Only Now Time

May 4 3:38.39A

“… all the time systems imagined one after another in ever more encompassing spheres are all simultaneous” (Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, p. 218)

   On transmission 

The soft gaze essential 

For centered riding 

Where edges blur

Two…One…All.

Peripheries linger

Sprinkling rainbow drops 

Of time-taken-ambiguity 

No beginning No ending 

Like Love layers Now

And our, each unique,

Meandering movements

Winnowing these atoms 

Like alchemy 

Seeking making gold 

Or spinning time

As if to catch fairy dust

AKA Holy Spirit photo ops

Revelations going gone 

Moon glow. Sifting shards

For night refraction—

Making hay while stars shine 

Straw into gold, by God!

Circles of time—let’s pay

Attention and not lose

Out wasting time 

Sift memories 

Reflections Dream Learn 

Illumination. Heat seeking

The heart. Rainbow end 

In shifts across time’s 

Distillation 

May 4 6:10.37A

“… all the time systems imagined one after another in ever more encompassing spheres are all simultaneous. Consider the rotation of the earth about the sun within the solar system, the whole of which, in turn, moves about some other center. And then imagine an ever-widening circle of such patterns continuing on out into infinity. It makes sense to speak of the earth’s involvement in all these movements simultaneously at each moment of time, at each ‘now.’ 

…To think of kalpas—to which the name ‘Aion’ may also be fixed with its twofold meaning of time and world-time—as a great, manifold time system suggests a mythical representation of time. But the ‘meaning’ of this representation can be interpreted as a recognition of an infinite openness at the bottom of time… The true Form of time may be called its essential ambiguity.”(Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, pp. 218-9)

May 4 6:47.47A

Disfiguring

 

Jan 5, 2026, 9:03PM

Ah-Ha! Just when I think I’ve figured it out…Not.

 

                                   yesterday's sunrise, taken with the camera’s “default” setting

Maybe moving into my 80th year I’m finally learning to look through, maybe to revalue the quick take or the disappointment, perhaps to imagine a conception possibly drawn from the other world. The “figured-out” more likely marks the activity of presumption and delusion, but rather than throwing it out, consider it as an opportunity to “disfigure.” The really important things like beauty, truth, love and the other 96 Names for God all surpass human containment. Claiming to grasp them descends into all manner of trouble; yet when problems are recognized and this brings a humbling recognition of human limitation--then  comes the chance of surrender to the beyond. And, by Grace, the Divine just might allow a whiff of the ecstatic.

same image edited to remember and imagine possibility of spring, etc

This venture beyond the bounds of cognition invites the play of imagination, and opens a free space where interpretations guess and dance with uncertainty. The figures that have ruled as unquestioned reality, as absolute right, get unmasked in  “disfiguring.” This term finds provocative elaboration in Mark C. Taylor’s Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion. Taylor explores and richly illustrates with contemporary artists, also connecting with philosophy and theology, as he develops the process of finding sacred ground by breaking idols that block access to creativity and compassion. How can we engage the modern condition without sinking into despair and alienation?

same image edited for black and white setting

“Modernism’s perfection is always a ‘violated perfection’; its purity is impure from the beginning, indeed, before the beginning. Modernity is infected by an other it both refuses and cannot refuse.

One of the figures of this irrefutable other is figuration. Modernism’s disfiguring is not only an aesthetic strategy; it is, as we have seen, a moral crusade. The struggle between figuring and disfiguring is the strife between madness and civilization. Inasmuch as it re-presents sensuousness and irrationality, figuration represents the primitive, infantile, feminine, and mad that modern civilization is constructed to refuse. The refused, however, never goes away. Constituting itself in and through acts of refusal, modernity needs what it nonetheless cannot bear. The refused eternally returns to disrupt and dislocate the structures constructed to control it. 

At its height, modernism’s search for purity is violated by the eruption of surrealism. . . 

The goal of surrealism is to reclaim the rights of the imagination by releasing the strange forces that inhabit the mind. These uncanny powers constitute madness in the midst of civilization and folly at the heart of reason. By soliciting the return of the refused, surrealism attempts to subvert modernism’s repressive puritan ethic. . .

Against modernism’s preoccupation with purity, order, rules, reason, clarity, and function, surrealists set impurity, disorder, transgression, irrationality, and uselessness. Such concerns are hardly reasonable; indeed they are folly—‘les folies les plus vives.’ Forever incomprehensible in any system—be it philosophical, religious, or economic—the folly of surrealism is the ‘non-knowledge’ that Bataille associates with the ecstasy of ‘inner experience.’ If the proposition (non-knowledge lays bare) possesses a sense—appearing, then disappearing immediately thereafter—this is because it has the meaning NON-KNOWLEDGE COMMUNICATES ECSTASY.’ 

(pp. 232-233, 235 in Taylor, quoting Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 52; emphasis in original).

Perhaps reading Taylor has encouraged my play with photo editing and its application to other stuck places in views of life past, present, and future. The snapshot offers a limited perspective dependent on the camera’s default setting and the photographer’s point of view, focus, zoom…so much like the mind’s view that has its own default settings, often unexamined, that control and limit understanding, action, and love for others as well as for self. So let's figure, dis-figure, re-fuse, play on...

Golden and Poignant

 The golden aura of turning leaves…the poignancy of those falling.

Perhaps you, too, know the compelling power of passion. It covers the universe spanning from blissful ecstasy to deepest suffering. Rowan Williams in Passions of the Soul very helpfully journeys through this complex, reviewing religious writers who demonize desire as well as those who paint the angelic, heaven-directed gaze. 
His contemplation on the Beatitudes is particularly moving. The “goodness of desire” risks corruption into avarice/lust: 

“To love someone else simply as someone who ‘plugs a gap’, whose role is to complete you, is to treat them as less than human, to make their identity serve ours, instead of wondering at their difference, their mystery; and so it never allows your relationship with that mysterious otherness to lead you deeper into the ultimate mystery which is God. ‘Lust’ is something to do with that inhuman or dehumanizing desire that reduces the independent reality around you to mere functionality, a set of characteristics that will slot into the pre-existing space in your heart” (p. 59).  

On Matt 5:8, “how blissful the pure in heart for they shall see God” (David Bentley Hart’s translation), Williams says, “Our purity of heart is discovering again and again, in this or that relationship, in this or that situation, what it is that which opens out on to a deeper level of longing; instead of stopping or freezing our growth, fixing it at the level of temporary gratification” (p. 61).
Rowan Williams earlier magnificent work focuses with its title the cost of those who seek God: The Wound of Knowledge. The knowing of God may be glimpsed in the stunning sunrise but no less and perhaps more in the darkness of loss, the personal experiences through to the social crises that shadow the cross. 

God is here. Transcendent. Immanent. Williams’ closing paragraph:

“Christianity begins in contradictions, in the painful effort to live with the baffling plurality and diversity of God’s manifested life—law and gospel, judgement and grace, the crucified Son crying to the Father. Christian experience does not simply move from one level to the next and stay there, but is drawn again and again to the central and fruitful darkness of the cross. But in this constant movement outwards in affirmation and inwards to emptiness, there is life and growth.” p. 190

 

Light and Shadow in Late Winter

The play of light hints across remnants of the last snowfall and flows on into the woodland with its still-clinging autumn leaves that this early morning call glowing in dawn’s promise, as if all this transmits a stay/leave tease in and out of hibernation’s haunt. 

Today’s social media (also flickering pre-dawn) featured a post by David Whyte on Love, a word ever transforming, calling "come in--if you dare..." Remember its falling-in and falling-out, the cross between the known and the further on. From Consolations, Whyte offers this:

Winter Promises

Most years the advent of winter has evoked dread. Or, if and when approached in a spirit of surrender, it's inspired sighs, even commitment to long-suffering, a reluctant dedication to further the very important virtue of patience, to carry the hope of spring-coming. Yet often the chill in the air makes breathing out in those steam puffs. Perhaps they’re little smoke-signals asking permission to join the bears—how about hibernating until the world turns alive again? 

      But then this week late autumn’s falling, mostly fallen, leaves are sprinkling wonder. Today, as shown above, the woods’ opening increased witness of dawn’s beauty. And turning to the opposite western sky, a double rainbow arched to land both north and south, even before the rains arrive.

Yesterday the sun-lit woods, more bared to essence, showed a redbud reduced to a few leaves, looking like heart-shaped jewels were tracing out the bowing limbs in lines as graceful as ballerinas, almost weightless, defying gravity. Alongside it a young maple echoed the dance, yellow light against the dimmed exuberance of spring, the background of fallen leaves turning bronze and disappearing as if the superficial gives way, releasing the eternal.

      Instead of dreading winter, this year there’s an exciting sense of winter tracks wanting to be followed, the ones leading further into the “True Self.” 

Recent reading of Richard Rohr has prepared the way to welcome the closed-in season because it’s a time especially fitting for contemplation. In his book on the second half of life, Rohr explains how summer’s “loyal soldier” builds the container for a person’s winter work and how the soldier has to be thanked and dismissed.

“Paradoxically, your loyal soldier gives you so much security and validation that you may confuse his voice with the very voice of God. If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God. The loyal soldier is the voice of all your early authority figures. His or her ability to offer shame, guilt, warnings, boundaries, and self-doubt is the gift that never stops giving. Remember, it can be a feminine voice too; but it is not the ‘still, small voice’ of God (I Kings 19:13) that gives us our power instead of always taking our power.

The loyal soldier cannot get you to the second half of life. He does not even understand it. He has not been there. He can help you ‘get through hell,’ with the early decisions that demand black-and-white thinking; but then you have to say good-bye when you move into the subtlety of midlife and later life. . .

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of ‘common sense,’ of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful ‘Beatrice.’ The true faith journey only begins at this point…we have a container strong enough to hold the contents of our real life, which is always filled with contradictions and adventures and immense challenges. Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things. (pp. 46, 48. Falling Upward; emphasis in original)

The passage invites return and deeper engagement in the resources such as the Mystical Languages of Unsaying  and to the Beloved, the stories of Layla… and forward into The Cloud of Unknowing and others.  Also, Rohr points particularly to Thomas Merton for guidance, especially to his New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton also reveals tracks on the pathway including those of St. John of the Cross and in his translation/versions of portions of Chuang Tzu. In his introduction, Merton writes: 

“The key to Chuang Tzu’s thought is the complementarity of opposites, and this can be seen only when one grasps the central ‘pivot’ of Tao which passes squarely through both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’ ‘I’ and ‘Not-I’ (p. 30). A sample appropriate to the forced inactivity of winter:

“… No one seems to know

how useful it is to be useless.”

The Way of Chuang Tzu, p. 59

These guides join others who teach and inspire in the way to the Beloved, the pathway home. This winter promises opportunity to re-trace ground turned years before, intent on deeper reflection. For example, these lines noted in last year’s autumn are calling:

“When the servant comes to know himself, thereby knowing God, he does not know God in Himself. Rather, he knows Him as his own Lord. This is the God who discloses Himself to the soul, and the self-disclosure is different from that experienced by any other soul. The God that I come to know through knowing myself is the God of my own belief, the water which has assumed the color of my cup.” William Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, p. 344 (cited in Light Enough, Sept 24, 2019). 

Beauty and Brokenness

At least twice I noticed these dried-up flowers, planned to take them out, and forgot. Old age, memory slip? Or a subtle gift? Getting old pushes further into beauty, loving 

“in a certain sense, between all living things. Life is attracted to life. Beauty is attracted to both beauty and brokenness—which is a good description of all that lives./ Life is fragmented and finite and yet part of a larger and attractive whole. We long to be with this wholeness” (Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace, p. 33). 

This third time noticing the flowers, not just dried-up, but broken-beauty breaks through shuttered sight. Having read the passage and taken it in, I'm taken out, camera in hand, as an opening allows a certain further sense, a searching, even longing, toward the sense of beautiful brokenness, a window for wholeness--

Transformation of Consciousness

“…now it is just a matter of time till false power falls apart.” As I’m reading the final chapters of Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ, the possibility of transformed consciousness, like the beauty of butterflies emergent from the dark cocoon, offers a ray of hope in this time darkened by blind hate, these dark nights when brothers and sisters are veiled by superficial differences from celebrating our connection, from living each moment knowing the essence that unites all of God’s creation. If only Love were to break through. Rohr tells of the transformation beyond the blinders of selfishness, fear, and oppression.

“I have witnessed much of this evolution of consciousness in my own small lifetime—toward nonviolence, inclusivity, mysticism, and ever more selfless love, as well as more correct naming of the shadow side of things. This is the gradual ‘second coming of Christ.’ Our present highly partisan politics, angry culture wars, and circling of the wagons around white privilege are just the final gasps of the old, dying paradigm.” (p. 198)

Transformation may be, perhaps always is, hard. Scary. The demanding tone comes through the spiritual teaching: “Die before you die.” 

The creature that only knew caterpillar crawling unbelievably floats on angel wings. 

Old consciousness has to surrender to knowings that had been impossible. Apparent opposites can be contained. “The people who hold the contradictions and resolve them in themselves are the saviors of the world. They are the only real agents of transformation, reconciliation, and newness” (Rohr, p. 148). 

Almost impossible, and it would be if one had to do it alone. But the good news is that the Way is Love and Love is never alone. This transformed consciousness unites with the Creator in the creation. The Way demands that we love, that we love more deeply. Passion.

“In the practical order of life, if we have never loved deeply or suffered deeply, we are unable to understand spiritual things at any depth. . . They are [God’s] primary tools for human transformation.” (p. 207)

The Soul’s Strange Alliance

Photo taken July 2019

So you’re telling me that the “slanderer,” the “blamer,” and the “spy” are relations to treasure? 

“… some commentators have interpreted the slanderer as a guardian angel…”

Really? You’ve got to be kidding! No! Well, maybe it doesn’t mean… how could these be valuable soul mates? 

In one of the Classics of Western Spirituality, Thomas Emil Homerin translates Umar Ibn al-Farid’s “Poem of the Way,” which includes these lines: “My ancient allegiance to you/ led me to see those wicked young slaves you entrusted to me/ as great and guarded treasures” (emphasis mine, from p. 89, Umar Ibn al-Farid. Sufi Verse, Saintly Life. Trans & Intro by Th. Emil Homerin, Paulist Press, 2001). Homerin comments:

“The ‘wicked young slaves’ correspond to the slanderer (washin) and blamer (lahin; laim) found in many Classical Arabic love poems, including those of Ibn al-Farid. Along with the spy, they are among the lover’s protagonists who seek to thwart his goal of union with the beloved; the slanderer denigrates the lover as unworthy of love, while the blamer criticizes him for wasting his time and tries to deceive the lover into believing that the beloved is beneath him. Like the spy, the slanderer and blamer may be read in terms of the lover’s psyche, as the first pushes the lover to further spiritual self-sacrifice, while the latter would pull him down into more selfish sensual pursuits. In addition, some commentators have interpreted the slanderer as a guardian angel, and the deceiving blamer as Satan.” (p. 88; his commentary on p. 74  adds that “In courtly love poetry, the spy guards the beloved.”)

According to this text, the Path to God seems to include a kind of flip by which apparent adversaries become integrated into the more developed soul. If we are each moving closer in a journey toward Unity, such a phenomenal happening would fit. Change, often enough, feels uncomfortable—even when we acknowledge problems with the status quo. 

Upon reflection, we realize how discomfort sometimes signals a better direction. Remember the soreness that marked the aftermath of a long run, that follows a good workout? Also, mental fatigue sometimes accompanies a significant breakthrough, an “ah-ha!” And emotional exhaustion comes in the train of those hard conversations that may be essential in order to ease estrangements.

Peace. Whether inner or outer, family or international, human as well as “all-my-relations,” how much it depends on shifting the boundaries of the “other.” 

This perplexing/amazing transformation from “I/it” to “I/Thou” constructs and opens a much needed window into the spaces that are so hard to see: the soul, spirit, heart, mind, as well as the absolute and eternal ecology in God’s creation.

Getting to Peace looks to be quite a journey. A book on spiritual retreat says: 

“the first theme in your meditation is to think something is trying to transpire behind that which appears. It is not God exactly; but it is what the Sufis call ayat: signs, or clues…God can never be the object of your knowledge, but there are some signs: namely, wherever you see beauty. In your despair, beauty is the clue—if you can see it transpire. And, actually, it is to be seen everywhere; but one has to have the eyes to see it…

A more concrete way of doing this is to see the beauty in the faces of people behind the masks that they are wearing; and even the beauty of your own face looking in the mirror, if you can see what transpires instead of that which appears. Ascribe what you do not like about what you see to the fact that we have had to borrow the fabric of our ancestors, and that we have been subjected to stress and pain and deception. It is true that the outer aspect of our being has suffered from distortion and defilement—but we have to look deeper.” (pp. 37-38 in that which Transpires Behind that which Appears by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan)

One of the richest resources concerning this ability to “see” and to resolve the estrangement from our soul brother/sister, from the beloved/Beloved must be Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

I contemplate a tree.

I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.…

Buber elaborates on the objective viewing of tree as “other” and then notes the transformational option:

But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined,

that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. . . The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it—only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity.  

Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself. (pp. 57-59, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Scribner’s, 1970

And, then, when this road of true relation is taken far enough, or perhaps when walked at all—we arrive at/in the divine gift of love:

“Jesus’ feeling for the possessed man is different from his feeling for the beloved disciple; but the love is one. Feelings one ‘has’; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its ‘content’ or object; it is between I and You. Whoever does not know this, know this with his being, does not know love, even if he should ascribe to it the feelings that he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. Love is a cosmic force. For those who stand in it and behold in it, men emerge from their entanglement in busy-ness; and the good and the evil, the clever and the foolish, the beautiful and the ugly, one after another become actual and a You for them; that is, liberated, emerging into a unique confrontation” (p. 66). 

Layla spark-lets

          Notice

              the little everyday 

                  moments spilling droplets 

              of beauty, 

                  of Beauty. 

                   It’s so easy to 

                       speed past

                            life 

                              slipping by. 

                              Layla steps 

                                   lightly, spark-

                                       lets of light, 

                                             of Light.

Longing into Certainty

Photo taken today 7:34:12 AM attempting to represent
“this moment in which the transcendent reveals itself as the immanent”

Three wonderful readings are converging, or perhaps they spiral, about. The “what” that they are mediating goes into the nameless and might be called “the mystery” as long as the nature of the inarticulate unknowable is respected. Huston Smith says that this “what” holds the certainty that summons the truth-searcher and carries one past the destabilizing turbulence permeating the current age. This transport, mediated with mystery, validates longing that otherwise risks being demeaned as escape or fantasy or even madness.

     Iris Murdoch, in the first page of her sixteenth book, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, opens with a character having “A sensation which he felt almost all the time now, a sort of mild aching disgust and lassitude, [that] made him unable to concentrate his mind.” Her portrayal, reminiscent of postmodernism’s miasma, with its devilish variations so evocatively portrayed here and through her fifteen previous novels, concentrates again so that we might loosen, and perhaps even gain release from the toxic illusion.

     Huston Smith’s book, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, very helpfully describes this “worldview that science introduced,” and more importantly, for me at least, points the way beyond, toward “apophatic theology, the via negativa” (p. 59), toward where mystics focus. And that’s the link to the third reading: Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying.

     These three readings are working together so that the attraction I’ve long felt to Rumi and Hafez makes more sense, and the increased understanding offers to bridge from the sacred into the profane and back again, and again as the indwelling flows without cease. Murdoch’s stories are especially valuable as the richness of story surpassing the intellectual gold of exposition allows compassion to develop so that the otherwise unloveable might be approached. But finding the way takes more than is humanly possible. The divine needs to come through. 

     For this to happen, I believe we need at least these three: the ground of understanding, the sweet waters of compassion, and the warm light from the spirit. In short, the mystical union. That’s what Rumi, Hafez, and all the charmers of radical love tantalize us toward. Michael Sells concentrates the teachings from the entire book in the final pages when he says this is “This moment in which the transcendent reveals itself as the immanent.”

“The affirmation of transcendence—when taken with full apophatic seriousness—then turns back upon itself. The paradoxes of transcendence and immanence, the coincidences of opposites, the displacement of the grammatical object—all are in violation of the conventional logic that functions for delimited entities…”     “This moment in which the transcendent reveals itself as the immanent is the moment of mystical union. [emphasis added] At this moment, the standard referential structures of language are transformed: the breakdown of the reflexive/nonreflexive grammatical distinction in the antecedence of a pronoun [It sees it(self) through it(self) in it(self)]; the breakdown of the perfect/imperfect distinction (it always has been occurred and always is occurring). At the moment of mystical union, the divine attributes are not known to a nondivine subject, the distinction of deity and creation and the duality of lover and beloved are undone. The attributes appear in the mirror, and the image in the mirror is divine in human and human in divine. As soon as the attributes are ‘known’ (perceived as objects by a subject other than them) they harden into idols. They can be realized only through union and self-manifestation. . . This realization is both timeless and utterly ephemeral.” (p. 212)

Michael Sells continues so that the language and the effect of the spiritual poets may translate more easily into the daily offerings pregnant with the grace of mystical union.

“The moment in which the ego-self passes away entails a ‘bewilderment,’ ‘love-madness,’ a ‘being driven out of one’s wits.’ Conventional rationality is built upon the very structures that are momentarily superseded in mystical union.” (p. 212)

     Terrible thing about a worldview is that when it’s the only view known there’s a significant risk that no other world can be believed nor born. Like if a Jonah were in the whale’s belly his entire life, could he have conceived any other possible world? Persons who only experience the narrow oppressive texture of the postmodern world may be so depressed in spirit and vision that they are condemned to be swallowed their entire lifetime. Thank God for sending prophets, poets, and other teachers throughout created forms to display the divine and to invite the mystical union.