Uradiance

There is a genuflection that ends at the feet of the master. But there's another bow that shatters your forehead and pours your soul into the ground, melting the distinction between I and Thou. This bending pulls you through every maelstrom of loss, down to the abysmal wound of awakening. More intimate than joy, death is only the sheath of a blue and wonderfully useless blade. Learn from the exquisite gesture of the new moon how to bow without purpose, slicing the darkness of your doubt into delicious silver minnows. Now your Guru is a white-tailed fawn curled among the gnarled fingers of an ancient cedar. Your Guru is a dying coral reef, the sound of the plaintive frog who lives in your geranium pot, an endangered lioness. Your Guru is a moth-wing settling on a lapis hydrangea, the muffled mourning of your daughter for her grandmother's soul. Wander the earth, bidding 'Namaste' to whatever perishes. Genuflect to every weed along your path. Fertilize...

There is a grace that burns the edges of creatures, gilding each with the gold of All. We are selved by dissolving, and made whole by a gaze of the Friend. Photo by Kristy Thompson

"In the beginning was the Word... Through him all things were created."   ~Gospel of John "Om is the primordial word. All that is, was, or will be is Om." ~Mandukya Upanishad "Adau Bhagavan shabda rasahi: In the beginning, the Lord created the cosmos through a subtle stream of sound." ~Rig Veda Creation is sound. The universe is sound. The subtle essence of light shines in darkness as sound. Each star has a sound. Every galaxy is a resolving chord, the harmony of a trillion worlds. The atoms of your body are chimes. Each cell of your body is a carillon. Your music vibrates into my sound-body, mine into yours. Both are intermingled with that galactic harmony, the gong of planets. Our subatomic counterpoint trembles and dances over the scale of humanity, and humanity's music co-mingles in the cosmic chorus of angels. You are a ringing bell. Who struck you? Even from a thousand miles away, I am touched by the song of your body. ...

"Shiva flares from the stars. Shakti surges from the earth, seeking his lips. Polar opposites kiss like lightning in your spine, swirling serpentine through your ancient brain, the brain before the thought, smelling like an almond tree sparkled with raindrops. "The effervescent union of the Lover and Beloved may not feel so delightful, but rather like a dizzy opening of your skull, a radiant pressure in your brow, a tremulous fickle romance in your heart, a restless apprehension of catastrophe in your solar plexus, a stir and burn of Eros through your hips. "In meditation, luminous golden supernovae, with the influx of celestial music, may distract you. In the body, heightened sensual attraction. In large crowds, exhilaration, loss of center, and possibly violence. "These are signs of the times we live in, end times, beginning times. So essential now to have a stable regular meditation practice, grounding and channeling these energies of holy c...

We are all indigenous. All come from the same land and return there to water our roots, touch our seeds. The land under the furrows of your brow, behind the ridges of your all too outward gaze. Green darkness containing the wellspring of this breath, ancient forest of your body mantling vast silence before any color is seen, before any concept of self or other arises. Here dwells the human tribe, which includes the angels, star beings, daemons of loam and firelight, undines o f the waterfall, dragonflies of the sunbeam, maggots of the tomb. My sister is a lady bug. My brother lies in his cocoon of gelatinous expectancy. We are each other's prayers. Our eyes and ears emit the same rainbow. There is no path, only the pungent unfolding of what Is. We are not strangers and pilgrims. We are natives in the wilderness of the heart. We meet here, and share food.

  A poem dedicated to 'La Pudizia,' also known as 'Veiled Truth,' by Antonio Corradini, 1750, completely carved out of marble, even the veil. O dear one, let our love divide the difference into the difference until the remainder is zero. Move beyond oneness. Become the light of beauty in my eyes. In this calculus of devotion you are the curve, I am the asymptote. Now cover your face with the veil of a secret joy. Know what to share and what to hide. Wait for the kiss of the lover who brings a rose from a garden whose colors have never been seen in this world. One breath releases a fragrance called 'Death.' In your chest the petals fall away. Flirt with that nameless inhalation who leads you inward toward the bridal chamber. Everything will be explained in an ecstasy. This is where Christ met Mary, not the mother, not the friend, but the paramour. Moons ripen here. Suns drown in the chaos of the ordinary. Between her brea...

Hang with the people who ripen you. Become a golden sky in your grape skin. But don't forget the wounded vine that rounded your bouquet with tannins of sorrow, dark tears of petrichor. True sweetness has body.

"God leads every soul by a separate path." ~John of the Cross I cannot possibly know what is most important: that which will transform me. If I already know what it is I will never be free, because I have packaged "liberation" as knowledge, in the tight wrapper of a concept. This means that spiritual transformation can never become a program, a technique, or a course that I take. The moments that liberate me are wild portals of unknowing, when the blue sky of wonder outsh ines any cloud it contains; vast emptiness shifts into the foreground; techniques, traditions, concepts cultivated in the past, dissolve. Thus the sage Ashtavakra taught the first and last spiritual practice : "Layam vraja - dissolve now." The best meditation evaporates into amazement. The best mantra melts into silence. The best guru dances in mist at the edge of the meadow, and disappears into your longing heart, where true path has no beginning.* No, I canno...

Be like the full moon. Reflect and overflow until you understand that the light of the Beloved shines from your own heart. His whisper awakened the jewel of Infinity in the core of my heart, and it was No Thing, just groundless clarity, like the blue sky. Yet nothing is more real. The drop and the ocean are the same water. The water is called Parousia. What is its essence? The fullness and completeness and boundlessness of Being. Take a drop of the Infinite out of the infinite sea, then pour it back as an offering. That's what we're doing here. We do it just for play, for the sake of love, becaus e the drop and the ocean were never two. Separateness is impossible. Each drop is Infinite, the ocean is Infinite. How could there be more than one Infinity? When you get the punchline, it won't spoil the joke. It just makes longing and union, longing and union, longing and union, more sublime. The punchline? Shhhh... Your Soul, your Beloved, and the ...

Great action is filled with silence. Silence is filled with great action. What thread of stars unites them? This breath. How do I know? I learned it from a sparrow.

"Awake, my dear, be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of Light and let it breathe." ~Hafiz Am I the trembling mirage, or the desert air? Diaphane of dragonfly wing, or the light passing through it? Am I the stained glass mind, tinted with old stories, or the golden beam from beyond the window? All I know is I have fallen into this world as a radiance to pierce prisms and die in your gaze.

  A Divine Breath created all this for your wonder, and through wonder you breathe it back to your Creator. That is why even God says, 'Thank You.'

Let us honor the insignificant unholy sacraments in the seasons of the ordinary , because they slow us down in a world that moves too fast for us to notice anything. I miss my Davy Crockett lunch box, its dark sepulchral wombs of food, bologna and cheese sandwiches on Bond Bread with Tastykake Chocolate Juniors. Forget the carrot slices, mom. I suffer unutterable longing for my Donald Duck Pez Dispenser. My health is fine, so are my teeth, despite all the Fizzies and Flavor Straws for which I feel a nimbus of impenetrable nostalgia, cloud-like mysteries of devotion to ancestral comic books, 'Sylvester and Tweety Bird' or 'Tales from the Crypt.' My favorite Saturday morning shows are still 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sky King,' my heart yet haunted by the valiant German Shepherd, Rin Tin Tin, especially the episode when he and Rusty got lost on the prairie and saved from a stampede  by White Buffalo Woman. All gone now, alo...

Sing the Water Song in your own body every day, the mother song of the waters echoed in all wisdom traditions. This water song is Algonquin. We find it in the Bible too: "And the breath of the Divine was stirring over the waters." ~Genesis 1 The Hebrew, "Ruach Elohim m'rachafeth al'panei tachom." Ruach means Spirit but also means Breath. She is the Shakti, the creative feminine energy of God. The Hebrew word for "stirring" comes from a Sumerian root that describes the motion of a mother bird sitting on her egg, constantly ruffling to warm and quicken its inner life. May the breath of the divine stir the waters of life in you, and may your own breath stir the earth to new birth.

  Grace dawns in the realm of the Effortless, beyond what you can choose to do or not to do. Don't dance, be danced, your wings so weighted with sweetness that you drown in the flower. Now your fragrance is the sky. If you understand this, you must be starving.

Strange and wonderful how "opposite" emotions are layered in emptiness, without the slightest conflict, repression, or confusion. One does not "by-pass" grief or pain to enter the Transcendent, for immeasurable empathy and compassion are already there. I learned this teaching of the Buddha, concerning The Four Immeasurables , from my dogs. My heart still reverberates with tears of grief after the loss of Bowie on a beautiful golden evening in May. Today I go into the woods, near the place where he chased a rabbit, instantly leaping into the realm of souls through the neck-snapping portal of a coyote's jaws. I build him a shrine, write his name on a stone, bury a clump of his unforgettable hair, chant the liberating Maha-Mrityunjaya Mantra, and wish him farewell. Again and again... I will never get over this grief. And yet, precisely in the heart of mourning, I sparkle with joy, because on a golden Father's Day in June, we picked up our ...