Anthropologist spoke of Afghanistan at Camden Library tonight.

The moon illuminates a thousand peaks
with the brilliance of daylight,
The sound of the bell falls
on my pillow of old friend's poems;
In my thin monk's robes,
unafraid of the frost's harshness,
I rise, roll up the thin blinds,
sit in the depths of the night.
- Tesshu Tokusai (?–1366)

Nowhere is there an easy solution.

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.

I should be suspicious
of what I want.

-- Jalaluddin Rumi (Dari Poet)

Each poem tries.

To see through.

What we want.

No dogma. No apologetics. No authority.

Looking for a place to settle
Cold Mountain will do just fine
Fine wind among thick pines
The closer you listen
The better the sound
Under them a man
His hair turning white
Mumbling, mumbling
Taoist texts
He's been here ten years
Unable to return
Completely forgotten the way
By which he came.
- Han-shan

But oneself.

No other.

There's a Tibetan word, "shenpa." It is usually translated "attachment."
Pema Chodron says it means more the energy that hooks us into our habitual patterns.

The Catholic Bishop of Rhode Island has said Patrick Kennedy is banned from receiving Holy Communion because of his public views on abortion. The bishop is full of shenpa.

The white clouds
On the mountain tops
Poke halfway into this thatched hut
I had thought too cramped
Even for myself
- Koho Kennichi (1241–1316)

At Sunday Evening Practice there were six of us, cat and dog included. Reading Pema's "The Natural Warmth of the Heart" from the Shambhala Sun Magazine issue was perfect.

Hospitality was a full house. Two conversations in prison Friday, one at Quarry Hill nursing facility, and one at hermitage made for four fine engagements. Canoeing Hosmer Pond and hiking Ragged Mountain yesterday -- climbing Beech Hill for silent sitting this morning -- we recognize and acknowledge the wonderful gifts of nature and community we are given.

Our life is like a Zen koan.

Koans are Zen riddles that you do not solve so much as step through, as through Alice's looking glass, into Mad Hatterish conundrums designed to stun rational sense and in its place induce wordless insight.
(from "Philosopher's Disease," in Shambhala Sun, November 2009, excerpted from ales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, An Autobiography, by Huston Smith)

Compline, gong, a computer episode, and now, time for bed.

Hanging opposite commode in new frame the words of Tecumseh read by Rob McCall on Awanadjo Almanack (on WERU radio).

The Teaching of Tecumseh

Live your life that the fear of death
can never enter your heart.
Trouble no one about his religion.
Respect others in their views
and demand that they respect yours.
Love your life, perfect your life,
beautify all things in your life.
Seek to make your life long
and of service to your people.
Prepare a noble death song for the day
when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting
or passing a friend, or even a stranger,if in a lonely place
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light,
for your life, for your strength.
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living.
If you see no reason to give thanks,
the fault lies in yourself.
Touch not the poisonous firewater that makes wise ones turn to fools
and robs the spirit of its vision.
When your time comes to die, be not like those
whose hearts are filled with fear of death,
so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again
in a different way.
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
(Tecumseh (March 1768 – October 5, 1813) also Tecumtha or Tekamthi, was a Native American leader of the Shawnee and a large tribal confederacy that opposed the United States during Tecumseh's War and the War of 1812.

Being wordless is parallel to doing nothing. At the same time, everything speaks for itself, and nothing is left undone.

This is the way the word begins -- not with a sound, but a presenter.

At dawn chiming gong on porch of meditation cabin. After dusk, after darkened cabin chanting compline, gong again. The gong is prelude. Silence follows.

What if every sound is the sound of awakening earth?

If you are spiritually sharp,
you can open your eyes and
see as soon as you hear me
tell you about this.
Have not people of immeasurable
greatness said this truth
is not comprehensible by thought,
and that it is where
knowledge does not reach?
Were it not like this,
how could it be called
enlightened truth?
Nowadays, however, people
just present interpretations and views,
making up rationalizations;
they have never learned to be thus,
and have never reached this state.
- Foyan (1067–1120)

Once we wanted to be a different kind of hermit monastic Buddhist Christian whose only faith was eco-spiritual wholeness.

It is no longer wanted.

This moment.

Is it.

"We are poor passing facts," wrote Robert Lowell in his poem "Epilogue."

Jack wanted to show me a paragraph from The Course in Miracles.

Words will mean little now. We use them but as guides on which we do not now depend. For now we seek direct experience of truth alone. The lessons that remain are merely introductions to the times in which we leave the world of pain, and go to enter peace. Now we begin to reach the goal this course has set, and find the end toward which our practising was always geared.
(ACIM, Introduction Part II, Workbook for students)

I tell him I am so pleased that words (will) mean the "little-now." There's so much emphasis these days on the big Now. I delight in words and I delight in the little-now, the particular, specific and immediate place and time wherein we dwell.

Body impermanent like spring mist;
Mind insubstantial like empty sky;
Thoughts unestablished like breezes in space.
Think about these three points over and over.
- Godrakpa (1170-1249)

Even so, this body, this mind, this thought place me here in this little-now.

Farmhouses, Iowa

Invariably, a family in each one
And someone opening the fridge to fetch
A carton of milk, someone sitting in
A chair and shelling peas, someone looking

Out a window at a barn, two willow trees.
Solitude broods like a pursuing shadow;
A radio fades in and out -the voice
Eager yet eerie. Three ages anchor

The oaken dinner table: Mom and Dad
Up-before-dawn weary, Grandma perturbed
About half-thawed rolls, the children recounting
School stories, then silent. In the parlor
A whiskey tumbler rests beside a Bible.
The old collie whimpers when a car goes by.
"Farmhouses, Iowa" by Baron Wormser, from Scattered Chapters. Sarabande Books, 2008.

Whiskey gone. Bible closed.

Collie prays for each passing.

The 90 year old woman at nursing home, after reading several poems of hers, remembers as she leaves room that she had been a librarian and helped young students to write poems.

She'd forgotten for a while what she'd done in her life.

A passing forgetfulness.

During conversation tonight my mind drifted to an eleven syllable haiku:

What is real?
How silly!
Who are you?
...am I
(wfh)

Visitors in the recovering community speak about how they broke. How they asked for help. And connect to God, higher power, or by some other name a truth that changes.

Who enters this door, who studies this teaching
Has to be thorough and push to the end.
Empty your body, and reason remains;
Blank your mind, and the world is void.
Cloud-draped trees form a sheet of white;
In a mountain's mouth the sun' s a red slice.
The flag moves or is it the wind?
It isn't the wind or the flag.
- Stonehouse

Cleaning up old roofing from grass into pickup on tarps.

Work slows to molasses on a cold day.

Last night in class, Chu-Tsi (12th C.), Wang Yang-Ming (15th-16th C.) and Jill Bolte Taylor (20th-21st C.) combine to point out rational and ideal Neo-Confucian philosophy, and the miracle of narrative following a stroke. Her stroke of insight sums up all philosophy.

Ingrid made sticky buns for the class. Four students gave presentations.

The trip to the dump and back was a meeting in itself.

Who are
you
am I

We tidy as best we can.

The rest stays where it falls.

I feel like the middle of November.

Whatever you are doing, twenty-four hours a day, in all your various activities, there is something that transcends the Buddhas and Zen Masters; but as soon as you want to understand it, it's not there. As soon as you try to gather your attention on it, you have already turned away from it. That is why I say you see but cannot do anything about it.
- Foyan (1067–1120)

I try to find my mind.

It' not there.

For Events, see http://sites.google.com/site/meetingbrookhermitage/Home/events-at-meetingbrook

..........

There was a young man that went into the wild in Alaska. He came upon a bus. There he stayed.

Reminds me of a friend who died 30 years ago asking someone not to steal his money in Mexico.

It's the way things happen sometimes.

"Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this living
Is just a hard way to go"
(--from song, Angel From Montgomery,"lyrics by John Prine)

We end conversation tonight saying: Live the mystery, investigate it, and stop worrying about it.

Nothing to it. Just give up everything that isn't real and present.

All of the river boat gamblers are losing their shirts
All of the brave union soldier boys sleep in the dirt
But you know and I know, there never was reason to hurt
All of our lives were entwined to begin with,
Here in spoon river.
(--from song "Spoon River", lyrics by Michael Smith

What do I long for? Here it is: the open, loving, with trust, natural, and present.

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
(--from song "Imagine", lyrics by John Lennon)

The stars are dancing. That's what Saskia said. I go out through the barn.

There they were.

Dancing.

I look around and through what stands around me and you.

Cabin was like a sweat lodge at Sunday Evening Practice. The wood-stove cranked hotter than the moderate outside temperature called for. And the candles went out one by one. The cardiologist from Antigonish and the homeopath from Rockport sat beside the artist from Vermont and the carpenter now living in Illinois, the lay monastic auditor/baker from Toronto and the mendicant with motto 'ama nesciri' from the country of Brooklyn rounded out the meditation cabin with white dog with black spot with herding stock from Pennsylvania and New York.

A man of the Way comes rapping
At my brushwood gate,
Wants to discuss the essentials of Zen experience.
Don't take it wrong if this mountain monk's
Too lazy to open his mouth:
Late spring warblers singing their heart out,
A village of drifting petals.
- Jakushitsu Genko (1290-1367)

Table reading was Sharon Salzberg's dharma talk "A More Complete Attention" in current issue of Tricycle. It seemed just right. As did the lentil soup (with or without sausage and beef). Rokie did his weekly plaintive wail for the lost ball deep under bookshelf in corner of dining room.

Poet Charles Olson wrote, "There is no intelligence the equal of the situation." Jacque Ranciere wrote that, "All have equal intelligence." The idea seemed right that intelligence and compassion are less a matter of who has them, but more a matter of who responds to them as they present themselves within each situation. Thus, what a person is to do is to show up in each situation, attend to the reality revealing itself, respond to/with the intelligence and compassion found there, and cease considering yourself 'other' than the situation.

We are standing around what is standing around with and for us. Circumstance -- of which we are not-other.

Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) wrote, "Jo soy jo y mi circunstancia."

Philosophy
Circunstancia

For Ortega y Gasset, philosophy has a critical duty to lay siege to beliefs in order to promote new ideas and to explain reality. In order to accomplish such task the philosopher must, as Husserl proposed, leave behind prejudices and previously existing beliefs and investigate the essential reality of the universe. Ortega proposes that philosophy must, as Hegel proposed, overcome both the lack of idealism (in which reality gravitated around the ego) and ancient-medieval realism (which is for him an undeveloped point of view in which the subject is located outside the world) in order to focus in the only truthful reality (i.e. life). He suggests that there is no me without things and things are nothing without me, I (human being) can not be detached from my circumstances (world). This led Ortega to pronounce his famous maxim "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" ("I am myself and my circumstance") which he always situated in the core of his philosophy. For Ortega, as for Husserl, the Cartesian 'cogito ergo sum' is insufficient to explain reality"therefore the Spanish philosopher proposes a system where life is the sum of the ego and circumstance. This circunstancia is oppressive; therefore, there is a continual dialectical exchange of forces between the person and his or her circumstances and, as a result, life is a drama that exists between necessity and freedom. In this sense Ortega wrote that life is at the same time fate and freedom, and that freedom "is being free inside of a given fate. Fate gives us an inexorable repertory of determinate possibilities, that is, it gives us different destinies. We accept fate and within it we choose one destiny." In this tied down fate we must therefore be active, decide and create a "project of life" -- thus not be like those who live a conventional life of customs and given structures who prefer an unconcerned and imperturbable life because they are afraid of the duty of choosing a project.
(from AllExperts, About.com, Free Encyclopedia) http://en.allexperts.com/e/j/jo/josé_ortega_y_gasset.htm

"I am myself and my circumstance." (Ortega y Gasset)

So,
(Question): Where do we find ourselves?
(Response): Where are you?

Who am I?
What are you doing?

Am I free?
You choose!

The rain has stopped. We had flooded celler and leaky roof (which is not quite finished being re-shingled). The Irish workman left the west side of dormer completely unprotected last season. The Scot temporarily cut and nailed an obtuse triangular temporary cover of plywood earlier this season. The roofer from Hope hadn't gotten to it yet last week. But the torrential rain coming from southwest did get to it. For hours of slashing downpour. The upstairs and downstairs bathrooms danced with dripping water through wall and ceiling. Pots and pans and multicolored towels bravely stood their ground during the deluge. Saskia fortified the troops. The battle subsides. All is well. And wet.

The brook roared and edged its limits under our footbridges. Big stones grumbled under water-falls. The sluice dug two months ago took runoff down Ragged Mountain that would have hit barn off to the other side of septic mound and across the road. I build make-shift earthen diverter dams to help water go away from new gambrel bookshed being built askew barn. Hosmer Pond was profoundly beyond its normal limits, flooding fields and backing toward road by 20-30 feet. Where we keep the green canoe on wood frame by pond was two feet too deep for our boots to approach -- so we turned back with life jackets hanging from paddles over shoulders.

November is warm this week. Many dogs ran the Snow Bowl. Color has fallen from trees to mountain mulching. Dawn gives light. I wake up early.

This.

All of this.

And you.

This is what I am.

Thank you.

With heartfelt gratitude!

A hermeneutic:

In the beginning earth breathing wholeness is monotheism's awakening.

Then, embodying wholeness is God become human.

Know the essence of mind.
Its intrinsic essence is pure clarity.
It is essentially the same as a Buddha.
Know the functions of mind.
Its functions produce the treasury of teachings.
When its activity is always silent,
Myriad illusions become suchness.
- Tao-hsin (580-651)

When no longer angered or disturbed by the reality of what is taking place around me, I surrender to the wholeness.

This is the course of Oneness -- of monotheism -- moving through Judaism, to Christianity, to Islam.

Fragmented and scattered mind finds Itself.

In whole-sight.

What needs doing...

Is being done.

Have you affirmed the Charter for Compassion yet?

http://charterforcompassion.org/

There's no purpose. We're useless.

And we love it.

The Zen Master asks, "But, what is 'it'?"

"And, irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed."
(--Gaston Bachelard in La formation de l'esprit scientifique, 1934)

Everything is itself. Everything is done for itself. No other purpose. No other reason.

Stop trying to be something. Or to do something.

As long as we insist that meditation must be meaningful, we fail to understand it. We meditate with the idea that we’re going to get something from it—that it will lower our blood pressure, calm us down, or enhance our concentration. And, we believe, if we meditate long enough, and in just the right way, it might even bring us to enlightenment.

All of this is delusion.
- Steve Hagen, from “Looking For Meaning,” Tricycle, Fall 2003

A man stops by. His wife has entered an Alzheimer's unit. He misses her. I feel for them.

Words and presence are the manifest realities of true silence and inseparate wholeness.

It grows starker these nights.

It is clearly, coldly, November.

Men and women who've served in the military -- especially those who experienced combat circumstances -- are to be acknowledged and thanked.

Those responsible for the stupidity of war are to be held accountable for their actions.

War is the one insult to human intelligence that human intelligence has not yet figured out.

The great way of the buddhas is profound, wondrous, inconceivable; how could its practice be easy? Have you not seen how the ancients gave up their bodies and lives, abandoned their countries, cities, and families, looking upon them as shards of tile? After that they passed eons living alone in the mountains and forests, bodies and minds like dead trees; only then did they unite with the way. Then they could use the mountains and rivers for words, raise the wind and rain for a tongue, and explain the great void, turning the incomparable wheel.
- Dogen (1200-1253)

However much we hate war, we have compassion for those suffering it -- combatants and civilians.

IX
Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered: "It had to be!"
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, "Why?"
(- final stanza from poem, And There Was a Great Calm, by Thomas Hardy)

The spirit of compassion, even pity, must be responded to.

We're not sure what to do with life or death.

Sniper Who Killed 10 Is Executed in Virginia
By IAN URBINA 1 minute ago; New York Times, 10Nov09

John A. Muhammad, whose murderous shooting spree in the fall of 2002 left at least 10 people dead, was executed on Tuesday night at a Virginia state prison.

We might be safer with him dead.

But we're not any wiser; not any better. Do we even want to be?

There is more to desire than just suffering. There is a yearning in desire that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. […]

As the well-known contemporary Indian teacher Sri Nisargadatta, famous for sitting on a crowded street corner selling inexpensive bidis, or Indian cigarettes, once commented, “The problem is not desire. It’s that your desires are too small.” The left-handed path means opening to desire so that it becomes more than just a craving for whatever the culture has conditioned us to want. Desire is a teacher: when we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame, or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.
(- Mark Epstein, from “In Defense of Desire,” Tricycle, Spring 2005)

We are so many dead men walking around no longer breathing -- but not willing to close eyes and exhale.

Tide out.

We hardly want to know what we truly desire.

But we are just.

We can kill.

Legally.

No need to be afraid of knowledge.

No need to be afraid of uncertainty.

Hospitality, conversation, and meditation are good examples of small ways available to us to affirm the simplicity of service, silence, and stillness.

I don't for a minute think that an empty room is empty of all the beings once occupying it.

Zen is the practice of seeing this emptiness through.

What is Ultimate Reality? It is what-is without the blade of thought to cut it.

There is only Ultimate Reality. All thinking that severs and divides is illusory thinking.

Imagination draws its energy from a confrontation with desire. It feeds off desire, transmuting and magnifying reality through desire’s power. Fantasy does the opposite; it avoids desire by fleeing into a crude sort of wish-fulfillment that seems much safer. Fantasy might be teddy bears, lollipops, sexual delights, or superhero adventures; it also might be voices in one’s head urging acts of outrage and mayhem. Or it might be the confused world of separation and fear we routinely live in, a threatening yet seductive world that promises us the happiness we seek when our fantasies finally become real. Imagination confronts desire directly, in all its discomfort and intensity, deepening the world right where we are. Fantasy and reality are opposing forces, but imagination and reality are not in opposition: imagination goes toward reality, shapes and evokes it.
(- Norman Fischer, from “Saved From Freezing,” Tricycle, Spring 2005)

Karl sends postcard from Village Soup with photo of us at the shop by the harbor. He says,"This photo always brings back fond memories...".

We imagine a new reality. Evoking it.

Shaping it.

Becoming it.

No teacher. Everything teaches.

No religion. Everything holds together.

No God. Everything resounds of God.

A Buddhist Retreat Behind Broken-Mountain Temple

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

Nothing to hold on to. Everything falls.

Only silence. Everything vibrates.

Loss and emptiness. Everything comes alive.

UPROOTED

The artists painting Cuba from memory
or from photographs, from family stories
of the exodus, from dreams, know
their bloodlines are not clear. The work
is mongrel, neither Cuban nor American.

They paint masks, figures floating, palm
trees set on pedestals. They sculpt women
locked in birth. What they want is a particular
place. What they find is borrowed space.
In hand-colored gelatin silver prints or wood

with oil and gold leaf or oil on linen or on
masonite or on carved locust bark, they discover
new rooms, dream landscapes, regions of origin
as small as phone-booths, as expansive as cane
fields, rented, tenanted, temporary.

—Interprete mi silencio—, one says.
They are like poets scratching out their
metaphors sideways on pieces of lined paper,
crossgrain, drafting possibilities,
unsettled, undecided.

These artists ask and never receive replies,
remember without mementos, feel without touching.
They have heard of the royal palm, seventy feet tall
and seek its landscape. How odd its trunk
is almost hollow, its roots mere threads.

(Poem by Jill Peláez Baumgaertner )

Gertrude wondered where Louise had gone with the poem Gertrude wrote about her husband. Her memory isn't so good. Louise steps off the elevator with the original and the copy she made for the poetry folder in the library of the Assisted Living Facility in Camden. Gertrude was a native of Brooklyn. Me too. Park Slope and Bensonhurst. She wondered if she'd passed my on the bus going to Brooklyn College. There in the foyer outside Suzanne's office we spoke waiting for the poem to reappear. When it did she was pleased. Louise put the copy in the red folder and said goodbye. Gertrude began her walk down corridor to room. It would soon be the evening meal. We go down the stairs.

Poetry has a way of reappearing just when you thought it gone.

She is a good listener.

To ask if we believe in the Bible is to ask if we believe in the fact of humankind. Do we believe we are alive? Do we think there is a mind? And what does any of it have to do with what we call "God?"

Beginning with Abraham, the Hebrew experience has resulted in the evolutionary unfolding of the human psyche. The Bible is the living record of this development, and therefore it has maintained its validity throughout the ages, up to and including the technological age of our own time.
(from p.69, in The Structure of Biblical Myths, The Ontogenesis of the Psyche, by Heinz Westman)

Present open thought. Here everywhere all dimensions. (Not being a marijuana smoker, still, the acronym is "pot head" for the prior sentences.)

The Course in Miracles circles through this issue:

The self you made is not the Son of God. Therefore, this self does not exist at all. And anything it seems to do and think means nothing. It is neither bad nor good. It is unreal, and nothing more than that. It does not battle with the Son of God. It does not hurt him, nor attack his peace. It has not changed creation, nor reduced eternal sinlessness to sin, and love to hate. What power can this self you made possess, when it would contradict the Will of God?
Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. Over and over this must be repeated, until it is accepted. It is true. Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. Nothing can touch it, or change what God created as eternal. The self you made, evil and full of sin, is meaningless. Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God, and light and joy and peace abide in you.
Salvation requires the acceptance of but one thought; - you are as God created you, not what you made of yourself. Whatever evil you may think you did, you are as God created you. Whatever mistakes you made, the truth about you is unchanged. Creation is eternal and unalterable. Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. You are and will forever be exactly as you were created. Light and joy and peace abide in you because God put them there.
(from Lesson 93, ACIM)

Let's not argue whether there is a God. Let's discuss whether you and I are here. Here and not perpetually absent. Missing. Nowhere to be found.

Westman says that Abram is told by the Lord to "Go from your country...into the land of your own becoming."(p.71)

What about you?

You want a special engraved eviction notice?

An inmate had a line in his poem today something to the effect: We are holding on even though we are already gone.

Anybody here?

Who's there?

Too many words about God. Let's keep still. And silent.

On Going to see a Taoist Master

A dog barking and the sound of water;
Peach blossoms heavy with dew.
In these deep woods, deer can be seen;
At noon along the stream, I hear no bell.
Wild bamboo divides gray clouds;
Waterfalls hang from blue peaks.
No one knows where you’ve gone;
Disheartened, I lean against a second,
Now a third pine.
- Li Po

Like the weather: falling cold rain, darkness too soon, an empty landscape.

Maybe up is down. Or, no up, no down. Maybe, up is up, down, down. However said, there is no opposite.

Living is joy, but death can only weep. You see in death escape from what you made. But this you do not see; that you made death, and it is but illusion of an end. Death cannot be escape, because it is not life in which the problem lies. Life has no opposite, for it is God. Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life. Forgive the world, and you will understand that everything that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real. In this one sentence is our course explained. In this one sentence is our practicing given its one direction. And in this one sentence is the Holy Spirit's whole curriculum specified exactly as it is.

What is the peace of God? No more than this; the simple understanding that His Will is wholly without opposite. There is no thought that contradicts His Will, yet can be true. The contrast between His Will and yours but seemed to be reality. In truth there was no conflict, for His Will is yours. Now is the mighty Will of God Himself His gift to you. He does not seek to keep it for Himself. Why would you seek to keep your tiny frail imaginings apart from Him? The Will of God is one and all there is. This is your heritage. The universe beyond the sun and stars, and all the thoughts of which you can conceive, belong to you. God's peace is the condition for His Will. Attain His peace, and you remember Him.
(--from ACIM, Manual for Teachers, http://courseinmiracles.com/teachers_manual/what_is_the_peace_of_god20.htm/

God's will is wholly without opposite.

What must it be like to be all alone?

All.

Alone.

Election Day.

We like to think each vote counts. It does.

Evening mountains veiled in somber mist;
One path entering the wooded hill:
The monk has gone off locking his pine door.
From a bamboo pipe a lonely trickle of water flows
- Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672)

Cedar shingling north wall of book shop/shed.

Just that.

And hopes for equality and compassion.