Uradiance

A collage of my words by Rashani Réa

  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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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

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.

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. ...

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 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.

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

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.

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.

  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

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 ...

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.

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

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: ...

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...

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

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.

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 a...

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.