There are no steps to enlightenment

where were the clouds to hide his nakedness
and this piercing blue
where was the smile
to hide his tears
to hide
the bite
the hurt
he could no longer deny

the paint on the window was a most liquid blue
yet sky could never be captured with a tear

trying to quench his thirst with sunlight
it sucked into itself
dry as a bone
an empty shadow danced on the water
until he saw the tender ache of his own reflection
Weeping


there are no steps to enlightenment
and no steps after
life cannot be traced
there is no past nor future

there is no one looking
no center or harbor to this edgeless sea
no wind that can be captured
no wave that is not ocean
no tears no sadness nor joy that is separate from you

enlightenment is not about not feeling deeply
oh my!
so beautiful, we get to feel it all!
it was never about your love
just love

the stillness of mind you seek
is the intimate knowing of this very immediacy
saturating the blooming of the flower
is its wilting
even though I live
my death is a most beautiful part of me

winter sings in the heart of summer


There is no key
Nor lock
Nor door
To slide-less-ness

The wall of belief, when no longer believed, loses its glue of hope and fear and becomes transparent.  Baseless brilliance shines through all and everything, knowing and feeling this edgeless seamlessness.  Always knowing that all thingness is made up, including you!  Some beliefs seem to fall away, some remain, yet none are believed.  Nothing feels solid. The passion play has no real center.  There is no more trying to find a source or understanding, to fill in the blanks as there is no equation that needs resolution, all feels complete in this delicious unknowing, suspended as vast ocean falling through sky.

The thought stream continues somewhat like before, yet it feels silent, like there is no one listening. You are alone as this silence...
There is no one in, or behind the mirror.


Morning fills the canyon with light and bird song
Piercing my eyes
My ears
My heart

No one is asleep
No one awakens
There is simply this
What seems to appear
It can feel seamless
Or not
All perception arises equally and evenly and is simultaneously inseparably recognized evenly and equally without any effort without anything needing to be done

The longing for tomorrow leaves on the dream train called time

This is our only home, this dream of dancing shadows.  Can you see your reflection on the canyon wall, sliding along with the moonscape, rushing toward the sea?

Can you see how every shared learned word paints the dreamscape into separate things and events? Even these words as you read them seem to paint a morning and a separate you.

But morning and the sound of the tea kettle are not separate, nor the light pouring through the window.  You’d have to capture life and put it into buckets to make it separate from you. But you cannot be separate from the attempt to capture it, this longing for solidity, this fear of unknowing, this fear of emptiness,
this fear of death.

The terrifying beauty of life’s fluidity is not a stranger to you, yet it creates a painful dissonance with the belief in solidity, the belief in other better more and next.

What we feared the most
The nakedness
To feel all this love we were afraid to lose
This impermanence
Is the beauty
And we are this fleeting flowing beauty.



even if you know you have never found a next, that does not erase the belief in it
there is no one who believes, there is simply belief
not someone who believes they are the doer
simply the belief in a doer, and the FEELING of a doer

When there is fear
You are it
When there are tears
You are then
This is intimate beyond measure
This is as real as it gets

you are the conditioning.. no one is conditioned
self is pretense yet there is no one pretending
What are you without the clothes of habits
Conditioning
Preferences
Belief?

there is utter nakedness
No one is wearing it.
there simply are no things nor non things... nothing solid or stable or fixed... no things to be changing or permanent

Without beginning or ending this fairytale that blooms and wilts simultaneously is this very unspeakable unbound lush rich beauty. 

I am simply a storybook character who seemed to lose her way as the pages fell apart and flew away with the wind. Singing soaring sky and blue into existence where memories no longer gather by the sea longing for the big wow.  It only seemed that there was a someone and a place to land. It only seemed like she had lost this heart magic...

It seems I am always weeping... tho you may not see my tears 

They have no time or name 

Joy sorrow love... nothing at all but this beauteous feeling of seamlessness... of edges seeming to appear yet feeling sublime edglelessness... 

Colors appear and swirl into wildflowers by the trail as my shadow precedes me... I fall in love with everyone I see... with thingness itself strewn across the vast unknown... 

Colors cascade down the canyon 

Echo on the walls 

Slide into your footsteps 

Sing these flowers blooming 

Dance these winds through your shadow 

Explode your very heart 

That the ink washed through 

That wrote the tales of last summer’s love songs

That etched your twirling silhouette into sky  

This sensuous lostness 

Of wind and sun and sky 

Soaring skinless 

Bathed with color and primordial melodies 

That sing these very words 

the film unwinds itself

celluloid transparency

painted on both sides

nothing in the middle 

erases the sides

no pictures caught in this wave

reflecting day above

dark below

kissed in between the wet

you drown in your own echo

sea shells worn with the rush and ebb of tides

reveal your seamless beauty

sea bird flies through cloud and sun

shadows drink the day

this sensuous lostness

pathless land

kisses you 

where never and forever collide

We are the impossible beauty of love’s simultaneous blooming and wilting.

rose petals falling

echo the wind

color the soft song of summer

breath of moonlight

sings of morning's slumber

in this garden 

winter sleeps

under the shadow

no one gathers light

it pools by itself 

drinking the day

…you scan all the tears you've shed for the ultimate words, but you cannot find this placeless-ness where you might be free... 

…you feel there must be a key to unlock the treasure chest of your heart, of what you know has been lost… you find yourself lost at sea… every path has led nowhere ...the storm you've longed for and dreaded hits... you are struck by the golden sunset that captured your dreams... your flimsy raft of beliefs lashed together with hope and fear collapses and you drown in the depths where hidden rainbows swim... and moonlight glints like silver fish within the sea of nothing… and in this watery home you find you can breathe.. and no longer trying to escape, you're home.

You had never left.  

Wind rises and ripples spill your heart to every unseen shore, and you no longer try to hold a part of it, for the fear of losing what never was spilled itself through you long ago. Unstained, the wine washed out and the intoxication never left.

All the ghosts and goblins, all that you feared arrived unbidden, and swept you away with the tides of unknowing.

You entered the dragons lair and were chewed up and spit out, and all the sparkling jewels were always reflecting your own brilliance, every nuance and hue, every song and footstep, every inseparable moment exploding imploding, yet never seen when you tried to see it.

Rudderless ghost ships meeting in the hush between the breath and the song.

Always simply just this as it is. All you ever thought you wanted sank to the bottomless bottom with your heart, and you rise through through the bubbles... surface into your own reflection, and look around. The wet has no beginning and no end. There is a tenderness in this for all and everyone for everything. A luminous diaphanous light gown woven with tears. 

After the shift the story still writes itself but it's like it is never read. No bookmarks placed.  No longing to peek to the last page or rewrite the first.  There is no one to pay attention to it anymore.  No one to say, ‘oh I should've done this’, or ‘oh my I must do this next’. No more trying to fix the story or predict the middle or ending.  The ever emerging edgeless momentary burns itself out as soon as it appears.  Like a shooting star we are the light emerging and simultaneously disappearing.  There is no one gripping and no things left to grip.

The sea sings, you are it’s echo, you are drunk on your love. It has sunk you and drowned you, and bled you, fed you to the ends of a shore that could never be found or lost in your heart.

This unutterable vacancy of even emptiness and vastness, and the mind shattering melancholic beauty of your ultimate aloneness slides through the mirror and into itself. The taste of this life without edges where sorrow and joy and love swirled into a heart ache that escaped the imaginary confines of an owner, of a home whose windows were broken long ago.  The looking out kissed the looking in, the mirror was found to have no sides, nor middle. 

Transparent crystalline endless blue fell through the ceiling as earth and sea crashed into sky. Blue into blue into blue into blue, and blue became meaningless. 

Mind conjures infinite mirrored facets inscribing the dream with unending wonder and unspeakable beauty. Coalescing as this flowing thought dream singing a story where the center has dropped out. 

First fallen leaves of autumn, scattered golden flowers blooming upon the path, nestling into the fallen feathers of wind shredded bark. Two children marvel at an ant carrying a bit of leaf and the mother marvels with them. I tell her she is beautiful. She smiles, and I catch a glimpse of my own radiance. Hot tears drying on my face, oh yes, here I am, waking along talking along singing these love songs with you. Love flows in this canyon of imaginary separation and paints our delicate tender outlines with this unspeakable flood of life kissing itself in a never ending always ending precious kiss. 

An unfathomable love of love's beauty sweeps through me in this always obvious swoon. Just as it seems to appear, feet padding down the trail, storm clouds blossoming, taking pictures for passersby, feeling deeply the pain of a lover, longing to soothe another's belief in the dream, knowing all I can do is love them, my skirt softly caressing my ankles, an unexplained tiredness, a jay song sings with the traffic, wind begins to ripple the late summer golden grasses into a pirouette as I wonder if I have a plastic bag for my phone for the coming rain, a soundlessness within sound, a seamless hush within the silence, a raw unadorned life of knowing this is it, always, sings through these very lips that no longer hunger for a tomorrow. 

Utterly satiated with this desire to sing.

 

Words can never catch this splendid beauty, yet beauty is a word. There are no love songs that will ever caress you as I long to, yet I sing. This life this life this life, un contained unfettered, beyond all ideas of freedom, all ideas of love, wondrous beyond belief or imagination flowing freely through me in me as me. Impossible to escape the dream but knowing it is a dream, and longing to sing of it, knowing this wordless song cannot be sung.

You waltzed into the sun's gaze alive fire blazing, lost, transfixed with unutterable beauty. This is knowing and feeling you are and all things are simply fleeting description. Even the knowing feeling that there never was a home nor you to leave it is the dream weaving and unweaving itself. Even these words as my thumb pats them on the screen is the dream painting itself. Only in this dance, in the Grand Canyon of love, is there beauty. It simply feels like there's nothing here, yet I am always rapt in my infinite intimate embrace. Joy love comfort love desire awe, familiar and new, this sparkling ache for what is, taps you on the shoulder and you whirl around and catch a glimpse of your beauty and emptiness as it flows through you as you. Everywhere and nowhere is home yet there is no home... extending infinitely outward and inward in every direction with no direction or time filling you emptying you. A sliding love poem singing itself kissing itself through your lips your song your edgeless heart.

 

Deep within the desert I lost my meandering footprints trying to lose my alone-ness, my lostness that was always on the tip of my tongue. 

I poured a thousand sorrows into a China cup and placed it on the window sill, and left it for the moon to swallow.. Diaphanous dragon clouds drank its iridescence and my tears traced delicate shades of unknowing into this paper heart that kept folding into itself as it was ripped apart by the recognition of my ultimate emptiness. I could not take refuge under the oak tree that stretched out its limbs to gather sunlight, as it was grown in sky.  All cloud castles crumbled, the scaffolding of hope that held up my world toppled. Dreams of another step were filled with a heaviness, and a sweet ache that was swallowed by the very earth this very song that blossoms into this color this sound this very light of darkness, this weight of light that swoons into itself within the racing river of my heart. No longer mine, this origami heart that was simply made of Imaginary lines drawn around a shimmering river of echoed vastness unfolded. All ideas of love flew away with tomorrow. 

Shadows dance on the sidewalk.

Midnight flowers bloom, night air sparkles and awe abounds. 

Love swoons into itself.

Love flows in this canyon of imaginary separation and paints our delicate tender outlines with this unspeakable flood of life kissing itself in a never ending always ending precious kiss.  This life this life this life, un contained unfettered, beyond all ideas of freedom…