down to earth

Does it matter that the mythic God is dead?

Look under your feet --

The grieving period is vast and long

in the morning

no luck

kitchen window open all night

found

nestled between embroidered

pillow and bed cover

bird

gone beyond

cat in bathroom overnight

in kitchen

flies from beam to picture frame to globe --

visiting bird

room 4

We are

only here for a short time.

These bodies wear out. Organs run down.

Cancers take over. Brain loses electric connections.

We die.

And before death our systems fail.

So it is.

In the meantime we wait. And watch.

We nap. Sip hot chocolate.

Read studies of history and religious thought.

Bide time.

One breath after another.

Together.

questioning this

Yesterday was Ascension Thursday. The invitation arises to consider what location means, what dimensions overlap with our space/time dimensionality, what it means to say ‘I am here.’

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) speaks of the physics and spirituality in a sermon:

Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now, through the faith, hope and love that unites us to him? While in heaven he is also with us; and we while on earth are with him. He is here with us by his divinity, his power and his love. We cannot be in heaven, as he is on earth, by divinity, but in him, we can be there by love. 

He did not leave heaven when he came down to us; nor did he withdraw from us when he went up again into heaven. The fact that he was in heaven even while he was on earth is borne out by his own statement: No one has ever ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven. 

These words are explained by our oneness with Christ, for he is our head and we are his body. No one ascended into heaven except Christ because we also are Christ: he is the Son of Man by his union with us, and we by our union with him are the sons of God.

(—from,  Second reading, From a sermon by Saint Augustine, bishop, office of readings, Solemnity of the Ascension)

I remember hearing the phrase in my youth coming from my mother saying, “that’s neither here nor there.”  With yesterday’s solemnity, forty days after Easter, a variation is suggested — “this is both here and there.”

Branes, in the vocabulary of physicists,

The central idea is that the visible, three-dimensional universe is restricted to a brane inside a higher-dimensional space, called the "bulk" (also known as "hyperspace"). If the additional dimensions are compact, then the observed universe contains the extra dimension, and then no reference to the bulk is appropriate. In the bulk model, at least some of the extra dimensions are extensive (possibly infinite), and other branes may be moving through this bulk. Interactions with the bulk, and possibly with other branes, can influence our brane and thus introduce effects not seen in more standard cosmological models. (Wikipedia, Branes)

The way we think, the philosophical system or categories we choose to be familiar with, influence what we hold as our spirituality.

Many, many people have been influence by Plato’s philosophy in fact -everyone who thinks that spirituality is nothing more than a means to escape from this world – are Platonic in their thinking. People who think that when they die  they will be forever free of their bodies in Heaven where they will become angels  are Platonic in their thought. They are also wrong too to think that a human becomes an angel when they die,  is the same as thinking that a frog becomes a human when they die. The point here is that this kind of dualistic thinking has more to do with Platonic thought, than it has to do with the revealed truth in the Bible. When we think about anthropology and cosmology from a biblical perspective we find a unity between the spiritual and material,  that the spiritual flows into the material and the material responds and is elevated.

From a biblical perspective, Heaven or the spiritual realm is where God and Angels dwell. Earth, or the material realm, is where humanity and animals dwell. The two touched each other, they penetrated and influenced one another, and they are never separated.  (—from, The Ascension: Why are you looking up to heaven?) 

Today, Friday, is the celebration of the Visitation, when Mary visited Elizabeth while both were pregnant, one with Jesus, one with John. It is said they both realized something was different about their pregnancies, some new understanding was at hand.

How thin is the veil between worlds?  Between dimensions? Between what we call heaven and earth?

And do we, or, should we, traverse and awaken to the infinite belonging inferred by our participatory residence in a multitude of manifestations interpenetrating this place under our feet and surrounding our shoulders?

What does it mean to be ‘here’ — to be anywhere?

And if we were to ever be ‘here’ — what revelation about presence and the boundless everything would we awaken to?

Will transparency, in time and space, be our liberation, our release from a restricted thinking and limited belief about our true nature, freeing us into our true Self within and without, whole and entire...

Into a new appreciation of who we are as family, community, friends, one another?

Yes, question this!

ordinary zen

Poet Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) wrote:

Napped half the day;   

     no one         

punished me!

Ah — the art of it! 

as we learn how to sing

Some words at Hospice Volunteers luncheon:

Definition: impede | imˈpēd |verb [with object]delay or prevent (someone or something) by obstructing them; hinder: the sap causes swelling that can impede breathing.ORIGINlate 16th century: from Latin impedire ‘shackle the feet of’, based on pes, ped- ‘foot’. Compare with impeach.

….  ….  ….  

     1. Quote:  Rainer Maria Rilke: “Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly, they are passed on unopened.”

     2. Quote: Life and death are a package deal. You cannot pull them apart. In Japanese zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death.” There is no separation between life and death other than a small hyphen, a thin line… 

(—from introduction to the book The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully” by Frank Ostaseski, founder of the Zen Hospice Project and the Metta Institute, is a Buddhist teacher, international lecturer and a leading voice in contemplative end-of-life care.

This is similar to the phrase ji-ji-mu-ge, meaning "between one thing/event and another thing/event there is no barrier (no impediment)."

     3. Quote: Jackson Browne, in the second stanza of his song “For a Dancer” wrote:                

            

I don't know what happens when people die / Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try / It's like a song I can hear playing right in my ear / That I can't sing / I can't help listening

….   ….   … 

Here’s the poem: It was sent me about 8 years ago by Carol, our former director of volunteers, during the planning for a training session on spirituality for new volunteers:

The Real Work           

          by Wendell Berry 

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work, 

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey. 

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. 

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

         (—by Wendell Berry, from Collected Poems, 1987)

….   ….   …

Conclusion: And so, however baffled our minds might be about death and dying, and our work in that journey —

may we learn from the stream — making its way over and through difficulties and impediments — may we learn how to sing !

the end of the month

Donald Trump isn't alone. It's a world-wide phenomena. To ignore it is to miss the big picture.

The common thread here isn’t just right-wing populism. It’s contempt for the ideology of them before us: of the immigrant before the native-born; of the global or transnational interest before the national or local one; of racial or ethnic or sexual minorities before the majority; of the transgressive before the normal. It’s a revolt against the people who say: Pay an immediate and visible price for a long-term and invisible good. It’s hatred of those who think they can define that good, while expecting someone else to pay for it. 

When protests erupted last year in France over Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to raise gas prices for the sake of the climate, one gilets jaunes slogan captured the core complaint: “Macron is concerned with the end of the world,” it went, while “we are concerned with the end of the month.”  

This is a potent form of politics, and it’s why I suspect Trump will be re-elected next year barring an economic meltdown or foreign-policy shock. You may think (as I often do) that the administration is a daily carnival of shame. You may also think that conservatives are even guiltier than liberals and progressives of them-before-us politics: the 1-percenters before the 99 percent; the big corporations before the little guy, and so on. 

But the left has the deeper problem. That’s partly because it self-consciously approaches politics as a struggle against selfishness, and partly because it has invested itself so deeply, and increasingly inflexibly, on issues such as climate change or immigration. Whatever else might be said about this, it’s a recipe for nonstop political defeat leavened only by a sensation of moral superiority.

(--from, How Trump Wins Next Year, What’s happened in India and Australia is a warning to the left. ByBrett Stephens, OpEd, NYTimes, 24Masy19) 

  Ayn Rand framed the debate which continues.

Selfishness — a virtue? Ayn Rand chose this book’s provocative title because she was on a mission to overcome centuries of demonization. “In popular usage,” Rand writes, “the word ‘selfishness’ is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends . . . and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment. 

“Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word ‘selfishness’ is: concern with one’s own interests. 

“This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.” 

In this collection of articles, Rand offers a “new concept of egoism” based on reason as man’s means of survival and opposed to all forms of sacrifice. 

It is commonly believed that morality demands we choose between sacrificing other people to ourselves (which is deemed “selfish” and therefore immoral) and sacrificing our own values to satisfy others’ needs (which is deemed unselfish and therefore moral). In this book, Rand rejects both options as forms of selflessness, and offers a new concept of egoism — an ethics of rational selfishness that rejects sacrifice in all its forms. 

Selfishness, however, does not mean “doing whatever you please.” Moral principles are not a matter of personal opinion — they are based in the facts of reality, in man’s nature as a rational being, who must think and act successfully in order to live and be happy. 

Morality’s task is to identify the kinds of action that in fact benefit oneself. These virtues (productivity, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, pride) are all applications of the basic virtue, rationality. Rand’s moral ideal is a life of reason, purpose and self-esteem.

(--about The Virtue of Selfishness, by Ayn Rand, 1964) 

Mr Trump is such an obvious picture, and hard to avert eyes from -- but he is merely close to our eyes. Spanning the globe, nationalism and self-interest, self-identity and me-first, take a more prominent role in the minds of the people. Ideas and ideals, intellectual or ethical, seem an unnecessary elective in the arising core areas of attention.

When an elephant shifts its weight and starts to lean its gait across the road, best be out of its way until it passes.

What sidestep, what shelter, is available during this passage?

It is the end of the month.

decoration day

Vinney died in Vietnam.

It was 1968.

I think of him today.

memorial day -- awaiting within eye and heart

We remember

and pray for

all those

dead

and deadened

by war



All for whom

war and

its sorrowing

does not go away



The day

belongs to the memory

of those for whom

home

without coming home



awaiting within eye

and heart an

incomprehensible

singularity



And so...

we bow, profoundly,

to our brothers and

sisters

this day

die sprache spricht*

          (On writing message when I might have meant 
                            massage — a reconstruction haiku)

What is the message?
   Touch me, one flesh, practicing
Unicity — me/you nique** — a trinity of
   Touching comfort, speaking
Silence

... ... ...

* die sprache spricht 
** The numerical value of nique in Pythagorean Numerology is: 3

without understanding

Or, we might consider Meister Eckhart:

Like other great minds of his time, Eckhart thus considered the question, “Does God exist?” to be meaningless. How can one question whether existence exists? Instead, he counseled, “every word that we can say of it is more a denial of what God is not than a declaration of what He is … the finest thing one can say about God is to be silent from the wisdom of inner riches.” Arguing for what was later called “learned ignorance,” Eckhart claimed, “If I had a God I could understand, I would no longer consider him God.” 

We must accept, in other words, that God is fundamentally unknowable, at least in terms of human language and thought. This was an unsettling, even threatening, idea for many of Eckhart’s contemporaries and it remains so in our own time. Eckhart, however, did not fear this central mystery of existence, of God. Instead, in mid-life he abandoned his own attempts to define God and instead dedicated himself to teaching others how to gain a heightened awareness of the divine presence within themselves. The transcendental nature of reality, he believed, had to be “known” intuitively and subjectively from within, not “objectively” from without. 

Eckhart’s approach challenges us to stop projecting our own concepts and agendas onto “God” and instead focus on an experience of the divine that leads to lives of love and service. It is a profoundly unsettling message. Yet it is one based on a more thorough familiarity with scripture than most modern Christians possess and a more profound philosophical grounding than most contemporary atheists can boast. Unlike many believing and unbelieving proponents of “God talk,” Meister Eckhart recognized all human language as metaphorical. He chose to know his God directly. Is there room for such a radical perspective in the pro- and anti-God debates of twenty-first-century America? 

Almost seven hundred years after his death, Meister Eckhart just might be the man for our moment.

 https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/everybodys-mystic/

What we project, we protect.

Neither president nor God needs either our projection nor our protection.

Things rise or fall of their own weight.

because I do not hope to turn

It is hard not to appreciate this observation by Robert W. Funk:

8. I believe  in original sin, but I take original sin to mean the innate infinate capacity of human beings to deceive themselves.  (—in Honest to Jesus, p11)

It is harder not to think we are experiencing such a blatant, obvious, and intentional manipulation of original sin by the president and chief uninspiring embarrassing person to degrade that position.

I wish to confess my inclination to unforgive such sad pharisaical intentional deception promulgated by such a disappointing crew of illegitimate office holders.

Many will die in the wake of such ignorance.

And, worse, many more will live in the hopeless depravity of cynicism and bad faith irradiated by these poseurs.

It is, conceivably, a horrible time ahead.

Let’s not conceive of such a future.

悲しい （かなしい）

Kanashii -- Japanese, 悲しい （かなしい）-- translates as sad, sorrowful.

More and more, looking at the president of the United States, a feeling of kanashii arises.

I'm not sure how this unsettling reality will play out.

As he often says, it is sad. 

Not as he means it, but that everyone must face, in his, their disturbed self.

on no road

There is no path, Antonio Machado wrote.

Jim Harrison writes a variation:

A Variation on Machado
             BY JIM HARRISON 

I worry much about the suffering
of Machado. I was only one when he carried
his mother across the border from Spain to France
in a rainstorm. She died and so did he
a few days later in a rooming house along a dry canal.
To carry Mother he abandoned a satchel
holding his last few years of poetry.
I've traveled to Collioure several times
to search for Machado's lost satchel.
The French fed him but couldn't save him.
There's no true path to a death —
we discover the path by walking.
We turn a corner on no road
and there's a house on a green hill
with a thousand colorful birds sweeping in a circle.
Are the poems in the basement of the house on the hill?
We'll find out if we remember earth at all. 

(Jim Harrison, "A Variation on Machado" from Dead Man’s Float. Copyright © 2016)

We carry poems with us.

We put them down.

The earth covers them with its love.

dumb, blind love is man’s meaning

Resistance is not a casual game watched from home.

According to Chris Hedges

Resistance entails suffering. It requires self-sacrifice. It accepts that we may be destroyed. It is not rational. It is not about the pursuit of happiness. It is about the pursuit of freedom. Resistance accepts that even if we fail, there is an inner freedom that comes with defiance, and perhaps this is the only freedom, and true happiness, we will ever know. To resist evil is the highest achievement of human life. It is the supreme act of love. It is to carry the cross, as the theologian James Cone reminds us, and to be acutely aware that what we are carrying is also what we will die upon.

(--Chris Hedges, in “The Cost of Resistance”, Truthdig, November 5, 2017 

And , again:

Power is a poison. It does not matter who wields it. The rebel, for this reason, is an eternal heretic. He or she will never fit into any system. The rebel stands with the powerless. There will always be powerless people. There will always be injustice. The rebel will always be an outsider. 

Resistance requires eternal vigilance. The moment the powerful are no longer frightened, the moment the glare of the people is diverted and movements let down their guard, the moment the ruling elites are able to use propaganda and censorship to hide their aims, the gains made by resisters roll backward. We have been steadily stripped of everything that organized working men and women—who rose up in defiance and were purged, demonized and killed by the capitalist elites—achieved with the New Deal. The victories of African-Americans, who paid with their bodies and blood in making possible the Great Society and ending legal segregation, also have been reversed. 

. The corporate state makes no pretense of addressing social inequality or white supremacy. It practices only the politics of vengeance. It uses coercion, fear, violence, police terror and mass incarceration as social control. Our cells of resistance have to be rebuilt from scratch

(--ibid) 

When the time is ripe for active resistance, be prepared to leave home.

I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.  

(—from novel, Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman, 1905-1964)

When meaning comes calling, please, be at home.

Where we all long to be.

not needing to be reborn

 True nature, hidden nature.

It wasn’t until I gave up in desperation that I finally
saw the truth of what my teachers had been telling me all
along. What they taught me over and over again, waiting
patiently for me to see in my own experience what they
had learned themselves, was that love, compassion, and
wisdom are manifesting all the time. It’s not that we are
pure way down in the depths of our being, but some-
how up on the surface everything is messed up. Rather,
we are pure inside and out. Even our most dysfunc-
tional habits are manifestations of this basic goodness. 

There is only one problem: We don’t see this true nature in
the present moment, and even less so the innate compassion and
wisdom that arise from it. Even when we understand intellectu-
ally that we have buddhanature—the potential to awaken our-
selves from the slumber of ignorance and suffering—we rarely
acknowledge this innate purity in the present moment. We see
it as a distant possibility, as something that we can experience sometime in the future, or maybe even in another lifetime.

(from, The Wanderer, BY ANDREA MILLER| MARCH 3, 2012. Shambhala Sun,  about Mingyur Rinpoche)

How to see?

There's the question.

I suspect the answer is tough to come by.

Twelve Kinds of Yogic Joy                                                                                                (Milarepa describes the happy life of the wandering yogi).

Like a criminal gaining his freedom from a dungeon hole

The yogi who gives up his native country knows bliss.  

Like a spirited horse that’s freed of hobbling chains 

The yogi who slips from perceived and perceiver knows bliss. 

Like a deer that has been wounded will lie low  

The yogi who lives on his own all alone knows bliss. 

Like the king of birds that wings his way on high 

The yogi who gains command over view knows liss. 

Like the wild wind that’s roaming through the sky 

The yogi not blocked by any obstruction knows bliss. 

Like a shepherd tending his flock of white-fleeced sheep 

The yogi tending his luminous/empty experience knows bliss. 

Like the massive bulk of the central king of mountain 

The yogi unfazed by transition and change knows bliss. 

Like the constant flow of a great and mighty river 

The unbroken-flow-of-experience-yogi knows bliss. 

Like a human corpse as it lies in a cemetery  

The yogi who shuts all activity down knows bliss. 

Like a stone that’s thrown into the deep blue sea 

The yogi who never turns back again knows bliss. 

Like the sun that rises and lights up the whole sky  

The yogi who lights up everything knows bliss. 

Like a palm tree when you strip it of its leaves 

The yogi not needing to be reborn knows bliss. 

This melody on these twelve kinds of yogic happiness 

Is a dharma gift to all of you, may it answer your question well. 

(Translated by Jim Scott, under the direction of Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche), Shambhala Sun, Macrh 2012 

Well?

black flies, maine

Sooner than
later

Things will
break

Open

Someone with
courage

Will speak/
act

Slapping up-
side

Fathead fluff
Sense

Remind blurry
dazed

Rule of
law

Seeks justice
not

Blowhard rhetoric
biting

two twenty five

Let there be night.

when bluebird visits

On broken seed
   boardwalk
under feeder
   bluebird
foraging —
   first time

If I see
   what is there
empty shells
   reveal the
nothing that
   isn’t

Anywhere else