Uradiance

  In the very unity of Awareness, the Other is present as Self-awareness.  The embrace of the Friend is already here. You are never alone.  (Image: Rumi and his Friend, Shams of Tabriz)

     Now a solar storm of beauty deluges the human heart. Distant galaxies are as intimate as the cells and molecules of your body. The ancestors gather round the fire in your chest. They are the very whisper of your deepest silence. The Friend is with you, even in the loneliness of midnight, even in the grief of the world. The linear logical mind cannot comprehend such Friendship, which does not come from outside, but wells up like a tear from the core of your being: the self-illumined radiance of pure consciousness. You cannot ever be alone, you know this now. Yet Divine Friendship seems so undeserved, so gifted, because it is not of your doing. This is why the intellect desperately resists the fierce onslaught of Now, experiencing the grace of Presence as a catastrophe, a loss. Old stories no longer work, because they try to place the cause before the effect, and the past before the future. You cannot build a bridge out of smoke. All there is, is the fire....

         “I heard a voice speaking to me: ‘The young woman whom you see is Love. She has her tent in eternity… It was love which was the source of this creation in the beginning when God said: Let it be! And it was. As though in the blinking of an eye, the whole creation was formed through love. The young woman is radiant in such a clear, lightning-like brilliance of countenance that you can’t fully look at her… She holds the sun and moon in her right hand and embraces them tenderly… The whole creation calls this maiden, Lady. For it was from her that all of creation proceeded, since Love was the first. She made everything…” ~Hildegard of Bingen  This is actually quite Biblical. In the book of Proverbs, chapter eight, Wisdom (Sophia) speaks as the divine feminine. She says that she was at play with God at the creation of the world and he delighted in her. She is the Shakti, the power of creation. Without her divine darkness there would be no l...

The breath you give is the breath you receive is the breath that whispered this planet into atoms, blew spirals of night into galaxies like glass and spindled out the flesh of your ancestors. We were connected by a dark sigh before we had names and our lungs are the bellows of the Maker. Don't waste a single exhalation complaining about the world. Choose beauty. The gift will not appear until you are grateful. Under snow, seeds listen. Are you singing to them? Why not? The softer your voice of praise the more they reach up golden cups of thirst and yearning. Here's the secret, creation happens quietly. Stillness swirls from inside out. You could be the cause of Spring. Photo from Issoantea