Lavender

"They were strangers and pilgrims on the earth." ~Hebrews 11:13

Gautama and Jesus were walking down the sidewalk. They recognized each other immediately because they were walking more slowly than other people.

"Excuse me, " asked Jesus, "don't I know you?"

"My name is Gautama."

"Are you Gautama the Buddha?" Jesus asked.

"Yes, that's what they call me. And aren't you Jesus the Christ?"

"I am," Jesus said. "And I have always wanted to ask you, what does the term 'Buddha' really mean?"

"Nothing," said Gautama. "And I've wanted to ask you what 'Christ' means."

"Nothing," said Jesus. Then they both began uproariously giggling. They laughed so hard that the busy crowds stepped far out of the path to give the two strange wanderers plenty of berth.

Sauntering beyond the boundaries of the city, they entered fields of wild lavender, lonely and fragrant, their companions the bees and crickets. All afternoon they chased after swallows and butterflies, just for the fun of it. Some weird wine was involved.

Later, rumors abounded. Farmers and villagers claimed to have seen wild creatures: a rainbow twisting backward in the sky, sprouting wings, then devouring its own tail; a peacock-crowned shaman with radiant blue skin riding through the sky on a trumpeting swan; a warrior woman in golden armor standing on a lion, her bow and arrows studded with diamonds; a wicked little trickster fat-bellied boy with an elephant's head, riding on a mouse; dolphins with Botticelli faces, diving through the cumulonimbus clouds.

In the evening, the two men came to a village. The villagers gathered in little clusters before the tavern, whispering. One said, "Since they shut down the mental hospitals, people like this have nowhere to live."

"Don't let your children near them," said another.

"They are illegal immigrants."

"Obviously, they don't work."

"One is Arab looking, the other is a Mexican."

But a local innkeeper saw how bedraggled and thirsty the two men appeared. He invited Jesus and Gautama into his tavern.

"It's happy hour," he shouted to them, "why don't you come in and have a drink on me!"

They sat at the bar. People shook their heads in disapproval. "What will you have?" the jovial bartender asked Jesus.

Jesus replied, "What will YOU have, friend? I have already drunk plenty of wine. Can I give you some?"

Then the bartender asked Gautama, "What's your pleasure?"

The Buddha answered, "I love being empty. Why don't you satisfy YOUR thirst?"

The innkeeper was confused. He began to suspect that these two were there to rob him, or perhaps they were really crazy after all. So he called the sheriff's office.

The sheriff's deputy booked the strangers for vagrancy, trespassing, disturbing the peace, soliciting drugs, and three minor misdemeanors that he exaggerated into felonies, seven counts in all. They spent the night in jail with bums, prostitutes, drunks, and the mentally ill. In the morning, the sheriff himself, who was too busy to take more prisoners in, took the neb to the edge of the county, let them out of the patrol car and said, "Don't come back."

When he returned to the police station, the other cops were gathered round the sheriff's desk, talking about last night. The guard on duty said, "Everybody was singing. And by morning, they was singing beautiful, like in harmony, a regular choir. But there wasn't no words, just a kind of angel wail. Them two guys taught all the prisoners to some kind of song!"

Another guard said, "There was this fresh bread smell everywhere. I can still smell it, can't you?"

Another added, "There was cups with leftover wine in every cell. Real nice crystal cups! Where in hell did they come from?"

"And in the morning, you found all the cells unlocked?" asked the sheriff. "Is that right?"

"Yes sir," said the guard, sheepishly. "But nobody tried to escape. They was all happy looking, lying around like they was right at home."

"I will need to report this to the county police commissioner," said the sheriff. "Now tell me about those two guys that made all the trouble?"

"They called themselves Josh and Buddy," the booking officer said. "We couldn't get no more information. All them sons of bitches did was giggle. And they didn't have no last names."

The Buddha Visits My Town

When the Buddha visits my town, he is a great disappointment. He doesn't talk about Dukkha, Anicca, or the Four Noble Truths. He doesn't make us sit in the lotus chanting the Heart Sutra. No robes. No glamorous antiquated flower offerings. And his name isn't "Buddha." It's Raymond something. Feldman, I think.

He invites us to a gathering in a dilapidated rancher with moss on the roof. But it has a large living room and the hippie elder who lives there is kind. We sit silently for fifteen minutes and, since nothing happens, we get restless. Then Raymond the Buddha says, "Let's cut the bullshit. None of you are really happy. You try hard, but its all pretend. Right?"

No one replies.

Then he says, "If you want a workshop in Calling Your Guardian Angels, or Egyptian Wisdom Of Your Past Lives, or Using the Law of Attraction for Abundance, then go somewhere else."

Looking at our iWatches, half of us leave.

Fifteen more minutes of quiet sitting. Then he says, "I'm not here to discuss your tribal politics either. If you want to blame the rich for the problems of the poor, or blame one skin color for the problems of another, or blame the military, blame the media, blame the cartels, then go on a peace march, though you won't find much peace there. Because blame only isolates the mind, and the more you blame, the lonelier and more desperate you become."

About half the remaining people snort indignantly and leave. The ruffled atmosphere settles down into a deeper silence. He says, "I'll level with you. None of that stuff interests me, because none of it makes anyone free. I'm only here to discuss one thing: how to be free. Right now."

More silence. Finally someone says, "Sir, are we supposed to be doing something?"

"No," replies Raymond. A few more people walk out. A few remain. The silence gets thick and gold, like honey.

"Who can add one moment to life by worrying about it?" Raymond asks. "So let's just sit in no particular posture and savor this breath."

More quiet time goes by. Or maybe the time doesn't go by; maybe it just stays here like an ever-expanding zero, a pond reflecting the stars. After a few more minutes he says, "Watch this breath entering your nostrils, your throat, your chest. Is it you who makes this breath happen? Did you create your breath?" Silence... "Your breath is a gift," he says. "What did you do to deserve it? Nothing. Notice this, and be thankful." Silence...

"Now perhaps your mind is trying to do something. Just observe how that is. See the humor and absurdity of it. Then come home to your breath. Don't take a breathe, receive it."

Over the next ten minutes, most of the remaining guests leave. A few remain, and they have joy on their faces. Raymond says, "Receive this breath, and when you exhale, offer gratitude. This is worship." Maybe twelve are left, a remnant. None of them are scholars.

Raymond Feldman the Buddha says, "I'm not telling you, believe in the light. I'm not telling you, go and serve the light. I'm telling you, you are the light. But the light only shines when you embrace the darkness, without resisting anything. You are the darkness too, and darkness is the womb of light." No one departs.

"And when you leave here, know that you're not leaving. Wherever you go, work softly at your work. Let your breath touch other hearts in silence. The world is not transformed by your thinking. The world is not transformed by your doing. This world is transformed by your Being."

Raymond stands up. He is dressed in a ragged golf shirt, blue genes, and sneakers. Yet his presence is like a sunlit cloud on a mountain. Flowing like a river, he moves quietly around the room. Ever so gently, he touches each person with two fingers.

Some he touches between the eyebrows. We barely feel it on our skin. But inside, a cool breeze of emptiness. Others he touches on the chest, soft as a feather. Between heartbeats, we sink through an abyss of stillness into the golden void. Some he touches on top of the head. It feels like a drop of dew, melting into the vast sky.

With this touch, you hear the voices of all the flowers on earth as they open in the morning. With this touch, you see ten thousand golden suns silently birthed from a black hole at the center of the galaxy, and the galaxy is whirling in your body, right between your nipples. With this touch, you taste the inebriating nectar of clarity, and fall into the groundless beauty that you Are.

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. Infinitely sustainable and full of emptiness is the sword-edged grace of mere Being. A mere heartbeat from death, your silence nourishes the earth more than any Word. The whole universe merely falls, rests, poised like a raindrop on a thistle.

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

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).

Drowned

Like a bee who has sunken and dissolved in a pollen bog 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.

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

You evolved through aeons of mineral, vegetable, animal, angelic energy, finally incarnating here in this earth-realm of paradox, where you merged the opposites of high and low, spirit and matter, pain and beauty, and became a Person. Did you pass through all this only to become the impersonal faceless One? Of course not. You came here to dance. Your mission was: condense, refine and Christolize stardust into personal ensoulment.

Yet every particle and wave of this evolutionary process, from beginning to end, has been the flow of one substance, one substratum, one river of 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 is 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 love that you have left in the shadows.

Then what is there for you to "do"? Just relax. Deepen your silence. Don't you know that your deep silence nourishes creation more than any Word, or any deed? When you fall into the deepest silence, you will hear the earth breathe flowers of gratitude.

Rose, water color by Marney Ward

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.

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."

No Still Life

“I am a teacher... I am a disciple....
I am a doctor... I am a patient....”
No, friend, I am not this, not that.
Neither wizard nor fool,
nor a color or a race,
not an angel, not a man,
neither christian nor buddhist,
nor republican nor democrat Am I.
I sinply Am,
shouting the absence
at the end of the sentence,
proclaiming with
eloquent silence
that this is no place
for nouns.
Nor a flower but to burst,
nor an oak but to root and trunk upward,
inhaling ten thousand stars
to acorn the sky.
I branch like bolted lightning.
No ocean but to froth
and bear a savory panging.
No moon but to luminously
wax-wane, splitting the atom
of every infinitive.
Neither energy nor matter,
but to pulsate, atomize, astonish.
O You in whom to sigh
sun-plodes my bone-dance,
mountain-heaves the rippled earth,
vineyarding what umbers and thirsts,

purple-plushing the Merloted unborn

roaring in the belly of the sparrow,
let me never forget
that You are the Verb         
who breathes me.

Collage by Rashani Réa

Passion of the Diamond Void

The passionate and truly ambitious desire more than fame or diamonds, gold or finest wine. They want to become the light of the Divine, to breathe the light, turn their bodies into dancing light, and pour the light into all creatures.

 

Yet there is an even more ambitious lover, who seeks the deepest passion, the highest wealth of all. She transcends the glory of God, abandoning the light, to mingle her bones with darkness.

 

She yearns to merge with the night of divine humility, beyond the veil of annihilation, where God becomes purely God, attaining the final end that is the beginning, of which we have been told, "In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void."

 

Here, before the birth of light, supreme wealth gushes and spills in the overflowing abundance of nothing. This is the holy blackness without vision, without illumination, without an eye.

 

The subject who yearned to behold an object, her Beloved, now returns to the Self alone, and no Word of creation is spoken, no creature emerges from the womb of the timeless. The I who said, "I Am," dissolves completely. Am only remains, like an unfathomable midnight.

 

This midnight ineffably sparkles with the pleuroma, countless suns and galaxies. Yet the cosmos is but a shimmering afterthought, with no mass or density.

 

The universe is like a vanishing mist compared to the solid self-luminous jewel of pure awareness. It is like comparing an amethyst to a mirage.

 

Thus the effervescent dream of creation just keeps disappearing in the silence of the Witness, Christalized in uncreated bliss, prior to Being. And this perfect unity, which need not even count to one, is Love.
____________________

LINK: Listen to a reading of this meditation. 

IMAGE: Avalokiteshvara Buddha, pure consciousness, creation's source.

Space Time

News from the universe:

The egg is shattered!

The mother's ancient water

has finally broken.

What was inside has been born

as space-time.

Twelve moons, a galaxy of hands

to sculpt the curves of space,

all spewing from one gust of

your shamanic breath.

The names of the Gods

are no longer required

to indicate how your eyes

gaze into themselves,

creating forest dances,

leopard songs,

each teardrop a talisman

for the warriors of the rainbow

whose translucent wings

carry your emerald pollen

out of the void and

into the garden of our dream.

Artist: Pablo Miguel

The Choice

Can you choose anything
but this moment?
Accept it or reject it,
that's all the freedom there is.
You think you decide your future,
but when it arrives it’s a strange land.
Of course you can always choose
what was.
People make up stories every morning
about last night.
But that’s a waste of tomorrow.
To hug the dragon of Now
and welcome this ancient wingéd
fire-breathing moment
with open hands, open eyes, open heart
is perfect joy.
To reject it is suffering.
But you’ll never reject this moment
because you're living it,
so where’s the problem?
You're always already free
when you choose what is.
This is how a flower grows.
How a drop of dew dissolves
on the purple clematis.
How a gazelle
offers the pulse of its throat
to the hungry lioness.
Don't worry.
We're all evaporating
into atoms, and whirling back
into stars.

Photo by Jett Finn Palmer