Uradiance

Take off the soft-breathing mask of forgiveness. You are really quite angry. Take off the fierce mask of outrage. You are really quite gentle. Be the one who wears them both, the one who has no face. All masks are hollow yet sparkling with frowns and smiles. No one inside, just silence, delight of enso, ever-expanding zero whose circumference is wonder. After you've taken your faces off, put them on again. Be anyone. Be thousands of transparent veils undulating in waves of moonlight. Be the gravity-free hollow who wears them. Be musky anthers unfolding in caverns of juice. This is your true body, woven for the dance. Woven of the mandible snap of animal laughter, woven of the yeast of living tears. This is your body of dark bread, woven of lightning bolts. Be night filled with stars, miracles in a thimbleful of loam. Be a mothering blackness of butter and sweat.

I don't want to stop at your skin. I won't turn back at your dazzle of erotic fire. I must pass through your locks and doors, a villain of the stars scattered in your thimbleful of brownest loam. I must see You, not the color of your herd or the tribe of your ancestors. I must taste the smoke of your true voice, not the missing tooth in your harp of chromosomes. I must see white mountains melt and tumble down your spine from the crown of death's wisdom to the broken pomegranate in your birth valley. Smell the musk of your tears. Hearken drum throbs, flutes in your panther walk, the way you shoulder blackness and growl down barefoot paths of night. I insist on beholding your pure scarlet form of undulation, just this breath before it enters your body. Why is there no serpent among the constellations? Because You are. The ram, lion, scorpion, bear, Use them to ford the stream of desire. They are mossy stones in the moonlight of an illusi...

Learn from the moth on a thistle. If you compare this moment to any other now, if you compare this presence to any other place, you turn your world to ashes, your wings of amazement to dust. What arises dissolves in immaculate beauty, incomparably timeless, a shaft of summer sunlight stabbing the peony's heart, then a raindrop to heal the wound.

Breath is not just air. Mingle awareness with the nectar of your breathing. Let it become a luminous and subtle elixir, the healing alchemy that dissolves the borders between 'mind' and 'body.' Your awakened breath reveals that there is only one energy pulsating in creation. We get stuck in concepts, trying to name this mysterious power - Shakti, Ruuh, Ch'i, Holy Spirit, the God Particle. Why argue for one minute over names, when we may taste this energy as direct experience? Through the gentlest breath, our atoms overflow with starlight, we melt into pure love, and dance with our Creatrix, She who spirals out of wild silence. Photo: Laka, Goddess of Hula, by Alan Houghton

"The last shall be first." ~Jesus Tonight before you go to sleep, sing a love song to your enemy. Send it out on tremors of the moon. Forget what is possible - that's been done. Imagine some uncreated goodness. Touch it here, under your breastbone, where sighs end and light is born from not wanting. Silence has a flavor like musk, communion between breath-rise, breath-fall, where prophecies and scriptures are stored before they are spoken. Assume that you only have one chance to enter the beauty of the hopeless, that love is eternal perishing, that this is your final exhalation.

You did not come to this planet to worship a pair of sandals or a white robe. You did not come to this planet to be a democrat or a republican, a christian or a muslim, black or white. You did not come here to get angry with reflections in a mirror, or get drunk on disasters that never happen. You came to be astonished by a dust mote. You came to be torn in two by laughter and pain, then made One by the tang of a berry on your wild tongue. You did not come to follow any map, but to be guided by the wayless curve in a labyrinth of fallen alder leaves after a storm, a cloud that stains the soft rice paper sky, the brushstroke of geese in flight. Why waste another moment arguing for or against, when you could slip back down a beam of breath, soft as moonlight, into the silent radiance you Are?

Indigenous people describe the cosmos as a Medicine Wheel, a Dharma Wheel of sacrifice. It turns when we give as well as receive. If we only take without giving back, our mouths eat but our souls die. This is the dignity of work. A functional economy is also a Medicine Wheel, not only providing free gifts, but empowering citizens to work and pay those gifts forward. Only then do citizens turn the wheel, and feel whole. Even Carl Marx understood this. He did not simply say "TO each according to their need," but “FROM each according to their ability." The earliest Christians lived collectively, yet they too followed the law of the wheel, quoted in Christian scripture: "He who will not work, shall not eat." Our politicians preach too often about what people should get for free, and not enough about creating jobs. We don’t just need a nanny state, we need a marketplace with an even playing field to generate meaningful work. We nee...

This evening, whether its raining or clear, why not bathe in the light of the full moon? Let that radiance, soft as pearl, pervade your breath, mind, and body. A gentle moonbeam permeates each cell of your flesh, filling the space between your molecules, overflowing the boundaries of your form. Let moonlight suffuse the silence within each atom, saturating the very nucleus, glowing in the stillness between gravity waves at the heart of a proton. Just as the moon radiates outward, the moon radiates inward, bringing peace to the mind, penetrating to your crystal soul, which reflects it like an open eye of wonder. This meditation requires no effort, no concentration, no imagining or visualization. For the light is already here. Just soak in the tingling  quietness of moonlight, and feel your anxious thoughts dissolve. Just for a little while, turn off the news, forget politics, let go of your need to fix the world. The world ...

Listen here! This is my butter song. This is my chocolate song. Real Irish butter. Real chocolate from the jungles of the heart. This is my bourbon kale cucumber smoothie song. Acoustic blues. My song of remembering grandmother, when nobody ever heard of gluten. "Eat from the hand of love, child. That is the only law." A time before commandments. Whatever fell from the wrinkled branches of Eden, her hands. Her prune eyes and persimmon cheeks. Dumplings and white gravy. Lemon maringue. Coconut custard. Cornmeal mush. Watercress she picked in the woods by a stream. Dandelion greens from pools of August sunlight. The past and future melting on a spiral of hotcakes, each blueberry a wound, a void, a center of the golden Dharma wheel. I still smell her biscuits soaking up the essence of all created things. I still taste frozen cream, sticking out of milk bottles at the back door on a Winter morning. Listen here. Singing is better than obedience. This i...

Inhalation and exhalation are your wings. They are soft and fragile, but bear you to God. If you weigh them down with thoughts, even a thought of "I," they will not soar. Freed from the burden of mental chatter, these breath-wings will carry you into the blue sky of silence. But this blue sky is within you. It is pure awareness. And the radiant sun that shine is this sky is your heart. Perhaps you have named this radiance the Christ, or Amita Buddha, Allah, Shiva, or God. These names are dross that must burn away in the golden beams of Beauty. And Beauty is not far away. It is not above. This Beauty is nearer than any concept or image of it: the luminosity of consciousness itself. When your inward eye merges with this sun, your whole body is filled with light (Mat 6:22). Then the formless distills into a tear, an earthly tear in your physical eye, and this tear is the gift of grace, the sign of divine wonder. Grace bestows this gift of tears. When you receive ...

Allah has become your breath - flowing in, flowing out, Rahman i'Rahim - so that the Life you receive you may offer. Shiva has become your breath - So'ham, God I Am - so that the Bliss you receive you may offer. Yes, my soul is the pulsation of Goddess Shakti in his stillness. Jesus has become your breath - Ish'hua, Ish'hua - and this breath is his luminous bride, the Holy Spirit, so that the Love you are given you may offer. Wiser than all the Vedas, wiser than the Qu'ran or a thousand Bibles, is the Silence between your breaths. Cherish and abandon, cherish and abandon. Here is the ancient science of bewilderment: breathe the joy that created you. She who fashioned your bones out of dust and made them hollow, who filled your chest with the boundless sky, has become your Emptiness. Why? So that you may sing the name of the Beloved, and fill her womb with praise. Painting, Hafiz by Mahmoud Farschian

God is local. Look inside a bee-crazed blossom. The honey is your wonder. The finch in your garden, dipped head-first in wine, flirting with the firmest young pears, is just one of countless gestures from Our Lady, Green Tara, mother of Buddhas, mother of oceans, mother of tears, revealing that all is well, and very well. Now dare to melt your gaze and see the one who sees. Photo by Kristy

Jesus spoke (I lie, it was the open mouth of a morning glory uttering one last breath  of starlight) "I did not come to forgive you." The new moon's blood-drenched tooth (I lie, it was the glint of a bobcat kunjed in honeysuckle) whispered, "Why are you here then?" Jesus answered (I lie, it was my own tongue entering my chest like a paring knife, flooding my body with strawberry wine) "So that flesh could forgive the calumny of its self-wounding." Now I hear the sound of mist, the gong of cattails over the wetland, thrush song up-spiraling, corpses of fallen angels bloating to the surface, lilies. I do not lie when I tell you that I am awake, that I breathe through naked feet, mud gushing between my toes, knowing that the bones of the earth are the of heaven. I am the cause, and I am the effect. I blame no one. Painting, Monet of course

How many breaths can you take at one time? How many heartbeats can you feel right now? Can you gaze at more than one pair of eyes this moment? How many mouths can you smother in a single kiss? The way winds long, the forest is deep, yet each step is a prayer, and an answer. Take one, then another, yet ever only this. Don't let your many-mindedness ruin the earth. Dear friend, the shimmering field of golden possibility grows countless seeds in a simple light, the light of You. Just this. Again I tell you, savor eternity one moment at a time.   Photo: http://instorys.blogspot.com/

You can always tell when someone is trying to sound like somebody else. They don't sound like anybody. If you want to bear real fruit, root down in your own body. When you are mad, be 100% of your anger. Be all of your grief. And when you feel like no one at all, rejoice in your emptiness. What if you're on a journey, and you stop for coffee with fresh marion berry pie, and you fall in love with the waitress? Then gaze at her like you mean it. Tell her everything in a single glance. Leave her a very large tip and a note that says, "I will never forget you." And you won't. * Painting: 'The Waitress,' William Paxton, 1923

True Presence is transcendence in the heart of the world. To transcend the dualities of the mind and the images of the senses is to become more present, to be "in the world but not of the world." Presence is "turiya," the fourth state of consciousness, transcending the senses, the dreaming mind, and the dullness of sleep. Presence is boundless Being itself, awalening prior to thought, prior to any image or belief in the intellect. One cannot try to be present, or "achieve" it, for that is merely a thought of Presence, or a manipulation of one's mood. Presence must be infused in deep meditation; it is the very stuff of silence. Gradually, with regular meditation, Presence permeates the subtle nervous system, until one quite naturally maintains the silent witness, the boundless power of Presence even in dynamic activity. Presence is an invisible radiance carried into the busy marketplace of daily life, healing and open other hearts. Yet one who carries...

Even if we only transcend the clouds of mind and taste the blue sky of pure awareness for an instant, this momentary impression of Eternity will free us from lifetimes of anxiety, endless loops of mind-chatter. From that moment on there is an inexplicable lightness at the core of our heart, a tranquility, a luminous and causeless joy. Hard times still come, with grief and anger and pain, but now we simply honor them as they arise, embr ace them as they break over us, then let them pass. We used to call it "suffering." Now it is only passing clouds, that weigh nothing, and do not touch the sky. Transcending the mind is a direct experience of Being, not a belief or philosophy. Awareness is not an idea. Established in That, we can use the mind as a useful tool, but the mind will not use us. How far above the clouds of everyday mind is the sky? The absurdity of this question is obvious. The Self is not above. The Self has no higher or lower ground. Self is what fl...

I keep hearing about "grounded spirituality," the latest thing. Isn't "grounded spirituality" just the old assumption of separateness: the spirit and the ground, soul and body, heaven and earth? Only what is separate from the ground needs to get "grounded." But the ground is consciousness itself. I need to get grounded in who I Am. Spirituality is groundlessness.

I lost the burden of freewill when I chose everything. Sap gushes from the whole rose, even the thorn. Eternity has happened, and it was beautiful, sad, sweet, full of waiting. Now I wait for you to flower in the space I am. I want you to be the fragrance of me when I am gone. No, only crushed and trodden. The juice is everlasting, fermented with yearning. Those who wander here, waking or dreaming, wonder, "Were they two?" Love unfolds without lovers. We're bubbles on the shore reflecting a thousand moons. Touch me ever so gently with your feathery exhalation. Don't be afraid to burst and become the wine of my unfathomable darkness.