Nothing lasts forever.

Everything else dissolves.

Be nothing else.

Let each their own faith.

There’s a tree that existed before the woods,
In age twice as old.
Its roots suffered as the valley changed,
Its leaves deformed by wind and frost.
People all laugh at its withered aspect,
Caring nothing about the core’s beauty.
When the bark is stripped off,
Only essence remains.
- Han Shan (early 9th century)

Pray yours be open.

Only the Alone.

The capacity of Mind is vast and great: It is like the emptiness of
space; It has neither breadth nor bounds; It is neither square nor round;
neither large nor small; It is neither blue nor yellow nor red nor white; It
has neither upper nor lower, long nor short; It knows of neither anger nor
pleasure; Neither right nor wrong; Neither good nor evil; It is without
beginning and without end.
- Sixth Patriarch

Doesn't know other.

If we say what is in our heart, is what is in our heart what is in the world surrounding us?

"What is" by any other name is the presencing Lord of creation, the permeating dwelling Christ within this existence, and the pervasive revealing Spirit of wisdom, love, and compassion of the now and present moment.

Each and every spring,
Blossoms gave my mind its
Comfort and pleasure:
Now more than sixty years
Have gone by like this.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

Spring dawns cold along mountain. Sun warms quietly the yawning trails. Sacredness bows to each being passing in place or on foot.

Choirs of silent praise fill morning with stillness.

All is consecrated!

Each is blessed!

In early morning climb with ski poles and dog up Ragged Mtn, the solitude is complemented by another hiker with ski poles and dog passing the high incline like hermits on Cold Mtn. Her dog brings the excitable Rokpa back to waiting leash so they can continue on after trail greeting. Just some solitaries with loving companions walking up frozen ground!

Though frosts come down
night after night,
what does it matter?
They melt in morning sun.
Though snow falls
each passing year,
what does it matter?
With spring days it thaws.
Yet once let them settle
on a person's head,
fall and pile up--
then the new year
may come and go,
but never you'll see them fade away.
--Ryokan (trans. Burton Watson)

Sitting on stump then stone with green scarf as zafu cover -- the glittering expanse of Hosmer Pond, Penobscot Bay, Megunticook Mtn, and glorious sky -- tucked inside meditation and revealing mantra: this is presencing God!
Taxes are done. The president is giving me an incentive to spend. That's nice.

"If I could meditate, I'd be a better person."
When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. It's a bit like saying, "If I jog, I'll be a much better person." "If I could only get a nicer house, I'd be a better person." "If I could meditate and calm down, I'd be a better person"... But loving-kindness - maitri - toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That's the ground, that's what we study, that's what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.
(- Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness from Everyday Mind, a Tricycle book edited by Jean Smith)

Talked with two curmudgeons today, one I hadn't seen in half a year. He says he'll be working on a house in France that Leonardo DaVinci himself once lived in.

Leonardo is best known for his painting the Mona Lisa, which is generally considered the most recognizable work of art in the world. He kept it with him for most of his life, working on it now and again. Today, it is probably the most analyzed work of art in history. For centuries, scholars have tried to determine the identity of the woman in the painting. A computer graphics consultant analyzed the painting and found that the nose, mouth, forehead, cheekbones, and eyebrows all lined up with a portrait Leonardo painted of himself. So he may have used himself as the model.
(--Garrison Kiellor, The Writer's Almanac)

We are models of ourselves.

It doesn't surprise that enigmatic self reflection appears as other.

The other's gaze is what places us where and as we are.

Not seen, we're nowhere.

Seen, there we are.

As what we see.

Bald Mountain has no snow on southern side. We hold our breath.

Yoshino Mountain:
White puffs on cherry limbs
Are fallen snow,
Informing me that blossoms
Will be late this year.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

Forty-eight degrees leads us to quiet caution. Rokpa runs and leaps on snow patches on northeast side of Ragged Mountain, lays on them, tears wildly tossing white slosh crystals as he practices his Border Collie nutso sprints, and then lays across receding familiar puppy under-footing gnawing branch fragment while watching to see if I'm about to try to snatch it away.
These days when his female human companion retires to retreat at monastery he tries to be content with male human companion who trudges mountainside and scans for no-longer-hibernating black with white stripe waddling folk seeking food. This morning at Birch Point State Park we sat and watched three species of fowl bob in placid high tide off rocky promenade. He's seeing things for the first time.

As do poets and those about to die -- see things for the first time.

Skunk walks into barn. Passes Rokpa. Passes me. (The horror!)

The unenlightened person does not understand his own true nature, does not realize the Pure Land in his own body, and thus petitions all over. The enlightened person never differs no matter where he is. For this reason the Buddha says, “Wherever I may be I am always in comfort and bliss…If only your mind is pure, your own nature is itself the Pure Land of the West.
- Platform Sutra

It will be a long spring if skunks make us a steady stop.

The thing about skunks is their smell. They put it on others.

There are people like that.
We'll have to be wary.

Leash the vulnerable.

Avoid the stinkers.

It doesn't matter what you believe, can you behave differently each time truth appears?

For many springs
I’ve come here to meet
And unite my mind
With the opening blossoms, so
I’m made of many recollections.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

I'm agnostic to belief systems. I want to know if the inquiry is open and active.

Followed closely by compassionate, joyful, grateful action.

When you have nothing to say...

Being in tremendous turmoil, the unoriented do not know that their own mind is Buddha. They search about, outside of themselves, spending the whole day contemplating the Buddha and paying homage. But where is the Buddha? Do not entertain any such false views. Awaken to your own mind: outside the mind there can be no Buddha.
- Bodhidharma

...say it.

Kristin said it tonight: "War asks us to be other than love."

That's the shame of it.

Though it has no bridge,
The cloud climbs up to heaven;
It does not seek the aid
Of Gautama’s sutras.
- Ikkyu (1394-1481)

We wish to be what God is.
Not other than.

Love.

Dog laps water. Cat chews kibbles. Night.

Nowhere is there place
To stop and live, so only
Everywhere will do:
Each and every grass-made hut soon leaves
Its place within this withering world.
- Saigyo (1118-1190)

The General and the Ambassador regale Congress with Arabian stories that are not good enough to placate worries. The champagne has been pushed to the back of the fridge.

It is frightening to witness this hate-torn world suddenly united for one brief hour, against Jesus. And what does he do? Every trial is in reality a struggle -- but not this one. Jesus refuses to fight. He proves nothing. He denies nothing. He attacks nothing. Instead he stands by and lets events run their course -- more, at the proper moment, he says precisely what is necessary for his conviction. His words and attitude have nothing to do with the logic or demands of a defence. Their source lies elsewhere. The accused makes no attempt to hinder whatever is to come; but his silence is neither that of weakness nor of desperation. It is divine reality; full, holy consciousness of the approaching "hour"; perfect readiness. His silence brings into being what is to be.
(--Romano Guardini, in Jesus Christ, Meditations, c.1959)

The silence of the American people allows the two messengers to reprise and resound their winning tales to investors in the war. The dividends are trickling out into the halls where once honest brokers did not try to parse democracy and decency.

Transcending Everyday Consciousness
When we sit down to meditate, we are trying to transcend our everyday consciousness: the one with which we transact our ordinary business, the one used in the worlds market-place as we go shopping, bring up our children, work in an office or in our business, clean the house, check our bank statements, and all the rest of daily living. That kind of consciousness is known to everyone and without it we can't function. It is our survival consciousness and we need it for that. It cannot reach far enough or deep enough into the Buddha's teachings, because these are unique and profound; our everyday consciousness is neither unique or profound, it's just utilitarian. In order to attain the kind of consciousness that is capable of going deeply enough into the teachings to make them our own and thereby change our whole inner view, we need a mind with the ability to remove itself from the ordinary thinking process. That is only possible through meditation. There is no other way. Meditation is therefore a means and not an end in itself. It is a means to change the mind's capacity in such a way that we can see entirely different realities from the ones we are used to.
(- Ayya Khema, from When the Iron Eagle Flies, from Everyday Mind, a Tricycle book edited by Jean Smith)

Entirely different realities would fit about now.

I've got to get back on my cushion.

Make the time right.

A new country.

A new seat.

Breathe!

Light.

Tonight I think of the men and women in jail and prison. Their families living in questions about guilt, innocence, bad breaks, and hard time.

I think about prisons of ego in which so many of us do a bid.

If you break open
The cherry tree,
There is not a single flower.
But the skies of spring
Bring forth the blossoms!
- Ikkyu (1394-1481)

Then I think about surrender. I think about the hard acceptance that precedes freedom, a freedom even in prison, or in the shadow of an ego no longer completely in charge.

Eckhart Tolle with Oprah said one could be whole without being perfect. I like that.

We are whole. We don't perhaps realize it yet, but we are.

The mother cries for her son, for herself, for her recently deceased husband.

And when I talk to her I am humbled by the wholeness one and one reveals.

In sorrow, no separation. In solitude, no loneliness.

In a moment of words moving through stillness, nothing is said.

But this.

Awareness.

Our neighbor's 9 month old cat has wandered off. We check our barn. The squirrels aren't giving away anything.

"To lose our selves and to become totally absorbed in God," says John Main, "through the human consciousness of Jesus -- is the precise purpose of all meditation -- to lose our lives."

At center, God. No need to go anywhere. Except perhaps to drop through illusory self into true center. Whether nature, humankind, acts, thoughts, feelings, or noise. We fall into silence.

In Pali, heart and mind are one word (citta), but in English we have to differentiate between the two to make the meaning clear. When we attend to the mind, we are concerned with the thinking process and the intellectual understanding that derives from knowledge, and with our ability to retain knowledge and make use of it. When we speak of heart we think of feelings and emotions, our ability to respond with our fundamental being. Although we may believe that we are leading our lives according to our thinking process, that is not the case. If we examine this more closely, we will find that we are leading our lives according to our feelings and that our thinking is dependent upon our feelings. The emotional aspect of ourselves is of such great importance that its purification is the basis for a harmonious and peaceful life, and also for good meditation.
- Ayya Khema, When the Iron Eagle Flies
from Everyday Mind, a Tricycle book edited by Jean Smith

I write to a man in jail pending court date on charges of child sexual abuse.

I write you just to write you. I’m pretty sure your situation sucks. You’ve probably come up against the strong and violent dislike on the part of both inmates and guards for the category of person who wears the charges you’ve got on your name. It’s a hard fact that many feel that vengeance and punishment are a sworn duty to be carried out even by some whose own situations are barely different than yours. But you know this already.

I write to tell you that you’ve found yourself a rough spiritual path. But a spiritual path it is. These words might sound silly, and I apologize if they are impertinent to you -- but, nevertheless, this is where you are for now. And, as you know, there is only now. You’ve come to a point in your life where you might not want to be, but there you are. We all are.

Child sexual abuse is a frightening crime. So many suffer. So little rehabilitation.

We Bring Democracy To The Fish

It is unacceptable that fish prey on each other.
For their comfort and safety, we will liberate them
into fishfarms with secure, durable boundaries
that exclude predators. Our care will provide
for their liberty, health, happiness, and nutrition.
Of course all creatures need to feel useful.
At maturity the fish will discover their purposes.

Poem: "We Bring Democracy To The Fish" by Donald Hall, from White Apples and the Taste of Stone. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007.

I must rehabilitate my heart/mind.

I must not remain criminal.

I must fall into the center.

God help us!

We might learn, as she writes, the grand conspiracy of life.

What is the hearth of the heart if not the good earth: the soil, the life-blood of rivers, the throbbing life-force in the intimate depths of every green thing, every flowering form, every singing, winging bird? And what is the heart if not this resonance, this inner knowing through which we love and, in turn, know anew and love again? We breathe in and we inhale the exhalation of forests, plankton, desert sage and the fragrance of spreading spring violets. We breathe out and the trees inhale us, take us into themselves in this grand conspiracy of life, this godly inspiration, this earthly distillation, this human intersection of all that is.
(--Return to Earth, in Earthlines, By Diane Pendola, http://www.ecocontemplative.org/elspring08.html)

I'd be willing to be taken in.

With all.

That is.

The nice elderly Catholic lady from Union wouldn't touch the dog because she was going to receive holy communion in an hour.

The dog didn't mind. He was looking up at her and wagging his tail at a holy communion.

It often escapes me when exactly it happened that Americans began fearing their leaders and hating their country.

An illusion of participatory governance has been shattered.

Only God feels the disappointment of it.

Forget the resurrection. Christians have never understood the incarnation.

Becoming human has never been of interest to the betters among us.

There's no one to lead. Don't follow.

Brian, visiting the prison conversation for the first time, said in final circle: "I am just here listening." Not that I heard this. Ryan did. He listened.

Sentient beings are really Buddha.
Like water and ice;
Apart from water, no ice;
Outside of sentient beings, no Buddha.
Not knowing it is near
They seek for it afar!
Just like being in water,
But crying for thirst!
- Hakuin

In Buddhist group a bowl of donuts, m&m's, chips, and cookies to celebrate H's release next week. Time magazine has the Dalai Lama on cover.

I rejoiced when the Lord listened
to the voice of my pleading;
I rejoiced for he turned his ear to me,
as I called to him day after day.

The ropes of death were around me,
the agonies of the underworld were upon me.
I came upon trouble and anguish,
and I called on the name of the Lord:
“Lord, free my soul”.

The Lord is kind and just,
our God takes pity on us.
The Lord guards the weak;
I am cast down, but he will save me.

Turn, my soul, to your rest,
for the Lord is kind to you.
He has torn my soul away from death,
my eyes from tears,
my feet from falling.

I shall walk before the Lord in the land of the living.
--Psalm 114 (116A)

In Protective Custody a new drop-in to the table is making sure we understand what he understands about Romans. We tell him it's meant to be a conversation, no matter how good the words he persistently reads at us. We get into a little Marcos Borg and Dominic Crosson. I see a man I used to see in seg. He's walking wide circles around the pod. I greet him. He wondered why I stopped visiting him. I was only a temporary chaplain, I'm a volunteer now, I say. He figured I'd catch him up.

Two men reading Tolle provide the 3rd conversation with something from chapter 3. Ego says we're bad; ego says we're good. Forget both. We're just who we are.

We leave the sliding heavy clanking doors behind and introduce Diane to Rokpa. He is waggy tail and puppy cute. His fiddle hangs (only sometimes) outside the door to the house.

The fresh baked bread in Rockland's Atlantic Baking Company smells just right.

People continue to talk about some bad times still to come.

April 4, 2008
81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on the Wrong Track
By DAVID LEONHARDT and MARJORIE CONNELLY

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/us/04poll.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Robert the Trappist monk said again this year: "Cheer up! Things are going to get worse."

No doubt.

Cheers!

They say a bicycle is best balanced by moving forward.

Kuei-shan asked Yun-yen,
“What is the seat of enlightenment?”
Yun-yen said,
“Freedom from artificiality.”
- Kuei-shan (771-854)

There's tires needing air.

It's not easy being a fool. It's easy fooling myself.

If people are quiet,
They can be quiet anywhere.
If people aren’t quiet
They won’t be quiet in the mountains.
Everything depends on you.
Life is transient,
Like a flash of lightning in a dream.
Before we receive this form,
We had another face,
Our original face.
We can’t see it with our eyes.
We can only know it with wisdom.
- Chi-ch’eng

I'll try to make light of it -- my foolishness.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
(-Charles A. Beard)

There must be a lot of darkness tonight; there are (at least) a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

This is our original face.

Wise up!

Watching Beyond Belief a documentary about two 9/11 widows who work to help widows in Afghanistan.

The very fact of life in Afghanistan for women.

The Tables Turned

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless--
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
(- Poem by William Wordsworth)

There is much for us to watch and receive. All that is required is that we watch, and receive.

There's a way in which each us makes small choices every day. And after a period of time those choices develop into a pattern, and we might be thought of as choosing ourselves. ...It's like any one of us -- we choose our way to being ourselves."
(Spoken by brother of one of the American women).

Who do we choose to be?

In our life?

Lets.

Choose life.