In “The Thin Place” of All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day, the worlds of the known and the unknown are only thinly separated.
It is a rare invitation to all integrity-loving people.
Let’s take that time to reevaluate and reconstitute our commitment to living without separation and without exclusion with our familiars and vast families nearby and worldwide.
It’s a perfect time to clear and change our hearts.
Let’s!
Sometimes a poem inadvertantly captures the zeitgeist of a country and a time in such a way as to send shivers.
POEM
Form is the woods: the beast,
a bobcat padding through red sumac,
the pheasant in brake or goldenrod
that he stalks—both rise to the flush,
the brief low flutter and catch in air;
and trees, rich green, the moving of boughs
and the separate leaf, yield
to conclusions they do not care about
or watch—the dead, frayed bird,
the beautiful plumage,
the spoor of feathers
and slight, pink bones.
Poem by Jim Harrison; (First poem in Jim Harrison: Complete Poems, 2021)
Perhaps a stark variation on "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" of the Heart Sutra.
This is our self.
We might not see it.
Until the pounce.
Ours or an-other's.
All along the way
It has been Francis, no place
No clique no secret handshake —
Just that guy nowhere but here
Showing up passing through glance
Let's pretend the insufficiently sympathetic and civil-minded disabled among us are only gussying up for Halloween by being thoughtless, unkind, and crass in their attempt to frighten the rest of us and run away with the spoils of the coming election.
Maybe it is a bad character costume shared and worn by MAGA revelers who've slogged through the poison fog atmosphere of brain-fried besotted monsters who do not care and have no moral foundation to hold them steady.
I trust and pray Mr. Pelosi will recover from his awful experience.
I'm unsure the flash mob of mindless followers of our current craven right-wing politicians have any hope in the near-time of unearthing the necessary redeeming virtues to bring them back from their awful and terrifying fantasies.
As October enters Thin Place.
Saturday morning. At 7:15am, 35 degrees.
A chilly sitting, prajnaparamita chanting, liturgical hour of lauds.
Sláinte mhaith agus folláine do gach duine! (Good health and well-being to all!)
s&b
If violence starts
Everyone is in danger
To those whose rhetoric is
To cause damage — shut up, you
Will not fare well with your mouth
Drop everything
Just look out eastern window —
slant afternoon sun
There are times nothing matters
When silence is only sight
How I Became a Saint
Some sloppy Googling at the Vatican,
and James Richardson the soccer commentator,
or the JR who builds boats, or some JR
the Internet has never heard of
lost out on an immortal gig:
St. Jim, Patron of Apology.
Sorry, guys: admittedly your Works
were nobler than mine, your Faith purer.
But as for the required Miracles!
The one with the radiant child, the one with starlings
sweeping away the sky—there were millions
I happened to be present for.
The water a clear stone over stones; the stream
of her gray hair, up close, clear;
how every way you look the fog
is thicker than where you are.
(Poem By James Richardson)
Or, as someone else wrote:
The student hiding in closet with classmates speaks like a zen master and christian mendicant combined in his experience of the real and horrifying.
“We’re all thinking it’s a drill,” Jawae said. When he got into the closet, Jawae texted his family to let them know that he was safe. Some of his classmates started panicking, he said. They could hear gunshots nearby, but they kept waiting.
“I felt empty, I felt really empty, I had zero emotions going through me,” he said. “I was ready to die.”
While in the closet, Jawae read a verse from the Bible from his phone, John 3:16.
“I understood that if this is my time to go, this is my time to go,” he said.
Teen and Woman Killed in Shooting at St. Louis High School, Oct.24, 2022, NYTimes
A teacher, a 15yr old student, and the gunman were killed. Seven others wounded.
The citizens of the United States hardly notice any more.
Why not?
Because it is not their child. Not their spouse.
This is their erroneous thinking.
And the gun has replaced the crucifix as an object of worship. It is a diabolical scam. Take, take, take. Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. Separate, separate, separate.
No one understands the crucifixion. A fully human person absorbs the suffering of the world.
The Christ holds everyone close. An intimate sacrifice extruding the inclination to separate and condemn.
The Bodhisattva hears the cries of the world and weeps while gathering unto herself those needing comfort.
The student hiding from the shooting says: “I felt empty, I felt really empty, I had zero emotions going through me,” he said. “I was ready to die.”
A prerequisite for becoming what we never expect to be.
No, not a victim.
Rather, a healing, holy, transformed (go ahead, say it!), saint, for whom caring, compassionate, and loving attentiveness becomes the only reality worth the presence of being-in-the-world.
For all who have suffered the losses, and for anyone realizing what the hidden sorrow betokens -- may you find in the crushing experience a new way of thinking and being in the world!
Truly, a profound and passionate sacrifice crossing our consciousness.
(After poet Jim Harrison)
In his poem he
Brings flowers to crash scene where
Her head was torn off
A cow watched him in blood grass
His ballad of love
I disagree. I'm not going to say yes to everything. I want to argue. Push back. Contend. Dialogue. Dispute.
But, I suspect, I can still love you.
Feel pity, sympathy, fondness, affection.
We are losing the ability and capacity to see things differently and still remain humane, brotherly, sisterly.
We are not here to eliminate one another.
We're here to find one another a place (outside us) and a time (inside us) to reside at home in the world.
In the quiet of this room, sitting alone, I am in community with each one who is one with and within themselves.
Those who are divided and who divide others are not easily associated with a community of complementarity and compassion.
There are those who know better, think they are better, strut and pretend there is no better than them.
No matter who is near them, they are lonely and isolated. And they want to make everyone else lonely and isolated.
One can sit alone in a room and be with everyone. Even with those who make themselves and others lonely and isolated.
Mendicants, perpetual pilgrims, hobos, transients, solitaries, wanderers place to place, time to time, thus come, thus gone.
Among us, these peripatetic dreamers who know they are dreamers in a landscape of hallucination, in a duration of timelessness, in a form garbed with the formless, accompanying us, in our surround, most likely a subtle smile of recognition felt from their ungraspable presence.
No fixed home, set address, unchanging domicile. It’s not homelessness. It's just that "home" is not what nor where we think it is.
If we can learn that love (there, the word appears) is no opposition, no division, no separation -- then we are both always alone and never alone at the same time.
Alone.
With others.
Alone.
Together.
And if you dare to turn around and glance there...
Alone with the Alone.
It's a closer look at the lyric of the Ed and Patsy Bruce song "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" -- the line that says:
"'Cause they'll never stay home and they're always alone
Even with someone they love".
We are not alone. We are with the Alone. Not two. Not one. Just...
With someone
We love
Abitazione — Dwelling
Loading lumber up
to crossbeams from cabin loft —
Meditating planks
Estrangement.
That’s what Paul Tillich defined sin as. Estrangement.
Separation from that which is the source, the ground, of our being.
I listen to those who blurt nonsense and idiotic accusation against those who work for justice, truth, and service to the needy. It is absurd.
I am estranged from the estrangers.
Thus, a sinner. (Oh, the complicated calculus of culpability!)
Miserere mei!
If you take another’s life, is it now within you? Is this why so many who have murdered feel haunted?
You have taken their life. “Unforgivable,” says a man in prison.
Unless, I think, the process of forgiveness does not point to forgiveness coming from outside you.
It is a more intimate process.
You have taken a life. It is now yours. However you understand this, some new relational intimacy is going on within you.
Forgiveness is impossible from outside.
It is what is within you that can be the only experience of forgiveness you can find.
No one can forgive you. Only you as one with another can find forgiveness.
The echoing resonance of embodied understanding.
Spirituality is the practice of everyday activity with attentiveness and awareness, a practice allowing things to come, things to go with reverent welcome, gracious release -- assuming the responsibility of sacred watchfulness and intimate engagement.
Become both -- because both become -- a spiritual and religious person.
Leave distinctions to philosophers and politicians.
Choose holiness.
See everything.
Trust that what we call God is Creating Energy moving through both vast universe and individual heart seeking to bring goodness and wholeness into and through each and all.
To pray is to encourage the Energy, the Cosmos, and the Individual to abide courageously and confidently in practical, infinite, and eternal joy of Being, peaceful existence, and compassionate loving presence.
... ... ...
In addition, these:
Far, faraway, steep mountain paths,
Treacherous and narrow, ten thousand feet up;
Over boulders and bridges, lichens of green,
White clouds are often seen soaring,
A cascade suspends in mid-air like a bolt of silk;
The moon’s reflection falls on a deep pool, glittering.
I shall climb up the magnificent mountain peak,
To await the arrival of a solitary crane.
Shide (8th c.)
https://www.dailyzen.com/
Then:
Ephesians 3:14-21 © A prayer that faithful may know the love of Christ
This is what I pray, kneeling before the Father, from whom every family, whether spiritual or natural, takes its name:Out of his infinite glory, may he give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted in love and built on love, you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; until, knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God.Glory be to him whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine; glory be to him from generation to generation in the Church and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.
https://universalis.com/mass.htm
Finally,
these three exquisite poems by Sharon Olds:
ENCORES: "Begin Again" with poet Sharon Olds
https://youtu.be/YjllzXC2PnY. (time, 11:56)
We don’t understand
Death, lifeless bodies no place
no breath, gone so far
within, unheard unseen, still
As sun slants through October
We mostly walk on
surface, one step, two steps, feet
secure solid ground --
but there's another pathway
beyond clouds after thinking
(A Waka for those once gathered, cara Patricia)
Once a year there comes
round a more intimate kind
Of recollection
As day moves into night, some
Twenty three years later — there
Older man admits
Going feeble in mind and
body; companion
says “no you’re not” then berates
him for not wiping wet soles
Some reading before dawn.
Good friends, I know there are people who tell others to devote themselves to sitting and contemplating their minds on purity and not to move or think. Deluded people are unaware, so they turn things upside down with their attachments. There are hundreds of such people who teach the Way like this. But they are, you should know, greatly mistaken.
Good friends, what are meditation and wisdom like? They’re like a lamp and its light. When there’s a lamp, there’s light. When there’s no lamp, there’s no light. The lamp is the light’s body, and light is the lamp’s function. They have two names but not two bodies. This teaching concerning meditation and wisdom is also like this.
Good friends, the dharma isn’t direct or indirect. It’s people who are sharp or dull. For those who are deluded, there is indirect persuasion. For those who are aware, there is direct cultivation. Know your mind and see your nature. For those who are aware, there is basically no separation. For those who aren’t aware, there are infinite kalpas on the Wheel of Rebirth.
Good friends, since ancient times, this dharma teaching of ours, both its direct and indirect versions, has proclaimed “no thought” as its doctrine, “no form” as its body, and “no attachment” as its foundation.
(—from, One Practice Samadhi Part 2! Hui-neng (638-713), Daily Zen, ! October 17, 2022)
We come to find ourselves, wonderfully lost and completely everywhere, at this dawning turn of light in a very large cosmos, surrounding and unsurceaseable.
They are not the one
Consciousness, they are one with
The one consciousness.
You are not god, you are god
With everything gathered in
We worry about facts. One writer and a commentator worry about our fiction.
What's the alternative?
Jump ahead a few centuries to our “post-modern” age in which [David Foster] Wallace writes, and one can see that a rather predictable thing has happened. The reductionist view of the objective world leads ever more to a reductionist view of the subjective. If Cartesian man was alienated from the world, post-modern man is alienated from his self as well. In the age of neuroscience the self itself is reduced to a meaningless machine. And of course late-capitalism fragments and commodifies the subjective realm just as much as everything else (cf. the “industries” marketing “self-help” “relationships” etc.). Infinite Jest shows this disintegration of the subjective with consummate skill (analyzed quite well by Stephen Burn). And what it shows with particular clarity is how this alienation of the self aggravates the problem of the diversion to an extent never seen before. Late capitalist culture is obsessed with increasingly ubiquitous and addictive forms of “entertainment” which are designed to divert us from our inner emptiness, but end up eating us alive.
Wallace’s literary goal was to find a way out of this impasse. As he once said in an interview:
Fiction’s about what it is to be a f***ing human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now. Or can be.
The problem that he sees with post-modern literature is that it only does the first half of the job; the post-moderns literary giants are great at deconstructing the idols of the age, but they don’t show any alternative:
We’ve all got this “literary” fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like “Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!” But we already “know” U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody. What’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not why not? (Ibid.)
( from, The Only Thing Worth Writing About, July 29, 2011 / Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist. )
https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/the-only-thing-worth-writing-about/I've only a smidgeon remaining to finish reading Infinite Jest. It's been years picking up and putting down.
Sometimes our way of loving is like that.
And the forgiveness of that is a practice of increasing capacity to thrive.
It’s a good thing to
argue with god. Disagree.
To keep words alive
To keep varied worlds astride
God will have to think again
There’s something waiting to be discovered in the traditional counsels/promises of the spiritual life:
1. Own nothing,
2. Desire nothing,
3. Listen, listen, listen to the sound of what is being said.
Poverty, chastity, obedience.
Contemplation, conversation, correspondence.
Hiddenness, surrender, interrelationality,
What are we missing?
While we argue about abortion, Bankei tries to catch our attention.
Odd, this way of thinking.
The unborn Dharma disappeared in both Japan and China, and it has long since been forgotten. But now it has appeared in the world again.
Once you come to know without any doubt that the marvelous illuminative wisdom of the Unborn is the Buddha-mind, and that the Buddha-mind puts all things in perfect order by means of the Unborn, then you can no longer be deluded or led astray by others.
Bankei (1622-1693), https://www.dailyzen.com/
The difference between being here and not being here is beyond me.
Maybe a coffee and donut will help.
Here is where the heart is.
Here, the placing mind stretches geographical stepping-stones.
Here, you are, as you are, whole and entire.
With, or without, being born.
As an altar boy
Kneeling at consecration
Something happens — what
Exactly is unknown, an
Unspoken stillness pervades
(Clearing throat) I want
To thank Nobel Committee
Passing over me
I’ve done nothing of any
Significance nor hope to
Rain, wind, and Friday
Night in middle October —
Assertion is ground
(These are words of carceral
Men) morning conversation
Come on — where is there to go? What am I supposed to wear?
What gibberish should I chant or pray or muffle into my sleeve?
No thanks.
I’m not stepping anywhere.
Hello?
Anyone there?
A Vision of the Bodhisattvas
They pass before me one by one riding on animals"What are you waiting for," they want to knowZ—, young as he is (& mad into the bargain) tells me"Some day you'll drop everything & become a rishi, you know."I knowThe forest is there, I've lived in itMore certainly than this town? Irrelevant—What am I waiting for?A change in customs that will take 1000 years to come about?Who's to make the change but me?"Returning again and again," Amida saysWhy's that dream so necessary? walking out of whatever house aloneNothing but the clothes on my back, money or noDown the road to the next place the highway leading to themountainsFrom which I absolutely must come backWhat business have I to do that?I know the world and I love it too much and itIs not the one I'd find outside this door.
Philip Whalen, "A Vision of the Bodhisattvas" from The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen copyright © 2007 by Brandeis University Press and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. www.wesleyan.edu/wespressSource: The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press, 2007)
Anyone?
Hello?
Just as I suspected — there’s no one there.
No forest.
No highway.
No door.
Nothing other than this.
What an absurd man
Afraid to admit he lost —
Raw stupidity.
It is not unkind to tell
The truth about idiots
Some say it is human nature to want for yourself that which belongs to another.
To steal, defraud, rob, traffick, thieve.
It seems, rather, to be belief and behavior better characterized as not-yet-human.
I’d submit that to be human is a higher calling. Some might want to call it a spiritual calling, that to be truly human is to be human-divine.
For me, today, to be human is to let another be another, and to experience and accept another as no-other.
Whatever name put on it, to be human in its most authentic manifestation is to become a transparent presence personifying aseity, haecceity, and tathātā.
Itself, this, and thus — a humanity recognizing the integrity, individuality, and inherent inchoate nature of authentic existence becoming and being itself without objectification without instrumentality without violation.
Some might call such a way of being a way of love.
However uncomfortable the use of the words ‘love,’ ‘human,’ or ‘god’ might be, it is a profound trust and hope that these three expressions of earthly existence just might be made manifest in our everyday experience and ordinary thinking.
May it be so!
Aseity (from Latin ā "from" and sē "self", plus -ity) is the property by which a being exists of and from itself.[1] It refers to the Christian belief that God does not depend on any cause other than himself for his existence, realization, or end, and has within himself his own reason of existence. This represents God as absolutely independent and self-existent by nature. Many Jewish and Muslim theologians have also believed God to be independent in this way.[1] This quality of independence and self-existence has been affirmed under various names by theologians going back to antiquity, though the use of the word 'aseity' began only in the Middle Ages.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aseity
Haecceity (/hɛkˈsiːɪti, hiːk-/; from the Latin haecceitas, which translates as "thisness") is a term from medieval scholastic philosophy, first coined by followers of Duns Scotus to denote a concept that he seems to have originated: the irreducible determination of a thing that makes it this particular thing. Haecceity is a person's or object's thisness, the individualising difference between the concept "a man" and the concept "Socrates" (i.e., a specific person).[1] In modern philosophy of physics, it is sometimes referred to as primitive thisness.[2]
Haecceity is a Latin neologism formed as an abstract noun derived from the demonstrative pronoun "haec(ce)", meaning "this (very)" (feminine singular) or "these (very)" (feminine or neuter plural). It is apparently formed on the model of another (much older) neologism, viz. "qui(d)ditas" ("whatness"), which is a calque of Aristotle's Greek to ti esti (τὸ τί ἐστι)[3] or "the what (it) is."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haecceity
Tathātā (/ˌtætəˈtɑː/; Sanskrit romanised: tathātā; Pali romanised: tathatā)is a Buddhist term variously translated as "thusness" or "suchness," referring to the nature of reality free from conceptualisation elaborations and the subject–object distinction.[1] It is a central concept in Mahayana Buddhism,[2][3] having a particular significance in Chan Buddhism as well. The synonym dharmatā is also often used.[citation needed]
While alive the Buddha referred to himself as the Tathāgata, which can mean either "One who has thus come" or "One who has thus gone",[4] and can also be interpreted as "One who has arrived at suchness".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tathātā
After watching film on human trafficking, this thought:
Evil is taking the benefit for yourself what belongs to itself, what belongs to themselves.
There is depravity in believing and acting on the belief that things and persons belong to you.
Let us pray for and act towards each and every being, each and every thing, belonging always and only to itself, one-ly to ITSELF.
God forgive us!
*Where you live is how you live. (Translated from Italian)
Love of the place.
Merely being-here.
At this time.
Fiddle music from Celtic Colours in Cape Breton parsing the grammar of morning at Ragged and Bald Mountains in Camden Maine of a Tuesday.
The fact of it!
Here, from the book “The Fate of Place” by Edward S. Casey, Chapter Title: Proceeding to Place by Indirection: Heidegger, this:
I do not want to be absolutely dogmatic by asserting that one cannot conceive Being except on the basis of time. Perhaps someday a new possibility will be discovered.
-Martin Heidegger, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit
The bare space is still veiled over. Space has been split up into places.
-Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Section 22
Unless we go back to the world, space cannot be conceived.
-Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Section 24
What, on Freud's view, dreams provide for an understanding of the uncon- scious mind-a via regia, a "royal road"-the body has provided for place, which by the end of the nineteenth century had come to be as repressed as the libidinal contents of the unconscious mind. Nevertheless, promising and productive as bodily inroads into place have shown themselves to be, they do not exhaust the modes of effective reentry to the place-world. In this chapter we shall consider the contributions of someone who neglected the role of the body in implacement but who managed to find other means of access to place as a subject of renewed philosophical importance. Indeed, it could even be claimed that it was precisely by his deliberate refusal to invoke the body- along with consciousness, its incongruent counterpart-that Heidegger made his own way to place.1 Heidegger's way back to place is a middle way, a via media between body and mind, both of which are set aside in order to concen- trate on what happens between them. In exploring this open between-this between of the Open-Heidegger was drawn into detours that, despite their digressive character, allowed him to glimpse aspects of place overlooked by other thinkers, ancient as well as modern. This is so in spite of the fact that these same detours are described in a vocabulary that is highly idiosyncratic and that, at least at first glance, seems to make little connection with previous descriptions of place.
Heidegger came to a full acknowledgment of the power of place only belat- edly. In earlier phases of his thought, place was important not for its own sake but because of its usefulness in such disparate contexts as the work world, the work of art, and politics. Even when Heidegger abandoned an instrumental interpretation of place in his middle period, he still did not single out place as such. Yet in later writings place (along with region and other related terms) emerged as an increasing preoccupation. Heidegger himself underlined this slow but decisive augmentation of place in his evolving thought when, in a seminar at Le Thor in 1969, he maintained that his thinking had traversed three periods, each with its own leading theme: Meaning, Truth, and Place.
Heidegger gets back into place, then, not as "the first of all things" to be considered (as certain ancient thinkers had assumed), or in reactive flight be- fore infinite space (a flight taken by many modern thinkers), but by indirec- tion: by traveling through diverse "forest paths" (Holzwege), as he liked to put it. To begin with, he returns to place not through but despite the body's involvement in placiality: as if place could be reached around and outside the body itself. Still more tellingly, he returns to place despite his own obsession with inaugurating a postmetaphysical era in philosophy-an era in which one might well imagine place to be a dispensable item, given its preeminent posi- tion in classical metaphysical thinking from Plato through Philoponus, and continuing into the Middle Ages. Yet just as place emerges in the Cartesian abyss between consciousness and body, so it rises, Phoenixlike, from the ashes of metaphysical thought as deconstructed by Heidegger. Thanks to such fea- tures as gathering and nearness, place becomes for him the very scene of Being's disclosure and of the openness of the Open in which truth is uncon- cealed. In the end, place figures as the setting for the postmetaphysical event of Appropriation (Ereignis).
pp.243-244, ch.11, Chapter Title: Proceeding to Place by Indirection: Heidegger! Book Title: The Fate of Place! Book Subtitle: A Philosophical History! Book Author(s): Edward S. Casey! Published by: University of California Press. (1997)Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt2jcbw8.18
Appropriate.**
As one’s own.
Undifferentiated.
Non-differation.
Is this good news?
Is this the heart of Buddhist/Christian thinking?
Not taking anything from anyone — being through time that which is, in itself,
early 15c., appropriaten, "take possession of, take exclusively," from Late Latin appropriatus, past participle of appropriare, adpropriare "to make one's own," from Latin ad "to" (see ad-) + propriare "take as one's own," from proprius "one's own" (see proper). Related: Appropriated; appropriating https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=appropriate
That moment of seeing something, glimpse, kensho, open field, event (Ereignis )
That which draws us into the place we are.
Shhh…
Sharing a Mountain Hut with a Cloud
A lonely hut on the mountain-peak towering above a thousand others; One half is occupied by an old monk and the other by a cloud:
Last night it was stormy and the cloud was blown away;
After all a cloud could not equal the old man's quiet way.
(Kuei-tsung Chih-chih, a monk who lived in a humble hut on Lu-shan (盧山 Rozan) (Essays in Zen Buddhism – Second Series 352))
The old man probably is the cloud.
Look around.
Do you see him anywhere?
Oh, up there!
Isn't he something?
I have fallen off
Zafu landing on feet here
October autumn
Release of leaves onto ground
Where each step is one with earth
Our practice is clear
Everything in and out be-
longs with this order
Bow if you wish, walk
sit, chant or be silent, you
are hereby now and
forever one with one in
the zendo as the sangha
The foundations of ethics is not in moral principles. Rather, it is an ontological issue.
We will come to understand the univocacy of existence.
That we are one another.
And if we come to grasp that revelation, something fantastic might emerge.
Love for oneself.
All of it.
meetingbrook has gone
idiorhythmic — each is
on their own unique
schedule — there is no practice
but haphazard quiet joy
Turns out ‘spooky action at a distance’ (cf Einstein) is a thing. It’s called Quantum Entanglement. Some folks just got Noble’d for their work on it.
Millimeter by millimeter we’re coming to see.
“When you change the way you
look at things, the things you
look at change.”
—Max Planck
Some Catholic friends are peeking behind dogma and doctrine and catching glimpse of energetic source made into doctrine and dogma, coming to suspect that the clothes you wear do not make you — they just make you appear in a particular way for a particular occasion. In this way, closets are where truth goes to alter its appearance.
Let’s clear up something else. Naked truth (as a physical metaphor) is not a mythic naked body. (Cf. Lord God asking Adam in Genesis, “Who told you you were naked?”—Gen.3:11)
Some feel that the human body without clothes is not a naked body. Rather, the body is one more covering of energetic source (let’s call it) masking, or making apparent that which is, in itself, non-visible.
No one, they say, has ever seen God. Only, we might say, appearances of God. And these are troubling occasions to try to verify.
God, they say, cannot be seen.
Nor heard.
Except in the most minuscule slice of imagination across a faded frequency of dilapidated radio tubes or rusted transistors off in the corner of a collapsed barn in northwest Nebraska.
We’re leery of those who claim to hear God speaking to them. What we hear is mostly egoism and narcissism cloaked in political Versace getups or Brooks Brothers haberdashery.
Look again.
Listen again.
See anything?
Hear anything?
Right there, that looking, that listening — that’s good stuff.
God is the looking and listening.
Dont look for God. Just look!
Don’t try to hear God. Just listen!
And…take naps!
Are we good?
You bet we are!
Small section of small
Practice plainsong doors and floors
Bells and tones sounding
So much holy silence bead
By bead echoing prayer
Where is the center
Of the universe? Each thing,
Each person resides
Generative center — one
Cosmos moving here to there
She thinks they are wrong
That Covid am I is me
(I’m going to nap now)
Leaves on ground yellow
Mountain brook's lethargic stay
Untumbled stones rest
beliefless, space/time —
network of relationships,
events create space
eventuates root ground
time not emergent, mere, there
The end of the rule
of law is no victory —
not for anyone
Something here to consider:
"I have learned that a man who counts himself a shepherd is not worthy to be a member of a flock." (-p.282, in novel, Haiku, by Andrew Vachss)
Somewhere, back a bit, the word "humility" had meaning one could feel.
It had something to do with earth;
—from humilis "lowly, humble," literally "on the ground," from humus "earth," from PIE root *dhghem-"earth." (Etymological Dictionary)
When earth was understood as lifeblood, heart path, and soul sanctity.
Can you remember?
Still attentive.
Angel of God
My guardian dear
To Whom God’s love
Commits me here
Ever this day
Be at my side
To light and guard
To rule and guide.
Amen
Still wondering.
For believers, the simplest explanation was that God was off attending some distant sector of the universe during the late thirties and early forties in Europe on planet earth.
For nonbelievers, god was a deluded dream held by delusional people delirious for some moral order in an otherwise insanely willful and chaotic display of human existence.
There’s a third possibility.
We have not clearly figured out what that possibility is. Not yet.
It has something to do with things becoming themselves, nothing other, a non-comparative aseity loosed from reliance from anything or any thought outside or other than itself.
Itself as a whole, unto.
Here is One —
Another Itself
A poet sends their poem.
Of course I reply:
A layer of ambiguous wrap
Cold is welcomed
It means wearing skullcap
Green draining from tired eyes
Watching shocked leaves
Out newly fixed kitchen window
Jewelweed drooping over septic chambers
Alone as any dying is, no longer
Caring to clear up anything
wfh/2oct2022
No reason not to.
Unless, of course, and until, a call is heard across a distance, "That's a wrap!"
