Hips

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, boiling with ant hills, tiered with turkey tail mushrooms : visualize your soul as That! A life of interior prayer is to contemplate the juice of gurgling microbes. And what is lectio divina? To linger over hieroglyphs of fungi in your lymph nodes. If you listen more deeply to the silence in your physiology, and tend the priestly flame in your pineal gland, what you call "the mind" will glitter with jewels of darkness. Now enter the year of the serpent, the season of hopeless beauty, when the Goddess Kundalini undulates through all forms, beginning with compost. Thank everything you smell.

Engraving by William Blake