Uradiance

Take back your power! Breathe your heart clear. Cleanse your gaze with the gaze of the Beloved, who is any stranger. Why hunger for images when you could thirst for Being? It is not your story that heals the earth, but your fragrance. Love opens without a word, just the burning sigh of scattered pollen, the sizzle a moth makes entering the flame. Taste that fire in your sap, your spine a green fountain of fierce deeds. Let those deeds be wild and unrehearsed , petals that open and fall in a single gesture of death. Make your intellect the clear blue sky, where beams of compassion pour down into these dark furrows, our wounds. Michele123m, flickr

The gashed forsaken animal in your chest is not who you are. You are the razor that slew it, honed by seven silences, your edges defined by what is not. Ruthless and bright in your gorgeous wounds, be a scimitar drawn from the breast of the Beloved, dripping the wine we all thirst for. She who wears the starry armor of night wants to wield you, and use your violet lethal incandescence in the formless combat of love.

Learn to balance the unbounded breath of a mother's gentleness on a fierce thin blade. They are precisely the same grace. Use both at once, like an iris petal slicing your heart in two. Pour blood from one cup to another like the voiceless child of the moon about to make humans out of mud. Let the last tear of your night vigil burn a hole through the sun where darkness can flow from light. Japanese higo iris photo by Peter Shefler

In this meditation the very first breath is what scattered the stars, spinning the web of countless galaxies around you. In this meditation the faintest whisper, the merest fragrance of the Beloved's name, is the Word of creation that opened the eyes of the sun and moon. There is no effort at all in this meditation, just the wonder space that melted your new body when you first gazed into your mother's eyes. In this meditation you are merely present, which is faith. A touch of warmth in your chest ignites the singularity, the terrible fire at the beginning and the end. A soft golden peony, then a smokeless violet flame consuming the earth in forgiveness.

I prayed without words this morning. Earth answered with wild poppies. When I listened, she sang the silence of flowers. We come in many colors, umber and cinnamon, persimmon, olive and gold. But we share one breath, and surely, it is green.

I keep returning to the naked revelation that Truth is not an experience, Love is not an experience, Beauty is not an experience . Truth, Love, and Beauty (Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram) are all names for the clarity, the nakedness, of awakened space, where every experience comes and goes like a veil of clouds. This awakened space is emptiness with no boundary, untouched by its content, an ever-virgin silence expanding forever in the splendor of dynamic stillness . This very quality of ceaseless expansion is ananda , which means bliss. But bliss is neither joy nor sorrow, for joy and sorrow are experiences. Bliss is the field, the ground, where experience occurs. Yet miracle of miracles - and there is no explanation for this grace - emptiness refers to itself, perceives itself, and is aware. To rest in this lively expansion is not an escape from the world, for it contains the world. Nor is it a case of  "spiritual by-passing," for pure awareness already embrace...

Vedic texts like the Puranas declare, it is precisely during the darkest age, the age of Kali Yuga, that the most direct path, the easiest path, the purest path to liberation is given. Grace is more abundant in the darkest time. This is the compassion of the Infinite. It is said that one cry of the Mother's name is enough. We are liberated not by staying in paradise, but incarnating on earth as dense voluptuous bodi es, in the garden of opposites. The gods are jealous of humans who get to be on earth at this time. Diamonds are not formed in the sky. Diamonds are formed under terrestrial gravity, out of pure black carbon. "God realization," Mahesh Yogi once said, "is a very concrete experience." Here on earth, the densest matter is a springboard to the higher Self. But we spring inward, not upward. We become both gross and subtle, dark and bright, human and divine. We become whole. Wholeness means total release from clinging. Wholeness means ...

This is a difficult lesson. It's why we came here. All of us are lovable. Not all of us are likable. To cherish only some is mere preference, not love. Preference is culture, love is God. Even here in my back yard, blackberry thorns draw blood but the berries taste wild and sweet.

Put some space around your story. This tale of lack, betrayal, perpetually unfulfilled desire, is always the tale of the past. But the space you hold around it is now, blue sky more wide and still than any storm. Don’t try to stop the whirl and chatter of the mind. Just stop believing it. You could fill the hollow in each cell, the star-strewn emptiness in every atom of your body with this delicious breath. What is real? An ancient presence, pulse of tranquility, deepening sea of namelessness that turns to honey, drowning the myth of ‘me’ in the nectar of silence. Friend, you have a secret work inside your work, the business of the heart inside the heart. The energy comes from gratitude, the connection a root feels with the sun, butter with the ghee flame. The task is Being. A new kind of Doing is born. For the white-throated sparrow, it's the labor of a song, the golden industry of sile...

Today was a beautiful day on earth. Did you notice the sky, filled to its goblet brim with blues? Did you smell the salt breeze from the bay? Did you take off your shoes at lunchtime and walk on sun-sparkled grass in the park? Did you turn down the voices and close your eyes to feel the silent air on your skin like a gingham quilt of ancient songs? You are wrapped in the love of all the grandmothers you don't remember. They have woven and are weaving prayers into your heartbeat. Did you breathe out the smoldering ashes of everything you know, and breathe in the sweet hollow crystal of uncertainty? The riches you don't notice are the ones you already have. O my soul, don't waste another beautiful day on earth! Photo: golden visitor on my back porch hanging basket.

A soul-friend said to me with yearning, "I miss the silence! How can I find it again?" This touched me deeply. It is the most important question, the most mature question.Yet it is the question of a child yearning for Mother, the question of one who could not ask it unless every particle of her body was already pervaded by the answer! Dearest one, do not look for silence with the mind. The mind is never silent. Find silence through this body. Your body, not your mind, is the gateway to samadhi... Let mind dissolve into sensation, sensation into energy, energy into emptiness. Then just listen. Descend into the cells of your body. Feel all your molecules vibrating as one sensation. This sensation is God's delight in the body of the cosmos. You are the stars, the galaxies, the infinitude of space. Nature's intelligence carries on the astonishing complexity of your cell physiology without planning, without thinking. So let your mind rest in bewilderm...

The story is in the mind, but it's energy is in the body. Mind is past. Body is now. Healing is not in the story. Healing is the release of energy that was bound up in the story, when the body awakens from the dream of the past. When I awake, the dream dissolves. When I awake, the past dissolves. My ancestors rejoice.

To make a flame, ancients struck stone against stone, worshiping a star. I brush my heart with breath, just one: the whole earth catches fire. My soul was never spun from world-stuff of desire. I shine through the empyrean, and dance upon the pyre. I birth the moon, I touch the sun inside, a deeper light, and higher. Image by Heinrich Khunrath , Ampitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae, 1595

Resting the mind in the heart, practicing the great healing mantra, 'I Don't Know,' I attain the supremely liberated blue-sky of Bodhichitta in one sip of the rare cognac of this breath, which puts the vast cloud of my hornet thoughts out of their misery with the fragrance of emptiness. Now I can listen and transcribe the Sanskrit sounds that babies make: 'Hum, Ghoo, Phwt, Sah!' I can let a thousand teenage angels skate board round the vortex of my belly button. O little one, Neighbor, your long-suffering headstand, your most patient warrior pose, are training wheels for dancing naked while juggling stars. Your crystal mala beads are just a handrail leading to the edge of the cliff where many ascetics leapt and fell, discovering that they still had bodies. You must take your ankles and teats, tear ducts and glands full of laughter, crows' feet in gray nests of hair full of turquoise eggs, the whole entanglement of this human an...

Here is the good news for the first Sunday in June: there is no solution. Your life is not a problem to be solved. This is the Gospel for a morning when salmonberries dangle in their sable caps, lusciously yellow, surfeit of their own bright leaves. If you do not take a handful and smear them on your tongue right now, the deer will do it! They will come so silently to steal the beauty you cannot see. Or by a viridescent shadow pool between the ferns unfolding in close breathless air, a huckleberry's sour fire will succor you. Taste all that burns with color. Given the wild possibility of such a world, is this not the best news? There is no conclusion, no certain end or new beginning - only pulsation, survival, and the edgeless unceasing chaos of faith.

The first drummers were women, and the throb of creation came from the womb of Her silence. Painting by Charles Landelle, b. 1821 'Algerian Woman Playing Dambouka'

Those who are liberated don't speak about a path, a spiritual technique, or embodiment. They don't use words like "non-dual awareness." In fact, they hardly speak at all. They sing. They're not even liberated, because no-thing ever existed to be liberated from. Whatever that search was, with all its telltale footprints of powdered sugar, the scattered rudhraksha beads of a broken mala, it disappeared into meandering dandelions, which now appear as they are: exploding galaxies of uncreated light. Every brea th an ejaculation of the ordinary, we let regrets and anxieties, ideas about the past and future, default into their original field, electrical sensations in the brain. No images, no thoughts, no memories, but a humming continuum of nameless honey, energy without form, where mind and body were never two. This is the pre-verbal music that trills creation, with joyous differences, but no edges. At 5 A.M. a sparrow breaks the unutterable void into a tr...