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,
Rest in the Motherhood of silence.
Give birth to the light in your heart.
Let your breath be Christ.
I love Jesus. I love the Pagan Solstice Christmas pine. I love Madonna Mushroom. I love Goddess Shakti. I love the 2nd Century Gnostic Valentinus who said, "The true Virgin Mother is mystical eternal silence." Love my wild Buddha-heart. Love the perfect consistency of my contradictions. Love luscious berries of fire and mistletoe clustered on the cross of paradox. Love the tree of life in the garden of my body: I am the apple. Love the newborn sun, and what my body says to my spirit: "Every particle of me is made of Mother Mater Matter Dust, each atom a cathedral where pilgrims arrive from the stars to celebrate the miracle of flesh. O my soul, You irradiate the world through this flesh. I am your dance. Let there be no more talk of our separation." Here, after thousands of years of religious combat, my body and soul Christalize into a single magnum mysterium. And where does this mystery occur? In the nameless roadside shrine of my chest, in the oat crunch of cows and fur scent of dogs, in a flame that was always burning yet never lit until Now. Here I celebrate the birth of God, who is this Breath.
Painting: Sacred Bond by James Neafsey
"Even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day: for you, darkness is as light." ~Psalm 139
I feel darkness dissolve into photons of uncreated light. Why could I not see it before? Darkness is made of sparkling finely granulated quanta, light made of velvet threads and particles of darkness.
I feel silence dissolve into a carillon of infinitesimal bells. Why could I not hear it before? Silence is the chant of our ancestors, the harmony of angels, the sound of Mary singing praises to our bodies. For every quark of us springs from her transcendental virgin womb.
I feel lover and beloved dissolve in pure love. Why could I not sense it before? Love needs no story. Love doesn't even need a lover. Love just wants to dissolve.
I feel how weightless it all becomes when I let go of grasping for an explanation, a correct view, a Way. When I embrace all by letting go of all, and I fall into grace. In an instant of surrender, just at the end of my exhalation, before the gift of the next breath is given, I feel the tiny empty bindhu that contains the wild unbounded ocean of divine chaos, where suns are born from the energy before the Word.
Here, there is no thing but Joy. Here, the mind can't understand. What is there to stand on? But the heart can burst with the radiance of the holy night.
The message I keep hearing from people is how tired they are, how utterly weary and exhausted. The message I keep hearing in response from Nature herself is this: "Now is the time to collapse. Now is the time to be fallen, and dissolve like the snow. It's perfectly OK to sink, to let go, to be scattered like seed. Fall into Me. You are held. It was precisely your attempt to elevate yourself, to ascend, to triumph, to surmount, that has exhausted you and brought you to this trough in the light, this furrow in my loam. Here is your work now: surrender. Abandon the quest. Only when you drop like a withered seed in complete surrender, will you be born like a new Sun from the very darkness you embrace. There is no other way to get through this miracle."
Painting by Susan Seidon-Boulet
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)
All that matters is the kiss
of pistil and stamen.
All that matters is the wave nature
of the moon.
All that matters an erotic caress
of listener and silence,
thrill of stillness
where music is conceived.
All that matters is the death
of distances, the pool
of sapphire yearningwhere the sky in your forehead
drowns my darkest embryo.
Are we not born
inside each other
as tears?
Here is the gift of emptiness.
All that matters is the touch
of your breath,
pouring in from the desert night
across the sea, where stars
arrange themselves so tenderlyover your slumber,
and my breath,
ebbing into the diamond blackness
that is always awake.
Photo: Shi Shi Beach, Matthew Nichols Photography
Are you looking for a quiet place?
Friend, you are already here.
Your blood in repose
between pulsations.
A mystic’s cave in every vein.
Secret chamber in your chest
where you have no enemies,
no one to blame,
and the endless journey is never begun.
The place where prayers for peace
need no speaking.
Simply disperse
into the finer element you are
before you breathe.
Be the sparkling sky
in the lungs of a hummingbird,
smoke of sage in desert air,
aureole
in darkness
where the flame was just blown out.
Burn away and remember
that your body is made of vanished stars.
Stumble and fall
into your own rhythm,
which feels like you are
not moving at all, because your mind
is at rest in the flesh
that needs no discipline
of stillness.
You are a nest inside the egg,
a mother's womb that carries
her own savior.
You are the seed of
what you have been seeking.
Now flower on a Winter night.
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
