Uradiance

O my body, O my soul, never say that this lifetime was not the best of lives! Of 10 thousand dwelling in the silence of a jewel, 10 thousand as a rose, 10 thousand on the feathered wing, 10 thousand in the fin and gill, 10 thousand garlanded by fur, 10 thousand in the House of Adam, this life alone is the one when I received the whisper of the Master's breath, the sweet anointing of Initiation. As an evening breeze chooses this pine branch, as a moonbeam chooses one trillium among the ferns to silently caress, as an ancient yearning chooses your mother's womb, so I chose this life. Not through merit, surely, not through virtue but delight, I chose to be chosen now, so that I could surrender and be danced! Painting by Mahmoud Farshchian

  "Love is strong as death." ~Song of Solomon 8:6 Mecca? No haj. You are already there - Allah's swirling gaze returning to your eyes through a golden rose. Jerusalem? No pilgrimage, only the gesture of the moth wing settling on a white dahlia. Benares? Even the flutesong of a scarlet tanager passing through these woods can lead you South to Shyam's intoxicating garden. Rome? No need to go. So very gently, like waves on sand, Christ comes to you as this breath. Love is not a journey but an opening. Rest in the meadow of never arriving. In each tear of dew, the wild anemone has already captured the sun. Wander where a sigh goes, to the edge of silence where there's no need to leap. No need to leap into the dark because the dark leaps into you. Perish in that amazement. Any infinitesimal point in space or time is a well that overflows with elixir, with wine more savory than death. Wherever you are, pilgrim, rest here, drink this .

"As for you, wise one, I have a feeling that you too perhaps have stepped across the threshold into the kingdom of your imagination, to take possession of it once and for all. Write and tell me - or save it for some small café under a chestnut tree, in smokey autumn weather, by the Seine." ~Lawrence Durrell, Clea: Alexandria Quartet

Let your discipline be a ripple on the ocean of effortlessness. Let your breath uphold the universe like a feather touching a bubble that encircles the weightless stars. What if it bursts? You attain emptiness. What if the feather floats away on a breeze? You attain grace. But there is no one here to carry the burden of attainment. So dissolve into the laughter of the Goddess. She breathes you. Embrace all things just as they arise and let them melt away - a drop of dew on the golden iris, a hungry worm in the fallen apple, dark petals drifting on the full moon in a midnight pond... Friend, there is no other way to get through this miracle. Photo by Kristy Thompson

My prayer wheel is the turning year, the sun my confessor, my priestess the moon. My daily offices are morning mist, evening swallows, hush of midnight. My scripture, white clouds on blue emptiness; pictograms of geese, pointing South. I gave up theology to watch the bees make honey. My anointing is the mud between my toes. The barefoot poet, Jesus, taught me to mulch and till the heavens into loam. His Spirit is a quietness in my heart. Hope gets in the way; the source is gratitude. Through vaulted arches of hemlock and cedar, a thrush bell calls me to prayer. May the pilgrim melt into her path, the path into the goal, the goal into this moment, and the very first step into Waylessnes....  

"And there was under His feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone, and it was like the very heavans in its clarity." ~Exodus 24:10 Rummaging through my mind, I couldn't find any past, or future, or now. So I concluded that past, present, and future are all a dream. This very inquiry woke me up. Then I looked at the shining blue sky, and the shining blue sky was looking at me: mirror-like vastness gazing into itself, beginning-less, boundless, ever-expanding. This infinite gaze into Itself is all there ever is. This gaze vibrates as Love. And this vibrant love-gaze beholds itself in the hollow of every nutrino, every atom of each cell, each breath and flower, each sun in every galaxy. The very shimmer of consciousness, celebrating its formless ecstasy in the forms of you, me, the fallen leaf, wakes again and again to its own Beauty, which is the substance of all matter and energy, the beginning of creation, and the final goal. Look into the petal of the last Autumn...

Even on the most radiant days, there is a sorrow at the heart of life. When we deny it, the day becomes a desperate quest for happiness, and the night is long. But when we absorb the trough into our rhythm, like the shadow of a breath, that benign negation infuses all things with spaciousness, tinges creation with golden poignancy, like Autumn itself. What is heavy is not sadness, but the denial of sadness. A cricket in the alder taught me this. Photo by l1993.deviantArt

The art of wine sipping is subtle. The discipline, one glass at a time. The vintage I speak of is this breath. Was it your heart or mine that became a cup for the other's lips? Was I the host and you the guest, or did you pay the tab? All I remember is, the tip was incalculable, but the server told us to forget about it. O Lord, we went reeling out of the tavern. I think I said, "Here's my shoulder. Now give me your arm. My devotion to the path will keep us both from stumbling." In the light of morning, I can't imagine speaking such words to You. I even remember whispering, "Here's my chest, with its broken gate wide open, Lord, I'll make sure you get home." It's not my fault that a single sip, a single inhalation of your presence, inebriates the Lover and the Beloved.

Before you were born you were the watcher of galaxies whirling within. Then you asked the Great Question: What would it be like to live on one of those infinitesimal dust motes floating in a golden beam of your heart? What would it be like to carry the whole bruise of a supernova in your softest tissue? And here you are, little one, crying for milk! Here you are where all the circling stars are less than a drop of fire falling into the boundless blue bowl of your gaze. Here, where the Question no longer arises, you have come to dwell in the uncertain and call it Presence; to drink from the unknown and call it Wine; to savor a breath of silence through your broken heart and call it Bread. This is better than a thousand answers. Picture, my daughter Abigail

Goddess of Autumn, don't allow the doe and fawn to steal all my plums.

Medieval Christians called the time between sacred festivals, "ordinary time." They recognized that ordinary time is also a time to celebrate, and called the liturgy for this celebration, the "Ordinary of the Seasons." What a wonderful expression! Tibetan Buddhists called this liminal time the "Bardo," which could lie between two lifetimes, or two breaths. Yet, whether we are Christian or Buddhist, or something in-between, this ordinary time is the time for enlightenment, the time for initiation into the Mystery. But we are too busy looking for the perfect end-time, the resolution of our problems in the future, to notice that we constantly fall through the secret Bardo of the Ordinary. We are too busy to notice that the between-time, wherever we fall, is holy. Let us learn again to savor the ordinary of the seasons. Look deeply into a persimmon on the kitchen table. Now it is an extraordinary persimmon. Why? What is the difference between the ordinary a...

For just an instant                      between breaths                                        be held       in the gentle palm                         of desolation.    Let a wing         of desirelessness                          glide up your spine,     ringing the star bell                 ...

It is so important to Be. Not to be a white or a black, a socialist or a capitalist, a democrat or a republican - but simply to Be. Have the courage to drop the noun after you say, "I Am." When you are not a noun, when you are not any-thing, you will experience the deepest miracle as you meet someone else. You will meet your own Being as the Other. You will love your neighbor as your Self.

Draw a line. Choose a point on the line where the ratio of the smaller section to the larger is that of the larger to the whole. Build rectangles out of these segments tracing an ever widening curve counter clockwise from the corner of each to the furthest corner of another. Now begin to dance, a serpent rotating your pelvis, rising through the knees, with back-handed sweep to scatter your seed, planting your corn in rings, not rows, galaxies of swirling Chi, Fibonacci gestures overflowing the ram’s horn of abundance in every atom of your flesh, each pearl on your rosary of chromosomes the sum of the two generations before it until you become a pineapple, a conch holding the moon and tides, the whorl of a hurricane, the dizzy glance of Goddess Inanna, the space between her cheekbones proportioned to the distance from chin to crown, and the ratio of that to the pilgrimage of her breath from the kum kum dot in her brow to the hollow between...

I believe in logic. It will be 90 degrees today. Therefore I am baking homemade blueberry pie. A tree frog lives in the folds of the old umbrella. Therefore it will not rain, and because you are in love, 2 x 0 = 1. A dragonfly lands on a quivering cattail precisely at the feathered gong in a red winged blackbird’s throat. This could only mean that the world is good, and very good. That the wetland will be here for at least a thousand years to come. And because you are troubled by almost everything, my dear, despite the constant golden pulse of grace that breathes you out of emptiness, you are perfectly human. Sumi-e by Sengai, b. 1750 .