The small pot-bellied stove has two broken legs. Tommy wants to be called when it is fired up for the first time. Snow melts from kitchen roof into white plastic gutter with hot sun over it waving hand fashioning disappearing trick. Jim walks carefully across snow and ice to pickup truck for telephone numbers he will call.

In the shop yesterday Susan tells me of a friend's wife with stage four lung cancer. She's been told -- two months to five years -- and is receiving either radiation or chemo, Susan doesn't know for sure. Earlier Karl and Bill separately tell me the news of a woman from church -- her son died -- suddenly and young. They don't know for certain, but suddenly and young evokes a groan of familiarity of recent deaths by suicide in the community. Joe and Gige stop in looking for a book that hasn't arrived yet. They are incensed by the oncoming and ongoing news from Boston about pedophilia and priests. Joe won't be going to the renewed hospice training in the morning, saying his 80+yr old energy can only be meted out for one thing at a time -- and the Patriots are playing on Sunday -- he's reserving his energy for that loss. Bob, who had a heart attack and is surprised at how that affects one's sense of well-being, calls to say he'll stop by for a chat Saturday afternoon.

An executive from Enron seems to have shot himself dead in his Mercedes in Texas. Hearings begin in Washington about the corporate collapse and matters of financial investments, political contributions, and accounting irregularities. Deaths in Palestine, Israel, Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan -- all indicate unfinished hostilities. It's not hard to wonder at death -- not why, we know why. We die because we are born. But how, the how of death -- that's what gives us pause.

Mokusen Miyuki in the book Buddhism and Jungian Psychology , in a chapter entitled "Dying Isagi-Yoku" writes:

Death is a concept. Dying, but not death, belongs to the experience of the living person. However, dying as a form of living is crucially different from other forms of living in that the individual is facing the critical moment in which he or she is going to disappear from this life. Here I present the Japanese response to the fear of death which can be characterized as the attitude of isagi-yoku.
Speaking of this attitude, D.T. Suzuki in his work Zen and Japanese Culture (1970) states:
To die isagi-yoku is one of the thoughts very dear to the
Japanese heart.... Isagi-yoku means "leaving no regrets," "with a
clear conscience," "like a brave man," "with no reluctance," "in
full possession of mind," and so on. The Japanese hate to see
death met irresolutely and lingeringly; they desire to be
blown away like the cherry blossom before the wind, and no
doubt this Japanese attitude toward death must have gone
very well with the teachings of Zen (pp.84-85).

This morning at Lectio, the reading about the two fellows, their names called, leaving their nets, father, and boat to follow Jesus -- something they saw, no doubt, something they heard -- and they're away. So many of them in a few years from that time are killed, martyred -- it is called -- for what they heard and saw, for what they said and did. "For the faith," some say. But that's not compelling. Faith in what? Belief in what? Or who? No, it's hard to imagine they died for a formula, a creed, or an affiliation. What then did they die for? Why did those fishermen drop everything, turn around, and enter a new reality? Typically we say they followed Jesus, followed the Messiah, followed Christ -- but what does that mean?

What if they dropped everything, turned around, and followed a new reality -- and it meant just that -- a new reality? When we see something, anything potentially, we are changed. Think of seeing the plane hitting the World Trade Center, or the twin towers collapsing. Think of seeing a loved one dead. We're changed by such seeing, such hearing. What if those fishermen suddenly heard and saw that they, (and possibly we), have been completely misled in what we consider reality to be? What if, like those science fiction movies, we come to the experience that everything we've believed about the nature of what is real and unreal has been completely overthrown? Like the film Matrix --living inside a computer program, or the film eXistenZ obscuring what is in the game and what is outside the game? Or one of those nocturnal dreams that are so vivid and active that we are unsure whether we are inside or outside the dream, and uncertain what waking would mean?

The fishermen, quite possibly, entered a new reality. What we read as a walking away from familial and lifework relationships in the narrative might be something more radical, unexplainable, and just a little bit terrifying -- a turning, not unlike death in life, or dying and living -- at and as -- the same instant. What if the very fabric and composition, ground and ideational perspective shifted -- and they no longer saw or recognized what they'd known as real and normal? What if they saw God?

I don't know what they saw. I don't know what they heard. I don't know what occurred for them after they turned. I don't know what new reality suddenly became their very life, their very existence. I don't know if "seeing God" means seeing reality differently or seeing a different reality. I suspect it means you no longer take anything other than what you directly experience as true, anything other than what you are experiencing as what you hold as true for yourself. For this we need both caution and abandon. We need what is called discernment and community -- to help sort through what is not true so to arrive at what is true. I suspect the lives and deaths of the fishermen had something to do with a profound and inalterable certainty that what they experienced and knew was completely worth isagi-yoku!. This attitude of isagi-yoku -- might perhaps be restated as life-in-death, death-in-life, wholelife/wholedeath -- a new reality of seeing as prayer and awakening.

I will die. You will die. We all die. What we struggle with is when and how. What if 'when' is now and 'how' is turning around into a new reality of seeing as prayer and awakening? Perhaps to live/die -- fully seeing what is really true -- is to be fully fearless and fiercely resolute in our response to what calls our name.

Outside window, the breeze takes edges of cedar branch a short way with itself. Fleeting water drop, sumie stroke on transparence, streaking window frame. White cloud moves effortlessly over Sally's land. Chickadee, with unseen sunflower seed, disappears. Each breath in this seeing is a prayer for the dead, the dying, the living, and those turning around.

Saul, it is said, was converted. His conversion is celebrated today. One's conversion, another's conversion, our conversion -- a formulaic understanding I need to come to terms with, to understand. It nears time to get up and return home.

Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him to Damascus.For three days he was unable to see, and he neither ate not drank.
(Acts 9:8-9)

Seeing nothing, some say, is prelude to new activity. In Saul's case the activity was the speaking aloud of what he heard -- namely, what we think is put to death because of our dualistic politics in the secular and religious realms, is transcended by the Christ who appeared from the center of woman, died into the center of earth, and resurrected as center of every nucleus and extension-without-end. Life/death is non-dual! Jesus related in an instant of blinding awareness to Saul that he, and we, are living in ignorance of what is true reality.

And what formulaic shape does this revelation take? Hurt anyone, hurt me, hurt yourself. Help anyone, help me, help yourself. Dismiss anyone, dismiss me, dismiss yourself. Kill anyone, kill me, kill yourself. Love anyone, love me, love yourself.

Jesus the human gift found himself Christ the gift of God. Christ the expression of the Father/Mother God is the gift Spirit gives through matter, life, word, flesh, and finally, truth. Find one, find the other, find oneself. Serve one, serve the other, serve oneself. Practice presence-itself, practice presence-with-other, practice presence-as-oneself.

This darkness of Saul's is prelude. We need to help each other in and through this darkness. Some get trapped in isolation in that darkness and commit suicide, or murder, or war - the combination of the two. We sorrow when that occurs.

Saul took the extended hands of companions that led him further through his darkness until he regained his sight. Our hands need to practice opening. Open one, open another, open to where light longs to lead!

Concrescence, says the dictionary, (from the Latin concrescere=to grow together), means a growing together of parts or cells. Alfred North Whitehead uses the word often in his philosophical writings.
In Stephen T. Franklin's book Speaking From The Depths, writing about Whitehead's thinking, Franklin says,
As we saw in the first section, religion is the application of the permanent side of the universe to the act of concrescence. This, however, raises a problem. For Whitehead, the process of the universe is a self-evident fact. How, then, does this "permanent side of things" find its niche in a world of endless change? How are we to verify the religious person's assertion that there exist ideals which are applicable to the concrescence of all actual entities at all times? Moreover, is there really any sense that the accomplishments of one generation are preserved from the ravages of the next?

Franklin says the primary religious problem according to Whitehead involves asking, "How then are we to account for this religious intuition into the permanent side of things -- the permanent principles of concrescence on the one hand, and the permanent significance of our accomplishments on the other?"
Quoting Whitehead:
The most general formulation of the religious problem is the question of whether the process of the temporal world passes into the formation of other actualities, bound together in an order in which novelty does not mean loss.
The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a 'perpetual perishing.' Objectification involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. (Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology p.517)

Franklin writes, "Whitehead is famous for his tenacious insistence that no one ideal can serve for all people in all periods -- to say nothing of all actual entities in all aeons. This is a motif which is woven into his entire book, Adventures in Ideas. We will quote one passage as an illustration.
The foundation of all understanding of sociological theory -- that is to say, of all understanding of human life -- is that no static maintenance of perfection is possible. This axiom is rooted in the nature of things....The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe (AI 353h-54a)."

As it rains this Thursday morning -- Sando snoring on bed, Saskia waiting in a Volkswagon repair shop, and someone (I'm sure) wondering why our sign at the shop says 'Open at 10:30am' -- I wonder about God.

To grow together we must respond to the imploring of perfection to find it new and now, inchoate and nascent. This inchoate (only begun) and nascent (coming into being, being born) of perfection (per=through, facere=to make) asks us to face a reality that is not yet, while standing in a reality which is now, believing in a reality from which we've just come. Said differently, By making our way through this present moment we call 'now,' we are always at the beginning or origin of reality-itself while bringing together what went before into what is being built by our dwelling in a true and real immediacy.

Perfection is not a past or future state. It is not an ideal somewhere else that we try to measure ourselves or our behavior against. Perfection is moving through here now. Perfection is doing and facing what is here and growing together with what is now.

If God is perfect, God is moving through this time, this place, you and me, and each and every thing encountered on the way. God is not other than what is taking place. To hold on to an idea of God that posits some fixed and final, immutable and untouchable state of being that is outside the experience of you and me, here and now -- is to have that idea, and only that idea. God is not an idea nor a puppeteer. God is not a facsimile of a Supreme Court judge deciding what will be for each and all.

God is a more compassionate way of seeing. God is, if we dare say it or see it, right now inviting and imploring us to make our way through this time and place in such a way that what comes to be born is something we can grow together in love.

Recently the local internet station posted a question for a community poll asking, "Do you go to church?" The options to choose from were:
Every Sunday.
Two or more times a week.
Only on religious holidays.
I find spirituality elsewhere.
I am an atheist.

Did they mean by "church" as in "go to church" a building? A particular denomination? A distinctive ritual? An obvious congregation identified by a recognizable set of beliefs? I wonder.

If I were to post a question that might evoke current sensitivities to the notion of "church" -- (from Greek word kyriakos, belonging to the Lord); "Lord" -- (from Old English hlaf or "loaf keeper" i.e. one who feeds dependents); dependent -- (from Latin dependere, to hang down, to be derived from); I'd ask:
"Do you gather with supportive, inquiring, practicing people in order to deepen in your life that which is loving, inspiring, engaging?" Or, "Where do you find belonging that feeds your sense of true self?" Or, "How do you get or receive with others the feeling that you truly necessary and something wonderful?" Or, "From what source in your life do you find yourself awakening to that which is called God?"

Has "church-as-denomination" ("denominate," i.e. to give a specific name to), a notion of church that which we're familiar with -- done its job well delivering many to "church-face-to-face" (i.e. like the Zen saying "Better to see the face than hear the name!"), a recognition perhaps not so familiar, yet? Will church as it has been known, change? Following the lead and groundwork that our traditional understanding of the mission of churches has provided, to save us from becoming lost, and become more of a sense of shared journey with God and each other toward that which is our true and very life-with-each-and-all, a foundness, a sacred gathering in everyday encounter? Will church evolve and flower into a sacred presencing, a nameless acceptance, justice, and love?

Perhaps it doesn't matter whether we retain or move beyond the cultural and historical denominations and divisions that have been part of our experience of church. Perhaps it does matter. It seems to me to be part of a koan, a riddle meant to deepen understanding: namely, If each is church, how often do we attend oneself? If we all are church, how often do we attend each other? Or, If God is presence, then who's missing?

As places of identification and worship of God, churches enrich us.
As everyday encounters acknowledging the mystery and inner holiness of every person and all beings, no matter their beliefs, an evolving understanding of church as our ordinary face-to-face, everyday breathing, and daily practice of kindness and compassion -- my vote on the survey would aspire to 60 seconds of every minute, every minute, hour, day of every week.

Perhaps that aspiration is what prayer is. I'll try to pray continuously if that's the case. And if you meet me while I'm not praying, will you pick up the slack for the time we hang together, sip tea, look at each other, greeting whatever & whoever shows up?

Martin was a revolution. In 1968 and earlier, he was a turning around, a new prospect of peace, respect, and soul. He presented the other cheek of Christ, the practical strategies of Gandhi, and the hidden longing of the American soul to do right by the other. Martin was good company in a bad time.

On a long journey,
It is essential to go with
Good companions;
Purify your eyes and ears
Again and again.
When you stay somewhere
Choose your company;
Listen to what you have
Not heard time and again.
This is the basis of the saying:
“It was my parents who bore me;
it was my companions who raised me.”
- Kuei-shan Ling-yu (771-854)(-from dailyzen)


In March 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. preached a sermon at the National Cathedral entitled "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," using the example of Rip Van Winkle sleeping those 20 years through a revolution, from King George the Third to George Washington, the first President of the United States.
While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain a revolution was taking place that at points would change the course of history -- and Rip knew nothing about it. He was asleep. Yes, he slept through a revolution. And one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution. (MLK, March'68)


We need good company today. Bombs and planes are still used as weapons of death; rich men and women fight for more and more wealth for themselves and disregard the financial needs of others; individual respect and rights of freedom afforded to Americans as a beacon of hope for the world are threatened and compromised in the name of control, security, and the assumed singular responsibility of power to fashion what it says is right for others. The company we've kept troubles in unrevealed ways the next generation's longing for love, non-violence, and justice for all.

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood [and sisterhood]. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers [and sisters] or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught together in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way God's universe is made; this is the way it is structured. (MLK, Mar.'68)[bracketed words added]


Martin didn't lead a revolution; Martin was a revolution. He turned and awakened. This is the way God's universe is made! With Martin's help, with God's help, we can make it; we can structure this world in such a way that we do right by the other, we become good company in a troubling time.

Behalf Conversation, A Poem
-- (or, Dwelling Towards Turning One)

1. Oikoumenikos, Greek: of or from the whole world (-in New World Dictionary)

2. If you pass your
Whole life half asleep,
What can you rely on?
(- Kuei-shan Ling-yu 771-854, dailyzen)

3. “Or lack of belief,” the Abbot said. “I think I was born before my time. A man doesn’t have to have such a big dose of faith anymore, does he?”
Kinsella smiled. “Perhaps not.” He had been about to add that today’s best thinking saw the disappearance of the church building as a place of worship in favor of a more generalized community concept, a group gathered to celebrate God-in-others. But decided that, perhaps, the Abbot was not ready for that step.
(--from novel, Catholics, by Brian Moore, c.1972)

4. We live in the conversation we generate about the world. (- Lynne Twist, New Dimensions Radio)

.....................
It’s not that dreaming isn’t real. It’s more that we can only half read, half speak.
The sorrow’s we’ve forgotten dream’s grammar – the poetics of conversation!

Sal calls during Being There saying he’s gotten my email
what can he do for me? Thank you, I say, we’d like to see

the place in case it’s the right place for Meetingbrook.
This morning at prayer Saskia points out the word “justify”

saying that it might mean, like composing a document text,
“falling into place,” and I say, Yes, that’s it, word transformed

from one time of religion to this time of seeing things as they are.
Sal wondered if I’d checked the zoning, “I’m not sure retail is allowed.”

How sweet of him to pick the one thing I’m willing to give up,
as if he were transforming word to this stranger along the wire –

you see, if the shop was the tail looking for the dog, then, re-tail, or
conversing the tail, we’ve found the dog, found the place, justified

in dream the syllables of grammar. Call it Schola Lumen – a Light Conversation,
or a Conversing Light – that which arrives from word to silence or con-versa.

We’ll wait half awake to fall into place with each one departing silence to word
a clear and present learning once called school, or church, or synagogue, or mosque, or temple

but now with new grammar, new parsing of now, a hospice of “or” –we become words
seeking breath, falling into place in each other’s eyes, each other’s ears, each other’s benediction.

We are half awake, the sound of dreams speaking in drowse. And we are ready to fall awake,
fall into place the words, “I understand!” -- without thought, generative, awaking half to whole.

(wfh, 20jan02)

Anthony lived alone. And because he lived alone a while he became the father of many alones. It was the early 3rd century. He heard words of scripture, and then he heard the silence of scripture, finally settling into word-made-Anthony, a new dwelling place of scripture and silence.

Walking path after 3:30am silent sitting back to brook with pre-dawn snow falling as stillness over everything, the thought occurs to dedicate the cabin on the feast of the father of monastic dwelling. Earlier in the darkness of cushion and flicker of vigil candle the thought occurs from wall next to window -- from framed icon of Mary and Child -- to name the cabin MoGLIAD. It sounds Celtic. Even Semitic. It might even be a transliterated Japanese word from a Waka by Dogen in his poem, There in midnight water, / Waveless, windless, / The old boat's swamped / With moonlight. But it is not any of these. It is the acronym of the words below the icon, Mother of God, Light In All Darkness. The Iconic Image was issued by the Bishop's committee a few years ago in honor of those living-passing-serving with AIDS. Drawing from that originating issue, portrayed is Madonna holding child who in turn holds lighted candle in its hand.

None of us are immune. No longer. Not just AIDS, but terror, and the ordinary but often ignored reality that we too pass -- pass on, pass away, pass by.

Mother holding child holding candle also suggests the Zen story about the abbot at night handing a visiting monk a lighted candle at the door of the darkened corridor telling him to come to the meditation hall after he is settled in his room. Before departing down the darkened way the abbot blows out the candle and disappears in an extinguished swoosh of fading sound down the blackness -- leaving the new arrival in darkness -- leaving him astonished and unseeing in his own riddle. How become lights unto oneself? How not need the light of another's way? How allow the inner light of True Presence to shine from within, thereby lighting the way as inner emanation?

MoGLIAD might be the name of the Meditation Chapel/Zendo. Or it might not. The dedication, however, will take place tonight at the hermitage after Christian Contemplative Studies at the shop. Already a single candle has burned this morning alongside a smaller icon holding the place for MoGLIAD.
..............................
Yesterday at the shop an afternoon full of laughter and conversation about buying a local Inn and transforming it into a Pension/Small Hotel for the many who frequent Meetingbrook to live in a consolidated yet autonomous community of artists, poets, musicians, monastics, contemplatives, seekers-of-the-way, transients, retreatents and other questionable accomplices-of-lightheartedness. We know the site -- we'd like the Camden Harbour Inn -- so now we have to hone the sight, (or, bring the vision home.)

Perhaps our earlier notion of a SCHOLA needs modification to become SCHOLA LUMEN-- that is, A Light Conversation!

These days we pray by head-shaking desperation and laughing-imagination. Anthony would understand. He was a fool to abandon all his land and possessions to live alone with others. Fools understand a fool. It's an understanding born of desperation and laughter, love and surrender. Today is his feast. We note the day -- we note his way.

There are so many of us waiting and watching for the light -- to show forth and be seen from within each one of us.

First the highway falls away. Then cushion. Then faces saying something I cannot comprehend, that maybe doesn't need to be said. Then a book fills my hands -- about history and indeterminacy, Mary and the odd matter of miracles. For two days the dog breathes, the cat purrs, pages turn. Rodents dart to sunflower seed. Ladybugs on book page, on lamp stand, under driftwood. Everything else is frozen.

Computer freezes. Mind freezes. A great locked stillness encloses God. The Bodhisattva of Compassion averts eyes from unmoving and shivering stillborn unawareness.
January, no place remains but the beginning, again. Ordinary time. Ordinary mind. Hiatus without promise of anything other than itself. Brrr!

Breaking Through Solid Ice
Oh lonely boat, advancing, breaking through solid ice! Out of the blur of towering, frozen waves, from the desolate winter light of that isolated region, weathered dark with sadness, you small black whaleboat. The compass needle of the boat, adrift in the deserted surroundings of the sea, and the single sharp prow of will, how they cleave and shatter the hard ice of winter.
(-prose poem by Sakutaro Hagiwara, translated by Lane Dunlop)

Will the woman in Pennsylvania make it through her second bone marrow transplant? Will the man in New York recover from pneumonia and spots on his lungs? Will the elderly woman looking at candles on her tree decide her memories more comforting than what used to compose them?
Will the looming empty space across the river from Brooklyn entrance to Battery Tunnel ever be felt as anything other than burial space for three thousand surprised souls?

We are in the season of questions -- a hard-frozen sorrowing sea of holding-fast questions!

Before going away a few days to visit friends and family, a meditation on what we are learning with Meetingbrook Conversations.

Seeing and saying and service are the very ground of learning.

I've been thinking of the Maine State Prison and the Meetingbrook Conversations held there. Something simple and lovely is taking place. Observations and insights from the community outside the walls, and from the community inside the walls -- are being shared and thought about, and if found useful, incorporated into each persons understanding of who they are -- inside and outside. Topics in philosophy, poetry, the practice of seeing and saying -- are talked about in round-table conversation. Inmates and volunteers from Meetingbrook Bookshop meet together twice a month for two hours a meeting. So far we've conversed about poetry or pieces from Rumi, Thomas Berry, Hafiz, Mary Oliver, John Logan, Andre, Brendan, Kevin, Boyd, Kenny, Stephen, Russell, Robin, Mike, Sonny, Denis, Robert, Paco, Chris, David Whyte, Richard Hugo, Robert Lowell, Eckhart Tolle, John Riker, as well as Seth, Cheryl, David, Dick, Gale, Saskia and I.

For once, for a brief space, we walk among you
for a space of words,
we quicken your hearts in pursuit of the sovereign will. O makers and unmakers! I shall shortly be borne
in a flowering cart of sandal, into a high heaven; a quaint apotheosis!
The routine slaveries once more possess you.
Man and god, Buddha and Merton, those years, this hour, fold in like a dough.
The blows of the kneading fist withdraw, the times are your own.
(--Daniel Berrigan, from his poem "The Funeral Oration as Pronounced by The Compassionate Buddha" from series In Memoriam; Thomas Merton.in New & Selected Poems)

Thinking is seeing. Poetry is saying. Service is sharing what-is-found.
If thinking is what wakes us, then poetry enlivens us more than we think, but the service of sharing with each other what is found in the encounter -- that is the real practice. These three aspects of being-in-the-world are the foundation of contemplation, conversation, and correspondence.

They are a monastic practice. By monastic practice I mean what we are and what we do when we are alone -- alone by ourselves, alone with others -- or, alone with the Alone. Being alone is not always easily understood. For me it means no matter where we are, no matter who is with us (one other or a number of others), we are engaged in the practice of remaining true and faithful to who we are -- we maintain our grounded individual being -- even while we engage and collaborate with others in the Being and existence we share with them. The Alone (with a capital "A") is the Source of our Being, or Higher Power, or Ultimate Reality, or God, or What-Is. Whatever name we give it, we are referring to that foundational root No-Other that upholds us, informs us, inspires us, creates us, sustains and draws us into our own deepest understanding of what we are, where we are, and why we are in the world. By any other name, this is philosophy, poetry, and practice.

While Breathing

Sometimes I breathe harder and all of a sudden with the aid of my continual absent-mindedness, the world rises with my chest. Perhaps not Africa, but big stuff.
The sound of a brass viol, the noise of an entire orchestra, the noisy jazz beside me, sink into a silence ever more profound, profound, smothered.
Their light scratching collaborates (in a way that a millionth of a millimeter collaborates to make a meter) with these waves all around which give birth to themselves, splay themselves, which make the buttress and the soul of everything.
(Prose Poem by Henri Michaux, translated from French by Richard Ellmann, in The Prose Poem)

This is the year of poetry, the time is right. I understand poetry in this context as -- what is being written, what is being spoken. "Poetry and Autobiography," the course Harold & I did at Maine State Prison as an independent study has been a wonderful experience following the promptings of personal recollection along with the promptings of poetry. If anyone else wishes to explore these promptings, it would be a good exercise, a good practice.
I'm planning to offer as a course suggestion to the University of Maine System. "Philosophy, Poetry, and Practice: A Study of Seeing, Saying, and Service of the Ordinary and Extraordinary in Life." As a working draft for a course title it is a bit elongated. Perhaps, "Philosophy of Poetry in Practice."

By means of the three "P's" we'd read, write, and reflect the three S's." It would be an interdisciplinary aesthetic inquiry into the inter-relationship of thought, expression, and engagement-with-others. We'd interweave philosophy, poetry, and spiritual thinking as collaborative corollaries to situations in the world, personal experiential autobiography, and the creativity of meaningful contribution to both the arts and to one's everyday interactions with the world.

"Look, Paddy, nothing could ever make me believe
in that heaven of yours."
"Of God's, more strictly speaking...
and all the luckier for you. Think of your surprise
when you'll be waking up and saying, 'I still don't believe
in all this heaven stuff!' and God just grinning,
'Nor do you have to, man. Not if not believing
makes you any happier. We aim to please.' "
(--from Ramon Guthrie's poem, "There Are Those.")

The joy of philosophy, poetry, and practice is that whatever is seen, said, or served by the conversation is meant to be taken back by any of the participants to their own root tradition, spirituality, everyday reality, philosophy, or personal experience. Everything about the conversations is gift, namely, anything given into the center of the circle is just given. Anything taken is just taken. No other agenda, no other intention. Many are wary about motivations. At Meetingbrook Conversation the only motivation is the conversation. That anyone puts in something they think others should hear, well, there's no stopping that. Any attempt to push the issue to the right or the left, to one corner or the other, is soon counterbalanced by comments that move the topic back to the center. Preaching, proselytizing, or trying to convince are accepted for their duration because the openness of the circle equally invites the opposite opinion, the countervailing comment that expresses whatever is in the mind of the person not to be preached at, not to be converted to, not to be convinced. All is welcome, and therefore, all is considered in its own light.

Existence itself is poetical. The poetry is merely an expression of such existence. Chinese poets penetrate into the source of things and reveal their true nature. As Archibald MacLeish would say, "A poem should not mean, but be!" The best works of Chinese poetry do not "mean"; they "are." The spiritual rhythm emerges from the objective reality, which appears no more a mere visual description.

When the poet is free from artificiality he will not only reflect pure objective reality, he will also be able to reflect spontaneously his inner joy without distortion and limitations from the ego-consciousness. He is purposeless and fearless as the flowing stream and the shining moon. Since the poet is serene he simply reflects what happens to his mind.
(pp.176-7, Creativity and Taoism, A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry, by Chang Chung-yuan)

The prison conversations, like the conversations held at the bookshop in Camden, are free, open, and informal. Free doesn't just mean there's no monetary cost to attend. It also means, as with all freedom, there's no telling where it will go and who will point it in that direction. This invited spontaneity serves to open the possibilities, and inform the individual and group that it is safe and sound to attend. Respect, rather than being a set of rules, follows when you know you are free to admit what you see and say into the service of the conversation.

Someone asked the master, Bokuju:
we have to dress and eat every day --
how do we get out of all that?

Bokuju answered:
We dress, we eat.

The questioner said:
I don't understand.

Bokuju answered:
If you don't understand,
put on your clothes and eat your food.
(in The Grass Grows By Itself, by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)

In other words, practice. As a contemporary saying puts it, "The only way out is through." Whatever we do is what we do; it is the mind that makes it burden or delight. Each thing done for itself needs nothing added to it. If the feeling or thought of "delight" or "burden" comes, then we just watch it come and watch it go. Practice is doing each thing for itself. So too, with things we've done in life, things we regret or things we'd like to repeat and repeat. Regret and longing to repeat are journeys to the past and the future -- which can only be done in the mind. The body is here and now. Awareness is here and now. To practice what is here and now is to free oneself from regret and longing for something else. Despite the attraction for what is not here and now, it is often a painful experience to realize that what is not here or not now is not real. What is real is here. What is real is now. By entering and engaging what is, here and now, is to live fully the life that is ours to live.

Perhaps there is a spirit of the place we occupy, and there are spirits of places we are not. (Poets can speak of these things; they have a poetic license.) When here and now, we occupy the spirit of the place we are, and are content to be what and who, and where we are -- no matter how objectively undesirable that place might seem to others. When not here, not now, spirits of the places we've wandered to in our minds occupy us, and we are at the whim of their memories and projections, no longer ourselves, and not moving through our own life, but through someone else's. Does poetry help us understand this dilemma? Czeslaw Milosz writes:

Ars Poetica?

I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

That is why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It's hard to guess where that pride of poet's comes from,
when so often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may think that I am only joking
or that I've devised just one more means
of praising Art with the help of irony.

There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.
(--by Czeslaw Milosz, trans. from Polish by CM and Lillian Vallee, in The Poet's Work, 29 Masters of 20th Century Poetry On The Origins and Practice Of Their Art)

In the same book as Milosz's poem is an interview with poet and Zen ecologist Gary Snyder. He has just been quoted as saying that,
Poetry effects change by fiddling with the archetypes and getting at people's dreams about a century before it actually effects historical change."
INTERVIEWER: I'm not too clear on the idea of the archetype blocks.
SNYDER: What I'm saying is we change the values of a society.
INTERVIEWER: Then the poet is essentially a pioneer?
SNYDER: No I wouldn't say a pioneer. A pioneer clear-cuts an eco-system and sets the succession phase back to zero again. A poet would be, in terms of the ecology of symbols, noting the main structural connections and seeing which parts of the symbol system are no longer useful or applicable, though everyone is giving them credence. And out of his own vision and hearing of voices he seeks for new paths for the mind energy to flow, which would be literally more creative directions, but directions which change politics. Poets are more like mushrooms or fungi -- they can digest the symbol detritus...
The value and function of poetry can be said in a very few words. One side of it is in time, the other is out of time. The in-time side of it is to tune us in to mother nature and human nature so that we can live in time, in our societies in a way and on a path in which all things can come to fruition equally, and together in harmony. A path of beauty. And the out-of-time function of poetry is to return us to our own true original nature at this instant forever. And those two things happen, sometimes together, sometimes not, here and there all over the world, and always have. (p.292, Gary Snyder, "The Real Work" -- Excerpts from an Interview.)

We are fortunate to be able to learn -- to listen to, speak with, and practice alongside so many wonderful learning individuals. This is the real work of Meetingbrook Conversations -- to see what is taking place with attentive presence; to listen to the sound of what is being said; to practice what is now taking place.

We walk the snowy surface of playing field and frozen Hosmer Pond as midnight nears. Returning to hermitage, lighting incense and two candles, bowing to cushion, sitting. Brass bowl sounds itself 12 times as both candles dim and extinguish themselves. In the dark and silence we sit. Whatever juncture is crossed is done without sound, without illumination. Only woman, man, dog, & cat -- each settled and still in the crossing.

May blessing and peace dwell herein at hermitage in Maine -- and at any other quiet place of heart or mind -- wherever we dwell in the wide world this New Year 2002!

A meditation this day: Mothering God – O Marvelous Exchange!

What would it be like to experience the expression of creation from God’s perspective? Is every appearance of life a maieutic event, a midwifing birth from no-it-isn’t to yes-it-is? Is God the mothering Being-unto-Birth attending tirelessly every insight, every howling infant, and every death-rattling final gasp that brings one more being through the door of finitude?

When Jesus was told that his mother was waiting for him he asked who was his mother, really, who was his mother but anyone who heard and obeyed the promptings of the source of all Being, the Father. Contrary to the sketches of hurt usually ascribed to Mary upon hearing this relativizing rendering of her place in his life, I suspect she was delighted. If Mary is the woman so long touted as extraordinary in nearness to the unfolding of Christ, then she knew hearing Jesus’ words that he knew what she knew what we all will know when our time comes.

“O marvelous exchange!” proclaims antiphon 1 at 1st Vespers for January 1, the celebration of Mary, Mother of God, and the Octave of Christmas. “Man’s Creator has become man, born of a virgin. We have been made sharers of the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

Don’t we all become what we create? In the Creator’s case, the Creator becomes the creation. What do we become? What are we creating?

As a new year begins at Meetingbrook we are creating space for meditation and contemplation, conversation, collation and recollection, correspondence, and simple engaged service. We are doing nothing special, really, nothing other than what anybody does who suspects or realizes that we have been made sharers of the divinity of Christ. And what is that? The divinity of Christ might be seen as the unbroken awareness that we are what God is doing – the unceasing revelation of God’s life and breath in this existence. Jesus knew it, Mary knew it – now, we are practicing what they knew and taught.

We practice the awareness graciously given us by these two wonderful beings. Presaged and predated by other marvelous and compassionate beings in Israel, India, Persia, and what would come to be called the Americas – this anawim (poor and lowly) woman and anointed son forged a new exchange – a new circle wherein what we will be and what we are is just ahead of what we’ve been. The straight road has turned around into itself and become a circular spiral where we no longer are straying from what and where we are – but are extending this being and place called who-we-are into a profound and deepening awareness of our shared origin. Point of departure and focus of destination have grasped each other’s hand and now twirl in ecstatic embracing dance at origin – a grounded, real, encircling earthly/heavenly origin.

That’s what a hermitage is and does. It creates a place of practice and then practices so as to be a place of practice. And so this New Year – we practice. Alone, together, with those we know, and with those we will come to know. This practice, this dance, this prayer -- this exchange of mothering creation with mothering creator – is the exchange taking place in solitude and community. As long as we can, we practice the presence of this exchange, one breath at a time.
………
We’ll be visiting a new prison when we continue conversations at Maine State Prison in February. Meanwhile, the windows for the Meditation Cabin are all nearly in, with door, flooring, and woodstove at ready to complete the creation. We want to buy the adjoining 2.8 acres this year and trust the money will appear. The Hermitage Harbor Room is ready to receive those wishing a retreat by the ocean. Call to reserve for a creative rest and retreat. It is available for all four seasons.
……….
As we face backward and forward this January, lets surround and mother each other with creation. Let’s pray for each other. Let’s practice with each other. Let’s exchange our life in the creation of freedom, peace, and love – the life of mothering God with us.

With gratitude -- May all experience joy this January, this New Year!

Let's end the year and begin the year with silence.

Wait! Before that, let's speak, even name what can be named, what can be understood, in words or music -- of the transition from this to that, old to new, one thing to another, what remains of the narrow self of our egos to what is immeasurably the selflessness of God. Then, perhaps, neither word nor silence will be necessary. Then, perhaps, both word and silence will comprise the song and music of what the eyes alone in cherishing muted gaze enfold. At Sunday Evening Practice Nancy spoke the word cherish, and we heard her.

Robert Lowell's poem "In the Ward" included the lines:
Music,
its ever retreating borderlines of being,
as treacherous, perhaps, to systems,
to fecundity,
as to silence.

Then, a couplet,
Die Sprache ist unverstanden
doch nicht unverstandlich?
[Language is not understood
but not un-understandable?]

Is there a communication, a cherishing, that occurs when the heart is open and receptive with love to anyone presenting themselves? Is this language of the unheard sphere -- the sphere of apophatic understanding, wordless and inexpressable, -- what we feel when an abiding accepting love permeates who, what, and where we are? (Perhaps our elder Janet captures Lowell's quote best when of a Friday night poetry reading she said, "I don't understand a word you write and say, but I love you!")

Martin Heidegger's words, Die Sprache sprecht! -- Language speaks! -- continue,
Its speaking bids the dif-ference to come which expropriates world and things into the simple onefold of their intimacy.
Language speaks.
Man speaks in that he responds to language. This responding is a hearing. It hears because it listens to the command of stillness.(in ,Poetry, Language Thought , p.210)

There is an ordinary language of daily intercourse that is heard, and there is a sacred language that stretches beneath it unheard. Both involve a speaking that fills our senses and our soul. As we listen and hear either dimension, so it is we learn to speak in response -- whether in sound or in silence. The whole body listens and the whole body speaks -- sometimes with vibrational word, sometimes with grace of gesture.

Heidegger later says,
It is not a matter here of stating a new view of language. What is important is learning to live in the speaking of language. To do so, we need to examine constantly whether and to what extent we are capable of what genuinely belongs to responding: anticipation in reserve.

Placing Heidegger's words in another configuration: "Anticipation in reserve,...the simple onefold of...intimacy, [is]...what genuinely belongs to responding." Perhaps this nears what Nancy is saying with cherish?

Bankai celebrates this cherishing language:
What does it matter,
The new year, the old year?
I stretch out my legs
And all alone have a
Quiet sleep.
Don’t tell me the monks
Aren’t getting their instruction.
Here and there the nightingale
Is singing;
The highest Zen.
- Bankei (1622-1693)

As does Lowell,
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.-- Lowell, "Epilogue" in Day by Day)

Georg Trakl's poem brings this night to transition:

A Winter's Evening

Window with falling snow is arrayed
Long tolls the Vesper bell,
The house is provided well,
The table is for many laid.

Wandering ones, more than a few,
Come to the door on darksome courses.
Golden blooms the tree of graces
Drawing up the earth's cool dew.

Wanderer quietly steps within;
Pain has turned the threshold to stone.
There lie, in limpid brightness shown,
Upon the table bread and wine.

From our hermitage to yours, one year to another -- May each be cherished! May all be cherished! May our language cherish what is each in all, and what is all in each!
For this, and for you, we are grateful.

Happy New Year,
Love,
Bill, Saskia, Sando, Mini & all who grace Meetingbrook

Family is what we are. When we practice what we are, we are holy; we are a practicing holy family.
Perhaps all revelation is made in small measure in local habitat. What is seen by one is a vision for many. Philosophers furrow brows and debate the one and the many. But for our benefit the one is the many. See one, see many; see one see all.

The Holy Family is what we practice by being what we are. The festival of the Holy Family practiced in the Catholic tradition is small measure and local habitat meant for many -- profoundly immeasurable and worldwide dwelling. Woman, Man, and Child -- the specific building blocks of individual human physical and spiritual community. Writ small -- woman, man, child is what each one of us is -- family unto oneself. Writ larger -- woman, man, child is the core blocks for what is most familiar -- what we've called nuclear family. Writ whole -- woman, man, child is the very embodied collective of our entire world population -- the human family.

When we practice family-unto-oneself we become real and honest. When we practice nuclear-family we become loving and patient. When we practice human-family we become compassionate and accepting.

But if we do not yet understand who we are as family, we pervert honesty, love, and acceptance. We make of those three qualities a lie. A lie is a lesser and perverted truth -- not the simple telling of what is, truth alone. A lie is a torturing of truth until it doesn't look like itself. To understand what family is, is to be oneself -- with particular others, in the embracing inclusion of everyone who now lives, has ever lived, will come to live. Family!

Embedding in stories of a holy man, Susan Trott has him telling of a "game" watching dappled ponies that applies as well to family:
Yes. Along with everything else about it, it seemed to be a parable for life. Going forwards and backwards and round in circles, striving ever forward only to have to run like crazy backwards to get the ball again, realizing that your enemy is after the same goal and you're actually helping him toward it and getting roughed up and possibly killed while you're at it but still feeling the comradeship of being in the game all together. (p.145, The Holy Man)

The straight line of our thinking is now capable of turning around -- rethinking and recollecting -- what has been there from the beginning, but only now able to be seen by more and more of us. The movement of our awareness has seemed through generations and centuries to be evolving toward a new comprehension of family. Robert Creeley's words from his poem "Here" help:

Past time -- those
memories opened
places and minds,
things of such reassurance--

now the twist,
and what was a road
turns to a circle
with nothing behind.
(from Creeley's book of poems Pieces)

And nothing left out. The comprehension of holy family has another dimension to it. Like 4th and 5th dimensional thinking of time and space, string theory posits many more dimensions of reality that we cannot yet seem to calibrate into our experiential understanding. Part of this to-be-grasped sometime is another dimension of family, namely, all matter, all beings, all animals all that has shape, form, and presence (whether visible or invisible) -- all as family. Sacred and real -- what is, has been, will be -- the timeless and spacious celebration of family.

Paul says in Colossians 1:15, Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creatures In him everything in heaven and on earth was created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominations, principalities or powers; all were created through him, and for him. He is before all else that is. In him everything continues in being.
Is Paul pointing to a dimension of appreciation that we have yet to arrive at experientially? Might this someday be appreciated as referring to each and every being and person that is seen and experienced as family?

For now, this appreciation or realization is for many of us embedded in the daily practice of the appreciation or realization. Some call this meditation practice, some contemplation practice, some call it banging their head against the stonewall of hard, unrelenting experience of its opposite. (The opposite is the hard, unreflective experiences of non-family, fragmented family, broken family.) To practice the appreciation and realization of true family, holy family, and the sacred familiar -- is to enter into true, holy, sacred for that moment, that duration of practice. We practice what we are; we are what we practice.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes in his lovely way about practice:
To me a meditation center is where you get back to yourself, you get a clear understanding of reality, you get more strength in understanding and love, and you prepare for your re-entry into society. If it is not like that, it is not a real meditation center. As we develop real understanding, we can re-enter society and make a real contribution
We have many compartments in our lives. When we practice sitting meditation and when we do not practice sitting, these two periods of time are so different from each other. While sitting, we practice intensively and while we are not sitting we do not practice intensively. In fact, we practice non-practice intensively. There is a wall which separates the two, practicing and non-practicing. Practicing is only for the practice period and non-practicing is only for non-practicing period. How can we mix the two together? How can we bring meditation out of the meditation hall and into the kitchen, and the office? How can the sitting influence the non-sitting time? If a doctor gives you an injection, not only your arm but your whole body benefits from it. If you practice one hour of sitting a day, that hour should be all 24 hours, and not just for that hour. One smile, one breath, should be for the benefit of the whole day, not just for that moment. We must practice in a way that removes the barrier between practice and non-practice. (from Being Peace, pp52-53)

So too family. We must practice in a way that removes the barrier between family and non-family. What we consider non-family might just be a distorted notion we carry that doesn't look like itself. The mind, if not watched with care, can torture what is true to an unrecognizable distortion. Such uncaring and uncared-for reflections that become distorted often result in much suffering and unhappiness. A practice that removes the barriers -- between family and non-family, true image and distorted images -- most often results in relieving suffering and realizing happiness.

We are family -- and when we practice being family, we realize what we are. When we practice what we are, we are holy. I greet the holiness we are, my family!

Thomas dressed for Vespers and died after the Magnificat. Henry lost a friend and a powerful counterforce. Thomas was murdered in the Cathedral. Henry's men left with bloodied steel sheathed in their belts. The Archbishop tried to stay the encroaching power of the King; the King wanted to control the power and tuck the church under the royal curtain and keep only his hand on the drawstring. Power wanted, power preserved, power exercised -- jealous power taking what the other has.

800 years later poet T.S. Eliot wrote of the event in his play Murder in the Cathedral , inserting the line that the highest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

Here in Maine other murders were committed 23 years ago. Yesterday Harold and I brought to closing the initial course on Poetry and Autobiography at the Maine State Prison covering the first 23 years of his life. Over 500 pages so far -- writing covering his childhood, school years, neighborhood, army, marriage, and murders at end -- have followed our first course. That course was about another experience about 15 years into his sentence -- a near-death or near-death type experience that brought him to a new, equally disturbing, and ultimately profound insight about what is true and sacred.

This seeming anomoly bypassed the traditional explanations of heaven and God and left him with seeds of seeing that slowly broke the ground of his awareness until he now sees what happened 23 years ago, what the right thing to do would have been, and that what he did wasn't right. For 23 years his reluctance to express remorse or regret was sealed in an inner crypt of untelling and unhearing, which, like Thomas and Henry, didn't find voice or ear to stave off murder and loss. There's another 23 years yet to be told.

Henry repented. Thomas sainted. Their dance down history as a pas de deux is a pattern part tragedy, part pawn of fate, part morality play. Both did what they did. And their story is told. Spin it as you wish -- friends gone political, church repelling state, power nibbling another's lunch -- the story shakes down to treason, wrong reasons, and the right thing to do or not do. Whatever the individual motives of either Thomas, Henry, or Harold -- each did what they did and their world, perhaps the world changes.

"The language of a people is its fate," wrote theologian Amos Wilder. What would it mean to be fateless? "Fate" the word cames from L. fatum , to speak. The New World Dictionary adds, "Fate refers to the inevitability of events as supposedly determined by a god or other agency beyond human control."

I suspect to be fateless might mean to be untelling and unhearing. A story untold and unheard seems to render a person to whom it belongs not-there. The opposite of presence is not absence, it is avoidance.

Our job is not to avoid what is. To avoid is to empty, make void, annul, invalidate, to quash. Avoidance of voice and story nullifies not only the one not speaking, but also the one not listening. Henry, Thomas, and Harold wish to speak and be heard. They wish to save our lives in the process. To denullify. No matter how imperfect we consider our lives, there is a perfection -- a moving through -- that waits for the right fate, the right speaking/hearing time to appear

Poet Wendell Berry ends his poem "To The Unseeable Animal" with the lines
That we do not know you
is your perfection
and our hope. The darkness
keeps us near you.

Nietzsche ends Zarathustra with,
And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also poet and reader of riddles and...a way to new dawns.

We make each other visible by our attention. Nothing is null and void. Rather, we seek something, something real and present. Our speaking and listening glorifies what is presenting itself. That is a new dawn worth waking to.

For the innocents who have been killed, for the ignorant who have killed them, and for the rest of us who fall between the two -- Forgive all that binds us in fear, that we might radiate love; cleanse us that your light might shine in us.

Psalm 51, in the companion translation Psalms For Praying, An Invitation to Wholeness, by Nan Merrill, continues a few verses later to its conclusion with:
Let the nations turn from war,
and encourage one another as
good neighbors.
O Most Gracious and Compassionate Friend,
melt our hearts of stone,
break through the fears that
lead us into darkness, and
Guide our steps into the way of peace.

What space there is between innocence and ignorance I do not know. Both have been part of my life -- one suffering, the other causing suffering. From there I am able to see their larger extension into the wider world -- those who suffer unknowing why, and those who make others suffer with no understanding of what or why they do what they do.

Explanations, yes, they have explanations, reasons, agenda, purpose. And, yes, they feel justified -- it is a right thing to do, they think. "They" includes me, and you. Ignorance is like that -- it attempts to hide the person under a bevy of righteous and defensive explanations.

Innocence is more open, a playing in the field of the Lord. That is, a presentation of oneself that does not know (or care to know) what will follow, as consequence, as repercussion, as effect. An innocent child doesn't know anything other. An innocent adult doesn't care to know anything other than the presentation of what and who they are.

Innocence is what holiness and enlightenment seek. Perhaps it is a simplicity of unworried mind, unselfconscious acts, gift without recompense. If innocence seems rare in our contemporary world the signs of its absence are worried minds, self-serving behavior, and exacting fees for any and all service.

Ignorance is even more troubling than innocence. Ignorance has considered the implications of actions, has looked at the right and wrong of situations, has traveled the oftentimes harsh road of experience and learned the hard way. But ignorance has a forgetfulness about it. Consciously or unconsciously ignorance disregards what it has learned and acts with abandon. Some abandon a right way for a wrong way. Some abandon fear of consequence for the need to engage what must be done.

Perhaps there's not much space between innocence and ignorance. What would that space be? What name would we call it? Saskia, when asked, says from rolling pin, "It is the knowing space. Where one is aware."

You have placed your truth in the
inner being;
therefore, teach me the wisdom
of the heart.
Forgive all that binds me in fear
that I might radiate love;
clense me that your light might shine in me.
(Merrill, from Ps 51)

Perhaps what is there, the "What Is" that dwells for our awareness, waits to be born in that knowing space. And until then, is constantly forgiving the innocent and the ignorant.

Snowplow climbs Barnestown road as morning dove sits on rope stretching from cedar to birch holding two bird feeders behind kitchen. On other side bright red against white snow on ground cardinal shuffles under feeder as chickadee fly to and from taking their individual seeds back to sheltered spot to eat. The cardinal depends this morning on chickadee fumble, selection spillage, for his taking. Dove is content to sit still with slowing flakes accentuating its balance. Like tales of Shakers at worship behind dove determined oak leaves sway and quiver in northerly breeze.

Ultimately, I have found it meaningless to hold the yardstick of fact against the complexities of the human heart. Reality simply isn't large enough to hold us.(Epigraph quoting A. Manette Ansay, River Angel in Diane Schoemperlen's novel Our Lady of the Lost and Found A Novel of Mary, Faith, and Friendship.)

The first line of the novel is, "Looking back on it now, I can see there were signs."

Watched the film "The Nightmare Years," William L. Shirer's account drawn from his Berlin Diary of the movement, sign by sign, the 3rd Reich made from Germany to Austria and France, to the Low Countries, to the bombing of Briton. Propaganda preceded invasions, protestations by the aggressor to being the victim enabling a confused populace to align with the hypothesis -- We're doing this for our own good, a defensive measure, we must strengthen our threatened identity.

Perhaps all war and all terror, within or between individuals, within or between countries -- have this aspect of protection and retaliation to secure a threatened identity. Whether or not we are that identity doesn't seem to matter once a threat to it occurs. On an individual level we begin to suspect after long loving looking that what we've considered to be "me" is a dubious construct the mind has fabricated to establish control. We are not what we seem to be. There are signs to that effect. In retrospect, if we care to, we can begin to see them.

Maybe that's what happened to Stephen whose feast was yesterday. He was singled out for scorn and held before some who knew better as someone whose truth was different from theirs. Truths that differ cause political and power turmoil. He was stoned and killed. Someone named Saul watched. Stephen asserted confidence in his union with Jesus and recognized the ignorance and unawareness of his murderers. Stark signs -- two men murdered for the truth they saw.

So many early martyrs for Jesus. So many contemporary martyrs for Osama, for Arafat, for Bush. Martyrs dying for their faith. Religion capitalizes faith until it becomes Faith. What is the faith the martyrs are willing to die for so others might live in a new reality? Are there similarities? What is our faith today -- not the proclamations of Faith with a capital "F" about exclusivity of power and divinity and the exclusive highborn roles that certain personages play in that Faith -- rather, what is the faith with small "f" that drives them and us to assert our confidence?

Is that longing, that faith: Equality under God? Love of neighbor, which means everyone? Unity of God? Care of the less fortunate, the sick, the misdirected? Respect for all life, all beings, all creation? Eminent ability to awaken for all men and women? Loving kindness and compassion toward each and all? Willingness to suffer with those who suffer? Readiness to serve when service is called for? Reluctance to kill? Unwillingness to deprive another of what is theirs? Trust that in our hearts dwells the strength and inspiration to transform our small opinions and beliefs into great and glorious revelations of grace? Finally, the courage and humility to understand without turning away that "I die and God dies!" when another is killed because their faith isn't spelled the same as another's?

Maybe Ansay is on to something, saying, "Reality simply isn't large enough to hold us." Mind-created reality, the reality resulting from fabricated opinions and beliefs, is often blinded to what its creator intends. What we call Reality (with a capital "R") itself might be equally blind to the intention of its Creator (with a capital "C.") If so, what are we left with?

Maybe we're left with signs of blindness, signs of uncaring actions, stark signs of murder and destruction in the name of things once held sacred but over time forgotten. What are we trying to remember? What are we left with that is beyond Faith and Reality?

Today is the feast of John, the prologue of whose Gospel can be read:
In the beginning the Word already was, it was at origin. And the Word was in intimate personal relationship, face to face, with God. And what God was, the Word was, not two, not other than.
[A personal reading helped by Detailed Exegetical Notes by W. Hall Harris, Ph.D. Professor of New Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary. (http://www.bible.org/docs/nt/books/joh/harris/gjohn-04.htm)]

Even now there are signs the writer of John saw something beyond our current conceptions of Faith and Reality. Will we continue to look? At origin, emptiness presents itself, holding us in sacred watchfulness. We can do this. We can begin here and now to be this.

Morning dove is gone from rope. Cardinal no longer under feeder. Barnestown road sounds wet with slush under tires. Many birds swoop for mid-morning feeding.

A day of joy for all!

It is today. It is here. What are we hoping for now?

Crunchy snow and frozen oak leaves underfoot on mountainside this morning after silent sitting at dawn. The ordinariness!

Sunlight through silent trees. Stepping of solitude on the trail. Curve and tumble of rushing brook falls with swell abandon down Ragged Mountain. The joy!

White birch, greeny fir, bare elm, lingering oak -- nothing stirring, nothing special -- just sound of water falling, feet stepping, sun climbing. The one after the other!

Returning to cushion, incense rising. Candle flame comes through the night. Inflection of resounding bell. Something long listened for, the coming of the Word, has leapt from the profound empty awayness of open space -- into the profound open nearness of every face, every thing. What hope!

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons." (--Vaclev Havel)

Christmas Haiku

Maybe Christ is no-w-
here found walking Ragged
path looking through each, all

(wfh25dec01)

The horizon, the boundary, is gone beyond. The Word has rooted Itself. Christ is born -- today!
Come, let us see the Word -- open today, here, with simplicity, silence, and service.

Now...you may dismiss your servant
in peace, according to your word. (Luke 2:29)

What are we? Perhaps we are this hope.

The invitatory verse of December 24th: Today you will know that the Lord is coming, and in the morning you will see his glory.

We've waited long enough. We've suffered enough. East, West, North, South -- there is no need for inflicting any further suffering. We long for the word to be spoken. And when it is, there, it will all change. We will have said what needs to be said. As it is said, so is it done. When word is made flesh, it dwells in and through, around and among us.

And what is that word? Well you might ask! By asking, by making inquiry, by prayer -- the word is ever nearer. The word in hidden emptiness begins to form. The word in frightened ignorance takes shape. The word in silent solitude stays poised for emergence.
What is that word, now, what is that word!

Wording what is, the invitation to honor, awe, praise -- the revelation of the essential, ultimate, existential reality of what we call God --that wording will determine our fate, will unveil our true face.

It is time. That time is now. This is the place. That place is here. We wonder what will happen. We're not certain. So we hesitate one last time.

What is the word? What is the word! The movement from questioning to declaration is a matter of inflection. Inflection is a turning, bending, or curving. When applied to voice -- it is any change in tone or pitch. Applied to grammar -- it is the change of form of a word -- as in, to be changed by inflection.

The time is very near. Do not delay. Open your self. Open your mouth. Inflect yourself. Pronounce one's name.
On that day,
The branch of the Lord will be luster and glory, and the fruit of the earth will be honor and splendor for the survivors of Israel.(Isaiah 4:2)
(Response, yes, time for response -- open my lips, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.)
The nations will revere your name, O Lord.
-- And the great ones of the earth will acknowledge your glory. (Our Daytime Prayer)

We've waited long enough. We've suffered enough. It is time for word.

Word us, O Silence!
Inflect us, O Night!
Open us, O Holiness!
Reveal us, O Brightness!

We wait in joyful hope for the coming of the Lord.

It rains. The baker bakes. The wet dog dries on kitchen bed. A lone chickadee flies to bare branch, there breaking open seed. All is ready!

What are we to word?

Bright sun on snow out window. Three more windows fitted into rough wood cabin yesterday by Paul and Jim. As someone observed "Its less a cabin with windows than windows with a cabin." Viennese potato soup makes its way mushroom by bacon, potato by celery into cauldron by Saskia in kitchen.

In the book On Essence (trans.c.1980 from Sobre La Esentia, c.1963) by Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri (1898-1983) A.Robert Caponigri writes in his introduction:
This most ancient and fundamental problem of western thought is simplicity itself; indeed, overwhelming in its simplicity but far more so in the profundity which this simplicity conceals. This problem is, in Zubiri's own words "el esfuerzo por entender el ultimo de las cosas", [i.e.] the effort to comprehend the first principle of things. This principle, whatever its character, is what is really real in itself and what, in turn, through the communication of itself, its "dar de si," is the source of all else that is real and that really is. The quest for this principle is philosophy. Its presence is the most distinguishing mark of western culture.

Where philosophy and the simplicity of human experience come together is in the meeting place of everyday reality. The snow on the kitchen roof, the dog's head on the blue pillowcase on the single bed, the pumpkin colored bowl alongside keyboard with leaning spoon where farina with chocolate, yogurt, and bananas filled not long ago -- these are all here, I see them, they are part of my field of experience that resounds Sunday morning in my awareness. I seem to know these things.

In their introduction to his life, the Xavier Zubiri Foundation of North America writes:
The fact is that an intrinsic priority of knowing over reality or reality over knowing is impossible. Knowing and reality are in their same root strictly and rigorously congeneric. There is no priority of one over the other. And this is true not simply because of de facto conditions of our investigations, but because of an intrinsic and formal condition of the very idea of reality and of knowing. Reality is the formal character—formality—according to which what is apprehended is something "in itself", something de suyo.

I like the phrasing, "what is apprehended is something 'in itself'."

This season is quiet for me. While the shop is busy there's a wider slower apprehending of a more intimate awareness of the beauty and love covering and emanating from each person entering or leaving. In the solitude that comes for me at Christmas there is a dropping away of the bustling exteriority of reconnection. In its place comes the simplicity of the fact of the reality we inhabit together, our congeneric presence -- that is, "of a kind together with," or as the Zen saying of it, not-two.

The fragrance of soup comes to this desk. Sando doesn't snore on the bed. The wind is not shaking the chimes. It is time to consider going in to open the bookshop/bakery. The meditation of embodiment and incarnation is upon us. First things first, and during, and at end.

One final word.
Reality, our awareness and seeing of what is, is a consideration of presentiation. It's a good word, "presentiate." It is defined in the O.E.D. with a twofold activity, namely, "to make or render present in place or time;" and, "to cease to be perceived or realized as present."

In a way, it does represent simplicity. Revealing and concealing are congeneric gifts of ours.
At Christmas, the word and the gift -- are ours to apprehend and comprehend.

Zubiri points to what Zen and Christ point to -- "what is really real in itself" -- and so do you and I.

Yesterday at the Maine State Prison -- in the old, and soon to be demolished maximum security prison, for the last time this year -- a Meetingbrook Conversation with prisoners took place in the education department after a night of new snow. Nine of us sat around the round table: 3 from outside, 6 from inside. The reading piece was from John Riker's Human Excellence and the Ecological Conception of the Psyche, his chapter on Basic Needs, specifically of the ten he lists, the need for Sacredness.

Whether the roundtable view was from Quaker, Pagan, Christian, Ethicist, Curmudgeon, Baker, Buddhist, Poet, Cell-mate, Optimist, Near-Death'er, or Pencil-sharpening visitor -- there was a profound willingness to read, speak, share poem, laugh, or ruminate the implications of Riker's words:
A person who has been touched by sacredness has two traits that are absent from those whose lives are grounded in the secular: thankfulness and peace. These characteristics are tonal qualities that infuse the entirety of a person's way of acting, feeling, and thinking. Thankfulness is dwelling in the memory of the world and self as gift. ...Thankfulness is a state that transvalues all values without hostility or rebellion. Peacefulness is a state of fully accepting the world and ourselves as we are.

Alfred North Whitehead's words on peace were contained in the chapter:
(Peace) is a positive feeling which crowns the "life and motion" of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. ...Its first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul's preoccupation with itself. Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality.

Chris asks and answers his own question: "Why have thankfulness and peace? To be icons. To be icons that teach and are a moral guideline for all."

Brendan says, "Each blooms in their own certain time. A handicapped person can't run a hundred yard dash; but maybe their highest 'bloom' is not kicking the dog."

Paco says, "The gift is not to teach or try to give someone what you've found. But you see it in some people. They simply emanate peace and calm. If I try to spread it, I taint it. The divine is love, so, you love. You just are it, there, with others. Like the child -- he loves because he loves."

Kevin says the child sees what is real.

We become adults. What the child we were has seen, and what the child we are now sees -- we easily forget. We forget so much. How do we invite what we've forgotten back into the open?

Sonny says, "By conversation."
"Sangha," says Brendan. "Community," says Dick.

"Poetry," says silence in Andre's eyes.

We will continue this in the New Year, in the new prison, in the new revelation of what is now for each of us with this.

This?
What is this?

We'll have to see what child is this!