Thunderstorms roll between mountains. We cover Jootje, Anna's double ender, on wood garden timbers in front of Merton bookshed/retreat on shore for scraping, panting, and pine tar/linseed oiling.

Seeing into Nothingness
This is the true seeing,
The eternal seeing
- Shen-hui (8th cent)

The world as we know it is the result of the minds of men who've fashioned it in their ideas and preferences. This same world can be refashioned in a clearer, kinder image with a little more awareness and self-emptying.

Let's consider that God, or that which we call God, is still unborn in this world. Yes, in the Christian metaphor, Jesus realized God-nature and embodied what is called Christ-consciousness. But what if his realization was only the inaugural of the potential of the process of allowing To Be that which we long for, namely, the Source, Oneness, Interconnectedness, & Stillness (SOIS) of each to each, all to all, now and forever?

SOIS, in French, is the present subjunctive of the verb Etre, to be. We suggest, require, and request that which is to be God in our midst.

Use the present subjunctive in statements that express a suggestion, requirement, or request.
-- LB Brief by Jane E. Aaron (Longman: 2002); The Brief Holt Handbook (3rd ed.) by Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell (Harcourt: 2001).

There is, it is said, no time with God. God, soi-disant, is not the egoic creation of man. God, soi-meme en-soi, is oneself Itself.

To be oneself itself is the longing, I submit, of every being in existence.

One hears the words: "Although I'm old, I feel young"; (French: Bien que je sois vieux, je me sens jeune.)

In effect, although we are neither young or old, we call ourselves these things in this manner because it is the way of this world to cast everything in quantitative distinction.

We love to think about God. We would like God to come to be the way of the world, namely, source, oneness, interconnected, & still.

There are two deserts -- that of God and that of man. This is where we wander. Is this all we are to hope for? Is there something else we might see?

AIR

Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.

This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.

I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.

Young as I am, old as I am,

I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.

This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.

(Poem by W. S. Merwin )

Let our singing be the chant of creation.

Just this!

Pay attention!

When I close my eyes, sleep comes easily.

Oneself as others.

What I call perfection of seeing
Is not seeing others
But oneself
- Chuang-tzu (3rd cent BC)

Because there is no others.

Only oneself.

Just.

As is.

Said.

Once I thought I was part of the whole.

Says the Tao Te Ching: “Once the Whole is divided, the parts need names.”

What can Man’s consciousness “say” about the Whole before putting names to it? Is the Whole a formal concept or has it a reality of its own? Even if it were a mere formal concept, its (conceptual) formality would equally belong to the Whole.

Having realized that consciousness of the Whole is both consciousness of the Whole (not of its parts) and the Whole’s consciousness (for there is nothing “outside” the Whole), consciousness is directed toward itself, that is, to introspection, interiority -- as Lao Tzu, the Upanishads, Aristotle, Augustine, and so many others remind us. They do not mean intimacy and solipsism, as it is sometimes interpreted. On the contrary, they mean the attempt to overcome the distraction of the parts to get in touch with the Whole.

In vedic parlance, the Whole is brahman, and the questioner in the Self, atman. Unless and until we have discarded ahamkara , egoism, we cannot even begin to philosophize. Philosophy is not hunting for entities and their links or causes in the critically polished field of consciousness. Philosophy is the opening of our purified conscious being to the self-disclosure of reality -- and this finds an obstacle in our ego. Without mumuksutva (ardent aspiration for liberating truth) philosophy is not possible. The culmination of this process is when the atman realizes atman-brahman.
Says Bhartrhari: “The attainment of Brahman is nothing more than loosing the knot [granthi] of the ego-sense in the form of ‘me’ and ‘mine.’”
(-pp.26-27 in The Rhythm of Being, The Gifford Lectures, by Raimon Panikkar)

Now I suspect I am the whole in individual form.

Which, of course, is emptiness.

Letting it go.

Moving on.

"Blessed To Be A Witness"

Corcovado parted the sky
And through the darkness
On us he shined
Crucified in stone
Still his blood is my own
Glory behold all my eyes have seen
Have seen

I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed to be a witness

Some have flown away
And can't be with us here today
Like the hills of my home
Some have crumbled and now are gone
Gather around for today won't come again
Won't come again

I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed to be a witness

So much sorrow and pain
Still I will not live in vain
Like good questions never asked
Is wisdom wasted on the past
Only by the grace of God go I
Go I

I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed to be a witness

I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed to be a witness

(Lyrics by BEN HARPER)

The line was meant to get a laugh. It went: “What you see is what you get.”

Don’t be afraid to look.

Two friends in prison study friendship with two friends not in prison.

Till now you seriously considered yourself to be the body and to have a form. That is the primal ignorance which is the root cause of all trouble.
- Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)

The laughter you hear is the direct result of looking at what disagreements arise with Derrida, Montaigne, Aristotle, Kant, and Cicero.

Don't get me wrong, we like what they have to say -- that's why the argument.

Its a thing we have about keeping them ads honest as we'd like to be telling the truth of what we try to understand.

About.

And with.

One another.

When we are through, will we turn out the lights?

Following the talk, Adyashanti answered questions from the audience. A woman sitting near us, whose hands had fidgeted in her lap through most of the evening, took the microphone and said she was feeling a tremendous sadness because she feared that she’d never have an awakening experience. Adyashanti asked what her deepest spiritual yearning was. The woman answered, “I want to know God.”
Adyashanti asked the woman, whose name was Nancy, momentarily to stop her search for God and go in search of Nancy instead. “Where is Nancy?” he asked. “What is Nancy? If I ask you where is your hand, where is your foot, you can answer. But if I ask where is Nancy, where is she? She pretends to be the center of this whole life, but where is she? Is this Nancy anything more than a thought?”
“No,” she said.
Adyashanti described the tendency of the human mind to believe in a limited notion of “me,” a separate self at the core of our being. But when we go in search of that “me,” we discover something deeper and more vast. “What is looking through your eyes right now?” he asked the woman.
After a pause she answered, “It feels like life.”
“OK,” he said. “Let’s go with that. It’s life peering through your eyes. So what is life? Is life male or female? When is life’s birthday? Does it have an age?”
“No,” she responded.
“So, at the very center of this thing called ‘you’ is nothing but life,” he said. “It’s not Nancy; it’s life that’s peering through. Now, just for fun, let’s remove the word life. I like the word life. It’s very unspiritual. But since you’re in search of God, what if we replace the word life with God? Isn’t God life, the essence of all existence?”
“Yes,” the woman answered.
“God is peering through right now,” said Adyashanti. “In this moment.”
The woman seemed profoundly moved. “Whoa,” she said, her eyes widening.
“Hang with that for a while,” Adyashanti told her as she quietly took her seat and the next questioner approached the microphone. I noticed that Nancy’s hands had stopped fidgeting and were folded together peacefully in her lap.
— Luc Saunders--in Who Hears This Sound? On Waking Up From The Dream Of “Me” by LUC SAUNDERS and SY SAFRANSKY
http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/384/who_hears_this_sound

Perhaps when through, there is no need for lights either on or off.

Standing or sitting, they say, just do either -- only, without wobbling.

Through matter, spirit.

Through body, soul.

Through Jesus, Christ.

Through small self, cosmic consciousness.

Spirituality means awareness beyond the limits of self.

The body does not know how to discourse or to listen to a discourse. This which is unmistakably perceivable right where you are, absolutely identifiable yet without form, this is what listens to the discourse. - Rinzai (d.867)

That, and the Dallas Mavericks defeat Miami Heat.

A good feast day.

A satisfying conclusion.

Gone beyond.

No limit

Read articles, watch dvd again with and without commentary, remain puzzled about what happened and why the leadership of government and military decided to so baldly and badly represent themselves.

It is, as Pat Tillman would say, disappointing.

When you are free and independent, you are not bound by anything, so you do not seek liberation. Consummating the process of Zen, you become unified. Then there are no mundane things outside of Buddhism, and there is no Buddhism outside of mundane things.
- Yuanwu

Given the most benign benefit of the doubt, lies were the main ingredient. A more sinister doubt still has to be deliberated.

They never counted on his brother Kevin discovering that there was an initial investigation that vanished. They never counted on a mother and father who were strong enough to demand the truth about what had happened, and determined enough to rescue the real person that was Pat Tillman from the spin machine into which the Pentagon tried to feed his body.

Pat himself, after seeing the Iraq war firsthand and declaring it to be “so fucking illegal,” quipped to his fellow soldiers that the military seemed to be so inept that it couldn’t even construct a credible lie. How prescient was that?

Kauzlarich, like Boykin and all their ilk, has the spiritual depth of his own skin, which is what he is trying to save … whether in an exchange of faith for immortality or in deflecting the sorry truth onto a bereaved and angered family with cheap revival-tent accusations of “atheism.”

Mary Tillman, Pat’s mother, showed me a page from Pat’s journal when he was 16 years old. It was Pat’s reflection on why he had decided, once and for all, that he didn’t need organized religion. The entry was motivated by Pat’s grief at the death of an old family cat. Pat wasn’t comfortable with the idea that one could love another creature that was being excluded from the bargain in the afterlife. He and his brothers grew up between a river and the mountains, where they roamed countless miles and delighted in the ceaseless interplay of geography, climate, flora and fauna. In his journal entry, Pat speculated about this singular universality, and made up his mind that one didn’t need some anti-material monarchy buzzing with angels to accommodate himself to mortality.

Pat never felt separate enough from the world to despise the worms. And so Kauzlarich’s expression of fear and loathing for the world would have amused Pat.

Pat’s ashes are adrift from where they were scattered along the Pacific Ocean, mixing back into the elements with which he was so at home; while Ralph Kauzlarich and the Pentagon fret about a five-foot-two-inch mother who refuses to make them an offering of her fear. Surely Pat Tillman is laughing.
(--Playing the Atheism Card Against Pat Tillman’s Family, 7/28/2006, Truthdig, by Stan Goff)

At morning practice we listened after sitting and chanting to Adyashanti interview about identity and the illusions we cultivate around identity.

We shoot ourselves in the head, or are shot in the head by nameless others for reasons difficult to fathom, when we identify ourselves too closely with what we are not.

We are not the saviors of the world, much less the Middle East, or northern Africa, nor are we the drug policemen of any country, certainly not our own.

Something awkwardly delusional has infected our moral stability, and we lurch violently left and right smashing precious things -- like justice, decency, respect, truthfulness, and a primordial fairness that has been exchanged for power and fear.

Let’s change that!

Please?

Watched film The Tillman Story. Sad the death of one man. Sadder the death of trust that truth be told.

This matter (Zen) is like a great mass of fire: when you approach it your face is sure to be scorched. It is again like a sword about to be drawn; when it is once out of the scabbard, someone is sure to lose his life. The precious vajra sword is right here and its purpose is to cut off the head.
- Tai-hui (1089-1163)

The only thing that forestalls desolate cynicism is that someone knows the truth, even if hidden and distorted, someone knows what happened.

Knows the truth of a particular situation.

This belief, we might call it, is a sustaining hope during a time when belief and hope are desperate commodities to find.

Two thoughts: If we carry trust within us we'll be able to find it when needed; And we cannot misplace trust unless we put it somewhere we are not.

Trust is an inner reality. It is who we are when we are there where it is.

We must stay well within ourselves.

That's where, in silent presence, truth be told, word and act create new worlds.

There is a difference between believing in God and believing in God's way.

As soon as you sense any lingering or obstruction,
all of it is false imagining.
Just make your mind clean and free,
like space, like a mirror, like the sun in the sky.
- Yuanwu

God's way is clear like mirror, free like space.

This helps as we move through something.

Making God's way home.

Avidya, ignorance, runs deep.

Deeper still, beyond form, is emptiness. And yet, emptiness is form. It's not a matter of choice. It's a matter of weathering the ride through both.

It is all pervading, spotless beauty;
It is the self-existence and uncreated
Absolute
Then how can it even be a matter
Of discussion that the real Buddha
Has no mouth and preaches no dharma,
Or that real hearing requires no ears,
For who could hear it?
Ah, it is a jewel beyond all price.
- Huang-po (d. 850)

In the dream the book was a series of green paper bags inside each other. One had a glass dish with crumbs on it. This, I suspected, was a new concept in reading -- the reading of things engaged by the reader's so-called writing of the text in situ.

The book, it might be said, is in the bag.

Wisdom crumbs.

The harbor seal broke surface close to rowing boat.

When no thoughts have arisen and nothing at all is on your mind, you merge with the boundless and become wholly empty and still. Then your actions are not interrupted by doubt and hesitation.
- Yuanwu

Bell buoy to bell buoy.

These long quiet mornings just after sunrise stroke by stroke on Penobscot Bay with what is there.

With us.

Sometimes, in the silence, absent intent or will, there is merely now, with nothing else to distract.

To consider this, one allows stillness.

"The future is unchangeable, then?"
"We have a saying," she told me. "'We don't change the future; we choose the future.'"
(-p.102, in Neverness, a novel by David Zindell, c.1985)

No choice, then, no future?

What will the zen mind think of next?

One instant is eternity;
When you see through this one instant,
You see through the one who sees.
- Wu-men (1183-1260)

Help see me through this: If you see through the one, who sees?

“And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it's seems
It would be easier sometimes to change the past”
--Jackson Browne

No change for the choiceless.

Do you mind?

Return here. That's cushion talk at morning sitting.

When we are not present it's not only our absence, rather we have absconded here itself.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
(--from poem LITTLE GIDDING (No. 4 of 'Four Quartets') by T.S. Eliot)

It's the same with alcohol. Man takes drink; drink takes drink; drink takes man.

It's not addiction to alcohol, primarily, it is theft of here.

Here is gone when human presence is missing. No one here.

So, sit on cushion, return here.

Save the world. Start here. Stay here.

At steamboat landing I drink Irish tea while tossing sticks into salt water for Rokpa. We walk boatyard where shrink-wrap is folded into sheds and slanting boatstands lean against each other after a long winter holding up boats on the hard.

It is that nether time between the official beginning of the season marked by Memorial Day and the veritable start with calendar summer and the 4th of July when visitors buy new sneakers and shorts and take in the shops. I bail peapod.

St Augustine's homilies on St John's gospel
The two lives
There are two ways of life that God has commended to the Church. One is through faith, the other is through vision. One is in pilgrimage through a foreign land, the other is in our eternal home; one in labour, the other in repose; one in a journey to our homeland, the other in that land itself; one in action, the other in the fruits of contemplation.
The first life, the life of action, is personified by the Apostle Peter; the contemplative life, by John. The first life is passed here on earth until the end of time, when it reaches its completion; the second is not fulfilled until the end of the world, but in the world to come it lasts for ever. For this reason Peter is told “Follow me”, but Jesus adds, “If I want John to stay behind till I come, what does it matter to you? You are to follow me”.
You are to follow me by imitating me in the enduring suffering; he is to remain till I come to restore the blessings that last for ever. To put it more clearly: let action, which is complete in itself, follow me and follow the example of my passion; but let contemplation, which has only begun, remain until I come, wait until the moment of its completion.
It is the fulness of patience to follow Christ loyally even to death; the fulness of knowledge lies in wait until Christ comes again, when it will be revealed and made manifest. The ills of this world are endured in the land of the dying; the good gifts of God will be revealed in the land of the living.
We should not understand “I want him to stay behind until I come” as meaning to remain permanently but rather to wait: what is signified by John will not be fulfilled now, but it will be fulfilled, when Christ comes. On the other hand, what is signified by Peter, to whom Jesus says “follow me”, must be realised now or it will never be fulfilled.
But we should not separate these great apostles. They were both part of the present life symbolized by Peter and they were both part of the future life symbolized by John. Considered as symbols, Peter followed Christ and John remained; but in their living faith both endured the evils of the present life and both looked forward to the future blessings of the coming life of joy.
It is not they alone that do this but the whole of the holy Church, the bride of Christ, who needs to be rescued from the trials of the present and to be brought to safety in the joys of the future. Individually, Peter and John represent these two lives, the present and the future; but both journeyed in faith through this temporal life and both will enjoy the second life by vision, eternally.
All the faithful form an integral part of the body of Christ, and therefore, so that they may be steered through the perilous seas of this present life, Peter, first among the Apostles, has received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, to bind and loose from sin. And also for the sake of the faithful, so that they may keep the still and secret heart of his mode of life, John the evangelist rested on Christ’s breast.
It is not Peter alone who binds and looses sins, but the whole Church. It is not John alone who has drunk at the fountain of the Lord’s breast and pours forth what he had drunk in his teaching of the Word being God in the beginning, God with God, of the Trinity and Unity of God — of all those things which we shall see face to face in his kingdom but now, before the Lord comes, we see only in images and reflections — not John alone, for the Lord himself spreads John’s gospel throughout the world, giving everyone to drink as much as he is capable of absorbing.
(-- from Office of Readings, Saturday of the 6th week of Eastertime)

The serrated blocks of launch ramp took a pounding during one of the winter stormy seas and are akimbo. A single orange cone serves as shy semaphore to offloading trailers as tide recedes.

I thought I heard that contemplation should continue until the time of completion of temporary evil. But the word was 'temporal' as in that faith will help the journey through temporal life.

There is much I do not see. If faith helps navigate through things unseen with confidence that all is well and all manner of things are well -- then, I embrace this trusting faith.

I put unfitting scored storm window for screen on southwest 2nd floor window of Merton Retreat, also a screen on new window of new bathroom in Saskia's mom's room, also known as repaired front room.

At Saturday morning practice, with Buddhist emphasis, sitting, heart sutra, reading from Sekito's Sandokai with Suzuki Roshi's help, circle reflection, metta, then bell chant, then coffee and toast.

Tomorrow we return to full Sunday morning practice mirroring Saturday's -- but with a Christian emphasis. The Quakers complete their visitation at meetingbrook this cycle and resume their Sunday Meetings at Children's Chapel in Rockport at 9am.

The words -- contemplative, zen, practice, hermit, silence, solitude, listening, simplicity, correspondence, as it is, and conversation -- all sound right during this quiet time.

More than right, they feel they are exactly what they say they are.

Tom and Lee over four weeks led a study of the Sandokai, a poem written in Eight Century China by Zen Master Sekito Kisen Diaosho.

In prison today we read from Joan Chittister's The Monastery of the Heart: An Invitation to a Meaningful Life.

At nursing home we read Oliver, Simic, Hall, Milosz, Merwin and a number of personal poems.

Mind has no color,
Is neither long nor short,
Doesn't appear or disappear;
It is free from both purity and impurity;
It was never born and can never die;
It is utterly serene.
This is the form of our
Original mind,
Which is also our original body.
- Hui-hai (8th cent)

The men in Protective Custody were interested to hear we consider them part of our monastic community. We're only practicing what is true.

Madmen

They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with bread knives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,
you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The real vandals are the restorers,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white doctor's smocks
who close the wound in the landscape,
and thus ruin the true art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the front
of the bar and hover there
until the next customer walked in--
then I watched it fly out the open door into the night
and sail away, I could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to say
was that art was also short,
as a razor can teach with a slash or two,
that it only seems long compared to life,
but that night, I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
except the faint hope that I might
catch a glimpse of the thing
in the fan of my headlights,
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes
(--Poem by Billy Collins)

If we talk with each other, if we listen with each other, we begin to remember who and what we are.

It's that simple.

Really.

What if Ascension is leaving relying on self and ego and moving beyond to non-egoic non-self?

What does that mean?

You cannot describe it or draw it,
You cannot praise it enough or perceive it.
No place can be found in which
To put the Original Face;
It will not disappear even
When the universe is destroyed.
- Mumon (13th cent)

That face is the one you are before mother and father are born and long after the origin is no longer spoken of.

Breath is both inside and outside the body at the same time.

As is what we call God.

We are in the process of being what is creating what is to be God now and forever now.

Amen.

Jesus made the journey so that when we make the journey we'll each have one another to journey with.

Yes.

At end of evening sit, three bells.

Just still the thoughts in your mind. It is good to do this right in the midst of disturbance. When you are working on this, penetrate the heights and the depths.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

Morning listening to Vigils on ocean.

Salting wood planks back at dock.

We attend parade.

We row to Curtis Island. Then around it. We arrive late for afternoon concert at Camden Opera House.

The retired army colonel introduced the civil war songs at the Down East Singers' concert saying it is about longing for the end of war, the pleas of warriors, the weariness and desolation. It's no wonder, he said, facing another dawn of terrible fighting, a prayer rises up.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:

"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,

Since God is marching on."

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:

Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,

He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,

So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Our God is marching on.

Warriors fight for the good of their country. They trust their leaders to point them in the right direction.

We are grateful for our warriors. For their sacrifice. But for their attendant sorrows, we grieve.

Vow to achieve the perfect
Understanding that the
Illusory body is like
Dew and lightning. - Hsu Yun (d.1959)

War devastates.

Warriors need protection and our gratitude as they do for us what we cannot.

May their leaders be wise!