Uradiance

  The illusion that we are separate beings. The illusion that we are all one being. The illusion that there is any being at all but this wild blue forget-me-not blossoming beside the compost pile. The terrible croak of a tiny tree frog shattering the illusion of distant stars floating on the stillness of night. Do they sparkle far above you, or inside your chest? Take a long slow breath, then pour it back into this lovely ocean of lies.

There is a blue sky in your heart. Before you take the next inhalation, before you have a single thought, gaze into your radiance.  Not a cloud moves here, and no horizon limits the space of your purity. This sky is before th e beginning. Some call it Christ-Consciousness. Some call it Krishna. Some call it Buddha Nature. It is vast compassion. Deeper than silence, deeper than sin, more inward to I than Am, the sky of the heart forgives all, embraces all, witnesses even our birth and death with joyful equanimity. This space is the infinitesimal bindhu between breathing out and breathing in. Yet worlds arise here, and dissolve without a sound, without a Word of creation. Here is your true home. You never really left. To return, surrender this exhalation. Feel the silence for one vast instant. Be one, but no one, annihilated in an inconceivable stillness. The same sky in every heart, you in I and I in you. Our lives enfold each other like azure petals on a single...

Curl up in your own fur until you feel your true nature of immortal warmth. To embody what you already are may be the deepest prayer. Beseeching God for strength confesses weakness. Making affirmations of abundance expresses lack. Asking for health resists dis-ease. Why not just be sick? Let the chaos of chameleon grace have her way with your bones. Isn't the universe mothered from a void? Owning your poverty, expand into the majesty of nothing. Let your vacuum ripple with wealth. All you ever wanted is nearer than the throb of your jugular. Refuse to change Suchness into Should. Welcome bending. Hug your flesh. Nestled in that sinless crystal of Original Warmth, where words return to one impeccable seed of silence, these fragile sacraments tremble from your body, the world. A thrush egg in a hemlock nest. A whispering brook of snow-melt under a dry mountain meadow. The pale moth of your grandmother...

Our Mother who art in Gaia, brown as loam, nameless as rain, may your presence be a golden void, the absence of the search. Let your family dwell here as a circle, not a kingdom, where spirit and body, heaven and earth mingle in small sacraments of compost and compassion. Be the breath we take, the bread we make each day with our own wrinkled hands. Let our prayer word be “Enough.” For you are the weaver of galaxies into nests for young planets, and you sing the whole sky in a robin’s egg. In you we are always home. Dissolve the veil of judgment, dispel our illusion of impurity, so that we may immerse one another in your bodily fluid of abounding goodness. For thine is the roundness and the brokenness and the healing. Amen. A page from 'The Fire of Darkness' with mandala by Rashani Réa: See books below. The Arabic says, "Heaven lies under the feet of mothers."

Look for imperfections, you'll find them everywhere. Now let a little astonishment in, it's all one trick of diamond light. Don't be deceived. Be a wet sparkling dogwood blossom. Be last night's moon in blue April morning. Be formless forest moss-mist risen into periwinkle crepuscule. Nearly distilled to aubergine, condense into a raindrop, fall again. Patter through a canopy of alders. Return to your cedar root birth wound. Lie down among virescent stretchmarks. Here. Of water the earthwise wheel ever turning, and the stillness through whom it rolls,  wonder be not fooled. You are always free.

            Vatican mural by Raphael, Lady Justice, 1512 I decided to weigh my imperfections in a scale against any faint perfection I might find in my soul, expecting my sins to outweigh my goodness substantially. So I set on one side all that is imperfect in me, which I soon f ound to be everything that has form. For all forms shift and perish. My body and its deeds, every cell and molecule down to the least photon of light is insubstantial, impermanent, and therefore tainted with mutability. Then, determined to set on the other tray what little perfection I could find, I looked into myself. And I beheld nothing perfect. Yet this perfect no-thing was everywhere! Perfection, I saw, must be unchangeable, motionless, unbounded Being. Only vast emptiness is perfect: only the void, the vacuum of space. Yet quantum physics shows us that this vacuum is the womb of every form. All creatures are unbalanced equations th...

1. A dream becomes more and more absurd until I realize, "this must be a dream," and wake up. Because the darkness of Kali Yuga is my most ferocious, surreal and absurd dream, it is also the most auspicious time for waking! The Kali age is ideal for finding out who I really am. As things get weirder and weirder out there, I can more clearly see that this dream is so weird, it could not possibly be me. The world of the senses is a projection of consciousness into density. For thousands of millennia, this projected dream has been so pleasant, I was perfectly willing to remain asleep, my consciousness absorbed in the dream. But in the age of Kali, the sense-projection ripens into its grossest expression, dancing wild, frenetic, as images of terror and beauty create a jarring contrast to the inherent tranquility of consciousness itself. It is the age of extreme contrast. Contrast is the key to enlightenment. Perceiving the difference between the gross external world an...

Let Silence be the work within your work. For only what is immovable makes waves. "Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes. Grass grows by itself." This classic Zen poem is not about inaction. It reveals the dynamic secret of success. Human "activism" has failed as much as human thought has failed to save the earth. So where is the solution? The solution must lie in a field that is deeper than either thought or action. The solution lies in the silent field of Being. Earth's healing comes from here, a source of power prior to any do-er, any "I." Dive into the bottomless wellspring of Being. This very un-doing stirs waves of harmony. Here where the Uncreated pulsates as pure love, Silence re-creates the world. This is why we meditate. And when we come out of meditation, we can act boldly, because the infusion of Silence into the world continues through every word and action we perform. It is such an exquisite paradox. Diving into a field that compl...

  "Glorify God in your Body." ~1 Corinthians 6:20 Spirituality is not the renunciation of the senses, but their refinement to the subtlest of all sensations: God. God is the most sensuous of delights. Meditation refines sensation through silence. Our spiritual practice cultivates finer perception until taste and smell may sense the flavor and fragrance of pure Being; sight may gaze at the light shining from Divine Darkness; touch may feel the inner caress of this breath, or the hug of earth's respiration through the skin; and hearing may listen to the hum of silence, which contains the music of galaxies. Subtler than these five sense organs is the sixth, the mind. Meditation refines the mind just as it refines the other organs of perception. When the restless mind settles into stillness, we transcend thought, no image limits awareness, the bliss of emptiness becomes full, and the mind can relish infinity. Subtler than mind is the seventh sense organ, the soul. The ...

"'From this moment on, now and for all seasons, I am released into silent restfulness, where time rests in eternity.' After saying these things, Mary settled into silence, for it was in silence the Teacher had spoken to her.” ~Gospel of Mary Magdalene Silence in the spiral song of the Townsend’s Solitaire, axis that pierces all creatures before the Word. Silence between piano notes drifting over the roses from the house next door. Silence of my hardly having spoken to the lady who lives there since the death of her mother. Silence of mist over the bay where sea lions bask and bark on a buoy three miles out. Black silence cleaved by owl wings at midnight. Silence over the battlefield just after the battle, where a hand rises, then falls, a leg twitches in a dream of running. Is there not a great silence, a great stillness all around the battle, even while it rages? And here, whatever the hour, a great silence in the cloister of stars, ...

  Eat butter. Go naked. Break the rules. Soften your belly, soften your gaze. Confuse left and right. Hear the inconceivable concerto of a white-throated sparrow. Make one sip of wine last forever. Stay drunk. Don't explain.

  Almost all conspiracy theories can be dispelled by applying the principle known as Hanlon's Razor: "Do not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity." However, I admit to my own conspiracy theory; feel free to borrow it. For billions of years, from the birth of time in fact, every black hole at the center of a galaxy, the gravity of each gazing star, the magnetism of every infinitesimal hydrocarbon and chloroplast, each photon of sunlight  and proton of breath, yes, even the shyest colors in the meadow, like celadon and sage, have been conspiring to guide my atoms to this very moment, where I have no choice but to fall on my knees in the dust, and spread my arms like useless wings toward wind and sky, and confess: "I don't know what the fuck is going on!" Only now do I have the capacity for prayer, whispering, "Thank you, I'm sorry, forgive me, I love you." Thus the universe conspires to reduce me to perfect jo...

Mary, what's the secret energy of your name? Mir-yam, Mir-yam, ecstatic and in-static respiration. Bittersweet sea that rises and falls through every breath. You are a fountain of starlight springing from the earth into my spine, shattering crystal distances over my crown, showering numberless mirror shards of love upon me. Are you not a tower of myrrh in the temple of my bones? Microbial transcendence of dark Mother Matter. E bbing fullness, swollen emptiness of the moon in an embryonic stem cell. O sacred chaos! O fecund annihilation! O Magdalene, pulse of my longing, thread of diamond stillnesses from whose ineffable beauty I weave a body for Christ. Art by Sue Ellen Parkinson

Instructions for living are instructions for dying. Instructions for dying are instructions for breathing. The most exquisite meditation only lasts a moment. We are made of moments, some never-ending. Awakening is beyond instruction, a pearl of sun folded in the gauze of morning mist, like a wound. The grace of palliative care is not tasted in the ashram, yoga studio or zendo, but on the death bed. Or here, in the crisis of the ordinary heart, the gossamer transition from breath to breath, when we hear a friend say: "The argument between you and yourself is over, dear; now your work is sinking from the forehead to the chest." Your mind has done enough complaining. It's time to place attention here, where the pain is. Your dizziness is just a disconnection from the ground. Feel the weight of your sole, your bare foot touching the wet earth. Plant yourself in the Mother and breathe through your root. If your rib cage burns, no need to call it fear. Let the invisible scent ...

I know that it's Spring because the apple tree is flinging away her clothes. The blossoms fall without announcing their joy or sorrow. They need no voice but the breath of April. I’m tired of voices, both yours and mine, yet I could listen to our silences all night long. Forgive me, Lord, sometimes I even get tired of your voice. How many scriptures does the world need? How many silences are there? Now come, breathe, stay. We could meet here where your silence and mine  and even the silence of God fling away their blossoms and whirl.

  Graphics by Rashani

Breathe out everything you are against. Surrender the argument. For just an instant be nothing in the gentle palm of desolation. 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 in the bleakest hour just before dawn. Whatever opens is a door. A Friend must have touched you there while you were sleeping. Enter the wound, this healing pain, this flower surge of yearning beneath your sternum. There is no other way to the darkness that illuminates the sun. Wonder without thought. It only takes a moment to turn each cell  in your body to a golden  chalice of fire. _______________ Hear this poem read aloud: LINK Art: Greg Spalenka

“ The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. ” ~Jesus (Mat 6:22) O Star Beings, O Melchizedek, Miryam, Christ, O Guru Dev: fill this garden and this home with Abundance, with Beauty, with Healing, with Love. Fill my bones with Uncreated Thunder. Through ages I've been looking FOR the light; now let my looking BE the light. May the radiance of my heart shine through these eyes on all I see, beaming through taste buds, touch, smell, and hearing to create a lush green planet. Let emanations from the black hole at the core of each proton in my body be ten thousand sword-wielding arms to shatter the duality-mirror, whose reflections until now have separated inner from outer, Shiva from Shakti, consciousness from matter. Christ's Single Eye is not in my head but in my heart, where twin flames kiss, one triangle descending through my crown, and one ascending from my sacrum, piercing each other in ...

Your niece is a caterpillar. Your cousin is a butterfly. Your unborn children are scattered over the Milky Way. The fragile boat of Namarupa, loaded with names and forms, foundered in the waves of the void, and now lies strewn on the shoals of duality. One nucleotide in your little toe is bigger than your mind. You claim  membership in this tribe, race, nation, faith. But your DNA belongs to the planet, embraces the whole human family, plus many other species. And not just citizens of the Earth, but star kin! Stop thinking so small. You are not a color. Stop shrouding your soul in veils of black/white left/right east/west spirit/flesh. O mind, listen to the music of your ribosomes, your protons, quarks and gravity waves, because every dot and bindhu of your body is a black hole containing all the information in the cosmos. You could be caroling from the green glow of your all-entangled heart. You could be singing all night about your glory, down in the moon-...