Uradiance

Today is the Birthday of Kuan Yin. In this year's lunar calendar, it falls on March 31. Allow Her whose sweet grace is always already here to teach you the most subtle, ancient and powerful of spiritual practices: Don't ascend. Don't travel to a "better" place. Don't try to achieve any state whatsoever. And do not concentrate. Just mingle the sweet wine of your attention with the bread of your flesh, saturate each pulsing atom of your body with mere awareness, and radiate golden bewilderment for a thousand miles around you in every direction.   Photo: This Kuan Yin was consecrated at a local Buddhist temple and given to my wife as a gift from a Chinese friend. We created this alter where she blesses our home.

  Hu dips up this breath from the ancient stream of Presence? Hu decants moonbeams through the hollow of your bones? Hu drops tiny violet petals, each filled with the whole sky, on a pearl-white pool in the wilderness, that valley of sighing just below your heartbeat, where a thirsty exhalation comes down to drink in the morning, or the cool of the evening like a wounded cougar? Hu... Hu... This is not a question but a name that fills your heart with silence.

  Don't mow your grass. Don't shave your armpits. Turn your lawn into a vegetable patch, your underarms into bowers of musk rose. As for that grotto between your thighs, let honeybees rejoice! Of course we're only speaking in signs, how mystic wool-shirted fools speak about the landscape of the soul, so brown and golden, musky and green, where creatures seem all sticky with pollen, glistening with sunbeams in their sap. All we're really trying to say is  that human love grows naturally into God. Art: detail, Botticelli's Allegory of Spring

My soul is mist over the valley, my flesh the old-growth cedar stand. Deep inside my chest a stillness, a dark pool surrounded by ferns and trillium, where thought may not enter, nor future, nor past. Here I thirst, and discover a fertile desolation. I crush a scarlet berry full of stars on my tongue, and cannot tell you any more about this place except, returning is not repetition. This may be the furrow where we lay before we trembled, and had lips. In Winter, after the worm has had her way, the sap of the apple comes here to remember its seed. This is where the gentle feral purr of the mother lynx begins. Here the silver cilia-fringed and wrinkled crone sleeps, dreaming her next body. Follow the deer path of this breath to the meadow where nothing was ever wrong, your original innocence consumed in the stillness of a raven's echo. What has fallen has fallen, broken into shards of perfection, nursing shoots of new green ...

Rest in the ancient lineage of the present moment. Listen to the evening breeze in pine green quietness. You will hear creation hymns that sang the sun and moon. You will remember when your tears were original rain and your eye created the light. Confess that your flesh is floating pollen in a beam of what sees, and you are the black vacuum at the core of what whirls. Now use the faintest feather brush of breath on bone to dust away the mind. Become the silence who has all along been listening to your prayers. Knead the bread of earth into doughy clay again. Shape it warm by a gesture of healing, and bake it  in the secret fertility of your stillness. A stem of furious cleansing will tremble through your hollow obsidian bones, from the belly to the dimple in your crown, wedding your ancestral darkness to an unborn star.   Image by Marcel Van Luit

You say there's a secret called enlightenment. But you are the secret that was given away in the beginning, when the sky got em-pearled in your zygote. You were born so that distant galaxies might see themselves. Now waves of amazement with troughs of silence crash on the shores of your body, cleansing your senses with the birthless Presence of ancient light. All your questions have been washed away. Each breath is the answer.

In the empire of the living Goddess  there is no "should," no rule to disobey,  no path to follow . The way is dissolving. Can the earth leave its orbit round the sun? So I cannot take my gaze from your face. This is the freedom of love's bondage.   Clouds look like a garland of thorns, a crown of poppies, yet the sky is always  formless and blue. Invisible sap  puts on the glory of a hyacinth, clear plasma takes the color of blood, and silence allows herself to be wounded, pierced by a wordless song.   Of course I could endure the Spring without listening to a single sparrow,  then boast, "I am liberated from Beauty." Yet I would rather drown in the blossom of your eyes, because they chose me for drowning. We are dead bees in each others' goblet of raindrops, slaves of unshackled sweetness.   Your emptiness feels like a baby's cheek. I gladly wear the chains of longing, just as my Beloved wears...

As quantum physics envisions it, the universe is made of energy, energy consists of fluctuations in the vacuum, and these frequencies of vibration, which are verily sound-waves, become matter. Cosmos is logos. A Vedic verse declare, "Adau Bhagavan shabda rasahi: in the beginning the Lord created the universe through a stream of sound." Yet whence did the stream emanate? From the silence of the vacuum. Yes, cosmos is logos. Yet logos is the Word of silence. Myriad names of God swirl from the womb of holy silence . Just so, stars spiral from a black hole at the center of the galaxy. Yet all the black holes in the cosmos are one and the same fertile void. This star-birthing singularity, the infinite hush of the maternal dark, is not far away. It is the core of your being, the bindhu at the center of your heart. In Jewish Kabbala, the Great Seal of Protection is a mandala containing the 72 divine names. We can find similar mantra-mandalas made of Tibetan and Sanskrit letters. In...

This blossom covered with dewdrops, is it right or wrong? The mind's first need is to be 'right.' The heart's first need is to feel connection. I can survive being wrong. I cannot survive being disconnected. On a Spring morning, breathing this blossom in has nothing to do with right or wrong. It is electric connection to the Shakti pervading all creation. Here is a meditation for clearing your circuits and re-booting your Presence: Spend a minute assuming that you are wrong about almost everything. Then gaze quietly into a flower, breathing in nameless beauty. Why does such a simple act of non-doing restore so much energy, not only to one's self, but to the environment? Because you discover that being 'right' or 'wrong' isn't very important. Even when the mind is 'wrong,' the heart can connect, responding profoundly to other hearts, to a raindrop, the moon, the sound of a robin at dawn, the pollen on a stamen ti...

Be the moon with no mantilla, the sky without a cloud,  the blues that stain a lover's thoughts. Be a naked mirror wearing your hijab of reflections, yet keeping the secret unstained. Savor melting gossamer illusions of the wound around your heart, expanding the sweetness of irremediable loss by refusing to tell a story about it. Rest in the catastrophe, reposing like a burnt lamb on the lapis alter of your breastbone. Let others make the haj. Your task is being more hollow. A mind that no longer seeks is a scintillating jewel in the erotic splendor of the void. To the cup it feels like something that pours, to the wine, like stillness. Did no one teach you to die with every breath? Grace is an eternal withering and turning gold. Fear was for another life, this one is for wonder. Now what shall you wear to the wedding? Just this golden veil of joy with no one inside.    ...

A volatile state of Uncertainty. Yet Uncertainty is nourishing. Ever-expanding. Ever-creating. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: each particle of the physical world vibrates out of the vacuum from boundless, unlocalized, mere probability. Uncertainty could be mother-like, and full of grace. Yet it makes us panicky, reactionary, eager to blame. Try this, friend. Use another name. Don't call it "Uncertainty," but "Possibility." Taste the infinite possibility of holy bewilderment. In a state of wonder the apple bud bursts, not knowing, "Will there be sunshine or rain?" Delicate petals unfold the inexorable geometry of the void, but no one can solve this broken symmetry of Zero. In a state of wonder the cloud unveils a moon, whether she is full or new. Just so the miracle in the egg, blindly muscling a golden path through cracks in darkness. Uncertainty, maturing into Wonder, dissolves fear. All we have is presence. We can li...

When the mind sinks in the heart ocean there shines an ineffably soft and luscious glow that is manna for the body and bliss for the soul. Taste the wine. The fire that mystics speak of is no metaphor, nor figure of speech, but the essence of dark energy, the sap of thorn and rose, the juice of the mind who feels the prick and tastes the fragrance. Call it Jesus, Amitabha, Kali Ma. All the gods have been trampled like grapes in the press of your heart. Their blood has soaked into the loam. Names don't matter there. Just tend your bed of coals in the forest at night. Surrender each step to a small pool of splendor on the way of shadows. Follow the warm wordless path of this breath Om to a place that was here before God said, “Let there be light,” a place where each electron bathes in the glory of its origin, every photon collides with the darkest particle of its other self.

Now is Shivaratri, "Night of Shiva," wedding of the Lord and Mother Divine. We pass through the liminal door between darkness and light, Winter and Spring, dissolution and re-creation - the holiest, most auspicious time for meditation in the Vedic calendar. Clear out a place in your body for the dancers, the wild girls from the village, with their spilling buckets of fresh milk. Also make room for us who want to drink stronger stuff, the fermented nectar of emptiness, aged in the cellar of our own chest. Everyone is a beggar here. Therefor we are all royals. Perhaps you would have time to attend this wedding, if you weren't so busy with the politics of blame, if you weren't so busy deciding whether to be a man or a woman, so busy arguing about what color you are, so busy searching for listeners to your ancient tale of woe. Just for tonight, awaken from this dream of busy-ness. Just for tonight, embrace bewilderment as the only explanation. Just for tonight confess: ev...

A net cannot catch water – the mind cannot hold who you are. When blackness murmurs with light do you need to inhale? The moon only appears to hang on a plum branch. Let your next breath be an effervescence of emptiness. The Self floats in cells of flesh, the body in the Self. Don’t try to understand this, just let the glow between your nerves be a crop of stars hanging above you in the orchard of prayer. To wake up is a ceremonial drowning, every threshold dissolved in one sensation: the grape into nectar, the nectar into a fine mist, the distillate into bewilderment. True inebriation is clarity – crush the moon in this dance, your feet oozing a ferment of sweetness. Leave it to the raven to scatter your seeds – only a dark wisdom sniffs the difference between wine and death. Most people fear the end with every exhalation. That is why their breathing is incomplete. But you have the privilege of dying right now, your lungs filled with burgundy and stars. ...

  I'm too dense to get the environmentalist motto, “Think globally, act locally.” So here's mine: "Think globally, act like a gorilla." Naturally in tune with their environment, Gorillas hardly think at all. They avoid higher education and lead a sustainable green lifestyle without credit cards or student loans. Because Gorillas aren't ashamed of being naked, they don't go shopping. They consume little water because they rarely, if ever, wash their hair. Sticking to their homeland, gorillas gently mind their own business. They won't invade and occupy another animal's habitat. When gorillas want to strut, they just strut, without putting on uniforms and eating each other. Gorillas slowly munch fresh vegetables, poop often, and shun paper products. They have no need for jet fuel, cosmetic surgery, or Gortex. Gorillas neither whine about taxes nor demand entitlements. They don't care whether the frigging stock market goes up or done. And when a g...

The milky way is not enough, the star-stream tapped from leaf veins, the indefatigable chloroplast, the hidden factory of golden nectar in loam, photons immolated in sacrifice to mold your bronze nakedness – still, not enough, not enough light! The sun does all she can, the moon dips cup fulls from her dark mysterious cellar, pours sparkling stuff into the lips of Spring cloud. Winter makes prisms of remembered splendor, galaxies of roses imprisoned in a snow crystal. But all this in-pouring is not enough, this shoring up of light in you, the radiance pooled and nuggeted in protons of flesh, the beam of your soul undrawn from its scabbard of loneliness. Light Hoarder, sheathed, un-shining, you darken the universe! Friend, haven’t you treasured this fire too long? Now spend it, waste it, irradiate everything seen! Be the Outpouring, bright warm wounded glory gushing from the hidden well where stars are born, coiled down in your tap root, your deepest gash… Ope...