Open To The Dark

You don't need to construct a higher self or a happy face to deny your pain, your world-weary anger, or the loss you feel this moment. Just let your wound stay open, and the wound itself will flower.

If you are closed and your shell is hard, open to the dark ocean. Don't resist the tides of fear. Breathe every chaffing grain of sand into the mollusk of your heart. Embrace the jagged edge and splinter of the world. Split open down to your soft core, until you awaken the vast space, for it is this uncreated vastness that opens you, and its already there. What seemed like emptiness was calling you all along.

A fist is closed tight. It opens and is empty. Then you discover it is this very emptiness that opened the fist. Nothing from outside pried it. Unconditional vulnerability is your invincible strength, your nature. When you touch your core, the dark contracted bud that seemed so heavy with the toxins of human sorrow suddenly blossoms into one entangled whole. The fragrance of this wholeness is love.

How can such alchemy happen in the effortless depths of surrender, at the very moment when you feel that all is lost? Because all.... is.... lost. So you let it go. You no longer identify with the particular contents of your awareness, but with awareness itself, which was always empty and clear.

This emptiness, this sense of loss and lack, made you search. You wanted to fill it with something, some teaching, or teacher, some God or vision. But all along, this very hollow was your nature, the hollow space of pure Existence. It is not what you're looking for, it's where you're looking from. No need to fill that hollow essence with some-thing other. Breathe it forth as a gift to the world, for that is the secret dark ambrosia others are thirsting for, and it is you.

Beneath the fleeting sensations of the world - some pleasant, some painful - is the continuum of awakening. Yet awakening is not a miracle. It is simply the mirror that underlies its reflections. Images in your mirror may be terrible storm clouds of despair, or summer flowers. Let them burst, pass away, and return. But the nature of what mirrors them never changes: the unfathomable clarity, the immaculate stillness you are.

Confession

A flower makes no effort to spring from its seed. So you spring gracefully from your own awareness, because you cannot possibly be anyone but you. The final liberation is just to repose as you are, right now, before you even have a thought. This is why Jesus told us, in his Sermon on the Mount, "Take no thought... don’t worry... just be as natural as the lilies of the field."

There is no other path, no other blessing, no other grace but to be You. Imagine how it feels for a rose to be nothing but a rose. For the wild meadow to be its own entangled galaxy of fragrances. Why would you need to be someone else? In fact, all suffering arises from this very effort to be other than I Am.

Reposing in the Self is not passivity, but ultimate dynamism, the regenerative power of surrender to the force that creates you. Resting as you are cannot but release the germ from its seed, the action that the universe longs to perform through your unique moment presence.

Ecstasy blossoms right here, and cannot be avoided. Confess that you are powerless to do anything about it. How else will you get through this devastating miracle?  

Point

When I lie there dying, or here,

for it is always here that we lie

or stand or walk or die,

let me not discover at last,

My God, it was the little things!

It wasn't about the party I voted for,

or whether I grokked nonduality.

It wasn't about the vegan diet,

or how many protests I attended.

It had nothing to do with karma,

or which Guru I followed.

It wasn't about becoming a Christian,

or a Muslim, or having any Way at all.

It was about gazing into the face

of a baby at Rite Aid.

It was the moment I caught and held

the eye of the fourth grade boy

behind the dark school bus window,

and said to him clearly, without words,

“I know how loneliness feels.

Therefore you are not alone.”

It was about finding the frog

who lived in my umbrella

at the corner of the porch.

The first Autumn rain, when I

unfolded it, spilling him into my hand,

and took him over to the rose pot,

placing him among the withered petals,

and spoke clearly, with clear words,

“You may live here all Winter.

I will listen for you every evening.”

It was about this kind of courage,

to speak with frogs.

About not minding garden dirt

caked on my knees, not taking

a shower on a Summer night

because I felt so good

that I planted the tomatoes.

It was the moment I sent my friend

with terminal cancer a link

to Allegri’s “Miserere,”

something as easy, as small as that.

It was about pausing on a long walk

to watch the cumulonimbus roil

into a personal face, I won't

say whose, I'll let you find your own

form of the Friend, who really does

appear in clouds, in trees, in toadstools

that spring up at midnight in glistening rings.

It was about the courage to whisper

Thank You whenever that countenance

smiles upon you, the courage to confess,

"Yes, it is possible, it is not foolish,

it requires no believing, only wonder."

When I lie there dying may I dare

to tell my dear ones, "There are no

big things, only little ones, somehow

threaded in a wine-dark mandala,

a wreathe of heartbeats growing

fainter, fainter now, a circle made

of all the moments when I paid attention,

even for a breath, growing fainter now,

yet widening into blue, into the sky

of one eternal heartbeat,

the point of it all.

Photo: Old bench in my yard

Still Searching

 

I'm still searching for a word
to describe what it's like
to discover the sky in my body
between two breaths,
what its like to swirl through
the blues in my diaphragm,
a word to explain precisely
how my eyeball shapes
the immeasurable curve
of the Milky Way,
and a silent stream of stars
pours all night down
the hollows of my spine.
There is a hummingbird inside me

probing for soma.
What does she call the honeysuckle
twined around my ribs?

There is a murmuring bee
covered with the golden pollen
of pure consciousness.
What does he call the sunflower
springing from my lungs?
Maybe the word is simply Friend,

whispered, then unwhispered, 

naming the one who touches 

my chest like a feather 

piercing a cloud,
like a dagger of honey
so finely honed

my heart hardly knows
it has been severed
into "I" and "Thou."


Photo by Bahman Farzad

In The White Noise

 

In the white noise
of many opinions
I long to hear the silence
creatures make
when they are listening,
and there is no thought
only the harmony
of trees and raindrops.
Invisible things appear.
Deer step gently
out of the mist.
When I listen, the heart
opens fearlessly.
No need to defend itself.
No need to form an opinion
about anything.


Photo from a hike with my brother on Mt. Rainier

Honor

Honor the ancestors.

They are the golden honey
that streams through this moment.

Honor the dead and the unborn,

for none are dead, none are unborn.

Sacred is the womb, 

sacred is the grave.

I sing to you, Mother.

As a wild iris bending 

toward dawn,

you bend toward the dark.

I sing to you, Father.

Let your withered beams return

to the hollow seed.

Each step I take on earth

makes this a sacred day,
a sacred day.

The soles of my feet
pay obeisance to you
who traveled before me.

Yet you leave no trail.

Each footprint a thistle furrow,

a bowl of chanterelles and raindrops,

no room for a Way.

That is why I wend off-trail

entangling the seasons

of Samhain and Imbolc.

I touch the moon through 

my own eyes, my own breath.

And I feel you, grandfather,  

walking in my footsteps.

Aboriginal art by Peter Mulchahy

Golden Idol

 

Reduce 10,000 commandments

to Zero.

Break the circle open.

Let the emptiness inside

spill into the the center of the Milky Way.

On your ballot, write in the name

of someone you really love.

Unjoin the party, the church, the sangha.

Wander out beyond the empire of thinking

into the solitude of all souls.

Does silence have edges?

Hear the song between the words.

Let it be the humming of your molecules.

It's not enough to be the sky,

you must become the loam.

Not enough to alchemize an angel.

You must become a mycorrhizal hypha

plunging like a dolphin through waves of sod.

Don't be more than you are,

be all that you have been

for 10 million years.

Find the farthest star in grit-spark

clenched in a clam shell, chaffed

by darkness into pearl.

Churn the void into a song of buttermilk.

Anther and ovule, you and I,

wedded in one calyx.

Gaze at a maggot close up,

the golden idol of your death.

Flow down the continuum of musk

to the incense of putrefaction.

It's not enough to be loam.

You must become the sky.

Micro-photo of a maggot by L.C. Lewis

Pilgrimage

 

Why travel to Mecca, Benares,

Jerusalem or Rome?
Just make the haj

to your own heart.

Follow the still motion
of blossoming,

the golden swirl

of Allah's most intimate gaze,

Christ's healing gesture,

Shyama’s dance of inebriation.

One spiral of amazement pierces 

the proton,  Laniakea’s 

superclustered spine,

a frond of lavender, this miracle 

of breathing inward, outward.

Is there a solitary 

infinitesimal dot

in all of space and time

that does not overflow

with the nectar

you thirst for?

Don't Go On

Don't go on and on about Oneness.
Just fall silently in love
with every crack in the path
and see what happens.
April, a dandelion,
October, a toadstool.
Meet each ache and throb
with a kiss
of direct perception.
Frog peep, nettle sting,
psalm of the Barred Owl
over the swamp.
Vacancy of the park bench
covered with wet leaves
where we met that Sunday
and surely touched
on a summer afternoon.
Small signs of awakening,
sacraments of the perceiver
in love with the sad,
broke-open, unfallen world.

The Four Immeasurables

Karuna... Breathe in the sorrow of all who are in pain, yet do not own it as "my pain." Mudita... Breathe forth the joy of all who rejoice, as if it were your own joy. Maitri... Taste the un-created nectar of pure love flowing through the core of every creature, yet call no one "my love." Upeksha... Repose softly, lightly in the broken heart of the universe, where sorrow is as sacred as happiness. Come home to the mystery of the bliss of silence. You won't be able to describe these feelings to anyone. That is why Buddha called them, The Four Immeasurables. Yet surely, someone will see the rainbow shining through your tears.

Addiction

I could not rid myself

of my addictions,

so I transmuted their yearning

into You.

I thought that the hollow place

inside my chest

must be veiled in the smoke

of Habana robustos,

the earthen bouquet of

oak-wise well-aged whiskey.

Now the fragrance of 

the merest breath delights me

with the musky finish

of your love.

Emptiness rejoices in the fullness 

of thanksgiving.

Longing itself is my

inebriation,

for I have met the Friend

whose glance changed

everything.

Solitude became a wedding,

night a darker sweetness

than desire.

I have too many

radiant centers now

to be alone.

Silence has been swallowed up

in the music of namelessness.

You flow into me

and I flow out beyond your edges.

Foolish and crazy,

self-luminous,

I must be the One

to whom I have been praying

for ten thousand lives.

Only the naked and the lost

can savor these words.

They alone are worthy

to beg.

Sculpture: 'Christ the Beggar' by Timothy P. Smaltz