End of first day runs

Unsaying Itself

On walk yesterday, apostrophes of muted exclamations to trees and dogs and earth.

This morning a question -- How talk with God?  A question of prayer?

I have no need to proclaim there is no God. I would rather say there is no containment or representation of God that can do what it might claim to do.

Trees, earth, snow, sky, dogs, sunlight. Apostrophes of love, each.

Whether naturalist or atheist, whether believing theist or mystic apophatic -- our best task is to see what is surrounding in the eight directions --(up, down, left, right, forward, back, before, after) -- and the directionless inner.

I greet you, each and all, with love. 

And yet, "I"do not love "you" as if some engineering bridge-builder connecting separate distant edges. Rather, we are love in the recognizing of what is surrounding us. 

Wu Wei, Bu Ji  -- (effortless act, nothing doing).

The susurrus of simple spirituality has moved from Word as language, through Word as flesh, to Word as silence.

I wanted to say this.

Before.

Recognition unsays me and everything becomes merely itself in loving gaze.

Franklyn at Farmington

Taking break from pulsing pain,

New snow follows Keylime yogurt.

Dogs know this bridge.

Sun standing on high branches,

Why we tell stories

It's the story that is told.

In scripture. In history. In your life and mine.

There is no objective external "truth" that is told.

It's the story. The teller of the story.

And the telling of it.

And when the story changes, history changes, scripture changes, you change, I change.

So, tell me, a story.

Wu Wei, Bu Ji

Wu Wei:

Effortless act.

Bu Ji:

Nothing doing.

One/no-other . . . another/no-one? -- (what is this ἔλλειψις, élleipsis, "omission" or "falling short")

If the act and the actor are isomorphic, there is no particular or proprietary face or name to attach to the act. There is the act itself, the work itself, nothing other.

But when a name or face emerges in the event of action, there is something attached that can be acknowledged. There is someone doing the act, something else at work.

"To remain nameless is to remain faceless, with hardly a life of one’s own. Accordingly, a character’s emergence from anonymity may correlate with a rise in importance.” (p.330, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, by Meir Sternberg)

We worry about incognito. We prefer disclosure. We demand from citizens and military members their name, rank, serial number, and a photo ID.

It used to be that G-d had no name, no one could see G-d’s face.

Only breath. Only sound. Only voice.

What occurs when appearance is demanded? With G-d an object is made, a something to implore or desecrate. With anything else, commodities are made, things to possess or annihilate.

What are we to do?

What about surrendering to the intimacy of one-an-other:
One/no-other; another/no-one?

The Heart Sutra says that emptiness is form, form is emptiness. Today it suggests to me not to make one the other, nor the other one.

The contemplative hermit might wish to be invisible, hidden within everything, doing nothing as no other.

Completely as what is.

February!  

of a Sunday afternoon

Talented actor dies from drug overdose.

Football players prepare to bang into each other on New Jersey field.

Reading on work from zen master O’Hara for tonight’s practice.

Root nerve pain left side upper rear reminds me of all the above.

Presentation, unaccountably and dismayingly, reminded.

Saturday night

Watching covert

Snoozing biggest and littlest

Death

There's nothing

To it

Happy Birthday Fr. Louis, o.c.s.o.

Tread well this erstwhile 99th!

"The grip the present has on me. That is the one thing that has grown most noticeably in the spiritual life -- nothing else."    (Thomas Merton)   http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com

The Merton Bookshed will glow today in your effulgence!

Lifeworld

What Husserl called subjectivity and it's world of experience.

Phenomenology,

1. A philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness. 

2. A movement based on this, originated about 1905 by Edmund Husserl. 

(--The Free Dictionary)

Here's looking at you, kid!

Actually, here is looking at you.

No kidding!

I'll have coffee with that question, please

Death inspires ethics.

It asks: If you are to die, how wish you to live?

She asks a fair question.

I'll live, for now, without sugar, inside that question.

Afternoon prayer

Gather

Water

Still

Mountain

Watchful

a way that takes nothing for granted.

Dog barks toward place where deer were overnight. The big goofy German Shepherd’s bellow has a resonance that holds ears in awe.

Postmodernism is an intellectual approach used in fields such as literary theory, sociology, and architecture. Although the term describes a broad class of viewpoints, in general postmodernism rejects the ideas of absolute truth and objective reality. Rather, it emphasizes how we construct our apparent realities by describing them, particularly through language.¹ A salient aspect of postmodern theory is the dense prose common to some humanities disciplines. Here is an example from a 1982 book entitled Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection by Julia Kristeva:

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced.²

Philosopher John Searle once asked Michel Foucault why his writing was so obtuse, when he was so easily understandable in conversation. Foucault told Searle that 25 percent of one’s writing needs to be incomprehensible nonsense to be taken seriously by French philosophers.³ Although Foucault rejected the postmodern label, he did believe that knowledge was generated through operations of power and his attitude reveals the intent of postmodernism to deliberately obscure.⁴

 (--from, "Academic Obfuscations: The Psychological Attraction of Postmodern Nonsense," by JIm Davies, article in Skeptic magazine issue 17.4, 2009).

 I remember Robert Lowell’s description of preparation for teaching his class -- one that I recognize:

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is “a young Republican." 

(--from poem, Memories of West Street and Lepke, by Robert Lowell

Lowell died at 60 from heart attack:

The Death of Robert Lowell, by Paul Mariani          September 12, 1977, Robert Lowell (1917 - 1977)

On this day in 1977 the poet Robert Lowell died at the age of sixty in the back seat of a New York City taxi. He had hailed the cab at JFK airport and was heading up to West 67^th Street, returning to his ex-wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. He had just flown back from a disastrous trip to Ireland, where he had gone to explain to his present wife, the Anglo-Irish Lady Caroline Blackwood -- like Hardwick a writer, as well as heiress to the Guinness Stout fortune -- why their marriage was over. The meeting at Blackwood's estate outside Dublin had of course ended badly, with Blackwood storming out with her three children -- the son she had had with Lowell and two daughters from two former marriages, one to the painter, Lucien Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud), one to the composer, Israel Citcowitz. At the end, Lowell still clutched in his stiffening arms one of Lucien Freud’s paintings of the young Blackwood, staring out from the canvas into the void.   http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=9/12/1977

Sara Teasdale’s poem fits:

Since There Is No Escape 

Since there is no escape, since at the end     

My body will be utterly destroyed, 

This hand I love as I have loved a friend,     

This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed; 

Since there is no escape even for me     

Who love life with a love too sharp to bear: 

The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea     

And hours alone too still and sure for prayer— 

Since darkness waits for me, then all the more 

Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore     

In pride, and let me sing with my last breath; 

In these few hours of light I lift my head; 

Life is my lover—I shall leave the dead     

If there is any way to baffle death. 

(--poem by Sara Teasdale, 1884-1933)

It could be death has a new name, “Baffle Death.” Is there any way to baffle death, or is baffle death the way?

What if our ethics were to begin with a sit-down alongside baffle death? Yes, begin there. Say hello. Share pleasantries: nice day; some water? a piece of fruit? what have you been doing with yourself?

Then: What, knowing you, am I to do with my life? How understand and deal with the concept of ‘others’? Am I...them? Are they...me? (Can you imagine the attentive gaze of Baffle Death, perhaps a kindly grandmotherly raised eyebrows state of readiness to sit as long as it takes for you to come to terms, come to peace with whatever understanding arises in your encounter.) Perhaps this new acquaintance will pour tea, offer Lorna Doones, and ask after your family -- their health, projects, whether they have warm gloves for the cold weather.

Maybe Baffle Death has been misunderstood, been thought of as an enemy, an unkind stranger unwelcome in our neighborhoods. Maybe, after the sit-down, a new view might emerge. Something not far from what we’ve known as ‘faith.’

There is a strong vein of hostility against orthodox religious believers in America today, especially among the young. When secular or mostly secular people are asked by researchers to give their impression of the devoutly faithful, whether Jewish, Christian or other, the words that come up commonly include “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old-fashioned” and “out of touch.” 

It’s not surprising. There is a yawning gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world. 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described one experience of faith in his book “God in Search of Man”: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement...get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. ...To be spiritual is to be amazed.” 

And yet Heschel understood that the faith expressed by many, even many who are inwardly conflicted, is often dull, oppressive and insipid — a religiosity in which “faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion.” 

(--from, “Alone, Yet Not Alone,” OpEd by David Brooks, NYTimes, Jan.27,2014)   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/opinion/brooks-alone-yet-not-alone.html?ref=davidbrooks

Often when we’re amazed we’re baffled. And there is hardly anything more baffling than death. We save our biggest one word questions for death: Why? Where? When? Who?

Baffle Death stays still and silent when approached by these questions. She is not aloof. She is completely feeling what you are feeling. Only, in such unimaginable stillness and silence such as death, we imagine it to be somewhere else, a far, far distance from our understanding. A long expanse away from our abilities to profoundly enter within the unimaginable mystery of compassionate presence awareness.

Yes, compassionate presence awareness, the real thing, is suffused with stillness, silence, and surrender in loving attentiveness.

Don’t fret about confusion, befuddlement, uncertainty, or unknowing.

Rather, be amazed!

Spirituality follows amazement along new pathways one step at a time.

Walking at night

Four hundred miles later.

Calais, looking across at St. Stephen's, Canada.

Cold ice where water hardens.

Matins

The metaphors of religion and scripture remind to look at what is now here as revelation in situ of story told as proleptic prelude.

If metaphor isn't this moment revealing itself, it was mere abstraction and dismissable. Now is the fulfillment of language. Grounding the specific and particular as touch of earth.

 Else we dwell in vast ocean fullness of possibility -- silence as genesis -- standing ready to create existence as breath of God in and through and with what is coming to be.

“There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all. 

There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent. And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning? 

There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed; when the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom: distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.” 

( – Thomas Merton, in No Man is an Island)

Any second now.

We shall be.

Released.

Awareness is empty; let things come, let them go

Live a blameless life.

This doesn't mean to do nothing for which you can accrue blame.

It means live not blaming anyone anything.

No blame from you toward another.

Accepting the condoning mystery.

As God is gazing.

As wind chatters with trees

I am content when setting out on Sunday morning the few steps given me.

   οἱ δὲ εὐθέως ἀφέντες τὸ πλοῖον καὶ τὸν πατέρα αὐτῶν ἠκολούθησαν αὐτῷ.
    καὶ περιῆγεν ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ Γαλιλαίᾳ διδάσκων ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς αὐτῶν καὶ κηρύσσων τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας καὶ θεραπεύων πᾶσαν νόσον καὶ πᾶσαν μαλακίαν ἐν τῷ λαῷ.
 At once, leaving the boat and their father, they followed him.
    He went round the whole of Galilee teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom and curing all kinds of diseases and sickness among the people. (From Gospel according to Matthew 4:12-23)

I wonder about this man. About the boat. What he was saying. How he cured. Why he cared.

The father at his boat must have felt abandoned. Or, at least, baffled.

So, I put on my green Irish fedora, brown tweed thinsulate sport coat, green Baffins, and in red sport shorts go out to bookshed, adjust heat, clear center table, shift blinds to hold heat, set out Quaker Meeting sign in front of snow-stiff red candle metal, watch white dog come up dooryard drive, walk through barn, back into house.

I suspect the boat got overturned, set on cross workbenches, placed by stone wall by cabin, to rest a few months until time for refit.

We're left to wonder. Left to ponder mysteries of time and purpose, touch and sound.

Just stepping from one thing to another and straight ahead for whatever else appears for our imagination.

unfinished justice, lost sanity

Thinking about 9/11.

Thinking about the US invasion into Iraq. Thinking about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Pearl, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet, et al.

It is a curious world where so much can happen that is filled with poisons.

At the root of human misery, Buddhism sees three destructive impulses: greed, anger and foolishness, which it terms the "three poisons." These are the essence of all the delusions and negative workings of life that impede the realization of our full potential for happiness and creativity. 

Of the three, foolishness is most fundamental, as it facilitates greed and anger. Foolishness here means ignorance (passive or willful) of the true nature of life. It is blindness to the reality of our interrelatedness--not merely our connectedness to and dependence on each other, but the connectedness of the unfolding of each of our lives to the unfolding of the very life of the universe; the fact that each of us is a vital component of life itself and a nexus of immense possibilities. Because it obscures life's true, enlightened nature, this ignorance is also referred to as "fundamental darkness."

(--from, Three Poisons --The Source of the Problem) 
http://www.sgi.org/buddhism/buddhist-concepts/three-poisons-the-source-of-the-problem.html 

So many dead. So many crippled. So many dispossessed. So much suffering and unfinished justice.

What has been the cost of the Iraq War? In strictly American terms, 4,486 U.S. military personnel died there (plus another 318 from Coalition allies); the dollar tab for the war is reckoned in the trillions. And in Iraq—how many people died as a result of the American-led invasion? That’s a harder question than it might seem. 

A new study with a controversial back story attempts to provide a good answer. Writing today in the journal PLOS Medicine, the University of Washington’s Amy Hagopian and 11 co-authors estimate that roughly 461,000 Iraqis died as either a direct or indirect cause of the war and subsequent military occupation. But reflecting the tortured effort both of getting good numbers from a war zone and the history of controversial past counts, by the time all their calculations had settled the researchers put their “confidence interval” for possible excess deaths between March 2003 and June 2011 at between 48,000 and 751,000.

(--from, A Better Stab at Estimating How Many Died in the Iraq War, by Michael Todd,, October 15, 2013, in Pacific Standard, The Science of Society)
 http://www.psmag.com/navigation/politics-and-law/better-stab-estimating-many-died-iraq-war-68419/  

How will we ever return to or find sanity again? 

God is: No idea; felt, in fact.

I place hands together and bow when passing cemeteries.

Time, you could say, does not have anything to do with that which is out-of-time.

The dead have just died. Always, just died. I greet them as they are transitioning through that timeless portal between now and now.

I say to them: God be with you!

I greet them in their new acclimation.

At Existentialism conversation Friday evening Willow said, "God is 'experiencing reality'."

No idea; felt, in fact.

Or, seen differently: Reality is no ideal felt in fact.