Uradiance

"A Baby Is A Yoga Teacher." ~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar A baby is a yoga teacher. A flower is a yoga teacher, the morning glory, here and gone. A raindrop is a yoga teacher. A teardrop is a yoga teacher. The ocean and the moon. Why? Because they achieve loveliness through aloneness, eternity through perishing. Time is a yoga teacher if you watch it because it is not really there. So is a trout flashing between rocks in a mountain stream when it vanishes. The electricity of a cat doing nothing is your yoga teacher. Or the current in a wire birds love to perch on that would kill you. Anger is a yoga teacher if you gently stay with it in your belly and watch the alchemy of bullet lead dissolving into sorrow, the mercury of tears into peace. Your mother's death is a yoga teacher. When she is gone, she is the soil itself and whatever is green. Now listen to the most distant sound you can hear. It is yo...

You are not a diamond. And I am not attracted by your faultless luster, or the jagged symmetry of fleshless asymptotes that touch no curve. It is the fall of your roundness, the dimpled shadows that draw me, the stumble and lilt of little flaws that make you utterly, uniquely beautiful. I see a new season in the darkness of your furrows. If God wanted your perfection, you would not have been created. You lure me to descend into the world of laughter and tears.

The universe is no-thing but vibration. Vibration of what? Pure awareness. The first creation is Sound. The first healing is Music. The first science is Mantra. You and I are melodies entwined in one rhythm. I do not ask you to dance. We were dancing before there was light.

We must practice the spiritual discipline of social distancing until we realize that there is no distance at all. Separation is only in the mind. Swallow vast distances, even the emptiness between the stars, with this breath. Enfold all friends and strangers in the spacious intimacy at the core of your heart. Practice this, even for one moment a day. Osho said it so perfectly: "The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. Only those who are capable of being alone are capable of loving, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person - without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. "They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the ot...

This must be the answer. The milky way is your breath, and your body is made of starlight from so far away it only now arrives in this world where you are standing with the whole night inside your chest, your thoughts vanishing in the bewilderment of holy silence; and having been veiled, you unveil, having dreamt, you undream the past, you open your palms to let them hold the sky with all its invisible things so weightlessly delightfully uncertain, and now, at last you have something to give. Andrew Studer photo, Milky Way & Mt. Hood

This is how I awake  in thrush-pierced silence at dawn. For one gracious instant just before the blunt imaginary blade of yesterday plunges its old story into my heart again, I see clearly through a sliver of eternity that we're all drowning. For countless eons our bodies have floated on this oceanic moment. Each perishing breath bows to another, yet this very bow is deathless. And blue skies fill my chest. But then I forget because I remember... O some first moment on the very first day, may I remember how to awaken, and how to forget.

You were not sentenced to this planet, remember? You volunteered. In fact, you waited in line for ten thousand years, a weeping angel.

Her voice contains the snow falling through darkness like frozen tears and stars that have not yet been born. Her name is Silence. The tears melt and worlds appear, greening, whirling, whole. But why say "her"? Because creation has a womb that heals and makes all things new again without a Word. في صوتها ثلج   يتساقط في الظلام كدموع متجمدة ونجوم لم تولد بعد . اسمها الصمت . تذوب الدموع وتظهر العوالم، تخضوضر، تدور في دوّامة، تكتمل . ولكن لماذا نخاطبها كأنثى؟ لأن الخليقة لها رحَم يشفي ويخلق الأشياء من جديد من دون الكلمة . Arabic translation by Dana Chamseddine. Milky Way Over the Sea by Wolongshan Photography

Collage by Rashani Réa, words from me.

Spring blossoms say, "Please, please be quiet," but I just keep singing to them. Their lives are so short, the flowers in my garden. But they don't complain. Photos: Apple trees in bloom all over my little town, flowers in my backyard.

"We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice." ~Hildegard of Bingen, 11th C. Jesus, the wild poet of the Galilean meadows, pointed to this flower and said, "Behold the lilies of the field! They neither labor nor toil, yet even King Solomon is all his glory was not arrayed like one of these!" He wanted his disciples to learn everything they needed to know about God by looking at a flower. Just so, in his final gathering, Buddha held up a little blossom, twirling it in his fingers but saying nothing. Ananda smiled. He understood the complete Dharma through one little anemone.  William Blake, the poet of perception, wrote: "See a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower!" The Kingdom of God is not a theological abstraction, but the break-through of this trillium,...

"It is finished." ~John 19:30 The blossom bursts the bud, and it seems to be finished, the end of time. But the perfect flower with all its fragrance was always here, at every moment, in every drop of unseen sap that permeated leaf, petal, stem, root, and the dark tenderness curled in the hollow of the seed.

We grow in circles, not steps. Nature knows no Level 1 or Level 2, no higher plane or lower plane, no sequence from points A to B on strands of logic in the air. All points are simultaneous, all threads of cause and effect entangled. At the level of the quark, there is no hierarchy. The biosphere is not a kingdom, ruled from above, but a riot of microbes. Vainly does the mind of the surveyor, with plum and compass, impose straight lines, right angles, upon earth's swell and trough. Nature needs no map. She is all hill and valley, circle and curve. Therefor we expand, we vibrate, we ripple outward and inward at once. But no one actually knows whence or where, or WTF is going on. Thank God. A warm sun opens our buds, roots us down, branches our Now in all directions at once. Where is any "Way"? "Way" only exists in the ghost-world of thought, super-imposing concepts of "progress," "path," and "ascent" onto the ...

Just for today, a Sabbath from knowledge. Who knows? Just for today, a Sabbath from judgment. Is forgiveness not your nature? Just for today, A Sabbath from being right or wrong. If a day is too long then just for an hour? If an hour is too long then isn't it enough to bathe a thousand stars in one breath of love? Just for now, friend, stay with me. ___________ This is Maunday Thursday, the day Christ held the Last Supper, and prayed alone in the garden of Gethsemane, imploring God to "take this cup of suffering from me." He asked his three closest disciples to stay awake, to watch and pray with him. But they fell asleep. When he came upon them sleeping he said, "Couldn't you stay awake with me one hour?" (Mat 26:40). That is why, on this night in Catholic churches all over the world, or in the temple of our own heart, we have "holy hour," a time to meditate in silence with the divine Friend, being simply pres...

Listen carefully. This could make you rich. Your breath, I mean the breath you take this moment just before you fall asleep, is a gift from the stars, a brook of crushed diamonds flowing out of darkness into light. Receive your inheritance and become the radiance you are.

No need to take a leap of faith. You have already drowned in the Grace ocean. Each tumble and trough is Jesus rising and falling in the waves of Mary's womb. From the edge of heaven to the center of a belly-atom, one breath. I'll wait for you here where death sparkles at the nadir of a sigh. Then you'll be a child again, resurrected by the next inhalation. There is no such thing as silence. The void is a sea of infinitesimal bells, the deepest emptiness a song pressed from nothing by an inward gaze. Descend into the chorus of your heart. Nearly imperceptible, that sound of bliss creating the world. If you become the least of these, my little ones, you'll hear it. You can't even make a mistake without Me. In the brief abyss of hesitation, or the missed heartbeat of doubt, You choose my presence. I carry you in the arms of astonishing love.

The breath you give is the breath you receive is the breath that whispered this planet into atoms, blew spirals of night into galaxies like glass and spindled out the flesh of your ancestors. Yes, we were connected by a dark sigh before we had names. Our lungs are the bellows of the Maker. Don't waste a single exhalation complaining about this world. Choose beauty. The gift will not appear until you are grateful. Under the snow, seeds listen. Are you singing to them? Why not? The softer your voice of praise the more they reach up, unfurl their golden cups of thirst and yearning. This is the secret: Creation happens quietly. Stillness swirls from inside out. You could be the cause of Spring.