Gone nowhere.

Some days solitude takes you.

A saturation takes place. All the personalities and opinions! The jostling in politics. The positions held and trumpeted. The wearying of words intended to carpet a flawed floor.

9
Throw away holiness and wisdom,
and people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won't be any thieves.

If these three aren't enough,
just stay at the center of the circle
and let all things take their course.
(--ch 19, Tao Te Ching, by Lao-tzu, from a translation by Stephen Mitchell)

There are days when you don't care. When the ordinary expectations fizzle into ash.

Kathleen Norris in her 2008 book Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, writes:

At its Greek root, the word acedia means the absence of care. The person afflicted by acedia refuses to care or is incapable of doing so. When life becomes too challenging and engagement with others too demanding, acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine: you know the pain is there, yet can't rouse yourself to give a damn. That it hurts to care is borne out in etymology, for care derives from an Indo-European word meaning "to cry out," as in a lament. Caring is not passive, but an assertion that no matter how strained and messy our relationships can be, it is worth something to be present, with others, doing our small part. Care is also required for the daily routines that acedia would have us suppress or deny as meaningless repetition or too much bother.
(pp.3-4)

If care means 'to cry out,' and God is invocation, what is to be seen in an acedic lament? And what did the monk mean when he said to me: "Cheer up...things are only going to get worse!"?

A Buddhist Retreat Behind Broken-Mountain Temple

In the pure morning, near the old temple,
Where early sunlight points the tree-tops,
My path has wound, through a sheltered hollow
Of boughs and flowers, to a Buddhist retreat.
Here birds are alive with mountain-light,
And the mind touches peace in a pool,
And a thousand sounds are quieted
By the breathing of a temple-bell. - Ch'ang Chien

It seems everyone has a complaint. The left and the right, the orthodox and the heretics (hairesis, Greek for 'choice,' as in those with a different opinion), those in power and those without power.

Nowhere is there enough solitude.

Itself a poem. Itself as poem.

Amy Lowell wrote:

No one expects a man to make a chair without first learning how, but there is a popular impression that the poet is born, not made, and that his verses burst from his overflowing heart of themselves. As a matter of fact, the poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet-maker. His heart may overflow with high thoughts and sparkling fancies, but if he cannot convey them to his reader by means of written word he has no claim to be considered a poet. A workman may be pardoned, therefore, for spending a few moments to explain and describe the technique of his trade. A work of beauty which cannot stand an intimate examination is a poor and jerry-built thing.

In the first place, I wish to state my firm belief that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is a created beauty, even if sometimes the beauty of a gothic grotesque. We do not ask the trees to teach us moral lessons, and only the Salvation Army feels it necessary to pin texts upon them. We know that these texts are ridiculous, but many of us do not yet see that to write an obvious moral all over a work of art, picture, statue, or poem, is not only ridiculous, but timid and vulgar. We distrust a beauty we only half understand, and rush in with our impertinent suggestions. How far are we from "admitting the Universe"! The Universe, which flings down its continents and seas, and leaves them without comment. Art is as much a function of the Universe as an Equinoctial gale, or the Law of Gravitation; and we insist upon considering it merely a little scroll-work, or no great importance unless it be studded with nails from which pretty and uplifting sentiments may be hung! (--from The Poet's Trade, by Amy Lowell, at Poets.org, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16037)

So it is today and yesterday both emit half understood beauty.

This jerry-built acausality.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, was fascinated by what he termed the process of synchronicity - seemingly random events which have a personally significant meaning. For example, you may start to think of a friend whom you haven't seen for a long time, only to receive an unexpected phone call from that friend the same day. Or, you are looking unsuccessfully for the source of a quotation when, almost unthinkingly, you pick up a book from your library, open it randomly, and there it is ! These type of things happen quite often.

Jung termed this process 'synchronicity' and he said that it is an acausal principle in that there seems to be no cause-effect process at work. However, I believe that this process is still based on the law of cause and effect, but on a level which we are not perceptive enough to realise. Synchronicity takes place in the hidden depths of the psychic - that is, at the transpersonal and quantum levels of existence.

This said, there is indeed a level of Being which is truly acausal, untouched by the law of cause and effect. It does not, however, occur or arise in the world of matter-energy, nor on the level of mind and psyche, but in the realm of Pure Consciousness. In the extraordinary Yogic text called the 'Yoga Vashishta', written several thousand years ago, the story is told of the crow and the coconut.......

A crow alights on a coconut tree and at the very same moment, by chance, a ripe coconut falls. These two unrelated events seem to be related in time and space, though in fact there is no causal relation. A man sitting under the tree would think 'it is because of the crow that I am now eating this wonderfully ripe coconut.'

The meaning of this parable is profound. It does not apply to the daily life of 'sticks and stones', where cause and effect is quite evident. Nor does it refer to the mental and psychic levels where, though less evident, cause and effect still function. It alludes to the relationship between Purusha (Pure Consciousness) and Prakriti (Matter-Energy-Mind) and the 'Transcendental Point' (Skt. 'bindu') where these two principles 'touch' each other. This is acausal.

In the story, there seems to be a cause-effect relationship between the crow and the falling of the coconut, but this is only how it appears and is due to our lack of understanding. If we could see the wider picture, we would see that there is no relationship between the crow and the falling coconut. In the same way, there is no cause-effect relationship between Pure Consciousness and the world of form, matter, energy and mind. This is a paradox which defies our normal logic.

The Bhagawat Gita declares: "All this world is pervaded by Me (the acausal Consciousness) in My unmanifest aspect; all beings exist in Me, but I do not dwell in them." (verse 9:4)

By jumping beyond the world of cause and effect, we may be blessed with the Vision and Realisation of the Acausal. Yoga and deep Meditation allow us to plunge into this ineffable experience
(--from, From the Causal to Acausal, by Swami Nishchalananda Saraswati, http://www.mandalayoga.net/index-newsletter-en-causal.html)

Nothing to flout. Nothing to flaunt.

A mere nothingness.

Ramana Maharshi looks at silence with different eyes:

A visitor asked: `What is mouna (silence)?'
M.: Mouna is not closing the mouth. It is eternal speech.
D.: I do not understand.
M.: That state which transcends speech and thought is mouna.
D.: How to achieve it?
M.: Hold some concept firmly and trace it back. By such concentration silence results. When practice becomes natural it will end in silence.
Meditation without mental activity is silence. Subjugation of the mind is meditation. Deep meditation is eternal speech.

D.: How will worldly transaction go on if one observes silence?
M.: When women walk with water pots on their heads and chat with their companions they remain very careful, their thoughts concentrated on the loads on their heads. Similarly when a sage engages in activities, these do not disturb him because his mind abides in Brahman.
(20th July, 1936, Talk 231, from Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi,
http://bhagavan-ramana.org/ramana_maharshi/books/tw/tw231.html

Some days you take solitude.

Going nowhere.

God is beyond me. I have no idea who, where, what, or how God is.

I’m happy with the everyday way
Like the mist and vines in these rock-strewn ravines
This wilderness is so free and vast
My old friends, the white clouds, drift idly off
There is a road, but it doesn’t reach the world
Mindless, who can be disturbed by thoughts
At night I sit alone on a stone bed
While the round moon climbs the face of Cold Mountain
- Han Shan (c 730)

Times when desolation vacuums any bit of understanding from within and leaves not a trace of comprehension or ability to locate oneself, such as now, serve to remind how pervasive the impermanence and unknowing of this being in the world.

I am long unseeing. I have not yet learned the order of things. So encrusted in illusion and ignorance I have not begun to shake free into seeing a thing as it is and entering authentic not knowing.

[P]henomenology means letting things become manifest as what they are, without forcing our own categories on them. It means reversal of direction from that one is accustomed to: it is not we who point to things; rather, things show themselves to us. This is not to suggest some primitive animism but the recognition that the very essence of true understanding is that of being led by the power of the thing to manifest itself.... Phenomenology is a means of being led by the phenomenon through a way of access genuinely belonging to it.
(Richard E. Palmer, quoted in The Word's Body, An Incarnational Aesthetic Of Interpretation, by Alla Bozarth-Campbell, c.1979, p.6)

I, unfortunately, forget this revelation. I run, instead, to search out some set teaching, a string of beliefs passed on to those of us unwilling to allow things their own being, things continuously revealing themselves. I have failed to disavow either institutional or personal soporific stupor. Days come when feeling devoured by diffidence is the only sweetness alienation affords. The absurdity of clinging to what is not there, the disappeared specter of illusory autonomous self, that delusion of separateness held sacred and special by this mercantile world.

"I have ascended to the highest in me, and look!
The Lord is towering above that.
In my curiosity I have descended to explore my lowest depths,
yet I found God even deeper.
If I looked outside myself,
I saw God stretching beyond the furthest I could see;
and if I looked within,
God was yet further within.
Then I knew the truth of what I had read,
'In God we live and move and have our being.'"
(Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Author of the 12th Century)

These words mystify. How can we see beyond that which we can see? The illimitable above, unfathomable depth, the inaccessible within, the unreachable without -- the measureless omni-directional empty vastness -- that which we call the Reality of God, is that with which we live and move and have our being. Who can approach this reality? Who can avoid it? Reality is reality; it is what is. There is only reality. We are not other than reality. Or, do we think we are?

We are of a piece in this existence. Whatever way we verbalize this absolute truth, we are an interconnected wholeness. We depend on one another, materially and morally, to dwell in this world. We are interdependent. It is the absence of this realization -- the realization of who and how we are in this world -- that causes forgetfulness. Forgetfulness brings with it the perception that “others” are out to harm us, take from us, and even eliminate us from the unified whole that is our true dwelling place. With deficient mentation, this forgetfulness, comes the impetus to strike out against any real or perceived hostility, and act to remove the enemy. Not seeing our real face, not engaging one another in healing reparative interaction, leaves us with surface or shallow impulses of retribution and revenge that trigger violence, warfare, and desolation.

A quote attributed to Nietzsche says, “The most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do. “ (Friedrich Nietzsche)

I forget what we were trying to do. In this state of affairs, I feel stupid. I cannot remember who I am and what I am doing here.

EPILOGUE

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(Poem from Day by Day by Robert Lowell, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1975, 1976,)

This is our task and our penance – to see each face, acknowledge names, and go on living as though this occupation were enough for the time being. All the while, down below and far beyond this occupation, suspecting a far odder fact of life undergirds the fact of this world.

In the beginning was the Word;...
The Word was made flesh, and lived among us,
and we saw Its glory...

Indeed, from Its fullness we have, all of us, received.
(John 1:1,14,16. Paraphrased from The Jerusalem Bible by Bozarth-Campbell)

There is a Zen koan that goes, “Show me your original face, the one you had before your mother and father were born.” After many blank stares some conclude the question absurd. The effect feels something like the Cheshire Cat, appearing and disappearing with and without body, its head and face fading in and out of the storyline. There is a sympathetic feeling of phantom-face, not unlike an amputee, or even the split second following beheading. There is a sense of trauma.

We must be gentle with trauma. The trauma we face is the disappearance of our own face. In time, our face dissolves. Out of time, a variant seeing takes place with no referential viewing point to call one's own. What we call our 'viewpoint' collapses into mere view without subject viewing or object viewed. There is only what is, what is as what is, neither here nor there -- merely itself in every manifestation. To face reality, we believe, we must have a face over and against this reality. But what if “reality” was its own face? Would that realization change our minds from holding a separate, dualistic construct of reality -- to one that is everywhere seeing what is there to see?

What is merely itself in every manifestation could easily be another attempt to name the unnamable, to specify God.

Let's leave it saying: What is merely itself is What Is Merely Itself. Tautology dressed in capital letters, a mimesis reviewing something seen with emphasis on sacral seeing.

V
The dangers are everywhere. Auxiliary verbs, fishbones, a fine carelessness. No one really likes the odor of geraniums, not the woman who dreams of sunlight and is always late for work nor the man who would be happy in altered circumstances. Words are abstract, but 'words are abstract' is a dance, car crash, heart's delight. It's the design dumb hunger has upon the world. Nothing is severed on hot mornings when the deer nibble flowerheads in a simmer of bay leaves. Somewhere in the summer dusk is the sound of children setting the table. That is mastery: spoon, knife, folded napkin, fork; glasses all around. The place for the plate is wholly imagined. Mother sits here and father sits there and this is your place and this is mine. A good story compels you like sexual hunger but the pace is more leisurely. And there are always melons.
(from poem "The Beginning Of September" by Robert Hass in his book of poems entitled Praise, c.1979)

In the U.S. Senate today there is strong vocal opposition to a procedural maneuver by the majority leader to limit amendments to a bill that has reached the floor. Words make laws. Laws govern a country. What we say matters. What we do matters. What matters becomes our very lives. Words, therefore, are incarnational. We are embodied word. Thus embodied, each act is an expression, whether silent or articulated, of what we are. We exist as a liturgy of incarnation in the midst of the world.

The presence of the poem as an incarnate being has power over those who perceive it, as the presence of the Incarnate Word was shown to have power over those who saw and heard Christ. The Spirit, according to biblical theology, is manifested as the power of love between the Creator and the Christ, overflows into creation, and touches human life directly, to transform it as if by breathing a new life into human beings. The Spirit and the Word move together to change the quality of -- to redeem -- human lives. There is a power manifested in the event of interpenetration if all factors combine to reveal the communion that exists between the poem and the interpreter. This power forms what has been called in this study a circle of energy, and the audience, if the kairos of the performing poem has come, is taken up into this circle in the transforming experience of communion. The visible utterance of the incarnate word in the spirit-charged power of performance can have the effect of breathing new life into those who participate in its moment of revelation.

The incarnational aesthetic of interpretation presented in this study acknowledges the phenomenon of interpretation to be a creative metaphor, enacted through the at-onement between the poem as a speaking-subject and the performer as an embodying-subject. The environment created by their communion is a result of a complex process of dialogue, embodiment, and participation. The artistic event of interpretation as the revelation of presence in performance combines the dynamics of creation, incarnation, and transformation, as a poem, performer, and audience are brought together in the moment of clarity and power that is communion.

...Through its incarnate presence in performance the word interprets human life and speaks forth a new existence that includes those who see and hear it. The poem makes us, and it makes us new. In the ideal performance, the performance that the serious interpreter always strives for and frequently can attain, the experience of the poem is full and complete. From its fullness "we have, all of us, received."
(pp.142,3,4 in The Word's Body)

What have we received?

What's There
When the small hulking rock on my path through the early morning dark
started
To be the skunk it really was and waddle an undulant shuffle away from
me, showing
Its chiaroscuro self by the luminous leftovers of a full moon and stars, I
was startled
For a second or two, brought up short by the uncertain solidity of a
world that keeps
Falling back to a fluency that's just the simple fact of things being clear
as day and
Enigmatic — that transparency we say we see in Being, being just
opacity itself inside it
But seen clearly for a moment and telling no lies about itself, clean as
the swooplines
A suspension bridge has: such solid mystery they make and we walk on
water. Water
Too, is like that, hitting the back of your throat with nothing but its wet
cool, nothing else
In or beyond it — distinct as the invisible dawn bird or a voice inside a
voice, informing you.
(poem by Eamon Grennan in "The Hudson Review," Volume LVII, Number 1, Spring 2004 )

The day has grown hot. Sando pants on floor. Cesco snoozes quietly. Earlier Mu-ge pee'd on couch. We suspect he did it in a fit of pique over not being let out. He’s out now. From time to time squirrel chatters in complaint. Birds are more wary approaching feeder.

I don't know.

It's all beyond me.

I’ve come to an end.

It's a place to start.

Nothing happens after. Nothing happened before. Everything, as odd as it sounds, is occurring just now right here in (what is called) your mind. My mind. Our mind.

After spring, the mountain is empty;
Clouds rise when people
Visit the temple.
Because I don't care
About comings and goings,
I won't be known to the world.
- Choeui Eusoon (1786-1866)

We don't know what to call it. It is what is called.

(Do you see? It is What Is. Called.)

Maybe it's the difference between chance and faith. Chance being the accidents of coincidence. Faith being the mystery of trust.

Trust? Trust is the suspicion someone is helping. However beyond imagination. Or understanding.

Voices from the Other World

Presently at our touch the teacup stirred,
Then circled lazily about
From A to Z. The first voice heard
(If they are voices, these mute spellers-out)
Was that of an engineer

Originally from Cologne.
Dead in his 22nd year
Of cholera in Cairo, he had KNOWN
NO HAPPINESS. He once met Goethe, though.
Goethe had told him: PERSEVERE.

Our blind hound whined. With that, a horde
Of voices gathered above the Ouija board,
Some childish and, you might say, blurred
By sleep; one little boy
Named Will, reluctant possibly in a ruff

Like a large-lidded page out of El Greco, pulled
Back the arras for that next voice,
Cold and portentous: ALL IS LOST.
FLEE THIS HOUSE. OTTO VON THURN UND TAXIS.
OBEY. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.

Frightened, we stopped; but tossed
Till sunrise striped the rumpled sheets with gold.
Each night since then, the moon waxes,
Small insects flit round a cold torch
We light, that sends them pattering to the porch . . .

But no real Sign. New voices come,
Dictate addresses, begging us to write;
Some warn of lives misspent, and all of doom
In way’s that so exhilarate
We are sleeping sound of late.

Last night the teacup shattered in a rage.
Indeed, we have grown nonchalant
Towards the other world. In the gloom here,
our elbows on the cleared
Table, we talk and smoke, pleased to be stirred

Rather by buzzings in the jasmine, by the drone
Of our own voices and poor blind Rover’s wheeze,
Than by those clamoring overhead,
Obsessed or piteous, for a commitment
We still have wit to postpone

Because, once looked at lit
By the cold reflections of the dead
Risen extinct but irresistible,
Our lives have never seemed more full, more real,
Nor the full moon more quick to chill.
(-- Poem by James Merrill)

It's hard to sit in the middle of the proposition that everything is happening now. We're all pretty smart. We know before and after. We have ticket stubs, high school yearbooks, and old calendars from insurance companies. There are dishes in the sink with crusted food from last meal. Along the edge of the road cigarette butts are strewn next to beer cans and fast food wrappers. Surely, something has preceded!

Maybe this is the reason so many among us do not believe in God. The churches didn't have it nailed. The preachers were too frightened to preach what grabbed them by the throat in their night dreams. There was no answer to the question "Why?"

God is now. And only now. God is what now is. Or, put differently: There is only God because there is only Now.

Now is God is Now.

So, what are we to do? I'll guess: We are to live.

Of course.

But...Why?

(There is no 'why.')

Landscape with Self-Portrait

A shading porch, that's open to the west
Whence the weather comes, and giving on a lawn
Won from the meadow where the hay's been baled
In cubes like building blocks of dusty gold,
And further down, through trees, the streaming creek
With three still pools by passagework
Of rapids and rills in fretted rhythms linked;

And on the porch the life-defeated self
And reciprocating engine of reverie
Translating to time the back and forth of Space,
The foot's escapement measuring the mind
In memories while the whole antic machine
Processes across the floor and towards the edge
And has to be hitched back from time to time;
And there to watch the tarnished silver cloud
Advancing up the valley on a wind
That shudders the leaves and turns them silverside
While shadows sweep over the stubble and grass,
And sudden the heavy silver of the first
Raindrops blown slanting in and summer cold
And turning continuous in silver strings;

And after that, the clarified serene
Of the little of daylight that remains to make
Distinct the details of the fading sight:
The laddered blue on blue of the bluejay's tail,
The sweeping swallows low above the swale
Among the insect victims as they rise
To be picked off, and peace is satisfied.
(-- Poem by Howard Nemerov, in his War Stories)

We've been looking for God's tracks through history and scripture. In our fading sight this quest dims and divides. Clinging to the literal we forget the metaphoric, the allegorical, and the mystical. Much of what we think and do is a dream. The notion that life is a dream surfaces again.

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM

Will you take part in
My life, my love
That is my dream

Life is but a dream
It's what you make it
Always try to give
Don't ever take it
Life has it's music
Life has it's songs of love

Life is but a dream
And I dream of you
Strange as it seems
All night I see you
I'm trying to tell you
Just what you mean to me

I love you
With all my heart
Adore you
And all your charms
I want you
To do your part
Come here to my open arms

Life is but a dream
And we can live in
We can make our love
None to compare with

Will you take part in
My life, my love
That is my dream
Life is but a dream
(Song lyrics by Raul Cita and Hy Weiss, performed by The Harptones, 1955)

All night we see. But in daylight, our sight grows dim.

"Now" is not time, not a measurement of time, not a pause in duration. Now is more curious than these encapsulating phrases. I've always wondered why it is said no one can see God...and live. If you meet the Buddha on the road, you're going the wrong way. If you see God, you are dead. Not "I'm in heaven" dead. Rather, dead in the manner that you have not yet awakened and are therefore not yet alive.

'Awake,' God is not seen. 'Awake,' God is what is awake.

Is all that we consider momentous and/or debilitating merely our mistaken inclination to gather up the past or project into the future? Both of which do not exist? And..never have, never will?

6. To Himself (XXVIII)

Now you’ll rest forever
my weary heart. The last illusion has died
I thought eternal. Died. I feel, in truth,
not only hope, but desire
for dear illusion has vanished.
Rest forever. You’ve laboured
enough. Not a single thing is worth
your beating: the earth’s not worthy
of your sighs. Bitter and tedious,
life is, nothing more: and the world is mud.
Be silent now. Despair
for the last time. To our race Fate
gave only death. Now scorn Nature,
that brute force
that secretly governs the common hurt,
and the infinite emptiness of all.

(--From, The Canti, by Giacomo Leopardi, 1798-1837, Translated by A. S. Kline)

Looked at from one direction (back or forward?) the "infinite emptiness of all" conjures particular emotions.

Looked at as itself, here, now, without reach or contraction -- the "infinite emptiness of all" frees the mind to rest in the mere fact of itself.

And yet, we live, and breath, and move, and have our being in this unbroken present presence. Some call it the Eternal Now. Some Absolute Truth. Some Unadulterated Love.

The rain has ceased. Sun shows through the west windows of bookshed. Nothing is going anywhere. All is ever here.

I will not be put off by time, grammar, and referential syntax. Michael's white van has arrived. Ananur is in New York. Kali in Connecticut. Jon is in Vermont. David in Alabama. The other David is in St. Augustine. This morning and afternoon it rained. Tonight the sun will disappear behind the far west side of Ragged Mountain. Time and place appear to be in every direction.

But for this: There is only now; There is only here.

It is mind.

See with it.

See through it.

After evening conversation, go get ice cream.

Church this morning was serene and lovely. The tone has changed in the small building on Union Street. Fanny spoke the words praying us through liturgy of Word and Eucharist. I held in light of prayer my mother and father -- as well as sister, grandparents, aunt, uncle and all family contributing to birth and growth. If there were to be no more days for me, there is today. Born today, die today. Grace unites.

He was a man of great equanimity, except when moved to compassion and mercy. And since a joyful heart animates the face, he displayed the peaceful composure of a spiritual man in the kindness he manifested outwardly and by the cheerfulness of his countenance.
-From various writings on the history of the Order of Preachers."He spoke with God or about God" -- about St. Dominic, feast day 8August)

Bill and Dayle stayed for Wednesday Evening Conversation on final chapter of Eckhart Tolle's Practicing the Power of Now, and through the night overlooking harbor. He came for blueberry muffin and didn't want to leave the spot he found peaceful. They'll head back to Tennessee, leaving a pewter candleholder behind as gift. Angel's visiting light!

Marie and Tom travel from Boothbay for Klotz book conversation. Adele stays over. Jon calls, so too Lori. Saskia floats three balloons with blessing sign from rack in shop.

In everyone it towers like
A mile high wall,
Flashing a great precious light
In everyone’s presence.
One thought ten thousand years,
Ten thousand years one thought,
Eating when hungry,
Sleeping when tired,
Who worries about the alternation
Of light and dark,
The change of the seasons?
- Daio (1235-1309)

The month of August now slides toward September. Prison in morning.

I don't think we ever really know what's right or wrong. Perhaps we might intuit what's best to do and what to avoid. When I write the President a love letter I don't pretend to know what he or the country should do or not do. I will, however, be accountable for my own contribution to or withholding from the conversation necessary for us to partner health of nation and world community. We are merely words in a larger conversation – one begun before us and lasting long after.

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
(-poem by Wallace Stevens)

Geoffrey read us that poem in 1966 the first year studying philosophy. It didn't make sense then. I barely take it in now.

Nothing else.

and write down useless notes

 I once took those walks. Morning beach, low tide, wind song, dog prints. Of many southern Maine beaches, Biddeford Pool had the curve and point, behind the big house an Irish or English round stone cottage, where I imagined I lived whenever I passed.

(Many things about this place are dubious.)

I'd like to retire there and do nothing,

or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:

look through binoculars, read boring books, 

old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,

talk to myself, and, foggy days, 

watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.

(--from The End of March, poem by Elizabeth Bishop)

It was the middle-time of my vagrancy. Not here, not there, not this job, nor that, a wandering promise with no payoff, a diminishing debt of detachment, seagull stretching toward fishing boat abaft piling on wharve with blue tubs of bait standing ready in their desultory smell.

Forty years gone by, friend from then, housemate, will visit with wife in a few days. We had a place there, two streets back, close enough to the ocean, not the dream place, but good enough winter rental.

There’s not much to see in the sea. Rising and falling swells. Stones at shoreline laced with faded and frayed green lobster line telling of days gone and owners gone. The old big doors and open wall launch for once big rowing station rescue boats at coast guard outpost their now quiet stories garbled with small shifting stones rolling in crosscurrent tide against sea wall.

I got a ticket once for leaving car there when I walked the length toward Goose Rocks. I never paid it. I’ve dreamt they were coming after me.

Forty four years in Maine, over half my life, the broken wooden traps have given way to bent green wire ones in small coves wedged between boulders smoothed by wet repetition.

You don’t have to live by the shore. It's close enough.  Sit there in pickup with coffee and bland donut for dunking. Visitors from away with iPhones and Nikons finding gems to take back with them, or those with enormous telephoto lens, their intimate nearness to take back to Photographic Workshop on their way to the big glossies and coffee table books.

Even back then I was a vagabondo trasandato -- a scruffy vagabond with no eye for anything lasting -- a single wave on a long shore of sea wall knowing how to deflect a glancing intrusion, shunted off, back out to lowering tide, a smashed trap now holding only stories of what once was thought to be caught.

If we run into each other some time ahead, please tell me your name.

That's my final line. I write it because I don't ever know who anyone is. Appearances are full of mystery. As much is concealed as is revealed.

"As is" reveals itself in ways mostly unclear to us. That's why Zen masters and poets both appeal to us and leave us questioning.

Happy Continuation Day

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people. To be born means that something which did not exist comes into existence. But the day we are “born” is not our beginning. It is a day of continuation. But that should not make us less happy when we celebrate our “Happy Continuation Day.”
Since we are never born, how can we cease to be? This is what the Heart Sutra reveals to us. When we have tangible experience of non-birth and non-death, we know ourselves beyond duality. The meditation on “no separate self” is one way to pass through the gate of birth and death.
Your hand proves that you have never been born and you will never die. The thread of life has never been interrupted from time without beginning until now. Previous generations, all the way back to single cell beings, are present in your hand at this moment. You can observe and experience this. Your hand is always available as a subject for meditation.
(--Thich Nhat Hanh, from Present Moment, Wonderful Moment)

Lori's grandma Mary died the other day. That, and Jon's good friend hauled off and found himself in a heap of hoosegow this week. This morning wind blows easterly and windowpanes are wet. The celebration of gratefulness strains on days not earmarked for it. And yet, there is always poetry.

The Summer You Learned to Swim
for Lea

The summer you learned to swim
was the summer I learned to be at peace with myself.
In May you were afraid to put your face in the water
But by August, I was standing in the pool once more
when you dove in, then retreated to the wall saying
You forgot to say Sugar! So I said Come on Sugar, you can do it
and you pushed off and swam to me and held on
laughing, your hair stuck to your cheeks—
you hiccupped with joy and swam off again.

And I dove in too, trying new things.
I tried not giving advice. I tried waking early to pray. I tried
not rising in anger. Watching you I grew stronger—
your courage washed away my fear.

All day I worked hard thinking of you.
In the evening I walked the long hill home.
You were at the top, waving your small arms,
pittering down the slope to me and I lifted you high
so high to the moon. That summer all the world
was soul and water, light glancing off peaks.
You learned the turtle, the cannonball, the froggy, and the flutter
And I learned to stand and wait for you to swim to me.
(Poem: "The Summer You Learned to Swim" by Michael Simms, from The Happiness of Animals. Monkey Sea Editions.)

Courage can wash away fear. Not fighting courage, but attention courage -- the kind of heart that sees kind heart as a continuation worth attending to -- we learn to serve, to stand and wait.

So it is that the mysteries of Christ will not be completed until the end of time, because he has arranged that the completion of his mysteries in us and in the Church will only be achieved at the end of time.
(from The treatise of St John Eudes on the kingdom of Jesus, Office of Readings, Fri.24Nov06)

I like the notion it is we who will complete and continue what has been begun with attentive courage -- to put a face on kindness.

For, what else was this Jesus about? But facing kindness with attentive courage -- saying: learn to make your way through this way of being!

Dive in. Try new things. Put down all formulas of conversion and belief.

Swim in the completing continuation of this day, these faces, our time together, the name you reveal to me each time you show up.

Presence, not kingdom.

It's right here.

Right now.

What do we make of it?

Waddya say?

apenas allí en absoluto

Don’t write

Me

A small poem