Uradiance

I honor your hands, those skillful bones, tendons, knuckles and fingers: you awe me, tool-holder! I bow down to you, my own hands inept, little accomplishing, hardly able to fold themselves. You who tie knots and make shelters, you who reach into the blood of birth and turn the breached foal's head in the womb of the mare; woodcarver, carpenter, thrower of pots, blacksmith, diamond cutter, pruner of fruit trees; you who swing bats or sink three pointers, loaf kneader, roller of noodles, whirler of pizza dough; calligrapher allowing clouds, expressing mountain and bamboo in wrists and fingertips, I honor you! Squirting milk into a bucket from the goat's teat, or fingering the Uileann pipes as you gaze inward at the eyes of Danu, Mother of green Eirre;  you, lonely cosmetician with your palette of faces,  I do not forget, nor you foot maseuse, nor plumber, chiropractor, nurse, laying hands on the sick at midnight unknown to the doctor; you the surgeon as we...

  I hear so many complaining of anguished dreams and sleepless nights, frayed nerves and a torrent of disturbing thoughts, feeling like they are going crazy. The important thing to know about this is, it's not just you. It's all of us. The second thing we need to know is that this crisis of anxiety is caused from within us, not from the external world. It is not the world but the mind that is off-kilter. Therefore the crisis must be healed within us, before we can heal any world "out there." The dissonance begins in the subtler realms of the astral and mental planes. When we are inwardly chaotic, it not only shows up in our dreams and night-sweats, but through our senses and perceptions of the world. Then we speak and act on those perceptions, and project our inner discord outwardly. Since the cause lies within, the solution cannot lie outside. The solution is not "fixing" the economy, or our politics, or the social system. Those are effects, not causes, an...

Atonement is return to the beginning. T'Shuvah. Rest in the place where God is creating the heavens and the earth, and the earth is tohu wa'bohu, formless and void. Darkness is over the face of the deep. And the breath of wisdom, who is the paramour, plays upon the waters, brooding like a mother bird over the infinite egg, stirring, ruffling the silence into waves. It is not far. The pilgrimage of soul-retrieval is a journey of one inhalation from the sun in your chest to the starry ayin soph in your forehead. And the practice of returning is a journey of one exhalation from the pulse between your eyebrows to your heart. T'Shuvah. On the way you will become a tadpole smothered in womb jelly. You will be a mushroom spore, a shard of moonlight wounding the imaginal cell of an ambiguous cocoon, a ululation of DNA on the tooth of a cougar. You will be the soundless blade of the owl's wing, one and the same final sigh in 5,784 deaths. You will pass through a forest of rainbo...

September now. I hear petals weeping, singed with their own fire. I hear seeds grieving lost goldenrod and mountains gliding home on clouds. I follow the glistening pilgrimage of that old summer snail across the hosta leaf. Yet I have renounced world sorrow for the hidden pain of love, given up charity and pity to gaze into your face, where I find all the otherness I can endure. With a single inhalation, I bind and heal the wounds of rich and poor, oppressor and victim. My brain is busy with forgiveness. Both chambers of my heart are murmuring with gratitude: the empty one says thank you to the one that pours, then offers back the ancient gift of my grandmother’s blood. My temple is the pillaged garden, my alter the sky. We hold satsang in the wetlands, the frogs, blackbirds, and I. When in doubt, I walk barefoot in wet grass at midnight, un-naming the stars. Friend, it’s not the world that makes you suffer, but your judgments about it. And surely, the last judgment is the silence of a...

Too beautiful, the peonies in your garden! By all means enjoy them, yet be only half distracted. Keep a tincture of pure attention stored in your chest. Don't let the seductions of pain or beauty utterly pluck that other flower, deepest grown, the one that has always already blossomed in your body with its shades of fire beyond imagining, kaleidoscope of nameless fragrances wound loose as mere light on the trellis of your bones. One day you will discover that consciousness itself is the Beloved. How can you be sure? Keep the promise of this breath. Photo by my dear friend, Aile Shebar

Even on the most radiant days, there is a sorrow at the heart of life. When we deny it, the day becomes a desperate quest for happiness, and the night is very long. But when we absorb the trough into our rhythm, the shadow of a breath, this benign negation infuses all things with spaciousness, and tinges creation with golden poignancy, like Autumn itself. What is heavy is not sadness, but the denial of sadness. A cricket in the alder taught me this. Last roses, by Kristy Thompson

  Collage of my poem by Rashani Réa

Don't tell me what enlightenment is. Tell me how like a thief, while others sleep, you silently come to unlock the cages of the mind. How you release the feral breath into its meadow, the sky. Speak not of angels or Goddesses, but dangerous lovers who swim in the ocean of the uncreated, deeper inside you than a soul. Speak of the ancient eye of the shelter dog. Speak of the fragrance that spills from your bruises, what seeps from the broken pomegranate, your heart oozing thousands of other hearts. Tell how you keep one secret: the taste on the tongue, the musk of sweet syrup containing the stars, their crushed fermented light that makes the darkness holy. Have your lips touched the rim of the cup? Why do you need a grail? You are the thirst, and you are the wine.

    I am tired of words. They have no hands. No mud gushing between their toes. Can a man give birth? Only to poems. I am tired of the Word that looms between my silence and creation. Is this why I scoop up three gobbets of mire, kneading them like dough? I have abandoned “why.” For no reason I slap one on top of the other, blow them dry with breath, three argil clods vaguely shaped like a woman. She does not turn to stone. Her hips move. I don’t know why she has come alive. I have abandoned “why.” This exhalation has no significance. Perhaps the musky sod was already breathing with an infinitesimal dance of microbial loam daemons. I give her no commandment, “Be fruitful and multiply.” I do not say, “Dance.” How could I command a miracle? No sticky wings of giant moth or fallen angel unfold, only breasts and elbows. She gazes into her fingers. W...

  Today is the feast of the birth of Mary. Today the Mother has a wish for us: not merely to pray for her intercession, but to intercede for one another. Every human person is an empath. Every human brain is psychic. Every hand can heal. Every heart can bless. And no matter how much the mind confuses us with clouds of anxious thought, every one of us is empowered to turn within, to bathe in the radiance of Being, to receive perfect clarity, wisdom and guidance from the Friend, who is nearer than our own soul. Icon: 'Virgin Eleousa: Our Lady of Tenderness'

Most likely the healing you need will not come from anyone who calls herself a "healer." Most likely the blessing you need will not come from anyone regarded as a "saint." Most likely your highest initiation won't be given by a "guru." Just pay a little more attention to this moment. Let a purifying breath, a new name for the world, a kiss of seven trillion stars caress your spine, because the wing of a swallowtail pulses among blossoming weeds on the last summer day. Photo: from my yard

And what is the body if not God? And what if the chalice is not a receptacle for nectar, but IS the nectar whipped and stiffened, liquid beauty curdled into the beautiful? We are the vessels of our Being, made of ourselves to contain what we Are. The golden rose composed of the light it holds, the pomegranate countless crimson seeds of its own sweetness. A breath throbbing with silence, the silence throbbing with breath. What is a mote of pollen, a distant star, what is dust, what is God if not the body? Photo: Kristy Thompson