Uradiance

Now tell me, is there a deeper beauty than the color of silence? I am polishing the mirror of my heart with this breath again, that I might see the diamond in the rose of your face so clearly, so clearly it shatters the difference between us. The Soul of the Rose by John William Waterhouse

  Go outside. Take off your shoes. Breathe sunlight through your fontanelle, the soft spot where the bones of that old story never healed. Feel honey trickle through your neurons, dripping down your vertebrae. A ray of violet bathes your furrowed brow, transmuting anger into joyous useful fury. Rays of song-bird yellow caress your throat, healing grief. Clenched heart-bud softening in glow of ancient forest green. One thousand petals unfurling, each shaped like a perfect wound. Knotted thorns in your belly disentangle in a fragrant breeze, the whisper of the name of the Goddess, and you notice the rose that was already there, blossoming in your diaphragm. What's this, fermenting in the cauldron of your hips? Your weary disappointment, changing­­ into purple wine. Through the soles of your feet, breathe out the shattered sunbeam, spilling down your spine through a rosary of prisms. Didn’t you know your body was made from infinitesimal ...

  To flower in sunshine and air, a seed falls into the loam, where the dead gather like old old friends to compost their pain into beauty. I am a seed. To sing, I fall into silence. To radiate the light of joy, I fall into darkness. To know wisdom, I leave the dry land of thinking and fall into the ocean of bewilderment. Are you poor? Do you desire wealth? Be a seed. Become poor in spirit. Vanish into your opposite, giving thanks for a blade of grass, the stillness of the swallowtail, the rising and falling  of this breath.

The world is quite capable of existing without you. See this. Just for a moment, step back and repose in the Sabbath of Pure Awareness. The infinite cosmos happens without your attempt to improve it. And you too are infinite, whole and wonderful, without any effort to improve yourself. Drop the world, just for the duration of a breath, even for the space between heartbeats, and let your attention rest at Home. A subtle ineffable sound arises from the empty bell that was ringing in your solar plexus prior to creation, the unstruck music that soothes and heals before any wound was made. In this humble sabbath from all entanglement, you discover that you are the radiance of Being, the fragrance of divine light, already containing in your Seed the fruit of every right action. Through one blessed moment of boundless non-doing, you transform the cosmos into what Is. This is the real revolution. So if you cannot meditate for half an hour, then surrender for one moment. This migh...

    Just below the heart and just above the solar plexus, to be precise, is a temple in the valley of grace. And here, two fingers' width in front of your chest, to be precise, is a flame that does not burn but gives sweetness. It is like cotton spun from fibers of starlight. All triangles point here. All equations are balanced by the breath this space holds. The constellations, those beasts of silence, gather to drink from this spring which Jesus called the well of everlasting life, Milarepa the jewel at the center of a lotus with bee-drowning fragrance, an amazement of proportions that drive mathematicians mad in search of beauty. Perhaps the name of Krishna will draw you here, perhaps the name of Christ, or the secret name of the Goddess, born on a vapor of surrender. But really, you won't comprehend this radiance at all until you gaze on the face of the Friend, in the mirror of your own lon...

Enough fair maiden talk: the soul is not always soft. Pick up your sword and slice off Shiva's head. He'll grow a thousand more, one of them yours. To hunt God's heart, use leopard's teeth. Drink blood, not milk, from jugulars of fire. Stop wringing your hands and start roaring. Your roar will wake up Jesus in his tomb. He'll walk out under his own power, motherless, no crutches, no angels. Legs spread wide, knuckles on hips, he'll shout, "Out of the cave, old monks! Penance is over! The dogs have learned not to pee on the rug!" No longer will the Prophet take dictation. He'll make up his own book, letters from the ground shaped like bugs, peach pits, cougar scat, wild poppies. Lord Krishna gets bored with obsequious kisses and all that moaning about past lives, mala beads on threads of regret. "What happened doesn't matter," he sings. "Bring me a corkscrew, not a rose. Warriors, let...

Why all this talk about “Surrender?” You returned before you were born. Had you not abandoned your soul to darkness, this dew-sealed morning glory would never have opened to receive its tongue of fire. Some nakedness embraced you like silence before you put on the garment of prayer. But the sapphire firmament of your mind began to mutter in the language of clouds, words like “devotion,” “path,” “returning.” You forgot that the fragrance is given, not taken, and respiration is an ecstasy, not a technique. You could no longer leap on the wine-stained tabletop of the summer sky, burgundy fled back into the grape, discipline locked the gates of joy. You would no longer crush great powers under the weightless feet of foolish wisdom. Now you’re a shadow made of stone, your gravity is grief, you think you need to make a sacrifice. Why not give up “surrender?” Why not drop your God-thought and plunge into the Zero of not believing, which is a dee...

  Make your heart a sheath for what is sharper than God, what penetrates the moist and soft. Clinging to tenderness is a great weight. The gashed forsaken animal in your chest is not who you are. Be a razor, your edgelessness defined by what is not, by what has been honed away through seven silences, ruthless and black, in the gorgeous wounds of your body. You are a scimitar. Let the Beloved draw you out of his own breast dripping with bliss and wine. Shiva wants to use you as a violet lethal incandescence in the formless combat of love.

Earth is wobbly. So what? Today is slightly longer  than yesterday or tomorrow. South of here it's slightly shorter. So what? Somewhere a stray  kitten is shivering in summer rain. Somewhere a neglected boy is loading his father's gun. Isn't every inhalation  a Summer solstice,  every exhalation a Winter one? If there is a god she doesn't care as much about your suns and birth signs, your sabbaths and full moons, the vast animal skeletons roaming through your sky, as she cares about the smile you could have given to a friend last night, the grace you might say to a stranger this evening, or the breath you savor this moment, like a sunrise in your chest.

My work is grace, your work is opening. F lowers are mouths that tell about silence. I will be your breath before it is a name. Leave naming to Me. I will call you Beloved in the most primitive tongue, not yet a whisper. At the golden hint of dawn a gardenia's lips , stained by the moon. Photo by Aile Shebar

Earth will not be saved by solving the big problems, or even paying attention to them. To redeem creation, we must refine our perception, take our attention from the big to the small, from the gross to the subtle. The rind is always hard and bitter, the sweetness lies inside, where the fruit is soft and sweet. Meditation is precisely this flow of attention from the outer to the inner, from the hard to the soft, perceiving the tiny particular causes of large and general woes, dissolving the gross into the subtle, softy, more softly, until perception arrives at the softest, subtlest, smallest "thing" of all, which is also the cause of all. Which is no thing, but infinite subjectivity, without an object. In this infinite subtlety, thing-ness is transcended. It is not even an "it," but Goodness, Tova, creating and upholding the universe. So scripture sings, "Taste and see that the Lord is good!" (Psalm 34) In thing-less-ness, see God. Taste God'...

I was created for you because One delights in Two. Friendship is more playful than union, Advaita swallowed up in Lila. The teacher said, "There is no other." I say, "Play." The teacher said, "You are not this body." I say, "Love." Nothing is more sacred than a Kiss. The Sun on the lips of the Moon. The footsteps of the Moon on the Sea. A wave caressing the sand, and the sigh of returning. A baby's mouth on the swollen teat. A Father's gaze upon the daughter already asleep in the lingering majesty of a summer evening. Hands opening, then closing on each other. That breath dissolving into this breath at the stillpoint just beneath your breastbone.

The wild rose springs up among weeds. Does it feel guilty about its fragrance? Please friend, never let anyone make you feel guilty about being happy in this troubled world. To be troubled is the nature of the world. To be happy is the nature of your heart - not a privilege but a birthright. Your happiness costs the world nothing, is not extravagant, exploits no one's labor, wastes no energy. Yet its blossoming can heal the air, the water, the soil. Joy does not come from this world, yet it suffuses the world with a secret light, and touches other hearts. The breath you give is the breath you receive is the breath that whispered this planet into whirling atoms, blew spirals of night into galaxies like glass, spindled out the flesh of your ancestors in helixes still dancing in the hieroglyphs of your sacred body. We were all connected by a dark sigh before we had names, our lungs the very bellows of the Maker. Don't waste a single exhalation complaining abou...

     Even before I wake,           you are trembling in summer silence.           When your name      softens my heart, the angry world seems           to bow      toward some mysterious           droplet      in its own blossom,           forgetting who to blame. The sign that I have      called You is the tiny broken stamen           dyeing the whole sky       with sweetness. Only You are           insignificant enough      to understand this. Our secret befuddles            the impor...

  (for those who graduate, and those who try) Got a D+ in English, in French I got a C. They say my diagnosis is Hyper ADD. In Math I got D- and all the rest were D's.   My learning style is different, like Socrates'. Like Moses. Like Beep Beep the Road Runner. I love the desert and the mountain top.   In dreams I ride the comet Hale Bop. Got a B+ in Snowboard and a straight A in Hope. I don't smoke dope. I'm not a geek. My learning style is just unique.   Like.... Hey nonny nonny and a hey nonny nee, Balloon Man whistling far and whee.   Verily verily I say unto thee, B'ishm'illahi Rock Roll a Marine. In the name of Yahoo the All-Merciful   and Compassionate Beep Beep the square root of the hippopotamus is the sum of the squares of Yin Yang   plastered on the golden dome of my skull  as I lie on my back and stare up at the Braille adreno-cortical Hebraic mosaic squirting leukocytes at my pituitary, scrawling graffiti dopamine equation...

What are words? Tears of silence. What is darkness? Womb of light. Be the climax of your opposite. Voluptuous hibiscus in an empty bulb. Your grief bears joyful orphans. The birth mother pants your true name. You remember the mystery of Winter. To see the same old stories in moonlit stone sparkling with quartz. Shake your fist all night to the unknown God. At dawn, take communion in your tomb. Anger subsides. You have learned how to look. To root down in hollows where the fur dreams stars. To undress the mind and discover the nakedness that makes you dance. Anger subsides. You have learned how to look. No season is not Grace. Learn from a useless Autumn sunflower how to empty yourself, how to scatter a thousand Spring mornings.