Uradiance

  Their lives are so short, the flowers in  my garden. But they don't complain.

No meaning, no purpose, no plan, no center or circumference, neither justice nor injustice. Only a swirling stillness, energy dance of forms arising just where they are, and where they need to be. What if a cruel hand is about to strike the child? Friend, even as that hand is lifted, your hand is already there, sweeping the little one out of the shadow. Act instantly, without a concept of "right" or "wrong," because no mind gets in the way. God is happening, and happening is God. You too are where you need to be. No plan, no center or circumference. Only a swirling stillness, the energy dance, the anarchy of love.

I craved the savor of non-duality, but kept finding two, the seeker and the sought. Then I quit the search to relish the hidden nectar in every perception. Chimes of wine on my tongue, melody of vanishing clouds, taste of evening star and amber glow of owl song at midnight, healing moon-kiss on my fontanel, the lovelorn blackness of the loins, the yearning curves of emptiness around a galaxy, which are the very proportions of this body. Each dissolving multitudinous touch, a quiver in the continuum, a tremor of the one invisible tincture of my own awareness, and yours.

On her gravestone, in the first letter of my mother’s name, a drop of dew. Or is it a tear? Uncertainty is the womb of 10,000 things. At midnight a scent of jasmine, at dawn a fragrance of sunbeams in lavender. The vow of my wound is not to heal, but to stay open like an ancient eye. Even grief is a breath of the Beloved. If you don't know how to be hollow, how will you be filled with music?

I love kneeling to the tiny spark that ignited this fire in my chest. The flame was not eternal until that burning kiss. Now the whole palace has crumbled to ashes like the dream it never was, and I'm falling through light years of darkness. There is no floor where I can lay my forehead. But there are other ways to bow. I can offer my heartbeat to turn the troubled silence of your gray cocoon into a song of plum blossoms. Or distill all my desires into the dewy smell of hay grass after Summer rain.  I could become that spark, drifting into your home, consuming your world in an instant like smokeless camphor. After the inferno, what's left but dust and joy? Eons ago I knelt down while you were sleeping. The cream of your breath rose. I tasted some with my tongue. Now I'm waking you up To show you how to dissolve. There was never any chrysalis, never any waiting time to be a postulant. Take my hand. ...

  You worship him as if he wasn't just like you. But why did he come? Only to reveal that your body  and the Lord of Love  were born of one mother.   His blood and yours is beaten  to a froth by her heart. His sole is covered with the same dust. Both say, I Am. T he I's are different, but the Am is one. You bend and wash his feet with weeping, dry them with your fallen hair. He can barely tolerate such behavior. Soon he pulls you toward his lips and whispers your true name. He fills you like a reed with breath. Then he bows to You. Which must be why you feel a secret yearning to prostrate your flesh before the wildest flower, the pulsating stone, the un-created sky. You might well genuflect your life away were it not for the pure white veil  of learning : tear it off!    The tears of a fool are jewels.   Shatter your crown on a forget-me-not,  a worm-encrypted clump of loa...

I don't need you to change me. Just help me become who I am.    It is good and very good for me to feel precisely what I feel, this cloud of grief, this downpour of despair, without any names or notes to self.   Only let me dissolve in a healing rain that penetrates all my shadows. A liquid sliver of sun may arise on the jagged edge of mourning. Or not.   Now I can feel everything because I have tasted the night.   How a bud bursts, spilling beauty from its wound. How the chrysalis shatters,  frees the golden  moth from her season  of uncertainty. How a single tear  becomes the sky.     Photo by Laurent Berthier

In the beginning, the Word, names blossoming first, bursting from the luster of silence, then the texture of the echo called into softness through pastel incantations of Columbine, Dianthus, Pulsatilla the Pasque Flower also known as Mouse On A Stick, Japanese Anemone, Grass Widow, Pearly Everlasting invoked as Anaphalis Margaritacea, Fritillaria the Chocolate Lily,   Trillium and Golden Bush, Dodecatheon the Shooting Star,   Lysitichon the secret lovely Western Skunk Cabbage, a shout of April flowers, cacophony of wave and trough, ghosts of beauty, shadow-bright, erupting from a frolic of quarks into fragrant clustered photons, the nectar of your flesh. Photo: Skunk Cabbage by Don Elliot

  Tonight the darkness barely opens her eye, a sliver of moon. Yet this is enough to fill the Prophet's chest with splendor, his belly with the feast of emptiness, and turn his breath into a caravan laden with gold, moving Westward through desert silence. Tonight is the beginning and the end of time, because we compare this moment to no other. And the dawn sparrow's bell of awakening will be like no music. Ramadan Mubarak!

How does the Serpent dance without feet? By standing on the tip of her tail, rooted in the loam beneath your belly. How does she hug you without arms, without hands, stroking your hair, placing two fingers like white petals on your crown, running them down the nape of your neck, your spine? She whirls inside her stillness, and you feel everything. How does she carry you off and bear you up without wings? By sending the golden boat of your own breath, laden with 10,000 suns. O take that voyage, throw away the oar, become a sail. And how does she speak to you in silence, imparting your secret name without a word? She listens, She listens to your cries of longing.

Why blue? The tint of sky. The tinge of silence. The blush in the glance of Sundara. The resonance of stillness. The color of the space between the notes inside his flute. The midnight aurora at the end of a breath. The pool in the garden  where our gazes meet. Why blue? Don't ask. Dissolve.