Uradiance

  At 4 A.M. this is my praise song simply because,  September. Or perhaps because  I thought  about Jesus  as I fell asleep last night. You are the vine, I am the twig, yet all your sap flows into me. Your exhalation plunges a bud through my heart. It bursts into a poem. Clusters of plums dangle over my fence, but I did not plant them. They drop into my palms. Am I a looter, like the deer, the coyote who comes at midnight? Blackberries too, everywhere, succulent with thorny sweetness. Sometimes they wound me when I pick them. The grosbeak and racoon are more skillful. They pluck the fruit and leave the thorn without making up a story about it. No politics, simply the scattered abundance of a nameless sower whose generosity stains my fingers, my tongue purple. Invisible stars also ripen on your vine. Who can explain our entanglement? Gilded Autumn moon, wormhole in the apple, darkness at the center of ...

There's a tender place at the top of your head, where your inhalation rises to kiss a trillion  stars. You meet your Teacher here, in that kiss, and the illusion of distance disappears. You sip from the chalice of the farthest galaxy, whose nectar overflows. What others may say about your Teacher doesn't matter. For the Beloved doesn't seem like a Teacher to you, but an ancient Friend, whom you haven't seen for 27 billion years. It's quite a reunion, and there are tears at both ends of eternity. Yet you shrink away, fearing that your sins, your imperfections, make you unworthy. Have a little courage. The Friend isn't interested in your guilt, but in the rhythm and the power of your pulse. How does your heart appear to the Friend? As a perfect diamond, covered in the dust of thought, which the Beloved will polish until it shines like the sun. It  is the sun. And for the gentle work of polishing your heart, the Beloved uses your own breath. Photo by my hear f...

  No need to transcend. Awakening pervades the dream, the dream pervades awakening. If you know that your next inhalation is the paramour who danced with the Creator when the world was born, there's nowhere else you need to go. Just dissolve the veil between soul and body. How?  Pay a little  more attention  to what flows  in and out. It doesn't matter if your atoms are made from the light of stars that ceased to exist before you were conceived. Walk softly on the planet, not like a landlord but a guest. If you don't know how to bend    and be hollow as a reed, how can you be filled with music?

  One morning when the Goddess Kwan Yin was a human child, she strolled out beyond the village to the place where the meadow meets the forest. While gathering berries for her breakfast, she met the Bodhisattva, deeply absorbed in walking meditation. Sensing the sweet savor of enlightenment simply through his body's motion at rest, and rest in motion, Kwan Yin approached him with a question. "Sir, I have been searching for someone to tell me why we are here. Can you?" "I can tell you why I am here," he answered gently. Then he knelt and whispered: To sit, to stand, to walk, and to lie down. These are the four dignities of the human being. If you do these four tasks well, all else in heaven and earth is accomplished. No need to pray for a miracle. Just dwell completely in your body." A professor from the nearby temple school was walking there too, gathering his thoughts for the next class in Advanced Moral Philosophy. Overh...

Claiming, "I am not this body,” is just pretend enlightenment. God dwells in every particle of your body - why shouldn't you? Liberation arises in your flesh. Gossamer whorls of DNA, tipped with holographic crystals entangling distant suns. Light-years of awareness between your atoms. The vagus nerve a golden hand of intergalactic harmony, reaching through the crown of the skull to the root of the spine, caressing you from within, attuning your dust-dance to the music of the spheres. You are not as dense as you imagine. Are you not made of portals, gateways, passages to other worlds?  Realization is the dissolution of opposites. A thin veil of illusion distinguishes the physical from the spiritual. Matter is vibrating consciousness. Consciousness is woven from luminous threads of Mother Matter pulsing through the void.  In truth, there is neither One nor Two, but the bubbling over of Zero.  Breathe through every cell. Meditate on your body. Radiate from your bod...

  Recently found the poem I read at graduation from Exeter in 1966. I was elected to be the Class Poet. Just yesterday is how it feels. Actually it was 60 years ago... P.S. My nickname was Kirby because that was the name of my Labrador Retriever. Each generation has its blades - and we were the unbilical swordsmen. We cleaved the clinging mothers from our rib and ribbed our rinds with scandalous fruit. We rode our mangers down the years and swamped the deathbed ebbing of the old with stallion-studded blood: We were the studs of Spring. Our hair turned in the lock of Youth, our mustard-tongued mouths burned History's witch, our lips were windy with desecration. We felt the sermoned fishes tugging at our tide and summoned young-yeared wishes against the Cross-hooked lives, but the lines ofour blood were taught and could never be broke by boys. So we paid no heed to our hauling veins. We built our bones with beer and song  while the age-old rhythm of our blood rocked like a Haufb...

When the sun rises in your heart do you need a candle? When the Teacher appears as your own pure awareness  do you bow to any form? You did not wander away from the Friend. The Friend came to dwell in your body, like a pilgrim returning home. You stopped calling and just opened the window of your fontanelle. Trillions of stars poured down into your temple of silence. Your spine became a still mountain. No climber, no ascent. Now every breath is an ocean of grace.  You abandon the sail, the rudder, the boat. Who stands on the shore to greet you? The Magdalene. How do you know? Her gentle smile is your own. ________  Painting: Indwelling Peace, by Sue Ellen Parker,  which is also the cover of my book, 'Strangers & Pilgrims.'

Nothing is pure that has not fallen. Be an apple petal on a stream, a pale seed in the mother-brown furrow, a spark of the iron hammer on the lock of the prison door. Be lamb's blood on the lintel, the silent footstep of a slave escaping in haste at night. If you cannot stay for one hour, stay for one moment and be whole. Nothing crushed in these green shadows fails to rise. Be the glut of a rain drop on the mouth of a lily, the starry wine that pours into the hollow grail of your own body. Breathe Christ through your broken places.

  We gazed into the sacred mirror,  that otherness of eyes. I breathed you into my chest  yet didn't keep you there.  I let you go, but first  I let you roam through secret  candlelit chambers. I offered you the cup of my  aloneness. Breathing you out,  I did not abandon you. I walked you to your own soul door in the mansion of love where I see you in every window. You change the rhythm  of my heart. Even now, an ocean apart, we are dancing. Ascend to another star, we are dancing. Return to the lost kiss where our birthless beams were one transparency, we are still dancing. Painting: Edward Burne-Jones

  In this land of sacraments things point beyond thingness toward some ineffable beauty deeper inside them than they are. Your garden is full of doorways. Colors augur more than umber, green, carnelian. Each form a portal  to the formless. A moment ago  in the sweet  sad seeming of April, this fat plum  was a tiny  white blossom. Now a hummingbird’s persistent tick scolds you to attention. The perishing golden catastrophe of a late August dahlia means something  that you cannot look up in a book. Children play on earth but grown-ups pass through into quieter worlds. Perhaps, after all, it is  the other way round. Children cross over and return like ravens, mushrooms, mountains in mist while the old ones remain, pretending to know. All I can tell you is: Your soil is silence. Your root is breath. Your blossom is wonder. When everything bursts open you release the fragrance of love. Painting by Étienne Colaud, d.1540

I do not seek the teaching of an ascended master. I scent the musk of a grounded one. She burrows her toes among the mushrooms and arrives at the beginning. Her journey is sinking into deeper relief. She ascends by awakening stillness. Her path is Presence, ever expanding.  I do not lift up my gaze. I let it settle  into the earth like rain. The valley is fertile with her breathing. The hills float lightly on her mist ocean. So the chrysanthemum stays right where it is, yet bursts open in every direction at once. That is quite a pilgrimage! Holding the sun at the tip of her stamen, clustering stars in her pistil, she carries the sky upon her petals, un-crushed. No clinging. She is like my hand. The moon and the planets are weightless when I open my fist completely. Her hug makes it happen. As Autumn comes, She teaches me to fall back into the seed, attaining the wisdom of the mountain top by rooting down where I Am. Painting by Shiloh Sophia

What if our spiritual growth is not a journey or ascent, but a relaxation and expansion, opening like a flower, like a Cross,  in every direction at once,  into who we already Are?  (Painting: Garden of Eden by Rolant Savory, 1611)

  At the end of your enchanted path the gong of the sea and the silence of the desert are one Name. When you arrive, your song is already here, waiting for you. Greeting you with dark troughs of light. You learn your own name in these waves. You are the rainbow blindly curving toward dawn. Light snuffs you out. Did you mean to die? The surface of every sphere tilts toward its vacuum. Did you mean to pour your yolk into the void with the whisper of ravenwings? The zeroing patience of a psalm, unafraid to mingle grief with devotion. Moment by moment you carve your body out of brave annihilations, a weightless violet flame. Your soul is the dancing tongue of a hummingbird.  Now we must  define  "enchantment": to sing the world into existence. To wear a veil that conceals everything beneath transparency. This is why you prefer  the night,  and blackness  becomes you. Ravenart by my dear friend Liz Miller

I will now reveal the Truth. I don't know anything because there is nothing to know. Creation is a silent blast of free energy spontaneously ordering itself and dissolving back into chaos this very instant. Free energy has no purpose but tastes like God. Somehow it gets trapped into separate minds, the way air gets trapped into bubbles on the sea.  What an honor to be the whole ocean of God, dancing in a bubble of God, dissolving into God.  Why am I trapped in a bubble? For the sheer bliss of popping and getting free again. Why do I do this to myself? I don't. Then why does the Almighty do this to me? She doesn't. There is no do-er. But it's fun to ask "why?" because it leads us to ask, "who is asking?" Now tell me, friend, why do drops of moonlight form in divine darkness and fall on a moth wing at 3 A.M.? To make the sound that awakens you to deeper silence.

  Don't tell me how embodied you are or how painful it is being an empath. Just feel the moon-flow through every nerve. Taste the star-birth eight billion light years away through a blue vein pulsing in your bare sole. Let your mitochondria dance to the flute-music of Sundara as he leads you to the cavern of radiant darkness in your chest. no, this is not a dream but a flesh-flame whose beauty is too feral and terrible to name except in a language of tears and quickly taken breaths slowly surrendered. Nothing can blind you but your mind, busy with explaining things. Just for tonight, let your religion be astonishment.

"Don't pretend that earth is not one family.  Don't pretend we never hung from the same branch.  Don't pretend we do not ripen on each other's breath.  Don't pretend we didn't come here to forgive..."  You can find this poem in my book, "The Nectar Of This Breath,"  at my Amazon Author Page ( LINK ), and other booksellers.

The simplest Way is not even to call it "meditation," or "spiritual practice." Simply drop the gray veil of thoughts/memories/fears/desires and feel the organic Hum of infinite light in your physiology. This is the whole of Christ's teaching, and the whole of Yoga. Just Be in your body, letting the ghost of mind dissolve into the energy of sentience.  

What does a Guru do? He's like a doctor. He looks me over and shakes his head to confirm what I’ve suspected all along. You've gone crazy, he says. Is there any hope? I ask. I’m afraid your madness is terminal, and there's nothing I can do but make you comfortable until you dissolve. We sit in silence for a long long time. Then he says, It's not so bad. Look at me. I went crazy years ago. Now, whenever I smile, thousands of people sing to me and give me flowers.