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The Next Step
It is my job to help wayfarers
clarify and understand
the thoughts and emotions
that arise on the journey.
It is not my job to correct,
direct,
fix or heal anyone.
The Great Way itself does that.
The best gift I can give you
is to help you see
the next step—
and encourage you to take it.
The Guns at Fort Knox
after three years of "Shock & Awe"
The big guns at Ft. Knox are booming—shaking, rattling
and rolling across forty miles of Kentucky knobs
and right into this quiet zendo. The same shock waves
rattled the windows in Merton’s hermitage 40 years ago.
I used to feel: "How ironic: as we sit down to meditate,
they begin unleashing the big guns—boom,
booming and shaking the entire house as if
a giant was marching straight through the Hollow."
But now it no longer seems ironic—but perfect.
For in fact, we sit here because they train for death there.
No longer sitting against these boys, and all their
dangerous toys. No, now I sit with them.
As I sit with my own fear, despair and aggression—
and know that it is no different from theirs.
No different from what motivates the Masters of War
at the Pentagon, or at Lockheed or Los Alamos.
Yes, I sit with all of them—and because of them.
Dying to know, in the marrow of my soul—
if there's a great peace to be found
even beneath the sound of the guns at Fort Knox.
20 March 2006