Uradiance

   If you listen carefully, but don't try too hard, you can hear the entire Rig Veda in the burbs and giggles and farts of a baby. It has no meaning. It's just music. As soon as you impose 'meaning' on the music of creation, the ocean of matter solidifies. You turn the verb of God into a noun. Connections and entanglements become 'things.' Then we no longer hear the song because it is smothered with ideas. The whorl of the whirled congeals like dead blood into a crust of concepts. It becomes intellectual property, the territory of the mind. The sacred chaos of our formless beauty, which is the beauty of each human form just it is, gets divided into races, tribes, nations, group identities rather than unique persons. Then wars begin. But it's going to be all right. Because, eventually, we all die. We return to the loam, dead landlords, fuel for mushrooms. We are fungus again, singing without words, and listening to the stars.

        Even if I possessed the most precious diamond mined from the soil, or the wealth of a billionaire, I would gladly give them up for the soft light, the gentle light, that You have awakened in my heart. If I possessed power over all the governments of the world, I would gladly surrender it for the soft light, the gentle light, that You have awakened in my heart. If I possessed complete knowledge of the planetary spheres, the constellations of the zodiac, the secrets of the past, the vision of the future, I would gladly let it go, to make room for this ineffable and incomprehensible light. If I possessed the wisdom of all scriptures, East and West, and committed the Vedas, the Qu'ran, the Torah to impeccable memory, I would gladly forget them for your soft and gentle radiance. What is the sun or all the clustered galaxies compared to the fragrance of the Hridaya, that blossoms in the wild and secret darkness between my exhalation and inhalation? N...

  It's not complicated. It's very simple. This is the time for us all to rest in the Being that is deeper than thought, deeper than any name, label, image or picture in the mind. Even if just for a few minutes a day. This Being has no opposite. This Being is the end of conflict, whose nature is peace. This Being is not "a" being, but Being itself. And this is who you really are. When you spend a little while resting in Being - not doing it, or thinking it, for Being is prior to any thought or action - then you create a magnetic yearning in every atom of the earth, every star in the galaxy, a yearning to follow you there, to feel your unity, your fullness, your peace which surpasses understanding. This may seems like no-thing, but No does not exist there. There is only Yes. This only happens now, never in the future. Let it happen, the journey into Being. A journey greater than ten thousand miles, yet nearer than you are to yourself. The journey of a single breath.   P...

  Don't try to love yourself. That's asking a lot. A lot from One hurting for the warmth of an Other. Mists, prairies, waves. Nature wants to enfold you. Who commanded you to love? I say, don't try. Better to feel the throb in a single cell than the numbness in the marrow between stars. Better to taste your wound, digest it like the pièce de résistance, than struggle to rise above. That effort only divides you, doubling your sentence of lashes. "Love yourself" is a very hard commandment, hardly the healing you need. Just rest in the unspeakable care that already covers you with a gesture of forgiveness that has nothing to do with your will to perform it. Honor the graceful mistake that ended in this disaster, the bruise concealed, the holy incompetence of a wandering mind, the pilgrimage of distractions, the love who cannot find her way home. Honor the ache. Little numbers are best. Not more than 9 in a ci...

  In the sacrificial fire of the present moment, everything is burnt up. The past is consumed. Awareness is purified to prepare for what is always new. If we offer everything in this sacrifice, it sounds like emptiness, but in fact this offering brings wholeness. There is a paradoxical relationship between wholeness and sacrifice, fullness and renunciation. We attain complete wholeness only when we sacrifice all.  True renunciation does not mean giving up one thing for another. It does not mean giving all your money to the ashram, in order to receive the Guru's blessing. It does not mean exchanging your wardrobe for the white robe of a monk. True renunciation does not purchase the pure with the impure, the spiritual with the worldly. All that is just doing business with God, the sign of immature faith. True renunciation offers the entire cosmos into the fire, including the mind of the one who offers. It's a fire-sale. Everything must go. No-thing remains. And now in the very s...

  Chickadee drippings on green cabbage stone, vinegar fog so cold to the bone,   vintage poured from daffodils,   "Slainte!" to wind-drizzled hills.   Raise a tulip cup, toast the plum bound in its bud, still scentless and dumb.   Batter the cherry, the loam-loaf knead, sweetened with drops of meadow mead.   Leavened by what makes peepers sing, dollop your eyes on the littlest thing. Feasting on crumbs, keep walking alone. Note: "Slainte," pronounced "slan-cha," is the ancient Irish toast.

  The cosmos explodes from your eyeballs. Beauty arises within, then pours into what is seen. But your life is too feverish. Why must you think so much and invent other worlds? The small green patch at your feet is Shivaloka, the center of the labyrinth, the holy thorn that un-knits all entanglement. Only here is there no mind. Plunge your sacrum into black loam, and thrust your crown into the cobalt void, igniting stars with your diamond fontanelle. The Goddess wields your spine like an ivory scepter.  She uses the flame of your body to illuminate all bodies. Some say everything happens for a reason. I say nothing happens for a reason. Milkweed ripens, snaps and billows from its pod, spilling countless bewildered selves. Be-wilder. Ebullient chaos is the nature of bliss. Why not become a peacock feather in Tara's fingers, brushing the forehead of every stranger with the shakti of your searing glance?   Like silk is matter spun, but who is the spinner? Don't try to under...

We can never un-knot our green entanglement. Spiritual discernment does not mean judging one person as good, another as evil. Each person is both. Nature hides her roses among thorns, and sweet fruit under bitter husk. If you grasp a stem of Devil's Claw in the forest, your palm will be useless and inflamed for days, shot by a thousand microscopic darts, shaped like serrated arrow-heads. But native people knew they could make healing tea from her roots. So if we gaze with discernment into the most broken and vicious human being, we can see the soul, even our own soul, seeping out of the wound.                                                                    ...

 "Let Jesus be your breath." ~St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain Let Jesus be your breath; He is the Door that is always already open. The frame may have a shape, but the passageway is empty. Let Rama be your breath. The arrow floats back to the bow. That is how true warriors win before the battle begins. Let Allah be your breath. Hu dissolves sugar into sweetness. But the sweetness is already here, before the sugar oozes from the broken stem. Let the Goddess Kundalini be your breath, turning your midnight nerves to silent lightning. At dawn, the sound in your chest is a forest full of exultation about nest-building. The fierce blossom in your body may appear as a reflection on the mirror of the world, spinning with fearsome beauty and chaos. But the stem leads inward. The golden flower is a path of drowning, petal upon petal, self within self. No distance, no journey. This honey bee can't fly, his feet so weighty with star-clustered pollen. Yet he wil...

  Times like these make me glad  that of my twenty six thousand genes 65% are exactly the same as the genes in a banana. 70% are exactly the same as the genes in a fruit fly. The banana blackens with sugary bruises. The sacrament turns starch into glucose. Entropy is grace. The fruit fly is happy. We are all food. Photo: a mighty fruit fly, Discover Magazine

  Grief is a place without words. Let's all meet here where myriad branches, fragrant blossoms, fruits both sweet and bitter spring from the hollow of a tiny seed, a seed that is planted in darkness deeper than prayer, deeper than breath can go. Friend, we are the flowers and we are the mud. Let's all meet here.  

In my quest for the most just and beautiful political system, I have consulted both the Left and the Right, the elites of each party, and the answer is clear: Goddess-Intoxicated Anarchy. Both corporate oligarchy and state socialism are over. I would rather drown in the un-picked blossom than sell the honey. I would rather kindle a tiny flame in my own chest than claim entitlement to the light of a trillion stars. The bio-region replaces the nation-state, because nature draws no straight lines or right angles: her borders are rolling hills and river valleys. The local transcends the federal, the sustainable out-performs the wasteful, the small rejoices over the big, and all is green. But renewable energy cannot be controlled or distributed by bureaucrats. It must be discovered again and again each morning in the stillness of the heart.    Congress meets for one day every month, gathered in silence around a forest pool, reflecting the full moon. The only sound is a fresh spr...

To be perfect is never enough. To be is enough.   You're already there when you're nowhere else.   The luna moth lives a few days, at most, but in her  chrysalis the wings   beat 13 billion  years  through an ocean  of stone   just to breathe this green secret of midnight to me.     Photo from Orilla News

  The scentless nectar in the rose, The hollow of the heart that knows, The emptiness inside the drum Where rhythms of the dance come from, The choice of what note not to play, The space around a star, The yearning silence that would say 'Beloved' were there any way To speak of who You are.

"May the forever youthful Krishna, the supreme lover of our lives, constantly shine in our hearts through His sparkling eyes which are laden with love, the refuge of ineffable irresistible beauty, newly fresh each single day and captivating every instant." ~Sri Krishna Kasrnamrita, Sloka 13  The deepest meditation is to Be, and simply gaze into this Being.   If such simplicity is not possible, then just breathe and gaze into your breath, until the stream of exhalation carries you to the ocean of this Being.   And if the miracle of this breath is not enough, then listen to the Name of God singing silently through your inhalation, susúrrus of a gentle wave among a trillion sandy stars on the shores of wonder.   Ebb into stillness, so astonished you do not exist. Let God gaze into God. Be nothing but this gaze.

  The only thing we can be sure of is that we will never find what we are searching for. Why? Because we are searching for that contentment which brings an end to the search. And as long as we are searching, we suffer the craving to become what we are not.   Our very search is what Buddha called Dukkha, usually translated as "suffering." But Dukkha is not abject pain. It is something more subtle and insidious: a restlessness of mind, an itch in the neurons, a brain feverish with wanting. And this nervous tension hides behind every spiritual search. Our true goal is not to find anything, but to dissolve the gnawing, the craving to become something else. Where is "else"? Else does not exist. Else has no being. Only when we dissolve this craving can we awaken to what actually Is. Only then can our ceaseless becoming flower as Being. This flowering requires the courage to rest in hopelessness. Have you noticed? When you fail, or lose, or come to the end of a relationshi...

  Listening is peace. Listen to the most distant sound you can hear. A seal barking from a wild rocky island across the water. Now the rustle of a nest-building robin in the bush by your window. Listen to the bells of the red winged black bird in the rushes by the stream, and the silence between them. Now you can hear the stream. You can hear the moon in daylight. Listening is peace. Cast the blessing of gratitude across vast spaces just by listening, which is prayer. And as if it were a song, listen to your breath, flowing in, flowing out. The stars will teach you your name. And you will hear the ancient story of the present moment, filled with the clamor of shields and spears, the clash of wings, the bronze promise of heavy-laden ships on the blue horizon, the flaring and dying out of suns, in the atoms your body. Cast the blessing of gratitude across vast spaces just by listening. Listening is peace. Mt. Rainier, by Erick Ramirez

  There are 10,000      doorways to the temple           of the Goddess. All of them           are in your body.           For one it is this      fire in the loins. For one it is the press           of wet moss      on the bottom of a naked foot.      For you, perhaps,           the full moon perishing in                her emptiness. For me, this breath,           a diamond knife      held just above the heart, and falling           soft as snow. She is the mother of wounds! Photo by Bahman Farsad

When you risk being fully kneaded, beaten and pressed into a breath, a heartbeat, you dissolve as pure sensation. You don't need to believe in anything, because you taste Aphrodite's nipple in a wild blackberry plucked on a forest trail. You attain satori through the fragrance of honeysuckle, the sound of a raindrop, the accidental brush of my shoulder on yours, the memory of ancient light from the farthest star, which is this very atom in your hand. O traveler, isn't it time to arrive? Christ didn't say to the hungry, "This is my soul." He said, "take, eat, this is my body." Brown fingers ply the corn flour into a tortilla. Gravity thickens and folds the golden distance into our galaxy of swirling selves. Every crumb has the flavor of un-created radiance. Don't worry about your evanescence. Just savor the essential oil. Photo: Hands kneading dough by Renee B...

I will never tell you what to eat. I will never tell you how to vote. I will never tell you which sadhana, which spiritual path, to follow. That is your business, the gift of your own free will. I will simply encourage you to polish the jewel of your heart with this breath, so that your true nature may irradiate the earth, illuminate the stars, and tenderly enfold the embryonic galaxies just now forming in the womb of your holy darkness. Om Satyam Shivam Sundaram. You are boundless Being. You are Peace. You are the Beauty that pervades creation. Photo by Laurent Berthier

In a chthonic forest of neurons there's a well. You have to be homeless to find it. What you drink there will be darkness like wine, but sweeter, stronger. Relentless moths will batter your eyelids, your ears, your tongue with luna-green and sapphire wings until they enter the soul through your shadow transporting into ancestral dreams their seven billion brilliant silver eggs kything and calling to you like anguished angels, "O fall down, fall down this well! "For all of us who cannot fall, you must fall down this well into your flesh and drown.... That is the only way you will ever touch the stars.”