referential unveiling of everything, all at once, simultaneously coming to be

 Eyes must be open to see coming to definition shapes of civil dawn occurring outside window.

Revelation of what is there seems like creation out of nothing dark and unshapen.

There but not yet apparent.

We’ve called it creation, from nothing.

Appearance requires the availability of someone to perceive it.

Nothing is unpercieved. 

Something is when what is there is seen by someone there to see it.

Readiness is all.

What’s right is each instant revealing itself in vicinity of an awareness available to allow and acknowledge what is coming to be sustained by necessary attention willing to take in and allow to be the thing itself as it is.

Way I see it, wrong has no way of sustaining itself. No one is actually there to sustain what is not there for any length of time absent the vivifying nurturance of actual care. 

What is wrong has no nurture in nature to thrive beyond false positive.

So, we stay close to what is right, wait for it to rub sleep from eyes, stretch our limbs, and walk out into light. 

Take heart! What’s right and what’s true will prevail — only with creative presence revealing itself to itself.

If you will. If we will. If I will.

Freely assent to it all.

Dwell with wisdom and love surrounded by what is here.

Coming to be with it as parent, as apparent participipant in whole process of revelation.

We are creating the cosmos, the universe, the coming-to-be of what-is, always and only here, and, now.

Can you see, 

what I am,

 referring to

As

Who I am

Coming to be 

With 

Care

betcha tomorrow never comes

 Comes midnight

All bets are off

Tomorrow dies

Into today

from where (the cosmos) to where

 In prison today

Bonaventure’s center

everywhere periphery

nowhere —  quantum

God, nirvana, aesthetic

thislife not afterlife

double speak

 Listening to radio play 1984

Like reading New York Times 

Front page

every now is not then

 Mindfulness is reincarnation

To dwell in present moment is to not be dead

Here and now is the only thing that is

feel better as a human being

In a conversation On Time, Mystery, and Kinship, An Interview with Jane Hirshfield  in Convergence magazine, October 24, 2024, Hirshfield says:

 JHIt’s only like four lines. So I probably have it by heart, but I’m going to find it in the book that I have, because then I won’t be nervous about getting a word wrong. What I was perplexed by was, how can anyone who has children or grandchildren or imagines the future, how can anyone not behave—2004, remember?—as if global warming is established fact, and as if we might need to do something to prevent its getting worse? And so I’ll read you the poem and then I’ll say why this introduction led to this poem.

Global Warming 

 

When his ship first came to Australia,

Cook wrote, the natives

continued fishing, without looking up.

Unable, it seemed, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.

Now that’s a true story, and I found it in the historian Robert Hughes book about Australia. But why this poem led to this title and this framing—why that story led to this—is it helped me find compassion for the climate deniers. And I want to find compassion. I do not want to be angry, and I do not want to be totally bewildered, which is how I was feeling, and say, How can anyone—said the indignant, leaping little Jane inside of me, How, how, how?And when I found this story, I understood how: “unable to fear what was too large to be comprehended.” And, you know, right or wrong, I’m sure there were some people who understood just fine and decided to be short-term greedy over long-term concerned. But I feel better as a human being if I can find compassion. —Ibid

 . . .

There are many things too large to be comprehended. 

I go about my fishing.

. . .

I also read Stephen Batchelor’s After Buddhism, Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age (2015).

He is interested in translating suffering as reactivity.

Non-reactivity is the experience of nirvana -- not reacting, but responding.

The transpersonal unity that is God, this is an arrival, he says, worth our interest.

He writes:

Consider how Gotama understands the Indian metaphor of rivers losing their identity when they pour into the ocean. The Muaka Upanishad says: “As the flowing rivers disappear into the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man, freed from name-form, goes to the Divine One.”[54] Here the aim of human life is to lose one’s identity as a person differentiated by name-form and merge into the transpersonal unity of God. For Gotama, however, the ocean becomes a metaphor for his dharma and the community of those who practice it. “Just as the great rivers on reaching the ocean lose their former names and identities, so also those of the four castes—nobles, brahmins, merchants, and workers—having gone forth from home to homelessness in the dharma and discipline, abandon their former names and identities and are just called ‘wanderers, followers of the Sakiyan Son.’”[55] Instead of losing oneself in mystic union with the Absolute, one loses one’s class identity in order to practice the dharma as a free, self-creating person.

        --Stephen Batchelor, Ibid, 7. Experience, (7) 

. . .

My dharma room is quiet. 

Everyone is here. 

Practice continues. 

There is a fishing pole leaning behind door.

There’s no bait and no hook at end of line.

redecorating

 When absurdity reveals its face 

take down all mirrors 

look away do something else

No image means 

no issue to face

We are free when

Invisible

Say good

Bye

that’s amore

Moon rises over bald mountain

One is across the road

The other 238,856 miles away —

So it seems, so it seems

ice out

 early winter

hits this land

icy hatred and cruelty

cover the streets

only a sane mind

and warm heart

can reverse 

this frigid time --

cosmic algorithm

longs for caring defrost

waits for

it

είμαστε εύθραυστοι,

of course we’re fragile

anything can hurt us

but its the sharp bad ideas

that cut the deepest

like “we don’t want you here”

like “poor people are disgusting”

stop it!

heal the sickness of ideology

heal the ugliness of self-referential

narcissism and grandiosity, you

are now patient number one in

this current moral plague

get treatment, go for healing

don’t throw up on the rest of us

we have our own lies to negotiate

our own deceptions to navigate

we don’t need yours, not a bit --

let’s assume you’re simply hurting

someone in pain, innerly distraught 

deep-rooted conflict, emotional nausea

we can commit to helping you heal

we don’t have to scream and curse you

we’ve not exhausted sympathy, empathy

we’re not cruel, unfeeling, you’re one of us

do you see this? can you understand this?

you are not alone until you are alone --

and if you are alone, we are all alone

an abyss of unconnected dissolution

so, stop it, stop the ugly screenplay

written for you by the worse self within

throw it out, face a new blank page

stare at it, don’t make a mark, wait ...

it will come to you, the healing diacritical

mark, the word that begins anew what longs

to connect to next word, gathering phrase

sustaining sentence full of copulatives and

parallel lines, verses of interspecific gather

a realization of something you are not yet --

we are fragile

don’t let the fear of it run you into psychosis

yes, you will live on further until you die

but you won’t die detached from everything

the way you seem to be right now

thinking you are the only one, the best, the king --

you’re not, you’re one of us, be that, before it's

too late, for you, for us, forgone and forlorn

wound and round we go

 round up the jews

round up the latinos

round up führer’s enemies

round up president’s critics

germany wound up ugly

america grounds up decency

and we the people? our wound

is too deep to feel, but mortal

hitler was ugly in belief and act

trump is ugly with ice and lies

fury and furor follow indignity

round and round we go

and where it’ll stop

we know, we know

dos-à-dos

Two cats

Roam house

Where mice

Show and go

if i didn’t care

When tired, 

sleep.

Zen wisdom

Rainy night

do we really all lie, most of the time

 into House

long live 

curmudgeons --

much to see

oddly

get up, go ahead, do something, move

Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation today:

Elias Chacour is a Palestinian Arab-Israeli and a former archbishop of the Melkite Greek Catholic church in Palestine. At one point in his ministry, Chacour went against the orders of local authorities to build a secondary school to educate the youth in his community in Galilee. He drew on his understanding of the Beatitudes to strengthen him in overcoming many challenges to its completion:   Knowing Aramaic, the language of Jesus, has greatly enriched my understanding of Jesus’ teaching. Because the Bible as we know it is a translation of a translation, we sometimes get a wrong impression. For example, we are accustomed to hearing the Beatitudes expressed passively:  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.  Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.  Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.  “Blessed” is the translation of the word makarioi, used in the Greek New Testament. However, when I look further back to Jesus’ Aramaic, I find that the original word was ashray, from the verb yashar. Ashray does not have this passive quality to it at all. Instead, it means “to set yourself on the right way for the right goal; to turn around, repent; to become straight or righteous.”   How could I go to a persecuted young man in a Palestinian refugee camp, for instance, and say, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” or “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”? That man would revile me, saying neither I nor my God understood his plight, and he would be right.  When I understand Jesus’ words in Aramaic, I translate like this:      Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you who are hungry and thirsty for justice, for you shall be satisfied.  Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you peacemakers, for you shall be called children of God.  To me this reflects Jesus’ words and teachings much more accurately. I can hear him saying, “Get your hands dirty to build a human society for human beings; otherwise, others will torture and murder the poor, the voiceless, and the powerless.”  Christianity is not passive but active, energetic, alive, going beyond despair….  “Get up, go ahead, do something, move,” Jesus said to his disciples.   Ultimately, the secondary school was completed and allowed to stand, despite the lack of official permits for water and electricity. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/set-yourself-on-the-right-way/

Prison was closed to volunteers today. 

I admit to loving cancellations. 

As well as the notion of going beyond despair.

from here to deeper here

 I watch moonlight

On empty road

Very slowly

Pale distance

Lumbering gait

One car

Passes through

This meditation

Vigiling 

Sacred transition

From here to

Deeper here

an unasked koan

Not sure it’s understood what is meant by the word hermitage. It’s where a hermit lives. It’s not really a meditation center. It’s not really much of anything anymore, if it ever was.

So it’s nice when exiting the barn there is a car in the dooryard and a man standing next to it. He was wondering about the “Dogen” center and if people came on retreat here. “No,” I said, "we don’t do much public stuff anymore." An Israeli, he tells me about his children, his interest in Buddhism, and I point him to the chapel/zendo.

The last few days we’ve run into three or four old-timers from meetingbrook, whether at marine harbor, small grocery store, large grocery store. It feels like a school reunion, to which I never go.

The hermitage has gone inside itself.

I love that there are places groups gather to meditate. Our conversations seem to be our only public practice -- on zoom three times a week, in prison twice a week, and soul-friend conversations whenever they happen. Although, the other resident at the hermitage carries the frequency of such encounters.

I have gone remarkably idiorrhythmic. 

It’s not really an advance in practice. More like a meandering haphazard awareness that everyplace is meditation hall, every person is sangha practitioner, each bit of news is dharma talk, whatever arises is koan study.

Bald Mountain across the way grows dark. A tilting fade of blue sky above it with darker clouds scattered. The clock-change sobers everything.

Perhaps one thing a hermit does is live the alone.

The alone, or the Alone, is a curious mystery. Hard to tell whether it is a general meshugana, or some form of undiagnosed idiopathy that arises and remains. Or, giving a positive spin, there is a beckoning into legitimate contemplative homeopathy burrowing below an asymptomatic absorption into the unknown.

The world is a monastery, this residence is a hermitage, my life is a mendicancy dependent on what falls into the begging bowl of my grateful soul.

           circumnavigating an unasked koan

 

My words are leaves

falling through bare branches

on a path never swept clear 

I let them settle where they fall

my life has no direction

at all 

both a concern

and (surprisingly, happily)

a joy 

(wfh, nunc) 

sorge

 “Being in the world is essentially care.” (Martin Heidegger)

If so, those who act in uncaring ways are, essentially, not in the world.

One can only wonder where they are?

If not here, where?

With so many in the current Washington DC administration, we look at their attitudes and actions are reasonably conclude they’re not from around here.

They live a little distance from themselves.

And very far from the rest of us.

je suis au milieu des transparences

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=87&issue=6&page=1 (ff)

I find Les Transparents, 

by Rene Char.

Then it occurs to me:

Nothing is hidden from us

We are the ones invisible

Dwelling as

Not willing to be seen

We think: ‘I’d love to see God’

But, alors, God is not to be seen —

God is “affable and quick of tongue”

And we are morose 

and slow to hear

Transparencies, that’s what we are

Reluctant to be morning

Sunlight glinting off passing cars

nothing follows now

 I will

sleep

now

and then --

there will be

nothing

left 

unsaid --

nothing

after elections, something in the air tonight

 something was lighter

in the air today

like breaking surface

gasping for air --

the relief that barrier

can be broached

no hand holding down head

fresh breath suddenly drawn

it is about time

 Thinking of Peter Maurin (1877-1949), his curiously written essays, friendship with Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker.

Blowing the Dynamite 

 

Writing about the Catholic Church,

a radical writer says:

“Rome will have to do more

than to play a waiting game;

she will have to use

some of the dynamite

inherent in her message.”

To blow the dynamite

of a message

is the only way

to make the message dynamic.

If the Catholic Church

is not today

the dominant social dynamic force,

it is because Catholic scholars

have failed to blow the dynamite

of the Church.

Catholic scholars

have taken the dynamite

of the Church,

have wrapped it up

in nice phraseology,

placed it in an hermetic container

and sat on the lid.

It is about time

to blow the lid off

so the Catholic Church

may again become

the dominant social dynamic force.

https://www.easyessays.org/

The Catholic Church, like the US Government, is a potential force for good, if the personnel within each are able to transcend their personal and moral flaws.

As does, the above sentence, apply to me.

(Damn, non-duality!)

moment of observation -- hanzi (汉字)

At Tuesday Evening Conversation, the sudden delight visiting with Edwin Morgan’s poem brought by Tina.

Aberdeen Train

Rubbing a glistening circle

on the steamed-up window I framed

a pheasant in a field of mist.

The sun was a great red thing somewhere low

struggling with the milky scene. In the furrows

a piece of glass winked into life, 

hypnotized the silly dandy; we

hooted past him with his head cocked,

contemplating a bottle-end,

and this was the last of  October,

a Chinese moment in the Mearns.

 

(Poem by Edwin Morgan {1920-2010}, 1968, in Centenary Selected Poems, 2020)

Landscape

Nature looking back 

on minuscule observer

the hanzi (汉字)

so deftly drawn

cancer cares, we’re unused to its affection

 Yes

Oncologists like numbers

This household pairing

Stepping on scales

Oxygen clips on fingers

(Hand pressing abdomen)

One in remission

The other

Not yet full transmission

The careful symmetry of it

this way through

 We love to read poems at meetingbrook conversations

They are secret doors into our common intuition —

The doors are unlocked

As is, our willingness,

 to walk through

those who voted today

We vote

to say

we’re here

As long as 

voting is allowed

and fair

the ship of state 

will not founder

nor smash on rocks

just as absurdity

is not the final chokehold —

we will send away the corrupt

moon coming to top of tree

the heart of the matter

Outside chapel/zendo

Deer look over shoulders

On Ragged and Bald mountains

Inside chapel/zendo

A different look

No hunting allowed

that-which-is, given

The classic distinction is that only God creates, we invent, organize, or manifest.

And yet if someone were to say “We are creating God”, what would our reaction be?

I think God is creation itself -- both the appearance of what is experienced, and, the process of bringing into being that which was not here before.

In prison today, our conversation.

We wondered what it meant to say “Death is nothing else.” That perhaps the reason we fear death is that we want something else.

We wondered if suicide is deluded thinking that this life will end and something else will replace it.

If death is nothing else, if there is only this, itself, mind, God, now, and the energy moving through everything, through and through, whether in the body or without the body -- is our attention and awareness the apprehension of reality as a whole before thinking about it, measuring it, comparing it, judging it -- a mere presencing, refuging and the intimacy of not knowing?

Mozart is given the music. So too Bach. Beethoven. Every musician, singer, composer, poet, novelist and playwright. Inspiration as that-which-is given.

I am dull. I do not listen. I do not feel. I try to make something happen. Nothing happens.

I am alert. I listen. I feel the stillness. I do nothing. And, of itself, there comes to be that which is revealing itself.

The language and music of God is silence. But we prefer something else. And there is nothing else.

There is much we do not understand about death. When the senses cease to receive what the intellect attempts to find meaning in, we mourn the departure of the visible and sonorous gateway that we call a human life. 

Silence and stillness attend us.

Creation detects the heart and mind of invisible wholeness.

There is nothing else.

Live with it and die with it.

It is the coming and going, the one who comes and the one who goes.

Between the coming and the going . . . 

nada más

 I think I understand it now.

     Understand what?

Death.

     You understand it?

Yes.

     How so?

Death is nothing else.

     Nothing else?

Yes, death is nothing else . . .

extra, extra, walk all about it

 We are the Sunday

Morning harbor walkers, we

Nod good morning, cross

Footbridges, inspect 

Sailing craft and fishing boats

Place coin on green thwart 

Faint chant from France as

Sunday Times, coffee, donut 

Replace scripture, new

Testimony to our

World extra church, cant or

The need to atone

merci et auvoir

It’s only a game

Say those who don’t know better —

No, it’s a sorrow

It’s possible I

Might have been disappointed 

No matter who won

clock it

 Game 7, World Series, extra innings.

zazen by toboggan chute

 One after one

Yellow leaves

Fall through air

From their trees

I sit in vigil

With these

My relatives

Returning to ground

Now scurrying 

With strong wind

To other location

Enroute elsewhere 

私の友人, watashi no yūjin, my friend

 Sometimes the reverse of a zen saying works as well:

                                           "Better to hear the name than see the face."

itadakimasu, (we humbly receive)

Sainthood is a mysterious thing. 

A soul is a mysterious presence.

So is memory. 

I knew her as a Sister of the Assumption. She died this early November date nine years ago.  We became friends. I went to Nicolet, Canada for her final profession. We corresponded. She tried to get me to come to Japan to teach. She became a chaplain at Yale. Then she left her order after forty plus years, got married, and lived a different life. 

Her husband wrote in her obituary she enjoyed garden parties, shopping on 5th Avenue, staying at the Yale club in NYC, and all things Cambridge UK. But that, I suspect, was how he valued and captured their time together. 

The postal office refused to deliver the birthday haiku I wrote to her because I addressed it to her street address in Madison CT and they had a post office box and some officious sorter couldn’t be bothered to drop it there and so returned it to me where it sits unopened over a doorway. She died weeks later.

That’s all. For fifty years we knew each other. Just that. 

We were two children in a photograph, one extending arm with flower in hand, the other, also arm extended, open hand toward extended flower, not quite reaching it, suspended in uncompleted nearness, the fragrance and freshness of their lovely gesture forever as it is shown, an invitation, a consideration, a breath between that both take in, separately.

HAIKU

(--for Jo-Ann, 私の友人, Watashi no yūjin, my friend)

child's hand reaches out

yellow daffodil offered

always, almost, held

(d. 2nov2016)

baseball

 Game 7 in a bunch of hours.

thus come, thus not gone

To notice, go beyond words, and wonder. 

This is zen mind, says Shunryu Suzuki. 

It’s where we begin, again and again, every instant, every place, with every encounter.

Zen mind is one of those enigmatic phrases used by Zen teachers to make you notice yourself, to go beyond the words and wonder what your own mind and being are. This is the purpose of all Zen teaching—to make you wonder and to answer that wondering with the deepest expression of your own nature. The calligraphy on the front of the binding reads nyorai in Japanese or tathagata in Sanskrit. This is a name for Buddha which means “he who has followed the path, who has returned from suchness, or is suchness, thus-ness, is-ness, emptiness, the fully completed one.” It is the ground principle which makes the appearance of a Buddha possible. It is Zen mind. At the time Suzuki-roshi wrote this calligraphy—using for a brush the frayed end of one of the large swordlike leaves of the yucca plants that grow in the mountains around Zen Mountain Center—he said: “This means that Tathagata is the body of the whole earth.” (-from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.)

 About the word:

Tathāgata (Sanskrit: [tɐˈtʰaːɡɐtɐ]), translated into Chinese as 如來 and English as Thus Come One, is a Paliand Sanskrit word used in ancient India for a person who has attained the highest religious goal.[1] Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, used it when referring to himself or other past Buddhas in the Pāli Canon. Likewise, in the Mahayanacorpus, it is an epithet of Shakyamuni Buddha and the other celestial buddhas. The term is often thought to mean either "one who has thus gone" (tathā-gata), "one who has thus come" (tathā-āgata), or sometimes "one who has thus not gone" (tathā-agata). This is interpreted as signifying that the Tathāgata is beyond all coming and going – beyond all transitory phenomena. There are, however, other interpretations and the precise original meaning of the word is not certain [2] -Wikipedia 

 Zen is the easiest hard thing you’ll ever encounter.

Start there.

And again.

che non distingue

Coming across Hegel, it occurs to me that 'emptiness' might be reflected in the (odd) way I've taken to translate Om mane padre hum, namely "behold what is within without, behold what is without within."

If asked if I think of God, I respond "I think of nothing else."

While Hegel is not buddhist, his take on the void where "nothing is known… because it is defined as the very other-worldly beyond of consciousness…" puts me in mind of "within what-is without, without what-is within" as the void sive what-is, what-is sive void.

Yes within, yes without; no within, no without.

This does not affect the price of a cup of coffee, neither does it perpetrate war or extra-judicial killings, nor hostile kidnappings from city streets by government thugs.

We must not confuse the void with the meaninglessness of a demented mind running away from itself.

"Itself" -- is all there is. It would be considered insanity to try to run away from all that is. 

The beyond is the simple turning-away of immediate objective existence from itself. To say that the laws of the world are beyond the immediately sensible world says nothing else than that this immediate world possesses negativity within itself. Immediate objects automatically exclude us from them; further, they (the objects) posit a beyond that mediates the differentiation of themselves. The world immanently excludes itself from itself, positing a beyond of itself from within itself. Thus, this supersensible realm that I must by necessity presuppose is not negatively nothing. It is the positive nothing that belongs to the objective world as such; it is what Hegel calls the “void:”

in the void, nothing is known… because it is defined as the very other-worldly beyond of consciousness… Suppose we are nonetheless to take there to be something in the void after all; this is a void which came about as the void of objective things but which now must be taken both as emptiness in itself, or as the void of all spiritual relations, or even as the void of the differences of consciousness as consciousness – and if the void is taken as this complete void, which is also called the holy, nonetheless there is supposed to be something with which to fill it out, even if it is only filled out with daydreams, or with appearances which consciousness itself creates. If so, then consciousness would just have to rest content with being so badly treated, for it would deserve no better, while daydreams themselves are still better than its emptiness (Hegel 2018: 87). 11

(from, Hegel's Understanding: Absence, Accident, Alienated, by Virgil Lualhati McCorgra, in International Journal of Zizek Studies,)  

 It is only temporary, but a painful temporary. The cult of insanity and inanity is full on right now. It is fixated on personal desires and the accumulation of raw power, hostile antagonism, and bedeviling logic about the priorities of a once idealist country being turned into an ideologically racist theocracy in the name of Christian Nationalism and Oligarchical Overlords.

I think the world is wrongly understood.

The separation of anthropoids from a cosmos of an inherently inter-reliant void is a mental opinion that creates devastating conclusions. Such as  -- kill the aliens, separate out anyone not "us" -- get rid of anyone not sympathetic to our ideology -- incarcerate anyone who we perceive as not in our corner, not loyal to our ascendant stature.

Our appearance is troublesome. 

E.M. Cioran wrote:

There is a kind of knowledge that strips whatever you do of weight and

scope: for such knowledge, everything is without basis except itself. Pure to the point of abhorring even the notion of an object, it translates that extreme science according to which doing or not doing something comes down to the same thing and is accompanied by an equally extreme satisfaction: that of being able to rehearse, each time, the discovery that any gesture performed is not worth defending, that nothing is enhanced by the merest vestige of substance, that “reality” falls within the province of lunacy. Such knowledge deserves to be called posthumous: it functions as if the knower were alive and not alive, a being and the memory of a being. “It’s already in the past,” he says about all he achieves, even as he achieves it, thereby forever destitute of the present 

Unmaking, decreating, is the only task man may take upon himself, if he aspires, as everything suggests, to distinguish himself from the Creator.

(--in The Trouble With Being Born, ch.1, by E.,M. Cioran 1973, 1976, 2011) 

Is this why we seem to love conflict and war so much?

Is our unmaking and decreating of laws, sensible policies, familiar national buildings, and all the agencies with their aid and assistance nationally and worldwide -- is this the only capability that an errant mind and skewed moral compass is able to conjure?

You cannot unmake or recreate the void.

Curiously, to buddhist and non-buddhist alike, the void might be our safest and healthiest refuge.

But we'll have to think about it -- and, then, harder still, unthink about it.

There is a current misanthropic tribe trying to mirror that entity against which the traditional prayer to St Michael pleads to assist us to face and forestall those "roaming the world seeking the ruin of souls."

Look at the faces, listen to their words, watch what they are doing.

They are trying to make something separate, disconnected, alienating. 

They are "a-voiding" what is gathered, what is interconnected, of a piece, what is holy.

If you do not yet pray, allow yourself to begin.

Do not a-void wholeness, because as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end -- a prayer that empties out anything other in favor of what-is-Itself.

An undistinguished and non-distinguishing pilgrimage through difficult territory.

just things as they are

Once young

Now old

It rains

i’m spiraling not relegating

 Do not

Suffer

Fools

Gladly

Show sorrow

Be sad

Feel compassion

Learn Christ 

Our fate is

In your hands

circumflex

 Bending around letters

Not walking into barn door 

Morning comes and light hesitates

As tilting earth over broken minds

doing this

 Sometimes

The only thing

You can do

Is what

You can do

There is

 Nothing else

I can do

So help me

Me God

sat,chit,ananda

Mind is emptiness

but my mind is emptying

I feel it draining

Being is bliss

but my fragment of being

is more and more remiss

Time is grand

but my time drips into sand

on a beach I forget where or when

it’s not a problem

being, consciousness, bliss

wending their way away

without ceasing

As is

If you will

Prayer

and i will always love you

Yes

Omnipresence

Sees no other

Where

No other

Is

If you love

You will see

This

dieu

 Love

Let’s be

What is

Here

no gaining idea, no following thought

 Zazen

Takes place

Every time

You see

What is

Before you

And everything

Is before 

You

noch einmal bitte

 If God wanted you

To live forever

You’d be here now

then, without speaking further, withdraws

 Q: Why do you pray?

  A:   Why?

Q: Yes, why?

A: To be

alone with

The Alone

Q: And are you?

A: Yes,

I am

Q: [looks, silently]