so many stories
she tells of travels, her life
cheer through and throughout
wfh/12oct23
...
in his photographs
his mother, his horse, nearby --
but, oh, sunflowers
wfh/12oct23
...
Why do we sit with
one another's last days? (Smile)
Don't ask . . . have a seat
wfh/28oct23
Lewiston reminds me to dwell in nescience every aware instant unknowing and filled with trust there’s a slow train coming of alert consciousness and compassionate engagement and I’ll want to board, all, aboard.
This life is prayer
Even when it is void, gone
Prayer is surround
Been to bowling place
Been to recycling place — Been
with devastation
Here’s what Bard AI writes:
Idiots who say it's not the guns it's not the weapons are wrong. Guns are inanimate objects, but they can be used to kill people. If we want to reduce gun violence, we need to restrict access to guns and make it more difficult for people to get them. —Bard
It’s Mike Johnson who is artificially unintelligent.
Unspeak yourself, sir!
The new speaker of the house:
“At the end of the day, the problem is the human heart,” Johnson told Fox News host Sean Hannity one day after a gunman killed at least 18 people and injured dozens more in Maine. “It’s not guns, it’s not the weapons.” (Mike Johnson, R. LA)
I’ve been thinking about idiots.
He comes to mind.
When you’re done you’re done —
Walking through this mountain side
Each tree family
I have killed eighteen
I shot them in Lewiston
I do not know why
Expunging old emails.
Will save this one from friend who died two years ago last week.
...You remain my best friend and you are always welcome should you decide to stir those aged bones. Cheers.
D.A. 27nov2008
Lest we forget.
These gifts.
An answer to ask
If god exists comes clear — no
Breeze through morning leaves
Everyplace you
go could be the last place gone —
shooters, guns, madness
Absence of God fills
Empty place through which I walk
looking everywhere
I’ve left the world far behind,
My robe is covered with moss;
A small bundle of firewood burns,
Brightening the night.
Ryokan (1758-1831) (dailyzen)
Barbarism, he(cf Atlantic article)
Apropos of pronouns (at Sunday evening practice), these:
nous, (Greek: “mind” or “intellect”) in philosophy, the faculty of intellectual apprehension and of intuitive thought. Used in a narrower sense, it is distinguished from discursive thought and applies to the apprehension of eternal intelligible substances and first principles. It is sometimes identified with the highest or divine intellect.
It cannot be described in words
What can’t?
The Way.
Oh.
Ok.
(Pulls blanket up to cover head.)
There is
A world
Out there
Here is
A world
In here
Love itself
Interpolates
Compassion insinuates
Extrapolation
(Words, words, words)
Rain this Sunday morning
Birthday of Francis J. H.
Death day of David A.
Wake up
Go to sleep
Oremus pro invicem
There are two things inhibiting compassionate living and holiness of spirit.
One is belief in the separation of self from other.
Two is the belief that things are mine even if they belong to you.
Once you’ve been heard you begin to become seen.I’ve noticed along the way that some people are much better at seeing people than others are. In any collection of humans, there are diminishers and there are illuminators. Diminishers are so into themselves, they make others feel insignificant. They stereotype and label. If they learn one thing about you, they proceed to make a series of assumptions about who you must be.
Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know how to ask the right questions at the right times — so that they can see things, at least a bit, from another’s point of view. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, respected, lit up.
Illuminators are a joy to be around. A biographer of the novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “To speak with him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to offer people that kind of hospitality.
(—from The Essential Skills for Being Human, by David Brooks, opinion piece, NYTimes, 19oct2023)
27 [22]. Jesus saw some children who were taking the breast: he said to his disciples: "These little ones who suck are like those who enter the Kingdom." They said to him: "If we are little, shall we enter the Kingdom?" Jesus says to them: "When you make the two <become> one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the upper like the lower! And if you make the male and female one, so that the male is no longer male and the female no longer female, and when you put eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in the place of a foot, and an image in the place of an image, then you will enter [the Kingdom!"]
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/thomas/gospelthomas22.html
What math is it when considering that 2 minus 1 is the absence of one?
There is interest in transcending duality. What does non-duality and Advaita Vedanta do within both consciousness and existence?
What is the absence of one in the simple subtraction formula of two minus one?
Is God both the remainder and the absence here?
Is the absence of God, (some prefer “withdrawal”), the very origin of creation with its particular complement of things and beings and whatnot?
Someone once wrote that absence does not make the heart grow fonder — it makes the heart forget, which is kinder.
Is this forgetting our double-edged condition in contemporary culture?
Have we forgotten the glorious surround of absence?
Have we, as Heidegger suggested, forgotten Being?
It is an historical query of humankind, namely, Why am I here?
Is “here” empty of anything other?
Is God “Here” — the replete and complete absence of “Other?”
Let’s fail the koan at this ending:
Q: What is here other than absence?
A: MU! or WU! (or) Don’t ask!
. . . . . . . . .
Some English translation equivalents of wú or mu are:
In modern Chinese, Japanese and Korean it is commonly used in combination words as a negative prefix to indicate the absence of something (no ..., without ..., un- prefix), e.g., Chinese: 无-线; pinyin: wú-xiàn/mu-sen (無-線)/mu-seon (무-선) for "wireless".[7] In Classical Chinese, it is an impersonal existential verb meaning "not have".[8]
The same character is also used in Classical Chinese as a prohibitive particle, though in this case it is more properly written Chinese: 毋; pinyin: wú.[9]
One of the men wanted
to talk about prayer.
Prayer is a call to presence.
As god is presence itself
So prayer, so the requester,
so us
Presencing within presence
Itself
If you must know who you are, there are three things you might do.
I can’t remember what they are.
A Dent in a Bucket
BY GARY SNYDER
Hammering a dent out of a bucket
a woodpecker
answers from the woods
(-Gary Snyder, “A Dent in a Bucket” from Danger on Peaks. Copyright © 2004)
Every call is a challenge.
Every response, a 公案 gōng'àn.
War means chaos — so
much pain and heartache, Ukraine,
Russia, Middle East
Heaven, earth, emerge
How our christian friends will wonder —
Be unborn again
A mendicant wandering through poetry, philosophy, and the cosmos.
Haiku:
now arriving here /
looking around to see you /
where else could I be
Here’s my prediction:
Chaos and anarchy will
Look around and stay
Looking through rain drops
grey mist foggy chill outside —
straightening blanket
Teresa of Ávila (28 March 1515 – 4 or 15 October 1582), a Carmelite visionary, is noted today.
More and more aware of the presence of God.
Which is a thing-in-itself, the presence of God.
"Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you. All things are passing away, God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing. God alone suffices." --St. Teresa of Ávila, (cf St. Teresa of Avila — Let Nothing Disturb You, by Shashi Dubey)
lack, noun
deficiency or absence of something needed, desirable, or customary:
lack of money; lack of skill.
something missing or needed:
verb (used with object)
to be without or deficient in:
to lack ability; to lack the necessities of life.
to fall short in respect of:
He lacks three votes to win.
verb (used without object)
to be absent or missing, as something needed or desirable:
Three votes are lacking to make a majority.
Verb Phrases
lack in, to be short of or deficient in:
(dictionary.com)
This definition, "to be without or deficient in" attracts.
If I am without and deficient within I am nexus of inter-connection, a betweening-being, Janus-looking, sighting ambient presence, lacking nothing, merely there.
Her way of prayer is described best in the book she wrote in 1577, The Interior Castle. In her words: “I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions.” She takes the reader on a journey from the first room, where humility is acquired, all the way to the seventh, the room where transformation is complete. She called this seventh room the room of Spiritual Marriage, where “two lighted candles join and become one; the falling rain becomes merged in the river.” It is a book drawn from her own experiences, and is as popular today as it was 500 years ago.
https://shashidubey.medium.com/st-teresa-of-avila-let-nothing-disturb-you-c6fbcec3ec13
Psychiatrist Karl Stern wrote, "All being is nuptial."
For Teresa, this participatory realization is "Spiritual Marriage."
For my investigation, it words as "Behold what is within without" (my approximating translation of Om mane padme hum.)
For all of us -- whether known or unknown, realized or unrealized -- it is this present moment.
Without fanfare.
As we live through ... that which is ... passing with ... delight.
Here, a poem by Richard Crashaw, c.1612-1649
Upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphical Saint Teresa
O THOU undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;
By all thy brim-fill'd bowls of fierce desire,
By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized thy parting soul, and seal'd thee His;
By all the Heav'n thou hast in Him
(Fair sister of the seraphim!);
By all of Him we have in thee;
Leave nothing of myself in me.
Let me so read thy life, that I
Unto all life of mine may die!
-- poem by Richard Crashaw, c.1612-1649
I died in Israel
I died in Gaza
I died in Ukraine
I died in Russia
I died in the arms of human stupidity
You’re wrong if you say Hamas is evil, Israel good; or you say Israel is evil, Hamas good.
Hear me out.
No one is evil or good.
Everyone is merely mistaken.
It’s the annoying insight of ancient religious/philosophical thinking — that we are more often mistaken and deluded than accurately clear and spot on the mark.
Delusion says you’re bad I’m good or I’m bad you’re good.
The consequences of such thinking are bullets bombs and bullshit.
The non-deluded point of view looks like this:
- It is morning
- Make coffee or tea
- Spread bread with butter or honey
- Feel the surrounding presence coming/going
- See yes in everything — and MU as nothing other
- When cat jumps up, say “cat”
- When dog sidles near, say “dog”
Learn what it is we must learn.
Epilogue
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(Robert Lowell, “Epilogue” from Day by Day. Copyright © 1977)
Thought has no mass weight
Travels with no measured speed
Is there while still here
I get nothing from
God, nothing. When I pray God
Looks the other way
What am I…to do? I gaze
Into MU … seeing nothing
Unfastened from world
one hundred and one year old
woman laughs on phone
The zen monk said yes
No one heard him — two loons
swam to shore — nodding
To combat evil
evil is combatant — this
Is how things are — thus
The only way to silence
Evil is to hear it out
Neither Christianity nor Islam nor Judaism can survive their ineffectual rituals of political grandstanding and cultural exclusion.
The only hope remaining is an emerging consciousness wherein radical presencing and nondiscriminating inclusion breakthrough and suffuse our dull and dismal understanding of what existence and being-in-the-world really is.
It is time for such a mutation.
We must become one and whole and see what is our duty, our nature, reconstituted.
Topmast on schooner
Snaps killing doctor on deck —
(There is no last line)
She asked my thinking
about Jesus — I said only
Inclusive presence
Embodied compassion — by
any other name — Is — God
Beyond what could be said is the silence that obviates the need for anything to be said.
But silence is nowhere to be found.
Anything anyone says about God should be greeted by "Thank you, now go away."
In prelude to the non-echoing clear space of unaccountable muted utterance, one looks about seeing what is there without commentary, criticism, or clarification.
The language of God, it is said, is silence. All else is bad translation.
Aquinas tells us that “angels are always announcers of divine silence.” Silence is surely one of the deep ways into the human heart and into divine mysteries, and it is integral to many forms of meditation in both the east and the west. But Aquinas gives credit to angels for bringing silence alive.
He is also being somewhat paradoxical in calling angels “announcers of divine silence.” Isn’t announcing always an act of speaking? Not necessarily, Aquinas is saying—not when it comes to the divine silence, which is so deep and speaks to us deep to deep, depth to depth, heart to heart.
But Aquinas also says that the angels don’t stop with the announcing; they also assist us to understand and interpret the divine silence derived from the divine mystery. It is necessary after something is announced to someone that they understand the announcement. In addition, therefore, because we can understand by the intellect the things that are announced to us through the angels, they themselves by the brightness of their own light help our intellect grasp the secrets of God.
(from, Are Angels “Announcers of Divine Silence?” by Matthew Fox)
Listen -
(ing)
Silent -
(ly)
Nothing
is (said)
With
(grace)