July 4th

Are we free? Are we just? Are we able to become both?

It depends; dance!

In deep; end, glance!

Indie; pending chance!

Gift being unmissable opportunity

Apostle Thomas wanted evidence & experience, not someone's word for it. His skepticism was respected by Jesus who asked, "Do you feel me?"

We'd rather think about reality than enter it.

Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself  

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.   

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.  

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside. 

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside. 

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,  

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality. 

(Poem by by Wallace Stevens)

America, it will be said this weekend, is having a birthday. Perhaps a reversal will take place. It will give back what it has taken by force and self interest. A gift returning fruits of expansion, greed, violence, and ignorance. It will antidote poisons. 

A gift of enlightened abnegation.

The Acknowledgment of Suffering Is a Gift 

As the early Buddhist teachings freely admit, the predicament is that the cycle of birth, aging, and death is meaningless. They don't try to deny this fact and so don't ask us to be dishonest with ourselves or to close our eyes to reality. As one teacher has put it, the Buddhist recognition of the reality of suffering—so important that suffering is honored as the first noble truth—is a gift, in that it confirms our most sensitive and direct experience of things, an experience that many other traditions try to deny. 

(--Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “Lost in Capitulation” Tricycle)

Empty cabin filled with sunlight and birdsong sits ready for experience and evidence.

Perhaps there is nothing other. Thomas, rather than example of no faith is example of what faith longs for. 

Faith longs for what is actually directly in front of us longing to be engaged, entered, felt, and unobjectified by dissolving into intersubjective affirmation of meaning without objective definition or rational certitude.

See suffering, be suffering.

Not to see/be is not to want to see another, not wanting to see self, not wanting to see God. Not to be what we see.

Thomas said no to not.

Thomas felt yes and came to understand heaven and earth as heaven is earth.

God is here as here is God.

A good birthday, America! A good feast day, Thomas!

Don't look anywhere else; near side alone

In the metaphor God comes to earth, entering the creation.

Enters creation he created

As

Creator.

Thus entering himself

As it enters itself.

It has always seemed to me that Christians do not understand incarnation -- not the Incarnation, not what it means to see heaven as earth, this life as all life, finite existence as satisfactorily an end in itself.

What if Christian life were the creative manifestation of wholly transforming earth divinely human embodying beginning to end what becomes

Itself holy and entire?

honor is way through

Allos, others.  Autos, self. Didatikos, apt and skillful in teaching.

Autos Didatikos Allos, self teaching through others. 

Autodidallocism.

THE LIGHTEST TOUCH

Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests your whole body,
steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

    - David Whyte
      from Everything is Waiting for You and River Flow: New & Selected Poems
      ©2003 Many Rivers Press

This is why I love teaching philosophy:

     I have nothing to teach but the learning of self-through-others.

Fog drips from house roof to porch roof then falls to brown earth. passing through.  

The mystery of the 'T' (cross) and the problem of presence

Get out of here!

Yourself Alone 

The paradox of our practice is that the most effective way of transformation is to leave ourselves alone. The more we let everything be just what it is, the more we relax into an open, attentive awareness of one moment after another.
                    (-- Barry Magid, “Five Practices to Change Your Mind,” Tricycle)

A new AA. 

Attentive awareness. 

Hi there! 

(Which is where ‘here' goes when crossed.)

'T'

slant

At table practice last night, reading Larry Rosenberg, we thought about suffering.

“There is suffering in life,” is the Buddha’s first Noble Truth.

It, like everything else in the existence of time/being, will cease.

What I believe, what I value most, is transitoriness.  

But is not transitoriness — the perishableness of life — something very sad? No! It is the very soul of existence. It imparts value, dignity, interest to life. Transitoriness creates time — and “time is the essence.” Potentially at least, time is the supreme, most useful gift.  

Time is related to — yes, identical with — everything creative and active, with every progress toward a higher goal. Without transitoriness, without beginning or end, birth or death, there is no time, either. Timelessness — in the sense of time never ending, never beginning — is a stagnant nothing. It is absolutely uninteresting.

(-Thomas Mann to Hermann Hesse, quoted in Brain Pickings, by Maria Popova) http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/24/this-i-believe-thomas-mann-time/?|

By attaching to suffering as “my” suffering, by craving it to be something else, by desiring it to go somewhere else (as if it weren’t everywhere throughout everyone) -- we increase suffering or, at minimum, prolong it.

YANA, WANA, you are not alone, we are not alone.

And yet, the feeling of aloneness can overwhelm us. It is this belief that we are detached from others, unattached from sky and birds, earth and tree, mother and father, neighbor and relatives, friends and former friends  --  this belief/feeling, so devastating, must be looked at from a long and loving vantage place.

Some people say that God is always with us. This comforts them as a closely held belief/experience. Others say as long as we remain in this existence we are beings in Being which is the whole of what-is. This observation has been known to comfort as well. Still others hold that God, Being, and Kenosis is a trinity unfolding of source origin, worded existence, and self emptying -- a process of emerging from nothingness, moving through existence, and transforming into unknown continuity.

What we hold as true, for now, is important to our ability to see our way through now and that which appears in the extension of now called by some ‘time’ or ‘future’ or ‘our lives going forward.’

Rosenberg writes:

Yet even the most fundamental teachings of the Buddha, such as the four noble truths, deserve to be held up to the light of inquiry described in the Kalama Sutta. I learned this in my early days as a Vipassana yogi, when the Thai forest master Ajahn Chah visited the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. At that time, many of us were enthralled with the liberating power of “letting go.” In our discussions, everyone was letting go of this and letting go of that—and often letting go of “merely everything.” As he listened, Ajahn Chah seemed to grow skeptical. He encouraged us to slow down, back up, and carefully examine the moments when we were actually suffering. Rather than rush to let go, he urged us to make direct contact with the suffering and to see whether it was caused by some form of craving and attachment, of wanting things to be other than the way they were. He felt that the real letting go was learned by seeing the price we paid by holding on and resisting—and the joy experienced when we were free of the burden of attachment. 

Paying attention to our own experience of suffering, rather than our conceptual notions of letting go, gave us the chance to see the benefits of the four noble truths in the crucible of our own lives. The transformation of suffering that comes from awareness is most powerful when it’s intimate with the experience of your own life. Inquire, question, and test your understanding of the teachings so that it becomes bone deep. 

(--from, Be a Lamp Unto Yourself,  By LARRY ROSENBERG | NOVEMBER 13, 2013), http://www.lionsroar.com/be-a-lamp-unto-yourself-january-2014/

At 3:42AM, following 3AM peeing ritual conducted by elderly German Shepherd out by garden Buddha statue, these words are transported to southern resident who has finished watching the 2013 documentary “Anita” about that generous and courageous woman Anita Hill. It follows closely behind Sunday Evening Practice conversation where those assembled considered the “bone deep” words of the article in Shambhala Sun. These words to someone suffering emerge in middle night where thinking about these things goes its own way on its own:

I've been thinking; "family" is often not limited to those who've birthed us biologically, but to a community of care who birth us in our current struggle to make it through, You have a wide "sangha" I.e. community of folks practicing presence now who hold you in their heart/mind. Our ongoing sustaining family often looks different than what we think they should look like. We are happy and graced, as are the many "odd" members of the meetingbrook community, to hold you in the light of care and love. So, if you want a rest, and circumstances arise fortuitously, come here for whatever time you need to rest and regroup energy to re-engage your spiritual/physical warrior journey to a future that awaits you and belongs to you with the company of unexplained grace and shared suffering.  

It's all gift. Even the frustrating, lonely uncertainty our minds can't figure out. Gift. So, oddly, we stumble awkwardly, trying to arrive at the door of gratitude, stuttering our "thank you" and "hallelujah" to the unexpected and heretofore unrecognized face appearing there. 

You have that gift. There and here. 

[We practice our life in order to] ready to presence assistance for whatever time you wish.

No matter how you look at it, things always seem slant. 

Beyond Within

Soaker-rain over everything.

I turn over wheelbarrow. 

It falls empty.

Our individualistic culture gives us the impression that we are each biologically separate beings-- separate from each other and from nature. At Harvard I received an excellent education in the reason- dimension of my mind. I am so grateful. But to be back here in Cambridge is an opportunity to see both the value and the limits of this education. Reason has its place, its value and its use, but we are not in fact separate from one another and nature. The existence of our galaxy among billions of them is preposterous, and it is totally unlikely that any of us are here, right now. It is absolutely unreasonable that we are living on a sphere that is rotating on its axis at 1,000 miles an hour, rotating around a sun- star at 67,000 miles an hour and spinning through the Milky Way galaxy at 568,000 m.p.h. All of this is happening in virtually empty space that has no up or down. We can forget our tiny efforts to control the situation. Blaise Pascal (17th c.) mused that “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” My heart is teaching me things that reason and science can’t prove but which--nevertheless!-- cultivate palpable experiences of hope, beauty and love. Reason’s most powerful questions--why, how, where and when--seem irrelevant and powerless in the vicinity of goodness, compassion and beauty. 

My heart is receiving a teaching from the Beyond Within, that we give each other our being, and our spirits are nourished by the spirits of others. With the hormone treatment and the radiation I often feel fatigued and sometimes afraid, but my emotions are labile and tears of love are always ready to soften the hard pan created by reasonable fears. I can feel a little depressed and lost in practical tasks, but then I feel a surge of desire as I lay suspended on my altar tables. I want to live! 

The other day, as I lay on the acupuncturist’s table with needles in my chest and abdomen, I put my hands over my eyes and a rich blue light dotted with countless shimmering stars poured through my eyelids into my whole being. Jesus was holding my hand out here at the boundary of a never-ending explosive, evolving and gorgeous cosmos, and letting me go.  

(--from "the empty bell", Radiant Light, A CaringBridge Journal, by Robert A. Jonas, p.15, 2014-15) 
http://www.emptybell.org/articles/CaringBridge-Journal-14.pdf

Dis-ease is our de-fault position. We long to find ease with what is taking place in our life.

It takes a while for mind to cycle close to what is really taking place.

Some call it experience without an experiencer.

For some it is Sunday morning rain falling down.

huh? koan -- [accompanying dharma encounter between Chris and Ikkyu]

(After receiving photo and teisho from Chris, “Buddha as a shithead. ...he would smile.”) 

Garden Dialogue Record

Koan:

Buddha: [splat] Hey, what's that? 

Blade of Grass: huh? 

Buddha: I said...[reconsidering]...oh, never mind!

Comment: 

Hence began important teaching by Buddha arising from grass.

And then, there is Ikkyu:

Enlightenment

Ten years ago I couldn't stop thinking, feeling,
Just anger, just rage, until this moment.
A crow laughs, the dust clears, I hold the arhat's fruit.
Spotted sunlight in Zhaoyang Palace, a pale face chanting.

(--  Zen Master Ikkyu, “Incense Thrown on the Buddha”)

A president encourages the people with grace

1. Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
   That saved a wretch like me!
   I once was lost, but now am found;
   Was blind, but now I see.
2. ’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
   And grace my fears relieved;
   How precious did that grace appear
   The hour I first believed.
3. Through many dangers, toils and snares,
   I have already come;
   ’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
   And grace will lead me home.
4. The Lord has promised good to me,
   His Word my hope secures;
   He will my Shield and Portion be,
   As long as life endures.
5. Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
   And mortal life shall cease,
   I shall possess, within the veil,
   A life of joy and peace.
6. The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
   The sun forbear to shine;
   But God, who called me here below,
   Will be forever mine.
7. When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
   Bright shining as the sun,
   We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
   Than when we’d first begun.

(--anonymous, 1829)

Let the Reverend Clemente Pinckney and 8 church members be remembered with praise, joy, and peace!

being enough; having enough

Morning meal of awakened earth. 

Modest repast. 

TONPA LA MED SANG GYAY RINPOCHE

KYOBPA LA MED DAM CHHO RINPOCHE

DRENPA LA MED GEDUN RINPOCHE

KYAB NAY KON CHHOK SUM LA CHHOD PA BUL

---

To the precious Buddha, unsurpassable Teacher,

to the precious Dharma, unsurpassable Refuge,

to the precious Sangha, unsurpassable Guide,

to the three Jewels, the sources of Refuge, I make this Offering. 

tibetan buddhist - mealtime prayer

http://www.worldprayers.org/prayerwheel/index.html 

May all find satis-faction.

May all comprehend and embody “enough” and “adequate.”

Guglielmo

Yes!

With morning comes affirmation.

The practice of mind.

Realizing the unrealized.

As the reordering of our life, brought about by moral training, creates the environment for meditation, the stillness of mind created by meditation will make possible the examination of reality that is the hallmark of wisdom. 

--  Lama Jampa Thaye, "Living by Meditation Alone" (Tricycle)

My brothers and sisters greet dawn with chant and song.

It is monastery of morning.

I remember William, namesake. And, by symbiosis, invisible patron.

William of Vercelli, Saint 1085-1142. founder, born in Vercelli Italy he was brought up as an orphan became a hermit on Monte Vergine, Italy after a pilgrimage to Compostella and attracted so many followers that a monastery was buillt. By 1119 his followers were united in the Benedictine congregation, the Hermits of Monte Vergine (Williamites) which he headed. The austerity of his rule led to dissension among his monks to restore peace he left and was taken under the protection of Roger I of Naples who built a monastery for him in Salerno. He founded monasteries through out Naples, and died at the Guglielmo monastery near Nusco Italy. He is also called William of Monte Vergine. Feast day June 25.

http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=585

The things we're not aware of!

The connections yet unrealized!

in center air

Back from evening hike on Ragged Mtn. We go to chapel zendo for compline. Final prayer asks for a quiet night and peaceful death.

Death is said to be a part of one’s life, but surely that is not the case if life has not preceded it. Robert Nozick said that “How unwilling someone is to die should depend, I think, upon what he has left undone, and also upon his capacity to do things.” In this sense a premature or untimely death is considered all the more tragic. Although death need not be feared, the prospect of not fully having lived life is heart-wrenching. We need time to realise our aspirations in order to leave a footprint behind. Whether or not we go “gentle into that good night” depends much on that footprint. Our life party will end in tears if we do not feel it is time to go. 

While an early departure has its obvious setbacks, receiving prior notification of it contains a blessing that many do not get. Millions of people each year die suddenly. They get no chance to say goodbye. With cancer you are usually forewarned, and you can fight it for a while. This buys time to put your house in order and say farewell to those you love. We all know that our time is finite, but we tend to live as if it isn’t. As hard as it is to confront, terminal disease allows the afflicted to live life in full realization of its finitude. There is no ‘later’ for which to put off those difficult gestures we otherwise never get around to doing. 

(--from The Party Without Me, David Rönnegard laments having to leave the party https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/The_Party_Without_Me

Out in dark, in empty cabin, a candle burns in center air.

For those needing light just now in their lives. 

One man, three sublime personas

John was a Zen Buddhist. As well as a messianic Jew. And a proleptic Christian.

READING Acts 13:23-25

According to his promise, God has brought forth from David’s descendants Jesus, a savior for Israel. John heralded the coming of Jesus by proclaiming a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel. As John’s career was coming to an end, he would say, “What you suppose me to be I am not. Rather, look for the one who comes after me. I am not worthy to unfasten the sandals on his feet.” 

(--from  Evening Prayer I for the Solemnity of the Birth of John the Baptist)

Here's the zen part: 

Not me; 

Another; 

Look there.

conversations

From a recent phone conversation with a young woman over many hours a goodly distance away.

1. Notes:

Notes and further reflection,
a conversation with C. (Maryland/Maine,13June2015) 

• Because of where we are, God resulted in Jesus’ suffering. (or, … God results in Jesus’ { or C’s } suffering. 

• He lived in the acceptance of the reality of the world in love.  (i.e. God as reality) 

• Infinite God =  (not ending God)          Something without end does not see things as we do trying always to terminate, either with our opinioning, appraising, or judging. With God, "there’s no end to it.” (As they say!) 

• There is a consistent lack of acknowledgment of what really is, and what really is there, and our participation with it, which is expressed through God...   (or, Reality, which becomes God’s existence now; or, that which God becomes existing now; or, that which now becomes God-existing; or, that which is God, the existing-now)...the God we reject, which results in our suffering in God which (or, who) continually calls for acceptance of it all. 

• The primary responsibility of being in the world is to realize the presence of God. 

• There is an unknown (of a) pattern that a criminal will reproduce a dangerous pattern of behavior harm.      There is a simultaneous need to protect from harm and to love. 

• (Or: There is an unknown pattern in consciousness that reproduces criminal behavior. This consciousness is always standing at a crossroad signaling left or right turn — leaving or staying — activating movement along behavior that either heads down harm or steps up love.) 

• In as much as we are separated from the awareness of God, so we participate with where we are in God which is God resulting in the presence of pain falsely interpreted as hate apart from the awareness of God in love. (Or: As much as we are this, we are that.)                       

• Perhaps: 

1. There is God.
2. There is awareness.
3. There is God, and there is the awareness of God.
4. There is us, and there is our awareness of God.
5. There is us, and there is our unawareness of God.
6. God is within and without all things. (or, With God there is no within and without; there is only presence.)
7.      When we are without the awareness of God, we still experience everything that is the presence of God, only, without awareness we derogate God-as-love, rather, now operating in unawareness, name the experience ‘hate’ or ‘evil’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’, and set out to ‘correct’ or ‘right’ the behavior or tendency that has been judged into the categories formulated by rational construct, while moving further away from the “awareness of God” we create a world of “pain falsely interpreted” and launch moral and bellicose activity to combat these categories, persons, forces, and separations.
8.      Whereas, “God resulting” is the flow of awareness that is inseparate and undivided in action and thought, an integrity of presence that receives all as the all it is, a sense of being that lives and moves and has its existence devoid of anything other than the awareness of God. Hence, we might conclude with Thomas Merton, there is no opposite of love, there is only love …and the perversion* of love. When love is perverted, (i.e. altered from its original course, or separated from original source) it is turned away — from source, course, and discourse — relegated and subjugated to distorted and corrupted unsaying or secrecy, a shadowy chicanery that purports to substitute fragmented self-interest in place of whole-sighted allocentric navigation of interrelationship, an aesthetic resulting in each instance a God-stance of consecration, concretion, and instantiation of what-is-this-moment-love.
9.       As much as we are this we are that. We are meant to be the whole of it in the same way we conceive of God as being the whole of it. 
10.      The Japanese appreciation of Wabi-sabi** applies.


...     ...     ...

*perversion |pərˈvərZHən|
noun
1 the alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended: all great evil is the perversion of a good | a scandalous perversion of the law.
2 sexual behavior or desire that is considered abnormal or unacceptable.
ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin perversio(n-), from the verb pervertere ‘turn around’ (see pervert) .


**Wabi-sabi (侘寂?) represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete".[2] It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence (三法印 sanbōin?), specifically impermanence (無常 mujō?), the other two being suffering (苦 ku?) and emptiness or absence of self-nature (空 kū?).
Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, asperity (roughness or irregularity), simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes. (—Wikipedia)

2. Poem:

Conversation
        
       By AI
            for Robert Lowell 

We smile at each other
 

and I lean back against the wicker couch.  
 

How does it feel to be dead? I say.
 

You touch my knees with your blue fingers.  
 

And when you open your mouth,
 

a ball of yellow light falls to the floor  
 

and burns a hole through it.
 

Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear. 


Did you ever, you start,
 

wear a certain kind of silk dress
 

and just by accident,
 

so inconsequential you barely notice it,  
 

your fingers graze that dress
 

and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,  
 

you see it too
 

and you realize how that image 


is simply the extension of another image,  
 

that your own life
 

is a chain of words 


that one day will snap. 


Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,  
 

and beginning to rise heavenward
 

in their confirmation dresses,
 

like white helium balloons,
 

the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning, 


and above all that, 


that’s where I’m floating, and that’s what it’s like
 

only ten times clearer, 


ten times more horrible.  
 

Could anyone alive survive it?  

(--Ai, “Conversation” from Vice: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1999 by Ai.) 

3. Comment:

        Phenomenological proof for the existence of what is most real:

Birdsong at dawn is the only proof needed that there is Loving-Being today. No creed. No ordination. No fealty oath. 

Only White-throated Sparrow and mist-testing Chickadee between Mourning Dove invitatory after invitatory. 

Let us pray: 

O This Reality, Come to show assistance! 

O Being Here, make way to help!

a good read

Yesterday at practice we read the following article from Tricycle: Son of a Gun, An arms manufacturer’s son visits home after moving to a Zen monastery, by Shozan Jack Haubner 

Here’s an excerpt:

As I sat on the phone with him, reaching deep inside for the right words to explain all this, how much he means to me and why I’ve set out on the course I have, the answer was right there in front of me all along. In my journal, instead of “The Death of God Left a God-Sized Hole,” I’d accidentally scribbled “The Death of God Left a God-Sized Whole.” 

For years, I was convinced that the death of a spiritual father figure—the death of God—was cause for eternal mourning and headshaking and teeth-gnashing. Now I’m beginning to see that it may be the very path to liberation. The first thing people want to know when they find out I’m a Buddhist monk is whether or not I still believe in God. If they’re atheists I tell them no; Christians, yes (or the other way around if I’m feeling truculent). But the truth is more complex and personal, and it mirrors my feelings toward my father. I still believe in Dad’s sincerity, integrity, and intentions, for instance, but long ago I stopped looking to him for answers or intervention, for him to rescue me—“guns ablazin’!”—from whatever personal Vietnam I might be suffering through. As with God, my relationship with my father has been marked by disillusionment, reassessment, and, finally, a search for deeper understanding. While I agree with him that our first job is to protect our families and then our country, for example, I don’t think our responsibility stops there, not anymore. In this day and age, it extends to the whole planet. 

God’s death creates a wide-open chasm of responsibility that we must fill. For me, the God-sized hole, through the prism of Buddhist thinking, has become a God-sized whole. 

After hanging up the phone, having resolved nothing, I said a quiet prayer back in my cabin, the kind I learned as a kid—a true prayer, the type that releases itself from within and is a kind of call, a cry, a blind thrust in what always turns out to be the right, the only, direction. It did not begin with “Our Father,” although I did have my forebears in mind. It went, simply, “Help,” repeated over and over with increasing intensity, until suddenly I came out the other side of the request. Instead of begging for help from some unknown source of the universe, I was telling myself to give it. The plea was its own answer, its own solution—a vocation.
http://www.tricycle.com/feature/son-gun

It is a good read. 

This anniversary of my father’s death.

Good, indeed.

no calculation

Only compassion.

Religious awakening does not depend initially on who we are or what we do; rather, it is becoming attuned to the working of great compassion at the heart of existence 

(.--  Taitetsu Unno, "Into the Valley" 
The path of imperfection)

The result of listening, of conversing.

Mere looking; correspondence.

“The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.” (--James Hillman)

by extension everything whole is progenitor

I send the lad an umbrella for Father's Day.

He sends Zabars.

It's raining here.

don't ask

Monsanto owns Blackwater?

Stop

There's something about the culture of exclusion and elimination. Take the south. Take racism and intransigent pretense of superiority on the part of white people. Take legislators with their code phrases, voter suppression, and gerrymandering doubletalking democratic values but enacting closet supremacy laws.

The murders in South Carolina yesterday are not a surprise "crazy" act, but a logical outcome of a century and a half effort to preserve and reinstate legalized slavery by harassing, imprisoning and disenfranchising black people.

The insanity has been institutionalized. It votes. It preens and struts to the tune of patriotic reels proclaiming us uber allies.

There is no sin to forgive by a forgiving Jesus, no criminal act for good legal minds to punish.  There is only perverted consciousness and deluded ideas carried by whole geographies of distracted people intent on punishing northern spoilsports for taking away a very lucrative slave economy. The new ruling class, bankers and corporate boards, now take their tax free profits and sweatshops off shore in the name of acting like real Americans. Just follow the wars and jump on equally lucrative reconstruction.

But I digress. What I really mean to say is -- stop!

Stop!

Just stop!

The stupidity, abandoned character, and inane "more guns" mantra coupled with "it's the black man in the White House's fault" spread an excruciatingly painful ignorance far and wide from the rotting core of an unembarrassable nation.

Das Erinnern

Viel, viel sind meiner Tage 
Durch Sünd entweiht gesunken hinab. 
O großer Richter, frage 
Nicht wie, o lasse ihr Grab 
Erbarmende Vergessenheit 
Lass, Vater der Barmherzigkeit, 
Das Blut des Sohns es decken. 

Ach wenig sind der Tage 
Mit Frömmigkeit gekrönt entflohn, 
Sie sinds, mein Engel, trage 
Sie vor des Ewigen Thron, 
Lass schimmern die geringe Zahl, 
Dass einsten mich des Richters Wahl 
Zu seinen Frommen zähle.

Friedrich Hölderlin

what is, being said, in our surround

My stomach just said something. Right there, next to Ruth Ozeki's novel "A Tale For The Time Being," it spoke a phrase. 

I don't expect the human species to be here for a very long time. At least, not me. One of these mornings this bed will be empty. "Was that his bed?" Someone will answer, "Yes, it was." And that will be that.

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")

Until then, there is just this morning. Squirrel on bird feeder. Chickadee chanting in green-leaf branch. Gray mottle cat on folded blanket at foot of bed in other room.

What you learn going in and out of prison is why not residing in prison is such a good idea. Arbitrary and ambivalent exercising of authority and power -- a practice mimicked at every juncture of interaction within the walls. Stay out of crime and prison. Unless, going in and out of prison, a shared equivalence of experience evokes Buddhist sympathetic joy or Christian corporal mercy that turns you inside out.

We are, each of us, where we are.

Sacred syllables waiting to be pronounced. 

Holy utterance waiting to be heard.