as it rolls down the hill

I happened across an obituary:

Father Eric F. Kyle, O.F.M., 91, a professed Franciscan friar for 69 years and a priest for 64 years, died Dec. 1, [2016] at Holy Name Friary, Ringwood, N.J. https://thetablet.org/obituary-father-eric-f-kyle-o-f-m/

It was 1963/1964 and Fr Eric suggested I might like a conference being held that summer at St John’s University in NYC on The Theater of the Absurd. I did. Still have Martin Esslin’s 1961 red paperback.

Also still grateful for this quiet friar’s scholarly teaching and lengthy thoughtful sermons at the seminary.

As a Zen Buddhist Catholic Christian living in a small hermitage not far from Canada’s Atlantic Provinces, I continue to recollect the spirituality and studies Fr. Eric helped me begin.

I’m glad I found this obituary.

The collation of literature with meditative and contemplative practice he exemplified resonates the insight of Camus’ words, absurdly, that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

I am happy to have been introduced to the absurd, as well as being acquainted with this Franciscan 54 years ago. 

Va bene, grazie Papa

 Take the worry out.

The Opinion Pages  | EDITORIAL , New York Times 

The Pope on Panhandling: Give Without Worry   By THE EDITORIAL BOARDMARCH 3, 2017Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

New Yorkers, if not city dwellers everywhere, might acknowledge a debt to Pope Francis this week. He has offered a concrete, permanently useful prescription for dealing with panhandlers. 

It’s this: Give them the money, and don’t worry about it.
The pope’s advice, from an interview with a Milan magazine published just before the beginning of Lent, is startlingly simple. It’s scripturally sound, yet possibly confounding, even subversive. 

Living in the city — especially in metropolises where homelessness is an unsolved, unending crisis — means that at some point in your day, or week, a person seeming (or claiming) to be homeless, or suffering with a disability, will ask you for help.
You probably already have a panhandler policy. 

You keep walking, or not. You give, or not. Loose coins, a dollar, or just a shake of the head. Your rule may be blanket, or case-by-case. 

If it’s case by case, that means you have your own on-the-spot, individualized benefits program, with a bit of means-testing, mental health and character assessment, and criminal-background check — to the extent that any of this is possible from a second or two of looking someone up and down. 

Francis’ solution eliminates that effort. But it is by no means effortless. 

Speaking to the magazine Scarp de’ Tenis, which means Tennis Shoes, a monthly for and about the homeless and marginalized, the pope said that giving something to someone in need is “always right.” (We’re helped here by the translation in an article from Catholic News Service.) 

But what if someone uses the money for, say, a glass of wine? (A perfectly Milanese question.) His answer: If “a glass of wine is the only happiness he has in life, that’s O.K. Instead, ask yourself, what do you do on the sly? What ‘happiness’ do you seek in secret?” Another way to look at it, he said, is to recognize how you are the “luckier” one, with a home, a spouse and children, and then ask why your responsibility to help should be pushed onto someone else. 

Then he posed a greater challenge. He said the way of giving is as important as the gift. You should not simply drop a bill into a cup and walk away. You must stop, look the person in the eyes, and touch his or her hands. 

The reason is to preserve dignity, to see another person not as a pathology or a social condition, but as a human, with a life whose value is equal to your own. This message runs through Francis’ preaching and writings, which always seem to turn on the practical and personal, often citing the people he met and served as a parish priest in Argentina. 

His teaching on divorced and remarried Catholics has infuriated some conservative critics who accuse him, unfairly, of elevating compassion over doctrine. His recent statements on refugees and immigrants are the global version of his panhandler remarks — a rebuke aimed directly at the rich nations of Europe and at the United States. 

America is in the middle of a raging argument over poor outcasts. The president speaks of building walls and repelling foreigners. That toxic mind-set can be opposed in Washington, but it can also be confronted on the sidewalk. You don’t know what that guy will do with your dollar. Maybe you’d disapprove of what he does. Maybe compassion is the right call.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/opinion/the-pope-on-panhandling-give-without-worry.html?comments&_r=0#permid=21681611 

Krishna told Arjuna not to be attached to the fruit, or outcome, of the action. 

If we need an argument from authority to do what we long to do naturally -- help one another -- this pope gives us a Lenten hand.

how so many

It's a little like liking a guy but not where he lives.

READING Jeremiah 14:9a 

You are in our midst, O Lord, 

your name we bear: 

do not forsake us, 

O Lord, our God!

Then again, as a hermit, I rarely visit another's house.

I'll have to be satisfied with hearsay.

How so many suffer so much by the unaware.

it's just a concern

Here's the worry:

• Scandals arise
• Quickly an attack on America by some "foreign terrorist or enemy"
• An immediate declaration of  Martial Law, freezing in place everything 
• All scandals and investigations are suspended while we look for the "bad hombres"
• Military attacks on the usual suspects commence 
• Nuclear weapons are "strategically" used
• And escalate until, four years later, carnage and desolation in specific areas of the geopolitic globe, there's a hiatus.
• And a presidential declaration that, while we had to suspend the constitution and NATO and the UN and the normal system of governance in the US, there will be a new jobs program, all residents with less than 50 years citizen status or less than 1 million dollars of liquid assets, will be rounded up and deported to the former Europe for reprocessing and reeducation.
• Blame will be assigned.
• Former presidents Obama and Clinton will be tried for treason.
• And massive crowds attend the swearing in of the first epoch of post-democracy "Huge Leader Reign" in the former United States.

It's just a concern.

Nothing like this could ever happen,

Right?

reading the day

It used to be -- "What are you giving up?

Then it was -- "What will you do as positive acts?"

Today it is raindrops on windshield and spinning prayer wheel and empty space crucifix, and cooling coffee in paper cup, and meditation beads from someone who visited India, and a small metal bell.

Everything, everything,

speaks of who we are

where our anchor sits

the perennial presence of

What-is

urging us on our way

tuesday into wednesday

I'm giving up lent.

I'm sitting down with silence.

Dust and death and suffering --

these I lament

these I remember

to these I do return.

stepping out beyond the veil

DT/45 is the new face of America

It looks into mirror

Seeing itself

Only itself

Others be dammed

It is time to consider another reflection

Another face looking back

Yours

Mine

DT/45 will soon fade from view

It's that way with pornography

It imprisons those whose fantasies

Play out in public

coming to word

The word is our body.

We must learn how to speak.

Pronouncing itself.

when you hear your name, please say "here"

Sue?

Susan?

(Silence)

Go well, dear cousin!

compline, saturday night

When I call

Answer me

O God of justice


In the silent

Hours of the night

Bless the Lord

(--Ps 4; Ps 34)

on learning today that Paula passed away

haiku
        (for Paula)

i see you’ve gone in-

to a view we can’t see -- out

of your words -- clear light

        (wfh/25feb17)

Which is all fine with me, as I tend toward a disembodied existence a few inches above my head and outside my skin. So why not inhabit a story, a history ? Where else is there to go ? Where do 10,000 wordless hours on a zafu bring you but into the silences of your own brain ? Is God or enlightenment there more profoundly than in that which we construe in words ? In the beginning, after all, was the Word which was with the Wordless which, in fact was the Wordless. 

Posted by Paula at Wednesday, October 15, 2014 Paula’s House of Toast 

what he’d say truth was

Like this.

It’s just like this.

That’s what the Zen Master said the truth was -- it’s just like this.

Are you happy with this explanation?

Yes.

It’s true.

Truth is just like this.

ama nesciri

I'm thinking of turning myself in.

crossing rt 161, Aroostook County,
Presque Isle to Ft Kent Maine 22feb17

"The increased threat of deportation has sent many immigrants into hiding." (NYTimes morning briefing, 23feb17)

Presque Isle, Maine, UMPI

I came here from a dark watery place. Before that I was in deep hiding somewhere outside known terrain. I was the conception of two agents intent on snuggling me into this existence before their sleepy cells took to snoring somnolence.

Presque Isle Maine, 22feb17

When I appeared out of the shadows I immediately went into hiding, assuming an identity with pastiche facts and dates and formulas of social incognito that allowed me to move quietly and freely through school corridors and work greetings without being recognized,

Now, some seventy plus years later, I return to the spiritually hidden place of pre-conception.

I look out.  

There are bare trees.

tree, Fort Kent, 8:30am

View from Fort Kent, Maine
over St John River to Clair, NB Canada

Canada is across the road 

Nobody knows my name.

Mt Katahdin, Millinocket Maine, 21feb17

I love 

to be

Unknown.

wisdom seeks for wisdom

Seek.

Rev. Suzuki’s talk
July 22, 1965
We are studying now the sutra of the sixth patriarch, in the evening lecture, and PRAJNA (this is of course Sanskrit word) we mean, wisdom, but this wisdom is not intellect, or knowledge.  This wisdom is so-called our inmost nature, which is always in incessant activity.  Zazen practice is to….wisdom seeking for wisdom is zazen practice, if I use technical term.  Wisdom seeks wisdom is zazen practice, and our everyday life is wisdom.  Realization of our precepts is our everyday life.  When wisdom…When our everyday life is based on wisdom we call it percepts.  When we sit, we do not do anything; we just sit.  There’s no activity of our mind.  We just sit and all what we do is taking inhaling and exhaling.  Sometimes you will hear some birds singing, but that is not actually….you are not hearing.  Your ears will hear it.  You are not hearing it.  Just, you know, sound come, and you will make some response to it, that is all.  This kind of practice is called “wisdom seeks for wisdom”.

Originally offered: July 22nd, 1965 | Modified October 27th, 2009 by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
http://suzukiroshi.sfzc.org/dharma-talks/july-22-1965/#more-225 

And may we find. 

reading paper about sila, pranna, and samadhi

Speed limit is 75 on 95 in northern maine from Benedicta to Houlton,

Then follow 12 wheeler up into Presque Isle.

Arrive tired. A fairly constant condition.

We tossed snow pieces over high banks off helipad at hospital in Millinocket.

Such a good

Dog

evolving out of garbled grunts and groans

In dialogue with a student:

RE: how we might think differently about the election, 
a philosopher’s point of view

COLLAPSE

"Political parties have become the sacred."

"The Dalai Lama discusses ...  how irrational it is that we blame others instead of their words - they are not their words and if they were in a state of happiness they probably wouldn't be speaking in the manner in which they do."(MW)

I like the way you weave our texts through your comments.  The above quotes catch my attention. It is true the political parties have become the sacred -- it helps explain our belief and fidelity to them. Even (one might say) the observation that Mrs. Clinton was anointed by her party to be the ordained candidate without sufficient or honest debate as to her ascendancy.

Like the phenomenon of SBNR (spiritual but not religious) we looked at briefly in class, Mr Trump arrived not really republican and no longer democrat and punched his way through the religious establishment much to the astonishment and (to many) the sacrilege of apostasy against the hierarchy of both parties.

Your statement suggests that this phenomenon of the breakthrough renegade himself mirrors the falling from grace of the traditional churches (Dems/Reps) and an early example of an ersatz new Martin Luther smashing the establishment into a new landscape that is unrecognizable and unpredictable.

And here we can retrieve your second statement -- that it is his words, his manner of speaking, the implications of which make us nervous and wondering where the syntax and tone will shake out and into what new dogmatic or evangelistic pronouncements. Is it possible that we are in a new and uncharted vocabulary that is being sounded into the forming chaos of a type of post big bang? That the man who has emerged with an unrecognized glossolalia is merely echoing the emergence into language as did our ancient ancestors evolving out of garbled grunts and groans up from inarticulate gestures toward articulation and understandable discourse?

(Yes, ok, a bit flowery and far-fetched prose -- but do get the point.) Perhaps the Dalai Lama is saying we might not like the words, but do not condemn the man -- he is trying to come to word.

Coming to word is a mighty accomplishment. Fact, feeling, experience, thought, and possibilities swirl and bump and twist in seemingly random patterns of interaction and diversion until they coalesce around an impulse of expression seeking to find its way into the world as word, as word become speech, word become language, word become flesh, become the spirit of interconnectivity that allows many the opportunity to move together toward ways of acting that recognizes and benefits what might be called community.

Is this the birth pang we are experiencing? Or is it a crapshoot, (an enterprise whose outcome is determined by chance) the rolling of dice that could just as easily become the near-edge of real danger? 

Our ethics begin to take on the role of a young reporter on the beat coming upon an unexpected slowly developing event that resembles something between creation and devastation. She wants to report on what is taking place. She watches. She reports. She is captivated by the fog and mist and the forming creature taking shape behind it all.

She is not the enemy. She does not hate what is trying to form itself. But she is uncertain, and a little frightened. 

Perhaps we all are.

theme: to care is to change

In Canada it is family day.

In America it is presidents' day.

In prison this morning it was Immanuel Kant and J.S.Mill and Nel Noddings, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sam Cooke.

How do you arrive at what’s correct? one man asked. And what about ego?

Kobe Bryant and Lebron James, was one response. Ego and integrated ego. The isolated self and the team player.

If you don't change, you don't care; if you don't care, you don't change.

Philosophy, it can be argued, is a family arête.*

*Note: 

In discussing arête, Plato leads the examination of humankind’s quest for excellence. Henry Marrou describes arête as “the ideal value to which even life itself must be sacrificed.” Although Marrou considers ludicrous the translation of the word from ancient Greek to mean virtue (he prefers valor), virtue is the term used by translator W.K.C. Guthrie in two of Plato’s dialogues to describe this quality that is made and not born in us, the quality of excellence toward which we strive in our daily conduct in society 

.https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/Arete

gracias, tibi

Not in church this morning

Not that kind of church

Dripping roof water, white noise waves, a trilling phone alarm in another room

All the baptisms, confirmations, communion and go-in-peace

Are unwalled, without vestments, no longer arguing pastor or priest, male or female, born once or born again

There is a freedom from that mind and time

Stay-at-home fruit juice and walnut raisin toast sunlight on February porch

I don't know who Jesus was, whether he liked jews catholics or protestants better

I don't know whether accepting him as personal lord and savior punches your ticket to glory

Or if Albert Camus is sitting in Algerian cafe smoking and thinking about absurdity

As the United States sells off sanity and buys crazy

Terrorists storing their dangerous ideas in foldaway tents and going on holiday

Until retirement benefits click in and yield 5.7% on the dollar

And jesus' 21st century caption reads "if you see me, say something" -- an invitation to

Post-prayer non-liturgical unfrocked morning ordinariness with half and half in coffee

As the apocalypse takes shape in idiots' minds looking to buy guns and shorting options

And nothing we know of arrives at end of driveway looking to befuddle us with bagels and donuts

Ita missa est

gracias, tibi

Saecula saculorum

Hoc est enim corpus meum?

Deus ibi est . . . 

breathing, itself, here

Cough from another room.

Furnace blows warm air through vents from basement.

Box of Tylenol opened.

Blood pressure high.

Pain from mouth pervades.

I've been thinking about last nights conversation. How compassion walks down dark alleys. Dumpsters full of debris and detritus call out resentment and condemnation wanting your compliance and complicity.

Instead of sorrow for those hurting as well as those doing the hurting.

Kuan Yin, Bodhisattva of compassion, hears the cries of the world.

Mary, Mother of Sorrows, feels in her heart the distress and difficulties of the suffering.

No blame.

No recrimination.

No protestations of failed righteousness or sinful deviancy.

Rather, attentive presence. Listening awareness.

Rigpa and condolence.

An offer of nearing humanity in an atmosphere of distancing greed, anger, and delusion.

And then, death.

Of self.

Of separation.

Of tendentious opinions signaling arrogant dismissal of other.

Finally.

Face to face with what is the face of oneself.

Without barrier, border, or boundary.

Breathing.

Itself.

Here.

recollection

ji ji mu ge

(Between one thing-event and another thing-event there is no barrier.)

Jijimuge: (Japanese) The doctrine of the Kegon School of the 'unimpeded interdiffusion' of all Ji, things. Apparently the last word in the intellectual understanding of the unity of manifestation. http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/history/glossary_fk.htm