Uradiance

I offer this hymn for Shivaratri, which means "Night of Shiva," most sacred of the Yogic calender. This night celebrates regeneration out of darkness, through the union of Lord Shiva and the Goddess, consciousness and its beloved body. Devotees stay up all night chanting the divine name to purify the mind, the nervous system, and the earth.   Calling this place your Heart does not make the way clear. It is nearer than that, closer than our lips when they meet  like an arrow of wine striking the vigilance of a ruby. Every spark from this wound is a poem about our hidden fire.  Remain awake in jasmine-scented darkness, sleeplessly singing  Shiva's name, your very breath his paramour, the Goddess Shakti. Evaporate your blood into the night, chanting "Shivo'ham!"  Let this sound be a medicinal thorn to remove the deeper thorn  of wanting. Shakti's sigh alone cannot find its alphabet.    Jesus and Magdalene meet ...

Someone spilled the ancient jar of light. It can never be stored in the temple again.   Don't try to keep your master's teaching in a can. Bottled and sealed, even the freshest beans go limp. If the Dharma gets packaged in plastic and shelved at the ashram, you'd better check the expiration date; it has to say 'Now.' Someone spilled the ancient jar of light. It can never be stored in the temple again. The vitamins of God dissolve in silence, but they nourish your body in action. For every breath you take, give one to the poor. And who are the poor? Look around you. Everyone is poor. Someone spilled the ancient jar of light. It can never be stored in the temple again. Each pair of eyes is thirsty for your gaze. Your smile is nectar. 'Enough' has no meaning unless it is shared. Fresh, with no container. The Mother never gets hungry. Her breasts are busy with lips and milk. Someone...

  "The one who descends is the very one who ascends higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe." ~Ephesians 4:10 Sophia, the Wisdom of the heart, cannot be known by knowledge. She is known by the power of intuition, the ecstasy that stills your breath. She alone is the unfathomable source of healing. Isn't it time for you to burst like a spore and take root in Her? The glory of the heart swallows up the illusion of distance, exposing your intimacy with galaxies whose light is only now arriving as your body. The constellations, those animals of wild night, are your internal organs. Countless suns thread silken rays of love into the atoms of your flesh. Here is your miracle: the golden splendor descending from the stars is the very energy ascending from the womb of dark matter, nourished by your ancestors' bones, entangled in the sacred dance of mycelial loam. From star-beings to mushrooms, countless messengers illuminate you, weaving themselves in...

  I pray for the people of Ukraine. I pray for the people of Russia too. I hold the earth in a tear, suspended in the light of my chest wound. Seen with the eye of the heart, Putin is a desperate, isolated, crippled ego fighting for breath, up-rooted from every network of nourishment. I feel sorry for any Russian, or any American fascist like Trump, who admires Putin as a strong leader. Who gave Putin the right to invade Ukraine? Good question. But did we ask who gave Bush the right to invade Iraq? His war of lies killed half a million people and threw the whole Middle East into chaos. Did we ask who gave Obama the right to invade Libya, the most stable and wealthy nation in Africa, throwing the whole northern continent into chaos? Until we ask this question of ALL invaders, we are the pawns of international bankers and arms manufacturers. As long as we blame one nation and absolve another, we are serfs in the Kingdom of Fear, which is fueled by nationalism. Seeing t...

  You have a mission of green on a thirsty planet. Don't become a cynic. Your task is the grace of a fallen raindrop, an opening bud, a thrush at dawn. Be a fragrance in the breeze. Don't waste time becoming anyone but a Lover. Do beauty with your hands. Breathe peace. Give people hope by insisting that this moment is enough. These are simple words, friend, but they were born of many tears. Water color by my friend, Marney Ward, who illustrated the cover of my new book.

  Tonight I am telling you 10,000 secrets in a single word: Surrender.... All right, friend, now that all the others have put "surrender" in their scented box and run away to sell it at the Ashram of Perpetual Hope, I'll share the true secret... There was never any need to surrender. You were already given up the moment this Breath created you.   Now She returns to swim through your marrow like a dolphin in a wave of stars.   The earth bows down to press her mouth on the clear blue sky between your eyebrows. The sun gazes up into your face.  

Existence is grace. Breath is gratitude. When Jesus said, 'I have overcome the world,' he meant, 'I have surrendered.' The night is about to pour her swirling chalice of stars into your chest. There is no radiance, no joy not already bottled  in your tears. A raindrop shakes the earth and a ray of morning sun pierces the Winter sky, an annunciation to the virgin silence of your heart. O friend, just being aware is abundance. All you need to do is stop complaining and say thank you.

I petted Schrödinger's cat. But it was dead. Would it be dead if I never petted it? You cannot answer this question until you turn the particle of you heart into a wave. Breathe both cats, living and deceased. The iron Buddha in my garden, is it half covered with snow or half empty? The question doesn't even arise in silence. Nor does any other. Now answer this one. Did the race of reptilian shape-shifters that controls both political parties descend with the Anunnaki from an alien star-system, or did they arise from the hollow earth in the sporification of eight billion angry opinions about nothing? Discuss. Here is an article from Scientific American on the implications of Shrodinger's cat for quantum theory: LINK

  I once petted Shroedinger's cat. But it was dead. Did it die because I petted it? You will not answer my question or even care until you turn the particle of you heart into a wave.

  Overnight they collapse - facebook, twitter, instagram. Replaced by the next technology, making our cell phones and computers irrelevant, just as the walkman and boombox, the record player, the am-fm radio, and the typewriter attained holy obsolescence in a day and a night. The new social media requires no hand held, lap top, or electronic device at all. Neither does it require fiber-optic cables or satellites to create the illusion of an immaterial cyberspace. The new social media consists of micro-holographic quantum time crystals, scintillating out of the void. These infinitesimal holograms enter our bodies through the breath. We imprint them with our genetic signature, then breathe them out again. Others breathe us just as we breathe them. In three days, everyone on earth has inhaled the quantum signatures of all humanity. In the words of the Veda, "Vasudaiva kutumbakam: the world is one family." Thus we imprint each other. There is no independent self. As the Christian...

From the new book LINK

Well now I know what a "podcast" is because I was on one, talking about poetry and sharing some from my new book. These two guys, 'The Philosopher & the Monk" are such delightfully unpretentious down-to-earth wisemen from Long Island. They were so much fun to talk to!  

  First you fight the current. Then you drown. Then you float on the river like a husk, like a dropped petal. Then you sit on the bank and watch the river flow by. Sometimes it is a violent flood, sometimes a gentle murmur. Then you are the river. It moves down your spine from the mountain spring in your crown through the forests and meadows of your body to the deep cavern of your sacrum, where it soaks into the earth and nourishes seeds of 10,000 things. It is a river sparkling with infinitesimal stars. All distance is illusion. Worlds form and dissolve between your vertebrae. It is the river of bliss. Do not fight its terror and beauty. Drown, float, witness, mingle. The river is this breath.

With this book begins the saga of the Sackett family, taking us from the 16th century fen country of England, to watch Shakespeare perform in London, to pirate ships off the Carolina coast, to the far blue hills of the Great Smokies, over the plains of Missouri and on into Texas, Colorado, Arizona, all the way to the little pueblo town of Los Angeles, in a series of stories so well researched that you will learn much American history that was never in your textbooks: not only about lonely yet heroic cow punchers, but about the prehistory of the continent, about Mexico's old culture in these new "United States," about diverse Indian tribes, real, individualized, and un-stereotyped. These tales are not just "cowboy stories," and they are more than mere history. They pierce to the core of human nature, manhood, womanhood, what it means to be native, what it means to be a wanderer, what it means to be in exile, what it means to search for one's lost...

To me, Imbolc is such a powerful mystery of time because it is like the space between thoughts. If there's nothing I need to think about right now, then I just stop thinking. Start listening. Listen to the music of awakening seeds, the whisper of creation bubbling out of silence all around me. The wordless breath of the Creator is a subtle thunder, more healing than any thought I could possibly think in this moment.

My sister asked me to describe my "process" for writing. I had never thought I had one. But on thinking about it, I decided to share these words, which I will also share here... On this beautiful feast of Imbolc and Saint Brigid's Day, I am finally getting to reply to your thoughtful inquiry. It is hard to answer because I do not trust any process or formula for writers. Each must find their own way to the grail by entering the thickest, wildest, most pathless part of the forest. For me it would be a sacrilege to "discipline" myself to sit at a regular hour and make myself write, for that would mean I depended on my own will, and my own mind. But poems flow from the divine Otheress, and She taps your heart in unexpected moments, usually between waking and sleeping, which is the space of meditation. My poems, those that have any kind of energy at all, begin with the faintest impulse in the heart (not in the head) at the end of a meditation period, or i...

  Eve was in Adam before he yearned and unravelled Her. That tender rib just over the heart. The Beloved you most need, deeper inside you than a story. Perhaps, after all, your body. We all long to have sex with the Creator and give birth to galaxies whirling out of the chalice of our thirst. Every planet and pulsar, each fairy ringing ciliate of shroom spore, even the flavor and caress of tartarean flesh, spills from a tiny seed, and the seed is hollow. Dive into This. Now let your next breath be a milky piquant stem of fire springing out of the loam between your nipples. Photo: Discover Magazine