don’t tell me, o muse, about the man
who is in everyone’s frying pan
singed and burnt from foot to hand
not able to run, not able to stand
he claimed to be the very best
but turns out to make us all depressed
I love you, I love you (say it,
help him heal) -- maybe some day he’ll
be able to feel,
become,
(say it)
almost real
Poetry is what is between words
It is what is between you and me
This is why so many dislike poetry
It is both thin barrier and nothing there
Sheer creative emptiness
Morning scripture is NPR
This Torah of historical narrative
Gospel of encouraging participation
Upanishad of mythical forgotten times
Sūra of mandated attention
Koan of bedraggled rationality
No Moses, no Jesus, no Krishna
No Mohammad, no Wumen —
Some say it is a tired tome
Of repetitive verbiage trans-
National horrors and downing
Corporate sponsorship interrupted
By fundraising and semi-snark voices
I turn it off unwilling to hear the prayer
Of isolated regional politics, terrorism,
Deluded narcissists and rich pederasts
The gibberish of denial, lawsuit and muck —
Now the room is silent, not enough rain fell
Only voiceless God with no theme music
We fabricate existence
Analyzing perceptions
We become conscious
In our own worlds
Not necessarily
The world itself
Disappearing under
Fantastical elaboration
Not clear reality
No building collapsed on me. No river swept me away. No missile flew into my house. No suicide bomber detonated his vest near me at a cafe.
I simply fell while hiking. Loose soil on a step-down. Kaboom. Scrapes and abrasions on face and forehead, hand and knee. Hot water, washcloth, antiseptic ointment, cup of coffee at home. I think Enso the dog thought I was just resting on the ground and went his sniffy way.
How do I answer the question medical personnel ask at visits these days -- Have you fallen more than once recently? Do you feel safe at home (in nature?) Do you think we should defund any medical care for the elderly? (They don’t ask that last question, but it’s on their mind.)
Listening to Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, he talks about Linji born sometime between 810 and 815 AD in Shandong province in China.
I hear the Chinese word wú shēngyì, and look it up.
Master Linji invented the term “businessless person,” the person who has nowhere to go and nothing to do. This was his ideal example of what a person could be. In Theravada Buddhism, the ideal person was the arhat, someone who practiced to attain his own enlightenment. In Mahayana Buddhism, the ideal person was the bodhisattva, a compassionate being who, on the path of enlightenment, helped others.
According to Master Linji, the businessless person is someone who doesn’t run after enlightenment or grasp at anything, even if that thing is the Buddha. This person has simply stopped. She is no longer caught by anything, even theories or teachings. The businessless person is the true person inside each one of us. This is the essential teaching of Master Linji. - (From Zen Battles: Modern Commentary on the Teachings of Master Linji)
I like the word “businessless” more than I do unemployed or retired. Although I do like Lin Yutang’s version:
Lin Yutang’s ideal is the ‘scamp’ – an amiable loafer who wanders through life, learning, loving, living. He is a good-natured Renaissance Man, dabbling here and there, connoisseur of nothing, dilettante extraordinaire. He is earthbound, a man of his biology and of his senses. (For Lin, happiness is “largely a matter of digestion.” He favorably quotes a college president who admonished his freshmen that “There are only two things I want you to keep in mind: read the Bible, and keep your bowels open.”) Lin’s loafing scamp is a profoundly embodied mind, not a brain on a stick. And most of all, he’s eminently ‘reasonable’ – a trait Lin mentions throughout, and points to as the very foundation of the Chinese character.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/71/The_Importance_of_Living_by_Lin_Yutang
Most of my life I did not know that such an ideal was being cultivated by me. I suspected I was just an ambitionless ne’er-do-well who was a feckless student and incompetent employee. Those things were true ... but perhaps there was a deeper narrative being woven in the mythological underpinnings of my anesthetized psyche.
Now that I dwell as a feckless octogenarian and unambitious zen buddhist christian hermit with a deficient predilection for poetry and phenomenology -- well -- a different mythopoetic and mystagogic appreciation arises.
I’m not sure the mountain cares that I fell. It doesn’t not-care either. It helped me fall, it held me as I face-planted, it supported me revolving my compass so as to lift back up to two-footed balance. It walked me back down trail through gate to washcloth and ointment and coffee.
Care is attentive presence. Authentic care neither causes nor obviates the scrapes and healings of our discourse with reality.
Care attends.
It has no business to transact with anything or anyone. Care is not transactional.
Care is free, open, and informal.
Care . . . full and well!
“To meditate is to be aware of what is going on.” (Thich Nhat Hanh)
Thanks Thay!
I’ll keep a look out.
One zen master said
To another zen master
How come your koans
Make no sense?
The second zen master
Said to the first zen master
Don’t ask!
They looked at each other
And both were swept away
Glad the pope told prime minister of Israel to not bomb Catholic Churches
If only pope understood that every home is the home of Christ
But that kind of spirituality takes time, fasting, and prayer
Heart doc asks if I’m unhappy being tired and low energy.
I tell him, nah, it’s all good.
The stress echocardiogram showed some constriction.
He explains the narratives of possible catherizations.
Nah, I say, I’m happy rope-a-doping from time to time.
Beside, who’d-a-thunk I’d live to this age.
He smiles.
Ok, he says, forget about heart surgery. Go live your life. Don’t worry about a heart attack. He explained how constriction influences these things.
Off in the corner, behind charts of internal organs, messiur de cor deflop peeks out at our conversation, saying nothing.
Unsaid is —If you have one, fine. No need to fret about it.
That’s my kind of cardiologist.
See you in six months?
Ok!
Cheers.
Chris Hedges in conversation with Nick Bryant, journalist and author.
Bryant says: “There are three things that make people really stupid: greed, arrogance, and sex.”
Can we say there are three other things that help people become wise? Namely: frugal generous poverty, realistic humility, and right respectful relationship.
We try to understand what is right and proper and what is wrong and improper.
Once you are compromised, you can’t get off the yacht in the middle of the ocean. (Bryant)
Hedges has always appeared to me as a fierce journalist and commentator.
Besides, Hedges was close to the fierce and poetic activist Daniel Berrigan, with whom I walked in demonstration protest in Norristown PA in 1981 during one of his trials.
when I went
from peripatetic mendicant
to sedentary reclusive idiorrhythmic *
I discovered God is not
where you might expect
Instead God is the respect
(the looking again) through
whatever is there
whenever and wherever
you are there
. . .
* It was the original form of monastic life in Christianity, as exemplified by St. Anthony of Egypt (c. 250–355) and is the opposite of cenobitic monasticism in that instead of communal ownership, the monk lives alone, often in isolation. Philosophically it consisted of a hermit's total withdrawal from society, usually in the desert, and the constant practice of mental prayer.[2] The word idiorrhythmic comes from two Greek words, idios for "particular" and rhythmos for "rule", so the word can be translated as meaning "following one's own devices".[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiorrhythmic_monasticism
I love comedy as much as anyone
I was listening to Donald Trump
talking about his uncle and the Unabomber
then saying his maga followers are stupid
I don’t know
Where’s George Burns when you need him?
(Oh God!)
. . .
From: Ante-nicene Fathers
(1) The text includes the phrase 'Arise, O God! judge the earth,' which is a plea for divine judgment.[7] (2) O God is a direct address used in the Psalm, indicating a prayer or supplication to the divine, expressing a plea for attention and assistance.[8]
https://www.wisdomlib.org/christianity/concept/o-god
Not me.
Who would have expected that theSelf nature is fundamentallyPure and clean?Who would have expected that theSelf nature is fundamentallyBeyond birth and death?
--Altar Sutra (dailyzen)
Not ever.
Anything else you want to say?
this body
gets craggy
my soul
is naggy
what mind
remains
is antag-
monistic
so many
many angles
so very
few angels
. . .
* Etymology
From νοητός (noētós, “conceivable, perceptible, intelligible, comprehensible”) + -τῐκός (-tĭkós, “verbal adjective suffix”).
I don’t know what he is talking about
when he calls everyone ‘evil’
it seems to me you see the world
through the lens you are
the world is the world
it becomes, for you,
what you are
looking through
* you say it
you become it
old monk walks mountain
hot July day, little water in brook
every step a prayer, each breath
brings earth through slow body