Uradiance

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.

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, so that we may finally see? 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. Intergalactic Hummingbird Silence. Diamond Gaze of the Holographic Dragonfly. Tantric Kiss on the Tourmaline Pituitary. Wastrel F...

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

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

'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 throwing itself into a dewdrop 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

  "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 fr...

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?

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 chee ks 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 o...

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...

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...

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 yo...

  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

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...

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'

"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 r aise you, or two women, or two men, as long as they feed...

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 sta...

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.

Auspicious the day when a massive coronal ejection shaped like a sperm streams from the Sun and shatters into billions of holographic images of the Father in our Earth's ionosphere, a single bindhu of which pierces my heart through a breath of wonder, wiping away 10,000 ancient hierarchies of fear. Auspicious the day when, pregnant with light, the moon infuses the mind with peace, cooling the eye of wisdom. Auspicious the day when the Mother of the planets inflames the solar plexus with joy, irradiating flesh with golden splendor. Let each cell of my body be the holy grail, a cauldron overflowing with the nectar of devotion to every form of the Goddess  - Kali Maria, Hochma Sophia, Isis Osun, Dana Rhuu! Let each photon of light be Lord Shiva, streaming to the earth from the stars, surrendering, dissolving in love for the Shakti of loam and fungal spore. I will root my neurons like lightning to the sky; I will plant my toes in the luscious muck of the Holy Spirit. Neither ...

I read this poem at an art auction and satsang to raise money for Covid relief in India, May 14, 2021, sponsored by the Art of Living Foundation. She meant to drop this mirror, shattering into countless images her perfect gaze. This is why we meet in brokenness, fitting our pieces together again through each others’ eyes, until we recognize one face with eight billion reasons for astonishment. Even our jagged edges are made from infinitesimal love-sparks. Let our meditation be the cry of a wound that is healed by staying open. Let our eyes tell beads of gratitude, pearled on threads of silence. Why does your Maker break your wings? To teach these feet to walk on earth. You can't thank Her enough, can you? Why have we become such dusty shards of looking glass? To polish one another with forgiveness. Keep it soft, friend, like the mystery of bones in a baby’s crown. That is the door we leave by, made whole by lost drops. After seven hundred lif...