Uradiance

  Drop your reins. Let the camel lead you, the animal of your breathing. Follow the star between your eyebrows over the empty desert of yearning into the valley of your missing rib. Something unspeakable is born here in the night of the heart because there was no room at the inn, which is of course your mind. A whinny in the dark, a moo of contentment, barn smells of straw dust and dove, mist of ewe breath in the sheepfold.  Here is a stable  for the lost and weary. Over the feeding trough a lady gazes down into the hay. Has someone lit a little fire? Strange beams fall upward, but their warmth is familiar, spilling  a tender incandescence   as of distant starlight  come home. The lady's face, bemused not so much with amazement as with the certainty that nothing could ever surprise her again. Who is born here  if not you?   Be the brea...

Just before you fall asleep tonight perform samyama on my smile. Glance only for an instant at love's ancient face in the mirror of your heart and I will fill your body with the laughter of the silent stars. Long for me ever so lightly, then let me disappear, a ripple in the moon on a forest pond. Drop my name like a pebble in the pool of your aloneness. Here where Breath goes to fold her wings. Turn elegant mud into a flower, oblivion into a kiss. Then forget, forget. Abandonment is sacred practice. When you hear the tender calling of the midnight owl and gaze into the night within, beyond the glittering houses, the cloudy constellations of eternity, I will be there. And you will almost but not quite remember * Samyama: a subtle practice described in the Yoga Sutras, combining Dhāra ṇ ā (concentration), Dhyāna (meditation) and Samādhi (union) on a single object. At the threshold of un...

Don't just unwind your solar plexus. Don't just relax your belly. Release your hips, those closed doors with rusty hinges built to swing open and dance, celestially designed to rotate like galaxies of golden pollen. Honor your lowdown seed pod milkweed silk and toss it in the breeze. Cherish the ley lines of your darkest valley, harrowed and plowed, fallow wilderness of blessed yearning. You will never expand your mind if you don't unbuckle your hips. Only then can you transcend, and celebrate the cosmic dissolution of your silhouette, evaporate the veil between spirit and flesh. The whole universe is your climax, gently exploding, just as it is. You don't need to attain anything. No anxiety, no performance. If you want to wear a thousand-petaled crown, then sink your stem in the loam and channel up rose's sap. Be your own furrow. Breathe through your bone marrow. Green your body. A nurse log lying in a lost ruined temple, overgrown with blackberries, trumpet vine, ...

  Really listen to mother coyote at midnight and you will stay awake forever. Stand still, not far from the bird feeder eavesdropping on gossip of nuthatch and titmouse, finch and pine siskin. Isn't this all the morning news you need?  In the evening when you hear Jesus weeping in the garden, stay awhile. Don't ask, "What's wrong?" Never ask anybody that. He'll just answer, "Oh, it's nothing." True poverty is resting without words. You think he is grieving about tomorrow? Really listen. There is never another day. His tears are for the beauty of silence, the softness of the dark,  and in the midst of all our sorrows, the gift of this breath. Photo by Pamela Karaz