tell them not to be afraid

 Transform rigid vertical hierarchy into breathable circular community.

That’s what I’d tell Corrections Commissioners across the country.

Yesterday’s “Awakening Exchange” facilitated from Maine State Prison.

A good use of time.

to everything

 turn,

turn,

turn.

what do you, want

 I don’t want to die

Why not? I’ll tell you. Want is

My friend. If you want

To know, or want to eat, it

Appears always at your side

Walks with you all day

(Hey, this waka went too far)

take out a sheet of paper, put away your books

  I was absent the day dying was taught in school. I wasn’t there for the test.

It was said by the Roman philosopher Cicero that to philosophize is to learn how to die. He was echoed by the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne, sometimes in earnest, at other times in jest. “If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry,” Montaigne playfully concluded. “Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately.”  (—In book review,  A Neuroscientist Faces Death, and Learns, nytimes, By Kieran Setiya, Jan. 17, 2023)

But, no worries, I was told.

You can make it up on the spot when the proctor calls your name for a spot quiz.

All learning and school should be so easy.

only sit

 Eihei Dōgen Zenji  (Dōgen Kigen) was born today (19jan1200) in Kyoto, (Several sources say 26jan).

From a zen point of view he might not have been born nor die. A similar perplexity suffounds Jesus. 

Shōbōgenzō

Treasury of the true Dharma-eye

Nami mo hiki.		In the heart of the night,
Kaze mo tsunaganu		The moonlight framing
Sute obune	A small boat drifting,
Tsuki koso yawa no	Tossed not by the waves
Sakai nari keri.	Nor swayed by the breeze.

 https://terebess.hu/zen/dogen/Poetry.doc

Dogen and Francis (of Assisi) are the inspirations for meetingbrook hermitage. For which, we are grateful.

The way things are found out underneath everything else. 

unhold slicing point of view

Truth is dangerous

Just look at you — obvious

Knife — what you hold

waldo general hospitality

Banana muffin

With orange juice after eye

Surgery — worth it

before surgery, walking nowhere

 Kinhin in kitchen

Before stinging eye drops — cat

Ponders my circles

pas de personne

 I once thought I’d see

God. Was told, “No one sees God.” 

 I became no one

slalom glide

 All that love can do

Is trust what appears in place

Of hope — hopeless, hopeless — trust

Skates between, says yes

carving their initials

 Scratching in wall, ice

Over mountain, rat’s teeth or

Mouse claws, bored squirrel  —

We live in sluice between two

Mountains — the homeless stop by

circus in town

 I grow grumpy. Too

Many improbable clowns

Saying I’m your hope —

They’re not, merely giggle fools

Elected by goofy votes

anodyne

 Buddha and Christ both

Walked into a bar, of course

It hurt, the bruises

no matter what the prize

This poem felt important this evening.

TEMPTATION IN THE DESERT

If a German soldier comes to you

and asks you to shoot the man

next to you because that man

isn’t even bones in his striped suit,

tell the soldier, “No, you’re the devil,

and though you offer me the cities

of the world and all their soft women

and bread, I won’t shoot this man

though he is as dead as I am.

We are brothers in death, and brothers

in death don’t torment each other,

no matter what the prize, no matter

that death is the only prize left.”

(Poem by John Guzlowski) 

~This poem appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review (2007)

For the Ukrainian people, in their travail. 

mlk

 Of course he was brave,

Martin Luther King, he was

What a good man is

mu dieu

 In the dream, dusty bookshop by ocean, repairs and tidying going on, mountain lion ambling in from water. 

So many people milling, pewter tableware set out, I wonder— do we even have a place to pay, a point of sale, an agreed pricing?

The housecats were there. Some dog I didn’t recognize was getting massaged by me, I was carrying some classical literary tome in middle of enormous room.

Whence these images? Whence this scene? Whence the characters in this fantastical dream? 

I let the mountain lion out the glass doors, careful to ensure I can slip in as she shoulders through to an unfathomable gyrotic meander.

There is no discrete God, but even so, it is that MU Dieu that captures my affection in kaleidoscope reveries on Sunday morning, uncomplacent and sans peignoir.

The sound of bell tolling five minutes before the half-hour.

from an- ‘without’ + arkhos ‘chief, ruler’.

 There's another way of seeing it. The crass animosity of republicans for democrats, illiberals for liberals, right wing for left wing.

Anarchy must be considered. 

anarchy | ˈanərkē | 

noun a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority: he must ensure public order in a country threatened with anarchy. • absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal. ORIGIN mid 16th century: via medieval Latin from Greek anarkhia, from anarkhos, from an- ‘without’ + arkhos ‘chief, ruler’.  (apple dictionary)

Republicans have done the math. They seem to know their skillset is not governance, not compassion for the people, not the advancement of services and opportunity for middle or lower income citizens. Those skills and interests, they calculate, are associated more with Democrat-led governance.

So, their thinking goes, tear down government. Strip the agencies and departments set up to provide services and a closer form of equality of power and financial resources. Prove to the populace that their opposite political party is only interested in liberal self-serving, power, wealth, and socialistic inclinations.

The meanness, the rousing of menacing hostility, ad hominem attacks, attempts to flay rights and respect, and their carelessness in protecting the dignity of individuals with needs -- are calculated strategies to diminish healthy hope and community support one for another.

There is a preference for no government/governance. Individual wealth is a privilege that takes precedence over shared contributions to the common good. And if there is a large and unreflective assemblage of religious fundamentalists looking for a hitching post to tie their sale-able beliefs, all well and good.

Add in the itch for a simpatico authoritarian demagogue whose personal moral character has never matured, and you have a convenient marriage of sociopathy and simplistic thinking masquerading as a legitimate alternative to representative democracy. 2016 was the ribbon cutting for carnival derangement.

But let's give the devil his due. The "people" are a dangerous and unpredictable force in the life of a democracy. Majority rule is a precarious predation of mob rule. There are, the thinking goes, some who know better than the hoi polloi, and, noblesse oblige, should lift the burden of self-determination from the thin shoulders of those uninitiated into a highly specific, if chaotic, ideology.

There are, some say, legitimate reasons to strip freedoms from individuals and groups and give authority to corporations instead of people, authoritarian commanders rather than misguided individuals, hierarchy rather than the ordinary citizen.

In 2023 there is a precarious hold on sanity and civility. Some say pay no attention to the news. They're right, of course. The less you know, the happier you might be. But to know less is different from the "don't know" mind. The latter is, conceivably, a more difficult way of making one's way through the turmoil.

I don't know -- not really -- whether democracy (as conceived) is a better option to anarchistic authoritarianism. I don't know, down deep, whether Republicans really want the disintegration of the structures of representative governance. And I don't know whether, as some insist, both political parties and philosophies are corrupt and narcissistically intent on feeding their own ambitions.

If I knew less I'd say let's break out the booze and have a ball; if that's all there is, let's keep dancing. Its a tolorable position to adopt. 

But I don't know. The cultivation of which suggests keeping on, eyes open, mind alert, heart ready, and feet shod to engage and encounter what is taking place, as it is taking place, with equanimity and compassionate readiness.

It always seemed simplistic -- the rejoinder to love even those you do not like. There's a lot, these days, I do not like -- and a whole lot of folks jabbering cruelty and nonsense from positions of responsibility that I definitely do not like.

As for that other word, that other way of being-in-the-world, (go ahead, say it) -- "love" -- well . . . I don't know . . .

I'll have to sit a while with that invitation. 

Still, I'm glad there's been an invitation.

which way

 There’s

No reason

To think

But

Do it

Any way

m.o.n.o.

 Capuchin Friar

Sent December card addressed

“Mono’s” to mailbox,

(“monastics of no other”) —

His laughter across the miles

behind rain, more rain

 If today is last

Hear this, no regret, no hope —

Coming or going

this is so

We’ve misunderstood the metaphor. Religion appropriated it and we looked away to other interests. 

If we apply the template, the process progression in a wider swath, we come to see a new dynamic of spiritual/psychological life applicable to ordinary life and everyday experience.

Religion, in this manner, re-enters its home ground — where earth and cosmos serve particular manifestations of energetic life transmuting itself into Itself.

In 1946, Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), the recently retired chair of the Depart- ment of Philosophy at Kyōto Imperial University, published Philosophy as Meta- noetics (Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku), a work that is often read as marking a significant transformation in Tanabe’s thought.2 In his uncharacteristically personal preface to Metanoetics, Tanabe explains that this transformation was spurred by his experiences in the last years of the Pacific War, when, confront- ed by the suffering he witnessed around him and his inability as a philosopher to bring his expertise to bare on the situation, he was thrown into a painful process of self-reflection and self-critique. From this personal experience, Tanabe began to question the limits of philosophy and turned to the theories of self-negation and repentance found in the True Pure Land school of Buddhism (Jōdo shinshū). Influenced by the teachings of the Japanese Buddhist monk Shinran (1173–1263), Tanabe conceived his personal experience and the ostensible crisis of philosophy more generally through metanoia (μετάνοια; zange), understood as a circular process of self-negation, repentance, conversion, and resurrection. For Tanabe, metanoia would serve not only as a new model for philosophy—where philosophy became metanoetics (μετανόησίς; zangedō), a continual process of philosophy’s self-negation and resurrection—but more immediately, would illuminate a path for Japan’s national repentance and reconstruction in the wake of war and defeat. The resulting 1946 text, Philosophy as Metanoetics, was not a discourse on religious conversion, or a new philosophy of religion, but a call for the complete rethinking of philosophy from a religiously inflected perspective. Ultimately, Tanabe hoped to push reason to the limits of its own antinomies and, through a process of negation-and- resurrection, reformulate the philosophical enterprise as a critical practice of what he called “absolute critique” (zettai hihan).

 Metanoetics is thus a bold and complicated text. It has been read as a philosophical treatise, as religious philosophy, and as an expression of the general discourse of national repentance (i.e., ichioku sōzange) circulating in Japan after its surrender in 1945.3 When Metanoetics is compared to Tanabe’s earlier writings—in particular, to his “logic of species” (shu no ronri) developed in the 1930s—Metanoetics appears to mark a major shift in his thought.4 For example, in the conventional literature, Tanabe’s earlier logic of species is recognized as a thoroughly political project, emerging from his concern with the historical reproduction of ethnonational units and their constitutive irrationality.5 In contrast, Metanoetics appears to be, as James Heisig has claimed, a “supremely nonpolitical book” since it is a “call...for a religious change of heart, not for a reform of social institutions.”6

(Tanabe Hajime as Storyteller, Or, Reading Philosophy as Metanoetics as Narrative, by Max Ward. In Confronting Capital and Empire of Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy Edited by Viren Murthy, Fabian Schäfer, Max Ward, 2017),

Changing one’s mind, in particularity, is isomorphic to changing Mind in absolute analysis.

It is often wondered what affect, if any, the individual (so small) has upon the collective (so large). In times like ours, when antipathy and arrogance threaten the well-being of so many, we begin to despair the absence of cooperation, harmony, and creativity in both political arena and personal milieu. 

When any one mind sees the whole, the whole is seen through and through.

Each person, each practitioner, (in a word) ‘saves’ the world from fragmentation and divisive intolerance.

How do we know this is so?

We don’t know.

But, in fact, this is so,

Critical entirety is ushered into Itself by each individual becoming itself/themselves.

It only takes practice.

Take it!

living (a)lone together, (a)part and with (an)other

 several inquiries

about meetingbrook's

daily schedule

I respond

we're gone 

idiorrhythmic *

between buddhist zen

and christian contemplative

traditions

 

apart from Tuesday

Friday, and Sunday  

evening zoom practice

we are on our own

to practice according

to each one's rhythm

the chapel/zendo

is open to all

at any time, unheated

the bookshed is

open to all 

at any time, gas heater

hermits come and go

keep to cell

love the alone

as we traverse

what is solitary

with (in) us

...   ...   ...

* Idiorrhythmic monasticism is a form of monastic life in Christianity.^[1]

It was the original form of monastic life in Christianity, as exemplified by St. Anthony of Egypt (c. 250–355) and is the opposite of cenobitic monasticism in that instead of communal ownership, the monk lives alone, often in isolation. Philosophically it consisted of a hermit's total withdrawal from society, usually in the desert, and the constant practice of mental prayer.^[2] The word idiorrhythmic comes from two Greek words, idios for "particular" and rhythmos for "rule", so the word can be translated as meaning "following one's own devices".^[3]

It was first developed by St. Anthony of Egypt (c. 250–355) and was practised at Mount Athos, Greece until 1992.^[4].   

(wikipedia) 

 Monasticism (from Ancient Greek μοναχός, monakhos, from μόνος, monos, 'alone'), also referred to as monachism, or monkhood, is a religious way of life in which one renounces worldly pursuits to devote oneself fully to spiritual work. Monastic life plays an important role in many Christian churches, especially in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions as well as in other faiths such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism.^[1] In other religions monasticism is criticized and not practiced, as in Islam and Zoroastrianism, or plays a marginal role, as in modern Judaism. Many monastics live in abbeys, convents, monasteries or priories to separate themselves from the secular world, unless they are in mendicant or missionary orders.

(wikipedia)

as january plods on

 the Bible

on windowsill

in bathroom

does not see

winter outside

it's the winter

inside me

that keeps

its covers

closed

the longing to light up drab landscapes

 It’s like watching torrential rains, devastating floods, mud rock slides. Or blast snow cyclones crippling highways and side streets — both causing destruction and death, altering landscape, shutting down movement.

You can watch, but cannot stop. The cleanup will be slow and disrupting. 

I think the core driver of politics across the Western democracies is this: In society after society, highly educated professionals have formed a Brahmin class. The top of the ladder go to competitive colleges, marry each other, send their kids to elite schools and live in the same neighborhoods. This class dominates the media, the academy, Hollywood, tech and the corporate sector. 

Many people on the middle and bottom have risen up to say, we don’t want to be ruled by those guys. To hell with their economic, cultural and political power. We’ll vote for anybody who can smash their machine. The Republican Party is the party of this protest movement.

(—David Brooks in, The Party’s Over for Us. Where Do We Go Now? Jan. 11, 2023, nytimes with Bret Stephens)

For some, the sledgehammer is more reliable than the blueprint or plane-saw and attaching joists.

The hidden anarchist in me claps hands and stamps feet.

The secret monk in me entertains the no lasting kingdom trope.

The political fool in me thinks it should be a confluence of dialogue and compromise.

The reclusive poet in me wonders where the red cardinals showing up yesterday at feeder have been these many months.

When aesthetic sensibility returns, long missed, and lights up drab landscapes, we will remember what authentic faces look like.

not just descriptive, but imperative encouraging invitation

Standing in dooryard

Night meditation with dog

He drops, rolls in snow

Looking toward mountain rise, sign

Crossing cabin planks — ‘open’

“t” as core connective home

 To study truth is to

Study God. To study God is to see

What is there as here

Collapsing here/t/here, finding

“t” as core connective  — home

throwing thought to side of road

 Experience first

Then, if you want to construct

A theory, do so —

Then drop it, returning to

Stark experience

see where the clouds rise

 The zen teacher said, 

“Don’t die within a phrase.” No —

Instead, “Realize 

the heart of Being.” Seeing,

we don’t get so caught in words

is, most intimate

 Ritual is structured silence. Sitting on cushion. Walking in silence. Bowing to the holy presence of tree, person, departed, or scurrying animal. The sangha of creation. God as what is appearing before us.

The ceremony of attention, without thought or calculation, with simple allowing, there and here, as is, in its own light.

When I was a boy, bicycling out of yard and driveway onto bay ridge avenue to 20th avenue, to 61st street, to iron rung fence that held my schwinn upright, climbing wooden stairs to sacristy.

The ritual of serving at 6:30am mass at St A’s.

Every step of the setting out, approaching, attending, serving, wondering, the mere awe of it!

I am still making the turns onto 21st avenue, onto 62nd street, surplice folded over handlebars. The earliness of it.

The ritual.

Imprinted.

In every step I take to chapel/zendo.

Even when nowhere near the Bay Parkway small wooden church or the Ragged Mountain cabin.

Even then, there,

Mind and body, body/mind, holds space and time, space/time, near and intimate.

I don’t know how it is we exist throughout the complexity of duration and location.

But as the zen master says, of meandering endlessly, not-knowing is most intimate. 

Or . . .

Where our feet take us.

many names mentioned in lighting of candle, the prayer of it

no further to fall

 When the rug is pulled 

and you are left unstanding —

find the floor — dwell there

dialogia

 I asked God to help me understand stupidity in political leadership and self-serving celebrity posturing.

God said, no, there’s no understanding stupid.

i enjoy our conversations.

resume writing résumé

 A day is coming when stupidity will no longer be rewarded.

On that day I will turn in my resignation and forfeit my riches.

Having long been stupid, I’ll have to find a new job.

Shall we look together?

still, life

It seems meaningless 

to say faith without belief —

like standing mid air 

ground far below cosmos far 

away, Paco, gone, smashed, car

on hearing of bobby’s (paco’s) death in car accident yesterday

The Snow Man  

                  BY WALLACE STEVENS

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. 

(Listen to it at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45235/the-snow-man-56d224a6d4e90)

friday evening conversation finally settled into this

 Tina shared poem by John Guzlowski:

What My Father Believed

He didn't know about the Rock of Ages

or bringing in the sheaves or Jacob's ladder

or gathering at the beautiful river

that flows beneath the throne of God.

He'd never heard of the Baltimore Catechism

either, and didn't know the purpose of life

was to love and honor and serve God.

He'd been to the village church as a boy

in Poland, and knew he was Catholic

because his mother and father were buried

in a cemetery under wooden crosses.

His sister Catherine was buried there too.

The day their mother died Catherine took

to the kitchen corner where the stove sat,

and cried. She wouldn't eat or drink, just cried

until she died there, died of a broken heart.

She was three or four years old, he was five.

What he knew about the nature of God

and religion came from the sermons

the priests told at mass, and this got mixed up

with his own life. He knew living was hard,

and that even children are meant to suffer.

Sometimes, when he was drinking he'd ask,

"Didn't God send his own son here to suffer?"

My father believed we are here to lift logs

that can't be lifted, to hammer steel nails

so bent they crack when we hit them.

In the slave labor camps in Germany,

He'd seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should

help each other. If you see someone

on a cross, his weight pulling him down

and breaking his muscles, you should try

to lift him, even if only for a minute,

even though you know lifting won't save him.

  Poem by John Guzlowski 

The poem is taken from his book about his dad and mom and their experiences in WWII, Echoes of Tattered Tongues

exchange of what holiness once was

 The story says angels, wise folks, and shepherds came and saw the child.

It’s a good story, told for two thousand years.

In Maine tonight bright moon on fresh snow.

There’s a sparkle about arising faith alongside diminishing belief.

Bald mountain knows only itself.

a feast of showing through — there’s nothing out there, not a thing in here

 The story changes

Poem says father sent son

To suffer. Maybe 

Jesus was born into this

Suffering world existence

The way snow alights

On mountain because it’s there

Sky, cloud and cold air

Purposeless facticity 

This, and as this is, itself

To suffer this is

To allow what is to be 

As fully engaged

With … with…not separate, with —

Presence intimately here

Forget puppet God,

Rather, come to understand

God as being-with

The whole of this existence

Nothing other, no outside

The inner life is

All of life seen through and through

Through and with and in 

Itself, beholding what is 

Allowing itself to be

silentio veritas

 I’d like to say this —

But “this” is unsayable.

So, that’s that.

But this —this resides well within itself. 

When Gibran’s prophet-protagonist is asked to address the matter of talking, he responds:

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;

And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.

And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/11/21/kahlil-gibran-prophet-talking/

This thought is morning light come up over night slumber.

Silentio veritas 

(The silence of truth)

Where 

One

Says

Nothing

0 / +

 Zero

     Plus

Circle

      Cross

Rounding

      Intersection

Empty

      Addition

kneading cat with sharp claws on me during “sed libera nos a malo” accompanies

 In Rome, at this time

Pope Francis at Vatican

Gives homily at funeral mass

For pope emeritus Benedict XVI

(Remaining in simple wooden casket)

As bare-headed Argentinian Jesuit 

Knows he, too, soon enough, 

Will follow in death, as we all do

stay home

 Healing heals itself

If you don’t make 

yourself other than

Healing itself

sounding what advances without an opposite

                (Waka on bye)

God is 

All in

Each

Listen to

Each, still

With all

In silence

Hear 

This

Let’s stop

Talking about

God

Each word

Is (truly)

Itself

it’s what our practice is

 Idiorrhythmic

or maybe it was meant for ensō dog

               (Waka sounding the three of us)

Chickadee on green

Feeder hanging from ridge pole

Above turned dinghy

Calls to me at barn door — Thanks

For seeds — good new year

one is alone with another

 Who we are

Is who we are

With

Relationship is

When two are 

With each other

Until there is

No

Other

One plus one

Equals one

Nothing

Left over,

We are who

We are in

Relation to

Who we are 

With

this, as it is, is good

                     (a waka, at first light, new year’s morning, tanka you)

Fish go splash and splish

Off winter docks — changing tide

Boats are on the hard

Deer hooves track in mountain mud

Look close — I Am — passing through

Rockport Harbor, new year’s morning

new year’s eve

no one has ever seen god

What is seeing itself

One does not see itself

One is not there to be seen

One is the emptiness through and through

As light is that which moves through darkness

Darkness, it is said, cannot grasp light moving through

Tell me this —

What is moving through

seeing through 

your life

don't let anyone put you down

Gotta love Anthony Hopkins:

https://twitter.com/AnthonyHopkins/status/1608558347925741568?s=20&t=dTKk0OJS2j-DwlvXudlUNw

causing suffering to another

 In prison today we spoke of the difficulty of someone getting into your business, giving you a hard time, harassing you.

"It's prison," a long-timer said to the relative newcomer, "there are bad people here."

Another inmate spoke of ways he goes about extricating himself from antagonistic or aggressive interactions. Short of violence, how respond?

Not an easy conversation.

Sidestepping for a spell, the old-timer wanted to talk about evil. Some words about the meaning of the name "Satan" "Lucifer" or "Shaiṭān." Adversary. Accuser. Missing mark mayhem maker.

Is it true that every act seems to the actor to be good, at least for them? Is "evil" the failure to respond to another in a way befitting our common connection and mutual longing for peace and harmony?

Why do we cause suffering to another?

Why the cross? Why the First Noble Truth?

These are hard questions. In prison there is no escaping them. Nor are they academic considerations. They are immediate, unrelenting, and everyday.

Options were brought up. Strategies. Tactics. Attitudes of mind. And recognition of the suffering, background and foreground, of those involved. "Hurt people hurt people" someone said.

No place for vague philosophy or bromide encouragement here. Just the hard work of considering the physics of light, weightless and shining through darkness, not eliminating it. An impossible nexus of science and spirituality.

Accepting the causes and conditions of real and present approximations of hurt people hurting on other hurt people.

Time grew short. We'd listened. We thought. We spoke to one another. We, by and large, understood the issue. In the context and confines of prison there's no escaping the suffering, misunderstanding, and set of bad choices available to someone faced with unpleasantness and aggressive encounters.

We were Muslim, Buddhist, Greek Orthodox, Catholic, and Shaivite. We talked about how these traditions see things.

We were reading Billy Collins poem "Flying Over West Texas at Christmas" for the second reading when the guard came in to say we had to end, things were shutting down ten minutes early. We did a fast final circle. Wished one another Happy New Year.  Bumped elbows, shook hands, fist knuckled.

The man who brought up the issue stopped at the door, turned, looked straight and steady into my eyes as we stood very close. He said it was helpful. Said he prays. He said he'd take what everybody said and mull it.

I get to walk out.

Lobby officer says, "See you next year, Bill."

"God willing," I said. 

In sha’Allah, I thought.

God help us, I prayed.

I get coffee at the place on Route 1.

yes, they will soon die

 Innocent children

Are abused, hurt and die —

We adore the wealthy

The powerful above law

Justice cannot find its legs

how’s the wife and kids

I cannot read the name or message the new executive director hands me after the conference in Philadelphia.

In the dream John is sitting at his desk through door in lower gym out of reach; he has died and generous hospitality is gone.

Or course, of course, I have nowhere to go, an artifact of former time, these kindly strangers, don’t even ask who I am.

The wonder of desolation! There is no belonging in rucksack. It holds everything — images of ghosts, tranche confusion, unformed faith, 

Unreadable messages, indecipherable pericope, a failed hermeneutic of a particular life, more empty space than protons unadhering.

listening to dogen’s uji

 They ski on Ragged

Snowmaking covers downhill —

I walk grassy field

and there she remained

 Yes

In the middle

Of the night

I call

Your name —

But no sound

Emerges.

Because

No name

Is there to be

Pronounced.

No name,

No sound!

If so,

What am I

Calling?

I think, 

“That’s it —

I am calling

No name with

No sound

In the middle of

The night.”

“And there,” as 

Aunt Ronnie

Would say, 

“She remained.”

(Just

Like

This)

some flowers before the stone

 Doris sends poem on Christmas.

It’s by Billy Collins.

Whose touch is nigh on perfect.

Flying Over West Texas at Christmas

Oh, little town far below

with a ruler line of a road running through you,

you anonymous cluster of houses and barns,

miniaturized by this altitude

in a land as parched as Bethlehem

might have been somewhere around the year zero—

a beautiful song should be written about you

which choirs could sing in their lofts

and carolers standing in a semicircle

could carol in front of houses topped with snow.

For surely some admirable person was born

within the waffle-iron grid of your streets,

who then went on to perform some small miracles,

placing a hand on the head of a child

or shaking a cigarette out of the pack for a stranger.

But maybe it is best not to compose a hymn

or chisel into tablets the code of his behavior

or convene a tribunal of men in robes to explain his words.

Let us not press the gold leaf of his name

onto a page of vellum or hang his image from a nail.

Better to fly over this little town with nothing

but the hope that someone visits his grave

once a year, pushing open the low iron gate

then making her way toward him

through the rows of the others

before bending to prop up some flowers before the stone.

(—Poem by Billy Collins,  from Aimless)

there’s nothing there

 Meister Elkhart writes that there is no image nor likeness with regard to God. In my youth I was taught that we were created in the image and likeness of God. 

We look for God and we find nothing. And we are surprised.

We search for our self, and we find nothing. We think self-knowledge will clarify things. We discover there’s nothing to know.

What is there to be done with this nothing?

There’s nothing to be done.

Where are we? And where is God?

.   .   .

Here.

Here we are.

Look no further than here.

. . .

The going out is the coming in. It’s a quantum paradox.

Here is where there is.going.  Where is that?

. . .

Nowhere.

. . .

Finding nothing

Returns here.

. . .

Here.

Here is all there is.

There’s no there there.

. . . 

We are always and only here.

As is God.

. . .

As is,

God

one’s birth is not-i’s death

A story

Only tells

A version

Of reality

Reality itself

Remains 

Still

And silent

If  I 

Choose reality

Beyond

Story

This

Reality

Is

Unknowable

I turn 

‘Round

And there

You go

As I

Too

Disappear

Into here

we are poor passing facts

 Happy Birthday, Creation!

And to humanity, a new beginning!

Suffer it well!

we are born for one another, oggi (today)

Oggi 

For

What is

As is

 Yes

The Nativity -- The Adoration of the Shepherds

by Antonio da Corregio

As is

Christ

For us

Al giorno d'oggi