What's changed?

A small room. Winter. Solitude. Sunday night solitude. Frank Sinatra songs of loneliness solitude first listened to fifty years ago.

But I'm not lonely. Not really. (Earlier woman pronounced 'real' as 're-al' -- as if the real is the 'thing or matter of God.')

A green pine is in the east garden,
But the many grasses obscure it.
A frost wipes out all the other species,
And then I see its magnificent tall branches.
In a forest people do not notice it, but
Standing alone, it is a miracle.
I hang a jug of wine on a cold branch;
Then stand back, and look again and again.
My life spins with dreams and illusions.
Why then be fastened to the world?
- T’ao Ch’ien

Morning snow group with Course in Miracles. Then breakfast at Mariners. Begin prelude to final push to course syllabi information.

Walk Bayview with ski poles listening to Grace Paley stories under full moon on fresh snow while elsewhere sitting practice at Ragged Mountain.

Afghanistan Frontline The War Briefing (30Dec2008) readying for sleep.

Nothing changes.

At all.

Note: The lovely snow! The bookshop/bakery will be closed today, Sunday, so as to do other necessary work.

We seem not to want a radical equality. We settle for feint gratitude toward our dominators. Who, in turn, feed off our false submission.

It's a matter of mind. Mind which must somersault. To return to itself.

People ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain – the road doesn’t go through
By summer the ice still hasn’t melted
Sunrise is a blur beyond the fog
Imitating me – how can you get here
My heart and yours aren’t the same
If your heart was like mine
You’d return to the very center
- Han-shan

Maybe it's simpler than begging something from someone. Maybe radical equality is radical emptiness in the Buddhist sense. Interconnected and at root of a piece, we have only to remember origin to retrieve grace.

Politically, Rancière favors the concept of equality. "Politics exists when the figure of a specific subject is constituted, a supernumerary subject in relation to the calculated number of groups, places, and functions in a society" (p. 51). Translated into layman’s English, Rancière is saying that politics is the struggle of an unrecognized party for equal recognition in the established order. Esthetics is bound up in this battle, Rancière argues, because the battle takes place over the image of society -- what it is permissible to say or to show.
(--from, RANCIÈRE, FOR DUMMIES, by Ben Davis, review of Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 116 pp., Continuum, 2006)
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/books/davis/davis8-17-06.asp

A beautiful thing is beautiful of itself.

Recognition.

Equally.

Shown.

Said.

It's no mystery what life will be for us after death. It will be how we live now. If we want to know about there, look here. What thoughts, acts, feelings, behaviors we value and cultivate now, we see a prelude of life then.

Life is, after all, analogous.

Sitting by a teapot in a room bathed with pure breezes and moonbeams, one can read the mind of Heaven in every thing. Walking along a running brook in the clouded mountain, one can observe the mysteries of Tao in every moment.
- Hung Ying-ming 1596

In Protective Custody pod early today one of the men spoke of how we use only (at best) 15% of brain consciousness potential. What of the remaining 85%?

Our calculative knowledge is limited to senses, emotions, and mind.

Is the soul's sphere of influence the realm beyond any knowing?

There's not much we know or can know.

Knowledge belongs to mind and body.

Soul, on the other hand, doesn't know anything -- not now, not then, not ever.

Soul is the thing itself dwelling as itself with/in The Itself.

85%!

Beyond perception. Unknown. A co-inhabited cosmotheandric space.

Soul co-originates no other as nothing to be known.

Three conversations; ten inmates; two of us.

Heaven enough for today.

We asked a man for a house to serve retreat, respite, and hospitality.

He did not see a way to give it to us.

This arrival at zero is love.

Anyone who fails to love can never have known God,
because God is love.
(from 1John4:7-10)

We asked the Wholly Dawning One for guidance. Would this vision take form now?

There was no discernible response but for the view from here the viewing eyes and what is to be seen interviewing silence.

And that too is love.

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
(--Soren Kierkegaard)

Everything, even the horror of war in Middle East, has to pass through love.

There is no place else to go. No place, as Rilke says, that does not see you.

Itself is all we are.

To find oneself, as itself -- in zero glance of silence -- is nothing else if not itself love.

No rising above. In the craft of Acting, it's better not to rise above someone on stage with you. The audience will always sympathize with the one risen above. Speak to, not down to.

Snow, falling, seeks low ground. Except over the ocean. Silent emptiness says -- Look forward to the next life.

Snow obstructs my brushwood
Door with me inside alone
One by one coral branches
Break in winter woods.
In the light of dawn
Mountain green is gone
If the plums have finished
Blooming I for one can’t tell
- Han-shan Te-ch’ing (1546-1623)

Silver tone at dusk over water as sleet slices along mountain.

Damnation is a damnable doctrine. That's what irked Darwin. He, and many of us, favors a benevolence of passage to places we cannot fathom.

Snow On The Backs Of Animals

There is a peacefulness
when snow falls like this, over everything,
and keeps on falling, windlessly,
on fence rails and ditches, made level now,
filling the upturned pail in the yard,
wiping the field clear of corn stubble, even
smothering the news and anyone
attempting to reach us.

A man walks out on a night like this
and the darkness weighs down his arms.
He forgets his purpose, stumbles,
gives up whatever it was he wanted
and enters the bodies of his friends,
growing deep and luminous.
(Poem "Snow on the Backs of Animals," by Dan Gerber, Wynn Books, 1986)

Not long ago it seemed an ending was sure to simply end this awareness of next word and next sound and next breath.

Evolution does not replace religion.

Religion tells the story of how we grew into the awareness of how stories tell the emergence of awareness of God evolving within us.

It snows up and down the harbor.

Not rising above, not falling below. 

Only this telling the story.

Note: Snow and sleet, we retreat, we're closed until tomorrow!

Bow?

Wow!

(I couldn't pass that up.)

Bowing is a very serious practice. You should be prepared to bow, even in your last moment. Even though it is impossible to get rid of our self-centered desires, we have to do it. Our true nature wants us to. Sometimes the disciple bows to the master, sometimes the master bows to the disciple. A master who cannot bow to his disciple cannot bow to the Buddha. Sometimes the master and disciple bow together to the Buddha. Sometimes we may bow to cats and dogs.
- Shunryu Suzuki (1904-1971)

A man I know gave me a knife today. A chance meeting at Good Will. An invitation. Coffee at his home. Words of distress. He brings knife. He wanted me to leave with it. It had begun to play with his wrist. He wanted that game over. He was arranging help with professionals who know this crisis. He says he trusts in prayer. We part in promise of that trust.

Day by day we bless you, Lord: we praise you for ever and for ever.
Of your goodness, Lord, keep us without sin for today.
Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy on us.
Let your pity, Lord, be upon us, as much as we trust in you.
In you, Lord, I trust: let me never be put to shame.
(--from Te Deum, on Feast of the Epiphany)

Love made visible also has a sound. It is the sound of our emptiness telling us we are interconnected. We feel one another's inner reality.

Those who cannot see or hear are lucky.

I prefer the unlucky.

I bow to them.

We've nothing. Not worthy. As wise visit.

We're fragile gift. Completely worth this manifestation. As wisdom seeks us.

Alzheimer's people and Zen practitioners both lose their mind. One chooses to.

Where do we go when we go out of our mind?

Sunday Morning
by Tom Sexton

Come down and do your crossword. I worry
when you stay in bed. Last night's early frost
killed the sweet peas but not our patch of berries.
Seven across just might be Limberlost.
The morning paper says a man with Alzheimer's
has wandered off to find his long dead wife.
He told an aide he knows just where to find her.
All he has with him is a butter knife.
Hurry down. I want to see you grimace
when you might be stumped. Five down is breath.
The day is quickly turning cold and grim.
Do you remember a Mary Elizabeth?
The raspberries in your white bowl
are bright and firm and very, very cold.
(- Poem, "Sunday Morning" by Tom Sexton, from A Clock with No Hands. Adastra Press, 2007.)

We go no-where.

We forget that.

Being now-here without recollection is a very mixed state of affairs.

When the Buddha was a Bodhisattva

"Bhikkhus [Monks], before my enlightenment, while I was still only an unenlightened Bodhisattva, I too, being myself subject to birth, sought what was also subject to birth; being myself subject to aging, sickness, death, sorrow, and defilement, I sought what was also subject to aging, sickness, death, sorrow and defilement. Then I considered thus: "Why, being myself subject to birth, do I seek what is also subject to birth? Why, being myself subject to aging, sickness, death, sorrow and defilement, do I seek what is also subject to aging, sickness, death, sorrow and defilement? Suppose that, being myself subject to birth, having understood the danger in what is subject to birth, I seek the unborn supreme security from bondage, Nibbana [Nirvana]. Suppose that, being myself subject to aging, sickness, death, sorrow and defilement, having understood the danger in what is subject to aging, sickness, death, sorrow and defilement, I seek the unaging, unailing, deathless, sorrowless, and undefiled supreme security from bondage, Nibbana.'"
(-- from Ariyapariyesana Sutta, in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, trans. by Bhikkhu Bodhi)

Once I was afraid to not know who I am, not know what I am.

Now I don't.

Say hello anyway.

I will.

The ruse went as follows: someone proposed a contest -- who could hit the other person's arm the lightest? The first person, not seeing the trick coming, taps lightly. The other person, in sheer brutal swing, flattens the gullible contestant and walks away laughing, saying "You win!"

Israel plays this game well.

Life’s fortune and misfortune are caused entirely by the mind. Shakymuni said: “A burning desire for gain is a pit of fire, and an indulgence in greed is a sea of suffering. Once our mind is purified, a flame is turned into a pool; and once our mind awakens us from a dream of worldliness, our ship of life is anchored along the shore of the Great Beyond.” Hence, a slight change of the mind can suddenly make a different situation. Should we not be careful?
- Hung Ying-ming 1596

It is Epiphany. It is said God was recognized in the form of a child. The creator becomes the created. A new game is introduced: What would humans do if God tapped their shoulder lightly?

Of course we should be careful.

If you ask for God, you have to be ready to meet God when God shows up.

I pray the slaughter in Gaza stops.

The meaning is clear: no punches!

We ground our lives in our Catholic-Christian contemplative prayer and our Zen Buddhist meditative practice -- as well as the engaged service that flows from both of these practices and traditions. These two are not two for us. Nor are they one. They are each themselves and we visit them as themselves. They are kind to each other. They respect each other. They dwell comfortably in practice and dialogue with each other and with us.

Becoming a Buddha
There is a simple way to become a Buddha: When you refrain from unwholesome action, are not attached to birth and death, and are compassionate toward all sentient beings, respectful to seniors and kind to juniors, not excluding or desiring anything, with no designing thoughts or worries, you will be called a buddha. Do not seek anything else.
(--Zen Master Dogen, Moon in a Dewdrop, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi)

We do not seek anything else other. We daily try try try this practice.

Reading: St. Augustine's Tractates on St. John. The Twin Commandments on Love

The Lord himself came, the Teacher of love, full of love, shortening the word upon the earth, as it was foretold that he would do. He showed that from the two precepts of love depend the whole of the Law and the prophets.
What are these two commandments? Join me, my brethren, in recollecting them. They ought to be thoroughly familiar to you and not just come into your mind when we recite them: they ought never to be blotted out from your hearts. Always and everywhere, bear in mind that you must love God and your neighbour, love "God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and love your neighbour as you would love yourself."
We must always ponder these words, meditate them, hold them in our minds, practise them and bring them to fruition. As far as teaching is concerned, the love of God comes first; but as far as doing is concerned, the love of our neighbour comes first. Whoever sets out to teach you these two commandments of love must not commend your neighbour to you first, and then God, but God first and then your neighbour. (--Augustine)

In front room at dawn practice dog and cat lay nose to nose between two zafus holding stillness atop.

Augustine continues:
You, on the other hand, do not yet see God, but loving your neighbour will bring you that sight. By loving your neighbour you purify your eyes so that they are ready to see God, as John clearly says: "If you do not love your brother, whom you see, how can you love God, whom you do not see?"
You are told “Love God”. If you say to me “Show me whom I should love”, what can I say except what John says? "No man has ever seen God." But you must not think yourself wholly unsuited to seeing God: "God is love, says John, and whoever dwells in love dwells in God." So love whoever is nearest to you and look inside you to see where that love is coming from: thus, as far as you are capable, you will see God.
So start to love your neighbour. "Share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless pauper into your house. Clothe the naked, and do not despise the servants of your kin."
What will you get from doing all this? "Your light will break forth like the dawn." Your light is your God, your dawn, because he will come to you to end the night of this world — he who, himself, neither rises nor sets but is eternal.
By loving your neighbour, by having care for your neighbour, you are travelling on a journey. Where are you journeying, except to the Lord God, whom we must love with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind? We have not yet reached the Lord, but our neighbour is with us already. So support your neighbour, who is travelling with you, so that you may reach him with whom you long to dwell.
(--Augustine, from Office of Readings, Sat 3Jan09) http://www.universalis.com/readings.htm

God and neighbor -- traveling as we do with each: not two, not one -- this is our practice.
This Saturday morning sitting, walking, reading (Lectio Divina), and offering prayer for all our brothers and sisters in union with not two, not one, but three as each in all.

Sipping coffee, opting fo(u)r union, sun slanting into this room full of open space.

We capitulate.

There's a cherry pie baking in oven.

Crown

BY KAY RYAN

Too much rain 
loosens trees. 
In the hills giant oaks 
fall upon their knees. 
You can touch parts 
you have no right to— 
places only birds 
should fly to.
Kay Ryan, “Crown” from Say Uncle. Copyright © 2000

Now it sits on metal counter, cooling.

Too hot to eat before bed.

Tea and English muffin, New Years tradition, following 1st dawn meditation of the year, morning sitting/walking/chanting meditation, taken with zazen Rinzai guest in Wohnkuche ('dwelling-kitchen') this +1 degree F morning, beginning again. We're usually happy to smile and bow greeting and goodbye wordlessly -- but Saskia holds to the tea tradition and we chat about Pennsylvania and Maine practice and laugh at our foolishness.

I’ve left the world far behind,
My robe is covered with moss;
A small bundle of firewood burns,
Brightening the night.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

Bald Mountain sits in morning practice outside my window.

The Kingfisher
by Mary Oliver

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world--so long as you don't mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your
whole life
that doesn't have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the
water
remains water--hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could
believe.
I don't say he's right. Neither
do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the
silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and
easy cry
I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.
(poem, Kingfisher, by Mary Oliver)

We embark to swallow morning Eucharist of silence, word, Rockland Cafe breakfast, walking woods to beach at Birch Point State Park, and sharing bread of companionship.

Start again!

A good anthem.

What new year? Today is Wednesday. Tomorrow, Thursday. Place remains the same. Space continues to extend.

The Dalai Lama's Nobel Prize Lecture

In conclusion, let me share with you a short prayer which gives me great inspiration and determination:

For as long as space endures,
and for as long as living beings remain,
until then may I, too, abide
to dispel the misery of the world.
(--The Dalai Lama, "Nobel Peace Prize Lecture," in The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness, edited by Sidney Piburn)

What place will hermitage be in? What space will practice and service occupy? Questions for an idle mind. So it is mine is.

One, two, three. With so much disparity about, I'm fo(u)r union.

The four seasons don’t ever stop to rest
The years come and the years go
The ten thousand things
Succeed themselves endlessly
But the universe itself does not die or decay
The east is bright and the west is dark
Flowers fall and flowers bloom again
Only the travelers to the Yellow Springs
Go shrouded in mystery and don’t return
- Han-shan

When there is no where to go, where is there to return from?

It's beyond me.

So, I'll sit dawn.

As soon as it and angels arrive!

The Spirit of God surrounds and insinuates itself everywhere.

For this, gratitude!

For this, humble and simple awareness of love!

Replete Isness, this.

The phrase came up during conversation at hermitage. No need for something other, making object, or two. Only the fullness of this as is. Experience isn't as important as the motion of stillness excluding nothing.

We just sit in the midst of this contradiction where, although we aim, we can never perceive hitting the mark. We just sit in the midst of this contradiction that is absolutely ridiculous when we think about it with our small mind. In our zazen, it is precisely at the point where our small, foolish self remains unsatisfied, or completely bewildered, that immeasurable natural life beyond the thoughts of that self functions. It is precisely at the point where we become completely lost that life operates and the power of Buddha is actualized.
- Kosho Uchiyama (1912 -1999) dailyzen.com

Even with eyes closed.

We have to see it first.

What we are doing.

Is the subject.

Of meditation.

Clouds and rain
Shroud the gateless gate;
Frost and snow
Veil the winding road.
With contemplation and
Subtlety of spirit
We discover Tao
And the secret of the Way
Grows within us.
- Loy Ching-Yuen (1873-1960)

Practice this evening.

Was the subject.

Of.

What we are.

Doing.

Dean brought in Kathleen Norris' new book. On acedia. A good conversation.

Please wait for the light of the moon,
The mountain path
Is covered with fallen chestnuts.
- Ryokan (1758-1831)

The shop filled chuck full this afternoon. Sam said thanks for opening. I ordered books. Strange time to be ordering books.

Acedia is a word from ancient Greek describing a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world. It can lead to a state of being unable to perform one's duties in life. Its spiritual overtones make it related to but distinct from depression.[1] Acedia was originally noted as a problem among monks and other ascetics who maintained a solitary life.
(--from wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acedia

Uh-oh!

I'll think about this later on.

I'm off to bed.

Too tired.

To think.

Puer natus est pro nobis. A child is born. To us. With us. Each child.

What are we missing in the story? What in our story are we missing?

"Are you looking for me?
I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
you will not find me in the stupas,
not in Indian shrine rooms,
nor in synagogues,
nor in cathedrals:
not in masses,
nor kirtans,
not in legs winding around your own neck,
nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me,
you will see me instantly —
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath."
— Kabir

Maine Coon cat crouches on white remnant facing bird activity beyond glass door. Gregorian chant plays to drying dishes and pots in wooden rack. Solitude is its own monastery.

‘Brother will betray brother to death, and the father his child; children will rise against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by all men on account of my name; but the man who stands firm to the end will be saved.’
(--Matthew 10:17-22)

What's his name?

Is his name "the practice of love without exception"?

No practice, no love, thus no name. We become nameless when we steal from others their itself-fullness.

"I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.

You don't grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own house;
and you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look!

Kabir will tell you the truth: go wherever you like, to Calcutta or Tibet;
if you can't find where your soul is hidden,
for you the world will never be real!"
— Kabir (The Kabir book: Forty-four of the ecstatic poems of Kabir)

It is not difficult to ask of this world, or country, or neighborhood, "Where is the sound of the true name of peace? Of love? Of truth? Of acceptance without reservations or conditions?"

It is not difficult to hear in response the crack of a gun, the blast of a bomb, the snicker of mocking denigration, the shuddering ice of disdain, the resolute sarcasm of professional hatred on radio and cable talk show. Or the mimetic recitation of our own suffering aimed at another or others. 

What is difficult is to be Stephen (in today's feast) or myriad others (in daily history) in the course of their being murdered still staying with the holy name of "the practice of love without exception." Real martyrdom is not being killed or suiciding yourself for something you believe, Real martyrdom is the active incorporation of your murderer (or daily executioner) into your name with the holy name as you travel beyond the limitations of this existence.

"I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?
We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants -
perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother's womb.
Is it logical that you would be walking around entirely orphaned now?
The truth is you turned away yourself,
and decided to go into the dark alone.
Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew,
and that's why everything you do has some weird failure in it."
— Kabir (The Kabir book: Forty-four of the ecstatic poems of Kabir)

The 'dark alone' is not the 'Alone' -- that is, we cannot travel alone to the Alone. The Alone is Reciprocity-Itself. When we come to see the reciprocal (Latin reciprocus returning the same way, alternating {Merriam-Webster}) -- we come to see one-in-two, two-in-one. It is our nature, for this time, to have to go out in order to come in, to go in so as to find out.

Waking from Sleep
by Robert Bly

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the waterlines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.
Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full
Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.

Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast!
Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,
Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.

Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.
Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;
We know that our master has left us for the day.
(--Poem, "Waking from Sleep" by Robert Bly, from Silence in the Snowy Fields. Wesleyan University Press, 1962.)

Christmas season is a celebration of birth. The birth of Jesus, yes.  The arriving of one with God-life. Whose name, we are coming to learn, transcends names. The coming, in a profoundly mythic narrative, of what saves us. And more. Your birth. My birth. Each birth.

What saves us? Maybe we could call it: "Being-With ... What Is ... Loving." 

To be with what is loving requires a presence beyond appearance or words. A silent engagement of one within the other.

Without exception.

No conditions.

There is much in this story to catch up with. So much has gone missing.

There's a papyrus scroll gathering dust in our inner cave of forgetfulness.

It wants to be found.

Inside our own house.

There in the next seat.

Dark, Night

Neither church nor Santa Claus encapsulates Christmas. Something else wants in.

When everything is seen and accepted as itself, as it constantly changes to become itself -- then, the day is what it is meant to be.

Perhaps the great quest in life is to discover this constancy - to know this continuing process of change. With one discovery comes another question. The game is infinite.

Yet in the discovery, perhaps Christ is Born, Buddha Enlightened, the Tao followed, and Truth revealed.
(--from, An Agnostic Celebrates The Birth Of Christ, by Susan Smalley, the Huffington Post, Posted December 25, 2008 | 08:39 AM (EST) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-smalley/an-agnostic-celebrates-th_b_151963.html

Arriving with family or remaining with solitude, we discover, are born, become enlightened, follow way, reveal what is. The mere delight of it all!

As things change.

Integrity is the loincloth round his waist,
faithfulness the belt about his hips.

The wolf lives with the lamb,
the panther lies down with the kid,
calf and lion feed together,
with a little boy to lead them.
The cow and the bear make friends,
their young lie down together.
The lion eats straw like the ox.
The infant plays over the cobra’s hole;
into the viper’s lair
the young child puts his hand.
They do no hurt, no harm,
on all my holy mountain,
for the country is filled with the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters swell the sea.
(--from, Isaiah 11:1-10, Office of Readings, Christmas)

Are we ready?

For love?

For love.

Is. No.

Question.