aphasia can present as lexical-semantic deficits with verbal paraphasia

Meetingbrook Conversations are, if anything, diverse and divergent, anomalous and contemplative, literary and linguistically gymnastic. 

In prison this morning, among other things: 

• reflecting on thalamus,
• on gospel of Mary Magdelene, and
• the structures of appearance and disappearance in social constructs.

In other words -- aporia, chaos theory, and apophatic silence.

We wondered about change. Confrontation or insinuation?

We wondered about post-dualistic triadic or trinitarian interrelation.

We wondered whether e.e.cummings was right when he wrote:

Better worlds (I suggest) are born, not made; and their birthdays are the birthdays of individuals. Let us pray always for individuals; never for worlds. "He who would do good to another" cries the poet and painter William Blake "must do it in Minute Particulars"—and probably many of you are familiar with this greatly pitying line. But I'll wager that not three of you could quote me the line which follows it

     General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, &flatterer

for that deeply terrible line spells the doom of all unworlds; whatever their slogans and their strategies, whoever their heroes or their villains.

(--from non lecture two, in six non lectures, by e.e.cummings, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1952-1953) cf https://endorsements.livejournal.com/32911.html

 The thalamus, according to the National Library of Medicine:

 The thalamus is a mostly gray matter structure of the diencephalon that has many essential roles in human physiology. The thalamus is composed of different nuclei that each serve a unique role, ranging from relaying sensory and motor signals, as well as regulation of consciousness and alertness.          ... 

Though a central sensory relay station, thalamic lesions can paradoxically present with various non-sensory clinical patterns, thereby complicating diagnostic issues.

Thalamic aphasia can present as lexical-semantic deficits with verbal paraphasia but with intact repetition and naming.[10] Characteristically this pattern of aphasia following thalamic strokes shows speedy recovery.[11]                                                                                                                                (--Neuroanatomy, Thalamus, Tyler J. Torrico; Sunil Munakomi. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542184/)

As doorkeeper and distributor, one can imagine the passageway of: 

(1) The vast and incomprehensible in the field of Being entering 

(2) the portal/gatekeeper for directional distribution into the carbon-biologic entity we call human body. This biologic unit can receive and process only so much according to its specifications and capacity until it becomes surfeited and deluged shutting down further input. 

(3) Thereby, in this revolving stasis, there happens a falling through, an emptying into, a reorientation beyond material capacity, down into silent emptiness, wherein and whereby the ever-present origin without shape, time, or dimension -- dwells.

In our mythic theologic articulation through folkloric history, a placeholder designation has been ascribed, namely, trinity. 

This trinity -- origin, anthropos, and pneuma -- might be depicted as inception, conception, reception. Perhaps: the  eternal inchoate, the courageous engaged, the empty reposition.

In Western religious thought: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Perhaps: Being, Becoming, Beholding.

It is our experience that everything-that-is falls through that-which-is-aware into vast-emptiness-at-center.

This journey, if you will, is the spiritual narrative of birth, death, and beyond. Yes, there is death in the middle aspect of this journey. The body, the transportation, the collector and distributor, can only take so much burden, space, time, dimensionality and functioning of organs, before it ceases to contain and negotiate that which is passing into and through it.

So, Jesus dies on the cross after imploring the Father to find a workaround to this middle dilemma.

He says the Spirit (Άγιο πνεύμα) will carry on.

Like last breaths of hospice patients in quiet rooms going out and on beyond my comprehension, I am left with my compañeros and compañera in prison conversations, with one another in final circles of reflective contemplation and community.

With gratitude.

dizzying kinhin 3am

 Strong rain

Truck windows open

Stagger outside

absent minded

How we think about things determines what the things are that we think about.

Thinking of Christ without oppositions of divine/human, without dualistic tensions of either/or, even without rationalizations attempting to include or exclude anything in some arbitrary attempt to define or categorize.

Emptiness is neither nothing nor something.

It is what it is and what it is not.

 Modern understandings of Christ are still formed in terms of the Greek ontological model. The great majority of Christians, while confessing Christ as both human and divine, tend to fall unconsciously into one or another of the heresies excluded by the early Fathers: in their minds, Christ either becomes God striding through the world, or a man with particularly godlike qualities. It is  

precisely this kind of conundrum that a Mahayana Christology can avoid because, in basing itself on the doctrine of emptiness, it refuses to define either the divine or the human nature of Christ. If things and persons have no essences, as Mahayana holds, then they have no specific differences in light of which they might be defined. Mahayana theology is not compelled to do an intellectual balancing act in order to reconcile two opposite natures attributed to the same person. 

(—from, The Emptiness of Christ: A Mahayana Christology, by John P. Keenan, Anglican Theological Review, Vol. 75 No. 1 Winter.1993, Pp48-63)

I sit with a man who breathes in a breath pattern twenty seconds of seven gasps followed by twenty seconds of faint near nonexistent breath followed by the gasping seven breaths across twenty seconds.

We listen to “Absent Minded” a piano and string piece by Gabriel Òlafs.

Christ hears us.

Christ graciously hears us. 

In that soundless sound, 

in that mushin no shin (無心の心)

we become 

what Christ is becoming 

with us.

perhaps, soon, literacy and elocution

 In poem “Mnemosyne” by Friedrich Hölderlin:

We are a sign that is not read  

We feel no pain, we almost have 

Lost our tongue in foreign lands

(—in, What is Called Thinking?, by Martin Heidegger).

la nostalgia è passata ieri

 There’s no visiting

the past. Over shoulder glance

then head turns forward 

its what happens next — upaya — skillfully

 We are holding stem

Flower of dharma twirling

Awakening hand

straddling my first birthday

 There’s no explaining Nagasaki. Don’t listen to any of the rationalizations. Nothing decent can be inferred nor intimated.

Ugly is as ugly does. My Nana was right. She’d say, “handsome is as handsome does.”

Nothing about 6aug1945 and 9aug1945 in Japan is other than horrendous and appalling.

The big dumb celebrations then and since echo in the ribald enthusiasm for a current day corrupt man who wants control over America’s nuclear arsenal. 

शिव चीज़ों पर नज़र रखते हैं  — (Shiva keeps an eye on things.)

not the transitory and impermanent

The actor, stepping from stage after delivering lines, takes off wardrobe specific to scene, plot, and role, returns to street garb, leaves behind that which was temporarily necessary for the performed play, going on into the resumption of their life unfolding forward through time and place traversed by each new step next breath next encounter.

It is the natural unburdening of task, title, and time.

To not let go of our false self at the right time and in the right way is precisely what it means to be stuck, trapped, and addicted to our self. (The traditional word for that was sin, the result of feeling separate from the Whole.) Discovering our True Self is not just a matter of chronological age. Some spiritually precocious children see through the false self rather early. Some old men and old women are still dressing it up. If all we have at the end of our life is our separate or false self, there will not be much to eternalize. It is transitory and impermanent. These costumes are largely created by the mental ego. They were useful to us in our development. Our false self is what changes, passes, and dies when we die. Only our True Self lives forever. [3]

[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013), 27–28.  From “Letting go of the False Self”, Richard Rohr, CAC

 You can’t stay on stage once your bit player role is enacted and performed. You move away. Step off. Relinquish costume.

We are not who we think we are. We are, performatively, who we are coming to be.

All the world is a staging. Players erect, play parts, disassemble, and move on.

What goes on, what is perennial, is the theater of being, being itself, being here, (ultimately) this present moment — surrounding and surrounded by — the merely true in all its disguises, scripts, and deliverance.

Look at you!

We thought we wanted fame, to be famous.

 What we’ve really wanted is to be famished by and delivered unto — the play of it all.

Alas and alack, hithertofor and notwithstanding, treading and trodding, satchel on stick over shoulder, trippingly and traducing, we forge and forage on.

Do play nicely and well!

famiglia, il migliore

 Francis, Katherine

Nellie, Jim, Tom and Sarah,

Patricia — thank you!

post-ferry seen off-shore, pre-three lbs of coffee and bags of fragrant tea

 Drenching rain on beach

Running dog stepping through waves

Perfect morning walk

existence by numbers and ancestral change

 Begins eightieth year

Dawning seven and nine, this

Twenty twenty three —

One day by one day, minute

By minute healing forebears

one is there already

 Really, where do you think you are? 

Highest mountain in the West,                                                  

eighteen thousand miles from the East,

reaching the sky and dwarfing the other peaks. 

If one wishes to reach it, one is there already; 

for a Zen student can make a mountain 

wherever the feet are touching.

 

—Jakushitsu Genko Zenji (1290–1368) in dailyzen

Its easy to be mistaken, thinking we are somewhere when, in fact, we might be everywhere. 

transfiguration

 Jesus says:

“See through me.”

going out, coming in

The mystery of spiritual journeying.

Ultreïa = further beyond

 ανάσταση = resurrection

The going out is the coming in.

Canadian author Sue Kenney – suekenney.ca – suggests that pilgrims on the way to Santiago would say “Ultreya” to which pilgrims on their way home would respond “Suseya”. For her the term would be intrinsically linked to the way back, which was at the time a very important part of the Camino de Santiago with no easy transportation means. https://www.ultreyatours.com/blog/the-meaning-of-ultreya-suseya-santiago-de-compostela/?cn-reloaded=1

Maybe that’s an invitational consequence of growing older — a meditation on destination-less travel (or is that desensitizing travail?)

So many I know delight in outward accomplishment, vacations to other continents, cycling or hiking glorious trails and mountains across the country. I salute them.

These days, I am accomplishing nothing, vacating the premises, doing kinhin in open-air terra-zendo, napping in imaginal reverie, chanting with birds and mewing cats.

Quite simply, there’s nowhere to go … I am … already dwelling.

Prosit!

four days of contemplation

 It is the sacred triduum of 

Hiroshima, Transfiguration and Nagasaki. 

America grew tired of God the Father

Preferring to rid itself of Jesus

Ushering in a new era of mass-killing

Crucifixion by nuclear destruction

Of course the acts were horrible

The mindless raving of exterior solution

We are left with interior silence and prayer

Seeing the cruelty, unrejecting Christ who

Lets be seen all IS and YES and HOLY

As we shade our sorrowing unseeing eyes 

This is the call of sacred numinous

Turn again and look, see what is there

See WHAT IS here

Entering emptiness

Released from delusional calculations

Warfare of comparison and dominance

Today, this transfiguration triduum,

Reject error of ignorant gain and greatness

See through love, see through wholeness

Right now, right here, may particular be seen

A new vision of each and any

This one, that one, anyone

Shining through many and all

Silent One Expression  — Inner Communion

Semblance of Christ

Within reflecting through 

A Heart Sutra inviting us

Beyond, awake, and wholly rejoicing

if wishes were horses

 It doesn’t matter what I think about Donald J.Trump. But he should not be president again.

I don’t care whether he gets away with his crimes and unsupportable attacks on law enforcement, judges, prosecutors, citizenry, anyone who doesn’t kowtow to him, or someone who thinks for themselves and finds him repugnant.

I wish he’d go away.

I’d like our country to be decent, kind, thoughtful, and believable. He’s not.

If prayer has any purchase or validity, I pray he stops being so unbelievably disingenuous.

without nothingness, within emptiness —- (where/what god is)

 The nothingness

Without

Is not

The emptiness

Within

(Savor

This

Realization)

for a second the severed head does not realize

When brash thuggery

Mocks and derides and insults

Everyone suffers

Look at a dangerous man

Krishna as time sharpens sword

at end of friday evening conversation she said the words

Are you

Being

You

Yes

Are 

You Being,

You

been outside (so long)

 the dying are go-

ing within as God is with-

in -- make of it what 

you will -- no need to believe

we're outside now -- looking in

a hundred and two year old compañera

 We time together

she sleeping, bed, me in chair

listening, Richter,

as light descends out from room

I get up to go, say bye

ένας (one) ... νας (you)

 One has

No inside

No outside

One

Is merely, wholly

One

are in we

Creating inside out. 

Where nothing ever was ... comes what is now ... becoming that which is.

 Something seen and felt — but still -- within, nothing there.

“Real?” You ask.

As real as real is, yes, of course, real. But don’t be fooled. Real is what mind is ... making through ... imagination. 

Nothing at core. Everything with care. A longing to cure.

Here’s Browning and Sayers:

 But here is the will of God, a flash of the will that can,

Existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo, they are! 

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, 

That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.

 

Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought, 

It is everywhere in the world-loud, soft, and all is said: 

Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought: 

And there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!' 

... Robert Browning: Abt Vogler.

"I mix it with two in my thought"; this is the statement of the fact of universal experience that the work of art has real existence apart from its translation into material form. Without the thought, though the material parts already exist, the form does not and cannot. The "creation" is not a product of the matter, and is not simply a rearrangement of the matter. The amount of matter in the universe is limited, and its possible rearrangements, though the sum of them would amount to astronomical figures, is also limited. But no such limitation of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were, to destroy the material of a Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree - form to create a table -form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to "creation out of nothing", and we conceive of the act of absolute creation as being an act analogous to that of the creative artist. Thus Berdyaev is able to say: "God created the world by imagination."

This experience of the creative imagination in the common man or woman and in the artist is the only thing we have to go upon in entertaining and formulating the concept of creation. Outside our own experience of procreation and creation we can form no notion of how anything comes into being. The expressions "God the Father" and "God the Creator" are thus seen to belong to the same category — that is, of analogies based on human experience, and limited or extended by a similar mental process in either case.

(—from, The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers (Published 1941)

 I cannot imagine God. My mind would prefer to put something there. Some image. Some thought. Some narrative.

God has no place there. That’s ok, mind says, we’ll create a place called God. Churches, philosophies, theologies, and even secular savants, all create a place for God. Admission fees are charged. Rules promulgated. Sanctions applied. Apparel approved.

Rare is the inchoate imagination fixing no place to reside, no place to hide.

the great advantage of being alive 

                                                                     by e.e. cummings

the great advantage of being alive

(instead of undying)is not so much

that mind no more can disprove than prove

what heart may feel and soul may touch

— the great (my darling)happens to be

that love are in we, that love are in we

 

and here is a secret they never will share for 

whom create is less than have

or one times one than when times where —

that we are in love,that we are in love:

with us they’ve nothing times nothing to do

(for love are in we am in i are in you)

 

this world(as timorous itsters all

to call their cowardice quite agree)

shall never discover our touch and feel

–for love are in we are in love are in we;

for you are and i am and we are(above

and under all possible worlds)in love

 

a billion brains may coax undeath

from fancied fact and spaceful time–

no heart can leap,no soul can breathe

but by the sizeless truth of a dream

whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea.

For love are in you am in i are in we

          (poem, the great advantage of being alive,  by e.e. cummings)

hold life like a face

At Tuesday Evening Conversation someone asked about confession. 

It still seems to me that each person knows what is right what is wrong -- emotional distress or lack of loving upbringing not to the contrary.

If so, each person wishes to unburden themselves following promulgation of unseemly, unkind, or unhealthy behavior or thought intentions.

There's a grounded balance of equality of forces that resides within and around each individual. Quite likely, said ground also exists within and around each corporate institution however many officers or administrative personnel engage issues under consideration affecting multiple individuals or general public.

I think we know.

And we want to say what we know.

To be equitably, freely, and refreshingly, there where we are.

Poet Ellen Bass:

         The Thing Is

              BY ELLEN BASS

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again. 

Poem ©2002 Ellen Bass, "The Thing Is," from Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, (Grayson Books, 2017).

Is that the desired outcome following confession -- "to love you, again"? 

The eremitic impulse is to shy away from entangling proximity in favor of solitary attentiveness just off to the side. 

Even there, once a clearing of geographical collectivity has been made, there arises a sense of vacuity, an awareness of one without two, a stillness of ding-an-zich

In Kantian philosophy, the thing-in-itself (German: Ding an sich) is the status of objects as they are, independent of representation and observation. The concept of the thing-in-itself was introduced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and over the following centuries was met with controversy among later philosophers.^[1] It is closely related to Kant's concept of noumena or the object of inquiry, as opposed to phenomenon, its manifestations. (wikipedia)

Sometimes grief sits with you like reticent friend knowing that to remain wordless is to approximate (or to proximate) presence in a different metaphysic.

Everything, one assumes, is within everything else. What we experience as separateness is our reluctance to see what is there in ways that ordinarily cannot be seen. 

Some say that God is within. I think they want to say, but restrain themselves, that God is the within.

When I hermeneutically translated for my own prayerfulness the mantra -- here explicated by the Dalai Lama A Talk On Om Mani Padme Hum, "Om Mani Padme Hum" (Sanskrit pronunciation) or "Om Mani Peme Hung" (Tibetan pronunciation) -- I did it in idiorhythmic fashion.

For me it worded itself as: 

    Behold what is within without; Behold what is without within.

It is this translation (if you will) of the mantra that stays with me. It suggests for me non-duality, a "don't make two; don't make one" admonishment, an experience of wholeness that eludes definition, categorization, and division.

It is, at times, an experience that nears loneliness. But there is a concomitant realization that aloneness is not necessarily loneliness. 

Maybe Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson came close in the chorus of their rendition of Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys.

We greet one another in passing. No need to make anything more, nor less, than that. 

Perhaps we've missed the meaning of forgiveness, of sacrifice, of confession, of the teachings of the Buddha, of the revelation of the Christ. 

It's an inside job. The external world is perceptual gymnastic parallel bars against and around which we fling our bodies in twirling awkwardness round and round toward dismount and dismantlement.

The words try to tell us. They say:

Be still

and know

that/this --

I am

(--God)

Love, again. 

yes your honor, swear me in

 I'm moving back to

Washington DC, try to

get jury duty

today's headlines tomorrow's joke

 cartoon characters

laugh at their audience, take

their money and run

realizing the errors of my thinking

 Never buy a new computer the morning after a former president is (again) indicted for criminality.

He was.

I don’t.

The United States ponders folly with fierce foray into no-nonsense justice.

a fabric of silence so fine and old that even a breath could tear it

Maybe choice-less life is best. At least, a few-choices life. I still have sport jackets from early 1970s. They currently hang from line on sunporch taken from dark closet and waiting for sun to burn dampness, dust, and time from recesses of corduroy and wool.

A new wood-appearing vinyl flooring upset every inch of accumulation moving into boxes that lean against boxes against turned-over chairs and to-be-sorted-later piles of disturbed inessential but squatting residents of shelves and coffee table. They squint on bright porch. They know I'd just as soon leave them there and forage my way through their languid insouciance for the next five years.

Still, at 6:45am practice this morning, I pretend there's nothing else to do and sit zazen, chant heart sutra, pronounce four vows of the bodhisattva, mention names to be prayed for, then listen to one co-practitioner snort on round rug in middle of chapel/zendo and another co-practitioner pronounce a meta blessing for all relations all beings all for the greater glory of what is before us.

 It is important to remember that there is no “right” breath. If you carry with you the idea that your breath should be deep and full when in reality it is shallow, you immediately get into trouble. At times the breath is deep, at times shallow, at times freely flowing, and at other times it can feel blocked. Your practice is to be with your breath as it is, learning to let go of how you think things “should be.” Mindfulness of breathing is a practice of learning to harmonize your attention with what is, in this moment. Short, long, deep, shallow are all fine breaths. Trust your body; it knows what is needed.

 (--from, Receiving the Breath! A meditation Q&A with Christina Feldman, By Christina Feldman SUMMER 2003, tricycle)

It is August. July has slipped beneath the heat, torrential rains, perennial fog, and its overall dyspeptic thirty-one day stay around mid-coast Maine. I bid farewell, thank you for your efforts, see you next year (if either of us is yet continuing in the circling repetition of calendar reappearance.

In the unshelfing process, Adam Zagajewski's book of poems "Mysticism for Beginners" shows up and beckons:

On Swimming 

The rivers of this country are sweet
as a troubador’s song,
the heavy sun wanders westward
on yellow circus wagons.
Little village churches
hold a fabric of silence so fine
and old that even a breath
could tear it.
I love to swim in the sea, which keeps
talking to itself
in the monotone of a vagabond
who no longer recalls
exactly how long he’s been on the road.
Swimming is like prayer:
palms join and part,
join and part,
almost without end.  

(Poem by Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) from Mysticism for Beginners, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997)

These breaths. There's one. There's one. And another. I'll be darned!

Darned, yes, the unfulfilled wish of dozens of socks in other hermit caverns in other rooms unfound and mostly forgotten.

Like my breath. A companionship that is always arriving always leaving sometimes staggering sometimes unbearably joyful, loved and let be.

Almost without end. 

Ainsi soit-il! 

the line which follows it

 At Sunday Evening Practice, mistakes and uncertainty. How do these inform practice of prayer and meditation?

We read about how Dogen spoke of One Continuous Mistake. Elsewhere, an article about What God, Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Have in Common. Therein we wondered what might be the benefit of agnosticism?

Certainty eludes me. Not that I look for it. That search stopped a long time ago. 

I do not look for certainty.

I merely look.

I am convinced by very little, not much of anything, perhaps nothing.

What joy there is, and there is much, is the looking. Looking into. Looking at. Looking with. Looking as.

Whatever is seen is acknowledged. Appreciated. Attributed. Accessed, as best as possible.

I am a mendicant of affirmation -- I say yes to what appears. 

Skepticism does not obviate affirmation, it gives it shape and cautious approval. The yes is both wary and worrisome -- but it is also accommodating. 

The skepticism is not a judgment. It is a cautious consent to continue on.

Is it possible to say 'yes' to everything even when 'no' abides just out of sight waiting to see if it need appear when properly summoned?

In prison this morning, after talk of Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Wiesel, Vonnegut and Herbert -- we touch on e.e.cummings who also quoted Blake:

Better worlds (I suggest) are born, not made; and their birthdays are the birthdays of individuals. Let us pray always for individuals; never for worlds. "He who would do good to another" cries the poet and painter William Blake "must do it in Minute Particulars"—and probably many of you are familiar with this greatly pitying line. But I'll wager that not three of you could quote me the line which follows it

     General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, &flatterer

for that deeply terrible line spells the doom of all unworlds; whatever their slogans and their strategies, whoever their heroes or their villains.

(--from, six non-lectures, by e.e.cummings) 

Ideas and ideologies, whether religious, philosophical, or political are the stuff skepticism walks around giving respectable distance.

Individuals, though, are a place to step closer to, to move more inquiringly near, and to invite into a shared turning of both words and dos y dos circumnavigation.

It is a dance.

Imagination steps into the room and asks 'why are you here?'

look who shows up

 Two sneezes

Before bed

Sudden chill

Thây’s all

Surprisingly

the day I died while yet remaining still

 Who stands in a bathtub filled with water in desert mission

Who reaches over to move space heater closer to the tub

Who is thrown against wall saying “I’m still alive, I’m still alive”

This is how one becomes a zen Buddhist contemplative Catholic 

Alive, for now, I am, for now, still, for now

A member of the non-order of thomas merton and pseudo-death by

Electrical appliances and mortal electrocution watered against beatless heart  

Two years after Bangkok fabled shower story where Trappist monk lay dead after talk

Of Marxism and Monasticism in 1968 during the lie called Vietnam War

The saint of skeptical transcending vision 

smiling sardonic simplicity (dear annoying Tommy Merton)

zen masterful monk meandering this Sunday through breezy airwaves

if you (don’t) think about it

 Nothing has happened before.

“Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen.”  (Jorge Luis Borges)

Nothing will happen after. 

keep room for those who have no place else to go

 In prison Friday morning considering non-transactional presence. 

Where each act is not about you not about me not about benefit or deprivation. Where there is a middle space, a space between, autonomous and auto-defining, repository of potential, possibility and  probable promise if left to its own, treated with care and concern, allowed to unfold and express its coming-to-be along with its retrieval-of-ancestral-worth.

Right there, not me not you, not one not two, the whole of it prior to dissection division distortion.

What is whole

This by Joy Harjo: 

For Calling The Spirit Back 
From Wandering The Earth 
In Its Human Feet

by Joy Harjo

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that 
bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control. 

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel
the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and 
back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were 
a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the
guardians who have known you before time, 
who will be there after time.
They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people 
who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought
down upon them.

Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, 
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few
years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and
leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the 
thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning 
by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call yourself back. You will find yourself caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. 
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It will return 
in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be 
happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and
given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who 
loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no 
place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next 

 person find their way through the dark.  

© Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution From Holy Beings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

on his right wrist

                (for L, as his drew nigh)

His watch was far from

What actual time it was

As if it mattered

room

 

compañeras compañeros

 Community is teacher.

Practice is teacher.

Great doubt, skepticism, is teacher.

Finally, great faith, that which is beyond reason or belief, is true teacher.

I bow to my teacher/teachers

 Chris asked all attending at Tuesday evening conversation who our teachers are/have been.

Such a good question.

We mulled and pondered.

Now I ask you: Who are/have been your teachers?

Here’s a hint: they are alive within you within us.

simplemente no saber y un espacio vacío en el mundo*

 James the Greater, back then. They say he was the first of the apostles to be killed, it was 44AD. 

His memory is pilgrimage these days, Camino de Santiago.

Nineteen hundred years after his death, when circumstances brought my parents to the moment of birthing the possibilities inherent in a new life, I arrived, unknowing and an empty space in the world.

History hides so much. 

Beheading someone because they say what they've seen and heard was then, and is now, horrendous.

Where does one go when the mighty challenge the low?

Where does one go to sound the truth, to face the facts, to change one's life?

Look to one another.

See in one no-other.

No need to murder a different experience of reality.

Listen to it.

Just that.

Let what is being told be told -- without fear or the impulse to erase what is before you.

What has changed? 

Still, where I thought I was --

* just unknowing and an empty space in the world.

6:45am practice

When any one sits

Everyone is sitting

When any one practices

Everyone is practicing

Oh, my brothers and sisters

Welcome to chapel/zendo

when

 Why not now?

mais oui

 At practice tonight E spoke of “the holiness of insignificance.”

A good phrase.

A sacred petit rien.

this is everything

 What is

Now

Is God

this changes everything

 What if

Now

Is God