Uradiance

You asked me to drop every concept of 'Other' and 'God,' so I did. Then I abandoned words like 'Trauma' and 'Embodiment.' Love is not a story. Now I sink into my true flesh, the infinite physiology of light. This stillness in my chest is an unbroken pour that doesn’t flow from 'there' to 'here,' but quivers in the void, a braid of black lightning. The taste is beyond thought and breath. I call it sweet wine, but that is the language of fools and lovers whose tale gets drowned out by silence. I will never know who tilted Fullness into Emptiness and made the starry rim of this cup overflow with a wonder no longer named 'me.' But still I say 'thank you, thank you, Friend.' And still I ask, 'Was there a journey in that pour? Or have I always already arrived at the Tavern of Awakening?'     Painting by Mahmoud Fars...

Men who believe women. Men who care for women in pain. Men who praise women when their bodies grow old. Men who listen to women even when they repeat themselves. Men who hear women even when they do not speak. Men who hug the whole body, the whole radiance of a women with their own radiance, Rahman i'Raheem. Men who father daughters and sons. Men who father mothers. Men who linger by forest ponds and gaze into green stillness, speaking to the great mother. Men who travel deep into the wilderness not to hunt or kill, not to climb the highest peak, but just to be there. Men who know valleys, observing the etiquette of mist, the customs of cedar and willow. Men who understand that the fire in their belly is the Goddess. Photo: at the Jersey shore with my wife and daughters, 1988.

"Yatha drishti, tatha srishti: as your mind is, so your world appears." ~Upanishads Every particle of matter is made out of love, wisps of pure love dancing in a cosmos of appearances seemingly tainted with impurity and imperfection, d ue to the playfulness of our own minds, who project any qualities they freely imagine onto the world. We don't even need to forgive. We just need to be still for a moment and see through the eye of the heart the dance of energy as it truly is, without projecting our labels and beliefs onto that nameless kaleidoscopic rainbow of self-luminosity. In that moment of innocent seeing, even the most terrifying appearance becomes free energy, absorbed back into our mind as sparkling awareness. This is how we get liberated by everything we behold, just as it is! The liberation is never esoteric, the revelation is everywhere.

  I used these short poems, and fragments of poems, from my book 'Wounded Bud,' as a guided meditation last night in a small group. I hope these fragments make you whole, and create moments of silence for a morning or evening worship...   Of your mother and father all that remains is you. Of the bee and flower, just honey. Of the master and disciple only a quivering braid of cream poured from bowl to cup. Why ask if there are one or two? Compare us, my beauty, to melting snow. Give up perfection, take up laughter and tears. Drown in what you are.   May the pilgrim melt into her path, the path into the goal, the goal into Presence, the very first step into this breath.   What the bud calls a wound we call blossoming. This is how the angels see our gashed and broken places. They keep singing, "Stay open, stay open!" Don't you know that through your tears that world flows as light into this one...

Poppies flirt with fire. Crimson fragrance of disheveled roses on promiscuous wind. Pollen makes its spaceless pilgrimage from pistil to stamen like the wandering of God's name from your forehead to your chest. Bees brew honey in clandestine places buzzing with the flavor of darkness. These are small but generous signs that your soul is not a thing but the dance of what you must become in the diamond of your death. I speak, dear, not of the body but the sparkling gift of impermanence. You've let sorrow break your heart. Why not let joy? Why not lick the moonlight from your fingers, tasting of thunder? There's an emptiness between your breastbone and belly where inhalation and exhalation kiss, effusing starry musk. Worlds can happen in that sticky dot of incomprehensible sweetness. The sign that you have been there is a teardrop enfolding your whole mind in blue silence. Never underestimate the surface of things. It is a portal...

This morning I know why Krishna's body is blue. Because it is the color of wonder and the tint of pure consciousness. Morning glory blue, blue of the sky staining a lover's thoughts, canopy of emptiness, boundless firmament pervading every cell flesh, sapphire hologram of Presence shimmering with the past and future where "I" dissolve into "Am." This morning, I surrender to the blues.

Your breath is the Giver, not merely the gift. The Ruh who danced with Allah, the Shakti who sported with Shiva, Hokmah Sophia frolicking with Jesus at the sunrise of creation. In stillness She swirls galaxies. Her lips light every world with a mother's kiss. Whatever greens and grows she moistens with tears of compassion. Whoever dies  has already been hugged home  to her body of sacred darkness. I keep telling you: she pours herself down your spine, filling your beaker from belly to brow. Through your eyes, through the quietest touch  of toes on soil, you spill her nectar. You fertilize the earth with her. And what to say of your fingers? They are her stained beams of careless grace. O you, her profligate wine steward, why not invite strangers and enemies to the wedding? I keeping telling you, but you think it's only a poem. There's no time left for metaphor. Her crystal sweetness surfei...

Advaita? Merely a sigh encircling two in its belly, "Aah" savoring "Dvah." Intimate conversations with the Friend, tryst of playful lovers, flavors of thirst and rapture flowering in the heart of the One.... Every thistle silk and dandelion is a boundless soul who aches for wind-ravishing. A swan floating on its own rippled reflection. Wait patiently for the hour when the plum breaks its stem and falls, unplucked. You are betrothed to a mysterious Guest whose face is the night, whose secret caress is the risen fallen softness of your own breath. Photo: Dancing Pen Books

There are 196 verses in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. Only three of them deal with asanas. No one teaches yoga to a flower. Learn bending from her stem, what the hurricane cannot crush. Breathe from the seed. Abandon every sequence and routine. Your body is a river of postures flowing toward the ocean of repose. Valiant and gentle as an oak, stand and sway in the breeze of your own exhalation. Mind falls like a feather on your belly. The estuary of your lungs ebbing, rising, as you listen to the moon. Inhale the night, the emptiness into your bones. Feel your ligaments dissolve into swirling galaxies, your muscles washed in pure awareness, rolling out of the sea in every cell. A goddess guides you now, thinking is not required. Your backbone is her wand of bewilderment. Your pelvis is her boat, laden with its cargo of unborn stars. No creation through the Word, but an infinitesimal murmuring, the Godspell of your body, every molecule a hologram o...

You say you have a Guru? Listen, your Guru is empty. If he or she is really a Guru, they'll tell you, "I am Hollow. I am Nobody. Nobody will save you." Give up concentration and you will attain one-pointedness, because your heart is every bindhu in the Void. Become the dark and you will give birth to original light. You're waves of emptiness. This is what you're made of, a ripple of no-thing in a strange quark. Each cell of your flesh is hollow, your belly hollow, your veins and bones, mouth, ears, nostrils, anus and eyeballs, your vagus nerve, all hollow, dissolving into dark matter this instant. Your fireplace is hollow, your kitchen stove, the dome of your temple, your mosque. Your toilet bowl is hollow. Christ's apostles worshiped the vacuum in the left ventricle of their own hearts. They called it God. But Dogen called it the Empty Circle. The Holy Spirit, Ruach Elohim, mysterious and sensual, flows in and ...