this way I live: 

Straw hatted, staff in hand, 

I move illimitably, 

Through earth, through heaven. 

               - Ungo (1580-1659) (dailyzen.com)

I look forward to seeing that day.

who wants to be forgotten

There is much to worry about here.

Q: "And you don't want to be forgotten?"
A: "Who wants to be forgotten?"
(--Loujain al-Hathloul, interviewed by Mona EL Naggar, NYT video, Ladies First: Saudi Arabia's Female Candidates

In case we forget.

See also The tragedy of Fahad Albutairi and Loujain al-Hathloul, by Kirk Rudell, 1/4/19, Washington Post

There  are  places  in  the  world  where  wealth  and  power  are  hard  luxuries  to  endure.