Uradiance

No matter what type of meditation you practice, it is helpful to begin by grounding in the body, because this body is our true home, the garden from which we have exiled ourselves through too much thinking. For just a few moments, as Jesus said, "Take no thought." Simply feel the seed planted in your heart.  

  A moment ago  in the sweet sad seeming of April, this fat plum  was a tiny white un-bud. Now the 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 while grown-ups  gaze through thingness into quieter worlds. But perhaps it's the other way round. Children cross over and return like ravens,  mushrooms, mountains in mist, while the old ones remain here , too gray to remember that this is a land  of sacraments, things pointing beyond  themselves , toward some ineffable beauty  deeper inside them  than they are. The bones of heaven are the bones of earth,   and you are a garden of doorways. Colors augur more than umber, green, carnelian. Bodies are portals to the formless. All I can tell you is, your soil is silence, your root is breath, your blossom is wonder. Death will ravish and ...

     August 15, Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the Mother of God. Here in the fullness of Lion’s Gate and Lughnasadh, the summer harvest festival, the Church places the glorious celebration of the Mother’s body, assumed into Paradise. Not just her soul, but every jot and tittle of her flesh. This is her banquet of organic delights, Earth garlanded with dahlia bling in Pagan fullness, each pollen mote, each ear of wheat or aster grail, brimful with the Christall sun. The art of the Church, like the art of Buddhist and Tantric mandalas, is a symbolic language. Lush paintings of Mary’s Assumption remind us that divine love transfigures not just soul but flesh into the fire of God. Mary’s bodily assumption into “heaven” foreshadows what Teilhard called “the divinization of matter.” Yet her bodily assumption is just the first fruit of humanity, for our own bodies, unto the least twirling chromosome, must ascend as well. How? By descending into Matter....

Evening meditation. My center must find a center. No need to ask the Friend to enter my heart. The Friend is already here, more inward than the soul, a silence inside silence who loves me. Let my Being turn full well unto its own depth, like a mirror, gazing at the Christal seed. Here, drink from love's winecup, with Rumi, Hafez and Jesus, with Radha, Mirabai and Magdalene, beholding all their faces, sparkling facets of the bejeweled hologram I Am. This is companionship beyond Advaita, deeper than stillness, One overflowing into One .

Polishing   the pearl in my chest  with this breath,  I know  that the silence of my heart  is God,  the glow is Christ,  and the river of unborn stars   flowing through my spine is the Holy Spirit.  Then what is my soul? No-thing but a shimmer of amazement as Lover and Beloved dissolve into Love. This is how three become One, and One becomes three. Choose anything, the sound of a cricket, the roar of the sun, the motionless explosion  of a rose. Art: J. Kirk Richards

The stars and planets always point to Now. This moment is the portal  ever leading back  to earth, our true home,  but deeper  inside her loam body. Here's the secret. You don't need to go anywhere else.  Just sink. My astrologer gave up when she looked at my chart and saw the constellations wobbling out of control, neurodivergent planets  zany as maenads erasing trines and sextiles like lines on water,  exchanging aspects, bipolar masks  of grief and exultation. "You're just empty space!" she said, "How did you do that?" "Friend," I replied, "awareness is a crystal more solid that the sun, more tranquil than Polaris. Let everything dissolve except the diamond glistening between your nipples. Learn to smile. Laughter emancipates the stars from the tyranny of thinking.  Give up yesterday. As for tomorrow, it's already here!   Painting: Lucie Bilodeau

Jesus, you are the Mystery my frail mind cannot explain. Yet  through your Mystery, many mysteries are solved.     You have said, "If thine eye be single, thy whole body will be filled with light (Mat 6:22)."  When I meet you in the center of my soul, I can see through your single Eye, the lens  of my heart.   And your Eye in my heart irradiates whatever it sees with the light of a new creation.     You anoint me with a sobering vision, yet a vision that heals, and leads to wholeness. I see how this beautiful earth is immersed in a cloud of human vanity. I see why humans treat each other so cruelly. How our politics and even our science are perverted by the ego. Why our wounds so willfully reject the very kindness that would heal them. How we are driven by an unacknowledged  grief . The grief of pride. The pride that cannot confess its yearning for you.    How can I heal myself when "I" am the dis-ease?  Your humility...

        As you fall asleep tonight, keep falling, plummeting into the star-foamed darkness of your heart. Play in the wave-nature of silence, rising up and sliding down the pearl moonbeam of this breath. Drifting in the ocean of no thought, fill your sail with the whisper of Hamsah, "I Am Thou." How could there be "higher" or "lower" in this froth of uncreated worlds where birth and death have not yet been divided into moments of time? What hand, passing through these waters, could cleave light from shadow, heaven from earth? Surrender is the subtlest art, it happens without you. Just rest in bewilderment. You have been given. When you witness your own waking, no need to invite the savior in. He is already here. Christ won't return because he never left. A face of compassion, ineffably human, seen by your Self in the mirror of Self-realization. The crystal gaze that has always alre...

I confess that I am "first among sinners."    Why? Because all that I behold I only know through the shattered lens of my ego, distorted by a mind that projects its own blurred vision on the other. The world I see is fragmented, flawed because my mind is fragmented and flawed, apprehending only itself in what it beholds. So declares the Yogic scripture: "Yatha drishti, tatha srishti: as the mind is, so the world appears." The modern "progressive" mind cannot see itself, because it is identified with itself. So I project my own blurred vision onto the other party. I seek a scapegoat to blame for the distortions caused by the cracks in the very lens through which I see. This profoundly realistic Christian vision of Sin is precisely the teaching of Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism. Advaita reminds us that we do not see the true nature of creation around us, we see the superimposition of our thoughts. Buddhism's first Noble Truth teaches that "hum...

The swan of your Name descends upon the breath of dawn to rest on the still lake of my beaten heart, where a golden mist of unfathomable kindness rises to kiss the sky, and many thirsty creatures come down by the water's edge to drink from our mystery. No need to murmur "Jesus, Jesus" with each heartbeat. No need to pray "So'ham, So'ham with each exhalation, "I am You, I am You." Silence understands. Lips and wings already know how to find this place without moving.     It’s almost midnight. I’ll tell you a secret. You are the candle. God is the moth.  Image: Matt Collishaw

    When the world is spinning off-center, a very deep spiritual practice is minding our own business.   Yes, that sounds self-centered. But who is the Self, and what does it really mean to be "centered?"   During desperate times, we tend to project our anxiety by becoming busy-bodies, crusaders, trying to save the world, to solve everyone else's problems but our own. Here's a humble suggestion: we might better respond to the chaos, not by minding other people's business, but minding our own, very lovingly, very carefully, very gently.   Minding our own business can profoundly affect others, like a flower that enhances the whole garden by releasing its peculiar essence, its unique beauty. When we learn to be wholly authentically ourselves, we radiate the quality of wholeness to others. Wholeness is a resonant field, as real as gravity or electromagnetism. The energy of a centered soul can center a community. This is not just the wo...

   Playfulness without a player. The frolic of God. An abandoned lute fingered by the midnight wind. Countlessness of pollen grains in a single flower. The fragrance of myrrh wafted over the ocean where moons dance in dolphin crescent stillness. A fallen tower spilling jasmine  and oil of spikenard on the sand as rudderless boats of plenty drift unhelmed wherever anointing is needed. Her body laden with jars of chrism and wine, how could she whirl up your backbone from blossom to blossom, escaping your gravity? A woman of the night or the temple virgin of Ningal? Yes. And the grail holder of Jesus. Scholars will never understand how her polished emptiness overflows. How her darkness engenders stars. They would rather correct mistakes in God's translation of her marvelous silence. If you want to taste her fecund blackness, cleanse the secret window of your heart. Behind clouds of grief and time the space of her...