on patch of island between two bridges where brook tumbles on either side, two people part ways

Trusting Continuance

1. Things have a beginning, a middle, and a continuance.

2.  We remember beginnings. We experience middles — (some delights, some difficulties).

3.  We don’t know what continuance will look like.

4.  We just step, and step; we flow, and flow.

5.  How do we continue when we don’t know, can’t know, where it goes?

6.  Look! (At branches of brook flowing by, going their way.)

7.  Our task — to let it go! To trust continuance, to

8.  Trust the mountain, the bridges, the fallen tree, and

9.  Trust ourselves as we go on with presence: boundaries of edges provided by earth’s natural sluice.     

          This —

10. Helping us go on,     trusting,    continuance. 
                                                                          
                                                                                                     (wfh/24may18, Parting Ways Ceremony,)

We stood with them as they moved toward silence.

don’t waste a moment

Morning twilight, woodpecker awakens at tree hits wooden Han* calling practitioners of zen to their practice.

Songbirds grumble their way into dawn zendo finding branch zabuton sprig green zafu measured anicca breath silently reciting: “The awakened way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.”

This Thursday morning.

No, thing, special — woodpecker stalwart in its invitation.

Surely our neighbors are meditating on impermanence.

*Han: A wooden block hit with a mallet to notify sitters that zazen is about to begin. On the back of the han appear the following words of the Buddha:

Great is the matter of birth and death
Life flows quickly by
Time waits for no one
Wake up! Wake up!
Don’t waste a moment!

https://www.torontozen.org/glossary.html

ex nihilo

I prayed today

I said: I don’t know

how to pray —

that was enough

to awaken god

and set the world

right. God loves

fools and unknowing

how words matter

I

am not

a poet

flip the coin

The president of the United States might be on his way out.

Or maybe it is merely the dissolution of the American experiment.

It was a nice try.

And it's a complicated political world.

But we no longer want flimflam or echolalia.

There will be no tears.

money comes from: thin air.

Just when you think that we have money problems in the US, you have another
think coming.

Which changes everything.

In one of her most important academic papers, published in 2000, Kelton  

maintains that government doesn’t actually finance its activity by levying  

taxes or issuing bonds.  

Instead, it creates money by spending it into existence. If a government  

wants to build a road, it calls some contractors and puts money in their bank  

accounts to pay for it.  

Where does this money come from? The same place all money comes from:  

thin air. 

(--from, Stephanie Kelton Has The Biggest Idea In Washington, Once an outsider, her radical economic thinking 

won over Wall Street. Now she’s changing the Democratic Party. By Zach Carter, 05/20/2018 07:23 am ET, 

Huffington Post) 

We knew it all along, didn't we? All the economic, tax, and banking stress
played on ordinary working stiffs is and has been a ruse.

I'll have to sit and have a think on this.

psalms -- read them with your whole self, praying

Yes.

Attraction and revulsion surround and interpenetrate each other like a sumie Ensō rolling at bottom of page with Four Vows of the Bodhisattva exploding where beginning and ending smash into one another as if surprised to learn they'd arrived where they departed and departed from where there was no point unarriving.

Who would use terms like wholeness or enlightenment when the startling point is a rereading of the maxim 'Nothing ventured, nothing gained.' No longer the 'Go do it!' interpretation but rather a sobering realization that nothing begins nothing ends.

We cannot understand this. It evades reason and hides in riddles. Like sitting with a dying woman as turkey walks back and forth outside patio door along split rail fence as dimming daylight hurries ground feeding songbirds sorting through broken open shells to wing back to night nest.

Psalms, as my dimness descends, attract and repulse.

Richard Rohr arrives this Sunday morning with his meditation:

The Psalms
Sunday, May 20, 2018

So much of our lives is dictated by our preferences, what we like and don’t like. We all naturally gravitate toward what we find attractive, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But we need to be aware that there are things deeper than our preferences. If we do not recognize that, we will follow them addictively and never uncover our soul’s deeper desires. Often the very things that don’t appeal to us have the most to teach us spiritually.

If you’re like me, you’d much rather spend time in the classical, medieval, or renaissance galleries than in modern exhibits. We tend to be attracted to whatever version of art makes us feel comfortable or reflects our worldview. We play this game of preference even in what we we’ve deemed the “sacred art” of the psalms. We prefer the calm bucolic scene of Psalm 23, but cringe when the psalmist mirrors back to us the messiness, violence, and confusion of being human. St. John Cassian (c. 360–c. 435) taught that the psalms carry in them “all the feelings of which human nature is capable.” [1]

Poet Kathleen Norris writes of her experience singing the psalms three times a day as a guest in a Benedictine monastery:

The psalms demand engagement, they ask you to read them with your whole self, praying, as St. Benedict says, “in such a way that our minds are in harmony with our voices.” [2] . . . You come to the Bible’s great “book of praises” through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you may feel like hell, you sing anyway. To your surprise, you find that the psalms do not deny your true feelings but allow you to reflect on them. . . .

But to the modern reader the psalms can seem impenetrable: how in the world can we read, let alone pray, these angry and often violent poems from an ancient warrior culture? At a glance they seem overwhelmingly patriarchal, ill-tempered, moralistic, vengeful, and often seem to reflect precisely what is wrong with our world. And that’s the point, or part of it. As one reads the psalms every day, it becomes clear that the world they depict is not really so different from our own; the fourth-century monk Athanasius wrote that the psalms “become like a mirror to the person singing them.” [3] . . . The psalms remind us that the way we judge each other, with harsh words and acts of vengeance, constitutes injustice, and they remind us that it is the powerless in society who are overwhelmed when injustice becomes institutionalized. . . .

In expressing all the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the psalms act as good psychologists. They defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first. [4]

The Psalms—like all great art—lead us to a truer image of ourselves, reality, and God.
http://email.cac.org/t/ViewEmail/d/0670169C6ECABD3C2540EF23F30FEDED/D7E1331FA0AEA466942A2DF08F503B7C

two of our compañeros, two statements, both worth a hearing

One brother tells it stark: Christopher Hitchens was once asked where he gets his free will from. He answers "From the acceptance of my solitude, sole responsibility. I cannot refer my problems up to a dictator."
(42:10 into clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuX028G9oBo&t=1000s)

As a counterbalance, here's a brother who knows how to preach:

“Bishop Michael Curry of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. delivered an impassioned sermon at the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgluP3BkVaA

You've got to love the freedom and ability to listen to, hear, and cogitate what our family is saying.

time's right

A friend will marry in Belize in June.

How kind of him to go where I will not.

My gift to them was Hitchens tonight.

Inchoate vs innate, daimonium throughout.

me, an I? (ng!)

A

Cross

Word

omg, is that the right word

No.

One

Can 

Stop

These people

From their 

Appointed tasks

And so

We

Wait to

See

How it

Will end

Because

It will end

Hopefully

The bloodshed 

will

Be

Minimal

And you, 

yes

You

Survive

In tack.

non sum qualis eram (latin)

 Horace, translated as, "I am not as I was."

The title of Dowson’s poem is taken from the Roman poet Horace, and specifically from Book 4 of his Odes. It means ‘I am not as I was in the reign of good Cynara’. (Cynara, by the way, means ‘artichoke’ in Greek.) That phrase, ‘I am not as I was’, points up the poem’s speaker as somebody who is past his prime, whose best days are behind him. As we will discover, the speaker of the poem is lovesick: ruined by the hopeless love for a woman. 

(--from, A Short Analysis of Ernest Dowson’s ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’, in interesting literature)

I heard the Latin phrase while listening to Christopher Hitchens give a talk, his last public appearance.

On October 8 2011 Christopher Hitchens received the Richard Dawkins Award at the Texas Freethought Convention on behalf of Atheist Alliance of America, presented by Richard Dawkins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFqIiddsoKM 

He died 15Dec2011. He was intelligent, and colorful.

Another Latin epigram has interested me. At times, to the consternation of some:

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Quotidie morior from the Mysterium Cosmographicum, 1621 edition.
Epigram attributed to Ptolemy

The commonplace of dying I admit 

but when I ponder Heaven's form close-knit, 

My feet don't touch the ground. 

Instead, with ZeusI taste ambrosia, sip celestial juice. 

               translation©2002 Leonard Cottrell

*Epigramma Ptolemaeo adscriptum 

Quotidie morior, fateorque—sed inter Olympi 

Dum tenet assiduas me mea cura vias, 

Non pedibus terram contingo, sed ante Tonantem 

Nectare, divina pascor et ambrosia.

...   ...   ...

This epigram has its use in a different metaphor, namely, I must decrease.

I tire of my and therefore the culture's insistence that puffery and bloviation, celebrity and notoriety are the crowning achievements of an individual. We seem to love the Royal family or presidential family pomp and drama. We marvel at the 25+million per year salaries of athletes and media personalities. We are attracted to the loudest and most outrageous person in the room.

I prefer decreasing and disappearing.

Death refers to life.

So death, i.e. pointing attention to life, especially life in its subtle origination in each moment and its passing away in the next, interests me.

I wish to assert nothing but life itself.

I am not as I was.

I am as I am.

Inshallah!

all there is

We walk around in narratives.

Stories we tell ourselves.

Interpretations that seem reliable and familiar.

We've heard them before.

What if we dropped our narratives?

Stopped telling ourselves stories?

Ceased interpretations?

No longer listened to the voices in our head?

I don't know.

What would happen if everything was merely itself?

Would we walk around as itself?

In itself?

difficulties and quicksand

Watching old debates between Christopher Hitchens and individuals aligned with religious faiths.

Listening to news shows telling latest breaking of ethical or legal precedents by the current president or his attendants.

Religion has its difficulties.

Politics is quicksand.

It is a task to try to maintain equilibrium in wobbly realms of religion and politics.

today is today

I wake up. It is Wednesday. Birdsong. Sunshine. Cool air comes in open windows. Foolish news from radio.

Silence now.

I look back on days where it mattered what priests or ministers rabbis or imans elders or pundits presidents or congresspeople ceo's or actors celebrities or athletes local cop or school principal loud knowitalls or experts of any stripe those who claim to know and those who don't know but have power to influence -- those days no longer exist.

Today is today. That's all we know.

No one knows anything other than whatever is emerging in the moment just now.

Birdsong.

Sunshine.

Your eyes.

Breath.

whatever vanishes

Yes

Whatever happens

Whatever you say

Whatever failures

Whatever vanishes

Remains

Yes

trying to de-fence the injustice they receive and the injustice they distribute.

Our smiling political first family are safe and sound in Jerusalem.

On the other hand:

"ZEITOUN, Gaza Strip —   Israeli forces killed 55 Palestinians on the boundary fence with Gaza on Monday...""More than 2,400 people were injured, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza, including 1,200 from live ammunition. " (Article, Washington Post, 14may18)

...

HAIKU        

               (a proportional response) 

Ivanka, Jared 

are OK. They celebrate 

their new embassy

The inmates of Gaza Strip, and the inmates of the Trump administration, are trying to de-fence the injustice they receive and the injustice they distribute.  

'yes' is saying nothing other than presence

Someone at Friday Evening Conversation recently said they'd been watching a Netflix Documentary titled "Wild, Wild Country" about Rajneesh, Antelope Oregon, and Ma Anand Sheela, his secretary.

An interview with Sheela posted on Vulture:

Were you ever surprised by his requests? 

In the beginning, I was and I questioned him. His answer to me: the way you are on television, you will protect the community by deterrent. You will become the deterrent. 

He said also that outrageous performance will bring more interest from other television companies or television channels or news media. Media is very expensive, advertisement is very expensive, so every performance must bring new performances. Nowadays you see this on a daily basis with Trump. 

I was going to say that, yeah. 

He creates every day a new sensation and media gets exhausted what to do. Every day — five, ten breaking news. I think Trump is a better student of Bhagwan than me in that sense.

The Daily Beast compared you to Kellyanne Conway, but you didn’t seem to like that comparison. 

No I don’t like it. What I’m saying is a joke, and I’m not comparing Bhagwan and me to Trump under any circumstances. 

But the approach is similar. 

Because people only understand sensation. They don’t understand, other than negativity and sensation. People remain stuck in negativity. 

By appealing to that, aren’t you just propagating that quality? 

You can look at it that way. You can also look at it that the negative approach brings you more media, and you want to remain on the tubes for self-protection. 

I can tell you something. A small story. There was a man who goes to a master and says nobody pays attention to me, everybody ignores me. That hurts me very much. And master said: Next time somebody starts talking, you just say no. No to everything. It will create a counterreaction and then everybody will pay attention to you. The man tries this thing and suddenly he becomes a big important person from simple “no.” That is our mankind’s stupidity. When you say “yes” nobody listens to you.

(from, Wild Wild Country’s Ma Anand Sheela Did It All for Love, By Mallika Rao, Apr.23, 2018)

This recalls the line in "Man for All Seasons" where playwright Robert Bolt has Sir Thomas More, on trial for his life, say, "Qui tacit consentiri, the maxim of the law is, Qui tacit consentiri -- Silence means consent."

It suggests to me that all the news and hoopla about and from Rajneesh and Trump, the din and drumbeat, distractions and incessant caterwauling comprising our contemporary culture -- is our way of saying NO to what is true and beyond obvious, meaningful and nourishing to our lives.

Silence, the silence of mere moment within itself, is what YES sounds like -- affirming, forgiving, and allowing unadorned emergence of what is guileless humility to stand without pretense in the light of day and be unafraid of the womb of night.

May we be blessed with nobody listening to us!

Yes is saying nothing other than presence.

qui tacet consentiri

Morning.

source silentium 

creative verbum 

listening actus

Monday.

quies ab initio 

conversatio in creatio  

movere auscultare

Mnemosyne. 

there

is no

         time --

like the

        present