as a transitory dwelling-place.

 Carl Gustav Jung’s words.

A morning meditation:

 “The individual ego is the stable in which the Christ-child is born.” – Collected Works Vol. 11 

“The highest and most decisive experience of all . . . is to be alone with . . . [one’s] own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation.” – Psychology and Alchemy 

“The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration.” – Alchemical Studies

“The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.” – Mysterium Coniunctionis 

“On the level of the Son there is no answer to the question of good and evil; there is only an incurable separation of the opposites. . . . It seems to me to be the Holy Spirit’s task and charge to reconcile and reunite the opposites in the human individual through a special development of the human soul.” – The Symbolic Life 

“[There is a] . . . continued and progressive divine incarnation. Thus man is received and integrated into the divine drama. He seems destined to play a decisive part in it; that is why he must receive the Holy Spirit. I look upon the receiving of the Holy Spirit as a highly revolutionary fact which cannot take place until the ambivalent nature of the Father is recognized. If God is the summum bonum, the incarnation makes no sense, for a good god could never produce such hate and anger that his only son had to be sacrificed to appease it. A Midrash says that the Shofar is still sounded on the Day of Atonement to remind YHWH (God) of his act of injustice towards Abraham (by compelling him to slay Isaac) and to prevent him from repeating it. A conscientious clarification of the idea of God would have consequences as upsetting as they are necessary. They would be indispensable for an interior development of the trinitarian drama and of the role of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is destined to be incarnate in man or to choose him as a transitory dwelling-place. ‘Non habet nomen proprium,’ says St. Thomas; because he will receive the name of man. That is why he must not be identified with Christ. We cannot receive the Holy Spirit unless we have accepted our own individual life as Christ accepted his. Thus we become the ‘sons of god’ fated to experience the conflict of the divine opposites, represented by the crucifixion.” – The Symbolic Life

 (—from, these things inside, Jung on the Christian Archetype)

Then there’s this:

“God is reality itself.”

“God is a psychic fact of immediate experience, otherwise there would never have been any talk of God. The fact is valid in itself, requiring no non-psychological proof and inaccessible to any form of non-psychological criticism. It can be the most immediate and hence the most real of experiences, which can be neither ridiculed nor disproved.”

“All modern people feel alone in the world of the psyche because they assume that there is nothing there that they have not made up. This is the very best demonstration of our God-almighty-ness, which simply comes from the fact that we think we have invented everything physical – that nothing would be done if we did not do it; for that is our basic idea and it is an extraordinary assumption. Then one is all alone in one’s psyche, exactly like the Creator before the creation. But through a certain training, something suddenly happens which one has not created, something objective, and then one is no longer alone. That is the object of certain initiations, to train people to experience something which is not their intention, something strange, something objective with which they cannot identify.

“This experience of the objective fact is all-important, because it denotes the presence of something which is not I, yet is still physical. Such an experience can reach a climax where it becomes an experience of God.”

(Jung quotes from: The Visions Seminars, Answer to Job, Jung Letters, Vol. 2, and the December 1961 issue of Good Housekeeping.)

(—from, these things inside, Carl Jung says God is reality itself,)

Reality itself. 

There’s something to ponder.

This sunny birdsong cool breeze morning.

I think I’ll walk the dog. 

the sight of it

 Underground water

Earth tears the sight of human

Unreadiness drips

monday after pentecost, look again

 It seems, like ocean tide, the phases of mythology rivet our attention on primordial in and out, arrival and departure, appearance and disappearance.

So too in Christian undulation mysteries:

Birth, emergence

Death, cessation

Burial, disappearance

Resurrection, reappearance

Ascension, emptiness hiatus

Pentecost, fullness via illumination and clarification.

Ordinariness, revisiting, reappraisal, inchoate insight. 

His Holiness The Dalai Lama describes the Mahayana Heart Sutra in terms of personal spiritual development as a continual spiraling through the five stages represented by the final mantra "GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA" in his talk (cf especially time from 8:50 to 19:04).    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej0_39J4yts&t=1201s. 8:50 to 19:048

If we think we've arrived, we haven't.

We are always beginning again.

Why not laugh through it.

It's a healthy way to practice.

Look again.

the lady with the umbrella said she never explains anything

There's something to be said for explanation.

Don't! 

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible. 

(-Eugene Ionesco, Decouvertes (1969))

Point out, if you must. 

Intimate, imply, hint -- even better.

Explanation, especially overexplanation, is where innovative insight goes to die.

destroyed and vanished into the oblivion of human history.

What a phrasing!

The oblivion of human history. Where Salome danced. Where John was beheaded. Where you and I read this.

Early Roman Period 

 

44 A.D.: After the death of King Herod Agrippa I in 44 A.D., when the ruined Machaerus together with Perea, came under the control of the Roman Prefectus Judea in Jerusalem, a military garrison stronghold was formed for the Roman army on the ruins of the original Machaerus citadel. 

66 A.D.: The citadel was taken over by the citizens of its lower city and later reinforced by the Zealot rebels. 

71/72 A.D.: After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Romans—for the third time—conquered Machaerus by order of Emperor Vespasian through the Legion X Fretensis, under the commandership of LuciliusBassus, the Roman Legatus of Judea Province. The fortress of Machaerus was destroyed and vanished into the oblivion of human history. 

 

Modern Period 

 

1807 (January 17): Ulrich Jasper Seetzen identified the Machaeruscitadel.
   

1909 (January 1): Fr. Félix-Marie Abel OP identified the Machaerus lower city.
   

1965–1974: August Strobel surveyed and published the Machaerus circumvallation wall.
   

1968–2019: Archaeologists excavated the Machaerus citadel. 

(—Machaerus Through the Ages, Győző Vörös   November 13, 2020 , Biblical Archeology Society)

day by day, this day

Per síngulos dies* 

      benedícimus te

et laudámus nomen tuum in sæculum,*

      et in sæculum sæculi.

Dignáre, Dómine, die isto*

      sine peccáto nos custodíre.

Miserére nostri, Dómine,* 

      miserére nostri.

Fiat misericórdia tua, Dómine, super nos,*

      quemádmodum sperávimus in te.

In te, Dómine, sperávi:*

      non confúndar in ætérnum. 

…  …   …

Day by day 

     we praise you:

     

we acclaim you now 

     and to all eternity.

In your goodness, Lord, 

     keep us free from sin. 

Have mercy on us, Lord, 

     have mercy.

May your mercy always be with us, Lord,

     for we have hoped in you.

In you, Lord, we put our trust,

      we shall not be put to shame. 

(—ending verses of Te Deum, in Office of Readings, from Feast of Pentecost)

with nothing move on

 It is not hard to

have faith. Give up every-

thing, surrender all.

arrival of illumination and clarification

                           (a pentecost haiku)

something holy this 

way comes out through darkness see

what is revealed now

punked

 You can see country

Trying to fathom the lies

Told by vile liars

experientia magistra stultorum

Tonight’s conversation began with bidets and ended with belief or faith.

Hence, this:

Experientia magistra stultorum

In English: Experience is the teacher of fools.

I thought this would be a good follow-up to yesterday's proverb    about learning, painfully, from mistakes. Today's proverb is also about learning from mistakes, but it makes a sharper point: fools need to learn from mistakes, because they do not use reason to predict the outcome of their actions. Instead, fools can only learn by experience, making mistakes and suffering the consequences.

The Latin word experientia is a feminine noun, so it is the feminine teacher, the magistra, the "mistress" or "school-mistress" of people who are fools.

A fuller form of the saying makes clear the difference between the way that fools learn, and how wiser people make their decisions: Experientia stultorum magistra, prudentia sapientum, "experience is the teacher of fools, while foresight is the teacher of wise men."

You can find this notion invoked in Erasmus's introduction to his Colloquia familiaria, where he says in praise of his book: Adde quod bonae prudentiae pars est, nosse stultas vulgi cupiditates et absurdas opiniones. Eas arbitror satius ex hoc libello discere, quam experientia stultorum magistra, "Add the fact that part of good prudence is to know the foolish wants and crazy opinions of the masses. I suspect that those things can be better learned from this little book than from experience, that teacher of fools."

Even better, Erasmus goes on to say in the same preface, Et haud scio an quidquam discitur felicius, quam quod ludendo discitur, "And I don't know whether anything can be learned more fortunately than that which is learned through play."

Hurray for Erasmus! 

(—from Bestiaria Latina Blog,  FEBRUARY 27, 2007)

As a fool, I learn by experience.

To have faith in what is not yet seen, what is not yet known, is a kind of foolishness.

To trust.

What is to come.

the ways we’re navigating the dialectics of life

Everything written on these pages has been heard from someone somewhere else.

 Today at Meetingbrook intends to be a recollection of conversations had, things read, situations experienced, films and documentaries seen, contemplative reflection encountered, and other various donations received from friends, sangha members, kindred personages throughout history, and imagined felt experiences from the phenomeno(logically) extended cosmos.

In other words, it is all passing through.

The ever-present origin pauses an instant on its way through to what is yet to come.

Wisdom is different from knowledge. Montaigne pointed out you can be knowledgeable with another person’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with another person’s wisdom. Wisdom has an embodied moral element; out of your own moments of suffering comes a compassionate regard for the frailty of others.

Wise people don’t tell us what to do, they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see our narratives both from the inside, as we experience them, and from the outside, as we can’t. They see the ways we’re navigating the dialectics of life — intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty — and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth.  

(--from Wisdom Isn’t What You Think It Is,  NYTimes,15Apr2021, By David Brooks )

We are to one another a way station, giving a temporary place to rest and recollect as way is made through what is here enroute what will soon be here.

We echo, enhance, recollect and reconstruct what is given, sometimes unbeknownst and unintended, for one's own passing awareness shared with another's passing engagement.

We do this with and for one another as an act of love.

We are invited to listen. 

That's what community is.

Something, someones, heard.

Caring-with.

¡ay, caramba!

 Faint light strong bird song

As if warning a sleeping 

Hombre cops coming

mind well

 Humility and

Honesty — these virtues — heal

Fast what is broken

how close

 Democrats are not 

as pugnacious as they need

to be in a fight

how far

 Republicans are

Not evil, not corrupt, not

Close to being kind

deaf politics

 Republicans think

They will bury one/six with

Deft cynicism

gaza

 With bombs and rockets

No shalom no salaam no-

thing resembling hope

buddha’s belated card

 He has floating birth-

day, and yesterday was one —

I brought him no gift

stepping through barrier

 Faith, not fear, frees. So

Move through it, feel your way. All

Matter shows you through

betweening what is

 Is it a lacunae, this time, this between time in christian metaphor, between ascension and pentecost?

And what happens in the between?

What happens between what is,

The activity of what is,

And the illuminating clarification of what is?

Is this betweening what, in the christian metaphor, has been referred to as the trinity —

The father being what is

The son being the activity of what is, and 

The holy spirit being the illumination and clarification of what is?

iss

 Then there is the International Space Station, for a tour.

how big is the universe

Plenty big. 

Because of the connection between distance and the speed of light, this means scientists can look at a region of space that lies 13.8 billion light-years away. Like a ship in the empty ocean, astronomers on Earth can turn their telescopes to peer 13.8 billion light-years in every direction, which puts Earth inside of an observable sphere with a radius of 13.8 billion light-years. The word "observable" is key; the sphere limits what scientists can see but not what is there.

But though the sphere appears almost 28 billion light-years in diameter, it is far larger. Scientists know that the universe is expanding. Thus, while scientists might see a spot that lay 13.8 billion light-years from Earth at the time of the Big Bang, the universe has continued to expand over its lifetime. If inflation occurred at a constant rate through the life of the universe, that same spot is 46 billion light-years away today, making the diameter of the observable universe a sphere around 92 billion light-years. [VIDEO: Oldest Light in the Universe: How it Traveled to Us] 

https://www.space.com/24073-how-big-is-the-universe.html 

Then we ask: Who are you? Who am I?

And how far have we come?

after feeding cats, considering mysticism

 The inward in the outward. 

The outward in the inward.

Neither anywhere.

Both everywhere.

Soon, coffee. (Or chai tea with hot chocolate mix and chocolate milk.)

stillness

 yes

stillness

yes

go ahead, move forward

Perhaps today there will be no murder, no domestic abuse, no destruction of homes, no insult, no beating down of someone poorly defended. 

Oh, and tell me what's the man with a rifle in his hand

Gonna do for a world that's so sick and sad?

Tell me what's the man with a rifle in his hand

Gonna do for a world that's gone mad?  

 

(from song, The Body Electric, by Hurray For The Riff Raff, on Small Town Heroes (2014)

Perhaps today someone will realize that every sound travels further than his ears, that each ignoring of someone is a diminishing of oneself, that each affirmation of someone's effort is a strengthening of the communal body of our shared soul.

Put away the rifle.

Allow each their own direction.

Their own breath.   

نحن عائلة هل نسيت*

 Look around. There’s no need to go anywhere. You’re there. 

Have you found what you’re looking for?  It’s right there. It is what is looking. Looking, not for something, but as something. 

As is, what is, looking.

 The mind's capacity is limitless, and its manifestations are inexhaustible. Seeing forms with your eyes, hearing sounds with your ears, smelling odors with your nose, tasting flavors with your tongue, every movement or mode, it's all your mind.

At every moment, where language can't go, that's your mind. The sutras say, “A tathagata's forms are endless. And so is the awareness.” The endless variety of forms is due to the mind. Its ability to distinguish things, whatever their movement or mode, is the mind's awareness. But the mind has no form, and its awareness, no limits.

A material body of the four elements is trouble. A material body is subject to birth and death. But the real body exists without existing because a tathagata's real body never changes. The sutras say, “People should realize that the buddha-nature is something they have always had.” Kashyapa only realized his own nature.

Our nature is the mind. And the mind is our nature. This nature is the same as the mind of all buddhas. Buddhas of the past and future only transmit this mind. Beyond this mind, there's no buddha anywhere. But deluded people don't realize that their own mind is buddha. They keep searching outside. They never stop invoking buddhas or worshipping buddhas and wondering where is the buddha?

Don't indulge in such illusions. Just know your mind. Beyond your mind there's no other buddha. The sutras say, “Everything that has form is an illusion.” They also say, “Wherever you are, there's a buddha.” Your mind is the buddha. Don't use a buddha to worship a buddha.

Bodhidharma (440-528)

In my dream, I am visiting prison. I’m confused. I know I’m a visitor but I seem to be wholly ensconced in the wandering from place to place, room to room, trying to figure out how to faithfully carry out what I have promised to do for several people in several directions at the same time.

Waking from dream, my sunlit room. 

Am I in my right mind?

This room.

The men I know in prison.

The time that has gone by unable to visit, converse, zazen, laugh.

In cultural religious temporicity, (achronon), it is that space between ascension and pentecost when, what is signified as religious reality, disappears, and what is to become inspiration and clarifying, is not yet arrived. 

In a sense, we are left to ourselves.

What do we make of that? Out of time, outside of time, a space of achronological stasis, 

A waiting.

Still, a waiting with belief.

Ani ma’amin,

Be’emuna shelema

This is where we are. And so, this is where we must find ourselves. Because we are in no other place, we must look through the ‘no other’ and try to find there what we are looking for, what we are looking at.

Achake bechol yom sheyavoh

It is a dream-space.

We have been here before.

Out of time. Out of mind. Between everything. Gone, gone, gone beyond. Lost in the space of not-yet arriving.

Where a question arises out of thin air, out of mist, out of eponymous time:

نحن عائلة هل نسيت

* We are a family, have you forgotten?

It is our koan, our achronological  koan. 

Have we? 

Forgotten?

how it was we no longer deserved

Some have bacon and eggs with coffee on Sunday morning. Some go for walks. Some listen to The Daily podcast, today a story about Weird Al Yankovic.

Some die in a military bombing.

International pressure to bring an end to the raging conflict between Israel and Hamas militants mounted on Sunday, even as local health officials said an Israeli airstrike in Gaza overnight killed more than two dozen people, the single deadliest attack of the current hostilities.

In all the overnight airstrikes, 33 people died, including 12 women and eight children, and 50 people were wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. The ministry said the figures could rise, as rescue workers continued to search for victims and survivors in the ruins.  

On Sunday morning, rescue workers combed through the rubble of three buildings flattened in the Israeli airstrike as the hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians escalated to levels not seen since a 2014 war.

(in Live Updates: Airstrike Kills Dozens in Gaza as U.N. Security Council Prepares to Meet, NYTimes, 15may21)

Its the law of absurd distribution. Kill anybody, whether or not they have anything to do with threatening you with hostile aggression. 

Kill anybody. 

Hell, it's what we're capable of, and with billions of dollars worth of munitions, dammit, we'll do it!

Among the victims of an Israeli airstrike over the weekend at a refugee camp that killed at least 10 Palestinians were eight children. Mohammed al-Hadidi said his wife, along with their sons Suhaib, 14, Yahya, 11, Abdelrahman, 8, and Wissam, 5, were killed, as were her brother’s four children and her sister-in-law. Only a five-month-old baby boy, Omar, was pulled from the rubble alive.     (-ibid)

Children!

Children!

If someone is keeping score, pencil in these children's names.

We'll want to remember how it was we no longer deserved to be called civilized, moral, decent. 

Omar, one can only pray, will grow to become a good man, and save the world.

moored

Stop looking around —

If you are alone, that place

is a holy place

morning, praying, practice

 Koan study: spontaneous response to what is arising.

Flowers present the question.

Ensõ turns his back and asks for final bell to ring.

carrying on

 Watching The Crown — the

Bland snobbery of  upper

Class, chilly noblesse 

have you tried this, they asked

 Technology kept

Woman at arm’s length — slowing

Arrival — passing word

what was the sin, was the question

Zoom confessional —

 Improvisational shrift,

“ I wanted to win”

food fall

 Without thinking, seed

Falls from birdfeeder to grass,

Ground team retrieves drop

shugyo-an

 All day, rain showers and sunshine crisscross each other.

It feels like a long while ago I was on the mountain with Ensō this morning.

There is no silence like that of four o'clock in the nighttime of prayer.

This, from Merton:

There is no where in you a paradise that is no place and there

You do not enter except without a story.

To enter there is to become unnameable.

Whoever is nowhere is nobody, and therefore cannot exist except as unborn:

No disguise will avail him anything

Such a one is neither lost nor found.

But he who has an address is lost.

                                (from poem, "The Fall," by Thomas Merton)

Zen Master Bankei (1622-1693) wrote about the unborn:

In 1633, at age eleven, Bankei Yotaku was banished from his family's home because of his consuming engagement with the Confucian texts that all schoolboys were required to copy and recite. Using a hut in the nearby hills, he wrote the word Shugyo-an, or "practice hermitage," on a plank of wood, propped it up beside the entrance, and settled down to devote himself to his own clarification of "bright virtue."

He finally turned to Zen and, after fourteen years of incredible hardship, achieved a decisive enlightenment, whereupon the Rinzai priest traveled unceasingly to the temples and monasteries of Japan, sharing what he'd learned.

"What I teach in these talks of mine is the Unborn Buddha-mind of illuminative wisdom, nothing else. Everyone is endowed with this Buddha-mind, only they don't know it." Casting aside the traditional aristocratic style of his contemporaries, he offered his teachings in the common language of the people. His style recalls the genius and simplicity of the great Chinese Zen masters of the T'ang dynasty. 

(--from, Goodreads) 

 To dwell in a practice hermitage is to listen to the mind listening to itself listening to nothing at all sounding in the surround. 

This morning I thought of an old friend. We worked construction together many years ago. He practices mendicant-dwelling still as he wanders closer to ninety years of age.

I do not know where he lives.

Nor my other compatriot with whom I wrote articles for a journal and taught at conferences. He too pilgrimages like Ryōkan begging along roadway. He, as well, does kinhin towards ninety. 

I don't know where he lives.

I suppose to be unborn suggests we do not have any address to move from or forward to.

That seems just fine.

A good-enough practice.

See you there.

haiku

                  (for a friend in prayer)

What is (yes) a name —

Jimmy, Matthias, (HaShem) —

lealeim* — (ascending)

...   ...   ...

* from Hebrew, to hide

night, prayer

 One breath in one out

In silence allowing this

Becoming itself

seven, seven, (stop)

Gaza.

It is that time again. Cruelty and animosity shun kindness and justice.  

 Alongside those now-familiar scenes, Jewish and Arab citizens have clashed in the worst violence in decades in Israeli cities — stoning cars, burning offices and places of worship, and forming mobs that have dragged people from their vehicles and beat them to within an inch of their lives.

Several Israeli leaders, led by President Reuven Rivlin, evoked the specter of civil war — a once unthinkable idea.

“We need to solve our problems without causing a civil war that can be a danger to our existence, more than all the dangers we have from the outside,” Mr. Rivlin said. “The silent majority is not saying a thing, because it is utterly stunned.”

Palestinian leaders, however, said the talk of civil war was a distraction from what they see as the true cause of the unrest — police brutality against Palestinian protesters and provocative actions by right-wing Israeli settler groups.

(Live Updates: Jews and Arabs Clash in Israel’s Streets, NYTimes, 13may2021  

Poem: five seven five seven seven, seven, (stop)

don't tell me your name

i'd rather not know nor care

you are enemy

living on this stolen land —

rather, here are our bombs,  hate

exploding to bits our hearts

                                                      (wfh/13may2021)

mere kataphatic apophasis

 Where is he?

         Inside.

 (Looking around)

          Inside where?

There’s no telling where

ascension thursday

 no theology

poor man passes through koan

nods and disappears

pilgrimage through what-is mind

 He rises to earth

then from earth, thus to ascend

God knows where. Look there

oplopend

 Where will he go, up

To what dimension, and where

Will we, following

how do we fight lies

Much is being said about a cold civil war of ideological turmoil about the direction or destruction of democracy in the United States. 

In that war there is a subtext of weapons chosen for the battlefield. 

Lies are loaded and fired from sniper positions. 

Truths are called up and assembled at front lines. 

There are no non-combatants. Everyone is called up to engage the conflict. 

Our children are hiding in shelter bunkers.

The question is asked: How do you fight lies?

Think again if you answered “With truth.”

The question has been long and seriously asked: What is truth?

And there’s been an equally long and serious silence in response.

We’ve been unfamiliar and little acquainted with truth.

Do we know how to answer?

Do we know how to fight?

we’ll see

 Some words say it well. These do:

What is Zen? It’s both something we are—our true nature expressing itself moment by moment—and something we do—a disciplined practice through which we can realize the joy of being. It is not a belief system to which one converts. There is no dogma or doctrine. Zen is the direct experience of what we might call ultimate reality, or the absolute, yet it is not separate from the ordinary, the relative. This direct experience is our birthright. The practice of zazen—meditation—is a way of realizing the non-dualistic, vibrant, subtle, and interconnected nature of all life.

(from, TheZen Studies Society, What Is Zen?)

We often confuse distinctiveness with opposition. 

Difference does not mean contention.

The absolute in not at odds with the relative.

My being not you is not the trigger for evaluative hierarchy nor judgmental dismissiveness.

Variance of opinion and arguments of approach need not separate human from human inexorably.

Two things can be true at the same time. They can stand side by side. Sit at same table. Speak with one another.

This and that need not be this or that. And is not or. This resides in that and that resides in this. And yet, this is not that, nor is that this. This is this, that is that. 

Again:

Zen is the direct experience of what we might call ultimate reality, or the absolute, yet it is not separate from the ordinary, the relative. This direct experience is our birthright. The practice of zazen—meditation—is a way of realizing the non-dualistic, vibrant, subtle, and interconnected nature of all life. (op-cit)

Zen says “I see you.” 

The word ‘see’ and the act of ‘seeing’ is non-separate inter-being inter-active dwelling.

And as for our temporary blindness?

We’ll see.

morning dog standing on sky

 (photos of ensō, by saskia, hosmer pond, 11may2021)

i haven’t a thought

 I don’t care — live, die —

It’s all the same — tell me this,

What do you think’s next

tidal destruction

 We want so much to

trust representatives to

work for the people

It is hard to see

the way laws are debated

like dead fish floating

better to be heard, not seen

 the old men paddle

shenandoah of psalmic

drip, drone, bending flood 

écoutez

 No metaphor, no rote

Rain at 3 AM. Foot steps

Down hall, on porch roof

suspect to both sides, prospect to each as they are

 As a zen Buddhist

and

Catholic contemplative

Monastic

There is only one way

To practice —

No mind

is

Christ mind

and Buddha mind

is

Mu-shin, (thus)

This

Is 

All

 I 

(don’t) 

know

not one man’s death

 At practice, the thought: 

The cross is invitation

Into compassion

what the cross invites non-dually

 Grotesque cross, he said. 

You too, (his ambiguous

wording). Compassion

mothering, dialogue, meditation, loss and death, (how) we go on

 We're constantly birthing that which we give our attention to.

1.   For Mother’s Day, a Healing Meditation on Mortality, By Maya Phillips, May 7, 2021,  

2.   Netflix, The Midnight Gospel, S1:E8, “Mouse of Silver”, time: 36 mins

       Episode referred to in Maya Phillips’ piece.

she who places me here, a mother’s day haiku

                      (for mothers, gardeners, attentives )

Walking past flowers

She hears a petal murmur —

She found soil for us

continue their lives

 Bombs outside girl’s school

in Kabul blow up killing 

many — (one breath, our breath)

adiutorium

 I am in bed, three

AM. I am in France, Lauds.

In Maine, God’s still stall

neither calling back nor saying goodbye

 Looking back my life

Seems bland and uneventful —

I walk and listen

what the pandemic teaches

 have we had it wrong?

is the cross compassion? if

we gaze, feeling, see?

divorce separates two, true marriage is triune

Will you marry me?

No! We can only marry 

what is between us

considering the zeitgeist

 I suspect it is

a miracle anything 

persists and survives

four years later, the state shrugs

Ledell Lee would say:

‘I'm an innocent man.’ Seems 

so. Still, we killed him

...

(cf. 4 Years After an Execution, a Different Man’s DNA Is Found on the Murder Weapon, by Heather Murphy, NYTimes, May 7, 2021)

offering

Incense in morning

Sun curls up from desk, there rise

Prayers offered for all

dearmad

To wander need not mean to err.

To think is to wander.

To do philosophy is to vagabond.

Homelessness is a hazard of reflective inquiry.

Words for "error" in most Indo-European languages originally meant "wander, go astray" (for example Greek plane in the New Testament, Old Norse villa, Lithuanian klaida, Sanskrit bhrama-), but Irish has dearmad "error," from dermat "a forgetting."

(—from etymology dictionary)

Sometimes forgetting is the unexpected dwelling of one seeking truth.

Truth — don’t leave home without it.

praesentem

Latin for "In a particular place" -- present.

prae-

                1. before; in front

sum

      1. I am

I am (right) in front of you.

...

This last sentence is what being present means.

It is often a struggle for each of us to be present -- in any of or all its implications.

We wonder if those who've died are still present.

The possibility is that they are, indeed, "still" "present."

The question is laid at our feet: Who sees anything that is still?

So, too, we wonder (even at or after our death) if we are "still here."

what a thought-provoking film might evoke about ethical thinking response

 Three things:

...

1. What comes at you

2. Is what you’ve got

3. To respond to and do what you’ve got to do.

...

Four types and non-rules:

1. Fact-based Ethics.

2. Reality-ground morality.

3, Beyond-principles agency.

4. Gotta-do activity.

...

Five points to ponder:

1. What is thrown at you is not your making.

2. What arrives at your feet was not your stepping choice.

3. What you’ve got to do is not a deliberate choice of options.

4. You are a response to a provoking stimulus.

5. Ethical standards and moral laws are non-applicable to the immediate demands of presenting-reality.

...

Conclusion:

1. Stay awake.

2. Don’t think; look.

3. Take choice-less action.

...

Note: (cf. film "I'm Your Woman," Amazon Original, 2020)

whoa, that’s going nowhere fast

 I can’t go faster

than the speed of light. I’ll just

sit here and think now

recalling coming out of anesthesia

 young woman with co-

vid sings song about Jesus

from deep memory

until things are seen whole, no one is

When she died forty 

years ago no one knew this

squirrel at feeder

,just look at them and sigh

 Mothers teach children

Tell the truth, respect tellers —

It’s a good teaching

simply stated

 That this country is

Mired in the lies of losing

Former president

Signals cynical

Stupidity continues

With republicans

not something we did

From Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, Sunday 2may21:

 Reflecting on trauma has made me think that much of the human race must have suffered from what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It is heartbreaking to imagine, but it gives me much more sympathy for the human person caught in repeated cycles of historical violence.

Could this be what mythology means by “the sacred wound” and the church describes as “original sin,” which was not something we did, but the effects of something that was done to us? I believe it is.

If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows us what to do with our pain. Great religion shows us what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the traumatic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

(- in, What Do We Do with This Pain?)

quo vadis

 The given, or

The arrived at —

Which?

In 12th century

The scholar and the saint

Set terms of battle

Scripture and tradition, or

Thought and insight

Conformity or innovation?

They argued

Monk of mystical inspiration, against

Monk of incohating phenomenology

Robert, (remembering canonical convictions)

Peter

(not forgetting Heloise nuptial connection)

Received and handed on, 

Unveiling and asking into

Paraclete protecting or setting free?

In my dream, in Russia,

Carafe with round energetics, timorous 

We are trying to get somewhere 

Right here, or

(if not)

Ahead of us

spare change

 If you give yourself

To another, what remains?

Nothing worth counting

slicing through simile

 Woman brings soup to

COVID folks up back stairs — as

Man with edger cuts

off the machine

 My patience died try-

ing to breathe through thick obtuse

sludge cynicism

after dawn

 Solo concert done

Songbird enters silence gone

Offstage heart alight

addendum

 Coronavirus

Ain’t over, compañeros —

Don’t listen to fools

move along (now)

 pay

No

attention

(to me)

there’s 

Nothing

there

(to see)

sic et non

I have

Never

been

(happier) 

There is

Nothing 

more

(now)

to

compare

...   ...   ...

Footnote:

Abelard maintains that everything in the world apart from God and angels is either form, matter, or a composite of form and matter. The matter of something is that out of which it is made, whether it persists in the finished product (as bricks in a house) or is absorbed into it (as flour in bread). Ultimately, all material objects are composed of the four elements earth, air, fire, and water, but they do not retain their elemental forms in most combinations. In general, the form of a material object just is the configuration of its material parts: “We call the form strictly what comes from the composition of the parts.” The form of a statue, for example, is its shape, which is no more than the arrangement of its matter—the curve of the nose, the size of the eyes, and so on. Forms are therefore supervenient on matter, and have no ontological standing independent of it. This is not to deny that forms exist, but to provide a particular explanation of what it is for a form to inhere in a given subject, namely for that subject to have its matter configured in a certain way. For example, the inherence of shape in the statue just is the way in which its bronze is arranged. Hence material things are identical with what they are made of—with one exception: human beings, whose forms are their immaterial (and immortal) souls. Strictly speaking, since human souls are capable of existence in separation form the body, they are not forms after all, though they act as substantial forms as long as they are joined to the body.

(--on, Peter Abelard, (1079-1142), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)