Uradiance

It doesn't matter how many of your planets are in retrograde. Who cares whether your sun, moon and pole star crash into each other, annihilating time, pulverizing your diamond destiny into the eye opening emptiness of now? So what if your constellations are in rut, entangling their horns and talons in mortal combat? Let the Lion and Bear, the Ram and Archer come down at dawn to drink from the pool of silence between your heartbeats. You are not this riot of stars. You are the largesse of immemorial darkness through which they wheel and clash, stagger back, and wander on. Photo: NASA/SOPHIA/Lynette Cook

If you're tired of who you have been, just be who you are. But don't try to become who you will be, or you'll be right back where you were. At each bend in the road, meet yourself as a perfect stranger. Bump into You at every corner, astounded by the beauty of your face. Never throw mud at the mirror of the world. True friends don't just frolic on each other's shore, sticking their toes in. After all, each dissolving bubble of foam is another universe. The sparkling music of creation dances on an ocean of silence. True friends take off all their clothes, dive in with their whole body, and drown in ancient waves of grace.

Agé quod agis. This was the favorite teaching of St. Ignatius. But I learned it from my cat. "Do what you are doing." Amazing how many of us do not choose to live the very life we are living, especially since this is the life we chose before we were born. Yet more amazing how much stress dissolves, how smoothly life flows, when we agree to live the life we chose. Only then do we begin to blossom, transform, and discover the vast energy waiting to grace our eyes, our fingers, our breath, our footsteps. There is only one possible life for each of us: the one we are living. Yet we resist almost every moment of it, preferring to be somewhere else. We would rather conform to an "ideal" preached by saviors, prophets, life-coaches, self-help books, media stars. We want to be like them, when the highest good is to be like ourselves. Don't assume that surrendering to the current of your own life is passive and spineless. In truth, it is Radiance, the unimpeded vibration...

My home is suspended in mandalas of dew, spider webs at every window, weaving corners of rooms and mother's Chippendale to the bushes and late summer flowers, bundling up slumbering daughters like stunned bugs into maple leaves at the edge of the forest, calling us on silk pathways of radiant return to the rooted portals where elves and butterflies enter the world. Who is awake? Who is not still woven into this realm of dreams?

Without even moving its lips t he baby murmurs, "Ma ma, ma ma, ma ma," then "La la, la la, la la," so effortlessly, so playfully! Does the baby simply cry ma ma, or is this a technique of meditation with the mantra, Amma, a name of the Goddess? Does the baby merely chortle la la la, or is this the practice of ziqr, repeating the name of Allah? What's the difference? Whether you're a bhakta or jnani, you are an infant resting on your mother's breast. A baby needs no instruction, because a baby is filled with grace-milk. The infant already floats on the ocean of music between sound and silence, between breathing out and in, between waking and dreamless sleep. What is the difference between the bliss of Bhakti and the technique of Vedanta? Only a pure translucent thread of awareness. But our egoic mind loves to entangle itself in distinctions. We can't wait to argue about devotion vs. non-duality, and separate the bliss of surrender from the form...

  We've been in love before. This kind of passion precedes breathing. Where inhalation begins and every sigh comes home, we were united prior to the egg. This is where motherhood was born. Before there was earth and rain we childed the father from seedlessness. Beautiful one, what more can I say? When you gaze at me, I am created. We were lovers before anyone whispered, "Let there be light." When darkness shattered into stars and the pulse of your wound became a heart, we taught God to sing. Our touching creates His hand.

Don't try not to try. Effort is a faint breath dismantling the chrysanthemum, whirling the slivers away to stem nakedness,  hollow as gold. What sort of practice is that? Who was trying? The bright doomed petals? The September breeze? Let your effort flower, fail and fall into laughter and tears, a compost of calamities where you might discover priceless ancient jewels of imperfection sprouting from your grandmother's bones. The way morning glories entangle a gravestone. The way an abandoned quarry becomes the rookery of a thousand herons. Ask a mushroom why it grows in the dark. Use grief mulch for orchids of joy. Let chaos sting you awake and decay caress you with mycelium fingers of unanticipated beauty. Dance in the ruins of your discipline. Don't try not to try.   Photo by Steve Axford