I say goodbye, he says

Mark Strand, poet, dies at 80.

In an interview with The Paris Review in 1998, Strand discussed the process of writing a poem:

Well, I think what happens at certain points in my poems is that language takes over, and I follow it. It just sounds right. And I trust the implication of what I’m saying, even though I’m not absolutely sure what it is that I’m saying. I’m just willing to let it be. Because if I were absolutely sure of whatever it was that I said in my poems, if I were sure, and could verify it and check it out and feel, yes, I’ve said what I intended, I don’t think the poem would be smarter than I am. I think the poem would be, finally, a reducible item. It’s this “beyondness,” that depth that you reach in a poem, that keeps you returning to it. And you wonder, The poem seemed so natural at the beginning, how did you get where you ended up? What happened? 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/29/mark-strand_n_6241750.html 

 The Remains

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

(--Poem by Mark Strand)

twin-nope: becoming moment and manifestation

Each breath a gift from breathing itself. Breathing itself could be called God or it could be called that-which-is-nowhere (twin).

Advent arrives. It augurs moving toward an occasion of moment and manifestation. Can twin be actually seen or encountered? Is "here" distinguishable from the one attempting to identify it as isolatable and identifiable?

Can that-which-is-nowhere be found as something apart from inquirer or inquiry? 

Is nothingness or emptiness the inseparate wholeness of that-which-is-nowhere? Have we finally begun to glimpse -- no, gaze -- through our reality? And cease the objectification and fragmentation of what we are?

With Thich Nhat Hanh's inspiration, and with prayer for his well-being, I add:

I am immigrant. I am black men shot dead. I am the shooter. I am the man frightened with illness. I am morning dawning through fallen snow. I am reading this. I am writing this. 

There is nothing going on that is not the going on wherein we breathe, move, and have our being. There is only breathing, moving, being. Surrounded by awareness, the one thinking they are aware has arrived at no-other-place-emerging (nope).

Twin-Nope is my utopia this final day of liturgical year. It is disappearance and reappearance. All of a piece. 

I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert 

stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems) 

on all sides, shifting as I speak, 

so that I was constantly 

face to face with blankness, that 

stepchild of the sublime, 

which, it turns out, 

has been both my subject and my medium. 

What would my twin have said, had my thoughts 

reached him? 

Perhaps he would have said 

in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument) 

after which I would have been 

referred to religion, the cemetery where 

questions of faith are answered. 

(-- from poem, AFTERWORD,  by Louise Glück) 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/243222

That which is nowhere.

No other place emerging.

Twin-Nope. 

a white (snow) friday

Today I am shopping for civility and kindness.

The deal is to become both.

No discounting; no crediting. Free for the awaring.

Only God extends the product.

what monastics look at when gratitude nods

The solitaries complete the day before the majority of people.

It is night.

In the surrounding silence the woman dedicated to the absence of God returns to her cloister.

The man who knows nothing brushes teeth and thanks empty godspace for visiting today.

sole sight, soul safeguard

Number 4 catches my attention: "back to a starting point."

I am not a violent person. Nor do I believe in violence -- neither its use by lawful or unlawful authority. 

There is an erosion of respect for the dignity of so many individuals, peoples, and things in our contemporary culture and society. 

What is the starting point from which we began our travels as human beings toward a communion of community?

Where would a return point us? What sort of turning would bring us to that place where it comes round right?

Prayer, a writer of fiction recently stated, is not to change the world, but to safeguard the soul in the midst of what is taking place.

From Dictionary.com

revolution
[rev-uh-loo-shuh n] Spell Syllables noun
1. an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.
2.
Sociology. a radical and pervasive change in society and the socialstructure, especially one made suddenly and often accompanied byviolence.
Compare social evolution. 3.
a sudden, complete or marked change in something:
the present revolution in church architecture.
4.
a procedure or course, as if in a circuit, back to a starting point.
5.
a single turn of this kind.
6.
Mechanics.
a a turning round or rotating, as on an axis.
b a moving in a circular or curving course, as about a central point.
c a single cycle in such a course.
7.
Astronomy.
a (not in technical use) rotation (def 2).
b the orbiting of one heavenly body around another.
c a single course of such movement.
Origin
1350-1400; Middle English revolucion < Late Latin revolūtiōn- (stem ofrevolūtiō), equivalent to revolūt (us) (see revolute ) + -iōn- -ion  

Perhaps prayer is revolution. 

Back to —

a

.

the ambiguity of pivotal moment

"It's so sad. It's just so sad." That's what a woman said in Ferguson Missouri.

Yes. It is.

All of it.

All of it.

monday before thanksgiving

when rain arrives    (with compassion)

frozen ground    (even hardest heart)

will soften    (practices Anicca)

Gott gibt und gegeben ist

Is it true that the death of any being, animate or inanimate being, is not the work of God?

God, the given-God, is life itself -- the origin, essence, and continuation of life.

That which is not-God is the desecration, diminishment, and destruction of life.

Do we have to think about this a little more?

Even here, one can think twice, but still find a compassionate inkling under incomprehensible whimsy.

Suicide Bomb Trainer in Iraq Accidentally Blows Up His Class                                      By DURAID ADNAN and TIM ARANGOFEB. 10, 2014

BAGHDAD — If there were such a thing, it would probably be rule No. 1 in the teaching manual for instructors of aspiring suicide bombers: Don’t give lessons with live explosives. 

In what represented a cautionary tale for terrorist teachers, and a cause of dark humor for ordinary Iraqis, a commander at a secluded terrorist training camp north of Baghdad unwittingly used a belt packed with explosives while conducting a demonstration early Monday for a group of militants, killing himself and 21 other members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, army and police officials said. 

Iraqi citizens have long been accustomed to daily attacks on public markets, mosques, funerals and even children’s soccer games, so they saw the story of the fumbling militants as a dark — and delicious — kind of poetic justice, especially coming amid a protracted surge of violence led by the terrorist group, including a rise in suicide bombings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/world/middleeast/suicide-bomb-instructor-accidentally-kills-iraqi-pupils.html?_r=1

Let's remind ourselves again -- the behavior of fanatics, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, is not (is not ) Islam, Judaism, or Christianity.

The root of bigotry and violence is fear -- not intellectual conviction, not emotional piety.

Fear, not-God, is the rallying cry of government, cable news demagogues, and church hawkers.

Fear is not-God.

I, rather, trust in God. Perhaps it needs to be said and written as given-God.

So, not-God is different from given-God.

Gott gibt und gegeben ist. (God gives and is given.)

The practice of es gibt is where the breath and the breather practice communion within and through the one breathing.

a greater joy is required

St. Cecilia and John F Kennedy on November 22.  Both murdered in interval of nineteen hundred years.

I’ve been thinking about the illusions we negotiate. Like safety, security, and fairness.

Murdering will continue. Murderers fear. Only those with no fear wii not murder.

Fearful people are so difficult.

So willing to kill.

Let’s think about it.

Let’s be silent, hear the music of silence, and find courage not to kill.

sentenced to, and sentencing, life

The student just said it, that, for Heidegger, Holderlin was the technology through which the river Ister became a poem presencing itself as sign and significance read and not lost.

Remarkably, an insight that entered the question of technology and unveiled what had been concealed.

The meaning that surfaces
comes to me aslant and
I go to meet it
   word for word, until I am
everything at once. 

(--Rita Dove, from her poem "Reading Holderlin on the Patio with the Aid of a Dictionary")

We joke that at a certain age one rewrites the narrative of one's life through a different lens. The difference between falling in love and failing in love becomes a single letter two letters away from each other (j,k).

The same student said she didn't like failure or the word failure. I held up the book by Kathryn Shultz, Being Wrong, and said there's something about failure we have come to oppose -- a dualistic foible -- and perhaps we might wish to question failure as to where it has come from and, more importantly, where it is going.

If we are a story being told (a story, being, told) why leave anything out?

Tell it, sentence by sentence, everything, at once!

book under calendar wednesday morning points out...

...what I couldn’t know in 1974 at George Washington Bridge Terminal where and when I purchased it.

Itadakimasu

Man from down the road at coffee this morning tells me of his flight returning from Japan ten days ago. There was very strong turbulence for well over ten minutes. Everyone had to fasten in. He had left his assigned seat to nap stretched-out strapped-in across an empty three seats up front.

The shaking and rumbling of the plane increased. He experienced concern, then fright, then fear. It was then that a mantra came to him. He repeated it again and again. Something shifted for him.

Here’s the mantra he composed:

This is singing
There’s nothing to fear
We are all

Curiously, he was ok after his recitation.

His mind was not turbulent. Or, perhaps, it was not separated from the outside turbulence.

When he got up and ricocheted down the aisle the fastened flight attendants scolded him his movement.

He returned to his seat next to his wife.

He took her hand.

The plane continued to Chicago.

In the middle of the night

V: Domine labia mea aperies.

V: Thou O Lord wilt open my lips.

R: Et os meum annunciabit laudem tuam.	R: And my mouth shall declare thy praise.

Walking farm field in Oxford Maine yesterday, I wondered how to pray.

And asked.

we as well

Fresh shapes at dawn.

"Art in time opens the soul to the numinous light of receiving the vision of the unjudged, with it comes compassion and well-being." (--Robert Hake, from Art in Time, a Clarity blog), http://clarityposts.blogspot.com/2014/11/art-in-time.html

If someone asks what practice emerging from 21st century buddhist/christian interbeing is worth our time, tell them it is the vision of the unjudged practicing unjudging seeing.

Practice, like history, moves with time and circumstance. The flaws of the past nod to evolving reparation of moment, allowing transformation.

Religions, like morning skies, spin into noon and sunset, hibernation, and resurrection as new expression of new awareness -- birdsong chant announcing.

So, we, as well.

travelogue

Leaving for Ellsworth, snow.

At Good Will store, hail.

To Machias and back, rain.

In bed, weary.

With sleep, dreams.

Where belief ends

              (a haiku)

One belief beheads

Another 

Hell with no hope --

No one asks why;

Why?

Prison Haiku

            (14nov2014)

In intimacy

Nothing intervenes -- --

Snow no longer falls

read in

Love learning. (A phrase to be read a variety of ways.)

A phrase

To be

Read in

Many ways.

(See how "a variety of ways" becomes "read in many ways".)

Seneca wrote, “Toti se inserens mundo,” a phrase translated by Hadot as “plunging oneself into the totality of the world.” Taking this plunge could be understood as the heart of active presence, of “being here now.” The Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku writes in Love of Knowledge (1987) that the self lives in the world like an illegal alien, always afraid that its identity will be questioned. “Taking the plunge” is the exact opposite. It means fearless presence, total involvement, holding nothing back. If it is difficult for the self to do this, if it clings to and defends its own positions and wants, that only underscores the need to challenge the self and the conditions it imposes on experience. 

Those who question the contemporary mindfulness movement ask whether it does justice to the Buddha’s revolutionary call to transform both self and world. But we do not have to conclude from this that the only alternative is to stay within the tradition, though for some that will clearly be the right response. Active presence does justice to the Buddha’s revolutionary impulse on a wholly different basis. Not holding back, fearlessly questioning, always going beyond what we know, active presence offers a way into the deeper existential and universal concerns that the Buddha raised through his teachings. 

(--from The Present Moment, by Jack Petranker, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2014)     http://www.tricycle.com/feature/present-moment

Like the phrase "being read in" wherein we do become signs that are read within the great reality (called "being") which is an open book unbeginning and unfinishable.

Learning loves.

What is prayer

Mind is relationality. Meaning is correct relationality. Sanity is clear connection.

Nothing intervenes clear intimacy.

Intimacy is realization of the interpenetrative unbroken.

The night is cold.

Prayer is being said.

We hold this dear man in the light

From Plum Village website:

Official Announcement

To all Plum Village Practice Centers,
To all Practice Centers and Sanghas World Wide, To our Dear Beloved Friends,

Plum Village, November 12, 2014

Re: Thay’s present health condition and how to support Thay’s recovery

With a deep mindful breath we announce to the world the news that yesterday, the 11th of November 2014, Thay, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh experienced a severe brain hemorrhage. Thay is receiving 24 hour intensive care from specialist doctors, nurses and from his monastic disciples.

At present, Thay is still very responsive and shows every indication of being aware of the presence of those around him. He is able to move his feet, hands and eyes. There are signs that a full recovery may be possible.

For the last two months, Thay’s health had already been fragile due to his advance age. He was hospitalized in Bordeaux on the 1st of November. He was gaining strength day by day until this sudden and unexpected change in his condition.

All the monasteries in the tradition of Plum Village are organizing practice sessions to generate the energy of mindfulness and to send Thay this healing and loving energy. We would like to ask the whole worldwide community of meditation practitioners to participate and support us in this critical moment. We know and trust that Thay will receive all your energy and that this will be a big support in his healing and recovery.

Our practice of stability and peace in this very moment is the best support we can offer to Thay. Let us all around the world take refuge in our practice, going together as a river to offer Thay our powerful collective energy. We are all cells of the great Sangha Body that Thay has manifested in his lifetime.

Future reports on Thay health and recovery will be posted officially at www.plumvillage.org, langmai.org, villagedespruniers.net, and www.facebook.com/thichnhathanh.

On behalf of the Monastic Dharma Teacher Council of Plum Village,

Bhikkhu Thich Chan Phap Dang Bhikkhuni Thich Nu Chan Khong Nghiem