Uradiance

  Let all your pronouns dissolve in Thou. You are not a gender or a tribe, a nation or a race. You are the one who was born to gaze into my face, as I was born to gaze into yours. Our religion is a broken heart, spilling light out of darkness. We meet in the smell of food, giving thanks to the smallest creatures, the bee, the seed, the raindrop, learning from a withered Autumn sunflower how to scatter a thousand Summer mornings. ________ A poem from my book, 'Strangers & Pilgrims.' Illustration from The Rubaiyat of Omar Kayaam by Renée Bul

You no longer need a path to get back to the Beginning, to the Source of creation. Now you can begin at the goal. You are the Source. All paths flower out of your heart. This is not pride, but the fruit of emptiness. 

   We are most like God when we are uncertain, and draw no conclusions about anything. What is God's conclusion? Are we ever finished? Is there  an almighty stopwatch that rings and cries out, "All right, time's up?" What is the boundary of time or space?  Yet humans must invent the notion of a "Last Judgment" because we can't endure the boundless, the perhaps, the open-ended darkness of our glory. So we crave limits and border lines. We long for the end of time. I tell you, consciousness endures no closure, no final decision. Consciousness is ever-expanding. Will we look up in the sky to see a scoreboard telling us that our team won? This is the fantasy of the immature, the mind that needs linear thinking to construct final judgments. The mind needs conclusions, but the heart just keeps quietly bursting into the Unknown, flowering into Wonder. Image: Gustav Doré, Danté Gazes into the Celestial Rose

Don't wait for the shift to occur. You are the shift. Don't wait for the grand alignment of planets and stars. You are the alignment. You are not "in" the world or "of" the world. You are the world.    Feel the new earth. Feel it into creation. Do not will it or think it, but feel it. You are embarking on a whole new way, the Simpler Way, without a journey. Creation happens. The new earth manifests on the threshold of silence, like a faint ripple on a still sea. It happens at the  subtlest level of energy, which is the  breath of emptiness. Felt, not thought. Listened to, not spoken.    You no longer need to take up a "cause." You are the cause. You no longer need to impose an ideology upon others. That was like shouting at people from another room. Now just be present, sensing their energy, attuning to their frequency, gazing into their faces through the eye of your heart. Move them without joining any movement.   ...

  I cried, "Give me a meditation practice! Give me a spiritual technique! Something I can do right now to gain enlightenment!" The Friend answered, "You are already doing it." "I don't understand." "You're not supposed to understand," answered the Friend. "The mind has no part in this." "Then what practice am I doing?" You are born in a body on earth. You awaken. That is the practice." "What is the meaning of this birth?" "You are on a cross, crucified by a paradox, with no escape." "What is the meaning of this crucifixion?" "The marriage of opposites, which occurs on no other world, and in no heaven. This is why even the gods must be born on earth if they wish to gain liberation." "What is the center of this cross?" "The vanishing point between past and future, spirit and flesh, joy and pain, stillness and action, converging in your cruciform body, at the hea...

  Don’t teach, just marvel. Thread your words  loosely on  strings of silence. Never murmur to the edge of the page. When you rest  in this breath, nothing is ordinary. A fat summer fly still humming at your window pane. An old man in a white room still hoping  for a visit  from  his daughter. A rose-breasted nuthatch cocking her head, walking round and round the empty bird bath. Don’t teach, just marvel. Fill the stone circle with tears. Photo: Grange Co-op

When the old man in his forest cottage stirs honey in his tea, he is whisking the earth around the sun. When the mother is up at 4 a.m. rocking her sick baby, she is rocks the planet very gently on its axis. That moth you met on the mountain last summer, settling blue wings on a lupine, fanned the air just enough to bring snow this Winter, a promise of thistle blossoms in Spring. Now it is morning, time you bowed down to this ancient breath. The world is not saved by much doing. Image: St. Seraphim of Sarav

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.

Yoga scriptures of Patanjali define "samyama" as the last three "limbs" of yoga combined. This is confusing to many students because it seems like multi-tasking, doing three things at once: "dharana" (one-pointed focus), "dyana" (meditation, dissolving the intellect in the ocean of ananda), and "samadhi" (realizing pure awareness as the essence of creation.) In fact, the experience of samyama is one intuitive act, without effort. It means simply dropping your intention into the bliss of silence. Do you want to MANIFEST your deepest intention? Then plant your seed of intention in the dark soil of the UN-manifest, and leave it there, unseen, unknown, unspoken. Only then will your intention germinate, to flower in the light. Holding onto your intention, or constantly speaking it, only diminishes its energy, which is much more powerful when left in the silence of the seed. The womb of nature herself will gestate the seed in her own time, by...

"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...

  When the part of you           that cries out for more,      the part of you that shouts,                "notice me!" becomes absolutely                silent,      absolutely still           in the heart's core, all you ever wanted           will fall at your feet      and you will say, "No thank you.           Silence is enough.      I am already rich.                I am already full.      I am the beloved           of the sun and moon. Stars are falli...

Don't just unwind your solar plexus. Don't just relax your belly. Release your hips, closed doors with rusty hinges built to swing open and dance, celeste designed to rotate like a galaxy of golden pollen. Honor your lowdown seed pod milkweed silk and toss it in the breeze. Cherish the ley lines of your darkest valley, harrowed and plowed, fallow wilderness of blessed yearning. You will never expand your mind if you don't unbuckle your pelvis. Only then can you transcend, celebrate the cosmic dissolution of your silhouette, evaporate the veil between flesh and spirit. The whole cosmos is your climax, gently exploding, just as it is. No need to attain anything. No performance, no anxiety. If you want to wear a thousand-petaled crown, then sink your stem in the loam and channel up rose sap. Be your own furrow. Breathe through bone marrow. Green your physiology. A nurse log lying in a lost ruined temple, overgrown with blackberries and trumpet vine, boiling wi...

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

Listen. Really listen to mother coyote at midnight and you'll stay awake forever. Stand still, not far from the bird feeder eavesdropping on gossip of nuthatch and titmouse, finch and pine siskin. This is all  the morning news  you need. In the evening when you hear Jesus weeping in the garden, stay awhile. Don't ask, "What's wrong?" Never ask anybody that. He'll just answer, "Oh, it's nothing." True poverty is resting without words. You think he is grieving about tomorrow? Really listen. There is never another day. His tears are for the beauty of silence,  the soft  abundance  of the dark,  and in the midst of all  our sorrows, the gift of this breath. Photo: Cornell Lab, All About Birds

Raven cries, "Stop thinking!" Mountain wind in murmuring h emlock,  "Stop trying not to think!" Down here in  fern forest shadows, "stop thinking"  and "stop trying  not to think" are precisely the same practice. The valley of Wu Wei is lovely and green, humming with stillness. Silt settles in the stream. Problems vanish by themselves. No need to touch the surface or the depth. This we call, "Stop thinking." Rest on the river bank and listen  to the music of far-off melting snow. This we call, "Stop trying not to think." To see who is looking  and hear what listens is effortless but  not so easy. White waters of silence tumble over 10,000 stones. Photo: Took this on a hike at Mt. Rainier

    You are not here      to save the world.           You are here to discover                that you Are the world. You are compassion.      You are perfect healing.            In you the mountains                 are lighter than the sky. Don't try to understand this.      Just fall in love with           yourself in every                pair of eyes. And however you may worship,      take a blessed breath           of this newborn light                that is never even one                     moment old. Artist, Artemio Coanqu