Bardo In Imbolc

Bardo in Imbolc, space between the seasons, neither beginning nor arriving, this is your borderless land. You are the secret in the chrysalis, formless cytoplasm not yet moth or rainbow, amuck in peristalsis and thaw, squeezing an “I” out of ambiguous weather.

From black to black, from spore to spore, the leaping tongue of chaos in a gaggle of electrons, mud-bidden upward by a rosary of echoes, dense and opalescent as the dumb light that creates you.

How close to God you get depends how deeply you soak into compost and disorder, the glory of death, dark energy of larvae. Through wave and trough of frosted loam slice silver moon fins. The plow has not yet violated the mycelium. Lost leaves of Winter lie, a vast placenta, cruor of ancestors teeming with fertile infection, anointing both babies and flowers in one chrism of microbes.

Your only hope is Presence. Nobler to be the furrow than the sower. One medicine for the robin and the rat. Crows foul the bird bath with the bones of both. So we nibble and peck the suet of our grandmother’s marrow.

Hear the unstruck chimes of Imbolc ringing in their seeds, licorice sweetness of mitochondria, sparkling stream of silence after frog croak, star-spume of the quantum vacuum in a coyote howl. Are you not swaddled in a tulip bulb, the quivering Bodhichitta stillness of a black hole?

Is this the hour we meet in solitude? What is thw whorl of stars entangled like a dragon in your vertebrae if not Laniakea, mother of the Milky Way? Pierced by twigs of goldenrodin the crinkled dream of a cocoon, you have fasted and fallen into the unfathomable silence between thoughts, the voluptuous erotic sea between “I” and “Am."

Stars bend over your sleep, caressing your forehead with intimate distances. Now you have become your own luminous listening, coiled in serpentine Otherness. Praise the yearning of two petals in one seed. Praise the mother enfolded in her egg. Praise the soul of Darkness born from the womb of Christ. Meiosis of one heart into Lover and Beloved, praise!

You are the first sparrow singing in the season just after the dream, and just before awakening. You sing to the dead in the Bardo of Imbolc, that they may live again. You sing to the living, that they may die more gracefully this time.

  Photo: took this hiking in the Carbon River rainforest, Mount Rainier

There Are No Inanimate Objects

We gouge the earth for coal and bleed her black veins for oil as if She were an inanimate object. Western culture assumes that the material world is simply "raw material," ours to take and to monetize. Otherwise, Earth has little or no value because minerals, water, oil and air are lifeless matter. How's that been working out?

In truth, there are no inanimate objects. A single atom in a rock vibrates with layers of living intelligence. A pebble is animated with atomic motion, organized in unfathomably brilliant mathematical architecture. Some stones are quite wise.

Native Americans who keep to the ancient ways, still fast and pray near sacred rock formations and mesas, listening to voices of the mineral kingdom. For thousands of years, Australian Aborigines have oriented themselves in vast stretches of desert by listening to the "Song Lines" that vibrate from rocks and sand.

Jesus illuminated a morsel of bread with divine fire: "Take, eat, this is my body." "Every creature is a word of God," wrote Meister Eckhart. St. Basil the Great said that nature was "God's other book." And St. Bernard told the first monks who settled the European wilderness, "Go into the woods: rocks and trees will teach you more than any library." Christian mystics incorporated this ancient way of knowing, called Animism, into their vision of "the universal body of Christ."

But post-Enlightenment science, along with Protestant theology, debunked Animism as primitive superstition. And tragically, modern education drills such animate shamanic modes of knowing out of our children. When my daughter was in first grade, I explained to her how native peoples honor the life in stones. She shared this with her classmates in the art room. You'd think at least the art room would be safe! One of the children told the art teacher, and the art teacher made my daughter stand in the corner for suggesting that stones are alive.

Our survival as a species may depend on our ability to revive our tribal Elders' way of knowing. This is why the film, "Avatar," ignited such yearning for atavistic vision. The salvation of the earth may depend on our recovery of Animism.

For we have lost our vision of a living earth, our second sight of soil infused with spirit. We have divorced Father mind from Mother matter, and thus devised an economic system that brutalizes the natural world.

Yet an Animistic vision of hope arises, not in our churches and synagogues, but in the science of quantum physics. Founding quantum physicist, Sir James Jeans, wrote that the material world is "a world created out of pure intelligence." Physicist Arthur Eddington, another quantum pioneer and president of the Royal Academy of Science, wrote: "All through the physical world runs that unknown content which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness. The stuff of the world is mind-stuff."

"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force," wrote Max Planck, one of the monumental physicists of the 20th Century. "We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter."

Our body is as sacred as the soul, each molecule of flesh a portal to unbounded consciousness. A blade of grass embodies the angel. And on that tip of green grass oceans of wisdom overflow the dewdrop. Take the smooth pebble from a cold stream and hold it in the palm of your hand: this too is sacred. Each atom glitters with galaxies in sub-nuclear radiance. Here, starry nebulae are born in a field so subtle that distance and dimension have not yet arisen. These are the waters of the void, which is the sea of your own primordial awareness, where matter and consciousness are one. Over those waters, deep inside you, the Spirit breathes, and God is always whispering, "Let there be light."

NOTE: I recovered this post from 2010 and thought it was still pretty relevant.

The Season Between

 

The outrage in your chest

is stifled pollen.

Be linden fragrance

or magnolia.

Let a faint breeze feather

the trembling bud.

Singing gently to yourself

is the first mystery

of Imbolc,

stirring the petals

in your seed.

You are the season 

between Winter and Spring

when a secret breath

ignites the heart

and the sky is filled

with the roar of love.

Remembering Our Ancestors

The irony of remembering our ancestors, who scintillate all around us in the dream-time, is that they yearn for us to bless them by being more fully Present.

Invitation

"I did not invite you here to save me, but to walk barefoot on my wet sand, feel my breath in your hair, hear the sound of waves and seagulls. I am the sigh of pines and the sparkle of streams, I am the silence of an ancient stone. You need no pleasure but my elements mingling with your soul. The pleasures you think you receive by exploiting my body are not pleasant at all: they are painful addictions to illusory power. When you were a child, every leaf was a mystery, the raindrop's touch a sacrament, to wander nowhere on my shores a sacred pilgrimage. It is because you have forgotten how to be astonished by the littlest creatures that you became desperate, and exchanged delight for ownership.You don't need to own me. You don't need to save me. I invited you here to love me. Save yourselves through this love." ~The Mother

The Ocean In The Hut

 

Once I went out
into the world roaring,
“Here am I!”
But this “I” was a flame
without a candle,
a blossom with no stem.
Now the flame has taken root
in the black loam
of bewilderment.
“I” no longer go, but stay 
in a hut by the sea,
O so close to the waves,
the burning dark waves
of love!
And the world comes to me, 
whispering, “Here am I,
may I enter?”
Dear world, how could you
enter this tiny cell?
Not even “I” can enter
the secret chamber 
of Not Knowing.
You are too busy coming
to arrive
here where the only work
is wonder,
the one reward, this breath.
If you dipped your toe
in my doorway
you might drown,
because I have done my work
and it is finished:
the ocean
is inside the hut.

Classic sumi-e ink painting by Sesshu Toyo

Four A.M.

If you knew

how inconceivably near

the moon is to

this pearl of silence

in your forehead,

threaded by a finespun

sparkling dew

of pure attention,

if you knew

how many elixirs of love

you imbibed

with your last inhalation,

how many potions

of healing you'll pour out

through your next

astounded sigh of praise,

you would awaken

before dawn

to spend the darkest hour

in radiant stillness, simply

caressing the earth

and bathing the stars

with this breath.

Photo by Bahman Farzad

Lila

A dear dear friend and Anam Cara passed suddenly away a few days ago. He was not only my best friend in college, but the mentor who guided me to meditation, who kept me on the path, and who inspired me to go with him to a teacher training course in meditation. Now suddenly, he is gone. I haven't seen him for years, though we were occasionally in touch at important times.

I feel so close to him again. I feel his Presence in the middle of the night. I pray for him, and then slip deeper into silence, and I am praying to him, and even deeper, I am praying in him, and he in me, and we are in the place called the Heart, where we've all met before we breathed, and will meet again, all of us as One, and One in all.

Effortlessly he drew me into the place which Christian mystics call “the cloud of witnesses,” and “the communion of saints,” where our mutual shining yet individuated consciousness goes to rest: and play. Here, for a few moments, he and I had quite a conversation. Of course, conversation there is beyond words, and a thousand pages of theology happens in the briefest moment. This is the place where mind dissolves into intuition, intuition dissolves into silence, and from that silence God is ever whispering, “Let there be light,” and the Word-world is born.

We met in a heavenly kingdom that was just a bubble bursting on the foamy surface of this Silence. Of course, our world is but a bubble bursting there as well. The conversation lasted only a moment in eternity, but if I transcribe it into words it will seem much longer...

“Hello, dear Friend!” I said. All he could do was smile. Yet his whole discourse was contained soundlessly in that smile, which was not a mere expression on his face but an energy flowing through creation. I feel that smile now as I am telling you this. It is a smile that awakens bliss in every nerve, every cell down through my chest and belly. Each cell in my body smiles his smile. The warmth of the April sun melts my solar plexus, even though it is Winter in this world. And through his smile, he silently says everything...

“Yes, Freddy, this is it! As you can see, there is nothing but joy here! And this joy is our work.”

 

“But it all seems so relaxed, so easeful here, free from every big deal, every great significance, and every need to Do. It feels like an ocean of Being where all Becoming just happens without any task as all!”

 

He laughed and laughed, with the laugh of our beloved Teacher, which I recognized immediately. I asked, “Is he here with you?”

“Of course he is! Not only with me, but in me, and I in him. There is no difference here, no distance here, yet there is a constant churning of melody, harmony, and rainbow wings that open from every infinitesimal dot in space. And the chords of time keep sounding, resolving into greater and deeper harmonies, swirling splays of galactic light throughout the vast incomprehensible Silence. And this is our work, the work of Beauty.

"Some of us are musicians. Our instruments are the physiologies of those who are still in their earthly bodies. Some of us are artists. Our palette is the brain and the eye and the pineal gland of earthly painters, who imagine the colors we send them. Some are poets, whispering phrases into the ears of earthly listeners, who feel an irresistible urge to write them down and sing them to their paramours, wondering where the words come from. Some of us are scientists inventing the mathematics of yet-to-be-discovered crystal elements in the periodic table, which shall be used to build a new earth with a more celestial kind of matter. And we murmur these equations to the day-dreaming scientists in your world, through the language of pure mathematics. And some of us are just lovers, wandering through the sad cities of the earth, uplifting the fallen with the merest gaze, pouring the nectar of heaven out of our eyes like a libation into the soil.”

 

“And this is your work?”

 

“Yes, yet nothing is done. It all just happens in stillness. But the stillness is so ecstatic that it breathes, it becomes, it creates. You on earth don’t realize that our stillness isn’t far away; it isn't separate from your own bodies. It is the very stillness between your heartbeats, and you can enter our stillness and hug your dearest departed friends at any moment you turn within.”

 

“So for you there is nothing to do, yet there is eternal work?”

 

“Yes, exactly! Our Master taught us this, did he not? And he gave us the meditation practice to make this eternal work of Being a lived experience. Did he not say, again and again, ‘I teach you to accomplish more by doing less, until you accomplish everything with no effort at all.’ "

"Certainly I remember, Friend. I can still hear his words ringing in my heart, and not with gravity, but laughter!"

"How do you pray?” he suddenly asked.

“How do I pray?”

“Yes, how do you manifest your desire?”

“How do I manifest?”

 

“Yes, how do you accomplish your work without doing?”

“I don’t know!”

“Yes, just so! By not knowing! Don’t even think of what you need, what you desire, what you must manifest in your life; whether it is financial, or political, or aesthetic, or whether it is the ideal relationship you seek with a partner. Don’t try to manifest any of it. Just repose in the Un-manifest, this is the secret. Repose in the Un-known.

"Rest in the silence of God, at the very center of your heart. Rest in the stillness between an exhalation and an inhalation. For God already knows what you need before you ask. Resting in his silence will allow the silence to manifest every-thing you need from no-thing, the fullest abundance from emptiness, and the fiercest act of victory from the peace that is already here. To become, from Being, the unimaginable future from Presence."

O dear Friend, if I tell them this, they'll imagine it is so very deep, so mystical, so serious. But it is actually weightless, breathless joy, divine play."

"And so it is. Our eternal work is playfulness. Our burden is light. Tell them not to try so hard. Tell them not to worry so much. Tell them to play."

Image: Jacob's Ladder by William Blake. Photo: 1970, the Teacher, my dear friend, and I.

Don't Let Them

Don't let them make you feel ashamed.
These shatter-lines on your broken mirror
are a tree of wounds, bearing fruit
that is both poison and power.
In you, shame-merchants see fractals
of their own confusion.
Don't let them disgrace you
with your own blood,
this ribbon of honor unwinding 
through a telltale furrow
in the vale of your flesh.
You are the bruised brooch your mother
pinned to her nipple, a diamond amulet
gleaming at midnight with ancestral faces.
Listen to the crystal whisper of her pain,

it is your pain, the incomparable
suchness of a single syllable
containing all the cries in your given name.
Don't let them abash you

for you boundaries.
You need them to glisten,
even when you collapse
to the floor of your heart,
splayed like a mop on linoleum,
soaked in your particular infamy.
Each fallen sparrow is a tear of the moon.
Don’t be ashamed to savor
the fragrance of your rage,
the musk of your desire,
to ravel up the labyrinth of the constellations
in your own inscrutable knot.
For the clustered starry hot mess
of your self-revelation,
is the only universe you have.
To weave these stained ragged threads

of seeing into one immaculate gaze,
the particular attention you pay
to particulars,

does not make you impure.

You have a right to call
the breath of the Goddess
your own breath, a right to feel
her widening roar in your solar plexus,
the rise of her impeccable smile
from your sacrum
in a blossom of black tears.
No law commands you to bend
before the patriarchs of shame.

You merely have a choice:
shame them back, or inhale their pain,
breathe in their grief,  the feathery smoke
of their charred wings.
Then breathe out a benediction.

Daughter, let darkness have
her deepening way with you,
immerse you and drown you,

until your tremor of silence sings
an embryo of light.

Let her birth you again.

Painting, 'Beloved,' by Gabriel Dante Rosetti

Treasures of the Tomb

You are the connoisseur of Truth
because you desire not only

the Light but the Darkness,
not only stars of heaven
but oozing treasures of the tomb.
You are willing to decompose
in order to find what never changes.
You are willing to stink.
And stay.
You are not content with the quiet repose
of the Answer.
You want the piquant yearning
of the Question too.
The fertilizer roses come from
is your first home.
You lounge among mushrooms
with the spicy white worm.
Your rainbow does not hover above,
it pierces the eye and gets covered
with blood like a scimitar.

It penetrates the womb

to test which color you are.

Chartreuse means boy,

amaranth girl,
cerulean someone
in between.
I am speaking about the rainbow
of this breath,
not as it was in the sky,
but as it punctures your lung,
warm and crimson with
uncertainty,
your death trickling down,
clothing silence
in the song of your ancestors.
From the rattle in the throat
to the drum in the egg,
you fall and rise.
Your being is not afraid
to become.
Your becoming is not afraid
to be.


Artist: Pablo Amaringo

Light of the Body

Perhaps the saddest thing about our religious traditions is their failure to glorify the human body as the temple where God and Goddess meet to dance round the fruit-bearing tree of the spine, uniting in the bridal chamber of the heart.

Instead, Western religions have covered the body with a veil of shame, while the so-called "non-dualists" of the Eastern traditions insist that "I am not this body."

Oh yes I Am.

I Am the Body, I Am the Radiance around the body, and I Am the energy field of this beating bloody heart that extends beyond the stars, enfolding the farthest galaxies.

I Am the Body, located right here, and I Am the non-localized ocean of light into which each quantum particle of the body dissolves this instant. My body is a holographic matrix of resonant emptiness containing all the information in the cosmos, and the death of my body is but a return of these ripples in space-time to their stillness. Nothing is lost, nothing is added. When we cease clinging to what dissolves, the body no more limits the Spirit than a mirage limits the blue and boundless sky. Each electron in my flesh contains a charge of electricity, a charge of Shakti, a charge of bio-stellar Glory, greater than ten thousand suns.

This is no New Age talk. It is the teaching of ancient Yogis and the teaching of the primitive Church. Jesus declares that when your inner eye is one, "your whole body will be filled with light." (Mat 6:22)  "Glorify God in your body!" sings the Epistle to the Corinthians. "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?" (1 Cor. 6) In the 2nd Century, one of the first and greatest Christian theologians, Saint Athanasius, wrote: "God became human so that humans could become God."

The actual message of Jesus has nothing to do with shaming the body, and everything to do with celebrating the Incarnation. Jesus manifested a body to demonstrate that the Spirit expresses her divine breath through human form. The Word is made flesh.

But after the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., theologians discovered they could control their congregations through shame and guilt. The fundamentalist movements that resulted from this distortion of the original message all manifest violence, based on repression of the body. They mutilate the myth of Adam and Eve to suggest that the "sin" was Eve's surrender to sexual temptation. However, there is nothing in the original story to suggest this at all. The so-called Fall was not sexuality or embodiment. It was our descent into dualistic mind, a mind conflicted by opposites, a mind that seeks its nourishment, not from the Tree of Life, but from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The only "sin" is apparent separateness, magnified by shame. Sin is ignorance of the divine unity of our own Being.

The rupture of our wholeness results in a chain reaction of illusions, all in the mind, generating actions that create a culture of conflict. We act from our perception that humanity is alienated from God, man from woman, soul from body, black from white, and heaven from earth. When these illusions dissolve, it becomes clear that there is only one "sin": to tear asunder our immediate spontaneous intuition of unity. Our original innocence in the Garden was the synergy of spirit, breath, and body. Which is not only the wholeness of Christ incarnate, but the actual definition of "yoga."

Ironically, in the present age, those who recall us to our original innocence are not so often the ministers, imams and rabbis of religion, but the poets, musicians, and artists of the world. In the words of the sublime novelist, E. M. Forster, "The Garden of Eden, which you place in the past, is really yet to come. We shall enter it when we no longer despise our bodies."


Image: Emanation of the Giant Albion before Christ by William Blake

Only Hope

There is just
one God
who contains
all the others.
She has no form,
no face except
the mirror
of pure attention.
Then why say "She"?
Because when
you are very still
you hear a flower
breaking its
heart of ice.
Because inside
the trembling

 viridescent sleep
of the buried bulb
it is already
April.
Because the seed
is awake, gazing
into its own
hollow.
And because your
only hope
is Presence.

Meditation Time

Come now, it’s morning.
Meditation time.
Time for the swan
of exhalation
to settle on still waters,
deep belly waters
that were here before
the earth was made.
Time to awaken the clear
blue sky in your chest
where the sun neither
rises nor sets,
because you are the sun.
You illuminate the world.
Isn't it a perfect morning
to go nowhere
breath by breath
down this winding
forest way,
letting your feet perform
a miracle of healing
with every step?
Don't take a walk,
give one.


Photo taken by daughter Abby in our back yard

Kali

 

The most beautiful form of Kali

is whatever you are resisting.

The most beautiful face of Kali

is whomever you are judging
right now.

Until this moment your words
were shadows of what you meant,

hand-me-down dominions,

their titles overheard in the gossip

of unfriended angels.

Now you reinvent the language

to describe a terrible realm

of embodied goddesses,
deeper than sadness, deeper than sin,
the furrows they have fallen in.

First, you abandon belief.

Then, you relinquish the believer.

A convulsion of longing

keens the silence of your infinite loss,

the sign of perfect grieving,

ululation of darkness,

your new name for light.

Your mouth is the womb of Torah.

Vedas emanate from your eyes,

black hieroglyphs of Tantra 

inscribed with ink of tears.

You speak a Logos of entangled galaxies.

Your name is Legion,

flowing from your lips on serpent vines,

your groin a cauldron of melted rubies,

topaz wine distilled

from the juice of unsolved koans.

Abba Philoman of Sinai

pronounced this apothegm

to a seeker from Rome

who, upon hearing it, fled back

to the city and worshiped Caesar:

"Surely the Word of the Lord

creates you

because it is a Word

that you create

with the breath of surrender."

Vespers

I used to imagine

that I was mist,

but I am the sun.

I have become the space

where minds wander,

a stillness not imposed by thought.

Because I am neither

"for" nor "against"

I have outraged everyone

but God.

She and I sit quietly

by the stream

eating whatever berries

are in season.

It's a stream we all know,

some of us carried

along by the current,

some of us just watching.

Please don't call me

irresponsible.

I respond to mothwing,

pang of raindrop,

thistle-touch of purple evening,

cry of mother raven

just dissolved

in whispering pines.

What breathes me turns

the magical wheel

of Winter stars.

If you want an answer, friend,

just rest more passionately

in the silence where

there is no question.

Then learn to take a walk.

Learn to listen

to stammering seeds

in the darkening meadow

of this moment.

'Evening at Kuerner's' by Andrew Wyeth, a farm a few miles from where I grew up.