Four conversations today. Two in prison. One in old age home. Lastly, at hermitage. In each one, practicing presence and respect with listening and responding.

It is an act of creation that we are too close to see. We are mere bristles in an artist's brush crossing a canvas in a motion too subtle to detect.

Each one is necessary. Each a unique and gifting presence.

Sages lean on a pillar
That is never shaken,
Travel a road that is
Never blocked, are
Endowed from a
Resource that is never
Exhausted, and learn
From a teacher that
Never dies.
They are successful
In whatever they undertake,
And arrive wherever they go.
Whatever they do, they
Embrace destiny and go along
Without confusion.
- Wen-tzu

What is being written? What is being painted? What is being heard?

Yes. And yes. And, finally, yes.

The day practices presence and we are merely within the day.

Being practiced.

The sea is just the sea. Fish swim in it. Men die in it. Life depends on it.

"Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

The wind is just the wind. Birds fly with it. Clouds float on it. Women turn their heads to face it.

La Mer is mother. Le Vent is father.

That's the whole of it.

There is no word for greater than the whole.

Don't take what you want. Rather, don't want, and take what is left.

Ten thousand rows of bamboo reach my door,
Bearing a clean wind and harp music
In every season.
Heaven's will travels freely in the thick grove;
Shadows sweep the yard;
The dust remains.
- Naong Haegun (1320-1376)

What-is will always be left.

Good doesn't triumph over evil.

Good merely remains after evil has destroyed itself -- to set things right, again, for a spell.

Awakening is a never-ending narrative. There's no end to it.

No boredom. No accomplishment. No place to begin.

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

Every layer penetrating awareness within opens a corresponding layer widening the expanse of awareness without.

Universal solidarity supersedes yet involves typical group solidarity.

Compassion longs for nothing outside itself.

Because there is nothing outside.

Jack loans his Shaw & Tenney oars for our evening row. They are light and lovely.

I am corresponding with a man in California about his oars for sale.

Chop and swells around Curtis Island tonight. Dee emerges along with 4 or 5 children from lighthouse residence to wave to us. The kids jump up and down while waving.

Vast and far-reaching
without boundary,
secluded and pure,
manifesting light,
this spirit is without
obstruction.
Its brightness does not
shine out but can be
called empty and
inherently radiant.
- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091-1157)

The sea is a good home.

It holds us up, and teaches how to balance

"Assume your nature as yourself" -- wrote Charles Olson in his poem "Love."

As we gather into ourselves what once was scattered anon and elsewhere as other and others, we begin to dwell in the middle of our being-in-the-world, we begin meaningful life.

"If I find Him with great ease, perhaps He is not my God. If I cannot hope to find Him at all, is He my God? If I find Him wherever I wish, have I found Him? If He can find me whenever He wishes, and tells me Who He is and who I am, and if I then know that He Whom I could not find has found me: then I know He is the Lord, my God: He has touched me with the finger that made me out of nothing." (--Thomas Merton)

The Assumption of Mary is the belated recognition of earth and woman rejoining kosmos and man. It is the unsplitting of the atom.

I like the phrase "Sailing by Ash Breeze." It refers to self reliance. In the golden age of sail it was a "tongue-in-cheek" reference to pulling the ship when becalmed. With no alternative power and total dependence upon the wind, a ship was helpless when it found itself in total calm. In most instances the crew could do nothing but wait for a breeze. But in the case of an emergency, as coming under attack for example, a crew would secure lines to the bow of the ship and to the boats. They would pull on the oars of the boats in order to move the ship. Because oars were made primarily of white ash, the term "sailing by ash breeze" was born.

I like the term and find examples in my life when I either have or should have sailed by ash breeze.

(--from WetDog Blog, http://wetdog-sailor.blogspot.com/2007/01/sailing-by-ash-breeze.html)

Jim's mom, Janet, and Heather's dad, Richard, died on this date. I visited a loved one in Nicolet, Quebec who took vows a long time ago. The turn of summer pivots here and runs toward the ending of a season. You can feel it.

We chant Night Prayer after evening practice ends and participants leave. The candle stays lighted before Mary's icon. Myth, mystery, and metaphor dance in shadows thrown by flame.

While some Protestants pulled back from the declaration as hardly conducive to ecumenical relations, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung considered it the most important religious declaration of the twentieth century. As a master of the mythological river that nourished what he termed our “collective unconscious,” Jung grasped the profound and fitting symbolism of such a declaration at mid-century.

The world had already turned its attention toward the endless vistas and wonder of space and astronauts would leave boot marks on the moon’s surface a generation later. The Swiss scholar sensed that the Assumption symbolized the mystery of human destiny and the end of the pre-Copernican era at the same time. The Assumption was a mythological and therefore a spiritual symbol of a Mystery in which we are still caught up. There was another numinous layer beyond the celebration of Mary and the confirmation of human dignity.

The Assumption proclaimed the Mystery of the century, the return of Mother Earth to the Heavens and the end, therefore, of the split between Earth and Heaven and all the divisions, such as between flesh and spirit, that flowed from that. It heralded the unity of the universe and the unity of human personality. That is the richest and perhaps least plumbed aspect of this feast. The wonder is that the Assumption is rich and deep enough a Mystery to accommodate these various levels of understanding all at the same time. Midsummer allows us to savor its Mystery in many ways and to understand how much we lose when we limit our religious understanding only to the concrete literal level.

( Eugene Cullen Kennedy, emeritus professor of psychology at Loyola University, Chicago. --from, What are we to assume about the Assumption? http://ncronline.org/blogs/bulletins-human-side/what-are-we-assume-about-assumption)

By assuming our nature as ourselves we step out of the separation into the distinct wholeness of solidarity with what is here.

And here is what time is now.

Heaven-earth as it is assumed.

Gathering into itself what is here.

Life is all over the place.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought. (-- Basho)

As we are, all over the place.

LORETTA I'm freezing to death.
RONNY Come upstairs. I don't care why you come. No, that's not what I mean.
Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is and I didn't know this either. But love don't make
things nice, it ruins everything, it breaks your heart, it makes things a mess. We're not here to make things perfect. Snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. We are here to ruin ourselves and break our hearts and love the wrong people and die! The storybooks are bullshit.
Come upstairs with me, baby! Don't try to live your life out to somebody else's idea of sweet happiness. Don't try to live on milk and cookies when what you want is meat! Red meat just like me! It's wolves run with wolves and nothing else! You're a wolf just like me! Come upstairs with me and get in my bed! Come on! Come on! Come on!

[Loretta follows Ronny into his building.]
(-- Dialogue, Ronny and Loretta in film Moonstruck, 1987

In the film's final scene everything is clarified and settled around the kitchen table.

They are family.

We are family.

An imperfect compendium.

We grow old. We fade. We teeter between dream and dizzy wakefulness.

Suddenly, we die.

But death isn't something up ahead around the bend off in the future. Death accompanies life. My life. And yours. It is companion.

And as all that is not life itself begins to fall away -- control, plans, ego, blame, time, and rationales for actions -- so then does death fall away.

Leaving life alone.

A person's life? Empty water bubbles.
Eighty years passed in a dream.
Now I throw away my leather sack,
The wheel of the red sun sinks in the West.
- Taego Bowoo (1301-1382)

Life alone -- that rare experience devoid of diversion, distraction, division, and distortion -- knows nothing other than itself.

Jesus extended one's neighbor to include one's enemies. He could not have found a more effective way of shocking his audience into the realization that he wished to include all men [and women] in this solidarity of love. The saying is almost unbearably paradoxical: the natural contradiction between neighbor and enemy, between outsiders and insiders must be overlooked and overcome so that enemies become kinsmen and all outsiders become insiders!
(--p.61, in Jesus Before Christianity, by Albert Nolan, Orbis, 1978)

To know nothing other than itself is to dwell with joy in wholeness where no mistake is recognized as mistake and nothing matters other than life itself.

Each life.

Within each.

Neighbor!

Being a hermeneute is close to being a hermit.

One can only hope to listen carefully and receive gracefully the empathetic consciousness of the world, which is meaning itself.

Evening meditation,
Enfolded in mountains,
All thoughts of the
World of people dissolve.
Quietly sitting on my cattail cushion
Alone, I face the empty window.
Incense burns away,
As the dark night deepens,
And my robe is a single fold,
As white dew thickens
Rising from deep meditation,
I stroll in the garden,
And the moon is already above the highest peak.
- Ryokan

To have faith is to be open to the open way which is dwelling before each face.

We're not strangers here; we are what is here.

Don't try so hard.

Candle burns before icon of Clare of Assisi. Off in corner, statue of Francis has small flower in hand. It's Clare's day. Perhaps when no one is looking he'll give it to her.

"What if you slept? And what if, in your
sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your
dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a
strange and beautiful flower? And what if,
when you awoke, you had the flower in
your hand? Ah, what then?"
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We need our directions recalibrated, our bearings straightened. We might be able to categorize and analyze our wrong understanding, but we should not become attached to it.

New Religion

This morning no sound but the loud
breathing of the sea. Suppose that under
all that salt water lived the god
that humans have spent ten thousand years
trawling the heavens for.
We caught the wrong metaphor.
Real space is wet and underneath,
the church of shark and whale and cod.
The noise of those vast lungs
exhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.
Heaven's not up but down, and hell
is to evaporate in air. Salvation,
to drown and breathe
forever with the sea.
(--Poem, "New Religion," by Bill Holm, from The Chain Letter of the Soul: New & Selected Poems. © Milkweed Editions, 2009.

The wind blew and tide churned southeast rounding of Curtis Island this morning. The sea whispers its secret. I wave to the lighthouse keepers breakfasting outside the door of their keeper's house. In what might be the final August of his duties, the man who has stopped treatments continues to wave. I let go of oar again and wave to his good continuation.

Megan's inscription to us inside her book reads, "May you gaze lovingly upon each other and all beings!"

May Clare's life illuminate your heart as you seek your own love, the love of God and companion, and the creation of a loving community. May we all learn from her wisdom, and her simple message of love and compassion, and know that we too can live in this way, bringing the manifestation of love into a lived reality in our world. As Ann Johnson has written in Miryam of Jerusalem, "God creates each one of us as endless community." Now is the time of sacred companions and sacred community.
(--p.xxiii, Introduction to Sacred Companions Sacred Community, Reflections With Clare of Assisi)

In the chapel/zendo the candle has kept well its vigil as the waving man his watch.

We chant Compline. Then leave.

We are blest.

Spirituality isn't a profit and loss spreadsheet.

Still, we take notice when we are about to lose something.

I tell you, most solemnly,
unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies,
it remains only a single grain;
but if it dies,
it yields a rich harvest.
Anyone who loves his life loses it;
anyone who hates his life in this world
will keep it for the eternal life.
If a man serves me, he must follow me,
wherever I am, my servant will be there too.
If anyone serves me, my Father will honour him.
(-John 12:24-26)

'My' life is fraught with ego, complaint, and judgment. Maybe, even though it is too strong a word, it is these three collateral aspects of my life that I 'hate.' If I 'love' these aspects of my life, I'll probably be saddled with them for all of time for all of eternity. The current culture of hate and intolerance is predicated on the dismissive and disapproving mind that carves life into in and out, good and bad, useful and useless, friend and enemy. These painful cuts leave pain and scars in their path.

We are beings whose nature is service to one another: each to each, each to all, all to all, all to each.

Let's look at this from a contemplative view.

If someone loves their life, it is lost. Love and lose. By this we can suggest that one's life does not belong to them any longer. It has gone into the undifferentiated whole where what is unique and different is celebrated as being-itself, and is given up and out to the service and empathy surrounding what could be called others, but might also be called each-in-all.

Flat Lake cold penetrates
Water-lily clothes
The mountain by the lake
Is neither right nor wrong
Dusty tracks all end
The world is far away.
White clouds and gulls
Have no hidden plans.
- Han-shan Te-ch'ing (1546-1623)

I love, I lose 'my' life in that it belongs, profoundly, to each of you, to thou, to earth, to kosmos,

In its most general sense, a cosmos is an orderly or harmonious system. It originates from a Greek term κόσμος meaning "ordered world" and is the antithetical concept of chaos. Today the word is generally used as a synonym of the word Universe (considered in its orderly aspect).

In theology, the term can be used to denote the created Universe, not including the creator. The Septuagint uses both kosmos and oikumene for the inhabited world. In Christian theology, the word was also used synonymously with aion to refer to "worldly life" or "this world" as opposed to the afterlife.

The philosopher Ken Wilber uses the term kosmos to refer to all of manifest existence, including various realms of consciousness. The term kosmos so used distinguishes a nondual Universe (which, in his view, includes both noetic and physical aspects) from the strictly physical Universe that is the concern of the traditional sciences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos

We're not meant to hate life here. Not meant to hate our profound and unique life. When we hate we hold tightly to what we hate. We need to let it go.

When we love everything is given to itself. Everything belongs to Itself.

We, as separate, isolated, and warring beings -- disappear. We're lost. Gone. Into the evening mist and fog on the buoyant waters.

Dusty tracks all end
The world is far away. (--Han-Shan)

Here is where I love you.

Here, not afraid.

Nothing left to lose.

Invisible service; indistinguishable honour.

We forget we are better than we think. We forget because forgetting is easy. We think we have to kill and eliminate those we call "enemy."

Rather remember this:

It is tragic. People have been deluded for so long. They do not recognize that their own minds are the true Buddha. They do not recognize that their own natures are the true dharma. They want to search for the dharma, yet they still look far away for the holy ones. They want to search for the Buddha, yet they will not observe their own minds. If they aspire to the path of Buddhahood while obstinately holding to their feeling that the Buddha is outside the mind or the dharma is outside the nature, then, even though they pass through kalpas as numerous as dust motes, burning their bodies, ….it is like trying to make rice by boiling sand—it will only add to their tribulation. If they would only understand their own minds, then, without searching, approaches to the dharma as numerous as the sands of the Ganges and uncountable subtle meaning would all be understood.

- Chinul (1158-1210)

August 6th 1945 Atomic-Bomb dropped, 130,000 dead in Hiroshima.

August 9th 1945, Atomic-Bomb dropped, 70,000 dead in Nagasaki.

(- casualty numbers from Greg Mitchell. He also co-authored two books with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America and Who Owns Death?, and was chief adviser to the award-winning film, Original Child Bomb. {Huff Post,http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/how-press-censorship-hid_b_675106.html})

Someone conceived of the bomb. Someone built it. Someone tested it. Someone decided to use it against Japan. Someone flew the plane. Someone watched it explode. Someone attended the casualties. Someone remembers what happened. Someone considers what it means.

If truth and being belong so closely together as tradition has always held since Parmenides, then the original meaning of truth must also be obtainable from the analysis of Dasein. The common definition of truth as adequatio rei et intellectus does not manage to point to an equality or similarity between subject and object or between ideal judgement content and fact, through which speaking of an agreement can be justified. The assertion states something of the thing: it is the same thing of which something is taken to be true and of which something is stated. Truth is equivalent with being true, and that means being revealing (αλήθεια—revealedness). It pertains thus originally to Dasein. Only in a derived manner is revealedness of beings in-the-world to be designated as truth. This is because of Dasein’s openness: it is in the truth. Likewise, however, — in its deterioration — it is in falsity when covered over by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.

( --from p.61, Martin Heidegger’s Existential Philosophy, by Edith Stein, Translation by Mette Lebech, Department of Philosophy, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. From: ‘Martin Heideggers Existentialphilosophie’, in Edith Stein, Endliches und Ewiges Sein. Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins, Gesamtausgabe, bd. 11/12 (Freiburg: Herder, 2006), ‘Anhang’, pp. 445–500, in MAYNOOTH PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS ISSUE 4, (2007) http://philosophy.nuim.ie/documents/FinalMPP20071.pdf

Someone thinks about life and death. Someone wonders what is the best way to live. Someone realizes that what has taken place is both fate and faith.

‘Only a being which, in its being, is essentially futural so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon its factual “there” by shattering itself against death, that is, only a being which, as futural, is equiprimordially having-been, can, by handing down the inherited possibility, take over the own thrownness and instantaneously be for “its time”. Only authentic temporality which at the same time is finite makes something like fate, that is to say, authentic historicality, possible.’49
‘Repeating is explicit handing down, that is to say, the going back to the possibilities of the Dasein that has-been­-there.’50 It allows not only a returning to what was previously real. ‘It does not abandon itself to that which is past, nor does it aim at progress. Both are indifferent to authentic existence in the moment.’[51]
In being-with others Dasein has part in the destiny of the community. Fate and destiny are being-towards-death. Thus all history has its gravity in the future, which only inauthentic historicality covers up.
The innerworldly present-at-hand is historical not only insofar as it is in the world, but insofar as something happens to it (which is fundamentally different compared to natural events). In the inauthentic sense of everyday concern the distracted Dasein collects its life from these particular happenings. In the authentic being of resoluteness it lives in its fate and in faithfulness to its own self.
(p.67, Stein, Ibid)

At 4:55AM in zendo there is scarce light. I sit in the recollection of 65 years ago. I am one day older. In the year up to 1945 someone looked at parent's faces and knew little of the world that was desolate and dangerous with war and mechanical death.

Leaves cup in sudden updraft.

Rain washes the morning.

I am still.

Still I know nearly nothing.

And little of the world.

After morning sitting, lovely hike.

Seeing lake and ocean from Maidencliff on Megunticook Mountain.

I am makeshift;

Lean-to of body,

A few sticks of bone;

But my unfinished life

Is part of the world,

Part of the day

My eyes borrow.

(--2nd stanza, from poem Temporary Structure, by Thomas Bolt)

After evening sitting we row harbor at dusk, seeing mountains from water as we round island.

I am grateful for this birth.

I'll have two eggs, coffee, and rye toast.

Happy those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. I tell you solemnly, he will put on an apron, sit them down at table and wait on them.
(--from Luke 12:32-48)

I watch. I gaze into the emptiness of everyday life and see the fullness of no other place, nothing else to do. It is all right here. God, one might suggest, is here. Where is there to go?

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.
(--from poem, Call Me by My True Names, by Thich Nhat Hanh)

We can't say we've been there. It would be a lie. No. We are only always just arriving. Hello! Is there room in this inn? Will you wake me at 6AM?

In my pot nothing
But the wind's deep moan,
For company only a
Staff of wisteria vine;
Last night we chatted
And laughed till all hours;
The empty sky listened with a cold heart.
- Muso Soseki (1275–1351)

If the cosmos is cold, dark, and empty, then we are cold, dark, and empty. But with a difference. We have the capacity to make of the cosmos a place of meaning. Make it a phenomenal place.

Attributes are not limitations.

We are the transcendence of any limitation mind imposes.

Metanoia, beyond-mind, checks us out of our former accommodations and leads us to new bright places of spirit, truth, heart, and, most importantly, laughter.

I greet you there and here.

Enjoy your journey.

Enjoy your companions.

Enjoy forever being born!

A cloud hangs over the day.

When man tries to ape the divine there is much suffering.

I mourn Hiroshima's mushroom cloud. I greet the unknowing cloud of Tabor.

I prefer transformation and transfiguration to mass murder and posturing power.

– He did not know what he was saying. As he spoke, a cloud came and covered them with shadow; and when they went into the cloud the disciples were afraid.
(--from Luke 9:28-36)

Be afraid of those who want you to be afraid of others.

If you wish to avoid wandering in samsara there is not better way than to seek Buddhahood. If you want to become a Buddha, understand that Buddha is the mind. How can you search for the mind in the far distance? It is not outside the body. The physical body is a phantom, for it is subject to birth and death; the true mind is like space, for it neither ends nor changes. Therefore, it is said, "These hundred bones will crumble and return to fire and wind. But One Thing is eternally numinous and covers heaven and earth."
- Chinul (1158-1210)

When Jesus was transfigured, the story goes, and all settled back into ordinariness, they discovered they were alone.

Only alone.

Like Thomas Bolt's poem "Temporary Structure" where "a bucket slowly disintegrating in a creek where 'it is beaten back and forth.' It is the form given by thought and language to a present continually improvised... " (James Merrill, from Foreword to Thomas Bolt's Out of the Woods, c. 1989)

This is our life.

This, our poem.

Worded.

Wondering, which cloud reveals our present coming?

"...[B]ut what is all-encompassing can have no opposite." (From Introduction to A Course in Miracles)

Before the eaves, slender bamboos,
A thousand stalks of jade,
Sing when the cool
Rains fall, with a rustling sound,
Their feathery green intruding at my desk;
They know there is no
Purer hidden spot than this.
- Isho Tokugan (1360–1437)

There is no outside.

Only illusory thoughts of there being an outside.

With each other, with one another, there is no other.

We're in the same boat.

Two plus two is four.

This message is not just
For the rich and noble
The thousand flowers
And the hundred grasses
All have spring within them
Profound people in later days
Who read the sutras
Do not ask the way to the
Great road of enlightenment.
Stop! Stop!
Why do you have to wander the south?
The site of enlightenment is right
Under your feet.
- T'aego (1301-1382)

Two times two is four.

Please -- evidence and experience.

No dogma, no doctrine.

Lies last only so long then stop.

Truth extends and expands, goes on and on.

Call truth; tell truth.

Sit still; stand still.

And know.

There's a phrase in the Nicene Creed: "...one in being with the Father."

It might read: One in being-with, the Father.

A single moon
Bright and clear
In an unclouded sky;
Yet still we stumble
In the world's darkness.
- Ikkyu (1394-1481)

Maybe it's what God is -- "being-with."

When we are really with someone, it is where God is.

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 67

Everyone under heaven says that my Tao is great and beyond compare.
Because it is great, it seems different.
If it were not different, it would have vanished long ago.

I have three treasures which I hold and keep.
The first is mercy; the second is economy;
The third is daring not to be ahead of others.
From mercy comes courage; from economy comes generosity;
From humility comes leadership.

Nowadays men shun mercy, but try to be brave;
They abandon economy, but try to be generous;
They do not believe in humility, but always try to be first.
This is certain death.

Mercy brings victory in battle and strength in defense.
It is the means by which heaven saves and guards.

(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)

They say Jesus said: "I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20)

Be merciful, with us!

The trail through woods on Ragged Mountain at dusk was dry and worn. I'd live in Cape Breton but for the mountains and ocean here. I'm glad Canada is neighbor.

Remember, as something "is" it is always also something "other." Being and otherness thus coexist in the continuous unfolding of becoming. Here it is extremely helpful to make note of the following passage by Derrida where he states: "You see, pure unity or pure multiplicity -- when there is only totality or unity and when there is only multiplicity or disassociation -- is a synonym of death." Here we can now also add the thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy of "being singular plural" where once again the emphasis is on both, as compared to one or the other, in the movement of being.
(pp.15-16, The Ethics of Uncertainty, Aporetic Openings, by Michael Anker, c.2009, Atropos Press)

Dog laps water.

It is August. Nights cool.

The wisdom of the Tathagatas is just like this: it is complete in the bodies of all sentient beings. It is merely all these ordinary, foolish people who are not aware of it and do not recognize it.
- Avatamsaka sutra

We're different and we change.

You and I are not who we were yesterday.

How do we remember each other?

Just by walking around?

The grass covered path
Is secluded and still;
A closed door faces
The Chung-nan Mountains.
In the evening, the air’s chilly,
But the light rain stops;
At dawn, far off,
A few cicadas start.
Leave fall
Where no green earth remains;
A person at his ease
Wears a common white robe.
With simplicity and plainness
His original nature still,
What need to practice
Calming of the heart?
- Chia Tao (779-843)

Rowing just after sunrise, passing gathering on southeast corner of yacht club high above low tide, a wedding party occupies the edge. I watch a few moments. Offer a prayer for them. Raise oars, extend arms, dip flats, pull up, exiting between green and red channel markers through calm and smooth waters.

Then he told them a parable: ‘There was once a rich man who, having had a good harvest from his land, thought to himself, “What am I to do? I have not enough room to store my crops.” Then he said, “This is what I will do: I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and store all my grain and my goods in them, and I will say to my soul: My soul, you have plenty of good things laid by for many years to come; take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time.” But God said to him, “Fool! This very night the demand will be made for your soul; and this hoard of yours, whose will it be then?.” So it is when a man stores up treasure for himself in place of making himself rich in the sight of God.’
(--from Luke 12:13-21)

Seems that I remember you're not to call your brother 'Fool.' Maybe that was his name. 'Empty-headed person; bellows, bag.'

I'd like to be a fool. (Some would probably say to forget the future subjunctive, enter the present indicative.) I am a fool. (But I don't want to brag.)

Without any guile I'm saying, I feel grateful to those whose serious attitudes and life lived at the edge of death define me as an empty human being and dreamer (there are moments when I'm on their side). Fundamentally, an entire human being is simply a being in whom transcendence is abolished, from whom there's no separating anything now. An entire human being is partly a clown, partly God, partly crazy . . . and is transparence.

(p.xxix, Preface, to On Nietzsche, by Georges Bataille, c.1945, English translation by Bruce Boone 1992, Paragon House, NY)

There's nothing in me but the interstice of what is to be found in you.

For Gina Arline Berriault

In the California Gardens

evening primrose, wand flowers,

red angel trumpets and poppies

abound in an extravagance

of beauty

that leads inward

where silence itself is beauty

and in that interior altar

is the recognition

of joined minds.

A sculptor of words dwells there,

her presence is clarity,

musical and precise

with a quality of friendship

that blesses us all.

This is the privilege

of life itself

and however far we fall short

in our friendship

the lines that stretch between us

are all there is

God is what we have between

each other and is never lost

I walked up her steps,

knocked on the door

and the door would open

into her rare air

A tea table perched in space

above sailing boats,

her head tilted

or held in her hands

a salad and cheese

and the spring light of her live spirit

carried me into higher currents.

We don't know what we are

or where, or how to look upon

ourselves or the world.

But in a dark place this week,

I turned and there at eye level

was an orchid of such translucent

radiance, it's her!

I thought with a jolt of recognition

And it is.

Thats how I remember her.

(Poem by Indigo Hotchkiss, San Francisco CA --from Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Vol 23 Number 2,

http://www.ad122112.com/HaightAshbury/poetry.html)

This is how we remember each other: remember what is between us.

"God is what we have between

each other and is never lost"

I went, after rowing, to sit with the Quakers. They are signless now. So a couple walks through their sitting at the outdoor Children's Chapel, white earphone buds in their ears, talking to each other throughout their passing, then down the stone steps past large silent bronze bell, and back to gravel driveway. The Quakers just sit there, not ruffled or shushing, gazing out at wide sunny Penobscot Bay or in to their accepting hearts, allowing each sound to come to go.

Just Walking Around

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is not name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

(From: A Wave - Poems by John Ashbery)

It is a lovely prayer -- silence. Each oar-stroke on my 2 hour journey around two bell-buoys served as prayer and patient progress. The Osprey chose not to dive at me. The seal did not try to leap into the pea-pod. I leave a nickel on #2 out beyond Curtis Island for mariners in need or for the spirits of those whose ashes travel tides in and out each dawn and dusk.

It is our life -- to journey with and through each other.

Do come. See it.

"Grant that we may," indeed, "see each other."

With calm hearts.

Walking around.