Uradiance

Being "for" expands your heart. Being "against" contracts it. Feel this. The energy you radiate from your chest is a thousand times more powerful than the opinion you hold in your head. Just for today, try a new spiritual practice. Forget to be against. Only be for. Be for the sun, and the daffodils. Be for tears, and the laughter of children. Bathe the world in the foolishness of God. Daffodil by Kristy Thompson

You breathe me in, I breathe you out, and our breath is trees. Even mossy stones will murmur if you listen. O Gaia, the hyacinth breeze whispers to the raindrop who whispers to the earthworm who tells the trillium root, "Wake up, it's Spring!"

Words by AKL, collage by Rashani Réa

  You are not merely your race, your gender, your tribe, your class. These are your ornaments, your incidents, but they are not who You are. You are infinitely more than the sum of your chromosomes. Transcend every identity group, every voting block, by which politicians try to contain You. For You are immeasurable, You include galaxies. It takes true courage to realize, in this very moment, this very breath, your incomparable uniqueness. And the true revolution is to become a Person. Then You have a priceless pearl to give: your Self. Photo: My incomparably unique daughter.

In holy dark the diamond silence of pure consciousness becomes more radiant, more solid than any object it could be conscious "of." A swirling flock of opposites, wings with nothing to carry, a galaxy of contradictions gracefully encircling the black hole of no-self. Now dear one We are ready. Let us make love because we are neither one nor two. O holy confusion, O erotic void, O paramour whose only veil is my yearning! Artist: Michelle McKinney

Shivaratri (February 21) one of the most auspicious nights of the year, celebrating the marriage of God and Goddess. This is the wedding of Shiva and Shakti: Consciousness and its own creative Energy. For one who remains awake, this marriage happens each moment - but tonight the potency is higher. It is the union of Subject (Chit) and Object (Sat) in the bliss of every perception (Ananda). Each wave of perception brings us back to the wholeness, the stillness of the ocean, th e Self. You do not have to travel to a special destination. These nuptials take place in your chest. You get drunk sipping from a chalice of sparkling emptiness. No RSVP required: just show up.And no need to bring a gift for the Bride and Groom. Only offer your breath, then Shiva gifts you the priceless jewel of inner silence. For some, the silence of meditation may seem like icing on the wedding cake. For others, this unfathomable silence IS the cake, and the world is the icing. True my...

"Then God began to compose a moving image of eternity." ~Plato, 'Timaeus' You do not defy gravity. Your body is a clutter of dodecahedrons and other Platonic solids, luminous mathematical possibilities described by the rotation of crystals in the mind of silence, love's ephemera, meaning that your weight is precisely your degree of presence. The moment you were born you touched the asymptotes of an infinitesimal perfection, like the first idea of a hand. Then you fell like a thistle into this meadow of umber curves to plow and plant and place your shimmer of probabilities on earth, where there is no emptiness. The deeper I kneel in your loam, the more exalted my kinosis. What trigonometry of lips and eyes, dear love, could shadow your breath or mimic your light? And what is more wondrous than bowing in a galaxy of dandelions? As the whole Spring day will pass through the wing of a dragonfly, and the sunbeam will linger al...

Your first act is your radiance. You can be the burning heart of creation. To become a force of love, a force of harmony on earth, begin by returning to your own physiology, which is the hologram of your world. Now is the time, now is the breath, to unite your mind and heart in a single flame. Let it rise from your chest to the crown of your head on the wick of your spine. Let it burn black holes through every galaxy. This burning that gathers trillions of cells, quadrillions of atoms, into one flame, is the same fire that gathers the stars into one body. And it is your body. The miracle is not to get out of the body, but to get into it. Painting: Divine Source by Alexandra Florschutz

You are the Lord of Wells. You measure us by our darkness and our falling. We listen for a sound that comes from below. Enough about my heart and yours. There are eight billion thirsts but only one spring. I vow no longer to confuse the name of my desire with your hidden aquifer of silence. One of St. Brigid's Wells in Ireland With their arches, rose windows and spires, the great cathedrals of Europe are portals leading upward to the Divine. Yet in the British Isles, sacred wells are portals leading downward to the Divine. To be whole, we need both doors to God, spirits soaring, roots sinking. A ray of breath threads the crown of my head to a distant star, yet the soles of my bare feet are mouths of praise.

Constantly bedewed, the brown loam clothed her hips in moss. Each stone is soft and green now. The sexual fury of the seed became the glow in the rose. Spring is a ventriloquist. Her rainbow lips barely move, yet poppies seem to gossip in a language of scarlet and yellow. Up through the nakedness of our entangled cilia comes a fragrance of beauty, mingled with the musk of death. What would earth say? "Everlasting impermanence." If you understand this, you are thinking too hard. Just know that all you ever wanted was here, and is returning.

When no Word had been spoken and mountains were still inside the wind, when the sky was a breathless blue not yet gazed from your eye, the sun not yet exiled from your heart into this lonely distance, and the seeds of creation were enfolded in your golden hug, who was the Beloved? What was Love's shape before the throb of time in the empty drum of no mind? Who caressed you when your flesh was not yet rounded into honeyed cells to receive it? Now look: A pollen-scented flame burning on the stamen of your spine, your wick of resistance in the fire of surrender. And between your nipples a moist brown furrow to sow with double rainbows of birth and dying, those lilies of pain that end all seeking. Note the clear nectar which is to look at looking, through which you see the bottom of the chalice. These are signs of what can never be pointed to, because miracles only happen before you notice, in a place where you already are. Now wake up drowning in th...

"Glorify God in your body." ~1 Corinthians 6:20 Body is the fuel, Spirit is the fire, Mind is the smoke. The more efficient the burning, the less the smoke, until there is only the violet flame of the self-luminous human form, irradiating the universe with wonder. In the final canto of his Paradisio Dante beheld, in formless divine light, the fleeting image of a Christic human body. Beyond that, his words and thoughts could proceed. This vision brought him not knowledge, but "forgetfulness," which would be better translated as "un-knowing." Leonardo da Vinci attempted to capture this vision in his painting of the "Vetruvian Man," whose lineaments and proportions, like a human hologram, contain the principles that generate the cosmos. So Hildegard of Bingen saw, in the blinding abyss of divine light, a human form which she called "the Blue Man," a vision she painted in one of her mandalas. Was the blue man Christ?...

We all had tears of laughter in our eyes, shouting, "Don't speak the Word, don't create heaven or earth. Let's just stay crushed together in this unfermented juice!" It was no use. The Old Man cried, "Let there be light!" Everything's been tumbling downhill ever since, from chaos toward perfect order. We all began fermenting. Now we are a tangle of vines, both luscious and poisonous, beyond the broken fence. Our mouths are full of honeysuckle. Our ears are clover petals. I am lost in a bio-galactic meadow among pulsars of dew, gazing at a string of moons through a dragonfly's wing. Your otherness is questionable as mine. We are dreams of light in each others optic nerves. This field must out beyond ideas of right or wrong. Rumi wanders barefoot here. Now drink from the bowl of my heart until it's hollow. Then drink even more. Let us both become the bottom of the well. We long for the gush of a rounder emptiness, a ringin...

It is not such a blessing to be in the presence of a person whose mind is full of thoughts, even if they are "intelligent," even if they are "right." In fact, it can be exhausting. The greater blessing is to be with one whose mind is awake in stillness, free from ideology. Look into their eyes. They will invite you, saying without words, "Welcome to the miracle, the greening of life." This is how little children meet on the playground. The "news" of the world is not the world. Our concepts about the world are not the world. They form a gray, ghostly, parallel world of thought. The actual world we only notice in brief flashes of wonder: a bursting blossom that was not there yesterday, the smile of a tree frog on a mossy stone. The actual world is a sparkling emerald of immediate energy that instantly endlessly materializes and dissolves in the ocean of pure consciousness. If we want to stand on the New Earth, even for one brief ...

  I wrote this little mindfulness manual for the senses in 2006. Just rediscovered it, and it feels even more relevant today. Sharing...                                 _______________ "Eternity was in our lips and eyes..." (Shakespeare) "Those who gained enlightenment by seeing blossoms or hearing sounds, achieved it through the body." (Dogen, Father of Zen) These are practices of wonder. Wonder is the one mode of consciousness which computer and nanno technology will never fathom or imitate. I offer these teachings for the healing of the earth, through the reunion of the Spirit and the Body. These practices do not take you above or beyond your body and its sensations. They consecrate the body, the ear, eye and skin. They make a sacrament of sensation. "Taste and see that the Lord is good!" (Psalm...