Uradiance

Everyone seems to be selling something but nobody knows what it is. When you find out you will give it away for free. How can you put a price on the flame that licks and kisses across a synapse in your brain? How can you coin the oil that anoints you, the current of healing that tumbles  from the sun? Jesus never sold bread or pearls. He just breathed them into your hollow bones and his whisper became a tower of myrrh, a Magdala glowing from your sacrum through your rib cage to your crown, through your fontanelle to the center of the Milky Way. Down this golden column spiraling angels fall   into the fire of your heart. What is the fee for That? Your whole Being. Who has any business charging anyone for anything? Just keep giving back the breath  of the Beloved. Image: detail, Mary Magdalene by Caravaggio 

  Last night I turned off the wi-fi in my computer. Then I turned off the wi-fi in my head. Stopped hearing thoughts and started hearing frogs, whisper of mist on a pond, pure attention between raindrops, a mouse skittering through the empty bell of this moment: 3 A.M. I heard a well-tuned spider's web plucked like a koto by a single finger of moonlight. The sonic boom of a barn owl breaking the speed of darkness. This is how to hunt at night. Send out silence to hold a deeper silence in the talons of your breath.

This nation doesn't need more political polarization, this nation needs to open its heart chakra. Its time to dissolve the knots in the third chakra and move into the space of the heart, transforming lack into love.

Follow the one who leaves no footprints. Let the next inhalation be your teacher. Those who stop seeking are anointed by Presence. If you need a sutra, a prayer, just say, "My heart always already open.” I give you a solemn promise. If you follow this pathless way a golden flower will softly silently explode  in your body, the very form of stillness between breathing out and in, its fragrance pervading both laughter and tears. How can I be sure? I have tasted the honey. I know where it is stored. In you, my friend, in You.   Photo by Kristy Thompson 

"I am the light of the world," Jesus said (John 8:12). But he also said, "You are the light of the world" (Matthew 5:14). Now is the time to stop fighting shadows and Be the Light. Now is the time to shift attention ever so softly from the kingdom of fear to the kingdom of heaven on earth. The Light is real. It shines through our hridaya chakra, transfiguring  creation by its influence on the laws of nature at the quantum level of energy. This Light is the nectar of stillness, the breath of pure awareness, more subtle yet more substantial than matter itself, manifesting through rest, not resistance. To embody this light does not require more effort, but more silence. Settle into it. No need to Ascend, just Descend. Sink down into the radiance of your Heart. We meet here as our luminous selves. This is where, in the truest sense, we always already Are.

  Gratitude is not a spiritual practice. It is a subtle thread of fire that binds your pulse, through sensations of sweetness, to the heart of God. Gratitude is not something you need to "do." Just follow one faint breath of thanks until you dissolve. Into what? There is no word for the answer . You must find out for yourself, with the quietest kind of courage. Be grateful for the least most insignificant blessing: the last petal on the autumn rose, a lock of golden fur from the little dog who died, a tear for no reason, the sound of a hummingbird on a Winter afternoon. You'll spiral down a dark stairwell to the wine cellar, where Jesus has been aging his love in a cask of delicate bones. Don't look for his face. The grape was crushed long ago. Meet him in the pure bouquet of silence, the hollow of not knowing. This is the poverty that will make you rich. The secret? In the smallest is the vast. An atom filled with stars. The flavor of God in a sip of wine, a mors...

Thank you for your Silence.  Your Silence is weightless, yet it is firm ground in the midst of the waves. Your Silence is dark, yet it is a lighthouse in the storm. Not one drop of Silence is ever lost. It nurtures the roots of creation. Thank you for your Silence.

  Breathe out everything you are against. Surrender the argument. For just an instant be nothing in the gentle palm of desolation between breaths. Inhalation, exhalation, wings of unknowing that brush up your spine, ringing each vertebra like a bell-full of night. If your heart is broken, it must have opened during the darkest hour before dawn. And what opens is a door. A Friend must have touched you there while you were sleeping. Enter the wound. This healing pain, this flower surge of yearning in your sternum. There is no other way to the darkness that illuminates the sun but wonder free from thought. It only takes a moment to turn each cell in your body to a chalice of golden fire. Photo: Kristy Thompson

The shaman charged too much for your own breath. The savior hid your soul under a cup and switched it with his own. The guru ran off with your Shakti during the honeymoon. Your soul came home weeping and ashamed. Meanwhile the leftist tricked you into thinking you were a victim, while the fascist promised to make you great again if you worshiped his flag and carried an AR-15. The yoga teacher told you your body was God, but the new age channeler insisted you could transcend flesh and become an Ascended Master.  So you took a workshop in Bali  with the leading non-duality coach  who used to be a tennis pro named Gabe but calls himself Ananda now. He spent the whole week reminding you  that he teaches Nothing because  there is no teacher, and no one to teach. You felt guilty when you cancelled his check for $5000 and sent him a new one  made out for Zero. Maybe that's why you went back to church and tried to feel...

  Pay more attention to the Ordinary. It is the altar where miracles descend like Spirit into bread - this breath, a deer trail leading back to itself in the little woods, three unharvested tomatoes glowing hollow as lanterns, a spider flinging its silken path homeward from your old garden buddha to a withered rose, or the last evening light fondling small things like the hand of the dying, not with regret but inextinguishable gratitude. Photo: My old bench in the yard  

  In this month before the Winter Solstice, we sink deeper and deeper into the dark. For some this darkness feels empty, or full of grief and despair. We say, "these are dark times," when we listen too much to the voices of the so-called "news." Or perhaps we define ourselves as "depressed." If we are women, we know this darkness well, because we carry an ancient wound that bleeds every month. If we are men, we also carry a deep atavistic wound, but we too often try to hide it. It is the grief we carry as men, for all the pain we have caused to those we conquered or colonized, to the earth, and to women. Men try to hide our deep secret sadness behind the armor of masculinity, or mastery, or masks of Ascension and enlightenment. And "nonduality" makes a very good mask, for a little while. But if we are true men, we have the courage to descend into our wound and forgive - forgive others through forgiving ourselves. Not to chan...

Awakening has nothing to do with changing outward circumstances. The ordinary is still ordinary - but it is now weightless, floating in groundless silence. The empty park bench is still a park bench, but falling through the boundless abyss of wonder. The grocery store is still a grocery store. The camellia bud is still a camellia bud, beautiful and perishing. Like the old woman's face, wrinkled, lovely, and not long for this world.  Awakening does not change the form or the content of the world whatsoever: it simply annihilates time, abolishing the notion that there is any "goal" or "purpose" in the future, or any "meaning" in the story of the past .  Awakening opens the vertical dimension of Being, which has nothing to do with the horizontal dimension of time. They converge at the center of the Cross, and that center is always Now. Being can only happen in the present moment.  In awakening, the world does not change. But the ground collap...

The dearest friend dwells deep inside    your own Presence. Don't count beads, dissolve them. Don't count breaths, dissolve them. Don't count the hours, the years, the sins of the world. Dissolve them in the beauty   I Am.

Love has ruined my heart. Poppies grow in rubble where a warrior once stood defending the One. Thirst is my strength now. Tears are mighty shields of prayer arming my eyes against the night. My only meditation is to wait for a rendezvous with the breath of the Other. Her name is the morning star. زهرة الخشخاش لقد أتلف الحب قلبي. ينمو الخشخاش تحت الأنقاض حيث وقف محارب يوماً يدافع عن الواحد الأحد. يصبح العطش قوّتي. ودموعي دروع من الصلاة تتسلّح بها عيناي ضد الليل. وتأملي الوحيد يمسي انتظار موعد مع زفرة الحبيب، مع كوكب الصباح.   Translation of my poem into Arabic by Dana Chamseddine 

  All men hold an ancient sadness, a primordial remorse for those we have enchained or slain in ages past, and women who carry our wounds. When our collective sadness melts and swells up into the heart of one, it touches all men with hope. It is a sign of transformation, from sadness to compassion. A sign of repentance, which is a sacred energy, not of blame but self forgiveness, and responsibility. This is a holy sadness, for it heals other men. I feel your sadness healing me. We do not become women through this sadness. We become true men. Only through this sadness do we wander into the Dance. Sink deeply into your sadness, friend. Yes, deeply into your darkness, until no-thing is left but that vast grieving night within. Have courage. Linger there. See what happens. Is there not a glow of first light? Is your very darkness not the womb of dawn? The Gospel says , "Light shined in darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it."  The scrip...

  "I," or some such wayward voice, speak this in the midst of the solar storm, the sky infused with cobalt rose aurora. The hieroglyphs of the zodiac inscribed in the runes of my human physiology, God zeros in on every atom. Here, in the new creation, it is not just that the opposites merge, but they merge in a precise point, the point of incarnation at the center of the cross. There is no more east and west, heaven and earth, past and future, but the cruciform embodiment of glory. There is no more collective, but the infinite multiplicity of unique selves. No more need for any government, political parties, or state bureaucracy, for all political polarities resolve intuitively through the dance of particular persons in this moment. We no longer need a "congress" of representatives. We represent ourselves with unveiled faces, in the politics of spontaneous personal relationship. Goethe wrote, "What liberates the spirit, with...

  Here is the field where I walk with my dogs and gaze at the great mother who floats on a cloud of prayers. The wound in my chest is a portal to her kingdom. She scatters worlds, like seeds, in the furrow of my spine. They germinate in my breath when I whisper her Name. The radiance above, in the blue mirror of the sky, is just a reflection of the true sun inside me. The mountain robed in morning snow is just a shadow of the true mountain inside me. But what does "inside" really mean? Food, water, warmth and shelter spring from my darkness as a gentle glow. These precious things flow out of my heart and permeate creation, but the light itself is un-created. Once I thought my darkness was despair, but despair was only a veil that covered the shining midnight of faith. I have given up trying to understand. I just sink deeper and deeper into bewilderment.

Darkness is holy. It is the fertility of the Unmanifest. Darkness is not the absence of Light, but the womb of Light.

  Yes, I know, right now we feel rocked by X-class solar flares, tormented by planetary conjunctions and alignments, over-stimulated by comet-bodied messengers like 3-I/Atlas, and fevered with invisible radiance from this morning's super moon. So in dizziness and breathless confusion, we mistake what comes from WITHIN for a bombardment of strange energies from ABOVE, or from OUTSIDE. Then we forfeit our sovereignty to gurus and governments, astrologers, channelers, and political parties. Lacking the confidence to consult our own hearts for wisdom and guidance, we listen to the latest message we can find from arcturian/pleiadian/ascended-master/angel-guides; or we pray to our ancestors, as if they know any more than we do just because they died. Dear friend, who told you that the interstellar regions of outer space are not inside you? Who told you that the most distant galaxies aren't floating in the vast intimacy of your own consciousness? Who told you that your body is a...

It's OK just to be OK. Just to be You.  Now remove the "just."  When there's no "should" there's no "just." We're all empaths. We're all light-workers from another galaxy.  Let go of the drama. Be incomparable. Your laceration is unique, a vein of rubies glistening in jagged stone. It's OK to bleed out your miracle in ordinary time. Register no grievance in the Book of Trauma. Fall down in tears on the kitchen floor with a broom in your fist not knowing why, exactly, you gaze into the abstract expressionist linoleum. Neither bliss nor clinical depression are required of you. The space between grief and bipolar ecstasy is the frail and unmiraculous pause between breaths. This is the place where it's OK not to be outraged, not to feel abused, not to tip-toe on the cutting edge. We’re all radicals which comes from the Latin for root, as in "radish....