as others are made to suffer

War is where young men go insane with the awful things their country asks them to do.

Their country receives them back.

But they seldom come home.

Who they were is left in battle zones.

Like unburied dead wandering in haze of terrible tasks done in name of duty and freedom.

They suffer.

As others are made to suffer.

to share sorrow

There's something about the ritual of condolence with the Seneca and Mohawk and the Iroquois confederation.

Condolence:
Origin of condole1580-90; < Late Latin condolēre, equivalent to con- con- + dolēre to feel pain; akin to dolor (--dictionary.com)

To share sorrow.

The prerequisite for civilized culture.

just pesky bugs walking up past yurt with dog this morning

Brrr!

In disturbing nightmares last few nights I heard a series of eulogies for USA. 

This morning I look out window. 

Oh good! 

Still here.

don’t make me go there

Sheilah, one of our 90+yr olds, read Leonard Cohen’s poem last Friday at meetingbrook’s Poetry, Tea, and Thee gathering.

STEER YOUR WAY
                        By Leonard Cohen 

Steer your way through the ruins of the Altar and the MallSteer your way through the fables of Creation and the FallSteer your way past the Palaces that rise above the rotYear by yearMonth by month Day by dayThought by thought  

Steer your heart past the Truth you believed in yesterdaySuch as Fundamental Goodness and the Wisdom of the WaySteer your heart, precious heart, past the women whom you bought Year by yearMonth by month Day by dayThought by thought 

Steer your path through the pain that is far more real than youThat has smashed the Cosmic Model, that has blinded every View And please don’t make me go there, though there be a God or notYear by yearMonth by month Day by day Thought by thought 

They whisper still, the injured stones, the blunted mountains weepAs he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheapAnd say the Mea Culpa, which you’ve gradually forgot Year by year Month by month Day by day Thought by thought  

Steer your way, O my heart, though I have no right to ask To the one who was never never equal to the task Who knows he’s been convicted, who knows he will be shotYear by year Month by month Day by day Thought by thought.

(--POEM BY LEONARD COHEN, JUNE 20, 2016 ISSUE, THE NEW YORKER) http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/steer-your-way-by-leonard-cohen 

In this time of addled and idiotic commentary on social/political burlesque, it is refreshing that there are poets to frame what is revealing itself to our imagination with eluctable possibility. We can struggle out of the increasing absurdity of contemporary personal and corporate culture, (which seem ineluctable).

• ELDERLY VETERAN ALLEGEDLY HELD CAPTIVE BY MAN IN MOTEL ROOM IN HIGHLANDS FOR 4 YEARS, HTTP://ABC7NY.COM/NEWS/ELDERLY-VETERAN-ALLEGEDLY-HELD-CAPTIVE-BY-MAN-IN-MOTEL-ROOM-FOR-4-YEARS/1434239/ 
• Cops Shoot Unarmed Caregiver With His Hands Up While He Helps Man http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cops-shoot-unarmed-caregiver-charles-kinsey-his-hands-while-he-n614106,                                                                                                                                  And this, http://abc7ny.com/news/man-with-hands-up-shot-by-cop-theres-no-justification-lawyer-says/1436778/
• Defiant Ted Cruz stands by refusal to endorse Trump after being booed during convention speech http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/20/politics/ted-cruz-republican-convention-moment/

--An old man held against his will four years in motel room for his monthly pension/social security.

--A man with hands up, prone on ground, explaining he is caring for an autistic man sitting beside him holding a toy truck who left his group home, is shot in leg by police who fire three shots at him while on ground, then handcuffed, left on side as his wound bled..

--The kabuki political theater of grimace and snarl, smirking and posturing, asking to lead a country that is fragile and vulnerable and a little bit crazed.

It is not easy to steer between militaristic police, nascent racism, and opportunistic unfeeling greed.

Besides that, it is July, temperature is hot, and full moon slowly wanes.

It feels like everything is collapsing. Cosmos, culture, personality.

I forget how to pray.

I’ll go look at rowboat to try to see how to stop leak.

card on brown book cover from Rockland bakery

it is today

Truth be told, shadows surreptitiously accompany us in this shadow world of appearance and concealment.

Where we are and who we are and what we are doing might be the trinitarian nature of being-in-the-world.

Morning sun behind post. Mourning sense behind ordinary actions. It is a benefit we can mask what we feel.

Like local theater company performance we pretend to the lives of others by reciting lines and crossing stage with convincing approximation. What is he to Hecuba? And what accounts for the fascination with motion picture films and tv dramas and so-called reality shows? 

In Cleveland focus moves from basketball championship to republican convention. Millionaires run and jump, throw passes and hack one another, feint and feign, stuff and finesse while those watching are unsure whether what they see is real or fake. Politics is a professional sport. We seem to like following celebrity.

We are unsure if what we see is what is there. Nor do we know where things go when they go away.

"It’s outside the nature of both my personality and my faith to speak much about myself. I don’t think people are truly capable of knowing exactly who they are, and that, myself included, any attempt to define this “I” approaches arrogance. Our hearts and minds change from moment to moment, just as the clouds shift in the evening sky as the sun goes down. Who are we to think we have grasped the true nature of our souls? The Buddha-mind within us will not be constrained by the limits of language."     —Abbess Fushimi, "Shedding Light"

In the Magnificat the first line says, "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior." (Luke 1:46)  Perhaps we are real to the extent (as P. suggested in prison) we allow the "Lord" or one true reality, the so-called "Soul Itself" to enter and reside within what we call "me" or "our life." 

Perhaps the soul is no thing and the Soul is nothing there. Rather the Soul is What Is, and to the extent we open to this one true reality, we come to be, we are. The soulless are absent. The soul-full (yes, the soulful) are here, present.

It is the dialectic of presence and absence, real and unreal, genuine value and dreck.

We are a people of windows -- looking through, light seen through -- giving rise to the feeling of hope that what is seen might be approached.

Perhaps "our" soul does make visible the truth of what is hidden in our midst. So we listen. We sniff out fragrance. We hope to pick up muffins from Chase's Daily in Belfast on our way to Milo and Old Town.

It is today.

What are we seeing?

there's nothing there

Q. Are you enlightened

A. No you

Q. I don't understand

A. Nor I

what is it we are listening for

What does it mean to love God?

It means morning arrives and saying thank you. To morning. Which is God, the God outside scripture and tradition. 

It means sun beginning to burn through fog. It is fog that is God. And is taken into sunlight as what is there is taken into eyes and brain and interpretative recognition as morning fog and blinding breakthrough of star/sun 92.96 million miles away, and into which 1.3 million earths would fit.

These are big numbers. In measurement language God is a big number. In poetic language God is no number, rather mere mist and sunlight and passing words on Monday morning.

In Baton Rouge more violence. Guns and bullets discharged. These past 2 weeks, civilians and police officers both shot and killed. Nobody seems to notice a common thread. We are killing one another.

We are killing one another. God is not killing us. We are killing one another.

Last night at Sunday Evening Practice we read Toni Packer on meditative inquiry. Saskia told story of great nephew and visiting Austrian cousin, both 6 yrs old, used her to speak with each other. They used her, she said, to "go through" in order to traverse the English/German language difference.

God is going through. God is that which is going through. God is the going through of that which is going through. And we are that which is gone through.

The earth sits on table. Cat curls on couch. Books hold words above earth and cat.

The Black preacher/scholar is on Democracy Now speaking about truth and justice. He tells how he agrees with the Green Party candidate. He wants to steer away from neofascist and neoliberal other two candidates.

We are a species of disagreement. We are a reluctant community. We are only beginning to learn how to go through difference without having to kill the different. We are just beginning to learn how to pronounce the syllables of our molecular dna and elemental transfusive emergent Word that creates itself in the movement from dark vacuity to bright appearance. This journey is an ever turning dance spinning through silence toward eloquence.

I love God.

I love the going through.

I long for the ability to hear and pronounce the emerging sound of what is real, what is true, what is loving.

Until that is embodied and revealed., there is , the black scholar might suggest, John Coltrane to ease us through.

1964 - John Coltrane - A Love Supreme - YouTube

water, water, every shear

Rowboat lists and I am listless

As it rains on Sunday morning.

bailing rowboat bicycling roads

I couldn't imagine why I would buy a gun. Nor even a knife. Protection? I couldn't imagine shooting or stabbing someone if threatened. So I didn't and don't.

There's nothing to protect. I have too many shirts. They hang on clothesline behind bookshed after washing machine. I have too many pants. They hang behind door of my room. I have too many books. They reside everywhere; calling to me -- Come, read!

There's also this almost childlike focus on the moment, the joy of the present alone: Is that really all there is to happiness? What about happy memories? What about the happy thought that tomorrow is another day to do something good and exciting? 

You may, instead, agree with the Tagesspruch (maxim for the day) that the owner of a hotel on the Baltic coast wrote some months ago on the breakfast menu for his guests: "Die wesentlichen Dinge, um in diesem Leben Glück zu erlangen, sind: Etwas zu vollbringen, jemanden zu lieben, und auf etwas zu hoffen." Approximately: "The essential things that make you happy in life are: to accomplish something, to love someone, and to hope for something." That’s not Goethe; but it's a happy thought. 

(--from, Philosophy for the privileged and the intellectual By Dr. Toad on March 5, 2010, reviewing The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson (Cultural Memory in the Present) Paperback – December 23, 2008, by Pierre Hadot, Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/Present-Alone-Our-Happiness-Conversations/dp/0804748365/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468355805&sr=1-10&keywords=pierre+hadot

 Some think a Bald Eagle (or the large snapping turtle)  took the Loon youngsters from Hosmer Pond, a 54 acre body of freshwater 3+ miles outside of town. There was much joy when the two little ones showed up in late June swimming with mom and pop Loon. Then, no show. The wondering has turned to disappointment. So geht das Leben!

Rather a black sweatshirt and pair of black sweatshorts. That's what I ordered yesterday.

And cycled 10 miles today.

After reading from book on Robert Lax and jotting poetry in yurt for quiet afternoon.

I'm thinking of nothing these days.

What is the relation of 'attention' to 'being'

It began as a mere response to why the killings of black men by police seems so noteworthy these current weeks (and years).

The Friday morning conversation in prison often is a springboard through insight.

One man mentioned technology, the filming of incidents.

Then it was said, "Attention is being given to it."

And all of a sudden, as part of the earlier question asking about the compassion equivalent to intelligence, the thought occurs: attention is being given to it.

And we ponder this. Is attention "being"? And is attention compassion?

And is attention, being, given, to "this?"

Are we stumbling into something here?

Friday morning beads

No more professional armies to battle each other on a recognized battleground like some chessboard using approved legitimate rules of engagement.

Now everyone and every place at any time with no rules no restrictions no exclusion of women and children and no identified goal -- polymorphously perverse killing destruction.

It is a logical extension of rifle, carpet bombing, Thompson machine guns, ak47s, drones, fighter jets, hydrogen bomb, stiletto knife, brass knuckles, choke holds, baseball bats, pushing off roofs.

Now, an 18 wheeler in a crowded street during celebratory gathering.

This is our future previewing on screens of uncomprehending consciousness.

But we've never been aficionados of logical extensions.

So we stare.

Wondering whether and to whom we might pray.

If there is a God, then where would one look to see God

Beneath

It

All;

Beyond

And

Between

Everything

if only we could see what is under appearance

What is Christ

Is Christ what is

Coming to be

Intimately unveiled 

After what has been

Is now departing

Unseen

are you religious

What if wisdom is a being of intimate awareness?

What if the "fear of the lord" was about what the lord feared, not that the lord is to be feared? (Does the lord fear our unwillingness to see things whole and act with conscious integrity for all beings?)

What if salvation means liberation from barrier and ignorance?

Would religion, then, be the most vital inquiry of any?

monday morning

Yes

Today Benedict of Nursia is celebrated, called the father of western monasticism.

Hosmer pond watchers are looking for two baby loons. No reports of sightings in past three days.

Photo arises from black lives matter Louisiana that sums up the mood of these times. 

JONATHAN BACHMAN/REUTERS

Is this the new iconic image of what America struggles to comprehend?

no eyes no ears no object of mind

I worry that criminals have stolen the country from so-called ordinary people.

Not petty criminals. Powerful criminals.

In two months it will be the 15th anniversary of a new century of criminal terrorism.

So many among us do not have the slightest suspicion as to who the real terrorists are.

Tonight, on my cushion, I listened to rain.

There’s a lot to hear.

indeterminate immediacy

There are modes of thought difficult to avoid.

Hegel’s Science of Logic
Volume One: The Objective Logic 

Book One: The Doctrine of Being

---

Section One: Determinateness (Quality)
§ 130
Being is the indeterminate immediate; it is free from determinateness in relation to essence and also from any which it can possess within itself. This reflectionless being is being as it is immediately in its own self alone.§ 131
Because it is indeterminate being, it lacks all quality; but in itself, the character of indeterminateness attaches to it only in contrast to what is determinate or qualitative. But determinate being stands in contrast to being in general, so that the very indeterminateness of the latter constitutes its quality. It will therefore be shown that the first being is in itself determinate, and therefore, secondly, that it passes over into determinate being — is determinate being — but that this latter as finite being sublates itself and passes over into the infinite relation of being to its own self, that is, thirdly, into being-for-self.  

Chapter 1 Being
A Being
§ 132
Being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself. It is also not unequal relatively to an other; it has no diversity within itself nor any with a reference outwards. It would not be held fast in its purity if it contained any determination or content which could be distinguished in it or by which it could be distinguished from an other. It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure intuiting itself. Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing. 

B Nothing
§ 133
Nothing, pure nothing: it is simply equality with itself, complete emptiness, absence of all determination and content — undifferentiatedness in itself. In so far as intuiting or thinking can be mentioned here, it counts as a distinction whether something or nothing is intuited or thought. To intuit or think nothing has, therefore, a meaning; both are distinguished and thus nothing is (exists) in our intuiting or thinking; or rather it is empty intuition and thought itself, and the same empty intuition or thought as pure being. Nothing is, therefore, the same determination, or rather absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as, pure being.® 

C Becoming
1. Unity of Being and Nothing
§ 134
Pure Being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same. What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being — does not pass over but has passed over — into nothing, and nothing into being. But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet that they are unseparated and inseparable and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore, this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself. ®

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlbeing.htm 

There are correspondences hard to extrapolate.

A Nigerian man who had recently fled to Europe to escape Boko Haram militants was beaten to death on the streets of Italy this week as he tried to defend his wife against racist abuse.
Emmanuel Chidi Namdi, 36, and his wife Chimiary, 24, were walking through the north-central Italian town of Fermo on Tuesday when a man called Chimiary a “monkey” and tried to grab her, according to local priest Vinicio Albanesi, a friend of the couple.
Namdi intervened, and the resulting fight left him in a coma. He was pronounced dead on Wednesday.
Amedeo Mancini, a 38-year-old Italian man who is part of an “ultras” gang of extremist soccer fans, was arrested Thursday on suspicion of killing Namdi. Mancini told investigators that he’d insulted the couple because he thought they were stealing a car, and he claimed that he’d acted in self defense after Namdi attacked him, HuffPost Italy reported. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nigerian-refugee-killed-italy-emmanuel-chidi-namdi_us_577e9e10e4b0c590f7e8702f 

There are instances of remembrance important to recall.

Like the birthday of one’s mother.

becoming what once we thought about

I know what is causing the shootings in this country.

Dualistic mind.

Specifically a deteriorated, deficient condition of mental rational consciousness.

A corrupted dualistic mode of thinking is what is driving the bus toward the edge of the cliff for its drop thousands of feet, thousands of years, into a hard bottom which will break everything into pieces of blood splattered and destroyed lives.

Until we look deeply within, profoundly meditating on the inner evolving changing consciousness, radically contemplating the unifying complementarity of non-duality, we will continue to battle one another, we will continue to murder, maim, and horribly wound one another. We will cultivate the meme of enemy. We will gather unto ourselves the means to harm and separate and make life a fearful experience.

Non-dual awareness will save us.

Think about it.

Think within it.

Become it.

No mind.

Seeing without division.

Compassion finding itself surrounding.

after dallas, baton rouge, minnesota; after all

Shooting begets. Let’s rethink shooting anyone.

OK, I’ve had my rethink. I choose not to own gun nor shoot anyone.

Anyone!

That’s me.

You?