So already a year has passed since September 11, 2001. Then we were caught in the rush and the shock of images and emotion. It's different now; for some, there seems to be a kind of sorting going on, thoughtful people considering what continues to matter a year on, what has emerged and persisted over these last months. It's a kind of middle passage, between the roar of the event and the time when we begin to settle into our long views of things. In the middle passage, the narrative is still unstable, but it's no longer just a jumble of sensation. Things begin to differentiate; it's a bit more spacious. We can notice what catches us, what wants to spend some time in our company, without, yet, having entirely to understand why. There's a beauty to such a time, in the beginnings of a collaboration between one's imagination and the little mysteries, the vignettes, the small shards that catch the light now, a year later.

As thoughtful people sort in their different ways, they bring forward their own little mysteries, some of which will leap into us. Here are a few that live now in me, too, at least for awhile, which I pass on to you as I received them, without trying to make meaning of them. Just the things themselves, which is plenty.

A photographer who was there, who saw people jumping from the Twin Towers, says he can't imagine doing that, making that choice for the abyss, and he wonders if things had already changed for those who jumped: perhaps they were already in the next world, so that it seemed to them that they were falling into a garden, a beautiful place they could rest.

A museum curator speaks about why he thinks art matters: because it opens us over and over again to being moved by the ordinary things of this world-sunlight pouring through a window, the pearl in a young girl's ear. He says this is the sacred nature of art, this revelation of the everyday as numinous, and one can't help but notice that, in the face of the awesome, the curator of modern art steps back into, and speaks out of, a tradition that is primordial and entirely unironic.

William Langewiesche reports that all the structural steel from Ground Zero was sold for scrap, shipped overseas and melted down, then used in the manufacture of everything from rebar to cars, the bones of those buildings become new things, spreading now to every corner of the world.

In the face of these bright shards, what's been called the kitschification of September 11 really doesn't matter. There's plenty here that's real as real can be and dreamlike as dream can be, all at the same time. What persists, what has fallen away, what catches you for the first time one year on? And what leaps from your imagination to join this great streaming life of ours?

"Isn’t that the logic of this and that? You have pain and you move away from the pain, you have fear and you run away from the fear. Its because we think its something other than ourselves. The pain is not us its something else, the fear is not us its "he did it", anger is not us its "he made me mad". Nuclear holocaust is not us, it’s the Russians and Ronald Reagan. So we move away, move away, move away, and we make it bigger, bigger, bigger, we deny it more and more and we are just victims and that is the way it is, that’s delusion, first class delusion. So what do you do about it? You turn it around a 180 degrees and go exactly the opposite direction. You don’t move away from fear you become it! You don’t move away from pain, you become it! You acknowledge it! The moment you acknowledge it, it returns to the self, the ten thousand things return to the self which is where they have always been, only we didn’t know it. There is no place to hide from samsara or pain, not even on a remote mountaintop, or a Zen monastery. Samsara is with us, its not the outside world, it is us, we carry it wherever we go, place to place, relationship to relationship, from birth to death, it’s the same scenario until we put it to rest. Empty out the mind, die the great death, the death of the ego. You can do it right off or you can do it little by little…"

Annie B., Stephen D., Andrew P., Wendy P., Randy S.

6/13/02

The dubious shadow

Covering the sidewalk

The ice cream cone was lost

For good enough for me

Into a quiet wooded area covered in mist.

********

The last man

Full soaked in the river

Drying up as I swim

In Alfredo sauce and Cheese

Whiz is best straight from the can.

********

I found myself

Sitting happily ever after

And then there were none

But the cup was full

Of subtle and mysterious waves.

********

A constellation of crumbs making a trail

For a killer mouse-sized intellect

With a penchant for quoting Sartre and Camus

But then I came to my senses

In a snap shot of emptiness.

********

Have you ever wondered why priests

Line dancing to can-can in Monmartre

For money on a plate being passed

To Shakespeare under the table

Upon which the bones where neatly arranged.

You Darkness, that I come from,

I love you more that all the fires that fence in the world,

For the fire makes

A circle of light for everyone,

And then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:

Shapes and fires, animals and myself,

How easily it gathers them!—

Powers and people—

and it is possible a great energy

Is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

-from A Book for the Hours of Prayer, by R. M. Rilke

is a perfect creature

equal to itself

mindful of its limits

filled exactly

with a pebbly meaning

with a scent which does not remind one of anything

does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardour and coldness

are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse

when I hold it in my hand

And its noble body

is permeated by false warmth

—Pebbles cannot be tamed

to the end they will look at us

with a calm and very clear eye

—Zbigniew Herbert

"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think that it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."

L. Cohen, "Beautiful Losers" (1966).

The steering committee met on Friday, August 9, at SBA. The following persons were in attendance: Randy, chair, Donella, Elizabeth, Robert, Annie, David, and Steve.

Robert reported a balance of $2250 in the treasury. Revenues and expenses have held even since the last sesshin.

Steve plans to have an issue of the Dharma Rag out by the first week in September. He expects to publish it quarterly after that.

Preparations now are complete for the All-Day Sit with Jeff Shore on August 17. Annie and Randy will bring recording equipment so we can have a tape of his talk.

A committee was formed to review emergency procedures for sesshin. Randy, Sarah, William, Steve and Annie have offered to serve. Others with input should speak with one of them.

In connection with new student orientation, Colorado College will sponsor an interfaith service and open house for on-campus religious organizations on Sunday, September 1, at 11 a.m. William will represent us, but anyone is welcome to help out.

There was extensive discussion of the fall class which Robert has offered to teach. It was decided that the class would focus on the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. It will meet four times: Oct. 3, 17, 31, and Nov. 14 from 7-8:30 p.m. Robert will prepare selections from the writings of Nhat Hanh for discussion.

David extended an invitation for everyone to come to his ranch west of Pueblo for a half-day sit on Sept. 21.

Randy, David and Steve agreed to serve on the planning committee for the Crestone retreat scheduled for Oct. 11-13. The cost will be $125 per person. We felt this event should be actively promoted as a more accessible introduction to extended meditation than the usual 4-day sesshin.

The next meeting of the steering committee will be on Sept. 13.