There's a collapse occurring. It's a little unnerving. Which is ironic in that we have lost our nerve to do what's right while the unscrupulous are not frightened & are full of nerve to do what is erroneous and injurious.

That, and the fact of an approaching hurricane!

As always, the moon
Night after night after night
Will stay on here
At this grass hut I put together,
And now I must leave.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

This morning, for the first time, Rokpa accompanied us into the prison for a visit. He played soccer in the rec area of Close A, Protective Custody. He visited the Buddhist end of practice. He went with Fonz to the library. Guards gave him treats. Inmates scratched behind his ears and rubbed his rump. They talked of their own dogs. A scrum of more than a half dozen men returning to their cells stopped to surround and touch the white Border Collie. It was a good visit. Rokie was charming.

Still --

Where things seem to be collapsing is everywhere. Food, oil, money, housing, employment, crime, governance, wars, wars and revolutions, terrorism, political infantilism, media mockery, celebrity envy, executive corporate obscene salaries, head in sand, feet in tar sand, belief in belief and not in reality.

If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.
-- Confucius Saying on Learning

There is much to learn.

Let's not wait.

Let's begin now!

Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO. Next day my Imac crashes. Forty days ago the protection expired. Perfect!

18 Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” 19 And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” 21 And the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, 22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by.
(Ex 33: 18-22)

"Glory" has always escaped me.

Jesus said to his disciples:
‘Stay awake, because you do not know the day when your master is coming. You may be quite sure of this that if the householder had known at what time of the night the burglar would come, he would have stayed awake and would not have allowed anyone to break through the wall of his house. Therefore, you too must stand ready because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.
(Matthew 24:42-51)

Hurricane wends our way.

It feels like things are disassembling themselves.

No fear. Just the annoyances of existence.

Even as it all disappears.

Maybe things will change in October. Maybe some Mayan or Hopi prophecy will turn things upside down. I don't know.

I can only live second by second, day by day. The unknowable hasn't much allure.

Unknowing, on the other hand, is always at hand.

True perfection seems imperfect... but is perfectly itself. --Lao Tzu

It's never easy to like someone else's narrative about the unknowable. The unknowable is so...unknowable.

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense"
-- Rumi, 1207-1273, trans. by Colman Barks and John Moyne)

The suggestion is that if we stay spiritually aware and without fear all will be OK.

A nice thought.

Worth sitting with.

Three quotes as epigraphs to sections of a novel:

A man is a god in ruins.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In the beginning was the World,
And the World was God, and the world was good."
--Fragment from the Heretic Bible

"I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful
to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!"
--Also Sprach Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche

It might be said that the story we tell becomes the reality we live.

Choose carefully the words of your story.

Care decisively for the reality you are, the reality you live.

When I say there is nothing outside,
Students who do not understand me
Interpret this in terms of inwardness,
So they sit silent and still,
Taking this to be Zen Buddhism.
This is a big mistake.
If you take a state of unmoving clarity to be Zen,
You are recognizing ignorance as a slave master.
- Linji (d. 867)

I would like to choose my words benevolently, tell the story benevolently, live my life benevolently.

Good will, yes, friends!

The universe, the inventor-scientist says, will become aware.

"Does God exist? Well, I would say, ‘Not yet.’"
-- Ray Kurzweil

I talk to a man studying to become a priest. He feels his church must also become aware

"Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you. The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to himself, and he is the one who has made it all."
— Kabir

Kurzweil thinks the singularity is near. Biological man will merge with mechanical/computational, nano-technological artificial intelligence. It will signal the end of what we have known as humankind and enter into a new techno-phylum distinctly different yet incorporative of the data-experience of human compilation.

This leaky, tumbledown
Grass hut left an opening for the moon,
And I gazed at it
All the while it was mirrored
In a teardrop fallen on my sleeve.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

Maybe Lowell was right. Maybe:

We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(--from poem, Epilogue, by Robert Lowell)

As I think about it, it seems that those two words serve as one good epigraph and one good epitaph:

"Not yet!"

Music of Thailand in the film stays beyond end. So much of our sanity the roots of our tradition. The Overture is the music.

One continuous clear void, the night precisely midway; the moon, cool, spews frost. When light and dark are merged without division, who distinguishes relative and absolute herein? Thus it is said, "Although the absolute is absolute, yet it is relative; although the relative is relative, yet it is complete." At this precise moment, how do you discern?
How clear. Twin shining eyes before any impulse!
How stately. The eternal body outside forms!
- Hung-chih

Downpour subsides.

It is what emerges from between two sides that reveals what is next for us.

No winners; no losers.

Only this very step.

And this.

As a hermit, socializing in crowds is not my favorite activity. Nothing personal. Just awkward.

Bahá’u’lláh urges that Houses of Worship be made "as perfect as is possible in the world of being" and that they be befittingly adorned. The House of Worship has three prerequisites: it is to be circular shape, to have nine sides, and to be surrounded by nine gardens with walkways. The emphasis on the number nine comes from the understanding that this number, the largest single digit, symbolizes perfection, comprehensiveness, and unity. Nine is also the numerical value of the Arabic word bahá (light, glory) according to the ancient abjad system, in which each letter of the alphabet is accorded numerical significance.
(--from Mashriqu’l-Adhkár (Arabic: "Dawning Place of the Praise of God"), Term used primarily to refer to a Bahá’í House of Worship, also known as a Temple, and its surrounding dependencies.
http://www.bahai-encyclopedia-project.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70:mashriqul-adhkar&catid=36:administrationinstitutions

One of the useful things about being a hermit is recognizing that solitude is a metier sans doute.

Without doubt one is alone in this thought.

Still, welcoming light.

Make it appropriate.

ORIGIN late Middle English : from late Latin appropriatus, past participle of appropriare ‘make one's own,’ from ad- ‘to’ + proprius ‘own, proper.’

Make it your own.

The world is unstable, like a house on fire. This is not a place where you stay long. The murderous haunt of impermanence comes upon you in a flash, no matter whether you are rich or poor, old or young. If you want to be no different from a Zen master or a buddha, just do not seek outwardly.
- Lin Chi (d 867?)

Because there's nothing out there.

Not.

In here.

See? Sea? Si!

Fog hides nearly everything at Rockland Harbor. Boat horn sounds rhythmically, probably ferry to Vinalhaven.

She "came out", the text says, "dancing to the sound of timbrels." Two months later, lamenting her virginity, she was gone, a casualty of a vow her father made for the Lord's help in defeating an enemy,

As Jephthah returned to his house at Mizpah, his daughter came out from it to meet him; she was dancing to the sound of timbrels. This was his only child; apart from her he had neither son nor daughter. When he saw her, he tore his clothes and exclaimed, ‘Oh my daughter, what sorrow you are bringing me! Must it be you, the cause of my ill-fortune! I have given a promise to the Lord, and I cannot unsay what I have said.’ (--from Judges 11:29-39)

As the fog lifts, the Breakwater Light shows itself, lobster boat slowing after fast crossing,

In second reading the guy without wedding garment is tossed on his ear.

“How did you get in here, my friend, without a wedding garment?” And the man was silent. Then the king said to the attendants, “Bind him hand and foot and throw him out into the dark, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.” For many are called, but few are chosen.’ (--from Matthew 22: 1-14)

This might not be a punishment. Nonconformity may be the kingdom. We have to be tossed into it.

Silence offers no explanation.

Comments, not commentary. There are questions. Such as: Why is virginity such a powerful notion in religious literature? Are we to suppose that not-being-born is a purer state that being-born? Or is remaining intact a metaphor for not buying into the fragmentation of dissolution and disintegration? Are we being tossed to Layman Pang’s thoughts about the ‘unborn’ --

The world over:

Men without wives

Women without husbands

Face to face,

Speaking of what is unborn.

(The Sayings of Layman Pang, #3: "One Gulp")

Which notion is artificial, and which authentic?

Kuei-shan asked Yun-yen,

“What is the seat of enlightenment?"

Yun-yen said,

"Freedom from artificiality.”

- Kuei-shan (771-854)

And then there is the wedding garment. Is a free meal a legal contract? Either it is a free meal or it is a legal contract. I’m leery of the King’s attitude. No one wanted to come in the first place, then those drafted have to conform to his dress code, resulting in an ignominious booting to someone garbed as an outsider. I’m glad the text prefaced the story with the word ‘may’ when it said: Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people, ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a feast for his son’s wedding. [Emphasis added]

Or, maybe not!

When the Blessed Sacrament is placed in monstrance after mass on Thursdays, the invitation is to look -- to look, perchance to see.

Dance, child, you are never not whole!

Be tossed, man, nothing defines you from outside!

Not a single one of you people at this meeting is unenlightened. Right now, you're all sitting before me as Buddhas. Each of you received the Buddha-mind from your mothers when you were born, and nothing else. This inherited Buddha-mind is beyond any doubt unborn, with a marvelously bright illuminative wisdom.

In the Unborn, all things are perfectly resolved.

(-Bankei Yotaku, 17th century Zen Master, 1622-93).

Fog bank rolls out to see.

Good white dog with black spot saddle snoozes on linoleum floor next to Waterford 103.

Then moves to sunlit door when he hears the sound of a car stopping on the road, wondering...

What may appear?

Where do the dead go? Some into a box into the ground. Some into a crematorium and out as ash. Some would say that's only where their bodies go, That 'they' go to some spiritual place to begin a new kind of existence.

Names of the Dead
Last Updated: 12:20 AM ET
The Department of Defense has identified 1,723 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations. It confirmed the death of the following American this week:

CUNNINGHAM, Joe L., 27, Second Lt., Army; Kingston, Okla.; 179th Infantry, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Oklahoma Army National Guard.
(source: NewYork Times, 17aug2011)

I don't know.

Thus it is that we should not fear the arising of thoughts, just fear being slow to notice. It is also said, "When thoughts arise, immediately notice them; once you become aware of them, they are no longer there."
- Master Chinul (1158-1210)

I notice my thoughts want to take me elsewhere and pronounce other words.

Instead:

I wish this soldier God. And his family, also, God.

This embrace of disappearance!

Reading all day.

Barking

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.
( - Poem by Jim Harrison, from Poetry, September 2008).

Except for mass in the morning.

The only question more important than "Does faith help you die?" is: "Is faith life itself?"

Thus, being a person of faith means the willingness to consider and accept life.

Today is the Feast of the Assumption of Mary into heaven. It's a good feast.

One definition of "assumption" is: "Taking to or upon oneself."

In India two persons meet. In English they say, "How do you do?" The Indian greeting is, "Are you upon yourself?" The moment you stand upon something else, you run the risk of being miserable. This is what I mean by meditation — the soul trying to stand upon itself. That state must surely be the healthiest state of the soul, when it is thinking of itself, residing in its own glory. No, all the other methods that we have — by exciting emotions, prayers, and all that — really have that one end in view. In deep emotional excitement the soul tries to stand upon itself. Although the emotion may arise from anything external, there is concentration of mind.
(-- from "Meditation," talk by Swami Vivekananda; Delivered at the Washington Hall, San Francisco, April 3, 1900*) http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_4/lectures_and_discourses/meditation.htm

I remember many people today -- the death of Jim's mom, the death of Heather's dad, the religious vows of a dear friend. Happily, death is not what we think it is. It is an uncharted mystery calling us through it. And canceling vows is a deep understanding of how life moves in mysterious ways through the years. Each year on High Holy Days we are called into a reflection about "All the vows" taken or to be taken in our lives. I've fallen through this cancellation.

We don't know. Perhaps we can't know. Our epistemology is a fluctuating wave and an uncertain footing. I, personally, do not know -- hardly anything, if anything.

And so, what seems paradoxical sits comfortably alongside.

As a Catholic I love Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha.

As a Buddhist I love Jesus of Nazareth the Christ.

Individuals, both. Not archetypes, not myths, not institutions. Individuals. As each of us is, or, could be.

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)

I no longer feel the need to defend -- (as if I ever needed to defend) -- religion against critics conflating or extrapolating disappointing details or dramas into wholesale condemnation or denigration. There are, it is undeniable, stupid, evil, unkind, and misdirected behaviors that reside within the structures grown up around the religious insights of ordinary or unusual people.

Today the thought arises that Max Muller's dictum "Whoever knows one [religion], knows none." -- might be expanded, I submit, to 'the only one religion is none of the above -- true religion is love and kindness,' and that all religions together are only a small attempt to penetrate that truth and translate it into everyday action by means of thought, prayer, and service.

It seems to me there is religion, and there is perversion of religion. 'Religion' is the response to the question, "What hold us and everything together?" To this question, the responses 'love' and 'kindness' arise. It is possible to suggest that anything not embodying the template and behavior of love and kindness falls short of 'religion' and doesn't hold together. Anything that purports to be religion yet offends and perverts the common understanding of love and kindness could easily be seen as the perversion of religion.

I suspect that the vast majority of people are dissatisfied with, and often shun completely, the 'perversion of religion' when they experience it. I also suspect that authentic 'religion' -- love and kindness-- whether done in the name of God, humankind, truth, earth, commonsense, or the appellations of Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Shintoism, Paganism, Islam, New Age, or None of the Above Agnosticism and Atheism -- is recognized and felt by any and everyone who has come into its presence.

The Broken


The spiders started out to go with the wind on its pilgrimage. At that time

They were honored among the invisibles -- more sensitive than glass, lighter

than water, purer than ice. Even the lighting spoke well of them, and it

seemed as though they could go anywhere. But as they were traveling

between cold and heat, cracks appeared in them, appeared in their limbs,

and they stopped, it seemed they had to stop, had to leave the company of

the wind for a while and stay in one place until they got better, moving

carefully, hiding, trusting to nothing. It was not long before they gave up

trying to become whole again, and instead undertook to mend the air.

Neither life nor death, they said, would slip through it any more.

After that they were numbered among the dust -- makers of ghosts.

The wind never missed them. There were still the clouds.

(--Poem by W. S. Merwin)

We might not be able to "mend the air" -- but we can honor the effort to see things as of a piece, whole and entire, even as the moving, flowing dispersion of forms into emptiness, nothingness moving through matter, and human understanding diminishing in the face of ungraspable mystery and mystagogy -- still, we long for a unified seeing wherein everyone and everything holds together.

We know that things fall apart. That's common to us. And yet -- and yet -- there is an ease with which what has fallen apart comes to itself again -- there is an intuitive and organic recollection and healing engendered by what we call love and what we call kindness.

I aspire to be what I am, a religious person. Even when religions fail, or the perversion of religion predominates, I trust that religion itself, in whatever form it might emerge, urges us through our yearning for love and kindness to the simple practice of love and kindness.

One breath at a time.

One person present.

Body, spirit, assumption -- the act of taking to or upon oneself.

To or upon.

Oneself.

Barn at dusk.

Dog on gravel at dusk.

No need to fabricate concepts. What we are looking for is right before us.

In the silence of this “night of faith” we return to simplicity and sincerity of heart. We learn recollection which consists in listening for God’s will, in direct and simple attention to reality. Recollection is awareness of the unconditional.
(--p.92, The Climate of Monastic Prayer, by Thomas Merton, c.1969)

Solitude is being-alone.

Community is being-with-others.

Between them, the conversation.

One day bloom. Next day gone

Morning chapel/zendo. Simple silence.

Evening. As sun goes down. Stern.

Brief, remaining, glance. Bow.

Between red nun and green can.

Darkness. Full moon.

Numquam se minus solum quam cum solus -- You are never so little alone as when you are alone. (Cicero)

The moon, just shy of full, hung behind Curtis Island out over the bay. I rowed back with it at 12:30 (the position, not the time) off stern while navigating rear-view mirror through maze of moored boats.

While everyone else
Is so busy striving,
The lone traveler
Is at ease by himself.
He's been living outside of convention
For a long time now;
In his pouch there is nothing at all.
When he walks,
He takes a cane for a companion;
When he talks,
He has the rocks for an audience.
If you ask him what his religion is,
When hungry it's a bowl of rice.
- Wen-siang (1210-1280)

Listening to James Finley on Contemplative Prayer as I row. Earlier this morning in prison we read Dom Christian de Cerge's testament from Algeria written before his death to be read after.

Later we sit with the Buddhist sangha and chant the Heart Sutra that Tony leads. Our final contact was with Olin telling us of the terrific work being done, inmate to inmate, about learning to consider living beyond labels. We talk about a directed college study of Kristof Kieslowski's films.

Philosophy matters. Art matters. Poetry matters. They can help.

The discipline of phenomenology forms one basic field in philosophy among others. How is phenomenology distinguished from, and related to, other fields in philosophy?

Traditionally, philosophy includes at least four core fields or disciplines: ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic. Suppose phenomenology joins that list. Consider then these elementary definitions of field:

Ontology is the study of beings or their being — what is.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge — how we know.
Logic is the study of valid reasoning — how to reason.
Ethics is the study of right and wrong — how we should act.
Phenomenology is the study of our experience — how we experience.
The domains of study in these five fields are clearly different, and they seem to call for different methods of study.

Philosophers have sometimes argued that one of these fields is “first philosophy”, the most fundamental discipline, on which all philosophy or all knowledge or wisdom rests. Historically (it may be argued), Socrates and Plato put ethics first, then Aristotle put metaphysics or ontology first, then Descartes put epistemology first, then Russell put logic first, and then Husserl (in his later transcendental phase) put phenomenology first.

Consider epistemology. As we saw, phenomenology helps to define the phenomena on which knowledge claims rest, according to modern epistemology. On the other hand, phenomenology itself claims to achieve knowledge about the nature of consciousness, a distinctive kind of first-person knowledge, through a form of intuition.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/

The chapel is full and present.

Only silence and stillness can do it service.

One of these nights there will be a blockage, say, in my throat. And I will die. It's not a big deal. Only a blockage. Nor is death a big deal. The fear of which is only a blockage. When it occurs, I suspect I'll have a different opinion.

Grasshopper
by Ron Padgett

It's funny when the mind thinks about the psyche,
as if a grasshopper could ponder a helicopter.

It's a bad idea to fall asleep
while flying a helicopter:

when you wake up, the helicopter is gone
and you are too, left behind in a dream,

and there is no way to catch up,
for catching up doesn't figure

in the scheme of things. You are
who you are, right now,

and the mind is so scared it closes its eyes
and then forgets it has eyes

and the grasshopper, the one that thinks
you're a helicopter, leaps onto your back!

He is a brave little grasshopper
and he never sleeps

for the poem he writes is the act
of always being awake, better than anything

you could ever write or do.
Then he springs away.

(Poem by Ron Padgett)

Tell me about the Real Presence -- about the relationship of Form to Emptiness -- about where light goes when it goes 'out.'

What's that? Nothing to say? Hello?

Perhaps no one has ever seen God because God is not outside anything. That, and the possibility that what is 'inside' anything inside is only vast and open and empty space.

Of course I believe in God.

You have to be 'in' God to believe anything.

Mostly I believe that to return to God is to be really present, as who you are, right now.

Two eleven year olds played with Rokie a long while this afternoon -- to the delight of their doting grandfather with whom I drank coffee.

At conversation tonight we wondered about consciousness, form & emptiness, and true religion.

-- Why?
-- Because it is fun! And, too, we restore you because of who you are., Mallory Ringess, the pilot who will never die, ha, ha! We give you our memories because you must know.
--I don't want to know anything.
__ Oh, ho, listen, Man, and we'll tell you everything1 Do you hear the waves whispering the secret? We know you know, Man. The secret of life is just sheer joy, and joy is everywhere. Joy is what we wre made for. It is in the rush of the nighttime surf and in the beach rocks and in the salt and in the air and in the water we breathe and deep, deep within the blood. And the shifting ocean sands and the wriggling silverfish and the hooded greens of the shallows and the purple deeps and in the oyster's crusty shell and the pink reefs and even the muck of the ocean;s floor, joy, joy, joy!
-- No, life is pain, I know. There's a poem; I remember some of it: "We're born in our mother's pain and perish in our own."
-- Life will not perish. We give you these memories so life will not perish.
-- I remember the song of the Host of Restorers.
-- All of the hosts are restorers. That is what we are; that is what we do.
-- I don't want to be restored like this.
-- It is a great song, isn't it? Do you hear the song?
-- I'm afraid.
-- Ha, ha!

The song of Agathange is a great song, but it is a song most human beings would care to hear. Some parts, of course, given the wholely human heritage of that mysterious race, are understandable. Humans and god-men (or even most gods, I think) share the knowledge that matter and consciousness are inseparable. The knowledge is old; ages ago the mechanics found that it was impossible to describe the behavior of subatomic particles without considering the effects of consciousness on the objects they were studying, just as it was impossible to explain the disasterous thermodynamics and poisoning of the Earth, all the while ignoring the conscious and criminal actions of billions of human beings. ...So, the Agathanians revere the unity of consciousness and matter, and they have pushed their belief to the logical end. The ten thousand hosts of restorers were trying to awaken the whole of their planet to greater consciousness. The song tells of the great restoration: The first ecologists had not trusted their miniscule consciosnesses. Had man's consciousness saved Old Earth? No, and neither would Agathange be saved, because man was man, and someday -- even though they made themselves like seals and took to the sea -- the natural harmonies would be broken. Only by creating a consciousness far beyond their own, a World-soul, could they sing a song of total joy, which, after all, is what they sought to do.
(--pp.254-255 in Neverness, novel by David Zindell)

I'd like to hear that song.

Philip Levine is named to be new Poet Laureate. A 1999 poem by Mr. Levine is called “He Would Never Use One Word Where None Would Do” and ends:

Fact is, silence is the perfect water:
unlike rain it falls from no clouds
to wash our minds, to ease our tired eyes,
to give heart to the thin blades of grass
fighting through the concrete for even air
dirtied by our endless stream of words.

A silent song where words have grown familiar with not being spoken.

Not-being, spoken, is silence and joy!

Watching bats fly from barn.

Seeing into Nothingness
This is the true seeing,
The eternal seeing
- Shen-hui (8th cent)

Last meeting of course in prison, Philosophy of Friendship.

There's nothing left but what we have.

Look around.

Do you see anything not there?

That's the idea!

Once born, stay aware of birth.

Once living, stay aware of life.

If you haven't attained clear, true vision,
This causes you to lapse into extremes,
So that you lose contact with reality.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

Once we begin to die, stay aware of birth and life.

Have I forgotten anything?

Oh yeah -- with gratitude for any and all love: my parents, my friends!

With continuation and good will for each.

I leave three pennies on bell buoy off-shore.

Just to feel human. That's what an inmate rehearsing Hamlet said about how he experienced the process of being directed in a play by a tough and caring director. It's This American Life -- always a good bet.

What I call perfection of seeing
Is not seeing others
But oneself.
- Chuang-tzu (3rd cent BC)

"I am Laertes," says one of the actors. He means it. Not just the part he played, but the realization of himself as not other than Laertes.

Being nowhere else is finding oneself everywhere.

ST: In the context of this aching or longing, how can we understand this idea of “the Palace of Nowhere” as our ultimate destination?

JF: The phrase comes from the Taoist sage and poet Chaung Tzu, who wrote: “Come with me to the palace of nowhere, where all the many things are one.” We therefore use the phrase “palace of nowhere” as a metaphor for contemplative fulfillment. That is, the palace of nowhere is a state of awareness in which we realize directly that ultimately nothing is real but love. Or that ultimately nothing is real but God. Or that ultimately the concrete immediacy of life itself is the concrete manifestation of the divine. The reference to “nowhere” means that as soon as we try to back up, to stand and claim what we seem to have found, that it will all slip through our fingers again. And so I deliberately use the phrase “palace of nowhere” to allude to this great paradox. The nowhere is the infinite ground of everywhere.

ST: If you were to imagine for a moment that Thomas Merton was still alive today, how do you feel he would be responding to the current world situation?

JF: I was in the monastery with Merton in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War. The Berrigan brothers would come there to visit him, and he corresponded with people like Boris Pasternak and Bob Dylan. He was one of the Catholic intellectuals who helped fuel the peace movement. My sense is that what Merton would say today would be consistent with what he was saying then. That is, we face the individual dilemma of estrangement from contemplative experience and the preciousness of our own lives, as well as society's estrangement from this awareness. And that estrangement perpetuates violence. Therefore the task of the contemplative today is to be a prophetic witness – a nonviolent witness to the preciousness of all life, at a level that precedes and transcends all ideological positions.
(- From interview with James Finley by Sounds True, http://contemplativeway.org/interviews/mertoninterview.html)

We are the prisoners we visit.

There's no need to resolve or justify or rationalize.

Nothing is real but love.