Uradiance

Woke this morning in the Kingdom of the Golden Fur, my healing dog Emerson pressed against my spine. And I knew, not as belief but direct sensation, that each photon, each electron of matter is made out of sparkling awareness, and the space between them is love, just as the space between the galaxies is love, the same space, and there is no distance. All this space is in my body, and all a love so near it need not be breathed, for it is the ocean I drown in each moment. This love is both Self and Other, and there is nothing impersonal about it, perpetually flowering as a rose and coral splendor in my chest, gathering distant stars into my heartbeat, the heartbeat of the universe, which I can hear as the secret two-syllable name of the Friend.

I voted. I voted for the rainbow. I voted for the cry of a loon. I voted for my grandfather’s bones that feed beetles now. I voted for a singing brook that sparkles under a North Dakota bean field. I voted for salty air through which the whimbrel flies South along the shores of two continents. I voted for melting snow that returns to the wellspring of darkness, where the sky is born from the earth. I voted for daemonic mushrooms in the loam, and the old democracy of worms. I voted for the wordless treaty that cannot be broken by white men or brown, because it is made of star semen, thistle sap, hieroglyphs of the weevil in prairie oak. I voted to keep the edges of the vineyard ragged and ungleaned for the hungry stranger. I voted for the local, the small, the brim that does not spill over, the abolition of waste, the luxury of enough. I voted for a motherland where politics dissolves into folk music, story-telling, fermented cabbage, totem-carved hoes handed down fro...

  I called you my Lord, but this was not the whole truth. I called you my Self, but this was not the whole truth. I called you the Christ, but the Mystery was even deeper. Then I called you Friend, and this was enough. This was everything. Each moment, I am bathed in an ocean of love. Is this love personal or impersonal? It it an Other, or Myself? If I am truly immersed in oceanic love, these questions don't arise. The mind simply drowns in the heart, swept away by each wave of Otherness, each trough of Selfhood. Here is the portrait of "Christ at 33" by Hoffman. Please don't tell me this isn't how he really looks, because this is very much how he looks when he looks at me. How he looks at you is your business. Incidentally, for what it's worth, Paramhansa Yogananda said that this portrait of Jesus was the closest portrayal of his likeness ever made. How would he know? Who really knows? Nobody.  Your own heart reveals the countenance of the Friend according to...