Uradiance

Raven cries, "Stop thinking!" Mountain breezes murmur in the hemlock, "Stop trying not to think." Down by glowing campfire embers evening is still and windless, the valley of Wu Wei lovely and green. Here you must look if you want to see. Silt settles in a stream. Problems vanish by themselves. No need to touch the surface or the depth. This we call, "Stop thinking." To rest on the bank and listen to the music of melting snow. This we call, "Stop trying not to think." They are one and the same practice. There is no practice. White waters of silence tumble over 10,000 stones. Photo: Took this on a hike at Mt. Tahoma (Rainier)

You will be disappointed in every teacher until you meet the one inside. Then what shines from your hollow core will reflect from the face of every stranger. Sinners and shelter dogs will grant you darshan, as will the countenance of the withered rose, the broken moon in a rainbow of spilt motor oil, a mandala of last night's untouched pizza, the toothless woman in a brown blanket gazing into her empty McDonald's coffee cup. Now let the molten gold of your disappointment be the ineffable grace that fills in the cracks  of the world. * Kintsugi: the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by using seams of melted gold.

I want to worship the next baby I see. I don't care whether it’s a girl or a boy, brought forth in a stable or a subway station,  rich or poor, amber, peach, or burnt umber. I don't care if it’s your child or mine, human or divine, I just want to worship  whoever is crying the first Word. I am hungry for the bread of original  innocence, the fallen star of her face gazing up into my eyes, making them equally wonderful this morning.  Let me bow down and press her  butterscotch soles to my forehead, and give her the gift of golden laughter, the frankincense of this breath, myrrh that oozes from a broken heart. I am thirsty to hear the suck of milk   from a nipple this morning, the sound of the tender generous bruise  that makes any morning holy. I won't wait for moons and planets  to align, or for the Messiah. How many evenings and dawns  have I already missed her,   lookin...

Now listen to your broken heart. Sink into the wound and bathe  in the balm of midnight. Don't follow a star. Your destination is  the gray stuff in cocoons,  neither wing nor worm. Let your root find sap in black loam oozing the light of distant suns. What are a thousand golden petals or the fragrance of balsam and myrrh compared to the yearning of the shadow for its cause? Faith is to fall through the long Winter night and witness the falling, until you come to rest in the groundless, healed by your loss. When you are truly still you'll hear birthless seeds  singing in the shadow,   bursting sepulchers of ice, already whispering, "April, April..." Winter is not an absence. Spring is not a destination. Lose your way between the seasons and wake up wherever you are. Painting by Lori Sweet

I love infant Jesus. Love the Pagan Solstice Christmas pine. Love Madonna Mushroom. Love Goddess Shakti. Love the 2nd Century Gnostic Valentinus who said, "The true Virgin Mother is mystical eternal silence." Love the wild vine of my Buddha nature, broken jar of Mary Magdalene, spilling juiciness over my crown, already fermented as it trickles down my vertebrae. Love the perfect consistency of my contradictions. Love luscious holly berries of fire and snow entangled on the cross of paradox. Love the tree of life in the garden of this body: I am the worm in the apple. Love the newborn sun, and what his gurgling baby bijas say: “Hum! Phwat! Bham! Zing!” which I translate to mean, "Every particle of me is made of Mother Mater Matter Dust, each atom a cathedral where pilgrim gamma rays arrive from the clustered salty rim of Margarita galaxies to celebrate the miracle of my flesh. O Christ, irradiate the world through these fingers and toes. I am your circle ...

  A widowed bud bursts her icy veil. Bitter joy of the flicker crying, "I alone remain in the kingdom of silence." Smell of fresh earth from your body.  This is the practice of Winter.   No more mountain tops.  Yearn for the valley. Listen until you hear listening. Mother your own heart. Welcome the sky into your diaphragm,  the moon into your belly, rising, setting,  wolf-gray mist in the ancient cedars of your alveoli.  a lady bug lands like a ruby kiss  between your eyebrows. This is the practice of Winter.   Through your blood, fatted salmon swim upstream toward the waterfall of breathing. Last night's rain snakes down your switchback trail of vertebrae.  Mud tastes sweet, the syrup of the sun. Aloneness whispers, “Touch my fern, my hemlock, the dripping jewel of my quietness after the shriek of the fox's desire.” Hu, Hu... plaint of the sn...

The wine of silence has loosened my tongue. I have fallen in love with the unspeakable. I only want to sing what cannot be named. After midnight, while others are sleeping, I listen to stars roaring in the void. The stream of the world flows back to this ineffable fountain in my chest, vanishing into the darkness where creation begins as a murmur, "Let there be light." Very quietly in the un-created garden an inch below my heartbeat, a seed explodes into a flower, God explodes into a universe. Image: James Web Telescope, exploding star, Times of India

I call God by his personal name. I call Goddess by her personal name. Signifying God with words like "Consciousness," "Energy," "One," or "Source" no longer suffices. Such terms may suffice for those merely interested in philosophy, doctrine, or the entanglement of conceptual argument. But for those who drown in foolishness, the wild insouciance of devotion, the madness of divine love, mere concepts of the intellect lack fire. What fire? The fire of communion. Union may be impersonal, but communion is always personal. For such astonished fools, only words like Shiva or Kali, Krishna or Radha, Christos or Mary carry the living flame. There is an abysmal difference between the concept of "God" and the experience of God, an unfathomable gulf between the belief and the flavor. One is just an abstraction, narrowing the mind into a mere idea, while the other is a conflagration that consumes not only the mind but each neuron in the body, satia...

  Someone created the earth so that we could say "Thank You." Angels are not this lucky. They serve without choice. But you may freely take the form of the bee or the rose, the seed or the furrow. You might become a flame, a wick, a nipple or a baby's lips. You could be wine or the cup, a stranger at the door or the host who says, “Come in, friend, drink, get warm, then tell me your name.” The part you play in  this world doesn't matter, as long as you dissolve into a golden arrow shooting upward, a breath returning your portion of Light to the fountain of stars. Annunciation by Simone Martini

  Stars have a secret. They are always tumbling into orbits of glory. They do not attempt to fly. Darkness is their wing.  If you don't believe me, you are still trying not to fall.  Plunge more deeply into the womb of night and you will draw very near to the radiance of your Birth. Painting by Peruvian artist Artemio Coanqui

  When the mind descends into the heart the problem becomes it's own solution because the concept of “something wrong” dissolves into free energy, your smile, or the tear of a stranger, set in the clutter of your path like a jewel for you to love. The energy of wordless humming, a gentle dance of immaculate chaos, the harmony somehow always here... What's the answer, friend? To find the place where the question does not arise. What do you feel? Here's what I feel, a vast cathedral in my rib cage where I listen to a litany of silences and taste the wine of not knowing and fall down weary as a thousand spent petals returning to the seed of Winter, yes, where I discover the Birthless born, Infinity informed, Darkness shining, Beauty breathed through the body of God. Image, detail by Rembrandt

The Soul: How can I express your flame of power without sounding like a Medieval theologian gone mad with the wine of solitude? The Magdalene: "I am the same Shakti that yogis and yoginis praise as the fire of breathing."   The Soul: You enter my flesh as this very inhalation, veiled only in silence, and search the Bridal Chamber of my heart for your lover, Jesus; and then you are not only the Shakti, the Holy Spirit, the energy of God, you are the Lady Magdalene, and your gaze calls me deeper into Being me. The Magdalene: "The Magdalene am I. My name means The Tower. I am the tower inside your body, uniting the earth to the sky, rising from your sacrum to your crown. Am I not filled with honey and myrrh?"   The Soul: But I sound like a fool when I try to express your presence, muttering about a miracle that all my brothers and sisters carry inside us. How can I find words to tell them about the consort of the Almighty, She who helped Him spin the galaxi...

 

August, I take refuge in the thousand skies of a single blueberry. Late November, I take refuge in the cry of an owl at midnight, that tender greeting of loneliness. Heart of Winter, perhaps January, I'm not sure where the heart is, no owl, only midnight, I take refuge in darkness. Now the scent of returning, less than hyacinth, a freshness laden with ancient deaths, wet moss stinging my bare feet, and certain of that sting in all the ambiguity of April, I take refuge in the glistening turquoise throat of a hummingbird. Water color, berries by Andrew Wyeth

Are you awake? Are you dreaming? Who is the dreamer? Lying in your bed after midnight, unable to sleep, why worry about the difference between dreaming and waking? Just assume that your body is getting the rest it needs. Don't try to sleep, any more than you would try to stay awake. You don't need more sleep. You need more Being. Breathe in. Feel the stars in the vast open sky at the crown of your head. Breathe out. Feel the stars pouring down into your eyeballs, your throat, your chest, into every cell of your body. Even your bone marrow sparkles with their distant light. Can you feel the moon pulse soft pearls into your pineal gland, deep in the back of your head, streaming them out into your brow? Can you feel the neutrinos, quantum particles from farthest galaxies, tumbling into your ancient brain, brushing and healing your hypothalamus with feathers of new-born light? Can you sense the golden swirl of the Milky Way in your vagus nerve? Those long b...

  This breath is a rehearsal for the last breath, which becomes the first breath again, because there is only one never-ending breath. The never-ending breath of pure Being appears to be breathless, because we experience rhythm and duration rather than eternity. In deep meditation, the mantra merges with the divine breath, the breath of the breathless, which is unwavering, eternal, absolute. Then the mantra is no longer a word, but a ripple of energy settling into the Logos, the ocean of sound at the source of creation. If the mantra does not settle into this continuum of Shabda, the stream of divine sound that created the cosmos, then it is not a living mantra; it is just a word of no repeated in the head. Yet merging with the Logos, the Shabda, is only the first level of samadhi. The sound-stream itself then merges into pure Light. The mantra becomes a silent radiance, the Sun of God, who is self-luminous bliss, and joy without cause, shining out of the absolute ground of Being. ...