St Romuald (c.951 - 1027), they say, preferred solitude. One writer wrote that Romuald "... died in a monastery he himself had founded at Val di Castro – as he wished, alone in his cell." (Universalis, Saturday 19 June 2010)

Solitude is a kind of poetry.

Spare and undiagramed, solitude points to something other than itself to express its own nature. The skill in solitude as in poetry is the realization that one is within everything in existence.

My sense now is that when people begin to speak, when language develops, there are two essential instincts: one of the instincts says, 'What is this?'; the other one says, 'So what happens?' So what happens is the beginning of syntax, of storytelling. The other feeling, where you are confronted by some aspect of reality for which language is always inadequate, is the instinct that goes into poetry." Poetry, he suggests, "begins with a cry" – of anguish, fear or frustration. Szirtes quotes Emily Dickinson's maxim that "a poem is a house that tries to be haunted". A poem should not deliver all its secrets at once, if ever; it is not there to be solved.
...
(Al Alvarez] worries that we are losing the ability to read closely. "People don't know how to read any more," he says. "You can't read poetry diagonally the way you read a newspaper." For Alvarez, a poem represents the search for perfection. "It's like one of those bank locks with God knows how many numbers," he says. "The point is that until every single word is in the right place, it's not finished and you know it's not finished. But when you've finally got it, a door swings open and you think, wow, that was wonderful, and you send it out to be published or you don't. You don't get that ever with prose. You can get near to it, but you don't actually get it. It's about getting something perfect."
(--from, What is the future of poetry?, by Stephen Moss, The Guardian, Friday 18 June 2010)

We shy from the word 'perfect' because we remember fruitless attempts to attain perfection -- whether in needlepoint, the moral life, or horseshoes. We falter, are humbled and frustrated, and either resolve to improve or lapse into seeming failure.

'Perfect' is a trick reference. Firstly, we all share perfection, we are perfect, whole, and incommensurable. Secondly, 'perfect' is a fool's errand. It's like trying to find in external fragments what is only interiorly whole.

St Cyprian's treatise on the Lord's Prayer

Why should we be surprised, beloved brethren, that this is the nature of the prayer that God taught, seeing that he condensed all our prayer into one saving sentence of his teaching? This had already been foretold by the prophet Isaiah, who, filled with the Holy Spirit, spoke of the majesty and loving kindness of God: completing and shortening his word in righteousness, because God will make a shortened word in the whole earth. For when the word of God, that is, our Lord Jesus Christ, came to all of us, bringing together the learned and the unlearned, and gave the precepts of salvation to those of every age and sex, he made a compendium of his precepts, so that his pupils’ memories should not be burdened by the heavenly teaching but might quickly learn what was necessary for a simple faith.

Thus, when he taught what eternal life was, he wrapped up the sacrament of life in an all-embracing and divine brevity, saying: This is eternal life, to know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. And also, when he had to gather from the law and the prophets the first and greatest commandments, he said: Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one God, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment; and the second is like it: you shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and all the prophets. And again: Whatever good you wish men to do to you, do it to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

It was not only in words that God taught us to pray, but in actions as well, for he himself prayed frequently and imploringly, showing us his example so that we should follow it, as it is written: But he himself went off to a solitary place and prayed; or, He went out onto the mountain to pray, and continued all night praying to God.

The Lord prayed and beseeched not for himself – for what reason has the guiltless one pray for himself? – but for our sins, as he made clear when he said to Peter, See, Satan wants to sift you as if you were wheat: but I have prayed for you so that your faith should not fail. Later, too, he beseeches the Father for all people, saying: I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in me through their words: may they all be one. As you, Father, are in me, and I in you, so may they also be one in us. God’s mercy and desire for our salvation are so great that he is not content to redeem us with his blood, but also prays for us over and over again. And now you should see what it was he was praying for: that just as the Father and the Son are one, so too we should be part of that same unity.
(--from Office of Readings, Feast of St. Romuald 19June2010)

One.

As you are.

In yourself.

In me.

In everything.

If we listen to the sound of what is being said, we are listening to poetry.

Is what is ...being... said?

Even in silence; even in solitude?

Spring tries on summer.

Fields we saw
Blooming with
So many different flowers,
Frost-withered now
To a single hue.
- Saigyo

Hot, sunny.

Everything is green.

Birds chant. Bookselling farmer brings yield from soil.

In prison this morning there was talk about common sense.

Dale thought it can't be taught.

Stupidity, he thinks, is the worst enemy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voices from the Other World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now is God is Now.

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

Of course.

But...Why?

(There is no 'why.')

Landscape with Self-Portrait

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

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

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

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

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. To Himself (XXVIII)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is mind.

See with it.

See through it.

After evening conversation, go get ice cream.

Let's begin with this statement: I have no idea about death. No special knowledge. No special experience. Not even an insight worth touting. But if we look at this thing called death, we can speak about it.

No one seems to come back from death. Certainly not in the same form. The body ceases its functions. The brain shuts down. There is a profound understanding that what was before the event of death does not seem to be after the event. What happened?

Jesus, some say, died and continued on, returned from the dead, ate, walked, talked, and then one day, 'ascended.' Where did he go?

Most of my uncles, aunts, grandparents, parents, sister, and acquaintances -- died, and do not seem to have continued on, come back, or ascended. So my personal experience is heavily weighted to not replicating Jesus' experience as told in scripture.

That said, I want to ask: Is what we call death nothing else than the ending of an illusion and the continuation of a truth far subtler than human perception? Is this weighted body, worn down by gravity and illness, merely a projected biosphere incorporating a lighted body -- a transparency of what we call 'spirit' -- which is the true nature of being, completely connected, en-lightened and aware, one with what we call the Spirit of Life and Truth, Wisdom and Compassion?

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

(-- Poem by Wallace Stevens )

Would a new knowledge of reality entail losing the old knowledge (or, at least, old impression) of reality? Are we dying all the time in as much as we are losing, or having taken away, all the ideas, dreams, beliefs, hopes, and ambitions we once counted on as comprising the notional identity of who we are or might be? What's going on here?

Rowing my small skiff in Rockport Harbor early this morning, an Osprey eyed me from its nest atop a rock-danger warning pole off shore from the old Apprenticeshop. It was an extremely low tide. I skirted the shoreline with small strokes facing forward going out beyond the last pier with attached float. I listened to Taize. Just that. Some details. That was my life. I came back in. The drifting ended. I climbed the ladder from free-float which was still askew, grounded by low tide, resting partly on bottom grit-mud nearest granite stone wall of Marine Park. I walked away.

It was a lovely row.

No one there can see me now.

What if alive and dead were not two things?

The only difference being awareness and awakening.

Would you consider you've never been born and never will die?

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

(--Poem by Wallace Stevens)

There are no two things.

Nothing two.

Nothing one.

Just connective extension without beginning or end.

In small rowboat each stroke and pull is felt down to white boots bought after mass in Rockland. Monday mornings are a toss and touch for me. It's been a long time between Monday mornings.

By a green jade lake,
What a wonderful sight:
An old hermit fathoming Tao.
Aren't they the lucky ones,
Humble and still,
Quietly humming the
Melodies of heaven?
- Loy Ching-Yuen

I circle Indian Island outside Rockport Harbor. I watch the water, horizon, and my soul.

Seal watches me.

Dolphin

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself--
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

(--Poem by Robert Lowell)

I can't imagine what people talk about any more. Odd emptiness from someone in love with real conversation. It's the make-talk that makes me silent.

I try to watch Capitalism, A Love Story by Michael Moore -- but the dvd doesn't play through -- broken as capitalism.

It's not a life-style choice I make in being a solitary. It is the only reality that gives breath to me. I don't have the skill to socially interact in this depleted time of mind.

So, on Monday morning, I go to church, then to coffee and muffin, then to rowboat -- a three hour meditation in quiet waters around Indian Island where Loon and bell buoy sound me through.

I have nothing to ask God. And God is grateful for the nothing I ask. We pass through the same neighborhood of nescience.

I count it astounding that contemplative gaze has not yet become witless stare.

I come home from the sea as from a slow and near-wordless conversation in a wide transparent emptiness.

Celtics take 3-2 lead in NBA finals.

It might not be important, but it is a fact.

Here is another fact.

And it is important -- start to finish, beginning and end.

Here.

I'm...

You're...

We're...

Here.

England 1, USA 1. A draw. It is more entertaining than some other things -- like 9 years of bad news and grim statistics into the Afghan War.

War is what happens when men want war.

When you dig into the earth,
Water springs forth,
And when the clouds clear,
All the sky is blue.
In the land of water and clouds
Is there anything but Zen?
- Mookam Choinul (1722-1795)

When man wants peace there will be peace.

There seems to be a difficulty sorting through the wants we experience within. War? Peace? A large chocolate cookie ice cream bar?

...the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.

At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.
(--from"In the Singularity Movement, Humans Are So Yesterday", By ASHLEE VANCE, the New York Times, Published: June 11, 2010, MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.)

No need for the part about prolonging age and eliminating death. A short life with certain death would suffice if...if there was intelligence, creativity, and a felt kinship with all and each existing here.

England's Mr. Robert Green, as goalkeeper, let an easy keep get away from him in South Africa, allowing the Americans to score their goal. Many tsk tsk'd. I don't see the big deal.

Everybody fails.

Get on with the next game.

Right after we end war, that is.

Dusk.

Let our heart be sacred, not scared.

Gain and renown are hindrances
To students of the Way;
They taint our purity of heart.
Uncentered,
How can we comprehend Tao?
- Loy Ching-Yuen (1873-1960)

The author of Romans (8:39) says something about fused eternity/mortality this Friday:

For I am certain of this: neither death nor life, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, or height or depth, nor any created thing, can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Phoebe flies to nest of squeeking mouths.

We say psalms.

Toll bell.

Walk to house.

There's a weariness about the world. There's too many things to dislodge any fixed opinion. Even the most heinous occurrence is, finally, regarded as a passing glitch in the orderly running of the day. Former candidates for higher office become beauty queens again dancing the polls and are stuffed with dollar bills right where they pontificate.

The brushwood gate to the hermitage
Is closed even in daylight.
What's the use of asking
About fleeting worldly affairs?
Even time slows its pace
When I sit before the blue mountains.
- Mookam Choinul (1722-1795) http://www.dailyzen.com/

Dogen said, "Dropping off body and mind" is the way to go. I can't claim to grasp this. But that doesn't matter. I can't grasp how cold water comes out of our well, through the pump, and out the faucet.

The Main Case
Dogen studied with Master Rujing. One evening during the intensive summer training, in the first year of Pao-chang, 1225, Rujing shouted at a disciple, “When you study under a master, you must drop the body and mind. What is the use of single-minded intense sleeping?”
Sitting right beside this monastic, Dogen suddenly attained great enlightenment. Immediately, he went up to the abbot’s room and burned incense. Rujing said, “Why are you burning incense?” Dogen said, “Body and mind have been dropped off.” Rujing said, “Body and mind dropped off. The dropped-off body and mind.” Dogen said, “This may only be a temporary ability. Please don’t approve me arbitrarily.” Rujing said, “I am not.” Dogen said, “What is that which isn’t given arbitrary approval?” Rujing said, “Body and mind dropped off.” Dogen bowed. Rujing said, “The dropping off is dropped.”
The Commentary
Beginning with his ordination at age fourteen, Dogen’s relentless search for the Way carried him from teacher to teacher throughout Japan. Yet, the Great Doubt persisted. Finally, at age twenty-four, he crossed the ocean to China. When he arrived there, he immediately resumed his search for an authentic teacher. After visiting a number of monasteries, he discovered Rujing. The monastic environment at Rujing’s monastery was marked by a severe and disciplined meditation. By this time, Dogen was as far onto the edge of his practice as anyone can get. When the crack of Rujing’s voice shattered the silence of the darkened meditation hall, the universe collapsed and the edge disintegrated for Dogen.
“Body and mind fallen away” is a realm in which there are no doctrines or marvels, no certainties or mysteries. It’s just “when you see, there is not a single thing.” Having reached this place, Dogen expressed it to his teacher. Rujing then approved and Dogen bowed. Having passed through the forest of brambles, he then passed beyond the other side, too. Rujing said, “The dropping off is dropped.”
We should understand that this body and mind is not the bag of skin. So I ask you, what is it that is dropped off? Who is it that drops off? This is the place of inquiry that must be clarified. Haven’t you heard the words of the teachers of old? When the ten thousand things have been extinguished, there is still something that is not extinguished. What is it?

(--Dharma Discourse by John Daido Loori, Roshi, Koans of the Way of Reality, Case 108, Master Dogen’s Enlightenment, Featured in Mountain Record 21.1, Fall 2002 http://www.mro.org/zmm/teachings/daido/teisho29.php)

Tonight at Thursday Evening Conversation we'll talk about the readings from which the below selections are taken. Some who attend know this stuff. I merely facilitate. I'm unsure I understand anything. I did, however, buy at Goodwill today a fine pair of five dollar fisherman's boots, easily slipped on, burnt orange toes so to see my feet just before I drown off the side of the dinghy I use. (I keep looking for an old, beat-up, rowboat to call my own -- if such claim to proprietorship is seemly -- that costs little or is donatable. The boots will fit well in a salty skiff with character.)

Hate is specific There must be a thing to be attacked. An enemy must be perceived in such a form he can be touched and seen and heard, and ultimately killed. When hatred rests upon a thing, it calls for death as surely as God's Voice proclaims there is no death. Fear is insatiable, consuming everything its eyes behold, seeing itself in everything, compelled to turn upon itself and to destroy.
Who sees a brother as a body sees him as fear's symbol And he will attack, because what he beholds is his own fear external to himself, poised to attack, and howling to unite with him again. Mistake not the intensity of rage projected fear must spawn. It shrieks in wrath, and claws the air in frantic hope it can reach to its maker and devour him.
(--from Lesson 161, A Course in Miracles)

Then there's this:

You have made much progress, and are really trying to make still more, but there is one thing you have never done; not for one instant have you utterly forgotten the body. It has faded at times from your sight, but it has not yet COMPLETELY DISAPPEARED. You are not asked to let this happen for more than an instant, but it is in this instant that the miracle of Atonement happens. Afterwards, you will see the body again, but never quite the same. And every instant that you spend WITHOUT awareness of it gives you a different view of it, when you return.

At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but NEVER experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely. For sin is never present. In any SINGLE instant, the attraction of guilt would be experienced as pain and nothing else, and would be avoided. IT HAS NO ATTRACTION NOW. Its whole attraction is imaginary, and therefore MUST be thought of from the past, or in the future.
(- from "I Need Do Nothing", ch.22, ACIM, http://courseinmiracles.com/urtext/chapter_22/section_6.htm)

For now, this body is good enough for me. Beat-up, old, and still wanting to carry on, or drift on into the misty buoyancy.

I dwell with or's and oars.

We drift in sheltered harbors and need not go anywhere that is anywhere else.

I'm told I will vacate my body some day.

I think of this when I tie up, set bumpers, and step out of the Cape Dory 10 that goes with Saskia's LOON IV. I don't go with the sailers, but I do huddle along in solitude when it is not being used. I balance, then slowly swing onto the beaten-up free-floats in Rockport Harbor.

The meditation correlates.

June deepens.

Oil gushes and pollutes. Everything.

No one knows what to do. This is not propitious. Not knowing, we turn to our most cultivated skill, mendacity, smooth and diversionary, placating and preposterous. Mendacity.

I know mendacity. It has been a longtime practice in my life. It's not the same thing as stupidity. It just wears the same clothes.

Account

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle's flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, thought it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own -- but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it's late. And the truth is laborious.

(Poem by Czeslaw Milosz, 1980)

There's a skewed consolation as well as terrifying realization flowing from the BP disaster in the Gulf Coast -- that we, all of us, do not know what we are doing. No one is in control of anything. There is only serial release of mayhem and reactive response of deflective ratiocination.

Then the predation begins. The talking heads and paid shills spew prepared rhetoric applicable to any circumstance. The formula is simple: Them bad; Me good; Send money; America (or Israel, or BP, or My Political Preference) is God's favored choice.

A Partial History of My Stupidity

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge
and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn't know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn't relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring
but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn't have made.
I was silent when I should have spoken.

Forgive me philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of the my by countrymen.

So I walked on--distracted, lost in thought--
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.

(Poem by Edward Hirsch)

We are becoming frightened people. Terrorism has become so attractive it is now a fund-raising goldmine. Anything done in the name of National Security is permitted and saluted, smartly.

Bullets and boarding raids, border protection and bullying behavior become our new Liturgical Celebrations. The Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, having left the desiccated altars of dithering forgetfulness, has taken to showing up milliseconds before the rounds of arms fire enter the bodies aimed at. The blood and the flesh, torn and ripped, is placed on these new mobile altars in the middle of waters, in empty sluices, and in desolate mountain passes where drones scream soundlessly their descent into gatherings of people, all of whom are, de facto of the hit, guilty as sin. No matter that sin has been forgiven. No matter that neighbor is to be treated as oneself. No matter that hell is in the eye of the reloader.

US Border Patrol Agent Shoots Dead Mexican Teen on Mexican Soil

A fourteen-year-old Mexican boy is being buried today, less than forty-eight hours after being shot by a US Border Patrol agent on Mexican soil. Mexican officials say Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca was shot in the head. Graphic photos published in the Mexico press show the boy lying next to a pool of blood. Sergio and his friends were reportedly playing in a dry section of the Rio Grande and throwing rocks at border guards. The Mexican government has condemned the shooting, saying the use of firearms to respond to boys throwing rocks was a "disproportionate use of force." An eyewitness said Hernandez was clearly on the Mexican side of the border when he was shot.
Eyewitness: "Once the youngsters were on Mexican soil, an official—I don’t know if he was an immigration agent or a police officer—arrived on a bike, wearing a white shirt, a helmet and shorts, and he shot at the youngsters, at the whole group. Some ran in one direction, and others in another. This one teenage victim hid behind the wall. He looked out, and that’s when the teenager was shot."
The shooting comes just weeks after President Obama announced a plan to send an extra $500 million and 1,200 National Guard troops to the border. Two weeks ago, a Border Patrol officer in California shot and killed an undocumented Mexican immigrant with a stun gun. The thirty-two-year-old Anastacio Hernandez had lived in San Diego since he was fourteen and had five American-born children. Border Patrol agents claim he had resisted being deported. (--From Democracy Now, 9June2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/9/headlines#5)

I often wonder: What purpose monasteries? I've come to this -- in real monasteries the monastics realize there is no enemy out there. Monks and Nuns practice awareness -- as do myriad lay-practitioners in middle of ordinary lives. Awareness reveals to practitioners the illusions of this world. The primary illusion is antithesis. A setting against. An opposite. A dualistic other that must be eliminated if the you (or separate self) is to survive. At that revelation there is choice to be made -- continue the illusion by taking arms against and watching the destruction, or shatter the illusion by embodying and integrating into whole-sight.

The contemplative is faced with this choice in prayer and stillness. Then, in act and motion, the invitation so reminiscent of heroes and saviors throughout history -- to become the place where illusion ends -- to remain the reality... God is. Embodying.

“The ocean drives climate and weather, shapes the character of the planet. We do know now that the ocean, where 97 percent of earth’s water is, is vital, not just to the dolphins, the whales, the coral reefs, the kelp forests; it’s our life support system, too. We are sea creatures as much as any of the other creatures who actually live in the ocean, because without the ocean, our lives would not be possible. Anything we care about—our economies, our health, our security, life itself—depends on the fact that this is a blue planet. The ocean is the key to our survival."

(--Sylvia Earle, from National Geographic Explorer)

Perhaps all is dream. The task is to awaken. And sleep is actually our never-ending judgments.

At this point, I'd be happy just to realize every belief and judgment as being belief and judgment. It'd be a start.

From there?

To here.

As from a nap.

A well-formed conscience must be followed. It supersedes.

1799 Faced with a moral choice, conscience can make either a right judgment in accordance with reason and the divine law or, on the contrary, an erroneous judgment that departs from them.

1800 A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience.

1801 Conscience can remain in ignorance or make erroneous judgments. Such ignorance and errors are not always free of guilt.

1802 The Word of God is a light for our path. We must assimilate it in faith and prayer and put it into practice. This is how moral conscience is formed.
(--from Catechism of the Catholic Church, http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a6.htm)

That, and walking at least an hour a day.

Its boundary is wider than the world,
But where to find a trace of it
Once relativity is broken?
Only fools examine their own hearts
It's like measuring the sky or binding the wind.
- Chunkyung Haewon (1691-1770)

Once you try to fragment and divide, the whole fabric of the world tears and frays. Like a broken mirror, each piece reflecting what it can, the whole of it is scattered on the ground. The ache for whole-sight is heart-rending.

High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
(Poem by Wallace Stevens)

Inquire into, clear-eyed, then, trust, yourself.

As you must.

Dawn. Time for prayer. Wood seiza bench. Brown cushion. Red blanket. Tibetan incense. Bronze bell.

Leaning on a stick, I entered a deep forest
And wandered freely, enjoying spring.
Its fragrance soaked through my clothes,
Butterflies followed me all the way home.
- Hwansung Jian (1664-1729)

Northeast breeze pushes through screen. Cat does rounds through barn. Purple Finch and young Grosbeak take seed at feeder. Cars descend Barnestown Road.

John relied upon a baptism of conversion; Jesus set out to liberate people from every form of suffering and anguish -- present and future. How?
(p.29, Jesus Before Christianity, by Robert Nolan)

How?

Now?

There is more here than meets the eye. Are we going forward in time, or backward? Or is it only and ever 'now?'

In the Angelus, is the final couplet, "And the Word was made flesh; And dwelt among us." Or is it: "And the Word is made flesh; And dwells among us."?

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
(-- from BURNT NORTON, No. 1 of 'Four Quartets', by T.S. Eliot)

Blue jay clanks green feeder. Sun comes over Melvin Heights. Silence remains the only sound that holds all sounds.

Crude oil in the Gulf sickens. Shooting in Iraq and Afghanistan has not ceased. Celtics even finals with Lakers at one each. The man who pitched a perfect game gets a one hit shutout.

There are doors I've never opened that store consciousness belonging to everyone. I'm not sure what to do with that sentence. Do I write: "I hope they open." Or, "It is better not to know."? There is a curious combination of declarative and interrogatory diacritical marks. I'm uncertain whether it means: "I am." or, "I am?"

I no longer know who or what I am. Even if or why? Someone dropped by last night to bring a pig-in-a-chef's-hat with blackboard at its apron. She arrives, says it's for Saskia if she wants it, takes cookie, tells of books in box returned to bookshed, leaves. The pastry pig stands on center island. After she leaves it occurs to me that it is all a dream. This coming and going. This sitting and praying. The dreams of night. This morning window and rising sun.

A dream that is real and not-real and not what it seems to be.

Car arrives. Man goes to meditation cabin. I have not yet begun to understand. And if truth be known, I'm not sure I wish it. An ambiguation reveals itself.

Cars pass. Radio comes on and soon goes off. Wind blows and leaves and birds give voice. Ground, wet with weekend rain, will dry. Books, demure reminders of conversations waiting to continue, poise.

It is Monday morning.

Time and tide wait for man.

The opposite is myth.

No?

If one were to live the silent life, there are considerations.

St. Romuald's Brief Rule 

Sit in your cell as in paradise;
 put the whole world behind you and forget it;


like a skilled angler on the lookout for a catch


keep a careful eye on your thoughts.

The path you follow is in the psalms -- don't leave it. 
If you've come with a novice's enthusiasm and can't 
accomplish what you want, take every chance you can find 
to sing the psalms in your heart and to understand them 
with your head; if your mind wanders as you read 
don't give up but hurry back and try again.

Above all realize that you are in God's presence;
 hold your heart there in wonder as if before your sovereign.

Empty yourself completely;
 sit waiting, content with God's gift,
 like a little chick tasting and eating nothing 
but what its mother brings.

(Saint Romuald's Brief Rule was written around AD 1006 -- about twenty years before St. Romuald's death.)

If one were to dwell listening, there is a way.

Voila le silence: Laisser le Seigneur

prononcer en nous une parole

égale a` lui.

Sieh, dies ist die Stille: Den Herrn in

uns ein Wort sprechen lassen, das er

selbst ist.

Behold the silence: Allow the Lord

to speak one Word in us…

that He is.

(At 0:58:54 in Le Grand Silence - film de Philip Groning, about the daily life of monks of La Grande Chartreuse, founded by St. Bruno (1030- 1101) based in the Alps, known as The Carthusians)

If one were to think of life as faith/grace, nothing linear or scientific could limit, nothing would be impossible with God.

Things appear and disappear -- people, rainclouds, small animals caught by cat -- still, we are invited into a place that goes nowhere, but is complete; that arrives nowhere, but is the ground you walk on to get right here.

I am, alors, grateful for merely being alive.

Her words rang true: "...where he is is really immaterial."

Mary Ewert said this soon after her husband Craig Ewert's 2006 physician-assisted suicide in Switzerland. The film made by John Zaritsky, The Suicide Tourist chronicled their journey together in the final days of his life. He'd been diagnosed with ALS, a motor neuron disorder, and preferred to die while he still had the capacity to actively take his life before his disease further ravaged his body, and he loses the option to die without what he felt might be unbearable suffering.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/suicidetourist/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=grid&utm_source=grid

He's there. He drinks the potion. He's gone. Anyone who's been at someone's death knows the experience.

The body is no longer his home. We have no particular idea where Craig, as he was known, has gone. Just that he's no longer there in an observable, sensible, communicable way. Some would say his soul took flight. Whether or where that flight alights is beyond the ability of those remaining behind to experience or know...for the time being.

You stop to point at the moon in the sky,
but the finger's blind unless the moon is shining.

One moon, one careless finger pointing --
are these two things or one?

The question is a pointer guiding
a novice from ignorance thick as fog.

Look deeper. The mystery calls and calls:
No moon, no finger -- nothing there at all.
(--Poem by Ryokan, 1758 - 1831)

At first light, 4am, I'm reading the book Rosy left, The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers, by Amy Hollingsworth. At 5am I'm on my cushion in the zendo, the Phoebes arriving and departing in quick succession outside and over the window. Coffee and cereal with silence and solitude moved the morning through deluge with thunder and lightning. Now I sit in Merton Bookshed/Retreat as across Barnestown Road the sounds and balloons of a celebration fill the air while Gregorian Chant plays downstairs. In the interim I nap, mail book to Maine State Prison, and bail dinghy in Rockport Harbor.

I retreat. Sunlight glistening green leaves.

What do you think of death? I don't know what to think.

I know what Lydia thinks - she reads us Milne in our Friday poetry group:

THE END

When I was One,
I had just begun.

When I was Two,
I was nearly new.

When I was Three,
I was hardly Me.

When I was Four,
I was not much more.

When I was Five,
I was just alive.

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.
(Poem by A.A. Milne)

Soon double six with peanut butter and mountain walking sticks. Lapping water under gunnel edge; buoyancy uplifts!

So we go along one day at a time. One hour. One minute. One second. We go along as if there is no end. Who knows? Maybe we go along because there is an end.

COME OUT WITH ME

There's sun on the river and sun on the hill . . .
You can hear the sea if you stand quite still!
There's eight new puppies at Roundabout Farm-
And I saw an old sailor with only one arm!

But everyone says, "Run along!"
(Run along, run along!)
All of them say, "Run along! I'm busy as can be."
Every one says, "Run along,
There's a little darling!"
If I'm a little darling, why don't they run with me?

There's wind on the river and wind on the hill . . .
There's a dark dead water-wheel under the mill!
I saw a fly which had just been drowned-
And I know where a rabbit goes into the ground!

But everyone says, "Run along!"
(Run along, run along!)
All of them say, "Yes, dear," and never notice me.
Every one says, "Run along,
There's a little darling!"
If I'm a little darling, why won't they come and see?
(Poem by Alan Alexander Milne)

Craig ran along.

One day.

We'll come.

To see.

For now, it's immaterial.

In prison we talk about Tony's story about trying to remain human in the midst of aliens. Then Jon reads a paper about trying to remain sane in the midst of insanity. I like conversations. In another room staff talk about stress-reduction meditation programs for inmates. I'm invited as a volunteer to sit in. I'm not fond of meetings.

When I began to learn Vipassana meditation, I became convinced that Buddha was a not a founder of religion, he was a super-scientist. A spiritual super-scientist. When he teaches morality, the point is, of course, there that we are human beings, living in human society, and we should not do anything which would harm the society. It’s quite true. But then—and it’s as a scientist he’s talking here—he says that when you harm anybody, when you perform any unwholesome action, you are the first victim. You first harm yourself and then you harm others. As soon as a defilement arises in the mind, your nature is such that you feel miserable. That is what Vipassana teaches me.
-S.N. Goenka, "Superscience" (Tricycle, Winter 2000)

Instead of trying to siphon and collect the gushing oil to sell it, the company BP might actually now be trying to stop the gushing oil. Or is it the other way round? That's what someone said this morning. It added a perspective unthought before.

It's a long haul.

Truthfulness.

I'm surprised the anarchistic is not mentioned. No ruler. How can we go on without measure?

Organizations and institutions, clubs and cults, professional societies and political fraternities -- all these are outside anarchistic affections. This world is an uneasy one to negotiate. More to the point, it is non-negotiable.

Something eludes me. Stasis surrounds. I stare. I think I am losing interest. Solitude, today, is wordless engagement with silence. Like the pitcher who threw a perfect game, when the 1st base umpire made a universally undisputed (even by his own admission) wrong call on the 27th out, thus voiding the perfect game into one with an umpire's error, the game must be taken as a whole, for some an injustice, for others an absurdity, but in the end, a meaningless distraction, unlike the 19 year old American/Turkish citizen Furkan Dogan shot five times, twice in head, who along with 8 other Turkish members of the flotilla attacked by Israel, was killed while escorting supplies for blockaded Gaza, which is a matter for our attention, which is something to stare at. Or through.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward into ever-widening thought and action -
Into that heaven of freedom, let us awake.
(--by Bengali poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore)

There is nothing on this misty damp day that should be said about our sleep. We must only acknowledge we are asleep, which acknowledgment only can be made once we awaken and realize we've been asleep. Further compounded by the belief on the part of the sleepers that they are functioning exactly as they should. Call 'em as you see 'em. Protect the small nation from enemies. Amass wealth while the getting is good. Damn the complainers and open the oily spigot.

Becket tells Henry in the final act of a favorite play:

I felt for the first time that I was entrusted with something, that's all — there in that empty cathedral somewhere in France, that day when you ordered me to take up this burden. I was a man without honor. And suddenly I found it — one I never imagined would ever become mine — the honor of God. A frail incomprehensible honor, vulnerable as a boy-King fleeing from danger.
(--from final act of play, Becket, or The Honor of God, by Jean Anouilh, 1959)

The honor of God is not absurd. I am absurd. Out of tune. Deaf. Irrational. Dull. I wear these attributes with no ambition to escape them.

To be in tune. Hearing. Reasonable. Alert. These qualities would be gift. Gifts generously extended with no conditions.

I stare.

Through.

A window.

Let's be sure what the so-called spiritual life is about. It is about simplicity, humility, and kindness.

Do not remain in the dualistic state;

Avoid such pursuits carefully.

If there is even a trace

Of this and that, right and wrong,

The Mind-essence will be lost in confusion.

Although all dualities come from the One,

Do not be attached even to this One.

When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way,

Nothing in the world can offend,

And when a thing can no longer offend,

It ceases to exist in the old way.

-- Seng Ts'an (d.606)

It is not control. Not reaching for something elsewhere. Nor is it adherence to some ideological or religious point of view.

It is each to be at home. That is hospitality. Allowing someone to think and feel as they do.
The spiritual so-called life is about forgetting forgetting and remembering to remember.

Whatever happens, if seen again with love, is how memory presages future with whole sight now.

Simplicity's so great that should God lack her might

He would be neither God, nor Wisdom, nor the Light.

( -- Angelus Silesius)

The hardest thing about the spiritual life is allowing what is emerging to do so with alert intelligent attentive presence.

Nothing else has ever been so attractive.

Watch Jim Sheridan's film "Brothers." They say it is about family not war.

It is about war.

After rain, flowers bloom in the night
And refresh the dawn window
With their clear fragrance.
The flowers smile at people,
As if with minds of their own,
But the monks in the Zendo
Waste the spring.
- Pyungyang Ungee (1581-1644)

The line, "Only the dead have seen the end of war," is heartbreaking.

We have the first TOD (talk of death) Pilot to Practice tonight.

“The law is for the wicked; if no commandment were written, the godly would yet love God and their neighbor.” — On the higher level of cognition the innocence of nature is thus given back to man. He accomplishes the tasks which are set for him with the awareness of an eternal necessity. He says to himself, Through this iron necessity is given into your hand to withdraw that part which is assigned to you from this same eternal necessity. “O Men, learn from the flower of the field how you can please God and be beautiful at the same time.” — “The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms; it pays no attention to itself, nor asks whether one sees it.” — When man arises to the higher level he feels in himself the eternal and necessary impulse of the universe, just as the flower of the field; he acts as the flower blooms. In all his actions the awareness of his moral responsibility grows into the immeasurable. For what he does not do is withdrawn from the All, is a killing of this All, insofar as the possibility of such a killing lies with him. “What is it not to sin? Do not ask much; go, the silent flowers will tell you.” — “Everything must be slain. If you do not slay yourself for God, eternal death shall at last slay you for the Enemy.”
(--from, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, Giordano Bruno and Angelus Silesius, by Rudolf Steiner)

Life without 'why' would be something to behold.

As would time without war.

Could we allow that?

I would.

You?

It is Memorial Day.

We remember, pray for, and honor all dead and deadened by war.

Vinnie died in Vietnam
there's nothing more to say --
He wrote me a few times from over there
That all stopped one December day. (-wfh)

Some in graves in the ground. Some at sea. Some in unmarked unknown places

Some who've gone and returned from war... changed.
Some who've never gone to war but who have sent others to fight for reasons never quite comprehended. (These are the most difficult to include, they don't even know what death they've wrought or how they've deadened themselves.)

Today we have to see things differently.

(Art by Clarity)

Let's walk among all of them -- the dead and deadened -- holding hands and singing life. Life for them. Life for those they've killed. Life for those whose lives they've saved.

We walk together.

And we walk alone, together.

In recollection and collation.

Saluting the fallen.