Cesco is ill.
In the Mountains
Common birds
Love to chatter
Where men live quiet lives.
Peaceful clouds
Seem jealous
When the moon is bright.
In the world,
The ten thousand affairs
Are not my affairs.
My only shame,
It’s autumn,
And I have no poem.
- Szu K’ung-t’u (837-908)
The athletic Border collie is unmoving on kitchen floor.
He is back from animal hospital. “Call me if you need to tonight,” the vet says.
Saskia keeps watch.
Friday, December 10, 2004
It is silence, after all, holds us.
Stop searching for phrases
and chasing after words.
Take the backward step
and turn the light inward.
Your body-mind of itself
will drop off,
and your original face will appear.
If you want to attain just this,
immediately practice just this.
(- Dogen 1227)
We pronounce promises at shop after conversation. Michael, Pia, Jean, Genevieve hear Saskia and I say yes to what and who we are.
In silence we face and admit that gap between the depths of our being, which we consistently ignore, and the surface which is so often untrue to our own reality. We recognize the need to be at home with ourselves in order that we may go out to meet others, not just with the mask of affability, but with real commitment and authentic love.
(--Thomas Merton, d.10Dec.1968))
Just this.
Stop searching for phrases
and chasing after words.
Take the backward step
and turn the light inward.
Your body-mind of itself
will drop off,
and your original face will appear.
If you want to attain just this,
immediately practice just this.
(- Dogen 1227)
We pronounce promises at shop after conversation. Michael, Pia, Jean, Genevieve hear Saskia and I say yes to what and who we are.
In silence we face and admit that gap between the depths of our being, which we consistently ignore, and the surface which is so often untrue to our own reality. We recognize the need to be at home with ourselves in order that we may go out to meet others, not just with the mask of affability, but with real commitment and authentic love.
(--Thomas Merton, d.10Dec.1968))
Just this.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
Time does somersaults. Anselm says, "The whole universe was created by God, and God was born of Mary."
This December, that which seeks Itself turns round and round in wobbly gyre, feet over head and hands with extended arms out from rotating shoulders. The season turns, and with its turning, we turn too.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we will not be ashamed,
To turn, to turn will be our delight,
'Til by turning, turning we come 'round right.
(from “Simple Gifts” -- a Shaker Hymn written by Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett, Jr. in 1848)
Time present and time past cartwheel when we try to figure and follow which comes first in the realm of the Spirit.
Reading: A sermon by St Anselm:
O Virgin, by whose blessing all nature is blessed!
Blessed Lady, sky and stars, earth and rivers, day and night -- everything that is subject to the power or use of man -- rejoice that through you they are in some sense restored to their lost beauty and are endowed with inexpressible new grace. All creatures were dead, as it were, useless for men or for the praise of God, who made them. The world, contrary to its true destiny, was corrupted and tainted by the acts of men who served idols. Now all creation has been restored to life and rejoices that it is controlled and given splendour by men who believe in God.
The universe rejoices with new and indefinable loveliness. Not only does it feel the unseen presence of God himself, its Creator, it sees him openly, working and making it holy. These great blessings spring from the blessed fruit of Mary’s womb.
Through the fullness of the grace that was given you, dead things rejoice in their freedom, and those in heaven are glad to be made new. Through the Son who was the glorious fruit of your virgin womb, just souls who died before his life-giving death rejoice as they are freed from captivity, and the angels are glad at the restoration of their shattered domain.
Lady, full and overflowing with grace, all creation receives new life from your abundance. Virgin, blessed above all creatures, through your blessing all creation is blessed, not only creation from its Creator, but the Creator himself has been blessed by creation.
To Mary God gave his only-begotten Son, whom he loved as himself. Through Mary God made himself a Son, not different but the same, by nature Son of God and Son of Mary. The whole universe was created by God, and God was born of Mary. God created all things, and Mary gave birth to God. The God who made all things gave himself form through Mary, and thus he made his own creation. He who could create all things from nothing would not remake his ruined creation without Mary.
God, then, is the Father of the created world and Mary the mother of the re-created world. God is the Father by whom all things were given life, and Mary the mother through whom all things were given new life. For God begot the Son, through whom all things were made, and Mary gave birth to him as the Saviour of the world. Without God’s Son, nothing could exist; without Mary’s Son, nothing could be redeemed.
Truly the Lord is with you, to whom the Lord granted that all nature should owe as much to you as to himself.
(from Office of Readings, Dec.8, Feast of the Immaculate Conception)
We re-dedicate hermitage to this wholeness of Mary.
At conversation last evening the artists named Clarity remind it is a round path, not a flat path, we each walk.
Listening this morning to Joseph Campbell. He says: God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought. Even the categories of 'being' and 'non-being.' Those are categories of thought. (from video, "The World of Joseph Campbell; The Hero's Journey")
Christianity is metaphor. As is Judaism, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etcetera. Those who hold metaphors as true are one category of seers. Those not holding them as true are another category of seers. We are invited to be seers. We speak at times and we remain silent at times in the presence of what is seen.
When we ask, "What is true?" we place ourselves in response to invitation. To ask is invitation into the open. The very question itself is invitation to contemplation, meditation, or prayer. Ask, and drop into the way of metaphor.
In language, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope where a comparison is made between two seemingly unrelated subjects. Typically, a first object is described as being a second object. In this way, the first object can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes from the second object can be used to fill in the description of the first.
A trope is a play on words, a word used in something other than what is considered its literal or normal form. It comes from the Greek word, 'tropos,' which means a "turn", as in heliotrope, a flower which turns toward the sun. We can imagine a trope as a way of turning a word away from its normal meaning, or turning it into something else.
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trope)
There is a dance that occurs with words. The steps of the dance are idiorhythmic to the dancer and the word. Idiorhythmic, that is, where each person and word could follow their own rhythm and tempo.
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an eye for resemblance.
(-Aristotle, De Poetica, 322 B.C.)
"Una voce dicentis" (one voice saying) was the Latin phrase leading to "Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus" (holy, holy, holy) in the preface to the celebration of the Presence in Sacrament at Catholic Liturgy.
What is holy is the sound of seeing.
On the 10th of December, (what we hold as the feast of Thomas Merton), we pronounce again our 3 promises of Contemplation, Conversation, and Correspondence.
Contemplation is the promise of simplicity.
It is a gift of poverty inviting open waiting, receptive trust, attention, and watchful presence. It is a simple Being-With.
It is attentive presence.
Conversation is the promise of integrity.
It is a chaste and complete intention to listen and speak, lovingly and respectfully, with each and all made present to us. It is a wholeness of listening and speaking.
It is root silence.
Correspondence is the promise of faithful engagement.
It is responsible attention and intention offered obediently to the Source of all Being, to the Human Family, to Nature. It is a faithful engagement with all sentient beings, with this present world, with existence with all its needs & joys, sorrows & hope.
It is transparent service.
{Three promises: Contemplation, Conversation, Correspondence ...as held by Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage “m.o.n.o.”(monastics of no other).}
We listen silently.
For that one voice.
Speaking as Itself.
Mother. Metaphor.
A blessed fruit.
Turning with love.
This December, that which seeks Itself turns round and round in wobbly gyre, feet over head and hands with extended arms out from rotating shoulders. The season turns, and with its turning, we turn too.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we will not be ashamed,
To turn, to turn will be our delight,
'Til by turning, turning we come 'round right.
(from “Simple Gifts” -- a Shaker Hymn written by Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett, Jr. in 1848)
Time present and time past cartwheel when we try to figure and follow which comes first in the realm of the Spirit.
Reading: A sermon by St Anselm:
O Virgin, by whose blessing all nature is blessed!
Blessed Lady, sky and stars, earth and rivers, day and night -- everything that is subject to the power or use of man -- rejoice that through you they are in some sense restored to their lost beauty and are endowed with inexpressible new grace. All creatures were dead, as it were, useless for men or for the praise of God, who made them. The world, contrary to its true destiny, was corrupted and tainted by the acts of men who served idols. Now all creation has been restored to life and rejoices that it is controlled and given splendour by men who believe in God.
The universe rejoices with new and indefinable loveliness. Not only does it feel the unseen presence of God himself, its Creator, it sees him openly, working and making it holy. These great blessings spring from the blessed fruit of Mary’s womb.
Through the fullness of the grace that was given you, dead things rejoice in their freedom, and those in heaven are glad to be made new. Through the Son who was the glorious fruit of your virgin womb, just souls who died before his life-giving death rejoice as they are freed from captivity, and the angels are glad at the restoration of their shattered domain.
Lady, full and overflowing with grace, all creation receives new life from your abundance. Virgin, blessed above all creatures, through your blessing all creation is blessed, not only creation from its Creator, but the Creator himself has been blessed by creation.
To Mary God gave his only-begotten Son, whom he loved as himself. Through Mary God made himself a Son, not different but the same, by nature Son of God and Son of Mary. The whole universe was created by God, and God was born of Mary. God created all things, and Mary gave birth to God. The God who made all things gave himself form through Mary, and thus he made his own creation. He who could create all things from nothing would not remake his ruined creation without Mary.
God, then, is the Father of the created world and Mary the mother of the re-created world. God is the Father by whom all things were given life, and Mary the mother through whom all things were given new life. For God begot the Son, through whom all things were made, and Mary gave birth to him as the Saviour of the world. Without God’s Son, nothing could exist; without Mary’s Son, nothing could be redeemed.
Truly the Lord is with you, to whom the Lord granted that all nature should owe as much to you as to himself.
(from Office of Readings, Dec.8, Feast of the Immaculate Conception)
We re-dedicate hermitage to this wholeness of Mary.
At conversation last evening the artists named Clarity remind it is a round path, not a flat path, we each walk.
Listening this morning to Joseph Campbell. He says: God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought. Even the categories of 'being' and 'non-being.' Those are categories of thought. (from video, "The World of Joseph Campbell; The Hero's Journey")
Christianity is metaphor. As is Judaism, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etcetera. Those who hold metaphors as true are one category of seers. Those not holding them as true are another category of seers. We are invited to be seers. We speak at times and we remain silent at times in the presence of what is seen.
When we ask, "What is true?" we place ourselves in response to invitation. To ask is invitation into the open. The very question itself is invitation to contemplation, meditation, or prayer. Ask, and drop into the way of metaphor.
In language, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope where a comparison is made between two seemingly unrelated subjects. Typically, a first object is described as being a second object. In this way, the first object can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes from the second object can be used to fill in the description of the first.
A trope is a play on words, a word used in something other than what is considered its literal or normal form. It comes from the Greek word, 'tropos,' which means a "turn", as in heliotrope, a flower which turns toward the sun. We can imagine a trope as a way of turning a word away from its normal meaning, or turning it into something else.
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trope)
There is a dance that occurs with words. The steps of the dance are idiorhythmic to the dancer and the word. Idiorhythmic, that is, where each person and word could follow their own rhythm and tempo.
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an eye for resemblance.
(-Aristotle, De Poetica, 322 B.C.)
"Una voce dicentis" (one voice saying) was the Latin phrase leading to "Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus" (holy, holy, holy) in the preface to the celebration of the Presence in Sacrament at Catholic Liturgy.
What is holy is the sound of seeing.
On the 10th of December, (what we hold as the feast of Thomas Merton), we pronounce again our 3 promises of Contemplation, Conversation, and Correspondence.
Contemplation is the promise of simplicity.
It is a gift of poverty inviting open waiting, receptive trust, attention, and watchful presence. It is a simple Being-With.
It is attentive presence.
Conversation is the promise of integrity.
It is a chaste and complete intention to listen and speak, lovingly and respectfully, with each and all made present to us. It is a wholeness of listening and speaking.
It is root silence.
Correspondence is the promise of faithful engagement.
It is responsible attention and intention offered obediently to the Source of all Being, to the Human Family, to Nature. It is a faithful engagement with all sentient beings, with this present world, with existence with all its needs & joys, sorrows & hope.
It is transparent service.
{Three promises: Contemplation, Conversation, Correspondence ...as held by Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage “m.o.n.o.”(monastics of no other).}
We listen silently.
For that one voice.
Speaking as Itself.
Mother. Metaphor.
A blessed fruit.
Turning with love.
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Mary is our sister. The present is our mother. What is here is What Is here.
Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Dear woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, this disciple took her into his home. (John 19:25-27, NIV)
“Here” is our only home. Jesus understood that “here” is our mother. When we are present we are mother. When we are in the presence of another we are in the presence of mother.
Mother is presence, and presence is always here.
Waking from sleep,
I can hear the dew in the trees.
I open my door
Overlooking the garden.
The winter moon
Clears the eastern cliffs;
Water murmurs
Through roots of bamboo.
The mountain stream’s
Beyond my hearing,
But a mountain bird cries once,
And then again.
Leaning in the doorway,
I follow night through to dawn.
What words can I summon
For such mystery and peace?
- Liu Tzung-yuan (773-819)
To be conceived and born whole is to be undifferentiated from presence itself. Mary, says the feast of the Immaculate Conception, was conceived and born whole. Thus it was that Presence Itself received permission to be let go through her. To be sent through here.
“Permission” comes from the Latin per = through, and mitto, mittere = to send, or, to let go.
Mary was sent through God. God was let go through Mary.
It is a wonderful feast. It is the feast of Letting Presence Through.
“Whole sight,” wrote John Fowles beginning his novel Daniel Martin, “Or all the rest is desolation.”
The world knows desolation and the ambition of the half-sighted.
Here it is time for whole sight. Mary whole is our permitted wholeness.
Mary, Spirit-Sophia. Mother of God. You and I. And each about us.
Recourse.
Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Dear woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, this disciple took her into his home. (John 19:25-27, NIV)
“Here” is our only home. Jesus understood that “here” is our mother. When we are present we are mother. When we are in the presence of another we are in the presence of mother.
Mother is presence, and presence is always here.
Waking from sleep,
I can hear the dew in the trees.
I open my door
Overlooking the garden.
The winter moon
Clears the eastern cliffs;
Water murmurs
Through roots of bamboo.
The mountain stream’s
Beyond my hearing,
But a mountain bird cries once,
And then again.
Leaning in the doorway,
I follow night through to dawn.
What words can I summon
For such mystery and peace?
- Liu Tzung-yuan (773-819)
To be conceived and born whole is to be undifferentiated from presence itself. Mary, says the feast of the Immaculate Conception, was conceived and born whole. Thus it was that Presence Itself received permission to be let go through her. To be sent through here.
“Permission” comes from the Latin per = through, and mitto, mittere = to send, or, to let go.
Mary was sent through God. God was let go through Mary.
It is a wonderful feast. It is the feast of Letting Presence Through.
“Whole sight,” wrote John Fowles beginning his novel Daniel Martin, “Or all the rest is desolation.”
The world knows desolation and the ambition of the half-sighted.
Here it is time for whole sight. Mary whole is our permitted wholeness.
Mary, Spirit-Sophia. Mother of God. You and I. And each about us.
Recourse.
Monday, December 06, 2004
War is deception and lie.
Common Form (1918)
If any question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
(Kipling)
War is now a permanent state for America. As long as there remains a single terrorist, America is at war. The next difficult question will be: Who is not a terrorist? Anyone opposing the ascendant reign of righteous warfare and crusade will be considered terrorist.
A Dead Statesman (1924)
I could not dig, I dared not rob,
And so I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue,
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale will serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Young men face down and kill men, women, and children in Iraq. They will have to live with the screams and scents of carnage. These men will come home. They will haunt the homes and streets of our neighborhoods. We will have to face terror in our streets -- the terror of felt memory in men. These haunted men and memories -- men who've done their job well will look out from eyes and smiles -- these decent warriors gone to the bidding of their leaders.
Our streets and roads will be filled with memories drifting like ghosts in and out of family cars, shopping malls, and places of worship.
The real way circulates everywhere;
how could it require practice or enlightenment?
The essential teaching is fully available;
how could effort be necessary?
Furthermore, the entire mirror is free of dust;
why take steps to polish it?
Nothing is separate from this very place;
why journey away?
- Dogen 1227
We can pray. Soon we will have nothing remaining but prayer for these our brothers, fathers, and sons.
Pray, then, we will.
For the living.
And dead.
Among us.
Common Form (1918)
If any question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
(Kipling)
War is now a permanent state for America. As long as there remains a single terrorist, America is at war. The next difficult question will be: Who is not a terrorist? Anyone opposing the ascendant reign of righteous warfare and crusade will be considered terrorist.
A Dead Statesman (1924)
I could not dig, I dared not rob,
And so I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue,
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale will serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Young men face down and kill men, women, and children in Iraq. They will have to live with the screams and scents of carnage. These men will come home. They will haunt the homes and streets of our neighborhoods. We will have to face terror in our streets -- the terror of felt memory in men. These haunted men and memories -- men who've done their job well will look out from eyes and smiles -- these decent warriors gone to the bidding of their leaders.
Our streets and roads will be filled with memories drifting like ghosts in and out of family cars, shopping malls, and places of worship.
The real way circulates everywhere;
how could it require practice or enlightenment?
The essential teaching is fully available;
how could effort be necessary?
Furthermore, the entire mirror is free of dust;
why take steps to polish it?
Nothing is separate from this very place;
why journey away?
- Dogen 1227
We can pray. Soon we will have nothing remaining but prayer for these our brothers, fathers, and sons.
Pray, then, we will.
For the living.
And dead.
Among us.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
John was ahead of his time. He saw God in stones.
For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones. (Matthew 3)
Paul was a theologian for our time. He saw 'welcome' as the glory of God.
Welcome one another, then, as Christ welcomed you, for
the glory of God. (Romans 15)
What is this for? What is that for?
For the glory of God.
Glory is defined, and defines us, as: Praise, honor, admiration, or distinction, accorded by common consent to a person or thing -- says Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
Common -- i.e. -- belonging equally to or shared equally by two or more.
Each stone, each person, and everything between -- is the glory of God.
The voice of success and profit
May stir the vault of heaven,
But not this place.
In the rounds of the day,
You wear threadbare clothing
And eat simple fare.
When the mountain snow deepens,
Your thoughts
Are far from those of people.
Occasionally,
Immortals pass your door
And knock.
- Kuan-hsiu (832-912)
Imagine.
Revise our theology.
For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones. (Matthew 3)
Paul was a theologian for our time. He saw 'welcome' as the glory of God.
Welcome one another, then, as Christ welcomed you, for
the glory of God. (Romans 15)
What is this for? What is that for?
For the glory of God.
Glory is defined, and defines us, as: Praise, honor, admiration, or distinction, accorded by common consent to a person or thing -- says Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
Common -- i.e. -- belonging equally to or shared equally by two or more.
Each stone, each person, and everything between -- is the glory of God.
The voice of success and profit
May stir the vault of heaven,
But not this place.
In the rounds of the day,
You wear threadbare clothing
And eat simple fare.
When the mountain snow deepens,
Your thoughts
Are far from those of people.
Occasionally,
Immortals pass your door
And knock.
- Kuan-hsiu (832-912)
Imagine.
Revise our theology.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
HIV/AIDS continues to do what no terrorist nor can military power do. It is a steady, unrelenting, and devastating threat of sickness and death. AIDS also has the curious potential to transform human understanding from small mind to big mind, bringing into view a compassion and understanding new and fresh.
Is there a “big mind” that can apprehend what has been and is the reality of the occurrence of this threat?
Too much knowledge leads to overactivity;
Better to calm the mind.
The more you consider, the greater the loss;
Better to unify the mind.
Water dripping ceaselessly
Will fill the four seas.
Specks of dust not wiped away
Will become the five mountains.
- Wang Ming (6th century)
At Wednesday Evening ‘Laura’ Conversation we read from comments on the life of a man, Buddhist and Gay, who lived with and died from AIDS:
What happened from there was AIDS. As the health crisis grew in San Francisco, Issan told a friend that, more and more, the epidemic was teaching him what Suzuki-roshi had meant when he talked about Big Mind.
Meditation practice, in the Zen tradition of Dogen at least, is about mind and body dropping away. Small, lively individual mind and grasping, needful individual body can recede, if only temporarily, into the background of experience. After twenty years of Zen practice, Issan had been able to experience life with Big Mind in the foreground of consciousness. He began to see and express the fact that an individual death, including his own, might not be such a big thing in the light of the steady blossoming of Big Mind experience.
To appreciate Big Mind in the midst of a plague is to know that the seemingly pressing concerns of individual personalities, identities, and cravings can fall away in an instant with mindful practice, the compassion which arises automatically with the experience of Big Mind makes working for the good of all much easier. Big Mind, Issan began to see, presumes that taking care of others is also taking care of self. As co-participants in Big Mind, sufferer and helper are mutually necessary - both help, both suffer.
Living and surviving, while someone nearby is dying, becomes like wave and trough on the surface of the sea --- each needs the other, yet both are fleeting.
(from "The Lone Mountain Path: AIDS in the Life and Death of Issan Dorsey Roshi," by Kobai Scott Whitney, 1997)
We are, each of us, fleeting.
Robert Lowell wrote:
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(from poem, Epilogue, by Robert Lowell, in Day By Day, c.1978)
Perhaps Lowell's use of the phrase "his living name" corresponds with the "Hashem" of Jewish mysticism -- "The Name" as the articulation of the "One Most True."
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when the Christian right was describing AIDS as the wrath of God directed against homosexuals for their sins, Issan was asked to participate in a San Francisco Council of Churches symposium called "Is AIDS the Wrath of God?" He was the only Buddhist representative at the meeting and he was quite emphatic about removing the reality of AIDS from the dualistic good/bad, sin/salvation paradigm being dealt with at the conference. He ended his short presentation with the astonishing (to Christians, perhaps) statement that "AIDS is not the wrath of God. AIDS is God."
(in Whitney, re Issan)
Is it possible to consider everything that occurs with ‘big mind’ and not separate anything from our notion of ‘God?’
Is ‘the Lord’ what we call ‘presence and compassion’ in each occurrence?
(Thanksgiving) The Lord’s ways are pure; the words of the Lord are refined in the furnace; the Lord protects all who hope in him.
For what God is there, but our Lord? What help, but in the Lord our God?
God, who has wrapped me in his strength and set me on the perfect path,
who has made my feet like those of the deer, who has set me firm upon the heights,
who trains my hands for battle, teaches my arms to bend a bow of bronze.
Psalm 17 (18)
The “battle” is overcoming with gentleness the small mind that makes ‘other’ what it can not understand.
The “bow of bronze” is less a weapon, (i.e. that which launches arrows), as it is a sign of reverence (i.e. bowing with joined hands, bowing down in respect) toward each and every being and person – those with AIDS, those without AIDS, those in any state of existence or experience.
AIDS is not a homosexual scourge. AIDS mutates and changes, reappearing in more dangerous forms, and belongs to everyone. We as a society try to contain, cure, and eliminate AIDS. In addition, we try to break open small mind so as to tumble into the gathered whole Big Mind wherein we come to see and love one another as we are.
For what God there is, is there.
Is there a “big mind” that can apprehend what has been and is the reality of the occurrence of this threat?
Too much knowledge leads to overactivity;
Better to calm the mind.
The more you consider, the greater the loss;
Better to unify the mind.
Water dripping ceaselessly
Will fill the four seas.
Specks of dust not wiped away
Will become the five mountains.
- Wang Ming (6th century)
At Wednesday Evening ‘Laura’ Conversation we read from comments on the life of a man, Buddhist and Gay, who lived with and died from AIDS:
What happened from there was AIDS. As the health crisis grew in San Francisco, Issan told a friend that, more and more, the epidemic was teaching him what Suzuki-roshi had meant when he talked about Big Mind.
Meditation practice, in the Zen tradition of Dogen at least, is about mind and body dropping away. Small, lively individual mind and grasping, needful individual body can recede, if only temporarily, into the background of experience. After twenty years of Zen practice, Issan had been able to experience life with Big Mind in the foreground of consciousness. He began to see and express the fact that an individual death, including his own, might not be such a big thing in the light of the steady blossoming of Big Mind experience.
To appreciate Big Mind in the midst of a plague is to know that the seemingly pressing concerns of individual personalities, identities, and cravings can fall away in an instant with mindful practice, the compassion which arises automatically with the experience of Big Mind makes working for the good of all much easier. Big Mind, Issan began to see, presumes that taking care of others is also taking care of self. As co-participants in Big Mind, sufferer and helper are mutually necessary - both help, both suffer.
Living and surviving, while someone nearby is dying, becomes like wave and trough on the surface of the sea --- each needs the other, yet both are fleeting.
(from "The Lone Mountain Path: AIDS in the Life and Death of Issan Dorsey Roshi," by Kobai Scott Whitney, 1997)
We are, each of us, fleeting.
Robert Lowell wrote:
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(from poem, Epilogue, by Robert Lowell, in Day By Day, c.1978)
Perhaps Lowell's use of the phrase "his living name" corresponds with the "Hashem" of Jewish mysticism -- "The Name" as the articulation of the "One Most True."
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when the Christian right was describing AIDS as the wrath of God directed against homosexuals for their sins, Issan was asked to participate in a San Francisco Council of Churches symposium called "Is AIDS the Wrath of God?" He was the only Buddhist representative at the meeting and he was quite emphatic about removing the reality of AIDS from the dualistic good/bad, sin/salvation paradigm being dealt with at the conference. He ended his short presentation with the astonishing (to Christians, perhaps) statement that "AIDS is not the wrath of God. AIDS is God."
(in Whitney, re Issan)
Is it possible to consider everything that occurs with ‘big mind’ and not separate anything from our notion of ‘God?’
Is ‘the Lord’ what we call ‘presence and compassion’ in each occurrence?
(Thanksgiving) The Lord’s ways are pure; the words of the Lord are refined in the furnace; the Lord protects all who hope in him.
For what God is there, but our Lord? What help, but in the Lord our God?
God, who has wrapped me in his strength and set me on the perfect path,
who has made my feet like those of the deer, who has set me firm upon the heights,
who trains my hands for battle, teaches my arms to bend a bow of bronze.
Psalm 17 (18)
The “battle” is overcoming with gentleness the small mind that makes ‘other’ what it can not understand.
The “bow of bronze” is less a weapon, (i.e. that which launches arrows), as it is a sign of reverence (i.e. bowing with joined hands, bowing down in respect) toward each and every being and person – those with AIDS, those without AIDS, those in any state of existence or experience.
AIDS is not a homosexual scourge. AIDS mutates and changes, reappearing in more dangerous forms, and belongs to everyone. We as a society try to contain, cure, and eliminate AIDS. In addition, we try to break open small mind so as to tumble into the gathered whole Big Mind wherein we come to see and love one another as we are.
For what God there is, is there.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
We already know.
Socrates, Buddha, and Christ each claimed we already know.
In this dhyana one does not
accept selfish pleasures,
one does not seek any reward,
and one is not moved by karmic records.
One enters dhyana solely for the
purpose of establishing one’s mind.
And then, out of wisdom,
returns to life in the desire realm
for the purpose of helping all
sentient beings achieve liberation.
This dhyana is called the paramita of concentration.
- Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra
Sure, we already know.
But tell me again.
Who I am.
You?
Socrates, Buddha, and Christ each claimed we already know.
In this dhyana one does not
accept selfish pleasures,
one does not seek any reward,
and one is not moved by karmic records.
One enters dhyana solely for the
purpose of establishing one’s mind.
And then, out of wisdom,
returns to life in the desire realm
for the purpose of helping all
sentient beings achieve liberation.
This dhyana is called the paramita of concentration.
- Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra
Sure, we already know.
But tell me again.
Who I am.
You?
Monday, November 29, 2004
Canada hosts the American president tomorrow. Maybe he'll choose to emigrate to a hospitable, inclusive, non-bellicose country.
Just by listening with your eyes
you can fold back on yourself and
merge into that primal
stream of awareness like a river
is swallowed by the immensity of the ocean.
Only then will you know what point to live from.
- Journeys on Mind Mountain
Live from personal and universal truth.
If we are afraid of being alone, afraid of silence, it is perhaps because of our secret despair of inner reconciliation. If there is no hope of being at peace with ourselves in our own personal loneliness and silence, we will never be able to face ourselves at all: we will keep running and never stop. And this flight from the self is, as the Swiss philosopher Max Picard pointed out, a ?flight from God.? After all, it is in the depths of the conscience that God speaks, and if we refuse to open up inside and look into these depths, we also refuse to confront the invisible God who is present within us. This refusal is a partial admission that we do not want God to be God any more than we want ourselves to be our true selves.
(Thomas Merton, in "Creative Silence" published in Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, Bulletin 67, August 2001)
It is odd that some Americans on The National, the evening news on CBC, are so hostile to other Americans who wish to emigrate to Canada because they do not recognize their country any longer. It is the hostility and mocking severity on the part of the right-wing that makes so many feel strange in their own land.
Maybe incivility is a passing phase.
There's still time to go deeper.
Where the real can be reached.
Only with open hands.
Not clenched fists.
Fall into God.
Just by listening with your eyes
you can fold back on yourself and
merge into that primal
stream of awareness like a river
is swallowed by the immensity of the ocean.
Only then will you know what point to live from.
- Journeys on Mind Mountain
Live from personal and universal truth.
If we are afraid of being alone, afraid of silence, it is perhaps because of our secret despair of inner reconciliation. If there is no hope of being at peace with ourselves in our own personal loneliness and silence, we will never be able to face ourselves at all: we will keep running and never stop. And this flight from the self is, as the Swiss philosopher Max Picard pointed out, a ?flight from God.? After all, it is in the depths of the conscience that God speaks, and if we refuse to open up inside and look into these depths, we also refuse to confront the invisible God who is present within us. This refusal is a partial admission that we do not want God to be God any more than we want ourselves to be our true selves.
(Thomas Merton, in "Creative Silence" published in Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, Bulletin 67, August 2001)
It is odd that some Americans on The National, the evening news on CBC, are so hostile to other Americans who wish to emigrate to Canada because they do not recognize their country any longer. It is the hostility and mocking severity on the part of the right-wing that makes so many feel strange in their own land.
Maybe incivility is a passing phase.
There's still time to go deeper.
Where the real can be reached.
Only with open hands.
Not clenched fists.
Fall into God.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
We want Isaiah's vision.
Nation will not lift sword against nation,
there will be no more training for war.
(Isaiah 2:4)
We want to move from numbing unawareness.
Besides this you know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep.
(Romans 13:110
We want to watch, carefully.
Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
(Matt 24:41)
Advent says it is coming.
Of all good works, zazen comes first, for the merit of only one step into it surpasses that of erecting a thousand temples. Even a moment of sitting will enable you to free yourself from life and death, and your Buddha nature will appear of itself. Then all you do, perceive, think becomes part of the miraculous Tathagata-suchness.
- Meiho (1277-1350)
Zazen tells the truth.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind --
(Emily Dickinson, #1129)
Dazzling lightning gradually approaching.
Christ seeing us through.
Sitting true.
Nation will not lift sword against nation,
there will be no more training for war.
(Isaiah 2:4)
We want to move from numbing unawareness.
Besides this you know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep.
(Romans 13:110
We want to watch, carefully.
Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
(Matt 24:41)
Advent says it is coming.
Of all good works, zazen comes first, for the merit of only one step into it surpasses that of erecting a thousand temples. Even a moment of sitting will enable you to free yourself from life and death, and your Buddha nature will appear of itself. Then all you do, perceive, think becomes part of the miraculous Tathagata-suchness.
- Meiho (1277-1350)
Zazen tells the truth.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind --
(Emily Dickinson, #1129)
Dazzling lightning gradually approaching.
Christ seeing us through.
Sitting true.
Friday, November 26, 2004
Note: Bookshop and Bakery closed today, Friday.
Friday Evening's Conversation Interreligious Dialogue will take place at the hermitage, 5:30-6:30pm.
Be back tomorrow, Saturday, 10:30am.
.....................
The authentic interests us.
An Introduction to Some Poems
Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don't understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.
Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close at you, close at the
edge we share, to be right.
We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won't believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.
The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next; it interests us.
strangely, it relates to what works,
but is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,
Or profit, or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming?
Good: now it is time.
(Poem: "An Introduction To Some Poems" by William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems © Graywolf Press, 1998.)
It worries, still, we have swerved for revenge. A Zen Master used to say, 'Only go straight.' It worries we become "vacant effective people" intent on making the world and our society in the image of a few men who wield power.
And yet, it consoles that the inauthentic has a short span. Life, they say, is ephemeral and impermanent. The authentic transcends and includes any and all limitation placed on it.
That's why the authentic interests. It "is between" any attempt to divide and dualize us into snarling pairs of opposites maligning the other.
But, there is no other.
Interested?
Friday Evening's Conversation Interreligious Dialogue will take place at the hermitage, 5:30-6:30pm.
Be back tomorrow, Saturday, 10:30am.
.....................
The authentic interests us.
An Introduction to Some Poems
Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don't understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.
Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close at you, close at the
edge we share, to be right.
We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won't believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.
The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next; it interests us.
strangely, it relates to what works,
but is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,
Or profit, or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming?
Good: now it is time.
(Poem: "An Introduction To Some Poems" by William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems © Graywolf Press, 1998.)
It worries, still, we have swerved for revenge. A Zen Master used to say, 'Only go straight.' It worries we become "vacant effective people" intent on making the world and our society in the image of a few men who wield power.
And yet, it consoles that the inauthentic has a short span. Life, they say, is ephemeral and impermanent. The authentic transcends and includes any and all limitation placed on it.
That's why the authentic interests. It "is between" any attempt to divide and dualize us into snarling pairs of opposites maligning the other.
But, there is no other.
Interested?
Thursday, November 25, 2004
In the corner of the meditation cabin is Janet's small wood box with a carved anchor on top. There is nothing in the box. The box is empty. At times it is open. There is never anything in it but empty, open, space. It is our tabernacle.
Writer James Carroll suggests:
What we love most is Thanksgiving's underlying idea: that existence itself is a gift. If the holiday ritual calls for the bounty of culinary excess -- four side dishes, three kinds of pie, two forms of cranberry -- it is not to celebrate affluence but to acknowledge the accidental richness of life itself. The multiple desserts are tribute to all that we don't deserve. In taking time away from work, we are remembering that the most precious things are those that we do nothing to earn.
At Mass this morning I looked at the tabernacle as the priest prepared the altar for communion. The door was open. The space was empty. The Eucharist, if you will, the Body of Christ, was out and about. The dwelling-place of the sacramental Jesus was open and empty. The whole process of remembering the true nature of what we call “God” resides in the empty open conveyance of one’s presence in the presence of one another.
An attitude of gratefulness defines us at our best. It does this by pointing away from the self toward others, or toward an Other. Conventionally religious people are quick to put the name "God" on the one being thanked, and prayers come quickly to lips this week. But the feeling of sublime indebtedness, defining what is expressly human about humanity, is larger than religion. On Thanksgiving, feast of the exuberant abundance of creation, all language about any conceivable Creator falls short because creation itself exceeds our capacity to account for it. No matter, because, in being buoyed by this most oceanic of emotions, one need not know toward whom, exactly, one feels it. Let each person be God, therefore, to every other. God enough for now.
(Published on Tuesday, November 23, 2004 by the Boston Globe "America's Heartfelt Holiday", by James Carroll http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1123-21.htm)
The day is foggy. Rain falls; darkness slowly lowers through shrouded trees. The road out front is quiet. Birds come to and leave feeder. Cat hopes for mis-flaps. Dogs snooze. Saskia fusses with kitchen scents. We bailed dinghy, walked Rockport Harbor, sipped tea on balcony of Hermitage Harbor Room after church. Myles was delivered a pumpkin cream cheese pie. The day is spacious with stillness.
No matter how hard Rabbi, Priest, or Minister tries to make ungrateful the nine who were healed but didn't return to Jesus to say thank you, they are misdirected. The one who returned is enough for now. In that one, all are represented. If it works for Jesus, it works for all of us – all who forget to say it, all who feel it but just keep on going, all who are surprised by sudden and unforeseen happiness – we are represented by any one among us who carries grace through our midst.
I agree with James Carroll. At our best, we are grateful.
For all of it.
Not excluding nothing.
Only you can resurrect the present. People
need your voice to come among them like nakedness,
to fuse them into one marching language in which the word
"peace" will be said for the last time.
(from Part 1 of "To American Poets" in The Naomi Poems Corpse And Beans, by Bill Knott, c.1968 in Introduction to Quickly Aging Here, Some Poets of the 1970's, edited by Geof Hewitt, c.1969)
I like the fact that Hewitt had faith there would be the 1970's in 1969.
Faith in gratefulness, accepting that nothingness reveals each as ‘Itself,’ affirming empty open space, and allowing happiness to return when it is ready -- this is my prayer, this Thanksgiving.
For all.
Everywhere.
Writer James Carroll suggests:
What we love most is Thanksgiving's underlying idea: that existence itself is a gift. If the holiday ritual calls for the bounty of culinary excess -- four side dishes, three kinds of pie, two forms of cranberry -- it is not to celebrate affluence but to acknowledge the accidental richness of life itself. The multiple desserts are tribute to all that we don't deserve. In taking time away from work, we are remembering that the most precious things are those that we do nothing to earn.
At Mass this morning I looked at the tabernacle as the priest prepared the altar for communion. The door was open. The space was empty. The Eucharist, if you will, the Body of Christ, was out and about. The dwelling-place of the sacramental Jesus was open and empty. The whole process of remembering the true nature of what we call “God” resides in the empty open conveyance of one’s presence in the presence of one another.
An attitude of gratefulness defines us at our best. It does this by pointing away from the self toward others, or toward an Other. Conventionally religious people are quick to put the name "God" on the one being thanked, and prayers come quickly to lips this week. But the feeling of sublime indebtedness, defining what is expressly human about humanity, is larger than religion. On Thanksgiving, feast of the exuberant abundance of creation, all language about any conceivable Creator falls short because creation itself exceeds our capacity to account for it. No matter, because, in being buoyed by this most oceanic of emotions, one need not know toward whom, exactly, one feels it. Let each person be God, therefore, to every other. God enough for now.
(Published on Tuesday, November 23, 2004 by the Boston Globe "America's Heartfelt Holiday", by James Carroll http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1123-21.htm)
The day is foggy. Rain falls; darkness slowly lowers through shrouded trees. The road out front is quiet. Birds come to and leave feeder. Cat hopes for mis-flaps. Dogs snooze. Saskia fusses with kitchen scents. We bailed dinghy, walked Rockport Harbor, sipped tea on balcony of Hermitage Harbor Room after church. Myles was delivered a pumpkin cream cheese pie. The day is spacious with stillness.
No matter how hard Rabbi, Priest, or Minister tries to make ungrateful the nine who were healed but didn't return to Jesus to say thank you, they are misdirected. The one who returned is enough for now. In that one, all are represented. If it works for Jesus, it works for all of us – all who forget to say it, all who feel it but just keep on going, all who are surprised by sudden and unforeseen happiness – we are represented by any one among us who carries grace through our midst.
I agree with James Carroll. At our best, we are grateful.
For all of it.
Not excluding nothing.
Only you can resurrect the present. People
need your voice to come among them like nakedness,
to fuse them into one marching language in which the word
"peace" will be said for the last time.
(from Part 1 of "To American Poets" in The Naomi Poems Corpse And Beans, by Bill Knott, c.1968 in Introduction to Quickly Aging Here, Some Poets of the 1970's, edited by Geof Hewitt, c.1969)
I like the fact that Hewitt had faith there would be the 1970's in 1969.
Faith in gratefulness, accepting that nothingness reveals each as ‘Itself,’ affirming empty open space, and allowing happiness to return when it is ready -- this is my prayer, this Thanksgiving.
For all.
Everywhere.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Music and St. Cecilia. Assassination and J.F. Kennedy. It is November 22nd.
Cecilia’s life inspires the creative spirit.
This saint, so often glorified in the fine arts and in poetry, is one of the most venerated martyrs of Christian antiquity. The oldest historical account of St. Cecilia is found in the "Martyrologium Hieronymianum"; from this it is evident that her feast was celebrated in the Roman Church in the fourth century. (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03471b.htm)
John F. Kennedy’s life inaugurates an uncertainty new to the mind.
Don DeLillo wrote, "What has become unraveled since that afternoon in Dallas is...the sense of a coherent reality most of us shared. We seem from that moment to have entered a world of randomness and ambiguity."
Today, creative spirit and uncertain mind are our odd companions.
If you want to understand that
All within the three realms
Is nothing but buddhamind,
Then contemplate that the Dharma realm
Is nothing but a product of mind.
- Avatamsaka Sutra
There is a spirit that is embodied when we learn love. There is a mind that is at peace when we allow the unhidden, when we suffer truth.
Teilhard de Chardin wrote; " If there were no real propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level, indeed, even in the molecule itself ~ it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up in the ' hominized ' or human form."
(It is curious that the word 'unite' and the word 'untie' depend on where the "I" is placed.)
Becoming human is suffering love and loving truth.
He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury; and he saw a poor widow put in two copper coins. And he said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all the living that she had”. (Luke 21:1-4)
Today, we consider putting all we have into the now, all our living into the empty present.
The spirit is willing. The mind, watching, sees.
Song and sorrow chant early gray dawn-light.
Morning comes.
It is today.
Cecilia’s life inspires the creative spirit.
This saint, so often glorified in the fine arts and in poetry, is one of the most venerated martyrs of Christian antiquity. The oldest historical account of St. Cecilia is found in the "Martyrologium Hieronymianum"; from this it is evident that her feast was celebrated in the Roman Church in the fourth century. (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03471b.htm)
John F. Kennedy’s life inaugurates an uncertainty new to the mind.
Don DeLillo wrote, "What has become unraveled since that afternoon in Dallas is...the sense of a coherent reality most of us shared. We seem from that moment to have entered a world of randomness and ambiguity."
Today, creative spirit and uncertain mind are our odd companions.
If you want to understand that
All within the three realms
Is nothing but buddhamind,
Then contemplate that the Dharma realm
Is nothing but a product of mind.
- Avatamsaka Sutra
There is a spirit that is embodied when we learn love. There is a mind that is at peace when we allow the unhidden, when we suffer truth.
Teilhard de Chardin wrote; " If there were no real propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level, indeed, even in the molecule itself ~ it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up in the ' hominized ' or human form."
(It is curious that the word 'unite' and the word 'untie' depend on where the "I" is placed.)
Becoming human is suffering love and loving truth.
He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury; and he saw a poor widow put in two copper coins. And he said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all the living that she had”. (Luke 21:1-4)
Today, we consider putting all we have into the now, all our living into the empty present.
The spirit is willing. The mind, watching, sees.
Song and sorrow chant early gray dawn-light.
Morning comes.
It is today.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Poetry, Tea, and Literature at the shop exceeded the hour limit, went for two hours Saturday afternoon, and seven out of nine of the attendees stayed for a third hour talking.
So much of human experience these days is about disapproval, trashing, belittling, bullying, eliminating, terrorizing and inciting fear. Does a healing solution to this human experience reside within the creativity of making, tasting, and intimately embodying the ontogenetic patterns of poetic intuition?
The superior students are unaware of the coming into the world of Buddhas or of the transmission of the non-transmittable by them: they eat when hungry, sleep when sleepy. Nor do they regard the world as themselves. Neither are they attached to enlightenment or illusion. Taking things as they come, they sit upright, making no idle distinctions.
- Meiho (1277-1350)
What is 'ontogenesis?' (Greek: 'onto'= being; 'genesis' = arising. Thus, arising [into, as, from, with] being.)
Ontogenesis refers to the sequence of events involved in the development of an individual organism from its birth to its death. This developmental history often involves a move from simplicity to higher complexity.
Complexity is one of those terms for which it is difficult to give a precise definition. Intuitively, it is thought of as a property or feature that implies the opposite of simplicity. Complexity is often used to describe single sytems made of multiple interacting parts.
(from http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Ontogenesis)
What is arising in our midst? It is an important question.
Unless we are awake, unless we are aware, we might fail to see what is arising in our midst. This failure at this point of human and world history would be a serious failure.
This is why we gather. We read. We listen. We converse. We attend and we attend to what is arising in our midst.
What is it?
In our midst arising?
Ask. And listen.
Carefully. With creativity.
Please. Come caring into being.
Be what is, what God is, loving.
In our midst.
So much of human experience these days is about disapproval, trashing, belittling, bullying, eliminating, terrorizing and inciting fear. Does a healing solution to this human experience reside within the creativity of making, tasting, and intimately embodying the ontogenetic patterns of poetic intuition?
The superior students are unaware of the coming into the world of Buddhas or of the transmission of the non-transmittable by them: they eat when hungry, sleep when sleepy. Nor do they regard the world as themselves. Neither are they attached to enlightenment or illusion. Taking things as they come, they sit upright, making no idle distinctions.
- Meiho (1277-1350)
What is 'ontogenesis?' (Greek: 'onto'= being; 'genesis' = arising. Thus, arising [into, as, from, with] being.)
Ontogenesis refers to the sequence of events involved in the development of an individual organism from its birth to its death. This developmental history often involves a move from simplicity to higher complexity.
Complexity is one of those terms for which it is difficult to give a precise definition. Intuitively, it is thought of as a property or feature that implies the opposite of simplicity. Complexity is often used to describe single sytems made of multiple interacting parts.
(from http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Ontogenesis)
What is arising in our midst? It is an important question.
Unless we are awake, unless we are aware, we might fail to see what is arising in our midst. This failure at this point of human and world history would be a serious failure.
This is why we gather. We read. We listen. We converse. We attend and we attend to what is arising in our midst.
What is it?
In our midst arising?
Ask. And listen.
Carefully. With creativity.
Please. Come caring into being.
Be what is, what God is, loving.
In our midst.
Friday, November 19, 2004
If it is true we dwell in the reality we see, much depends on perspective and willingness to see through what is there to be seen.
If what we call God, or "What's It's Name," is indeed Hashem Beyond All Comprehension, it is now, it is here, we must begin intimate and intense watchfulness.
Let others create categories of monster entities who prowl through the world seeking the ruin of souls -- I'll not look to create such symbols of misappropriation -- the taking unto oneself what belongs to all.
I prefer the whole of it.
Of which I am
No longer separate.
Light in love.
If what we call God, or "What's It's Name," is indeed Hashem Beyond All Comprehension, it is now, it is here, we must begin intimate and intense watchfulness.
Let others create categories of monster entities who prowl through the world seeking the ruin of souls -- I'll not look to create such symbols of misappropriation -- the taking unto oneself what belongs to all.
I prefer the whole of it.
Of which I am
No longer separate.
Light in love.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Being nobody is an authentic way of being. Doing nothing is a valuable active life. Going nowhere is a lovely journey.
There's a quaint tradition enacted in the Rose Garden at the White House today. It is the pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey. It is done with simplicity and good humor. It is a good ceremony. It reminds us of compassion and connection. Even though the turkey would ordinarily be slated to die for America's celebration of gift and abundance, it is allowed to live, it is pardoned.
There is no difference between
The mind,
The Buddha,
And all sentient beings.
- Lotus Sutra
As a nobody, doing nothing, going nowhere, I celebrate the fact of this day. Today a sentient being was allowed to live. Right now, I continue to live. The content-free appreciation of life -- where it is and as it is -- intertwines all who celebrate the fact of it.
I would like more than a symbolic turkey be pardoned -- among them, the innocent and those with unconscionable sentences in prison, and innocent civilians under bombardment in Fallujah, Mosul, and Najaf. I would like pardon be given to hostages, political prisoners, and the needless poor in societies capable of better generosity.
The poet says:
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you--Nobody--too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise--you know!
How dreary--to be--Somebody!
How public--like a Frog--
To tell one's name--the livelong June--
To an admiring Bog!
(Poem by Emily Dickenson)
We'd do well to pair up nobodies, doing nothing, going nowhere. Together we'd be a force negating or neutralizing every somebody, wreaking havoc, enroute paradise.
We'd surround them with peace.
We'd stand back and retreat with prayer and love.
We'd incarnate and embody the antithesis of celebrity, greed for power, and inane quest for supremacy or control.
And when they say, "Move or die!" -- We’ll be ready to die. And when they do us harm, we'll let their harm pass through our middle -- and evaporate in futility.
And if we die in and for peace, we will die as we have lived.
Is there a moral? No. Is there a payoff? No. Is there a happy ending? (Now, why would that question even come up?)
There is no ending.
Just -- passing through.
There's a quaint tradition enacted in the Rose Garden at the White House today. It is the pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey. It is done with simplicity and good humor. It is a good ceremony. It reminds us of compassion and connection. Even though the turkey would ordinarily be slated to die for America's celebration of gift and abundance, it is allowed to live, it is pardoned.
There is no difference between
The mind,
The Buddha,
And all sentient beings.
- Lotus Sutra
As a nobody, doing nothing, going nowhere, I celebrate the fact of this day. Today a sentient being was allowed to live. Right now, I continue to live. The content-free appreciation of life -- where it is and as it is -- intertwines all who celebrate the fact of it.
I would like more than a symbolic turkey be pardoned -- among them, the innocent and those with unconscionable sentences in prison, and innocent civilians under bombardment in Fallujah, Mosul, and Najaf. I would like pardon be given to hostages, political prisoners, and the needless poor in societies capable of better generosity.
The poet says:
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you--Nobody--too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise--you know!
How dreary--to be--Somebody!
How public--like a Frog--
To tell one's name--the livelong June--
To an admiring Bog!
(Poem by Emily Dickenson)
We'd do well to pair up nobodies, doing nothing, going nowhere. Together we'd be a force negating or neutralizing every somebody, wreaking havoc, enroute paradise.
We'd surround them with peace.
We'd stand back and retreat with prayer and love.
We'd incarnate and embody the antithesis of celebrity, greed for power, and inane quest for supremacy or control.
And when they say, "Move or die!" -- We’ll be ready to die. And when they do us harm, we'll let their harm pass through our middle -- and evaporate in futility.
And if we die in and for peace, we will die as we have lived.
Is there a moral? No. Is there a payoff? No. Is there a happy ending? (Now, why would that question even come up?)
There is no ending.
Just -- passing through.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
The deer leg was on the second runway when Cesco found it and began to gnaw. Somewhere else by someone else a kill is made.
To train in the fullest sense of the word, one needs an awareness of the impermanence of all phenomena, including our own lives, and an eye that isn’t blind to cause and effect; emotionally speaking, great compassion and courage on behalf of all beings; practically speaking, a firm faith in the Way and a firm resolve to actualize the Way through practice. If there is even a speck of any one of these present when beginning to train, that is enough. All will then become manifest through practice.
- Anon
Our practice leads to the middle. While the country tilts right and righter, there is a need for a practice seeking center.
Overreach topples. It is best to watch out as the weight of purging enemies takes place at a distance. When the next fall begins there will be debris and vituperation.
This morning in the cabin -- a silence holding sacred space for those pained by the terrible turmoil in Iraq.
While real men and women are suffering destructive power and military might, it is hard to suffer gladly foolish creating of horrible retaliation in wars administered with arrogant and hidden purpose.
It is time to recount the votes.
Surely, some mistake has been made.
Surely some slouching toward bedlam makes way without notice.
A trap is set to ensnare the unaware. We must take shelter.
Somewhere a pack has carried away a deer carcass.
We are wary.
Cold night.
Watch!
To train in the fullest sense of the word, one needs an awareness of the impermanence of all phenomena, including our own lives, and an eye that isn’t blind to cause and effect; emotionally speaking, great compassion and courage on behalf of all beings; practically speaking, a firm faith in the Way and a firm resolve to actualize the Way through practice. If there is even a speck of any one of these present when beginning to train, that is enough. All will then become manifest through practice.
- Anon
Our practice leads to the middle. While the country tilts right and righter, there is a need for a practice seeking center.
Overreach topples. It is best to watch out as the weight of purging enemies takes place at a distance. When the next fall begins there will be debris and vituperation.
This morning in the cabin -- a silence holding sacred space for those pained by the terrible turmoil in Iraq.
While real men and women are suffering destructive power and military might, it is hard to suffer gladly foolish creating of horrible retaliation in wars administered with arrogant and hidden purpose.
It is time to recount the votes.
Surely, some mistake has been made.
Surely some slouching toward bedlam makes way without notice.
A trap is set to ensnare the unaware. We must take shelter.
Somewhere a pack has carried away a deer carcass.
We are wary.
Cold night.
Watch!
Monday, November 15, 2004
A classmate from forty years ago writes three of us. He asks a question. Like the end of an Iranian film, the answer is discontinuous.
Knowing that sentient beings
All have a thousand desires
Gripping the depths of their minds,
The Buddha teaches them
In accordance with their characters
And conditions.
With stories, words, and skillful means
He teaches them the truth.
- Lotus Sutra
Like two breaths of a passing sentient being – one inhales, one exhales – we pass, and touch each other in passing.
Dear "three wise(?) men",
I don't believe I am sending this email, but what the heck. I am interested in your definition/description/version of faith/believing. I am not inclined to consider it a "gift", although it has been presented to me that way at times. I lean toward a view of it as evolving/changing/developing, possibly in a variety of directions. It just occurred to me that this issue has been the subject of books, so a recommendation for a book about faith/believing is also requested.
I am tempted to also pose a question or two about "morality", but will refrain. I don't really expect too much of a response, but if any of you three are so inclined, I'd be interested in a response. I have a pretty clear memory of each of you - physical image as well as your "persona". By now each of you is probably only a vague hint of the physical image I remember. Life goes on. Anyway, take care of yourselves and pray for me and my family. Sincerely, Dave
Breathing in, breathing out, one response:
Hello David,
How are you?
I have few beliefs. Mostly, like this evening, I practice Zazen, I sit in silence. I end with, "May our evening prayer rise before you like incense, O Lord, and may your loving-kindness descend upon us.” Last night we ended with Compline.
I live by faith. Not as you might suppose. For me ‘faith’ is the mere trust that what is happening is actually happening.
Another way of saying it for me is: Not to know is to rely on faith. In as much as I don’t know much, actually hardly anything, in fact – I don’t know anything – and thus, not knowing and faith are inseparable.
I don’t understand the common understanding of ‘faith’ or ‘belief.’
Tonight, ‘faith’ is writing this to you, and sending it. Why do you write? I don’t know. Why do I respond? I don’t know. And yet, and yet, and yet – there is your writing, and here is my responding. Knowledge has little to do with it. ‘Faith’ – whether in supernatural or in natural things – is the air we breathe and the sounds we hear.
I actually breathe. I hear my dog barking in the front room. These are facts that surround me like a blanket, a blanket of faith. It is a mere seeing and hearing. No reason, no purpose, no explanation, and no understanding arrive. I am delightfully empty of anything but what is taking place.
‘What is,’ for some, is called God. This, I don’t know. Still, I attend what is taking place. It is enough.
Best, Bill
We finish watching Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry,” the Iranian director’s meditation on life and death.
At the end, he is taking a sound check.
Knowing that sentient beings
All have a thousand desires
Gripping the depths of their minds,
The Buddha teaches them
In accordance with their characters
And conditions.
With stories, words, and skillful means
He teaches them the truth.
- Lotus Sutra
Like two breaths of a passing sentient being – one inhales, one exhales – we pass, and touch each other in passing.
Dear "three wise(?) men",
I don't believe I am sending this email, but what the heck. I am interested in your definition/description/version of faith/believing. I am not inclined to consider it a "gift", although it has been presented to me that way at times. I lean toward a view of it as evolving/changing/developing, possibly in a variety of directions. It just occurred to me that this issue has been the subject of books, so a recommendation for a book about faith/believing is also requested.
I am tempted to also pose a question or two about "morality", but will refrain. I don't really expect too much of a response, but if any of you three are so inclined, I'd be interested in a response. I have a pretty clear memory of each of you - physical image as well as your "persona". By now each of you is probably only a vague hint of the physical image I remember. Life goes on. Anyway, take care of yourselves and pray for me and my family. Sincerely, Dave
Breathing in, breathing out, one response:
Hello David,
How are you?
I have few beliefs. Mostly, like this evening, I practice Zazen, I sit in silence. I end with, "May our evening prayer rise before you like incense, O Lord, and may your loving-kindness descend upon us.” Last night we ended with Compline.
I live by faith. Not as you might suppose. For me ‘faith’ is the mere trust that what is happening is actually happening.
Another way of saying it for me is: Not to know is to rely on faith. In as much as I don’t know much, actually hardly anything, in fact – I don’t know anything – and thus, not knowing and faith are inseparable.
I don’t understand the common understanding of ‘faith’ or ‘belief.’
Tonight, ‘faith’ is writing this to you, and sending it. Why do you write? I don’t know. Why do I respond? I don’t know. And yet, and yet, and yet – there is your writing, and here is my responding. Knowledge has little to do with it. ‘Faith’ – whether in supernatural or in natural things – is the air we breathe and the sounds we hear.
I actually breathe. I hear my dog barking in the front room. These are facts that surround me like a blanket, a blanket of faith. It is a mere seeing and hearing. No reason, no purpose, no explanation, and no understanding arrive. I am delightfully empty of anything but what is taking place.
‘What is,’ for some, is called God. This, I don’t know. Still, I attend what is taking place. It is enough.
Best, Bill
We finish watching Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry,” the Iranian director’s meditation on life and death.
At the end, he is taking a sound check.
Saturday, November 13, 2004
The true form of the body is nothing we can see.
Contemplate the body until you see its true form,
then you will cease your grasping.
These contemplations will extinguish
the fires of desire
in the same way that torrential rains
extinguish wild fires.
- Perfection of Wisdom
At the "Many Faces of Death" conversation Saturday reading Who Dies by Steven Levine, the following:
As Achaan Chaa said, holding his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, "All you have to understand is just this much, just this moment." If you can participate in this moment openly, then you'll more likely be present for the next. If that next moment turns out to be on your deathbed, then you'll be open to that too. There is no other preparation for death except opening to the present. If you are here now, you'll be there then. (p.33)
We make juice from pear, orange, and apple. A lovely sipping treat.
"...Karl Rahner, one of the great theologians of the twentieth century, assured me that no matter the depth of my doubts about God and Christianity, I could still pray. 'If you think your heart cannot pray,' he says, 'then pray with your mouth, kneel down, fold your hands, speak loudly, even if it all seems like a lie to you (it is only the desperate self-defense of your unbelief before its death, which is already sealed)....' Although I couldn't will my heart to have a stronger faith, I could certainly will my body to take a posture of prayer and my mouth to say some words of prayer. Rahner assured me that not only was there no hypocrisy in this, but it was vital that I express my half a mustard seed of faith in this way.
"My favorite definition of prayer also comes from Karl Rahner, who says that prayer is opening our hearts to God. In the most familiar type of prayer, verbal or discursive prayer, we open our hearts to God using words. We talk to God, either aloud or mentally. But that's not the only way to pray. Christianity also has a tradition of contemplative prayer, in which we open our hearts to God without words or with very few words. We heed God's call in Psalm 46: 'Be still, and know that I am God.'"
(excerpt from Kim Boykin's book, Zen for Christians: A Beginner's Guide, published by Jossey-Bass (A Wiley Imprint), 2003)
There's the phrase -- "I am."
It is nothing we can see.
The true form of the body.
Contemplate the body until you see its true form,
then you will cease your grasping.
These contemplations will extinguish
the fires of desire
in the same way that torrential rains
extinguish wild fires.
- Perfection of Wisdom
At the "Many Faces of Death" conversation Saturday reading Who Dies by Steven Levine, the following:
As Achaan Chaa said, holding his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, "All you have to understand is just this much, just this moment." If you can participate in this moment openly, then you'll more likely be present for the next. If that next moment turns out to be on your deathbed, then you'll be open to that too. There is no other preparation for death except opening to the present. If you are here now, you'll be there then. (p.33)
We make juice from pear, orange, and apple. A lovely sipping treat.
"...Karl Rahner, one of the great theologians of the twentieth century, assured me that no matter the depth of my doubts about God and Christianity, I could still pray. 'If you think your heart cannot pray,' he says, 'then pray with your mouth, kneel down, fold your hands, speak loudly, even if it all seems like a lie to you (it is only the desperate self-defense of your unbelief before its death, which is already sealed)....' Although I couldn't will my heart to have a stronger faith, I could certainly will my body to take a posture of prayer and my mouth to say some words of prayer. Rahner assured me that not only was there no hypocrisy in this, but it was vital that I express my half a mustard seed of faith in this way.
"My favorite definition of prayer also comes from Karl Rahner, who says that prayer is opening our hearts to God. In the most familiar type of prayer, verbal or discursive prayer, we open our hearts to God using words. We talk to God, either aloud or mentally. But that's not the only way to pray. Christianity also has a tradition of contemplative prayer, in which we open our hearts to God without words or with very few words. We heed God's call in Psalm 46: 'Be still, and know that I am God.'"
(excerpt from Kim Boykin's book, Zen for Christians: A Beginner's Guide, published by Jossey-Bass (A Wiley Imprint), 2003)
There's the phrase -- "I am."
It is nothing we can see.
The true form of the body.
Friday, November 12, 2004
Richard comes in saying he's going to die. The vet's hospital, this day after Veteran's Day, told him what he's got is irreversible. He and Pia are talking by the fire. I ask him what he's got, "Is it 'life'?" He say's it's something else and gives a name. Joanie comes in and quickly enters the conversation, and it shifts.
Come to say goodbye,
We sit for a while
By the sandy creek.
On far roads,
You hold out an empty bowl;
Deep in mountains,
Walk on fallen flowers.
Having no master, you
Puzzle out Zen on your own;
Observing strict prosody,
Your poems merit praise.
This going-away
Has no circumstantial cause;
A solitary cloud
Has no fixed home.
- Chia Tao (779-843)
Of course his words are serious. I know they are. And so is whatever conversation the three of them have by fireplace. They are talking about cows now. This is how we carry on with one another. One speaks, the rest listen. This listening shifts around the threesome. Like some modern trinity of origin, word, and spirit they attend as best they can each other and the fire.
And in the beginning was love. Love
made a sphere:
all things grew within it; the sphere
then encompassed
beginnings and endings, beginning
and end. Love
had a compass whose whirling dance
traced out a
sphere of love in the void: in the center
thereof
rose a fountain.
(excerpt from poem "Circus of the Sun" by Robert Lax, 1915-2000)
Joanie says the guy in California was given a guilty verdict for killing his wife. They debate guilt and innocence.
In the beginning of everything there is love.
What happens after that is anyone's guess.
If love has a compass, we have to glance at it from time to time.
Cesco and Sando arrive.
North by Northwest.
Come to say goodbye,
We sit for a while
By the sandy creek.
On far roads,
You hold out an empty bowl;
Deep in mountains,
Walk on fallen flowers.
Having no master, you
Puzzle out Zen on your own;
Observing strict prosody,
Your poems merit praise.
This going-away
Has no circumstantial cause;
A solitary cloud
Has no fixed home.
- Chia Tao (779-843)
Of course his words are serious. I know they are. And so is whatever conversation the three of them have by fireplace. They are talking about cows now. This is how we carry on with one another. One speaks, the rest listen. This listening shifts around the threesome. Like some modern trinity of origin, word, and spirit they attend as best they can each other and the fire.
And in the beginning was love. Love
made a sphere:
all things grew within it; the sphere
then encompassed
beginnings and endings, beginning
and end. Love
had a compass whose whirling dance
traced out a
sphere of love in the void: in the center
thereof
rose a fountain.
(excerpt from poem "Circus of the Sun" by Robert Lax, 1915-2000)
Joanie says the guy in California was given a guilty verdict for killing his wife. They debate guilt and innocence.
In the beginning of everything there is love.
What happens after that is anyone's guess.
If love has a compass, we have to glance at it from time to time.
Cesco and Sando arrive.
North by Northwest.
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