All lose... what? Is, found

Driving home from visiting patients in hospital.




The day ebbs.








One woman sang me a song in her room.

Another, in intensive care, told me about her family.

Daylight at its edge.

That's odd

Some salute the flag. Honorably.

Some curse the day they were born.

Me, it's hard to explain.

I prefer odd moments.

Like...wood shavings on wet mulch at dusk.

A little distance from yourself

"Para" = side by side with. 'Beyond' also works.

"El" means "God" -- and so, the word "parallel."

What is your parallel existence?

Poustinia (пустынь) at meetingbrook

Janet. JoAnn. Mary.

A trinity of the 15th of August.

With gratitude for each.

Morning-Call Yurt is just about completed. Hang door in the morning.

Arms, shoulders, back -- exhausted.

Desert stillness.

Pardon me, but surely we have...

How many parallel lives are lived every day without our being aware we are living them?

Worldly people who do not understand me
Call me by my worldly name of Old Zhou.
You invite me to a seven-day religious feast,
But the feast of meditation knows no end.
- Huixu (431-499)

The 15th of August has long been heart notable. In a parallel world I am with a dear friend in the middle of nowhere.

And where is nowhere?

Just that place from which you have stepped from where you thought you were but have never been but in the dream of faint recollection as unexplainable wisps of familiarity brush by like fog on summer night.

Love, being whole, splits easily into many parts -- all of which contain complete and fleeting glimpse of what cannot be grasped.

Mountain to sea

      Work continues.

You ask where I live?

Issa wrote:

(tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara)

This dewdrop world,
is a dewdrop world,
and yet
(Kobayashi Issa, 小林 一茶?, June 15, 1763 - November 19, 1827)

The final words are my final dwelling: "and yet"

one plus two equals three

Origin, expression, convergence.

Contemplation, conversation, correspondence.

Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva.

It seems that what we have here is a failure to collate!

Collation and recollection into reconciliation.

At the hospital tonight the visits were
wonderful.

As all are...well.

Collectivity, complexity, convergence consciousness

In prison this morning Doris and I, waiting for Buddhist sitting to gather, talk of radial energy -- what we referred to as benevolent intention of presence, no matter who showed up, no matter who stayed.

Later, adjoining to the room where meetingbrook conversation was to take place,  Everett said to me that Tony had told him to stay in case I would be alone there -- a mission of pity for the volunteer if Tony noticed Doris to be alone in another room. Such kindness on their part! We laugh about it during the conversation attended, ultimately, by seven of us.

Tonight, at Friday Evening Conversation, Tom shows us the latest photo of a crop circle in England -- a Celtic knot, it seems, of 'no beginning/no end.' I mention radial energy, we look it up, and read the selection from The Cosmic Plenum: Teilhard's Radial Energy on the Stoa del Sol website:

"By death, in the animal, the radial is reabsorbed into the tangential, while in man it escapes and is liberated from it. It escapes from entropy by turning back to Omega: the *hominisation* of death itself... The universe is a collector and conservator, not of mechanical energy...but of persons. All round us, one by one, like a continual exhalation, 'souls' break away, carrying upwards their incommunicable load of consciousness. One by one, yet not in isolation. Since, for each of them, by the very nature of Omega, there can only be one possible point of definitive emersion--that point at which, under the
synthesizing action of personalizing union, the noosphere...will reach collectively its point of convergence--at the 'end of the world.' "
[Teilhard de Chardin, Phenomenon of Man, p. 272.] http://www.bizcharts.com/stoa_del_sol/plenum/plenum_2aa.html

Earlier, Saskia finishes her audits from July group. I have coffee with Ruth, my patient visitor compañera, at Highlands Cafe in Thomaston, our inaugeral tete-a-tete in this new venture.

At dust we walk the snow bowl with dogs aware how fortunate we are to share conversation, hospitality, nature, service, and time-itself together with our larger community.

"I would say there were a good many ways for a being to have a 'within.' A closed surface, irregular at first, may become *centered.*
A circle can augment its order of symmetry and become a sphere. Either by arrangement or the parts or by the acquisition of another dimension, the degree of 'interiority' of a cosmic element can undoubtedly vary to the point at which it rises suddenly on to another level. "
[Ibid, p. 89.]
"The essence of the real...could well be represented by the 'interiority' contained by the universe at a given moment. In that case evolution would fundamentally be nothing else than the continual growth of this 'psychic' or 'radial' energy, in the course of duration,
beneath and within the mechanical energy I call 'tangential,' which is practically constant on the scale of our observations..."
[Ibid, p. 143.] (from The Cosmic Plenum)

It seems we all suffer (patiently) from an interiority complex.

So it is, we sit and wait.

We stand and move.

Forward.

1945; one year, one day; august summer

Nagasaki.

Horror.

Shame.

molto gratitudine

We are born every day. Some days the numbers have particular historical resemblance.

Misalliance aside, ours is to fall groundlessly through radical trust that all shall be well, all manner of things -- all though the falling free upholding intervals of loving gratitude for what has been, what now is, and what will come to be -- completamente bene!

Epilogue 

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name. 

(--From Day by Day by Robert Lowell)

Lowell is a good place to start for all us, poor and passing, facts. Then, welcoming:

Thoughts come and go. Feelings come and go. Allow yourself to experience the transient nature of thoughts and feelings, welcoming everything that arises as Just this, not me, not mine. (--- Sandra Weinberg, "Eating and the Wheel of Life")

 Grazie, mio madre e padre -- intero famiglia -- amore, ciao!

Once cleared, everything...

Hate holds on. Love lets go.

Let it go. Let it go.

Unhold everything.

Once, I thought something and believed it.

Now, I believe nothing.

Other than this.

Simple and stupid -- clear everything else out.

Lauding holy now here

Peter said, "Lord, it is good for us to be here." it was, they say, a transfiguration.

When we forget, it will be easier, having seen the enormity and infinitesimal, to recall and this revisit
the holy here.

In Hiroshima, this day and month 1945, it is difficult to laud "here" amid nuclear bomb, death and destruction.

Still, we gaze at awful history, and at awe-full story, and remain human in our gaze.

Willing to be, trying to be, an insightful and compassionate place of (yes) ...peace.

Francis of Assisi knew he was a fool

So hot, so dry, so many places -- so few, with money and power, see any problem. Here's a point of view: if there was not such a fear of not having so much money, would they care enough to admit what is real and true? Pick up mindful mendicancy. Drop mendacity. Trust and act.

Evangelical poverty is a foolish act.

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!