continuation day

The lad in Vermont celebrates his birthday.

A rose to his mother.

In words.

mind your life

People cry at loss of family member. Or friend. There's no containing emotion when it gets caught in thicket of memory.

Bennacht / Blessing   

On the day when 

the weight deadens

on your shoulders 

and you stumble, 

may the clay dance 

to balance you. 

And when your eyes 

freeze behind 

the grey window 

and the ghost of loss 

gets in to you, 

may a flock of colours, 

indigo, red, green, 

and azure blue 

come to awaken in you 

a meadow of delight.   

When the canvas frays 
in the currach of thought 
and a stain of ocean 
blackens beneath you, 
may there come across the waters 
a path of yellow moonlight 
to bring you safely home.   

May the nourishment of the earth be yours, 
may the clarity of light be yours, 
may the fluency of the ocean be yours, 
may the protection of the ancestors be yours. 
And so may a slow 
wind work these words 
of love around you, 
an invisible cloak 
to mind your life.   

 (Poem by John O'Donohue)

To "mind a life" is to bring awareness to senses. With death the senses come up empty. Not like coffee sipped at edge of cup, or coconut vanilla ice cream on lips.

Death takes a different flavor. Call it dry stillness.

Like zazen.

A stark dry stillness where everything is allowed to be what it is.

Sometimes it is called kindness. Othertimes is is called death. At times it is called just sitting, shikantaza.

In  a circle of recollection, in meditation hall or common room of home for the aged, it is the practice of kindness and death that we find ourselves encircling.

Mind your life, Elizabeth!

Mind ours, the rest of us!

the mystery we share; with one another

Canada Geese go by at 6:23am. Must've had a slow start. Someone forgot their lunch.

The thing about repeatable regularity is adjustments have to be made. Like rebirth or reincarnation. Things turn up with small differences. As in dreams. Such as the one I wake from this morning. Sitting on hillside. Chairs, actually, not rock and soil, as large group of people, adults and children, climb up behind and off to side. I am missing someone. I realize this strongly. I am, as usual, out of place.

Summer Night 

                         by Connie Wanek  

The street lamp looks down; 

it has dropped something

and spends the whole night 

searching around its feet. 

The rumble of a jet, and the fast road 

blocks away, roaring like a cataract. 

The scent of mown grass, 

and of the body that mowed it. 

The sidewalk, made of warm squares 

heaved by maple roots, 

covered with hieroglyphs in chalk. 

A maple sapling, its trunk 

wrapped to the knee 

like the legs of a racehorse,  

galloping straight up. 

At dawn the prodigal sun returns 

accompanied by equatorial birds 

and a floral entourage. 

What good has it done us to labor so 

when all are rewarded? 

Let the spade fall, then, 

and join the feast. 

(--poem, "Summer Night" by Connie Wanek, from Hartley Field. © Holy Cow! Press, 2002.)

I imagine Elizabeth and the 151,650 (approx) people who die each day have that experience. Pleasant but fluid, quite reasonably there but uncertain where, recognizing faces but unsure of context, altogether irrepeatable yet still able to manage the encounter.

We live this way this side of death. Everything seemingly repetitive yet rifled with unpredictability.

Every time I meet someone that is how it feels: familiar yet lacking a pattern of equilibrium. We are always moving -- mentally, physically, spiritually. We are not who we were an hour ago. And in the next hour ... who knows who or what we will be.

Unnerving? Or comforting?

“...if I do not take my intellectual vocation seriously, putting it before everything else even at the risk of appearing inhuman, then I am also incapable of helping people in more concrete and proximate ways. Conversely, if I am not alert and ready to save people from a conflagration, that is to say, if I do not take my spiritual calling in all earnestness, sacrificing to it all else, even my own life, then I shall be unable to help in rescuing the manuscript. If I do not involve myself in the concrete issues of my time, and if I do not open my house to all the winds of the world, then anything I produce from an ivory tower will be barren and cursed. Yet if I do not shut doors and windows in order to concentrate on this work, then I will not be able to offer anything of value to my neighbors.”                ― Raimon Panikkar, The Vedic Experience: Mantrama~njari: An Anthology of the Vedas for Modern Man and Contemporary Celebration

Open the door. Let this and that enter or leave.

What any of us are doing here is an experiment.

It doesn't matter what we think is occurring or taking place -- what matters is that what is taking place or occurring is doing so with a mind that is open and a heart that is willing.

An open mind and a willing heart might be all that we can present in this nearly absurd existence we have with one another.

But I suspect it is not merely good enough and sufficient, but sacred and holy, the beginning and the end of the mystery we share named presence, awareness, this moment.

was, or will there be, resurrection?

As a young white seminary student in 1963 it was a remarkable sight from the bucolic grounds of Callicoon NY to see what was taking place in Washington DC.

That civil courage made public needs resurrection now that forces conspire to block voting, felonize whole generations of people of color, hold hostage people needing health and financial stability, slyly mock the president of the nation for his race, and rig the odds against women who are seen by them as fertility robots delivering the unintended to term.

Protests are too easily seen these days as threats to the security of the nation, criminal conspiracy, or cause for more intense surveillance.

We desperately need a new civil courage fortified by compassion and justice, a courage rooted in an interreligious wholeheartedness that recognizes every human being and all sentient beings as family.

May it be so! Freely, and lovingly, so!

(-- Commenting on The Ideas Behind the March, By DAVID BROOKS, Published: August 26, 2013,http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/opinion/brooks-the-ideas-behind-the-march.html?comments&_r=0

Room 118 is now, empty

As of 8:15pm last evening, Elizabeth follows her breath invisibly elsewhere.

Good . . . For you, friend!

Room 118

Elizabeth breathes her last dozens of breath. Millie plays harp. Jane sits by her side.

This is what end of life sounds like.

This is what we give ourselves to.

who, or what, do you take after?

The Japanese word, "narau," I'm told, means "to take after, to learn." Similarly, "naru" means "to become."

The question for educators is -- what are students taking after or becoming? Indeed, what do we need to learn?

My preference is the combining: "narau desu naru" -- to learn is to become. If we become what we learn, it seems to me we ought to be modeling freedom and creativity of thought with a solid grounding in skeptical questioning. 

This ought to be done in the proximate presence of one another.

We need both evidence and experience with intuition. Too easily are students led through someone else's agenda and curriculum. Too seldom are they encouraged to think and question what is presented as pure history and undeniable canon.

Two ways of learning -- calculative thinking and contemplative thinking -- must come face to face in an environment of engagement.

Put differently, there must be conversation, open and probing conversation. Perhaps such "taking after" will obviate the model of secrecy and surveillance in our contemporary culture and encourage a pathway of diaphaneity and pure gaze.

(Commenting on "The Two Cultures of Educational Reform," The New York Times, by Stanley Fish, 26August2013)  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/the-two-cultures-of-educational-reform/?comments#comments

facing each way; each falling away: no name's

"All lose,whole find" wrote e.e.cummings.  http://poems.writers-network.com/printview/printview-582.html

Something becomes clearer . . .

"Family," they say. "Don't mess with my family!" Pictures with faces smiling forward. 

As though that explained everything.

I look around. Can we see what is here?

Neighbor in distinct high-pitch voice, calls her cat. Out, no doubt, all night. As cats will do.

Maybe that's the clue.

No one left out, everyone called in, is family.

Sight moves through face, unbeginning, unending. Infinitely from within; eternally into outer.

No boundary. No barrier.

"Family" devoided, reconsidered as now-here-this, wherever you are!

Koan practice:

Question: What is the sound of one, family, gathering?
Response: Where are you?

Find out.

Allow in.

Gathering as no name's. 

Of a Monday afternoon

Woman from New York traveling down from Nova Scotia stops by. She is in Shambhala tradition. She practices in Vermont. She lights charcoal on sand in porcelain bowl, sprinkles juniper on it, fragrant smoke rising, she goes from building to building, room to room, counterclockwise, and blesses, chanting the following chant:

Invocation for Raising Windhorse 

om ah hung  The assembly of the three jewels-Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. 

The three roots-Guru, Deva and Dakini; gods and sages; 

The three protectors-mahasattvas-Manjushri, Avalokiteshvara and Vajrapani; Jayadeva, PadmaTöterang and the vidyadharas of India and Tibet; 

The glorious protector, Ganapadi with the divine armies of dralas        

The five patron gods

The great being Gesar, and so on 

All those gods of the cosmic lineage who command coincidence,

To all of those, I offer clouds of real and imagined good offerings, I supplicate you: with kindness, please grant your blessings.  

Curses, spells, burial sorcery, döns, obstructing spirits, obstacles and so on. May all these signs of the weakening and corruption of windhorse be pacified.  

Strife, enmity, scandal, warfare, lawsuits, recurrent calamity and so on, 

Pacify all such obstructing discord. Multiply the power and strength of the virtuous windhorse, the four legged miracle.  

Please accomplish the spiritual and temporal, supreme and ordinary siddhas.  

And without exception, whatever mind desires. 

om wagi shwari mum 

om mani peme hung 

om vajrapani hung 

om ah hung 

om ah hung vajra guru pema siddhi hung 

om ham ksha ma la wa ra ya ha ha hi hi he he ho ho sarwa vijaya siddhi hung 

tak seng khyung druk di yarkyé 

Gather all, sarwa, gather gather hoRouse all our life, virtue and glorious windhorse, higher and higher!

Karma Choling (Barnet VT) Shanbhala Shrine

(Photo by Michael Davis)

Workman framing door in upstairs bathroom wondered, he said later, what the heck scent was poked through the door and chanted at his back. But figured he was at meetingbrook where little makes sense.

Then we have cucumber and tomato salad with parmesan peppercorn bread. White haired man with walking cane pulls in, Saskia gets him a coffee, and he sits a spell near porcelain bowl at table in front of book shed.

You just never know who or what will present itself.

We receive this gift with gratitude.

Ki ki so so!

No one says anything; nothing is heard: Sunday afternoon

Chuang Tzu lived in fourth century BCE.

"All men know the utility of useful things; but they do not know the utility of futility." (Chuang Tzu)

"Wander where there is no path. Be all that heaven gave you, but act as though you have received nothing. Be empty, that is all." (Chuang Tzu)

For those of us now living in 21st century CE, these words are befuddling.

Except if you hear them from inside their spelling without any exterior sound.

"almost transparent, almost nonexistent"

 An actor who showed how.

The playwright John van Druten, who adapted Christopher Isherwood’s novel “Goodbye to Berlin” into the play “I Am a Camera,” the show that made Ms. Harris a star in 1952 (and later became the source material for the musical “Cabaret”), referred to her in a 1955 interview with The New York Times Magazine, as a glass pitcher. 

“You pour in red wine, the pitcher looks red; pour in crème de menthe, it is green,” van Druten said. “When she’s by herself, Julie’s almost transparent, almost nonexistent.”  

(--from, New York Times, Julie Harris, Celebrated Actress of Range and Intensity, Dies at 87, by Bruce Weber, 24Aug2013. She died on the 24th)

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/arts/julie-harris-celebrated-actress-of-range-and-intensity-dies-at-87.html?hp 

 Good zen teaching.

What is this? Joy

Canada Geese went by on the 6:12 this morning.

Where I was in dream is now fallen into filing system folder labeled forget.

Car sounds itself up Barnestown Road, another down.

It is Sunday morning. Like communicants approaching and receding from altar, geese and cars take on the circumincessional interpenetration of divine-human recourse. It is left to unchurching semi-apostates to remember the pilgrimage they once took but now leave walking sticks leaning against tree or wall ungrasped.

For who can grasp the whole?

Rituals recede into mixed blessing of memory.

Holy scripture is replaced by the new faithful with Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Email, those trinitarian testaments of touching temporality transient and tempting.

This morning I am nontheistic agnostic -- I don't know if there is not a God.

Glimpses of light lead me to suspect there is a star burning 93 million miles away, exploding and violent, mildly coloring faces of sailors on sailers where wind slides between sheets on reach to nowhere.

This ending of summer has been the beginning of other endings beginning in circular infinity.

Whoever I was has checked out of the hotel of fixed recognition and taken coastal bus heading toward unrecognition miles away from anywhere at the border of amnesia neighboring Alois Alzheimer in pasture waving in bucolic loss of presence.

Its not that the ability to think has been lost, its more that what is there to think about has taken a nap, off and away, in a niche hard to find nor wanting to be found.

I become the unfinding path -- the one lost and disoriented not receiving nor emitting appearance or intent -- but winding itself through everything.

Rather, this peregrinating everything becomes what it is without explanation, excuse, understanding, defense, or justification. No words occupy the path. Silence steps along. Memory is unfocused glance into middlespace. No apology forms with formlessness.

Oremus. Flectamus genua. Levate! 

Prayer is perception leaning on creative intimation. Consciousness kneels as radiating silence encircles. 'Yes' arises in solitude and wanders off alone. Nothing else emerges and sets about setting up camp with no tent, no site, no ground, and no person wishing to camp.

Joy is itself . . .  and does not need optimism to be itself.

This is.

What is.

Here.

remedial reading

Doing nothing, going nowhere.

This is the current condition of salvation. Not salvation in the churchy sense. But salvation in the preservation, reclamation, lifeline sense of continuing to move through this world without succumbing to insanity, distraction, dissolving of decency, and loss of grounding in what is real.

Human beings slowly become inconsolably unkind and unmoored. Taking from others to benefit only you and yours. Stopping others from exercising freedoms and rights. Numbing and hallucinating mind and body with merde and mindlessness. Full of going places, doing things, collecting prizes, causing suffering.

There is another way. Wu Wei. Learn and know when to act and not to act.

Do nothing.

Go nowhere.

Find way through the insanity of our age.

We know how.

How?

Begin to feel again.

Feel the connection.

Each person each being is a word ready to be read.

Learn to read; begin to see.

Let one move within and through what is there to move within and through.

Tolle Lege, Take and read, this is word! This, what you see!

First: 

Is there no way to cast my hook  

Out of this dynamited brook? 

The Fisher's sons must cast about 

When shallow waters peter out.  

I will catch Christ with a greased worm, 

And when the Prince of Darkness stalks  

My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . .  

On water the Man-Fisher walks.    

 (--from, "The Drunken Fisherman," by Robert Lowell)  
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15278

And: 

     ... It is true you are

now alone in your adversity in the company of Christ

only, but the people of God shall also remember that

your misgivings have become Sacred ...

        Your uncertainty

has become certain, a source of sacred dread to others,

but to you a kind of hell in which absurdity itself is

an earnest of salvation.

(--from, "Rites for the Extrusion of a Leper," by Thomas Merton)
http://www.thomasmertonsociety.org/altany1.htm

Early departure

Canada Geese catch 6:13 overhead

Chattering stories of their stay

Cat at window turns from station

Wait for next train

Vocational training

A lock picker I know learned his skill undoing the chain and padlock his parents wrapped him in as a kid after they went to bed drunk and left him around a pipe below the kitchen sink.

A useful skill.

See what can be, seen; then look away

One, more, beginning.

Sun rises from boy's picture holding shell in Haskell Cove many years alighting.

The simplicity of it

Water.

Is life.

I sip.

Iter, itirneris; Itinerary; quid est enim novi

There's no place else to go.

Besides, who is it that wishes to go anyplace else?

I look around. Everything there is here.

Turn this way or that way, walk in a straight or wobbly line in either direction, you'll probably find yourself returned right back here.

Like Loon hanging from hibiscus branch in midday warmth looking out over garden bench, I take my going slow, learning from stillness where I do not need to go.

 Quid est enim novi hominum mori, cujus tota vita nihil aliud quam ad mortem iter est? (Seneca)

(What new thing is it then for a man to die, whose whole life is nothing else but a journey to death?)

Ya Na; attending, another, alone, aware

 We need poets. We need mystics. We need monastics.

The world is too mean without these types. The temptation to loot, steal, murder, drug ourselves silly, become petty and pitiable, stay in illusion, perpetuate delusion, use people, claim "it's to protect family,"  dissociate and dissemble, and mostly -- to lose trust, genuine affection, and integrity -- these temptations are too powerful for 98% of human beings to resist. All, it seems, fall under the wheels of this impossible to resist train.

Today is the feast of Bernard of Clairvaux, Abbot, Theologian, and Poet, 20 August 1153: 

Bernard, third son of a Burgundian nobleman, was born in 1090. His brothers were trained as soldiers, but Bernard from youth was destined for scholarship. One Christmas Eve as a child he had a dream about the infant Christ in the manger; and the memory of it, and consequent devotion to the mystery of the Word made flesh, remained with him throughout his life. 

Bernard had good prospects of success as a secular scholar, but he began to believe that he was called to the monastic life, and after a period of prayer for guidance, he decided at age 22 to enter the monastery of Citeaux (Latin Cistercium, appearing on modern maps as Corcelles-les-Citeaux, 47:10 N 5:05 E), an offshoot of the Benedictines which had adopted a much stricter rule than theirs, and became the founding house of the Cistercian (Trappist) order. (Actually, the Trappists are a reformed (i.e. stricter) offshoot of the Cistercians, who are a stricter offshoot of the Benedictines.) He persuaded four of his brothers, one uncle, and 26 other men to join him. They were the first novices that Citeaux had had for several years. After three years, the abbot ordered Bernard to take twelve monks and found a new house at La Ferte. The first year was one of great hardship. They had no stores and lived chiefly on roots and barley bread. Bernard imposed such severe discipline that his monks became discouraged, but he realized his error and became more lenient. The reputation of the monastery, known as Clairvaux (48:09 N 4:47 E), spread across Europe. Many new monks joined it, and many persons wrote letters or came in person to seek spiritual advice. By the time of his death, 60 new monasteries of the Cistercian order were established under his direction.

http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/232.html

As a monastic of no other I attempt in ragtag dishevelment to follow the promptings of life to live it in a manner consistent and commensurate to the co-equal promptings of Benedict of Nursa, Francis of Assisi, Claire of Assisi. Dogen Zenji of Eihei, Basho, Han Shan, Hui Neng, Santoka Taneda, Pema Chodron, Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan, Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Day,  Catherine de Hueck Doherty,  John O'Donohue, Mary Oliver, Shunryu Suzuki, Thich Nhat Hanh, Seung Sahn, Gary Snyder, Naneo Sakaki, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Heidegger, Jean Gebser, Raimon Panikkar, Adam, Eve, Mary, as well as Siddhartha Gautama (called the Buddha) and Jesus of Nazareth (called the Christ.)

After a fashion, in erratic and chaotic manner, a daily life is lived under the guide-points of contemplation, conversation, and correspondence. These also translate from poverty, chastity, and obedience into another triadic: watching, listening, silence.

Perhaps: idiorhythmic, idiosyncratic, idiomatic.

Bernard wrote:

• “There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is Curiosity.
  
  There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is Vanity.
  
  There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love.” 
  ― Bernard of Clairvaux

• “What we love we shall grow to resemble.” 
  ― Bernard of Clairvaux

• “What I know of the divine
  science and holy scripture,
  I learnt in the woods and fields.” 
  ― Bernard of Clairvaux

So, we are grateful for this man, for all the men and women who have touched and transmitted something of truth, love, peace, service, learning, and joy.

It is a practice we gladly practice: attending, another, alone, aware.

It is a matter of conjoining "yes" and "no."

YA! NA!  -- You are not alone!

IAHWY: I am here with you.

May each of us be and become: bewithed and bewithing!

PRAYER 

O God, by whose grace your servant Bernard of Clairvaux, Kindled with the flame of your love, became a burning and a shining light in your Church: Grant that we also may be aflame with the spirit of love and discipline, and walk before you as children of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. (Ibid)

Cicadas

The mathematician conceives the name of god with numbers.

I eat ice cream.

Moon nears full.