Uradiance

"No one knows the day or hour." ~Mat 24:36 The long prophecied Apocalypse, a fiery flood of silence inundating the mind, sweeping away the city of thoughts, drowning the past and future: only then may there be a new earth, a new creation. This could happen so gently, right now, in this breath.

O this rollicking stillness! Can you feel the graceful jolt of alignment, your soft landing in the groundlessness that lets the planet spin? You've explored the rim of the glow on the wick of the stars and discovered that the prophets were wrong: there is no return. You were never in exile. You are ever at home in the beginning, where the most ancient light has always just arrived. This is why true sages ride their donkeys backward. Now you want to ask the Master for a refund? You should be grateful for the trick he played on you when you forgot to whisper, "Om Tat Sat, Aham Brahmasmi: Everything is God, including me." Here is the drunkenness: there's no one left to become. Now be Selved by dissolving. Find wholeness in the gaze of the Friend. Don't you know your breath is a secret name for Overflowing? Why not be the grace that burns the edges of creation, gilding the thingness of each with the gold of all?

Photo work from Lindsay Johnston Wegert

Listen! Swallows, tree frogs, unborn children, all singing, "Thank you!" The rainbow weeping, running its colors into one pure light around your precious body, and even this light whispering, "Thank you, thank you" as you fall asleep tonight, remembering flecks of gold on a broken tea cup, the ancient glow in her eyes over a candle, discarded roses, fallen feathers in a drain pipe, slivers of crystal from a mossy stone glanced in the woods, the bones of a rabbit that crows left in your sunlit birdbath, all mingled somehow in a single inward kiss on your darkening brow. What are they murmuring when you close your eyes and simply listen, as only you can listen with the silence you've been given just for this? "We are what i...

Thought is your veil, Silence your face. How near is the Friend? This breath.

Loafing among the blossoms in my back yard, I discover that when I enter the silence, I can understand the language of bees. I listen earnestly to their conversation, and hear the Queen Bee give instructions to the young honey-gatherers before they leave the hive. "Don't come back until you're good and drunk," she said. "I'll only let you in when you're reeking of sweetness." I hear them buzzing among the flowers, each nestled deep in his chosen blossom, murmuring, "Mmmm, thi s is the only true flower!" I hear another bee buzzing from rose to laburnum, crying, "Not this, not this!" Yet he never stays in one bloom long enough to find the pollen. I hear a remarkably nervous bee buzzing through the air above, never condescending to touch a single petal. He seems to be a kind of philosopher. This is what he says. "My way is the way of pure pollen without the petals. You are all too attached to fragrances. D...

Life is not full of trauma. The past is full of trauma. The past is not Life. Life is the present moment, the only place where living happens. Now is wonder, not trauma. Trauma is a deposit of energy, blocked and stuck. Wonder is a current of energy, transforming and dissolving. The most important choice we ever make, for our own health and the health of those around us, is simply not to dwell in the past.

There are so many voices inside me. The voice of the visionary anarchist, the voice of the fiscal conservative, the Christian mystic, the non-dualist, the lover, the warrior, the fallen monk, the narcissistic nine year old throwing his dish of spinach out the window. Which one is me? How do they ever reach a consensus? They don't. They just buzz around the wild flowers, drunk on nectar. I am the meadow.

How the prime mover entangles the void. Who the source of stillness is. Where we learn the etiquette of listening. Why only the sun can say, "Roses open themselves." These koans confused Shakyamuni until he sat quietly and watched the knot of everything untie itself. A dandelion for instance. The spinal cord of a snail in the alchemy of moonbeams and dew. The flower of your own emptiness on its anorexic stem, a green systole of pulverized bone. What seeds are, the detritus of nourishing corpses. A hurricane of stars in the spin of a quark. Waltz of embryos, wasp flight, your ear a hollow conch-full of oceans. All that spirals causes silence. You are the heart of the whirled. Photo: Dante's muse, Beatrice, the divine feminine power of his intuition, shows the poet a vision of the Prime Mover.

One breath of you is better than the gaze of a thousand masters, O presence too near to be named. Just for now you are the Water Avens, Geum Rivale , also known as Cure All, a flowering weed.

Be the drop a sliver of moon lathes rainbows through. Your task is transparency, your vocation effortless as a jagged prism. Let what pierces you splinter its bright desire in your crystal stillness, pouring out mountains, forests, clouds, unfolding roots into mosaic skies, rolling golden carpets of quivering wheat for restless hooves and raptor eyes to glint and thunder on. Let owl and panther hunt in your wild starless silences. Become the dark energy that gods don't even know they use to propagate waves of what Is from the sea of what is Not. Photo by Aile Shebar

  Before I met the Giver I was only pretending to breathe, wavering in my doorway, a homesick pilgrim who could not even begin the journey. Then , in the night of Unknowing , I heard a darker whisper that illuminated all things with the light of one Self. Your Name was not a prayer but a holocaust of stars. Now is the morning of the Blessed . Someone has departed, never to return.   Was it I? The desert traveler, my exhalation, has been ravished in a distant land by the Lord of Sighs who stole that very 'I,' leaving nothing but the open wound of love. Photo by vglima1975, Atacama desert, Chile