Moth Seeks Her Eternal Flame

There is a muted yearning within the heart that is destined to become our passion. That muted yearning begins to break its silence as it nears the Beloved, or as the Beloved nears it. It is an awakening, a stirring, a response to a calling. It is a return—yearning serving as an internal compass, homing instinct, and timer. If muted yearning is the heart’s winter, breaking its silence is its spring. That once-muted yearning actualizes into full-bloom passion when union with the Beloved occurs. Before union, it exists as a silent witness—watching, awaiting the spark and call to passion. But that spark is only a beginning—a sprouting. It’s much like the entelechy of an acorn to become an oak tree that the blueprint and silhouette of our yearning embodies the fullness and abundance of our passion. Yearning is the root of the rose of our passion. And the potential of our passion actualizes as our joys and sorrows—the flowering of our passion as a rose in bloom. 

In the beginning, there was only One—the Source, God, Great Spirit. And there was Source’s yearning. That yearning was the magic Word, the “open, sesame.” That yearning ignited the flames of what would become Creation. Source’s yearning itself gave rise to Creation. Creation is Source’s passion, or yearning-made-manifest. We are the flowering of Source’s passion, or passion-made-manifest. We are the fruits of Source’s passion. We are Source’s joys and sorrows. If creation is the rose, we are the flowering—the rose-in-bloom. We are the rose’s beauty and sweet scent, as well as the thorns of its death and decay. We may fear sorrow and seek only joy, but the circle, cycles, and dancing spiral of life promise no end—only conclusions and completions, and wisdom gained through repetition.

From the fruits of our passion—our own lived joys and sorrows—come the catalysts for our growth and evolution: the lessons avoided, lived and learned; the karma created, evaded, balanced and cleared; and the unavoidable justice encompassed and experienced in living and making choices, positive or negative. These are the fruits of the fruits of our passion harvested and from which there is no escape. If not now, then later. There are no shortcuts. No detours. It is through these fruits that we honor what is real and are able to continue to offer up what isn’t real in sacrifice to what is real and true—only love. It is through these fruits that we refine, recycle, and renew, and thus are able to return to Source. There is no loss here. There is no death. There is no escape. Lessons learned continue to teach. Karma balanced and cleared continues to serve. And justice experienced is a merciful gift that continues to provide us with the most direct route to Source, as well as the most sober return home. Those fruits never decay. They, and we, are continually renewed, to infinity. 
If you ever feel like you’ve lost your passion, remember your yearning as a spark within and tend to it. No matter how quiet your yearning has become, its presence is always enough. Break your yearning’s silence. No matter how far away you are, you can always return home. See that a little light shines in the dark for you. Open your eyes to your yearning’s truth. Like the moth seeking her eternal flame, follow the little light of your yearning home to the eternal flame of your Beloved. Embrace your passion, while seeking balance in its extremes. Find a way to be grateful for both the bitter and sweet fruits and all of life’s expansions and contractions. 

Cry Out in Your Weakness

Cry Out in Your Weakness – Rumi

A dragon was pulling a bear into its terrible mouth.

A courageous man went and rescued the bear.
There are such helpers in the world, who rush to save
anyone who cries out. Like Mercy itself,
they run toward the screaming.

And they can’t be bought off.
If you were to ask one of those, “Why did you come
so quickly?” He or she would say, “Because I heard
your helplessness.”

Where lowland is,
that’s where water goes. All medicine wants
is pain to cure.

And don’t just ask for one mercy.
Let them flood in. Let the sky open under your feet.
Take the cotton out of your ears, the cotton
of consolations, so you can hear the sphere-music. . . .

Give your weakness
to One Who Helps.

Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.

Just a little beginning-whimper,
and she’s there.

God created the child, that is, your wanting,
so that it might cry out, so that milk might come.

Cry out! Don’t be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament! And let the milk
of Loving flow into you.

The hard rain and wind
are ways the cloud has
to take care of us.

Be patient.
Respond to every call
that excites your spirit.

Ignore those that make you fearful
and sad, that degrade you
back toward disease and death.

~Rumi

Woe to the Laborer

Woe to the "laborer" who pushes only paper and creates little value, save the ones and zeros that sustain his livelihood, pinched pennies usurped from the worth and decay of his fellows, keeping him harrowed, vacillating between life and death. Woe to the laborer who has no craft but, through intensive abandonment of self, has become the lynchman of freedom, the hatchetman of despotic will, the right hand of oligarchic tyranny, the sin-eater who absolves no one and commits himself to a terrestrial eternity of regrets and unfulfilled dreams. His life, a dribble. His imagination, wasted on false premises, bogus rules, faked power.

This has become the bankruptcy of the noble, artisanal man. A push-button for the machine that has become his heart. His pacemaker, the motor that keeps him trudging through a life without music, without poetry, without integrity, without soul. The treadmill of his existence tied up in a vault, pedometer, calorie counter, and a watch that calculates the milliseconds until his pacemaker goes kaput! His Samsara, the revolving door of dead-end jobs, of passionless ambitions, of false pretenses, of superficial relationships, of multiple credit cards, bank accounts, email addresses, identities, and sexual encounters. He dives through no wreck.* He ignores what damage has been done and the treasures that prevail.* His miserly existence befriended only by misery. His love of illusions, the warden of his cemented will. And so he dies with the regret that he was never free, never the artist of his own mystery.

*A tribute to Adrienne Rich and "Diving into the Wreck."

Nostalgia, a Love of Shadows

Nostalgia—sweet and meddlesome—announces

my love of shadows.

Moments of syncretic intimacies and chemical

knowledge imparted, a mind prostrated to the

Invisible, sovereign soul departed.

Prescient and clear, I no longer stand vigilant,

candle lit, weeping or wailing or worshipping

ghosts, a prisoner of mnemonic love, a

servant of consecrated bones.

My heart empties out, vacuous, an abyss.

Fate swirls mother of pearl in an abalone shell

borne from Necessity’s kiss.

She had tied me in a knot at birth, while

preparing a scythe to cut me loose.

She had sent an angel to keep me, while

bringing my singular rose to bloom…

February 7, 2013

Found Freedom

But maybe I grow on you and within you,
when you're not looking.

Maybe I slither up you like jasmine, yawning
across eons of stardust towards the heavens.

Maybe I embed myself in the deepest layers
of your being, because I don't have to--I'm already there.

Maybe not.

Maybe I find a way to
"no-need."

Maybe I let go just enough
to embrace "as is."

Maybe I die to my loneliness,
come out freed.

Found freedom, my only bliss.

Woman Without a Conscience

A femme fatale is not a woman you should marry. She seduces for her own power and pleasure. She is like the night—mysterious, solicitous. She promises life only through death, an intimacy that can’t be bargained with. What is raw and ravenous can only be sated when the mistress meets the bride, the holy virgin within. Until then, stay away from a woman without a conscience.

Hexagram 61 Meets the Vesica Piscis

Hexagram 61 - “Inner Truth” 

This represents the link between the I Ching: Book of Changes and Sacred Geometry, with the overlay of the Vesica Pisces and the Star of David (two interlocking triangles), which symbolize yin and yang. I drew this hexagram when asking for insight about a series of recurring dreams. On my journey to understand, I discovered a serendipitous and synchronistic connection between the Vesica Pisces and Hexagram 61.

In sacred geometry, the Vesica Pisces represents the formative principle, denoted by the square root of 3, and the first day of creation. The monad goes outside itself. In Genesis, the spirit of the creator floated over the face of the waters and said, “Let there be light.” God created light through the second sphere. When we “shed light” on a situation, we come into the know. This could simply be an inner knowing, without evidence or outer reality reflecting it. According to Robert Lawlor, the Christic principle entered into the manifest world of duality and form here. The materialization of spirit: the word becomes flesh. Through the center of the Vesica Pisces, Christ-consciousness enters the world, as does human consciousness. Schwaller de Lubicz says, “The number one is only definable through the number two: it is multiplicity which reveals unity[…]” (Lawlor).

First, we have “universal consciousness,” or “unity.” The journey outside the first sphere introduces “empirical consciousness.” Man is in the center of the two, the “balancing consciousness.” Man “partakes of both unchanging and changing principles—eternal and ephemeral; human consciousness functions as the mediator[…]unity  projects itself outward in a perfect reflection of itself[…]”  In the I Ching, man is also the mediator in Hexagram 61, which is represented by the two middle lines, and while the top two lines represent heaven and the bottom, earth. Above and below trigrams correspond to Sun (The Gentle, Wind) and Tui, (The Joyous, Lake). The first sentence in the text of Hexagram 61 is, “The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water.” Sounds eerily like Genesis. The second sentence is, “Thus visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves” (Wilhelm|Baynes, 235).

This reminds me of the eureka moment, the moment of realization, that causes an irrevocable change in the structure: a birth or rebirth, a transformation or transmutation, a shift from me to we, when the unconscious becomes conscious (what we didn’t know we didn’t know). A new world comes into being with this insight. A break-through of sorts. The Vesica Pisces represents this reality symbolically and points to the macro-level. But what about the micro? What about moments in our own lives when we come to consciousness? “As above, so below.” It also reminds me of two hearts reflecting each other perfectly. It seems like a cosmic love or twin souls. Thus, Hexagram 61 and the Vesica Pisces symbolize the most perfect form of love, where there is no disconnect. A language of light. Not to mention all that we could associate with “inner truth.” Check out http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/learn/gua/hexagrams/hexagram61.php and http://www.crystalinks.com/vesicapisces.html