October Twilight

"You will find more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you can never learn from schoolmasters." ~St. Bernard of Clairvaux

Don't veer from the razor's edge. The grit of your bondage is the gravel path to liberation. In slivers of sensation, you are the unwounded witness.

Be instantly enlightened through whatever you deeply observe. Pass through frog croak, wand of fading lavender, Autumn musk of deflated tomato in the ruined garden. The portal to the miraculous is this toadstool.

The merest soundsmell touchtaste glitterblink is your Guru's countenance. Whatever jagged fringe appears before you this very instant is the Mandala of Supreme Awakening.

If you're old enough, read the purple hieroglyphs carved on the back of your hand. Love glows from husks. Be starlight through a brittle leaf, a quivering nipple of blue chanterelle. 

Notice how ferns remember to bow, how your naked attention illumines a rotted hollow squash, the broken apple bubbling in a sunbeam, inscrutable runes of the worm among the fallen.

Avoid abstraction. Be the witness of fire in a synapse. Feast your eyeball in a berry-flame of pyracantha. Through a dew drop on the spider's web, enter the temple of intergalactic diamond emptiness.

In a dimensionless seed, the black nectar of your heart dreams otherness, and feels alone. Imagines a distance where “here” longs for “there.” Feasts on the dark matter of solitude, the Milky Way, silken-rapt in a sizeless ayin-soph.

Bow your nose, iris, fingertip, tongue. Eternity is over, you're ready for a moment on earth. Genuflecting in the moss, let a silent tear encircle ten thousand cedars. It is important to find this tear and weep.

Upon the spiral staircase of your spine, wondrous Night, bejeweled in numberless suns, descends into your body as a breath of prayer, and you remember why the vast puts on the veil of the small.

The grace of entropy, forms ever-perishing, photons ever-perishing, your bone marrow, brain cells ever-perishing, your stories ever-perishing. But the Ever is deathless. Jesus said, "If you want to meet God, taste a piece of bread."

And here you are. October twilight, the odor of silence. Your exhalation is the sky. You hear a heron shriek, flapping over withered cattails. Your heart erupts with the laughter of the void. The poignant guffaw that created the world.

A single drop without circumference streams down your cheek, bathing your mother, your father, all your relations, for seven generations past and to come, in waves of astonishment. It is important to find this tear and weep.