Aware presence sits in maximum-security prison around table in education. Eight inmates, two visitors, reading at random snippets from The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace, pieces from many minds collected by Jack Kornfield. Later we read a piece on history and who we are. We finish with poem by e.e.cummings let it go .

Then Sonny getting up to leave says it. One sentence. It sums up the gathered circle conversation with compact clearness.

Sonny says, "What Jesus was, we are now, if we let it be."

Turning the wheel of the Dharma
is the beginning and end
of the whole training.
With this aspiration one starts
giving one’s whole heart to the training;
with one’s heart in it, one does it.
Depending on it, one looks
for the wonder arousing,
mysterious state behind appearances.
That attained, the transformation
of one’s life has been completed.
- Torei (1721-1792)

Beyond appearances, at center of our very being, Sonny's sentence.

Saskia ends with their nodding affirmation, “May we all be at peace, now.”

What if we've never grasped the incarnation?
Is there an incarnational constant, similar to the cosmological constant?
Creation is God's way of saying, "I am here!"
What if God is, from the first, awareness becoming human?
What if Jesus saw through Christ what God from the beginning is creating?

Who, then, would not celebrate each birth, each awakening, and each leap of light through night to earth?

Christ is now longing to be born. Jesus knew this. And this is what God reveals as truth in time.

Imagine this: religion has done its job, holding sacred sound reverently as time unfolds voice to pronounce its song. Our breath rises in and out the body mother bestowed on one and all.

This. Know this. "This," sounds God, "is my son and daughter in whom I am. Well. Pleased."

Oh dear! Here we are! Thanks be to God!

"People don't write history, historians do."

I remember that line (or one similarly phrased) from a play attended in Callicoon NY in 1964, The troupe of theater players would descend to auditorium under church and rehearse a comedy about somebody's war. Our own war was nascent in Vietnam. Our personal wars with what and how we thought were like rocks in the near flowing Delaware River, temporarily diverting the rush of event and history, a surprising whitewater of resistance that splashed over us before continuing toward Crows Nest, Port Jervis, the Delaware Water Gap, Dingmans’ Ferry, down to Philadelphia, and out into Atlantic Ocean.

Historians have realized for a long time that monks of the eleventh and twelfth centuries invented a past in order to legitimize their claims to the present.
(-- from Introduction, in Monks & Nuns, Saints & Outcasts, Religion in Medieval Society, c.2000)

If I were to invent a past, what would I wish to legitimize as a proper present?

Monastic culture sought to control the future through the proper performance of liturgy. Prayer, for the living and the dead was the primary function of the monastic community, a function understood and cherished by all orders of lay society. Moreover, ritual actions showed the proper social hierarchy, they acted out the proper order of the world, or, when necessary, they dramatized the failure of human society to conform to the divine order.
(-- from ch 1, Monastic Memory and the Mutation of the Year Thousand, essay by Patrick J. Geary, op.cit.)

How would I write it? The divine order, yes, what is the divine order? No matter what anyone else calls it in their version of history, I'd say that the divine order is common use of commonly used property and possessions. A wise person with no personal ambition would be wise counsel to those who gather into communities of common intent.

(Of course there would be the non-gatherers, the non-commoners who would rather think of themselves as special and privileged, who take to themselves honor and rank and assemble under their benevolence minions of fawning prisoners to their control and protection -- not unlike the current day governments with their two party political charade that rivets attention on every proclamation and grumbling complaint to their benevolent patriarchy. But these are not the divine order in the history I write.)

The divine order is a circle, not a ladder, not a straight line. Women and men attend to creation. This might be birds, cats, spiders, clouds, mice, dogs, horses, chipmunks, dust motes, baking flour, branches of trees, elderly people or even children. All creation, once or formerly visible, is the work and leisure of the divine order.

In this history there is no entertainment industry, no recreational industry, no educational industry, no financial industry, no industry whatsoever. There are only people living their lives with nature and unseen nature. The circle of life encounters each and every individual on the circle with attention, respect, and engaging service to the needs of each and all.

Women are neither baby makers nor objects of sexual satisfaction. Men are neither baby makers nor objects of sexual satisfaction. Women and men are the created, creation, and creators in a circle of reverence and love. There is nothing to take and nothing to give -- everything we once thought of as sexual industry is reconsidered in the light of what is calling forth now. Is now a child? Is now a comforting? Is now a coupling? Is now a non-coupling? Whatever emerges will be a result of what now is creating -- and not a result of an industry, whether ecclesial, cultural, or consumer -- for the good of now and forever. What we once called procreation and perpetuation of genetic strain is no longer of interest. What is the divine order that is of interest? Ask yourself.

You alone are the creator, the created, and the creation. In the past we were tempted to say "God created...” When we did say that, we fell deeper into forgetfulness with the use of a word with three letters. Today, now, is the space of remembering. The remembrance we arrive at is the very fact of what we have called incarnation. It is an awkward word. But so is God.

You and I are not God. God is not God. (God is not a word that represents God). Nor is anyone else God. What else can we say?

Go ahead -- say it. It is the present. It is now. God is everywhere present, but nowhere found. And the mystery we call Christ is the realization in Jesus this season that God is now human. It is a curious phrase: God is now human. If such is so, perhaps this is why God is nowhere found. Are we looking in the wrong places? Are we looking in words? In sky? In routines and traditions that have no further role in locating and celebrating God? And is this why we feel so alone and not with God?

There is no need to write history. We are what historians choose to say about us. There is no need to believe what is said. We are condemned to repeat history when it is someone else's telling of history. Forget it. History, far from being a recounting of events gone by, is a story embedded within us right now in our hands and feet. With every move we enact history. Don't let anyone enact your life for you.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
(-- George Bernard Shaw, 1856 - 1950)

Rather, be divine order. Write no history. Be the story of life as it is unfolding right now. Be what we are doing.
Yet the question remains -- If this common gathering is to simplify creation, who are we to say we are?

We are who we are and what we are, when and how we are there, as we are here.
Write this -- nothing other.

Breathe easy. The darkness of history is dying. Light will see us through.

Us. With us. God with us. Emanuel.
Write us -- no -- enact us well.

There's no place to go but home.

Gathering simples, going home
White clouds flying
Mists melt black mountains
And this wandering mystic’s
Wandered astray.
Black apes call and green birds cry
A magic crane goes before me,
Dancing, leads me
To my cave.
- Yun-K’an Tzu

Home is not what we think it is. Home is where no thinking leaves us. After illusions reveal themselves and scuttle off. After long looking down many paths yields an empty road with no encouragement to continue further. After one of the numerous beliefs we've cherished collapses into vacant stare at nothing we can remember. After we discover one more 'friend' has bailed out with oblique words such as, 'There are other things I have to take care of.'

Home begins to take shape when after one or all of the above riddles our lives with disappointment. We realize there has never been a real appointment with any of them -- not illusory perceptions, not the direction of our life, not beliefs we've held with foolish courage, and not the friendships that have been mere convenience, and you and I are now inconvenient.

Home appears when we are looking the other way. It occurs during the dismantling of our special lives. Home is where nothing special takes place with arresting awareness.

A poet who looked the other way with words wrote:

let it go--the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise--let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go--the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers--you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go--the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things--let all go
dear
so comes love

(e.e.cummings, XXIX in 1 X 1)

Being led, dancing, to that cave. Love is where there is no place to go, but home.

"Where there is no one, I am." It was a silent phrasing during 1st sitting in chapel/zendo.

That's what came after arriving at the cabin for Sunday Evening Practice and the woman connected to Tibetan monks asked where she might sit. Moonlight over her shoulder placed window squares on ash wood floor.

The letters "w" and "t" keep phrase from saying, "Here, here is no one, I am."

Pure and fresh are the flowers with dew
Clear and bright is the singing of the birds;
Clouds are calm, waters are blue.
Who has written the True Word of no letters?
Lofty are the mountains, green are the trees,
Deep are the valleys, lucid are the streams;
The wind is soft, the moon is serene.
Calmly I read the True Word of no letters.
- Zenkei Shibayama (dailyzen.com)

Cesco occupies middle blue zabuton below as I sit in loft. In the house Saskia researches music order, Mu-ge races crazily up and down stairs, up and down table, desk, and chair. Sando sighs on bedroom bed with elderly tolerance of the new energy bouncing off the walls.

The day extends. We walk with dogs in state park. Back at cabin as sun sets and darkness curls around bare branches we light oil lamps to begin enclosing porch with clear plastic. When night and cold temperature rendezvous we gather tools on porch for morning and enter chapel/zendo for Vespers.

Prayer is sung in psalm-tone. There is a trust that in ways we cannot fathom what we do matters. We don't know if it does. We just do it with intention to remain in loving attention with all there is and each one there.

We try to do, simply and starkly, what we are doing. When being and doing have little or no separation between them, we begin to disappear. In that disappearance, the one we call God is no longer absent but still invisible, no longer unheard but still silent. In that disappearance there is no knowing.

We know nothing of God. We barely know anything of ourselves. What we do manage to know are odd details of finances, academic test questions, flaws of others, and how to divert ourselves from ourselves by becoming someone. When and if we ever fail miserably and wonderfully at becoming someone, it is there at that ground opening emptiness the one we call God resonates “I am.”

No need asking why and how. No reason, no explanation, satisfies. Just this: Where there is no one, I am.
“I am!” -- There’s that sentence! We are permitted to praise this. And give thanks.

Choose your own silent phrase. Sit with it. Lose track of everything else. Go away. Return home.

Advent in forceful wind.

Phil Berrigan died Friday, Dec. 6. Reading Phil Berrigan’s final words about nuclear weapons, their production, threat, and ultimate use:
Because of myopic leadership, of greed for possessions, a public chained to corporate media, there has been virtually no response to these realities... (“PHIL'S STATEMENT 12/05/02” (dictated the week before Thanksgiving, via Liz McAlister) (http://www.rcnv.org/rcnv/archives/philberrigan.htm)

He died soon after an unfinished sentence in a completed life. Compare Phil’s life with the incomplete lives and finished sentences of profiteers and politicians trying to convince us that destruction and death is good for the economy and our ideals of freedom.

I came late to the dharma,
But each day, deepen my retreat.
Waiting for mountain monks,
I sweep my simple hut.
Then down from cloudy peaks
You come through knee-deep weeds.
We kneel on tatami, munching pine nuts.
We burn incense and study the Way.
Light the lamp at twilight;
A simple chime begins the night.
In every solitude, deep joy:
This life abides.
How can you think of returning?
A lifetime is empty like the Void.
- Wang Wei

Brendan Walsh gave a eulogy for Philip Berrigan. Walsh is cofounder of Viva House, a Catholic Worker house in Baltimore that operates a soup kitchen, food pantry, and free law clinic. He said that during one incarceration, he and Phil lived like monks together in a tiny jail cell for 5 months, eating wonder bread and grape juice for morning Eucharist, doing scripture study during lockdown. Wang Wei's words, "How can you think of returning?” must have been heard by Berrigan each time he did an action he calculated to land him back in jail. He spent over eleven years in prison for civil disobedience acts of opposition to war and destruction of implements of war.

It is mid-Advent in the Christian calendar. The yearly meditation on the coming of Christ into human history is paled by homeland security in America, nostalgia for segregation, privileged rulings for the wealthy, and an odd intensity to rid the world of evil that particularly interferes with the interests of commercial vendors of oil, arms and weapons of mass destruction.

While churches sing and celebrate liturgical sentiments of anticipation of the prince of peace, others plot bomb coordinates, CIA assassination targets, and random terror. This is done in the name of Christian and Muslim causes and values, democracy or holy war. Is the world dangerous? Yes, the world is dangerous.

The wind is a clearer sound. It makes no statement trying to convince anyone of anything other than moving along a course of night, sounding through chimes hanging to record its passing. The wind is a haunting sound. The wind has integrity many long to hear.

Christ is being born. Phil Berrigan has died. Two persons and two sentences that serve to evoke sacred longing and spiritual crisis. There is a skeptical uncertainty initiated by these two moments of appearance and disappearance.

Phil Berrigan was a forceful wind. And so, through this night we wait and watch. We do so with friends whose longing and crises ask us to wait and watch with them.

Woodstove smoke at 5:00am from cabin. Bald Mountain reveals and conceals itself with moving clouds along southern side. Inside we read Dogen's words on walking mountain. If we're unaware of a mountain walking can we be aware of our own walking?

Under the thin smoke of winter
The old temple is quiet.
After sundown,
All the visitors are gone.
On the west wind, three,
Four chimes the evening bell.
How can the old monk
Concentrate on zazen?
- Ma Chih-yuan (1260-1334)(dailyzen.com)

Following Saturday morning's conversation, Many Faces of Death, a woman said she thought the practice at Meetingbrook was a radical acceptance of & surrender to the reality of each person arriving here. Like death, we arrive, finally, at who we are as we are at that moment. Why not in life as well?

True love and prayer are learned in the moment when prayer has become impossible and the heart has turned to stone. (-Thomas Merton, quoted in The Grace in Dying.)

Today, in unrelenting driving rain, this impossibility of prayer surrounds the walking mountain, shrouding clouds, chimney smoke, and this stony heart.

Who knows what person we are?
The sound of each and every thing is sonorous within us. Which sound do we retain and claim to be us?

Or does our consciousness stretch to the extending edges of an expanding multi-verse far beyond the ideas we've held of a contained universe, enclosed mind, separate self, atomistic existence, or isolated unconnected people in a conditioning manipulation we call society and culture?

Dreaming, Chuang Tzu became a butterfly;
Waking, the butterfly became a man.
Who knows which is real?
Who know where endless changes end?
The waters of the deepest sea
Return to the smallest stream.
The melon-grower outside the city gate
Was once the King of the Hill.
Even rank and riches eventually disappear.
You know, and still you toil.
- Li T’ai-po (701-?)(dailyzen)

In Boston, the Cardinal resigns over issues of protecting child-abusing priests and denying the problem. In Washington the President chastises impromptu remarks by the returning Majority Leader of the Senate regaling segregation and lamenting the difficulties that followed not having a segregationist leadership in this country. In America the bait and switch technique so popular in retail minds is being applied to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in world affairs. Which one am I?

Mu-ge steals a slice of cheese from counter. Sando eats morning treat from pink bowl on bed. Cesco hides out under an unassuming alias. Snow melts from roof with warming sun.

Each is alone. We are not each other. Our true worth comes in realizing this, waking up from the very same dream, stepping out our life in the midst of everyone else sleeping, dreaming -- and waking.

Who knows who we are?
Who hears the sound of What Is being said?

Sitting in cabin night and morning. Temperature 18 to 8 degrees. No fire. Incense, sunrise, starlight.

There’s no self and no person,
How then kinfolk and stranger!
I beg you, cease going
From lecture to lecture;
It’s better to seek truth directly.
The nature of Diamond Wisdom
Excludes even a speck of dust.
From “Thus we have heard,”
To “This I believe,”
All’s but an array
Of unreal names.
- Layman P’ang (740-808)(dailyzen)

Arraying myself with unreal names, warm socks, and woolen watch cap the sitting occurs as snowmaker at Snow bowl makes good use of cold.

All in prayer, there, as sitting continues. One bell, two bells, three bells. Mother and child icon, circles on wooden cross, one finger raised on rosewood Buddha -- stain-glass candle is warmth enough.

All day, dust motes carry on in our absence.

Today is Thomas Merton day. We're happy Thomas Merton was who he was.

Let the wise one watch over the mind,
So hard to perceive, so artful,
Alighting where it wishes;
A watchfully protected mind
Will bring happiness.
- Dhammapada

He died Dec.10, 1968. He is vital for us.

"Thomas Merton wrote in his journal:
If I am to be a saint - and there is nothing else that I can think of desiring to be - it seems that I must get there by writing books in a Trappist monastery. If I am to be a saint, I have not only to be a monk, which is what all monks must do to become saints, but I must also put down on paper what I have become. It may sound simple, but it is not an easy vocation.
To be frank, without being boring, it is a kind of crucifixion. Not a very dramatic or painful one, But it requires so much honesty that it is beyond my nature. It must come, somehow, from the Holy Spirit. "
(Logan Alley's Eulogy for Thomas Merton, December 10, 2000, Gethsemani Abbey, Kentucky, http://archives.marshall.edu/~altany/rst351-0002-list/0293.html)


The man of Tao
remains unknown
Perfect virtue
produces nothing
'No-Self'
is 'True-Self'
And the greatest man
is Nobody
Thomas Merton, in The Way of Chuang Tzu

The Merton we knew, who is still in the lives of both of us, was a different man, and monk, from the saintly person of pre-fabricated purity that has become his image these days. He was a real person, not a saint; he was a mystic searching for God, but a God that crossed the boundaries of all religions; his was not a purely Christian soul. He developed closer spiritual ties than Church authorities will ever admit to the Eastern religions, Hinduism as well as Buddhism. In fact just before his appalling accidental death in December 1968, he was saying openly that Christianity could be greatly improved by a strong dose of Buddhism and Hinduism into its faith. These are things the record needs.
For us Merton was one of the seminal figures of our time. He was deeply curious about all religions, all areas of thought and philosophy. Rice says: "The Church has not done right by him. In fact, the Church has wronged him, and continues to wrong him, by glossing over, by evading the universality of his thought. The Church wants to obscure his basic human nature, his reaching out to other people in a desire to create a common bond, not necessarily based on religion."
"Sometimes I think there are two Churches," Rice says, "one run by the Vatican and the other by Merton. The one run by the Vatican is exclusionary and cold and based on dogma. The one run by Merton reaches out to the whole world and is based on faith." (Jim Knight, in his recollection of Merton, along with Ed Rice and Robert Lax, in The Thomas Merton We Knew, http://www.therealmerton.com/tommie.html)

Merton's last recorded words were "...and now I will disappear."
And so, he did. But not before he was sighted in our midst.

Buddha's Enlightenment Day. Mary's Immaculate Conception. Meetingbrook Monastics 5th public proclamation of 3 Promises: Contemplation, Conversation, and Correspondence. Strong wind blows clear stars above ground snow.

You’re bound to become a Buddha if you practice
If water drips long enough even rocks wear through
It’s not true thick skulls can’t be pierced
People just imagine their minds are hard.
- Shih-wu (1272-1352)

He saw, the star.
She is conceived, with no barrier.

We are happy to be in a garden with what grows around Sunday Evening table. Still, the Cape Breton attraction. Who dares explain what draws us:
Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche
Hier wird's Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist es getan;
Das Ewigweibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
(-- Chorus Mysticus: Faust)

(All things corruptible
are but reflection
Earth's insufficency
here finds perfection,
Here the ineffably wrought
is with love;
The Eternal Womanly
draws us above.)
(-- Mystical Chorus, Faust, by Goethe)

So it is, we are drawn.

“Now is the time for all good men (and women) to come to the aid of their country.”
I remember that sentence (parentheses added) from my youth. It was a typing exercise my mother and sister would peck out on the small Olivetti I’d been given. The sentence and sentiment seems renewed now.

So many in our country are passionately confused. Back our President and administration? Or, loyally, oppose their either preventive positioning or posturing pretense with regard to Iraq?
People in America are torn between the take-no-prisoners of the right wing politicians and commentators, and, the just-wait-a-minute of the undecided. Polls say the President’s focus on regime change and war with Iraq is much approved. The inner hearts of those who doubt either intention or motivation of this course of action at this time by this set of men in power – these hearts hardly show up in the count used to measure the will of the American people.

“I knew a priest once. When I lived in Beijing. He used to help me.” Shan spoke at her back. “Once I had a similar dilemma. About whether to seek justice or to just do what the bureaucrats wanted. Do you know what he said? He told me that our life is the instrument we use to experiment with the truth.” (-- p.319, in The Skull Mantra, novel set in Tibet, by Eliot Pattison)

For those wishing to experiment with the truth, there is something they can do. To find the truth amid confusion and diversion of attention away from it, there is something that must be done. Practice. Practice Now. And practice continuously.

Practicing with my life is the test and trial of my life. It is to try out – [L.ex-periri] – what is the very ground of my life. The word ‘experiment’ has this definition alongside several in dictionary:
“an operation carried out under controlled conditions in order to discover an unknown effect or law, to test or establish a hypothesis, or to illustrate a known law.”(p.293, Webster’s Seventh)

Practice, Now, and Continuous – this is what each is invited to do to learn the truth.

The immediate “now” of continuous practice is not something which existed in me from before. The time called “now” is not born from continuous practice. The time when continuous practice is manifested is what we call “now.” Consequently, one day of continuous practice by us becomes the seed of all the Buddhas; it is the continuous practice of all the Buddhas.
(-- from Gyoji, in Dogen’s Shobogenzo)

No one can accept another’s version of the truth without experimenting themselves, with their own lives, with the truth. One Zen Master, when asked for a definition of truth that would still be true in five hundred years, answered, “The truth is just like this.” And so each one must ask -- What is this?

War is a serious example of our unwillingness or inability to face who we are. The externalization of inner truth – the internalization of external truth – are ways of seeing what is whole and unbroken by our minds with their rationalizations, propaganda, self-interests, delusions, and deceptions. If we are truth, each one of us, everywhere, how do we account for the activities of destruction and elimination of what we are?

“Truth,” said Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "is only arrived at by the painstaking elimination of what is not true.” I can't help but wonder. Until we face what is not true within us we will never see what is true. To face who we are is the beginning of conversation. Are we, each of us, the conversation between what is true and what is not true? Perhaps Sherlock Holmes should have been given the line: "Truth is arrived at the painstaking awareness of what is true and not true now."

We are not at the mercy of those in power with their perceptions and intentions. Whatever they do cannot touch our true reality – that which is the Ground within us. Rather, we are at the mercy of ourselves. If we do not practice the alertness and awareness that will lead us to truth, to this truth available to each of us, then we do not belong to ourselves, and are lost. To practice, now, and continuous, is to look and listen – experimenting with the instrument of our life – with the truth.

“Truth” is embedded within. No one can ultimately manipulate or destroy it. Truth waits for us -- for our eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch, and simple awareness. Truth is not other than who and what we are. Don’t lose your truth.

By practicing, now, and continuously the truth we are, will help others, everywhere. From Washington D.C. to Iraq – we can help find the courage to experiment with the truth, deepen our lives, and painstakingly become aware of and live what is true. Elimination is not the necessity. Transparency, and embodiment of truth, is.

We pray for each one’s arrival, each one's discovery, and seeing each one through.

Kneeling/sitting with Omni bench in front room. Votive candle below bronze two-sided crucifix: corpus one side, tree other. Tree facing trees of Bald Mountain, body facing me in dimming daylight.

For a while we arrange and rearrange the details surrounding our lives. Soon enough we derange and descry the details of surrender of our life. It is not a difficult transition. Only, the reality of it often eludes us.

Power is the drama of monarchs and heads of state. Power is protected, always, by death and threat of death. In the Middle East Israel occupies Palestinian land. Angered, Palestinians strike back. America gives money and implements of power to Israel. Arabs and Muslims include America in retaliatory punishment. America unleashes death and threat of death in response.

The drama. The play. The actors.

Looking at crucifix one sees death and the threat of death do not exclude Jesus. He is dead; he surrendered to the power of this world; he was nothing special.

It is Advent again. He is coming, again. Boughs and cribs, lighted trees and choral refrains, again. The cycle of birth and death is dramatized in religious observance. In the Middle East a contemporaneous passion play in real time mirrors liturgical celebrations of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions.

Sacrifices are readied. Men, women, and children are primped, rehearsed, and sent out on stage. Rulers with serious faces give explanations for their motivations that are moronic. Tanks, machine guns, heavy artillery, bombs and victory parades are planned and positioned. These heads of state are something special; entourages, secret service, bodyguards, flags, salutes, posters, hiding places – the perquisites and pornography of power. Furtive agents of terror and secrecy sneak their wares through public everydayness and detonate their belief they are saviors, martyrs, and conquering heroes – the destructive and despondent spoils of delusion.

We wonder if Jesus embodied God. We listen to his words for an echo of God’s voice. We look at his deeds for an intuitive resemblance to God’s actions. We wonder, and our uncertainty keeps us wondering. If Jesus is nothing special, he is God’s nothing special.

All the other posturing and preening, the coveting articulation and demurring denials – these are the sad and sullen lines of demented characters in the play of power running on stages in our times. Who in their right mind kills people for applause and theatrical curtain calls? Our imaginations are not engaged. Something else is asked for. Strike the set. Lower lights. Empty the house. Can anyone find a script we can live with?

The light fades and Bald Mountain looms ghostlike across Barnestown Road. The last squiggly line of incense wafts by crucifix. Twilight, dusk, finally darkness.

When bowing, head to floor, the very gesture tells the body what sacred honoring it is doing. Each small, quiet bow following that one extends filaments of enclosure to each recipient of familial inclusive recognition.

I bow to you. I greet you there.

A hard heart doesn't hear the voice of God. Not in silence, not in the conversations that intersect our thinking. "If today you hear God's voice..." Psalm 95 says, "harden not your heart."

Do not accept anything simply
Because it has been said
By your teacher,
Or because it has been written
In your sacred books,
Or because it has been
Believed by many,
Or because it has been
Handed down by your
Ancestors.
Accept and live only
According to what will enable
You to see truth face to face.
- Buddha

Seeing God face to face is death -- death to ego, death to separate self, death to the powerful illusion we are alone. The voice of God sounds through everything and every sentient being. Seeing God face to face is a heart that is broken with compassion.

In the parking lot outside the restaurant there are screams. A young (man/woman?) was punching themself in the face and nose. Blood smeared. An older man and woman were in attendance. He tried to hold the hands. The person began banging their face on the car, Finally they agreed to get into the front seat, to have the seat belt buckled, to be driven away. This scene, autistic sorrow, covered the afternoon. The few in the shop spoke softly about the sorrow of autism.

One need not be supernaturally inclined to hear the voice of God. God screamed in the parking lot today. Our hearts sorrowed, softened, and stood ready to assist with helpless attention.

To enter God's rest is to pray -- that is, to open heart and mind to the sound of what is being said, the sight of what is taking place. Open mind, open heart, and open eyes -- without judgment, without separating oneself from the whole that is there -- this is how we learn to pray.

I pray for those three in the parking lot today. I pray for those hearing, seeing, and sorrowing the encounter.

I almost forget: he’d do anything for you. Love him
for what you might have become
and love him for what you are, not that far
from him. We are never that far. Love
everyone you can. The list gets longer and shorter.
We’re seldom better than weather. We’re nearly as good
as a woman we met in passing once at Invergarry.
Don’t be sorry, for him or for self. Love the last star
broken by storm. And love you. You hold it together.

( -- from poem Villager by Richard Hugo, in The Right Madness on Skye)

Bookshop/Bakery closed today. No open poetry reading there this afternoon.
.............................

White pail fell back down cliff from the spot alongside icy path we climbed up from rocky shore. I watched it bounce. It wanted to stay where I'd found it this morning.

Silent Illumination

Silently and serenely, one forgets all words,
Clearly and vividly, it appears before you.
When one realizes it, time has no limits.
When experienced, your surroundings come to life.
Singularly illuminating is this bright awareness,
Full of wonder is the pure illumination.
- Hung Chih Cheng Chueh (1092-1157)(dailyzen)

Take nothing for the journey, bring nothing back.

Poetry is one of the forms of joy, the most articulate, the most expanding, and, therefore, the most fulfilling form. It is no separation from the world; it is the mankind of the world, the most human language of man's uncertain romance with the universe. -- John Ciardi

Mu-ge finds crevice between table leg and file cabinet, hunkers down on spilt-over paper behind wires suckling electricity from strip plug, and watches me.

Poetry returns what is in words to itself.

It is Thursday.
For that fact
alone,
I am grateful.

In America it is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, a heavy travel day. Saskia yesterday, Jon today, off to places south and west. Sando, Cesco, and Mu-ge travel around the house, Ragged, and bookshop. Dredging of harbor continues. Emptying out and filling up is the rhythm of the day.

Better than a thousand hollow words
is one word that brings peace.
Better than a thousand hollow verses
is one verse that brings peace.
It is better to conquer yourself
than to win a thousand battles.
Then the victory is yours.
- Buddha in the Dhammapada (dailyzen)

We are stragglers and strangers wandering home. Just as there is no way to peace -- peace is the way itself; so too there is no way to get back home again -- home is where we are. Turtles, we traverse here to there, coming and going, dwelling and carrying our very home within and without.

Death reminds us of the illusion of fixed addresses. Certain addresses provide warmth, food, companionship, and a place to receive mail. But there is no longer any address that satisfies the psychological & spiritual need for home. Home is right where we are.

The eggshells of family visits temper the longing for home, for grandma’s house, during holidays. So much to reconcile from years and unfinished business gone by, so compact and charged a space of time to face it. We are nomads who feel every place and each relative we know owes us something we define as something we deserve but has somehow been denied us.

Beneath and beyond the opinions we cultivate and scores needing to be evened, we carry also the forgotten reality that is our very being. By forgetting Being we busy ourselves with tasks and appointments, people as resources and roles as defining identities. By forgetting Being we forget God.

Peace is remembering who, what, and where we are. Peace is who, what, and where we are. Ask those who radiate peace. Pray in their presence, whether they are alive and visible, or dead and invisible – either way, they are there. Ask Jesus. Ask Buddha. Ask saints and bodhisattvas. Ask the ordinary person sitting right next to you, or walking across the street from you, or passing on a bus, car, train, or plane.

Ask them, not necessarily with words or voice. Ask them with your eyes. Ask them with your heart. Ask them with your attention. Look at each one with silence and acceptance, and let your loving watchfulness be what you ask. You are asking them to consider where they are. Doing so you prayerfully and mindfully invite them to be at home. Stay a while at home. Dwell in peace.

May each dwell grateful as snow falling where it falls, finding where it is, home.

Worry, worry. It's not as though everything will not fall down around us. Leaves have. Deaths in Nigeria, Palestine, and everywhere else. Political parties pick up the pieces after wins and loses. Economy sags. War strains at its leash. Finally, this morning, some sunlight over new rows of wood Jon, Saskia, and I stacked Sunday.

To look at life is like being in a dream;
It is really noisy being in the dream.
Everything stops when the dreamer suddenly awakens,
And in the same way as a dreamer awakes,
The wise understand how to wake from the dream.
The deluded believe in the dream and are disturbed
That understanding and dreaming
Seem to be two aspects.
When once the truth is comprehended,
There is no other comprehension.
- Master Pen Ching (dailyzen)

Stepping through this dream -- what courage.

Francis M. Cornford in his translation and running commentary of Plato's Sophist, says, "The Stranger begins by pointing out that 'all discourse depends on the weaving together of Forms'."
259D.
Stranger. Yes, my friend, and the attempt to separate everything from every other thing not only strikes a discordant note but amounts to a crude defiance of the philosophic Muse
Theaetetus. Why?
Stranger. This isolation of everything from everything else means a complete abolition of all discourse; for any discourse we can have owes its existence to the weaving together of Forms.
Theaetetus. True.

The weaving together of Forms allows conversation. We experience it four evenings during the week around the fire in the bookshop and one evening around the Rhodes table at hermitage. No lecture, no performance, no sermons or reports -- just conversation weaving together the forms that have appeared.

When we as dreamer awake, we begin to experience comprehension of a truth well beyond distraction and inattention. The energy of awareness with its potential for sharing this teaching and practice with another -- is what Buddhists call faith. It is what Val used to call "holding as true." Our era, writes Thich Nhat Hanh, is a time of lost faith.

When we hold something as true we really don't "know" it to be true. There is room for doubt, for a change of form, for new insight. Faith allows us a temporary resting place for time to change hands.

There's no need to worry. What is going to happen will happen. What will not happen is what is not going to happen. In the meantime we must remember everything and forget everything at the same time. Worry is worthless. What is worthwhile is weaving together forms in conversation with each other and every one. This conversation is the origin of present moment. This conversation is the completion of dream and awakening of what we hold as true with each other.

Tonight ends the four-year volunteer facilitation by Susan Smith-Hudson of the Tuesday Evening Buddhist Meditation Studies. Her faithful service, choice of poems, and unwavering counsel to "breathe three times before speaking" and "no cross talk" will be the source of respect and ribbing for many years to come. We are grateful to Susan.

John Cassian conference read at Sunday Evening Practice. Is it possible that any act is in itself indifferent? That we receive it and impose on it the designation "good" or "evil?" And if our minds are open and unjudging? No matter what the intent of the one acting the act in our direction? Can it be that only good be received no matter how wrong the act appears to be?

It is quite the power of transformation to be able to receive all in the light of God. No slight, no hurt, no malicious intent need darken our minds/hearts/spirits. Yes, there will be sorrow. Yes, there will be delight. But the steady state of receptivity to all as the appearance of God -- and the freedom to accept whatever comes as the transformative grace of re-creation of the world -- is this in our everyday capability as public worship inviting divine transcendence with inner presence?

There is not much the world can do to touch our inner presence. Once God has disappeared into God's creation -- permeating inner and outer so that there is no absence of God's awareness -- then all can be received through us into God. Nothing can separate us from the awareness of God loving us within and throughout.

But, of course, our unawareness. It cannot separate us, but our unawareness will create the illusion that an absence of God prevails. While it is only illusion, it nevertheless overwhelms us with despondency, depression, and distraction. It is up to our willingness to surrender to the radical reality suffusing our uncertain reality -- surrendering to the ground of being waiting to be seen in each and every thing, person, or act. Even the acts that give every impression as being devoid of God.

Francis of Assisi called it perfect joy. Jesus called it forgiveness without fear. It is the radical acceptance of what is taking place. It is transformative reception of what is there. It is grace and gratefulness. It is gift to trust we are not lost in our falling but will be found safe in the open hands of a God beyond whom we cannot fall.

There is no place to go that is not the presence of God. Not a notion of a God that causes harm and wrong, but a reality of God who appears within the experience to see us through.

Love sees us through. We are seen through, and in that transparent gift of freedom, love sees us through.
This is an innerstanding, (Shunyata's word), with which I can only watch and pray while dwelling in silence, stillness, and stark surrender. It is most often an empty wait. So, don't wait. Rather watch and pray with what is within us and throughout all already. This is a gift one can live and die with.

One, with which, I am grateful.

Are we going to wake up? Michael Thoms poses the question on New Dimensions this Sunday morning.

Terrorism is how our lives become devastated. It finally became "our" problem, after long plaguing other countries. Thoms' guest wonders whether our current response is just an attempt to strengthen the illusion that we are in control.

It's not only terrorism that threatens the illusion of control we cultivate. Everyday living and dying, everyday accidents, everyday surprises -- these too threaten the illusion.

Taking care of you is not a selfish thing. Taking care of others is not a selfless thing. There is a middle place. That place might be called leaving care. In that place is leaving care its own. Leaving care is abandoning both the selfish and selfless. Leaving care is allowing things to follow their own course -- with an exception. That exception is our watchfulness, our engaged, participatory watchfulness.

This notion of leaving care is out of our control. Life is living itself within, through, and alongside our presence. We cannot control anything for the long haul. It is our illusion to believe the brief spurts of balance (that we mistakenly call control) can be manipulated and extended throughout our lives, the life of our country and the life of our planet.

God is caring-itself. When we are involved in true care it is caring-itself lighting through us. Leaving care is allowing caring-itself freedom to enter the world in its own light.

Only gratefulness, for each thing and for everything, allows us to see within the light of God.