don’t mind me, i’m dead

I died in Israel

I died in Gaza

I died in Ukraine

I died in Russia

I died in the arms of human stupidity

what is here, profoundly, is what we are, coming to be

You’re wrong if you say Hamas is evil, Israel good; or you say Israel is evil, Hamas good.

Hear me out.

No one is evil or good.

Everyone is merely mistaken.

It’s the annoying insight of ancient religious/philosophical thinking — that we are more often mistaken and deluded than accurately clear and spot on the mark.

Delusion says you’re bad I’m good or I’m bad you’re good.

The consequences of such thinking are bullets bombs and bullshit.

The non-deluded point of view looks like this:

• It is morning
• Make coffee or tea
• Spread bread with butter or honey
• Feel the surrounding presence coming/going 
• See yes in everything — and MU as nothing other 

• When cat jumps up, say “cat” 

• When dog sidles near, say “dog”

Learn what it is we must learn.

Epilogue

BY ROBERT LOWELL

 

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

I hear the noise of my own voice:

The painter’s vision is not a lens,

it trembles to caress the light.

But sometimes everything I write   

with the threadbare art of my eye

seems a snapshot,

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

heightened from life,

yet paralyzed by fact.

All’s misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

 

(Robert Lowell, “Epilogue” from Day by Day. Copyright © 1977)

 

I might be stupid, but I’m not crazy.

I know Reality is What Is Here.

And I love this . . .

Being

Itself

going elsewhere while remaining completely at origin

 Thought has no mass weight

Travels with no measured speed

Is there while still here

gazing through god into nothing other

 I get nothing from

God, nothing. When I pray God

Looks the other way

What am I…to do? I gaze

Into MU … seeing nothing

a son off grid under windmills

 Unfastened from world

one hundred and one year old

woman laughs on phone

yes is not no, but floating through

 The zen monk said yes

No one heard him — two loons

swam to shore — nodding

the saying of evil is muting itself telling why

To combat evil 

evil is combatant — this 

Is how things are — thus

The only way to silence 

Evil is to hear it out

what, now — no delay

 Neither Christianity nor Islam nor Judaism can survive their ineffectual rituals of political grandstanding and cultural exclusion.

The only hope remaining is an emerging consciousness wherein radical presencing and nondiscriminating inclusion breakthrough and suffuse our dull and dismal understanding of what existence and being-in-the-world really is.

It is time for such a mutation.

We must become one and whole and see what is our duty, our nature, reconstituted.

at sea, her unfinished psalm

 Topmast on schooner

Snaps killing doctor on deck —

(There is no last line)

it’s not about churches nor about religion

She asked my thinking

about Jesus — I said only

Inclusive presence

Embodied compassion — by

any other name — Is — God

last word on jesus

 If he embodied

Oneness and wholeness love and truth —

Then I acknowledge 

help me/see

 Israel/Gaza

Death/destruction covers land

Souls/hearts disappear

so deep and speaks to us deep to deep

Beyond what could be said is the silence that obviates the need for anything to be said. 

But silence is nowhere to be found.

Anything anyone says about God should be greeted by "Thank you, now go away."

In prelude to the non-echoing clear space of unaccountable muted utterance, one looks about seeing what is there without commentary, criticism, or clarification.

The language of God, it is said, is silence. All else is bad translation. 

Aquinas tells us that “angels are always announcers of divine silence.” Silence is surely one of the deep ways into the human heart and into divine mysteries, and it is integral to many forms of meditation in both the east and the west. But Aquinas gives credit to angels for bringing silence alive. 

 

He is also being somewhat paradoxical in calling angels “announcers of divine silence.” Isn’t announcing always an act of speaking? Not necessarily, Aquinas is saying—not when it comes to the divine silence, which is so deep and speaks to us deep to deep, depth to depth, heart to heart. 

 

But Aquinas also says that the angels don’t stop with the announcing; they also assist us to understand and interpret the divine silence derived from the divine mystery.  It is necessary after something is announced to someone that they understand the announcement. In addition, therefore, because we can understand by the intellect the things that are announced to us through the angels, they themselves by the brightness of their own light help our intellect grasp the secrets of God.    

 

(from, Are Angels “Announcers of Divine Silence?” by Matthew Fox)

 Listen -

(ing)

Silent -

(ly)

Nothing

is (said)

With 

(grace)

last walk of night

 High tide surrounds wharf

Long walk to Canadian

Coast Guard docked boats

these are our relatives

 Bagpipes Cape Breton

Listening from hundreds of

Miles in New Brunswick

Rainy windswept night on hill

So many people and dogs

the dog with me greets the god with you

Ensō, our St Bernard/Border Collie mix, does profound bow in the direction of all-that-is. Paws out straight, shoulders ruffled, back arched, head lowered between elbows, rear end staunch and strong centering his prostration.

He does the world honor presencing gratitude and fidelity to whomever and whatever is about him.

Bowing is a very serious practice. You should be prepared to bow, even in your last moment. Even though it is impossible to get rid of our self-centered desires, we have to do it.

Our true nature wants us to. Sometimes the disciple bows to the master, sometimes the master bows to the disciple. A master who cannot bow to his disciple cannot bow to the Buddha.

Sometimes the master and disciple bow together to the Buddha. Sometimes we may bow to cats and dogs.                                     ———Shunryu Suzuki (1904-1971)

Bow well.

Bow (wow).

Toss off the bowline.

It is thanksgiving in Canada.

chartreuse

 Bruno founded the

Carthusians, hermits living

in community

that's it, nothing else to say

he's probably watching now

a pit of fire

 Don’t mind me.

Life’s fortune and misfortune are caused entirely by the mind. Shakymuni said:

“A burning desire for gain is a pit of fire, and an indulgence in greed is a sea of suffering. Once our mind is purified, a flame is turned into a pool; and once our mind awakens us from a dream of worldliness, our ship of life is anchored along the shore of the Great Beyond.”

Hence, a slight change of the mind can suddenly make a different situation. Should we not be careful?

Hung Ying-ming 1596

One perception that falls off the counter and smashes onto floor will take a while to clear up.

Yes, we should, be careful. 

in the dream, circum-locution, deus solus

 I am … passing through … 

this … Yes … I am …so…what is 

This … is … what is … here

the feast of francis -- haecceity*

It occurs to me that Francis of Assisi's cosmological grasp of the Christ Reality goes deeper and beyond the sweet animals and flora of the countryside. 

Francis is presented only as deep and visionary as the writers and commentators taking up his persona and relaying it to us. 

Then, of course, there's our ability to comprehend the austere significance of mystical intuitions held by an Italian peasant seemingly breaking away from daddy and tumbling into the cloaking mother church in order to divest himself from all that was not himself in order to grok the swirling transmission of matter itself exchanging itself with the itself within and without him.

And if Francis was intuited as being the speculum christi, (the mirror of Christ), what inner grasp was effectuated by his spiritual charism flowing from him to the myriad stand-abouts over centuries of contemplation who identify with the appellation "franciscan" for reasons they cannot comprehend?

You’re referring to Information, Physics, Quantum, Wheeler’s 1989 essay propounding the idea that the physical universe arises from information, which he dubbed “it from bit.” Why were you reading it?

I’m trying to learn about what people are trying to say with the phrase “it from qubit.” Wheeler talked about “it from bit,” but you have to remember that this essay was written probably before the term “qubit” was coined and certainly before it was in wide currency.

Reading it, I really think he was talking about qubits, not bits, so “it from qubit” is actually just a modern translation.Don’t expect me to be able to tell you anything useful about it — about whether he was right. 

When I was a beginning grad student, they had a series of lectures by faculty members to the new students about theoretical research, and one of the people who gave such a lecture was Wheeler. He drew a picture on the blackboard of the universe visualized as an eye looking at itself. I had no idea what he was talking about. It’s obvious to me in hindsight that he was explaining what it meant to talk about quantum mechanics when the observer is part of the quantum system. I imagine there is something we don’t understand about that.

(--from, A Physicist’s Physicist Ponders the Nature of Reality, By NATALIE WOLCHOVER, Quanta Magazine) "Among the brilliant theorists cloistered in the quiet woodside campus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Edward Witten stands out as a kind of high priest." 

Yes, we say, the animals! The countryside, the clouds, the oddly described stigmata wherein replication of physical morphological episodes of experienced fact re-emerge centuries later in some quantum entanglement internexus suggesting a greater familiarity and intimacy between particular beings than previously thought. Is this the franciscan charisma?

Is it a felt interbeing (thanks Thây) that spans the illusions of time and distance to suffuse all physicality, all spirituality, so as to ground us as fellow beings, familial relatives, non-dual moments-of-existence so ensconced in the reality of one another that the words sympathy, empathy, and morphic resonance are pale expressions of the fact-being-undergone?

The franciscan way of being/becoming has long been a mystery. Pious raconteurs, perhaps, were ill-equipped to transmit the mysticism of Francis' seraphic experience. The light, ardor, and purity of the transcending inner grasp is difficult brushwork for an invisible canvas.

The information emanating from (what might be called) real presence is, perhaps, untranslatable to any idiom we might admix in our lexicon of spirituality.

But we posit this: If there was a christ, and there was a francis, and there is a cosmos, as well as a population of interested and curious individuals as to the core reality of being, existence, cosmos, life, and emerging humanity amidst soil, plant, animal, and human expressions of same -- then, well, here we are...

Francis, the story goes, would often say to his companion, "Write this down, Brother Leo! Leo, as a good scribe, would write the fabled communiques he heard that hagiographers would echo in delightful little flowers easily replicated over eleven centuries. 

I wonder. 

I wonder if Leo and the other fraticelli missed the subjective hortatory of his request. 

Was Francis saying "Write This down!" 

This!

The ever-present origin and foundation of the underlying reality of existence-itself, This.

This knitting-together and nuptial expression of what it is to be in this world with what is here and with whom we dwell.

It is the feast of Francis. Our fêted inter-being mirroring what-is-truly, our-very-reality. 

And so, we pray!

May this be so!

Statue of Francis, 

(gift from Janet Rhodes delivered to meetingbrook from Beach Island after her death 15August2000)

...   ...   ...

* Haecceity (/hɛkˈsiːɪti, hiːk-/; from the Latin haecceitas, which translates as "thisness") is a term from medieval scholastic philosophy, first coined by followers of Duns Scotus to denote a concept that he seems to have originated: the irreducible determination of a thing that makes it this particular thing. Haecceity is a person's or object's thisness, the individualising difference between the concept "a man" and the concept "Socrates" (i.e., a specific person).^[1] In modern philosophy of physics, it is sometimes referred to as primitive thisness.^[2] 

Haecceity is a Latin neologism formed as an abstract noun derived from the demonstrative pronoun "haec(ce)", meaning "this (very)" (feminine singular) or "these (very)" (feminine or neuter plural). It is apparently formed on the model of another (much older) neologism, viz. "qui(d)ditas" ("whatness"), which is a calque of Aristotle's Greek to ti esti (τὸ τί ἐστι)^[3] or "the what (it) is."

--wikipedia