Children at dusk on Curtis Island as I round from inner channel. A new generation to succeed the elder who slows and grows silent.

Evening meditation on passing.

Bye.

What does it mean exactly to say that we have a right to freedom? In his most explicit passage on the topic, Kant writes: “Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every human being by virtue of his humanity."
(--from, Kant on the Right to Freedom: A Defense, by Louis‐Philippe Hodgson, in Ethics 120 (July 2010): 791–819, University of Chicago)

We shingle part of remaining patch on bookshed. It will be covered soon.

It is autumn.

Leaves begin exodus.

Ground.

Free.

Everything disappears within the experience of life. God did. So does what I call "I."

When you are sitting in meditation, watch carefully to know when your consciousness starts to move. Consciousness is always moving and flowing. According to its coming and going, we must all be aware of it. Use the wisdom of a diamond to control and rule it, since just alike a plant there is nothing to know. To know there is nothing to know is the wisdom to know everything. This is the Dharma-gate of One Form of a Bodhisattva.
- Tao-shin (580-651)

Fog lifts. Full moon less one night shines through. I come to Merton Retreat to sleep. UPS does not arrive with oars.

There is only life. And everything disappears within it. Everything.

So too, memory disappears within soul.

Mind goes, body goes, and only life remains. Then it goes. Leaving only soul.

Where everything resides that once elsewhere did.

There's no map for this place.

You've arrived where you've never not been.

The four horses need to ride together side by side like a team attached to stage coach. Body, spirit, emotions, mind. The Pale, white, black, and red assemble in creative strokes of nameless artist.

All external conditions have no immutable forms of their own. Right and wrong, becoming and disbecoming are all only from the mind. If one is able to attain no-mind, he will not be hindered by dharmas. If one's mind does not mind anything, who will distinguish right from wrong? If rights and wrongs are all negated, all forms of things will be peaceful forever. Because dharmas and the ten thousand delusions are all like the Principle of Suchness.
- Tun-huang manuscript 2

I have considered the way of war. I reject it. And all its ugliness. And all its false promises.

I cry for those dead in war. I lament the lies and fools sending them to their deaths.

But today is autumn. Overnight, leaves turn colors. Suddenly, a chill wind blows under full moon.

Ask questions.

Become a skeptic without judging.

See things.

As they are.

The seal, the island, the zazen seiza in peapod coming back to inner harbor.

Brewing Tea

Green clouds spiral and twine,
Are drawn into the wind in a long stream;
On my cup's surface the faces of
White foam flowers are cool;
The mountain moon comes into my window;
Plum tree shadows move;
Pouring again and again into my unglazed cup
I sip the lingering fragrance.
- Betsugen Enshi (1295-1364)

I cannot separate mind and body.

I will let death pretend to do that.

Until then, mind is body, body is mind.

The whole earth is eucharistic.

The whole day is shunyata.

I bow and gassho to you.

And you.

In Genesis the repetitive phrase: "Let there be...".

It is spoken, we are to assume, by "Here." By Presence Itself.

Project your meditational concentration into everything that you think or do and make everything subject to meditational concentration.
- Shosan (1579-1655)

"There" comes to be by means of "Here" withdrawing itself for the sake of what is to be there.

Here is there with emptied self.

This "t" is how we come to be.

We are crucified into here in order to be there.

Dasein, the German word for there-being. For man.

Follow your heart there to embody here.

.......

Pachamama gathering tonight.

This is my haiku for 100 years hence:

2010-2110

We do what is right

and reverent, not waste and junk --

Thus we are happy

There is no other place to be.

There's only 5 billion years, give or take a billion, left in the sun. When it goes, earth goes. Our progeny will be far away across the expanse of what we call space by then. I probably won't be around. You?

It puts things in perspective.

Zen is to make one believe, practice, and realize the principle of without thought, without cultivation. What matters is the direct pointing to the true nature of your mind. Therefore, in the five divisions of the teachings there is also, besides the scriptural teachings, mind-to-mind transmission. Worshipping Buddha statues is nothing more than resorting to an expedient for those who do not understand true nature. However many scriptures you have finished reading over the many years, I think you will not understand through them the way of mind-to-mind transmission.
- Toui (d.825)

I drift around the universe of mind.

I drink water and eat chocolate Vienna ice cream on Dutch apple pie. The evening passes after spaghetti with sausage.

Maybe it's advancing age. But, everything seems without border or boundary. Like a Japanese saying there's no barrier between one thing and another one thing.

We walk Ragged Mtn and see the sun climb Bald Mtn while it simultaneously descends the far side of Ragged out of view.

There's really no place to go.

We're here.

For now.

Soon we won't.

Summer's lease is soon up. It will move out into stories. It's stay this year was as full of loveliness as was spring's. Maine was blessed.

Two musicians visited yesterday and left two albums of theirs. Last evening, rowing around island at dusk, a harbor seal accompanied me. I felt accompanied.

Can this matter of Zen be understood or not?
If you say that it can be explained and understood,
Then you are attaching to words and concepts
And miss the basic fact.
On the other hand, if you say
It cannot be understood,
Then how can the Zen Dharma be taught to all beings?
What can you do?
Look clearly!
A crow's head is black
A crane's head is white.
- Ma-tsu (709-788)

At Sunday Evening Practice, reading from Ibn al Arabi (1165-1240), we consider the experience of God to be the experience of our conversation at table. Incomprehensible; still, occurring.

There is no substitute for this experience.

I'm going there.

You come to.

Hear this!

No vows. No promises. No oaths.

Rather, remaining in the one we are within.

Be that without wording something other.

Whether meditating or in times of turmoil, the true is his basis. Vast and clear is his wondrous wisdom. His words are silent and his actions untrammeled. In emptiness he does not lose illumination. (-- Ch'ing-liao, 1088-1151)

Changing mind.

Listen; hear.

Gazing; see.

Be-coming; free.

Zen points to what is here.

It is Yom Kippur.

Now. Here. This.

Perhaps God is the experience of life.

Many do not believe in God.

They prefer the allure of death over life.

The morning glory
Seems transient enough, but
More transient is the
Dew that falls from its petals
Shattered and scattered.
- Japanese Folk Zen saying

No need to believe in God.

Live life.

Life is the experience of God.

Life is love when it is seen as what it is.

The experience of life believes in you and me.

It offers itself to us with every breath, with every encounter, with every 'practical contact with and observation of facts or events' -- that is, with every experience.

Trust your experience.

Trust your life.

Trust your experience of life.

Enlighten God!

Walking carriage path above Eagle Lake with white Border Collie.

Listening to Entitled Opinions podcast on Martin Heidegger.

Greeting each passing person.

Even profound concepts are ultimately empty: the Ultimate Path is wordless, and if we speak, we go astray from it. Though we may characterize the fundamental basis as "empty by nature," there is no "fundamental basis" that can be labeled. Emptiness itself is wordless: it is not a mental construct.
- Records of the Lanka

There is no place else I want to be.

Ever.

Sure, things fall apart.

There's no self and no person,
How then kinfolk and stranger!
I beg you, cease going from lecture to lecture;
It's better to seek truth directly.
The nature of Diamond Wisdom
Excludes even a speck of dust.
From "Thus have I heard," to "This I believe,"
All's but an array of unreal names.
- Layman P'ang (740-808)

Let them.

It's how we go on.

It is time to wake.

"This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."
~ George Bernard Shaw

Awaken to the earth, God-self, our humanity.

It's time.

The only real intelligence is living in the present.

Moment.

All else never has been nor ever will.

This is why so few intelligent.

Beings.

Can be found.

As is.

Said.

Originally.

In this assembly, no one is absent and no one is ignorant. This is a gathering of the Buddha-mind that is given to us at birth. When you return home, be mindful of all your daily matters, just the way you are listening to the teachings now. Then you'll be just living with unborn Buddha-mind. Because of desire, we become stubborn, self-centered, and deluded. This way we move away from Buddha-mind, and become foolish. Originally, no one is deluded.
- Bankei

No one is.

Deluded. Only,

Delighted.

It is time.

Not to say.

Anything.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. ( -- #7, in TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, c.1922)

Morning sounds.

Silences, our desire for them and our desire to fill them, emerge as one of Dunn's motifs in this book. Sometimes the silences are unwanted and elusive, as in "Turning to the Page":

I learned there's nothing more shaming
or as memorable as an intimacy
unreturned. And turned, therefore,
to the expected silence of the page

Dunn's pages are sometimes quiet, but never silent. He concludes this same poem by writing that after turning to this "expected silence of the page," the page replies:

Bring to me, it said, continual proof
you've been alive.

Such discourse is the essence of the poems contained in this volume: whether the dialogue is between two lovers, the page and the poet, or the warring factions of one's own psyche, these are poems about the conversations and silences, the stories and transformations at the heart of poetry itself.

One final silence notable in its breeching here is Dunn's reticence to write poems about 9/11. Dunn's poem "To a Terrorist" from the 1988 book Between Angels was frequently reprinted in the aftermath of the attacks of that day, yet he himself reasoned that it was impossible for the conscientious poet to write a poem about those events without appropriate distance, chronological and psychological. In The Insistence of Beauty, Dunn finally breaks his silence on 9/11 with several poems, including the title poem which invokes in its closing lines the fortifying power of storytelling and poem-making:

When word came of a fireman
who hid in the rubble
so his dispirited search dog
could have someone to find, I repeated it
to everyone I knew. I did this for myself,
not for community or beauty's sake,
yet soon it had a rhythm and a frame.

This is what we have after everything else, the poet says. A rhythm and a frame. Dunn knows of the passions such rhythms and frames can ignite and inspire, writing in "in the Land of the Salamander,"

When we returned to shore, you allowed me
to speak of barracudas and bananafish, knowing
I loved words more than anything I might have seen.

The poems contained in The Insistence of Beauty are indeed about love: of words, of what is lost to the past, of what salvation a new love might bring us. Dunn's poems reveal a mind alive within its own inner-circlings, the transforming power of loss, the fictions that lead to the core of our truths, the possibility and reality of loving another again.

(-- from Stephen Dunn, The Insistence of Beauty, in Literary Review, Wntr, 2005 by R.G. Evans)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2078/is_2_48/ai_n8692130//

I remain silent.

In the transforming power of loss.

In the fictions.

In the possibility and reality of loving.

Good fireman!

Good Dog!

Silent



God

Don't call 9-11 a conspiracy. Call it mass murder.

Turn around the light to shine within,
Then just return.
The vast inconceivable source
Can't be faced or turned away from.
Meet the ancestral teachers,
Be familiar with their instruction,
Bind grasses to build a hut,
And don't give up.
- Shitou

Rather, Eid. Rather, Rosh Hashanah. These delight.

Rather, a terrible day of murder and destruction. This devastates.

We are humans.

We want to know what happened and who did what.

We don't give up inquiry.

We will one day know.

Murder asks to be unmasked.

If faith comes from hearing, it depends on what we choose to hear. Can we hear the movement of love beneath the shouting idiocy of hatred and bias?

Can we hear what another sees beyond the stubborn facts of division?

http://www.raimon-panikkar.org/english/videos.html

The movement of love is what is passing over and through every interaction. If we choose to feel it so.

Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage

I've built a grass hut
Where there's nothing of value
After eating, I relax and enjoy a nap.
When it was completed, fresh weeds appeared.
Now it's been lived in
Covered by weeds.
The person in the hut
Lives here calmly,
Not stuck to inside, outside,
Or in between.
Places worldly people live,
He doesn't live.
Realms worldly people love,
He doesn't love.
Though the hut is small,
It includes the entire world.
In ten square feet,
An old man illumines forms
And their nature.
- Shitou

Va bene.

Go well. Pass well.

Porous passage permeate.

Dialogue
is
wisdom
passing
through

Summer's end. Labor Day.

Cricket chants midday salute. Cars drive south to toll booth. Sails fold around masts of small boats on lakes and harbors. Breeze waves green leaves along Ragged Mountain.

As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck'd,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

O baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth,
Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I
have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and
bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single
object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart
upon me and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.

(--from poem, As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life, by Walt Whitman)
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/soundings/ocean.htm

When the man in his late 80s asked me if I was happy as I helped him into the passenger seat of his car, I said "Yes" without hesitation. There was no need to deliberate. I was happy to be asked.

In this world of dreams,
Dozing off still more;
And again speaking
And dreaming of dreams.
Just let it be.
- Ryokan

Last night at Harbor Park, just above high tide, sitting on rock by American Boathouse listening to Gorden Bok and the January Men (and Then Some) sing kindly seafaring songs, I glance about at schooners, children, faces of those attending, night sky with distant stars, and felt the fondness and generosity of all of it. Walking closer I stood beside Ed and Silvia as they took leave toward their "Fitzy" car up by street and we share a passing instant of simple greeting with each other.

I, too, leave just as fireworks begin in outer harbor. Their sound follows me. I leave their sight to others. I drive back to this valley content at having rowed so far in whitecap swell and wind this morning and having listened so near beside becalmed sea and sky this evening.

I do so love wharves and harbors, boatyards and oarlocks, the stillness and silence of solitude in community.

I am happy to be alone. I am shy about being with others, but I am happy to be so when I am.

Every other concern falls away. This behavior, that behavior, this attitude, that memory, this desire, that regret -- all these have little power when placed alongside the middle phrase of the statements above.

That phrase is "happy to be."

Which.

With great gratitude.

I am.

If we make distinctions, let them be distinctions without separation or assigned hierarchy.

Panikkar understands what pluralism means and what it can offer us -- in his language, he is attuned to the "myth" of pluralism -- without succumbing to it as another "ism." His working proposition is that for modem persons of any persuasion "isolation is no longer possible and unity is not convincing since it destroys one of the parties." The embrace of pluralism "implies that the human condition in its present reality should not be neglected, let alone despised in favor of an ideal (?) situation of human uniformity. On the contrary, it takes our factual situation as real and affirms that in the actual polarities of our human existence we find our real being." This is the problem, so much discussed today, of the other as other, taken here with great seriousness and made the central challenge to human growth, and indeed to human survival.

Each of us represents in his or her uniqueness an irreducible quantum of lived experience. In order to claim this experience fully, however, and to discover the presence of God in that experience, each of us requires the presence of others; to be in Christ through our own experience, each of us needs the other. That statement can sound like just another call to community until one realizes how fundamentally Panikkar means it. Why such a mutual being-present with one another is so necessary, how such a presence can be brought to pass, and what it might mean for a deeper commitment to Christian faith, are questions that have absorbed Panikkar for years. He is convinced that this kind of pluralism constitutes the kairos of our times, a special opportunity given by God. Pluralism is the sociological "blessing" of the late 20th century, a true providential novum in which old forces of domination are collapsing.
(--from Raimundo Panikkar: Pluralism Without Relativism, by Peter Gorday, originally published in The Christian Century, 1989.) http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=914

Do not let the sun go down on our popularity contests before we acknowledge the inauthenticity of self-congratulation.


Two facts are two facts. They are not only one fact. Nor shall we make one true and one false.

Being present and being good is also being exactly what one is even when two is what is there.

As a Catholic Buddhist, or, Buddhist Catholic I shall not try to answer any questions except for the one asking why the chicken crossed the road.

But I cannot answer while I am on the road.