Uradiance

    When the world is spinning off-center, a very deep spiritual practice is minding our own business.   Yes, that sounds self-centered. But who is the Self, and what does it really mean to be "centered?"   During desperate times, we can externalize and project our anxiety by becoming busy-bodies, crusaders, trying to save the world and solve everyone else's problems but our own. Here's a humble suggestion: we might better respond to the chaos, not by minding other people's business, but minding our own, very lovingly, very carefully, very gently.   Minding our own business can profoundly affect others, like a flower that enhances the whole garden by releasing its peculiar essence, its unique beauty. When we learn to be wholly authentically ourselves, we radiate the quality of wholeness to others. Wholeness is a resonant field, as real as gravity or electromagnetism. The energy of a centered soul can center a community. This is not...

   Playfulness without a player. The frolic of God. An abandoned lute fingered by the midnight wind. Countlessness of pollen grains in a single flower. The fragrance of myrrh wafted over the ocean where moons dance in dolphin crescent stillness. A fallen tower spilling jasmine  and oil of spikenard on the sand as rudderless boats of plenty drift unhelmed wherever anointing is needed. Her body laden with jars of chrism and wine, how could she whirl up your backbone from blossom to blossom, escaping your gravity? A woman of the night or the temple virgin of Ningal? Yes. And the grail holder of Jesus. Scholars will never understand how her polished emptiness overflows. How her darkness engenders stars. They would rather correct mistakes in God's translation of her marvelous silence. If you want to taste her fecund blackness, cleanse the secret window of your heart. Behind clouds of grief and time the space of her...

         The feast day of Mary Magdalene is over, yet the daily discipline of her gaze continues. Her darshan is a flame that consumes us, burns us up, and burns us down. Her alchemy turns our dross to gold, annihilating everything that is not ourselves. Nothing remains but our uniqueness. The eyes of the Magdalene behold us, and we are held. She holds us in the gaze of a most severe and lethal demand: the demand to become who we are, each of us.  This is true bhakti. Her gaze is not a call to merge with the One,  annihilating  our personhood in collective consciousness. It is a refiner's fire, shaping us in the ingot mold of our soul, destroying all but the grace of our own eccentricity. "Bhakti" means devotion. But devotion to what? To whom? To the love of Jesus? To the Guru? To the path of enlightenment? No dear friend, Mary's eyes burn with an even more terrible and beautiful vocation. Her silence calls, "Be You!" When...