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