This is, and

1st day of new year.

In hospital for visiting tonight.

Immortal means no time. Which means no death. Which means no birth.

I don't know why abortion is such a big deal. Is not being born the same as being unborn?

I build boardwalk toward new yurt.  I trust you realize the futility of trying to make sense of what republicans are talking about.

Then will come the democrats.

It doesn't matter. Really, it doesn't.

Just this is; nothing else is.

Joyful duration

For forty years

The lad

Has been son.

Perfect saying

Francis de Sales said: "Ask for nothing and refuse nothing."

Log, zzzs

Building boardwalk leading to center path up to yurt.

Vipassana meditator visits for Tuesday Practice.

Finish generic conversation brochure for prison(s), hermitage, nursing home, and hospital.

Sleep.

Plaintive

I'm sure there's something good to be said about political conventions.

There must be.

No?

O eternal Truth, true Love, and beloved Eternity, you are my God, and for you I sigh day and night. As I first began to know you, you lifted me up and showed me that, while that which I might see exists indeed, I was not yet capable of seeing it. Your rays beamed intensely on me, beating back my feeble gaze, and I trembled with love and dread. I knew myself to be far away from you in a region of unlikeness, and I seemed to hear your voice from on high: “I am the food of the mature: grow, then, and you shall eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food; but you will be changed into me”.
(-- Augustine of Hippo, in The Confessions)

There's bound to be...

Something.

Nothing, more, to say

I can't tell the future. There is no future. I can't recall the past. It's gone. But I can see, now.

Call it what you will. The infinite possibilities and potential permutations, combinations, and calculations of the net of now presenting everything and everywhere in its true context, that context you and me aware, without  question or explanation, as just this, here, in all its inclusive and idiorhythmIc transitory hide-n-seek manifestations.

Notch the arrow of emptiness 

To shoot the hawk of ultimate meaning;

If you're not right on target, 

You will be deceived by this barbarian monk. 

-- Fugai Ekun (1568-1654)

Meanwhile the men of the grand old party become more and more stupid about vagina, womb, sperm, egg, consenting relationality, and offspring. They are making women into body parts and legislative language that men own and operate.

Let me, despite what I've said, tell you the future.

Leonard Cohen said it starkly: "I've seen the future, brother: it is murder." (--from, The Future, song by L.C) 

Abortion and rape, they figure, are isolated and a-relational events having nothing to do with a woman, except that she just happens to be in attendance to their enactment.

Not-being born and Bankai's "unborn" are curious considerations in a world mind-set of dualism and linear historicity. We're tied, it seems, to notions of "born" and "died" -- the words populate all our documents and obituaries.

What if we saw things differently? The physics and spirituality of appearance and disappearance, form and emptiness, energy and matter and the transformation of them -- the understanding of unfolding and multidimensional synchronicity interweaving through our consciousness the variegated multiplicity of an integral and real universe -- the net of now -- beguiles.

A deranged or, even, barbarian monk would have nothing more to say.

Mind before thinking is the unborn

Close the gate. There's a hermit lurking!

The fuel in the tea brazier is burnt out,
So I collect pine needles;
The fields of medicinal plants are empty,
So I cut vegetable roots.
Naturally dull, I've forgotten Zen activities,
My gate is darkened at noon by
The shade of ancient trees.
White clouds impart a sense of peace
To my Zen meditation,
Green grasses suffice to make a rug for my guests.
What I have collected is a hundred years
Of emptiness.
- Isshi Bunshu (1608-1646)

Emptiness, like enlightenment, is not what you think; it is!

Et habitavit in nobis

Sitting in four rooms in hospital with four different patients we talk about remembered lives, moving place to place, elopement, taverns, acting, hospital as permanent residence, the healing work needed, and school yard football.

Just talking.

A simple act.

Verbum caro factum est!

Love love me true

So less interested in what is not true.

I cannot imagine wanting to remain in the false.

I'm not that creative.

The ordinary I find more interesting.

Then, where?

Don't look for me here. I'm not here.

It's a staggering notion, one I hope to outgrow.

With gratitude and watchful gaze

Morning-Call Yurt's first day of solitude.

More about its name to come.

Penalty and pain; promise and healing

The land of abandoned gods is a quiet place where mull the once adored in muted light just outside the busy and distracted attention of weekday people.

Gods have given way to things with circuitry and bytes. Even the One-God has retreated to the center of everything. No longer the recipient of bowing bodies and wispy incense this One-God recognized falling stock prices and insurance payouts enough to place remaining wealth offshore beneath deep waters in secret caves near dateline meridian where Tuesdays cannot imagine Saturdays nor nine comprehend fourteen.

Krishna and Christ adorn walls near Bodhidharma and African Goddess just above New York Times and New Yorker with their sultry models and buffoonish politicos in election year. "All," as the ending of the bard's play ruminated, "are punish'ed." All know penalty and pain.

Tear and smile -- the fluctuations of any family, any relationship, any gathering of people for social, economic, or religious reasons. Disappointment and fond recollection.

As a solitary this all applies, all of it, without exception

Human nature is developed by profound
Serenity and lightness,
Virtue is developed by harmonious
Joy and open selflessness.
When externals do not confuse
You inwardly,
Your nature finds the condition
That suits it;
When your nature does not disturb
Harmony, virtue rests in its place.
- Huai-nan-tzu

Still, we each prefer our way of life no matter the conditions or circumstances.

The hard learning is respect for the other, even if your preference is the belief there is no other.

From kitchen the expectant father says he'd like to name his daughter 'Althea' -- a name meaning in Greek 'healer.'

Healing is our fondest wish.

For one.

For all.

Sea me...

Monday morning.

"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me."(--lyrics from 'Tommy' by The Who, 1969)

I leave coins on buoys for travelers, in realm of the living, or the realm of the the fantastically probable, to use for whatever purchase seems seemly to them.

In this way, I am content to contribute.

Comes slowly quiet

Sunday ends.

Love is strong as death,
jealousy as relentless as Sheol.
The flash of it is a flash of fire,
a flame of the Lord himself.
Love no floods can quench,
no torrents drown.
(--Song of Songs 8:6-7)

Note: occupy meetingbrook

There will be no Sunday Evening Practice tonight (19Aug12) due to a family gathering retreat occupying meetingbrook. Regular practices will resume Tuesday.

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.