Uradiance

  There should be a name for the fleshiest of organs, the old drunken pump, swilling blood and oxygen, spilling it all over my body to each globe of hunger, churning this dark animal plasma to bright hemoglobin, yet somehow enfolding in its cave of bone, it's gristle of night a throng of galaxies, the rimless possibility and swirl of a starless Beyond that, ah, not even God has yet explored: I call it my Heart. But really, it's the portal to another thirst, a yearning for the beaten and beatific face of the unnameable. Still, I call it my Heart. Photo by Kristy Thompson

The Shift is not a happening in time. It is not something you need to wait for. The Shift is a blessed and perpetual fall  from the chatter in your brain to heart hollowed quietness. From the abstract to the local, the swollen repose of a snow-bound crocus, racket of flycatchers over thawing bog water, improbable worlds of pearl condensed in the ordinary, like the sweat of sweetness on a plum. The Shift could be the fondle of your own breath kindling a flame of Presence through the gray mirage of regret in your abdomen,  or the awakened caress of moist burnt umber soil on your barefoot soles. Now why don’t you soften your belly and shift  into the place where you  already are, effervescing in your  only certain warmth, the body.   Photo: Western skunk cabbage from Bluebrightly, 'Signs of Spring in the Pacific Northwest'  

"I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night." ~Søren Kierkegaard 3 a.m. You fall into the groundless abyss of the heart. You are a wounded darkness gushing light. Winter invites you in, a breath of silence, whispering, "Don't mistake emptiness for lack. Emptiness is rich." You are here to be a light stream. But a stream only flows when there is an opening, and opening is emptying. How can light stream through you if you are not dark and hollow, like a root going down into the earth? Our culture has become clogged with its own desperate seeking for something, anything, a "thing" to fill our space. But our space is sacred in its hollowness, free of content. We have turned our experience of "emptiness" and "loss" into negatives, associated with poverty and lack. But our inherent lightness, our essential freedom, bubbles out of what isn't there, not what is. Even physics points to this truth: matter is m...

If you're looking  for a surrogate mommy or daddy, then get a manikin.  Decorate the thing  with rudhraksha beads, a white dhoti, sandals, long hair, and perhaps  a wise beard. Be sure to paint bright eyes   and set two jewels  in the pupils. Seat it on a couch  surrounded by gladiolas and  ten thousand chanting devotees. When you're no longer scared and lonely, pack the thing up in a pile of sticks and burn it. Throw the ashes in the Ganges with other dead bodies. Or crucify it on a cross. That was Jesus, you're looking for the Christ. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. That was Gautama, your looking for the Diamond Anatta. Now breathe down into the temple of your diaphragm.  Shatter the looking glass with all its idols, images,  reflections of the "I"  who isn't there and become what you are,  the "Am,"  shining without a mirror. Do...

I. Let us breathe Allah instead of using the name of God to kill people. In the Qu'ran, "Allah" is the same name of God found in the Jewish scriptures: "El'." For reasons never completely explained, the Biblical authors used the plural form, "Elohim." In fact, Elohim means "Gods." A Semitic Jew would pronounce the singular name for God in Hebrew as Allah is pronounced in Arabic. Jesus would not have recognized the Germanic word, "God."He would have recognized the Semitic word, "Allah." We were meant to breathe the name of God, not to use it as an argument or a weapon. Like all divine names, "Allah" flows through our body with the breath, as a mantra. "Mantra" in Sanskrit means "mind-vehicle." The Indo-European roots are "mannas" (mind) and "tra" (vehicle), from which we have the English "mind" and the suffix "tron." As an electron is a...

Times like these make me glad  that I share 65%  of my DNA with a banana and 70% with a fruit fly. The banana blackens in sugary bruises. The fruit fly is happy. Even if I don't, Earth survives. We all become food.  Entropy is grace.

"When the spiritual power of the Kundalini Shakti enters the heart center, the self-begotten unstruck music of God begins to be heard." ~Jnaneshwar Her body is the form of this breath; She dances as dawn in the fading of sleep: the dream was never real. You need no mala beads to invoke her; darkness sparkles, night itself your rosary of pearls, each moment rounded, gleaming with eternity. The Guru is her silence, respiration of the unchangeable; O breath, what do you teach us this morning? That stillness is pulsation, hollow and full, hollow and full, the way of the moon. Kernel, blossom, wheat, a withered husk; flavor, scat, and in the scat, a seed: the ordinary of the seasons. On this planet, all is explained by pigment, pungency, and musk; everything verified by excruciating sweetness, and what rattles in the zero of a gourd. Unsettled weather is the mother of ceremony, both rain and sun the daughters of the sky; blackness a cup for the elixir...

Here's the secret: just stop thinking. Take no thought, Jesus said, for which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to your stature? The Goddess has given you this breath for guidance. The Guru has given you the nectar of silence. Be still. Be still and know. Be still and know that I Am. God. The hum of pure Being resonates in each cell of your body. You move to the music of intuition. You dance in a realm beyond concepts, in a land of foolish wisdom where few will go because there is no path and all the flowers are filled with the wine of grace. Tarot card by Brigid Ashwood

Olive skinned Semitic Jesus. Black Jesus from the source of the Nile. Red-haired bumpkin Jesus, nature poet of cedar'd hills and waterfalls. Jesus the king. Jesus the slave. Jesus the Rabbi who studies with Essenes in Egypt. Jesus the Yogi who visits Kashmir. Jesus the illiterate fisherman. Jesus the mystic fasting for a vision in the wilderness. Jesus the Marxist shouting at the rich. Jesus the High Priest offering blood sacrifice. Shaman Jesus mixing his spittle with mud as a healing balm for the eyes of the blind. Jesus the Lion of Judah. Jesus the Paschal Lamb. Jesus dove. Jesus serpent. Jesus hummingbird who visits the Chóco rain forest of Equador. Non-binary Jesus. Infant Jesus with a tiny penis. Jesus who proclaims, "I Am," awakening I Am in you. Jesus the Christ, whose color doesn't matter. Whose gender doesn't matter. Who pervades all forms with pure compassion. Who pervades the cosmos. Who pervades every neuron in your brain, every cell of...

A poem from 'The Nectar Of This Breath' As you awaken, just before the mind of yesterday falls like a net of stones behind your eye, be weightless. No story of the past survives the ecstasy of Presence. How your soul looks in that mirror when it sees itself! What gets you out of bed, dancing like a wild purple iris in the breeze of your next inhalation! It doesn't matter at all what you will do for a living today. The priceless jewel is just living. It doesn't matter at all how much money you will make today. Your body is more precious than sunlight. Your sternum is beaten from finer gold. Whether you feed the multitudes or only wash the dishes makes no difference at all. What matters is to plunge down the stem of the meditation flower, to follow the thunderbolt in your backbone all the way Om to silence, and drop the terrible fairy tale of last week's anger. The mirage of sorrow vanishes in the sky of your chest, empty and blue. Love doesn’t need a story. Collage...

  April doesn't wait to see how you feel about it. Nature is joy. Your body is a farm where the earth raises her favorite bacteria. The sky keeps changing her cloudy mind. Stars wriggle their way like worms through the loam of darkness without the slightest interest in your destiny. Portals open, planetary alignments happen every moment. You pass through them unaware. A new age begins with each breath. Before becoming you, Being was already perfect. So rip out your stitches and let laughter pour from your wound.   Painting by Carol Cavalaris

The music that drove you mad was coming from your heart. Rumi says, a lute plays there. I say it has two strings. My darling, I have always been inside you.

Everything depends precisely on how whirling kisses stillness...

Just for today, a Sabbath from knowledge. Who knows? Just for today, a Sabbath from judgment. Forgiveness is your nature. Just for today, A Sabbath from being right. If a day is too long then just for an hour? If an hour is too long then just for a breath? That is enough to wash a thousand stars with your love. Just for a moment, friend, stay with me. Peace flower by Kristy Thompson

You could be the answer to the ancient prayer offered in the first breath of creation when suns, galaxies, countless worlds came swirling through the silence of your Being. Let the face of the marigold, or the eye of a child remind you. Let a wild and tiny weed, the forget-me-not, become a mirror of your opulence, a mother-of-pearl bee's wing the window to your sky. It could be your breath that fills every creature. Wake up and repose in who you are. Phantom Galaxy, James Webb

Better than a thousand hours of disciplined sitting is ten minutes of effortless meditation, a few steps walking barefoot in the garden of gratitude, two sips of wonder, breathing in, breathing out, one moment of surrendered prayer... if you have been touched by the madness of Grace.

Han Sh'an always noticed small fallen things because his mind was empty, crazy and free from anticipation. He would pick up a lost soul hold it in his palm and breathe upon it until it cooled off. He would follow a stranger and say, "Wait, I have your soul. Would you like it back?" The stranger would turn and look at Han Sh'an from the holes in his face, replying, "Go away, old beggar!" So Han Sh'an collected many sparkling selves and gave them to orphans and wanderers at the ragged edges of the market place where real business is done. Then he decided to climb back into the realm of swirling mist. That is when I met him on the path to Cold Mountain. "You must be Han Sh'an," I said, "please give me a poem." Han Sh'an replied, "Just look down at the dust in your path. Look up at the crow in a dead pine waiting for a tasty mouse. Look at the gift of the blue sky between white clouds, between one moment and the next. This i...

  'The jewel at the center of the lotus,' the 'inward light,' the 'fire of Christ in the heart': these are not mythic symbols but transcendental sensations in the human body. For too long philosophers and theologians have intellectualized these fiery, organic, bio-spiritual encounters with God in the flesh. When did our culture forget that the human body is a garland of portals to the other worlds that are all within this one? We are, in fact, born to breathe the divine, to taste the sacred, to imbibe the nectar of Love through the heart. And I mean this blood-drenc hed muscle in our chest, which is so much more than a pump. The cardiac plexus embroidering the physical organ  is as 'spiritual' as any metaphysical 'heart' invented by intellectuals. Let us feel the heart. Quite literally, let awareness sink into this dark flower pulsing at the center of our physical form. The heart is like one of those painted Russian Easter eg...

Sometimes you need it all to start over again, a new earth. So you take, no, receive one breath. Then you remember, this is the stream of gratitude that bathed us all in the beginning. So’ham. The scentless nectar that sweetens the rose and desert sage alike, invisible sap that ripens all our faces to ochre, mahogany, ginger and fire. So’ham. No vow, no sacrifice required. Just keep pouring the ghee of attention into the flame of your body. What thrills distant stars? The jolt of coming Om to rest in your heart. Which is surely what you relished when you were very young, your sadhana was being just as you are, you offered your flesh into your flesh, and woke up the sun. Sometimes you need it all to begin again. So you listen and breathe, take, no, receive, So’ham. There now, it's done, and the world is new.     Photo by Laurent Berthier