Uradiance

  “Watch and pray.”~Matthew 46:21   The deepest prayer watches the play of this mind as a mother broods over her feverish child. The Witness is a comforter who untangles thought with her glow, her feathered rustling over the ocean of silence.  Our roots are in the waters before creation. Isn't the purest worship just to pour one breath into another, a fragrant offering that turns the stars in their wheels of stillness? Ours is a priestly office in the temple of bones, kindling the mystery that rents the veil between inside and out. To repose in the rhythms of unknowing. To make a wine-dark oblation of our certainty.  Now let some soft supernova burst beneath your ribs. Don't name it. Just let the wellspring spill over your fontanelle and carry hope everywhere on a careless wind. Betroth your heart to the night. It's easy to say that a Goddess perva...

The Vedas declare, "Yatha drishti, tatha srishti: as you are, so your world appears." Your heart is not just a muscle pumping blood. Your cardiac plexus is not just a bundle of nerves in your chest. It is a resonant field of energy extending far beyond the apparent edges of your flesh. Your heart irradiates the cosmos, and interpenetrates all other hearts. The quality of your own heart makes others more expansive, light and joyful, or more contracted, heavy and angry. Every breath may be a river of life and healing. You not only choose your soul, you choose your universe. Photo by Kristy Thompson

The day will come when you no longer count your breaths, no longer pray for a blessing, no longer wait, no longer wait... The day will come when you can do nothing but sink into the ocean of the effortless, which is the space of the heart, and hear the Beloved's name, like the hollow of a golden flute played by no one but the softest breeze just after dawn. I think that every morning is this day, this invitation.

It is not our planets that must align, but our body, senses, breath, and mind. The spiritual journey is not to travel, but align. Aligning these layers of our experience, we sink into the heart by means of a gentle breath, and then the heart spontaneously sinks into groundless Being. As when a ripened apple snaps from the branch, and falls, its seed enters the loam. What is our loam? The zero-point black hole bindhu ayin soph womb of creation. Prayer is alignment with the Source. Devotion is alignment with the Source. Seva, service, is helping others align with the Source. The greatest service one can perform is to encourage another to align - not with you, not with your guru, not with your race or your political party, but with the Source. What is the Source? A tiny seed planted in the core of your cardiac plexus, which is not a mere bundle of nerves but a resonant field irradiating the cosmos. The hollow of this tiny spore in your own chest is the space beyond the farthest galaxy, wh...

Discreetly, as nature does, no, not her most common colors, but the ones she reserves for caesuras, vanishing centers, the depth of pools, a morning glory, robin's egg, a sky over Lemnos in June, the stillness between thoughts, and when we gaze into each other, where we go, where we come to rest, the purest blue. Photo by Edward Fielding

I am quenched by yearning. I pray without words. Earth answers with wild poppies. She sings the silence of the meadow. And because the sun must overflow this morning, golden ripples clothe the naked beauty of the soul in colors, umber, cinnamon, persimmon, olive and wheat. Yet we share one breath, and surely, it is green. Painting by my friend, Klaus Ostendorf  

"I salute the light within your eyes, where the whole universe dwells." ~Chief Crazy Horse   The arrow the axis the afflux of love pierces the center of a star, pins it to the spindle of the earth through the dark meridian of your heartbeat. The moon pours cool ointment over the wound. You are the beauty of blackness at the center of fire. Gaze into my eye. Now gaze into your own eye. This is what I mean by the meridian. We are rims and veils of one light. What overflows the grail of a distant galaxy illuminates a particle of dust in your belly button. Now is the shuddering pause in our turning wheel of gratitude. This is the moment to share a secret. Any creature who can say "I Am" gets filled with her creator. There is only one commandment: Don't put any noun after To Be. If you can’t understand this, go outside at dawn. Listen to the golden warbler singing about the sun that rises in her tiny chest.

What do you mean? Why do you need to mean? Atoms are made of rhythm and sound, not meaning. Blossoms, trees, and forests are made of rhythm and sound,   not meaning. Clustering spirals of rhythm and sound, galaxies don’t mean anything. What does this poem mean? Nothing.  It's just rhythm and sound. For a moment, friend, on a Sabbath morning, give up the work, give up the search   for meaning. Just breathe, circling round a great emptiness filled with the rhythm and sound  of love. God doesn't mean. God whirls and sings.

"Am I the only one who is awake? What's wrong with you people? I've figured out the truth but when I try to explain it you all run away. No one seems to agree with me but me." Friend, perhaps you might listen to this feathered golden thing of air. She also tells the truth. No words, yet everyone stops, hears, and smiles. Why? Because knowledge is not as important as singing.

Stop, friend, step aside at my favorite tavern. This pause in the journey may be where you were going. Drink the nectar of my mother's flowers, savor the fragrance of stillness. Her heart is a dilapidated rose whose petals are distant galaxies attracting bees the size of the sun. Are you one of them? Your hum makes you enormous. Yes, you've been here before, but you were yet unborn. Now the thirst is real because your flesh is brown and dusty. I'll buy the wine, you provide the music. Is your body not a lyre, your breath of gratefulness a lyric without words? Drink, and remember.

We are more powerful when we don't react to the world than when we do. Re-acting, we enter the conflict and take sides. Then we become part of the conflict, and feed it. But when we don't re-act to the world, the world is blessed, bathed in pure awareness. This is what Jesus meant when he said, "My kingdom is not of this world... I have overcome the world." When he said this, he was very much IN the world but not OF the world. Jesus was established in pure awareness, beyond the entangled reactions of karma. Does this mean he felt too good for the world? Does it mean he was full of himself? Quite the contrary. He was empty of himself. The New Testament term is "kenosis" (Philippians 2:7) which means, quite literally, self-emptying. When we do not react, we stand squarely on the earth without taking sides. We become the healing Presence that both "sides" really seek, but will never acquire through their conflict. Presence is the mediator, bec...

I am a tiny drop tingling with the sea. The silence of God is my soul, therefor I sing. My calendar is empty, I only have time to meet with fools. Crashing head-on into busy people, I'm sure they're all traveling the wrong way. Friend, chanting Om is too stuffy. Let's just hum like bees.

  Pain is the husk, love is the fruit, bliss is the nectar. There is no escape from wholeness.

With your softest breath, polish the diamond silence in your chest until a secret joy outshines creation. Why else would you be here? Photo: Bahman Farzad

Why this flight from individuality, this fear of being selved? Why this suspicion of the "ego," this hesitation to whisper, "I Am"? When civilization seems too complex and insecure, at the collapse of an empire, we escape into collectivism, seeking solace in the anonymity of the political group, the religious commune. We define ourselves by our race or gender or party, rather than our personhood. It is too frightening to stand forth as an individual self, an independent moral agent. This collectivism, whether political or spiritual, does not promote our evolution. It simply gives us cover. Yet the plasm in a cocoon yearns to be a butterfly: not a species of butterfly, but this butterfly. Elements of soil gather from detritus of the myriad organic dead, rejoice in the seed, concentrate their ancient urges in a stem, then sing the flower: not a collective flower, but this flower. No great poem was ever written by committee, n o masterpiece ever painted by a general...

  Through with the big corporation. Through with the nation-state. Through with the global church, the world guru. Ready to return and taste the sparkling renaissance of the small and the local. No left or right: the center, yes, but without circumference. Better to barter a bushel of peas for a well-honed axe handle, graze my sheep in the commons with yours, the sacred pasture at the heart of every village. Our little farms touching in one meadow, we’ll send bees back and forth in a country with no border but the stars. No minarets and spires, but treetops, Raven Mother perched in one, Eagle Father in another, calling us to lauds and evensong. Shamanic circles, bio-regional theologies. Eight billion gods, each with a human body. And one ancestral bonfire to change the bones of the dead into the sky. I will dance like a flame in your kiln, you like a pear on my table. Let there be drums in the ancient forest filled with the rhythm of our roots. Every house a temple, every child a p...

There's a stillness where the poem begins. There's a silence where the song arises. There's a resting where the dance is born, a wonder where science starts its inquiry, a thirst only quenched by giving. There's a hollow core in your heart that flowers with radiance, spilling over as your world. Every breath wants to lead you there. Follow. Don't wait another day. Please remember, th ese places are the same place. One writes, one sings, another dances. One serves the poor, one studies the plants, and one is a scholar. All are inspired by the same fieriness, a single flame that wants to burn everything up in thanksgiving. Jesus pointed to this fire, Mohammed pointed to this fire, Krishna pointed to this fire, your Mother gave birth to this fire. The name doesn't matter at all. What matters is to burn. Painting by Freydon Rassouli

The object of worship dissolves into my own awareness, for in truth, there is no Other. Then the afterimage of the Other arises as a glow in my chest, the fragrant gratuity of grace. So I continue to worship, delighting in adoration for its own sake, the Self pouring into the Self, two chambers of one heart. This is the foolishness of God.

  My spine is a wick in the candle of this body. I was created to be lit by a flame. Years ago, naive and foolish, I sat in meditation each morning, each evening. I am still naive and foolish. I still sit in meditation each morning, each evening. In those days, I needed the blessing and grace of the Guru. Childlike, I felt that the Guru's gentle whisper would free my mind and open my heart. Now I have grown old. Many years have passed. And still, I need the blessing and grace of the Guru, who has become the gentlest whisper in my mind, the golden radiance in my chest. And still, I bow down. When I bow, I am a ripple in the ancient river of bowing. All who bow completely are one genuflection. It is not a bow of worship, but gratitude, not a bow of bondage, but freedom. My spine is a wick in the candle of this body, created to be lit by a flame.

  Breathe out everything you are against. Surrender the argument. For just an instant be nothing in the gentle palm of desolation between breaths. Inhalation, exhalation, wings of unknowing that brush up your spine, ringing each vertebra like a bell-full of night. If your heart is broken, it must have opened during the darkest hour before dawn when you didn’t even know you were praying. A Friend must have touched you there while you were sleeping. Enter the wound, the healing pain, the flower-surge of yearning in your sternum. Call it a door, this sacred black hole between heartbeats where stars spin from your stillness. A special kind of darkness that illuminates the sun, wonder free from thought. And it only takes a moment to turn each cell in your body to a chalice of golden fire.     Flower photo by Kristy Thompson