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