Root Cap

Let Us Gather Together: Part 3

One who sees variety & not Unity wanders on from death to death. Knowing this, let the lover of Brahman follow wisdom. Let him not ponder on many words, for words are weariness. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

How does one see Unity & not touch instantly, its variety? Come to rest beneath its Tree & not know the communion within its leaves? Where is the high regard for all that is small & in concreto of God?

May this depth of darkness teach us that to learn is to honor. To understand our ignorance begins the eminent regard; it sanctifies the holding on, just as it profanes by letting go. Love we must, for in love, we come to gather & compel our habits to open their integuments & let turn the root so it may learn the ways of the water film radiant with bacteria; of the water film & naked amoeba; of fecal decay & the fertile castings that range in the wake of the great worms who plow the dark below. Like the tree, its people of cells, or the sea, its tree-like upwelling, those who make for molecular water, who make for the congress of thought, who make for the dust of stars, who make for the concupiscent dog, who people & thrive---gather in desire to grow wise.

Wise to every germ of the generous, every spore of the wandering, every growing-tip of the speculative, every annelid of the appetite, every cell's watery body a mind.

Wise in a love that makes us expansive, that makes us grow out into great dust storms or vast ocean floors or the vortices of air that shadow the beautiful animal.

Wise in a love that makes that expansiveness devolve into the last atom upon the tip of an eyelash that bares the entirety of Brahman.

Wise like those in exile, who learn to live with what is left after another is dead.

Wise like those who grow into old age to give what they have to those who have less.

Wise to the path that ambles & winds & not the crowded reality it leaves to the side.

Wise to death because what else could make us better understand this expansiveness, this desire to root & leaf & spill our seed?

Wise to a seed because we are wise to a desire as the sea is to a sun as the sun is to a dark as that is to a fire---but no more! No more. For though words can make many grow wise, we fear for the weary.

Let Us Gather Together: Part 2

Those who see the light enter life eternal; those who live in darkness enter sorrow. Even by the mind this truth must be seen: there are not many, but only One. Who sees variety and not Unity wanders on from death to death. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

Like an atom in the leaf, concatenated with everything to make a tree, or the many within a molecular cloud or wandering island of stars, the One is a crowded All. A sea of its sociability churns & heaves, seething with contingencies. Take from it the spontaneous & what is left but the eternal? The null of Any & you lose the kinds & unities conspiring to an eyelash or a planet. All that are void of animation are void of putrescence. Those sealed from every influence cannot decay because they lack the know-how of liberty. Increase of the immutable fails upon each charitable effort of the dead. Decrease of an everlasting chaos succeeds upon any effort to share. Somewhere it is written: “Drive off ignorance & let flee experience & all that is left is light”.

One is not whole by being closed to pollution; or complete, by being independent of creation; nothing new to be born, nothing old to die away. The One is an open union where all come & go—the Whole made so only by the restless flow of rot & its redemption; this ceaseless movement of Adventure & its ending.

To intimate the crowded All is to guess at infinite variety. It is to see both increase & decrease, as it is to see the absolute engaged, the determined unbound, & the unchanging ravish the finite. Like the great organizations of dust storms or vast ocean floors or turbulence at the edge of a butterfly’s wing—all things that are born & die away to advance & influence the endeavor of Love---the One has no ontological stability.

Even if we are to discover the prefect, irreducible particle; the atomos that has no predecessor; the summun genus of the enormously many—this totality of one would find itself shifting & changing: one moment fixed by an elegant stasis & then the next, perturbed by a rent in what was thought to be matter free of any filament. A tear that now reveals a here-to-fore unknown fabric, that let goes some attenuation of the threads of Love, & lets in (as perhaps it must be) some energetic ply to yarn a novel textile that makes for a thought, propensity of star dust, or a new dog.

If the One could deny Life the charity of the dead, than would the One deny Love its ability to live.

Dog: To what end, this wandering?
Atman: To see unity.

How is unity seen?
By those who have become enlightened.
Luminous with what? What is insight?
Emancipation.
What is set free?
The wanderer.
To do what?
To show others the way.
Why others?
Because they live in darkness & enter sorrow.
How does one learn the way?
By living in darkness & entering sorrow.
To wander is to know All?
To wander is to know.

Let Us Gather Together: Part 1

While we are here in this life, we may reach the light of wisdom; and if we reach it not, how deep is the darkness? ...Even by the mind this truth must be seen: there are not many, but only One.  Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

If wisdom is to be reached what part shall be left out of the effort? Reality is irrepressible variety. If we are to become wise, must we not begin sanctified by this?

We suggest that the One knows how to get itself to crowd & hang together. In our effort to reach the light, we see the modest unities amid the common ferment. We who submit to reason say: "Segregate like specimens & their gathering becomes a set, or class or kind. Undo the distinction & the 'sole fact' again vanishes into a uniqueness that cannot entirely suppress confusion. When no two things are alike but for the habit or desire they share, the sharing somehow gets assembled--an instance of kind & such kinds, by their esse, tend to congregate. Specimens of a vapor, belief or stiffening may than congress into useful descriptions of wind or free speech or remembrance. Communal specimens may expand their sympathies into compelling notions of weather, or just society or mindfulness."

And just so, the fermenting stuff of allegiance is taken up by “living matter” & they by cells & they by organism & thus by species. Genus gathers this as does order, family. So too the stuff of stuff, such as resistance, attraction & diffusion neatly commit to distinct & lawful forces. There persist a pregnant One which may hold together the entirety of decay & increase, but must acquire its strength & propagate its influence by the many kinds embraced.

The All-that-is-One is true in this important sense: it begins as an incipient chaos that gets itself organized. Confusion into specimen into community, & this into kinds of kinds & unities of unities as it seeks its way to a sea of Union. This increase for One is, at its watery depth, a desire to learn; at its breach of sea, a fierce Leviathan desire to know. The interior of every connection, this fuse of kind, contain the habits of Love: its heated randiness, its pedagogic interests, & its satisfactions that obligate generation with possibilities advanced by such methods as conception, speculation & exploration—all this being the preoccupations of the One’s sociable many-ness.

Experience requires us to acknowledge the many who give rise to any unity we might enjoy. The pleasure of Dog is not an ineluctable fact, but one generated from a commitment & aim that only Love can make. From conception & the earliest migration of rapidly dividing cells within the blastocyst, to the coordination of vast divisions of labor & contemplation amid the adult body negotiating a world rift with the unexpected; becoming more complicated & prone to new influences—in part, by virtue of its own burgeoning, & in part by those generated from a landscape of chance & invention—a Dog is a way that Love expands us into the living. And conversely how the living endeavor Love by the common interest of a vast gathering that ponder a thousand-thousand points of advancement. 

All this must move from any back into that of sociability—no more than this is the depth of darkness.

Isaac

"I always felt he was getting the better of me."
words from a good friend of the deceased

"He was my first love & my favorite dog...full of kisses, full of mischief, and full of soft, soft fur."
another whose life was increased by the deceased

"Sometimes I would look at him & say "canine ludens". He taught a man of the middle age, how to play again."    
a life-long  companion 

"He bound us together & showed us the way." 
his "kid" brother

"He was the fire we gathered around."
his sister

What Makes A Brother Makes A Dog

Dog:
"Love makes for life. It is the reason why everything holds together. When it does not & we lose what we love, than something has died. Death brings decay; but what brings death is decrease; the cause to grow less; waning of the one who can no longer help with the holding together. Love will come to this if we cannot, one to another, make it endeavor. When any does not, than someone is left to let go—lowered into grief like another, who too has let go, but lowered into a grave."

Brother:
“To grow less brings death, as death, the ruin of companionship. We grow old in the ways of the dispossessed: expelled from youth, deprived of vigor, banished from unbounded optimism, forced by decrease to lose the ones that make us live. Like the many in exile, denied entry to the territory of lasting peace. We learn to love with what is left. That is our wisdom. To not wait for our wandering to end, but to grow more & give what we have in love to help those who have less.”

In Memoriam: Brother Todd who let go September 13, 2000 & brother Isaac who let go September 13, 2006

An Ineluctable Fact of Glacier National

We who abide this half of the planet’s exigency, know it is the North that sends us the smell of ruin; the redolance of Winter; an exhalation of shades lunged from a movement;  at play upon a far-away divide, crowded with blue pines, beset by a whispering snow we imagine as the absence decay inspires.

The spoil of stars we now behold because Fall has pulled down the black shroud of the North, confirms what summer was able to mostly conceal: the dark that surrounds the Worm, surrounds the World.

Marginalia To Autumn

Summer is well past its radiant apogee. All the flowering of long ago, satisfied with the fruit we eat. Its seed we leave to wait out the anticipated ruin: this ritual decay of green; this disinterest of a dimming Sun, the draining heat, extinguished rivers & hushed thunder of a far off, anxious sea.

It was a voluptuous relation, both of penetration & reception, this high light of increase. This excess of light that loves us.

Death is an aim without love as an outcome. It comes with the collapse of the vivid & divide of the cellular. Those who sleep like the buried & those who sleep as the buried. The latter "come alive" with loam, flourish with soil-rot & make a rich waste of the once great promise that was Spring.

An adequate truth for the time of Autumn should console the ones who have come to their path’s end (the conjured ground where corruption begins): We who fall, once migrated from dirt, creatures of growth: taught ourselves a unity that will never be again. But we, who are to die past this soil, shall be, as ever, willing to learn & become again fertile--- for as long as there is death, than as long will we learn to live. As long as there is decay, than as long will we learn to create.

 May all else wake
to the weather of amorous seas & a sun pregnant
with Spring.