Ode to Hands

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 well,
you, the veterinarian who operates on puppies;
I do not forget the engineer in the ribcage of the ship,
or the navigator by stars in oceanic night
on the bridge with his sextant and compass.
I honor the greaser and breaker of rusted bolts, you,
mechanic changing my mother's tire on the highway;
you who lay brick walls in a straight line, who play
steel stringed guitar with tough delicate fingers;
poodle groomer, binder of wounds on the battlefield!
I honor your hands, sword-wielder, marksman,
backhoe driver, shaker of the shaman's rattle at the moon.
I honor the deft diaper changer and the mixer of cocktails;
the Ayurvedic pulse-reader, the miner with infernal drill;
distiller of barley malt, brewer, grafter of grape vines;
you who bless tinctures and ointments, crushing flowers
into homeopathic salve, all of you equally adept.
I honor the handyman and midwife, the builder of campfires,
mudra-weaver in your mountain shrine, you, love-maker. 
With my hands that make nothing, I offer you this poem.

Inward Healing

 

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, and the effects will not change until our consciousness shifts into a state that is more stable, centered, and harmonic. What influence, what transforming power, can bring about such an internal shift? It won't be a shift in the stars and planets, or a descent of some ascended Master into the world. It will come in a "still small voice of calm," the whisper of a blessing that is more interior to our heart that our own thoughts.

Meditation is the art of opening to this interior shift. It is not escape from the world, or "by-passing," or narcissistic fantasy. Meditation is the application of wisdom at the level of the cause rather than the effect. Yet this salvific blessing cannot come from self-effort. It cannot come from our own mind, since our mind is the problem. This mind cannot save itself, cannot even change itself. For the mind who acts on the mind is still the same tormented mind.

Peace comes only when we learn the art of surrendering the mind to Grace. Then we drop immediately from the head into the heart, where we can hear the unstruck sound of a power much deeper than thought (I say "deeper" rather than "higher"). In silence, the Grace of the Friend fills the field of mind, not with thoughts, but with vibrations of healing love. Let the will and the intellect harmonize to that inner tuning fork. The sound of divine Love is called the Mantra. It resonates in the field of the Heart. This vibration of Love does not come down from above; it wells up like a tear from the core of your chest, percolating through every neuron into all the cells of your flesh, irradiating the body and senses, greening the world.

If you are, like so many, experiencing the nightmares, sleepless torments, and jangled nerves of despair, don't waste time and energy on blame. Blame neither yourself, nor others, nor any external cause. The cause is within. By returning to the silent core of your own heart, and reposing on the breast of the Friend, you will feel the healing caress, yes, but not only you will feel it. That healing caress will pass effortlessly from your center into other hearts, touching all humanity.

Beneath our separate and separating thoughts, there is a quantum field where we all pulse like ripples in one sea of empathy. Here there is no need for thought or image, for in simple silence the breath surrenders. Here we are each the secret self of the other. And when we meet here, our hearts repose in one another. We share from a single bottomless cup, at rest in Rumi's meadow, where there are no rights and wrongs, only energy.

Painting by Breughel

Day of Atonement

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 rainbows

rooted in the blackness of the aquifer,

the rain itself.

It is not far.

The pilgrimage of the soul is the body.

The journey of our unending breath

back to the Wordless beginning.

Return.

T'Shuvah.

Imagine the silence.

Icon: 'Eve at Peace' by Sue Ellen Parkinson

Gospel

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 white chrysanthemum
bursting under the Autumn moon.
This is the Gospel of Astonishment.


This poem is from my book, 'The Nectar Of This Breath.'
And this is a watercolor, not a photograph, by Rukiye Garip.

Mabon

Still in love with light, incline
toward darkness now, the mothering etherium.
Settle in the cleft of seasons, see
through the golden shadow.
Tugged no longer by the sun, let your
umbilicus run back into the marrow
between stars.
Night motivates your bones, your melancholy
made of Winter and pearl.
It only takes one breath to change the world.
Don't be too sure you ever got out of the egg.


Art by A. Gokhan Gultekin

The Fire Of The Magdalene

In the gaze of Mary Magdalene there is a certain severity, the searing power of her shakti, which we too often try to soften into a comforter. Yet there is naught so soft, so comforting, as the no-thingness that burns away all that we are not.

What is Mary Magdalene's mission? Is she just another archetype of "the divine feminine?" Are we called to abstract her, with all the other Gods and Goddesses, into the faceless hegemony of the One?

Or does she, in Shakespeare's words, "give to airy nothing a local habitation, and a name"? Her feral astonishing bittersweet gaze, calling us toward some task quite unheard-of and outrageous?

Her darshan is a droplet of terrible fire that consumes us, burns us down and burns us up, in such accurate alchemy that our dross turns to gold, all that is not ourselves annihilated. No thing remains but the christ-all hologram of our uniqueness, irradiating every particle of the cosmos with the intimacy of our peculiar heart.

The eyes of the Magdalene behold us, and we are held. We are held in the most severe and lethal demand: the demand of bhakti. Her gaze is not the fire of anger or judgment, but passionate devotion.

Mary is devotion. That is what bhakti means. But devotion to what task? To loving Jesus? Attaining Gnosis? Embodying Sophia? Dear friend, she burns with an even deeper, purer bhakti: devotion to becoming herself.

When the drop merges with the ocean, it is our spiritual work. When the ocean merges with the drop, it is our spiritual play, our lila, our anointing.

Mary's olive-eyed glance pierces the heart, calling us to the work and play of the great transformation. She points to our becoming and whispers, "Be yourself!" She who refuses to be an archetype or a symbol, refuses to signify any truth other than her own jagged broken perfect wholeness, calls us to the ineluctable suchness of Personhood.

LINK. My new book is dedicated to the work and play of Mary Magdalene. This painting of the Magdalene by Robert Lentz.

Too Beautiful

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

Wabi

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

Unique

Eight billion mirrors

look the same

when unbroken.

But when they fall,

no two shatter alike.

No two reflect

the wild rose window

of a similar world.

Rejoice in the jagged

chiaroscuro

of your singularity,

the shattering

that makes you whole
and holy unlike.

The miracle is not

to merge with God

or evaporate into
the One: the miracle
is to become

a Person.

The mirror of
Christ fallen,
spilling its emptiness

into creation.

Let us imitate the love,

but not the pattern,

for we each have our own.

The more naked,

the more unique.

Now take off your veil,

then take off the veil

under the veil.

Show me the gaze of

your most radiant wound.

Photo: NASA's WISE space telescope shows a cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars, including the Berkeley 59 cluster and a supernova remnant.

 

Collage of my poem by Rashani Réa

Don't Tell

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.

New Moon

 

 

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.

Will she pluck debris from the swollen

stream of her eyes, uprooted trees and

cell phone towers, wind turbines,

granite slabs of fallen cathedrals?
Is she about to strangle her father?
Does her left palm throb with healing,
her right etched with runes
that hum before language?

I remember now.
This happens again and again.
We kneel before her in the mud.
This is what comes of Autumn rain,
the pregnancy of loss,
the new moon.

Birthday of Mary (September 8)

 

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'

Story Time: 'The Bumboat'

"In the beginning was the Word" ~Gospel of John

"Adau Bhagavan shabdha rasahi: In the beginning the Lord 

manifested the universe through a stream of sound" ~Vedic text

Here's a story of my pathless youth. This is about how I learned the science of mantra from a Nigerian bumboat man, which is the most wonderful science of all, because it's how the universe is created.

Not sure that would ever have made sense to me if I had not managed to get my Seaman's Papers and worked on an American merchant marine freighter to Africa. I sort of needed to transcend the Ivy League for awhile, even though I was still in college.

We sailed up and down the coast of West Africa. Seven countries, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Guinea. I have to explain that there are only three things to do when you are a U.S. merchant marine sailor ashore: one is get drunk, one is get into a fight, and one involves women of the night. I was a novice at most of these. But I must say, the ports of New York and

Baltimore were rougher and scarier than any city where I caroused in Africa.

The port of Lagos Nigeria is huge, built around a bay, where the ships anchor far offshore and you take a launch to the city. What I didn't know is that Nigeria was in the middle of a war: "the Ibo War." The fighting was deep in the interior, but once somebody had actually flown a bi-plane over the city to drop a Molotov cocktail, gasoline in a glass bottle. So now they had a curfew every night to protect them from the "Ibo tribal air force." I mean, they told me all this at a bar, sort of joking about it, so I didn't take the curfew seriously.

I played sailor all evening, until the lights went out. It was about that time that a very drunk Brazilian sailor accused me of stealing his wallet and pulled a knife on me. Fortunately, Nigerian policemen pulled up in the dark street in front of the bar and threw us both in the back of their van, to drive us to the ferry dock. I said, "Wait, you can't throw me in the back of the van with this guy, he's got a knife and he wants to kill me!" The policeman said, "Yes we can." But by the time we were in the van, the Brazilian had forgotten why he wanted to kill me. Instead, he hugged me and said we were friends forever.

The cops dumped us at the dock and there was no light on anywhere. All over the city, all over the bay, pitch dark. The ships at anchor were lightless too, small shadows drifting on a big shadow, surrounded by shadow-gray night. Somewhere there was a moon, behind the clouds. No stars.

The office at the dock was closed. "Christ," I said. "This is for real." No ferries, no traffic in the streets, no people, no light. I asked the policemen, "Are you just going to leave us here?"

"Yes."

"But there's no way to get out to my ship. What am I supposed to do?"

"Your problem," the cop said. But as they drove away, he shouted, "Try the bumboats."

I had no idea what this meant. The Brazilian sailor had wandered off into the dark. I banged on the chained door to the ferry office. Nobody. Blackness inside and out. I walked down the rickety stairs to the sand beneath the dock. It was creepy, lapping waves, garbage, feces along the shore. Tangled jungle about twenty yards back from the water, animals up there scrounging and yelping.

For about fifty yards I walked along the beach, looking for my ship out in the bay, then glancing behind me into the shadows. Pretty sure I knew which ship was mine, a bulkier darkness in the dark, about 3/4 of a mile out. But what the hell was a bum boat?

"So this is being twenty one," I thought. I had always wondered where I'd be when I was twenty one. Then I called out, "Bum boat?" My voice sounded like a chirp in the vacuum. I cleared my throat and yelled louder, "Bum boat?"

Somebody shouted back from the dark trees. I squinted. There was a hut. Actually, probably several huts. A bony figure tumbled out of the dark and shambled down to the water. "Bum boat?" I said again.

"Yo bum boat," he nodded, with flashing teeth. He was all skin and bones, but his smile was brilliant, and his eyes were shining somehow in the blackness.

"Speak English?"

"Naah."

I pointed out to my ship in the distance and he said, "Bum boat two dollar."

"OK!" I said, and gave him two dollars. I sort of regarded him as my savior right then and there. And American dollars were like gold back then. Now they aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

He ran back into the shadows. A dog barked. I waited. Then a hollowed log about eight feet long and two feet wide slid out of the darkness, the barefoot man chasing after it. He beckoned me to get in. I sat in the bow, if you could call it a bow, and he pushed out into the bay, perched in the stern with his paddle.

Before I knew it we were bobbing in the waves, the shore spreading behind us like a dark stain, the invisible city a shadow behind that. It turned out these Nigerians were serious about their curfew. Not a sound or a flicker of light through the vastness. Not a single lantern on any of the ships. Just paddle sounds in the night, and waves slapping a log.

I sat back and witnessed the moment, to gain some situational awareness. I trusted the guy. I half trusted his log. I was pretty sure I knew which ship was my freighter, and I knew the ladder would still be down for tomorrow's ferry. All in all, not bad. On the other hand, one wack with the oar and I would be fish bait, my wallet in his hand. Or if this thin tipsy dug-out got broadsided by a wave, we would be swimming hundreds of yards from shore in the middle of Lagos bay, where no boats were moving.

Here's what I thought about. No one in the world except the bumboat man knew where I was - no one in the city of Lagos, no one on my ship, no one at home in America. I could very easily disappear from the face of the earth, and no one would ever find out where. For some reason, this brought a very relaxing sensation, and I felt free. The perfect craziness of the inevitable dawned, the wayless beauty of the Absurd, and some causeless joy beyond choice arose in my chest, deeper than laughter and far more blissful.

For no reason at all I leaned back and spread my arms, as if I was hugging the waves and the bumboat, hugging the man and the city behind him, the invisible stars, the vast gray uncertainty of Being. With all my heart, I started singing, chanting really loud, "La la la la la!" Just that. I bellowed, "La la la la la la la!" Laughed and roared, "La la la la la la la." Like a fearless goofball moon-drunk baby.

The bumboat man grinned and swung his head around in circles, davening and Zikhring with delight. He too chanted, "La La La La La Lah Lah!" Then he said, "God name, God name! We sing God like that!"

It was the name of Allah we were singing. And it filled us with power, charging our bodies, the boat, the waves with power, the clouds and the stars with power, with the power of the name of God, the energy of the mantra, the Word that created the cosmos. Yet at the same time, our sacred hymn was merely the song of a fool, the song of children lost and found at sea who trust one another in the dark.

* Photo, my ship, the African Neptune, now moth-balled and melted down for scrap metal.