From pre- to post-eternity
is but a single breath,
a breath free of all these
high and low melodies.
Treasure this breath,
this moment you now enjoy.
Spend it in happiness; there is
no time for sorrow.
Once this moment has passed,
it is gone forever.
Your remaining time is less
than the very least you can imagine.
If you spend this moment laughing,
the world will reflect your joy.
But if you fall into depression,
the whole world will seem to be in mourning.
Don’t give your heart to this
transitory world
with all its ups and downs,
its twists and turns.
Bring joy to another’s heart;
and be joyful yourself,
for the highest gain in the world
is this.
Take care, Nurbakhsh,
not to hurt any heart;
accomplishing this is more dear
than any crown or throne.
~ Javad Nurbakhsh
The mouse asks the beloved frog,
“Do you know what you are to me? During the day,
you’re my energy for working. At night, you’re my deepest sleep.
But could we be together outside of time as well as inside?
Physically, we meet only at breakfast.
Your absence during the rest of the day enters all of my cravings!
I drink five hundred times too much.
I eat like a bulimic trying to die.
Help me!
I know I’m not worth it,
but your generosity is so vast!
Let your sunlight shine on this piece of dung,
and dry it out, so I can be used for fuel
to warm and light up a bathhouse.
Look on the terrible and stupid things I’ve done,
and cause herbs and eglantine to grow out of them.
The sun does this with the ground.
Think what glories God can make
from the fertilizer of sinning!”
The mouse continues to beg, “My friend,
I know I’m ugly to you.
I’m ugly to me!
I’m perfectly ugly!
But look, you’ll be sad
when I die, won’t you?
You’ll sit by my grave
and weep a little?
All I’m asking is,
be with me that little bit of time
while I’m still alive!
Now. I want you now!”
A certain rich man was accustomed to honor a sufi
by giving him pieces of silver.
“Would you like one piece of silver now,
O Lord of my Spirit, or three at breakfast
tomorrow morning?”
The sufi answered,
“I love the half a coin that I already have in my hand
from yesterday more than the promise of a whole one today,
or the promise of a hundred tomorrow.
A sufi is the child of this moment.”
Back to the mouse, who says,
“The slap of Now has cash in its hand. Give me slaps,
on the neck, anywhere!”
Soul of my soul of the soul of a hundred universes,
be water in this now-river, so jasmine flowers
will lift on the brim, and someone far off
can notice the flower-colors and know
there’s water here
“The sign is in the face.” You can look at an orchard
and tell if it rained last night. That freshness
is the sign.
Again, the mouse,
“Friend, I’m made from the ground,
and for the ground. You’re of the water.
I’m always standing on the bank calling to you.
Have mercy. I can’t follow you into the water.
Isn’t there some way we can be in touch?
A messenger? Some reminder?”
The two friends decided that the answer
was a long, a longing!, string, with one end tied
to the mouse’s foot and the other to the frog’s,
so that by pulling on it their secret connection
might be remembered and the two could meet,
as the soul does with the body.
The froglike soul often escapes from the body
and soars in the happy water. Then the mouse body
pulls on the string, and the soul thinks,
Damn, I have to go back on that riverbank and talk
with that scatterbrained mouse!
You’ll hear more about this
when you really wake up, on Resurrection Day!
So the mouse and the frog tied the string,
even though the frog had a hunch some tangling was to come.
Never ignore those intuitions.
When you feel some slight repugnance about doing something,
listen to it.
These premonitions come from God.
Remember the story of the military elephant
who would not move toward the Kaaba. Paralyzed
in that direction, yet swift if pointed toward Yemen.
It had some in-knowing from the unseen.
So the prophet Jacob, when his other sons wanted
to take Joseph out in the country for two days,
had a heart-sickness about their going, and it was true,
though divine destiny prevailed, despite his foreboding,
as it will.
It’s not always a blind man who falls in a pit.
Sometimes it’s one who can see.
A holy one does sometimes fall,
but by that tribulation, he or she ascends,
escapes many illusions, escapes
conventional religion, escapes
being so bound to phenomena
Think of how PHENOMENA come trooping
out of the desert of non-existence
into this materiality.
Morning and night,
they arrive in a long line and take over from each other,
“It’s my turn now. Get out!”
A son comes of age, and the father packs up.
This place of phenomena are sliding through us
like ideas through curtain.
They go to the well
of deep love inside each of us.
They fill their jars there, and they leave.
There is a source they come from,
and a fountain inside here.
Be generous.
Be grateful. Confess when you’re not.
We can’t know
what the divine intelligence
has in mind!
Who am I,
standing in the midst of this
thought-traffic?
~Rumi
A Meditation of Transparency
Bestow the skill of insight
pierce the enigma
of disguise.
Transform the layers
of confusion
disclose the lie.
Deliver the buoyancy of daisies
music
autumn leaves.
Impart the courage of reflection
note the past
how it tugs.
Lead the foot with the hoof
of strength
walk the bridge of truth.
Manifest starlight
the tenderness
of doves.
Reveal the columns of clarity
let them guide us
toward love.
Jeannie E. Roberts
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage
that began without harm, scatters
Into debris on the shore
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover that announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the ponds edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
~reggie whitehead
By our friend Habiballah
You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone
,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!
—
powers and people —
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.
~Rainier Maria Rilke
In the end,
I believe we don't need
to do anything to be loved.
We spend our lives trying
to seem prettier,
smarter.
But I've realized two things:
those who love us
see us with their hearts
and attribute qualities
to us beyond what we really have.
And those who don't want to love us
will never be satisfied with all our efforts.
Our imperfections are not flaws,
they are the key to recognizing
those who truly love us.
Frida Khalo
THE LAUGHTER OF POMEGRANATES:
If you buy a pomegranate,
buy one whose ripeness
has caused it to be cleft open
with a seed-revealing smile.
Its laughter is a blessing,
for through its wide-open mouth
it shows its heart,
like a pearl in the jewel box of spirit.
The red anemone laughs, too,
but through its mouth you glimpse a blackness.
A laughing pomegranate
brings the whole garden to life.
Keeping the company of the holy
makes you one of them
Whether you are stone or marble,
you will become a jewel
when you reach a human being of heart.
Plant the love of the holy ones within your spirit;
don’t give your heart to anything
but the love of those whose hearts are glad.
Don’t go to the neighborhood of despair:
there is hope.
Don’t go in the direction of darkness:
suns exist.
Rumi
PLUMFALL
True lovers abandon
this word, love.
It is no substitute
for a thud of plums
in the mist before dawn,
or the first apple
thumping sweetly into the birdbath
at midnight.
True lovers feel
the passion of Christ
in the ripening
of a huckleberry.
They hear each verse
of the holy Qu’ran
in a thrush’s throat,
and the Song of Solomon
in the pine breeze,
the elegiac coyote,
the rain that whispers all night,
“Be breathed.”
In the morning
they are intoxicated
by the feral bouquet
of their own nakedness.
True lovers know that
the Mysteries
can never be named:
a ball of goat's fur tangled in lupine,
a blue moth disguising her wings
as an alpine aster,
taste of honeysuckle,
grace of a whole afternoon
without naming the world:
no Word
but what things are.
~Fred LaMotte
The leaves asleep under the wind
are the wounds' ship,
and the ages collapsed on top of each other
are the wound's glory,
and the trees rising out of our eyelashes
are the wound's lake.
The wound is to be found on bridges
where the grave lengthens
and patience goes on to no end
between the shores of our love and death.
The wound is a sign,
and the wound is a crossing too.
~Ali Ahmed Said Esber
“Arise oh day! The atoms are dancing!
For her the spheres and wind are dancing
Souls ecstatic with joy are dancing
I’ll whisper in your ear where they are dancing…
Every Atom hovering in the air
Look at it with the eyes of Merci
as it is insane for the sun as we are for the beloved.
Every Atom, happy or sad
Is dazzled in the unquestionable shining sun. “
Molana Rumi
The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:
The moon is within me, and so is the sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.
So long as man clamours for the I and the Mine, his works are as naught:
When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.
For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge:
When that comes, then work is put away.
The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers.
The musk is in the deer, but it seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.
~Kabir
The silent with careful stones,
build Castle,
the stones of their Horse are ignored by the Noise,
Silence is always forgotten,
in a world with invisible walls,
between the imposed noise,
from The Noise.
Noisy cast the stones for victory
demolish all the forts,
on behalf of the Crowd:
Was not this centuries-old plague
between Silence and Noise?
~Fatmir Tirziu
Dog Days
Summer lies in tatters
In the ragged grass,
everything that matters has
already come to pass.
But, March will come in March's season.
With it, the conviction
that this is new and that thing, too.
With innocence, we shall embue
tired echos with immunity
to winter's benediction
and for the sake of pleasure,
take our liberties with reason.
rw