The Book of Yes

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In our love
for this world
and all within it,
we balance here
on a razor’s edge
of pure potentiality,
of infinite expansion
in Self-awareness,
beyond any fate
or willfulness.

We wade out
like fearless children
into the tumbling waves
of raw experience
with a thrill
of open ecstasy
rising in our throats,
our irrepressible
cries of joy
rippling,
resounding out
across the vastness,
leaving struck souls
we’ve never met, melting
to their knees in awe and praise!

My Darling, when you ask me what it is I like, I must tell you that I like the horizontal slant of late-day light pouring through the trees like warm and luscious syrup. Within that honey magic there is no blind reliance on the false gods, because everything is spontaneously self-liberating — the ambient coo of the winged tree animals, the delicious caress of a gentle breeze, the way you look into my eyes as if there is no before or after.

Softly, softly I whisper to you that the whole desperate history of distance is presently evaporating. We will watch it grow smaller until it never was or will be. For those who find a certain subtle joy in loneliness, we will tell you that it is possible to exchange that small selfishness for one without any enduring sense of self at all, not even a shimmer, an echo. It is possible to be what we are and always have been – possible to be that fearless.

Then we are unable to say any longer what we know or don’t know, because such conceits require belief in a distance which can no longer exist. It has gone the way of the little lies which children make up when they are trying to explain how they were before being born. Indeed, we seem to be standing here in the late afternoon sun, but we are no longer waiting to be born. That exquisite moment is perfectly timed to our death, but we are whatever persists before and after any event — birth, death, love-making.

This is why the glorious light is falling all around us, yet we are never implicated. We are never moved from this eternal embrace by the time it takes for heaven to pour its sweetness through the forest, across the shining pond, and into the souls of the passionate invisible beings who have arrived here for a just taste of that, a taste of us. That is also why nobody will find us here. They will only see a mirror, a mirror which will simply reflect back to them the unspeakable beauty of their own hearts. Isn’t that enough?

Even though it sometimes seems as if this meager place has only known sadness, within our shared dream we all live in a transparent house high above the winds of the world. We send our light out from there and watch, entranced, as it pours in a horizontal slant through the forest trees like warm and luscious syrup. Whomever it touches will be expanded in a blossoming euphoria until they eventually begin to understand that there is no longer any reason to resist falling fully into it.

A time will come when all reluctance and chronic ambivalence is at last released, all sorrow and inner conflict forgotten, because it has gone the way of the little lies which children make up when they are trying to explain how they were before being born. We will no longer be compelled by our implanted sense of shame to make excuses, because we have recognized our natural magnificence, and how even the most mundane thought can birth fantastic universes beyond the human intellect’s most far-reaching comprehension.

In another part of the dream, we were taught about the great migrations of the air animals, the sea animals, the land animals. It is a wonder how ardently they struggle to return home when moved by their natural instincts. There can be no failure in this, even for those who may seem lost along the way. Likewise, such intense yearning for home may once have deeply motivated us too, before we learned the pure and graceful art of the winged tree creatures — the blissful cooing sound they make in the late-day light. Now there is only pellucidity, and the way we look into each other’s eyes as if there is no before or after. My Darling, when you ask me, this is what I like.

Sunset on the Mountain, and then a wild wind’s chilly sutra, chanted in the dusky crack between two realms, invokes another night’s emergence. Stony crags tower and glisten in the icy moonlight flooding the slopes, while this hapless heart hangs, impaled, upon their granite spears, surrendered to the sirens of the night.

Who can answer for this pulsing wound that beats within our chest? Whatever we call “our life” – here it is, in so many words, what words can never say.

Have a heart!

The musings of abstruse dharma, philosophy’s elegant pantomime, provided no lasting peace. It only held a dusty mirror to my inarticulate ruin. There is no one to praise or blame.

The wise ones learned to throw off the chains of wanting, of needing, of demanding to know. How often their kind advice has since fallen on deaf ears! True mercy is never-ending, but demands the eager heart first sacrifice itself on the altar of its own wanting.

That sense of separate self, a poignant assemblage of found things blanched in fearfulness, will only seek the safety place, wrapped tight in its own wry confirmation, warmed by the imaginative tinder that mind burns for itself to ward off its own looming extinction.

Still, have a heart!

When you opened the door before dawn and found me, head slightly tilted into the night, eyes climbing up into the breaking dawn of your solar smile, I was wearing a mask from the underworld, a mask you had not touched but only dreamed of, and so I slipped into that dream to find you, to hold you and touch your wound, which we have always shared. I held up my heart to you, then let go as it rose into your blinding light, to die and be re-born there.

What did we know then, or even now? We were given these wan transparent masks to wear over the ruined beauty of our fragile innocence, a gift from blind elders for the ghost banquet of our reunion at the heart. Everyone is present, though nothing is accounted for, except the power of Love that lives us as this one heart, that shines as Love Itself through all these masks.

When you invited me across your threshold, I sensed in my blood that everything I knew was going to die, but I had no mask for my death — it demands a kind of nakedness that my artifice cannot disguise.

You lifted my face to yours and my mask fell off, and no, it really doesn’t matter — it just fell off. Death is a simplicity, with no reference but itself.

You looked down and you saw yourself, your own love, come back from the dream worlds of echoing wounds to touch you, to come to rest in you and make love to itself without prior images, without the futile and pleasureless masks of memory, but already alive as this immediate presence, this utmost innocence, this bliss.

This is how your own mask began to crumble — imperceptibly as dawn, and we could not hear it then, the peacock song was too strong, we were consumed in that eloquent melody, and because it is kind and very patient, something nameless smiled and began to fill our infinite room with the intoxicating fragrance of immaculate white light, such that even our secret masks became translucent, so suddenly they could no longer blind us to this holy wound’s sheer radiance.

Neither pain, nor fear, nor the inevitable revelation of our impermanence — love’s mysterious grand charade — could ever mask the unbearable beauty alive as this wound at the heart, Love’s own wound it made just so that it could heal itself as us, as This, as God wrapped in the sublime embrace of God!

Art by Melissa Houpert

You woke me from a dream of absence,
and as that empty world dissolved,
another world of presence
took its place.

This other world is not elsewhere.
In the dream, I was. I was without You.
Where or what am I without You?

An orchid stalk in a blue vase
placed just so on the garden wall,
suddenly drops two flowers.

When You go, I go too.

I only came here to be with You.
You called to me: “Come, Beloved!”

I fell out of a consummate darkness
into love, for You are love, and You
woke me to You, to this love we are.

I am nothing but Your own love,
awakening to itself in yet another
disguise, recognizing itself behind
these eyes which utterly adore You.

This is how we soak in love’s marinade.
This is how we bake in love’s oven.

Beyond perception or conception,
it’s here we make our bed.

Having made our bed, we’ll
rise and greet the daylight.

In that dawning radiance,
there will be no place where
Love leaves off and something
else steps in. There is nothing else,
only this expanding light without end.