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: even though your story includes the whole past and future, no story can contain the present moment.
The moon has been kissed into darkness. The eyes have been closed, the tongue laid to rest in the dome of your mouth, like a dove in the roof beams. And through the alchemy of listening, your ears have spiraled into conch shells, overflowing with silence.
Whether the blackness at the center of your spinning is an absence of light, or the blindness caused by too much, you will not understand til the wedding is over and you whisper "I do" - the vow that makes you hollower than God.
Tonight is the night of un-knowing, when you bathe each cell of your body in this breath, filling it like a scabbard with the scintillating flame of No-Mind. Let that fatal fire consume all distances, and dissolve all otherness.
Then You and I, You and I and Thou, will meet under a canopy of tears, in the bridal chamber of Shakti and Lord Shiva, which is the bridal chamber of Magdalene and Christ, which is the bridal chamber of the sigh and the inhalation, the surrender and the grace, which is the place under your breastbone where we were never two.
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