Uradiance

Action is what I do when I'm lost. Being is what happens when I find myself. Appearances are deceiving. When out of touch with my Being, I feel active, yet to others my actions appear as sound and fury, signifying nothing. But when I truly Am, I feel that I am doing very little, yet to others I appear to be a man of accomplishment. This is the miracle of Wu Wei. The universe has the structure of a joke. The punchline comes when you find out that action is stillness, stillness is action. The widest embrace is to let go of everything. So when in doubt, hug it all. P.S. I wrote this at 3 a.m., then went back to sleep.

I cherish most of my body very deeply, but I am at war with my belly. Perhaps you are not getting along with one of your body parts? If so, here's what to do. Expand it to fill the sky. Let it encircle the moon and all nine planets. Perhaps it is your penis, like a majestic tower rising beyond the rim of Andromeda. Perhaps it is that trembling golden water lily, your clitoris, floating on a lake of stars. Your drooping eyelids, one always stumbling a little behind? Let them be horizons of twin galaxies. Or are you ashamed of your brain? Turn it into a cathedral whose spires poke through the Crab Nebula, horns for the Rearing Horse   of Cosmic Dust where new suns are born from the womb of Unknowing. How could anyone be troubled or bound by a body-part that is really a temple of fiery intelligence, a singing bowl whose circumference outshines God? I hope this works for you, friend. It wor...

If there is half a particle of pain in your flesh, where is the other half? In my flesh, though I be a thousand miles away. Through the quantum entanglement of prayer, these halves collide and kiss, annihilated by love, replacing pain with spaciousness. The healing we seek, we Are. Shift attention to your quietest energy, which physicists call the field of least excitation, an undulating stillness, ocean of gratitude in a dust mote. Just become aware of what Is, the Wordless essence of this moment. Merely to Be is thanksgiving. Deep inside the fibers of your most ancient trauma, mad charm-quarks spiral, spun from uncreated blackness in the belly of creation, weaving mother-love into each wisp  of DNA, entwining your marrow with jungle flowers, serpent fangs, raveling up wonder into photons of primordial sod. A fetal hum in your body of brilliant shadows already sings thank you, I'm sorry, forgive me, I love you. Image of...

Non-duality is a poor substitute for bewilderment. A holly berry crystal'd in frost, made of your seeing it. Threaded on a rosary of miracles, a photon of light, created now and now destroyed in an irrevocable protest against the tyranny of One. The sun and moon whirling because your love makes them crazy. Rocks ringed in melting snow, a naked tree full of crows, the undulating stillness of a heron reflected in the stream, and your own brown body bathing in a tub of foamy pearls, all ineffable. Just don't mistake your thoughts for the world. Rend the veil of the mind-temple and gaze into the flaming sanctuary of silence, where creatures break their shells, each standing free of its name. With no anticipation, let the Milky Way spill down your spine, overflowing the stone cup of your heart, where emptiness has been waiting a long long time, carved from your ancestors' pain. Don't even call it thanksgiving. Gratitude is not a practice. Love is not made. Published in Braid...

Even when you transcend duality, merging with the uncreated womb of creation, with boundless darkness at the source of light, even then, and more so then, you are a Person! Quintessentially singular, outrageously playful, fiercely Selved, image and likeness of no one who has ever been, or is, or will be. And this in fact is why you are here: to provide God with a body, a place to be Selved. Now. And now. How tragic that so much new-age teaching is a complete distortion of Advaita, encouraging us to un-selve! How sweetly fermented and musky wild it is to roar: "The whole ocean delights to dance in every drop!" I learned this from one who is eternally feral and unique, who lives in a forest cave at the silent core of every human heart, whose name is Miryam, the Magdalene, priestess of the moon, mystical bride of Christ, incarnation of the Goddess Shakti, Spirit-breathed and wind-blown pilgrim wandering over the sea of gratitude. New painting of the Magdalene by...

A word is a wave on the ocean of silence. A kind word, a praise word, or a word of thanksgiving sinks into the heart, touches bottom, mingling with beginningless murmurs you've heard before, in Mother's belly, or lying on a beach at night, listening to stars... Even this faint sigh dissolves into a glow of golden darkness, a motionless tide of fire whose flames flicker inward, flooding every cell, ineffable radiance of your body. Do you need a boat, a secret mantra to carry you beyond the doubt and din of this world? No, friend, you only need to sing the Beloved's name with abandonment, the way a drunken poppy sings,fiercely blossoming all Winter in its seed.

  I pray to the Unity that becomes Two for love's sake while remaining One. O Mother of Eternity, Almighty Father, Christ Sophia, Rachman i'Rahim, O Shiva Shakti, El Shaddai,  entwined upon my spine, O Magdalena, Tower of Myrrh, Melchizedek of the Parliament  of Starlight pouring  through my vagus nerve:  I breathe in your Love and breathe out Love to all the earth. I breathe in your Beauty and breathe out Beauty to all the earth. I breathe in your Healing and breathe out Healing to all the earth. I breathe in your Abundance and breathe out Abundance to all the earth. By the authority and grace of a single exhalation, I abolish and dissolve every border drawn by politicians and kings, priests and ayatollahs, whose maps live only in the mind. And by the outrageous invincible audacity of one humble breath, I declare that from this New Moon on, Earth's only boundaries  shall be curves, the round and oval, tree rings, se...

Now is the time to invest in the Treasury of Silence. It is not like other banks. They will fail, overgrown by the grace of the ancient forest. But there is a bank that will never fail, and we own it. We are the board of trustees. There are billions of us sharing one abundance, credit unbounded, never-ending equity. The portal to the vault is always wide open. Anyone can enter, to draw on the Mother's endowment, the Father's annuity. Strange that so few of us step through the door. Come, leave the mind of penury, drop the chain of old stories, receive the inheritance of a quiet heart. There's a gateway to this fortune in each cell of your body. Enter the golden darkness of God's abysmal trust. If your mind won't come, leave it on the front steps, begging. Image: 'Wall Street' by Andree Wallin

One who speaks of a Way is already lost. One who seeks for an Other is always lonely. Christ says, I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. It is not the voice of an ancient Palestinian rabbi, but your voice, the roar I Am from the golden core of your body. You are the Way,  breathed by the Truth, pulsing with eternal Life this moment. How do I know? I learned it from the silence of an Autumn rose bursting in my garden. I heard it from a caterpillar falling all Winter long deeper, deeper into the chrysalis, chanting her mantra, "Spring." Digital Art by Christina McAllister

  Ask a child to point to the heart. Ask a Zen master to point to the heart . Ask an indigenous shaman to point to the heart. They will all point here , to the pit in your chest. This blood fruit,  this beaten talisman of body: no  new age meta-babble or theo-jargon about "the center of the will" or "being-ness." No hip-hop chakra jazz. Just this palpable lump of holy gristle. W hoever thirsts for life knows heart means heart. It’s beauty lies in physiology, not metaphysics.   My heart a meaty twin-chambered organ  of dualities. Diastole and systole. A rterial in, venous out. Bright scarlet to deep blue. My hear t a rough shuddering blast-site of anxiety and yearning, rage and unspeakable sorrow, well of tears in love’s desert.  A  cosmos of nuclei in the darkest cavern of Adam's missing rib, physical as hell, yet radiating  infra-red  magneti c resonance to the lion in the zoo and the prisoner on death row . ...

Don't give away all your beauty for free. Let there be a portion of your silence that falls into deeper silence, pulsing like a distant star in the scented abyss of your intimacy with no one but the dark. Learn the art of not revealing what you yearn to share with every thirsty stranger. Let your luster be like the moon pulling on the garden from within. We all share the night. Now and then a green nocturnal bud bursts free, and there's a sigh among the ancestors composted in loam. Pilgrims stop and want to know, "What is that fragrance?" Don't tell them. Just let your wild invisible sweetness fill the air, the hour before dawn. Love is a secret. The Beloved is a secret. You must be a secret too.  

  The husk is made of words, arguments, political opinions. It is dry and brittle. But the bud is breaking open. An effortless breath carries your heart beneath the words, into the still dark silence, where Being blossoms. Let this silence feed you. For a little while, at least for a sabbath, sink into the perfect peace you Are.

Be an arrow floating back to the bow, breath returning to the archer. Whatever you inflicted in your enemy's flesh, wash with your tears until the wound mysteriously closes like the bones in a baby's crown. But keep it soft. That's the door we leave by. Like peonies unbursting, we spiral inward toward the bud. Only in appearance do we escape the seed. When creatures repose in themselves again, that is the healing. This poem is an echo of the cry of a stricken breast already whole. Beads of gratitude fall from these eyes, pearl worlds on a thread of silence. I keep whispering, "Grace, grace..."  

All I can do for you is take your hand and softly lure you to the quietude that surrounds your wound, enfolding the remnant of this breath in what is so hollow it glows. No sorrow survives that silence. It is like a mirror. Look, I am holding it up for you. Stories come and go there, mists sighing on glass. They are not who you are. You are the possibility, the clarity itself. Now slip into the insouciant beauty of your gossamer Witness. If you have no faith, use mine, this shattered beaker of bone. Follow the blood from sepulcher to sea and fling your heart into orbit around stillness. Be the untethered gaze that sees from every star, e ncircling absence with a wider absence. Let loss be the illuminated door . And what if your path does not lead to the next moment, but deeper into this one? Hush now , the eloquent don't cry. Catch a full moon in your quivering web of emptiness. Be Winter sun in a white seed, offering your shadow back to what is not yet created. They father f...

  Stars have a secret. They are always falling into orbits of glory. They do not attempt to fly. Darkness is their wing. If you don't believe me, you’re still trying not to fall. Plunge more deeply into the womb of night and you will draw very near to the radiance of your Birth. Call it the hollow that runs through your spine, through the center of Andromeda, the axis through the nest of all that whirls. Call it uncreated light, the dawn not yet descended, holding in its tiny cups the coming Spring, the seeds of a new creation, curving infant embryos, curling their hands, their petals, shaping their dreams on the tip of a stamen. Or say the secret is   twin infinite beams gazing through all centers from the mirror of your face into the mirror of mine, until they collide in the kiss, the catastrophe that is everywhere. Photo: NASA James Webb Telescope