Uradiance: 10/1/22

Before You Sleep

Go to your chest

and become the softest sound.

Your inhalation? No,

the murmuring that was here

before anyone breathed

a Word of light,
bioluminescence of emptiness,
undulating in the fertile sea

of not yet, not yet.

Uncreated love

ceaselessly expanding

into this world of dust

because there is no

resistance in the void.

And you?

A gentle rippling

of distant stars in night water,

risen now in tidal waves

of silence, ravaging

the fragile effort of the mind

to know.

Just drown

in the grace of not seeking

and come home.

This utter failure to

touch bottom

is called "the heart."
Your Beloved is so intimate

there is no other,

ever waiting, ever longing

for you to plunge into yourself

like a dagger of absence,

a diamond blade that

hones what is

with the brilliance

of what is not.

For You, I cease.

For Me, you are whetted

by fire into nothing.

Yet we are both possessed

by hosts of the blessed

and the lost

like pollen

in a bursting flower.

See, hear, taste, touch.

Go to your chest.

Do not breathe.

If you understand this,

you are not here.

Photo by Kristy Thompson

Cookie

"It is not what goes into your mouth that defiles you,
but what comes out of it." ~Matt 15:11

Dear friend, I am Jesus,

and I have come to tell you

to eat.

Eat without shame.

Eat without listening

to experts,

the ones in your head.

Make peace with gluten.

Hug that little demon

peanut butter cup.

Be no longer afraid

to bake with

real butter.

Dunk a home-made

oatmeal raisin cookie,

no, no! Better yet,

a fresh-baked toll house

chocolate chip cookie

in a big glass

of cold milk filled

with the double digested cud

of green grass,

oats and sunbeams.

Just so, just so,

I pronounce all foods pure!

Why not ginger snaps

made with real molasses?

why not donuts in

steaming dark coffee?

I know that you can smell this.

I know that these words

like the odor of cornbread

will make you crave and eat

what you should not.

Why shouldn't you?

Where does 'should' come from?

If you were here to abstain,

your mother and father

would have abstained

from conceiving you.

Now make peace

with gluten.

With little demon Hershey kisses.

Fall in love with butter again.
Take, eat this cookie.
This is my body.
Savored as a prayer

in your mouth,

devoured with all your heart,

moist and chewy,

hot and round,

let it be a host

for the ravishing down-pour

of my love.

Woof

My breath is woven

out of your breath.

Your breath is woven

out of mine.

Strands of evanescent

pearl, each bead

a cluster of gazes

that have not yet

received their eyes.

The tapestry of stars,

a warp and woof

of seeing.

And you an undulation

of spider silk

from the pit of the belly

to the crown of the skull,

a filament of respiration

reeling in the moon.

Sacred kinesthesia,

braiding air

with light and song,

the gossamer

pull and release,

how you spin a body

from the ineffable loom

of stillness,

how you knit

your silence

into a garment of fire.

Mine out of yours,

yours of mine,

even God is woven

from our breath.

NASA photo, the Lagoon Nebula

Things Fall

My belly refuses to obey. My patriarchal tongue colonizes my whole body. I have other organs who are anarchists. They throw bombs at the officers of my sacred story. Sometimes my heart is a pot-still of Irish whisky. All I can trust is the mud between my naked toes. And listen to the whisper of my knees. I bow down before an old cedar, and give up self-improvement. There is no me left to feel like a victim. Only the messy sweetness of grace, the incalculable unity of chaos. It all comes together when I abandon trying. Things don't fall apart, they fall in place.

Photo: took this in the Carbon River Rain Forest, Winter, Mt. Rainier

Merge with your doubt.
Drown in bewilderment.
Though non-existent, past and future
are too heavy to bear.
But take heart.
Every atom of bones and trees,
stones in the path,
eyes of ornamental owls
guarding the gates of the
abandoned sanatorium,
are filled with empty sky.
At home in loss,
you too are weightless.
Be a golden mountain
dancing in the void.
Ever moved by the stillness
of a Mother's breath,
fall into the orbit of your song,
that old favorite called,
'I Don't Know!'

Photo by Jim Graham, my homeland, Chester County PA

Patanjáli Blues

A svelte and blissfully sun-tanned
yoga teacher taught me:
"Yoga means wholeness.

     If you want to be whole
          you must harmonize your mind,
               heart, breath, and body."

"That sounds like too much work," I said.

"What if I leave them as they are,
scattered across the linoleum,

and just hug the whole mess?

Wouldn't that be pretty much

the same yoga?"

She kicked me out of her studio.

So here I am, rambling

down the sidewalk,

practicing Coyote Asana

without even knowing how,

and mumbling my favorite

Jack Kerouac quote:

"Whether you're sitting

at the bar, or climbing

the Matterhorn, it's all

the same void, baby!"

Photo: Jack at the Kettle of Fish bar, East Village

Every Quark

Every quark of gristle
           sings to a star
     about some incomprehensible
           connection
between pain and beauty.
     Angels cock
             their heads, perplexed
and ever so sweetly
      troubled
             by the music
emitted from your nuclei.
      Something about your
               gravity and grief
gives them
       courage. They long
to clothe themselves in bone,
            the very stuff that
      weighs you down
to this mother
           of bodies,
      the planet pulsing
with silver hair, sweet grass,
               empty park
      benches and
               lonely faces
of dissolving frost
     on maple leaves.
               All Gods yearn
to fathom the
      opacity of your tears,
           and smother their
                brilliant souls
in dust.

Cistine Madonna Cherubs by Raphael

Thirst

Sometimes when I've poked my stick too much and muddied up the water, the best thing to do is absolutely nothing, silently, until the stream clears.

To attain perfect clarity by not interfering is also action. Waves of stillness. Words full of quiet. To dance like a mountain on a cloud. These are the signs of the Witness.

This morning I am called, not to improve my doing, but to deepen my Being. In Hebrew, the word shabbat literally means "stop!" Let my Sabbath nourish the earth.

Lie fallow, boldly decay, regenerate, take time. When I take time for time, I move in eternity. I hear ten thousand seeds of Spring singing in the silence of Samhain. Winter comes lovely like a bride, rummaging among my bones. Isis, Ishtar, Cybele, Anat, the Magdalene weeping at our tomb. Desolation is the field of the Mother.

Perhaps you hold great knowledge, great power. Perhaps you have become the "spiritual teacher." You no longer need the Beloved. You no longer need a morning and evening practice. You no longer need a lineage of wisdom to root you down in the ancient now.

But I do. I am a fool. I have dropped knowledge. I have dropped power. I thirst for the grace of the Beloved, who is deeper inside me than I am.

Pungency of the ruined gourd. Musk of the withered chrysanthemum. A dazed bee in a wild meadow turned gold, I scent fragrant nectar. Here is the secret, friend. The Beloved's grace is deeper than knowing, deeper than power, deeper inside than I am. It flows out of my heart, to seek my heart, to gather my heart, and guide my heart home.

Let my Sabbath nourish the earth.

The Mystical Bride

If She does not caress you

with your own inhalation,

or walk with you in the garden

between heartbeats,

how can you say that you have

ever really met the Goddess?

And how will you know when

She is here? Dear one,

your emptiness turns indigo,

fragrant as jasmine.

Your numb places overflow

with the nectar of yearning.

You no longer fear growing hollow,

or floating like a leaf

on the stream of night.

You do not fall asleep, you fall

into prayer, a kind of wedding,

a vow without words.

The bride wears your breath

as her luminous veil.

She presses on your brow

a throbbing pearl of wakefulness,

the kiss of solitude.

Instead of slumber, a waveless

flame glows in your body,

lit by love’s silence.

In the darkest hour

you cease to ask for light

because the midnight stillness

under your breastbone

is a maelstrom of stars.

You are present to yourself,

like silver in a moonbeam,

like sweetness in a mother’s milk.

And the dignity of this very breath,

how it gently places the soul

in each cell of your flesh,

is your Beloved’s secret name.

Exquisite photo by dear friend Aile Shebar

Minus (A Poem from 'Savor Eternity...')

I got drunk
on the gin
of subtraction.
From every creature
I deducted your name.
From your name
I subtracted my breath.
The remainder
was nectar.
Then I took away
the one who tasted it.
I think I may have subtracted
loss itself.
Now there is only
a fragrance of poppies,
a forest the color
of blood, the green
of parrot shouts,
the silver of glistening
toads, evocative
of death not by violence
but beauty.
I subtracted the veil
between worlds.
What remains is
the entangled chaos
of my astonishment.
Pay attention.
The Beloved is whispering,
“Loss will teach you
everything.”

Photo by Laurent Berthier

The Final Rose

In a place neither inside nor out,

a nounless silence of no thought,
not even a thought of silence,

the final rose is burning
its black hole through your retina,

pressing a turquoise pineal kiss

on the back of your skull.

The fragrance drifts through umber petals

the way a soul exits a crinkled body,

except that the soul is only
a description of itself,

but the scent of withered rose is real,

un-predicated on its name.

We say, "In the beginning,"

but this place is before the beginning.

We say, "was the Word,"

but why assume it was a noun?

"In the beginning," then, "was the Verb,"
neither of the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person.

Please, no pronouns either.

Perhaps there are no objects at all,

and the act of worlding is thing-less.
Perhaps the cosmos we can speak of

is only our thought about it,
every concept a shield,
the earth a blaze of sweet destroy

to cauterize our lips and singe
our lenses with wonder.

But what of Jesus, Mary,
the Virgin, the Lamb? Perhaps
they weary of their disembodied stains
on a cathedral window, fixed
in a catechism of glass.

They long to dissolve in the beams
that pass through them,
to pierce the eye and liquify the mind,
quickening our ancient glands
that once flicked out the world,
ineffable as a poison tongue.

They would have us forget their names
so that they might clothe their loving
in luminous verbs like "to fall,"

which is, in fact, how you arrived
in this place of the final rose,

where things, nouns, certainties

must perish in terrible fire.

You Know How

You know how to
succor the world.
It doesn't matter
whether you're a
woman or a man.
Each of you has
a mother within.
A moist mysterious
shadow spreads
on a veil of sepia,
umber, wheat,
mahogany.
The color of the cloth
doesn't matter.
You hear the cry
of yearning lips,
and yearn back.
Nameless, sweet,
your healing
swells, expressing
the milk inside.
It drips down.
Impossible to keep
this motherhood a secret.
We all need to drink
from each other.

Painting by Paul Cezanne

A Night At The Astral Ashram

Last night I dreamed that I was at an ashram, or a new age academy of some kind. Everyone was trying very hard to get enlightened. It was a busy place. We were entangled in gossip, spiritual competition, and the busy-ness of out-doing one another at "seva," service.

We were all rehearsing kindness - so that, presumably, when we got home we could try it on the rest of the world. Whenever you saw a sweet person coming down the path to be kind, you would of course smile. And they would smile back even harder. But inside, you were saying, "Uh oh, here she come again," or, "O God, deliver me from Mr. Nice."

No one ever got around to actually sitting quietly together, walking alone in the lovely forest, or going to satsang. Nor did anyone ever attend the Big Guy's darshan talks. I didn't even know who the Big Guy was, if there was one.

I tried very hard to be sweet, but no one liked me. Unintentionally, I offended almost everybody. With each attempt to do good, to soothe and comfort people, to advise them on their spiritual path, I simply interfered with what was none of my business. The women all thought I was coming on to them, the men all thought I was a conniving son of a bitch. So I tried even harder to act nice.

Maybe this dream was only a minute long. Or maybe it was a thousand lifetimes. But when I woke up this morning, I felt so glad that I was at home in my own bed, and not in the ashram. Through my dawning breath, from somewhere beyond thought, came a soft voice of intuition, whispering:

"The more your mind tries to please people,
the more you annoy them.
But if you are simply you,
your very presence will refresh them.
All this effort, all this talk
about serving humanity!
Take a sabbath from service.
Just radiate Being.

Ananda

Ananda: dedicated to fierce lovely Devi Katyayani
on the sixth day of Navratri.
We do not call the deep heart of meditation "contentment," but "bliss." And what Bhaktas mean by bliss cannot be understood by the intellect, or by comparing it to our relative states of mere happiness. Bliss is the energy that radiates through the void. It is not static passive stillness, but dynamic stillness, ever-expanding untrammeled stillness that churns with creative wonder, turning waves of silence into roaring photons of virtual energy. Bliss is the oceanic stillness that sweeps you away beyond the rim of the furthest star cluster. It is a clear empty blue sky that overflows, rains down the spine, rises from the hips to the top of the crown like a lightning bolt, soft and soundless as a garland of white roses. Yet the wild grace of ananda is no-thing at all. Ah, even less! Such an infinite paradox, such a union of opposites, is utterly astonishing. And this dumbfounded astonishment is bliss. It may begin as the inaudible Om hum, but it ends in a cry of Shiva! Shiva! Shiva! Durga Ma!