Uradiance

  Wishing you all a New Year. Not a happy new year, just a new one. Because if you allow time to be new each moment, you cannot help but be happy, filled with the energy of re-creation. In the coming year, let us resolve never to be more than one moment old! But if we carry the old year into the new one, if we carry our old stories, doubts, angers, politics and belief systems, we cannot possibly b e happy. The mind the past can never bring joy. No thought, no belief, no content carried over in the mind can provide living energy, living Presence. Happiness arises when the mind doesn't cling to its content. That is when we taste the wine of silence between our thoughts. We soar into the empty blue sky of sparkling awareness, without clinging to the clouds. Then no-thing makes our mind happy: our mind IS happiness. I pray that in the coming year, every moment, you will breathe out the old, and breathe in the new. Have a very New Year!

"Behold the lilies of the field, how they grow." ~Jesus Keep falling and falling until you finally feel the gentle jolt of landing squarely in your own wild groundless heart. You are suddenly unbounded, because boundaries only appeared when you tried to be someone else, someone 'better.' Here you don't need to follow any path, because you are your path. You've become the answer to your spiritual questions. Your mind has what it really wanted: silence.   Now the mind doesn't need to condemn or criticize others. It has a much more important task: to rest in the silence of the heart. From this rest, tremendous vitality and creative action spontaneously arise, driven not by ideology but love. This is freedom: simply radiating your own truth without wasting an instant comparing yourself to others. Truth, radiance and bliss do not come from another, from heaven above, or  from the world outside. Truth, radiance, and bliss only come from one place: alig...

Do you understand the vast distinction between a Master and a Teacher? If you hear about a Guru please don't ask, 'What does he teach?' The Master assigns no lessons. He is a professor of Nothing. His lectures consist of silence between the words. Passion in the tremor of stillness. When a secret admirer leaves a fragrant blossom at your bedside, Do you learn anything? Or is there simply a storm of sweetness in your chest, a deepening hollow in the trough between heartbeats? The Master has come too near to be known. Presence is a gift. He is the gift buried in the gift.

"Behold the lilies of the field, how they grow." ~Mat. 6:28 Jesus wants you to look at a wild poppy. Really see the lake, the mountain, the silent explosion of stars, the eye itself, orgasmic torrent of pixels charging your dark amazement with waves of sparkling probability. Avoid names. Un-thing the creature with pure naked beholding. Watch boundaries dissolve into bliss particles of the void. Enter the wilderness of your lungs where out and in breath merge. Where the world and your soul meet like lovers in a kiss. Where Bodhisattva mind evaporates in sky blues, no cloud. Walk in the meadow of groundlessness. Let each bare stinging footstep awaken sleeping seeds. Have the patience of Winter, the body of Spring. Because the dead poet Jesus wants you to really see. His gift a wild poppy throbbing in the moonlight of vast awareness. ~Photo from incolors.club

While trekking through the high sage desert, I found Christ trapped in a ruined Church, shattering the stained glass windows, rattling the prison bars, pounding on the door from inside. Chains and shackles of dogma bound his wrists and ankles, more terrible than any nail wounds. "You, you have the key!" He shouted, "Open the door!" He was pointing frantically at my mouth. "What key?" I asked. "Your breath," he replied. So I breathed through the keyhole of that ancient door until it opened, whereupon Christ became a rare white mother raven with a wingspan that stretched to the far horizons, East and West. She rose into the sky, carrying the moon and all the stars in her beak. She grasped the earth in her talons like a mouse. Spiraling outward to the end of the ages, then circling back to the present moment, she perched on my shoulder by my left ear and whispered, "You, you are the Christ too, filled with my Holy Spirit....

The amethyst of pure attention shines in no-mind, lit by its own grace. Without a thought breathe forth galaxies in distance that appears to be outside you. The gift of the One: two lovers in a single jewel, twin chambers in your heart, pulsing empty, full. Surely you must weep, for this is the purest prayer. But doesn't each tear encircle a mysterious otherness? No intimacy is deeper than solitude. God draws very near to those who are alone.

Stars have a secret. They are always falling into their orbits of glory. They do not attempt to fly. Darkness itself is their wing. If you don't believe me you are still trying not to sink. Plunge more deeply into the womb of night and you will draw very near to the radiance of your Birth.

My Introduction to the new book of poems and collages by Rashani Réa and me, which is available this Spring. It is entitled, 'The Fire of Darkness: What Burned Me Away Completely, I Became.' Art, like beauty itself, is a cauldron of opposites: light and darkness, Winter and Spring, the Warrior and the Mother, the political and the contemplative, the swirl of chaos and the stillness of the center. Only in vain do we seek victory against our antipodes. For that very battle feeds the polarity and divides the One. The answer is always wholeness. My poems are a cauldron of opposites too. I cannot speak of the triumph of light, for that would disdain the creative potency of the dark. I cannot deny the spiritual power of the Warrior, even though he is born of the Mother’s womb. The best Mother is also a Warrior, and the best Warrior is also a mother. And just as my poems refuse to divide the wholeness, so the art of Rashani Réa embraces divine paradox, and gives birt...

  I don’t believe. I don't believe in my heart, yet it keeps beating. I don’t believe in my hand, yet it stirs honey into tea and washes my grandmother's cup. I don’t believe in the taste of an heirloom pear from a tree my father planted, it is so sweet. I gristle my fist around his original hoe, and learn silent bending from a gracious willow without believing anything. I don't believe in the hummingbird asleep on a lilac twig, head cradled on her own emerald breast. Or in the silken cat slipping through her element of moonbeams. I don't believe in your eyes, yet their gaze obliterates my confusion. Empty, empty of every belief, I can listen to the sound   of falling stars in my body, like snow, God’s breath brushing my breastbone .

Someone said, "You need no other." But I do. I cannot light the wick within me. I am lit. From the instant I was planted in the flesh I needed someone for my milk and tears. Even the absence that encircles the moon, the stars, is curved by a Mother's inscrutable care. Aloneness created us to love. Before first light, the thrush waits blindly to feel that same pull: the jasmine breath of my listening. Here's the mystery: we do not thirst for the One, but the Near.

In the Beloved there is no "should," no rule to obey, and no one to follow down any path. There is only melting. I was butter, now I am ghee. The pain was deep, but all that was burned away was not me. Can the earth leave its orbit around the sun? So I cannot take my gaze from your face. Who would call this bondage? The formless sky of love has become a crown of thorns and a garland of roses while remaining empty and blue. Invisible sap looks crimson  in the drunken poppy. You are the hollow of a baby's palm holding me like a ruthless talon. Of course I could endure the Spring without looking at a single flower, then boast, "I have liberated myself from Beauty." But I would rather drown in your blossoming eyes because they drown in me. We are dead bees in each other's goblet of raindrops, slaves of the pain of sweetness. I gladly wear the chains of my Beloved which are made of pure light, because ...

Breathe in everything at once and be the royal master of creation. Then become poor in spirit when you breathe out. If you won't let loss play with abundance you will never be a lover. A blood-red poppy drops its petals, dives back into the seed, meets the spark of frozen solstice in the blackest loam. Take root in your grief where the Sun is born. Dark energy encircles us all like the womb. Spring up through a bolder falling. Who knows if, tonight, you might not finally embrace the fierce beauty of your own beaten heart? Painting by Father J. Battista Giuliani

Please make mistakes. In your latticework of wounds you look more broken and beautiful. A trellis of cracks on the mirror gives intricate wings to your reflection. One appears as many there because we dare to stumble and drop the crystal trinkets of ourselves. Surely, love grows vines on the arbor of our shattering, and we make wine of sorrow. That's why we listen in rapture to those who have been crushed. The secret is to soften the gaze until the splay of your fault lines becomes a rose. How falling becomes you, and turns you gold! When you think you are whole, you wander like a hungry ghost far from the marrow of your breastbone, where the elixir is hidden, unpressed. But when you've been torn beyond repair, the breath that was too soft to take comes home to heal you.

   Originally the word "courage" meant love, from the Old French, based on the Latin word for "heart." But our hyper-aggressive culture of insecurity has separated love from courage. Keeping the heart open without judgment is love. Keeping the heart open to the pain, without shielding ourselves through judgment, requires very great courage. Love is the highest form of courage.