Boats are lowered from Wayfarer's travel-lift at regular interval. Floats are in. Channel markers too. The harbor comes alive with brightwork, rattling, batten, and hull paint. Deckhands seize sail to mast-hoop as gaff-rigged schooners ready for season.

We have the farm under contract. This fact is equally disturbing and humbling. Karl, head shaved, says "calling" and continues eating Topfen Kuchen -- as though everything is said with that word. As though with each forkful raised to mouth the vocation of Meetingbrook is visible, the sound of it audible.

Every thing,
Every place is real,
Each particle makes
Up the Original Person.
Still, the absolutely real
Is voiceless,
The true body’s
Majestically out of sight.
- Chosha (9th century)(dailyzen)

So much to worry about and doubt.

I read the poet Randall Jarrell,
In a letter to his red-haired Viennese friend, Elisabeth Eisler, Randall prided himself on being "quite optimistic, mostly in order to save bother: I accept, dismiss and forget about bad things that happen as quickly and well as I can." I guess one of the great principles of my life is: 'O don't bother, forget about it...'"
Saving bother coupled with my own great commitment to William James's "Wisdom is knowing what to overlook" spared us many a squabble.
(Mary von Schrader Jarrell, in Introduction to Remembering Randall, A Memoir of Poet, Critic, and Teacher Randall Jarrell)

No bother. What takes place, takes place.

The elegant and large ketch Sumurun ties up at Willeys wharf.
Sam and Susan row by in their dory. Charlotte comes in under her large daisy hat and hangs flyer of the Wabanakis of Maine and the Maritime. Alan pours tea. A seagull inspects Waterfront Restaurant deck. It is warm.

James is right -- "Wisdom is knowing what to overlook."
The Original Person is what is only seen in silence and stillness. Transparence is her shape. Emptiness his sound.

Let's try wisdom. Let's listen to the voiceless.

Yesterday Isidore the Farmer looked over rolling acres and saw silence.
Today Ramana, the saint of primal awareness, smiles and remembers his name often pronounced in the Wednesday Evening Conversation reading from Lex Hixon's book.

Earlier Ignacio from Bolivia laughed and took pictures and talked about the United Nations stay he'd done for Franciscan International. Thirty-four years between conversations and I remember how sweet a fellow he is, and Francis our common bond.

There is much questioning about the farm negotiations. If they collapse, that would be fine. If they take root, also fine. But the most important incarnation is the Laura Common. That belongs to itself. We are caretakers of that belonging -- taking care to listen to it speak itself, taking care to watch it form itself.

Spirit, holy and true, inhabits the sound and form of what is Itself for and with others.

As the earth longs for the spirit of holiness and truth, so does the Spirit present Itself to any of us willing to dwell in that good company.

Come to earth! Dwell here in peace and good will!

Rain
Watering earth.
May mothering Spirit ground.

Liturgically we are between things. Between Ascension and Pentecost.

O monks, there is neither going or coming or standing still; neither is there duration or decline or growth; nothing is fixed and still, nothing moves nor has foundation. This is the end of suffering. (Early Buddhist text, quoted in Bruno Barnhart's Second Simplicity)

That which Barnhart the Camaldolese Benedictine points to -- pure ultimate unitive reality and to unitive contemplative experience, reawakening in the Christian tradition by the encounter with Buddhism today -- is rainfall today. Everywhere everything is watered.

Veni Creator Spiritus, Come Creator Spirit.
Being between mothering -- our unknowing birth.

Terence on life support Friday afternoon allowed my hand on his head, on his hand. Water, holy and wet, forgave him if ever he'd forgotten he too was water. Two women cried by his bed. Water remembering he was water as he died.


In the realm of True Purity
there is no such thing as
“I” or “he” or “she”
nor can “friend” and “foe”
be found.
The slightest confusion of mind
and innumerable differences
and complications arise.
- Muso (1275-1351)

This morning canoe ride in harbor after sunrise and Eucharist at 7:30 service, I bought ground coffee, muffins, and New York Times at French and Brawn. On Bayview Street sidewalk a still and stiff bird with blood splattered on neck similar to Terence’s. On one knee I pick it up placing on bed of flower against tree in front of ice cream shop. Like water under paddle earlier and wine on lips at altar rail the flow of life and breath, rising and falling, dispensation and death interspersing each other as coffee poured through filtered grounds to air pot.

Prayer touched Terence's head and hands in final hours. And prayer knelt to move bird to funeral bier. At Sunday Evening Practice we laughed at Cheryl's talking to a piece of cake, saying she was talking to her mother -- laughing -- when words couldn't do what words often can't.

We mother with our love whatever we attend.
Happy Mother's Day -- all of us-- who've ever let their heart attend life!

Ascension Thursday was our decision time:

We have decided: 1) to obtain a lovely farm to live a quiet, contemplative, and engaged service life that can invite others to do the same in their own communities and homes. We have one picked out and are making an offer. 2) We will retain the bookshop/bakery on Camden’s Bayview Street with its retreat room above it on the harbor – it will be supported by membership subscription.

So it is.

"Here's the hardest part," says the man struggling.

The container is not what it contains. The institution that has conveyed within it a core essence is only a conveying shell, not the essence itself. The essence, he says, is that which belongs to everyone. Water may be conveyed by brook, pail, bottle or cupped hands. But water is the essence.

When you’re settled in Zen,
Your mind is serene,
Unaffected by worldly distractions.
You enter the realm of enlightenment,
And transcend the ordinary world,
Leaving the worldly while
In the midst of society.
- Fenyang

Right in the middle of society, right in the center of the conveyance -- right there within your heart, right here looking out from our eyes.

Gratitude for the carrying forward. Now, go home!

Light Dancing From Water to Brown Wood Planks and Beams
(A Thursday poem after 40 days)

It is where the heart is.
The sun rises warm on right shoulder.

Harbor surface calm with small ripples rubbed by breeze.
It is Ascension Day!

If Christ were to disappear from our eyes,
Would it matter to the heart?

It is the heart that sees what the eyes cannot.
The very next person I look at, the very next awareness of my heart,

There...
Here...

Christ has returned home. Christ is seeing what you are
Seeing.

Here it is again.

A Proposal for Intentional Community:
Meetingbrook Hermitage -- A Laura Common
Maine USA, and dwelling places elsewhere

Meetingbrook proposes a Laura of Hermits, an intentional community, a loosely knit association of individuals seeking what might be called Zen Contemplative Ecology. A “hermit” is one longing to dwell with simplicity, silence, & service -- deepening their life alone or with others. “Embodying the dwelling place of the Alone, Stepping aside to make room for another.” Hermits are those longing to dwell in their true home and in true community.

For the purpose of Meetingbrook’s proposal, “laura” means the pathways and waterways connecting us on our journey. A laura is:
1. a gathering of individuals living their own lives in their own dwellings;
2. peripheral to a central location shared for communal use;
3. building community with distinct yet similar shared intention to deepen one’s life;
4. each engaged in idiorhythmic practice (i.e. according to one’s own rhythms and schedule) -- whether prayer, meditation, contemplation, energy work, healing unease, encouraging physical, intellectual, spiritual health & balance;
5. with periodic sharing of each person’s conversation & practice in community;
6. devoted to the common intent of cultivating peace, compassion, engaged service, merciful reconciliation, and lovingkindness;
7. welcoming hospitality and generosity of spirit within and toward others.
8. A Zen Contemplative Ecology is, for this proposal, the practice of seeing directly & clearly -- now, safe, & whole -- interrelationships of individuals in community, sentient beings in nourishing environments, and a cosmotheandric awareness (of earth & nature itself, divine presence, and human family) that caringly and carefully makes room for each other.

A Meetingbrook Laura Common -- welcomes individuals, couples, & families. Members of any or no religion are welcome. Members of sanghas, orders, followers of specific teachers, are welcome. Those on any particular spiritual path, those willing to allow others to practice their own religious and spiritual path, are welcome. Inclusive, autonomous, & generous hearted people, are welcome. Those who appreciate diversity and a plurality of seeking, those realizing and embodying what is natural, sacred, and human – the immeasurable gift of existence and life beyond compare -- are welcome.

The mere prospect of connecting what already touches us is attractive. Identifying, consciously and intentionally, as part of Meetingbrook Laura of Hermits, deepens the affection and mystery of living life alone with others. Whether you prefer: to live alone on one’s own; live with others; or live alone together – we will explore how to dwell engaging solitude and community – a dedicating of life and love -- with God, each other, oneself.

If interested, come join us for some exploratory conversations toward the creation invited by a Meetingbrook Laura of Hermits. If nothing else, it might provide some thoughtful considerations, laughter, & a spate of belonging!
If interested in such an exploration, please email or call 236-4346, leave name and #.

Thanks, Bill Halpin and Saskia Huising 25Feb2002 - 6May2002 laura@meetingbrook.org

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Proposed Engaged Service Projects for Meetingbrook:
1. Conversations in Prison
2. Community Bakery Volunteer Connections and Recipe Ethnography for those in Good Health and Healing Recuperation
3. Practice and Study of Inter-Religious Peace, Understanding, & Tolerance.
4. A Laura Common – A Practicing Zen Contemplative Ecology Community.
5. Respite Community Resource -- Time Apart for Those Suffering Alone or With Others.
………………………………………….

Theme -- Meetingbrook Hermitage: As and In A Laura Common

Writing this on 5May2002 I remember my mother who died this date 1981. It is also four days until the Christian feast of the Ascension. On that day we will have chosen the way Meetingbrook will go on. It might have been an arbitrary choice of date for decision – but it’s ours.

Ascension, however else it has been conceived and celebrated, is the feast of Christ returning home to dwell as and in Father/Mother, Spirit & Truth. That Jesus opened himself completely to this Christ Reality is the joy of his followers.

Ascension is the return to one’s true reality. Some have called it one’s true self, others the absolute, divine self, ultimate, nirvana, liberation, or the ground of our being.

It might entail disappearing into undifferentiated suchness, as Buddhists speak of it. It might entail giving up our attachment to separateness and embracing unity. Or perhaps it entails a final tiring of fear and a corresponding surrendering to love

Ascension is coming home.

In Jesus’ Ascension it appeared he was leaving those who loved him. They were wary of his assurance he’d be with them always. Always! They might have been consoling words, but their eyes saw him no more. He was gone. No longer out there to see.

Here – that’s the promise Jesus tried to assure them – I am here. Here with you. See me, he said, and you see the Father, and the Paraclete (a supportive comforter – like sangha, community) will come. And all will be well with each and all.

(As I write this I break to dash to kitchen stove every five minutes to spray and bake bread.)

Still uncertain but open to what Ascension means for Meetingbrook, we listen and watch, both in silence and conversation. We don’t know. What we trust is our “yes” to the call to contemplate, converse, and correspond with all that is taking place.

If you want to be no
Different from the buddhas
And Zen masters,
Just don’t seek externally.
The pure light of a
Moment of awareness
Is the Buddha’s essence within you.
- Linji (d.867) (dailyzen)

At the end of his Gospel account, Matthew has Jesus saying as he ascended,
Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold I am with you always, until the end of the age. (Mt.28:19-20)

“To observe all,” – what a lovely teaching and learning to dwell with one another in common!

Here is what we propose: To engage the lovely teaching and learning – the sacred reality that observes all dwelling with one another in common.

In trusting appreciation, we go on.

At end of Lectio, Kristen prays us out with her words, "O Christ, may we move with ease into your bountiful emptiness."

Is the truth the world does not understand this -- that the one before us is the whole of the Father, Son, Spirit -- that the core reality is right there, right here? The "commandments" Jesus speaks of -- that if we follow them all will know we are disciples -- are these commandments the affirming yes of acceptance of the core reality of this existence?

If we love Jesus (or anyone) we become a way of being that does not make what we love other. Therefore, there are things we will not do -- not to, because of -- the one we love. Affirming whole present reality -- seeing as one seeing one -- we abandon the illusory othering view. There is no other to do wrong to. There is no wrong to be done -- not, at least, if we abandon ourselves into love.

Inside the sacred fence
Before which I bow
There must be a pond
Filled with clear water;
As my mind-moon becomes bright
I see its shadow reflected in the water.
- Daito Kokushi (1213-1279)(dailyzen)

Five days to the 9th. Monday we view a farm with friends.

The pond with clear water is in the viewing with friends -- the truth the world cannot see. Viewing with the one before us, looking back at the one viewing us.

The view, the viewing itself, the one viewing, the viewing with one another – this is the interview with Christ, this is the interview with Bodhisattva.

Those who would master Zen fully engage and embody this interview.

Pilate asked, “What is truth?” Jesus stood silent before him. Pilate didn't get it.

Enlightenment is no big thing. It is dropping into the one, into the viewing, interviewing the reality right before us. Seeing truth as it is.

What is that? And what is this?

O Christ, may we move with ease into your bountiful emptiness!

Cisco wags tail greeting at door of shop. Sando, the veteran, snoozes by bakery case.

To be resolute in the way means
from the beginning never to
lose sight of it, whether in a
place of calm or in a place of strife;
to not cling to quiet places nor
shun places where there is disturbance.
- Daikaku (1213-1279) (dailyzen)

A little boy named William wearing yellow and wine red is carried in by his mom after Buddhist Studies, He grabs on to ribbon of bell over counter. He rings and rings. His father's sister is in India with the Tibetans,

Gary Snyder's words say we don't change reality but we can transform ourselves.
With that, an elevating of awareness, a deepening of consciousness.

Mini is curled for the night on chair by desk in 2nd floor room at hermitage.

War is one of those realities. We cannot live as war. We must be peace.
Sorrow for one. Pray for the other.

I wouldn't want to live in a world where no one winced when a cat was killed -- even in a Zen story. Relationality is the human story. We are not the moral of a teaching story. We are the story.

Dirk wondered if (a phenomenological example) my comment on observing a body, a bat, and blood on the floor, one concludes something wrong had occurred -- was absolute or relative. "It was felt," I said. And if the whole is to be whole, it is a related whole.

Paul and Jim worked on the birchwood floor of cabin this weekend. In kitchen with coffee we spoke of clay feet and those in religion. Community begins when each one realizes the commonality of their ordinariness. Intention to live a particular kind of life only points to the way you wish to travel. Those who travel with or near are community to you. We all have clay feet. It is our earthy steps that give us the grace of each other -- not our lofty aspirations.

All the holy ones have turned within and sought the self, and by this went beyond all doubt. To turn within means all the 24 hours and in every situation, to pierce one by one through the layers covering the self, deeper and deeper, to a place that cannot be described. It is when thinking comes to an end and making distinctions ceases, when wrong views and ideas disappear of themselves without having to be driven forth, when without being sought the true action and the true impulse appear of themselves. It is when one can know the truth of the heart.
- Daikaku (1213-1279) (dailyzen)

When we pray we pray earthbound for all alongside moving as we move. Deliberate with each other, there is much to say and listen to on our way.

Fear might be the need to cut, stack, and burn wood; but ash is how we are transformed into love.

Poetry is what remains
when words dive into fire.
Poetry is ash seen
transformed back to lumber,
ahead to tomatoes.
(wfh)

Pulling Mark Strand's book of poems Darker (1970), the following:

The One Song

I prefer to sit all day
like a sack in a chair
and to lie all night
like a stone in my bed.

When food comes
I open my mouth.
When sleep comes
I close my eyes.

My body sings
only one song;
the wind turns
gray in my arms.

Flowers bloom.
Flowers die.
More is less.
I long for more.
(Strand, p.30)

At Friday Evening Poetry Annie reads poem about bus ride Boston to Rockland shared with young Korean carrying belongings wrapped by mother in paper with strings looped and tied. We see in words she left out her own finger placed on the bow being tied on what this young man carries in his journey. She is mother to him departing at Union Street. Of course, the poem and destination is left without sentimentality at Union.

Sando on one bench with me, Cisco on other bench with Saskia, Annie alongside logs glowing with fire in hearth.
Cisco is a border collie who will stay with us. He arrived Friday morning. His mistress leaves Maine for Florida and asks us to be home for Cisco. Black and white, over 10 years old, Cisco acclimates to hermitage and shop. He is sweet. He stares at Mini the cat, which has become meditation object for Cisco. Everyone is learning their space, sniffing proximity, and giving room for each other. It goes well!

There are three things I must do before dying:
1. wash dishes;
2. walk meditation path;
3. scratch cat passing to window;
Now I am ready. Now I die.
(wfh)

Poetry helps make an ash of ourselves. That's the more and less of it!

The Church, said Doug, is collapsing. "Did you ever think it would disintegrate in our very lifetime?" he asked at Chase's Daily breakfast last week.

The Boston Globe reports Cardinal Law sent faxes to his priests: "Cardinal Bernard F. Law is cracking down on efforts by lay Catholics to organize in Greater Boston, ordering priests not to cooperate with an evolving coalition of parish leaders." On the Globe website the 27April2002 headline reads, "Law seeks to curb organizing by laity."

The frown becomes scowl. The clergy, good or bad, has given itself the Church.
Laity must now, as in the beginning, give themselves to Christ.
Until they admit their absurd appropriation of what belongs to all Christians, all beings, all nature, the institution with its hierarchical arrogance should be left to flounder and fail.
When Christ is allowed back into the Church the laity will welcome back the clergy

Don’t tell me how difficult the Way.
The bird’s path, winding far,
Is right before you.
Water of the Dokei Gorge,
You return to the ocean,
I to the mountain.
- Hofuku Seikatsu (dailyzen)

Someone I worked with in New York once addressed the behavior of an opinionated school secretary in his employ saying, " She is impertinent." Irrelevant, insolent, no longer worth listening to -- this was his meaning twenty-five years ago in the child welfare agency. It was an icy dismissal, done with an unflinching belief that his characterization would carry the condemnation of opinion and its holder.

The institutional Church in the Globe's story -- and in the pedophilia scandal -- mimics the secretary and the director. Impertinence and, like Toynbee's declining slope of post-creative deterioration, a dominant minority carving stone with dictum better left unworded.

I walk to the mountain. There I find bird path, no other way.

Here is why we are in the world!

Closed out the old year
And held a dream of spring behind
My shut eyes…til now
This morning I opened them to see
It’s really come into the world.
- Saigyo (1118 – 1190)

Nature snowed through the night. As morning middles itself, sun looks at the unlikely spill, melting swiftly. Like last evening's conversation -- nature's urge is to present itself as it is for all to engage.

Separate dissatisfies. Unified releases. In the interim we measure the alleged supposed apparent and believed distance of one from the other. This activity is known in places as "sin."

The days stretch toward 40. There are 13 remaining. What will ascend?

Maria turned 74 Wednesday. We sang to her last evening. A jar of Trappist Apricot Jam curled itself in her hand. She believes in love. Thus she is, loved! Tom smiled with her out the door heading home.

Christ blames no one for the death of Jesus.

No one is converted to truth by means of blame or shame. What moves us to change our way of life is the compassionate revelation that the ignorance, mistakes, and misunderstandings we’ve cultivated can give way to a deep and lovely awakening of our true nature, true relatedness, true being.

Mind's no solid
One can touch or see --
Dew, frost.
(--Dogen)

Ephemeral and beautiful, dissolving and disappointing, impermanent and wistfully watched disappearance.

Once we learn to accept failure, love grows. We do not grow by thinking about it or by wishing for it, but only by the experience of failure. (Thomas Keating ocso, The Mystery of Christ, p120)

These 40 days of prayer, meditation, and conversation about Meetingbrook continue with us. And you too?

In every vocation, events and other people constantly reactivate our emotional programs for happiness, along with the accompanying turmoil that occurs when these programs are frustrated. Such self-knowledge is not a disaster but the necessary condition for changing them. When these have been dismantled, our ministry starts to work of itself because, once freed from the obstacles of pride and subtle forms of selfishness that hold the false-self system in place, the Spirit of God can work in us.
The seventy-two disciples, flushed with success, came to the Lord expecting to get a pat on the back, and all he said was, "Don't get excited about working miracles. Anybody with a little psychic power can do that. What really counts is that you are part of God's plan. The thing to rejoice in is that you are chosen to become divine and to join me in raising the consciousness of the world." (Keating, p.121)

No blame, no shame -- only the new foolishness of sun and mountain, sea and sky.

Like water running brook tumbling down Ragged we smile and wave to each other with passion and passing recognition.

We'll have many things to converse about. If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow, it doesn't matter.

What matters is choosing to be what each truly is, choosing to dwell who we really are.

Dew, frost -- ourselves!

Hawk? Or eagle overhead? The silent walking meditation Lauras itself along Ragged Mountain on Saturday morning.

An enfolding meditation on our retreat day:
1. Zen is looking; Zen is listening.
2. Inviting insight, allowing what is there to reveal itself, as it is.
3. Prayer is gratefulness, trusting what is there to reveal the presence of God. For where is God not?
4. Jumping in, engaging what is there, acting & moving, a transformation which affirms, empties, resurrects, and ascends.
5. At origin, still -- listening, looking, the practice of no barriers.

Brook carries itself before our eyes.

By becoming a human being Christ annihilated the dichotomy between matter and spirit. In the Person of the Divine-human Being, a continuum between the divine and the human has bees established. Thus, God's plan is not only to spiritualize the material universe, but to make matter itself divine. This he has already done in the glorified humanity of his Son. The grace bestowed on us by the Ascension of Jesus is the divinisation of our humanity. (Thomas Keating, in The Mystery of Christ, p.86.)

Sando lay in the brook looking at us, lapping water, and epitomizing the emerging and engaging convergence of our lives. Susan sings a song. We bow to the betweening embodiment, and return to the hermitage for lunch.

The grace of the Ascension enables us to perceive the irresistible power of the Spirit transforming everything into Christ despite any and all appearances to the contrary. (p.87)

The bird overhead, I think, was a hawk. Watching us as we step our prayer mindfully.

Jo is bald like a Zen nun. Head shaved clean as a whistle. So is David's -- but he hasn't just come home from a second bone marrow transplant. On back stoop in the cool of evening Jo asks what is my dream. I tell her to be the monastic I am.

To seek and long for God alone. And since nothing is really separate from God -- to seek and long for each other in our awakening into the realization of God. So many are alone, even alienated, unaware of their true relatedness, their true home. To invite -- quietly, kindly, and compassionately -- oneself and each into their own very nature, this is the practice of contemplation, Zen, and engaged service. To invite Christ, God, Bodhisattvas, holy men and women -- each into the wordless silence of love's simplicity, stillness, and sanctuary.

Empty and desireless,
Cold and thin, simple and genuine,
This is how to strike down
And fold up the remaining habits
Of many lives.
When the stains from old habits
Are exhausted,
The original light appears,
Blazing through your skull,
Not admitting other matters.
Vast and spacious,
Like sky and water merging
During autumn,
Like snow and moon
Having the same color,
This field is without boundary,
Beyond direction,
Magnificently one entity
Without edge or seam.
- Hongzhi (1091-1157)(dailyzen)

It was 94 degrees at 1:33pm in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. Now, Jo calls down to say "ice cream" -- and in that calling all is for the moment just as it should be.

Someday, David says, illness and disability will be no more. Will that eventuality be a conclusion of courage or a cause for reassessing all valuing?

"To ice cream," says David, going up stairs with his Welsh laughter.

To say it simply -- we might have found ground -- a place for Meetingbrook Hermitage to root.

The seedling these several years searching soil, is, perhaps, ready to enfold, dive deep, and unfold. It's still early. But, something quickens!

On a doorpost in a lovely house in Belfast there is a Mezuzah with the Shema. "Shema" is the word that begins the verse "Shema Israel", "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One". (Deut.6). Upstairs, on the door to a bedroom with a tank of tropical fish, there is a crucifix.

In the readings for this weekend the Jewish Yeshua (Jesus), who had been put to death, is reported to breakfast on the beach with a small group after a fishing encounter that yielded a surprising catch.

These memory devices -- words on doorposts, wood on doors, words on paper -- are set there to remind us of a ground longing to arrive home. The Lord is One. The child of God who died rather than deny that reality. The story of surprise nourishment when we release our controlling will and open to the free and loving wholeness that each is in God. These are fragments of a picture we puzzle to understand.

If you think that you
Have cut off illusory mind,
Instead of simply clarifying
How illusory mind melts,
Illusory mind will come up again,
As though you had cut off
The stem of a blade of grass
And left the root alive.
- Menzan Zuiho (1682-1769)

Our task is to clarify how illusory mind melts. If we allow this clarity to arrive with a still, silent, safe, and aware compassion -- we might be able to simply live with each other as neighbor, friend, and family.

We can't cut each other out. We can't cut each other up. Something else is being called for. We, if we are to live profoundly the gift we each have been given, must listen.

"Listen," says St Benedict in his rule. "Hear," says the Shema. Take root illusion, and watching, let it melt away -- the Zen invitation calls.

The ground is softening. It is mid-April. Smell that ground. Feel it. Love it. It -- everywhere and at every depth -- is our source.

In Belfast this week we found ground. For this next week, we'll watch, listen, and pray.
Soon, we trust, we’ll see!

The windbell rings outside my window over kitchen where Zwiebel Kuchen (onion cake) lofts its scent with breeze moving through bell and open window. Sunlight. Daffodil stalk rises dark green alongside empty birdfeeder. A lovely morning! And yet, will this all one day disappear?

About the mystery that the cosmos has to disappear, Teilhard de Chardin said –
The more I think about this mystery, the more it appears to me, in my dreams, as a “turning-about” of consciousness – an eruption of interior life – as an ecstasy. There is no need to rack our brains to understand how the material vastness of the universe will ever be able to disappear. Spirit has only to be reversed, to move into a different zone, for the whole shape of the world immediately to be changed. (The Future of Man, p.322)

In 1955, 10April, on Easter Sunday, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died. His writings -- a combining of biology, paleontology, philosophy, and spiritual visionary reflection – had to wait until after his death to be published. He was as obedient a Jesuit as he was an unorthodox thinker.

He'd written a reflection finished in Tientsin, on 25 March 1924, titled, "The End of the World." It is found in his book The Future of Man as the final essay. It ends,
When the end of time is at hand, a terrifying spiritual pressure will be exerted on the confines of the real, built up by the desperate efforts of souls tense with longing to escape from the earth. This pressure will be unanimous. Scripture, however, tells us that at the same time the world will be affected by a profound schism -- some trying to emerge from themselves in order to dominate the world even more completely -- others, relying on the words of Christ, waiting passionately for the world to die, so that they may be absorbed with it in God.

It is then, we may be sure, that the Parousia will be realized in a creation that has been taken to the climax of its capacity for union. The single act of assimilation and synthesis that has been going on since the beginning of time will then at last be made plain, and the universal Christ will blaze out like a flash of lightning in the storm clouds of a world whose slow consecration is complete.

…At that moment, St. Paul tells us (1Cor.15: 23ff) when Christ has emptied all created forces (rejecting in them everything that is a factor of dissociation and super-animating all that is a force of unity), he will consummate universal unification by giving himself, in his complete and adult Body, with a finally satisfied capacity for union, to the embrace of the Godhead.

Thus will be constituted the organic complex of God and world – the Pleroma – the mysterious reality of which we cannot say that it is more beautiful than God by himself (since God could dispense with the world), but which we cannot, either, consider completely gratuitous, completely subsidiary, without making creation unintelligible, the Passion of Christ meaningless, and our effort completely valueless,

Et tunc erit finis. [Then it will be finished.]

Like a vast tide, Being will have engulfed the shifting sands of being. Within a now tranquil ocean, each drop of which, nevertheless, will be conscious of remaining itself, the astonishing adventure of the world will have ended. The dream of every mystic, the eternal pantheist ideal, will have found its full and legitimate satisfaction. ‘Erit in omnibus omnia Deus.’ [‘God will be all in all.’)
(The Future of Man, pp322-323)

We are in 'between' time. We’re happy to move along our ordinary lives. But something nags. There is a suspicion that we really don’t have much figured out. But we go on, as we must.

Elsewhere, a web essay looks at Teilhard's thought:
To be fully ourselves, according to Teilhard, we must head in the direction of "convergence with all the rest...towards the other." He puts it grandly: "The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis."

The danger, or the evil, is not so much the ego as it is egocentrism! Teilhard denotes that egocentrism (or egoism) confuses "individuality with personality." Becoming separate, the ego "individualizes itself." It is a fatal move, it is regressive. It seeks "to drag the world backwards towards plurality and into matter."

For Teilhard, the point of the individuation process, or being open to universal insight, is to further the evolution of cosmic (and human) consciousness and creativity.

Teilhard believes that there is an enfolded creative Intelligence within the depths of the cosmos...and that every aspect of human experience can be affected by this creative Intelligence, mainly via a "breakthrough" experience.
("The Cosmic Plenum: Teilhard's Gnosis: Cosmogenesis," by Beatrix Murrell on web Stoa del Sol essays)

The wind picks up. Gale warnings off the coast. White clouds chat against April blue sky. So much on the ground – in Israel and Palestine for example – is besieged by momentary uncertainty, by the nearby dissolution of particular lives. We are no longer that far. Not merely from warfare and terrorism – but we are not that far from the change in consciousness Teilhard speaks about.

This “turning-about,” this “breakthrough” – not that far? Between here and there, between now and then – what fears of ours will have to dissolve?

While we ponder, phoebe, crow, and redwing blackbird sing psalms and antiphons into the wooded wind.