blessing, praise, thanksgiving

Under the songs no longer owned by language
Under the maze of voices
Under the suicidal stars burning themselves out
Under the mountain that was never there

Further than my bare feet can walk
Near the end of days
Further into the unknowing
On the peripheries of orchestrated electrons

Over each other’s desire, desire, desire
Over the very center of light
Over tumbleweeds and crickets
Over the sea of the sky

Further than back in the womb
Further than the God of everything
O Heaven below, the tragics and magics,
O the useless broken wings, the glory of nakedness beneath stars
Alive in it All with you

word grace

Carefully set with joy,
it holds everything and skims along,
a promise of frail words, this poem,
so far to travel. When you find it
my true love dream, it’s then I am with you,
the thought that you are reading it
the strangest thing, the brightest light.

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

"If there is one thing I've learned in thirty years as a psychotherapist, it is this: If you can let your experience happen, it will release its knots and unfold, leading to a deeper, more grounded experience of yourself. No matter how painful or scary your feelings appear to be, your willingness to engage with them draws forth your essential strength."
John Welwood

more density

I write for the unpredictable grace of love
For my arms open underneath you
For transformation inside my vision
As exercise in humility and the now, the now, the now

There’s a pleasure in the aching of a torch song.
But with you, my love, I know we’re talking more than
An accumulation of vibrations at the base of the Heart.

Thought for the Day

"Let us be lost in the madness of love, for that madness will pull us out of the madness of the world that binds us & instead bind us to God. Let us find fulfillment in the spirit & not in the world of illusion & matter. Let us be receptive to the intoxication & love. If we choose to hold onto our reason & intellect & resist the intoxication, we will remain at the level of the mind & senses. But if we let the waves of love wash us into the ocean of bliss, we will find ourselves in the lap of God. May each of us return to God’s embrace as quickly as possible & experience the wonderful treasures of love & bliss that are our destiny."
— Master Rajinder Singh

there is only love

We are already something vast
Where distance dissolves into expanse
Like my hand on your cheek as you sleep
None of what we’ve known

To be perfectly frank
Sometimes during mountain nights
My heart shrinks to bird muscle size
Yet here we are, my love

I come to you lost in thank you, thank you, thank you
Thank you for living with uncertainties
Thank you for your name smeared across my lips
Thank you for the shaking off of darkness
Thank you for your proximity in the healing bamboo forest
Thank you for love as large as the world
Thank you for welcoming fire into ourselves
Thank you for the living milk of morning conversations
Thank you for the poems, large and small, like warm lakes
Thank you for the gift of swimming in the present moment
Thank you for the heaven only through your voice
Thank you for the dreaming in our words
Thank you for this deep down dancing

Two Songs of the Day

Thought for the Day

"Winter is a time for death.
do you think death is a bad thing?
then you still haven’t got it.
you’ve lived countless lives and died
countless deaths in an endless process of evolution.
each death has brought you more life.
without, death, there is no rebirth.
the ultimate death is nothing to do with the body.
it is the death of your self as separate from God.
you are standing at the edge of his ocean of love.
plunge below the surf of separation.
dive into the mystical depth.
dissolve yourself into that sea.
like a moth around a candle, be irresistibly drawn
to the light until you are engulfed by flames in an inferno of communion.
the lover chooses the fire because he knows
the secret: “the honey is worth the sting."
Rumi

Om Chant

My almost like you to you
My crack-up questions to you
My right now and then to you
My hands and warmth to you
My silk compassion to you
My cloudless blue to you
My love to you

Oh easy morning soul
Forgive us all
Electric mind
Dance lightly
Don’t be afraid
Of Heartthrob,
Come on as gentle
Living flesh*

*Thank you Allen G.
Lincoln Park-1968

Thought for the Day

After a reading Roshi Bernie Glassman gave during a book tour, a woman stood up and asked him, "What does it take to live in the Now?"
Glassman answered, "Would anyone who is not living in the Now please stand up?"
Sean Murphy
One Bird, One Stone

Love and Crossing

A Valley of Light with choice to cross or not
A path steeply to the valley floor
You in the innermost core of my Heart
Your love, my vulnerability

Adjust, make my way, step by step, down the radiant flow
Come safely to O most beautiful you

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

"Saved? There is nothing to save, my friend. You cannot cast yourself into the Unknowable in the hope that gesture will buy you salvation – you have to jump for the hell of it. In a nirvanic universe there can be no salvation because we are never really lost – or found. The choice is simply between nirvana and ignorance. That is the adult truth the Buddha urges upon us. We are the sum of our burning. No burning, no being."
John Burdett
Bangkok Haunts

there is blessing enough

Losing the self in you
One tender, sweet molecule at a time
D a n c i n g on the edge of the inconceiveable
Between the illusion of permanence & ever-present zen uncertainty

Here we are inebriated with each other
Turning dervishes in love-filled moments of the cosmic flow!

Thought for the Day

"Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, “you owe me”. Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky."
HAFIZ

of an ancient love

You translate me so well
I am in your breath, song to be sung
Let the distance be our touch
I put my hands in yours, barely

I want to read our dreams
Written on your palms

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

"Have you been to the source of a river? It's a very mystic place. You get dizzy when you stay for a while. An especially big river has several sources, and the real source, the farthest point which turns to the major stream, is moist and misty, with some kind of ancient smell, and you feel cold. You feel, "This isn't the place to go in." There is no springing water, so you don't know where the source is. Actually, such a place exists in everyone; the center of us is like that. From such a place, the ancient call appears, "Why don't you know me? Living so many years with me, why can't you call my real name?”
The more your understanding of life becomes clearer and more exact and painfully joyful, the more you feel, "I'm so bad." The one that appears and says, "No, you are not bad at all," that is the way to go, that is your teacher.
Don't misunderstand, this teacher is not always a person. It can embrace you like morning dew in a field, and you get a strange feeling, "Oh, this is it, my teacher is this field."
- Kobun Chino

abundant in treasure

While the world is asleep
I wait for a miracle
and quietly enter
my poetry.

For it’s a love song
that binds us
homage
celebration
ritual
other rainbow blends.

While the world waits
to be decked out,
I get up
and quietly enter
my poetry –
lotuses
green ether
ovoids
patch-worked.

Every night
down
my body;
her honey cream
like a cloak of summer sky
wraps my body
with relentless kisses.

While the world talks of
breaking news, turmoil and terror,
positioning for success,
I quietly enter
my poetry –
paradises,
aureoles of flame,
full of unfoldings,
fields and sunburst meadows.

It is the way
she has taught me
to love you.

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

"The more you sense the rareness and value of your own life, the more you realize that how you use it, how you manifest it, is all your responsibility. We face such a big task so, naturally, such a person sits down for a while. It's not an intended action, it's a natural action."
- Kobun Chino

Window to Love

Open a thousand and one days

to what is beyond

knowing,

distance

with no measure,

pure

sacred blossoming

into the infinite

Heart.

Do not trade this love

for some other

dreaming

or angelic

path,

challenge

to our story,

with love

ghoul becomes guide (Rumi)

glittering mirage,

earth reaches

for sky,

sky touches

earth

did i find you

or were you searching for me

all your history

upon the restless,

lonely plain

of consciousness?

Thought for the Day

"You are flawed, you are stuck in old patterns, you become carried away with yourself. Indeed you are quite impossible in many ways. And still, you are beautiful beyond measure."
- John Welwood

ain't love crazy

We share an imagined flow
You said
Far beyond the stars
With outstretched arms
Beneath the lines
I have seen
How easy we're together

I love you
I said
Growing out of my body
Blowing in the wind
Seeing circles of light

Let’s start again
We said
And live in the space
Of bright morning skies
As I am held
In your quiet smile
And my desire fulfilled

Thought for the Day

"We fall into a story about enlightenment - about life, in fact - and we can get trapped in it for many lifetimes. I wonder more and more how well any life really fits a story. What if our life is not this, then that, in a flat and sensible way, but is equally round like a globe, like the earth itself? Maybe our life never did lie flat on the page and read from left to right, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth of the month."-
Susan Murphy

almost t-HERE

I am not perfectly ready for the divine my love I think of you and i breathe
you here I love the sun in you and it is in me an open door brings blessings
it is hard to say this I’ll confess something to you I have been practicing
walking in light in the flow of becoming between worlds
and turning my love for you and the contradictions of love toward the
immensity tonight my questions remain endless but friend & my love

O look up I am beginning to stretch toward the vast unseen

Song of the Day

Qute for the Day

"When the self and the other get intermingled, it challenges our sense that our identity is fixed, and when we get hurt it makes the illusion of the self very visible."-
Mark Epstein

red though his wounds are healed

i dreamed. i was dreaming tonight
that you were waiting for me. somewhere.
our love is a dance in the same fire
of jubilance. i wanted to look for you

woman of Light and words. hear me;
that we might embrace without fear.
in the distance you were hazy and blurred.
who else would dream such a painful dream?
i am the one with the beautiful wounds
who lives in our tender moments.

Song of the Day

Quote of the Day

Fits and Starts

question and answer
beginning and end
post and comment
fits and starts

these all dissolve
beautifully into one
(a one with no parts)
when we let go
of our heads
and enter our hearts

Benjamin Dean

To the Rumi and Shams Inside Our Hearts

original painting by VG

The word for love was not love,
or even kiss. It was sky
beyond the mysteries of this
endless journey of the soul,

freeing desire for the goodness of love,
breathing blessings from each to the other.
Concede it , celebrate it. Let it
be your comfort; find the place

where the ones who know the words
for hunger and thirst and even God
have hidden themselves from the idea

of salvation, and there

partake of transformation.

Thought for the Day

This moment, mortal as you or I,
was full of boundless, senseless,
silly joy, as if it knew
something we didn't.
- Adam Zagajewski
Moment

Valentine's Day

Hare Krishna




Morning mist thickens as we move among the mysteries

What a beautiful little dream we dream!

I lie in bed and think a therapist will never understand.


Then some sleep, a leap, a laugh, a song.
Our love is good.
Our lives go round and round.

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

As above, so below, As within so Without."
— Create your life through your thoughts.
The law of attraction is the law of creation
Everything that’s coming into your life you are attracting into your life.
As above, so below, As within so Without. Create your life through your thoughts.
Whatever you think about – and thank about – you bring about.
Peter Vidani

Song of the Day-I Go Chop Your Dollar

Thought for the Day

"Surrender is faith that the power of Love can accomplish anything even when you cannot foresee the outcome."
— Deepak Chopra

FIVE JOYFUL MYSTERIES

replacing desire with the clear blue of everything
calming the spirit

someday we will combust in the passion
that devours us each day

laughter shines in our eyes
a sacred ceremony from the deep

knowing we are alive is infinity itself
passion burns in us like the first star

what we are not able to dream
we abandon in the flow of living things
as our passion becomes more elegant

Twilight Thought for the Day

The Kulaarnava Tantra says that "success is attained by those very things which lead to [one's] fall" and this notion pervades tantric thought, that the sheer immediacy of manifest existence is the vehicle to transcendence.
Layne Little

rise up.

You will drink
the very substance of sky.

trishna

Each person's life is but a piece of sky.
k.


Sky, a devotion-floating overhead,
all the way open prayer,
full of ease and promise,
cave of wings. In this atmosphere
we rise,
& sun remembers that love blooms,
invites us under white crane clouds, a circle wheels,
turns night, little symphonies resound,
sky of dreams, endless purity.
Canopy of Hope. We become what we worship.So many questions: I'm fine, just fine.
How are you? Long for
the open sky? I am always
offering us up to the sky ?
Give me your hand,
let's interweave our hymns
with the mathematics of meteors.
Let's celebrate the milky
wildernesses in our hearts
with nothing but sky words.

For, as a matter of Tantra,
desire shapes the form of our becoming.

Thought for the Day

"We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it's dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washrooms and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss."-
Tom Robbins
Jitterbug Perfume

Song of the Day

no fixed ideas

photo by kim

I saw myself between starlight and shadow. I don't understand.
I don't know.
Nothing to say or ask.

I was floating in space and on the periphery,
skin peeled back, planting tears
in flower beds.

Against the wall, some one's heart,
maybe my own, was stripped
of its hindrances and
turned into an offering.

love has no words to spell in the middle of yes and no

or lines not so fine to start and stop

Everything was rebirthing out of a luminous essence. I seemed
purified, insignificant.

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

"If you are too intellectual, you will antagonize others. If you are too emotional, you will lose yourself. If you push too much your own way, you will feel uncomfortable. How difficult it is to live in this world of people. Yet, there is no place where we can escape."-
Soseki Natsume

i caught this cloud for you

in and beyond the present life

I want us to transmute into our own radiance
Savoring a state of golden unity on a vastly larger scale.
While inner-forces shine and the future starts now,
Share our rise in angelically fragmented mantras.
Germinating unnamed flowers
Seizing blue sky peeking between clouds.
Spontaneous fantastic light bathes us like milk.
We find blue waves of solace
contain the Great Whole of time
where intuitive beauty is safe.
The lotus stigmata vibrates us ready for anything,
The bush is burning. Everything's so temporary,
so tragic, so urgent, so sacred.

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

"Amazingly, the same neurons fire whether we do something or watch someone else do the same thing, and both summon similar feelings. Learning from our own mishaps isn't as safe as learning from someone else's, which helps us decipher the world of intentions, making our social world possible. The brain evolved clever ways to spy or eavesdrop on risk, to fathom anothers joy or pain quickly, as detailed sensations, without resorting to words. We feel what we see, we experience others as self."
Diane Ackerman

in my bones i know we're vast

It seems to me that your absence...
opens us wide to miracle.
...
Mountain shadows. My mind desires, shifts.
Remembers...outstretched hands.
...
Outside I need wander...tentative comfort...
My need to forget so much it seems.

...

Air, earth, this poetry
knows the weight and length of you.
Flesh on flesh and Spirit more.
...
Stop time! You offer me
the gift of colors. My darling, my heart is
holy-stained in the color of you.
...
I pretend to sleep, as the moon laughs ...
...I want more enlightenment...
I believe we're blessed & shining through the twilight...
...
such a tiny perfect flicker of hope that you will hold my hand again someday...

Thought for the Day

"Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large. Loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. Loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nobody answers; solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity."

Kent Nerburn

after BASHO

This path we stumble and strive
To tell you the truth nobody's travelling it
Save el crepusculo and us.

Thought for the Day

"More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other."- Russell Hoban
Fremder

the pull

When was it when
we floated out into the cold blues of night
with so infinintely precious touches
that had no map,
I gathered you up in my sky diving dreams.
Easily I could have made you retreat,
life would have been less complicated,
I'd be safe now
but I needed to invite you in, unafraid
of winter and losing all heaven or hell,
finally found myself in the cobalt sky-scape,
in wings of birds, underbellies of clouds,
the winds of love, even in this heart-breaking distance.

Thought for the Day

Here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that Love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.
Herman Hesse, from Siddhartha

Song of the Day

wherever we are

Our mystical season is unshakable.
Nothing can keep
Honey from lovers.

When you see this
Not in the stars but in blue shadows
And the rivers on your hands,
You will see me,
Beautiful One,
Naked in my candle light,
Shivering in my poetry,
Unlikely,
Inevitable,
Lonely walking on the moon,
Our secret almost weightless now.
Does it take away your breath
To find my heart a small flame
kindling our bonfire?

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

"Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know."- Paul Goodman
Five Years: Thoughts During a Useless Time

what it means to dream in color

I give you my twilight voice
unfurled, whispering
interwoven fragments
transforming them
into mandala
implausible, haunting

In your waking hours
search the dazzling world
as clouds flow into blue future
everything moves from outside to inside
some afterglow of Heart

Everything out of my mouth-
stretching to break through the emptiness
fearlessly towards you
Each breath a prayer
If my soul should break
Let it be
In your slow and saving hands, My Love

Quote of the Day

". . . as I have said often enough, I write for myself in multiplicate,
a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts."
Vladimir Nabokov

Song of the Day

Spaciousness

An easy technique to use in times of confusion is simply to look up at the blue sky. Tantric blue is used to symbolize nonduality, freedom from conceptuality.
from Introduction to Tantra, The Transformation of Desire


Her voice
Bursts of blue
Winter snow shadow blue
Sometimes frozen blue, some time
Blue deep. Sometimes blue laughter, subtle and clear
Clear as the thin clouds to the other side of the blue moon

Possible to teach the mind blue
Blue behind the waves
The warm blue of both of her hands
Our voices mixed into blue
Miracles of blue vibrations fever us
Holy blue oceans within us
Blue hearts beating
Blood
Blue
Lovers

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others'
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren't hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.-
Adam Zagajewski

THE ONLY KNOWN PHOTO OF GOD

the gift of love

the
concept
of
love
can be
every
bit
as
problematic
as
the
concept
of
God




Clouds to the left and right
yesterday lost,
the sky in a deep sleep
"i'll pour out love," said the sun, "which
will open the spiritual body to resurrect the world
as dreamed in overlapping cycles." the sun
a prayer within love
a grace story. but becoming love is the
unfinished vision. its rays turn the mystery
into ashes whose significance
no one is able to fathom. in fact, the very
meaning of God, the cosmic egg of love,
the once-rosy root of everything is
caught up in the moment, consumed by this WILDerness
growing inside our blood.

WING

Quote of the Day

"The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is it all about? What is it for?"
Kenneth Koch

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

Words were my altar and my school.
Wherever they took me, I went,
and they came to me, winged and bearing
the beautiful twigs and litter
of life's meaning, the songs of truth.

Then a question arose in me:
What language does the mind
speak before thinking, before
thinking gives birth to words?
I tried to write without embellishment,
to tell no lies while keeping death in mind.
To write what was still unthought-about.
Stripped to their thinnest selves,
words turn transparent, to windows
through which I sometimes glimpse
what's just beyond them.
There, a tiny flash - did you see it?
There it is again!-
Chase Twichell






Sunday, January

dream of loving grace

It is not with ease of a magic show
we meet on these hills of losings and longings,
coming to the blue waves as we do –
with our hearts in a series of fragments.

When we say, ‘we want to love more’,
it is because the steel boot of caution
would stomp down joy and beauty
in the landscape of our current soul winding paths.

Oh no, not for us the wonderbread
of first communion; we stare into the mystery hole
of what went before and dream majestic plans
of a life less familiar, where the sparks

of love are given chance to fire
in the telling of some moving, breathing tale.
In the dark and empty hallways of convention
new rooms open every time we meet:

this is what it is to hold you closely to me.

Song of the Day

Thought for the Day

And whatever your path is at this moment, every single step is equal in substance. Every step actualizes the self. Every moment of practice is always the koan of having to agree to your condition, to bring unlimited friendliness to what you are, just as you are, right now.
Susan Murphy