Uradiance

Just where the ripple starts to rise from stillness, just where the vacuum breaks its perfectly symmetrical emptiness into goose bump froth on your skin, where the urge of your optic nerve fashions this inscrutable chaos of flames into a green-gold meadow, and the mind of trembling silence contracts black entropy into an 'I,' here the singing begins. You learn bewilderment from a sparrow. Are you the voice, or the listener? Imaginal wings effervesce in the hollow of a cocoon. Are you the flier, or the sky? This is where the void bubbles over and you become the juice: root of Veda, bulb of Torah, seed of Qu'ran. You need a more fragrant language to dissolve the difference between Lover and Beloved, and a muskier more pungent voice to sing the sacred music of Twoness.

When I am telling and retelling my story, I give precedence and authority to the past. I am not really here, now. I drive the story deeper and deeper into my psyche, until it becomes my very 'I' itself. The wound does not heal by talking about. It heals through revealing its own energy to itself as pure sensation. When I feel my story in the body, the past dissolves. The story erases itself like a line written on water. It's words and images melt into raw sensation, pure energy, kinetic awareness, a whirling Presence. The past has no Being. It is a bundle of beautiful and troubling images, names, forms, players in a story - but they do not Exist. Life only lives in the present moment. If I am willing to feel my story, however full of pain and trauma, as present energy in my body, then here I Am. And I Am free, as dynamic emptiness, with no predicate noun after the verb To Be. Not "I am an American, a White, a Christian, Advaitin, Republican, or Democrat...

What is meditation? Don't concentrate. Don't focus or try to keep the mind steady. Surrender to entropy and bewilderment. This is the only way to sink into emptiness more solid than diamonds, darkness brighter than the sun, a groundless womb of grief that bears pure beauty. Whose death, finally, are you grieving? Yours. And what is death, after all? The radiance of a heart that has no time left for ‘me.’

When the wave comes, rise higher. When the trough comes, sink deeper. This is the only way to become the sea.

Written after today's Qigong movement and meditation with Master Mingtong Gu. Our trauma finally heals not in words and images of memory told again and again; but in the flesh, this moment, pure energy released from the name and form of the story. This mind, this tale of woe, is the past. Presence is the body. There is only one location and we are all here, sparkling with beauty and pain - the place where our galactic hips swirl in slow circles, sky sweeps brain clear and empty, breath brushes the tender sternum from inside, and our barefoot thirsty soles massage the mother soil like infants' lips, pressing forth the nectar.

Gather round the fire and do not try to teach one another. Do not try to change one another. Do not pass any laws against one another. Just listen to the stories. And after each story, do not clap, do not discuss. Just be silent. You can argue against an opinion, but you cannot argue against a story of the heart. You can only listen. And this is the true sat sang, the true congress, the real polit ics. Photo by Aile Shebar

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Last night when I went to bed, I was feeling dry and culturally malnourished. I thought about how obsessed our nation is with its illness, yet how spiritually empty our response has been. The medical technology, the pharmaceutical jargon, the anxious fear, the confused state of our technocrats. Where are the wise ones? The ones who sing to us the meaning of what we endure, who inspire us to grow stronger and healthier? Falling asleep, I had a powerful dream. I was a modern shaman, an interfaith chaplain, tasked with holding space for a large gathering. My job was to tell stories that would heal the people. The vast audience was mostly little children, but interspersed among them were Tibetan monks, tribal shamans, rebbes, priestesses, and poets. I was joyously confident because I knew exactly what stories to tell. I felt them welling up inside me as stories I knew well and told often. In fact, they felt like my two favorites: a story about Friendship, and a story about the ...

Sorrowful, sublime, gentle, hard, soft and jagged edges. That's why we're here, isn't it? To taste opposites and be wildered. The mandible of the pit bull in the throat of the kitten. Gray mucous wings emerging from Winter's cocoon as a rainbow instantly in flight. A hummingbird, motionless in midair. Your aching nipple giving milk. None of it is born but for an instant. Doesn't this make you glad? Doesn't this make you cherish what Is?

In the background of this moment, and every moment, is one eternal golden sun. Polish this sun with each breath, and feel it forward through all forms until the goal outshines the path, and you outshine the world. Namaste.

At the center of every proton in each atom of your body, hidden by the smoke and mirrors of the quark dance, is a black hole that contains, and Is, all the information in the cosmos. This is exactly the same black hole that exists at the center of our galaxy, and every galaxy. Groundless Yin. Dark energy between the threads of creation. Trough of your mind between thoughts. Hollow in a seed. Virtual fragrance of an unblossomed bud. Sound of ocean in a conch. To fall into this brilliant abysmal darkness is meditation, which happens, not through knowing, but un-knowing. Therefore scripture says, "The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men" (1 Cor 1:25).

The heart of stillness is pulsation. Globed in quiddity, we tremble and dissolve like profligate dewdrops, heirs of emptiness. Each particle of sand, star, breath, snow is a little black vacuum overflowing. We are guests at the feast of loss. Now ground yourself in one atom of your left little toe, as if it were the center of the Milky Way, or the axis of a greater whirling, supreme mudra of the coming Buddha, the very form of sparkling compassion. Ah, the gesture of falling into who you already are! Moths and morning glories live eternally in one day because they occupy their own bodies completely. _____ Photo: I found this jewel in the meadow yesterday. The Goddess must have dropped it. I often hear her walking there in the form of falling rain, stark naked, except for her earrings. I'm not giving it back!

This is not just a pandemic and a reign of fear; it is a crisis of breath. Many are dying for one precious jewel of breath. The diamond that we do not value fully as our birthright on this earth, nature brings us to appreciate, and she can be a ruthless teacher. It is time for humanity to remember that in every wisdom tradition the word for Spirit is also the word for Breath. Adam was only a biological organism, but not a living soul, until Elohim breathed into the dust. The Hebrew for dust is 'adamah'. Only with this divine breath did the dust become 'nephesh chayya,' a living person. The Hebrew for person or soul is 'nephesh,' rooted in the Hebrew verb, to breathe. So in Genesis 2:7, 'The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils a breath of life, and the man became a living person,' that is, a living breath of the divine. Honor your breath this morning. Your breath is healing. Your breath i...

The oak takes a journey without moving from its roots. Branches, leaves and blossoms all folded in the hollow of the seed. These days, gnarled, wizened, oaky, I stay more and more in the place where I am going instead of traveling there. When they ask me, I answer, 'I don't know.' When they say, 'How?' I say, 'Slow and easy.' So they pass me by, intent on arriving at their goal while I reach the end of the path with every step. You don't have to start at the bottom, friend, and you don't have to strive for the top. You are the mountain. Just pour one breath into another, pausing to drink from the chalice of your heart. Photo: hiking Mt. Rainier wilderness area