Uradiance

Astonishment is a thankless task and it pays so little but somebody has to do it or this green world will harden with ruthless certainty into money, politics, and steel. Dear friend, it is through your eyes, the glowing breath of your speechless lips, and the effortless radiance around your body that the work is done.

“Not until the soul breathes in the fragrance of its own lunacy can it stop being a stranger to itself.” ~Attar, Conference of the Birds Do animals have conferences? We know for a fact that birds do. Busy hummingbirds gathered at sugary water coolers to buzz about the news. The gossip of grooming baboons. Cud-munching cows who grind slow jaws, muttering drole asides in the meadow. Even cedars, nodding together, murmuring like bearded magistrates in green robes. What do they all talk about? Us. And on the Serengeti at sunset, by the edge of the waterhole, a gathering of unlikely species who let go of many small needs to share one great need. The lioness, having drunk, rears back her head, eyes closed, knowing that the antelope is near. She demurs, whispering, "Take heart, sister. Neither of us will die tonight. Greater than our hungers is our thirst." A nervous hyena glances over the glassy stillness. The gazelle looks back, her lips dripping. You can hear...

 My words, enhanced by the art of Rashani Réa

  A poem of mine in Braided Way Magazine marvelously translated into Gaelic (ancient Irish) by Gabriel Rosenstock. Thank you, Gabriel! LINK Through with the big corporation. Through with the nation-state. Through with the global church, the world guru. Ready to return and taste the sparkling renaissance of the small and the local. No left or right: the center, yes, but without circumference. Better to barter a bushel of peas for a well-honed axe handle, graze my sheep in the commons with yours, the sacred pasture at the heart of every village. Our little farms touching in one meadow, we’ll send bees back and forth in a country with no border but the stars. No minarets and spires, but treetops, Raven Mother perched in one, Eagle Father in another, calling us to lauds and evensong. Shamanic circles, bio-regional theologies. Eight billion gods, each with a human body. And one ancestral bonfire to change the bones of the dead into the sky. I will dance like a flame in your kiln, you ...

This wedding was planned before you were born. Your ancient Heart and the Mother of Dances were the elders who arranged it. Don't worry, they knew what they were doing. They run the beachfront honeymoon hotel made of crushed emeralds where we all stay between lives. They chose this breath to marry your body. Now you go stumbling down the aisle, wondering if you're ready for this, making eyes at the guests in their pews, doubting, muttering to yourself, "Should I marry this one instead?" Stop tripping over your veil! Stop chatting with strangers and unruly cousins! Just keep gazing toward the sanctuary, at the one who waits for you there. The chuppah your vine-tangled ribs, the aisle your exhalation of surrender. As you walk down, you gradually awaken. This procession is a pour of wine. Your beloved is the bottom of the cup, a mirror of empurpled splendor.   When you pour your gladness into that face, and taste of that ances...

I received a massage from NoBody, who says that the "information age" is over. All information is a corrupted file, because it leads to the delusion that there is a knower separate from the known. The very act of in-forming creates an illusory distinction between inward and outward, when in fact reality is a continuum of consciousness: pure energy aware of itself without being separate from itself. There is no "interior life" separate from the exterior life. The boundary between inner and outer is only a mirage. The soul and the body are entangled on the grapevine of ISness. We are here to be tasted and touched, not informed. Massaged, not messaged. The cosmic flowering of energy that we call the world, the universe, was too much for us at birth. It blew our minds. That was the original trauma. We turned around to flee from the terrible beauty of creation. It was too intimate an explosion, because it was all our own consciousness. So we tried to get back ...

Oh blackness, Oh 3 a.m., Oh womb, voluptuous ink of poems, O Virgin of Montserrat, the blessed symmetry of zero, quantum vacuum gushing particles of night, Oh fountain and fecundity of nothing, without your one eternal uncreated No this mad and multitudinous dance of Yes could never have been born - Oh Light is not enough, I love the Dark! Photo of Venus and Saturn conjunction taken on a walk near my house. Prose poem published in The Yes Book.

  In an instant you could lift your soul into the center of a dust mote, which is the center of every sun, attaining the infinite clarity of the stainless mirror where every face of God appears, to see forever all that is through one pure tear of compassion, just by striking the diamond of Awareness against the diamond of Awareness, generating trillions of ananda-sparks, neutrinos, pollen, supernovae, other selves. Image: 'high-energy ghost-particle from outer space,' published at CNN

Shakti is a slight excitement in the field of infinite Rest, an ever so gentle whisper in the field of infinite Silence - the secret source of Power. Photo: The hibiscus in my backyard bloomed last night. The air cleared and the blue sky shouted and all distances dissolved in the intimacy of the Self.

"Someone asked me, "Are you a Christian, a Hindu, or a Buddhist? I can't tell which." I answered, "Neither can I!" "You must be confused," he said. "Blessed are you when you are confused, for then the mind must descend into the heart." "But what is your religion?"he asked. "Listen, friend. I was a born-again Christian, a twice-born Hindu, and an un-born Buddhist. Then the Goddess hugged me to her bosom of unfathomable silence, and suckled me on the mere sweet milk of breathing. "Un-created fire gushed up my spine, poured through the wound in my heart, and fountained out my empty crown. These eyes became black holes at the center of twin galaxies whose blinding light has not yet reached this world. "Now I am just a finger writing on trembling waters: Impermanence is the soul of Beauty. "

Thank you water. I love you. Rain. Thank you dirt. I love you. Molder down. Thank you sun, at dawn or evening. Clothe me in your beams. Thank you, death. You feed the loam with bodies large and small. I return to you. O stars, I'm not sure what you do, but without you would I be? I love you, held or falling. Thank you, masked workers in orchards or trucks at 5 a.m. I love you, bruising your hands with fruit. Thank you wind. I receive you like a moaning pine. You lift me like a thistle. In my foolishness I see no difference between my body and an alder leaf. Autumn comes, hollowing a place for the soul in things. My soul is parched with praising. I would sing like a wren, disturbing the great silence. Photo : Monk's Garden, County Kerry

Take a rest from the restless mind. Sink into the eye of the heart that looks by feeling. Sea-feel every cell of your body as an ocean of love, each strand of DNA immersed in healing waves of luminous breath. Since this is utterly real, you don't need to visualize, imagine, or try. Just feel, see, become aware. The miracle is here already, but it is activated by awareness.

Einstein daydreamed at his messy desk, sliding down a lazy sunbeam at the speed of light.  E = mc 2 August Kekule fell asleep in front of the fireplace, his rational mind exhausted. He discovered the circular structure of the benzene molecule dreaming of a luminous serpent biting its own tail. Dr. Oppenheimer directed the Manhattan Project, inventing the first atom bomb. He also studied Sanskrit. As he watched the explosion in the desert at Yucca Flats, he muttered verses from the Bhagavad Gita. "I am become the destroyer of worlds. Even if you beheld the light of 10,000 suns, you would not see one particle of my glory." The first Neanderthal was a scientist too. He gathered a handful of useless corn, jagged and tasteless as broken teeth. Then he stumbled, spilling the kernels on hot coals. It was an accident. They popped, grew soft and fragrant. He tasted one. Science asks very simple questions without clinging to answers, for the answers are dancing li...

  I received this wonder-ful picture and message from a women named Issa who lives in a community deep in the rain forest of Costa Rica. I have never met her. "Hi Fred, hope you are doing well. I wanted to share with you the current state of the books I have of you. You wrote in the preface: ' I hope it gets dog-eared and frayed, used like a hand tool.' Well they sure did, and got soaked, molded, here in the jungle of Costa Rica! Yet each & every poem is still readable and read."   Then Issa went on to post her interpretations of a poem on her web page, with another photo from the rain-soaked moldering book.                                                            "From my favorite poet... For me it describes perfectly the very rich experience of living simple, nomadic, immersed in green, in Costa Rica. No securities, only ...

no longer adding things  to things, but subtracting  everything from everything

  When I stop trying to be good, I become better. I never saw a bird trying to sing. The music just happens. A common sparrow is perpetually surprised by the flow of all into all. This is the mystery of the obvious.   Let us refresh the depth of the ancient expression, All in All. The All in Greek philosophy (Panta) is the divine Pleuroma or fullness. It is what in Sanskrit is meant by Brahman, the totality of the universe alight with God-Consciousness. Hence the beautiful expression in the New Testament: "Let God be all in all (Panta hen Panta)" ~1 Corinthians 15:28. "All in All" means that the fullness of the cosmos is not only completely full, but doubly so because conscious of itself: All aware of All. The common sparrow has no little "i" trying to sing "better" than any other sparrow. The song that pours through her astonishment is the song of All singing to All through All. And that is how we humans were meant to sing, with the a...

A light flows from my center yet shines from somewhere   beyond "me." When I get used to that radiant blindness, it seems more like a garden. Then I hear a flute deep inside the silence and yearn to know who lives there, dancing in the moonlight. Write this on my tomb, friend: All he did was wonder. To enter the wedding of breathing out and in I open the gate of emptiness. If there is a Beloved, there must be a Lover. Write this on my tomb, friend: All he did was wonder why it takes an Other   to awaken Oneness. Grace is not an abstraction but a living touch   ignited by a glance,   an exhalation, a scent   of rose and evening rain. The Master may appear   before you in white robes, brown face and sandaled toes. But that is only an occasion for the Sun and Moon   to kiss and shimmer in your own chest. Write this on my tomb, friend: His deepest pleasure   was to drown in the gaze that spills from your eyes.