The day was already laden. Hiroshima is remembered. Transfiguration is celebrated. Silent sitting gathered four of us to be still, to chant, to listen to a reading, then have a circle reflection where each of us offer a response from our practice. We read "In Sync" from the current issue of Shambhala Sun: "When body and mind are synchronized, SAKYONG MIPHAM says, we can live with grace and dignity, grounded and in harmony with the world around us."

The theme of bravery radiates throughout the Shambhala teachings, which were introduced to the West by my father, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The first kind of bravery is being free of deception. Through meditation we are less seduced by afflictive emotions and habitual patterns, so we’re not as frightened by egolessness. We are able to leap into the moment—which is the second type of bravery. Having taken that leap, we gain the vision of the Great Eastern Sun, the third kind of bravery, which reveals the sacredness of our world. Through that sudden display of courage, our whole world is illuminated. As my father put it, “You begin to experience basic goodness reflected everywhere.”

From that act of freshness, our mind is liberated from doubt and disbelief. Such a visionary approach leads to the fourth level of bravery: realizing the dignity of body and mind being synchronized.
(-- Shambhala Sun | September 2011, Excerpt from "In Sync")

Then there was the news from Afghanistan:

Copter Downed by Taliban Fire; Elite U.S. Unit Among Dead
By RAY RIVERA, ALISSA J. RUBIN and THOM SHANKER
Published: August 6, 2011

KABUL, Afghanistan — In the deadliest day for American forces in the nearly decade-long war in Afghanistan, insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter on Saturday, killing 30 Americans, including some Navy Seal commandos from the unit that killed Osama bin Laden, as well as 8 Afghans, American and Afghan officials said.

The helicopter, on a night-raid mission in the Tangi Valley of Wardak Province, to the west of Kabul, was most likely brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade, one coalition official said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, and they could hardly have found a more valuable target: American officials said that 22 of the dead were Navy Seal commandos, including members of Seal Team 6.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/world/asia/07afghanistan.html

Someone at practice this morning said it was difficult for him to see the underlying perfection and goodness during the "samsaric depression" mentioned by Sakyong Mipham. That we cannot determine or control the events in Afghanistan, Somalia, Lybia, Syria, or the economic ghettoes of political pushers -- is cause to remind us of the need to go deeper into the silence beyond mind-noise and ego-shouting that deafens us.

Helping each other, service without requirement of recompense, praying for everyone and everything in the world -- these things assist the way we look at and see the world.

The Transfiguration story of Mount Tabor is iconic. The mythic resonance is inviting.

Let us run with confidence and joy to enter into the cloud like Moses and Elijah, or like James and John. Let us be caught up like Peter to behold the divine vision and to be transfigured by that glorious transfiguration. Let us retire from the world, stand aloof from the earth, rise above the body, detach ourselves from creatures and turn to the creator, to whom Peter in ecstasy exclaimed: Lord, it is good for us to be here.
It is indeed good to be here, as you have said, Peter. It is good to be with Jesus and to remain here for ever. What greater happiness or higher honour could we have than to be with God, to be made like him and to live in his light?
Therefore, since each of us possesses God in his heart and is being transformed into his divine image, we also should cry out with joy: It is good for us to be here – here where all things shine with divine radiance, where there is joy and gladness and exultation; where there is nothing in our hearts but peace, serenity and stillness; where God is seen. For here, in our hearts, Christ takes up his abode together with the Father, saying as he enters: Today salvation has come to this house. With Christ, our hearts receive all the wealth of his eternal blessings, and there where they are stored up for us in him, we see reflected as in a mirror both the first fruits and the whole of the world to come.
(--From a sermon on the transfiguration of the Lord by Anastasius of Sinai, bishop, "It is good for us to be here.") http://www.universalis.com/readings.htm

"Here" is all there is.

Some spell it - 'M.i.n.d.'
Some spell it - 'G.o.d.'
Some spell it - the 'T.r.u.t.h.' or, - the 'R.e.a.l.'

For me, the word 'here' covers it nicely.

As I sit on the porch of the meditation cabin wrapping the leather sleeve edge of my rowing oar with tarred string I hear this phrase with a new clarity -- It is good for us to be here!

What is good resides in the profound and supremely mysterious 'here.'

We seldom visit it.

The route is little known.

It goes by way of silence.

Listen with a listening sighting here.

I like Walt's poems. He likes them to rhyme. They have humor. In his nineties, he worries about his wife who is not well. Each fortnight is a delight to see them.

The debate continues about bodies and what is entailed with them.

Till now you seriously considered yourself to be the body and to have a form. That is the primal ignorance which is the root cause of all trouble.
- Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)

It's odd to speak of 'having' a body. Or 'being in' a body.

Went rowing at dusk. My body is still chilled.

Something blah this way hovers.

I hardly understand anything.

The world is as we see it. So, we see the world. And it is as it is.

The world we see is the world we get. And when that doesn't seem such a good deal, look again. There's something we're not seeing.

Step back on your own to look into reality long enough to attain an unequivocally true and real experience of enlightenment. Then with every thought you are consulting infinite teachers.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

About our wars:

Total Fatalities: 6,026
Operation Iraqi Freedom: 4,442
Operation Enduring Freedom: 1,584
(Updated June 5, 2011)
-- The Washington Post

Semel in anno licet insanire. ("Once in a year one is allowed to go crazy").

We don't yet comprehend that war is insane.

Nor that there is no one else to fight other than ourselves.

What's the big deal about real conversation?

The body does not know how to discourse or to listen to a discourse. This which is unmistakably perceivable right where you are, absolutely identifiable yet without form, this is what listens to the discourse.
- Rinzai (d.867)

Listen to this.

Then, enjoy the discourse.

One word at a time.

Tide lowers. Ducks jete on to unsubmerged rocks covered with seaweed, nibble a bit, then tuck heads back under feathers. Nap time.

Mass, coffee, and novel Neverness at landing of Camden Harbor before going to other side to bail Jootje after last night's torrential rain and lightning storm.

When you are free and independent, you are not bound by anything, so you do not seek liberation. Consummating the process of Zen, you become unified. Then there are no mundane things outside of Buddhism, and there is no Buddhism outside of mundane things.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

Schooners dry their sails, tourists come to the water, Sibelius plays from public radio.

You must not go towards equality, but must start from equality. Starting from equality does not presuppose that everyone in the world has equal opportunities to learn, to express their capacities. That's not the point. The point is that you have to start from the minimum equality that is given. The normal pedagogic logic says that people are ignorant, they don't know how to get out of ignorance to learn, so we have to make some kind of an itinerary to move from ignorance to knowledge, starting from the difference between the one who knows and the one who does not know.
(--Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. English)

We know.

What we don't know we know.

Tearing what we know and don't know from what we think we know or not know is the work of learning -- investigating what is torn.

Scissors help.

Glimpsing what is between us -- in that torn place -- also helps.

Infinite love, the mystery of God, sees we do not see, and sees for us what we do not see.

"A good traveler has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving."
- Lao Tzu

Life is it's own destination.

Here we are!

I see this. And this is all I see.

Summertime, and mornings are meditation in quiet spaces.

As soon as you sense any lingering or obstruction,
all of it is false imagining.
Just make your mind clean and free,
like space, like a mirror, like the sun in the sky.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

We pray for those whose own prayer needs companioning.

For those whose death is nearing, or has occurred -- recently, or further back, those lingering just on the edge of eternity.

For those whose story confuses them and those who long to be free of stories no longer needed, no longer theirs.

What would you see? The choice is given you. But learn and do not let your mind forget this law of seeing: You will look upon that which you feel within. If hatred finds a place within your heart, you will perceive a fearful world, held cruelly in death's sharp-pointed, bony fingers. If you feel the Love of God within you, you will look out on a world of mercy and of love.
( --from Lesson 189, paragraph 5, A Course In Miracles)

The day belongs to itself as we belong to ourselves as God belongs to everyone and everything.

Quiet spaces invite us in to reflect on and become what they are.

Until we are all praying for each other in whatever manner each prays.

Quietly.

As we come to see one another.

Source and fruit.

It's all gift!

Surprise visit from Rob, Randy, and Suzanne down from Belfast for Friday Evening Conversation.

Rob said to my “It’s great to see you here!” that, “It’s great for me to see you seeing me here.” A thread in the fabric of the meetingbrook community stitched closer through many years between Camden and Thomaston and Warren.

What you believe is what you see. The label is the behavior. Theory molds data. Concepts determine percepts. Belief-dependent realism. (p.21, "Mr. D"Arpino's Dilemma", in The Believing Brain, From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies, How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, by Michael Shermer, c.2011)

This morning’s practice reading from Thich Nhat Hanh’s You Are Here the moving story of the war veteran beginning again to live through and beyond the memory of killing children in Vietnam. A roomful of thoughtful reflections on our need to begin again in so many areas.

It is all pervading, spotless beauty;
It is the self-existence and uncreated
Absolute
Then how can it even be a matter
Of discussion that the real Buddha
Has no mouth and preaches no dharma,
Or that real hearing requires no ears,
For who could hear it?
Ah, it is a jewel beyond all price.
- Huang-po (d. 850)

I like the thought that what we believe is what we see.

And if you believe nothing...do you see nothing?

Nothing is the wholeness seeing nothing outside it.

What a gift!

Bald Mountain at dusk is wavy outline against remaining light.

One instant is eternity;
When you see through this one instant,
You see through the one who sees.
- Wu-men (1183-1260)

This morning, out in Penobscot Bay during a 6.7km row, I leave a quarter on R2 bell buoy beyond Curtis Island and red nun, then a quarter on red and white channel marker bell buoy out past Sherman's Point. I leave these coins for mariners, alive or dead, who need passage toll.

You never know who might be in need of a coin for the ferryman. Some arrive unexpectedly. Some forget the cost. Some wander aimlessly in the wide and deep ocean trying to remember where they are going.

It's the least I can do. Even when kayakers or sea gulls remove the coins from the buoys an invisible purse serves the wanderer beginning their journey.

A peopled home is the ocean bed;
The mother and child are there;
The fervent youth and the hoary head,
The maid, with her floating locks outspread,
The babe with its silken hair;
As the water moveth they lightly sway,
And the tranquil lights on their features play;
And there is each cherished and beautiful form,
Away from decay, and away from the storm.
(-- final stanza of poem, The Drowned Mariner, by Elizabeth Oakes-Smith 1806-1893)

Wherever there is loss, there remains a way to go.

The people are being played for fools. One man not the right color has right wing ideologues slashing and spitting at phantoms and fantasies they call government. What they want is a government of their own kind with the power to subjugate and sequester.

If you can see a thought as it arises
This awareness will at once destroy it.
Whatever state of mind should come,
Sweep it away, put it down.

Both good and evil states
Can be transformed by mind.
Sacred and profane appear
In accordance with thoughts.
- Han Shan Te Ch'ing (1546-1623)

The right wing is in it's ascendancy. No one can stop them from their appointed disquisition and diatribe against those they consider other.

A hard time is upon us. Haughty times and heightened inequality loom.

Jesus has been appropriated and compromised by hacks and heinous intent. Where will the ordinary and simple take refuge?

A wasteland encroaches on civil sensibilities.

It is time to move deeper into a hidden geography.

Into the true desert of the heart. Into the vast emptiness of the mind.

Do not allow them the slightest inkling of false fealty. They must come to know they dwell in a desolate deception.

It is possible I am wrong.

That said, do not suffer fools gladly. We are in a hard and trying time.

In prison class on the philosophy of friendship today we read the final pages of Mark Vernon's book The Meaning of Friendship. There is an intimate relationality between philosophy, friendship, wisdom, and moral value. As, too, in the sound of the two words "adios" and "amigos."

There' a journey to make.

What You Have to Get Over

Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses,
the blue one, especially.
Your first love rounding a corner,
that snowy minefield.

Whether you step lightly or heavily,
you have to get over to that tree line a hundred yards in the distance
before evening falls,
letting no one see you wend your way,

that wonderful, old-fashioned word, wend,
meaning “to proceed, to journey,
to travel from one place to another,”
as from bed to breakfast, breakfast to imbecile work.

You have to get over your resentments,
the sun in the morning and the moon at night,
all those shadows of yourself you left behind
on odd little tables.

Tote that barge! Lift that bale! You have to
cross that river, jump that hedge, surmount that slogan,
crawl over this ego or that eros,
then hoist yourself up onto that yonder mountain.

Another old-fashioned word, yonder, meaning
“that indicated place, somewhere generally seen
or just beyond sight.” If you would recover,
you have to get over the shattered autos in the backwoods lot

to that bridge in the darkness
where the sentinels stand
guarding the border with their half-slung rifles,
warned of the likes of you. 

(Poem by Dick Allen, "What You Have to Get Over" from Best American Poetry 2010, Scribner, 2010)

Most of what is important is just beyond sight in the open-hearted possibilities a reserved optimism allows.

These men are friends.

Over twenty two years visiting and conversing has warned and revealed the likes of me.

The night is quiet. For the moment, that is enough.

It is as if our heart and mind learned something only night teaches.

Everywhere -- in prison, on an island in Norway, in kitchens and street corners and quiet residential lanes away from cities -- actions are taken to rectify or irradiate some impedance, some perceived injustice or blind insult rendered and needing remedy.

Is some shabby variation of underground faux-justice playing out? Are we leaning toward something more immediate than our stated system of justice can pronounce?

Mind has no color,
Is neither long nor short,
Doesn't appear or disappear;
It is free from both purity and impurity;
It was never born and can never die;
It is utterly serene.
This is the form of our
Original mind,
Which is also our original body.
- Hui-hai (8th cent)

What's the difference between truth and illusion?

Not much. Except, neither of them are to be feared.

Only seen through.

With clear intent not to get stuck in either.

As Donne said, every man's death diminishes me.

I am much diminished by events near to home and around the world these days.

Maybe someone wishes to talk about gunning down youth on an island in Norway. Others might wish to talk about a woman who sang and drank and died in London. And still others might find themselves alone in a chair on a screened-in porch in the woods at the foot of a mountain.

It's an odd, funny, and disturbing world. Who knows the punch line?

Let go of all your previous imaginings, opinions, interpretations, worldly knowledge, intellectualism, egotism, and competitiveness; become like a dead tree, like cold ashes. When you reach the point where feelings are ended, views are gone, and your mind is clean and naked, you open up to Zen realization. After that it is also necessary to develop consistency, keeping the mind pure and free from adulteration at all times. If there is the slightest fluctuation, there is no hope of transcending the world. Cut through resolutely, and then your state will be peaceful. When you cannot be included in any stage, whether of sages or of ordinary people, then you are like a bird freed from its cage.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

The world is not a stage. We don't know our parts. We stand slack-jawed staring out at a series of stories that make no sense.

I don't expect to pass this way again. While here, might I be of some help?

A few seconds ago it was 7/22, 22:22:22 on the 24hr time piece. Just that

You cannot describe it or draw it,
You cannot praise it enough or perceive it.
No place can be found in which
To put the Original Face;
It will not disappear even
When the universe is destroyed.
- Mumon (13th cent)

It is time to end the Kabuki theater on the debt ceiling.

End ideology; begin reasoning together.

It is too hot for nonsense.

Let’s face it.

Mourn the sorrow in Norway.

Pray for sanity.

It's not a choice.

Solitude is the way the solitary retains sanity.

Yes, of course, there are other people. But 'society' is optional.

It is the memory of God that informs solitude.

What if there were no black men? What if there were no white men? No red men? No brown men? No yellow men?
Nor any hues depicting various women?

What would we do then? How would we refer to one another without referencing color?

Misty trees hide in crinkled hills' blue green.
The man of the Way's stayed long
At this cottage in the bamboo grove.
White clouds too know the flavor
Of this mountain life;
They haven't waited for the Vesper Bell
To come on home again.
- Ching An (1841–1920)

I tire of the facile referencing and quantifying, qualifying, categorizing and compartmentalizing.

What would we do without our modifiers and descriptors?

Everyone is Buddha. Everyone Christ. All free. No one owned by or owning of another.

A tree is a tree. A dog a dog. God god. You you. Me me. A passing car a passing car.

We have not all been here before; we've been here all along. Where anything is there we are and have been and will be until there is no until.

Well then -- what's this all about, this packaging and selling and opining and attempting to conjure, consecrate, conjoin, and conjugate?

Don't ask me.

I have nothing to add. Or subtract.

I find myself numberless. As all beings, are.

We are countless. We don't count. We're way beyond that.

Way beyond!

When an itinerant zen practitioner stops by to visit, everyone is better for it.

I ask him to bless our zendo. He sits a while. In the silence, unmuffled sounds from direction of his sitting. He rises, bows, invites bell three times, bows three times, and exits.

The place is blessed.

The hermit doesn't sleep at night:
In love with the blue of the vacant moon.
The cool of the breeze
That rustles the trees
Rustles him too.
- Ching An (1841–1920)

Once we are born, there is nothing we can do but live. Once we realize we are dying, there is nothing we can do but visit a zendo and bless it with our presence.

Each step along this path is the journey of enlightenment.

Whether sudden or gradual. An ordinary Joe. At end, ordinariness is our common embrace -- a transmission of gratefulness, a ceremony reminder at walkway edge to hold dear and let go what is passing through.

It is joyful! It is good!

Thank you, Kozan, ancient mountain!

What is in a name?

Yes -- what is is in a name.

When the mind is properly adjusted
And quietly applied
The Way is attainable;
But when you are too fervently bent
On it, your body grows tired;
When your body is tired, your spirit
Becomes weary.
When you spirit is weary, your discipline
Will relax, and with relaxation of
Discipline, there follows many distractions.
Be calm and pure, and the Way will be gained.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

Only allow what is to sound itself through your name and you and I will be exactly what we are in this world.

In this way all is accomplished. In this way everything minds itself.

Nothing's wrong. There are no mistakes.

Follow, if you wish, this way of being.

What about not following nor having a following? Can we just be part of the journey?

What if there were nowhere to go and nothing to accomplish? Whence the journey then?

There's a stream, and there's bamboo,
There's mulberry and hemp.
Mist-hidden, clouded hamlet,
A mild, tranquil place.
Just a few tilled acres.
Just a few tiled roofs.
How many lives would I
Have to live, to get that simple.
- Yuan Mei (1716–1798)

Hot summer day in Maine. Sitting in shade in front of book shed, reading. Morning practice and Evening practice. We are so fortunate!

Without opinions what would I be?

Probably, free.