Lover

I have located the glow
of pure silence.
It is your face.
I won't tell anyone.
They will have to find it
when their lips
touch yours.
I am not a jealous person.
Love has a trillion faces
but there is only
one kiss.

Painting by Mahmoud Farshchian

The Finest Sensation In Your Body

Constantly buffeted by the storm of other people's politics, where will you find your own? Bombarded by other people's "spiritual teachings," where will you find your own? Hacked by other people's name for God, for Truth, for Awakening, where will you find your own? Smothered under stories of other peoples' trauma, where will you find the key to healing your own, which is the finest sensation in your body?

We find wisdom not by listening to the babble of the media, which our mind soon interiorizes as its own babble, but by listening to the silence between up-swirling Swainson's Thrush songs, the silence between rain drops, the silence between our thoughts.

Sink into the ocean of stillness where exhalation dissolves, at the pit of your sternum. Now enter the finest sensation of pain in your body, wherever it arises, drowning your attention in that terrible sweet spark.

Let go of every name and label for this spark of pain, and simply merge with the taste of it. Then, through the alchemy of the effortless, this sensation transmuted into pure energy. Unbounded, without circumference, irradiating the universe, the primal dark matter of all bodies, a concentrated droplet of the sea of bliss.

The energy that was bound up in suppressing that pain with a concept or a name is now released as pure consciousness. This energy becomes available as awareness, and its release is freedom, is bliss. You are actually made out of these countless particles of dimensionless bliss, each carrying a charge of joy or pain, depending on your degree of resistance.

You are neither flesh nor spirit, which are just polarizing terms for the same fire of aliveness. When you let this fire burn up both You and God, what remains? Waves of annihilation, dancing in a golden void.

Love begins here, with this perishing at the center of the Cross, the point bindhu where all opposites converge. How do you find the center of the Cross? By resting in an infinitesimal particle of your own body, the particle that calls to you through its voice of pain, its throb of loneliness, its whisper of grief...

"I am alive. I have been numb. You sedated me. You submerged me in other voices, in the electric drone of insensate entertainment. You disguised me as the Victim, then as the Oppressor. You cloaked me in your anger. But all along I have been your most intimate Friend, pulsing in your vein, aching in your bone, twisting through a synapse of your brain.

"I am the thinnest string you can pluck, the faintest note you can hear. Drown in Me. I am the symphony that thrums your silken web. Are you not threaded to each trembling star? My singularity, my precise location in your body, is the door through which you pass into all other sentient creatures.

"Become the silence at your secret core, where no one else can go: then you will heal their hearts too. Don't try to understand. Just exhale and repose in the tomb of Christ. Now inhale, arise, walk through the garden of your body.

"Meet me here. I am the Gardener, falling and rising with every breath. Do not reach out to touch me, for I am already inside you. I call your name. I am the one who knows your name. Only you can recognize that sound.

"A sound beyond meaning, beyond words. Yet it may be likened to an ocean of sweet sorrow, a tower of myrrh, the yearning bees feel when they hum, the fragrance exuded by an obelisk of moonlight in your spine, as you immerse in meditation, feasting on the honey of emptiness."

Painting by John William Waterhouse, Boreos

Just Wait

Inside the withered

gray cocoon

there's a rainbow.

Just wait a little while.

Who put it there?

Not you, not I,

not the wandering

poet, Jesus,

but the secret breath of joy

who rearranges our dust

in darkness.


Photo: Laurent Berthier

Blue

Here is all
the politics we need:
Blue sky pervades
each atom
of your body.
Blue sky pervades
each atom
of my body.
Where you are, I am.
Where I am, you are.
Translucent wings
of the turquoise moth
dancing in radiance.
All our troubles
woven in the veil
of a single thought:
"I am not You."
Just letting
this thought dissolve
is Love.

Photo by Laurent Berthier

Shabbat

Shabbat, in Hebrew, does not mean the Sabbath, or
Seventh Day, or even Rest; it literally means, 'Stop!'

“Be irrelevant.

Let snowdrops 

flower without you.”
These are voices if you listen.

The slug on a crocus,

a doe savoring young clover,

waves of new moon 

caressing your pupils,

all whispering
in wordless earnest,

"We don't need you.

Your absence is holy.

It is for us a deeper presence.

Thank you,

but this is our planet.

We perform virescent deeds 

of Imbolc, Equinox, and Spring

without using your mind.

We are grateful to you

for not interfering in our

tiny miracles of quietness.

Just listen and witness,

don't even pray."

These are voices on the verge

of creation.

"Learn from melting snow

how to dance, how to perish,

how to be here and

not here.

Just for an hour 

on a Sabbath morning,

give up knowing.

The earth won't disappear.

You will.

Go fallow and cease,

refresh the meadow."

Yes, these voices, this

homily of silence.

"Sink down

into your barefoot sole,
your breath a hollow path
for the muddy sun.

Let the falling of attention
burst open the golden

swamp cabbage.
Permit the trillium,

shy star of the fern forest, 

to fill you with joy.

Let snowdrops

flower without you.
Be irrelevant."

 

7 Inspirations: A Practice Of Springtime

This is not a poem but a practice. Go outside this Sabbath morning and un-do it now! After days of rain the sky melts into pools of cobalt, foaming rivers of mead. I follow the prescription of a robin: “Take seven inspirations of sunlight; then see how you feel.”

Standing nowhere special, everywhere sacred, bare feet on wet moss, I lean back drinking long warm body-breaths of gold. Into my forehead, down through the perineum, out my squishy toes, I am a hollow path for muddy sunbeams.

Been doing this since I was 11, the day I escaped from Sunday school and ran outside in my underwear. Spread arms cruciform in early Christian Orant pose, which is also Native American vision quest asana, which is also Qi Gong posture for touching East and West with fingertips, sky with crown, earth center with your mycelium capillaries.

How did I know how to do this? I didn’t. It’s not knowledge. Just drinking sunlight through my pores, making seedlings tremble with nectar in the loam. Every cell in my body an ocean filled with wind and lightning, mollusks and rain, I am the fifth element. We all do this before we learn to talk.

Infinitesimal benevolent bacteria wriggle in the belly of the planet, moving me to meditation. They glisten, therefore I Am. Under deathless stones that pulse too slowly to notice, larvae uncurl, awakening my prayer, just as my prayer awakens them. Transcendence is causation.

Once, forsythia were yellow waves of yearning in the zeal of my seed, sewn in the furrow between thoughts. The chasm of a peony proves that God is nothing less than ultra-violet pollen, charged with the fragrance of human desire.

Every heartbeat is a prayer. Let my ventricle and atrium be chalices of wanting, flowers of blood, full and empty. A bursting plum bud startles Shiva from sleep. O Jesus, wandering through tombs of Imbolc, I am the garden, you are the Spring.  

After a long Winter’s journey, we know that darkness is not the absence of light. Darkness is the womb of light. Flames of alyssum. Hyacinth fire. Sequin velvet hummingbird who drinks from a bee balm grail. I worship Shakti, the primeval dancer, in the form of this inhalation, the compost in my bones, and the good worm.


Photo from Save The Redwoods

Are You Not A Lightning Bolt?

Non-Existence is a stream
that washes everything,
sparkling through the fallen feather,
the lost engagement ring, the tears,
sharpening the scimitar, defining
its deadly edge by what is honed away.

The space that bubbles an atom
immerses distant supernovae
in a vast and intimate negation.
See how humbly the Lord refuses
any temple
but the temple of dissolving?

Dark matter is fire, fire is breath,
breath is ocean.
Whatever pulses overflows with God,
waves of sex in your body.
Are you not a lightning bolt
of golden wine, poured down
from the "Hu" sound of creation?

Each cell of you a smile remembering
a womb where the corners
of her mouth touched,
making spheres of "O!"
the first word of every prayer,
the black hole containing
all you will ever need to unlearn?

A swirl of secret happiness
weaves these sticks in a flicker's nest,
a galaxy, a pine cone, the up-spun
Swainson's thrush song, a staircase
in the tower of your backbone.

Whatever spirals before you now
is the final revelation, instantly gone.
It is all one standing wave
arising through genuflection.
The rhythm of your breast.
The bewilderment of Jesus.
the violin of a cricket's legs.
Throb of moon path on the sea.

Throw yourself on the linoleum.
There is no other freedom.

Painting by Anne-Marie Zilberman

Animal Familiar

Your animal familiar coils in the spore. Does she have eyes? Are they rainbows? Does she spiral up your vagus nerve, green and glistening? Foraging for mushrooms and grubs at the base of your spine, has she sniffed out the musk of your fearless yearning? Only you can name this wish-granting animal of power. Don't call her "Kundalini" or the "Holy Spirit." Those are second-hand goddesses, afterimages of someone else's ecstasy. Does she prowl at the threshold of wilderness, between creation and the un-created? This is how you know she is near: you lose your dread of madness. Friend, all I can tell you is, before you rise upward, you must fall into the loam of your ancestor's body, the darkness that your roots love to kiss. Only here will you touch the stars and fondle the sweet light that has not been born.

Art by Susan Sedon-Boulet

Blessed Shivaratri

Friend, this is the night of Shivaratri, most sublime in the Vedic year, when Shiva weds Shakti, and Awareness merges with the Energy of creation. Chanting Om Namah Shivaya, the embodied soul thrills with the sensation that the whole universe is simply our personal relationship with the Beloved. On this night of nights, please remember that there is no need to cling to the petals. You are the jewel at the center of the lotus. Your integrity outshines the world as the sun outshines a hundred thousand candles. You are more magnificent than any experience you could possibly have, because there is no Object more beautiful than the Subject who perceives it. Repose in the divinity of awareness. Then breathe your beauty into the earth!

Photo by my dear friend, Aile Shebar

Mission

You have a mission of green
on a thirsty planet.
Your task is the grace
of a fallen raindrop,
plumb bud opening in snow,
a towhee at dawn
grubbing through delicate moss.
Be first among fragrances
in late Winter.
Disdain the cynic.
Release a gleam of April
from your loam bulb.
Don't waste time
becoming anyone
but a Lover.
Breathe peace.
Do beauty with your hands
and hope with your eyes,
giving a portion
of your light to strangers.
Insist on no other moment
but this one.
Simple words, my friend,
but they were born of many tears.


Photo: Wall Art, Etsy Norway

Rim

This moment is the rim.

Something overflows

into non-existence.

I dance on the edge

tipped and poised

for spilling.

Why speak of safety?

Only the past is safe.

The Word of creation
happened yesterday
like an old newspaper.

There is no program for Now.

Berries, moths,

the skin on hot milk,

wrinkle and perish.

The light of my flesh returns
to cooling stars.

Only dark energy nurtures us.

The microbes in our gut
outlive us and the form
we embody boils down

to gelatin in a cocoon.

My wings have never quite
congealed, so I fin
into the murky future.

What is faith?

Smiling like a dolphin
while I plunge through waves
of shadow

with no idea what I will find.

Here's my advice:

Be the chrysalis
after the worm dissolves
into unknowing.

Perhaps a glistening rainbow

will unfurl, perhaps not.

Taste uncertainty in your sternum

like a blade.

Feel the falling itself:

there is no ground.

Be a seedling

furrowed between seasons,

ripening surrender into

bruisable fruit.

Repose in the nameless awhile.

Then offer a prayer
for what emerges, this
fragile trembling thing,

the earth.

Here

Who told you that you must attain enlightenment so you won't need to come back? We're all coming back.

There's nowhere else but Here. Those who come and go have never returned to the beginning.

You have one everlasting incarnation. All bodies are yours. Now try to remember where you were before you were conceived...

Where you'll be when you're dead, where you dwell right now; it's all the same place.

Here is your deepest center, with no circumference, no past or future. This is your home and no one else's. This place I call Am.

Maybe you tried to abide in Jesus, in Buddha, or in your Guru. It didn't work, did it? You can't adopt the Presence of another. You must inhabit your own Presence.

At the heart of this moment, find your peculiar eternity. You'll never depart. Wherever you go, Here you are.

If you learn to repose in the Uncreated, you will bathe all creatures in harmony. The silence of the depth infuses the waves on the surface.

Rooted in this ground, send out branches and leaves. Many creatures on the wing will rest in your shade, finding fruit for their journey.

But don't invite them to stay and build a home in you, just as you must build no home in another, not even in your Master, or in Christ.

For we dwell in one another only when we dwell completely in ourselves. There is no one but You, at rest in the heart of every creature.

This is the home-coming of divine love.

Peony

Knowing gets in the way. Just surrender conceptual thinking, but very gently, with tender affection for this useless mind. Then rest in the surge of energy that comes with being merely awake, free from thought. Countless invisible suns fill your blue sky. You don't need energy, you Are energy. You are the vast energy you wasted in trying to know something. Now all that energy is available as wonder.

Past and future dissolve in the silent explosion of Being, because they were only thoughts. Now, waves of delight vibrate from your body into each blade of grass and lump of soil, causing microbes to shiver with grace and galaxies to tremble with joy. Yet you haven't actually "done" anything. You simply surrendered the effort to know. Even if it only happens for an instant at dawn, the whole day will vibrate with the energy released by your awakening – when you open your eyes at first light and simply see, just before yesterday’s mind pounces on you out of a lingering wisp of the dream...

This precious state of naked awakening is called Turiya, which means "the fourth state." It is neither dream, nor sleep, nor conceptual thinking, but the cloudless blue essence of I Am. How can one express the astonishing simplicity of this miracle except by smiling at heaven and earth from every cell of your body? Did you know that each atom in your flesh contains an unborn smile? Your bones are packed with infinitesimal grains of bliss. Your no-thingness tingles in the most distant stars. How humbling to become nothing, raptured into the essence of all! Angels, ancestors, and ascended masters bow in gratitude the moment your forehead touches the ground, for you are bowing to them.

We say "God" because we have no other word for this mutual genuflection of myriad creatures. God is our bow to all that bows to us. God is the bow itself. We practiced this bow when we were babies. I remember when it happened to me in my Mother's flower garden at about the age of six months old, my earliest memory, yet it is still the stamp of eternity at the center of every Now.

Of course, when you're six months old, you don't have words to describe your experience, so there is no conceptual thought. Just astonishment. Gazing into a peony, I saw the cosmos silently roil out of the golden void, a boundless genuflection of no one to no-thing, bubbling up into its opposite, the bow of everyone to everything. That flower, I tell you, contained all the galaxies, swirling in the very capillaries of my eye. And this miracle of intimacy, the intimacy of All in All, happened through the grace of emptiness, the dark energy of love.

The peony I saw when I was six months old is still my mandala, at the heart of every perception, the tonic chord in all my songs. I am a fool, but I am hopelessly blessed. Even if I were the most liberated Buddha, I would still return to this world of bruises and tears. I would still take a human body just to gaze into this peony once more, its pollen grail without circumference, and breathe again the sticky amber sweetness of matter.

Listen to this reflection HERE. Photo by Kristy Thompson

My Contradictions

 

My contradictions are beautiful
as crazing on a blue cup.
I am a mess.
I am chaos.
I am love.
Stopped trying to exist
and dropped into a furrow
between I and Thou,
past and future,
being and non-being.
A seed broke open,
a sprout gushed out,
a root tingled down
to touch the center of dark fire
in the virgin womb
of my own absence.
I became ground.
Walk on me, I will hold you.
When your name has withered
like a leaf in the cough of the sky,
fall down.
I will hug you like mud,
offer you a place to
decompose and be nameless.
Let others ascend, searching
for titles and pronouns,
twigs reaching toward the sun,
which is the wrong direction
for the thirsty.
The wise come home to suckle
on our compost.
We are the silent bodies
of the Unknown.