flower never taken

 When her husband died 

Four months ago, three and a half

Years after her death, gone was any trace

Of  fifty four years of tangential

Acquaintance that edged friendship,

The letters, visits, phone calls here

To Nicolet, Japan,  Petersham, Brockton,

New Haven

Assumption the thread

They were happy for nine years

We were merely friends

We couldn't save each other

There would always be a train station

The saying goodbye

Transitions, she said, we see each

Other in transitions

Not her wedding

Not her illness

Not her death

Just a brother and sister

Going somewhere else

overhear one-an-other

We looked at this at Friday Evening Conversation, from an interview with Jorie Graham:

 PM: And after Snowden?

JG: After Snowden—(even though he just stands in for a much larger and pre-existing crisis)—the feeling of writing “for a reader”—be that reader one’s self, an imagined other, a muse, God, whatever poets have posited or imagined over the centuries—was perhaps, for me, almost unconsciously replaced by the feeling of “writing for the random overhearing forces.” That’s a huge shift. An address to someone or something not “hearing” but “overhearing”—an algorithm, an NSA scanner, a program such as Prism—is a very different kind of a conversation. Your voice changes. You internalize it of course. So you’re overhearing yourself as well as hearing yourself. It’s a vortex, but also a new kind of confessional. Only there is something very random and also indiscriminate—ruthless as well as deeply disinterested—which is your interlocutor. When John Stuart Mill wrote that “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard,” he could probably never have imagined the digital eavesdropping of our moment. So yes. That.

PM: So your fascination with the fragment came from that? You have used it since your collection Swarm, but of course here it is more pronounced.

JG: The force, the system, we now interact with—what we know as “the world”—would fragment anything it interacts with. Paradoxically, you have to learn the fragment to speak with that world. To maintain integrity. Yes, you give in to the machinic, but then you take it into yourself and you force humanity, and personal singularity, back into it. It’s complicated. It’s partial. It’s a hybrid you make at best. But you have to fight to stay whole. More than ever. Physically, bodily, spiritually, morally. Also intellectually—but that’s the least important part of it.

(--from, In Conversation with Jorie Graham, on Literary Hub, by Peter Mishler, Feb 23, 2018)

Hölderlin said in a poem that we are a sign that is not read. I add that we are a sound that is not heard.

Poetry overhears.

Until we dwell poetically we are not read, nor heard.

What does it mean to dwell poetically?

Listen to the sound of what is being said. Perceive world sound.

Overhear one-an-other!

pietá

To give one’s life for

Another is foolishness —

Unless you see whole

corrosion fatigue

We each want rest, re-

spite, not doubt and worry, clear

space mockery free

hide and perceive

 Silence leaves the world

Alone;  Jesus enters it —

Hears, prefers, real sound

leben ohne warum

 Do I want to understand why I am here and alive on this planet?

No.

Just the fact of it is enough.

it becomes too much

The Republican Party might not be racist. But, “You have to be comfortable having a racist as president.” (—Stuart Stevens, author of It Was Always a Lie)

Something frightening is happening.

He’s skillful at mocking and insulting women. 

Especially women of color.

heaven the whole daylong

Trailer for film “Zen For Nothing” ends with these words:  

whatever you may think

it’s gone already

I've been thinking about my life. 

Nothing seems good enough.

Clare of Assisi wanted the privilege of owning nothing. She mostly got it.

Then I remember George Gershwin, Louie Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald gave us "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin." 

Whatchoo got?

being is being-made

 Or, sat (Sanskrit for ‘being’) is sat-faction, (facio, facere, feci, factus: Latin for ‘to make‘, or ‘do’). Thus, sat-is-faction.

What this country needs:

1. An intelligent, compassionate leader.

2. Someone who refuses to cultivate acrimony and discord.

3. Anyone who will lift the cloud of despair and angry depression.

You can’t always get what you need, but, let’s just say it — we know what we want.

hiroshima and nagasaki wail

              (haiku after original child bomb)

America learned

Seventy five years ago

Watching heartless death

no choice

 Love

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.”  —Thomas Merton 

 Truth 

muted mudra

            (a forlorn haiku)

No explanations

Suffice — Nagasaki bomb —

Abject cruelty

in the silent hours of night

 Mantra found in cabin writing book from 13 years ago:

Francis, 

     Buddha, 

Dogen, 

     Christ —

See us 

     Through

This 

     Lovely 

Life

Nice to find what has long been here.

ordering intelligent preaching

           (a haiku after Osma and Caleruega)

Dominic prayed psalt-

er and rosary, Mary

a clear star for him

stepping through resemblance

               (a w-hole w-heat haiku)

Being born is trou-

blé. Who can stand by mirror

and not fall into 

brother, sister, origin

                 (haiku for radix, räis, ra’s, rosh)

Black, Brown, Red, Yellow,

White — we drink water, chew food

Walk road, greet each, one

fallout

                (haiku after desolation)

Flash Hiroshima 

Everything gone, decency

Has no place no more

each as itself

This from Center for Action and Contemplation:

A Mirror Image
Thursday,  August 6, 2020

An image is not of itself, nor is it for itself. It rather springs from the thing whose reflection it is and belongs to it with all its being. It owes nothing to a thing other than that whose image it is; nothing else is at its origin. An image takes its being immediately from that of which it is the image and has one sole being with it, and it is that same being. —Meister Eckhart

Sometimes it takes a mystic to translate another mystic for the rest of us. My dear friend, CAC faculty member, and modern mystic James Finley helps us understand Eckhart’s words. A slow, prayerful reading of this brilliant text will deepen your own insight:

[Meister Eckhart] says that the generosity of the Infinite is infinite and [that God] gives [God’s self] away as the reality of all things. And he says that our sorrow is that we do not know that we are the generosity of God. . . .

This is a paraphrase of Eckhart: Imagine you’re standing before a full-length mirror, and imagine the image of you is conscious, that it can think. And this image of you has been through a lot of therapy; it’s taken a lot of courses on being an insightful image. And it has come to a point in which it informs you that it doesn’t need you.

You say to the image of you, “Well, you know, this is going to be rough, really, since you’re an image of me.”

“No,” the image says, [after a pause], “I’ve worked on this; I’ve come to this point.”

And so, to gently help the image out, you step halfway off the side of the mirror; and half the image disappears. The image has a panic attack and goes back into therapy and says to the therapist, “I’m not real! I’m not real! I was working on my affirmations. I bolstered up my confidence, but I don’t know where I went. I buckled!”

Now, the image was real, but the image wasn’t real in the way that it thought it was real. It was real, but not real without you. It was real as an image of you. See?

Eckhart says, “The image owes no allegiances to anything except that of which it is the image.”. . . There is nothing that has the authority to say what it is except that of which it is the image. And so it is with us, Eckhart says, that we are the image of God. Without God, we are nothing, absolutely nothing. In being the image of God, we owe no allegiances to anything but the Infinite Love in whose image we are made. And the idolatry of diversions of the heart where we wander off into cul-de-sacs with the imagined authority of anything less or other than Infinite Love to name who we are: this is the problem.

(—from Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, 6Aug2020)

...   ...   ...

The Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn wrote:

“Your mind is like the sea. When the wind comes, there are very big waves. When the wind dies down, the waves become smaller and smaller, until finally the wind disappears altogether and the sea is like a clear mirror. Then mountains, trees and all things are reflected on the surface of the sea. There are many thought-waves in your mind. But if you continue to practice don’t know mind, this thinking will become gradually smaller, until finally your mind will always be clear. When the mind becomes clear, it is like a mirror: red comes and the mirror is red; yellow comes and the mirror is yellow; a mountain comes and the mirror is a mountain. Your mind is the mountain; the mountain is your mind. They are not two. So it is very important not to be attached either to thinking or to not thinking. You mustn’t be upset by anything that goes on in your mind. Only don’t worry and keep don’t know mind.”

(—from Three Letters to a Beginner, by Seung Sahn)

...   ...   ...

As we think about what we call “God” — as we think with what we call “mind” —there are premises and templates applied to the inquiry. 

If there is only “itself” rippling and reverberating across the expanse of “itself” — then all talk of something “other” looking “at” something other than itself is rhetorical flourish. 

Rather, the itself looking “as” itself into itself is self-reflection or self-inquiry with no-other as manifestation of what-is and what-is-coming-to-be within the field of emptiness that is Being-Itself.

Today is, in the Christian metaphor, the feast of Transfiguration. It is there, in a diaphaneity of clear sight, a transparent and traceless movement reveals the whole of things in omnipresence and infinite variety, each as itself, all as no-other.

A koan meetingbrook has held for its meditation has been:

Here is One-

Another Itself

(wfh) 

what about that

Before we become aware, there is nothing. 

“Because man thinks, I am, says the universe.” (Hannah Arendt, in Life of the Mind)

Once we embrace satori, there is nothing. 

warm afternoon

                 (helping someone haiku)

Entering numbers

Excel spreadsheet — Do people

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