Season of Musk

 

When did dapper cedar waxwing don
tuxedo for the berry feast?
Dressed to the nines in black mask and tails,

gliding over the ballroom of fallen water lilies.
Musk of collapsing melons.
Zest of the last chrysanthemum.
A bad hair day for the caterpillar.

Why does Mama Coyote flash

her platinum bling in the moonrise?

How could you not notice naked Alder

drop her golden gown

with a shrug of Autumn?

Fling your garment of excess away, 

woven from an endless thread of causes,

herringbone tweed of past and future,

twill of gristle and stars,

infinitesimal knit of rainbows

lining your breath’s dark cocoon.

On this self-luminous morning,

when the world seems all one silken

sutra, half whispering, "Thou,"

half sighing, "There is no other,"

friend, if you must go to war,

win it in your belly.

These woods, these prairies and insouciant

ruined gardens of September

have nothing to do with your disquiet.

They simply celebrate

the victory of flowers.

Shall I Sell The Sky?

This world is a marketplace. But what can I sell? The morning air, a distant mountain, clouds perishing over the meadow, a thistle of silver and amethyst?

 

My God is the buzz of honeybees around late August lavender. What price would you pay for that consciousness? My Lord is blackness between stars. Do I get a commission if you invest in this imperishable emptiness? My Guru is the way pure space becomes nectar when you pause for a sip of this moment. Shall I distill and bottle it for you?

 

How shall I put a price on wonder, or the color green? Offer you the sea breeze or evening mist in an on-line seminar? How much do I charge for the scent of pines, lupine blues in an alpine valley, the pearl of a pasque flower? Shall I teach you to inhale?

 

Friend, we were billionaires the moment we got baptized in the river of birth, bathing in a legacy of talismans, the wealth of our ancestors, heirloom microbes from the jungles of hope.

 

Who paid for our bones, so lavishly packaged in chestnut, carnelian, umber and wheat gold, flesh zesty as a persimmon? The cost is all in the recipe that only our grandmothers knew. Who set sapphires in the sockets of our eyes, anointed our crowns with the smell of mushrooms?

 

This body is more to me than trillions of dollar bills, all those zeros without a One you buy with your credit card. What would you offer for my little toe? The knuckle on my ring finger, crippled by a drunken punch? The wrinkles of my birthright grin?

 

Your dividends are sleepless nights. Bitcoin won't feed you, it tastes like electric steel. Can you pour the wine of Christ through fiber optic cables? The soil is not yours.

 

Shall I sell you the sky in breath-sized vials? Will you purchase a jigger of rain in the cup of an Autumn rose? Why don't you buy the spiderweb in my garden, ravel it back up into a spool of starlight? Do you remember how?

 

And what would you give for the grandeur in my open palm, the weightless empyrean of the Milky Way? Through the softest beam of sunrise, on the first day in September, a cedar waxwing’s whistle is no less than a thread of diamonds. Not for sale.

A Tender Place

There's a tender place at the top of your head, where your inhalation rises to kiss a trillion  stars. You meet your Teacher here, in that kiss, and the illusion of distance disappears. You sip from the chalice of the farthest galaxy, whose nectar overflows.

What others may say about your Teacher doesn't matter. For the Beloved doesn't seem like a Teacher to you, but an ancient Friend, whom you haven't seen for 27 billion years. It's quite a reunion, and there are tears at both ends of eternity.

Yet you shrink away, fearing that your sins, your imperfections, make you unworthy. Have a little courage. A Friend isn't interested in your sins, but in your heartbeat. How does your heart appear to the Friend? As a perfect diamond, covered in the dust of thought, which the Beloved will polish until it shines like the sun.

For it is the sun. And in the gentle work of polishing your heart, the Beloved uses your own breath.

Greatful to Aile Shebar for this flower, the same one used for the cover of my new book, The Tavern of Awakening (see below).

A Poem For Falling Asleep

Your breath

is the subtlest

object of sensation,

yet it is the fragrance

of the soul.

Shakti wears

your inhalation

as a luminous veil.

Remember this while

falling asleep,

which is falling in love,

which is drowning

among the galaxies

clustered like living coral

in the ocean of your body.

Don't be a dream,

be the witness.

In the bell of your heart,

be the silence,

giving a self

to every creature.

Yes, the Goddess

wears this breath

as a wedding gown.

Yet behind the veil
her face is unfathomable
darkness.

Please don't try

to understand.

Just become the night.

Photo by Aile Shebar

Complin

 

Some people have

a personal relationship

with Jesus.

Some people have

a personal relationship

with Krishna,

a holy amour

with the Guru,

a love affair with Mary.

I have a liaison

with Autumn air,

intimate secrets

with a raindrop.

A tender solitude

whispers my name

just before dawn,
this very breath, so dear.

Silence is my paramour.

I am in love

with love itself.

 

 

Image from Art.com

Let Autumn Come

Can you tell the difference
between the liberated
and the bound?
They have the same limits,
the same human fringe
and shadow.
But those who dwell in
noble uncertainty
can feel their edges melt,
other hearts
beating in the dark.
They taste the granular
discontinuity of time
caramelized like sugar,
the petal crushed into its fragrance,
breath returning
to the sky.
They rest between
the moon and stars
in the boundless power of doubt
without fleeing
toward an answer.
Through a glow around the body
their work of bewilderment
is accomplished. 
They don't call it “dying.”
They let Autumn come,
whispering "yes"
to what is.

Hungry Mirrors

"I have become the original Image freed from its reflection... The chains of my forgetfulness only existed in time... Now, where time rests in the stillness of Eternity, I repose in silence." ~The Magdalene's Song, Coptic Gospel of Mary, 3rd C.

Mary Magdalene believed that she must bear
Jesus's child.
She became pregnant by him.
Yet Christ did not fill her womb but her heart,
which grew infinitely round with his image,
like an egg.
She brought her pregnancy to full term
by emptying herself like a mirror
so that she could reflect the Beloved.
Call it Kinosis.
She accomplished this secret work of yearning
in the fertility of silence,
and the deep companionship of solitude.
Thus Mary gave birth to her own anointing.
She exchanged a life of hollow things
for a wholly living no-thing full of bliss.
You too are a Magdalene,
walking on waves of the Moon Path,
keeper of the Sun's likeness.
You too enfold the luminous egg,
finishing the silent work
of mystic motherhood.
It is no small accomplishment in your darkness
to give birth to the radiance of Christ.
The secret beams of your conception
penetrate all other souls.
We are each a hungry mirror, friend,
yearning for reflection,

longing to contain, by means of emptiness,
the beauty of each other’s face.
________________

This poem is in my book, 'Strangers & Pilgrims,' where it is entitled 'Kenosis.' The word is used in the New Testament and means 'self-emptying.' The Biblical text says that Christ did not become God by exalting himself, but by emptying himself.

Walk Softy

No need to escape

or transcend.

Awakening pervades

the dream, the dream

pervades awakening.

If you know that your next

inhalation is the paramour

who danced with the Creator

when the world was born,

there's nowhere else

you need to go.

One breath

annihilates the difference

between soul and body.

Just pay a little

more attention to what flows

in and out.

It doesn't matter if your atoms

are made from the light of stars

that ceased to exist

before you were conceived.

Walk softly on this planet,

not like an owner but a guest.

If you don't know how to bend

and be hollow as a reed,

how will you be filled with music?

Portrait

You are not here
to do penance.
You are not here
to justify your being.
You are not here to earn
your way.
You are here to lose your way.
You are here to
soak up our tears,
wander and trip
over unsought treasures.
You are here to be thrown
and caught,
captivated by the Lord
of Entanglements.
You are here to make
a mosaic of mistakes
that, when you finally
step back and see,
looks just like the face
of Mary.

 

Photo: detail, Mary Magdalene by Caravaggio 

God Is Not An O.B.E.

 

God is not an out of body experience. Do you think this flower has to get out of its body to become a divine radiance? Of course not. The divine seeks an ordinary miraculous earthly flower like this to express Herself in matter.

Mother Matter is God delighting in form. How much more does God delight in the light of your eyes, the curve of your lips, the roundness of your belly?

You can never be out of your body. The softest wave of your anatomy is the fabric of space itself. You have no edges.

Your body includes every stranger. All races and nations co-mingle in the rivers of your blood. No one is excluded from the fireside gathering of your tribal heartbeat. Your physiology contains forests, deserts, mountains. Your pulse aligns the planets. Your breath turns the galaxy.

"Ano raniyan, mahato mahiyan" declares the Upanishad: "one atom of the smallest is greater than the greatest." A synapse in your brain, flashing with this moment of awareness, condenses the light of the Milky Way. Choir upon choir of heavenly beings stand in ranks of shimmering fire, like petals in a vast chrysanthemum, which is only one photon of your flesh.

Honor each rising and falling of your chest. Cherish your body.

Chrysanthemum, Japan, VCG Photo

The Price of Attention

Pay a little more attention

to the crinkled lea its atoms

of edgeless fractal piquancy

dissolving on the infinitesimal
tongues of your soul,
thin air itself an altar
in this shimmering season
of the ordinary. A breath
will wing you down

to your Winter place, 

alluring your heart to 

a deeper silence,

the resonance of Spirit
descending
into warm bread.
The deer trail leads

to its starting place
in the perishing greenbelt 

between gray-windowed houses.

Follow it
as you would follow your tears.
Discover three
unharvested tomatoes

glowing hollow as lanterns.

Watch the spider fling

her silken path homeward

from the old garden buddha

to a withered rose.
See how last evening light 

fondles smaller and 

smaller things,
like the hand of the dying,
not with regret

but inextinguishable gratitude.

3 A.M.

I will now reveal the Truth. I don't know anything because there is nothing to know. Creation is a silent blast of free energy that spontaneously orders itself and dissolves back into chaos this very instant. Free energy has no purpose but tastes like God. Somehow it gets trapped into separate minds, the way air gets trapped into bubbles on the sea, for the sheer bliss of popping and getting free again. Why do we do this to ourselves? We don't. Why does the Almighty do this to us? She doesn't. It happens without a do-er, because it is an honor just to play, and an honor to be forgotten. It's fun to ask "Why?" because it finally leads us to ask, "Who is asking?" Now tell me, friend, why do drops of moonlight form in the ocean of divine darkness, and fall on a moth wing at 3 a.m.? Because they make the sound that awakens you to deeper silence.

Photo: Luna moth from 6legstoomany

 

Pleroma

In this land of sacraments
"things” point beyond thingness
toward some effable beauty
deeper inside them than they are.
Your garden is full of doorways,
where colors and shapes are only
keys, green, brown, scarlet,
and a hummingbird’s persistent tick
scolding you to attention,
the perishing golden catastrophe
of a late August dahlia
mean something that cannot
be found in books.
Children remain here, playing,
but grown-ups pass through
into wilder more silent worlds.
But perhaps it is the other way round.
Children cross over and return
like ravens, like wisps of milkweed,
like mountains in mist
while the old ones remain,
pretending to know.
All I can tell you is this:
Your soil is silence.
Your root is breath.
Your blossom is wonder.
And when you burst open
you release
the fragrance of love.

Wanderer

 

"Be a wanderer." ~Jesus, Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

"Not everyone who wanders is lost." ~Tolkein

I am most aware, most present, when I am wandering. When I am a pilgrim. When I’m good and lost, I find myself. Open, vulnerable, alive. Not when I claim to have already arrived, in the Kingdom of Non-Duality, but when I wander in the vale of uncertainty, which is the liminal space between One and Two, the bothness of being on the Way, and arriving.

 

There is something authoritarian to me about "Non-Duality," and those who claim to be instantly enlightened just by saying, "All is One." The One can be quite oppressive when it becomes a doctrine, a belief, when it is not stumbled on in a journey of wonder. And for a journey to occur, there must be the dynamism of twoness, the beginning, the arriving, even if they turn out to be the same place. Both the eternal, and the not-yet...

 

Those who claim to be "non-dualists" seldom deign to call themselves seekers, disciples, or pilgrims. They only want to call themselves "spiritual teachers." Their message is, "I have arrived." And they’ll tell you that you have arrived too, even if you haven’t.

Being-there gets rather smug with no more journey, and no more path. Jesus' words, "Be a wanderer," call me to a Wayless Path, which is different than being "lost." Those who feel lost assume there is a destination. They are dissatisfied with where they are, because there must be somewhere better. But wanderers discover beauty in each step. They never yet always arrive. This is the lively paradox, the blessed not-yet, of enlightened Duality.

The Gnostic Jesus doesn't say, "Follow me," pointing up the mountain to a final resting place. He shows me the never-ending labyrinthine spiritual power of waylessness. If I follow, I follow the one who leaves no footprints on the water. Each breath is the end, the beginning.

I learned this not from Jesus, but from his favorite and most beloved companion, Mary Magdalene. She became my “anam cara,” my Heart Guide, when I was wandering down the Medieval pilgrimage routes through southern France many years ago, knowing not at all what I was looking for. And back then, I had no idea about her-story, for it was still submerged in history. This was a decade before the publication of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," and long before "The Da Vinci Code."

According to Medieval tradition, after the first Easter, Mary Magdalene became a wanderer. She was lost at sea in a rudderless boat, tossed up on the shore of southern France, at what is now Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. A pilgrim, a stranger, she found herself with no map, no compass. That is how we all find ourselves. She finally arrived at the beginning of her journey, awakening Christ-Consciousness in the Western world, before theologians and evangelists were ever invented. And even now, she is the Friend who blesses me when I am most fallen and far from any path.

I must say, in my old age, as I no longer try to go anywhere, it is delightful to realize that such great soul-beings as Jesus, Mary, Krishna, Radha, Qwan Yin, Lakshmi, Gurudev, are not mere archetypes, abstract symbols dissolved in some non-dualistic pablum. They are living Persons I can know with intimate precision, in the glory of friendship. When I abandon the destination and just become a wanderer, I often bump into them somewhere out in Rumi's meadow.