listening to dogen’s uji

 They ski on Ragged

Snowmaking covers downhill —

I walk grassy field

and there she remained

 Yes

In the middle

Of the night

I call

Your name —

But no sound

Emerges.

Because

No name

Is there to be

Pronounced.

No name,

No sound!

If so,

What am I

Calling?

I think, 

“That’s it —

I am calling

No name with

No sound

In the middle of

The night.”

“And there,” as 

Aunt Ronnie

Would say, 

“She remained.”

(Just

Like

This)

some flowers before the stone

 Doris sends poem on Christmas.

It’s by Billy Collins.

Whose touch is nigh on perfect.

Flying Over West Texas at Christmas

Oh, little town far below

with a ruler line of a road running through you,

you anonymous cluster of houses and barns,

miniaturized by this altitude

in a land as parched as Bethlehem

might have been somewhere around the year zero—

a beautiful song should be written about you

which choirs could sing in their lofts

and carolers standing in a semicircle

could carol in front of houses topped with snow.

For surely some admirable person was born

within the waffle-iron grid of your streets,

who then went on to perform some small miracles,

placing a hand on the head of a child

or shaking a cigarette out of the pack for a stranger.

But maybe it is best not to compose a hymn

or chisel into tablets the code of his behavior

or convene a tribunal of men in robes to explain his words.

Let us not press the gold leaf of his name

onto a page of vellum or hang his image from a nail.

Better to fly over this little town with nothing

but the hope that someone visits his grave

once a year, pushing open the low iron gate

then making her way toward him

through the rows of the others

before bending to prop up some flowers before the stone.

(—Poem by Billy Collins,  from Aimless)

there’s nothing there

 Meister Elkhart writes that there is no image nor likeness with regard to God. In my youth I was taught that we were created in the image and likeness of God. 

We look for God and we find nothing. And we are surprised.

We search for our self, and we find nothing. We think self-knowledge will clarify things. We discover there’s nothing to know.

What is there to be done with this nothing?

There’s nothing to be done.

Where are we? And where is God?

.   .   .

Here.

Here we are.

Look no further than here.

. . .

The going out is the coming in. It’s a quantum paradox.

Here is where there is.going.  Where is that?

. . .

Nowhere.

. . .

Finding nothing

Returns here.

. . .

Here.

Here is all there is.

There’s no there there.

. . . 

We are always and only here.

As is God.

. . .

As is,

God

one’s birth is not-i’s death

A story

Only tells

A version

Of reality

Reality itself

Remains 

Still

And silent

If  I 

Choose reality

Beyond

Story

This

Reality

Is

Unknowable

I turn 

‘Round

And there

You go

As I

Too

Disappear

Into here

we are poor passing facts

 Happy Birthday, Creation!

And to humanity, a new beginning!

Suffer it well!

we are born for one another, oggi (today)

Oggi 

For

What is

As is

 Yes

The Nativity -- The Adoration of the Shepherds

by Antonio da Corregio

As is

Christ

For us

Al giorno d'oggi

{the person} {they are}

 “The {man} who loves for the sake of love only—{he is} completely free.”

    (Thomas Merton, May 4, 1963)

Become that person. Be born as such today, tonight, in the middle of the falling hours into dawn.

Be complete, and thereby, completely free.

Nativity is beyond historical.

It is what you are…

doing now.

that what is true will become evidently true.

A good day to remember that

fiction is the fodder for faith — 

that we create what is meaningful from 

the longing that what is true 

will become evidently true. 

May it be so!

if

 “Today, if you hear His voice,

8do not harden your hearts,”

(—from Psalm 95)

un buon natale a tutti noi

 The conversation circled around prison, monasticism, military, corporations, structure, intentional communities, and the neutral zone where longing to belong has no localized expression.

In final circle I concluded my preference. That preference is for an accidental, unintentional, haphazard, and non-localized disassembled coterie of irregulars passing (recognized by subtle eye, but unacknowledged, but for a covert synchronous nod in passing).

There’s no community but that of the nature of shared existence.

The Ontic/Cosmo/Theo/Andric community everything shares in, accepting and allowing idiosyncratic and idiorhythmic insouciant participation by dint of being an existent entity appearing and arriving and accommodating.

I pledge and troth myself to such a manifestation when and if and as it occurs.

There are no membership fees.

All is free.

All is safe.

All is happy even when sorrow accompanies.

All are dwelling in their and our true home.

Un buon natale a tutti noi.

to see the real world

The temptation used to be to only look in temple, church, mosque, meditation hall, or sacred grove.

No more. 

I always liked that Saint Kateri Tekakwitha’s name “Tekakwitha” means “she who bumps into things.” What if holiness is a contact sport and we are meant to bump into things? This is what it means to embrace a contemplative, mystical way of seeing wholeness. It gives a window into complexity and keeps us from judging and scapegoating and demonizing. If we allow ourselves to “bump into things,” then we quit measuring. We cease to Bubble-Wrap ourselves against reality. We stop trying to “homeschool” our way through the world so that the world won’t touch us. Hard to embrace the world . . . if we are so protective and defensively shielded from it. A homie told me once, “It’s taken me all these years to see the real world. And once ya see it—there’s only God there.” 

—Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness (New York: Avid Reader Press, https://email.cac.org/t/d-e-zjyjkld-tlkridklo-v

 If we elide one word from the opening line of William Wordsworth’s poem:

The world is … much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

The world is not “too” much with us.  “Nature” is our core reality. Nature is much.

But we are not much when we erase or eliminate our “Nature” in favor of artificial constructs and selective beliefs that partialize us into categories of separation and erroneous comparison.

What-is “with-us” is the mystery of the mystical life.

When we began to elide “God” from “Nature” we began to pretend we had control over “Reality” its manifestation, definition, and meaning.

We don’t. Never have, nor ever will.

The only gift worth receiving is “with-us”.

Always and everywhere, as and in, everyone.

Ours.

With-us.

Not what we think, but who and what we are.

Only God there!

Bump, bump, bump . . .

hai

          (hai, Vietnamese for “two”. For Vinnie who died in Vietnam 20dec1968)

Too many 

words

Only 

One

Is necessary

Go ahead

Say it

lament

 The bleating

from unsound

voices

fill airways

with absurd

quarrels 

like school-

children

bullying

it was too

good to be

true

mature

democracy

and justice

yo no soy yo -- the transparent pervasive wholeness of endurance

There is a poem that, on second look, reveals itself as the perfect poem for the mystery of creation, incarnation, and the transparent pervasive wholeness of endurance.

The name of origin and enduring presence is I Am.

The name of what-is-being-revealed is Not-I.

The name of this essence, existence, and endurance which evokes and encompasses un-ending diaphaneity of pervasive perseverance is This One.

Here is the meditation:

I Am Not I

I am not I. 

              I am this one 

walking beside me whom I do not see, 

whom at times I manage to visit, 

and whom at other times I forget; 

the one who remains silent while I talk, 

the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate, 

the one who takes a walk when I am indoors, 

the one who will remain standing when I die.

(Poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez, 23dec1881– 29may1956: translated by Robert Bly)

For me, this year, this poem is the celebration of Christmas. 

     Yo No SoyYo

Yo no soy yo 

                 Soy este  

que va a mi lado sin yo verlo,  

que, a veces, voy a ver,  

y que, a veces olvido.  

El que calla, sereno, cuando hablo,  

el que perdona, dulce, cuando odio,  

el que pasea por donde no estoy,  

el que quedará en pie cuando yo muera. 

- Juan Ramón Jiménez

eve of solstice

 Dark night

Gathers 

Light

To return 

Tomorrow

much better than that

 For 24 hours I could not figure out the koan “Disappointment is giving acceptance."

Then, suddenly, it looked at me.

 Everything’s not OK. It’s much better than that: everything is falling apart around us, within us. But this is great, good news, for in Christ we have been grasped by the love of God and drawn irrevocably into the fullness of his desire for us. For God has, at last, heeded the lonely cry of his creatures, “Please surrender yourself! Lower the heavens. Come down to us.” And he begs for us to surrender to him in return, even as he astounds us, perhaps even disappoints us, with his unpretentiousness and weakness. A Rose has blossomed from Mary’s tender stem. And from this altar we receive his self-surrender to us in a scrap of bread, rose-red with his precious blood.

http://spencerabbey1098.blogspot.com/2022/12/a-rose-has-blossomed.html

And I was seen. 

(something) imagined (not) recalled

nothing 

(I recall)

satisfies

only your 

eyes seeing 

this emerge

satisfies

(I recall)

nothing

aspettare, non aspettare

 It’s Monday before Christmas.

We’re uncertain 

What is

Being born

To us

This

Week

disappointment is believing fiction

 Yes

The monk said that confusion is grace.

That maybe 

disappointment is 

giving

acceptance

(whatever 

that means)