what opens here is nowhere else

we have here no final parking place

we must be diligent today

 If I wander around the house. If I wear meditation beads around wrist. If I listen to the obscenity of political Florida Senator squawking for criminal defendant in violation of gag order against family members of judge and prosecutors.

If I wish to maintain a balanced and sober mind in the midst of vile characters.  

Do not pursue the past.

Do not lose yourself in the future.

The past no longer is.

The future has not yet come.

Looking deeply at life as it is

In the very here and now,

The practitioner dwells

In stability and freedom.

We must be diligent today.

To wait until tomorrow is too late.

Death comes unexpectedly.

How can we bargain with it?

The sage calls a person who knows

How to dwell in mindfulness

Night and day

“One who knows the better way to live.”

--Bhaddekaratta Sutra

I listen to the sutra.

I breathe the room.

poetry as its own “standing in itself,” must be seen “its own truth” in the “beauty” of its very word

Thought and love are not strangers.

Perhaps their arrival in the same place at the same time augurs a promising outcome.

Is what we call pure thought and pure love the invitation into what we call the life of God? 

Heidegger therefore maintains that philosophy exemplifies a particular love, indeed a clearly erotic relation to thought.14 And in his lecture course What Is Called Thinking?, he turns to Hölderlin to articulate the relation between love and thinking to trace the relation between thinking or philosophy and love. Reflecting on thought and poetry, Heidegger claims that poetry, as its own “standing in itself,” must be seen “its own truth” in the “beauty” of its very word (WT, 19). This self-standing in the truth “does not exclude but on the contrary includes what we think in the poetic word” (Ibid.). Heidegger’s reading of the poet’s word turns it out of the center of one of Hölderlin’s seductively intriguing poems, “Socrates and Alcibiades”: “Who the deepest has thought, loves what is most alive” [Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste].15 The poet draws us to thinking and love, posing them side by side, as Heidegger observes: “ ‘thought’ and ‘loves’ form the center of the line. Inclination [Mögen] reposes in thinking.”16 The alignment of love (the past of thinking and the present allure of love) betrays the sobriety (and self-sufficiency) ordinarily supposed for the life of thought.

—pp.5,6 in Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, by Babette E. Babich, 2007

Sometimes referred to as the life of the mind, thought/love in reflective interaction can easily lead to a sense of equanimity and poise.

Philosophy isn't just an intellectual somersault through arcane concepts and logical mazes, rather, philosophy (as a friend once put it) is ordinary thinking done more carefully.

The life of thought is attractive.

We like thoughtful people.

Just as we like those able to clarify and open up things difficult to comprehend.

Let's see poetry where it is.

Let's look around.

One's own truth.

In itself.

post-hagiography, retrospective

He said he wanted to be someone who prays

So he tries to pray

He looks at god and says “I really don’t see you”

He shakes head and sits on bench 

Wonders

In the empty space god is not

The vacant bench 

He rethinks prayer

Comes to conclusion

There’s nothing there for prayer

Stands up

Looks around

Wanders away

Disappears into chill fog

Giving up body

Leaving behind mind

Laments loss

Becomes birdsong

stop the killing, stop the destruction

all forms of violence

are to be condemned

the Senator from Vermont

speaks truth in Senate

how good it is to hear

a strong and clear voice

christian faith commends those who are relentless in their pursuit of justice

There seems to be a difficulty as to how to respond to or react to the horrendous response to a horrendous action last October wherein Hamas committed terror against Israel and the Israeli response of terroristic reprisals against Gaza.

Verse of the day

And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 

- Luke 18:7

Voice of the day

To me, it’s clear we should follow the lead of many of these persistent students in using our own social capital — however much or little — to raise a ruckus in the name of those who suffer starvation, disease, and death-dealing violence each day. 

-- Brooke M. Foster, “Student Encampments Echo Jesus’ Parable of Annoying the Powerful”

Prayer of the day

Our persistence is powerful. You tell us that even the most unjust rulers can grant justice when they’ve been bothered enough. May we continue to annoy the powerful in the name of the marginalized.

    --Sojourners     

It's as though no one is aware of the horrible way the marginalized are treated by the mighty.

It is as though no one is aware of the ugly attacks upon the innocent and the compromised in both Israel and Gaza.

Surely, we are not that stupid.

Surely, we have eyes to see.

But do we have heart-courage and mind-clarity to face and resolve such blatant injustices.

reclusively with appreciation

few people know 

my name 

fewer care to --

its a beneficial trade-off

being no-one

going no-where

happy to be your kin

happy to travel incognito

happy to be happy for you

conatus

Spinoza's notion of God made people uncomfortable.

For humans, being free is understanding the laws of the universe.

In the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, conatus (/koʊˈneɪtəs/; wikt:conatus; Latin for "effort; endeavor; impulse, inclination, tendency; undertaking; striving") is an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. This thing may be mind, matter, or a combination of both, and is often associated with God's will in a pantheist view of nature. 

 

... The Latin cōnātus comes from the verb cōnor, which is usually translated into English as, to endeavor; used as an abstract noun, conatus is an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. Although the term is most central to Spinoza's philosophy, many other early modern philosophers including René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Thomas Hobbes made significant contributions, each developing the term differently.^[1].

    ...Conatus is a central theme in the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677), which is derived from principles that Hobbes and Descartes developed.^[13] Contrary to most philosophers of his time, Spinoza rejects the dualistic assumption that mind, intentionality, ethics, and freedom are to be treated as things separate from the natural world of physical objects and events.^[14] One significant change he makes to Hobbes' theory is his belief that the conatus ad motum, (conatus to motion), is not mental, but material.^[8] Spinoza also uses conatus to refer to rudimentary concepts of inertia, as Descartes had earlier.^[1] According to Spinoza, "each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being" (Ethics, part 3, prop. 6). Since a thing cannot be destroyed without the action of external forces, motion and rest, too, exist indefinitely until disturbed.^[15] His goal is to provide a unified explanation of all these things within a naturalistic framework, man and nature must be unified under a consistent set of laws; God and nature are one, and there is no free will. For example, an action is free, for Spinoza, only if it arises from the essence and conatus of an entity. However, an action can still be free in the sense that it is not constrained or otherwise subject to external forces.^[16] Human beings are thus an integral part of nature.^[15] Spinoza explains seemingly irregular human behaviour as really natural and rational and motivated by this principle of the conatus.^[15] Some have argued that the conatus consists of happiness and the perpetual drive toward perfection.^[17] Conversely, a person is saddened by anything that opposes his conatus. Others have associated desire, a primary affect, with the conatus principle of Spinoza. Desire is then controlled by the other affects, pleasure and pain, and thus the conatus strives towards that which causes joy and avoids that which produces pain.^[8] 

  (--wikipedia)

He said we are all expressions of the same divine substance.

It's our interconnectedness.

By caring for the world around us, we are caring for ourselves.

This 17th century philosopher needs to walk and converse with us in the 21st.

deep homesickness

 everyone has a hobby

whiling time watching time

slide into invisible effect

the inevitable nostalgia

pretending wonderful 

memories and accomplishment

instead, looking out window

weathered prayer flags 

holding remnant petition

dropped aspiration and gone

intention the day turns

a spirituality of homecoming

where true self wanders alone

hobbyless unwatching gaze

imaginative dreamtime

a deep time without

clear or recognizable reference 

trans [s]it i on

• trans:  derived from Latin trans- "across, beyond, so as to change"    
• Many arrivals are us live  -- (Roethke, The Manifestation)

Being Is

That 

Which Is

Becoming 

Itself

after lectio -- ground of being

going nowhere

staying nowhere --

one looks out, 

looks in

israel / gaza

 it is hard to tell

who is more wrong who more

destructive of peace

those who use terror or those

who also use terrorism

behind branch

 There it was

Moon just before dawn

Peeper and songbird

headlights on dark road

Imagination,

peace — no imagination

No peace — imagine

some franciscan brothers

 their names from the past

on the page reside quiet

the way fondness feels

see you

 let my final thought

be -- "oh, what a joy to have

 this final look" -- yes

corporéité -- life’s moments and all transitions between

I like the prospect that when the body goes kaput the signal is lost and there is nothing of the world retained.

    Kaput originated with a card game called piquet that has been popular in France for centuries. French players originally used the term capot to describe both big winners and big losers in piquet. To win all twelve tricks in a hand was called "faire capot" ("to make capot"), but to lose them all was known as "être capot" ("to be capot"). German speakers adopted capot, but respelled it kaputt, and used it only for losers. When English speakers borrowed the word from German, they started using kaput for things that were broken, useless, or destroyed. (--merriam-webster)

Either way, according to early phenomenologist Maurice Marleau-Ponty, the body is the connective/corrective source of knowledge.

Merleau-Ponty emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the perceiving body and its perceived world could not be disentangled from each other. The articulation of the primacy of embodiment (corporéité) led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call "indirect ontology" or the ontology of "the flesh of the world" (la chair du monde), seen in his final and incomplete work, The Visible and Invisible, and his last published essay, "Eye and Mind". (--wikipedia)

So many fellow human beings (if, indeed, we were to ascend to such a designation) long for everlasting life beyond death with all the presupposed benefits of Elysian Fields, heaven with God, saints, angels and forebears, and the possibility of reincarnated reinstatement into (supposedly) more and more evolved states of conscious being.

I like the idea of turning the lights out and going into the sleep of indecipherable darkness with no awareness of that fact or any other fact continuing. 

Perhaps the notion of eternality could fit. The word "eternal" is mostly defined as everlasting. I do not think that's what it means. I prefer to see eternal as meaning "no-time." Timelessness. A no-time and un-spaced remainder. A balance of emptiness.

Elsewhere, this consideration:

Focusing solely on the near-death cognizance of the dying, rather than the material perspective of the living, reveals a new understanding of death. Its significance to psychology, philosophy, and religion is huge for what emerges is a long overlooked phenomenon: a nonsupernatural, relativistic, and timelessly eternal consciousness, which can be a natural afterlife. Ironically, the validity of the theory of a natural eternal consciousness (NEC) assumes the loss of all materially based consciousness with death — more specifically, the permanent loss of time perception. The theory claims, and the article deduces from empirical knowledge, that by imperceptibly entering the timelessness before death, one’s last conscious moment, whatever the type, becomes by default — psychologically, from one’s perspective— a forever present moment. To help explain and validate the theory, the article presents thought experiments and a formal model of all of life’s moments and all transitions between periods of time perception and those of timelessness. An open-minded reading should reveal that the NEC does not threaten faith in a god or a heaven.

 . . .

The natural eternal consciousness (NEC) (in a nutshell):

You believe you are having an

experience, and for all eternity

you never know otherwise.—p. 63

(--from, The Theory of a Natural Eternal Consciousness:, The Psychological Basis for a Natural Afterlife, by Bryon K. Ehlmann, © 2020 The Institute of Mind and Behavior, Inc. 

There's something intriguing about never knowing otherwise.

As I approach my inevitable death the company these days of squirrel, chipmunk, sparrow, finch, bluejay, mourning dove, junco, chickadee, nuthatch -- as well as cats, dog, nighttime footsteps in the dark of moving unseen animals -- and, of course,  compañeras and compañeros on the conversing journey through this existence --all suffice, happily and affectionately.

Suffice

and satisfactorily 

go on sufficiently

sustained in their being

as who and where they are

as who and where I was

scurries off into nescient nullity

amen!

with a compassionate heart

To live a zen life is not a hobby.

It is where intent goes to nap.

Since sky and earth are mindless,
They last forever.
What has mind has limits.
A person who has attained
The Path is like this too.
In the midst of no activity,
She carries out her activities,
Accepting all unfavorable
And favorable circumstances
With a compassionate heart.

--Yunmen (864-949)

It is what I do whenever I can.

To nap. And to live a zen life.

I'm not so good with either.

Take right now. 

As an abject failure I cannot find anything to suggest accomplishment.

Such circumstances are troubling.

I am troubled. But why?

Red squirrel and Tchaikovsky Vogel (White-throated Sparrow) dance outside sliding door.

There, there, I am whole and entire.

allocution

 We need 

one another

One 

no other

We need 

No other

That’s God-

Language

There’s 

No other

Way

(To say it)