Uradiance

My words accompanied by the art of Rashani Réa

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 ...

  You're not here       to save the world.            You're here to discover                 that you Are the world. You are compassion.      You are perfect healing.            In you the mountains                 are lighter than the sky. Don't try to believe.       Just fall in love            with yourself in every                 pair of eyes. Now take a blessed breath       of the newborn light            that is never even one      ...

  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

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, the glory of dust.  

Rest in the Motherhood of silence. Give birth to the light in your heart. Let your breath be Christ.

Why must you expand when you could delight in an atom? A photon of your laughter encircles the sun. The globe of one limpid tear mirrors a thousand galaxies. You are everything, but that isn't enough until you fit into this breath. No dilation without contraction. Howl. Give birth. Gaze into the dew of pain. You came to marvel at a dogwood blossom bursting in a moon beam, a mother curled in your heartbeat, a father sleeping in your bellybutton, Christ in a breadcrumb, crying, “This is my body!” What is the joy of great beings? They condense themselves into drops of love. Dalit Madonna, India, by Jyoti Sahi

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.  

Who is the Friend? The one who placed an infinitesimal bell of silence in your heart between what rises and falls. When you hear this unstruck sound, stars tremble. Even the darkness grows intimate and soft, because the breath that encircles the universe is yours.       Painting of Mary Magdalene by Sue Ellen Parker

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

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 ...

On my back porch at the new moon in December Buddha celebrates the birthday of Jesus. On my back porch at the full moon in May Jesus 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 egg with something stirring inside that wants to break the shell and emerge as a flame of silence. Between the seasons, during ordinary time after one holy day and before another, they hitchhike to Kansas and meet on the outskirts of Topeka, truth tramps slamming each other with verses from the Lost Revelation of the Bi-Polar Harlequin. "I changed water to Ayahuaska made from celestial poppy stars and drank all seven barrels." "My mind is a neon bubble of no-thing, so don’t get wasted on martyrdom." "Moderation will g...

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.

  All night, be breathed. Darkness is not the absence of light. Darkness is the womb of light. Darkness is not despair, but peace where joy is born, the hidden seed of self-blossoming. A bud is wrapped in darkness to protect its golden petals from the frost, a chrysalis cocooned in darkness to protect its rainbow wings from the storm, your tears rapt in shadows to ripen before they fall. Musky, fertile the void. No lack, no lack is there. Stars shine because the blackness between them gushes what flows through your spine. It is you who re-conceives the sun in the abyss, the new moon an embryo floating in your holy silence. Are you not the Motherhood of the longest evening? Are you not a radiance sheathed in the unseen? Honor the ache of your desolation. Feel the darkness stir and kick in your belly, down where you would not go. A wordless sigh will lead you there. Your next inhalation will attune you to the pulse of Divi...

Use the night to wash the sunlight from your wings. Ascending into glory has made you stiff. Let gravity be your prayer. Plummet with valor. A mother draws you down to her umber breasts. Mingle in the pull of that deeper love. Cease to struggle against what makes you heavy and you will be weightless. Anoint your forehead with grass and soil. Unpolish yourself. Into your bright wounds rub the tincture of darkness. God wants to be all of you. From my book, 'Savor Eternity One Moment at a Time.' Image by Bernadino Luini, National Gallery, Washington.

  The darkness is beautiful and holy. The light is beautiful and holy.

Action is what I do when I'm lost. Being is what happens when I find myself. Appearances are deceiving. When out of touch with my Being, I feel active, yet to others my actions appear as sound and fury, signifying nothing. But when I truly Am, I feel that I am doing very little, yet to others I appear to be a man of accomplishment. This is the miracle of Wu Wei. The universe has the structure of a joke. The punchline comes when you find out that action is stillness, stillness is action. The widest embrace is to let go of everything. So when in doubt, hug it all. P.S. I wrote this at 3 a.m., then went back to sleep.