Uradiance: 2024

One Gentle Breath

One gentle breath

is a caravan to the heart.

One gentle breath

is a pilgrimage across the void

between the sun and moon.

The desert is wide, yet

one exhalation sweeps away

the endless past, with all its

stories of the ancient one
called Me.

As one inhalation stirs
the buried seed, releases the sap,

bathes the earth in a soundless

song of flowers.

Sky blues pour through

the crystal windows of your body

because you have wounded your chest

with this invitation:

Come fill and empty me,

throw me down and drown me

in the silence of your Name!

O pilgrim, bandalero, warrior

of purifying transformations,

wield this breath wisely.

It is a burning sword of love.

Painting: Rossetti, St. Joan of Arc

A Deeper Silence (Full Moon Feast of Mary Magdalene, 7/22)

"In the Breath of Christ's Spirit we experience a new embrace. We are no longer in duality, but in unity... All will be clothed in light when they enter into the mystery of this sacred embrace... What is the Bridal Chamber if not the place of trust and consciousness of the embrace? ~Gnostic Gospel of Phillip
Fall into a deeper silence and you will hear the earth breathe flowers of gratitude. A ray of the full moon descends into your fontanelle. You are the anointed one, the wounded one whose crown has never healed.

One drop of her nectar slips down your throat and pierces your chest. Hold it here, like a pulsing pearl. Your breastbone is an altar, where moonlight mingles with the warmth of the sun. This is the bridal chamber of the heart. Christ meets Mary here. Their pure encounter is a mysterious kiss.

The two become one. Yet the one becomes two for the sake of love. Their silence trembles with a song. Surely, this is the song of songs. Miryam, in Hebrew, means a bitter sea, an ocean of tears. Magdala means a tower. The tower inside you is stored up with sweet myrrh. It rises from your sacrum to your brow. Mary Magdalene is bittersweet. She stings inside you.

Let the syllables of her name be your inhalation and exhalation. Ascend and descend on her tower of aloneness over the sea, each outbreath an offering of sacred loss, each inbreath a chrism of her beauty. Sip from the murmuring spring of ineffable modesty that pulses inside you like a vein in stone.

Give up your pilgrimage to the past. Stillness has no history. She listens to the story of your silence, and hears the ancient beauty of your longing. Bow down to a leaf, a moth wing, the cry of an ecstatic sparrow. Let your journey be a ragged saunter to the edge of any meadow, not far from home.

When you arrive at the feast of Presence, she will loosen and let fall her greenery, anointing your feet with dew, daubing them with moss and clover. Surely you must know, the Beloved takes the humble form of wherever you are.

Did you think you would find her in a ruined cloister, or a sojourner's shrine? Or tap the voiceless diamond gush of her song in the Torah, the Suras, the lips of Jesus?

Friend, the music you've been yearning for is the sound of one breath pouring into another, the spill of distant starlight from the rim of your own diaphragm, the name an infant whispers just falling asleep at the Mother's nipple. For thousands of years you've been falling asleep like that. Now is the time to fall awake.

The conversation of the Bridal Chamber is an ineffable mingling of voices that become a single secret revelation. “Your love is sweeter than wine, and your name is perfume poured out. Lead me into your chamber, O King. I am the garden and you are the Spring."

Image: Mary Magdalene by Danté Gabriel Rossetti

Mere

I love the word "mere." A mere blade of grass, a mere breath. Is Mere someone's name? Is it rooted in the syllable for Mother, or Sea, for bittersweet spices, or Mary, Miryam? Mere Presence is so much more alive than any story you could tell about the past. Ever infinitely sustainable, available and full, the sword-edged grace of mere Being. A mere heartbeat from death. And what of merest Silence? Your deep silence nourishes the earth more than any Word. The universe falling, resting, poised like a raindrop on a thistle.

Swan

Surely, you've been told,

a Goddess flows

through your darkness,

thirsting for love.

Don't seek, be drawn.

Wander and be found.

Learn to age the wine

of your longing

in an empty sepulcher.

Pour yourself wordlessly

into the cup of desolation.

A blossom doesn't open itself.

Something warm and soft falls

into it's ovule

from another world.

You have two centers:

one here, one there.

A single inhalation pierces them both.

Honor this piercing as a gift

and you will be the very garden

where thorns become blossoms,

every cell of your flesh

a grail of nectar.

The Ham'sa swan

descends from the ravenous stars

to settle on still waters at dawn

and drink from the ocean

in your chest.

Her song is "I Am She."

Your song is "I Am Thee."

It is the Mystery

of the Bridal Chamber.

Her wings are your inbreath

and exhalation.

This is why you have a body.

_________________

NOTE: Ham'sa is the natural mantra of the breath, as expounded in the Upanishads and the exquisite Yoga text, Vijnana Bhairava. 'Hamsa' also means 'swan' in Sanskrit. Aham-Sa: I Am She, I Am One With God. This is the natural inner sound of what Kabir called 'the breath inside the breath.' Vijnana Bhairava states:

श्रीभैरव उवाच
ऊर्ध्वे प्राणो ह्यधो जीवो विसर्गात्मा परोच्चरेत् ।
उत्पत्तिद्वितयस्थाने भरणाद्भरिता स्थितिः ॥२४॥
'
The supreme Goddess, or highest Śakti, who is the essence of creation, goes on expressing herself upward and downward in the form of exhalation and inhalation. When the mind rests in the point between breathing out and breath in, one perceives the source of all worlds.'

सकारेण बहिर्याति हकारेण विशेत् पुनः।
हंसहंसेत्यमुं मंत्रं जीवो जपति नित्यशः ॥१५५॥

'The breath is exhaled with the sound sa and inhaled with the sound ha. Thus, the human body perpetually recites this mantra, haṁsaḥ.'

Image from 'Heart of Conscious Living'

Our Lady of the Nurse Log

She dwells in my flesh as this inhalation, a gentle lightning bolt in my spine. Every quark of my gristle sings to an invisible star, about some incomprehensible connection between pain and beauty.

Angels cock their heads, perplexed and ever so sweetly troubled by the music emitted from my nuclei. Something about my gravity and grief gives them courage. They long to clothe themselves in bone, the very stuff that weighs me down.

Call her Laniakea, 100,000 clustered galaxies, my vagus nerve her golden hand reaching through my body. I am pollen on her sticky feet, I am milk-weed on the breeze of her exhalation. She honors my fallenness, sprinkling me over the meadow again, rooting me wild, nurtured by larvae, pierced and stitched again by symbiotrophic fungi, fertilized by ancestral forgiveness.

Of course, you may call her Chi, Ruuh, Shekinah, Kundalini. Or let her take the shape of the Mere: mere wings of frost dissolving on a window. A drunken worm in the golden apple. The shadow of a cloud brushing dew from a faery ring of toadstools. A hairy caterpillar crawling toward its rainbow of doom. Merely what is...

And isn’t this what God is doing here, glistening in your tear, which might be the portal to a new earth, when the beam of your seeing makes a prism of it? A single I Am breathes through our separate bodies. Impermanence is the poignancy of love. Self and other merge again and again in micro-orgasms of perception. But the seer and the seen are one sap, rising through billions of quivering stems in the chaos of our greening.

So now I loaf on a mossy nurse log, having wandered barefoot in the forest at midnight, un-naming the fires of heaven. No words here, only her Presence. Listen! The rustle of death, the murmuring of birth all around us. Sigh of photons, song of mitochondria, creation’s first and only respiration, breath of the Mere.

Infant saplings tremble out of a moldering cedar. Fir spores ciliate their shakti into loam. Miryam reaches out her naked cinnamon foot, nudging my big toe.

Photo: took this in the Carbon River Rain Forest, Mount Rainier. A poem based
on this forest murmuring is in my book, 'Strangers & Pilgrims' (see below).

108
sparkling gems
on your mala.
One of them a diamond,
one a pearl.
Most are polished glass.
Or are they all
just beads of dew?
Is one worth more
than all the others?
How can you tell?
Is one of them you?
The same hollow
at the center of each,
maybe that
is who you are.

Drowned

You swim in a miraculous sea of grace. This is the secret of secrets in the heart of the heart. You are a breath of the Beloved, whose grace pervades every particle in creation. Don't even try to understand it. Just drown.

Like a bee who has sunked and dissolved in the bog of pollen at the center of a rose, you don't need to go anywhere to find the sweetness of God, no journey required, no seeking. All you have to "do" is awaken. Awakening is the reason you are here.

Did you evolve through aeons of mineral, vegetable, animal, and angelic energy, and finally incarnate here in this earthly realm of paradox where you merged the opposites of high and low, spirit and matter, pain and beauty, only to become an impersonal One without a face, without a dance? Of course not. Your mission is to condense, refine, and Christolize stardust in personal ensoulment.

Yet every particle and wave of this evolutionary process, from beginning to end, is the flow of one substance, one substratum - divine love. Physics is the fire of divine love, biology the honey of divine love. Your cells are drops of divine love, and your body is the honeycomb.

Awaken and see that it was all made out of love. Matter is love. Separation is love. Death is love. You are love. And the one you most despise is just an aspect of yourself that you have left in the shadows.

So what must you "do"? Relax. Deepen your silence. Your deep silence nourishes creation more than any Word. And when you fall into the deepest silence, you will hear the earth breathe flowers of gratitude.

Photo by Kristy Thompson

Guided Meditation: Always Already Here

Uradiance · Meditation- Always Already Here

Billions Of Moments Of Beauty

So many people feel that the world's sorrow must prevent us from being happy. We feel guilty if we are not weighed down by the suffering we see endlessly magnified by the echo chamber of the media. But the media seldom attend to the billions of moments of beauty, the myriad little acts of kindness, happening all over the planet right now. They only see momentary shocks of violence, and repeat them over and over, creating the illusion that the violence is constant. Yet in between those momentary noises are vast territories of silence, of gentleness and creativity. Now, more than ever before, it is important to be happy on earth.

A flower photo by Kristy Thompson

Bridal Chamber

Blossoms don’t open themselves.
It takes a sunbeam to ignite the rose.

I was asleep until you placed
a ruby on my chest

awakening the expiration
of this gentle song, the whisper

of Spring in a Winter garden.
So’ham, So’ham, So’ham...

One breath pours wine into
the burnished cup of another.

Some say that this is just
a sound without meaning.

I say it means the Magdalene
has met Jesus

in the Bridal Chamber
of your heart.

Poem from my book, 'Wounded Bud.'
Painting: 'The Bride' by Dante Rossetti

Sown

Try not to rise above your longing.
Sink deeper,
plant pain in the earth.
Try not to rise above your weariness.
Sink deeper,
plant sorrow in the loam.
Try not to rise above your flesh,
plant every breath.
You too are sown
in the body of a Mother,
roots, stem and branches
permeated with her tears.
Walk barefoot.
Any place in the forest
is holy.
Sorrow and desire are seedlings.
Offer them.
Our Lady's grace will open you
like a sprouted wound.
Midnight will nourish you with
infinitesimal starry voices
rising from the furrows of her plow.
Beauty is subterranean.
It knows how to germinate
in darkness,
how to ascend, just as it knew
how to fall.
Some green ineffable
innocence trembles
from your astonished heart.
Here is a secret:
the warmth that draws you upward
is below.

This poem appears in both English and German
in our newest book, 'Tavern of Awakening' (see below).
Painting: Mary Magdalene at the Cross by Botticelli.

Veiled

Veiled in silence,
O thinnest only bridal gown,
you suffuse my body
with your body.
Black as granulated diamonds
dancing inside me,
moving like a serpent
who has just shed her skin,
are you this very breath?
Are you Kali, or a bitter sea,
or a tower rising
from my sacrum to my crown,
a silo of myrrh, struck
by lightning, spilling sweetness
where there was famine?
Whoever said your form
was terrible
has not really seen you,
or fallen victim to your
sword-wings honed
by yearning.
Catastrophe of grace,
you burn and tear
the wedding garment.
Your name means,
“Ruthless Thunder
in the Hollow of My Spine.”
Your name means,
“She Who Takes No Captives.”
But who among the living
knows your true name?
I pray in the language of the egg
where nothing has yet been born.
Let my flesh grow still as Shiva
that the night inside me
might comprehend your radiance.
Let my blood ferment into the wine
of Christ’s desire,
that I might murmur,
“Miryam, Miryam.”

Published in 'Winged Moon' magazine on July 22, for the feast
of St. Mary Magdalene. Icon of Mary Magdalene by Lentz,
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco.

Learn

Learn from

the Swallowtail.

Surrender.

Suck nectar

out of the blossom

that bewilders you.

Be humble.

Let God's golden light

reign through your heart

over all creation.

Settle on a sprig

of milkweed

with no feeling

of dominion,

only a thirst

for the love that

nourishes your wings.

Photo: a weed in my back yard

More Silence

Our country doesn't need more action. It needs more stillness. We don't need more words. We need more silence.

If they are not rooted in silence, our words as well as our deeds are just chatter. Protest, preaching, prayer... dry leaves in the wind. Words of the candidate, the professor, the scientist, the guru... brittle twigs scratching at the glass.

Words of the righteous politician or the leftist politician, words about yoga, or non-duality, or love... these words are wearisome and predictable without a seed in the Unnameable.

Words shouted in the street or murmured in the temple, words like "freedom," "democracy," "god." What use are they if we won't deepen our silence to fathom the ineffable Being toward which these words are only pointers?

I am not talking about negative silence, which is only the absence of noise, but life-giving silence, the silence of the heart. I am talking about the bottomless wellspring of breathing, the nectar of a mind free from thought.

Yes, there is a silence beyond understanding, the womb of creation, the fountain of eternity in the hollow of this moment.

If you are very fortunate, you'll meet a teacher whose whisper leads you back to the Wordless. Which is the real purpose of language - to carry our awareness to the Unbounded, beyond all concepts.

And this is the real purpose of a mantra, the name that dissolves in the Nameless. The Sanskrit root of mantra is "mannas," meaning "mind," and "tra," meaning vehicle, as in the suffix "-tron." Electron is a vehicle for electricity. Photon is a vehicle for light. Mantra is a vehicle for mind, transporting the mind inward to its source in divine silence.

For the universe is not born of a Word, but of silence. Word is only the vehicle, the vibration of silence. And mantra is this process of creation in reverse. A true mantra carries our surrendered heart gracefully, effortlessly, back to the stillness of the cosmic womb, where every particle of our body and every breath of our spirit is refreshed, renewed, reborn. This is the actual purpose of meditation.

My first teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was a master of this ancient science. He once whispered...

"Silence vibrating is Creation.
Silence flowing is Love.
Silence shared is Friendship.
Silence seen is Infinity.
Silence expressed is Beauty.
Silence maintained is Strength.
Silence omitted is Suffering.
Silence allowed is Rest.
Silence recorded is Scripture.
Silence preserved is Our Tradition.
Silence given is Initiation.
Silence received is Joy...
Silence alone Is."