A student's father dies. We say we'll hold him in prayer. A young man from town dies in snow bank in Vermont. He, too, passes through our prayer. So, also, the Afghani children -- and on, and on, and on.

The mind for truth
Begins, like a stream, shallow
At first, but then
Adds more and more depth
While gaining greater clarity.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

Prayer is, simultaneously, holding and releasing presence as it moves on.

Prayer, like life, is touch and go. The touch of our hand, like the touch of prayer, lends itself to blessing and comforting each other as we pass through the increasing diaphaneity and clarity of life’s wholeness.

Elie Wiesel writes in his short story, The Wandering Jew, that “God means movement and not explanation.”

There is no explaining death, no explaining God.

We move with each other, we move with God -- through, with, and in one another -- as the stream flows deeper into clarity

The mind for solving problems cannot comprehend this movement. The mind for truth resides within and releases its grasp as it flows through God's depths.

We pray for peace and grace.

Throughout.

In the desert prepare the way of the Lord. (Isaiah 40:)

Only wind and sand know their way through the desert. Everyone else is guessing.

The field of boundless emptiness
Is what exists from the very beginning.
You must purify, cure, grind down,
Or brush away all the tendencies
You have fabricated into apparent habits.
Then you can reside in the
Clear circle of brightness.
- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091–1157)

Thirty-five years ago Thomas Merton died in Bangkok. We feast him today. His smiling face connecting Catholic Christian contemplative tradition and Buddhist Zen and Tibetan meditative tradition as he went about with camera, sumie brush, and poems.

Further down 40 Isaiah says,
Here is your God!
Here comes with power
the Lord God...

"Here" is God. Nowhere else. Here.

When you come to consider this, where is not here?

What is not here?

Only here is here.

This here is the way of the Lord.

Now here? When the space between words dissolves, as the space between our thinking and mere transparent reality disappears, we'll be nowhere.

As God is. Clear light.

Tonight we pronounce again our Meetingbrook promises. We’ll say aloud in the presence of one another and whoever attends Wednesday Evening Conversation that we will practice Contemplation, Conversation, and Correspondence along with the Simplicity, Silence, and Service attending each one.

The water of this way humbles the desert of our lives.

"And."

Is that the word?

At the moment of awakening,
the Buddha exclaimed:
“Wonder of wonders!
All living beings are
truly enlightened and
shine with wisdom and virtue.
But because their minds
have become deluded and
turned inward to the self,
they fail to understand this.”
- Kegon Sutra

"And" connects, collates, includes, and collaborates with what is near it.

The Eucharistic koan, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you; only say the word and I shall be healed;" -- took a glinting turn when I heard the word "and" today. I hear it today, "...only say the word, 'and;' I shall be healed."

Say the word 'and,' hear the word 'and.'

In so doing, healing takes place.

'And' is the balm soothing the cuts and slashes that attempt to sever us one from another.

With the aspirant 'h' attached, we have something to extend each other -- a hand.

What is received when receiving communion?

At mass following blizzard Fr. Art preached Mary. We sat in rear near Mary chapel. Last night's and this evening's vespers in chapel/zendo ask for her protection. Moonlight brightened by snowy ground made the cold beautiful.

Diane and Paul brought two watercolor paintings to reside at shop for a while. Elizabeth and Irwin stop in to catch up since they closed their shop across the way. Jeff brought folk song cd for those who sing on Wednesdays and Sundays. All this and we were closed today.

The light of awakening
Appears when it has been
Forgotten
High and vast the mountain
Lifts forth the moon
I myself have climbed
To the summit
In the world outside of things
There is nothing to get in the way.
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)

We remember Margaret's mother. She died recently. The clarity of night's full moon on snow be with mother and daughter in this passage.

Mothering transcends biology. We mother each other even when we do not emerge from each others bodies. The whole is mother. When we touch each other with light of wholeness, we mother what we touch. Mary is seed. We are ground. God is emerging through seed breaking open.

We pray for Buddhists today. Enlightenment and Immaculate Conception bespeak common sound -- none are separate, none severed -- a holy sound only profound silence realizes.

We're grateful to be celebrating these two people and events.

Coming back from evening walk to Snow Bowl we take letter from mailbox. The Internal Revenue Service says they "are pleased to confirm that you are exempt under 501(c)(3) of the Code, and you are classified as a public charity under the Code section listed in the heading of this letter." We'd finished the four year advance period, submitted what we've been doing, and are now successfully told to continue on.

It is auspicious that we receive this on 8 December. The 8th, 9th, and 10th of December are held in special regard by Meetingbrook. We renew our promises on the 10th, as it happens, the anniversary of the death of Thomas Merton.

Communion?

What is -- (whole-hearted surrender to One who is what One does) -- in this instance, love, is received when receiving communion.

We go on.

Sea.

See.

All beauty is found here.

Maria.

Snow everywhere. White mountain. Heaps alongside path and driveway. Drifts on windowsills. Piles in corners backed in by wind.

“Delusion,” “enlightenment”
just fox-words fooling
Zen practitioners everywhere.
- Daito (1282-1334)

Eve of Buddha's enlightenment. Eve of Mary's Immaculate Conception. And John Lennon's death.

To think about enlightenment is to worry white from snow. To strut and fret dogma is failure to appreciate and move through the necessity of sin. And not to have song to whisk us willy nilly through time is to stand mute and deaf under richness of melody.

Nine children were killed in Afghanistan by American military ordinance. We are fooled every day by words that have no root in common human decency.

No Buddha is enlightened. No Mother of God remains unsevered from original wholeness. And no writer/singer of songs is able to enchant his listeners.

Snow is not enlightened, does not foreknow God, and cannot carry a tune.

Snow is just snow.

Over everything.

At and on and under as it is.

Not fooled.

"At night he remembers freedom"

One’s life, lived variously, will not forget what cannot be forgotten.

At Tuesday Evening Conversation we currently read After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, by Jack Kornfield. The night was growing cold and the fire dimming. There were words about community. One woman in the book spoke about seeking communion.

It occurred to us during conversation that the phrase 'receiving communion’ expands beyond the application given it in religious parlance.

If we understand that we are already and always connected one to the other, whether or not we are aware of this connection, then to ‘receive’ this ‘communion’ means connection opens to us, we see it, we experience it, and the world changes for us.

There seems to be confusion about whether or not we should learn how to be with each other in this world. The confusion stems from arguments about which side of ‘or’ each person resides:
Rich or poor? Strong or weak? Haves or have-nots? First world or second, third, fourth? God’s people or ungodly? Good or evil? Right or wrong? White or black? Elderly or young? Intelligent or not so intelligent? Privileged or underprivileged? Male or female? Monotheists or polytheists? Law abiding or criminal?

The word “or” captures our essential freedoms as well as our frightening choices. It is small word glue holding precariously together what it intends as separate. It is difficult to live in this would free of dualisms. It is uncertain we are able to conceive this existence without dualistic references.

There are discrepancies in our thinking. Discrepancies insinuate between dualities.

[Dictionary: "discrepancies"

1. lack of agreement; difference; inconsistency.
the discrepancy between the reported figures and the actual ones.
variance (1) , difference (1) , inconsistency (2) , disparity
disagreement , difference
disagreement , incongruity , dissimilarity , divergence , deviation
2. an instance of divergence or inconsistency.
difference (2) , contradiction (3) , inconsistency (1)
incongruity , dissimilarity, lack of agreement; difference; inconsistency.
(http://www.wordsmyth.net/live/home.php?script=search&matchent=Discrepancy&matchtype=exact)]

Poetry helps. Poems are glimpses through and beyond human dualistic thinking and experience.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
(Poem by Robert Frost)

There really is no difference: saint/sinner; host/guest; this path/that path; divergence/convergence -- we think apparently there is a difference, but really there is no difference.

The Second Patriarch Hui-k’o stood in the snow, cut off his arm, and awakened. The Sixth Patriarch heard someone recite the Diamond Sutra phrase “arouse the mind without placing it anywhere,” and he awakened. Ling-yun saw a peach blossom and awakened. Hsiang-yen heard a tile fragment strike bamboo, and he awakened. Lin-chi was given sixty blows by Huang-po, and he awakened. Tung-shan noticed his own reflection when he was crossing a river, and he awakened. In each case, these men met the Master.
- Daito (1282-1334)

We never know when we might meet the Master. Can we dare predict what event in our lives will be the openning through which we are seen through? Is this the confusing demand of faith -- to not know, but live through -- one's life in the midst of another's life?

SNOW IN THE SUBURBS

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes,
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.
Poem by Thomas Hardy.

Awakening is as odd as the fact we breathe at all. It is like communion -- always there, always ready to be received. The task and gift of mature spiritual practice is coming to see with the heart who and what we leave out. Once seen, our practice changes. Once we come to see – anything – for what it is, the master is looking through our eyes.

Richard brought in Robinson Jeffers last night. He wanted to read in honor of Erika’s difficult decision to put her dog Vera to sleep.

HURT HAWKS
I
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II
I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.
I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
(Poem by Robinson Jeffers)

Once unsheathed, bare and transparent, there is no place, and nothing, to hide. Dwelling openly in the realization of community --communion -- is our distinct and welcoming home. Thich Nhat Hanh has said that the Buddha of our age will be the sangha, the community. If we refuse to receive communion, that is, if we deny who and what we are in one another's lives, we fall into forgetfulness.

We cannot forget what cannot be forgotten.

We practice living one’s live, variously.

At night, usually in deep darkness, we remember freedom.

Beautiful and wild.

"We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here!"

Sunlight through cold windowpane wet with morning melting wash. Chickadee and Nuthatch look for seed-net taken down from ski pole outside room over kitchen. Squirrels have been looting. Birds ask, “Will we have to look elsewhere for our seed because some thief takes his share from here?”

All who are fortunate, set yourselves free
With the mind unbound by meditation,
And observe reality from a state of freedom.
- Godrakpa (1170-1249)

Bird and squirrel alike are neighbors to hunger. Disapproving mind binds opinion that feeder is for birds. It tells me to keep the unwanted away. While removing what is necessary to spite the offending squirrel, I deprive the birds as well. It seems a solution – but gives no joy. There are other feeders hanging elsewhere, still....

21.Then Jesus was filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit and said, "O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding the truth from those who think themselves so wise and clever, and for revealing it to the childlike. Yes, Father, it pleased you to do it this way.

23. Then when they were alone, he turned to the disciples and said, "How privileged you are to see what you have seen. 24. I tell you, many prophets and kings have longed to see and hear what you have seen and heard, but they could not."
(- Luke 10:21,23-4, Holy Bible, New Living Translation, © 1996.)

Deprivation and imprisonment are cousins in our world. The shoplifter and plane hijacker most likely share a common insight. It is one I catch a glimpse of, but cannot yet fully see. It has to do with the undistributed sentence, “This belongs to me!”

What, I wonder, belongs to me alone?

Nature's Questioning

WHEN I look forth at dawning, pool,
Field, flock, and lonely tree,
All seem to look at me
Like chastened children sitting silent in a school;

Their faces dulled, constrained, and worn,
As though the master's ways
Through the long teaching days
Their first terrestrial zest had chilled and overborne.

And on them stirs, in lippings mere
(As if once clear in call,
But now scarce breathed at all)--
"We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here!

"Has some Vast Imbecility,
Mighty to build and blend,
But impotent to tend,
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?

"Or come we of an Automaton
Unconscious of our pains?...
Or are we live remains
Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone?

"Or is it that some high Plan betides,
As yet not understood,
Of Evil stormed by Good,
We the Forlorn Hope over which Achievement strides?"

Thus things around. No answerer I....
Meanwhile the winds, and rains,
And Earth's old glooms and pains
Are still the same, and gladdest Life Death neighbors nigh.
(Poem by Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928)

(Note: It is curious that in an anthology edited by Milton Crane published in 1961 the final line of the poem is written differently from other published versions: “Are still the same, and Life and Death are neighbors nigh.”

With “gladdest Life Death neighbors nigh” we are invited to see an active neighboring nearness of Life Death – a non-separate joy. Whereas in Crane's book “gladdest” is gone, followed by an “and” between “Life and Death” -- effectively separating Life from Death, and this without joy.)

I’ll put back the mesh-net hanging bird feeder. Neighbor will feed with neighbor for as long as there is seed.

In dooryard, Paul and Paul Jr. talk with Saskia while looking up at tired farmhouse siding and barn roof needing more to keep the rain from passing through. Sando barks her opinion. In my mind I turn the key starting engine of bulldozer. It seems I have always lived in tired falling houses. That doesn't phase bird or squirrel. We seem to live one cracking seed at a time.

Nothing belongs to me…alone.

We wonder.

We find us.

Here.

There is no time. Like the present.

Lastly, we said that time only comes about in virtue of having an infinite openness at its bottom. This infinite openness also contains an ambiguity of its own. In a word, it can mean both nihility and sunyata in its original sense. According to the meaning it takes on, time and all matters related to time will assume meanings fundamentally opposed to one another. The true Form of time consists in the simultaneous possibility of these opposing meanings. The essential ambiguity in the meaning of time means that time is essentially the field of fundamental conversion, the field of a “change of heart” or “metanoia” (pravrittivijnana). (p.222, in Religion and Nothingness, by Keiji Nishitani, c.1982)

Play this field.

“The Way of all beings.”

I agree with a friend who writes suggesting further reflection about fear.

I think…your analysis skips over the obvious: good old reptilian fear is an important powerful motivator for us at many junctions of our path. [F]ear is often a ‘negative’ emotion, but also, in a primitive and/or hardened situation, it can truly be the ‘the beginning of wisdom’ (JS, 30Nov03)

I’d written:
"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. (Proverbs 9: 10)
If we read the line, paraphrased, as: The Lord is afraid that we have no comprehension or experience of the Holy One. The “Holy One” is our unity and familial inter-relationship and inter-dependence each with each, each with all, all with each, all with all.
It is as if the Lord was saying: “I am afraid they will not see who we are in, with, and through each other. If they understood my fear, my deep longing for each one to see and experience the truth of existence -- in, with, and through the Whole of Now – then, with that comprehension and experience, each one would begin walking the way of wisdom. (wfh, blog, 23Nov03)

It is interesting to question whether “good old reptilian fear” is transformed into Fear of the Lord as we move and evolve through life. That fear, he suggests, saves us from harmful consequences of harmful behavior.

What if the fear involved with certain life experiences (in a transforming way) really has to do with the "Holy One" in each of us seeing the loss and devastation that might have resulted if we continued the actions and perpetuated the behaviors we were doing?

We do call it 'fear.' And 'fear' is a powerful motivator.

Still, what if fear is merely the ripples spreading away from the tossed stone breaking the surface?

The stone itself might be called our self-as-it-is plunging through the surface into the depths, seeking to find solid resting place as it falls and tumbles through fathoms -- heavier than water -- with no buoyancy.

We cannot 'fathom' the travel, the purpose, or even the fact, of the very reality of the plunge. But, we are plunging. Do we trust and surrender to the plunge?

The ripples are surface indicators that something has dropped through. 'Fear' is the unsettling of the surface broken through. Our actions are the unsettling of the water along the surface, or, perhaps, the passageway into the deep. Our actions send out ripples, reverberations, which alert others to have a look-see at what has disturbed the surface. (Enter the authorities, whether in law or psychology, to take up their intervening roles in the drama.) There is a natural inclination to stop the unfolding drama, to return to some normalcy. There is not a natural inclination to plunge through all our dualisms with their corresponding clutching and grasping, craving and reaching for what is 'out there' to save us.

What occurs next -- the actions we take, the judgments of others, the counsel of others -- determines where we go, what we change, and who we become. We can go back -- so it seems -- repair the broken consequences, and reinstate a familiar pattern that will keep us recognizable to those who know us.

And yet, and yet, and yet -- something is going on below the surface. The stone of self is plunging to the bottom. That plunge feels like nothing we know-- like emptiness itself.

What is the bottom? The 'bottom,' is the floor, the ground, the original resting place that all things seek. I would call that original resting place, or bottom, the Holy One.

Enroute there we encounter the ten thousand distractions, the ten thousand dispersions of inattention, and the ten thousand wrong directions that the seeming isolated self runs up against.

These diversions seem to be necessary. However inconvenient or disturbing, they seem to appear unavoidable. We wouldn’t consciously seek them out, but they surround us. They are, perhaps, the gateways to Annutara-samyak-sambodhi, (Sanskrit), meaning unexcelled complete enlightenment.

In Sanskrit words, Annutara means supreme, being nothing above it; samyak means equal; sambodhi means genuine enlightenment. (http://www.buddhistdoor.com/bdoor/archive/sutra_comm/heart/heart_16.htm)

Elsewhere, this description:
My guess is that the version of the precepts that was used at the San Francisco Zen Center developed from Dogen Zenji’s 13th century commentary on them. I would like to go back over these precepts, comparing the different versions to Dogen’s commentary. The first precept is, "avoid all evil" or "not to commit wrong actions," which we say as "refrain from all action that creates attachment." This has the meaning of non-harming or keeping the precepts. Dogen’s commentary is, "Ceasing from evil: this is the abiding place of laws and rules of all Buddhas, this is the very source of laws and rules of all Buddhas....

The second is, "Practice all good," which we say as "I vow to make every effort to live in enlightenment." Dogen’s commentary is "Doing good: This is the Dharma of Annutara Samyak Sambodhi; this is the Way of all beings." This Sanskrit phrase Annutara Samyak Sambodhi means an "Unsurpassed, Complete and Perfect Enlightenment." It is one of the types of enlightenment–one of the more thorough types–and it is noted in the Heart Sutra. If we replace the Sanskrit with English, we can say Dogen’s verse as "Doing good: This is the Truth of Unsurpassed, Complete and Perfect Enlightenment."
(“Taking and Receiving the Precepts” Part 3, by Taitaku Pat Phelan)

The way to what is good begins and ends right where we are. Between what we perceive to be our beginning and ending is where we experience dispersion, disappointment, and doubt. Everything is called into question. In reaction, we try to find answers – any answer, whether ours or others’. In grabbing for answers, we follow where they lead. Anything, we think, that will float us back to surface.

Answers, especially those given by and belonging to others, fail to bring us home – only serving to delay and distract us from the Holy One. The Holy One is a question “unsurpassed, complete, and perfect” in its own light.

If you trust in nature, in what is simple in nature, in the small things that hardly anyone sees, and that suddenly become huge; if you have this love for what is humble, and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems small: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent; not to your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished; but in your innermost awareness, your innermost awakeness.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you with everything I am to have the patience with everything unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Don't search for the answers: they could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live your questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers.
(-- Rainer Maria Rilke in "Letters to a Young Poet" )

When we fall to an unfathomable depth, when the seeming isolated self is dissolved in unknowing surrender, we come to see what is the real question. Without fear, with the Holy One at ground of all we are, we realize the question.

Who are you?

You are the question.

Live your way.

Live the Way of all beings.

Good for us all!

“By surprise like a trap”

Christians begin liturgical preparing, again, for the birth of Christ into human history. They begin by worrying the end of all life as has been known on earth. Dismay, fright, and vigilance are prelude to escape. Hardly an inviting prospect augers standing before the “Son of Man.”

Jesus said to his disciples: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon,
and the stars, and on earth nations will be in dismay, perplexed by the
roaring of the sea and the waves. People will die of fright in
anticipation of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the
heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a
cloud with power and great glory. But when these signs begin to happen,
stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.
“Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and
drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by
surprise like a trap. For that day will assault everyone who lives on the
face of the earth. Be vigilant at all times and pray that you have the
strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent and to stand before
the Son of Man.”(GOSPEL,Cycle C, 1st Advent, Luke 21:25-28, 34-36)

Lloyd says the poet Pessoa thought we shouldn’t worry much about what takes place in the world, that only the inner life, the inner reality was worth the attention of men and women. We were reading poetry. Fernando Pessoa was joined by Diane DiPrima, Robert Bly, Ted Hughes, Marianne Moore, and others at Friday Evening Conversation focusing on poetry.

Survival Skills

Here is the virtue
in not looking up:
you will be the one
who finds the overhang
out of the sun
and something for a cup.
You will rethink meat;
you will know you have
to eat and will eat.
Despair and hope you keep
remote. You will not
think much about the boat
that sank or other boats.
When you can, you sleep.
You can go on nearly forever.
If you ever are delivered
you are not delivered.
You know now, you were
always a survivor.
Poem: "Survival Skills," by Kay Ryan from Say Uncle (Grove Press).

When we can, we sleep. Much of our time these days, it seems, we wander about asleep. It is easier to imagine the shift taking place -- in politics and other environments of natural or international mutation – is an under water, under sleep activity taking place without our full or conscious participation. To claim consciousness of the sea change would be to grab at lines, right sails, and steer toward sustainable buoyancy. Or go, and stay, under.

[C.S. Lewis] was a confident Oxford philosopher, not at all prepared to find himself a Christian convert. To his friend Owen Barfield he wrote: "Terrible things have happened to me. The 'Spirit' or 'Real I' is showing an alarming tendency to becoming much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You'd better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery." (Garrison Keillor remembering Lewis’ birthday) [Poem and Lewis quote from The Writer's Almanac for Saturday, Nov. 29, 2003]

‘The Spirit,’ or ‘Real I’ is alone awake. That Reality will not be discouraged by our soporific certainties about remaining sleepily indifferent to what is taking place. The world, it is said, is a dangerous place. There is beauty and joy, and there is fragile sanity also.

C.S. Lewis said, "Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand." (Keillor)

To enter religion is to enter, eyes open, the reality of this world.

We can only escape illusion, not truth. Truth is constant surprise. Illusion is narcoleptic paralysis. Most the time, we court, and are courted by, illusion. Truth is a deeper, more stunning, and simpler wakefulness.

Truth demands practice. Truth asks for vigilance. Truth, if it were told, is just like this – right before our attentiveness.

The Brahman Dona saw the Buddha sitting under a tree and was impressed by his peaceful air of alertness and his tranquil demeanor. He asked the Buddha:

“Are you a god?”
“No, Brahman, I am not a god.”
“Then an angel?”
“No, indeed, Brahman.”
“A spirit then?”
“No, I am not a spirit.”
“Then what are you?”
“I am awake.”
- Anguttara Nikaya [DailyZen]

Blessings,

this Advent...

Awake.

Forget liberty?

Before doing so, celebrate it. If we are going to forget it, let us remember how it fell from grace.

Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. (‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958), L 172 [FEL 125] by Isaiah Berlin (1909 - November 5, 1997). Berlin was a political philosopher and historian of ideas, born in Riga, Latvia.)

There is worry about a great country forgetting what made her great -- namely, freedom.

Reacting to hurt by further retaliatory hurt is the abandonment of compassion, and instead, taking up cruelty. Even at home, further hurt is piled upon sorrow and fear by seeming abandonment of core beliefs of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – this in the name of security and homeland pre-eminence.

I’ve broken through Cloud Barrier
The living way is north, south, east, and west.
Evenings I rest, mornings I play,
No other, no self.
With each step a pure breeze rises.
- Daito (1282-1334)

In meditation cabin at dawn, double window behind zafu and zabuton instructs the mind. Votive candlelight reflects twice the stain glass holder in window glass. At same time the windows hold reflection of candlelight, they allow transparent seeing through to outside stones, branches, old apple tree, and wet earth. That which we see is that which is seen through.

No other, no self.

‘Life can be seen through
many windows,
none of them necessarily
clear or opaque,
less or more distorting
than any of the others.’
(-- Isaiah Berlin, ‘Winston Churchill in 1940’ (1949), PI 4)

It is difficult to govern. Balancing fear and freedom. Sorting through what is good for one segment of the world or country and who will be left to suffer the lack. It is a difficulty moderated by clear thinking and honest analysis. With the best of intentions the worst results can occur when original, guiding principles are forgotten in favor of ideologies and reactions made popular by desperate men performing Orwellian switches in the meaning of words.

‘Debate’ comes to mean ‘dictate.’ ‘Freedom’ comes to mean ‘repress.’ ‘Terror’ comes to mean ‘all other views.’ And ‘security’ comes to mean ‘no other way.’

[T]hose who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.(Berlin, Introduction to ‘Five Essays on Liberty’ (1969) 52 [lx]

I prefer to think it is fear and failure of imagination that drives the current movement to suspend the experiment of this republic. The world is changing.

Immigration is suspect. International cooperation is disdained. Only corporate profit and courting wealth counts. There is no longer pretense of the words ‘people’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘humankind.’ These words are replaced by ‘demographics’ or lobbying groups’ or ‘collateral resources/damages.’

It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: & that others cannot be right if they disagree. (‘Notes on Prejudice’ (1981), L 349)

Eating dinner Thanksgiving night listening to radio dramatization of “The Grapes of Wrath,” adapted from novel by John Steinbeck, it occurs that there is a pervasive tension between those that have and control and those that don’t have and need.

Perhaps the true test of human and spiritual maturation is the willingness to share, openly and equally, with human beings what each one needs. Food, clothing, shelter, respect, and freedom from oppression – these are basic and inalienable rights that divine, natural, and human law distinguish themselves making manifest.

Those, no doubt, are in some way fortunate who have brought themselves, or have been brought by others, to obey some ultimate principle before the bar of which all problems can be brought. Single-minded monists, ruthless fanatics, men possessed by an all-embracing coherent vision do not know the doubts and agonies of those who cannot wholly blind themselves to reality.
(Isaiah Berlin, Introduction to ‘Five Essays on Liberty’, 1969. 47 [lv] )

Reality is not an idea. True reality exists at the feet and before the eyes of every person, every being that breathes air or resides in the embrace of earth.

The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.
(Berlin, ibid. 48 [lvi])

We try to commit to memory what freedom sounds like as clanging doors close noisily and faintly amnesiac faces look nervously around them, fearing they are losing something dear to them, but vague and nearly out of mind.

On 6 November 1949, her son Lev was arrested for the third time and
the following day Akhmatova committed her poems finally to memory
before burning their manuscripts; among them, the completed
‘Poem without a Hero' in which Berlin appears as ‘The Guest from the Future'.
(--from a poem by Jon Stallworthy, "The Guest from the Future," recalling a momentous meeting between Isaiah Berlin and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and its consequences.) [Gratitude to http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/]

Those who forget, live off the pain and suffering of others.

Forgive us our forgetfulness.

And deliver us.

To liberty.

And justice.

For all.

Was none of them found?

Walk to town. Attend Mass. Breakfast on deck by harbor on tea and baked goods. Row to Curtis Island. Walk around island. Then row around island. It's Thanksgiving.

Just as space reaches everywhere,
Without discrimination,
Just so the immaculate element,
Which in it essential nature is mind,
Is present in all.
- Visuddhis Magga

Light life -- the immaculate element.

11 On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, 13 they called out, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" 14 When he saw them, he said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." And as they went, they were made clean. 15 Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. 16 He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. 17 Then Jesus asked, "Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? 18 Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" 19 Then he said to him, "Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well." (Luke 17)

Preachers often miss this one. They like to say only one was grateful. Nine were ingrates. They miss it.

If it were a Zen koan Jesus was asking, the one returning missed the opportunity. To Jesus' question, "the other nine, where are they?" -- the Samaritan might have answered, " See me, see them." And, "One gives praise, all give praise."

At Thanksgiving we are healed when we realize mercy. We are made well when no one is left out of our awareness of the wholeness of the body of Christ, the wholeness of the body of humankind.

When food is taken in, when sound is heard, and when light gives shape to each particular presence -- each is present in all.

All of them, found.

Thank you.

One’s light?

Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea.

A Catholic koan. “Lord I am not worthy that you should come under my roof: but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.” A more recent translation has the phrasing, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you. Only say the word, and I shall be healed.”

What is the word? What will be healed? What is worthiness?

Learn for yourself here.
A teacher can’t help you here.
Watch.
But first ask yourself why
You need to be told
Why you have allowed yourself
To stop learning about those things
Most basic to your life.
If you attempt to learn
Without asking those questions,
You can never pass beyond
Technique.
You’ll only trap yourself
Again and again,
A skin’s thickness away
From the living present.
( - Journeys on Mind Mountain)

Absent historical explanations or scriptural exegesis, what word heals and worthies?

The Buddha's Last Instruction

"Make of yourself a light "
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal - a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I'm not needed
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
(Poem by Mary Oliver)

We are frightened by the gaze that looks directly in our direction. The gaze that looks into us. The gaze that sees our worth without proof or explanation.

What is the word?

Only say it.

I will be healed?

To receive you, I must go.

You?

No I.

The sacrament of what is pure and holy is what is occurring between us when you and I have dissolved into this mere and very next reality.

One's light.

What to do with appalling errors?

Michael Moore's book, Dude, Where's my Country?, puts in one place questions about 9/11 and the current administration that have floated disconnected for two years.

How do we rebound with compassion and justice? How rebuild confidence and respect? How move from dispiritedness and disgust -- an unhealthy state of being for anyone -- to retrieving hopeful and worthy citizenry of a fine country? How repair fabric of trust ripped to shreds by lack of openness and private motivations that are refused light of day?

Like entrusting yourself
To a brave person
When greatly afraid,
By entrusting yourself
To the awakening mind,
You will be swiftly liberated,
Even if you have made appalling errors.
- Majjhima Nikaya

What can one individual do?

Our involvement with others does not begin with just our speech and physical movements. Each of us individually has an effect on the lives of beings around us through the quiet processes going on in our minds. If we are full of good feelings, they radiate around us and people want to be near. If we are full of bad feelings, others tend to stay away. So if we would be activists for good, for the positive, we must assume responsibility for our minds as well as our speech and our physical activities, otherwise our negative mental habits will drag down the entire community of beings. On the other hand, when we break through into the liberty of heart, mind, and spirit in the process of enlightenment, we free others at the same time.

We can envision the planet as the residence of billions of human beings each living around a bubble of inner awareness, each having an inner theater of sounds and lights and impulses that is interconnected with everyone else’s through broadcast vibrations and patterns. When one of those bubbles explodes in a burst of insight or joy – when it releases a knot in its interior energy circulation – it influences ever so slightly all the other bubbles. When an educational, cultural, or civilization movement influences a large number of those bubbles in certain ways, an even more powerful resonance which affects all the other bubbles is created. If we see morphic resonance as a principle operating in history, we can conceive of the possibility that when a whole country or a group of countries adopts a new pattern of perception or behavior, surrounding countries can be profoundly influenced as well. (pp. 27-28, from Introduction to Inner Revolution, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness, c.1998, by Robert Thurman)

If our political and personal profit have steered us away from the Holy One, inner revolution is a way back to unity and wholesome community. Our longing is strong.

Away with guns and military force; arrive with awareness and sacred spirit!

In our time of nearly limitless communication and freedom of choice in so many countries, our civilization is ripe for another step in what the Buddha saw as our inevitable evolution toward happiness. (Thurman, p.29)

The washer twists in corner. One bite taken from half cinnamon swirl. Grapefruit juice two sips down. The dogs are in the barn wondering why morning walking meditation is delayed. Mu-ge plays hockey with quarter on bathroom floor.

Overcast sky.

Errors are evolution’s way of embarking a new course of growth. We must study this course well.

It is time for mountain walking.

Good resonance to us all!

Wisdom attends.

Morning kitchen. Mu-ge snoozes on black chair. Cesco on tan rug. Sando on daybed by window. Saskia wipes counter after preparing dough for bread and setting squash in soup pot on stove.

The morning walk along mountainside with dogs was crisp and clear with sunlit silence. Water trickles down in furrowed meander from woods to pond.

The mountain was in the stream, both on the surface and in the glittering white of the polished stones in the streambed. Reflecting easily despite the rapid flow of the current. The snowy white mass seemed to double in size. It was the purest white you had ever seen, and it floated in the blue sky. The day was incredibly fresh and clear as you walked in it, step by step, each step complete in and of itself. Each step the beginning of a leap into the infinite present. The mountain enfolded you; the mind stopped, stunned, and still. You walked through the silence toward the mountain, each step a leap into the deep silence which is always present, always unfolding.
- from Journeys on Mind Mountain

There is a danger in colonialism. Jim Hightower and Michael Thoms discuss corporations, separating personal responsibility from the law to legally rob people, Enron and other bankruptcies of Savings and Loans paid for by ordinary citizens. They speak about Wal-Mart and other big boxes sucking money from communities and underselling local businesses.

Once sacred silence invited us into the divine. These days men in governing power encourage fear, stifling opposing views and reasonable demonstration, and foment a frightened silence. They mock the original language of God: -- Creative Silence. They replace it with insult and belittlement: -- terrifying aphasiac muteness.

On Wednesday, for the 50th anniversary, the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission gathered all the Marshall scholars now in Britain and British dignitaries who have supported the program, with Prince Charles presiding. The event, held at the University of London, was timed for the Bush visit, because Secretary of State Colin Powell, the keynote speaker, was one of five Americans being presented with the first Marshall medals. There were a few protest banners waiting for Mr. Powell around campus, but nothing extraordinary. Prince Charles showed up with what appeared to be one security guard.

But there was no Colin Powell.

A few hours earlier, the organizers were told that Mr. Powell was canceling, because of "security concerns." Every American I talked to was both sad and embarrassed — sad that an event intended to affirm the Atlantic alliance turned into another small victory for terrorists; sad that all these young Marshall scholars didn't get to see their secretary of state being honored and to hear his thoughts; and embarrassed that some nameless security officer decided Mr. Powell couldn't brave a few protesters, but Prince Charles could.

But this is more lament than criticism. I wouldn't want the responsibility of deciding when the president or secretary of state should appear in public.

These are tough calls. It's always hard to know where the line should be. But I fear we're starting to cross it in ways that could actually be dangerous for us all. Whether we're talking about our public officials or your family deciding whether to vacation in Istanbul, we all have to learn to live with more insecurity. Because terrorists are in the fear business, and every time we visibly imprison ourselves, they win another small victory and become more emboldened. Indeed, we could learn from the British. The I.R.A. murdered the queen's cousin and almost blew up Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her hotel — yet life in London goes on and the police here still don't carry guns.

I fear that the kinds of security officials who pulled the plug on Mr. Powell are becoming the new priesthood of our age. If the 1990's were the era of "Davos Man," the 2000's are the era of "Security Man" — and like a priesthood, these "terrorism experts" have unchallenged authority to curb our freedom in the name of freedom. Some of them deserve respect and know their stuff. But some wouldn't recognize the 6-foot-5 Osama bin Laden if he walked past them dribbling a basketball and dragging his dialysis machine.
(from "The Way We Were" OpEd, By Thomas L. Friedman, (Published: November 23, 2003, New York Times)

We must re-learn how to speak with each other. The joy of open conversation is necessary for healthy community. The people of the United States long to be, again, part of the world community of peoples. We long to be able to speak with each other in creative dialogue instead of shorthand invective laced with ad hominum name calling. We long to enter a dialogue with even, and especially, those who find repugnant the ways we do business and aggress wealth and reserves. In that conversation we will have to step down from our high horse and sit on the ground with one another.

Proverbs 9

1 Wisdom has built her house;
she has hewn out its seven pillars.
2 She has prepared her meat and mixed her wine;
she has also set her table.
3 She has sent out her maids, and she calls
from the highest point of the city.
4 "Let all who are simple come in here!"
she says to those who lack judgment.
5 "Come, eat my food
and drink the wine I have mixed.
6 Leave your simple ways and you will live;
walk in the way of understanding.

7 "Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
8 Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you;
rebuke a wise man and he will love you.
9 Instruct a wise man and he will be wiser still;
teach a righteous man and he will add to his learning.

10 "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
11 For through me your days will be many,
and years will be added to your life.
12 If you are wise, your wisdom will reward you;
if you are a mocker, you alone will suffer."

In the Catholic Christian liturgical calendar today is the feast of Christ the King. Taken from the metaphor of kingship, it intends to set the scene of royal leadership. Today’s metaphor might be different. It might be: Christ the Wise.

Gregory the Great (540-604), in his Homily on the Gospels, wondered whether it was possible to be in the world, (live in one’s culture and society with its norms and behaviors) but not be of it, (live as one’s conscience required, free to choose the way as one sees it).
He wrote:
I would like to urge you to forsake everything, but that I do not presume to do. Yet if you cannot give up everything of this world, at least keep what belongs to the world in such a way that you yourself are not kept prisoner by the world. Whatever you possess must not possess you; whatever you own must be under the power of your soul; for if your soul is overpowered by the power of this world's goods, it will be totally at the mercy of its possessions.
In other words, we make use of temporal things, but our hearts are set on what is eternal. Temporal goods help us on our way, but our desire must be for those eternal realities which are our goal. We should give no more than a side glance at all that happens in the world, but the eyes of our soul are to be focused right ahead; for our whole attention must be fixed on those realities which constitute our goal.
He says later that, “Nothing should interfere with your soul’s longing…”

The temporal is the world of time. The eternal is no time. The eternal is the now. The ‘now’ is what is and will be. So, we ask ourselves, what are we doing now? What are we doing throughout now and now and now?

It occurs to me that the verse from Proverbs – “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” -- longs to be heard anew. It is not that WE are to fear the Lord – as if fear and terror were avenues to the divine. Rather, it is the fear of the LORD that we will not understand the Holy One. If we read the line, paraphrased, as: The Lord is afraid that we have no comprehension or experience of the Holy One. The “Holy One” is our unity and familial inter-relationship and inter-dependence each with each, each with all, all with each, all with all.

It is as if the Lord was saying: “I am afraid they will not see who we are in, with, and through each other. If they understood my fear, my deep longing for each one to see and experience the truth of existence -- in, with, and through the Whole of Now – then, with that comprehension and experience, each one would begin walking the way of wisdom.”

SuSane would like that phrase, the “Whole of Now.”

When Tibetan monks poured sand from mandala, milk, and small flowers into the harbor yesterday morning, trace grains, white liquid, and yellow petals floated with outgoing tide passed oars of my skiff out into Penobscot Bay. One and each dissolved into each and All. Going on. The song of their passing sounding near every watery being.

Morning sun swings to other side of barn. The mountain is, indeed, in the stream. The stream is in the pond. The pond is on its way to the harbor. The harbor water glides into the bay. The bay into the sea. The sea touches every continent on its way. The earth connects with every neighboring celestial body making its way through space.
Widening space embraces and reaches out into every conceivable possibility within and beyond our comprehension and experience.

It is Sunday.

Attend wisdom!

Attend throughout!

Word opens world with watchful awareness.

In rowing skiff with photographer aboard I circle dock float where nine Tibetan Buddhist monks blow horns, beat drum, chant multi-tonal song while pouring sand and milk into harbor. The lovely artwork of sand mandala has dissolved in salt sea.

The mystical consciousness of St. Theresa implies a certain basic attitude toward the self. The thinking and feeling and willing self is not the starting point of all verifiable reality and of all experience. The primal truth, the ground of all being and truth, is in God the Creator of all that is. The starting point of all Christian belief and experience (in this context) is the primal reality of God as Pure Actuality. The "existence of God" is not something seen as deducible from our conscious awareness of our own existence. On the contrary, the experience of the classic Christian mystics is rooted in a meta-physic of being, in which God is intuited as "He Who Is," as the supreme reality, pure Being. The self-centered awareness of the ego is of course a pragmatic psychological reality, but once there has been an inner illumination of pure reality, an awareness of the Divine, the empirical self is seen by comparison to be "nothing," that is to say contingent, evanescent, relatively unreal, real only in relation to its source and end in God, considered not as object but as free ontological source of one's own existence and subjectivity. To understand this attitude, we have to remember that in this view of things Being is not an abstract objective idea but a fundamental concrete intuition directly apprehended in a personal experience that is incontrovertible and inexpressible. (from Zen and the Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton, 1968, New York: New Directions Books.)

Marti's mother is dying. She travels north to see her. We keep Joanne in prayer. Death is a personal experience that is hard to share.

D.T. Suzuki says: "Tasting, seeing, experiencing, living - all these demonstrate that there is something common to enlightenment experience and our sense-experience; the one takes place in our innermost being, the other on the periphery of our consciousness. Personal experience thus seems to be the foundation of Buddhist philosophy. In this sense Buddhism is a radical empiricism or experientialism, whatever dialectic later developed to probe the meaning of the enlightenment experience." (D.T. Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, N.Y., 1957, p. 48)

We walk through local Inn with its owner. We note its loveliness. We wonder whether the innermost being of Meetingbrook -- community cafe, retreat house, hospice rooms, place of intimate conversation -- would find itself in such a radical experience.

We notice we are not in control.

When, and as, light shines itself through -- we pray for grace not to be hindrances.

If happiness is hosting openness, we are happy to consider the open as host.

Receiving communion, we walk back to the shop with silent awareness of the Divine.

Say the word.

In prison this morning, Charlie had it this way: "There's so much crap that gets talked about here [in prison], I get tired of it. It's why I took a break even from these conversations. But I came back because these Meetingbrook conversations are a better quality of crap than the rest of it."

Steeply Mt. Yunmen rises
Leaving the white clouds way below
Its streams rush so swiftly
That no fish dares to linger
- Yunmen (864-949)

We can't linger too long in the heady rush of considerations about things beyond our comprehension. From reincarnation in our current existence, to "mere I" in Dalai Lama's talk in Salzberg, from Henri Nouwen's twofold poverty of heart and poverty of mind, to Philip Levine's poem about some things you know all your life -- we can glance and taste but seldom see and devour what passes quickly by us.

The Simple Truth

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.
(Poem by Philip Levine)

Once in a while, and then maybe again, we come to reside in our body whole and entire, aware of the incarnation briefly grasped then forgotten until next incarnation awareness. All in one lifetime.

Saskia said, "Happiness is hosting openness."

At end of prison conversation we say goodbye for this brief time until next time. Josh and Bob, Ryan and Charlie, Dick, Saskia, and I -- share the necessities and pleasantries of passage.

Maybe the raft is not the shore. Maybe there is no other shore. Maybe we are the flowing waters.

The very between of interconnectedness.

Hosting the open.

Merely.

"Each of us has the same right to pursue happiness and avoid suffering." (Dalai Lama)

Walking Ragged Mountain trails with Sando and Cesco in quiet moistness remaining from night. From stream where dogs drink the ocean four miles east can be seen through leafless trees. The taste of mountain stream is cool and plain.

The mighty ocean has but one taste,
The taste of salt.
Even so, the true way has
But one savor,
The savor of freedom.
- Majjhima Nikaya

There is reason to worry about freedom. Many people do not care for freedom. They care about ideas and control. In countries locked into repression, freedom is sacrilege. In countries that claim to be sole arbiters of freedom, dissent is treachery. It is becoming confusing which countries are most worrisome -- those who fear freedom and torture the infidel, or those whose freedom evokes fear and unleashes fear of freedom. In America there are many who fear freedom. This is worrisome.

The Most Famous Buddhist in the World
By Lama Surya Das

Q. How did the Dalai Lama become the most famous Buddhist in the world?

A: Spiritually speaking, many people assume that the Dalai Lama is like the pope of Buddhism. This is not true. For one thing, the Dalai Lama is the highest-ranking lama in Tibetan Buddhism, but he is not officially recognized as a leader among the other schools of Buddhism.
For example, although Tibetan Buddhism is the state religion of Bhutan, the last independent Buddhist kingdom in the world, Bhutan has its own head lama. Other schools of Buddhism have their own chief monks or sangha leaders. The Sangha Raja (Sovereign Monk) is the supreme patriarch of Buddhists in Thailand. There are also other heads of large Buddhist sects, such as Fuji-san, head of Japan's Nichirin, or Pure Land, sect of so-called "chanting" Buddhists, who are known for building "peace pagodas" around the world.

The Dalai Lama's role differs from the pope's in other ways, too. Buddhism is not arranged in so hierarchical a fashion as is the Catholic Church, and there is no single head or ascendant ruling school. In fact, in Tibetan Buddhism, there are four sects or schools, and the Dalai Lama is head of only one of them, the Gelugpa school.

The dramatic escape in January from Tibet of the 17th Karmapa Lama underscores the interrelationship of the various sects and their high lamas: the Karmapa (which literally means "man of Buddha activity"), is the third-highest ranking lama in Tibet and the head of another large sect, the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism, founded 900 years ago.

The Panchen Lama, Gendun Choekyi Nyima, meanwhile, is the second-highest ranking Gelugpa Tibetan lama after the Dalai Lama. Human rights groups call the young Panchen Lama, who would now be 10 or 11, the world's youngest political prisoner. After the Dalai Lama officially proclaimed him Panchen Lama in 1995, the boy was almost immediately abducted and imprisoned by the Chinese government and has not been seen in public since. It is feared that he is dead. All three of these lamas--the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa, and the Panchen Lama--are revered spiritual leaders and vital symbols of Tibetan independence both within and outside their homeland.

The Dalai Lama is also Tibet's political leader. He remains the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, which he established in the Indian hill station of Dharamsala 40 years ago, through the grace of Pandit Nehru and the Indian government, after escaping into exile himself in 1959. From there, he leads the fight for Tibetan cultural preservation and autonomy, if not complete political freedom and independence from Chinese rule. In each of the last 10 years, he has visited 50 or more countries on his mission of peace, nonviolence, and human rights. For his humanitarian work and peaceful resistance to Chinese Communist rule in formerly independent Tibet, the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.
(http://www.beliefnet.com/story/14/story_1463_1.html)

Freedom must be considered in the light of birth, life, and death. We're born, live, and die. Or so it seems. If birth fades, if death fades, there is only life. Right here. Right now.

When mortals are alive, they worry about death. When they're full, they worry about hunger. Theirs is the Great Uncertainty. But sages don't consider the past. And they don't worry about the future. Nor do they cling to the present. And from moment to moment they follow the Way. (Bodhidharma)

The two dogs lay in kitchen under fragrance of lentil soup, with and without sausage.

Here is where life resides.

And here,

And each here you are.

Michael talked awhile before going to pick up Pia. Three years in Sweden. Now in New Hampshire.

Overcome your uncertainties
And free yourself
From dwelling on sorrow.
If you delight in existence,
You will become a guide
To those who need you,
Revealing the path to many.
- Sutta Nipata

Dana asks what my philosophy of life is. It seems I can't remember being asked this in a very long time.

Life is love. Surrender to life, surrender to love. The Dalai Lama says his religion is kindness. I’m not always religious.

What I think is helped by Dogen – one continuous mistake. What we do next, (as God tells Joan of Arcadia), is what’s important. It’s the ‘next thing’ that differentiates God from ‘the other side.’

Tibetan monks are in Camden for a week. Nine of them will take soup and bread at the shop tomorrow, Wednesday, at noon. They’re creating a mandala.

To delight in existence reveals the path to many.

Studded snow tires are on Caravan. Oil change.

Hospice Memorial Service tonight.

Simple kindness; simple delight.

Christy says she swims every morning. She wants a zabuton and zafu. And information about pre-Christian Brigid of Celtic lore.

Constantly see your body as
Empty and quiet
Inside and outside
Communing in sameness.
Plunge the body into
The realm of reality,
Where there has never been
Any obstruction.
- Tao-hsin (580-651)

Lea says script of film being made nearby of book by Richard Russo starring Paul Newman was sold at local auction to benefit school for dropouts.

Fire crackles. Skiff is readied at dock for final row from floats on harbor in back of shop. Floats will be taken out for winter tomorrow.

It is an odd shop we have. It makes no profit. It seems like a new phylum, a peduncle. According to Teilhard, nature will suppress us.

In 'The Phenomenon of Man' Teilhard de Chardin discusses, in
some detail, the severe paucity of traces left behind by
beginnings, particularly the beginnings of branches on the
tree of life. In regard to commencements of all kinds he makes
reference to a 'fundamental condition to which experience is
subject, by virtue of which the beginnings of all things tend to
be materially out of our grasp.' (1) Applied to the evolution of
life, this condition can be designated as 'the "automatic
suppression of evolutionary peduncles".' (2) The context of
Teilhard's use of the term "peduncle" here gives it a purport
that is more or less equivalent to the term "bud". Indeed, he
says as much when he notes that the expression 'the
peduncle' has for him a meaning that 'comes to the same
thing [as] the bud'. (3) By the suppression of an evolutionary
peduncle on the tree of life, Teilhard simply means the
disappearance from view, of the bud, the incipient sprout,
by which a phylum began its life as a branch on that tree.
(Subject: Beginnings Leave Few Traces, Regards, Brian Cowan; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/teilhard/message/1370?source=1)

Perhaps November sets thought to diminishment. Impoverishment seems appropos in emptiness. We've neither the benefit of financial security nor the gift of inheritance. Like the seasonal cycle we try not to cling to what we do not possess.

It's the season of surrender.

There's nothing to relinquish.

The color she wants is violet.

Len, John, Peter, Sam set to play banjo, mandolin, guitar, and harmonica as Joanie comes through door with cane.
Saskia sets up flute stand.

It is time. Out back door, to skiff, away from crowd, oars in salt water, sun and sea stillness, slipping into traceless glide.