Java

Sunday morning my friend Kamaji and his mother picked me up and took me to Zazen. It was both of their first times. Sunday night Tricia threw a wonderful dinner party. Can you tell how wonderful all these people are? I was surrounded my deities all day.
And the newspaper website kept me informed about teh deaths in Java. i found this quote:

"To surrender oneself is something more than to devote oneself, more than to give oneself; it is even something more than to abandon oneself to God. To surrender oneself is to die to everything and to self, to be no longer concerned with self except to keep it continually turned towards God. Self-surrender is no longer to seek self-satisfaction in anything by solely God's good pleasure. It should be added that self-surrender is to follow that complete spirit of detachment which holds to nothing, neither to persons nor to things, neither to time nor place. It means to accept everything, to submit to everything."
-Saint Therese Couderc

Java. How can I even begin to feel the suffering? There is so much in the world. Over 4,900 people killed in Java. How many children are homeless now? The pain in this world is so great; I can’t begin to imagine it, or to feel it. How do I even begin to feel this much pain?
I might close my heart. For even the smallest whisper of suffering existing in this world would rip it apart. wouldnt it?

The painful kiss of the Lover breaks the crystal egg open.

I pushed ink
the chaos pushed me,
Through my human nervous system, the
The Presence got its way,
And now maybe I can
Open as love, and cry with the rest.


It’s so sad.
Help me God. Help me accept this pain and transform it into compassion. Help me submit to everything.

I surrender.
The pain like a river begins to fill up my mind and soul. The crying, the pain of broken bones and scratched eyes, of dead and dying children and mothers and fathers. And the rain. As if the earthquakes were not enough, the rain pours down on the homeless and broken and beneath this vision a lukewarm, watery sadness rises up through my stomach and lungs, up into my throat, horrible sounds and black tarry smoke swells. I swallow it down, into my heart, which breaks open releasing an explosion of crystal clear light. Like wind, the warm light races across the fields of mind, touching all the memories and tears and bodies and fears and faces of everyone suffering. no, no, the pain is too loud. And just when I think the door of my heart is about to close again, the Divine Thought, the Holy of holies, the desire to help alleviate everyone's suffering arrives on a white horse, descending from the highest height within the Presence, this savior made of light, my own highest Self, arrives effortlessly to open the door of my heart and keep it open. Unable to turn back, the pain and compassion flows in an out of me, like an endless geyser at the bottom of the sea.