even today i am still arriving

It was merely suite #1 in G major by Johann Sebastian Bach. I cried. Bach has come closer to me since I used to play it on radio for our Border Collie. I think it calmed him. It does me. Orchestral Suite # 2 follows. They are visits as I read Bernard Lonergan's Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. I began reading the work in 1964 in the library of a Franciscan seminary college in Callicoon NY. After 56 years I still look for it in my library and still hold it near begun.

Last night at Sunday Evening Practice we read from Nietzsche and Zen, An Essay in Philosophical Theology, by Stephen Priest. An excerpt: 

The fear of death is not overcome by belief in a metaphysically transcendent afterlife. For example, Nietzsche repudiates, and the Zen Buddhists do not endorse, any reality similar to the Judeo-Christian heaven or hell. Rather they advocate a profound self- transformation in what it is to be human. A human being has to become the kind of being for whom death is not disturbing. This transformation is not essentially brought about by the acquisition of new beliefs but by living in a different way. By the practice of the kind of meditation called za-zen, and by ceasing to be subject to 'herd morality’ or 'slave morality' a person becomes the kind of being who is not afraid to die. Nevertheless, fear of death is defused by the acquisition of two central insights. One concerns rebirth, the other concerns the self.

It is an entailment of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return and the Zen doctrine of rebirth that any human being has been born and has died innumerable times before this life. We face innumerable births and deaths in lives to come. Both doctrines admit of both a metaphysical and a non-metaphysical interpretation, or both a literal and metaphorical reading.

Read metaphorically, Nietzsche is saying that one should have the strength to live one's life as if one could bear for it to be repeated in every detail an infinite number of times in the future. One would then live with a life-affirming energy and an authenticity of commitment which would make living thoroughly worthwhile. The French atheistic existentialist novelist and playwright, Albert Camus, says at the start of his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942):

‘There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.’

Nietzsche would have urged us to answer in the affirmative.
Read literally, Nietzsche is saying that one's life as a matter of metaphysical

fact has been repeated in every detail an infinite number of times in the past and will be in the future. Nietzsche, the anti-metaphysical philosopher, is showing us that he can do metaphysical philosophy of the most disturbing and outrageous kind.

Read metaphorically, the Zen Buddhists are saying that within this life there is a kind of birth and death from moment to moment; a coming to be and passing away of the galaxy of thoughts and emotions that constitute one's 'self' or 'mind'. Inwardly, or mentally, each of us is ceasing to be and beginning to be at any moment of our lives, no matter how brief. I am always dying, always being reborn. (We shall see later, however, that what we think of as the end of a life is not radically different from these transitions. Up to a point, this blurs the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical readings.)

Read literally, the Zen Buddhists are saying that at the moment of one's biological death (or soon after), one is reborn as a new life. There is life after death in the sense of another life after death. Each human person lives many karmically induced lives. The life that one thinks of as 'my life' is only the current one. Clearly, the metaphorical and the literal construals of each doctrine are mutually consistent. I can live my life as though it would be infinitely repeated and it could be true that it will be infinitely repeated. I might be psychologically reborn and die at every moment of a life and be reborn at the end of that life.

(--pp. 10-11, from NIETZSCHE AND ZEN, An Essay in Philosophical Theology, by Stephen Priest) 

Someone mentioned during conversation she thought it would be interesting to know when she would die so as to be prepared. It occurred to me that I just might know when. It is now I die and now I am reborn. And here I go again, and here I return. Gone once more, back once more.

This process of coming and going, going and coming in and out of existence is the fundamental oscillation of being-in-the-world.

The first line of the poem "Please Call Me By My True Names" by Thich That Hanh, often breezed by on the way to the rest of the poem, is: 

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow—even today I am still arriving.

I look around.

A breeze passes through.

For now I am still here. I have nowhere else to go. 

solventur risu tabulae

A time will come when Horace's words will follow dishonorable individuals out of their offices they irresponsibly administered.

I suspect many lips will curl when thinking of the back of them leaving with scorn.

Solventur risu tabulae, tu missus abibis

 The case [person?] is dismissed with a laugh [ridicule?], the court is dismissed, and you are sent away. (Horace) 

It is an odd and awful time we live in.

May both the corrupters and their supporters turn to kinder more respectful ways going forward! 

facing radical core

Heart is for love. Yes

Love is root reality. 

Face what is in heart 

finally, a sign

 

wait a minute

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

I have heard

This

One.

Well done, you’ve stopped ‘me.’

melancholia

I played Bach for him

Before he died. Now cello 

Gives itself to me

far and wide

I was in New York when he pitched there.  I tried, but was never able to say the Mets were my team. My team got lost in 1957 somewhere in the air between Ebbets Field in Crown Heights Brooklyn and Dodgers Stadium somewhere in Los Angeles. I have a blue cap with white 'B' on crown. It is a grave marker and I am a walking funeral procession through a dispossessed ghosted ballpark hovering over the streets in a Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1950s with leather Wilson glove hanging from Louisville Slugger carried across handlebars of Schwinn bicycle.

 Tom Seaver, Pitcher Who Led ‘Miracle Mets’ to Glory, Dies at 75

By Bruce Weber

• Sept. 2, 2020, The New York Times 

Tom Seaver, one of baseball’s greatest right-handed power pitchers, a Hall of Famer who won 311 games for four major league teams, most notably the Mets, whom he led from last place to a surprise world championship in his first three seasons, died on Monday. He was 75.

The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia and Covid-19, according to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

At 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, give or take a few, with a thick waist and tree-trunk legs that helped generate the velocity on his fastball and hard slider and the spin on his curveball, Seaver at work was a picture of kinetic grace. He had a smooth windup, a leg kick with his left knee raised high, and a stride so long after pushing off the mound that his right knee often grazed the dirt.

With precise control, he had swing-and-miss stuff. He struck out more than 200 batters in 10 different seasons, a National League record, and on April 22, 1970, facing the San Diego Padres, he struck out a record 10 batters in a row to end the game. His total of 3,640 strikeouts in his 20 big-league seasons is sixth on the career list.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/obituaries/tom-seaver-dead-coronavirus.html 

It was 1955 and I was walking home from grammar school on 61st and Bay Parkway to 19th Ave and 69th Street. Every store along the route on 20th Ave had the World Series ballgame either on TV or radio. I'd stop in each doorway to listen to the broadcasters coloring the action. It was the Yankees they were playing. By the time I got to Stein's Deli where I, as an eleven year old, bought quarts of Rheingold Beer for my father, carrying the two bottles each time in brown bag home, it was the final inning.

Brooklyn won the series 4-3. There was joy in the neighborhood.

I wasn't very good as a player as a kid. But when I played in my first college game I hit it over the left fielder's head and made it home on a poor throw in from the edge of the field. I call it a home run, but it wasn't, not really. I never hit as well as I did during those college practice sessions when batting practice was thrown by our coach who was a former Boston Red Sox pitcher. I can feel the crack and sting of swinging contact with his fastball sending it far and wide those brief moments of happy memory. 

near and dear

 Solidarity is recognizing and appreciating the differences and diversity within existence without manufacturing division and detachment.

There’s a difference between not being attached, and detachment.

The subtlety of being there, as you are, near and dear, without clinging.

how we began humanities course in prison by zoom thursday

 Conversation with a Stone

                     by Wislawa Szymborska

I knock at the stone’s front door

“It’s only me, let me come in.

I want to enter your insides,

have a look around,

breathe my fill of you.”

“Go away,” says the stone.

“I’m shut tight.

Even if you break me to pieces,

we’ll all still be closed.

You can grind us to sand,

we still won’t let you in.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.

“It’s only me, let me come in.

I’ve come out of pure curiosity.

Only life can quench it.

I mean to stroll through your palace,

then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.

I don’t have much time.

My mortality should touch you.”

“I’m made of stone,” says the stone.

“And must therefore keep a straight face.

Go away.

I don’t have the muscles to laugh.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.

“It’s only me, let me come in.

I hear you have great empty halls inside you,

unseen, their beauty in vain,

soundless, not echoing anyone’s steps.

Admit you don’t know them well yourself.

“Great and empty, true enough,” says the stone,

“but there isn’t any room.

Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste

of your poor senses.

You may get to know me but you’ll never know me through.

My whole surface is turned toward you,

all my insides turned away.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.

“It’s only me, let me come in.

I don’t seek refuge for eternity.

I’m not unhappy.

I’m not homeless.

My world is worth returning to.

I’ll enter and exit empty-handed.

And my proof I was there

will be only words,

which no one will believe.”

“You shall not enter,” says the stone.

“You lack the sense of taking part.

No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.

Even sight heightened to become all-seeing

will do you no good without a sense of taking part.

You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,

only its seed, imagination.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.

“It’s only me, let me come in.

I haven’t got two thousand centuries,

so let me come under your roof.”

“If you don’t believe me,” says the stone,

“just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.

Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.

And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.

I am bursting from laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,

although I don’t know how to laugh.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.

“It’s only me, let me come in.

“I don’t have a door,” says the stone.

(—From “Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997” by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (Harcourt Brace: 274 pp.)

a sentence

 Morality is action with truth caring for the other.

something visible

This from Center for Action and Contemplation:

The Illusion of the Separate Self

Tuesday,  September 1, 2020

CAC faculty member James Finley studied under Thomas Merton as a young monk in formation. While many have been influenced by Merton’s writings, few have had the opportunity to learn from the mystic himself. Today, Jim reflects on the insights on the True Self and false self that he gleaned from Thomas Merton.

In the following text Merton makes clear that the self-proclaimed autonomy of the false self is but an illusion. . . .

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.

This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.

We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves—the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin. [1] . . .

The false self, sensing its fundamental unreality, begins to clothe itself in myths and symbols of power. Since it intuits that it is but a shadow, that it is nothing, it begins to convince itself that it is what it does. Hence, the more it does, achieves and experiences, the more real it becomes. Merton writes,

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. [2]

Richard again: Our false self is how we define ourselves outside of love, relationship, or divine union. After we have spent many years laboriously building this separate self, with all its labels and preoccupations, we are very attached to it. And why wouldn’t we be? It’s what we know and all we know. To move beyond it will always feel like losing or dying

(—from Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, 1sept20)

This meditation points out what appears to be the premier problem facing anyone trying to see and act in the world as an integral whole.

These days the thrust of virulent power is to split and fragment, divide and segregate what is in its true nature of a piece, an Itself, difference without division.

If, as a thinker, you wonder about God, you are one contemplating One.

Does this point to an inside within no outside? A vast variety of life-within-itself? A diffusion of multiplicity within unicity?

I suspect that what we long for is love.

Love allows itself, each itself, to be Itself, one-another.

who can hear any more

 Desolation day—

The crass sound of his voice, per-

fidy in practice

this longing can surprise you

Michael McCarthy says that for 50,000 generations, we were wildlife. 

Tippett:

I spoke, once, with a Buddhist teacher, Joanna Macy. I don’t know if you’re familiar with her. She’s been — she was involved in environmentalism before the word was coined. And she talks about, also, our “fierce love for the world” and that when we — when someone you love is sick, is in the hospital, is ailing, is dying, you don’t — you go sit with them, and you don’t say, “Well, I’m busy.” But with the world that we love, with our insects and our birds and our blossoms, it’s so overwhelming, we turn away. And yet, I think you’re making that connection too, that — what is that bond, you say, that bond we have with the natural world? If we could take that seriously, that could keep us, also, attending, and then healing, participating.

If I ask you to start — this vast question, what does it mean to be human, as you’ve lived your life and the things you’ve cared about, the observations you’ve made, how would you begin to speak about how your understanding of that has evolved, what it means to be human?

McCarthy:

Well, the single greatest thing in our lives is the love for another person, that’s what I think, whoever we are and whoever the other person is. But human love is transcendent. I think it’s the single greatest experience we can have, and I rejoice when anyone has it and finds it, and if I could wave a wand, the thing I would do is let every individual find the love of another individual. I think that’s what I would do.

But in terms of the context in which we’ve been talking, clearly, we humans come from somewhere. And where we came from, where we emerged from is the natural world. And for 50,000 generations, we were wildlife. Well, we don’t think we are, anymore, and probably, we’re not. But we were just another species. I think — for myself, I cannot see our identity as humans as separate from the natural world from which we emerged. And what I think is that in the end, our spirits have an urge; they have a longing, still, to be part of it. And I think this longing can surprise you; it could suddenly leap out in certain circumstances; you could suddenly realize you’re surprised by the strength of your feelings. But I do feel that to be fully human is to recognize that the natural world is where we came from, and it remains part of us. And without it, being fully human is something we cannot do. 

 

(--from On Being with Krista Tippett, orig. 3may18, Michael McCarthy, :Nature, Joy, and Human Becoming )

What are we now? 

And where, it should be asked, is our joy?

about which, at friday evening conversation, we spoke

Poem

        BY JORIE GRAHAM

The earth said

remember me.

The earth said

don’t let go,

said it one day

when I was

accidentally

listening, I

heard it, I felt it

like temperature,

all said in a

whisper—build to-

morrow, make right be-

fall, you are not

free, other scenes

are not taking

place, time is not filled,

time is not late, there is

a thing the emptiness

needs as you need

emptiness, it

shrinks from light again &

again, although all things

are present, a

fact a day a

bird that warps the

arithmetic of per-

fection with its

arc, passing again &

again in the evening

air, in the pre-

vailing wind, making no

mistake—yr in-

difference is yr

principal beauty

the mind says all the

time—I hear it—I

hear it every-

where. The earth

said remember

me. I am the

earth it said. Re-

member me.

(—from, Poetry, January 2020)

troweling words

Comings and goings. Surrounding what we think of as home. A former president and his wife, hammer in hand, the measured activity of building houses. The poet, archeologist of soul’s home-ground, troweling words from hidden origination, revealing artifact and symbology.

What we call ‘ourselves’ is home.

We dig.

 For me, one of the most important messages from Gebser is, that the arational structure of consciousness, which in his opinion has been in the process of “constellating” itself since the turn of the century, does indeed depend for its full emergence on each individual person. We all have to do  the work of self-transcendence which, as Gebser freely admits, is the most difficult of all human tasks.  He said:

“All work, the genuine work which we must achieve, is that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves. If we do not freely take upon ourselves this “acceptance” of the pain and torment, they will be visited upon us in otherwise individual and universal collapse.” (Kulturphilosophie als Methode und Wagnis, p. 409)

 (—from piece about The Ever Present Origin by Jean Gebser, in spirituality, consciousness, and me)

A friend’s brother has entered Sussman House, an end of life hospice facility. Some would say he is going home.

Where is home?

A second question is necessary:

Where are you?

Werde du selbst!

quiet gaze of reality looking in on itself

We don't know God. We can't. God is unknowable. 

But we can pray. Even though awareness of what prayer is or what prayer does remains shrouded in a magical or mythical mind considering how to made things appear or disappear, how to please or assuage that in whose direction prayers are dispensed.

Why do we pray? We might think that if we do the Buddha, or God, or the deity will look kindly upon us, bestow blessings, protect us. We might believe that if we don’t, the deity won’t like us, might even punish us. But the purpose of prayer is not to win the approval or avert the wrath of an exterior God.

To the extent that we understand Buddha, God, the deity, to be an expression of ultimate reality, to that extent we receive blessings when we pray. To the extent that we have faith in the boundless qualities of the deity’s love and compassion, to that extent we receive the blessings of those qualities.

Sometimes we project human characteristics onto things that aren’t human. For example, if we sentimentally think, “My dog is meditating with me,” we’re only attributing that behavior to the dog; we’re imagining what it’s doing. When we anthropomorphize God, we project our own faults and limitations, imagining they’re God’s as well. This is why many people believe that God either likes or dislikes them depending on their behavior. “I won’t be able to have this or that because God doesn’t like me—I forgot to pray.” Or worse, “If God doesn’t like me, I’ll end up in hell.”

If God feels happy or sad because we do or do not offer prayer, then God is not flawless, not an embodiment of perfect compassion and love. Any manifestation of the absolute truth, by its very nature, has neither attachment to our prayers nor aversion to our lack of them. Such attributes are projections of our own mind.

To understand how prayer works, consider the sun, which shines everywhere without hesitation or hindrance. Like God or Buddha, it continuously radiates all its power, warmth, and light without differentiation. When the earth turns, it appears to us that the sun no longer shines. But that has nothing to do with the sun; it’s due to our own position on the shadow side of the earth. If we inhabit a deep, dark mine shaft, it’s not the sun’s fault that we feel cold. Or if we live on the earth’s surface but keep our eyes closed, it’s not the sun’s fault that we don’t see light. The sun’s blessings are all-pervasive, whether we are open to them or not. Through prayer, we come out of the mine shaft, open our eyes, become receptive to enlightened presence, the omnipotent love and compassion that exist for all beings.  

(--from, Prayer: Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, A Tibetan master explains that using deities in prayer is a method intended to eliminate duality. By Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, Tricycle, Spring 2000)

Earth. 

Earth is the galaxy, the universe, underfoot.

We humans are the earth, galaxy, and universe in the shoes feet ankles legs hips sternum shoulders eyes nose mouth and ears -- hats on heads and quiet gaze of reality looking in on itself.

Which is what prayer is -- quiet gaze of reality looking in on itself.

And seeing nothing there, breathes in and out that nothing, thanking God for what is passing through, even as we look at/as this.

Love, as it is, our prayer.

light enough to pass for breath

 Mourning 

                           (by Carolyn Forché) 

A peacock on an olive branch looks beyond

the grove to the road, beyond the road to the sea,

blank-lit, where a sailboat anchors to a cove.

As it is morning, below deck a man is pouring water into a cup,

listening to the radio-talk of the ships: barges dead

in the calms awaiting port call, pleasure boats whose lights

hours ago went out, fishermen setting their nets for mullet,

as summer tavernas hang octopus to dry on their lines,

whisper smoke into wood ovens, sweep the terraces

clear of night, putting the music out with morning

light, and for the breath of an hour it is possible

to consider the waters of this sea wine-dark, to remember

that there was no word for blue among the ancients,

but there was the whirring sound before the oars

of the great triremes sang out of the seam of world,

through pine-sieved winds silvered by salt flats until

they were light enough to pass for breath from the heavens,

troubled enough to fell ships and darken thought — 

then as now the clouds pass, roosters sleep in their huts,

the sea flattens under glass air, but there is nothing to hold us there:

not the quiet of marble nor the luff of sail, fields of thyme,

a vineyard at harvest, and the sea filled with the bones of those

in flight from wars east and south, our wars, their remains

scavenged on the seafloor and in its caves, belongings now

a flotsam washed to the rocks. Stand here and look

into the distant haze, there where the holy mountain

with its thousand monks wraps itself in shawls of rain,

then look to the west, where the rubber boats tipped

into the tough waves. Rest your eyes there, remembering the words

of Anacreon, himself a refugee of war, who appears

in the writings of Herodotus:

I love and do not love, I am mad and I am not mad.

Like you he thought himself not better,

nor worse than anyone else.

(Hear Carolyn Forché read her poem at Source: Poetry, October 2016)

what we came to see

small tea candle flame

lights hillside midnight visit

passing felled branches

the luminous interval

Surely some celestial event off in distant part of galaxy. A bright light suddenly expansive, then gone. Standing by road in pre-midnight darkness, looking skyward north by northeast, it shone then disappeared. No satellite, no plane, nothing resembling something I’d seen before. An exploding star? Perhaps a million light-years away come to where my glance happened by accident.

PROLOGUE

WE COME from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide: (a) the ascent toward composition, toward life, toward immortality; (b) the descent toward decomposition, toward matter, toward death. Both streams well up from the depths of primordial essence. Life startles us at first; it seems somewhat beyond the law, somewhat contrary to nature, somewhat like a transitory counteraction to the dark eternal fountains; but deeper down we feel that Life is itself without beginning, an indestructible force of the Universe. Otherwise, from where did that superhuman strength come which hurls us from the unborn to the born and gives us - plants, animals, men - courage for the struggle? But both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.

 (—from, THE SAVIOURS OF GOD, Spiritual Exercises by Nikos Kazantzakis Translated by Kimon Friar)

To grasp that vision, and harmonize.

Of a night in August. 

as earth receives

                  

                                                             (a haiku coming to rest alongside tree and brook)

after giving up 

heavy stones from brown rich depths

earth embraces Max

seeing with heart

                                       (haiku for max manjushri)

looking through window --

no one here but what once was 

as love passes through

 

max's yard, brook trails, meditation chapel, and peek-a-boo tree

 

the morning max manjushri ran out of fear

The visitors waved goodbye, blew the horn twice, turned right just after the gate opened for their departure. Saskia‘s family were leaving. She held Max until they were gone.

Such a sweet boy. Easily spooked easily stimulated. During thunderstorms he would jump on top of desk, television tables, bathroom windows, anything to escape the terror evoked in him. When someone shot a gun in the distance he would run frantically. 

The yard was fenced by some caring women working with Saskia. She had put in for the last eight months enormous time and effort trying to make him less fearful and more at home. And she has been successful. He was at home. He was calmer, this sweet boy. The vet still had him on anti-anxiety drugs. He was being given natural remedies, rescue remedies, and he was in a loving environment.

Still, fireworks, a gun firing from other side of Hosmer pond in the hills, the clang of dump truck tail slamming, or nail gun pounding from a distance — all would trigger him spontaneously sending him on a mission up and out, to get up higher, to get out of himself, terror in his eyes, beyond consolation — until soothing words, Saskia’s untiring ministrations, and the cats’ bewildered edgy watchfulness — in his own time — he’d come through.

Before we could get to the gate at bottom of dooryard, some loud report from some unidentifiable direction, jarred him and set him, fast as the wind, down dooryard, deaf and racing God knows where. We stepping after, loudly calling, at that point helpless as he sprinted in his blind fear through the gate, into Barnestown road. The loud and sickening bang, thud, crash hit of the downhill passenger car stopped everything. 

We were there and he…he was breathing his last. Saskia knelt at his side, the final look, the final heartbeat, then stillness. The man from the car that hit him was distraught. Another couple stopped to see if they could help.

Just like that. After eight months of opening and closing the enclosed space built for him by loving hands, keeping the dooryard gate closed for eight months making the hermitage more of an enclosure than ever before, eight months of unceasing patience and energy by Saskia to train, and care, and going for hikes, and vets, and special foods, anxiety meds, socializing with humans and other dogs, even a rapprochement with his two cat-mates, a ten second opening and a sudden sharp sound sent him away.

We are deeply saddened.

He is in the chapel/zendo surrounded by candles, incense, flowers, and vigil-keepers.

This four year old rescue Border Collie had a rough go of it in three or four homes before coming to us. We added the name Manjushri to the name Max he came with. Mañjuśrī is a bodhisattva associated with prajñā in Mahāyāna Buddhism. His name means "Gentle Glory" in Sanskrit.

His wisdom came hard. It had to travel through great fears. 

We love him.

We are grieving.

wash out a word

In world of dream I visit with man with whom I worked in New York and Philadelphia.

In world of dream he remains kind and non-assuming, easy to moment easy to word.

The thinker was saying in conversation from podcast that form is the activity of formlessness. 

He said the universe is the activity of consciousness. (—Rupert Spira)

We believe that something occurred forty years ago but it is only a belief. There is no duration able to sit across table with you. 

No accumulation of fragments of time to place on mantel.

His name, John. I was looking for a cork to stick fishing hook into. Then sitting with his staff.

There are no forty years. They are a story we tell to try to explain emptiness of mind.

It doesn’t matter, the story. It remains oblique and memorized lines for proscenium.

Scenes are set behind curtain, narrative spills from formulation of mind into overt script.

The dead are dead. Someone with Nietzschean mustache is carved into sentence with John.

I am seldom where I am, unremarkable void surrounding surfeiting role, mere improvisation.

As nobody, slipping through what must have been conjured history, I have never left this room; dawn lighting appears.

Just photos and letters, extant characterization — these are wisps of morning fog foraging shape.

There is nothing here. Shapeless lines of plucked words calling costumed actors to mythic stage — gestures and turns.

Awareness a screen colored by images of moving faces telling passing stories imagining consequence.

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit 

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” (―Omar Khayyám)

 

We are this morning.

We arrive only to depart.

No night follows.

No night precedes.

Exeunt omnes —

Se iam advenit!