Uradiance

We confuse busy-ness with accomplishment, rushing through each task to get to ten more. But fulfillment seldom comes from doing everything we can. It comes from doing a few things very well, or even just one. I learned this from a caterpillar, moving slowly down a twig toward its singularity, the angled cleft that the universe had chosen for a cocoon.

Shhhh, here's a 4 A.M. secret: The Goddess isn't just an 'energy,'  She's a person. The 'energy' comes from her gaze. The gaze comes from you heart. You can never be alone.

Wishing a peaceful Rosh Hoshana (New Year) to all Jewish friends who begin the High Holy Days today; and a joyful Navratti to all devotees of the Mother, as we begin the nine holiest nights on the Vedic calendar of India. These ancient festivals follow the lunar cycle, and come on the first New Moon after the Autumn Equinox. In the Northern hemisphere, to the primal earth-centered eye, creation tilts toward the dark womb of its source. These mysteries are open secrets, reveal ed by the beauty of the ruined garden. If you feel the call of inner silence at this time, a sinking and withering of the light, a purifying fall, just let go into the mystery of fructifying darkness. Repose in the Groundless tonight: this is deep meditation. We can feel a bit spacey and displaced during this transition, because organic life hollows out, thins its marrow, furrows its soul for the planting of a new Light Seed at the Winter Solstice. Just be compassionate with yourself, and be gentl...

At the New Moon, Sept 24, begins Navratti, the nine holy nights of Mother Divine. The vibrations of the Vedic mantras chanted at this time, especially those bijas (seed sounds) that resonate through the nervous system at the quantum field in meditation, bring green energy to the earth and peace to the mind. Let humanity drink from the well of Vedic wisdom. These mantras were not invented by men: they are the eternal formulas of creation, t he very structures of intelligence that constitute Natural Law. Civilization will regenerate the threads of its golden destiny, not through war or material technology, but through the inner science of consciousness. All things are poured out at her feet. Nothing belongs to me, not even this breath. From the sparkle of the photon in one atom of my flesh, to the choreography of stars at the farthest circumference of my heart, everything belongs to Mother Divine. Jai Guru Dev.

Buddha was deeply misunderstood. He didn't renounce the world. He liked it. He liked the forest and the city, green tea and coffee ice cream, bare feet and wingtips, soccer and slam poetry. If something appeared before him, he liked it. When it dissolved, he didn't care. His smile of tranquility was not an enigma, it was a smile of tranquility. Buddha saw that no phenomenon is inherently superior or inferior. Therefor we can give up comparison of forms and simply notice everything that arises as a sign of awakening. Awakening to what? To the perception that this form is composed of the awareness that perceives it. Therefor, all things scintillate in the fulfillment of self-perception, and there is nothing to desire. To our ordinary minds, clogged with moral opinions, to reject nothing and grasp nothing seems irresponsible. But Buddha was deeply responsible. Because he was awake, he was able to respond. Only in the present moment can we respond to the passin...

Root your soul in the loam of breathing. Why pay white people for workshops in 'shamanism' when your dark ancestral matriarch rides her fiery lioness up the forest path of every inhalation?

Last day of summer, the day when the ray returns to the Sun, the day you remember, you are not a seeker of the Light, you Are the Light. Any Autumn rose could tell you this through its fiery silence, offering fallen petals back to a golden intuition. Be that way, just notice. This is all that is required of you today. Just notice, and be grateful.

O gentle green intelligence of frog, fern, cedar, hummingbird, how beautiful earth must have been when it was all yours, before the invasive species, the Mind, descended to infest your forest with concepts, like profit, property, and private wealth. How lovely earth was without usefulness, without thought of future reward, without any thought at all! Now the work is to eradicate this foreign species, Mind, to weed out and destroy its seeds, its concepts, until we are able to perceive again, through no medium but wonder, in silence, the gentle green intelligence of frog, fern, cedar, hummingbird - rainbow wings of pure light, trembling out of purer darkness.

If you are sad, just be sad. Suffering does not happen when we are faithful to our sadness. Suffering happens when we are sad, and try not to be. We are conditioned to believe that it is wrong to be sad. We live in a culture of compulsive happiness. It is like saying that the light of Spring is good while the light of Autumn is bad,  or that, when a sunbeam touches your golden body, you should not cast a shadow. Embrace the bud of your sadness for a little while; it will open into something unimaginable. You will never attain this unimaginable something by resisting your sadness, only by drowning in it, tasting its nectar, letting it ferment.

Do you practice your sadhana For any reason other that melting into Presence?

Delicious food  Silences the mind. Is this a spiritual experience?

The most priceless sparkling jewel is a mind free from judgments. I once thought freedom from judgment was a negative state of dispassion, a way to remain unstuck. But now I experience, by grace, that when the mind is free from all judgments it becomes a clear crystal prism, through which divine light can reflect and radia te into creation. God doesn't need believers. God needs empty channels and hollow lightning rods, free of every belief, to conduct divine energy down to earth.   Grasping no object or belief, a wareness itself is the Philosopher's Stone, Chitta Mani - the Wish Granting Jewel, the Diamond at the center of the Lotus, the Pearl of Great Price. Every spiritual tradition has a term for the holographic jewel that condenses all the information of the cosmos in its radiant emptiness. This jewel is who we ARE when the mind is transparent. The crystal subject becomes its own object in a Self-reflection that generates ineffable Beauty. Here is a graceful secr...

U.S. Foreign Policy 101: * Create and arm your own enemies. * To ensure perpetual war and maximize profits, sell weapons to both sides of every conflict. * If you sell enough weapons to 'moderates,' they will end up in the hands of 'extremists,' giving you an excuse to sell the 'moderates' even more. * Elect obedient lapdogs for the military-industrial cartel and its bankers. * In presidential speeches, use the same buzz words every ten years to promote a war against 'evil.' Always tell the people how many of us they killed. Never mention how many of them we killed. * Pretend that American war is Christian war. Never remind them what Jesus really taught: 'Whoever lives by the sword shall die by the sword... Love your enemy... Resist not the evil one.' Since weapons are this nation's most lucrative business, the teachings of Jesus are bad for Wall Street.

On this 20th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act, I weep. I weep for the women of the unspeakable rape-culture of India, for the daughters of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in whose perpetual civil war more than a million have been violated, for the women of Iraq and Bosnia and Cosovo, and all victims of the weapon of mass rape, used as a political tool. I weep as well for the victims of domestic abuse in America, especially those who are so traumatized by our pa triarchy, they cling faithfully to their abusers; and I hang my head in sorrow... Then I remember the Goddesses who honor me with their friendship. Never has a man had more awe-inspiring friends who are women: prophetesses and poets, artists, yoginis, wisdom teachers of the art of living, herbal healers, shamanist elemental movers of earth air fire, and water breakers, defiers of the rules of illusion, fire walkers through vast Dakini fields of Demeter-consciousness, who elevate the sacred grain s...

At this very moment, doubtless there is a sudden local act of violence happening in a "trouble spot" somewhere on earth. But for every trouble spot, there are 10,000 spots where peace is breaking out, children are kicking soccer balls, mothers are brushing their daughters' hair, men are working in fields, families are gathering around fires, laughing and telling stories. When we allow the media to define our world, the news is never good. Is the world more violent today than in the past? Or is there just more coverage of disaster, more news about unhappy places, more electronic hyper-vigilance? Reading every political site we can find on our computer when we get up in the morning doesn't enhance our consciousness at all: it merely causes collective secondary post-traumatic stress. When our minds feed on this virtual media world, we lose touch with the vibrant continuum of the organic Earth, humming through its fur into our senses. This is why medit...

There is no 'spiritual awakening.' Spiritual awakening is a meaningless term, a mere concept in the mind. Awakening is not predicated on any relative condition such as 'spiritual.' To be totally awake annihilates all mental descriptors like 'spirit' and 'matter.' We awaken as naked wonder, wearing no veil of thinking, no shroud of mental commentary. Let pure awareness burn through the veil of thought, until no mind remains. I am sure this little dog, Bowie, a waif rescued on the streets of San Francisco, knows more about awakening than any philosopher, because the animal energy of his neurons is a pure fire burning without the smoke of names and concepts.

Wild, ephemeral wounded ruins of summer - Autumn crocuses.

A list of eleven liminal things that aren't things because they are both physical and metaphysical: 1. Light 2. Breath 3. A dolphin's smile 4. The eye of a fawn 5. The new moon 6. The silence in a song circle just after the song 7. Fireflies 8. An old book of poems found  in the attic on a rainy afternoon 9. Fragrances of the abandoned garden 10. The electric brain that lets go of thinking 11. A loon I would have added the September mist over salal and huckleberries  in a stand of hemlock, but it settled into my marrow and made me long for a body of fur... Photo: late summer hike on Mount Tahoma

"Take no thought for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take thought for itself..." ~Master Jesus If at certain moments we feel purposeless, wandering without a plan, why not repose and rejoice in the grace of aimlessness? Our culture conditions us to feel useless, lazy, irresponsible in such moments. But those can be the moments when we come up for air, step out of the box of our agenda. Those are the moments when we become intensely aware of the tiny sacraments all around us, the countless possibilities for small acts of kindness. Chung T'zu said, "Many know the use of the useful, but few know the use of the Useless." Today, the earth has woken up perfect and whole. You can wake up perfect and whole, just as on the First Day. You were perfect when you were born, what happened? Someone convinced us that we needed a plan. And then we became disappointed, because the world never works out according to our plan. Blessed are those who still have the c...

If I could show you the blue eternity in the jewel, the sky in my heart, if I could show you the story of the stars in my breath, we would dissolve into each other. But I cannot show you. I can only tell you one word: Love. Yet the word is not enough. Let it become a deed. Let become a gift. Let it quench your thirsty lips - pure water. Friendly Water for the World:  A great cause, created by Quakers in Olympia, WA. Please Give! LINK