Uradiance

  You have a deep green mission on a thirsty planet : to invoke the robin by listening in the dark. At 3 A.M., let your inhalation be the fragrance of honeysuckle on a ragged breeze. Ransack the meadow, then surrender to unscented night.   Breathe through your forehead. Smell the stars. You have another eye, like a gash in your lung, that sees our shadows as golden beams. You have an ear in your belly that hears our weeping as oceanic moonlight.   You’ve been a marmot lacerated by the hunter’s trap, curled in deep snow, warmed by crimson seepage of your essence through fur. You’ve been the chafe of sand-grains in a shell grown lovely through silence, solidified into black pearl.   There was blood on the sheaf, and then on the floor. Why let your trauma turn to stone? Healing comes from the energy of the wound itself, not from the story of how it happened. Don't waste time being anyone but a Lover.   ...

  In the abandoned barn a forgotten wind chime rung by the wandering breeze ever so quietly, a silence just before and just after. If you cannot taste the Great Disappointment, how can you savor the Great Liberation? The Great Disappointment  is knowing that this  is all there is. The Great Liberation  is knowing that this  is all there is. The silence just before and just after.

We met on the endless ride into stillness, seated on the same donkey, every atom of my flesh an oasis, every atom of yours a well. When we gazed at each other, we could not speak, because our mouths were filled with one sky. Still our hearts broke with that sound, the scratch of brittle leaves against the prison window. When the breeze blew out of the East, how those iron bars rang with sweet songs of exile! If we did not hone our loins with stabbing tears of ancient friendship, what beauty could seep from our jagged bones, like the wine Christ served at the wedding? Nothing caused this radiance between our ribs, we simply gave up trying to arrive. Yet beauty is more lovely half-veiled, seen by one whose eyes have been polished by waiting. You danced at the edge of a meadow near Aleppo in rags of moonlight, frog song, and blackberries. These were but appearances, I know, for we are a broken mala whose scatter...

  I am grateful for my skin. Though it is edgeless and, at the farthest fractal of its holobodygram, merely blinding diamond consciousness, with neither form nor color, still, I am grateful for my flesh in all its hues, roseate, brown, wheaten, peach, mahogany, crow's feet and frown lines.   I am grateful for my lymph nodes, sinews and fat, for bonefulls of dark energy and their marrowy burrows which shall be the feast of earthworms and larvae. I am grateful that my plasma will coagulate into the crème brulee of magots.   I am grateful for the live volcano of my basal ganglia, for the reptilian gangsters who dwell in my hippocampus, for the neuroplastic salamanders of my intuition flicking out their twin sulfuric tongues, for axons and dendrites copulating in my caves of fire.   I am especially grateful for my crevices and pits: Romanesque intestinal corridors, the pagan granaries of my belly, my windpip...

  When your mother lives in the street and sleeps on the sidewalk in front of your brownstone, you need many laws to keep you safe. They all say the same thing, "Stay away." But when you invite her inside, you recognize, indeed, she is your mother, the one who brings this breath. She sits down by the fireplace where your grief is burning and you give her something warm to sip from the bowl in your chest you've carefully kept from too much beating. You notice, indeed, there are many cracks in it now. And you remember, it was she who gave you this bowl, just as her mother gave it to her. Then you discover that only one law is required, the one that says to every stranger, "Welcome home."

The journey is over at this end of the rainbow. The colors of the garden all exist in the prism of a hollow seed. The answer is the silence where the question never arises. The world appears as I appear to myself. This is response ability. Between pistil and stamen, a sweetness; between "I" and "Thou," some kind of pollen so gold and soft it melts all into one, then back into two. This honey thickens before the flower has even sprouted. Where was it brewed? In my body, where breath kissed breath. Knowing this could bring the bees home.   Nothing caused the radiance in my chest. I simply gave up trying to arrive. Now I contain the cosmos like a feather holding up a cloud. Breaths cannot be counted, each inhalation is the last.   For the rest of the day, a magical inebriation keeps me unborn. No effort required. The discipline is simply my agreement to be nowhere else. Is there a place called Else?   It must be here, at 3 A.M., under the hunter...

No one teaches yoga to a flower. Learn bending from her stem, the supple power of green no hurricane can crush. Breathe from the seed.   Without a sequence or routine, your body is a river of postures flowing toward the ocean of repose. The zephyr of this breath rests like a feather on your belly.   After so many years of practice, can you give up formal poses and just move to the rhythm of begonias in October?   Rooted as a weathered oak, can you sway with seasons of in-pouring and out-pouring, ligaments softening in the void, a starry wheel rolling out of your chest, the axis of the galaxy poised between your nipples?   Can you dance with the Beloved, even when you are alone, your backbone Kali’s wand, your pelvis her boat, laden with its cargo of moonbeams, and let a serpent pierce your heart?   The mind does not survive her thunderbolt of silence. All that remains is the flesh. You wander i...

Everybody is a spiritual teacher, a life coach, except me. They give workshops, I just mutter to the sun. They teach you there is no teacher, and nothing to learn. No practice, no path, no lineage, no master. Just the workshop, $300. Petals from a wind-blown rose, they drift in their own delightful fragrance. I am the naked stem, not even green. The scentless sap of this breath connects me to the root, and the root leads to a tiny seed. What a fool I am, hunkering down into the brown earth, naked and groundless. Devotion in the dark. I charge no fee for these murmurings: Petals blow away. The root of the Guru remains. The seed is God. You are the berry.   Painting: Erica P. Johnson

Don't tell me about the end of the world. Tell me about the beginning of the world. A thousand colors of sky curled up in a raindrop, your wings in a tear. Next Summer's light on a brittle twig, wrapped in a gray cocoon. Self-healing fur in a mossy burrow. The blue egg waiting in a mother-swirl of sticks, She also the shaper of galaxies. Don't tell me how it ends. Tell me how it begins. How this breath is given, because you surrendered that one.   Photograph by Scott Elliot, an Autumn meadow near Mt. Rainier

Jesus said, "You can't put new wine in old skins." Because, as the new wine ferments and expands, it bursts the wine skin. So it is with our rage. Rage is the wine of Presence trapped in the mind of the past. Rage is a vast heart bound by old concepts. The zygies, or paired opposites, of yesterday's ideology - male/female, blackness/whiteness, East/West, Body/Soul, Socialist/Capitalist - don't work anymore. They only feed conflict. They are the archons that keep the spirit in bondage. It is like trying to carry the ocean in a little measuring cup. You have to smash the cup and dive in with your whole body, stripped naked of old stories. When our living rage bursts free from the bondage of yesterday's mind, it transforms into a completely different quality of energy. No longer anger, but love, it is the very same energy in a new vibration, unshackled from concepts. This energy is sacred fire that rises from the heart, consuming all with beauty, a fire that crea...

That Master was a Fool who said, 'I am not this body.' I Am this body and what is beyond it. I Am this body and the cosmos, its glow. I am this body and the womb who bears me. I am this body and the seed who ignites me. My soul is loam, my sorrow rain, my sexual longing the sun. My breath is the vast blue stillness that watches me dance. I am the golden beams that shower my bones with muscle. I am the night infusing my atoms of marrow and fat. My brain I am, my tears I am, my belly, my buttocks I am. My foot I am, taking responsibility for the footprint among the ferns and cedars of unborn childhood. I am the food and the excrement, the salty God-ocean in a sperm, the galaxy of numberless worlds in the pupil of my eye, I am the herd of caribou wandering through the desolate winter of a teardrop. I am the swan of Hamsa settling on the membrane of a memory in the lobe of my cerebrum that traps moonbeams in dew. I am the eye of the tiger w...

It is important to say that the sun does not caress this mossy stone without delight, and the breeze does not ripple a pond in the meadow without rapture. All night in the fern forest, trillium shine. They see through eyes more ancient than ours, and not without a tear. At first light, petals of magnolia, filled with rain, fall and bruise themselves not without that peculiar sorrow which is the soul of time. Before I leave this place it is important to say that I have heard the voice of the raven, wise as the silence that was already here when God shouted, "Light!" I have seen the whole blue curve of the cosmos in a robin’s egg. I want you to marvel at the grace of the small, the yearning in an apple bud, the pebble's presence. I want you to hear every creature cry, “I am patience in a stone, ardor in a peony, the whisper of grief in a meadow of scattered bones. We are from the stars and they are not cold. Loam is alive with all our relations. Mitakwe Oyasin! And yes, the...

I finally got honest to God. I said, "Everybody's either begging or selling something: what's your angle?" God said, "I'm begging for your next breath. And I'm offering a deal: Give me back the sound of rain. Give me the touch of golden fur. Give me the tweet of the flycatcher, the blue sky in the chalice of a morning glory. Give me the fragrance of compost when April finally arrives with her chorus of worms. Give me the scent that drives you maddest, the memory of her hair, or the brackish sea wind luring you back to the sandy shore. Give me the way the stars appeared when you climbed like a silver goat into their jagged emptiness. The payment I'm asking is every sensation and its echo in the grail cells of your body. Let them be my flesh too. Offer it all, then become as hollow as an orchid's stem. In return, I'll pour my breath back into your heart, a diamond stream of uncreated stars. Then you will know your Name." Art by Elena Kotlia...

We are not two-story beings, with a ground floor and an upper story. We live on the ground floor of this body and it is the only story. Notice where the heart is. The heart is in the center of the body. The heart is not on top of the body or above the body, but at the center. When the mind rests in the heart, there is no need to conceive of any other story. There is no above or below: only the radiance of sat-chit-ananda, transcendent being, awareness, bliss, immanent in each particle of the body. And this radiance we call God, yet God's glory shines from the sacred heart of your flesh. The glory of God incarnate has no boundaries. The glory of God incarnate, as You, irradiates other hearts, pervades trees, pebbles, earthworms, mountain, sky, moon and stars. This glory is the light of the sun, yet it rises in your chest. Every sparrow know this and sings about it. Your inner radiance has no edges. You are a cosmic being. You are dust in a sunbeam. You fill the space beyond the far...

“You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you can never learn from schoolmasters.” ~St. Bernard of Clairvaux Don't veer from the razor's edge. The grit of your bondage is the gravel path to liberation. Be instantly enlightened through whatever you deeply observe. In the bond of each sensation, be the unbounded witness. The merest soundsmelltouchtasteglitterblink is your Guru's countenance. Whatever jaggedness of space or shrapnel of time arises before you this instant is the Mandala of Supreme Awakening. Bow down your nose, iris, fingertip, tongue. Eternity is over, you're ready for a moment on earth. Through a dewdrop on a spider's web, enter the temple of intergalactic diamond emptiness. Pass through frog croak, wand of fading lavender, Autumn musk of deflated tomato in the ruined garden. The portal to the miraculous is a toadstool. Your atoms ever-perishing, breath, marrow, brain cells ever-pe...

  There's a temple inside emptiness, a space within space where darkness hides her secret wealth of light. That is where the world comes from, and many other things too beautiful for the world, until we imagine them in ourselves.   I know, I know, there is only One, but God loves reflections. Within the Within is a mirror, where She looks into herself, and this is not vanity but amazement. That gaze is a river of laughter and tears, an opening of countless mouths to sing the name of hidden splendor. When you are very quiet, you can return to that clear glass, and see for yourself.   In that mirror you and I first met. Unborn, we touched, and I think the green earth tumbled from our burning fingers. For the vacuum is not empty. The void is a ripe pomegranate, gushing bittersweet red gems, and m idnight a cup for the elixir of stars . Our own bodies fermented in their ancient distances.   Whatever you suffer is a womb. Enter it more...