Our Lady Of This Breath

Rest the mind in the heart.

She will guide you there,

Our Lady of this Breath.

To the manger, the birthplace,

She will guide you.

And you will refresh

the whole creation

when you repose in that place

where the world arises

as a wave of your perceiving it.

This ripple of joy

in the ocean of gratitude.

If you think these are

just words, friend,

you haven't quite arrived

at the silence, the billowing

stillness of wonder.

You're just reading.

Now rest the mind in the heart.

She will guide you there,

Our Lady of this Breath.

"Mary Magdalene" artist ~Cassandra Barney

Harvest

“The true wine is compassion...” ~Rumi

It's a crazy vineyard.

These grapes have already

fermented on the vine.

They don't even need

to be crushed.

Why get drunk like Jesus?

Why get high like Rumi

out in his field of scarlet poppies?

Or Magdalene who sipped
too many cocktails
at her bridal shower,

or Mira the tipsy paramour
of Krishna?

Each gets drunk in her own way.
Savor your inebriation.

One grape is a hologram

containing all the stars,
black holes, pulsars beyond
the rim of light.

It may be that you are only
a drop in the sea, but when
the drop falls back into the deep,

the ocean gets its flavor
and never tastes the same.
For billions of years

these swirling constellations

groaned like patient beasts,

bearing buckets of fire, prana,

hydrocarbons and myrrh

just to distill the unique bouquet

of your breath.

Pruners have labored like lovers

over your vine.

Would they do all that work

simply to pour you back
into dry brown sod?

No friend, the cosmos strove

to give your blood its
peculiar glow,
a singular fragrance made
of distant galaxies.

Your pronoun is "Thou,"

like Christ's, like mine,

like the clang

of the empty wine cup,

wanting.

Listen to this poem: LINK
Painting, 'Girl With Grapes,' W. A. Bouguereau.

Thanksgiving

Blaming others impoverishes the heart; gratitude makes it rich. One gentle breath of thanksgiving dispels a storm of anger and fear. One silent beam of gratefulness falls from the stars through the soft spot in your crown, pours through your eyes, throat, chest, sacrum, sowing seeds of bliss in the dark loam below. Earth murmurs and awakens. Seven blossoms open on the trellis of your spine. The true feast is a flowering of forgiveness in the heart. Love is the harvest.

Image by Étienne Colaud, b.1501

Energy

 

"Energy is eternal delight" ~William Blake

If your revolution does not begin by drowning in the ocean of delight, who will you liberate, and from what?

If your neurons are not rivers of flame springing from wounds of delight, what use is thinking and believing?

If your heart is not a tavern where chalices of wonder pour stars and planets back and forth to bring out their delightful bouquet, what teachings can you offer?

You claim that sorrow makes you wise, but does your shadow not consist of pulverized suns, infinitesimal charmed quarks of joy?

Do not speak until every particle of your tongue is Shivananda-Lahari, a wave of Shiva-bliss.

Don't march for Peace or pontificate for Justice until your steps leave no footprints as you dance with a furious delight that granulates the rosary of your bones, churns your tears into the buttery spawn of rainbows, glitters your body in the hopeless bling of midnight, for love is never in the future. Love is the flowering of Presence, where there is no need for hope.

Listen friend: death-welcoming soil, dank fallen leaves, opening petals of camellia in December, elegant downy mold that blossoms on the compost heap, a mother's teardrop, the hard-bitten nipple in the baby's lips, the scales of useless memory crusting the eyes of the dying, the stained yellow remnants taken out to be burned, the hollow of a mouth about to say farewell, but cannot, the buried seed that dreams green wings flying up through the loam to touch a golden ray, yet waits, and dreams in darkness...

These are all a fantasy of dust, of very dust, kneaded and risen and twice-born, yeasted with your breath, gifted with your grace, every mote of your body a tremor of eternal delight.



Listen to a reading of this prose-poem HERE.
Engraving by William Blake.

While I Was Sleeping

While I was sleeping, seven billion

homeless wanderers came to my door

(I know you were one of them)

wanting a mug of yesterday's coffee

and some toll house cookies my

grandmother taught me how to bake.

This is why I keep my heart ajar

all through the Winter dark, a sliver

of me unlocked to hear the shuffling

socks of humanity come down the hall

of my breathing (I know you took off

your shoes when you came in)

to rest a little while in my kitchen

by the candle's flickering pool of

loneliness until at last we're all

gathered again, absently staring

through widening rings of embryonic

moonlight not yet shaped by

uncertainty into ourselves.

No need for me to say to you

who wander uninvited here,

"Welcome, rest and drink.”

Some evening I may find your own

leftovers warmed and ready for me

in the small but generous kitchen

of your own broken heart

(have you baked them yet?)

because I know our sleeplessness

out-spirals the stars, wending

the circumference of a hug

( I around you around me)

arriving at a place beyond the night

where death comes home to

breathe and be born.

 

Illustration from Grandfather Twilight, Barbara Berger

Gate Gate

Gaté Gaté Pará Gaté Parasám Gaté Bodhi Svahá:

'Gone, Gone, Gone Beyond, Gone Beyond Beyond, Hail the Go-er!'

~Buddhist Mantra of the Great Liberation

 

Spent thousands for enlightenment at the Ashram of Tantric Wine Tasting. Advanced flow-yoga at a seaside resort in Bali. Mantra to make me smile. Then, at Saturday's workshop, a Spiritual Teacher taught me that there is no teaching and nobody to teach it. The $1200 course fee included a complimentary green smoothie. I told my bank to cancel the check and wrote the Teacher a note: "Since there was Nothing to learn at your workshop and Nobody was the teacher, I am paying Nothing for what I received. Thank you."

 

I must be getting lazy. Lost my longing for exotic spiritual destinations. Just want to wander in the woods now, beyond my dilapidated fence, listening to raindrops on ferns, no dakinis sculpted on the walls of my mind cave, no Tibetan runes on the limestone cavern of my emptiness. And please, no more vanilla dharma talks by some guy named Levine who calls himself Ananda now.

 

I must be getting old. Just want to sing about the vastness of what I don't know. Want to open my eye - not the eye in my forehead but the eye in the sole of my foot, pressing dark loam with a barefoot kiss. Standing on the slow turning earth, I can see that this wheel rolls nowhere, and "here" is already "there." Just let me walk more gently on the planet, sighing without words. This I call prayer.

 

I only became thankful when I stopped turning gratitude into a practice. Gratitude is the intimacy of this breath. Gratitude is the grace of what already is. And grace has no past.

 

I honor the moss-bearded cedars. They are very great gurus, who give their priceless teaching of mist-green stillness for free. The roots of their lineage truffle down into the first moment of creation, entangled in the fungi of the void, close to the fountain of bewilderment that gushes up from the center of every Now.

Listen, friend,
a teacher fills you,
a Guru empties you.
A teacher transmits knowledge,
a Guru wakes up the knower.
A teacher gives you information,
a Guru gives you wonder.
The mind thirsts for certainty,
the heart yearns for breaking.
If the yearning is intense enough,
the Guru could be a cricket. 

 

Now you still need some rules to follow, follow these: taste the nectar of this breath. Bow down to your father's enemy and kiss the ground. Vow to be healed by the very next stranger you meet. Walk softly over the earth, sipping from the barrel of foolishness. Pulverize diamonds with your whirling...

 

Listen! Hear the chthonic incantation of She who meant to ululate the color green, but accidentally sang the stars. It's midnight. Soundless owl wings slice through the glory of darkness, bright knives of Un-knowing. Moonlight seeps out of my wounds, and I am thrice awakened - here, there, and in the gut of an earthworm. Parasám Gaté, beyond the beyond, right where I am. Coyote howl will be my song. 

 

Photo: Took this at the Carbon River Rain Forest, Mt. Rainier

Again

In your next incarnation,
I will be your breath.
What is love?
Since we met, I no longer pray
that this be my last life on earth.
Enlightenment is not to soar
above the body but to dance
through the aching, gaze
through the years.
It is not flesh that disappears
in paradise, but this "I"
who cannot see your face,
or taste the dark matter of desire.
Let me come back, reclaim
this human energy and beam
through your pupils, breathe
up your spine, quiver your veins
with my flame of exhalation,
swelling two chests
with the motion of one mind
incarnate in a sigh.
I want to undulate
inside your breastbone,
drip down your sternum,
float on the rising falling
tide of your belly.
I want to be your gasp
and whisper, build my hut
in the valley of your bosom.
The mud between our toes,
the wattle of our bones,
shall be home-making stuff.
And if beyond the farthest
galaxy there wander
better stars, in some exile
of perfection, let them fall
into our moist unholy sky,
and take birth
as our children again.  


My young family dancing with seagulls at the Jersey Shore, 1989

Xiphos

For a little while each morning and evening, I vow to let go of all doing, all thinking, and reconnect with pure Being. Let go of effort, concentration, and repetition. Let go of tradition and expectation. Let go of every thing and plunge into thingless Silence, where I am no longer a creature, for I have come Om to the uncreated. Where I am not an object, and there is no noun after the verb, to Be. Where the pilgrim has returned to the beginning of his journey, and it is the end. I no longer look for that place, I look from that place.

I see the whole cosmos happening around me. But this is not who I am, I am the seer. I see the whole cosmos happening within me. This is not who I am, I am the seer. In my mind I see the chaos of 10,000 thoughts, the residue of 10,000 lifetimes. This is not who I am, I am the seer. In my body I see trillions upon trillions of sparkling atoms dancing through stillness. This is not who I am, I am the seer. Let mind, body, moon and stars do the dance. This is not who I am, I am the seer. I am the witness at the center of the whirled. And what is called "the cosmos" is but an afterimage, flashing in a silent bolt of lightning up my spine, for an instant that stretches from one end of eternity to another.

Now let us get very specific, very local, for we only enter the non-local, the boundless, through the infinitesimal vanishing point of focus. At the tip of my sternum, just beneath my heart and just above my diaphragm, is that diamond point of the sword. The Bible calls this the sword of the Word. In Hinduism, it is the sword of Shiva. In Tibet, the Vajra sword. Western anatomy calls the lower tip of the sternum the Xiphoid Process, from the Greek "xiphos," meaning sword.  The sternum is a sword pointing downward toward the gentle wound-like indentation at the center of the chest.

Then let this exhalation be a gentle sword that pierces my heart, following the point of the sternum down into this vulnerable hollow place, this wounded valley, where I let go of I, and plant the seed of Christ. At the end of the outbreath is an instant of annihilation. Ancient yogic scriptures declare that all the worlds, both heavenly and earthly, burst out of this tiny dimensionless point. Dying into this point Bindhu, even for an instant, our awareness becomes eternal and unbounded. Out of that seed, the next inhalation springs up, a dragon of fire, a new creation.

Jesus said, "Ameen Ameen, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a seed; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Therefore, whoever clings to his life will lose it, but whoever looses his life will find it for eternity" (John 12). He was not preaching theology or metaphysics, but describing sadhana, a spiritual practice.

 

The sword of the Spirit makes her gentle but fatal stroke when awareness descends from the mind into the heart, piercing even through the hridaya chakra into the vale of tears at the center of my body, where thought dissolves. Through the perishing of "me," silence blossoms. It is death for the mind, but life for the soul. The silence is vast, but the portal to it is a dimensionless dot between breathing out and in. Through the infinitesimal we pass into the infinite.

To taste true Life, the soul must root down into unmoving, uncreated, unknowable Silence. Where is the entrance to this wound that leads to infinite healing? Here, where the tip of the blade pierces the center of my chest. Here I am not merely a human, but a human Being.

Is this a "teaching"? Very well then, let it be the simplest teaching, for I am the most foolish of teachers. This is the foolishness I teach. A Goddess visits your body bearing a mighty sword, yet the sword is your own breath. And it is the Spirit of God, for the very word for Spirit in the scriptures is also the word for Breath.

Let her melt your sternum into a pillar of moonlight, with the fragrance of sweet myrrh. She who whirls the galaxies at the dawn of creation, the first mover in the stillness of God, now comes as your comforter, nearer to your heart than your very soul. Some call her Shakti, Shekinah, Ruuh, Sophia, Magdalene the Bride of Christ. But, her touch is more tender and lethal than any name.

IMAGE by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, showing the Herbig-Haro object HH111, which lies about 1300 light-years from Earth. Herbig-Haro objects consist of young stars blasting superheated jets through surrounding clouds of dust and gas, like a sword piercing the heart. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Nisini. Second image: by Danté Rossetti.

Genesis

In the beginning, there was no difference between Earth and Paradise. We were all Elohim, just ordinary Gods. Out of pure consciousness, we imagined flesh, sensuous undulation in the void, so that we might touch and dance, our soul-bodies vibrating through infinitesimal particles of chiaroscuro, a harmony of light and darkness, allowing each of us to manifest a unique glory. Did we dance in uncreated Light, or the light of creation? A meaningless distinction. Did we touch in divine Darkness, or the darkness of ignorance? Again, a meaningless distinction...

At some point in eternity, one of us conceived of "something better," and started whining, complaining, "Is this all there is? We need to improve things around here." The notion of "something better" spread quickly until there were two groups of Gods, the Angels of the Ordinary and the Angels of Utopia.

We gathered the Council of Elohim to discuss what to do. I must remind you that the word used for God in your Bible is Elohim, the plural, which means "Gods," not El, the singular. There is no separate single God but only we, the Gods. And we are not a collective. We are singular persons.

In council we decided it would be best to separate the Angels of the Ordinary from the Utopians before the rebellion went any further. So we created the Earth as you know it for the whiners. Or rather, you were allowed to create it for yourselves, from the energy of whining.

These two realms are really not as separate as they seem. All that separates them is a mirage, a veil of thought. As soon as your thoughts become silent and you stop complaining, you descend into the heart, and awaken the world of Beauty, which is already spread out around you. In that moment, you have fallen back into Paradise.

The truth is, both Utopians and the Angels of the Ordinary are busy doing “good.” The difference is, when a Utopian desires to do a good work, they only see lack and imperfection. When an Ordinary Angel desires to do a good work, they see only fullness overflowing into deeper fullness. They take up the chant of microbes, the song of worms, the cry of the field mouse in the beak of the owl, the sigh of fir needles scattered by the lonesome November wind.

ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पुर्णमुदच्यते

पूर्णश्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ॥

ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ॥

Om Purnamadah Purnamidam

Purnat Purnamudachyate

Purnasya Purnamadaya

Purnameva Vashishyate

Om shanti, shanti, shanti

Painting by Jean-Achille Benouville,1841

When I Awoke

When I awoke this morning, before the mind of yesterday returned, I floated for a moment in eternity. It was so obvious that the truth about the universe had been "educated" out of me and replaced by a false story of separateness, distance, competition, struggle; a story drilled in at an early age and re-confirmed by religion, politics, pharmaceutical and medical dogma.

But the truth is not this story at all. Truth is the boundless radiance of my silent Heart, the Anahata center, which in Sanskrit means "the unstruck sound." This truth is my immediate non-conceptual sensation, before I even begin to think: the total Self-perception of this body. And if this truth must to be spoken, it might be described or pointed to like this...

'Let go of your thoughts, regrets about what has been, anxieties about what might be: simply feel their underlying sensation in your brain. Even a powerful memory, an event you believe really happened in some place you call "the past," actually happens in the present moment, as a flicker of light leaping an axon into the dendrite of a neighboring cell. The mental image created by this flare is secondary, like smoke.

'Let awareness fall back into neurological fire. Don't worry; you won't lose your mind. Your mind will be nourished at its root. Then, when you need to think, your thinking will be useful and clear.

'Feel the subtle energy of your nervous system, not only in the brain but throughout the whole environment of your physiology. Share your consciousness with microbes, with ancient wiggling hieroglyphs of DNA. Become a single sensory field permeated by awareness, without words, labels, or thoughts.

'Now see if you can feel the "edges" of this awakened sensuality. Does your flesh have any borders? Does your body have an outline?

'Feel the air around your skin. Bathe in the radiance, the warmth of other living creatures. Do they have edges? Where does your territory end and their bodies begin? Sense the forest, the mountains, the ocean, the clouds, as extensions of your pelt.

'Now be mindful of space itself, not as an impersonal abyss of frightening distance, but the intimacy of your own furry attention. Space is awake, fibrous and soft as cotton. And space is awareness itself...

'The stars are very near you. Galaxies are dancing, whirling inside you, as the luminescence of your own blood cells. Separateness is not illusion, but it is merely appearance, a play. Just for a moment, give up the falsehood you were taught in school: the myth of distance. Let go of that story, the story about the universe as an enormous machine far beyond your ken, in whose steely gears you are an infinitesimally lonely spark, weighted by chill inanimate absence. This is the lie.

'Dare to soak in the Glory you actually are. You are not merely made of star-stuff: you scatter suns with each conscious breath. Transcendence is mutual causation. You generate a berry in the void. The berry generates your seeing of it. Participate in the creation of all that you behold. And ever remember what the Vedas declared before writing was invented, when language was all humming: "Yatha drishti, tatha shrishti: as you are, so your world appears."

'Macrocosm and microcosm simultaneously interact and mutually depend. Your body the soul of the universe. A raindrop, earth trembles. There are no abstractions.

'Be intimate with all sentient beings, they are your nerves, whether they dwell on earth, on other star systems, in the realm of the ancestors, or the hungry ghosts. Wash them with each heartbeat. Enjoy the inestimable honor of healing them with every breath. This is the truth.

'Our sun is very active right now. But that is just a shadow of the radiance shining from the black hole at the center of our galaxy, which is precisely the same black hole that centers every proton of your body. Therefore, let solar flares and inter-galactic rays penetrate your physiology. Receive them as celestial caresses, without pushing back. Embrace them as pure energy without labels. Don't freak out when your vibrations throttle up, and you feel disoriented, with every manner of throbbing, vertigo, palpitation, and weirdness. Most of this is caused by your resistance. Allow it all in the knowledge that the cosmos wants to transform your chromosomes, and evolve your soul into the gentle munching kindness of a wingéd gorilla.’

Illustration from 'Grandfather Twilight' by Barbara Berger

Gratitude Is Not A Practice

Gratitude is not a spiritual practice. It is a subtle thread of flame that binds your pulse, through sensations of sweetness, to the heart of God. Gratitude is not something you need to "do." Just follow one faint breath of thanks until you dissolve.

Into what? There is no answer. You must find out for yourself, with the quietest kind of courage. Be grateful for the least most insignificant blessing: last petal on the autumn rose, a lock of golden fur from the little dog who died, a tear for no reason, the sound of a hummingbird on a Winter afternoon.

You'll spiral down a dark stairwell to the wine cellar, where Jesus has been aging his careful blood in a cask of delicate unbroken bones. Don't look for his face. The grape was crushed long ago. Meet him in the pure bouquet of silence, savor the hollow of not knowing. His poverty will makes you rich.

The secret? In the smallest is the vast. A photon the width of an angel's wing inscribed with distant nebulae. The flavor of Mary in bee nectar. On your tongue, a morsel of bread dipped in the Pleiades. You have everything, my friend, absolutely everything, in one faint breath of thanks.

 

Face of Christ by Rembrandt

Gnostic Gospel of the Raindrop

This is first verse of the Gospel of the Raindrop, written 50 years before the birth of Jesus by Krist’ Al- Fanaa, a Romani mystic from India who eventually settled in Provence to tend the mule that transported water barrels up to the cave of Mary Magdalene. Jesus himself kept a copy of this secret scroll sewn into his azure robe, hidden from the Pharisees, just as we keep it hidden today from the archons of our universities and political parties, who imprison us in their matrix of linear thinking. I had to access this scroll in the archives of my cerebellum, where it is inscribed as an ancient gypsy script in neuro-hieroglyphs, which are really quite easy to read when you gaze with compassion into the radiant crystal hollow of your pineal gland.

Child of the Pathless Way,
yearning to understanding
the art of manifestation:
here is a deeper skill.
Learn to become the Unmanifest.
Child of creation,
yearning to make things appear,
learn to disappear: then see what remains.
The art of the shaman,
the science of the mystic
is the alchemy of vanishing.
Plant your I-Am seed in the womb of darkness,
giving birth to ten million suns.
Weave invisible constellations
into the seamless gown of the blue sky.
Feel the unseen moon pull your blood-tide
at midday, your ancestors surround you
as the nectar of space.
No Thing is the source of creation,
the origin of joy.
When this becomes impeccably clear,
you are everywhere and immortal.
Your fingertips see, your toes taste wine,
the vast black hole in your chest overflows
with star music.
You become the dark matter in every soul,
the groundless depth
in both Lover and Beloved.
You are silence, the hidden Mother.
Never be afraid to practice this craft,
for only when you vanish
are you truly here.
Let earth reveal her radiant miracles
in your sacred Absence:
the divinity of the snail
glistening in a moonbeam,
the mushroom swelling with sentience,
a raindrop at the tip of a twig
sparkling with countless worlds
whose light is your wonder.

Snail, Stockcake free image