one way or the other

Deo Gratias

Otherwise

Miserere nobis

preghi

 Yes, I pray

For you, for me

I pray we become human

Free, safe, and come to dwell

In our true home… Happily —

What does our “true home” look like?

I suspect we will know it

When we find ourselves in it.

May you find

Yourself well

Within it!

vetus

willing to be old

each day comes and goes, can't help

losing this and that

looking back seeing nothing

looking ahead, nothing there

...

        * vetus, veteris M; [Latin] old, aged, ancient, former, veteran,  experienced, long-standing, chronic

when prophecy ends

Shut up

MU -- Say no

More

what did illusion say to certainty

If you want to be

Enlightened, go ahead do

It — I’ll just sit here

bridges for inter-cultural communication

Makes you wonder what the 'human-being' makes of, or contributes to, the fact of 'Being-Itself' sounding through our being-human.

Thus one could claim that the lack of an elaborated anthropological vision made Heidegger’s philosophy after the ‘turning’ philosophically anti-Hellenic. The quest for ethics and moral distinctions that have bedeviled the students of his work must be incorporated within a quest for a complete anthropology delineated by his works, an anthropology that would look at Being in its anthropic re-creation of the silence of nature and the absence of god. Only then will the ethical consequences of the “livable” part of his philosophy become apparent and Heidegger’s philosophy regain the moral authority to reveal the essence of being. Heidegger’s philosophy is arguably the most daring hypothesis about the human condition in recent centuries; yet his answers somehow do not do justice to the questions he poses and show the unredeemed debt that he himself owed to his society, class and personality. Yet the hypothesis remains valid and still spurs thinking on; indeed it makes philosophical thinking immerse itself into the ‘thick questions’ of the mind and helps reformulate important aspects of the European tradition. Indeed, Heidegger’s thought has stimulated great Japanese thinkers like Keiji Nishitani, Nishida Kitaro and Masao Abe and has contributed to the re- interpretation of Dogen and to a degree of Nagarjuna himself. Thus it builds bridges for inter-cultural communication that express a new understanding of the anthropic in history. The cross-pollination of his philosophy leads to a new anthropological vision of being in history and time above and beyond the cultural limits of the philosopher’s origins. For to philosophise does not simply mean to ask “why there are beings rather than nothing?” but “why beings that are experience nothing?”. Then Being ceases to be mute and becomes the true being of the human presence.

 (--in, Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living, xv, Edited by Vrasidas Karalis, 2008) 

Perhaps it is our 'coming to word' that creates, organizes, and causes to emerge into appearance that which is hidden and that which is not-yet and coming-to-be into what we might call the 'umwelt of now.'

Our contemporary culture suffers an aphasia that stifles authentic communication which might build and nourish out and away from decadent morbidity and caustic rhetoric of decimation, elimination, and ostracization. 

Do we not long for an aesthetic eloquent in creativity, compassion, and cooperating community toward wholesome interrelationality and open-hearted caring?

I do!

And you, too!

se ci sia un altro modo, non lo so

 yes

to everything

all the time

no matter what

(it's simply

the way to 

see one's

way clear)

...

    * whether there is another way, I don't know

mirar dentro

 Sacred Heart of Jesus 

Immaculate Heart of Mary —

There might be a hint here

How fare our hearts?

...

    * look inside

what is going on

 This

Whole

Time

(Yes, 

That’s

It)

watching with wonder and worry

 Rainy Friday morning

Two baby loon on hosmer pond

Their watery home

can I still be joyful whilst not optimistic

 I don't buy it. The over-the-top reckless acclamations of revenge and vituperative governance if elected again. I don't buy it. 

I worry about assassination. I worry someone has decided it would be good for rightwing uprising if the titular frontrunner were to be mowed down by an ambiguous assassin. I worry the rightwing would rather sacrifice the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party and reap the forensic fury to the detriment of maligned and misidentified parties as stooges in the planned misdirection of the crime.

But this worry comes from reading these days about violence, the collapse of civilizations, and the weirdness of consciousness. [cf. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated, by Eric H. Cline (2021); The Weirdness of the World, by Eric Schwitzgebel (2024); and Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads by Gil Bailie (1996).] About the latter:

This is a Girardian-influenced, engagingly written classic on the nature of violence and the hope for overcoming it in our conflict-ridden world. It is also a literary work, an often miraculous interplay between cultural documents and historical periods. (Amazon)

The current political babel about vengeance, retribution, mass arrests and deportations, ending immigration, freeing of criminals and flirtation with despotic dictatorship might be a parody carnival-act on the part of a desperate man. 

But it's a script of a bad movie when shadowy characters decide to sacrifice one man for the good of the party and the future of a manufactured crisis. We are witnessing the zombie-like rogues-gallery backdrop to the master of ceremonies' complaint and victimization monologues following 34 felony convictions. 

Like ghouls at an execution they salivate the prospect of being second fiddle to the chief prevaricator as he whittles his way into a mythic scenario of being crucified for the good of the people and the sins of the opposition party.  Is he playing the role too well? Is he being steered into a dark alley to be accosted, mugged, and left for dead in a murky drama of horrific violence?

The comedy becomes a tragedy. 

The nation will be shocked.

Sanity will be compromised.

Chaos will be cultivated.

It will be called "A Time for Retrieving Our Constitutional Footing."

All the crazies who've appropriated the legislative, judicial, and executive functions of our once nascent democracy will declare the experiment too ambitious, too unrealistic, too marxist/socialist, too unchristian and too aufgewacht (woke) for our Schläfrig (sleepy) country.

What do I think?

I hope the carnival continues. I don't want any resolution that entails violence or extra-judicial action. Let Trump be Trump. The people will tire of him. And his entourage? They will drift away to other cons and grifts and become entrepreneurs of entropy grinding down the alacrity and energy of a yet-to-emerge populace from its infancy.

Can I still be joyful whilst not optimistic?

Sure I can.

Pass me the next book, please.

salut et louange du ventre de ma mère

Eighty years ago

In third trimester — drear beach

In Normandy France —

So many gave their lives — sand

waves, fear, blood — fighting for life

…  …   …

     * salvation and praise from my mother's womb

out with dog

Stars off bald mountain

How far away are they — near

Just beyond loon call

not perception, perspective

 This is not reality

Yes it is

This is not really reality

Yes it is

This is not ultimate reality

Wait — 

What are you

Looking at

(Encore) This is not

What I am

Looking at

It’s what I am

What I am

Looking…

how we go on

Nuns chant psalms

They are in France

I listen to their tones

I am in Maine

Morning comes and day begins 

this fourth day of the week

Perhaps there will be

No assassinations today

Unlike fifty six years ago

In California near Midnight

dwelling together in peace

if we stay at the horizontal level of calculating

 In prison this morning we wondered about thought being pre-physical.

True thought is pre-physical. This is the thinking behind the thinking, the consciousness behind our small ability to plug into it. If we stay at the horizontal level of calculating, judging, and labeling, we won’t plug into it very well because we don’t really believe in it. Many of us don’t really believe there’s anything spiritual beyond this material body. (--Richard Rohr)

Five of us considered the prospect of return to the source. 

And whether Christ is actually the cosmos.

in the heart of every atom

Today in the Christian calendar is the feast of Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ. It got me thinking. What if the body of Christ were the very earth. The very cosmos itself?  Would that realization be an insight, a faith, that transcends anything that any religion, church, or dharma has previously taught? 

The historical Buddha and the historical Jesus each walked the earth in their day, but it is the living Buddha mind and the Cosmic, or resurrected, Christ that are present among us today. Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the “ontological Buddha, the Buddha at the center of the universe,” which echoes the Cosmic Christ “in the heart of every atom,” as Teilhard de Chardin puts it. I see the Cosmic Christ archetype as a parallel concept to that of buddhanature, or Buddha mind.

It is easy for Christians to forget that the oldest understanding of Christ is as the Cosmic Christ, which predates the Nicene Creed by three centuries. Paul called the Cosmic Christ “the pattern that connects,” which “holds all things together in the heavens and on the earth,” and is the “light in all beings.” (—in Ultimately the Same, by Matthew Fox, Oct 2022 Lion’s Roar)

Maybe Jesus didn’t just come to earth. Maybe he came as earth. 

Buddha as Being.

Christ as creation.

corpus christi

 I look at body of christ

There outside window

First light through cool air

I look as body of Christ

Here inside room

Turn off light; telling beads

Wavering leaves

Dance with dawn breath

Christ’s body with bare feet

believe me because you are wrong

We live upside down. It doesn't occur to us that we are living upside down. But we are.

It is a curious fact. But a fact nonetheless. We live upside down.

Bad is good. My flaws are really your flaws. I am perfect, you are crooked. I am pure, you are corrupt.

Do you see? Can you feel how this is going? Do you recognize how you have been so unaware?

If I commit crimes I am being persecuted. If found guilty for those crimes every one who pointed it out, laid out the facts, deliberated the details, judged the proceedings -- all of these people are liars, evil, conflicted, against me, and wrong.

In is out. Up is down. Bad is good. Everything is silly putty and magic marker. You are not you. Only I am I.

There are marvelous teachers lecturing the populace as to what it is like to live upside down.

They are ordinary citizens, elected officials, members of house and senate, those sitting on the highest court.

God is not in his/her heaven and all is not right with the world.

And here we are. 

No amount of education or study of history contributes anything to the alertness of the citizenry. It has all been edited and re-education into correct thinking has become a full-time job for the deranging rearranging of what we thought we knew into how we now must think.

We live upside down.

Be glad the torture has not yet begun.

Postscript: Some say there have been those who came to us to tell us we've been living upside down. You know their names. 

Right?

You do know their names, don't you?