Acceptance is the issue. Surrender the means. Desolation, the impetus. The ascetical life is not punishment of the body -- it is allowing each their own reality, with kind attention.

The reverential mind can let things be and celebrate a person's presence or a thing's beauty without wanting something from them.
(--from p.77, section "The Ascetical Presence: The Wisdom to Subtract from the Feast" in chapter on "Presence" in John O'Donohue's Eternal Echoes, c.1999)

We've decided the reason there is so much recidivism among released prisoners is because the monastic experience had while incarcerated isn't supported back in the world. Harsh distraction and indifferent hustles tear away the dissolved self experienced in solitude and introspection -- replacing it with a fortified false self that tries to juggle disturbed values and desperate loneliness -- only to drop, and lose the act.

We need an authentic spirituality to offset a formulaic religiosity.

Everything collapses first.

Then comes prayer.

Nothing to say. No one to say it to.

Well, then...Shut my mouth!

* 9. It is a discourse that inevitably completes itself again in a new silence.

A God who would be completely transcendent -- in addition to the fact that it would be contradictory to hope to speak about such a God -- would be a superfluous, if not perverse hypothesis. A completely transcendent God would deny divine immanence at the same time that it would destroy human transcendence. The divine mystery is ineffable and no discourse can describe it.
(-- from NINE WAYS NOT TO TALK ABOUT GOD, by Raimon Panikkar, in CrossCurrents, http://www.crosscurrents.org/panikkar.htm)

There are times when giving up seems the only option.

In spiritual life, it is called surrender.

I look around.

To whom does one surrender?

What is being given up?

Not even this is easy.

Evening this is peace.

How about that?

"May the Lord be vivified by your being." That's the phrase I heard just before waking from night's sleep this morning. It was a dream.Or, this life is a dream. Either way, to vivify is how awareness brings skillfulness.

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

A woman donates a whole bunch of classical music cds that belonged to her father. She says, "The more someone is lost from God, the more they need to acquire material goods." It is a sentence for me to ponder. I would think that the pathway music leads along was the footing of divine traverse.

There was great hubbub on the patio today for 4th of July celebration.

Pastoral

When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.
(Poem: "Pastoral" by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems of W.C. Williams. New Directions, 1991.)

This nation is having a difficult time remembering that what you make of yourself does not exclude what you make of others.

It's not too late to turn back from the hateful edge of the direction some would take us.

July 4th is a good day to begin that turn.

One good turn deserves others.

Vivify well, with humility!

Restart the music.

No doubt about it, doubt is OK. Ask Thomas. He doubted. Then he saw. Until we see, doubt is honest inquiry. We need more honest inquiry.

Whether you are going or staying or sitting or lying down, the whole world is your own self. You must find out whether the mountains, rivers, grass, and forests exist in your own mind or exist outside it. Analyze the ten thousand things, dissect them minutely, and when you take this to the limit you will come to the limitless. When you search into it you come to the end of search, where thinking goes no further and distinctions vanish. When you smash the citadel of doubt, then the Buddha is simply yourself.
- Daikaku (1213-1279)

It's an odd practice to take someone else's word for things. "He said," or, She said" are often exercises in miscommunication; they are most often prey to the demon of misinterpretation. Leave someone else's word where it belongs -- it belongs in and to that person. "Go and find your own word," is what a kind teacher would say.

St Thomas the Apostle
The apostle Thomas is famous for doubting the resurrection of Jesus when his fellow apostles told him about it; but if he is the sceptical apostle, he is also the believing apostle, for having seen and touched a risen man, he made the immediate leap of faith and so became the first apostle to call Jesus God.
(--Tuesday 3 July 2007, Saint Thomas, Apostle, Feast. http://www.universalis.com/)

Learning to see for yourself, like learning to see yourself, begins a long, lonely, yet lovely journey up the path of search, through thickets of dark despair, across deserts of empty promises and expectations, until you cross the sudden river of profound doubt, and step into the wide open expanse and gracious hospitality of vanished distinctions.

Jory writes, adding, "Adyashanti says it like this:"

The true heart of all human beings is the lover of what is. That's why we cannot escape any part of ourselves. This is not because we are a disaster, but because we are conscious and we are coming back for all of ourselves in this birth. No matter how confused we are, we will come back for every part of ourselves that has been left out of the game. This is the birth of real compassion and love. For too long, it has been said by spiritual traditions that you have to slay so much to get to love. But this is a myth. The truth is that it is love that really liberates.
(- Adyashanti, from Emptiness Dancing)

To be mindful means, ultimately, to be what you are doing -- every primary instant, and each second of existence. This being of incarnated and eternal presence is one of love.

I don't mind doubt.

In the same way, I don't mind breathing.

I just wouldn't want to be without either.

Until I am.

The Declaration of Indefendants has just been issued.

It replaces the old, worn out documents of Constitution, and the other Declaration of 1776. They were Old America. Bush and Cheney are the new floundering fathers.

At night, deep in the mountains,
I sit in meditation.
The affairs of the world
Never reach here;
Everything is quiet and empty,
All the incense has
Been swallowed up
By the endless night.
My robe has become a garment of dew.
Unable to sleep I
Walk out into the woods
Suddenly, above the highest peak,
The full moon appears.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

Mr George Bush has commuted the prison sentence time of Mr. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. This new declaration voids all laws for the Executive White House.

Thank God for the full moon.

At least there one sees something to respect.

A woman visiting the shop said she was an atheist. She expected, maybe, an argument. She got none. Instead she got a piece of chocolate cake with rum icing.

Religious people can be so intolerant. So can the irreligious. Factor out the common -- and conclude it is people that can be intolerant -- adding or subtracting religion is only a foil to a deeper realization.

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

When we joked with Tom the mailman on Saturday about how there was no good business reason we should have lasted 11 years and be beginning our 12th, he said : "Well here it's all about people and relationships, isn't it?"

Another to whom he said, ‘Follow me’, replied, ‘Let me go and bury my father first’. But he answered, ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead; your duty is to go and spread the news of the kingdom of God’.
(--Luke 9:51 - 62)

That news is people and relationships.

Joy is entering into the reality of both with open eyes.

The dead in death, and those dead in life, will bury one another with belief in the death of life. Without that belief, life perfects itself in life and through death.

Each is, and both are, good.

Ed from Wisconsin visits at noon for "15 at 12" our midday 5 minutes reading, 5 minutes silence, 5 minutes speaking from the heart. There were five of us gathered today, We read from Jean Vanier's Community and Growth.

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

Kristen and son grab two chocolate chip cookies. She says she and her husband will come to "rehearse" on our deck. Right now three folks play and sing as Alan Watts delivers a talk from an old CD.

In prison yesterday we decided that the old task of deciphering the specific scientific and reaching for the transcendent intuitive might be worded anew by focusing on "be-ing" and "be-yond." It is the task of attending to what is measurably right here and what is immeasurably everywhere infinite.

A young girl comes in and says to her parents, "Are you interested in books or are you interested in beautiful?" The moon was rising , full and orange, southwest of Curtis Island from well and deep beyond the waters of the North Atlantic. The child is clarion to the sweet loveliness of cosmos.

Three women from Thomaston are enjoying their night out in the restaurant, come over laughing, striking gongs and laughing their delight -- and wind up purchasing The Grace in Dying for a friend of theirs.

A man regales two female patio-sitters with his odd assortment of stories that don't promise much for the rest of the evening.

A large and wide assortment of people stop in. It's a holiday weekend. Minnesota, New Jersey, Texas, Boston, and New Harbor Maine are each represented with friendly welcome and conversation.

It's an odd life.

But it's ours.

And we love it.

Twelve years ago today we opened Meetingbrook Bookshop and Bakery.

Our twelfth year begins.

We are grateful.

Earth, mountains, rivers
Hidden in this nothingness.
In the nothingness
Earth, mountains, rivers revealed.
Spring flowers, winter snows:
There’s no being nor non-being,
Nor denial itself.
- Saisho (15th century)

Someone wanted to buy our icon of Ss.Peter and Paul hanging over the cash register. While I was on the phone with a former inmate living in Southern Maine a volunteer brought it out to me for a price check.

It was not meant to be. There was no price on it; the Printery House person at Conception Abbey said it had no such icon in its inventory and didn't carry it anymore (ours being some ten years old) ; we'd given it to ourselves for our tenth anniversary of the shop; and one of the women kept looking for a lower price than her companion offered.

She said she'd go back home and find it in their catalogue. I wished her luck. I'd been willing to let it go with her. The icon shook the dust off its kissing images, put itself back on the nail in the post along the wall, and attached to itself a "NFS" label, (not for sale).

It's funny how it wanted to stay.

We too.

Seem to.

Want to.

Keep the good company of one another.

Jack Bernard, in the early pages of his book How to Become a Saint, A Beginner's Guide, writes about holiness as being set apart, not for common use. Hmm!

The pause is caused by wondering what it means to be set apart, not for common use.

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

There are places that are intended to be for God alone. We might say that "God alone" is all there is. Nor are we other than all there is. It seems a trick phrasing, especially adding the word 'here': God is all there is here. If so, everything is meant to be holy. Each place and each person is a holy place.

We forget this -- if we've ever even considered this.

To be in the world is to be holy. To be of the world -- is to be of common use.

Which seems just fine -- if being of common use is accompanied by the respect and reverence belonging to what is holy. Sadly, often, common use means abuse. This might be why craftsmen are so particular about who uses their finely cared for tools. In the hands of irreverence, the most lovely things are poorly treated and broken down.

“Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, 'This is my beloved son, the beloved; listen to him!’” (Mark 9:7)

The practice of listening to sounds of a creating God is vital for understanding holiness. Each being is a lovely being. By listening closely to the creating God within and through each being, we begin to come to prayer. God alone is the wholeness of creation and the loveliness of what is here. But this is no hierarchical or separative understanding of God. God alone is the invitation to consider the interweaving loveliness of each in all and all in each.

For years I have prayed some version of the “Jesus Prayer.” The significance isn’t in getting the words just right, and I have felt free to change them. I used to put a lot of thought into formulating the words so they fit my thoughts and feelings. The basic form of the Jesus Prayer is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” At times when I really felt like a sinner, this felt quite natural.

At other times, it seemed a little awkward. I would think, “Surely it would be more pleasing to God if I took a more upbeat posture toward him. After all, I am his beloved child. Does he want me to always sound like a groveling sinner?” My prayer would follow this thought process until I came to recognize that my prayer was no prayer at all. It was nothing but my own musings about myself and to myself.

I am now learning to stop, and in learning to stop, I am learning to pray. Stopping means stopping my own thinking, reasoning, and evaluating for a time. I still think, reason, and evaluate, but I am learning to stop it at times in order to simply be in the presence of God. I am astonished at the questions I don’t need to ask and the points I don’t need to consider when I am consciously in the presence of God.

The point I am trying to make here is that it is important to take up some prescribed forms of prayer and enter into them without having to invent everything for ourselves. The notion that prayer has to be arranged to personally and individually fit us is just another manifestation of our incessant drive to fit the universe to ourselves. The attempt to conform the universe to ourselves is precisely what we must stop in order to pray.
(--from IN ORDER TO LISTEN, article originally written by Jack Bernard in January of 2001 for Church of the Sojourners)

In contemporary culture there is a strong (and important) emphasis on finding, communicating, and exploring individual opinions. It's how we learn. When people's points of view are not heard, some form of tyranny or suppression is afoot. However difficult or tedious it might be to suffer through the wide variety of personally held points of view, it is a valuable practice. If, of course, someone is wed to only their view and show no hope of entering genuine exploration of differing views -- the difficulty and tedium become more acute.

I often miss the point.

In an older metaphor, missing the mark or missing the point or missing the goal was called "hatah" (in Hebrew) or, sin.

(I hear Echhart Tolle's voice asking "What's the point?" when I think of this matter). Perhaps there's more to this question "What's the point?" than mere confusion or frustration encountered in daily life or monkey mind.

What is the point?

(If "God" is the ultimate "What is" -- or perhaps, if God is what is wholeness, and this alone -- we are not excluded from this entirety.

The German word "gestalt" is found defined in Merriam-Webster as:

"...a structure, configuration, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts."

Wholeness is not derivative. Nothing is left out; nothing added together. Wholeness is wholeness in the same way religious language asserts "God is God."

Is there an integral compass of authentic spiritual practice? Or are we experiencing 360 directions (or 10,000 doors) -- each his own formula, each her own expression -- with no integrating interconnective path back to union or communion?

The "point" here is that the compass of authentic spiritual practice, no matter which particular direction the indicator, is within itself not other than the wholeness of what is ground and "one-turning" (i.e. uni-verse) wherein each-in-all and all-in-each dwells as it is with no exclusion.

The point is not only the goal seen at the circumference of the compass dial. The "point" is not only a centripetal or centrifugal absolute center to the compass of spiritual vision. The "point" is "not only".

"Not only" means not only. The "point" is that which is in and of itself is the all encompassing.

The sorrow is a black and white cat just killed a Rosy Breasted Grosbeak at barn door.

The sorrow is Iraq:

BAGHDAD, June 28 — Twenty decapitated bodies were found today in a predominantly Sunni village southeast of Baghdad, Iraqi police said.

The grisly discovery was made on a bloody day across Iraq. A car bomb killed 25 people and wounded 40 others in a busy intersection in the mostly Shiite Bayaa district in Baghdad today. And the casualty count from an attack on Wednesday in Kadhimiya, another Shiite neighborhood, rose to 10 dead and 17 wounded.

In Basra, a roadside bomb killed three British soldiers and wounded another, Reuters reported.
(-- from The New York Times)

We miss the point.

Across the yard, a plaintive call for family, friend, and mate echoes in this sorrow.

Brings tears.

Often it's a difficulty of translation.

The Art of Peace begins with you.
Work on yourself and your
Appointed task in the Art of Peace.
Everyone has a spirit that
Can be refined, a body that
Can be trained in some manner,
A suitable path to follow.
You are here for no other purpose than
To realize your inner divinity and
Manifest your innate enlightenment.
Foster peace in your own life and
Then apply the Art to all that you encounter.
- Morehei Ueshiba

Take the old definition from the Baltimore Catechism, re-translated:
Q: Why did God's creation bring us about?
A: God's creation brings us about to know one another, to love one another, and to serve one another in this world of time and human being, and to be happy with one another in God for the immediacy and eternity of all life of love itself.

Be angry if you must, but do not sin: do not let your anger outlast the sunset: do not give the Devil his chance.
(--Ephesians 4:26-27, Compline reading, Wednesday)

God views the individual within the whole.
Humankind might someday come to view God as the whole.

The devil tells the individual he is all that counts.
God's voice says each individual within the whole counts.

When anger over egoistic exclusion threatens to break the whole into self-serving parts, be angry. Then, let it go.

Pray with whole heart, with whole mind, and with whole being -- pray that all shall be well. Christ serves well. Will we serve all with Christ?

Will all be well?

It will.

Be.

Wholly.

Well.

The old black and white Border Collie stands a long while looking up the trail to meditation cabin, then, slowly, eases himself down at foot of path just to the left of hanging bird feeder. It's a hot afternoon. I look out at him frequently. He's apt to wander toward the road these days -- his compass twirling ways unfamiliar.

Below the cliff, riding in a boat,
I think of climbing up.
The mountain temple is silent.
It seems to have no monks.
A falling star – a single dot
It is a beam of lamplight
From the Kannon Hall above.
- Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672)

Walking the four miles to town earlier two dogs raced down their driveway snarling and barking as I went by on the other side of Hosmer Pond Road. They came half way across at me as I held up one hand and loudly shouted "STOP! NO! NO!" Had they not, had they not turned when they did, had the white pick-up truck not been a wee slow honking at their teeth, and had their master not risen from doldrums to call to them just as it was over -- my hand reaching back to folded steel in black case on belt. But all the 'nots' combined to keep walking with beads in hand and prayer in heart.

But we, Lord, are made the least of all nations.
Today we are brought low over all the earth
on account of our sins.

Today there is no prince
no prophet, no leader,
no holocaust, no sacrifice.
No offering, no incense,
no first-fruits offered to you
– no way to obtain your mercy.

But in our contrite souls,
in a spirit of humility,
accept us, Lord.
(--from Daniel 3)

I get mail from friend two decades quiet hoping the letter I wrote to a man I worry about results in fishing and conversation in the same waters.

I am satisfied with loft in cabin for morning sitting and then psalms. Solitude is a friendly silence. Red squirrel worried about me. No, today you eat!

Two poems

On a bridge over the Pace Freeway

a junkie held a knife to my throat

and said: your coat has many pockets.

I took it off very slowly,

the cars passing under me.

I was sure nothing could go wrong

while I was trying to help.

His voice was slurred

as if by great distance

but the blade was steady.

I began telling him. a story:

how I'd hitchhiked from Pueblo to Cheyenne

looking for work, and found a job

painting the white lines in the road.

I could feel the prick of the blade

against my adam's apple. I thought:

if you're telling this story,

you must live through it.

Somewhere there was a cricket.

The bridge rocked constantly.

He held the jacket between his legs,

extracted the billfold with one hand,

counted the money with a sidelong glance.

He nodded, as if there were a sum

I owed him, and moved back a step

to let me pass. Then I feared him:

I was no longer entirely at his mercy.

I waited. Traffic passed.

There were snatches of music

and voices telling the news.

I said I was waiting for a friend

who was to meet me at dawn.

He answered: there is no one,

but he'd begun to back away

with the coat under his arm,

ten steps between us, twenty,

and I was on the other side:

a street of shops that seemed miniature,

the lamps still lit though it was daylight.

In front of a shuttered grocery

someone had left hampers of milk and bread.

The silence was absolute.

On the grate of a cantina

there were signs for last year's dances.

The gaunt dogs, that; sniffed as they pleased,

flinched when they saw me, then caught my scent

and knew I had no power to hurt.

I walked through them as if on stilts.

I came to a phone and dialed a number.

There was a holding voice and music.

Another number: another voice, music.

I had no more change. I looked behind me.

I walked quickly past tiny houses.

I smelled toast and heard children arguing.

A sprinkler winced, despite the drought.

I could hear the clink of a tame dog '

moving on a chain, clearing its throat to bark.

I broke into a run. Already

I could hear the hum of the next huge road.

Immense Fires and Not Yet Summer

The face responsible for opinions

hasn't slept in three days,

the mouth in charge of facts

has begun to stutter.

The cloud that hides that city

is radiant and lights the room

where we watch, legs dangling

on the edge of an unmade bed.

I turn to tell you

"I foresaw this, so did you,

seeing this coming made us a couple."

Your finger is on your lips.

Your eyes are rapt, flares in reflection

cross your cheek like moods.

On the screen the armored personnel carriers

have arrived, already the shots sound

a split-second delayed, as if on a separate tape.

(-- Poem by D. Nurkse in The American Poetry Review, July 1995. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3692/is_199507/ai_n8719029/pg_1)

Seeing this time coming makes us a couple. You and me. We've tried to be clear about what we see. But it all passes so slowly there's no grasping it. We have to live it through, without celluloid, without digital enhancement, without commentary.

We are our lives.

Every inch, every instant of it.

It is taken away by milliseconds and fabric edges peeling each strand from the fray.

I am not the name I've answered to all these years.

The old dog is...still...looking up the path...a single dot.

Seen from a small, irretrievable, not.

We need a new view.

The mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson, speaks to Amy Goodman about his feeling that George Bush and Dick Cheney should be impeached. He is ashamed of his Democratic Party for taking impeachment off the table. He says someone down the road has to know that the American people deeply felt at the time that the practices and tactics of this administration were wrong and dangerous.

We've got to end this war.

First, we've got to change the language used by this administration to describe the war. Glenn Greenwald in his book, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, writes:

Because the threat posed by The Evil Terrorists is so grave, maximizing protections against it is the paramount, overriding goal. No other value competes with that objective, nor can any other value limit our efforts to protect ourselves against The Terrorists.

That is the essence of virtually every argument Bush supporters make regarding terrorism. No matter what objection is raised to the never-ending expansions of executive power, no matter what competing values are touted (due process, the rule of law, the principles our country embodies, how we are perceived around the world), the response will always be that The Terrorists are waging war against us and our overarching priority — one that overrides all others — is to protect ourselves, to triumph over Evil. By definition, then, there can never be any good reason to oppose vesting powers in the government to protect us from The Terrorists because that goal outweighs all others.

But our entire system of government, from its inception, has been based upon a very different calculus — that is, that many things matter besides merely protecting ourselves against threats, and consequently, we are willing to accept risks, even potentially fatal ones, in order to secure those other values. From its founding, America has rejected the worldview of prioritizing physical safety above all else, as such a mentality leads to an impoverished and empty civic life. The premise of America is and always has been that imposing limitations on government power is necessary to secure liberty and avoid tyranny even if it means accepting an increased risk of death as a result. That is the foundational American value.

It is this courageous demand for core liberties even if such liberties provide less than maximum protection from physical risks that has made America bold, brave, and free. Societies driven exclusively or primarily by a fear of avoiding Evil, minimizing risks, and seeking above all else that our government “protects” us are not free. That is a path that inevitably leads to authoritarianism — an increasingly strong and empowered leader in whom the citizens vest ever-increasing faith and power in exchange for promises of safety. That is most assuredly not the historical ethos of the United States.
(--Glenn Greenwald, in A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency.)

One commentator adds to Greenwald:
No, it is not. Greenwald has written a book that finally gets to the meat of the matter and addresses the underlying error that has led inexorably to all the errors that followed. The Bush administration took a simplistic, Manichean, “good vs evil” approach to the threat of Islamic terrorism, and in that one act handed them a victory. One of the great advances of our civilization is the recognition that the line between good and evil is not between one group and another group; the line between good and evil lies inside every human being. All it took was a handful of religious fanatics with a willingness to commit suicide to make an awful lot of Americans forget that.
(--Digby, blogger at http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/06/24/fdl-book-salon-welcomes-glenn-greenwald/#more-9918)

While politicians bob and weave through sensitive deliberations about their personal political careers, there is a massive problem they are reluctant to address -- self-deception.

When any individual refuses to face the universal inner tension of good/evil at core of each one of us, there is a blindness that occurs. In that blindness there also occurs a projection outward of resentment and hatred of that part of each one of us that we refuse to acknowledge as us. This projection hurls anger and righteous revenge on any object, entity, or person made into the opposite, the enemy, the "other."

The simplistic and self-deceiving language used by Messrs Bush and Cheney has occasioned a time in the history of America that will take its place as one of the ugliest times. We have tortured the innocent, killed irresponsibly, spied on our own, denied legal rights, punished dissenters, invaded a sovereign country illegally for false reasons, kept secret and hidden matters vital to oversight by duly legislated and elected American officials, deceptively presented erroneous data to international regulating bodies used to justify our bellicose actions, and, unambiguously sullied the reputation and good will of the United States all across the globe.

These and additional actions, taken in what appears to be febrile fixation with unregulated and uncontained power isolated in the Executive Branch, have all the earmarks of a coup d'etat done in plain sight with seeming complicity of the American public.

Han shan reminds us of an alternative way to cool the flames of anger in the face of such combustible evidence:

As for me, I delight
In the everyday Way,
Among mist-wrapped vines
And rocky caves.
Here in the wilderness
I am completely free,
With my friends,
The white clouds,
Idling forever.
There are roads,
But they do not reach the world;
Since I am mindless,
Who can rouse my thoughts?
On a bed of stone I sit,
Alone in the night,
While the round moon
Climbs up Cold Mountain.
- Han shan ( 8th century)

He's right, of course. That doesn't diminish the feelings of impotence and upset. Injustices continue to be promulgated in my name. It causes profound discomfort and illness of spirit.

There are many who claim when there's a mean, dangerous, and harmful presence outside your door the best strategy is to hunker down in a closet deep in the unused section of your dwelling. They might be right. Perhaps it's time to contemplate my own good/evil in the quiet suffering of solitude. When that is done, these people will still have to be confronted. But the possibility exists that I will no longer do what they are doing, will no longer demonize them and shout at the wind.

I will have to face the person I am. I will have to face who you are. I will have to face God. And God is, as you know, not other than what God is in you and me.

No blaming God. No blaming you. No blaming me.

Choices

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don't cut that one.
I don't cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

for Drago Stambuk (--Poem: "Choices" by Tess Gallagher, from Dear Ghosts. Graywolf Press, 2006.)

Look up!

Mountain wisdom and sobriety give pause. There's more there than meets the eye.

Nests proliferate everywhere unseen and simply given to offspring learning to breathe and opening eyes to light that eases darkness from sky perduring the circular yin/yang, the ebb and flow of awareness through ignorance to consciousness itself.

Consciousness as itself.

We are not desolate.

Something new.

Comes to be.

There.

And here.

With you.

With me.

Coming.

To.

See?

How strange to have depiction of a capital punishment as primary symbol in prominent view! Something about the crucifix over the alter at St Francis of Assisi Church in Belfast this morning caught my attention. Why is that corpus on the cross?

Only one who bursts with
Enthusiasm do I instruct;
Only one who bubbles with
Excitement do I enlighten.
If I hold up one corner
And you do not come back
To me with the other three,
I do not continue the lesson.
- Confucius

I can barely find one corner, much less lift it and bring it back. In fact, these days, I am hiding lost under a pebble on which a corner of some four-square fabric finds itself thrown. Or, maybe, some revelation is at hand -- similar to the one Yeats wondered about. What that might be, I don't know.

"All that matters is how we go through this life -- completely free of ulterior motives, letting God have his way, obeying what happens as a manifestation of his will. If you don't try to set things up, that's what you'll see."

"A moment comes when because of the simple daily life, you reach a point where you have to say you're willing to let the real person live this life and the 'show' person has to go. It's painful. You have to be willing to say, 'I'm weak and vulnerable.' And you realize that everyone is going to see you like that. You're going to stand naked. But you also know as sure as you exist that these guys will accept you as you are -- real weak, vulnerable."
(--Trappist monk Dan to visiting journalist Frank, p.154, in Voices of Silence, Lives of the Trappists Today, by Frank Bianco)

The body is there because it is the instant of transition when life/death and the mystery of transformation/transcendence is occurring right there and then.

The director of the film Etre et Avoir (2002) says in an interview that to grow up is to learn to leave things behind, to go on without them.

But with the image of this man Jesus on the cross, it is the instant of non-differentiation. He is one and the other -- alive and dead and gone beyond. To say "It is finished; It is completed" and go on, letting go, leaving the once-was for the to-be-as-is becomes the most difficult learning experience we are ever invited into.

It's not a show. It's us. Our life.

It's a go.

Going.

Beyond.

Completely.

Awake(?)

(Good luck!)

Letter to Vice President Richard Cheney
23 June 2007

Mr Vice President,

Happy summer! I hope you get a chance to rest and refresh yourself.

I write to say that I am not happy with so much about the way the important office of Vice President is being conducted.

I fear you and your staff are, wittingly or unwittingly, gutting the traditional rule of law, constitutional separation of powers, international agreements of conduct in times of war, and the moral integrity of the United States -- both within the country and across the world. It concerns me that so much negativity is generated from the Executive Branch (and whatever branch of government the Vice Presidency will ultimately fall under).

There is a vast countryside of diverse people in this great land who wish you and your colleagues would just stop the secrecy, hidden government, and fear tactics -- and open the government to just and responsible accountability with transparency. As you remember from your youth, we as a people long for justice, peace, and truth. These longings are not covert. They seek open engagement.

I invite you to Maine to sit and converse about the vital matters of ethics and morals, personal and governmental. It's what we do nightly at the shop -- converse about vital spiritual and personal matters

I assume you have good reasons for your agenda. It might be helpful to converse your point of view alongside differing points of view. I know how impossible the public glare makes authentic conversation. We are a small space, and confidentiality is respected. (Unless someone's well-being is threatened -- and then there has to be public disclosure). We will keep in focus the well-being of one another, the country, and the world at large. God help us! (Of course we'll invite God-Consciousness to dwell among us.)

The coffee and tea are always on the house at our bookshop.

I wish you good health and an honorable completion of your office.

Let us know when you'll be able to visit. Saskia will bake a delicious torte for us all.

Sincerely,
Bill Halpin
Meetingbrook Bookshop and Bakery
Camden, Maine

32 Years Ago


Before he died, he lived.

Afterwards, we saw him

No more.

His body, yes. But not him.

He'd gone inside.

My

Father.

We're out here.


(--Poem by wfh, 22june07)

We must, humbly, protest. War cannot be seen. In the same way, we cannot be seen. Only external acts and their results can be seen. War is as hidden and unknowable as is the self it attempts to satisfy.

Somewhere deeper than war and self is our truest way of being in the world. That way, too, is difficult to arrive at. Much dangerous territory must be crossed. Still, we must cross.

In contrast to Heidegger and Dogen, Derrida agrees that death can be characterized by mineness in the sense that it is irreplaceable. Although it is true that no one can die for another person, Derrida reinterprets "my death" to mean the death of the other in me.
(p.170 in ch 7, Time and Death, from Zen And The Art Of Postmodern Philosophy, two paths of liberation from the representational mode of thinking, by Carl Olson, State University of New York Press, c.2000)

There's a koanic reading to the phrase, "the death of the other in me." To "die on the cross" takes on a new meaning.

"...I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be taken over by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that, is the extent to which I become accepted by the other, and to that extent I can accept myself."
(--James Nachtwey, photographer, in War photographer, A Film By Christian Frei, 2001)

We need help seeing our deepest self through the self that greedily desires, hates, and thereby slobbers egoistic drivel all over others and on the world stage. War needs to be seen as a terrible ugliness covered by make-up of patriotic nationalism, righteous ethnicity, super-power pretense, and religious exclusivity.

In the world, church (real gathering, not mere membership) is attempting to come into being. It is mostly not-yet. Just as Nachtwey holds that photographing war is protest against war, church is protest against the triumphant solipsism of certitude and arrogance found in propagandist human discourse and delusional quests for power.

Church
As a gathered people, we want to demonstrate that, in Christ, people can live together in genuine love and peace.

We believe God intends Christians to live out the pursuit of holiness not just individually but with a people, with a local church. And we believe that the mission of the church is to be the church for the world.
From the beginning of time, human beings have built walls against each other. We have built these walls with many things, including violence, resentment, feelings of superiority, emotional isolation, racism and economic oppression. The church is called to let God tear these walls down among his people by experiencing his love together and as a body trusting him. The walls have come down so rarely in human history that we and the world need to see that reconciliation and love among people are possible. Our calling is to be a demonstration plot where the world can see God’s love at work.

To put it in Jack Bernard’s words, our mission is to “learn to live together in genuine peace and love, and let others in on it.” God has already given us his peace and love; our task is to live into that reality and to invite others in.
We know we will often fail at this task, but we will try to take our sin and failure as an opportunity to renew our trust in God’s faithfulness and grace. We are clear that on our own we will never be a demonstration of anything good. That will only happen as the Holy Spirit acts through us as we seek him in our weakness, especially in prayer and studying his word.
(--from Our Values, The Church of the Sojourners, a live-together church community, San Francisco, at http://www.churchofthesojourners.org/node/13)

There is talk of a "new monasticism" arising. If so, then the work of James Nachtway serves as precursor, as witnessing agent whose purpose is to unblinkingly see what is taking place with accuracy and fidelity.

The Twelve Marks of a New Monasticism

Moved by God’s Spirit in this time called America to assemble at St. Johns Baptist Church in Durham, NC, we wish to acknowledge a movement of radical rebirth, grounded in God’s love and drawing on the rich tradition of Christian practices that have long formed disciples in the simple Way of Christ. This contemporary school for conversion which we have called a “new monasticism,” is producing a grassroots ecumenism and a prophetic witness within the North American church which is diverse in form, but characterized by the following marks:

1) Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire.

2) Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.

3) Hospitality to the stranger

4) Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities
combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation.

5) Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church.

6) Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the
community along the lines of the old novitiate.

7) Nurturing common life among members of intentional community.

8) Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children.

9) Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life.

10) Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economies.

11) Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18.

12) Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.

May God give us grace by the power of the Holy Spirit to discern rules for living that will help us embody these marks in our local contexts as signs of Christ’s kingdom for the sake of God’s world.
(Rutba House Community, Durham NC, http://www.newmonasticism.org/12marks/index.html)

I notice my feet have taken a step away from the daily fare of madness masquerading as reasonable action or speculative thought, even political ideology.

People who study Buddhism
Should seek real, true perception
And understanding for now.
If you attain real, true perception
And understanding,
Birth and death don’t affect you;
You are free to go or stay.
You needn’t seek wonders,
For wonders come of themselves.
- Linji (d. 867)

Suffering and cruelty do affect us. They are complicated and exacting ways of conquest.

Something simpler longs to inhabit our being.

It starts with watchful presence.

Moves through selfish ambition.

Crosses.

Arrives at empty realization.

Feels kinship companioning.

Gathers engaged compassion.

Is what church could be.

What sangha could be.

Last night of spring.

My teacher said to me,
“The treasure house
within you contains everything,
and you are free to use it.
You don’t need to seek outside.”
- Dazhu (487–593)

Some light sadness at things failed at.

Things left undone.

A foundering.

What implications if we are alone with What Is Alone?

A buddha is one who does not seek.
In seeking this, you turn away from it.
The principle is the principle of
Nonseeking; when you seek it,
You lose it.
If you cling to nonstriving,
This is the same as striving.
Thus the Diamond Cutter Scripture
Says, “Do not grasp truth,
do not grasp untruth,
and do not grasp that
which is not untrue.”
It also says, “The truth
that the buddhas find has no
reality or unreality.”
- Pai-chang (720-814)

Is it the case that beneath the stories we tell to buoy our frightened mind there is a deep and radical emptiness through which we will not fall, but within which peace is encountered as nothing other than one's existence itself? Or do we imagine the Holy One as sitting in a chair with teacup and cookie plate on table with flowery cover?

The practice of solitude entails remaining well within yourself while understanding the emptiness of any separate reality other (or no other) than the Wholly Oneself.

In Catholic calendar it is the feast of Romuald. He saw something that he awkwardly yet effectively attempted to show to others.

St Romuald (c.951 - 1027)
He joined a Benedictine monastery but made himself unpopular there by trying to get the lax monks to mend their ways and so, with the permission of his abbot, became a wandering hermit. In a constant fight against the degenerate monasteries of the day, he founded hermitages and monasteries where a life of prayerful solitude could be truly lived. The monastery at Camaldoli, which he founded and where he remained as abbot for a number of years, became the first house of an order of hermits which still exists. But Romuald took to his wanderings once more, and died in a monastery he himself had founded at Val di Castro – as he wished, alone in his cell.
http://www.universalis.com/

It sounds like a trick phrase, "alone in his cell." Are we not alone in our cells?

It's the birthday of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). I like the idea that "despair, [and...] disillusion, are, [...] no illustration of personal weakness."

Mathematician, physicist, and theologian, inventor of the first digital calculator, who is often thought of as the ideal of classic French prose. Pascal lived in the time when Copernicus' discovery - that the earth moves round the sun - had made fallen human beings insignificant factors in the new order of the world. Facing the immensity of the universe, Pascal felt horror - "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." For him the world seemed empty of ultimate meaning or significance without Christianity, which he defended against the assaults of freethinkers. While Montaigne lived at ease with skepticism, Pascal was tormented by religious doubt, and took the question Why are we here? with the utmost seriousness, revealing his thoughts in his most famous book, the posthumous PENSÉES.

"Pascal's disillusioned analysis of human bondage is sometimes interpreted to mean that Pascal was really and finally an unbeliever, who, in his despair, was incapable of enduring reality and enjoying the heroic satisfaction of the free man's worship of nothing. His despair, his disillusion, are, however, no illustration of personal weakness; they are perfectly objective, because they are essential moments in the progress of the intellectual soul; and for the type of Pascal they are the analogue of the drought, the dark night, which is an essential stage in the progress of the Christian mystic." (T.S. Eliot in Selected Essays, 1960)

"Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling," Pascal said, "do not understand the process of reasoning, for they would understand at first sight and are not used to seek for principles. And others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles, do not at all understand matters of feeling, seeking principles and being unable to see at a glance." But Pascal's belief in God was based on personal religious experience - he saw that reason cannot decide the question of God's existence, but he could appeal to it. In Pensées Pascal wrote: "Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is."
(--from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bpascal.htm)

Will we evolve in awareness that we will be able "to see at a glance"? To see at a glance is to have no interference blocking what is there to see.

Solitude can help. Solitude invites what is there to see.

Some men in prison celebrate another kind of solitude today. It is "Juneteenth."

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.

Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another, is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another, is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. All or none of them could be true. For whatever the reason, conditions in Texas remained status quo well beyond what was statutory.
(from History of Juneteenth, http://www.juneteenth.com/history.htm)

There are so many layers of solitude, many layers of community within solitude. We are comforted, you might say, by the gift and ability to see at a glance.

"But, if this part of our history could be told in such a way that those chains of the past, those shackles that physically bound us together against our wills could, in the telling, become spiritual links that willingly bind us together now and into the future - then that painful Middle Passage could become, ironically, a positive connecting line to all of us whether living inside or outside the continent of Africa..."
Tom Feelings, in http://www.juneteenth.com/aboutjuneteenth.htm

We ask -- What implications if we are alone with What Is Alone?

We answer -- We are solid, in solidarity, with everyone. Everyone's experience is my (our) experience. God is not absent. God is presence itself -- everywhere at once. How is it God is so denied, even by, (some say, especially by) so-called believers?

Belief, emptied of content, is authentic affirmation -- is radical faith.

Solitude invites us to enter this emptiness.

Where all is.

Finally.

Wholly.

Alone.

We.

Silence positions the body between points of view held and spoken -- a presence unbidden. Most conversations never take place. Serial speaking predominates.

The urge to make philosophy into Philosophy is to make it the search for some final vocabulary, which can somehow be known in advance to be the common core, the truth of, all the other vocabularies which might be advanced in its place. This is the urge which the pragmatist thinks should be repressed, and which a post-Philosophical culture would have succeeded in repressing.

The most powerful reason for thinking that no such culture is possible is that seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places, constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally humiliating. Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognise it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.” This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre’s remark:

Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are.

This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together -- the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.

A post-philosophical culture, then, would be one in which men and women felt themselves alone, merely finite, with no links to something Beyond. On the pragmatist’s account, position was only a halfway stage in the development of such a culture -- the progress toward, as Sartre puts it, doing without God.
(--from 5. A Post-Philosophical Culture, in Consequences of Pragmatism, Essays 1972-1980, by Richard Rorty; published by the University of Minnesota Press, 1982.)

After two weeks in a position of unbidden presence, the requisite difficulty arises returning to talk that passes time. I concede the neighborliness of talking about what has taken place. Still, silence makes extraneous the need for explanation or persuasion. Presence insinuates itself within silence the same way birds precede dusk with clear and simple song.

In a recent book, To Achieve Our Country, Richard Rorty reasserts the traditional idea that the United States has the unique potential of coming closer than any other nation to the creation of a moral society, one in which "liberty and justice for all" becomes a reality. But he departs from the traditional belief that we have this unique destiny because of our special relationship to God. Instead, he bases his optimistic belief on a political ethos that "has no room for obedience to a non-human authority" but only to "freely achieved consensus among human beings."

Rorty assumes that moral values are created by human beings out of our experience and therefore have no need of any foundation in some entity or force that transcends our needs, desires, and hopes.
(--from, Does American Democracy Need God? - book by Richard Rorty, raises the question of America's belief in, and need for, God -- in Humanist, July, 1999, by Lawrence Hyman)

To say nothing of God. Of which, or, of whom nothing need be said.

I mistrust myself casual benedictions commending Gods blessing on someone. (I knew a man for whom such a salutation sometimes sounded like telling someone to go f**k themselves. His rote dismissal was not believable.) Nor is, I submit, God believable. I suspect God is merely present. In that presence, God is the breath between words, an invitation to converse with authentic, albeit reluctant, speech.

All truth is conversation.

This is spoken; that is responded.

And, for now, we hold this and that with reverent attention.

Until next we pause between inhalation and exhalation.

Where presence perdures.

The Syrian-born priest ended his words with -- "Love forgives."

I left. My gratitude for these words was a berry scone and coffee at Chase's Daily, kissing the waitress Kristen who served the surrogate eucherist.

Cease practice based
On intellectual understanding,
Pursuing words and
Following after speech.
Learn the backward
Step that turns
Your light inward
To illuminate within.
Body and mind of themselves
Will drop away
And your original face will be manifest.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

She'd sung last night at an Italian restaurant, forgot some lyrics, and was tired. She was sardonically happy to be in Maine, "Where," she said, "careers come to die."

It is the man who is forgiven little who shows little love.’ Then he said to her, ‘Your sins are forgiven’. Those who were with him at table began to say to themselves, ‘Who is this man, that he even forgives sins?’ But he said to the woman, ‘Your faith has saved you; go in peace’.
(--from Luke 7:36 - 8:3)

Faith is love spelled longer. Just as hope is faith spelled shorter.

Driving through upper Searsmont and Liberty I listen to Jane put the finishing touches on her morning radio show on WERU. Judy Collins is singing about being promised to go boating on the Seine, and watching the Paris sun set in her father's eyes.

Later the dyslexic success talking on New Dimensions is saying that we are all of what human can be; we're to acknowledge all of it. I wonder about finding balance in the places where wholeness finds itself in us -- where nothing is excluded, and each fact is at home with us, even as we pack our bags with each act of leaving home.

I end two weeks at harbour room on solitary retreat.

LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered;
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.
(--written by James W. John­son, 1899. Found at The Cyber Hymnal)

What else could we pray for but to be -- True to our God, true to our native land -- eh?

We have to do this alone.

No matter who is near us.

To be true to 'this' is a solitary act.

To be true to 'that' is a solitary fact.

Even forgetting lyrics, we still sing.

Love forgives.