Force of Emptiness

May 31, 2026 brings forward a spectrum of features: 

* Heather Cox Richardson recounts a tragic event from this date in 1889 when over 2,200 lives were swept away in the Johnstown flood caused through the greed of materialism. 

* Richard Rohr’s meditation for today:
“The dualistic mind cannot deal with the biggies: love, death, suffering, God, infinity, and the very notion of grace.”  

* From Jim Palmer’s Week in Review

“The weakening of religion did not eliminate humanity’s need for meaning, belonging, or transcendence. Technological progress did not solve loneliness, mortality, grief, or purpose. Information abundance did not produce wisdom. Instead, many people now find themselves carrying enormous responsibility for constructing identity, meaning, and coherence under increasingly destabilizing conditions.”

* Reading in the wee hours:

Beneath an empty autumn sky stretch stretch endless wastes where no one goes. Who is that horseman riding from the west? These lines are by Wang Ch’angling, a Chinese poet of the eighth century. Using them to depict the realm of total emptiness and the marvelous activity of enlightenment that emerges from within it, Hakuin calls on students to affirm the sutra’s negations for themselves. (p. 43, Zen Words for the Heart: Hakuin’s Commentary on the Heart Sutra, Translated by Norman Waddell)

     Going yet further back, we note that these all are echos from the opening of Wisdom “all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

And yet, still, the day begins with glory of a setting full moon and rosy hues from a rising sun. 

The Ecstatic Blur

 

Sunset yesterday

     Sometimes a partial is all that’s given. Whisp of a dream… the unavailable you and the might-be beloved speak “You…” The words in the dream have slipped back across the veil. Right enough. Dreams and other ecstatic whiffs are just enough to draw the next step, into the blur…A-slant. 
Ex-stasis. Outside self. Not literal. 

Literal. Letter?  Word. Representation. Re-Present is not same as present (in its multiple meanings slip-sliding to push the edge of sense). This chain of associations brings to mind Epaminondas: the tragedy of literalism and fundamentalism; the risks yet critical necessity of imagery running into troubles of idolatry and idealism…
     All this points toward realization of “other.” The standing outside of one’s self. The Ecstatic. The Not. Nothingness. Not knowing as beginning of wisdom. Nishitani on going beyond emptiness. 

“It is only in breaking through to the field of ecstatic transcendence (or trans-descendence), then, that the awareness of birth-and-death as ’transmigration’ comes about. This ecstatic trans-descendence appears in the endlessness of finite life and in the totality of the horizon that embraces the mode of being of man along with that of the other species. Nihility opens up only in this transcendence.” (Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, pp. 174-5). 

Transcendence?  At least going outside. Ecstatic. “Non-knowledge communicates ecstasy,”  Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring, quoting Bataille, Inner Experience.
     Rosemarie Waldrop opens Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes:

“Faced with an undecipherable world we set out to create language, a place where human discourse can arises, and we come to exist as human beings; where, at the same time, we can maintain a relation to what transcends us, the undecipherable, the ultimate otherness, and speak to it under the name of God.” (p. 1)

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

Tuning In

May 3, moon at morning

When awake mid-night 

As in any time attuned 

Look not for clock-time 

The Lord of both worlds 

Calls always “Now!”

Listen for in tone ing 

Home making

Of that harmony 

Eternal recurrence 

Of the Order 

Not for food-sleep-pleasure 

Nor for calendar bank account 

But to home in 

Always returning

“Original Countenance”

And Remember we are 

   there 

Sooner 

   moving more slowly 

Mindfully 

For fewer dragons 

   Disturbed 

 

May 3, 5:59A

 

Being in time. I’m wondering about the baseline … perhaps it’s a sense of center. The “original countenance.” Nishitani says “The dropping off of body-and-mind is self-presentation of the original countenance.” 

“…all things coming forward to practice and confirm the self is no different from defining the dropping off of body-and-mind as being the practice of Zen. The dropping off of body-and-mind is self-presentation of the original countenance. The original countenance is present at the point that the world worlds, where ‘one’s treasure-house opens of itself and one can use it at will.’ It is the place of self-joyous samadhi. . . On the whole, this is the meaning of ‘observance.’

… in the Existenz of the dropped off of body-and-mind (that is, of true emptiness)… a standpoint of absolute freedom. By means of its own dharma, this Existenz maintains dharani over all phenomena in the dharma-like nature, or suchness, within this world of transitoriness and uses them for its own enjoyment. Hence, when the self as body-and-mind is born, it is a birth that is a unbirth; and when it passes away, it is a passing away that is a non-passing away. (pp. 199-200)

May 3, 5:56A

 

Planting a Tree Oneself

 

Sunrise, April 8

Wonder how many have written

On planting a tree

Oneself sifting soil

Grain by grain, 

Brushing back leaves of the ancestors, 

Temporarily extracting stones—

They’ll hold the borders—

For sugar sap to rise years hence 

As memories too rise up—

Perhaps across to that other world 

For those who planted sweetness 

They’d never taste—

Here. Take this falling leaf in,

Your current, and read/write 

Revelation from your own digging/

Planting. 

One self cannot separate other, indeed cannot know the Unknowable but better leans toward, falls, fails into. Yearning tries to complete the true-self yet succeeds when holding open access to and from the Source. The self/other dynamic frustrates and celebrates being/becoming. 

“The incarnation of the divine in the human is the disappearance of transcendence in immanence… ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is a condition of the heart…something that comes at every moment and at every moment has not yet arrived.’”    [p. 60, Mark C. Taylor, Nots; quoting Nietzche, The Will to Power, Kauffman, trans. p. 98-9]

Yearning, grief, desire, mystery—such forces carry the energy to move beyond the known, to transgress the limited self that’s too bounded by reasons, prohibitions, dogma and/or bones. Spirit goes mysterious ways out past right/wrong, either/or, heaven/hell…

Late afternoon, Apr 5

Confounding of Suffering/Joy

Pre-Dawn December 4

 Hard to imagine writings of more importance on spiritual walking than the work of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, and equally difficult to find anyone better for guidance into their texts than Edith Stein. Wikipedia’s entry for her begins with this background:

Edith Stein [in religion, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross] 12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942) was a German philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. Edith Stein was murdered in the gas chamber at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp on 9 August 1942, and is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein

The Science of the Cross is Volume VI of The Collected Works of Edith Stein and it focuses on St. John of the Cross. In Kieran Kavanaugh’s introduction to this volume, he says that Stein “weaves together John’s words and her own. The fire that was dark, consuming, and painful is now brilliant, loving, and gentle” (p. xxxi).  

Moving into this material seems impossible without willingness to persist in mystery; the “Dark Night of the Soul” admits passage only as one yields to the Unknowable and to the Incomprehensible Love. To sustain the journey, the traveller leans into frequent confounding of suffering/joy and dark/light, accepting just what is sufficient to take a next step, uncertain of the ground yet trusting in the guide. The manna is rich, complex, and it thus requires time to integrate into the grey moments of personal experience, in order to gain candle-like illumination, for receiving sufficient light and warmth on the way.

For example, in relation to feeling the Presence of the Guide, Stein elaborates in Chapter 17, “Rays of Divine Glory,” on  Stanza 3 of St. John’s Living Flame of Love :

O luminous lamps of fire

In whose resplendent rays

The caves of sense—profound abyss—

Which once were dark, bereft of sight,

With rarest beauty unite

In gift for the Belov’d, warmth and light

[p. 203, Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel]

In Living Flame of Love , St. John followed the poem with his commentary which includes this discussion of Stanza 3 (paragraph 23):

“Yet—may the Lord help me—since it is true that when the soul desires God fully, it then possesses Him Whom it loves…the greater the soul’s desire the greater will be its satisfaction and delight rather than its suffering and pain” 

(pp. 618-19, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, Trans/Ed Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriguez)

In her discussion of this material from St. John, Stein notes:

“Yet, if the soul longs for God in truth, she already possesses the one she loves and so it seems that she is no longer capable of feeing any pain…the more intensely she desires to possess God, and she will do this all the more because she lives all the more in possessing him. Therefore she, too, feels neither suffering nor pain.” Stein, p. 207

Moments felt as dark can be incorporated with the three abidings: faith, hope and love. Suffering can be known as refining faith, as affirmation of God even when it’s inexplicable (cf “why hast Thou forsaken me?”); hope may be extended into times when no positive way is seen or imagined; and love claimed even when it seems no one cares.  There, in the darkest night, is God found. In ways and knowing beyond…

In Chapter 11, Enkindling of Love, Stein elaborates the preparation for and initial experience of union with God.

The human intellect, united with the divine through supernatural illumination, becomes divine. In like manner, the will is united with the divine will and divine love, and the memory, affections, and appetites are converted and changed according to God. . .

The dark night of the soul also deprives the soul of satisfaction in good things, yes, even in supernatural and divine things. This is so because the soul’s impure, lowly, and very natural faculties can receive supernatural things only according to a human and lowly mode. Through ‘being weaned, purged, and annihilated…they will lose that lowly and human  mode of working and receiving, and thus all these faculties and appetites of the soul are tempered and prepared for the sublime reception, experience, and savoring of the divine and supernatural that cannot be received until the old self dies.’  

[pp. 137-8; Stein references St. John’s Dark Night, Book 2, Ch 16, para 7, 9, 13, 14 which may be found in Kavanaugh and Rodriguez,  pp. 365-368]

The fire felt, the darkness of knowing, the aloneness of bereavement, all witness the Divine transforming the soul (will, intellect, feeling) that moves, knows, and loves into the ineffable, the unseen, through embraceable longing, all that mediates toward, possibly even into, union with the Oneness.

Full Moon Rising, December 3 

Hidden in the Cold

David would’ve been age 40 today…suppose is, in memory at least… gone just before 19, just over 21 years ago. Reading in the middle of the night from Edith Stein’s The Science of the Cross, adds perspective on loss. In her chapter on “Spirit and Faith” (reflecting particularly on the work of St. John of the Cross, both Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul):

Therefore faith is a totally dark night for the soul. But it is precisely by these means that it brings her light: a knowledge of perfect certainty that exceeds all other knowledge and science so that one can arrive in perfect contemplation at a correct conception of faith. That is why it is said: Si non credideritis, non intelligentis (“If you do not believe, you will not understand,” Is 7:9). [fn 3: See Ascent of Mount Carmel 2.3.2-4 ]

From what was last said, it has not only been made clear that faith is a dark night, but also that it is a way: the way to the goal toward which the soul strives, to union with God. For it alone gives knowledge of God. And how is one to arrive at union with God without knowing him? However, in order to be led by faith to the goal, the soul must conduct itself in the right manner.  She must enter into the night of faith by her own choice and by her own power. After having renounced all desire for creatures in the night of the senses, in order to reach God, she must now die to her natural faculties, her senses, and to her intellect also. For in order to reach the supernatural transformation, she must leave behind everything natural. Yes, she must divest herself, as well, of all supernatural goods when God grants her any of these. She must let go of everything that falls into the realm of her power of comprehension. ‘And she must remain in the dark like a blind man, leaning upon dark faith and choosing it as light and guide and not supporting herself by anything she understands or enjoys or feels or imagines. For all this is darkness that will lead her into error or delay. Faith, on the other hand, is above all such understanding, enjoyment, feeling, or imagining.’ [fn 4: Ascent of Mount Carmel 2.4.2-4] 

   from pp. 58-59 Stein, The Science of the Cross

 Looking back at written reflections, this item seems good for reflection:

When You Come to the Land

Halfway to his third-grade class, I lurch at the wheel
spotting bare ankles between jeans and sneakers,
and feeling the cold rubber brake as on our soles.
It’s mid-December. Ice crusts the left-over rain.
How can he not know his socks are missing?
We can’t blame sleepiness as he’s jabbering away
about meteor showers, fishing for a word
to catch the ground between exciting and afraid.
Some line’s down between head and foot.
Did a big storm pass through, snow and wind?
Has the ground around him been too harsh?
The stares cold inside the house, an icy silence?
Oh, perhaps he’s in search of winter’s power,
that makes hidden, in the cold, the hope of spring.

 

Framing Presence and Absence

October 18, Good Morning

Midway in Mark C. Taylor’s The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, the dialectical wonder around presence and absence lightens shadows and complicates the clear. Might we draw closer to God, the Great Unknowable, as these phenomena happen? Again, the ever-present longing: Love, beauty, freedom, justice, truth. Perhaps we only have dissolving frames, another way of imaging. Taylor explores the artistic erasure of the picture: Is God more present in the admission of absence?

Before I press the shutter, I’m less moved to erase frames. To wonder and wander into depths of “reality,” perhaps the telephone pole belongs (possible reminder of a cross), the bumper of my 15-year-old car belongs in the edging of today’s glorious sunrise, including the glass and screen in the window allows the reflection of my partner in the pre-dawn display of autumn leaves. 

We’ve contemplated long on the life task of containing opposites. The yes and no. Life and death. Light and dark. Presence and absence.

God forbids making images, idols… Yet we’re said to be made in God’s image…and advised to know oneself is to know one’s Lord. There might also be comfort in considering God’s anger at idol-makers and in dealing with our feelings concerning the violence and craziness in living today…

“ A jealous God authorizes no delegates and sanctions neither representatives nor representations. ‘The uniqueness and unicity of God,’ as Peggy Kamuf observes, ‘must forever prevent His appearance through any kind of substitute, any doubling of the eternal One and the Same. God, who is unique and uniquely the one who is, cannot tolerate a double, a replacement, a representative.’ Always beyond reason as well as the imagination, the jealous God cannot be figured.” [p. 71 in Taylor; quoting Kamuf from A Derrida Reader, xxiii.]

Thus humbled and leaning thru sight and blindness…