I am in full grok of wondrous suchness feeling my sole as my soul and the sol of solitude the sun; thus mouths in my bare feet hungrier for moonlight than the pulsing wound in the crown of my skull; because the word for dust in Hebrew is "adamah," and the word for breath is the word for spirit, and ancient languages tell us how to sing not how to think; the Qi, the Ruuh, the Pneuma, the pun of soul on breath, the Lord breathing into Adamic dust to make a living person, a "nephesh," from the verb "nephash" to breathe, and yes these unshod soles are puns that make me free to wander naked in my garden under the New Moon of the First Planting, and to inhale through my whole body, from the ground up, exhaling through my crown, a dark alchemical musky fountain changing sod to consciousness, like a larva full of stars.
Breathing Through My Sole
Hidden Work
Put some space around your story.
The sky.
A wilderness of blue encircles
every storm.
Why resist the whirl
and chatter of the mind?
Just stop believing it.
This tale of lack and sorrow
is time past,
but the space you hold around it
is always now.
The journey of a seed into its fruit,
how far the ocean goes
to embrace a lost wave,
where the robin finds a galaxy
to shape her nest in April:
intimacy tastes
of unfiltered distances.
You too could fathom stillness,
fill the hollow in each cell
of your flesh,
the star-strewn vacuum in each atom
with delicious inhalation.
What is real?
An ancient Presence,
pulse of repose, deepening abyss
of honeyed silence.
Drown here
in the sweet secret well
between breasts.
Friend, do it while you're still on earth.
This hidden work
replenishes the loam
and nurtures many souls.
Moratorium On Names
I have been in love for seven million years.
It was always you.
Don’t ruin it now by telling me your name.
Isn’t it time for a moratorium on names,
A moratorium on the name of God
and the word Peace,
until we learn to use them as verbs.
A moratorium on Love, so that this body
may be love’s exquisite synonym.
A moratorium on Better, Worse,
on Sin and Hell, on Heaven too,
so that our eyes may grow
accustomed to the earth.
A moratorium on the sobriquet
of Christ, Allah, Yahweh, Ram,
so the goddess may have room to breathe,
and we may hear her inscrutable murmur
from the cavern of the prophet in each
human heart, her infinitesimal thunder
in a violet’s bell, rung by a dewdrop.
Isn’t it time to reinvent the tongue,
so the ineffable may babble sweet
new names for the One Who Is?
O Magdalenic Desolation.
O Magdalenic Desolation.
Intergalactic Hummingbird Silence.
Diamond Gaze of the Holographic Dragonfly.
Tantric Kiss on the Tourmaline Pituitary.
Wastrel Face in the Bottom of the Empty Grail.
Quantum Spider of the Long-Legged Ayin Soph.
She-Wolf Who Steals My Ancient Heart
and Suckles Me Anew on the Milk of the Forest.
Crocus-Footed Goddess of Melting Snow.
Worm of Delight in the Apple of Melancholy.
Umber-Thighed Alluvium of Birth Streams.
Vowel of Sighing.
Mother. Friend. Bewilderment.
* A poem from The Nectar Of This Breath
* A poem from The Nectar Of This Breath
'Be Ye Perfect'
A life-coach told me,
"you're perfect right now."
So I tried perfection for a day
but it was boring.
After all, God is already God,
but who would be Me
if I didn't keep fucking things up
in my own peculiar way?
My blemishes define me,
jagged edges are the letters
of my true name.
Call me Broken Buddha,
the Half-Awake.
This universe just wouldn't
be the same without my sins.
I am more priceless uncut,
a ruby in the mud
that looks like a fallen berry,
the gem of surprise!
Here's the sign of progress:
I'm even less perfect now
than I was yesterday.
I dedicate this poem
to you, my dear,
who discovered the hot mess
of your body on the kitchen floor
slobbering your tears
into the linoleum
while Good Morning America
bled out in the living room.
I honor the unconditional
catastrophe of your hair,
your crow's feet, the droop
of your udder destruction,
the warm spreading mystery
of your wounded smile.
You have blossomed
in the compost of uprooted plans
and wasted seeds of possibility.
No matter how deeply
you scatter, you germinate.
No matter how far you fall,
you are caught.
You plunge into the Hug
that was always already here.
We could hug each other
like that.
Anne's Photos: 'Lovely Dead Crap Still Life'
Wings of the Ordinary
The miracles we do not notice this first morning of Spring fly back to the Creator on disappointed wings. But the ones we behold fold their wings, and settle into the commonplace. Creator did not say, "Let there be light," at some ancient point in time. Creator says, "Let there be light," each instant. And this act of creation remains unfinished without the light of our awareness. We seldom hear the most important commandment, because it is the whisper of silence: "Thou shalt notice the toadstool and the hyacinth, the web of dew, the pebble, the bud." We are here on earth to pay attention, to perceive the miraculous wings of the ordinary. Our wonder completes the design.
Photo by Laurent Berthier
A Body Shaped Like The Wilderness
Just as Christ was in Mary
there is prayer inside the breath,
a soul inside the soul,
one who watches
and one who weeps,
a body shaped like the wilderness
inside the body,
made of dark matter and fire.
Just as Christ was in Mary,
there is energy in silence.
When evening falls,
stars populate the blackness
of zero
with countless powers of minus 1.
The Magdalene holds up an egg.
Her eyes long to tell us
what she will not say.
Where is her voice?
Where is yours?
Spring trembles in white bones,
but the marrow is burnt umber.
Within the egg,
is it light or shadow,
or some green yearning
inside green?
She will not speak, yet she sings
a canticle of silence
that rises
out of the belly of all things.
A ululation
that passes over her tongue
like wind at night without a husband.
Just as Christ was in Mary,
love is burning, born
of aloneness.
Painting of Magdalene by Robert Lentz, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
Placebo
The universe has no meaning or purpose other than its own playfulness. It is like a sugar pill, a placebo - harmless, yet full of energy, and whatever potency we imagine it might possess. Most of our conflicts, and much of the stress we cause each other, will dissolve when we grok this simple truth instead of resisting it. The cosmos is a placebo, and placebos work.
Here is radical freedom: we get to superimpose any story we like upon the world. Just as we attribute healing properties to a sugar pill, we attribute to the dance of creation the meaning we choose, healing ourselves by telling our story about the world. The story makes us feel good, makes our life seem more meaningful, until we finally, very gently, let go of storytelling. Then we permit ourselves to feel good without a story. True joy needs no story. Joy simply is.It's a lot less scary, less exhausting, when we relax into this wholeness, this holiness, which is the perception that the universe is just a celebration of energy, dancing in itself, renewing itself each moment, without "meaning" anything. The task of living gets simpler because we quit insisting that others adopt our story, our religion, our politics, our diet, our taste in books, movies, ice cream...
Almost miraculously, the energy shifts from negative to positive as we remember that another person's story is valid for them, just as ours is valid for us, and all our stories are but co-entangled threads in one vast tapestry of human hope.It isn't our stories that create conflict, but the insistence that your story must be mine, or mine must be yours. People inherently do not want to tell violent, hopeless, negative stories. They love to tell stories of courage, creativity, self-renewal, and beauty. But if I rob you of your own story, and insist that only mine is true, then I force you to tell a story of resistance, retribution, retaliation, war, which is simply your reaction to my need to be right.
Let me tell my story, as you tell yours. But let us ever be ready to meet in Rumi's field, out beyond stories, in a chaos of Spring flowers, under a riot of stars, in a cosmos that needs no meaning but its own perfectly wild and Wordless energy.
Photo from my back yard taken by my daughter Abby
Aquifer
'Aquifer' is my favorite word.
The upper half of her body
is the sound of water,
the lower half the sigh of fire,
like a despondent moonbeam
deep in the forest. Now
the aquifer is underground,
but spoken it rises
through my lips, a breath
emerging as a woman entirely
carved of pearl and amber,
or an undulating mist, merely
eerie and wise, Sophia
permeating every form of
pain and sorrow, softening
the verdant stone, weaving
a mouse nest out of moss
in an empty helmet. Less
illusory than I am to myself,
athyrium fingers knead the sod
of fallen soldiers, free as ferns
to become each other's
bodies now. She is
a wellspring, a cloud
ridden by a mountain,
is snow, is rain, is loam,
and inside this, the river
of forgetfulness that flows
through an awakened worm.
Painting: John Everett Millais
Look Into My Tears
"Seek the remedy inside the pain, because the rose came
from the thorn and the ruby came from a stone." ~Rumi
Look into my tears.
Just as the proton carries a hidden charge
of dark energy,
so every heart encircles a secret night.
We don't know its name,
but it's the same ache in each of us,
thought we hide it under a smile
because we are afraid it might be ours alone.
We never imagine that the face
who smiles back at us
also carries the uncreated matter
of the shadow.
We find that out much later,
when we gaze into each other’s tears,
when we embrace the night
within each other and it blossoms
into a luminous rose,
not because we've been forgiven,
but because a radiant grace
is the nature of the hour before dawn,
and the true smile rises
from a heart that stops trying
not to grieve.
Here is a deeper secret, friend,
one that has no shadow at all.
I smile from your heart.
You smile from mine.
Goddess of Night
In the history of light
nothing like this splendor
has ever fallen on
a human face.
The crystal goblet becomes
the color of the wine,
and I take the form
of the beauty I behold.
What could be more
exquisite than the black
gaze of the Goddess
of Night?
From the Dreamtime of The Fur
Today I went to see my therapist, because I felt the ancient anxiety returning, that shadow of the past, that ghost in my body, with all its stories of conflict.
So I visited my therapist and lay my body down on her couch. Without speaking a word, she rubbed her silken spine against me, gently climbed on top of me, sat on my chest and gazed into my eyes, her pupils expanding with implacable nowness. She let me stroke her cheeks and run my fingers through her fur.
Her body shivering with delight, she arched her back, and I could feel the stress flowing out of me, a current of stale electricity cluttered with images of yesterday. My muscles released their grip on themselves. My brain dissolved its stories. My neurons became vibrant hollows filled with golden streams of imageless bliss. Because I was whole again, the world was whole again - the actual world of furry suchness, without blame or division.
Suddenly, the therapist leapt off my body and walked out of the room. My session was over. She had another appointment.
Photo, our dear Basquiat, 20 years old
Elf-Taught
14 thousand years ago, when I was 9 years old, my father sent me into the meadow to herd his meager goat flock. From the forest, where I was told never to wander, I heard a thrush song so melodious that it almost seemed like the call of an angel. At the time I did not know that songs do not descend from above, but rise up from the animal kingdom.
Allured, I abandoned my goats, who grazed contentedly on thistles and clover, and plunged into the woods where it grew thickest, greenest, and most wild.
Under a blossoming dogwood tree I met a boy my own age. His skin was blue as a rain-laden cloud in early May. His eyes were twin trillium dancing in fern shadows. Being a prince, he superciliously gave me a commandment: "Leave all your duties and make mischief with me."
"Is this permitted?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, " because the world needs mischief more than work."
"What about the rules?"
"There is only one rule. Fall in love. Then it is your duty to break every other law."
He taught me how to turn my body into a wounded flute with seven holes. He showed me how to pour tears through it. He taught me to catch peacocks by the tail and follow their outraged flight to the moon. He taught me to transcend both sleep and dreams, and to sing all night.
Then my dark blue playfellow led me to a deep pool filled by a waterfall in the forest, where the daughters of his royal cousins were bathing. We tiptoed over the moss and stole the clothes that they had scattered on the bank. Climbing up in a yew tree, we hung them from every branch, laughing and teasing the ladies below, who shrugged their shoulders and covered their buoyant breasts with crossed hands.
I accidentally dropped my wallet into the pool, a little bag filled with my most precious heirlooms. One of the girls dove for it, then came up gasping, waving the purse and shouting, "You must give us our clothes to get this back!"
I called, "There's nothing in that bag but my name, my grandfather's diamond signet ring, and the deed to my father's property. Throw it back into the water. I'd rather see your nipples!"
She did just that, causing the blue boy to laugh with delight. "Well done!" he said, clapping his hands. A very large salmon leaped out of the water with my wallet in its mouth, then swam down the stream toward the sea.
But the blue boy wanted to give the girl a little punishment for throwing my wallet away, not because she had done wrong, but just to tease her. So he blew a breath upon her that transformed her body into a mourning dove. "You may return to your human form tomorrow," he said.
Beating her wings in distress, the dove flew to a willow branch that wept over the water. All night she keened the plaintive ululation only lovers understand. At dawn her sweet mist-muted cry came from afar, over many hills.
When the sun was high and the mist had burned away, she wandered back to her friends, naked and human, her bare feet delicately pressing last night's dew from the moss. "Sorrow is lovely," she said. "Now I will never be afraid. I miss the dark."
Almost 10 thousand years later, while wandering through Manchuria, I met the Old Master of the Way, hitchhiking out of the empire. I was still a young boy. "Before you escape from civilization," I asked the old fellow, "what can you teach me?" He taught me to breathe through the soles of my feet. I still hate shoes.
I followed the caravan routes across Persia to the Roman Empire. On the way, I passed through a picturesque little kingdom called Israel, noted chiefly for die-hard zealots who kept challenging the authority of Caesar, getting themselves crucified, then coming back for more.
I befriended the son of the High Priest while I was stealing pomegranates in the crowded marketplace. He took me to his father's house and, discovering that I had met some sages in the East, the High Priest asked me if I wanted to visit the temple. Of course I did. He made me bathe several times and cover my body in a white robe, then escorted me through the court of the gentiles and into the sanctuary, where I had no right to be.
"Are you sure the temple guards won't arrest me?" I asked.
The High Priest just winked and said, "You're a traveler. Speak well of what you see here as you travel Westward."
He led me down aisle after aisle, past many tables where merchants were selling pigeons, lambs, and wine for the devout to offer in sacrifice. There were pots filled with dinarii and other trinkets of silver. In the heart of the temple, I walked up the stairs past alters of incense and sacrifice, carefully stepping over trenches in the floor that ran with the warm blood of rams and bulls. The Levitical priests seemed entranced by their work of slaughter and didn't notice me, a 12-year-old goy in their midst.
Then the old man led me to the Holy of Holies, its door barely visible in the cloud of incense that perpetually gloomed the pillars and alters. He asked me not to speak, then opened the golden door. We walked into the shrine room at the center of God's little kingdom.
Imagine my surprise. There I expected to see another alter, with a holy book lying upon it. Or perhaps the Ark of the Covenant, containing the tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. Or even the lost tablet, the one Moses broke in fury, on which a single commandment was written: "Love thyself."
But instead I saw another door wide open, actually more like the black throat of a cave. The High Priest beckoned me with a sweeping gesture, and I walked through. Before my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I seemed to be spinning through a vacuum, tumbled by waves of pure possibility, like a wildly unbalanced quadratic equation searching desperately for Zero, buffeted and baffled by expanding and contracting bubbles of space-time. I was lost in the swirling maelstrom of infinitesimal worlds smaller than Planck's Constant.
Suddenly I touched solid ground and could see again. I had passed through some mysterious portal into an ancient forest. Thick with cedar, hemlock, ferns and trillium, green shadows echoed with the sound of birds, shrieks of monkeys and other hominids, only the eyes of whom were visible, glinting from the dark. Reptiles with human faces twined around every tree trunk, smiling like flowers, singing so softly that their descant was an all-pervading whisper, mighty in its quietude.
Looking at the High Priest, I yearned for an explanation yet was unable to speak. In a very deliberate and barely audible voice, he said, "No temple can ever contain Adonai, the Lord of Creatures, whose true name is unknown. For God is wilderness, and order is chaos. In the presence of her mystery, all words perish, all thoughts fall silent. A holy scripture is holy only when it conjures images of the ancient forest. To find enlightened, you must be feral again."
So I walked deeper into the green shadows, and swooned... Then I found myself sitting in the market place, eating that pomegranate among the merchants' booths. Where was the High Priest and his son? Had it merely been a reverie? Were the seeds of the pomegranate fermented?
Not many centuries later, I was strolling through a village near the source of the Ganges, and who do you think I encountered? Bodhidharma, the 6th Patriarch, on his way to the North. He invited me to go with him but I answered, "I'm too young. Besides, I've already been there."
That night we lay under the stars. Bodhidharma gave me a pearl and said, "Rest this between your eyebrows." So I did. "Now look into the stars." Then I saw my seven grandmothers riding galactic bicycles, pregnant with light years, bearing the galaxies from virgin silence.
On my way home, I wandered through Macedonia. One night I left the path to sleep in a forest cave. About midnight I was wakened by a goat-footed singer with a three-stringed lyre, who was climbing through the cave on his way back from the Underworld, where he had been dallying with his lover. He gave me a drink from his wine skin and played the richest harmonies, the most haunting melodies, on just those three strings, for the complexity of the universe is only the music of the Trinity, Three in Zero. I began to weep with incomprehensible waves of grief. The singer said, "You must make a lyre of body, breath, and mind if you want to turn your tears to laughter."
I am not sure if this was a dream, but he touched his lyre to my lips and the strings melted like maple sugar candy, dripping down through the hollows of my rib cage, each drop echoing in the cavern of my belly. The goat-man said, "Loop these strings through your nostrils and stretch one to your heart, one to your navel, and one to the tip of your spine." I did as instructed. "Now breathe," he commanded.
As I inhaled, each neuron tingled with a love song. As I exhaled, strange rhyming couplets spilled from my lips in words of evaporated crystal. Even today I breathe these bejeweled sounds. This is how I remain just twelve years old, though I have outlived the world's most ancient volcanoes.
About 2000 years later, I met Jesus. He was an honored guest in the house of my master Levi, where I was a servant boy. Reclining on his elbow by the low table, as was the custom at Hellenistic feasts, Jesus said, "Come here, boy. What are you serving?"
"Olives, sir." I offered him my plate of succulent brown ones.
"Not sweet enough for me," Jesus said. "Do you have any grapes?"
The whole room grew quiet. My master Levi and all the men reclining at the feast wanted to see what I would do, for it was a great sin to insult a guest, and I was a slave boy. "No grapes, sir," said I, "Only olives; but my master's olives are more luscious than any fruit."
At that, both host and guests sighed with relief, resuming their debate on the philosophy of love. Jesus reached his fingers into my dish of olives, drawing out a dripping fistful. Holding his hand over my head, he crushed the olives in his palm and drizzled their juice over my hair. It spilled down my forehead into my eyes and over my lips. Jesus said, "Boy, I anoint you with oil. You are the Christ, just as I Am. Together, we will become pure breath, and enter the bodies of saints and fools."
Deeply disturbed, my master Levi cried, "Why do you anoint this servant boy as if he were a prophet? He belongs to me!"
Jesus simply gazed into my eyes and commanded, "Speak, boy!"
My mouth made sounds, but were they words? Was this a language anyone could understand? I had no idea what I was saying, but I knew exactly what I meant:
"You have wandered too long in blazing desert sun. Come to my oasis of figs, pomegranates, cocoa and apple boughs. Rest in my green shadows."When your eyes take root in my fecund darkness, you will see gemstones lying among the lilies: rocks of amethyst and jagged topaz, blackest onyx, sapphires gleaming with their own inward light."Turn them over one by one and behold, a gushing spring under each stone. And see, dwelling in those gurgling fountains of night are all the serpents that were ever banned by priests of religion from every nation on earth. Now they dwell here, in my oasis, beyond good and evil. Press your face into my streams and drink of these serpent waters!"That was a very sweet night.
Several centuries later, I wandered through the ancestral hills of Eire, searching for elves and leprechauns, having read in a wicked book that Ireland was the last place on earth where the little people could still be found - at least out here on the world's surface. I climbed over a mysterious mound covered with clover and eglantine. Ancestral commotions rumbled from under the ground. In the thicket, a five-point stag was waiting for me. He whispered, "Follow quickly, we are hunted."
Hearing the huntsman's horn, the buck and I ran into the white fog, then emerged in a cedar forest, walking along a deep crevasse in the broken earth. I heard no horn of huntsman now, but elfin music rising from that cleft in the earth. "Fairies?" I asked the deer. But the stag had dissolved into mist.
As I was very tired, and it was evening, I lay down among morning glory vines whose blossoms were folded up. A sweet breath of warmth pervaded that cluster of green. Falling into deep sleep, I dreamed that tiny dancers entered and left my body, carrying excavated treasures which they loaded into carts carved from bone, pulled by winged dolphins who flew up into the night. They exported my whole body, atom by atom, into the stars. And I was made of stars.
Awoken by sunbeams, I was refreshed but hopelessly entangled in morning glories. The blossoms opened wide and gaped with foolish grins, yet the songs they sang were just tremors of silence in the breeze. I had the peculiar sense that this breeze and its silent songs were emerging from my own bone marrow.
Then I noticed a little man sitting beside me on the ground, his endless wheaten beard spiraling around him. Those vacant limpid eyes were like pools of cream, and somehow I knew that he was blind. But he gazed upon me with second sight, holding a ruddy glistening fish in his arms, as one might hold a fat furry cat. It was the salmon who had stolen my wallet in a previous age. This fish had no trouble breathing the sunny air.
"Who are you, sir?" I asked the small wheat-bearded man.
"My name is Turlogh," he said, "Turlogh, the Blind Harper."
"Have you come to teach me to harp, or to see?"
"Ah," he said, "You are so clever! Have not the little people been teaching you my songs all night?"
At that, I remembered the music in my marrow, and watched my breath sink into my heart, where a flame burst out, undulating in the emerald form of a lady with a serpent's tail, on which she could tiptoe and spin, spreading enormous rainbow wings. Her eyes were filled with tears, her lips with a succulent smile. Yes, a harp sang inside me. And deep underground, a chorus answered the song of my body, echoing from the crevasse. I understood that the elves, who lived down in the heart-wound of the earth, had been teaching me their songs throughout the ageless hours of darkness.
"Now you comprehend your name!" Turlough said. The truth was, I had always hated my name, "Alfred." But I never knew what it meant until now. "It is Anglo-Saxon," the little man added. "Elf-Read, which means, Taught-by-Elves."
That is when I awoke a second time, and Turlogh was gone. Or was it the third time I awoke? I am losing count. My life has been a never-ending rosary of awakenings. There in the grass beside me was a rabbit, a squirrel, and a fat raven. They plucked, pulled, and untangled the morning glory vines from my body.
The raven said, "None of the beings you have encountered until now were real. Not one. But we are real. We are animals. We come to you in dreams, disguised as other sorts of people whom you respect more. But you have been learning from us the whole time."
The rabbit and the squirrel stared at me with great kindness, then hopped off into the forest. The fat raven beat his wings and rose into the air, making a croak that seemed like the gong of an enormous star-encompassing bell. At that, I seemed to awaken yet again.
"Wait!" I shouted, "Was it all a dream within a dream?"
The raven called, "Yes!"
I shouted back, "Not so, because ravens can't talk!"
And the raven, now very high above, disappeared into the morning sunshine, singing, "This too!"
Invitation to a New Age Workshop
Excited to invite you to the Eighth Heavenly Tantric Zoom Initiation of Prophet Elijah’s Astral Chariot Prayer, during which you will definitely gaze upon the Face of the most Ancient of Days. or your money back! The cost is more than you could possibly afford, the sum of your remaining lives. All proceeds go to the Self. You will not only ascend to the Intergalactic Cathedral of Unknowing through the diamond dorge of your wisdom crown, but you will descend, through the fiery Portal of the Ordinary into the Cavern of Now, receiving a precious blood-stained Garment of Flesh. No need to register. Your account has already been charged. You have already taken the workshop. You were anointed in your mother’s womb. All you need is to remember, then look around you, and behold! Wherever you are, whatever you see, is the Christic Majesty of the Divine Countenance, whose eyes are ever fresh with tears. Now disappear without a trace into the inconceivable vastness of the next moment.
Hibiscus on my porch, a portal to what Is.
If Your Happiness Needs A Reason
If your happiness
needs a reason
you're out of luck
on this planet.
If your joy must
be earned
you'll never notice
weeds blossoming
from cracks.
Perfection is a waste
of time, because it already
happened, scattering
its chaos of silken chances
into the dark wind.
Every mistake is a crystal
that makes angels
want to visit this place,
to sharpen their eyesight
on jagged edges,
shattered tears.
Like them, we sift through
shards of heaven,
half-remembered dreams,
and use them as kindling
to build a flesh-fire,
burning up pain
in deeper pain.
Only here, in this moment,
can you ever arrive
and find the berry bush
in the forest where
your beloved's bones
have been picked clean,
then weep without a choice.
You've been trying too hard
to stay sober, friend.
Just watch the galaxies
spin and dance inside
your belly button.
Witness moon-rise
in your forehead,
the glittering night
behind your eyes.
The lens through which
you see is what
you're looking for,
the mirror of the cosmos
in a grief drop.
This search for awakening
will only make you sleepy.
Just cry “Kali Kali Ma!”
Then drink the milk
you've been drowning in
since your first breath.
Be For
Being "for" expands the heart. Being "against" contracts it. Invest in whatever makes your heart expand. Divest in judgment and blame, gently drop what makes your heart contract. The energy you radiate from your chest permeates the environment. It is a thousand times more powerful than the opinion you hold in your brain. Let this be your practice for a Sabbath morning. Forget to be against. Just be for. Be for the sun, and the daffodils. Be for tears and the laughter of children. Bathe the world in the foolishness of God.
Photo by Brian Johnston
But Not Me
My body's getting old, but not me.
Each night before I go to sleep
I take out my eyes
blow on them, polish them
with a tissue, set them on a table
by the window where
they can absorb moonlight.
I unsnap my ears
and balance them against each other.
To my eyes, lying beside them,
they look like delicate mollusks
holding oceans of silence,
which I carefully pour out
into a thimble, then sip.
I unpeel my mouth
very slowly to avoid the pain,
folding it in a crescent smile
to lay by my pillow
where I can reach it if I need
to scream, or just to cry.
Because when you cry
it is not the tears that matter
so much as the sound,
the name you try to say
when you are weeping.
I remove most of my fingers,
toes, other body parts,
gently unscrewing them.
They fall so wistfully
on the oriental carpet
which was my grandmother's.
And you are here beside me.
We have our breath,
which cannot be taken
from our spirit.
We have hearts which cannot
be taken from the rhythmic
beating of our souls,
two moths at one candle.
Then what's left, my dear,
my partner, lover, friend?
What's left is the sky at night
full of the stars we are,
and all that does not sleep.
Photo by Carlos Moreira in Sky & Telescope
Veriditas
When this season arrives, a dark forgotten well
starts gushing again, the creek bed in my spine
marrowed with moss and babbled with pebble song,
more local to the bone than basil or thyme.
Lower than roots, my juice still in its breathless stone,
I've fallen for a wanderer with uncombed maidenhair,
a shepherdess reclining on her elbow,
dangling fern fingers, sapling hips of pine
splayed from a nurse log. Slow as evening,
gestures of mushroom and cedar frond conceal
last summer's light, her feet the rain on huddled wolves.
She's thistle in the apple's root, a plum twig
twisted in her dream of seeds, secret fragrance
I’d fast and starve these thirsty lips all winter for,
groping for the milk of her name. Now friend,
abandon words and wander into the ground.
~A poem from my book, 'Wounded Bud'
Things That Make No Difference At All
"The Blessed One set these questions aside, for they are questions not tending toward edification. Is the cosmos eternal or not eternal? Is the cosmos finite or infinite? Are the soul and body the same or different? After death, does a Buddha exist or not exist, both exist and not exist, or neither exist nor not exist?" ~Malunkya Sutta i.426
These are things that make no difference at all:
Whether God's word is written in a book, on the palm of your hand, or in the veins of an alder leaf.
Whether you call the deep end of your soul Allah or Jesus.
Whether or not He was born of a virgin: for natural conception is also a miracle.
Whether you name the Great Silence mother or father: for She is both.Whether the cosmos expands into a frozen crystal hologram, or all our prayers finally converge in a human face of blazing compassion.
Whether you call the deep end of your soul Allah or Jesus.
Whether a man or a woman raise you, or two women, or two men, as long as they feed your soul with tears.
Whether your brow is anointed by the hand of a priest, or by your own hand wiping away the holy sweat of earthly labor.
Whether you gnash on keilbasa sausage with city soot and slaw, or drink pure prana from an alpine hermitage: it is all the milk of the Goddess.
Whether the edges of nations exist on the curved body of the world, or only on maps.
Whether the government has any real authority, or the government is a paper house blown down by a fierce new wind.
Whether the newe wind is the Spirit of God, or your own breath.
Whether your ancestors dwell in the dream-time or in your blood, riding winged dragons of DNA.Whether or not you call it Nirvana when you fall asleep in meditation.
Whether you gain instant satori, or drown for a trillion years in the torrent of loving-kindness: what has this to do with your baby's cry?
Whether the cosmos is a lightning flash, a stream of bubbles, or a wisp of fog in the glow of some ineffable future morning.Whether you prick your finger on a thorn when you reach for the rose.
Whether you give the mountain a name, or it floats in cloud silence forever.
Whether or not you are remembered, having for this moment truly lived.
Whether we are white or black, of the East or West: for all of us rent this verdant home from the same nut-brown ancestor.
Whether you gaze at the full moon, or sleep away the night: for the moon's fingers are always at work in your body, pruning your tangled nerves, gleaning what is ripe.
Whether cities, temples, and churches collapse as armies exhaust themselves in a furious futile final war: for we shall sustain our kind by spontaneity, self-organized in local healing farms of organic song.
Whether you keep your word or give your word or your word becomes flesh, as long as it is your word and not another's.
Whether we address each other by name, or with eyes only, using the holy Thou of silence as our pronoun.
Whether there is no tomorrow, or whether there has ever been tomorrow.
Whether you postpone till the end of the ages your cup of sorrow, your taste of joy.
It makes no difference, no difference at all.
For then and now and always the Beloved awaits you, in the patient yearning conflagration of your heart.
Only One Heart
The "heart" they talk about in yoga studios is not other than the one who beats in your body. O mind, don't evict the soul from its flesh temple!
If I think my anahata chakra is different from the blood-puddled throbbing thing in my chest, whose silent red tongue hungers for a word, I uproot heaven from the earth. To distinguish the "physical" from the "metaphysical" is an act of violence.
This musclebound tangle of neurons and grief is a flame without edges. The flame flickers, but the smokeless burning of its un-caused fire can never cease.
O mind, don't wrench the particle from its wave, the proton from its void. There is no spirit separate from the pulse in your sacred flesh.
These venous and arterial caverns of yearning are the pathways to innermost worlds, lokas of celestial light, buried in dark crevasses of the body. This bewildered beast, who howls at the night from your rib cage, deserves to be fed with stars.
Come Om to your wounded animal. Kneel down and feed her, clothed in nothing but a breath. Lay your breast upon her breast. Repose in the only heart you have.
Art by Helena Nelson-Reed
Love Story
The story of Jesus and Magdalene cannot be told. It happens when your heart flowers and names dissolve into silence. Gazing into each others face, each other's pain, each other's beauty, they cannot speak. They are too filled with wonder. They are made equal by wonder. Through wonder, we are made equal, one Being in love with Being. I am not you, you are not I. Yet the Being who loves to be you, and the Being who loves to be I, is one. Jesus said, Love one another as I have loved you. Love your neighbor as your own Being, your Self. Our love is not a story, for a story happened in the past, but love is ever dissolving into Presence. Selah.
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