amid and within all creation

Mostly I remember Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole on horseback (Thomas à Beckett and King Henry II) on a beach discussing the absurd fate landing on them and their friendship in a political time.

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain: 
Temptation shall not come in this kind again. 
The last temptation is the greatest treason: 
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

(--T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral)

The awkward calculus of ethical and moral clarity in a troubled time weighs on the human heart. Every assassin somewhere believes that are doing the right thing. The world is shocked at their action. Commentators endlessly discuss the rationale, the mental illness, the antagonistic motivations for their murderous act. Sides are taken. If he is handsome, a mythology forms. If foreign, a renewed hatred arises.

Beckett is murdered in the cathedral. The troublesome priest has been rid. Henry submits his back for the lash. He is penitent. But he is king. He rules on.

Human history is an unsatisfactory thing. Justice is seldom the outcome of dispute and political maneuvering. The cunning and clever, i.e. the rich and powerful, seldom are held accountable for despicable acts and cruel behavior.

It seems to go that way.

Our fate, if you will.

If you are a fatalist.

I prefer to think of it as simple, uncomplicated ignorance. Side-skirting the clamor to label bad behavior “evil,” I prefer to see it as a deficient heart and a disinterested mind.

 I begin to sense that the inner creates the outer. Then, if maturation continues, the inner becomes the outer. (Our mythology of the christian incarnation follows this process.)

To give the benefit of the doubt, I imagine when our evangelical fundamentalist friends blithely ask if I’ve accepted Christ as my personal lord and savior, they are asking from a deep unconscious place whether I understand that unless the clear and undivided inner wholeness that centers all of creation is seen and accepted, the outer expression of the world will remain and be the chaotic divisive confusion of ego-fractured separation and unfeeling dominance it is and has been since its origin.

“Christ,” in this mythology, is that which ‘saves’ us from the delusion of hostile difference and cruel indifference. Christ is the manifestation (some say in human form) of what might be called loving wholeness in particular expression purposed to heal the illusion of fragmentation and to assist in effectuating harmonious peace and attentive presence encouraging meaningful interconnection and compassion amid and within all creation.

The shorthand for this might be -- to take away sin.

If we were to take away institutional hubris and political machination, is “Christ” that which is meant to guide humanity (vide all creation) through chaos and despair into harmony, stability, and peace?

The christ reality, rather than being the proprietory patent of institution and church management, is open source  intercommunion of all being, all beings, seeking nourishing existence and loving service one unto the other.

The wrong reason is to have everyone join your belief system. The right deed is to allow love to appear in the inner and outer world on its own, in its own way.

what spirituality is

For Sunday Evening Practice: 

As year ends, I revisit my roots and invite you to look in.

I am enthused that genuine spirituality is everyday life, everyday encounters, everyday things. 

 

"The greatest discovery was that the heart of Celtic spirituality was simply living the life, following the Way, traveling the journey in the everyday ordinariness of life –the pain and the pleasure, the heartaches and the hopes, the disappointment and the dreams. This is of great importance because this is essentially what spirituality is.” (—Trevor Miller)

It intrigues me that (it is soberingly possible) what we’ve seen as our need of scriptures, gurus, clergy, shamans, masters, or the panoply of spiritual teachers, is a fading and diminishing need, giving way to an associative inner self-reflection and community intercommunication as our exploration and supportive correctivity/connectivity.

Are we (mercifully) being thrown back to ordinary experience and conversational intuition with all beings and things, here and now, to reveal our shared worth and our material/spiritual direction?

Cheers,

s&b

1.

Celtic Spirituality – A Beginner’s Guide

Trevor Miller reflects on Celtic Spirituality.

https://www.northumbriacommunity.org/articles/celtic-spirituality-a-beginners-guide/

...   ...   ...

Here is One-
Another Itself
             
meetingbrook 
      hermitage

  בס”ד   (With the help of heaven)  bəsiyyaʿtāʾ dišmayyāʾ

  إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ    (God willing) 'iin sha' ٱllah

saluer la dignité, χαιρετίζω την αξιοπρέπεια, rendere omaggio alla dignità, saluting dignity

to them that serve

who pledge to protect

from foreign and 

domestic enemies

with gratitude and

respect for what you do

for your country

above board and unshy --

you know your duty

you know what honor is

legitimate and courageous --

be faithful and respected

pas de tout

 Why sit

Why be still

Why not know

Silly questions 

Silly unmoving 

Silly awareness

I once wanted

Something, anything —

Now, nothing, suffices

I’m amazed

To be alone

With nothing else

summa teleologica

 The end of things

Driven by some intelligence

Beyond our ken

Proves, says Thomas

There is an intelligence

Beyond our grasping 

The fifth proof of

An existing God

That tumbersault mind

Happily lands on two feet —

Taking applause

Arms outstretched 

Bowing from waist

Bouquet arriving at stage —

Design, the end

Precedes beginning 

You are because what

You are doing adds up.

Go ahead, factor origin

Divided by duration

Equaling destination halved

And how’d by quotient 

Division without a divide

Positing a whole over parts

I was never good at math

Nor logic, the good is

Only only as good as the

Included bad, embracing

Choicelessness, unknown

Whims, necessary faults

All (it is said) of a piece

(Pieces broken on ground)

God, they say, will reconstruct 

Refashioning integrity despite

Shards and pieces and debris.

The compute, the calculation

Factors back within the scattered

Pieces— all of them, regathered.

The ergo, as Cummings wrote,

“All lose,whole find”

claustrated

 From barn door

Starlight

From bed,

End-light

anachronistic fidelity

 what do you mean

you are different

not the same

different

day is cold

eight bells

snow tightens

light darkens

perhaps we should

abandon who we think 

we are, the purity of

our preferences, let

what is passing

pass, without comment

the way the thought 

of peace is not peace

and a prayer is just 

a preference thrown like dice

mes défauts et mes péchés ne définissent pas qui je suis.

   'Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.' (Confucius)

Of course John Prine wrote

a song called “Christmas in Prison”

the day comes, the day goes 

people start talking about new year’s

no wrapping paper, no candles

just wary greetings from second tier.

and it's over, same old same old

voices loud and Christ got born and all

back in his home with steel door closed

night does its job putting day to sleep

like this

 Yes

One day follows

Another

Three hundred

Sixty three days

Until Christmas

It’s beginning

To look

A lot like this

recollecting

 Zen is the practice

Of no barriers;

Contemplation the practice

Of no boundaries.

May we (mais oui)

Practice well!

last leafs

 there are a few of them on the mountain

hangers-on, shimmying in brutal cold

staying put, watching friends fall away

willy nelson has his say, says it just right

hunkering down

 7 degrees

frigid morning

this Stephen’s Day

any day now, any day, now, we shall be . . .

 No prison conversation today

Education department closed

Just well-wishes

To all of us

In our prisons —

May we be released

Soon

pourquoi, parce que

78  “,,, because of the tender mercy of our God,

    by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven 

79 to shine on those living in darkness
    and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.”

—Luke 1 

summa catholica

Think about

Solitude

You’re

Alone

Thing about

Prayer

You’re

In God

Thing about

Being human

You’re alone

With God

λόγος, logos, reasoning, intuiting, energy of creating word

 “The eternal birth of the word takes place in the ground of the soul.”

                (--Meister Eckhart)

“It is the awakening of the pure I am in each of us as each of us.”

              (--Rupert Spira) 

https://youtu.be/oUVQBuEtrM8?si=f2pZoiqX3iI6L69H

Prosit!

cat in meditative communion this christmas morning

 

cheers!

peace, and all, good

 It is

Good to be

Human

This is

What Christmas

Holds

One day

I hope we

Become human

comes midnight

 Squeaking snow 

underfoot

Bright stars 

overhead—

Just that

Night

and so it is

(they tell me)

Christmas

so it is

what it is

each one within

nearing birth without

accept as true

 To believe is not a belief, it is an act of faith

It is not to understand, but to affirm, to consent

If I believe in God, I can say yes. Saying yes does

not mean I comprehend what yes implies, only 

that I step forward, or sit on cushion, or look in eye

while unable to say anything but please and thank you

to live deliberately

 shovel a bit

snow light and deep --

not going anywhere

of the whole rather than just fragmented parts

Putting my solitude into perspective, coming off Tuesday Evening Conversation about the good and the not-good, about cruelty and diseased self-aggrandizement, this from Edward R. Murrow on Buchenwald, April 15, 1945. I was eight months old.

https://youtu.be/YlhQvPfYSXk?si=6o2PIBnFLBdRWhb-

Robert Lowell wrote in his poem “Epilogue” -- 

All’s misalliance,

Yet why not say what happened?

It seems to me, today, that remembering the suffering of others is suitable impetus to long for the awakening in oneself and others (both of whom, obtuse and cruel), which awakening is the coming to earth of a new vision, a new expression, and a new embodiment of what it could mean to be human.

The Jesus story, now subsumed under Christmas lights and tinsel, gets pushed into the corner of living rooms and church carols. Instead of being seen as a radical invitation to love and transform the very nature of personal self into an interpersonal and inter-cosmic re-evaluation of existence itself, we have continued on our familiar holiday routines of gifts, goodies, and grousing.  

(Remember, these words from someone solitary and reclusive during these days of culmination of a calendar year and the festivities of theological sensationalism. These words are suspect and aperspectival.)

The cats have been fed and there’s more coffee in the kitchen

I’ve begun to consider the incarnation as the revelation of things as they are.

When we abstract all the folklore, myth, and metaphor, we look at desert people under the thumb of formidable and merciless rulers.

These rulers have replicated this impulse to dominate and control those living within the ambiance of their authority throughout history. 

This is the way things are. The question is -- is there something afoot, something not-yet, that pierces the facts of human existence as it is and has been -- so that a transformation, a going beyond how things have been, a devastating realization/penetration into a new reality, a new character, a new revelation is available and presenting itself?

I don’t know.

Are we so damaged by narcissistic self-absorption that the invitation to incarnate a new aseity, auto-generative, wholistic, autodidactic -- the unfiltered inchoate creative imagination of that-which-we-have-called-God? 

I don’t think I have fully understood this “story” this offering of incarnation and its universal imagination infusing all of creation and each being therein.

I don’t think we have understood this.

But the invitation to sit inside it, to contemplate it from within, and to empty out what no longer serves us toward some sort of moksha, some variant understanding of redemption...

Some arrival that recognizes both those who knew Buchenwald and those willing to embody the transforming ecstatic liberation remembering who we really are, who we are not-yet, becoming.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

                (--Robert Lowell, ibid)

Hashem (הַשֵּׁם)

(Or, as it might have played out in the neighborhood where I grew up:

    What’s your name? 

 

Don’t worry about my name. 

 

    What’ll I call you? 

 

Don’t call me anything. 

 

    How will I know it’s you? 

 

You won’t.  

 

    [silence] 

 

    What should I say? 

 

Say thank you, then shut up and go away! 

 [exeunt] 

 When you can’t grasp something, don’t. When you can’t hear something, stay silent. When you have no idea what to say or do, practice MU!

I’ll be on my cushion if you want me. 

it’s beginning, to look

 Plow passes

Quiet

Bald and Ragged

Stillness, mountains

Look out

As I do

At what is

Coming to be

and peace

 All good

I wish you

All good

huh . . . what trouble

Cuppa chai tea.

Waiting on snow.

Bread order picked up from Rockland.

Provisions stocked.

Dog and his mistress packed up and drove off.

Bird feeders filled. 

Till now you seriously

Considered yourself

To be the body and to have a form.

That is the primal ignorance

Which is the root cause of all trouble.

--Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)

My primal ignorance turns to look at me.

My body sits in chair by window.

Banana bread.

Coffee milk.

“Huh...What trouble?” Jeremiah Johnson answered the old trapper who asked him if it all was worth the trouble.

Depends how you look at things.

Body just goes on doing what it does.

Ignorance or not, one step at a time.

Moving through.

let, instead, love

 The vitriol

Against this president

Becomes unproductive 

Let him go

He is meant to go

Let, instead, love

Pray to become

A better person

In his absence

at the brink

you can just tell when

a fool has stepped too far to

the edge of high drop

and it’s right there

Faggin says he will soon be able to prove that a tree has consciousness, that it has no need of a brain, but has consciousness. 

Entanglement took over thirty years to prove that entanglement exists after the first experiment showed that it exists because scientists didn’t want entanglement. ...It connects everything from the inside. It’s what allows the world to be holistic. (--Frederico Faggin)

In prison today we looked at Joseph Brodsky’s poem:

December 24, 1971

BY JOSEPH BRODSKY

For V.S.

 

When it’s Christmas we’re all of us magi.

At the grocers’ all slipping and pushing.

Where a tin of halvah, coffee-flavored,

is the cause of a human assault-wave

by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels:

each one his own king, his own camel.

 

Nylon bags, carrier bags, paper cones,

caps and neckties all twisted up sideways.

Reek of vodka and resin and cod,

orange mandarins, cinnamon, apples.

Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway

toward Bethlehem, shut off by blizzard.

 

And the bearers of moderate gifts

leap on buses and jam all the doorways,

disappear into courtyards that gape,

though they know that there’s nothing inside there:

not a beast, not a crib, nor yet her,

round whose head gleams a nimbus of gold.

 

Emptiness. But the mere thought of that

brings forth lights as if out of nowhere.

Herod reigns but the stronger he is,

the more sure, the more certain the wonder.

In the constancy of this relation

is the basic mechanics of Christmas.

 

That’s what they celebrate everywhere,

for its coming push tables together.

No demand for a star for a while,

but a sort of good will touched with grace

can be seen in all men from afar,

and the shepherds have kindled their fires.

 

Snow is falling: not smoking but sounding

chimney pots on the roof, every face like a stain.

Herod drinks. Every wife hides her child.

He who comes is a mystery: features

are not known beforehand, men’s hearts may

not be quick to distinguish the stranger.

 

But when drafts through the doorway disperse

the thick mist of the hours of darkness

and a shape in a shawl stands revealed,

both a newborn and Spirit that’s Holy

in your self you discover; you stare

skyward, and it’s right there:

                                                    a star.

 

Copyright Credit: Joseph Brodsky, "December 24, 1971" from Collected Poems in English, 1972-1999. Copyright © 2000 by the Estate of Joseph Brodsky. 

One of the men wanted to be sure I made a note of what he was about to say in final circle: “Love is the action of removing within for the sake of without.”

Earlier a staff member engaged in playful banter with three of the men and said to one of them a sentence that also bears some thought: “They’re always together and I’m not.”

This notion of disappearing into the reality at hand resonates the holiday called Christmas coming up in three days.

One says the ‘why’ of incarnation and crucifixion has to do with love, “not to be devoid of his presence.”

An entering and an absenting?

I wondered if the “inside/outside” should be switched in his words on love. “No,” he said. 

And I take it to my meditation seat.

the essence of tyranny is predetermined answers to unasked questions

 "There are no questions to a machine. There are only answers to a machine."  (---Federico Faggin) 

Trumpism is a machine.

It has only its own answers

unhearing any questions asked 

affirming participation, what no longs to show

 Yes

If what is

Real and true

Whispers in darkness

So too the holy

Like morning mist

In spray of trees on mountain

Yes

If pale blue light

Brushstrokes upper left

Of northeast window pane

Yes

I say yes, this spiritual life

Of noticing and listening to

What longs to appear and sound

Yes

Let me out

I will go

Into emptiness there —

Yes

falling back on that which is in and of itself

 It is consciousness that creates mathematics, not mathematics that creates consciousness.  (---Federico Faggin) 

there it is

beyond mathematics

consciousness itself

options

 if you love me

become flesh

if you love what-is

become human

otherwise,

remain invisible

otherwise

utter no sound

in kitchen

I stand and stare at her

not saying anything -- dementia

practiced and revealed

how we appear

 darkness and silence, 

she said, the feminine --

light and logos shine through,

he said, nothing

pride of working class

Cat occupies swivel chair

Curls in corner of it by window

She thinks catching mouse in

Middle of night gives privileges,

Bah, phooey, I toss it from window

Sit in another chair

this sweet strong animal will bring us back

 Whoa, (pulling on reins) 

Good gal, ease up, (comes to stop)

Good goin’, my dark beauty

.(snorts, scrapes ground, stands still)

Far enough, steady girl, rest a beat

We’ll be turning back, (stands unmoving)

Wintah' balances on front legs,

Darkness at its end, beginning, still,

It is time to turn, (gently pulls 

head to left) looks down moonless trail

Starts ahead, slowly, easy, carrying

Light in saddlebag, as tired darkness,

Dismounted, on solid ground, is left behind—

Now each step inch by inch urges toward light

Winter’s cold rehab through stasis looks ahead

Each step inch by inch getting lighter

Deep darkness changed us, pausing, lets up, 

Look inside, we hear from little way, do you feel it?

Yes, yes (we think) we do. (Turning, turning), 

new dawn, new light. Right here, just now, turning

bird feeders are filled and hung

 I attended a Christmas party tonight

The place was green and red

All the people that were there

We’re sweet and kind and dead

I didn’t attend a party

Only headlights on the road

I’m told soon it will be Christmas

I’ll wander this abode

eyes, ears, mind

God and body from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Western Concept of God:

Incorporeality. 

 God has no body (from Latin, incorporale), or is non-physical. This is a central tenet of monotheistic religions, which insist that any references to God’s eyes, ears, mind, and the like are anthropomorphic. Christian belief in the incarnation is a unique case in which God takes on human form in Christ. 

While some regard God’s incorporeality as true analytically (that is, true by the very definition of the word “God”), others derive it from one or more other attributes. Accordingly, God cannot be corporeal because that would preclude his being eternal, immutable, and simple, for example. Furthermore, if God were corporeal and omnipresent, it would seem that all physical things would be part of God. Others derive divine incorporeality from an apparent incorporeal element of human nature, termed the soul or spirit.

So, what do you think about this?

       Me? I dunno.

It’s early yet. Take your time.

       Ok. Thanks. I will.

[end scene. lights dim. curtain falls. audience leaves]

One small boy looks at his mother and asks “What does it mean?”

She smiles at him, takes his hand, and, immediately, they disappear with whatever meaning they might have found.

Camera centers in to volunteer usher off to left who says: “Don't let the uncertainty turn you around. Go on and make a joyful sound.” (Quoting For a Dancer, from Late for the Sky, by Jackson Browne)

Or, perhaps, if something further is necessitated, Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

Poems, and corporeal beings, don’t just appear and disappear, you know! There’s more to it than meets the eye or is contained in our philosophy,

Act 1 Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, Hamlet says to his friend: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 

Sigh!

[Exeunt omnes]

appear star, disappear star

 This myth we live in

This Christmas myth

We are newness being born

Be present be present be present

Try not to be confused, no history

Can expunge your incarcernation 

Do your time, live in the body

Then turn to cosmos, disappear, a star

what dark arts and predictive conjuring is his name doing

 Is Donald Trump dead?

What’s his name doing on a Washington Memorial Building honoring the dead?

a portion burned in paris

The enemy of the empirical is not the illogical. The enemy of the empirical is the secretive 

. (—Kevin Birmingham, in The Most Dangerous Book)

Considering Joyce’s Ulysses

Literary rainy day

Biography of a book

Seven hundred thirty two pages

seeing dental staff waiting for table

 Prison closed 

to volunteers 

this morning

We sit at wharf

By coast guard

Wind whitecaps

The day

Proceeds

(a pace)

a new england atlas

 He killed two in Rhode Island

One in Massachusetts 

Then himself in New Hampshire 

We had breakfast

In moody’s diner in Maine — 

That, at least, was something good

announcement from the high-rise

As Trump Puts His Brand on Washington, the Kennedy Center Gets a New Name

The board for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced that it would now be named the Trump-Kennedy Center, although a formal change may have to be approved by Congress. — (nytimes, 18dec25)

Our new board and slaver recognizes Ντόναλντ Τραμπ. 

(donald trump) and has renamed The Basilica 

of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC

"The Trump Spectacular Regression" of DC, (and east coast.)

Mass this Sunday will consist of Big Macs, diet cola, and 

greasy fries for those who pay five hundred thousand

for their perpetual indulgence and free ticket to heaven. 

The Whitehouse press secretary says all catholics will now

be called magaholics and must be rebaptized in January at

the trump-baths just outside Orlando Florida. The ceremony 

will cost an additional five hundred thousand dollars and you

get to shake hands with the new pope, his excellency Wholly Farther

Trump-Epstein the Fecund, once removed, resurrected with honors.

(God, we love what is being done with the place!)

Anybody who can make it, should reserve a space for brunch.

Five hundred thousand dollars will get you ham and eggs, 

coffee, and pineapple cheese cake.

Lets make religion fun again!

Oh yeah, no pre-2026 christians are invited. We're starting a

new cleansing of that fake Jesus stuff. The new papal motto

will be: Ο Ντόναλντ θα το κάνει, (O Ntónalnt tha to kánei)

"Donald Will Do It."

[Note: this press release will go out at 2:30AM, 25December2025. Thank you for your detention within this madness.]

rte 220

 Two field-hands ride

Snowmobiles to pole-barn

Across from Morse’s Sauerkraut 

Walk across road

Get something to drink

dear laddie

Mornin’

I’m noticing that a lot of people die around my age and I suspect death, mine, will trundle down the mountain in due course.

Just wanted to say i love you, carry on, and try to be as happy as a weekday allows you to be.

I’m happy to have known you, loved you, and shared in your wit and wisdom,  What a weird time it has been  — as it is in this flawed and flatulent time of our current blowhard in the Whitehouse.

You are a lovely son, a lovely man, and a delight to have known.

Don’t bother about my ashes. Wherever they wind up is fine. The earth and sea will roll with my debris.

Enjoy things, enjoy friends, enjoy yourself.

Bite a bagel, think of me, throw away the bakery bag in a proper receptacle, and may your coffee stay hot enough for a generous time.

I love you.

Nothing more,

Cheers,

Dad

just the two of us

 One day

He will

Fall down

Dead

That blowhard

One day

I will

Fall down

Dead

This blowhard

respiciō

 Shhh

Quaker Friends

What is

There

(To be heard)

well now

I don’t know about religious holidays.

I do know December will end in fourteen days

And that the bitter cold has snapped

One instant is eternity;
When you see through this one instant,
You see through the one who sees.

--Wu-men (1183-1260)

Morning comes and daytime follows.

There’s nothing to do.

I read. I follow the news. The bedlam.

The stillness of this room.

The way everything is here, even if unseen.

I no longer know what to think about God.

It’s fine with me not to know what to so think.

Hannukah, Christmas -- have at it.

I take no refuge in these celebrations.

I greet the living, I sorrow the dead. Nothing more.

I bow to Buddha and cross, all things that remind me to observe.

The foolish kabuki dance of political posturing does not interest.

Mostly alone, I look around, seeing comforting friends.

Buson:

    中々にひとりあればぞ月を友

nakanaka ni hitori areba zo tsuki o tomo

well now,

if I am to be alone

I'll take the moon as a friend 

--Cheryl A. Crowley, Haikai Poet Yosa Buson

and the Bashō Revival (2006), 113

Dog wags tail in his sleep. 

insight (yes) imagination

Για την σκεπτόμενη ψυχή, οι εικόνες χρησιμεύουν σαν να ήταν περιεχόμενο της αντίληψης (και όταν ισχυρίζεται ή αρνείται ότι είναι καλές ή κακές, τις αποφεύγει ή τις επιδιώκει). Γι' αυτό η ψυχή δεν σκέφτεται ποτέ χωρίς εικόνα. 

—Αριστοτέλης, περί ψυχής, 11l, 7

To the thinking soul images serve as if they were contents of perception (and when it asserts or denies them to be good or bad it avoids or pursues them). That is why the soul never thinks without an image.

—Aristotle, de anima, lll, 7

Imagination

Thinks

Itself 

In 

What is

Seen

In 

The

Mind

In 

The 

World

(Where,

As we 

Know)

There is

Only

Mind

(Imagine that

Imagining

This!)

Berdyaev said

The 

World

Is created

By

Imagination

sending dog scurrying

 This ending of year

Leaves us like the great 

Swooping horned owl

Landing on bench

Ten feet near last night —

Wondering what’s next

rozzo e sgradevolex

 Crude and unpleasant

It’s just the way he is

Our president

He doesn’t know better

A decipherer, a flawed

Text of character, garbled soul —

Here we are, unsure whether

To pray for him or punch him

In his face, turn, walk away

Sadder and no wiser about fate

His, ours, all of it, a brokenness into

Fragmented pieces, our dignity

what do we think we are killing

 A sadness arrives. 

Murders, ignorant leaders, 

more murders, 

an ignorant president, 

saddens.

At least, in prison this morning

conversation about space, the space

between us, how we fill it with what

we put there from what is within us

suspecting we create the world

Reflecting on Hitchen’s question

if Jesus cured the blind man, why

not cure blindness? Why is it only

Lazarus that is raised from the dead?

Is love really a verb? Because, if so,

to say “I love you” means I participate

in your co-creation. “You” are brought

through the movement of love into

apparent existence where stark relationality

is what love is bringing about. I, you, no other.

We kill each other in misguided attempt to

accomplish no-other, to find ourselves in the

wholeness of holiness without exception. But --

our mistake is trying to eliminate the physical

rather than embody the spiritual in vibrant form.

We kill the other -- a misguided belief

that there is another to kill. We misunderstand

the word “another.” It means no-other. There is

no-other. What we are killing is ourselves. One 

by one we destroy ourselves destroying no-other.

It is a sad time.

Our ignorance waterboards us.

We sputter and choke and feel ourselves drowning.

We take up knife and gun and missile and invective.

We are thick students in the face of hard learning.

If ever peace

then inner love

seeking out into

the space between us

a new creating, a new seeing 

a total eclipse

 Someone wants to give you a piece of their mind. Dont take is. Even if only a figure of speech, it is easy to be deceived and think you are being given something, some thing, you deserve, are owed, need.

The real understanding is there is no mind. No-mind, (wu-shin) is there. The best reception, the best engagement is with no-other. There are only a few who can effectively share what is not there.

What-is not-there.

Mind has no color,
Is neither long nor short,
Doesn’t appear or disappear;
It is free from both purity and impurity;
It was never born and can never die;
It is utterly serene.
This is the form of our
Original mind,
Which is also our original body.

Hui-hai (8th c.)

Mind murders. Mind splits. Mind is a terrible thing to waste.

True mind sees no-other and loves what-is seen.

True mind is willing to be inside Itself and outside Itself at the same (proverbial) time.

True mind knows heart is a lonely hunter and so accompanies it with invisible presence and encouraging nearness, a felt and objectless support.

Mind knows no-limits and resides there like a destitute hermit on perpetual pilgrimage encircling emptiness with joy and good will.

Feel the space you pass through.

Be there as another (i.e. no-other) arrives, resides, departs — imprinting space like an unseen footprint in melted snow..

Instead, it is the peace of one’s mind that makes for a true world with liberated hearts and loving eyes seeing everything as Itself.

strana strano

 Murders

Here, there,

Everywhere

It seems

An odd

Odd world

what is looked for

"Liberation depends upon yourself.” (--Khyentse Rinpoche)

The outer projection of an inner meditation, he said, is what is looked for.

So, we look at the world today. Is that our outer projection? Yes it is. Oh dear!

How, then, does the world change?

Rather ask -- What is my meditation?

Complete or right meditation is the re-creation of the external world.

It is no surprise that people shoot and kill shoot and wound other people from academic university to Australian Hanukkah celebration, to men in boats carrying drugs.

Their inner meditation is unsightly and urgent to eliminate that which is unwanted by them. 

In order to love the world that is becoming itself through creative wholeness and accepting accommodation we have first to find that inner capacity to accept, forgive, and love what we find within ourselves.

A better world is no secret.

But the manifestation of worse world is well kept secret. Only project your inner turmoil, greed, anger, and delusion out into the observable world.

If it is important not to dwell in a deteriorating and ugly world, begin to dwell in a rehabilitative healing and constructive inner world.

Stay away for a while if necessary. Allow darkness to cover you. Become penitent. Pray for all to be well and true and transfixed by loveliness.

There is beauty in that which is coming to itself.

Itself, alone, is liberation.

Become alone with the Alone! 

two words about guns and shootings

 Two words and 

one comma

Most of us

Want no comma

“No

More”

Republicans seem

To want to keep it

“No,

More”

The heartbreak of

Gun shootings!

my head hurts

 This hurts my head. 

Maybe it’s the 4AM belief I could read and understand such a piece.

Americans might be used to hearing conservatives blame postmodernism and critical race theory for social problems. Dr. Weaver, who died in 1963, took aim at a philosophical concept called nominalism, the rise of which he traced to early modernity. (Think of philosophers like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.) Nominalism involves the rejection of universal concepts and absolute truths — including transcendental moral truths. Nominalists believe that truth is embedded in the particulars of the world around us. There is no universal objective moral reality as Plato and other philosophers believed and it does not exist as an expression of the divine.

Dr. Weaver insisted that nominalism was not merely wrongheaded; it was the source of all our woes. In his introduction to “Ideas Have Consequences,” he called the shift to nominalism evil and likened it to Macbeth’s seduction by “the witches on the heath.” Like Macbeth, Dr. Weaver wrote, “Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions.” By challenging the idea of universal objective moral reality, modern man had succumbed to individualism, relativism, materialism, historicism and politics as will to power.

 In my research on the MAGA New Right and in the countless hours I’ve spent in conservative academic circles, I’ve heard this Weaver-esque refrain again and again. It is hard to think of a single significant thinker of the MAGA New Right who would disagree with his assessment of the ways in which modern thought is inherently corrosive or who would dissent from his insistence that we must restore some kind of transcendental moral orthodoxy to our politics.

But conservative ideas have consequences, too. When Dr. Weaver argued that modern ideas are evil, he helped legitimate the repression of anyone who thinks about truth differently. When the thinkers of MAGA New Right suggest that only conservatives — or as some put it, heritage Americans — have access to America’s founding principles or that America is a Christian nation, they are providing a justification for authoritarian actions on the part of the government.

(—in, The 77-Year-Old Book That Helps Explain the MAGA New Right, by Laura Field, nytimes, dec.13, 2025)

I’m going to take two aspirins.

Don't call me in the morning.