Folks from Findhorn find the shop this Friday. Married there, they return to Maine. They look for community.

A piece of mind as clear as the sky
Where clouds float freely into all.
This quiet night I do not lean toward sleep
But listen for leaves falling in my yard.
- Kuo-Yin ( c. 1111)

Robert and Su.Sane sit with Sam and Susan a while. The first two will do an art show at the library in autumn. The second two show tool sharpening skills at Rockland Apprenticeshop this afternoon.

Joanie's leg goes flex and flatten on machine in bed. Saskia's LCD computer screen goes kaput in southern Maine during a workman's comp audit. Barbara H will leave Camden in a few days after several years for New York State. Richard O' returns south to Florida after vacation.

The little boy was drawing when his mother noticed and asked, "What are you drawing, Jimmy?"
The little boy, without looking up, answered, "A picture of God."
"But Jimmy," his mother replied, "Nobody knows what God looks like."
"They will once I'm finished."
(p.55, in Doing Nothing Coming to the End of the Spiritual Search, by Steven Harrison)

God is not what we think God is. Nor are we who we think we are.

So -- What is God? And -- Who are we?

At Times I Have

At times I have happy ideas,
Ideas suddenly happy, in among ideas
And the words in which they naturally shake free ...

After writing, I read ...
What made me write that?
Where have I been to find that?
Where did that come to me from? It is better than
me ...
Shall we have been, in the world, at the most, pen
and ink
With which somebody writes properly what we here
jot?...
(18.12.1934) (--from 'Selected Poems' translated from Fernando Pessoa by J.Griffin.)

Tom and Lloyd, Saskia and I read Pessoa and Bozarth, Cummings and Basho for poetry at Friday Evening Conversation.

Friedrich Nietzsche asked the obvious question: "Which is it -- is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's blunders?" (p.56, Harrison)

I prefer poetry.

There, it is neither question nor answer that matters.

Rather, poetry moments us.

Summering leaf holds in heat and sudden shower.

No blunder.

Left alone, Cesco ate cherry Kuchen piece of cake in van while Sando and we visited Joanie in Windward Gardens.

Talent discarded
wisdom wiped away
you return to foolishness
No desire to leave traces of bungling
to a world of dust.
(-- Jakushitsu)

At Meher Baba conversation Wednesday evening Ken spoke of the silence and the veil of ignorance. Saskia's insight was that breaking the silence is lifting the veil of ignorance.

It's not a matter of words or wordlessness.

You were saying?

No trace.

Speaking Now into Being is entering Sacred Silence.

Nothing prepares us for the loss of meaning.

Petals drop from flower like words from language -- and we are bare -- ready realization of empty presence.

I watch a teacher lecture on the sutras
His eloquence flows like running water.
Expounding on the five stages
And the eight categories,
He explains them with unequaled cleverness.
They proclaim themselves masters
And others believe it.
However, question them about the essence of Zen
And they have no useful answer.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

The essence of Zen?

He who truly attains awakening knows that deliverance is to be found right where he is. There is no need to retire to the mountain cave. If he is a fisherman he becomes a real fisherman. If he is a butcher he becomes a real butcher. The farmer becomes a real farmer and the merchant a real merchant. He lives his daily life in awakened awareness. His every act from morning to night is his religion. (Sokei-an)

We didn't open the shop yesterday. We instead worked all day and night on codes and numbers for the other work Saskia does in order to support the shop. It was nice to be away from the crowds that a busy summer weekend of craft fairs and wooden boat shows and harbor festivals that Camden, Rockland, and Belfast hosted this sunny mid-summer. We're the only shop in the area in high summer that has to close its doors in order to make some money.

At Evening Practice we read from Speaking of Silence, Christians and Buddhists on the Contemplative Way. Participants in a forum talk about monasticism and the changing dynamics East and West for new populations wishing to engage and encounter the mysteries of God and Bare Reality.

Jim says something about the need for a new organic expression of the spiritual life.

We're ready for such an organic change.

Our every act, from morning to night, is our religion.

Blessed be the presence.

The reality.

Of this.

It is our body and blood.

Christ.

Nearing, and nearly empty of any other meaning.

Now seeing us as no useful answer.

Seeing Itself?

Charlie and Joe sit with Cheryl and I in education room in prison.

"Look around, see what is about you as you move to what is in your sights -- this is how we keep balance," says Joe.

In a pellucid ocean,
Bubbles arise and dissolve again.
Just so, thoughts are no different
From ultimate reality,
So don’t find fault; remain at ease.
Whatever arises, whatever occurs,
Don’t grasp-release it on the spot.
Appearances, sounds, and objects
Are one’s own mind;
There’s nothing except mind.
- Niguma

Charlie was called to the hospital.
Soon we'd have to leave early due to administrative special circumstances in the close (maximum) security unit.

Joe said, "What you are seeing -- it's all about balance."
It occurs he might be saying:
"What you are,
seeing --
it's all about,
balance."

Cheryl says, "If we read someone else with grace, and let others read us with grace, we allow graciousness to dwell in our midst."

This is what we want -- patience. (L. patior = to suffer, permit, or allow.)
To listen is to suffer what is heard.

We're in prison. We listen to each other. Suffering is shared. Patience is practiced.

Joe says that when he is leaving someone he says, "Keep in touch with yourself."

If we are what we wish to learn, then there is no teaching, only presence learning from itself.

Last night Joanie calls from hospital, she'd fallen, breaking her leg. We visit after leaving razor-wire fence. She's in surgery.

We pray for her, and for Eleanor and Douglas, and all suffering the conversation with age and frailty.

One breath at a time -- we touch one another -- with presence.

Remain at ease

Innocence.

Not knowing.

Buddhists are asked to have great faith, great doubt, and great effort.

When I went to meditate in mountain-range solitude,
I briefly encountered realization of mind itself.
When I practiced without distraction,
A continual understanding arose.
Now it doesn’t depend on a state of mind.
I’m content with resolution in a birthless state.
I wander in mountain-range solitude,
Or else perform seated retreat in a cave.
Or in the midst of an assembly;
This current continues without interruption.
- Godrakpa (1170-1249)

Walking into the barn last night Cisco stops, listening. I stop, listening. To the left of the door leading from barn to mud room the white and black of a skunk.

We exit. Leave the skunk be. Enter house from dooryard. No stink, no fuss, turn around, go another way. Good we were silent.

What do we know? We have stories we tell about ideas or experience. Some stories we believe. Some we reject. Sometimes we follow stories down the road. Sometimes we find ourselves in a beautiful clearing. Sometimes we fall into a ditch.

Cheryl talked about intention, then eurhythmic "ah" from a Steiner workshop she attended. Sylvia read from a book about dreams -- how they are a place we go for learning. David said, "No judgments." Saskia spoke of sailing, of not trying to impose your will on the wind and water.

We are asked to be attentively and alertly aware of what is passing through us. Allowing passage, constructing no barrier to what is passing through.

Cheryl's brother Kirk sent this poem:

LESSON #1

It is as simple as this
If I wake in the morning
I get up
If I die before the dawn
I don't
Everything else
is story.
(--Kirk, c.2003)

Nature, that which is of itself so (tzu-jan), follows its course spontaneously.

Two stories pass through today:
1. War is a loud lie enacted for all to hear and see.
2. Truth, that which is just like this, quietly finds its own way out into clear light.

In this truth there is great faith. In the lie of war there is great doubt. In natural innocence revealing itself through our lives, there is great effort to simply allow artificial barriers dissolve and genuine sacred openness flow through.

Water seeking lowest place. Water source of life. Of itself flowing through.

Humility.

Full moon over cabin.

Earlier, smell of skunk through kitchen window.

God, embodied in the world, drives away in Subaru wagon and BMW motorcycle from Sunday practice.

Earlier, Sue and Peg returned to dock and took off in their Ford 250 turbo-diesal.

We must replace those who unworthily distort truth. The living and the dead deserve a truth-telling for which to live and to die.

The universe is very, very large.

Earlier, we thought everything passes away.

Truth, as it is, allows passage through.

Moving through what is true we embody what is found there.

Our prayer is for all to travel well through each.

Prayer embodies each passing through all.

We are to travel light.

Spare us!

Everything belongs to itself.

It is no longer possible to take sides and limit the appearance of anything. Categorization and claims of ownership are beginning to be seen not as the skill of intellect or wealth of proprietary economy. Rather, consciousness itself is beginning to grasp the startling realization that no one owns anything, everything belongs to itself.

Don’t be surprised,
Don’ be startled;
All things will arrange themselves.
Don’t cause a disturbance,
Don’t exert pressure;
All things will clarify themselves.
- Huai-nan-tzu

Aseity and Tao -- for example.

[Aseity, (Latin: a, from; se, self) The property by which a being exists of and from self, a property belonging to God alone, who exists without other cause than Himself, who is independent and self-sufficient; regarded by many Fathers and theologians as the best way of expressing the very essence of God.
New Catholic Dictionary - Catholic Encyclopedia, God: His Knowability, Essence, and Attributes, Saint Louis, 1921 (ed.)]

Call God 'God', if we wish, but what is 'God' but that which is of itself. That which "of-itself-is" (Chinese, tzu-jan) is What-Is, happening.

Tao means basically "way", and so "course"; the course of nature. Lao-tzu said the way of the functioning of the tao is "so of itself"; that is to say it is spontaneous. Watch again what is going on. If you approach it with this wise ignorance, you will see that you are witnessing a happening. In other words, in this primal way of looking at things there is no difference between what you do, on the one hand, and what happens to you on the other. It is all the same process. Just as your thought happens, the car happens outside, and so the clouds and the stars.

When a Westerner hears that he thinks this is some sort of fatalism or determinism, but that is because he still preserves in the back of his mind two illusions. One is that what is happening is happening to him, and therefore he is the victim of circumstances. But when you are in primal ignorance there is no you different from what is happening, and therefore it is not happening to you. It is just happening. So is "you", or what you call you, or what you will later call you. It is part of the happening, and you are part of the universe, although strictly speaking the universe has no parts. We only call certain features of the universe parts. However you can't disconnect them from the rest without causing them to be not only non-existent, but to never to have existed at all.

When a one experiences oneself and the universe happening together, the other illusion one is liable to have is that it is determined in the sense that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why obviously not, because if you are really naive you see the past is the result of what is happening now. It goes backwards into the past, like a wake goes backwards from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing finally, they go away, and away, and away. And it is all starting now. What we call the future is nothing, the great void, and everything comes out of the great void. If you shut your eyes, and contemplate reality only with your ears, you will find there is a background of silence, and all sounds are coming out of it. They start out of silence. If you close your eyes, and just listen, you will observe the sounds came out of nothing, floated off, and off, stopped being a sonic echo, and became a memory, which is another kind of echo. It is very simple; it all begins now, and therefore it is spontaneous. It isn't determined; that is a philosophical notion. Nor is it capricious; that's another philosophical notion. We distinguish between what is orderly and what is random, but of course we don't really know what randomness is. What is 'so-of-itself,' sui generis in Latin, means coming into being spontaneously on its own accord, and that, incidentally, is the real meaning of virgin birth.

That is the world, that is the tao, but perhaps that makes us feel afraid. We may ask, "If all that is happening spontaneously, who's in charge? I am not in charge, that is pretty obvious, but I hope there is God or somebody looking after all this." But why should there be someone looking after it, because then there is a new worry that you may not of thought of, which is, "Who takes care of the caretaker's daughter while the caretaker is busy taking care?" Who guards the guards? Who supervises the police? Who looks after God? You may say "God doesn't need looking after" Oh? Well, nor does this.
(from Taoism, by Alan Watts)

What will happen if and when all things are allowed to be what they are?

Nature is tzu-jan, it of-itself-is.

In prison yesterday Jeff kept relating his life in prison to the plant Josh brought in and set at the center of the table. The soil, the roots, water, light, and relatedness to all else around it and him -- the need to be in harmony. Charlie quoted someone who wondered whether we have to see in order to believe, or believe in order to see. Duke, Ritchie, Nancy, Saskia, and I surrounded these observations and questions.

Each is of-itself-so.

Each is all. All in each.

Greet God!

It was the combination of reflection about evil and asking how we practice through this thing called evil that was Wednesday Evening Conversation.

It was the curious question about self and no-self that made the column by James Carroll interesting.

It is the sadness felt by many for the current situation of death and disorder in Iraq that permeated the conversation.

Bush's war against evil
By James Carroll, 7/8/2003

IN THE GOTHIC splendor of the National Cathedral, that liturgy of trauma, George W. Bush made the most stirring - and ominous - declaration of his presidency. It was Sept. 14, 2001. ''Just three days removed from these events,'' he said, ''Americans do not yet have ''the distance of history.'' But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.''

The statement fell on the ears of most Americans, perhaps, as mere rhetoric of the high pulpit, but as the distance of history lengthens, events show that in those few words the president redefined his raison d'etre and that of the nation - nothing less than to ''rid the world of evil.'' The unprecedented initiatives taken from Washington in the last two years are incomprehensible except in the context of this purpose.

President Bush, one sees now, meant exactly what he said. Something entirely new, for Americans, at least, is animating their government. The greatest power the earth has ever seen is now expressly mobilized against the world's most ancient mystery. What human beings have proven incapable of doing ever before, George W. Bush has taken on as his personal mission, aiming to accomplish it in one election cycle, two at most.

What the president may not know is that the worst manifestations of evil have been the blowback of efforts to be rid of it. If one can refer to the personification of evil, Satan's great trick consists in turning the fierce energy of such purification back upon itself. Across the distance of history, the most noble ambition has invariably led to the most ignoble deeds. This is because the certitude of nobility overrides the moral qualm that adheres to less transcendent enterprises. The record of this deadly paradox is written in the full range of literature, from Sophocles to Fyodor Dostoyevski to Ursula K. LeGuin, each of whom raises the perennial question: What is permitted to be done in the name of ''ridding the world of evil''?

Is lying allowed? Torture? The killing of children? Or, less drastic, the militarization of civil society? The launching of dubious wars? But wars are never dubious at their launchings. The recognition of complexity - moral as well as martial - comes only with ''the distance of history,'' and it is that perspective that has begun to press itself upon the American conscience now.

Having forthrightly set out to rid the world of evil, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, has the United States, willy-nilly, become an instrument of evil? Lying (weapons of mass deception). Torture (if only by US surrogates). The killing of children (''collaterally,'' but inevitably). The vulgarization of patriotism (last week's orgy of bunting). The imposition of chaos (and calling it freedom). The destruction of alliances (''First Iraq, then France''). The invitation to other nations to behave in like fashion (Goodbye, Chechnya). The inexorable escalation (''Bring 'em on!''). The made-in-Washington pantheon of mythologized enemies (first Osama, now Saddam). The transmutation of ordinary young Americans (into dead heroes). How does all of this, or any of it, ''rid the world of evil''?

Which brings us back to that Gothic cathedral of a question: What is evil anyway? Is it the impulse only of tyrants? Of enemies alone? Or is it tied to the personal entitlement onto which America, too, hangs its bunting? Is evil the thing, perhaps, that forever inclines human beings to believe that they are themselves untouched by it? Moral maturity, mellowed across the distance of history, begins in the acknowledgement that evil, whatever its primal source, resides, like a virus in its niche, in the human self. There is no ridding the world of evil for the simple fact that, shy of history's end, there is no ridding the self of it.

But there's the problem with President Bush. It is not the moral immaturity of the texts he reads. Like his callow statement in the National Cathedral, they are written by someone else. When the president speaks, unscripted, from his own moral center, what shows itself is a bottomless void.
To address concerns about the savage violence engulfing ''postwar'' Iraq with a cocksure ''Bring `em on!'' as he did last week, is to display an absence of imagination shocking in a man of such authority. It showed a lack of capacity to identify either with enraged Iraqis who must rise to such a taunt or with young GIs who must now answer for it. Even in relationship to his own soldiers, there is nothing at the core of this man but visceral meanness.

No human being with a minimal self-knowledge could speak of evil as he does, but there is no self-knowledge without a self. Even this short ''distance of history'' shows George W. Bush to be, in that sense, the selfless president, which is not a compliment. It's a warning.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 7/8/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

We have much to reflect on.

We have much to question.

We have much sorrow to move through.

Learned friends,
When you hear me speaking
Of the void, please do not
Grasp the void.
The first thing is not to grasp
The void.
If you sit in meditation
With an empty mind,
You will grasp the
Unrecordable voidness.
- Altar Sutra

I asked Annie what an alternative was to grasping the void.

She repeated the question, and then paused. She remained paused. She was looking through the windows toward Mt. Battie.

However stained, clouded and smoky the windows, she continued to look through without words.

Fog over coast all day.

Words and speech, fine concepts
If pursued, will lead us astray.
Let us leave these behind
And nothing is closed to us.
The moment we are illumined within
We bypass all barriers.
- Seng-ts-an (d.606)(dailyzen.com)

Tonight it rains.

The great thing is not things but God Himself Who is not things but ourselves, and the world, and everything, lost in Him Who so fully is that we come closer to Him by imagining He is not. (from letter to John Harris from Thomas Merton, May 5, 1959, in The Hidden Ground of Love, The Letters of Thomas Merton, c.1985)

The Buddhist teacher told Betty Ann even the Buddha spoke about the relative and the unconditioned world. That's how self and no-self were to be considered.

Sando lay stretched on dirt and gravel in parking lot at shop by harbor.

Imagine God not?

Joan has a new silver Toyota pickup. And a zafu. Dick helped tie rope around world war two surplus climbing rungs used as fence on patio. Brad watched quart of oil poured into van crankcase.

Pizza in harbor room while Jon's in Boston.

Ourselves.

Lost.

The war continues.

Man on aircraft carrier with grand statements how we won, people freed -- he's gone on to next agenda.

One by one soldiers are being killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their families ask why.

The next agenda keeps those who might be able to answer very busy. Money being raised. Political strategy being planned.

What's wrong with war is the way it goes on.

War is the belief someone else must die for our plans. Every war sets ideology and plans above ordinary life.

End war today.

No ideology.

No plans.

Just...

life.

A hermit lives as-one-is.

Alone with others, there is no difference.

Merton's closet friend is now a friend of mine and lives on Patmos. Robert Lax is a hermit in society, perhaps pointing the way ahead for today's contemplative. He is a poet who lives alone and yet loves people. Everyday he walks in the streets and talks to many friends he has made in thirty years on the island and to any strangers he thinks may need help. He is concerned, compassionate and sensitive. He is a close and loyal friend and will say that friendships are an important part of his life, but every evening he returns to an empty house and centres himself within its silence as he has for over forty years. Out of that silence and solitude emerge the insights of his poems and the revelations of his conversation on being alone in the world today. (Pp.xv-xvi, in Hermits, The Insights of Solitude, by Peter French c.1996)

There’s a mistaken belief that hermits live cut off from other people away from human contact. It is an ingrained belief somehow connected to the point of view that God is separate from ordinary life, or, that there is something special about undergoing suffering in order to placate, and place oneself nearer, God.

Zazen is the practice of stilling body and mind. When body/mind is allowed to drop façade and frantic business and busyness a restful release occurs.

Set aside all involvements and let myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavor. It is not introspection. Do not desire to become a Buddha; let sitting or lying down drop away. Be moderate in eating and drinking. Be mindful of the passing of time and engage your self in zazen as though saving your head from fire. On Mt. Huangmei the Fifth Ancestor practiced zazen to the exclusion of all other activities.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

We need not sit and face a wall for years. We need not sever parts of our bodies to prove dedication. And we need not slavishly follow the teachings of someone else even though they reached their goal.

When each person is himself or herself they are practicing as-one-is. When each thing is itself the Itself is found.

In Christian terms, when Jesus became fully who he really was, God was no other place.
We are ‘saved’ when all we think is not God dissolves into simple realization – as one might hear bird-call of a warm afternoon.
The very breath of that singing is in and through our own ears and nostrils.

Zazen is the no-mind breeze of which one is aware.
Without expectation, without explanation – each is itself – and the next thing that occurs, occurs of itself.

Engage your self in what you are aware of.

Forget your self.

What-you-are-aware-of, that is the practice of zazen.

A hermit lives as-one-is. What one is aware of -- that is where we are alone with others.

Poem
writes
itself --
every
single
one-of-them.
(wfh)

Unhiding.

Ken stopped by and spoke about Meher Baba late morning. In late afternoon sky darkens with storm clouds. Sailors make it in before downpour.

Sitting on top of a boulder,
The gorge stream icy cold.
Quiet fun holds a special charm.
Fogged-in on deserted cliffs,
A fine place to rest.
The sun leans and tree shadows sprawl;
While I view the ground of my mind,
A lotus comes out of the mud.
- Han-shan

Sky was hard to read. We are hard to read.

I don't have to tell you that the coiled double DNA helix containing the information on a human individual, that Hermetic caduceus within the nucleus of each of the individuals hundred thousand billion cells, weighs no more than one hundred thousandth of a gram but, when extended, is approximately the same length of the individual himself, so that the number of possible sequences at the molecular level is vast. If written in the three-letter words of the four-letter alphabet, a human being is determined by a genetic narrative long enough to fill the equivalent of five hundred Bibles. In the meantime human beings have discovered this for themselves.

-- That's right. They have uncovered our profoundest concept -- namely, that life is ultimately reading. They themselves are the Book of Books (p.4, in The Discovery of Heaven, by Harry Mulisch)

Three Tibetans, one Canadian/Camdenite, two Rocklanders, and one South Hope crew made it through the pre-storm debate about what kind of story they'd be telling.

The downpour lasted a half hour.

The sun returned.

Faith is the opening of the heart and mind to what is right here before our eyes.

Jesus, the Gospel reading says, is astonished at his townsfolk's lack of faith.

Do we see what is here in our midst?

Faith. Reading oneself.

A fine place to rest.

No lie.

Have we learned to read?

"Meetingbrook is a refuge for the spiritually homeless." That's what Maria told Saskia last night after Thursday Evening Conversation.

Whenever a thought occurs,
Be aware of it.
As soon as you are aware of it,
The attachment to it will lessen.
If you remain for a long enough
Period less caught on objects,
You will naturally become unified.
This it the essential art of zazen.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

Michael and Rachel wandered in as Tom said we are being lived through. We are asked to move through what is being lived through us. Michael used the phrase 'common union' after speaking of RNA. There'd been a quote from Harry Mulisch about DNA and each individual being the Book of Books.

Trust and faith practice no barriers.

Trust, in terms of science, means we continue to ask into the code of life, obvious or hidden, without fear and without prejudice to what is emerging. Science goes beyond beliefs that precede experience. Science, like Zen, points to what is seen. "Forget what you know. Believe what you see." (James Van Praagh)

Faith, in religious terms, is willingness to follow the inquiry wherever it leads. Faith asks 'What is this?' with open heart open mind, willing to move through what is being questioned, willing to embody the response. This is where what we know about God is secondary to what we see through the sight of God.

I will no longer speak much with you, for the ruler of the world is coming. He has no power over me, but the world must know that I love the Father and that I do just what the Father has commanded me. Get up, let us go. (Jn.14: 30-31)

Referencing the ruler of the world -- whether the prince of lies in biblical parlance, or lies and distortions of truth by secular and religious rulers in our time and times past -- Jesus wishes both to warn and reassure us.

The warning confirms there are dangerous times and dangerous persons in the world. Truth, love, justice, and peace will be ravaged in the name of truth, justice, love, and peace.

Reassurance is given that this one, here the Christ, is free. Jesus -- now in the transforming process of suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension -- will not be deceived or overcome by lies. Rather -- truth, love, justice, and peace are the body of Christ that will be illuminated by the breath and sight of the Holy Spirit.

In a curious translation a Sunday Missal (1961) translated by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, the words for (Jn.14: 30-31) read, “ For in Me he has nothing.” The (New American Bible) translation, “He has no power over me” feels different even from “he has no hold on me,” used in the Jerome Biblical Commentary (1968) by Bruce Vawter.

Three phrasings:
1· “in Me he has nothing,” has the ring of kenosis – a self-emptying – wherein the prince arrives at an abandoned place, a nothingness that has dissolved its ego, no longer bound by any real or imagined enticements to separated, divided, or dualistic being in the world.
2· “no power over me,” suggests mightiness, a well-defended fortress against which the prince cannot prevail, left standing impotent and frustrated.
3· “no hold on me,” has the feel of freedom from coercion, lack of entrapment, a loosing of conditioning that allows the speaker to avoid the clutch of the prince.

And there are other translations. “There are limitations inherent in all translations,” the editors of the JBC tell us. If we are to read the scriptures of the Judeo-Christian tradition we have to acknowledge the difference and limitation of the words presented to us.

So also with the Book of Books in the prologue of Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven. The millions of data within a cell. The inner reading available to us. The translation each one of us presents to the outer world.

Martin Heidegger writes, "In his draft for the hymn 'Mnemosyne' (Memory), Hoelderlin says:
"We are a sign that is not read,
We feel no pain, we almost have
Lost our tongue in foreign lands."
(from Lecture 1 in What Is Called Thinking, MH quoting Friedrich Holderlin)

Freedom longs to be read -- “…less caught on objects, You will naturally become unified…”

Zazen is the reading, the “common union” we embody with stillness and silence.

'Read me,' says freedom.

Come home.

How much time remains?

I enjoy my lifelong path
Between misty vines and rocky caves
In the wilds there’s room to spare
And time to accompany clouds
This road doesn’t reach the world
Only the mindless can climb
I sit alone nights on a couch of stone
While the round moon comes up Cold Mountain
- Han-shan

There is a shift needed. Meaning, like soggy toast, falls from itself. Mind cannot find meaning.

Each thing resides in its own place. Overturned bottom-painted rowboat. High grass along two-wheel road. Resignation of tossed shirts atop one another.

A lovely emptiness disturbs with peace the mindless rest between this and that. It's been that way all day. No memories are formed. Nothing is forgotten.

Something mere. A simple quiet. Uncomprehending yet bemusing lack of interest.

What on one level gives every appearance of vacancy -- if seen in shifting light -- becomes just one gaze without someone gazing nor something gazed at.

Even the world is metaphor.

Off to the side a poet hears nothing to word.

The Buddha says we're on our own.

The Christ wonders why he's been abandoned.

Comes sunfalling this 1st of July.

Sun starts at treetops. Comes down mountain. Pauses on canopy leaf. Sets itself inside Nuthatch chirp just beyond honey spackle rough wood light crossing cabin porch. Warms face of barn where Phoebe stutter-stop on Gaia flagpole in and out passing.

Why sit? Because we're here and we do.
Why sunrise? Because birds chirp and earth turns.

Why pray? Why look? Why listen?
Because God is breath itself breathing through our silent song. Presence practices itself through awake and aware stillness. Light moves itself through all that holds and reflects it's passing.
...

Sit, over. Next, chant. Bow, return to porch.
...

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
The stem of a blade of grass
And left the root alive.
- Menzan Zuiho (1682-1769)(dailyzen.com)

Patches of sunlight spot ground pathing itself back up to sound of brook. Longer song and stretch of car noise. Woman arrives with four fresh flowers and two groomed dogs. Three and four of them resume silent stillness surrounding sunlight through window at rest on wall and blanket covering zafu and zabuton.

Red squirrel and chipmunk, Cardinal and Chickadee choral green mottled morning at foot of Ragged Mountain. Lite breeze pushes white "Open" letters under dove carrying olive branch on purple banner hanging off corner of cabin.

Today the Catholic parish, Our Lady of Good Hope, has its first resident pastor since a year ago. He arrives and says Mass at 8am. The tradition of remembering the presence, sight, and passage of Christ is done in gesture, word, and liturgical gratefulness in a building named 'gathering place' in the middle of town.

Here, sunlight settles over, in, and through the living earth. Birdcall, like sanctuary bell, beckons awareness to what is taking place. Here and there "what is taking place" watches with Christ as we, awake or asleep, rest in his peace.

Now, Lord, dismiss me.

Melt.

Today begins our 8th year.

Three moments, some say objects, more likely icons, in the cabin, our chapel/zendo, from floor to gable, this morning, catch my attention.

A man of the Way comes rapping
At my brushwood gate,
Wanting to discuss the essentials of Zen experience.
Don’t take it wrong if this mountain monk’s
Too lazy to open his mouth:
Late spring warblers singing their heart out,
A village of drifting petals.
- Jakushitsu Genko (1290-1367)

Seated Buddha on floor.
Cross-center circling outward/inward hangs eye-level.
Mother/child embrace gazes from rafter height across to loft.

These three items, maybe occasions of reflection, tell the day our life as we sit.

Contemplation;
Conversation;
Correspondence.

Or:
Awareness,
Sacrifice,
Nuptiality.

Today, eight years ago, we opened the doors of Meetingbrook Bookshop/Bakery. Ed says after Susan from Indiana leaves and John from Philadelphia walks back uptown that he doesn't know how we've managed to stay open. True.

How? A grinding. Two and a third. Wearing away edges. Smoothing one into another's contours.

Needless to say, all this has felt like being ground between two millstones, but one thing is more and more clear each time the stones go round: I don't desire anything in the world, not writing, not teaching, not any kind of consolation or outward activity: I simply long with my whole existence to be completely consecrated to God in every gesture, every breath and every moment of my mind and body, to the exclusion of absolutely everything, except Him: and the way I desire this, by His grace, is the way it is among the Trappists. (Thomas Merton, in letter to Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Dec.6,1941)

Two need not be oppositional. Rather, two is prelude to three. Three is not a crowd. Three is the way two become themselves. Three is the child one and one go through two to be.

There is music and laughter, puns and quiet spots at the shop this sunny Sunday afternoon.

Here is the threesome for today:
Shunyata, (Transparant stillness);
Kenosis, (Emptying oneself);
Sandokai. (Harmony of Difference and Equality), or, one and two meet greeting touch.

Schooner with growlish engine passes through harbor channel. Sam and Susan leave under loon call. Carter and SSH talk dance steps by dark and cool fireplace. Robert and Su.Sane sing with Saskia, Virginia and Hugh on patio. Lola watches Mt. Battie under green straw hat.

There it is.

Every time I bow when entering and leaving chapel/zendo I move through Contemplation, Conversation, and Correspondence.

Child of this bow, parenting transparency and emptiness, greet and touch with harmony.

Peter and Paul give way to each one ever after.

A village of drifting petals.

Lovely.

Where are the schoolyard monitors?

Anyone not a schoolyard bully recognizes the sneer of schoolyard bullies. It says, "My way. I win. You lose. Get over it!"

It has been asked,
“How should those who enter the
path apply their minds?”
All things are originally uncreated
And presently undying.
Just let your mind be free;
You don’t have to restrain it.
See directly and hear directly;
Come directly and go directly.
When you must go,
Then go.
When you must stay,
Then stay.
This is the true path.
A scripture says, “Conditional
existence is the site of enlightenment,
insofar as you know it as it really is.
- Niu-t’ou Hui-chung (683-769)

Stay or go? It comes to this.

Schoolyard bullies push and punch, poke and piss so everyone knows their power, possession, and pontification.

The United States has dealt with schoolyard bullies and had their own. Sometimes they go away on their own, they grow older, their sneer fades.

Anyone who has experienced a schoolyard bully knows their charm and their arrogance. If you don't suck up to them you stay away from them. Their inner circle grab and control as much as they can while they can and usually keep it even afterwards -- after they've been replaced, shamed, or merely disappear.

It is time to impeach the schoolyard bully.

His lie is in our face.

He and his lie must go.

To make way for a true path, the false path must be abandoned.

We must not allow stay what must go.

Monitors!

Losing Heart

Not

permitted to leave house, only escape is poetry, landscape
like Kurokawa’s “Waiting in the Fog” framing what

remains

of mind. Dissolving like millions of assisted
living residents whose children take time from busy lives

to watch

them disappear. It occurs like birds turning into scent of seed.
Straight lines to other places are diverted. Suddenly something

stops.

Eyes look around. There are sounds belonging to themselves.
Breeze with fragrance carries bell toll. It is not death, but

another irreverence,

ill-mannered barging in, knocking over water glass, meek smile
asking, “who are you?” I have lost my heart, “… what we call

heart –

intending by that term the organ of intelligence which takes
its meanings whole and live, not masticated into chewed abstractions.”

(So says

Archibald MacLeish in Poetry and Experience, p.21). Gone as day is gone
at dusk, just able to make out shapes behind shapes in whispering fog,

blending

shape of face you loved yesterday, (was it?), or long indefinite pronunciation ago,
when lost your gaze fell through and beyond what’s their name right there.

(wfh, 27june03)

Holly told about retreats these few months. Buddhist settings here and abroad. Like cut made by saw or knife in hand of clear-seeing user she sliced through our curiosity with unresisting deft.

My hut isn’t quite six feet across
Surrounded by pine, bamboos, and mountains,
An old monk hardly has room for himself
Much less for a visiting cloud.
- Shih-wu (1272-1352

Harvard Pluralism Project writes asking if we are "still active".

We are still, active.

There is so little room remaining.

Even the cat can't find his way out.

At Holly's Laura Soul Friend conversation I find my epitaph:
"He was a pain in the ass,
Now he isn't."

There's room for all of us here.

If we are still.

Active.

Who will speak for us when we find silence?

The great way of the buddhas is profound, wondrous, inconceivable; how could its practice be easy? Have you not seen how the ancients gave up their bodies and lives, abandoned their countries, cities, and families, looking upon them as shards of tile? After that they passed eons living alone in the mountains and forests, bodies and minds like dead trees; only then did they unite with the way. Then they could use the mountains and rivers for words, raise the wind and rain for a tongue, and explain the great void, turning the incomparable wheel.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

Who will listen to us when we have nothing to say?

As we know Zachariah was doubtful of the angel's words and was struck speechless, literaly. Elizabeth conceived and gave birth to a son. Eight days later at his circumcision she said he was to be named John, but her relations and neighbors objected because no one had had that name in her family. So they gave a writing tablet to Zachariah who wrote,

"...His name is John... whereupon he regained his speech. All were amazed and wondered... 'What will this child turn out to be?'..."

Zachariah then prayed the well known "Benedictus" Canticle, which is used during Lauds every morning throughout the world. It is a song of blessing and thanksgiving. God has kept his promise, remembered his covenant with Abraham, and this child John is to prepare the way for the fulfillment of that promise, which is,

"...the rising Sun to visit us, to give light to those in darkness... to guide our feet into the way of peace..."
(June 24, Patronal Feast of The Monastery of Christ in the Desert, The Birth of St. John the Baptist)

Who will settle for the particular, peculiar, and partial in a wordless return to love?

Essay on the Personal

Because finally the personal
is all that matters,
we spend years describing stones,
chairs, abandoned farmhouses--
until we're ready. Always
it's a matter of precision,
what it feels like
to kiss someone or to walk
out the door. How good it was
to practice on stones
which were things we could love
without weeping over. How good
someone else abandoned the farmhouse,
bankrupt and desperate.
Now we can bring a fine edge
to our parents. We can hold hurt
up to the sun for examination.
But just when we think we have it,
the personal goes the way of
belief. What seemed so deep
begins to seem naive, something
that could be trusted
because we hadn't read Plato
or held two contradictory ideas
or women in the same day.
Love, then, becomes an old movie.
Loss seems so common
it belongs to the air,
to breath itself, anyone's.
We're left with style, a particular
way of standing and saying,
the idiosyncratic look
at the frown which means nothing
until we say it does. Years later,
long after we believed it peculiar
to ourselves, we return to love.
We return to everything
strange, inchoate, like living
with someone, like living alone,
settling for the partial, the almost
satisfactory sense of it.
(poem by Stephen Dunn)

Who will read the invisible all around us?

Circles of angels, and great clouds of darkness
By the mighty hand of man invite us to take hold.
But a question lodges deep, and we must ask again --
Who wrote the life in the ancient dust that falls to earth like invisible rain?
Who wrote the life in the ancient dust that falls to earth like invisible rain?
(from "Invisible Rain," song by Tom Albury, in Ragged Works)

Who, in deed, am I?

Who in deed, are you?

Silence says nothing and is seen in particular, peculiar, partial acts.

We are articulate silent expressions of gratefulness.

Touching.

Moving through.

What is, here.