Uradiance

When she was five, walking back from the beach, my little girl asked, 'Daddy, we saw the full moon over the ocean last night. And we saw the full moon over Nana's farm at Christmas. But is it the same moon?' Now, finally after many years, I know the answer to Abby's question. 'No, dearest one. it is never the same moon.'

Advaita is not a path. It is an experience, an experience of dropping the path. Those who have tried to turn Advaita into a path have created confusion and mental stress. The truth is, you will not even get close to Advaita until you drop every concept of "nonduality." We are discontented and would rather be somewhere else. We want to attain oneness, want to get "there," so we follow a path called Advaita, nonduality, to lead us out of "here.” But isn't it obvious that our very path is what separates here from there? This is the joke-like structure of seeking. So, if you really want to experience nonduality, just drop it. Go out into your ruined garden, drown your senses in your heart, and your heart in the fragrance of a late summer rose. Leap boldly madly gently into the hopeless entangled frolic of distant stars with intimate protons on the tip of your nose. There is no path because there is no possibility of coming or going in the ever-dissolving quantu...

If you could feel beneath your ribs one beat of the caged falcon's wings the rich would give their wealth away, the angry surrender despair, the violent melt bullets into tears. The thief would repay what is stolen, yet the victim would insist, Please keep it, you need it more than I. Isn’t this why you sing, Om mani padme hum ? The jewel at the center of the lotus. Isn't this why you pray, La ilaha il'Allah ? No God but God. Isn't this the mirror kiss of the soundless swan who settles on your heart lake? So'ham, So'ham. Touched by the effortless breath of dawn a blossom springs from mud. Call it the flower of emptiness because the seed is hollow. Unfathomable to philosophers how shadows shine, and when you don't resist the dark some secret splendor bursts inside you, healing the world.

She is a slight excitation in the field of unfathomable rest, the ever so gentle whisper of a mighty healing wind. Her singing bowl is your heart when quietness overflows. Her wisdom taught God how to play. Her wings of emptiness make an M over the vast Enso of the Omkar moon. Like a gander, She knows how to return. If the breath of the Goddess is here, the poem flows. If not, no work can make a poem. If the breath of the Goddess is here, the plum ripens. It falls, and its thud is sweetness. No amount of work can make a plum. The present moment is the splendor at the end of time, where all pilgrim paths gush into her pool of healing waters. The holy turbulence of stillness washes away every fear. Viruses of doubt cannot survive  her invisible radiance. She loosens her bling in the Milky Way. Magdalene,  Laldev, Rabia, Mechthild.   You must bathe in the milk of her name. Become naked and put on her puri...

Announcing publication of my new book from Saint Julian Press LINK   Better than a thousand hours of disciplined sitting are seven steps walking barefoot in the garden of gratitude, a few brief moments of adoration in the heart, or one silent breath of amazement, if you have been touched by the madness of Grace.

  Mary Magdalene cast up on the shore, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in Camargue, southern France. It is approximately the year 35 A.D. The dawn behind her is soft and lovely, yet there is red on the horizon, “Sailors, take warning!” Storms will come. In her aura, acorns, honey combs, regeneration, transformation, the great from the small.The rich embroidery of her dress, that of a bride, a lover, not a mourner. Her hand on her breast in gratitude, yet her finger points to her throat. In the past, the words of Jesus. But in the future, hers: the Gospel of the Beloved Companion. In her white alabaster jar: spices for anointing the dead? Or the best wine, saved until the end of the wedding for those who live? Look again at that broken boat on the beach, evoking such compassion.The mast is a cross covered with the shroud that enfolded the body of the crucified. Now it becomes the garment of the Spirit, charged with his energy, and hers. The energy of heresy: we are all...

"Glorify God in your body!" (1 Cor 6:12) This day, August 15, is the Feast of the Assumption, celebrating the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven. In 1950, Pope Pius XII proclaimed her bodily assumption into heaven an official doctrine of the Church. In his book, Answer to Job, Carl Jung wrote, "I consider this the most important religious event since the Reformation." Why? Because it holds a greater significance than the Church prelates themselves even realized at the time. It signifies that the Divine Feminine is not on a lower order of being than God. Mary is not on a lower order of being than Christ. Mother-Mater-Matter is not on a lower order of being than the Holy Spirit. The Spirit infuses our earthly form as Breath infuses the blood. Mary's physical assumption "into heaven" is a sign of the glory toward which evolution leads us, not just as souls but as embodied children of humanity. Of course, the old Catholic lady and her grandchild, lighti...

  Don’t tell me what you are against. Tell me what you love. What you cherish with your whole body. Being against contracts the heart. Being for opens your chest like an orchid bending toward the light. Now is the time to depart from the kingdom of fear and return to the palace of your human form. One sweet dark nerve in your solar plexus   radiates a thousand times more power than any opinion. Let this be your worship on a Sunday morning. For a little while, don’t be against anything. Only be for. Be for the sun on the table. Be for the late summer rose. Be for tears and the laughter of children. Wash the whole planet in the foolishness of God. Image by Picasso

  Trying to practice silence, imposing stillness on the mind, is not meditation, but a subtle form of violence. To control thoughts, force them out of the mind, or concentrate on one thought to the exclusion of others, is not meditation but oppression. And to repeat an affirmation over and over again is not truth: it is control and denial. The affirmation tries to will away a feared condition by drilling down into a description of its opposite. But behind the affirmation is the fear that the opposite is true, and this fear tacitly empowers what it fears. We pride ourselves in our techniques of "self-discipline." But self-discipline is the inward idol of the authoritarian mind. Who is the self that disciplines the mind? Who disciplines that self? An infinite regression of selves to be disciplined, until one finally surrenders... True meditation is the weary traveler who lets go of the quest, takes off her clothes, leaves the path, and slips naked into a forest pool. She wash...

  How many times must I hear Buddha say, "breathe in, breathe out," before I can do it myself? I got tired of being spiritual. So I came home to the place where Buddha-mind  and my mind are one cerulean sky wrapped around a robin’s egg in a bold little nest on a lilac tree by the back porch. Came home and built a fire, made coffee. Took out my mother's bone China cup and ran my fingers over the crazing, the lace of imperfections in all that once was white. We’re full of cracks and dark patches, aren’t we? Millions of moist lips on the verge of a single kiss. I came home to hug you. The world feels brown and blue. Got tired of being spiritual. Now I’m just Being.     Photo: Buddha on my porch under the lilac tree

  “Not all those who wander are lost.” ~J.R.R. Tolkein   The wilderness invites your whirling heart, rudderless, eddied, spun by a tide incoming, entangled in a chaos of weed and beach foam, still beaten by the breath of your beloved, keeping his promise to the starfish, the unborn. Now meander inland like Jesus until you're good and lost, then take off your shoes and call it home. With every step, the earth says "welcome," and you never even get close to where you were going. The only consolation is to throw away your map and start dancing, dark-bodied, right where you are. Open your palms toward sunset. Pray without naming the stars that arrive one by one like honored guests, bending to touch your naked feet. After all, aren’t you made from their journeys of curved light? Dust is your sacrament now. Wiggle your toes in thanksgiving. Linger, but do not stay.   Be a wanderer. Image of Mar...

  Who can say whether this wedding was arranged by the star people, or by your own pilgrim heart long before our grandmothers were born? All we know for sure is this, the minister , the prayer shawl, the loving cup, the maid of honor winsomely gazing at the best man, the canopy of tough entangled vines, the gentle flower girls scattering wisteria, even the bride and groom dissolve, dissolve into the swirling fire of “I Do.” Tonight, these grapes become wine. Painting by Marc Chagall

  True lovers abandon this word, love. It is no substitute for a thud of plums in the mist before dawn, or the first apple thumping sweetly into the birdbath at midnight. True lovers feel the passion of Christ in the ripening of a huckleberry. They hear each verse of the holy Qu’ran in a thrush’s throat, and the Song of Solomon in the pine breeze, the elegiac coyote, the rain that whispers all night, “Be breathed.” In the morning they are intoxicated by the feral bouquet of their own nakedness. True lovers know that the Mysteries can never be named: a ball of goat's fur tangled in lupine, a blue moth disguising her wings as an alpine aster, taste of honeysuckle, grace of a whole afternoon without naming the world: no Word but what things are.   Photo: first plums in my back yard.

  As you fall asleep tonight, keep falling into star-foam, the ocean of the heart. Play in the wave-nature of silence, rising up, sliding down the pearl moonbeam of every breath. Drift over phosphorescent swells of Turiya, beyond all slumber, your sail billowing with "So'ham." Sink into the froth of worlds unborn, no "higher" or "lower," no "matter" or "spirit." Go where birth and death have not yet been divided into time. What rudder, what hand, passing through such un-created waters, could cleave the formless from the void, Tohu from Bohu? Surrender is the subtlest art because it happens without you. Now witness your waking, not one moment old. This is the first morning. Who passes seamlessly from the dream of night to the dream of day never sleeps. NOTE: "Tohu Bohu," Hebrew, Gen 1:2, "formless and void"