do these analogies perplex

 Fear closes voices. Truth hides behind fear. People die with fear and truth failing to find open disclosure and moral courage.

Remember the cowardly, the leader who hid behind personal deception and broken character? Who failed to care? Who lied and lied?

We cannot allow the crime of distorted loyalty simply to drift away from carnage effected.

Finally, the intimidated experts slowly find their voices and acknowledge the pseudo-emperor did not have any clothes or raiment of truth anywhere on his exposed body.

 But it was Birx, who has been pilloried for praising Trump as being “so attentive to the scientific literature” and for not publicly correcting the president as he made outlandish claims about unproven therapies, whose disclosures — in one of her first televised interviews since leaving the White House in January — may have been the most compelling.

As of Sunday, more than 548,000 Americans have died from infection with the coronavirus.

“I look at it this way,” she said. “The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge.

“All of the rest of them,” she added, referring to almost 450,000 deaths, “in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially” had the administration acted more aggressively.

She also described a “very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult” phone call with Trump after she spoke out about the dangers of the virus last summer. “Everybody in the White House was upset with that interview,” she said. 

(—from, Birx lashes Trump’s pandemic response, citing needless deaths, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg New York Times,March 29, 2021, 1:39 a.m., in The Boston Globe)

Truth is a shy guest arriving at our table. It has followed incontinent elephant during absurd acclamations of grandiose pomposity walking down parade route of self-aggrandizement. 

Nero fiddled and our misleader duffed from golf course. Something seriously wrong happened. It begs for reckoning. But all that remains are scorecards with false accounting touting great victory.

He thought there was something to be gained by his lies and denials of what begged for truth.

We were snookered. He claims mulligan.

The dread clanging of metal hammer on iron spike has torn through flesh with sickening applause of drugged enthusiasts unwilling and unable to say “No!”

The condemnation of truth is long our courted proclamation. Justice wears blindfold and a gag and is chained to chance in a deteriorating mental casino named impotency and shameful forgery owned by a family without conscience.

I don’t know

 Yes

“Soon dead,” the zen master would tell 

his students whenever there was a fuss.

It is Holy Week.

I can hear him off in the distance,

“Now dead,” he is saying.

In the story Jesus rode death into Jerusalem.

It would soon die, death. What then?

Death dead, where is death?

Gone, gone. What remains?

(You cheeky bastard!)

You think I know?

arriving to depart

Consciousness rides mule up hill to town gate

Become our king, little thoughts exclaim

Knives in sleeves are fingered out of sight

Prepare to carve initials into shavings fell to dirt

unseen light behind closed door

 There are mysteries

In your refrigerator

Angels cannot reveal

Take honey yoghurt

Or chocolate milk on door

Scriptures not yet read

That monastery

Where prayer is always silence

Nothing moves God’s breath

gut yom tov

Shalom,

chag same’ach

no way, out

 Of course slavery is wrong. For everyone. Mostly for the enslaved.

And, of course sin is separation. But from what? And there’s the mistake.

We think we are separated from something, or from some state of perfection.

When I become fully human I suspect there will be sufficient awareness to realize there is nothing that I lacks.

(That phrasing is not dialect.)

No-thingness.

We are not things. We are no thing. I doesn’t see that.

It is the idea of nothing that frightens us.

Being nothing, doing nothing, will not be frightening when we are that doing what that is doing.

So much seems wrong.

And there is nothing...

We can 

Do

With that.

for the very first, time

 Virginity

When no one is used for your desire

When no-desire uses you for a resting place

Celebrate celibacy, if you find yourself there

remembering no more

 Everything falls away

This and that and the other

Until only you remain

In a world unpopulated

Birdsong and rain dripping

Car through morning wind

To town, to mountain rise

The way we purpose action

Why is this night so different

The screams, bloodstain, anguished

Horror of preferential murder, children

An ugliness of a chosen metaphor

I cannot celebrate memorializing violence

Making the horrible ritual ceremonial lore

because it favors me, a gift almighty given

A subjugation of gratitude sweating in hiding place

The mind can only make the story fit

An alibi of convenience — I am here because

Blood of innocence torn from helpless bodies

Marked doorway dripping red into hardened ground

The poet’s words:

Love, if you love me,

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,

the getting out

 

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness

(—from, The Rain, by Robert Creeley) 

everything falls away like last night’s rain

Morning sun a demented confusion

Cheerfully trying to remember what in dream

He’d forgotten after telling woman wearing

Choral brown his manner was 

to teach sideways, as if her hearing that

Meant anything at all. The children, you see,

Were dead, as the story namelessly rushes on

protect us lord as we stay awake

I am not religious. I am not spiritual. I am not yet a human being.

I am coming to be what I am not yet aware of.

Don’t call me by any of the names you know.

And asleep, rest, if you can, in his peace.

where have you gone

I looked long at where 

I'd been -- mute melancholy,

slow return back here 

At where I didn't

go -- quieter glance about,

lost in open drift

The day escapes me,

fog hides mountain across road --

cedar branch, slight shake

a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart

 I suspect every generation looks at hypocrisy and thinks it has never been worse than it is at the particular time of their looking. 

 Voting rights.

Gun explosion.

Sexual abuse and slavery.

The degradation of institutions.

Mistrust of everyone.

But I look at this time with the mind of doubt and confusion as tabby cat kneads her way into nesting after coming to my face with meew inquiry. We discuss what’s on menu for her breakfast. I suggest “cat food” for her consideration. She seems amenable. Turns. And settles in with the suggestion.

As for hypocrisy, thy name is “legislature” “house” and “senate” and your sin is always before you.

We don’t know what to do about sin. It seems too ingrained and a mere fact of being alive.

We don’t know what to say about what is so blatantly wrong in our conditions and circumstances, in the works of this generation of hypocrisy.

Friday morning psalm 51 contributes::

15 Open my lips, Lord,
    and my mouth will declare your praise.
16 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;
    you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
17 My sacrifice, O God, is[b] a broken spirit;
    a broken and contrite heart
    you, God, will not despise.

We like to believe the Lord will make things right from his residence in the great beyond. We wonder what is taking the Lord so long to set things right. Like waiting for a late colleague at the cafe. “Where ARE they?”

I have an idea what to do while waiting:

Let people vote. Make it easy.

Ban and eliminate assault weapons from general purchase and slaughtering rampage.

Never use another person as a means to satisfy your desire. Back off. Learn to garden or shoot free throws.

Strip power and misplaced belief in institutions whose primary goal is to be overloading and controlling.

Learn to trust yourself, your instincts, your investigation of what is right, and true, and non-egoistic.

Revive intersubjectivity, engage one-another, learn to do good.

This morning it rains. The cat has abandoned her burrow. Tires slosh up the road between two differently named mountains. Men and women dress, leave their homes, and set out to make other people do their bidding and succumb to their legislating, corporating, and financialing.

And, as might be expected, someone is loading their car with weapons, ammunition, and a sincere despair as to the conditions and circumstances of their fellow mortals, and accelerates off to prove the one thing they know no one will dispute — the mortality of those they will point to.

It’s not a meaningful way to live. 

It’s no way to live.

“Are you ready to order? Or do you want to wait for your colleague?” asks the waitress. 

“No, yes ... uhh ... yes, no,” they say. Not knowing what to say next.

if today you hear the voice

 God is the soundless word, creating itself

Christ is the resonance of that which is coming to be

You and I are empty spaces where what will be will be heard 

Sounding through approaching light in deep unknowing and 

Wondering darkness

tell me a story

In the beginning 

there was nothing  

Nothing? Yes, nothing.

Then there was something.

The sound of it. 

Pronouncing itself.

Silence eventually covered

Everything. We were free

Listening to nothing.

And here we are. 

Silent and free with

Nothing.

anunciarte

Do you want to birth 

God?

Sit down. Take a breath.

Say yes.

We really need God.

i look forward to hearing what comes next

 Explain this to me.

What?

This.

sine ipso factum est nihil

 Sluggish, he says, is

how he feels. He cannot say

any other word

zen trash talk

no talk (no failure)

just be what you are doing —

take trash out—  (gassho)

pointing thoughts not weapons

I do not own guns.

I have books in every room —

I am not afraid

should you wish to pray

 Prayer is the willingness to allow love to be here.

idkailu

 It’s not the man who shoots the gun. It’s not the gun that shoots the bullets. It’s not the bullets that pierce the flesh. It’s not the flesh that is torn and bleeds. It’s not you reading these words. It’s not words that reveal  our ignorance. It’s not our ignorance that fuels deranged hate. It’s not delusive derangement and hate that kills each human being. It’s not the human being that brings about such sorrow and pain.

What is it?

I don’t know...and I love you.

dear misguided neighbors

 I go to the market for milk.

I look around to see if someone has an AR15 or AR-556 in one of the aisles.

I’ll give up milk if you give up your gun insanity.

I pray for all of us, especially those dead in Boulder Colorado

a poet dies

Adam Zagajewski died in Krakow yesterday, 21mar2021.

This:

 Try to Praise the Mutilated World  

BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

TRANSLATED BY CLARE CAVANAGH

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Remember June's long days,

and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.

The nettles that methodically overgrow

the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

You must praise the mutilated world.

You watched the stylish yachts and ships;

one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

while salty oblivion awaited others.

You've seen the refugees going nowhere,

you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world.

Remember the moments when we were together

in a white room and the curtain fluttered.

Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

(--Adam Zagajewski, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" from Without End: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2002)

recovered dialogue

Q: My God, my God, Why hast thou forsaken me?

A: Because there is no 'me.' 

     Break open and you will see.

geez

 I want my hour back. 

No way. It’s mine now, you lost

it yesterday, gone

who you be

 Big yawn, cat turns to

Window, sun grown  higher in

Morning pettifog

time, thy appetite is timely

Winter’s bones blanch under morning’s cheering birdsong.

Harken!

The Latin phrase “tempus edax rerum” means “time, devourer of all things.” 

And Shakespeare’s inspiration, it comes to be revealed, was Sir Thomas North.

Alas, poor Yorick, now winter shares your grave, and sunny slant of light draws us hence into morning’s pleasant obsequies.

it’s

    s

        p

              r

                    i

                           n

                                    g

it is

it is

       thank you

       very much!

                                      you’re 

                                       well

                                       

                                                          come . . .

                                                                             walk

                                                                                with

                                                                                    me

untranslatable intimacies

One thing is not another.

We engage in translation. 

Definition of translation 

: an act, process, or instance of translating: such as

a

: a rendering from one language into another

also  : the product of such a rendering

b

: a change to a different substance, form, or appearance : CONVERSION

c

(1) : a transformation of coordinates in which the new axes are parallel to the old ones

(2) : uniform motion of a body in a straight line     (Merriam Webster)

We are constantly in the process of changing "to a different substance, form, or appearance."

Not only is form emptiness and emptiness form, but the more a thing changes the more it becomes itself.

This is a form of hospitality. We practice translation with languages, while navigating a more existential or ontological translation of not-self through no-self into self-itself. 

We long to be home. 

In On Translation, Ricoeur spells out the various implications of this paradigm of linguistic hospitality.

Translation sets us not only intellectual work .... but also an ethical prob- lem. Bringing the reader to the author, bringing the author to the reader, at the risk of serving and of betraying two masters: this is to practice what I like to call linguistic hospitality. It is this which serves as a model for other forms of hospitality that I think resemble it: confessions, religions, are they not like languages that are foreign to one another, with their lexicon, their grammar, their rhetoric, their stylistic which we must learn in order to make our way into them? And is Eucharistic hospitality not to be taken up with the same risks of translation-betrayal, but also with the same renunciation of the perfect translation.1

1 Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 23.

A crucial step in resisting the lure of the Perfect Translation is to honor a dialectical balance between proximity (welcoming the stranger into our midst) and distance (acknowledging that something is always lost in translation: the other’s meanings can never be completely mine). A ‘hospitable’ translator is one who aims at approximate correspondences between two tongues without ever assuming these to be final or adequate. Which is why translation is always an endless task. It is work which is also a working through, in the psycho- analytic sense of Durcharbeitung—a difficult and demanding labor of mediation between one linguistic mind/culture/world and another. Such mediation involves a process of mourning and letting go—and in particular the renunciation of the egocentric or tribalist drive to reduce the alterities of the guest to one’s own will for total adequation. As if, in translation, there were only one true language: my own. Our own. But that is not so. As Ricoeur insists, there is no such thing as language, only languages. Traditore, tradutore: to translate is always in some sense to betray; for one can never do one’s guest true justice. And this means accepting that we all live east of Eden and after Babel—and that this is a good thing. Our linguistic fallenness is also our linguistic finitude: a reminder of human limits which saves us from the delusion of sufficiency, the fantasy of restoring some prelapsarian logos (where we play God speaking a single divine language with a perfect word for each perfect thing). We also need to abandon the illusion of a perfect logos of the future— such as the enlightenment dream of a caracteristica universalis or the more recent delusion of a pan-European Esperanto. Indeed the translation model of hospitality stands, politically, as an indictment of all historical attempts to impose a single language on diverse peoples—Greek, Latin, French, Spanish or today English (sometimes known as ‘Globish’). Imperial campaigns have always sought to impose a normative lingua franca on the multiplicity of vernaculars. But it is the right of every living tongue to speak itself and be translated into other tongues while retaining a certain reservoir of irreducible, untranslatable intimacies and secrets. Whence the legitimate double injunction of every guest language when faced with its host: ‘Translate me! Don’t translate me!’ Take me but not all of me. Take me in, incorporate me, but leave something of me to myself. Good translation is transfusion not fusion. It signals a mutual transaction between two worlds, never a subsuming of their differences into one.

(--Double Hospitality. Between Word and Touch, by Richard Kearney, Boston College, Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion 1 (2019) 71–89, brill.com/jcpr) 

We like the idea that we are on our way to some place that will be a form of translation from this physical place to that spiritual place. 

And yet, we pause and ponder whether there is an untranslatable intimacy that dwells between these imagined concretions of our traveling.

At the end of meditation practice at meetingbrook, a part of our metta is: "May we come to dwell in our true home." 

Our true home?

Perhaps we long to be what is lost in translation.

but through matter

 In an article in Center for Christogenesis focusing on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Understanding the Christic in an Open Universe, by ILIA DELIO | AUG 15, 2020, the author writes:

If we want to understand Teilhard’s Christology, then it is best to place everything we learned in a drawer and focus on two essential ideas: first, the incarnation (which is the doctrine of Jesus Christ) means that God has entered into materiality, and, second, we are in evolution in which change and complexity are accompanied by a rise of consciousness.  

For Teilhard, God and world form a natural pair. He called this the principle of complementarity. He insisted that a genuine “complementarity” exists between God and the world; that is, God and world form a mutually affirming union. What makes the God-world antimony insoluble is that we first split up a natural pair and then persist in considering the two terms in succession.The optimal way to understand God and world is to perceive God as different from the world in nature but personally linked to it in a relationship of mutual complementarity. Teilhard’s God-world relationship could be described as “cosmotheandric,” that is, cosmic, human and divine all at once. God is completely other than the world and yet unable to dispense with it. It is not the complete dependence of the world upon God (as in Thomistic metaphysics) but the “complementarity” of God and world in such a way that one cannot adequately exist without the other.  Reflecting on Teilhard’s doctrine, Thomas King wrote: 

Matter is the principle of otherness. In matter God and man can become other than what they are.  Through matter God and man can meet. God is not found through opposition to matter (anti-matter) or independent of matter (extra-matter) but through matter (trans-matter).[i]

 https://christogenesis.org/understanding-the-christic-in-an-open-universe/

...   ...   ...

We begin to think about the “thoroughness” of existence.

I hold the thought: transmitting through matter.

A transmission trans-matter.

Without words, without dogma, without authoritative control.

Like sniffing the ground during late winter rain.

Or listening to the Ensō doggy snore in afternoon nap.

Maybe, seeing cat in wicker basket licking her shoulder then looking up through skylight window.

Or abandoning hope and residing in the gift of present presence. 

form is emptiness, emptiness is form

From Greek/English Interlinear ABARIM  Publications online:

PHILIPPIANS 2:5

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:

τουτο

this

dem pron
nom-si-neu

γαρ

for

conjunction

φρονεισθω

he be verbalized

verb
pres-pas-imp
3rd-p si

εν

in(to)

preposition

υμιν

to you

2nd pers pron
dat-pl

ο

which

rel pron
nom-si-neu

και

and

conjunction

εν

in(to)

preposition

χριστω

to Christ

noun (name)
dat-si-mas

ιησου

to Jesus

noun (name)
dat-si-mas

PHILIPPIANS 2:6

Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:

ος

who

rel pron
nom-si-mas

εν

in(to)

preposition

μορφη

[see note]

θεου

of God

noun
gen-si-mas

υπαρχων

being

participle
pres-act-par
nom-si-mas

ουχ

not

conjunction

αρπαγμον

[see note]

ηγησατο

he was of the opinion

verb
aor-mDe-ind
3rd-p si

το

the

def art
acc-si-neu

ειναι

to be

verb
pres-act-inf

ισα

equal

adjective
acc-pl-neu

θεω

to God

noun
dat-si-mas

PHILIPPIANS 2:7

But made himself of no reputation*, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:

αλλ

but

conjunction

εαυτον

himself

3rd-p refl pron
acc-si-mas

εκενωσεν

[see note]

*

μορφην

[see note]

δουλου

of worker

noun
gen-si-mas

λαβων

taking

participle
2aor-act-par
nom-si-mas

εν

in(to)

preposition

ομοιωματι

to similitude

noun
dat-si-neu

ανθρωπων

of men

noun
gen-pl-mas

γενομενος

the becoming

participle
2aor-mDe-par
nom-si-mas   

PHILIPPIANS 2:8

And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

και

and

conjunction

σχηματι

to semblance

noun
dat-si-neu

ευρεθεις

being found

participle
aor-pas-par
nom-si-mas

ως

as

adverb

ανθρωπος

man

noun
nom-si-mas

εταπεινωσεν

[see note]

εαυτον

himself

3rd-p refl pron
acc-si-mas

γενομενος

the becoming

participle
2aor-mDe-par
nom-si-mas

υπηκοος

obedient

adjective
nom-si-mas

μεχρι

[see note]

θανατου

of death

noun
gen-si-mas

θανατου

of death

noun
gen-si-mas

δε

- 

conjunction

σταυρου

of public display

noun
gen-si-mas

(--ABARIM )

...   ...   ...

meetingbrook Note:

* [or, he emptied himself]

NASB ©

Greek	Strong's	Origin
but emptied	ἐκένωσεν (ekenōsen)	2758: to empty	from kenos

mutual dependence

One, alone, is nothing.

“Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.” (– Nagarjuna)

And yet, The Lord is One.

a shift

 It occurred during walk around waterfront in Rockland near Coast Guard station that it is not about Christ consciousness.

Rather, what it is about is Christ is consciousness.

Let see where this goes.

covering consciousness

Friend sends article from The Atlantic: 

A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved, A neuroscientist on how we came to be aware of ourselves. by MICHAEL GRAZIANO, JUNE 6, 2016

And it occurs to me:

Domine, non sum dignus

ut intres sub tectum meum,

sed tantum dic verbum,

et sanabitur anima mea.

 It has the tectum, the verbum, and the sanabitur. (The roof, language, & the healing inclusion.). If we interpret ‘domine’ as ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness,’ we have it covered.

tá go cinnte

Irish?

Yeah.

Green?

Uh huh.

A good day for it.

Sea mo ghrá.

ridding off into sunset

Tough guys spurn vaccines

I get it. They don’t. It is

Theater unto grave

o lord, open these doors

 Downstairs, at ready,

Two sticks of firewood give them-

Selves to Irish stove

middle march, middle way

 Cold air blows through Maine

Iron wood stove heats wohnkuche

Where cat sits rafter

looking out winter's small window

Broken cedar limb

leans on frozen ground, soldier

for whom war is done

if you hear the voice of the lord, harden not your hearts

Wind outside barn door

Log in wood stove falls to edge

Night listens, whispers

et tu

 Beware the

Idea

Of

Marching —

Amble slowly,

Saunter

unum solum

Reading New York Times,

Washington Post, I see why

Eremites stay cloaked