A collage of my words by Rashani Réa

Waves

 

Waves of affection
for the teardrop world
arise in my heart
without any reason
when I watch a duck
turn upside down
in the muddy stream.

The Void Is Not One

No one escapes the miracle of embodiment.
Emptiness demands uxorious paramours.

The void is not one.
She sparkles with the matter of the dark.

Thus your pure heart pounds
Two ancient drums of hollow probability -

The Lover and Beloved, lying among
Palpitating berries under a vegus tree

In the quantum entanglement of your
Nerve garden, both green and inconceivable.

This is how you dance when breath
Meets breath in the bower of stillness,

How you return to the hearthstone beneath
Your sternum, where the pilgrimage never began.

Why else would angels yearn for birth, if not
To feel the wings of rapture and desolation?

They gaze into waveless light, but you have
Sunrise and sunset over an ocean

Of unfathomable aloneness.
No one escapes the miracle of embodiment -

Not even God.

Generosity

We are truly generous when we
share our bewilderment.
Isn't it time to worship
all the Christs in all
the strangers,
beneath the veil of each
the same soul mirror,
love yearning for love,
dark matter beyond name and form?
These bodies crinkle up
like roses at the close of summer.
Light itself is fickle.
Most of it will never arrive.
So lovers should be silent and follow
an eternal breath
home to the garden.
Point here, to your chest
where we first met.
Become the drop of nectar
that sweetens the whole sea.
Eternity flowers
through eyes, not words.
What were we before we had faces?
Beneath the veil of each
the same soul mirror,
love yearning for love,
mystery beyond
wounding and healing.
And when we gaze into each other,
we are solved.

Grail

I think the human heart is the holy grail. This physical beating organ is round and full of blood, yet it is only the grounding site of the real heart, an energy field that extends into the vastness of the galaxy.

In the holy eucharist, the priest dips a little piece of bread into the cup of wine. That wine cup is our heart. It must be polished and emptied by the breath of devotion. Then it can be filled with amrita, the nectar of divine inebriation.

Christ is the wine steward but the wine does not pour down from above. It bubbles up from within, from a wellspring deeper that our own self, like a black whole at the core of our body, radiating creation. That is why Jesus said, "What I give you to drink will be a fountain welling up inside you unto eternal life."

In truth, our body is the morsel of bread dipped in the wine of its own heart. The heart is not in the body, but the body is in the heart. Wherever we walk gently on the earth is the alter of the grail. The interior of the grail is bottomless and centerless. Its circumference is infinite. All is Communion.

Why

Who knows why
a sparrow sings
just before dawn?
If she had a message
it would not be music.
Who knows why
the snow-melt stream
meanders all
over the meadow,
taking the pathless
path of least
resistance, giving
birth to lupine,
purple aster,
Indian paint brush?
Why this smile
arises on your lips
for no reason?
Why this tear,
condensed from distances
between the nameless stars,
suddenly blurs the earth
with gratitude?
Don't tell.
It would not be music.
We must each learn
from our own heart
that happiness
has nothing to do
with being
sure.

Prayer Word

I have been a pear I have been
a chestnut I have been a worm.
Now here is my secret
prayer word, 'Enough.'
What the bee says to the honeysuckle,
a lover to the unveiled,
milkweed to wind.
What gleams through the cloud
of an infant's eye already asleep,
while her tiny lips
keep savoring the nipple.
The warrior's last exhalation,
smoke unfurling from a snuffed out flame,
the pungency of death,
incense returning from an Autumn garden
to the unborn sky.
I have been a pear I have been
a chestnut I have been a worm.
What the moon says in her
bridal gown of darkness,
'Enough. Now I will show you
my nakedness.'
Don't even say it.
Just breathe.
Don't even breathe.  

Off

Off the grid
of political mind,
beyond the energy field
of either-or, left-right,
I dissolve polarity
in my belly button,
take one slow step
barefoot on moist moss
among the ferns
under old-growth hemlocks,
listening to a heron
screech in the bog,
whooshing enormous wings
into the golden
August evening mist.
He's been standing all
afternoon on one leg
at the center of his mirror,
waiting for a fish.

Photo by my old friend and wilderness guide, Scott Waeschle

How Intimate!

Waves of emptiness.
The trembling
of uncreated light.
Flowering prism
of the void.
You can gaze
into this jewel and see
the infinite sky
of your own face
looking back at you
as Lord of Vrindivan.
How intimate your solitude!
It is a sapphire, a mirror
shattered into perfection,
a lotus of 10,000 daggers
piercing your heart
from its own center.
This is the pain
of formless love,
your breath a flute song
of prayer extinguished
before a word arises.
Yet the luminous silence
inside that sound
bestows its name
on every creature.
Now just for
the sake of play,
let me call you Krishna,
and I will let you call me
your Self.

The Blessed Uncertain (A Poem of Social Distance)

In the time of the blessed uncertain,
we become a communion of ones,
the fellowship we always needed.
Our solitudes entwine.
We widen the weave of compassion
to heal with ease our dis-ease
and quench our thirst at the well of grieving.

Trust in your tears,
they will never betray you.
Know this: though far apart,
we share one breath. I am the wind.
I breathe you, stranger, as you breathe me.
From across great waters of darkness
I come to dwell in your body,
as you dwell in mine.
Distance has been swallowed up
in Being.

You grow weary on your journey?
Rest with me.
Your hearthstone far away?
Stay here.
If you feel something break inside you,
pass it through the flame in my chest
until it is whole again.

Let time move inward, slowing
to the silence of the heart,
the passage between beats
where no thought arises,
the way an animal knows
it must curl in the circle of its fur
for curing, rain-drenched under ferns.

We must all discover this Self-need.
I won’t come too near.
From the majesty of my aloneness,
I bow to your aloneness.
Namaste!

 


Mary Magdalene by Domenico Fetti 

Bleed, Sing, Listen

A woman's wound
bleeds at moon time.
Man, if he is lucky,
has a wound as well,
where skull bones never
quite fused into a wall
against the night,
a soft spot distances
collapse into
with all their fallen
spheres of fire,
blue-finned comets,
red dwarfs, other worlds,
globes of desire.
He drinks stars,
then sings them.
She listens.

Love

Love is not a feeling. Love is not a deed. Love is the energy generated by the dissolving of separateness. It can happen when you drown in the eye of a stranger, share wine, bread and song with friends, or sit alone with a flower. Wherever it happens, space expands, an intimate emptiness fills the streets, covering farmlands and distant mountains, enfolding the earth, touching the stars to make them somehow intimate. What are stars, after all, but the sparkling of your own awareness? You are love.

Listen

Before the invention
of thoughts
we sang ourselves
to sleep.
The day melted back
into humming,
the humming into silence,
silence into a breath
of the Beloved.
Of course the stars
were not yet born,
and the moon was still
inside you.
Lay your head
on my shoulder now.
Listen with all
your heart,
and I will tell you nothing.

Art by Cory Loftis

News

Do you want to hear
the morning news?

Then why do you listen
to the Cable Noise Network?

Real news comes
from within.

Just listen to
what is listening

before a single
thought arises.

Then you will hear
the Good News.

Jump

Don't stop leaping
into beauty.
Fall off the cliff
of what you already know.
Could anybody
catch you in their arms
the way air catches wings?
Only the lover
who is everywhere,
softer than down.
If you don't understand this,
jump.

Well

 

It takes no courage to doubt the validity of our happiness, and argue in favor of despair. That is quite common these days. What requires deep courage is to doubt our despair, and stand on a quiet inward joy as the ground of our true nature. Take responsibility for healing the earth. Be a well. Gently but constantly, and often in darkness, bubble up with love.

Photo, on the way to Green Lake, old growth forest in summer, Mt. Rainier

Dancer, Delight

Some say you are not this body.
I say you are a tidal wave of stars
whose ancient roar has just arrived
to shape your torso into flame.
I say the dark abyss devouring time
is the well of your exhalation.
And if you will not rendezvous
with your Creator in a liver spot,
a crow-footed furrow in this aching 
fallow-fallen meadow of  flesh,
or these ripening gossamer gray thistles,
how will you taste the bloom and blood
of lips on the heavenly Christ Rose?
Come now, enter your patient skin
and use the faintest feather brush of
breath on bone to dust the mind away
beyond astonishment, lost in nuclei.
Float your pollen in a beam of seeing.
Glory of sod, I say you are this body,
loam of ancestors, risen from loss
and yearning so deep below no god
could fall there, never having breathed
the sky into this golden atom of death.
Now be the blackest vacuum at the core
of all that whirls; gaze out in crazed
clarity through the windows of a quark
at photon moons, molecules, supernovae
foaming in the belly of the Goddess, Uu.
Dancer, delight in divine confusion,
stunned by your mortal magnificence.
Become the dusty silence who has all
along been listening to your prayers.

Photo by Bu Reem on Flikr

Own

There is no rest
in what is ever becoming,
yet never is.
Rest in what is,
yet never becomes.
The Real is unchanging
and cannot be lost.
The Unreal ever
changes and cannot
be grasped.
Ten trillion years old,
the light passing through
a housefly's wing.

Tell Me

Now that you've told me
what breaks your heart,
tell me what you would become
if you leapt beyond sunset
toward that burning star
where your gaze began.
You've been hiding a rainbow
in your chest, because you
thought it was too bright
for the world. Unfurl it.
let that beauty no longer
confuse you. The Friend,
whose golden countenance
singes your doubts away,
is no Other.


Photo, sunset on Puget Sound from my village

Moon Play

Krishna: "I am the still blue sky, pouring into your nakedness as this breath."

Radha: "Exhalation is longing. Offering back the gift to you, I become every star in the empyrean."

Krishna: "My love wandered forever, seeking repose in the loam, in fragrant crystals of opal and lapis, the musk of withered desire. Then I found your body, exhausted by dancing."

Radha: "Without your silence in each cell of my flesh, I could not have whirled. In you, I am weightless."

Krishna: "This garden blossoms from the hollow at the end of your sigh. Heaven and earth are your tears."

Radha: "Take off your shoes and leave your footprints on my chest."

Krishna: "It is not enough to be a rose-windowed dragon fly. It is not enough to be a serpent full of nectar dangling from the tree of knowledge."

Radha: "I am full, yet I yearn. Let me be your guru, and teach you the art of erotic dying."

Krishna: "You are the intuition of a lotus floating in a pail of milk."

Radha: "When I see you, all my senses are confused. You are the scent of the moon, a white chrysanthemum made of thunder. I offer you seven bright wounds in a flute of blackness."

Krishna: "I dance with ten thousand Gopis. Yet you alone are my paramour, for you alone return my gift of pearls on the silver string of breathing."

Radha: "Now my empty cup sparkles with your face."

Krishna: "Radha, the taste of your name on my lips turns God into a fool."

Radha: "Ah, my love, that is because whoever drinks the wine of desolation grows wiser than her Creator."

Driving North On I-5

Driving north on I-5, I took the spiritual bypass around Portland, and there she was, the holy mountain. Because I was woke I called her by her native and true name, Tahoma. And because I was so exquisitely embodied I perceived her, not as a mountain, but a dark brown breast gushing milk-streams through hydro-electric teats. I picked up a hitchhiker named Virgil and asked him to guide me through the ninth circle of the inferno. He didn't get it. I think he was offended.

"Don't be holier than thou," I said.

"More traumatized than thou," he said.

“Same difference," I replied.

He said, "I murdered my little sister with marmalade and ants."

I said, "Yeah? Well, while I was still a fetus I got the naked Father tattooed on my belly button."

"I’m not as perfect as I was yesterday," he said.

"That's progress," I admitted.

He replied, "A vegan with lamb chop fantasies!"

I said, "Love is not a feeling or a deed."

He said, "We circle azure emptiness like farted clouds."

"Love is subatomic energy,” I continued, “released when separateness dissolves."

"Are all your stories in the past?" he asked.

"I am more grounded than a frog in a pot of high-rise condominiums."

"Your forty story penis cannot scrape the sky."

So I screeched on the breaks at a walk-in Urgent Care, operated by the pharmaceutical state, and let him out so he could drink vaccine tequila through his astral blue mask, which was the impeccable countenance of his serenity, and the doppelganger of a darker fear.

The last thing I heard was his screaming, "This iPhone doesn't recognize my face!"

Ground

No path.
Don't bow.
Your ashes
have already
been scattered.
Just whisper,
"walk here,"
and they will
not notice.
But you will be
their Ground.


Photo: Vipassana by Hartwig HKD on Flikr

3 A.M.

Silent moon
over the wetlands,
a single peeper's solo
and suddenly
ten thousand songs!
What one frog says
can keep the moon and stars
up all night wondering
what Spring is.
Friend, never doubt
your solitude.
Never doubt the beauty
of your lonely voice.

The Friction

Here's a secret: the friction of breath on flesh ignites the grace of the Beloved in your body. You were meant to be born. A Goddess of inconceivable beauty yearns to nurse you with streams of wild joy. There has never been a more perfect time than this moment to breathe.

When grace overflows your soul, it takes the form of gristle and bone. Why not savor the red wine of embodiment? There’s a reason why pain shapes you into a dark chalice; why you have hollow roots and empty places inside you; why a green syllable spirals up your stem, forming a two-petaled cry, "So'ham," why mother coyote sighs, birthing her pups among dark ferns and trillium, why a chant of fire bursts from the lungs of the dying soldier.

Now fall into the grail of pollen between outgoing and incoming prayers. Repose in the silent kiss of breath on breath, the rustle of the Name against your chest. Ashtavakra said, "Layam vraja: dissolve now!" When the inner sky of love annihilates this dream of clouds, your skin will enfold both heaven and earth.

Sheathe a warrior’s blade in your softest inhalation, and the blue flame of dispassion inside the golden flame of yearning. God is the aura in the aura of a wickless burning.

Feel the nerve of lightning in your spine's hollow, where the earth dangles from the sun. Exhale and slay ten thousand fears. Your surrender heals oceans and forests. With the touching madness of the moon in your gaze, turn every stranger's wounded eye into a cave of diamonds.

Surrender

Ah, four years ago last night...

The Lover said to the Beloved,
"I am immersed in You."
The Beloved replied with
twinkling eyes,
"You have no choice!"
Who comprehends this conversation?
I only love because I have free will,
yet when I surrender
my heart completely
like nectar to the Guest,
love annihilates the will,
and this is perfect freedom.
The cup of the rose is empty.
The bee is no longer restless.
The music of So'Ham
pervades the whole garden.
I know this
because I have become
a fool.