Buckled naming itself; plus a snoozing pup

After a full day shoveling dirt, carrying beams, losing strength to hot sun, helping to construct platform for yurt donated to us, I go to first evening visiting as patient visitor at local hospital.

Ten rooms. Ten patients, conversations on ten topics. Such a lovely beginning. Great way to spend Saturday night.

If tired had legs they would be buckled by its own name.

Nothing's gonna change; my world

Christ, the Cistercian writer wrote, is peace.

At conversation tonight someone said Christ brought eternity into time.

It will come that "now" will extend to and encompass everything.

Peace is eternity now. Christ is eternal now. This is all we can hope for.

Now here this!

Being here, for this

Young bird on doorstep of chapel/zendo, eyes not opened, hole in neck from talon of predator, dropped in flight from deadly predation. We have no cat. No need, just now, for ambiguous feelings. Just this surprise and sorrow for the coming and going of living beings. And why, even, these feelings? Because they are, and I am, and impermanence in this form, while understandable, bears weight of ambiguity.

The trees and leaves are dusky still as I move the bird to a quiet spot by standing trees near mossy stones.

The images of peace hearts taken just before discovering the fallen bird ask new questions after the discovery. The template of peace does not exclude, as yet, death. Will it, can it, should it some day render death obsolete? How would such a prospect present itself to our minds? Without opposition would peace reconcile comings and goings into a seamless flow of a creating energetic wholeness?

Sitting in fading light of diminishing breath of expiring bird I hear a lonely call from canopy of motherhood through realization of loss.

I have been here for this.

All will be

It is easy to remind someone needing reminding that all is well because...it is, as each is, well, with our love.

May Lugh be with you...in light!

What are you for now

I'll probably have to define terms. Someone will ask what I mean by the words. It will take time to assure no offense meant, no harm intended.

Just the following: most everything is both simple and stupid.

Simple is as simple does what it does as it does it.

Stupid doesn't know what or why.

It used to worry me that I was these things -- simple and stupid.

Now I do not worry being this.

Being this is fine with me.

Find me doing what I am doing.

Leave me not knowing what nor why.

Simply and stupidly I am here!

For now.

That which radiates through is of god

Some say angels. Some say demons. I say Klondike ice cream watching British crime drama. Tangled webs.

Rowing with Saskia around Curtis Island moon nearing full sunset colors over mount Megunticook tide coming in from bay.

July wanes.

Oars pivot and pull.

I feel further and further into simple love of place. No drama, no apprehension. Place itself.

Like monastery to monk, sea to seaman, mystery to mystic.

If you look, really look into your life, you see through appearance and gaze as one in love with what is seen.

Ad maioram dei gloriam!

Don't speak my name; show me...your face

If we want a better world we're going to have to learn how to speak, pronounce words, enliven them, embody them. Or, maybe, just keep silence.

What do you say?

He eventually argues that it is the prime business of philosophy to make new words -- this is how it changes our world. (p.3, in Introduction, Heidegger, by John Richardson, c.2012)  

                                           

Richardson later writes:

In "Origin"[The Origin of the Artwork, 1935-36] Heidegger gives one of his rare examples in a famous account of a Greek temple:

The temple-work first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline win for the human essence the shape of his destiny. ...The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to humans their outlook on themselves. [OA (W 20-21)]     (--pp.294-95, Richardson) 

 This might be why silence is so valuable.

What is created by non-pronounciation of any words at all?

Here, listen to this...

Itinerary

Charlie P. dies in Maine State Prison. In there for a heinous crime, he was in his thirty third year as inmate. His name is taken off the Corrections website. He's done his time. I liked Charlie.

A doctor we know is in the hospital waiting on word about a growth blockage in process of diagnosis. He is dear to us.

We light a candle in chapel/zendo for both these men.

As medicine protects from the torments of poison, so Nirvana eases the torments of poisonous passions. Moreover, as medicine puts an end to sickness, so Nirvana puts an end to all sufferings. Finally Nirvana and medicine both give security.
-- Nagasena

Today is Saturday.

Tomorrow morning, Sunday.

Day by day we praise each and every one of you!

Water in boat, outside boat; strake life on it

Bailing boat, high tide head of harbor, calm waters.

Until time to go, no place to go, going anyway.

Each has curious distinction of being Schrodinger's cat, simultaneously alive and dead before peering within.

Look in, either way, truth be known.

Say it again; but, try not to use words

I am going home. Dvorak's New World Symphony musical refrain echoes sweetly. But not in the interpretation traditionally understood. At least not in tonight's conversation.

It is not that home is some other place. Nor are we 'going' there, as if there meant not here. Gerund or gerundive might help.

'Going home' is a singular notion. I am going home means I am the very activity and movement of what is called 'going home.'

I am here going home -- meaning the very nature of my being is the movement and activity of 'going home.'

Not 'to' some place, but as that ontological passing-through everything way of being that has as its nature the journey of factical 'going-home.' How I stand in regard to things is a passing-throughness that is a going-home -- meaning that in my passing through is my ephemeral and moveable becoming what I am -- which is a going-home.

Which is what I am.

Going-home.

Not before; not after. Undivided itself.

Follow.

No.

One.

Only truth serves and saves

Make no mistake, poetry is the great teacher.

Brushing the leaves, fell
A white camellia blossom
Into the dark well.
(--poem by Basho, 1644-1694)

Poetry, like life, as the zen master said, is one continuous mistake.

If you don't know where to turn, don't

No more. Never the less. I think collapse and revolution are inevitable.

What will become of us?

On the other hand -- a good night's sleep is a good place to start.

You are well; come

Sunday is rest.

The rest of the day is contemplative sitting, reading, rearranging chapel/zendo.

                Some call it resting in God.

Some ... just rest.

God is that place where everything not God finds rest, and everything God receives whatever arrives in inquiry, pilgrimage, or devastating empty desolation.


Today, for me, there is no problem with any route to this place.

Bienvenue!

Reading Patch Scratching

Because it's time.

To listening

I tire of opinions. Mine and yours. No more of them.

Let's not say anything.

Let sound speak itself.

You think you are going somewhere?

Who you are remains even after you leave.

So, who are you?

That...remains to be seen.

Taking no for an answer now

What is the distance between heaven and earth?
None.
Who made us?
No one.
Where are you from?
I am from now on.

is; not interfered; with

I read about Colonel Robert Rheault, "The Fall of a 'Lost Soldier'," in the November 14, 1969 issue of LIFE Magazine. (It cost .40 cents then.) I order A Murder in Wartime: The Untold Spy Story that Changed the Course of the Vietnam War, by Jeff Stein (1993). The "Green Beret Murder Case" wherein Thai Khac Chuyen, a suspected North Viet double agent was killed by American Special Forces, is now looked upon as an odd event likely credited to ending the career of Rheault, the leaking of the Pentagon papers, the Watergate break-in, and the fall of Richard M. Nixon, among other things such as the figure of Kurtz (partially modeled on Rheault?) in the film Apocalypse Now. 

Bob Rheault has introduced the last three Memorial Day concerts at the Camden Opera House. His words are always clear, riveting, and apropos.

“Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory: (1) He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. (2) He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. (3) He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit through all its ranks. (4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared. (5) He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.”   (--Sun Tzu)

 We didn't "win" in Viet Nam. For more reasons than imaginable. The same can be said for Iraq. The same for Afghanistan. I have no insight. Just this: It is past time tactics to kill and maim to get what we want.

Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself. --Karl Marx, in Zur Judenfrage,  used as epigraph to John Fowles novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman)

Everyone I know who was in Vietnam is suffering from PTSD and is being financially reimbursed upon that diagnosis. We, the civilians of a different bellicosity, are still paying for that war. As are families of the fallen, the men and women visiting or inpatient at Veteran's Hospitals country-wide, and the silent in-ground, their experience and thoughts muffled in the fog time lays down.

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.  --John Fowles (in The French Lieutenant's Woman)

 I order two books: Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, by Rachel Maddow; and, Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy, by Chris Hayes. If I could only learn to read, these purchases would have more meaning.

So too, if I could learn to read the facticity of history I might reside more equanimously with those I know. It would be a place, though not understandable, where at least it might be more easeful and gracious.

Prayer, yes...that which seems absurd...might be the medicine. Prayer as humble curiosity into what is here. Prayer as a silence weaving through the noisy antagonism of clattering and clashing voices. Prayer as unfocused listening to the multivalent sound of things falling to ground.

I liked hearing Bob Rheault on Memorial Day. He brought with him a presence that could be taken as an undisclosed petition for peace surrounded by a chorus of soulful choral supplication.

For allowing freedom!

When you hear of it, everything is predicate

Chocolate ice cream, chocolate cookie.

Hot day from Milo to Orono to Bangor.

A prayer for a man who died inside depression.