Uradiance

Remember, but without memories. Gently attend to the silent field of Memory before any images or events from the "past" arise. We can rest in the spaciousness of memory prior to thought; a subtle but effortless practice, really only possible when the mind is still, and the breath is faint. To be Present, we don't need to deny the vast Ago. Just don't crowd it with ego stories: 'I did this,' 'that happened to me.'  Air brush the 'me' out of memory until it is just a blue sky. Pause in your linear journey to look back toward the horizon. Where did you come from? Where are you going? Out of vast space, into vast space. What's the hurry? To embrace Memory without memories takes us more deeply into Presence. This moment expands into the primordial beginning-less. Memory is eternity, and the ancient Now an abysmal silence, ringing with intelligence unborn, bell music unstruck, emanating from the place where Ouroboros bit her own serpent tail, mer...

Smiling we know is a form of meditation. Weeping is also prayer. Worry is beseeching, “Let the Whirler of All bring me the things I don't want.” To practice the purest tantra, digest despair like bacon in your belly, without naming it “despair,” or “bacon.” When the fire of outrage burns a hole through your forehead, this is profound samadhi. Now be the hole. Fall through it, all the way down to your rectum. This is yoga. There are ten thousand ways to pray. Lying here awake at 3 A.M. is one of them. Glittering constellations conspire to sabotage clear thinking. Big-breasted crone moon throbs, making everyone crazy, then veils herself in raven feathers. Rejoice in the darkness where all your planets are ajar. This could be freedom. Your horoscope is the web of a spider who fell into a Starbuck's Frappuccino and got hammered on caffeine. Rebel empaths invent their own Qigong. Get out of bed. Wrestle with a mud-spattered...

  Collapse into Being. You are the berry already fermented on the vine. You don’t even need To be crushed. Photo by Victoria Pittman

"They also serve who only stand and wait.” ~Milton I remember how my first teacher, Maharishi, loved and quoted this line from Milton's sonnet. There are some whose lives seem very humble, apparently not too "productive" or "successful" in a material sense: yet upon the invisible stability of their inner silence the world depends. Are you one of these keepers of the vigil? (Ah, I write these words at 3 A.M. on a Sabbath morning!) Were it not for your unfathomable silence, offering this breath to the breathless, the world's getting and spending would spin out of control. Indeed, this is happening, and we need you these days more than ever, friend. Never before has it been so important for contemplatives to dwell among us, though their lives be quiet, obscure and unremarkable. You walk softly on the earth, yet stay awake. If you are one of them, thank you. You play an important role, the role of Being. Some of you will understand that the greatest work yo...

Why all this talk about destroying your ego? Don't take this little 'i' for granted. It's the last grape to be crushed, but the sweetest by far! Through that final pressing the wine tastes its own flavor, attains distinction, and learns the secret knowledge of the fool: this nectar was fermented on the vine. God was already drunk when the song of the stars burst out of her lips, so dark and sweet, and somehow shining! Painting by Bartolomeo Cavarozzi

“And they confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims   on the earth.” ~Epistle to the Hebrew, chapter 11 Only through estrangement and pilgrimage do we come to know that we have always already arrived; that the journey from our lost and far-flung star to the center of the galaxy is but a trillionth of a hair’s width sparkling in the neuron of this thought. Love asks no image or belief but merely to dissolve the myth of distances. I think we orbit one another. You find your center in me, I find mine in you. And this kaleidoscopic turning of all through all is the Great Stillness. Light that swells the East and melts the West is only breath-mist coming and going on the mirror-like mind. I am the glow that floats about an inch above your diaphragm. And when it is soft enough, your inhalation fathoms my sky, overflowing the rim of night. Through estrangement and pilgrimage we come to know that there has never not been unity. Do you want to heal the earth? Massage the chrism of aw...

Let all your pronouns dissolve in "Thou." You are not a gender or a tribe, a nation or a race. You are the one who was born to gaze into my face, as I was born to gaze into yours. Our religion is a broken heart, spilling light out of darkness. We meet in the smell of food, giving thanks to the smallest creatures, the bee, the seed, the raindrop, learning from a withered Autumn sunflower how to scatter a thousand summer mornings. Painting by Laurent Berthier

Between heartbeats is a garden, the place where Magdalene and Jesus touch. She thinks he is the gardener. He thinks She is the breath of God, caressing his chest. And she is. Between heartbeats is a garden, the wilderness where Israel meets Wisdom, that Sabbath Queen who sings of loss. How could they make love in the desert? They pitched a tent of animal skins, and it became a holy pavilion of gathered silences. Between heartbeats is a garden, where village girls dance with the Prince of Herdsmen. Each maiden is his flute, but only one can be his Song. If she who wears your respiration as her wedding gown does not wound your artery, here, in the throat, how will you know her? By what signs will you prove that the Paramour is your Betrothed? Dear friend, your emptiness turns indigo, fragrant as jasmine. Your numb places overflow l...

  You taught me your hungry language: Ishq Allah Ma'bud Allah, “the Lord is love, lover, and beloved!” I know it now, God's native tongue, though my grammar is confused. The pronouns bewilder me because I have fallen into the flower of your wound, whose petals are Mine, Yours, His, Hers, Ours. A groundless falling, a ravenous exchange of lips and silences, gazes of Otherness in a single eye, Ishq Allah Ma'bud Allah! All that matters is the wave nature of the moon, the secret kiss of the bee in the pistil of the hyacinth. All that matters is the sexual caress of listener and stillness, a tremor where the music is conceived. The blue note in your flute has become my sky. I taste the death of distances. In the star-swirled center of my forehead, you drown your dark embryo. We are reborn as drops in each other’s eyes. Healing, like a bellows, is the gift of hollowness. Is your desert night above, or deep inside, where the constellations arrange th...

In the valley of my backbone two rivers meet, the Ida and Pingala, mingling crystal waters of the sun, emerald waters of the moon. The gardener is Shakti Magdalena who comes in the darkest hour, a temple priestess of the morning star, to pluck the clusters from entangled vines of pain and joy. I kiss her on the lips. This I call breathing. In her mead-quiet mist, everything seems motionless, yet dances in a faint exhalation laden with the glow of galaxies. Wild flowers lie fallow as weeds, yet bear inebriating fruit, fermented on the stem. All that falls rises as rain, as brackish wetland desire, as flesh itself, marrow of angels lit with fire, ringing the angry bell-beautiful cry of a great disturbed blue heron. Earth weeps insouciant poppies, still foggy with a dream of ambiguity. Who comes veiled in a lapis hijab at sunrise? My sister the modest sky. When I pass through the shadows she takes my hand to guide me down the soggy creek bed where the bones of heaven lie strewn by an anc...

  “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: stay here and watch with me.” ~Matthew 26:38 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 one hour? If an hour is too long, then just for one breath? Even that is enough to bathe a thousand stars with your love. Just for a moment, friend, Stay with me.

“ He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only... I will not reason and compare: my business is to create .” ~ William Blake. You fail only by comparison. To whom? To what? Un diminished by a ratio of otherness , you are ensouled by singularity. Suns do not mutter, "Which of us is brighter?" Your face was already beautiful before those dark eyes fell into th is world of oblique refracted beams, and these flesh atoms from the first breath of creation arranged themselves into a brief kaleidoscopic symmetry. Now is the time to repose in your own peculiar light. Cultivate stillness by dancing, by swaying ever more gently into your center. Cultivate silence by singing more softly, until only your nerves can hear you . B y letting ten thousand thoughts swirl like dust in a sunbeam , attain perfect emptiness . B y allowing weeds to blossom, cultivate exotic flowers . Name ...

Be still and know that I Am God. Be still and know that I Am. Be still and know there is no other. All creatures are waves of energy in one ocean of  the stillness I Am. My energy is love.

"Countless stars illuminate the night behind our eyes, whether we sleep, dream, or wake. This inner sky is purest Presence. It is wonder, both the source and goal of every mystical path. And this spacious depth in us is our connection with the Creator. "When the inner silence vibrates, we participate in the Logos, the resonance at the source of creation. As I feel it, this resonance is the essence of a poem. To immerse in the vibrant energy of a good poem is to participate in the primal act, the Word of God. "The delicious problem of the poet is to report this inexpressible space of amazement, as it shines through the most ordinary creatures in the world. Not to separate the ordinary from the transcendent, but to celebrate how ineluctably one they are, like the color blue and the emptiness of the sky." ~From the introduction to my book, Savor Eternity One Moment At A Time , published by Saint Julian Press. Photo: sunset over my little town on the Salish Sea, first d...

1. Embrace anger as pure sensation in the forehead. Embrace grief as the awakening of the gut, which is also the root of laughter. Embrace fear as a sense of contraction in the chest, throbbing with energy. When we embrace these emotions as energy, without attaching them to images of the past, without naming them in the mind, we give that energy a chance, an opportunity to transform itself. We give it freedom to blossom into fresh electricity in the cells, the atoms of our flesh. Because this is what anger is: creative energy contracted and solidified.   Use the gift of this body to let anger settle and dissolve into its deeper primordial condition: fear. But don't stop there. Feel the taste of the fear, and it too will dissolve into something even more primal: our weariness, our weariness with trying to be in control.   In the safe space of our own body, which is our temple, its OK to be out of control. It's OK to explore the sensations of in-tense emotion as se...