God, Truth, and Love

sufidoors

The weary ghost insists that the conversation continue…
You’re asking me for answers.

Being so conscientious, I’ll do my best
to stay awake and talk, but it’s gibberish.

I miss days of talking through an entire night – into oblivion –
until the sun lights a blue line across the horizon.

Babbling until the air flees into zephyrs and we snap awake….
only to slumber the entire day in borrowed repose.

We humans were made to be commanded by our hearts.
This shell I haul around was a consequence; a cloak with which to hide me among others.

True love is to remain hidden among the mysterious combustibles of the heart,
it’s sun-fire leaping upward casting light from the hearth of the eyes.

This is how we recognize love –
by the depth of deep of the hidden light, and the length of the reaching flames.

You say, “I like it when your consciousness is slipping away.
Your heart speaks and it spins silk
and only you can tie bows in the wildly flailing ribbons of flame!”

Leave it to God, the gift wrapper.
Who in turn leaves it to me to unwrap…like a child with shortened breath.

We cannot desire the gift of truth long enough,
before it comes to find us – bursting through the wrapping.

The great gnostics say when we take one step toward Allah,
He takes ten toward us; how am I to love a lover like that?

It’s all within … all within you.
Beauty outside comes from beauty within.

I’m not as bright as the moon, the closest we’ll get to the true light,
But beneath its glow, I too am a reflector of the sun.

Sunlight is all white, and the framework of atoms within the lattices of molecules
assemble and dance to bend such light into a spectrum of colors.

But there is a white light…so pure, which no prism can break into hues.
So white that ink flees the parchment of it’s pages.

Unable to describe with the mind of speech, we are left with unuttered replicas,
and seek and love our journey through others, while not holding them idols.

God wakes us from sleep, but not from dreams.
Hold these illusions wordless in your heart.

Life is a touch, a kiss, the draw of a bow…
A bottom flagon of dreams – overflowing the cup of reality.

I cannot touch the light which illuminates images
Nor touch the images themselves; only their matter.

We are shadows cast by light,
earth cast by breath into clay –

The moon is but a phantom without the sun….
a shadow of the earth.

All we have with which to love others,
is what God leaves us.

That you make it easy to speak, and do not hear my words as tricks of my mind….
makes me, hm, awake but dreaming.

God in everything I do suppose – O’ Hafiz who asks,
“where shall I go, from thy presence. Thou art everywhere.”

Love is a steady wind that erases what we know as soon as we try to grasp it.
It is pre-eternal wisdom, named by God, whispered only to the heart.

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Raw Hands (Palestine)

Child unearthed alive after buried in Gaza by Israeli air bombardment.

After a “warning bomb” through your roof, you are given 58 seconds to run, and 8 minutes to dig your child out from the rubble.  The completely buried child’s darkness and terror notwithstanding, imagine the burning bare hands of these men, digging and scraping through cement dust, jagged pieces of concrete, and cinder. It sucks the moisture out of your skin. And there’s no water nearby.

We are shown these dark shadows, to better see ourselves in the path of light. I will not go easily into the shadows, but if I must to show others, I will – I pray now though, that there are men and women like this to unearth me. My children will dig with their hands, and not bury with them.

Raw Hands

These hands can deliver a baby 
Or be used to write a poem
Our hands can join another’s 
and together build a home.

They can exhume a child, buried alive 
beneath a tomb of rubble, 
Or they can hold a candle steady
Or fan the flames of trouble.

I can use these hands to dig a grave
To embrace the families of the dead
Or throttle another’s life in vengeance
Perhaps a trigger pulled instead.

They can pen a declaration
To stop or start a war
I can clench them into mighty fists
Or open them in succor.

I can point a finger at another
For his poverty or his wealth,
Or I can turn a page in humility
And point a finger at myself.

See, my hands are just like yours
Born empty, pressed in prayer
All applaud their promised land,
But, in the end it’s all our hands, 
                          whose deeds will lead us there.

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Shams

For Shams, there is little difference between the bottom of a well, or the heights of Halcyon.

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Poetry in the Elusive Garden

We pluck sweet and thorny words,
like roses, from the cacophony
and hand them to one another
in the vicissitudes of poetry.
From pre-eternity,
it is we who are plucked from garden of non-existence
to dwell a while in the Garden of Imren.
We all are the wilting flower
in the elusive Garden we seek.

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Change Without Begins Within

It is easy to forget, and impossible to know, that where we are today is the result of a change someone made or failed to make in the past.

These subtle forms of complicity are more treacherous than rotten deeds that precede them.

They taught us in land navigation that the best way to never get lost is to shoot our azimuth (direction we wish to go) at the farthest object in the distance along that azimuth.   “Keep your eye on it, and go.”  Little things get in the way; a tree, a house, a lake, but the same principal applies in circumnavigation.  Pick a mountain peak, a tower, and go.

As we unite to change society as a culture, it’s also important to consider how we engage the tempo of change within ourselves – our individuality.  I may not be the perfect “person” today, but over span of my life, I can become more perfect through recalibration (change) applied to my own behavior.  Extrapolating this across an eternity – if I recognize Karma, and my faith or religion embodies this – then perhaps the entirety of my imperfect life, is redeemed through continual moral recalibration; I become more perfect through the countless soul journeys and incarnations beyond the bounds of This – One – Life.   The reasons of small change today may not become clear until another lifetime.  And even then, the soul we’d become, would know little of what it chooses today… your soul “today” has the advantage of knowing.  Personal change happens in the “now-ness” of being…there is nothing to wait until tomorrow for.

Within our True heart, is the compass of divine direction.  Where is your heart pointing?  Find the true unchangeable heart center, and it will navigate the changes around you.  The unchangeable (immutable Truth) can cause change… can endure change, is the result of change.

 

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Remember My Face

Angels from Gaza

My dear friend Omid Safi saw this picture and wrote: “Every once in a while you come across a story, a person, a soul, that touches your heart, inspires you, and fills you with light. This little Palestinian girl does all that, and more, for me. I don’t know her name. I saw her story on Aljazeera American tonight. The Israelis bombed her house, destroying it. Her response afterwards was to comfort her younger brother. Her strength, goodness, faith, hope. I have never seen the resilience of an occupied people so beautifully encapsulated in one person’s face. Little girl, sweet, beautiful, and strong angel…. I don’t know your name, but I have seen something of your spirit in this one glimpse. And here is my own promise to you: I will never, ever, forget you. I will never put your life, your dignity, your wellbeing behind any one else’s. May you someday live to breath freely, walk freely, sing freely, pray freely, and play on the beaches of your ancestors.”

It was not my home they bombed
The little girl said,
But a thin shell 
which failed instead.

My home?
It is within a billion hearts
And beyond that,
part of every star.

My name?
It’s spoken in every tongue,
But a different language
For everyone.

And what ever for us,
was willed to be
Before the dawn 
of eternity.

No, it’s not my home,
This restless place,
But for the reflection of love
When you remember my face.

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Bliss is a Master of Disguise

Every story is story within a story.
And clarity doesn’t come while in lotus position,
chanting in dhikr, near death experiences, or love making

(although the latter two can be faintly indistinguishable)

Rather, it is not just in the “doing”
but first in the “being”
It is this that undoes the laxity of existence.

While on a mountain trail,
an epiphany came without a meaning
just a raw feeling that everything
was exactly where and when it should be.

It didn’t happen before or after I encountered this man
walking along a mountain road
with a wounded doe in his arms…
This view was as if it had always been happening,
and I just found myself “in it.”

Why toil the years unraveling something
that took an eternity to tangle.
I acquiesce my understanding
to the happening of now,
The doing of then.

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Killing time

aysha farooq pilotOppression is a disease to be eradicated.  Sadly humans are carriers.  But if this (photo of Pakistani female pilot, Ayesha Farooq) were an American male fighter pilot, flag on his helmet, in an American F-16 going on the same bombing run against the Taliban, would we “feel” the same way?  Fighting oppression (of which killing becomes part) does not require a political regime;  it requires first and foremost humans united under a moral ideology based on equality and freedom – vice imperialism, fascism.  And even this has loopholes – I shouldn’t have to fight to be who I have always divinely been.  
Ayesha’s achievement seems to represent the condition of women (especially Muslim women) taking up the cause on their own behalf.  She is not exercising her right to kill, but her right to live.  Despite her “uniform,” she doesn’t seek to reign over nations, but live equally among everyone.  If she could end oppression without firing a single missile, I’m sure she’d be grateful and so would I.   Like oppression, the natural entitlement of living free, comes with the unnatural ultimatum to kill. Thank goodness for the balance. 
Malala Yousafzai delivering a speech to the Pakistani congress or UN is not unlike Ayesha Farooq delivering ordinance on a Taliban guerilla training camp – may both their aims be accurate… but may Malala’s blast radius be widest!
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Pieces of Gibran

To marvel at Gibran the writer, his works, or the self disclosure both reading and knowing him brings. Which? Which? Perhaps, we should not try to disassemble anything that already

leaves us feeling whole. We cannot reassemble colors into pure white light simply by thinking like a prism.

The mind shreds, the heart keeps whole. The mind, the house…the heart, the home inside it. Even describing this duality, is dangerous. Perfect poetry cannot be heard… but do we ever love “imperfection!”

The poem is powdered magnesium, the ear is a burning flame, the heart is water. Disclosure is the explosion when they come together.

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Measured Time, Immeasurable Perpetuity

Measured time is illusory – so much, that memories, in so far as they can be remembered now, are no more real than the present moment, which itself is completely and utterly transient. Poof!
It seems the facets of illusion build up to everything we know with our minds – imagine the vast nothingness beyond the veil, the real Real. Where even illusion itself, is illusion. Yet, cut from the reed bed, as we drift serenely on still waters, we all hold this world, this trickery, in reverence…for even illusion – wrought, nurtured, and rendered with utmost sincerity – enjoys perpetuity.
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