There is a love that needs no story, a love that needs no lover, a love that falls in love with Being. This love need not cling to any thing, because it is already our true nature. A love that nourishes All, because there is no Other. What is the sign of this love? An ever deepening silence of the heart. It is the mystery of the divine womb.
Pinturicchio, 'Madonna of Peace'
You don't need to be a rose-soft new-age angel to meditate. You don't need to sip liquefied kale or visit an ashram to tap the infinite Source. You don't need to be higher, purer, more enlightened, or sit in lotus posture. Here's the heresy of this blessing: there's no one "else" for you to be. The fundamental dis-ease that cripples this culture is our toxic compulsion to be someone better than we are.
Find the courage to be incomparable. You are not a fraction trying to reach One. You are One. Call off the search. The beginning and end of spiritual practice is to rest the mind in its own broken heart. Align with your jagged edges. Tune into your rough, unpolished, sparkling joy. But leave some room for the wrinkles and tears that define you. Be utterly You-nique.
Without the piercing singularity of your love-note, the symphony of creation could not resound. You'll never know how many trillions of creatures gather to the hum of your tuning-fork, the crystal of your self-forgiveness.
This earth doesn't need another Gandhi or Jesus - it needs You. Come, enjoy a new paradigm: enlightenment is more like falling than ascending, more like collapsing than getting it all together. Why cling to the raft of someone else’s teaching? Sink in your own wave, whose depth is perfect stillness.
I wish you the inestimable grace of Being who you already Are. I did not learn this from the gods. I learned it from the dogs.
Photo: my dearest friends, Emerson and Finn
Sadness of the waning moon.
She carries the weight of our light
into unfathomable absences.
We pretend
to love.
To love me, to love you.
But there is no other.
There is only love at rest
in the stillness that surrounds
all our desiring.
You have needed the beloved
for a long long time.
Now learn the mercy of the dark.
If this be too limitless, too vast,
learn the cry of an owl
in the sadness
of the waning moon.
Photo, barn owl, Britannica.com
You will be disappointed
in every guru
until you meet the one
inside.
Then what glows
from your hollow core
will reflect from the face
of every lost
and fallen stranger.
You'll get darshanfrom a little child,
the countenance of a withered rose,
the broken moon in a rainbow
of spilt motor oil,
a toothless woman
shrouded in a ragged quilt
gazing at the stars in her
empty coffee cup.Now let the molten gold
of your own ineffable grace
fill in the cracks
of the world.
* Kintsugi: the ancient Japanese art of repairing
broken pottery by using seams of melted gold.
Surrender has already happened.
"You" did not do it.
Before your first breath,
this enormous invisible flower
was blossoming, releasing
the miraculous pollen
of ordinary
things.
Just enjoy the fragrance.
Stop worrying about
"who"
surrenders, "who" fell
into this bottomless
ageless cup of sweetness.
Still falling, still falling
in every direction at once.
If Truth could be expressed
in words, in thoughts,
the earth would not be filled
with willows, herons, mist,
distant mountains,
Follow the
ones who leave
no footprints.
We who stop seeking
are anointed.
Let the next inhalation
be your teacher.
When you need
a prayer, an antiphon,
chant this:
"My chest always already open.
My chest
always already open."
I give you a solemn promise:
If you take the pathless way
a golden flower will softly
silently
explode in your body,
the very motion
of your heart's stillness.
How can I be sure?
I have tasted the honey.
I know where it is stored.
In your wound, my friend,
in your wound.
Stop thinking, and stop trying
not to
think.
To stop
thinking
and stop trying not to think
are exactly the same practice.
This is the valley of
Wu Wei.
It is green and beautiful.
Just watch.
Silt settles, problems vanish.
No need to touch
the surface or the depth.
The pond
clears all
by itself.
This we call, "Stop thinking."
Resting on
the bank,
listening to the music of your mind
like a mountain stream,
this we call, "Stop trying
not to think."
Just watch
the white
waters of silence
go over 10,000 stones,
singing and beautiful.
Photo: Took this on a hike at Mt. Tahoma (Rainier)
I did not come here
to get angry.
I did not come here
to be sad.
I did not come to carry
the bones of old stories in my skin.
I came to find a forest place,
the glade of moonlight
we only discover
when we're lost,
where animal guides gather
to dance,
and ice crystals sparkle
with the silent echo
of Spring flowers.
I came to fail in every endeavor
where I might have imagined
myself in control.
I came to feel the waves of joy
that swell from the grief ocean.
One chamber of my heart
is empty, the other full.
I came to hover
over the frailest boundary
until it disappears.
My map is the caesura
between breaths
where light hides in darkness
and my lover is waiting
to step from her veil.
There’s a hollow stem
sprouting out of my breastbone,
unfolding jasmine galaxies,
ten thousand petals,
so quietly.
Solstice art by Sue Wookey
"Above all things, love silence. Out of your silence will arise something that will draw you into deeper silence. If you practice this, inexpressible light will dawn upon you." ~St. Isaac of NinevahListen to silence. The silence of your listening is love. Attraction of a subject for an object, a lover for the beloved, is only the shadow of love. Before any subject or object arise, before Creator even speaks the Word, "Let there be light," pure love trembles in waves of the primal sea, the quantum vacuum.
The darkness of love is the color of voluptuous silence. Sink into this. To attain the light, you must ascend, but to embrace divine darkness, you need only fall. Give up the work of rising.
"Now the earth was formless and void" (Genesis 1:2). Be the formless fertility of emptiness. Be where light is born, a seed dropped into the mothering furrow. Let gravity be your prayer.
The Black Madonna dwells at the core of every proton in your flesh. Your physiology doesn't need to think in order to experience God. Prayer is no metaphysical work of the mind, but a chthonic sensation of the infinitesimal Ayin Soph in the heart of the electron.
This self-effulgent dot of no-thing is the same black whole that throbs at the core of the galaxy. Light emanates from every empty center, the quantum entanglement of quark and star. The total universe of information is stored in silence.
The womb of awakened silence releases a silken spore, a thread of grace that passes from the sacrum through each tear on the rosary of the spine. A subtle glistening root ignites the brain stem, illumining the cortex with arboreal fire.
Is your nervous system not the Tree of Life at the center of the garden? The Burning Bush that Moses saw in a cloud of Un-knowing? Let this radiant cilium, born from total surrender to the dark, dance through your backbone to the soft spot in your crown, raveling you up into the clustered galaxies.
Silence weaves the hollow of all that whirls, threads each mote of Mother Matter to a star. Silence in prayer, stillness in action, savored in deep meditation or walking through the December forest. Berries bursting in the void, wood and stone suffused with compassion, dreamless seeds awake in their loam, murmuring, "April, April." Nothing can ever die here.
Let distance dissolve in the splendor between your breaths, ever returning to the inner solstice where the sun is born, Winter after Winter, cradled in your chest. Didn't you not know that this is your labor of grace?
In the dark pause at the end of your exhalation, find the eternal moment where worlds are born. Center creation in a sparkling singularity, the crystal of your own divine night. Listen to the silence. The silence of your listening is love.
Photo: Spencer Butte, OR
Vast silence all around us, vast stillness, beauty, and peace. Why don't we see it? Because it is too near, too intimate. It is our very Being. So Christ was born on earth to remind us that every atom of our body is made out of Love.Painting: Father Joseph with the Infant Jesus, by Guido Reni
Buddha has never been anything but a lightning bolt over Bartlesville, Oklahoma, here and gone in an instant. A lightning bolt is Buddha. Buddha has never been anything but a stream of snowmelt cascading through misty cedars into the Nooksak Valley. A mountain brook is Buddha. Buddha has never been anything but wind sighing through a rook's nest above the lepers' cemetery at Madalene Hospital in Chichester. Cemetery wind is Buddha. Buddha has never been anything but a pebble in the path to the Orphanage of the Sisters of Mercy in Brooklyn. A pebble on your path is Buddha. Where were you going? Buddha has never been anything but the infinitesimal pause between exhalation and inhalation, a gift offered to a gift. Your breath is Buddha. Observe. See if the snow chooses whether to fall on a pine bough or a camellia blossom. Be choiceless. Choicelessness is Buddha.
Ink painting: "Five Crows in a Snowy Tree,' Kono Bairei, Minneapolis Institute of Art
Auto-arisen self-appearing hot mess in the empty mirror of wide-awake silence,
the boundless clarity of the glass and the dancing reflection upon it
are precisely the same One.
No choice to be made between stillness and action, consciousness and the world.
The void is a wounded pomegranate bursting with wet crimson seeds,
spilling it's offspring cosmos from abysmal darkness in waves of fire
woven from downy fluctuations in the vacuum, ripples of no-thing,
polynomial transcendental equations trying to balance themselves
within a boundless Zero.
Exasperated delightfully unsolvable broken symmetries of mathematical paradox
gush from emptiness as virtual photons, the universe ever already complete,
finished in a single ancient flash that embodies the clustered galaxies not yet
born.
An explosion soft as the midnight peony blossoming in your garden,
perceived through its fragrance in a dream: what shall you call this flower
full of stars that appeared in the diamond clarity of your own consciousness
several hundred billion years ago?
You call it “God” because you do not remember it; but when you remember,
tongue-tied with wonder, you drown in the fiery silence beyond names.
It cannot be remembered. It is too intimate. It is your Self.
And every distraction that pulls you away from this primordial jewel
is a tremor of it, a facet of its own unfathomable glory.
There is no distraction from God that is not God,
so why not simply rest in chaos, just as it is?
Why make distinctions between seeking and arriving,
the Spiritual Master and the infant newborn in a pile of rubble?
As for those who still insist on joining the resistance, there is nothing to
resist.
There is only the Heart, ceaselessly beaten and broken over fallen shards
in the mirror of its own compassion.
LINK to hear this poem read aloud. NASA photo: cosmic rose, the Rosetta Nebula
On my back porchat the new moon in DecemberBuddha celebrates the birthday of Jesus.On my back porchat the full moon in MayJesus celebrates the birthday of Buddha.Sure they are “one,” more or less,but not the same.They love to compete in poetry slams.They keep the rivalry positive,giving each other compliments like,“Damn that’s good! But mine is better.”They know its all for fun,because every word of scripture is an eggwith something stirring inside that wantsto break the shell and emergeas a flame of silence.Between the seasons,during ordinary timeafter one holy day and before another,they hitchhike to Kansasand meet on the outskirts of Topeka,truth trampsslamming each other with versesfrom the Lost Revelation of the Bi-Polar Harlequin."I changed water to Ayahuaskamade from celestial poppy starsand drank all seven barrels.""My mind is a neon bubble of no-thing,so don’t get wasted on martyrdom.""Moderation will get you nowhere.""Nothing wrong with a clean shave, Rabbi.""What's with the belly, Tattagatha?""The Milky Way is my frisbee.""I churned God's anger into ghee.""I remember more lives than sand grainsin your desert of self-flagellation.""All the information in the universeis one weird quark of my hemoglobin.""The sea turtle with the elephant on its backcarrying the world in his tusksswims in the ocean of my emptiness.""Yeah well I have ten thousand armsbearing swords of un-knowing,ten thousand eyes gazingthrough wounded black holes,ten thousand mouths all shouting Neti Neti."Finally, like all truth tramps, they get hungry,throw their arms around each other’s shoulders,and swagger down to Happy Jack's Diner,where they bang on the counter, laughingout of control and shouting,"See that apple pie? We want the whole thing!"Happy Jack's mother is a Mexican named Maria.She silences them with a smile."I know, boys," she says, "I know how it is,”then gathers their lips to her soft brown breastsand suckles them with unspeakable grace.
Photo: my back porch Buddha
Your presence
fills me, Friend.
It is the bridge
deep in my heart
leading me back
to myself.
Your presence is
the rainbow rising
out my aloneness,
spanning the sky
between breaths.
Perhaps I remember
your name
down in the seed,
before it becomes
a whisper.
Perhaps I merely
recall your face,
then repose
in your formless glow.
Or perhaps I hear
the ring of Being
in the bell
of my emptiness.
Friend,
your presence
fills me.
