Uradiance

     Go to your chest and become the softest sound.            Your inhalation? No, the murmuring that was here       before anyone breathed                 a Word of light, bioluminescence of emptiness,           undulating in the fertile sea                 of not yet, not yet. Uncreated love            ceaselessly expanding       into this world of dust                 because there is no            resistance in the void. And you?            ...

"It is not what goes into your mouth that defiles you, but what comes out of it." ~Matt 15:11 Dear friend, I am Jesus, and I have come to tell you to eat. Eat without shame. Eat without listening to experts, the ones in your head. Make peace with gluten. Hug that little demon peanut butter cup. Be no longer afraid to bake with real butter. Dunk a home-made oatmeal raisin cookie, no, no! Better yet, a fresh-baked toll house chocolate chip cookie in a big glass of cold milk filled with the double digested cud of green grass, oats and sunbeams. Just so, just so, I pronounce all foods pure! Why not ginger snaps made with real molasses? why not donuts in steaming dark coffee? I know that you can smell this. I know that these words like the odor of cornbread will make you crave and eat what you should not. Why shouldn't you? Where does 'should' come from? If you were here to abstain, your mothe...

  My breath is woven            out of your breath.      Your breath is woven                 out of mine.      Strands of evanescent            pearl, each bead      a cluster of gazes                 that have not yet             received their eyes. The tapestry of stars,       a warp and woof                 of seeing. And you an undulation            of spider silk  from the pit of the belly       t...

My belly refuses to obey. My patriarchal tongue colonizes my whole body. I have other organs who are anarchists. They throw bombs at the officers of my sacred story. Sometimes my heart is a pot-still of Irish whisky. All I can trust is the mud between my naked toes. And listen to the whisper of my knees. I bow down before an old cedar, and give up self-improvement. There is no me left to feel like a victim. Only the messy sweetness of grace, the incalculable unity of chaos. It all comes together when I abandon trying. Things don't fall apart, they fall in place. Photo: took this in the Carbon River Rain Forest, Winter, Mt. Rainier

Merge with your doubt. Drown in bewilderment. Though non-existent, past and future are too heavy to bear. But take heart. Every atom of bones and trees, stones in the path, eyes of ornamental owls guarding the gates of the abandoned sanatorium, are filled with empty sky. At home in loss, you too are weightless. Be a golden mountain dancing in the void. Ever moved by the stillness of a Mother's breath, fall into the orbit of your song, that old favorite called, 'I Don't Know!' Photo by Jim Graham, my homeland, Chester County PA

A svelte and blissfully sun-tanned           yoga teacher taught me: "Yoga means wholeness.      If you want to be whole           you must harmonize your mind,                heart, breath, and body." "That sounds like too much work," I said.      "What if I leave them as they are,           scattered across the linoleum,                and just hug the whole mess?           Wouldn't that be pretty much                     the same yoga?" She kicked me out of her studio.      So here I am, rambling   ...

Every quark of gristle            sings to a star      about some incomprehensible            connection between pain and beauty.      Angels cock              their heads, perplexed and ever so sweetly       troubled              by the music emitted from your nuclei.       Something about your                gravity and grief gives them        courage. They long to clothe themselves in bone,             the very stuff that       weighs you down to this mother      ...

  Sometimes when I've poked my stick too much and muddied up the water, the best thing to do is absolutely nothing, silently, until the stream clears. To attain perfect clarity by not interfering is also action. Waves of stillness. Words full of quiet. To dance like a mountain on a cloud. These are the signs of the Witness. This morning I am called, not to improve my doing, but to deepen my Being. In Hebrew, the word shabbat literally means "stop!" Let my Sabbath nourish the earth. Lie fallow, boldly decay, regenerate, take time. When I take time for time, I move in eternity. I hear ten thousand seeds of Spring singing in the silence of Samhain. Winter comes lovely like a bride, rummaging among my bones. Isis, Ishtar, Cybele, Anat, the Magdalene weeping at our tomb. Desolation is the field of the Mother. Perhaps you hold great knowledge, great power. Perhaps you have become the "spiritual teacher." You no longer need the Beloved. You no longer need a morning and...

  If She does not caress you with your own inhalation, or walk with you in the garden between heartbeats, how can you say that you have ever really met the Goddess? And how will you know when She is here? Dear one, your emptiness turns indigo, fragrant as jasmine. Your numb places overflow with the nectar of yearning. You no longer fear growing hollow, or floating like a leaf on the stream of night. You do not fall asleep, you fall into prayer, a kind of wedding, a vow without words. The bride wears your breath as her luminous veil. She presses on your brow a throbbing pearl of wakefulness, the kiss of solitude. Instead of slumber, a waveless flame glows in your body, lit by love’s silence. In the darkest hour you cease to ask for light because the midnight stillness under your breastbone is a maelstrom of stars. You are present to yourself, like silver in a moonbeam, like sweetness in a mother’s milk. And the dignity of this very breath, how it gently places the so...

I got drunk on the gin of subtraction. From every creature I deducted your name. From your name I subtracted my breath. The remainder was nectar. Then I took away the one who tasted it. I think I may have subtracted loss itself. Now there is only a fragrance of poppies, a forest the color of blood, the green of parrot shouts, the silver of glistening toads, evocative of death not by violence but beauty. I subtracted the veil between worlds. What remains is the entangled chaos of my astonishment. Pay attention. The Beloved is whispering, “Loss will teach you everything.” Photo by Laurent Berthier

  In a place neither inside nor out, a nounless silence of no thought, not even a thought of silence, the final rose is burning its black hole through your retina, pressing a turquoise pineal kiss on the back of your skull. The fragrance drifts through umber petals the way a soul exits a crinkled body, except that the soul is only a description of itself, but the scent of withered rose is real, un-predicated on its name. We say, "In the beginning," but this place is before the beginning. We say, "was the Word," but why assume it was a noun? "In the beginning," then, "was the Verb," neither of the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person. Please, no pronouns either. Perhaps there are no objects at all, and the act of worlding is thing-less. Perhaps the cosmos we can speak of is only our thought about it, every concept a shield, the earth a blaze of sweet destroy  to cauterize our lips and singe our lenses with wonder. But what of Jesus, Mary, the Virgin, the La...

You know how to succor the world. It doesn't matter whether you're a woman or a man. Each of you has a mother within. A moist mysterious shadow spreads on a veil of sepia, umber, wheat, mahogany. The color of the cloth doesn't matter. You hear the cry of yearning lips, and yearn back. Nameless, sweet, your healing swells, expressing the milk inside. It drips down. Impossible to keep this motherhood a secret. We all need to drink from each other. Painting by Paul Cezanne

Last night I dreamed that I was at an ashram, or a new age academy of some kind. Everyone was trying very hard to get enlightened. It was a busy place. We were entangled in gossip, spiritual competition, and the busy-ness of out-doing one another at "seva," service. We were all rehearsing kindness - so that, presumably, when we got home we could try it on the rest of the world. Whenever you saw a sweet person coming down the path to be kind, you would of course smile. And they would smile back even harder. But inside, you were saying, "Uh oh, here she come again," or, "O God, deliver me from Mr. Nice." No one ever got around to actually sitting quietly together, walking alone in the lovely forest, or going to satsang. Nor did anyone ever attend the Big Guy's darshan talks. I didn't even know who the Big Guy was, if there was one. I tried very hard to be sweet, but no one liked me. Unintentionally, I offended almost everybody. With each attempt to...

Ananda: dedicated to fierce lovely Devi Katyayani on the sixth day of Navratri. We do not call the deep heart of meditation "contentment," but "bliss." And what Bhaktas mean by bliss cannot be understood by the intellect, or by comparing it to our relative states of mere happiness. Bliss is the energy that radiates through the void. It is not static passive stillness, but dynamic stillness, ever-expanding untrammeled stillness that churns with creative wonder, turning waves of silence into roaring photons of virtual energy. Bliss is the oceanic stillness that sweeps you away beyond the rim of the furthest star cluster. It is a clear empty blue sky that overflows, rains down the spine, rises from the hips to the top of the crown like a lightning bolt, soft and soundless as a garland of white roses. Yet the wild grace of ananda is no-thing at all. Ah, even less! Such an infinite paradox, such a union of opposites, is utterly astonishing. And this dumbfounded astonishm...