Mother Raven

There is no beginning.
Let a dark and unknown Goddess

be your breath.

Then you won't need any law

but wonder.

Just for a little while
sorrow and joy

will drink from the same bowl,

the one you've been holding

in your rib cage

and polishing too carefully.

What true chalice doesn't
get chipped and tip over?

Spill it now.
Mother Raven in her fire-flecked feathers

brings you no sun in her beak

to dip in heart wine

but a black hole whirling inward,

the circular splendor 

of all that is hollow,

portal to the uncreated.
There is no end.

Image by Cororo on DeviantArt

We Tried

 

I am a person.

The Goddess is a person.

We tried oneness and non-duality,

but that was no fun.

So I and Thou

just dance.
Advaita blossoms

in the play of lovers.
We flower in the dark,
the moon and I.
There are not enough stars

to fill our cup, 

so we drink from

the ancient beauty 

of emptiness.
This merging and re-emerging

of Lover and Beloved

is a pulsation 

in the silence of the heart
that creates every particle

out of the void.
I simply let Her be 

my breath

and forget all the rules 

but Joy and Kindness.

Photo by Bahman Farzad

Pour

Life became

          more soft

               and radiant,

     luxurious

          and interesting

when I stopped

     preferring This

               to That.

Green tea,

     black tea.

          Yes please.

     When I discovered

the ocean of diamonds

               in this breath,

     the mountain of silence

          in a gentle

               footstep.

     Not to hurry

               but to touch

          the earth

                    so lightly,

this is how we arrive

          at the end,

               the beginning.

     Not to say

     “Meet me here,”

for we met in the temple

               of Being

     before we were born.

Now rest

          and drink

     from the cup

               of my presence,

as I sip from yours.

     Pour out all

          your sparkling

               imperfections.

Thank you.

          They are
               so succulent.

Sukkot

Thin down, hollow out.

Give away your fruit

to the wandering Shekinah

who comes to dwell

in the meadows of your flesh.

Wherever her naked feet touch,

gashes open, 

secret wounds ripen, 

exuding the fragrance 

of their own healing.

Her absence

was the deepest wound of all.

You sang of it in summer light

and thought you were happy.

Voices bled until she appeared,

hungry, ordinary, poor.

Now celebrate the withering

of old stories.

Your land is ripple and reflection,

a shattered mirror of loam, 

grape and plum clusters

left unplucked 

on the margins where 

strangers appear, their faces 

your own.

The cost of communion?

You are not just you.

In the sukka, the sound

of weeping.

All around you the crushing

of the wine dance.

You were a wanton sower

scattering seed in the furrow

between thoughts,

extravagantly wasting

dark energy,

almost everything.

Now see what you have done.

Eight billion children,

one mother.

Feed them.

On the Feast of Sukkot, scripture commands the Hebrews to celebrate the Autumn wine harvest by partying for seven days, living out in the fields, in huts built of vines and leaves. They are to glean their harvest carelessly, leaving fruit on the edges of the field for wanderers. And after the feast, they must fill these huts (Sukkoth) with food for the hungry and unhoused.

Image by William Adolph Bouguereau 

Take Heart

 

Merge with your doubt.

Drown in bewilderment.

Though non-existent,
past and future

are too heavy to bear.
But take heart.

The empty sky
fills every atom
of bone and flower,
stone in the path,
eye of ornamental owl

guarding the gates
of the abandoned sanatorium.

At home with loss,
you too are weightless,
a golden mountain

dancing in the void.

Ever moved
by the stillness

of your Mother's breath,

just fall into dancing and sing,
"I don't know!"

Portrait of Hafiz by Bahman Farshchian

This Is Not The End

This is not the end of the world, but the beginning. Old ideologies, religions, political concepts of left and right, dry up and fall like brittle leaves, swept away by a gentle breath of Presence.

We do not "shift" into a new dimension, a new age, or a higher level of consciousness. We dissolve all dimensions into one, which cannot be divided into levels, planes, or degrees of initiation. There is no higher or lower. Such illusions evaporate into a singularity, a primal blast of energy, which is always right now. Yet this shiftless transformation inside us is the work that heals everything.

Such alchemy does not happen in time. Effortless melting into Presence has no duration. Where do we shift? Nowhere. We simply relax from anxious mind into the space between thoughts, which is the space between stars, which is the radiant clarity of emptiness.

Unzip the hollow of your chest, drop every garment of belief, denuded of hope, step out of your story. When you sink into the darkness of uncertainty, into the wound of not knowing, the glory of ten billion suns bursts out of the stillness between breathing out and in.

With this inhalation, gently rise into your crown and take off your cap. Unscrew the nozzle, like it was when you were a baby with a wide open fontanelle. Let awareness spray up like a fan into the starry night. Rest in the fully-held still breath of silence.

Now breathe out, letting the Milky Way flow down into your cranium through every neuron, polishing the pineal gland in the back of your skull until it shines like a blue pearl.  Let this sparkling nectar run over the chandelier of your pituitary, that hangs at the center of your cranium. Vintage of starlight anointing your hypothalamus, your amygdala, healing the fissures and lesions, soaking through your brain stem, down the back of your throat, like honey.

Doesn't every muscle in your face now feel massaged into a gentle smile? Don't your eyeballs feel refreshed, seeing neither outward nor inward, but simply luminous unto themselves? Your ears so cleansed, so hollow, that like conch shells they contain the sound of the sea.

Let this star-nectar of flow down your breastbone. It is like a sword piercing your heart, but softly, with the thrill of peace. The tip of your sternum barely touches the hidden valley just beneath your lungs and above your diaphragm. Here, in this humble furrow, let the nectar drip, exhalation dissolving in stillness.

Repose in the "ayin soph," a diamond seed of no-thing between breaths. Just for a moment, yet a moment of eternity. In this infinitesimal space, galaxies are spun from threads of your own inner light. Now a soft glow emerges from this pointless dot of darkness, blossoming like a wild flower of grace, an inch or two in front of your chest. What is this glow? It is the whole universe. Did you do that?

To awaken is to discover that this transformation has always already happened, before the beginning, in the un-created core of the Ancient Now. Is there an I who left Om to arrive here, finally, where I Am? Was there a journey?

Miracles happen in the field of the effortless. Galaxies whirl out of causelessness. There is no do-er, yet some vast Thou, into whom I dissolve. That witness, that smile, blessing, touching the heart of all creatures. And here, at the center of your own heartbeat, earth is reborn. Come and see for yourself. Bring all your relations.

 

Mandala by dear friend, Rashani Réa, from the book we made together called, "The Fire Of Darkness: What Burned Me Away Completely, I Became" (See books below)

Breath of Dawn (for the Full Moon in October)

 

Brahma-Muhurta in yogic meditation practice is the hour before sunrise when the atmosphere is most highly charged with Prana, spiritual energy, and the ideal time for meditation. It is also known as Nabasvan, the Breath of Dawn.

I am addicted to light.

I drink from the oblation

of the moon.

Forgive me my habit.

Naked I wake after midnight

craving stars, stealing

downstairs barefoot,

tiptoe past the refrigerator

with its cargo of pudding and stew,

wander out to the edge of the forest

making footprints in frost,

brittle grass crunching under me.

I stand hollow and dry as a reed

quaffing the whirlwind of stars,

turned by the Godslow galaxy, 

my face a grail up-titled, 

eyes half closed, opening my brow, 

throat, belly, shamelessly imbibing 

the secret nectar of blackness

until my roots have wound 

and tingled down to the center 

of the planet, and my crown 

is glittering Andromeda.

Wasted by luminosity

before it is even dawn, 

I pray, O Mother,

witching breath of Nabasvan,

hour when silence turns to milk 

and mushrooms quiver up

nipples of loam, feed me 

your dagger of angels

sheathed in moonbeams,

for I am addicted to night.

Image: MysteryKids Digital Art

Yoga

Yoga is astonishment. It's not just twisting the body, holding the breath, or chanting mantras, but a state of wonder that kindles the heart and melts perception, like butter into ghee. I create duality when I try to put a concept around my wonder. Why would I need a concept? Being without a concept is Yoga. No past or future, just this causeless inconceivable explosion of Now, whose energy is love.

Task

 

I keep returning

to 3 A.M.

Millions mingle here

in verdant mist,

some plunging toward slumber,

others rising toward black

curves of emptiness

bending to no asymptote

of thought or word

in the womb of awakening

where small frogs only listen

but do not peep,

raindrops neither

cling nor fall, suspended

in glistening darkness,

no exhalation of Thou,

no inhalation of I,

only a trembling stillness

that enfolds the infinitesimal

tear of the green earth

in a vigilance that was here

before we opened our eyes.

O dear one, be reminded

by silence

that our work is not

to fall asleep,
this vigilance,

this task of love.

Awake

When you woke up
this morning,

did you really?

Are you certain?

Have you tasted the light?

Have you sated your breath
on the emptiness
of a vast blue grail?

Then surely

you feel like dancing!

Photo: Mt. Tahoma in her gown of new snow from a hill near my home.

Pointless

Everybody seems to be pushing a point of view. What if you had no point of view to push? What would it feel like to stop pushing and simply relax? To become the infinite night of silence, where all points of view arise and dissolve like sparkling stars? Wouldn’t your spaciousness embrace all creatures, blessing the world more than any point of view? The last rose of October taught me this, holding the sky in its petals like an open hand that grasps nothing.

And yet this space is not inaction. It is the space of spontaneous action. When we meet here, where thought has no agenda, listening begins and love is possible. Slow and goal-less, we walk together, each step an arrival that heals the earth.

Rosettta Nebula, from Constellation Guide

Pluck

It takes no more time

to realize God

than to pluck this blossom

from a twig.

It takes no more effort

to surrender

than to dip these weary feet

in a mountain stream.

God is the one who is always

already here,

heaping this heartbeat

with weightless treasure.

Some say not a person,

just energy.

But who delights

in its flavor?

Some say the gardener

who meets you at dawn,

calling your true name.

Some say the player

who presses a golden flute

to anointed lips, and smiles,

luring you into a forest

of bewildered melodies.

Yet others say the music flows

from a sepulcher inside

your breastbone,

where a Goddess coils

in serpentine stillness,

your breath her emerald necklace.

All I can tell you is this:

I am a doula for the birth

of ancient silence.

I will never return to pretending.

I have gazed into love's face

and tasted the nectar

that annihilates

the sorrow of seeking.

Photo by dear friend, Aile Shebar

Don't Tell Me

 

Don't tell me about the end of the world. Tell me about the beginning of the world. A thousand colors of aurora wound in a raindrop, your rainbow wings in a tear. Next Summer's light on a brittle twig, wrapped in a gray cocoon. Fur self-healing in a mossy burrow. The blue egg waiting in a mother-swirl of sticks, She the shaper of galaxies. Don't tell me how it ends. Tell me how it begins. How this breath is given, because you surrendered that one.

Print by Amy Haderer

Gospel of the Radiant Healing Amethyst Sky

Here is the Gospel of the Radiant Healing Amethyst Sky, Sutra One, written by the Gnostic Krystom al 'Akash about 50 years before the birth of Jesus, who carried it in a secret pocket under his seamless blue robe, just as we carry it in secret today, for it is banned by the ruling archons of our universities and political parties, who want to keep us imprisoned in conceptual thought - which is why I had to access it in the archives of my own nervous system, though the text is much shorter in the original Romani script, where the meaning is implicit in a few intuitive pictograms that, once you get the hang of it, are easily visualized in your pineal gland...

What is meditation?
Prayer dissolves into presence,
thought dissolves into silence,
your question dissolves into listening.
and I dissolve in Thou.
So Rishi Ashtavakra
sums up all instructions in one:
"Layam-vraja, dissolve now."
When infinity evaporates into zero,
don't mistake the empty circle
for nothing.
The full moon is still here
even at midday.
Thing-less bewilderment
contains everything, yet
boundless space remains,
the ever-expanding glow in your chest
where worlds appear and disappear
like foam on the sea.
Let your effervescence
aerate the night with stars.
Let sap gush up
through your breastbone
into the stems of every garden,
East and West,
a luminosity so fine
it makes stones pulse gently
and atoms spin in the rose,
so true to their infinitesimal spheres
that they hold our galaxy
to its vow of silence.
Thus Rabbi Ishmael declares,
"The mind says let us pray,
but the heart says let us play."
We no longer bow our heads,
we throw them back
in the gesture of roaring.
No Word comes forth but a smile
whose fire devours the cosmos.
Lady bugs and dragonflies
our priesthood,
our scriptures falling leaves,
a dust mote is liberation.
Each particle of light is God.
Each wave of darkness is the Mother
from whose womb we keep
taking, no, receiving,
our first breath.

Painting by Persian master, Mahmoud Farshchian