We don't have enough words
to say "love,"
so we use our hands.
We don't have enough hands
to do love,
so we use our tears.
We don't have enough tears
to feel love,
so we use our silences.
Not enough amazement
to contain love, so we surrender.
Now the murmur of soft morning rain
has ended.
The shattered sun trembles at the tip
of every fern.
Stones grow soft, moss green.
With less than a song, a musical
question merely, the rosefinch heals us all.
Fragrances of death return
as shades of indigo.
If you understand this, you're thinking
too hard.
Just let the sexual fury in a seed
become the glowing hyacinth.
Clever people seek partners in the market.
All they find are faces in a crowded mirror.
I dance to a throbbing drum
and meet the crazy lover in my chest.
When I open my eyes,
the world is a kiss.
The world seems full of problems. But there is only one problem, and it isn't the world. It is our own mind. Please don't mistake your mind for the world? Mind pollutes the whole creation when it turns bitter, judgmental, polarized with blame against an other. What is the cure? Spend a few moments each day being astonished.
Om is too stuffy.
Let's just hum like bees
drawn by the fragrance
of a wild dilapidated rose.
Of course this is no
ordinary rose.
These petals
are countless galaxies.
You swarm through
light-years of your wild
dilapidated heart.
The scent that drives
you crazy is the breath
of your Creator.
Forget your own name
in That.
The honey is already made.
When I visit
the cemetery
at the close of day
(or is it evening now?)
at the end of Winter
(or is it the beginning
of Spring?)
I am very sure,
nearly certain in fact,
that Unknowing
is the space
of compassion,
that Bewilderment
is the source
of creation,
and that God loves
to wonder,
which is why
this tulip emerges
from the snow,
this breath turns
homeward
toward silence,
and on the gravestone,
in the first letter
of her name,
this drop of dew
(or is it a tear?)
contains the sky,
the night, and all
the stars unseen.
Photo from englishrussia.com
No need for me to say, "Dive in."
You have already drowned
in the ocean of grief,
the ocean of loving kindness.
You won't get stuck in the net
of "right" and "wrong,"
"pain" and "pleasure" again.
You're the water now.
But you can still breathe.
You can be a wave
of what is ever whole.
We all share loss unspeakable.
It feels like a void in the heart.
Yet no matter who abandons us,
our voids are all the same:
a door we enter to be changed
by what never changes.
Can you flee from this moment?
It will be Now when you arrive.
Travel ten thousand miles?
You'll be here when you get there,
resting as a witness immovable.
Better to honor the flowering
of your pain, this nameless blossom
whose fragrance has no edges.
Desolation herself gets burnt away
by this honor. Perhaps you have
suspected the truth all along:
creation springs from bewilderment.
Everything dissolves
into sparkling awareness.
Don't worry, you can still pray.
All the gods rejoice when you call
their name, the beginning of prayer
in every tongue, just one word:
"O!"
God said,
'Let there be light'
and there was light,
which means that
God must have been
the darkness...
Just abandon yourself
to what you are
and you will grow
very bright.
Make a delicious mistake. Fuck up once in a while.
After all, I invented peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
when I was 4 years old, stealing and smashing
two jars from mommy's grocery bag, sticking my hands
in the mess, then in my mouth, wiping the glisten
of chunky brown and crimson from my cheeks
with soft white Wonder Bread. Yes I did.
When I was 7 I invented the frisbee
while throwing a plateful of broccoli
my babysitter forced me to eat out the window.
I did. And I invented S'mores at the age of 12
when a pimply camp counselor wouldn’t let me have
three desserts: so I crushed them into one.
Don’t you love people who crush things into one?
And burn the marsh mallow?
Even in the uterus my great aunt Molly, who lived
in a previous century, made me wear red rubber
rain boots, scrawling L and R on them, like left
and right would matter in the 8-shaped breath
of my infinite womb-swimming, which made me
so angry my subatomic bones would rattle the stars.
Yes, I was a mad and powerful embryo.
What did you invent by smearing, by smashing,
by your glorious lack of impulse control
in the sacred mayhem of childhood?
Go ahead, tell me everything. Or tell
an exquisite lie so outrageous it might be true:
"I invented the way light shatters in the prism
of a dewdrop by powers of ten, creating
the first rainbow." Or, "I was a wanderer,
hitchhiking before I could walk." Or maybe,
"My past sins cancelled all my works of mercy;
negative and positive collided in my heart,
adding up to nothing, no karma at all, which is why,
at birth, my fetus crowned through Zero."
Makes perfect sense to me, Friend. Now listen:
Whoever God is, She embraces this mess.
Squirting our mouths with milky streams of Life,
Life in abundance, She overbrims our grail with
Second Chances, permitting the Impeccable Blunder.
From the uncertain locus of an electron
to mutations in a molecule of cytosine,
right up the crazy chain of non-causality
to how black chaos engenders stars
in the belly button of a supernova,
all of us are mistakes of necessity, even Jesus,
hairline fractures in the magnanimous vacuum,
filled in with molten gold, kintsugi of the human.
So if you never got sentenced to time-out chair
in kindergarten, or sent to the principle's office
for pulling someone’s pony tail in grade school;
if you never cut class to explore the wilderness
in your soul, or skipped church to attend
the carnival in your body; if you never got
tear-gassed by cops on the street in college;
never got fired, never spent a single night in jail;
and never found your body in a hot mess
on the kitchen floor, your fingernails engraving
hieroglyphs of grief in the linoleum - dear one,
you may not actually have been alive.
Nothing could be more ordinary, nothing could be more miraculous, than this breath. Please remember, a breath is never taken, but given. Be grateful. At this very moment, what swirls the galaxy and sings the stars is breathing you. Every cell in your flesh knows this, and softly smiles.
The breath who comes to dwell in your body is the very form of the Beloved, and the very Goddess who plays by God’s elbow at the dawn of creation. (Proverbs 8).
Each rise and fall of inhalation, exhalation, polishes the golden cup of your heart, whose sparkling emptiness receives the image of God's face from every creature.
Somewhere in the forest, a fern unfolds; that too is your breathing. A trillium gazes at all your shades of green. In the empty robin's nest, your broken shell contains the whole blue sky.
Just for an instant, you return to the ordinary miracle of your body, and the kingdom of fear vanishes forever.
When we honor our own breath as the divine Guest, this perishing moment becomes a little Sabbath that lets eternity in. Friend, such Sabbath moments are not an escape: they heal the world.
There's an unquenchable spring
of lethal awakening
inside you.These waters are clear.
I've been pointing there, friend.
That's a difficult task.
Now you must do the easeful work
of turning, following the sound,
the subtle, wild and joyful murmur
from deeper in your body
than your soul.
Take the motionless green journey
of a spiraling seedinto the death of its flower.
We can only feel sorry for those
who wander up above themselves
and search the sky for another world
when the light they seek is
already gushing from their bones.
If you become so silent inside
that even your name disappears,
you will hear the music of this river.
Ah, that bitter word again, "inside."
There's nothing to be inside of, friend.
This is a little secret that can’t be hidden.
You are made of the very distances
you yearn and travel through
to find yourself.
Galaxies cluster and dissolve
in each atom of your flesh.What bubbles up and pours
is your stillness.
Now drink, and become fierce.
