The “initiatory intensity” of Marrow of Flame is powerful because it streams from the work of someone who does not in any way seek the status of a “Master” or “great mystic.” Dorothy’s deepest wisdom—and the deepest wisdom of her poems—is that of an irradiated “ordinariness.” She knows—and her poems show that she knows—that the greatest of all human achievements is to become one’s own—complete integrated divine human self in the core of ordinary life where, as she writes in “Still Life:”
Each movement, each quiet gesture, awakens a rosary in the blood.
For many years I have thought I would be among only a handful of people who knew who Dorothy “is” and who can derive strength and joy from her. Now in Marrow of Flame she will make many new invisible soul-friends, and her profound illumination will go on living, long after she or I are dead, in the deathless Light that all souls live in and somewhere know as their origin.
From the Introduction to Marrow of Flame by Andrew Harvey
More from the Tao
1.
When some put on robes
and others bow down before them,
it is already lost.
2.
When some speak endlessly,
while others sit wide-mouthed
writing in notebooks,
it is not present.
3.
When groups begin to look all alike,
and comb their hair the same way
and can be found doing identical things
at a certain hour,
nothing is happening.
Don’t Make Lists
Every day a new flower rises
from your body’s fresh soil.
Don’t go around looking
for fallen petals
in a fairy tale, when you’ve
got the golden plant
right here, now,
shooting forth in light from your eyes,
your awakening crown.
Don’t make lists,
or explore ancient accounts.
Forget everything you know
and open.
No matter what you know,
someone is always wanting
to correct you,
to sell you a bill of goods,
from the shop marked
“authority.”
All the “authorities” got
frozen into stone
years ago after the great flood
wiped out original knowledge,
and left behind only these granite shadows.
Reality is always soft clay,
ever shifting and changing
its shape.Fire it into form, and
at the very moment
you are hailing it as
final truth
it will break in your hands.
The Lovers
If the gods are ourselves, extended,
then we met in transcendent space.
force fields reversing in pulses.Our kiss sent clouds
of passionate angels
floating through one another.Our cries of love
were instantly translated
to sacred scrolls
rippling down the side of heaven.Our gestures were repeated endlessly
in myriad expanding cosmic mirrors.From afar, this landscape glistened,
like crystal turning to light.
A Thousand Ways
The Beloved knows a thousand ways
to enter your body.
When you were young,
she sent you a lover of flesh
who stood near to awaken your nature.
arriving without notice
on unexpected occasions.
To discover her, turn gently,
and follow your breath
to the center of your being.
