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.

Empire

When you discover that

each inhalation is nectar,

indescribably sweet,

and the space between your heartbeats

is the silence between stars,

and the one who encircles you

with unfathomable compassion is

inside your body,

where the luminous hollow

of each nerve echoes
with the sound that created all things;

then you are rich, you need nothing.

You begin to thrive

in the kingdom of moonlight,

on the barefoot sensation
of dew,
the smell of honeysuckle,

the sparkling transparency

of this perishing moment...
But really,

what do you mean

when you say “Now”?

A dark moth settling

on a petal of flame?

Here is your wellspring of healing.

If you’re thirsty, just use the cup

of this breath.

Painting by Elias Van Den Broeck

Krishna Lila

It is not through mathematics
that we learn to hear the music
of the spheres,
but by whirling as they do.
Let the rotation of angles
in Krishna's sky-stained body
describe a geometry of playfulness
in fractals of lila,
the calculus of his ankle bells,
the whimsical trigonometry of elbows.
Note the inclination of those wrists,
a finger's curve approaching
the asymptote of the flute,
the littlest one angled upward
as if holding the stars in a teaspoon.
The resonance comes from breathing
through black holes
in a reed of escaping bliss,
the entropy of a sigh.
Who can balance such equations?
Interstices of calf and thigh,
the ratio of tilted hips
to the slant of his glance,
the distance from heart to smile
in proportion to the length 

of an inhalation,
those lips like the red shift
in the vector of longing.
Let the slope of his neck
and the tilt of his peacock feathered crown
be your golden mean,
and your yearning the invisible limit
to the curve of his crimson smile.
You need to solve these equations, but how?
Build cathedrals out of stillness.
Let the quotient of a sigh
divided by a sudden inhalation
be the proportion of your longing
and fulfillment
as jasmine releases its sweetness,
arousing the Om-hum of honeybees
in a blossoming kunj.
The broken symmetry of silence
is the sound of the Veda
when you whisper your lover's
secret name.
Shyama dances in the garden
and the logarithms of rasa-lila
multiply the forms of the cow-herd boy
until each Gopi's heart has One. 

Bewilderment is the final science.
Let Radha's confusion expand
like a peacock's tail in the hologram
of your chest.
This is the moonlit algebra 

your nakedness understands,
the pavonine spiral of Gopal.
Only through this quotient of
delight and pain,
the reed flute hollowed
to the breath of God,
will you ever conceive how
intricately the cosmos
entangles its vastness
in your body.

NOTE: The Greeks, Neo-Platonists, Medieval alchemists, and artists like Leonardo all believed that the mathematical proportions of the human form were divine. They tried to capture these divine ratios, "circling the square" through the formula called the Golden Mean. We can see this in works such as the Mona Lisa. In the Bhakti tradition of India, this knowledge is not through the study of mathematical symmetries, but through the divine chaos of Krishna's sheer playfulness, the lilas of the mystical body of the Lord of the Dance.

The Upper Room

The apostles found Jesus in the upper room, weeping.

"He refuses to open the door," Peter told John, knocking harder. Jesus shouted. "Leave me alone for an hour." Peter answered, "Master, we want to stay with you!" So Jesus unlatched the door. The disciples sat down around him. He looked at them wearily. "I can't go on," he said. "I am lonely. And I am tired."

Peter noticed immediately that the master's scrolls were gone, the ones containing channeled messages from the Archons, who were known in Hebrew as the Elohim. One of the scrolls revealed instructions from Gabriel about the Church they were supposed to organize. One was from Zamiel about economics and justice in the "City of God," the ideal socialist state. Another was a military manual from Archon Michael about preparations for the final battle at the End of Days. There was also a compendium of astrological and medical knowledge from Archon Raphael, containing countless laws about food purity. But now every one of these files, downloaded from the heavens, was missing.

"Where are they?" Peter asked. He had a bad feeling about this. Jesus remained silent. Peter reminded himself that he must be very gentle with the master. All this channeled information pouring through his crown into the human cortex could make even the Son of God testy. He suffered from mood-swings and migraines. More quietly, Peter asked, "Master, we're only here to assist you. What happened to the instructions from the Archons?"

Jesus answered, "I burned them."

"What?"

"I threw them out and burned them. They were just information. I am tired of information."

Now Peter raised his voice. "How can I run a Church without that information?"

"I don't want a Church," Jesus replied. "What people need is not information."

The disciples looked at each other in gloomy silence. This was their worst fear come true. The voltage of Gnosis had been too much for his nervous system. "I don't have an economic plan," Jesus said. "And those physiology mandalas, with herbs linked to signs of the Zodiac,all that nonsense about what to eat and what not to eat; and that drivel about the end of the world, the opening of the Seventh Seal: it's all just... just information! I won't teach information. Information gives me a headache. I want to take a nap."

Meanwhile John, assuming that he was Jesus' favorite disciple, stroked the master's hair. "You all go away and leave him with me. I'm his best friend."

Peter rolled his eyes, "You've all gone soft. This is not what the Baptist taught us when we were with the Essenes in the desert. Our mission is Knowledge. We bend Natural Law into Divine Law until they become one Law. We hammer the blade in the fire of discipline!"

Then the Magdalene spoke. She had been waiting the shadows behind the disciples. Now she came forward, bending down, cradling the Lord's head to her breast like a mother. "You heard him, Peter. He's not interested in that anymore. He burned it. He burned up the blade in the fire!"

Peter said, "Who are you to stick your pretty nose into our affairs, woman?"

The others held their breath. They knew it would come to this, a confrontation between Peter and Mary. Philip interjected, "We're upsetting him. Why don't we all leave and let John comfort him awhile."

"Yes go!" Jesus said, "All of you, John too. But you stay, Mary. I need Mary to stay." Peter glowered at Mary, then left the room, followed by the others. When they had gone, Jesus sighed, then allowed himself to weep. "I can't do this any more."

"You don't have to," she answered gently.

"The Archons will be furious," he said. "They'll let the Romans have me. And the Romans will torture me, the way they do to slaves and Zealots, on a cross."

Mary whispered, "Issa, we can flee together! Come away with me to Egypt again, to the School of the Mysteries where we first met. Or we can sail across the sea. My uncle Joseph has ships, he is a wealthy merchant. He will arrange to take us to the land of the Gauls. To Avignon, where we could keep a vineyard and start a new community. We could even journey to the Western Isles, the land of Eire."

Issa looked up with ruthless clarity through his tears. "What are we, Mary, without the Gnosis of the Elohim Fathers?" She sat beside him on the bed, wiping his tears away with her long black hair that smelled of citrus and frankincense. She leaned down and kissed his cheek. He put his arm around her and said, "My heart is on fire, Mary. The knowledge of the Elohim means nothing compared to this fire!"

"My heart has been on fire forever," she said.

Issa seemed transfigured; yes, more luminous, but more solid as well. His body glowed like amber in a sunbeam. By a breath of grace, after years of alchemy and inner work, the transformation happened in a flash of wonder. He said, "This fire is not the love that brought our bodies here. That love was only a preparation for this love."

"Hush now, I know what love is," she answered as she daubed his tears away.

Issa said, "Help me understand, Mary."

"The breath of the Spirit is your Mother," Mary said. "She flows down from the stars like a stream of pearls through your crown. Until this night, you tried to grasp this with your mind, to contain it in the prison of your skull. Now you must open like an infant at the breast, and let the light pour down into your heart. Let this starry breath merge with that other stream of dark energy, surging with the fragrance of roses from below, gushing like wine from the earth into your loins, your navel, your chest.

"The stream from heaven meets the stream from earth in the center of your body. There in your heart is the Bridal Chamber where they mingle as one, yet remain two. Two triangles, one descending, the other ascending, wedded in a six-pointed star. This is not merely the marriage of man and woman. It is the wedding of the Lord with his Shekinah, the Christ with his Holy Spirit, his very breath.

Issa gazed at her, enraptured with her beauty. She said, "All the ancient wisdom is here," and gestured to her breast. Then she placed his hand on her heart, so that he could feel it beating. He said, "How many lifetimes have we been preparing vessels of flesh to contain these hearts?"

"I am Aphrodite Ourania," she whispered, "Who are you?" Then Mary unfolded a kerchief containing lumps of chocolate. "My uncle Joseph brought this cacao from Africa. But he was told it first came from a continent beyond the Western Sea." She smeared a little on his cheeks and lips. "Taste and see how good it is, Issa!"

They ate the cacao and lay down, gently hugging, feeling their hearts beat together in unison, two rose wings pulsing in a single jewel, delicate as a moth. This mutual irradiation of hearts was their love-making. It was a new kind of love-making.

Then they called the disciples back into the room. Issa was radiant now, for he had embraced the dark, and it was sweet. He said, "We have a change of plans." To Peter it felt like a betrayal. "We will have no Church. We will have a Beloved Community. I will not be your Teacher, your Savior, or your Judge. Each of you will be your own Teacher, your own Savior, and your own Judge."

"But Master!" Peter protested, barely controlling his anger.

"Stop!" Issa said. "No one must call me Master any more. From now on, call me Friend."

Heedlessly Peter continued, "But we have the saving Gnosis, the knowledge of the Archons!"

"What do the Archons really know?" asked Issa, looking at Peter with tenderness. "They have never even known a body with a beating heart." The men stared at him in wonder. Issa gently continued, "Now we bear Good News not only to men but to angels."

"What good news?" Peter asked.

"Just this. Love one another. Rest your mind in your chest. And if you must have rules, here are the only rules you need. Walk barefoot in wet grass at midnight, un-naming the stars. Sing for no reason. Offer back every breath, with unspeakable gratitude, to the one who gave it to you. For breath is not taken, but given."

The disciples were dumbfounded. Then Peter announced, "If you won't fulfill the mission of the Archons, I will. The Church will be mine!" So Peter walked out.

Issa looked at Mary, yet he was speaking to the disciples. "If you must have a leader, this woman will lead you. She will keep minds low and hearts alive. The world will not listen to you, yet you will be purified by their scorn. When you learn to sing like fools, then they will listen. For foolishness is wiser than the wisdom of angels."

He took a blue aster from a vase on the table, twirled it in his fingers, and smiled. Then he handed it to Mary, who blushed, glancing down at the tiny wheel of blue petals. In that moment, to her astonished gaze, this humble flower became the whole zodiac, wheeling in the azure empyrean, each blue petal inscribed with a sacred syllable of incomprehensible majesty, written in galactic swirls of fire. These sound syllables resonated in her heart, inscribed in her consciousness forever. Mary could hear them vibrating like infinitesimal chimes dissolved in the silence of the room around her.

A voice in her breast, quiet as breath itself, whispered, "These syllables are the seeds of heaven on earth. Each is ho' eucharístos monologísthos, a one-word prayer. Whisper these heart-mantras to those who join our circle. This is the worship of the coming age."

The space in that little room seemed to thicken with pulsations of starlight, suddenly near, intimate, and warm. Gazing into Mary's face, the men found her countenance more lovely than a dark hibiscus lit by the moon. Issa said, "You are no longer followers. You are not a religion. You are Children of the Midnight Sky."

Crestfallen and brooding, John stepped forward. "Master, over Peter and me you have chosen a woman. Therefore, I too must leave you. I go to Patmos, where there is a small community of Essenes. I will live as a monk, and continue the work that you refuse to do. There is much knowledge yet to be channeled from the Archons, concerning the End of Days and the Last Judgment."

"John, I tell you because you are my friend, no mind knows the outcome of this world, not even the mind of God. Our faith is to repose in possibility. Our hope is in the present moment. Don't sell your wonder for certainty." But John was already out the door and gone. Issa sighed and said, "He will end by babbling. Yet many will follow his dreams."

Issa and his friends departed from that upper room, using side streets and shaded alleys, for imperial guards were already on the move. They made their way to the garden where Issa and Mary loved to stroll in the cool of the evening, sitting in meditation under a spreading cypress. Mary of Bethany, her sister Martha, and several other women with their children met them there. For in this circle there are no priests, male and female are equal, and the wisdom of children is most sacred.

Peacocks wander here among fragrant lilies. Ayísh the evening star rises. Delicious with dew, the grass is soft and stinging on our naked feet. Issa and Mary teach a love song. As they sing, we walk in a circle, very slowly, on a spiraling pilgrimage into ourselves, receiving caresses, kisses and blessings from one another.

Issa and Mary join hands in the circle, not at the center, but simply as links in the moving ring of all. Each of us whispers our heart-blessing to another as we pass by. Here is what Issa whispers to me: "You are the angel of your own guidance, you are royally anointed with your own joy." What would you whisper, friend?

Last of all, Mary Magdalene places a tiny smear of cacao on our lips, whispering a sacred syllable in our ear. Somehow this subtle sound contains the entire Logos, the stream of silent music that created the universe. In the beginning was the Word.

The sound descends from hearing to the heart, resonating in each cell of our body, gathering into one chord the music of the galaxies, the energy of the heavens, and the silence of eternity. And in the stillness of this harmony, where creation is born, we too are re-created. Then our bodies laugh and sing.