the intuition of imagination and creative regard.

 Commenting on Trump’s strategy regarding COVID-19, the author writes:

 Oscar Wilde reportedly said the following about religion, “Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there -- and finding it.” 

(—Excerpt from: "Only I Can Fix It" by Wendell Blue. Scribd)

I'm afraid circumstances are such that neither Trump nor republican followers nor democrats of any stripe have the savvy, will-power, or moral energy to dissuade a re-continuance of his presidential ambitions in next election.

The quotient of emotional or intellectual intelligence required to slow the descent of the United States into degraded status in world stature and corresponding decline in quality of life or soul among its population is lowering and glowering across the nation.

This is not about God. This is about what is not. It’s not that God is not great, rather, it is about the unimaginative and intemperate people who wish that man and the know-nothing subservience surrounding him to be the face and misfortune of America.

I’ll be dead. Nor do I suspect there’s more than a dark room with soundproof non-resonance to follow. (Gott sei dank!) But some will still be here. And it will not be pretty.

About religion, my only belief is becoming what in essence and existence we already are. It is faith in what is here and now our true nature arcing toward wholeness and kindness of the good. Toward that direction I am a follower of clear inner light, the intuition of imagination and creative regard.

There is where I greet you.

There is where I watch with apprehension the foolish degeneration of responsible acts and effort.

There is where, if prayer has any efficacy or innate purpose or benefit, I pray for each being passing in front of me.

like trees

 This from Sojourners:  

Verse of the day 

Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 

- Romans 12:10

 

Voice of the day 

If we surrendered / to earth’s intelligence / we could rise up rooted, like trees.   

- Rainer Maria Rilke, “How Surely Gravity's Law” 

 

Prayer of the day 

 

Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts. 

- The Book of Common Prayer

a dazzling sacred ecology

 The author writes (if I recall hearing correctly): 

God, the one who dwells in the midst of it all here on earth.  (--Diane Butler Bass, in Grounded: Finding God in the World - A Spiritual revolution)

There is something attractive about calling God "the one."

"One" at the center of it all. It echos comfortably inside the question I hold for every description/depiction of God, namely, "Do you believe in or behold God?"

I resonate with "the one." This suggests there is no two, or that the two we manufacture is not the truest reality. There might be differences within the one. There might be others within the one. But no one is excluded from the one. No division made by rational thinking can escape the wholeness of being enwrapping everything.

Elsewhere Bass writes:

Where is God? Not up "there" in heaven. Rather, God is here. With us.

Often unnoticed or misunderstood by commentators and even some religious leaders, a theological shift is happening around us, a revolution of divine nearness. People use a new spiritual vocabulary to describe it - God is in the sunset, at the seashore, in the gardens we plant, at home, in the work we do, in the games we watch and play, in the stories that entertain us, in good food and good company, when we eat, drink, and make love. In the midst of the problems and challenges we face, the distant God is being replaced by a more intimate presence. Millions of people are experiencing God as more personal and accessible than ever before. This is not a romanticized greeting card divinity, but it is a God who is robustly present in the chaos, suffering, and confusion surrounding us, the Spirit who invites us to save the planet and make peace with the whole human family, and who is a companion and partner in creating a hope-filled future. This is the God that many are reaching toward, realizing that a far-off God will not do. A God who is not with us cannot be for us. The only God that makes sense is a God of compassion and empathy who shares the life of the world.

This is the grounded God, the presence at the center of a spiritual revolution growing from the ground up, an earthy faith that insists on the importance of the planet and its people. Instead of living in a disconnected three-tiered universe, we are discovering that we inhabit a dazzling sacred ecology where God dwells with us. God is in nature and with our neighbor, whose "face" can be seen in both creation and human community.  (--Diana Butler Bass: Where Is God?  Thursday October 15, 2015) 

Everything has a center.

What that center is called has various names. Still, it is the center. Despite arguments as to whether your depiction of center is better than your neighbor's depiction of center; whether your description of 'one' is better that your neighbor's description of one -- center is center, one is one.

Can we face such inquiry?

Will we face one another in this investigation.

The zen proverb still reverberates wisdom:

Better to see the face

than to hear the name

I keep watch. 

texas 2021

 If I understand the Texas legislature and governor, they have decided the following: 

A fetus will have a gun inserted into its mother’s vagina so that it could shoot through uterus to kill host body so that said fetus, when it becomes a human being, gun in hand, can vote for limiting the ability of poor and persons of color to exercise any right to vote, and to preserve the gun-toting state-given right to become a bounty hunter against any woman and anyone else assisting women in the eventuality of having had an abortion, collecting ten thousand dollar bounty for each rat-out and catch.

Do I have this, right, Texas?

but nothing much happens

When I first read Miller's play it was as though I was a character, I was Bert. Miller wrote about my experiences following an unconscious first semester in collage, dropping out, and working in a mailroom of an insurance company.

Even now the haunting recollection of each character in his play mirrors the characters in my daily workplace. Nothing in any classroom could have provided me with the anthropology of personalities moving past bins and tables, conversations and kibbitzing, flirtations and gross innuendo as those seasoned and randy few did their work and skirted supervisor's hearing. They were retirees and city fellas, hard experienced with closely kept autobiographies whose resumees and sidetalk were strewn with outlandish tales and subdued revelation.

I was, then as now, an oblivious adjunct to the main course of working cant and jowl unregulated chatter in backroom slipped manners. It was my curricula of universalized studies. I majored in being a tolerable listener and a better third baseman on the company softball team.   

 Patricia enters and crosses past Bert, looking out through the windows. Tom gets up and bumbles through a pile of goods on the table, checking against an order in his hand. It is as though Bert wished it could stop for a moment, and as each person enters he looks expectantly, but nothing much happens. And so he gradually moves -- almost is moved toward an exit, and with his book in his hand he leaves. 

(--Just before curtain, final narration of Arthur Miller's A Memory of Two Mondays, A Play in One Act, c.1955)

 It stays with me. Each of them. Sixty years later. 

I never made it into mainstream. Periphery, adjunct, alternate, walk-on, outsider.

Still, I remember each teacher. I learned from them. A lingering affection. A nodding gratitude. Like Bert, I wished it could stop for a moment. It didn't. Nor has it ever.

It just goes on and goes sideways and goes into a side pocket bank shot, whether called or not.

cashing out

 Every religion

Thinks God is theirs — ownership —

The flaw of each faith

schooling the uneducable

What we learn from war. 

 There is one winner, only one winner, in war. The winner is war itself. Not truth, not justice, not liberty, not morality. These are the vanquished.” (--Thomas Merton)

 War is an arrogant and merciless teacher.

invisibilia theologia

 God is nobody

If you have a body then

You are one of us

walk on by

 Pay no attention

To anybody for whom 

Fame is drug and dough

on not buying hunting knife

 Lawn mower stops starts

Birch tree topples from back hill —

prayer, is spare, change

loneliness of long distance view

 Watching Christopher

Hitchens, over the years, his

Acerbic insights

something’s lost something’s gained

 September first, New

Years Day, calendar pivots —

Try to remember 

now I lay me down

 It seems like a good

time to disappear, to say

thanks for everything

not is, but, will be

 Peace is a choice, each

time, each comment, each action —

Our own creation 

une seule rose

 Your birth August’s new

year’s eve, Laddie, a good day

L'chaim, — good life to you

solitariness

What’s up? 

   Nothing.

Waddya doing?

   Nothing.

Watcha thinking?

   Nothing.

 

“Religion is what man does with his solitariness”

.(Alfred North Whitehead)

call your first witness

 line up excuses

prepare notes for interviews —

war — again on trial

* جنازې

It’s over, they say, 

gone, wheels up, ta ta, see ya—

now then, what’s next, eh?

….  …   …

* (Pashto for ‘funerals’)

a true name embodies the one whose name it is

 Call me this:

I am passing through.

Yes, yes, yes —

Say no more or less

that slow sinking

Even on smaller treks in familiar locales, I have known this: 

    Somewhere between Onioshidashi-en and the hostel, you take a wrong turn, or several. It would not be hard to do—few of the road names are posted, and the arrows on the signs point in directions that make no sense to you, even if you could read them. You stumble on for an hour for two, for four. 

 

    Now dark is falling, and you are nowhere near anything you recognize. At times you catch glimpses of Mt. Asama through the trees, each time in an unexpected direction. You grow frustrated, you curse the hand-drawn map you made this morning. Anger drops you into sadness, and sadness into that slow sinking that you have never learned to pull yourself out of. 

 

(--Craig Arnold, Journal) 

 

And still do. 

he visited volcanos, and disappeared

 Meditation on a Grapefruit  

             POEM BY CRAIG ARNOLD 

To wake when all is possible

before the agitations of the day

have gripped you

                    To come to the kitchen

and peel a little basketball

for breakfast

              To tear the husk

like cotton padding        a cloud of oil

misting out of its pinprick pores

clean and sharp as pepper

                             To ease

each pale pink section out of its case

so carefully       without breaking

a single pearly cell

                    To slide each piece

into a cold blue china bowl

the juice pooling       until the whole

fruit is divided from its skin

and only then to eat

                  so sweet

                            a discipline

precisely pointless       a devout

involvement of the hands and senses

a pause     a little emptiness

each year harder to live within

each year harder to live without

Source: Poetry (October 2009) 

...   ...   ... 

(also): 

Although humans from all cultures or ages share hopes and struggles, worldly aspirations pale when put into context of topic cycles of destruction and creation. These cataclysmic occurrences became a fascination for Craig, and “the volcano became an emblem of geology’s indifference toward humanity.” The title of the proposed work itself, An Exchange for Fire, comes from the Greek philosopher Heraclites, “whose mystic notions of change and impermanence comes closest perhaps, to the insights of Zen Buddhism, blurring our conceptions of what constitutes Western, what Eastern thought.”

(--from,  An Exchange for Fire—, The Final Pilgrimage of Poet Craig Arnold, Excerpted from My Postwar Life—New Writings from Japan and Okinawa Chicago Quarterly Review Books, 2011, By Christopher Blasdel)

as koan study ends

                    (waka for hooded R.)

 Great-nephew of aunt

asked again before leaving 

When did you get here? 

answers by kitchen sink, "Now, 

apparently" -- bell is hit

wonder -- where wisdom begins

Start at source. 

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.

--Saint Augustine

End at source.

Rinse, return, repeat. 

distress even mentioning

documentary

pedophilia clan, who

can abide such hurt  

a feeling of falling

Temptation is the way being-in-the-world invites us to give up who we think we are in order to investigate and invite us into what it is we might need to become.

Yesterday Monica. Today Augustine. Church calendar names. The North African mother and son in their striving to account for temptation and it’s consequence.

ACADEMIA Letters

Tentatio as fallenness and death as Care: Of Dasein’s

many faces in early and later writings

Ulkar Sadigova

Phenomenology of Religious Life is concerned with factical existence. This factical life of early lectures is already and not yet a Dasein that comes to light in its full existentiality in Being and Time. Dasein; the being-in-the-world first reveals itself to us questioning. The penultimate task of Dasein is to know itself. The questioning of oneself becomes possible through Augustine’s tentatio. Only through temptations, one knows himself: quaestio mihi factus sum. [I have become a question to myself.1 I can answer these questions only through my factical life – my temptations; my fall. These temptations resemble for Heidegger a feeling of falling in Phenomenology of Religious Life which is later conceptualized as fallenness- into-the-world in Being and Time. This fallenness of Being and Time is the existentiality of Dasein itself. Augustine’s tentatio is the kernel of fallenness in Heidegger’s magnum opus. Heidegger says, “my ’facticity’ is the strongest temptation...in it, I move in a somehow falling manner.”2 Being-in-the-world seems as a fallenness – the anxiety of being-here and being- present emerges for Heidegger as an inauthentic life. Thus, the conceptions of earlier lectures find their echoes in Being and Time as fallenness and thrownness in the world. Augustine states the initial perception of life experience: “already the next moment can make me fall and expose me as someone entirely different.”3 This constant fall – the temptations – open being for possibility. The Being and Time does not explicitly refer to Augustine in each connection, inevitably though, they are implied.

(—Academia)

Thrownness and fallenness in the world is our everyday revelation.

We worry it is our wrongdoing, our sinning, that defines us. Rather, what defines us is the awareness or non-awareness arising from the presentiation of tentatio, a prior experience anticipating action or no action.

What is created in the interim is prelude to positing what follows — whether rightdoing or wrongdoing.

Tentatio, temptation, is defining gift. What is fined, what is excellent or worthy, follows and becomes experience.

We are fallen into experience.

We are thrown into experience.

Experience is an unabashed teacher.

ACADEMIA

 Letters

Tentatio as fallenness and death as Care: Of Dasein’smany faces in early and later writings

Ulkar Sadigova

Phenomenology of Religious Life

 is concerned with factical existence. This factical life of early lectures is already and not yet a Dasein that comes to light in its full existentiality in

 Being and Time

. Dasein; the being-in-the-world rst reveals itself to us questioning. Thepenultimate task of Dasein is to know itself. The questioning of oneself becomes possiblethrough Augustine’s tentatio. Only through temptations, one knows himself:

 quaestio mihi factus sum

. [I have become a question to myself.

1

I can answer these questions only throughmyfacticallife–mytemptations; myfall. ThesetemptationsresembleforHeideggerafeelingof falling in

 Phenomenology of Religious Life

 which is later conceptualized as fallenness-into-the-world in

 Being and Time

. This fallenness of 

 Being and Time

 is the existentiality of Dasein itself. Augustine’s tentatio is the kernel of fallenness in Heidegger’s magnum opus.Heidegger says, “my ’facticity’ is the strongest temptation…in it, I move in a somehow fallingmanner.”

2

Being-in-the-world seems as a fallenness – the anxiety of being-here and being-present emerges for Heidegger as an inauthentic life. Thus, the conceptions of earlier lecturesnd their echoes in

 Being and Time

 as fallenness and thrownness into the world. Augustinestates the initial perception of life experience: “already the next moment can make me fall andexpose me as someone entirely dierent.”

3

This constant fall – the temptations – open beingfor possibility. The

 Being and Time

 does not explicitly refer to Augustine in each connection,inevitably though, they are implied

the matter of dimensions

 afterlife, panel

describes, so far we don’t know —

I’m good with just this

endlich über jeden

 Ask George, ask Barack

ask Donald, ask contractors

How great is war — weep

inside/outside, outside/inside (listening)

 beyond god is this

everyday cacophony 

chaotic wisdom --

say what you will, religion

cannot contain this next sound

just before they wake up near island

 Somewhere out on bay

Sailboat shifts weight in water

With each dreaming turn

composition

 Say what you see — tree

Silhouette in dawn light through

Window, nothing moves

it tolls at abbey gate

 I have been killed, grief

moves through each body, turns eyes

inward sorrowing

this war is (not) over

 Desperate killings

US troops at airport die

Bombing sad exit

fact or fiction, something’s changed

 All writing is now

Autobiographical

Integrality

awe

 Surprise arrival

Something never seen before

Passing, through, zen, mind

his experience

 Flautist says Jesus

Lives inside him— seems content

blows note empties bell

listening to the voluntarily unvaccinatable

 One day it occurred

We are very foolish folks —

Without doubt, sans doute  

the.rap.y

 I’ll concede each lives

Inside me inside you, all

We are is each one

yes, yes, let me think, and get back to you

 For days I ask the eleven year old boy visiting his great aunt, “When did you get here?”

He just looks at me, or ignores the question.

Last evening he said to his great aunt, “He always asks me that question.”

He’s right. It is an annoying question. I should be ashamed of myself for asking it. But I can’t help it.

Recognizing that difficult emotions are common to all humans also seems to arouse immediate feelings of empathy with others. We share our emotions: they are part of our collective karma, the human condition.

For some time after the terrorist attacks and the start of the war, I also found myself thinking of the Buddha’s admonition to reflect on our own death, and the fact that we can’t know when or how it will happen. “Of all mindfulness meditations,” said the Buddha, “that on death is supreme.”

 (- from, It’s Only Natural, By Wes Nisker, SPRING 2002, TRICYCLE)

So I ask you: When did you get here?

It seems like something important to ponder

Something of the ground

Surrounding my attention

The Buddha said: “Of all footprints, that of the elephant is the deepest and most supreme. Of all contemplations, that of impermanence is the deepest and most supreme.”   

(- from, The Supreme Contemplation, Practicing with the Four Reminders, By Andrew Holecek, Winter 2013, Tricycle)

 Something one cannot 

Step over without consideration

sleeping in my memory

A friend writes and asks a question. Having no answer, I write this:

…   …   …

Saskia’s mother and I had a thirty year dharma combat about this question. She’d say ‘love’ I’d say ‘compassion.’

You’re right, not much that I’ve found to explicate love in Buddhist literature. Unless…

Unless the exploration sidesteps the word/concept ‘love’ and considers focusing on the activity corresponding with ‘loving.’

Perhaps this includes considering:

• There is nothing other than love.        (What does ‘nothing other’ suggest about being loving?)

• Affirming ‘this’ as it is is the source of loving-kindness.      (If ‘this’ is all there is, and it is affirmed, is that affirmation a balm and nurturing toward healthy becoming?)

• The meditation on, and the realization of, anatta drops us into a shared empty space where sandokai (harmony of difference and sameness) emerges as a loving realization of true relationship.      (If it walks like, and quacks like selfless harmony, would it be called loving?)

Simon and Garfunkel sang: 

Don’t talk of love

Well, I’ve heard the word before

It’s sleeping in my memory

And I won’t disturb the slumber

Of feelings that have died

If I never loved, I never would have cried

I am a rock

I am an island

That song captivated me in 1965 for reasons I did not comprehend. Was it fear that I was locked up in a stony isolation? Or was it a proleptic prescience pointing via reverse engineering to what love insinuated and beckoned?

Where is love in Buddhism? Is it sleeping in the memory of all that is not love? Is it the ‘gone-ing’ of all the marble that is not David until Michelangelo frees David from accretion and hiding? Is it just this, harmonizing with the nothing other, beholding what is within/without, the sacred sound of without/within?

I loved the argument Erika and I had for nearly thirty years. 

Love? Or, compassion?

Enter MU. 

It cautions me to un-ask (and unmask) the question, the difference, the distinction.

It says to me — “Nah” — it’s not one or the other, it’s seeing what we all must disguise through (y)our loving eyes. (Thank you Peter, Paul & Mary)

Zen is the passing through of love and compassion.

Loving is zen is Loving.

Be-ing is compassion is Be-ing.

Thanks for the prompt!

….  …   …

On Aug 23, 2021, at 6:39 PM, Chris York wrote:

Good conversation last night!!  Thank you both. We have been thinking, reading talking about love in Buddhism. My Zen  training did not address this topic...nor have I seen much other than Theravada Lovingkindness teachings. The Christian tradition seems to hold love at the center of its teaching and we have been puzzling about this contrast..self??, emptiness ????..any thoughts?

From Theravada teachings..."Compassion is what happens when suffering meets love and sympathetic joy is what happens when happiness meets love."

interesting but not very elucidating. 

Bows and hugs. C

cody and max, anniversaries plus one day

Yesterday was the anniversary of two sweet dogs that graced meetingbrook.

Erika's Cody in 2015 age 11, four years with us. A German Shepherd.

Max Manjushri in 2020, age 4, eight months with us. A Border Collie.

The joy of their company. The sorrow of their loss. The happiness they were here.

until it’s gone

 The theoretical physicist is saying that all the mammals on earth live for the same number of heartbeats, about 1.5 billion heartbeats. Then he posits that these days the average human gets 3 billion heartbeats, 70-80 years. He also says there’s no life after death.  (Sean Carroll, in The Nature of Reality  A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Theoretical Physicist)

Surely (at my age) the heartbeat count hovers near 3 billion. 

Elsewhere I read: “There are approximately 7 x 1027 atoms in the average human body.”

The physicist suggests there’s no way these atoms, processes, and interface connections carry on once death has interrupted, silenced, and dispersed everything.

This eventuality, or non-eventuality, is fine with me. I can imagine nothing happening — no meetings, no reward or punishment, no astonishment at divine beatific vision, no horrific repulsion at horrible demonic miserableness.

All of which makes this life such a curiosity. 

The time we have.

IX

Time comes into it.

Say it.        Say it.

The universe is made of stories,

not of atoms.

(—from poem, The Speed of Darkness BY MURIEL RUKEYSER)

Yes there is suffering and death.

Yes there is joy and life.

Given the choice between cruelty or kindness, I’d prefer to be kind.

If feeling were available to us, I prefer to feel what another is feeling so to be in sympathetic appreciation for and with my fellow being.

As the folk singer Joni Mitchell, (in an exquisite rendition of the song), concluded: I really don’t know life at all. (Both Sides Now)

Some find absurdity too much to shoulder.

Others…

Happily, not knowing, go on, until gone.

unmove

 Gone.

Taoist poem from 8th century:

I asked the boy beneath the pines.
He said, “The master’s gone alone
Herb-picking somewhere on the mount,
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.”

[Chia Tao (777-841)]

 For the moment, rain is gone. It hovers. Will return. But I do not clutch it. Can’t. Never could. Birds sing in it. Green leaves unmove for time being.

But, gone.

What is here is here.

But … gone.

 Noting “gone” allows you to experience “This too is passing,” which will provide more comfort than if you just try to remind yourself “This too shall pass.” Noting “gone” creates a stillness and tranquillity within you; this is a natural consequence of the nature of vanishing.

But there is another effect that people often report and that seems to go against the nature of vanishing. Some people find noting “gone” to be rich and sensory-fulfilling. Where things go to is where things come from. Each time you note “gone,” for a brief instant your attention is pointed directly toward the richness of the Source. That is what’s behind the seeming paradox of satisfying nothingness. There is a word that means both “cessation” and “satisfaction” as a single linked concept. The word is nirvana.

(—from, The Power of Gone, by Shinzen Young,  Tricycle, Fall 2012)

 At Sunday Evening Practice woman in Massachusetts said she was calm and at peace with herself, happy to be there. It was final circle. 

Words of e e cummings lingered;

let all go – the

big small middling

tall bigger really

the biggest and all

things – let all go

dear 

so comes love

Which suggests:

Where things go to is where things come from. 

how things change

                   (se souvenir jo-ann)

my dear friend does not

worry about storm surge near 

house — since death came by

paragate

sound neighbors clear out

dirt bike four wheeler hard rock

big truck tires — bare yard

night

 rain drops

porch roof

sound

pattern

resembles

nothing

familiar

falling

go on, ask

 There is suffering

in life, hurt, disappointment —

How we think of God

Is how we think each other

So ask yourself, who is God

unfathomable jaunt there to here

 I used to think God

was all there was. Now I think

God is all here is

follow the thread

 Doc says: sure I’ll cut

you open, sew some stuff, stitch

you up, send you home

sudden breeze through window

 You cannot give me your death.

O Lord, give everyone his own death, 

A death stemming from his own life. 

—Rainer Marie Rilke

Nor I give you mine. 

Here’s to your own!

because I was looking

 hummingbird hovers

at emergency room door

left right up down leaves

sanus, sana, sanum

 What keeps me sane? No-

thing. There is no sanity —

We have gone insane

komusō*

*Priest of nothingness, monk of emptiness. 

This komusō within which and wherein I stand and walk and sip my coffee.

Practicing suizen, blowing air through this physical shakuhachi of lungs and nose, throat and hara.

Jewelweed crop is plentiful. Bees attend their morning liturgy. Sacred buzz-chant ripples out from their offices. An undulating eucharist, as if open field hesychasm in mid-august creating new welcome to all who've abandoned their formal churches for deeper elevations of dirt and soil and earthen resurrection.  

Topsoil gives grass, wildflowers, worms, ants, small frogs and crawling caterpillars. 

 "God is a dirt farmer, not a garden cultivator." (David Roberts, Patheos)

There are days when all man-made creations feel shallow and fallow. Machines, banking systems, automatic weapons, fighter jets, bombers, lawn mowers, cars and trucks, stock markets, public relations firms, cable news outlets, glocks, clocks, and conference rooms.

Then there are days when being a komusō with repetitive om mani padme hum on fingered beads as sole companion feels good enough for now.

Monastic of no other.

Priest of nothingness.

Monk of emptiness.

Hanger of laundry on sunporch.

Feeder of cats in their separate quarters.

Washer of dishes.

mendicant crown beads

origin beckons

destination dwelling home

middle — step by step

dory dockside ritual

 penny placed on thwart

under securing line draped

over gunnel green

looking at us

 Bush, Obama, Trump, 

Biden — Afghanistan, war —

This time so awful

literature

 Finished Jayber Crow —

Wendell Berry from ground up

Feeling full feeling

unsatisfying exchange

 War is when we fail

Talking with each other, set

Down words, take up pain

in and out and back

 Pray if you got ‘em!

Military personnel 

Take a break broken

losing twenty year war

 “Afghanistan is at the end of nowhere.” 

       (Retired General Barry McCaffrey on MSNBC re: the ability of  US sympathizing Afghans to flee the Taliban today overrunning Kabul as compared to Vietnamese fleeing Saigon by sea in 1975)

an uncaptured eventuality

Thought is, as yet, elusive.  

 

 They’re alone at the fountain, in a dark well.

They’ve been exiled by the world of hope,

which is the world of action,

but the world of thought hasn’t as yet opened to them.

When it does, everything will change.

(—Excerpt from: "A Village Life: Poems" by Louise Glück. Scribd)

 

For us, to think, is to become an uncaptured eventuality lingering just outside the circumference of campfire light in a dark unseeing that nears and enthralls.

regaled and astonished by the possible in our surround and imagination.

The astrophysicist gives the example of an ant watching a sheet of paper disappear.

It had been on a two dimension surface of desk when a human lifted it up to be placed into a third dimension paper holder extending upward from the desk. To the ant it simply disappears, having no reference to a height in its length and width world.

Today is the feast of the Assumption of Mary into “heaven.”

Not even time, the fourth dimension, comes close to explaining her disappearance into some heavenly dimension we have no capacity to detect or understand.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, like some modern day evangelist for planetary scientific description, tells us about the universe with grace, wit, and clear examples, enjoying the story-telling and narrative excitement of emerging human knowledge and discovery.

Today we say Hello Mary in a new way.

The world has not yet yielded, with grace and wit, all its theoretical manifestations and dimensional mysteries.

And yet, here we remain, regaled and astonished by the possible in our surround and imagination.