Uradiance

Drink the full moon. Hold her as a breath, then set her back gently in the sky. Gaze awhile and you will see the blaze of your own tenderness, the bruise of your caress. She loved that. It awakened her. With your whole body, teach Gods how to kiss. Photo: I took this on Feb 26 as She was flinging off her veils.

  We don't have enough words to say "love," so we use our hands. We don't have enough hands to do love, so we use our tears. We don't have enough tears to feel love, so we use our silences. Not enough amazement to contain love, so we surrender. Now the murmur of soft morning rain has ended. The shattered sun trembles at the tip of every fern. Stones grow soft, moss green. With less than a song, a musical question merely, the rosefinch heals us all. Fragrances of death return as shades of indigo. If you understand this, you're thinking too hard. Just let the sexual fury in a seed become the glowing hyacinth. Clever people seek partners in the market. All they find are faces in a crowded mirror. I dance to a throbbing drum and meet the crazy lover in my chest. When I open my eyes, the world is a kiss.

Did you ever wonder what dogs talk about when they sit so quietly on the couch together all morning, waiting for their walk? "Non violence is the way to true anarchy." ~Finn "Anarchy is the way to true non violence." ~Emerson "Let us eat from our own bowls." ~Finn "Let us eat from each other's bowls." ~Emerson "Will humans be different after the revolution?" ~Finn "Nah." ~Emerson

The world seems full of problems. But there is only one problem, and it isn't the world. It is our own mind. Please don't mistake your mind for the world? Mind pollutes the whole creation when it turns bitter, judgmental, polarized with blame against an other. What is the cure? Spend a few moments each day being astonished.

When I visit the cemetery at the close of day (or is it evening now?) at the end of Winter (or is it the beginning of Spring?) I am very sure, nearly certain in fact, that Unknowing is the space of compassion, that Bewilderment is the source of creation, and that God loves to wonder, which is why this tulip emerges from the snow, this breath turns homeward toward silence, and on the gravestone, in the first letter of her name, this drop of dew (or is it a tear?) contains the sky, the night, and all the stars unseen . Photo from englishrussia.com

  You've been crushed, fermented and poured. You'll never return to the grape. Now your only hope is to fall from a great height and never reach the bottom of the grail.

No need for me to say, "Dive in." You have already drowned in the ocean of grief, the ocean of loving kindness. You won't get stuck in the net of "right" and "wrong," "pain" and "pleasure" again. You're the water now. But you can still breathe. You can be a wave of what is ever whole. We all share loss unspeakable. It feels like a void in the heart. Yet no matter who abandons us, our voids are all the same: a door we enter to be changed by what never changes. Can you flee from this moment? It will be Now when you arrive. Travel ten thousand miles? You'll be here when you get there, resting as a witness immovable. Better to honor the flowering of your pain, this nameless blossom whose fragrance has no edges. Desolation herself gets burnt away by this honor. Perhaps you have suspected the truth all along: creation springs from bewilderment. Everything dissolves into sparkling awareness. Don...

God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, which means that God must have been the darkness... Just abandon yourself to what you are and you will grow very bright.

  First we all produced our own CD, using a digital garage band to pretend we had a group. Then we self-published our own bestseller, imitating someone else's imitation of someone else's fake versions of Rumi and Hafez. Now we've reached the final stage: we're all self-appointed spiritual teachers. This body is a hot mess on the kitchen floor, fingernails engraving hieroglyphs of grief in the linoleum. But almost instantly we can prop our higher chakras in front of the computer to give a guided zoom meditation, our lower ones garbed in the same pajama bottoms we've been wearing all week. Hypnotized into what they think is "meditation" by our carefully cultivated life-coach voice, everyone feels great. For about 20 minutes. Then we shut down our PC and descend into the garage to scream at the teen-aged daughter, still asleep in her car. Obviously she wasn't social distancing last night. Reminder to self: at the next boomer-zoom, talk about "trauma....

Make a delicious mistake. Fuck up once in a while. After all, I invented peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when I was 4 years old, stealing and smashing two jars from mommy's grocery bag, sticking my hands in the mess, then in my mouth, wiping the glisten of chunky brown and crimson from my cheeks with soft white Wonder Bread. Yes I did. When I was 7 I invented the frisbee while throwing a plateful of broccoli my babysitter forced me to eat out the window. I did. And I invented S'mores at the age of 12 when a pimply camp counselor wouldn’t let me have three desserts: so I crushed them into one. Don’t you love people who crush things into one? And burn the marsh mallow? Even in the uterus my great aunt Molly, who lived in a previous century, made me wear red rubber rain boots, scrawling L and R on them, like left and right would matter in the 8-shaped breath of my infinite womb-swimming, which made me so angry my subatomic bones would ra...

Nothing could be more ordinary, nothing could be more miraculous, than this breath. Please remember, a breath is never taken, but given. Be grateful. At this very moment, what swirls the galaxy and sings the stars is breathing you. Every cell in your flesh knows this, and softly smiles. The breath who comes to dwell in your body is the very form of the Beloved, and the very Goddess who plays by God’s elbow at the dawn of creation. (Proverbs 8). Each rise and fall of inhalation, exhalation, polishes the golden cup of your heart, whose sparkling emptiness receives the image of God's face from every creature. Somewhere in the forest, a fern unfolds; that too is your breathing. A trillium gazes at all your shades of green. In the empty robin's nest, your broken shell contains the whole blue sky. Just for an instant, you return to the ordinary miracle of your body, and the kingdom of fear vanishes forever. Whe...

There's an unquenchable spring of lethal awakening inside you. These waters are clear. I've been pointing there, friend. That's a difficult task. Now you must do the easeful work of turning, following the sound, the subtle, wild and joyful murmur from deeper in your body than your soul. Take the motionless green journey of a spiraling seed into the death of its flower. We can only feel sorry for those who wander up above themselves and search the sky for another world when the light they seek is already gushing from their bones. If you become so silent inside that even your name disappears, you will hear the music of this river. Ah, that bitter word again, "inside." There's nothing to be inside of, friend. This is a little secret that can’t be hidden. You are made of the very distances you yearn and travel through to find yourself. Galaxies cluster and dissolve in each atom of you...

Mira, Francis, the Baal Shem Tov were anarchists for love. King David danced naked before the Ark, an anarchist for love. With only a broken jug, a brick for a pillow, Rabia refused the princes' hand: an anarchist for love. Whitman, cummings, Teilhard de Chardin, all ambulance drivers and poets who bound up warriors' wounds, anarchists for love. Jesus too: he burst the old wine skin of law with the new wine of I AM. Ferment your marrow, distil your blood. Burst what contains you, drink who you are. Burst the wine skin of Marx and Trump, the wine skin of Mohammed and Jesus - they won't mind. Burst the wine skin of all government, the wine skin of belief and non-belief. Don't bottle your sparkling heart: you're the hard stuff, exploding with joy. You cause timid people to dance. Don't waste time scrawling your laws in the sky. Don't look for Kali's form in shattered glass. Get beyond drunk or sober, beyond violence and non-...

"I don't believe in God, but I miss Him." (British philosopher Julian Barnes) Be the river of longing that flows from the secret fountain of O to the ocean of namelessness. No need to say, O Jesus: Just O! is enough. Prayer happens first, then God. Give up beads and words: the Lord is not an echo. Be the troubled water where that river becomes this sea. Why stand on the shore, measuring such vastness in a cup? Throw your cup into the waves, then dive in with your whole body. If you take a boat, remember to quit rowing when the wind hits your sail. Don't be a candle at noon. You might say, "I'm sorry," but never, "I forgive you." Such a breath adds nothing to the whirlwind that cleansed us before we were born. As for, "Thank you," that too is illusion. Anyone who gives you even the smallest sip of water is God, and God is already drunk with gratitude.