Uradiance

There's a secret in this madness. Everything is breath. A toadstool is Spirit-blown like glass. This mossy stone must be  the supreme Being because it exists. The wing of a housefly reveals a thousand verses of scripture, but you need to look. The fur on a golden shelter dog is infested with celestial messengers. Your next inhalation, the intimate name of Lady Wisdom, Sophia, whose whisper only lovers know. How does Mount Fuji float on a cloud? How do a billion stars rest in your open palm like a black moth? It happens through the science of miracles. The sun and planets in free-fall, caught and held by some colossal stillness. Be a pilgrim, then you'll understand the secret in this madness. Let the radiance of your destination illuminate your starting place before you take the first step. Let the space between the beginning and the end be a single exhalation of grace. What stands in your way is seeking. Everyth...

  "Above all things, love silence. Out of your silence will arise something  that will draw you into deeper silence. When you practice this, inexpressible  light will dawn upon you." ~St. Isaac of Ninevah, 7th C.  "True prayer is the heart's silence, free of all thoughts, ceaselessly breathing Christ..."  ~St. Hesychius of Jerusalem, 4th C.     

    Knowing makes you small. Big spirits mutter in amazement, mantras like, “WTF?” and, “I have no idea,” their windows and doors wide open, letting wind blow seeds in. Some meet the Master and start building earthworks right away with sandbags of mind dust and suspicion bones. Others see a long-lost Friend, scent jasmine and let their last breath go, falling into dazzled silence, dark as the soul of Beauty. From that moment on they’re breathed by an Other who is deeper inside them  than memories of birth or death. Sun floods earth, one perfect beam for each awakening bulb. It depends on how ready you are to burst open and fill the air with the fragrance of your Unknowing. Listen, dear, this world is a dry cocoon. Soon it will crack and shatter, spilling up into golden air the crinkled rainbows you've kept holding too long  in your chest. Give up certainty. Just unfold. Photo: A visitor in my backyard

To you who say God is not a person I say God is my friend. To you who say God takes a human form I say God is boundless space in the brain of an ant. To you who say God is beyond the body I say God is this breath. I hold opposite teachings in my chestful of wonder. To you who say God dwells inside I say God spills over the rim of the star chalice like silence from an empty bell. You say God is One, I say God is love longing for a companion. You say God is your paramour, I say yes, yes, God hides in the plum blossoms dancing as pure light through the wings of a dragonfly. Photo by Clare Louise Larkin

"Rest the mind in the heart" is a very simple instruction found in an ancient Indian treatise on meditation, the Vijnana Bhairava, and repeated verbatim in the Orthodox Christian manual of prayer, the Philokalia. Rest the mind in the heart, until the path disappears. We meet here, in this brokenness, where all our pronouns dissolve into Thou.  This journey from the mind to the heart may be twelve inches, or twelve thousand light-years. You decide. The earth doesn't need capitalism or socialism or any other -ism. The earth needs to open its heart chakra. Sovereignty of the heart is the only real government, the kingdom of heaven within you. It's time to take our sovereignty back.   At first we think our heart is just a blood pump. But as we rest in the valley at the tip of the breastbone, a mysterious warmth arises, then a glowing wholeness enfolds our entire body. After a time, the heart shines like the solstice sun. The he...

The final apocalypse has already happened. The Last Judgment was a moment ago, in your diaphragm, when you breathed out.  The End Time  is now, a sunbeam shattering  the prism'd raindrop on a dragonfly’s wing, scattering colors on a still pond. Creation dissolves in the tranquility of chaos.  Look around you. Don't think, don't name anything. Just look in a state of original amazement. What do you see? A wordless unceasing explosion of free energy, which is Love.  When you are doing what you truly love, are you not living in the end of time? I n that moment are you searching for "meaning"? Of course not. You are too busy living the explosion, the dazzling eruption of free energy from the Void.  This Love has no cause, no story to tell, no past to regret or future to fear.  Love must be lived, not thought. Love is not a concept at the conclusion of any logical argument.  To dissolve into pure existence,  Sat, into pure awareness,  C...

I will not stop at your skin. I won't turn back at the dazzle of your purity, that most subtle  substance of erotic fire. I pass through your locks and doors, a villain of galaxies scattered in your thimbleful of brownest loam. I imbibe You, not the color  of your flock, or scent of your  ancestral herd. I taste the smoke of your true  volcano, your voice, not the missing tooth in your old harp of chromosomes. I must see mountains melt  and tumble down your spine from the death's head of wisdom to the broken pomegranate in your birth valley. Smell the musk of your tears, hearken your bloody drum throbs, flutes in your panther walk as you shoulder all darkness  between stars,  and growl down black paths  through the core of Andromeda, which is the core of every proton  in my body.  I insist on beholding the smokeless  undulant flame of your form as it scorches my eye,  feeling the pai...

Let us continue the work of Christmas every day. The flame in my heart is the name of the Friend. What is most soft and gentle is most powerful. Therefore the glow in my chest pervades the galaxies. All I want is to pass this flame to other wicks. This is not my work, but the work of the Friend. Brothers, sisters, our souls are like the myriad facets of a vast diamond, and we are all made of the same light. Picture: Angel Gabriel, The Annunciation by Simone Martini

  Can you pour the ocean into a thimble? Can you honor Woman in one day? The whole lifespan of Allah, Shiva, Yahweh is one breath in her eternity. Earth spins on her spine of stillness. Planets circle their suns because her darkness is awake. Stars drip from the rim of her bowl. We drank from her silence before we were conceived, trillions of galaxies suspended like dust in the golden beam of her gaze. When She closes her eyes, there is fullness. When she opens them, we dance.

  Just for an hour on a Spring morning, give up being right. The earth won't disappear. You will. Not being of the world refreshes the meadow. Just for an hour, lie fallow. Or even for a breath allow the golden swamp cabbage, the shy forest trillium to fill your absence with joy. Be irrelevant. Let snowdrops flower without you.

You are not in time. Time is in you. You are not a tick of the clock.  You are the Witness of past, present, and future.  

  By dawn, the wind had fled, leaving a ruffle of  night-weary Canada geese in the wetland. Pearls of moss on stone. Jagged bolts of dogwood etched softy in the sky. Plum buds releasing their grip on themselves. A silent white boat drifting over me. Is it the same moon that floated over grandmother’s garden before I learned to measure  months and years? Child (I say to myself) it is never the same moon. It is never the same mind. When the heart is free from thought, I hear the burst of onion-scented snow drops. Nothing urgent in the conversation of tree frogs. All they mean to say is a thousand good mornings. I sip the green tea of What Is, mindful of the ever unfolding moment whose trembling we call time. Some causeless force distills my senses into healing tears, pure love’s transparency, a love not of or for, staining the empty silk-screen of awareness with this wabi-sabi world suspended in Spring mist. ...

Again I say, this is the time of the great shaking. One of the terrible blessings of Kali Yug is that what may be shaken falls away, so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Our personality is shaken. Our emotions, minds, and bodies are shaken. Now, thrown back into what is never shaken, we drink from the unquenchable wellspring of pure consciousness. Tapping the nectar of hridayam, the silence of our heart's core, from there we sing the causeless music of the unstruck bell. This is not a time of crisis, but opportunity: an invitation to distinguish the changing from the unchanging. Our spiritual journey is not to rise, but to fall. And fall not far. Simply descend through a breath of Grace from the mind to the heart. Let the Friend guide you to the hidden treasure of your Self. We do not discover the Self in the angst of division and blame, but in the fragrance of unity. The scent of this flower is uniquely your own. Yet in your trembling core of stillness is the wedding of Shiva...

  Every human heart needs a Friend made of fire. I choose the one whose gaze  is annihilation, whose storm of love is my next breath. I know by the warmth in my chest that the Friend has found a home, the flame has found a wick. But if truth be told, I have no choice, and neither does the Friend. Does a famished bee select which flower to drown in? Can a honey thief resist this invisible fragrance? I was beguiled by God, God beguiled by me, both of us, choiceless. Photo by Aile Shebar

Let us continue the work and the play of Christmas, meditating every day of the year. Embrace the dark, rest in the heart, and give birth to the light within. Our work is to glow. ‪ Pictured here, the icon 'Our Lady of Vladimir,' 11th century, one of the oldest and most beloved paintings of Mary and Jesus. "The deeper part of the contemplative life takes place altogether in darkness, and in a cloud of unknowing, with a loving stirring blindly beholding the naked being only of God..." ~Cloud of Unknowing, 13th C. "Above all things love silence. Out of your silence will arise something that draws you into deeper silence. If you practice this, inexpressible light will dawn upon you." ~St. Isaac of Nineveh, 7th C.

           "Savor every inch of breath in your body." ~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar One inhalation is incalculable abundance. This breath, an influx of wonder, brings more revelation that the Bible, the Qur'an, or the Vedas, because it is their source. Every inspired text or prophecy springs from the silence where this breath is born, and to which it returns. To delight in this breath is the end of war. To delight in this breath is the end of consumerism and craving. When you savor this breath, your needs are few. When your needs are few, you exploit no one. You walk softly over the earth, tasting every step in the present moment, the green in the moss, the murmur of a tree frog. Walking this way, you are free. In a very innocent way, you can live simply, sustainably, without preaching, without political parties. Wherever you stand is holy ground. Remove your shoes. You do not take this breath, you receive it, and just to breathe is worship. For the span...

You have a mission of green on a thirsty planet. Your task is the grace of a fallen raindrop, a plum bud opening in snow, a towhee at dawn grubbing through moss for scattered stars.  In late Winter, be first among fragrances. 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. 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: Rolalaloves.com 

This morning our meditation is to hum. No Om, no metaphysics, no esoteric tantra. Just hum. You did this when you were very young. Maybe listening to your mother's heartbeat. Maybe pressed against your father's chest. Feel your voice resonating in your skull. Feel your music gonging the bowls in your belly, your hips, overflowing. More quietly now, feel your own voice ringing every cell. More quietly now, hear it chime your atoms, every photon a moan of light, a final M of silence. Now you understand. The hum was already there, oscillating your molecules. The hum was already there, spilling starlight from a proton. The name of God already there filling empty space beyond the rim of time. You were dancing to this music before you were conceived. You were singing this song, this song was singing you before you breathed. All was forgiven, given before, by Grace. Joy was given before creation....