which is why I’m telling you about it

Reading Frank O’Hara. Send a copy to a man I know from prison.  O'Hara was just 40 when he died, in July 1966, after being hit by a jeep on Fire Island.   https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/11/books/frank-ohara-having-a-coke-poem.html

Some say it’s hard to always know where to end your poem.

At times a Jeep will end it.

              it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

            (--from poem, Having a Coke With You, by Frank O’Hara) 

χωρίς λογότυπα, (chorís logótypa), (no logos*)

*In literature, logos is a rhetorical appeal to an audience's sense of reason or logic, employing facts, statistics, data, historical precedents, and clear, rational arguments to persuade the reader. It focuses on presenting well-supported claims that make logical sense, ensuring a story or argument remains plausible and engaging by avoiding logical fallacies.  [AI]

for now

this sorrow

is pulsing from

Minneapolis

children shot dead

elsewhere, wherever

elsewhere is, 

they say

life goes on

but it doesn’t

you can utter words

say anything

but not every word

is λόγος 

and with our absent brothers and sisters

 “This is my body”

shots, shots, shots

"Go, the mass is over”

america, america, america

why america is rusting

they pray to Monica

children are shot dead

this is how america

functions day to day

always someone 

shooting

always someone

saying crazy things

then he shot himself

the sacrifice at the altar

wasn’t enough for him

it wasn’t holy for him

president trump will fix this

he will tell us what he thinks

everything will get better --

except for that death thing

any questions

If eternal

Means only now,

No time --

Then now is

Only what

God is

Only what

Life is

eternal life

 It is no timeline

Right now, just now

Nothing gone by.

Nothing ahead

Now, now, now

No pre-life, no afterlife

Just life-now

Free from before and after

Here here here, and

Gone gone gone

What joy

What grace

coming round

 I have not forgotten who you are

Let me think for a moment

Nothing

I do not remember who I am

Let me think for a moment

Nothing

Would you like a glass of water

Yes, that’s it, a nice cold drink

That’s something 

the external appearance of inner experience

Not just our inner experience, but all inner experience. 

 “Matter is the external appearance of inner experience.” (--Bernardo Kastrup)

Perhaps, beyond being, the inner experience of what some call God.

The cosmos is experienced from within.

Mind, rife throughout the universe, is also well within human beings.

We apprehend things even without apparent direct contact with them. Hence, cosmic entanglement.

Hence, the vestiges of telepathic intercommunion.

Thereby, Trump is no stranger to me. Would that his strangeness would give way to a more interconnected sensitivity to his fellow beings rather than the obsession of control and cashing in on all of it in his purview.

A true spirituality would see things in a more benevolent way.

May the divine assistance visit and remain with all of us now and for all time and beyond! 

something darker and more dangerous

 J.B Pritzker according to Heather Cox Richardson:

Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”

He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”

“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.

“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”

https://substack.com/home/post/p-171959225

Good to hear.

May good return to what is here. 

And, finally

If It Be Your Will

    By Leonard Cohen

If it be your will

That I speak no more

And my voice be still

As it was before 

I will speak no more

I shall abide until

I am spoken for

If it be your will 

If it be your will

That a voice be true

From this broken hill

I will sing to you 

From this broken hill

All your praises they shall ring

If it be your will

To let me sing 

From this broken hill

All your praises they shall ring

If it be your will

To let me sing 

If it be your will

If there is a choice

Let the rivers fill

Let the hills rejoice 

Let your mercy spill

On all these burning hearts in hell

If it be your will

To make us well 

And to draw us near

And bind us tight

All your children here

In their rags of light 

In our rags of light

All dressed to kill

And end this night

If it be your will  

If it be your will

https://youtu.be/fICsHinJNbc?si=e2mCTZqw88Q2T6d2

verbindung

We do not have a political problem, nor a moral problem. We have a spiritual problem. 

Defining spirituality is tricky; the word is amorphous by definition, slipping through your fingers just as you think you’ve captured it. “Belief in a spiritual realm” gets close, in the way it hints at or hopes for something beyond the material world.Many people explain spirituality through the lens of connection: connection with God, connection with their innermost selves, connection with ancestors, connection with fellow humans.  

https://www.templeton.org/news/speak-to-the-earth-and-it-will-teach-you

If we were to become a spiritual community, a careful, caring community -- we might have a chance. 

pointing to the road

I'm glad the Buddha taught for so long. 

And so well.

Despite the obstacles,
I pursued the great monk
The misty mountains a million layers high
He pointed to the road back home
One round moon, lantern of the sky.

—Han Shan (c 730)

He touched the earth.

As the earth touched him. 

ucana or tnau

 In prison today we solve the problem of border control in the United States.

We were talking about schismogenesis. 

Gregory Bateson developed the concept of schismogenesis in the 1930s in reference to certain forms of social behavior between groups of the Iatmul people of the Sepik River in New Guinea. Bateson first used the term in a publication in 1935,^[1][2] but elaborated on the concept in his classic 1936 ethnography Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View (reissued with a new epilogue in 1958).^[3] The word "naven" refers to an honorific ceremony among the Iatmul whereby certain categories of kin celebrate first-time cultural achievements. In a schematic summary, Bateson focused on how groups of women and groups of men (especially the honorees' mothers' brothers) seemingly inverted their everyday, gendered-norms for dress, behavior, and emotional expression. For the most part, these groups of people belonged to different patrilineages who not only did not regularly renew their marriage alliances, but also interacted through the mode he called schismogenesis. Men and women, too, interacted in this mode. And thus the naven ritual served to correct schismogenesis, enabling the society to endure.^[4] wikipedia

Then we decided to revamp the geographic and political landscape of North America to incorporate the nascent thinking of the current American president and flesh out a longer term resolution and composition.

Canada, the United States, and the countries of Central America will merge into one entity while honoring their individual expressions.

It would be called UCANA. That is "Union of Central America and North America."

Canada, US, Mexico, and the 7 countries of Central America would take on an identity in the same fashion of The European Union. It could also be called The North American Union.

We will leave the details of organization to more sophisticated minds than ours.

But we would like the planning of such an evolution of composition to begin forthwith.

intrigante

Bonaventure said that creation itself is the first scripture.

All the scriptures of all the religions attempt to explain the first scripture.

The original always intrigues.

Let’s be intrigued.

incarnation is resurrection

 it was conversation

things were said

thinking passing through

and so, this:

the incarnation is

the resurrection

being-born is

passing through 

non-being

into existence

standing out 

appearance

Christ is revealed 

as God as man

once so, no 

reversal, being-born

is where beyond-being

entered into standing-out

now, standing-within

and standing-out coincide

this coincidence, this

uncaused manifestation

contains and encompasses

all semblance of opposite

until, no-other appears

and with no-other what we

call sin cannot abide

separation becomes inseparate 

separation becomes the illusion

of erroneous belief 

(are all beliefs erroneous?)

rather, direct experience

reveals our neighbor 

as ourself, until (uh-oh) we 

believe other-unwisely

rather, self-secluded

enclosed and suffocating --

no, no -- re-surrect, breathe

through, breathe through

breathe through this Being

une chose devenant elle-même

Where is God?

God is

Not yet

Here

Who are you?

I am

Not yet

Human

What was Christ?

Christ is

Wholeness in

Human nature

Why Christ?

Incarnation is

Resurrection. Cross

Is transformative 

Transition —

One thing

Becoming

Itself

ne rien faire du tout

 I have

Nothing

To do

And I

Will

Do it

Even 

though

I do

Not know

How to

Do it

twenty years later

At end of 

conversation on

Shunyata she said 

“To be one with 

God 

is to no longer 

know God.”

i would not have been here without it

 Id like to 

thank Friday

For staying 

Until

It’s end

samskaras

 God might be. Good.

But, do we want. 

God to be. Good?

Volition and intention

Karma, action, is womb

For us to be born into

This. Next instant. Free

skhisma

 She told us the word at Tuesday evening conversation, “schismogenesis”.

I’d not heard it before.

Schismogenesis is a term in anthropology that describes the formation of social divisions and literally meaning "creation of division", the term derives from the Greek words σχίσμα skhisma "cleft" (borrowed into English as schism, "division into opposing factions"), and γένεσις genesis "generation, creation" (deriving in turn from gignesthai "be born or produced, creation, a coming into being"). The term was introduced by anthropologist Gregory Bateson and has been applied to various fields  https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Schismogenesis

This is that time. 

Cleft and theft.

por la misericordia de nuestra realidad más profunda

 They say Jephthah made a deal with God — Help me defeat the Ammonites and I’ll sacrifice to you the first person who greets me when I return to my household. He beat them. It was his 12 year old daughter who came dancing out to greet him on his return. He grieved his bad luck. (What did he expect?) Then, after three weeks, he sacrificed her in flames. (Cf Judges 11:29-39)

 Stephen King must have written that novel.

Derangement and horrible tales sometimes fill what is (oddly) called sacred scripture.

My cat stretches on brown blanket.

I’d rather read Carse on The Religious Case Against Belief.

Some sacrifice people in order to achieve some benefit for themselves in their derangement. 

Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin display this derangement. Perhaps new books of the Bible will be written on them. Lord knows they have their flock and followers willing to summon new apotheoses.

The world, despite our best hopes, is mostly absurd. History often a theater of the absurd. Individuals, with their dramatic beliefs, diminish themselves in stature and sensibility by embracing the far fetched and proclaim the nonsensic shamanic credos of their feverish imaginations gone askew.

Forgive me, I stopped drinking alcohol some thirty years ago, and the hangover drapes itself over the nonsensical thinking and proclamation of my surrounding communitas.

We dwell in an ethos and culture of imponderables. So we make things up. Much of our telling is a prevarication on an ill-conceived and diseased apprehension of what we like to call ”reality.”

(Don’t mind me, I’m busy contemplating cottage cheese penetrated by remaining strawberry jam.) It is Thor’s Day. I will not get hammered today. Rather, I grieve for those slaughtered in Cambodia, German concentration camps, Gaza, Ukraine, Tulsa, the trail of tears, the fields of Flanders, the terrain of the Iliad and Odyssey. 

Tolstoy asked, What then must we do?

I’ll sit here a little longer pondering that question.

What I won’t do is ask God for some favor promising to kill some folk if I am granted the favor.

Call me old fashioned, but live and let live still sounds attractive.

And may all the tyrants, dictators, and fascists fall face down in a mud puddle.

And may the souls of all our departed, through the mercy of our deepest reality, rest in peace! Amen

adoremus, venite

 Nuns at Neumz chant compline

Small joys

Psalms and antiphons

Clarity of bells

presto, disincarnato

Cardiologist says

You can live with the weariness,

get surgery, and/or, soon enough die

Ophthalmologist says You can live 

with the cloudiness, start unseeing

or get lasered

Oncologist says

MRI will tell advancement

in pancreas, millimetering

Also, Waldenström 

 macroglobulinemia, he says, is

a slow train, but will get there

Oral surgeon

has done his damage

says someday I'll adjust

Nurse practitioner says

diabetes is loading its guns

adjusting its scopes

Priest says, who? What's 

his name? Forgive me, I

Don't know him

Former friends say

yeah, I remember him,

odd, quiet, what was his name?

Meditatiion community says

no, can't picture him

did he ever sit with us?

My parents, grandparents, 

sister. those I've known all say -- 

we're dead, let the living figure it out

Jesus says

let him without thick skin

toss the last scone

Buddha says:

if you meet him on the road

call ICE, ship him to dark site

And you, yes you, what say you?

"I say I can't dine, can't dance, Ive

got to purchase a cow."  MU!

The best news I've ever gotten:

"Cheer up, Bill, things are only 

going to get worse!"

(That last advice from Trappist

monk who kept sheep, wrote

poetry, sold jams, and sat zazen)

Being nobody is good practice

a time comes soon when insight

will perfect with disincarnation

honoring what is and who were

Cedar tree

Outside window

Across dooryard 

driveway

God’s within

Within God

This Wednesday

Morning

Candle 

And

Incense

Burn

a new vocabulary

Epigraph to James Carse’s book The Religious Case Against Belief:

 To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe.

— JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Mr Carse was on the selection committee that kindly awarded me a small fellowship to do graduate work in religion in 1969/1970. 

With my gratitude, 

A description of his book:

Through careful , creative analysis, James P. Carse's The Religious Case Against Belief reveals a surprising truth: What is currently criticized as religion is, in fact, the territory of belief. Looking to both historical and contemporary crises, Carse distinguishes religion from belief systems and pinpoints how the closed-mindedness and hostility of belief has corrupted religion and spawned violence the world over. Drawing on the lessons of Galileo, Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ, Carse creates his own brand of parable and establishes a new vocabulary with which to study conflict in the modern world. Carse uses his wide-ranging understanding of religion to find a viable and vital path away from what he calls the Age of Faith II and toward open-ended global dialogue. 

https://ebook.yourcloudlibrary.com/library/CamdenPublicLibrary/search?query=James%20carse

The rest of Sartre's quote goes:

Thus to believe is not to believe any longer because that is only to believe. [For instance, say that I believe that Peter likes me. Then I know that I believe this. But I also am aware that there is no external evidence for this belief because Peter could just be pretending. Hence I also believe that Peter does not like me. The same arguments hold for the belief in God, as we saw in Kierkegaard. This is why belief (like faith) is different from knowledge.] 

(--found in Sartre: Nothingness and Bad Faith, pp.3-4,  https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~degray/CP05/Sartre%20-%20Nothingness-Bad-Faith.pdf) 

surrounding, inhabiting

 I have not found God

nor is God findable

I do not look for God

nor am I not merely looking

rather, God remains within

and fully without

I cannot look for something

that will not be seen

and so -- here we are, looking

through Being to see what is not

what is completely beyond Being

surrounding, inhabiting, Reality

not even a poem can make up something like this

 That's what the poet said after reading his poem.

The First Law of Thermodynamics

He was a good ole boy, and when he died his friends carried out
his final wish—the body was cremated and the ashes stuffed
into shotgun shells. They walked through the woods he loved
and fired aimlessly into the trees—he came down everywhere
in a powdery rain, a pollen of ashes that once was the memory
of a boy walking under trees showering him with leaves.

(Poem by Joseph Stroud) 

 Which leaves us grateful.

we come here to be alone

 I have

no

relationship with

God --

one without two

disappearance

Itself

acknowledging retreatant

 dry stones

in empty brook

this

is why we pray

this

is how we meditate

wenn das alles ist, was es gibt

 I am closing in

Nearing, if you will,

Nothing at all

There is no comfort

In this realization —

Just this, itself

at the wake

 After he dies

Many will say

Goodbye, good luck

We’re done with you

Let absurdity end

That’s over

We will look at

Each other and wonder

How it was allowed

To happen

The raw idiocy

The moral mud

on seeing photo of old friend

 it is good to arrive

at this age

because this is the

age we are

this very year, every 

age is good

because it is

the age you are

look around

everything is

the age it is

without exception

there is no other

age to be when 

you are the age you are

do not commit suicide

rather, look around

everything is the age

it is, nothing else

do not kill another

when flowers receive 

water there is nothing

else to say, just water

in soil, Sunday morning

è nel profondo della vita

quando la morte rientra in sé 

è nel profondo della vita

when death reenters itself 

it is deep within life

each step down to open gate

the surprise of morning

the ability to walk, the quiet

mountain, the good st Bernard/

border collie hunkering

in dooryard outside barn

it is sunday morning, no peignoir

no complacency, no church

just sunlight on bald mountain, 

dry ground lifting each foot

everything has returned within

remembering signs and symbols

liturgical phrases, ritual, sounds

catholic and zen buddhist, an

archeology of buried remains

walking back up to good dog

there’s no place to go, I am the 

journey, pilgrim reentering itself 

when death comes 

back to itself 

it is in the 

depths of life