Month: January 2019
Ali in battle
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Learn from Ali how to fight
without your ego participating.
God’s Lion did nothing
that didn’t originate from his deep center.
Once in battle
he got the best of a certain knight
and quickly drew his sword.
The man, helpless on the ground,
spat in Ali’s face.
Ali dropped his sword, relaxed,
and helped the man to his feet.
“Why have you spared me?
How has lightning contracted back into its cloud?
Speak, my prince,
so that my soul can begin to stir in me
like an embryo.”
Ali was quiet and then finally answered,
“I am God’s Lion, not the lion of passion.
The sun is my lord.
I have no longing except for the One.
When a wind of personal reaction comes,
I do not go along with it.
There are many winds full of anger,
and lust and greed.
They move the rubbish around,
but the solid mountain of our true nature
stays where it’s always been.
There’s nothing now except the divine qualities.
Come through the opening into me.
Your impudence was better
than any reverence,
because in this moment.
I am you and you are me.
I give you this opened heart
as God gives gifts:
the poison of your spit
has become the honey of friendship.
The reed sparrow
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A reed sparrow flew by my window
She looked a little pale
shaken by her experience
but eager to tell her tale:
“I saw I always had been dreaming
And was suddenly wide awake”
The earth that seemed so stable
Was fluid, like the lake
my mother never gave birth to me
I was giving birth to her, you see
And I was not flying through the trees,
But the trees,
they flew through me…
Hafiz – Rubaiyat 26-30
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One with such beauty none will make.
The morning breeze tended to the rose,
Don’t let go of the cup’s lips
I long for your hug and kiss,
I spent my life chasing my wishes
26
One with such beauty none will make.
When her garments off we take
You can see her heart in her fragile breast,
Like a hard rock in a clear lake.
27
The morning breeze tended to the rose,
A maid-in-waiting, as the flower grows.
If in the sun you have a shady refuge,
Seek the shade of a rose, and one who glows.
28
Don’t let go of the cup’s lips
Till you receive your worldly tips.
Bittersweet is the world’s cup
From lover’s lips and the cup sips.
29
I long for your hug and kiss,
I want the wine that will bliss.
Let me cut the story short,
Please return, cause you I miss.
30
I spent my life chasing my wishes
What benefits fate furnishes?
Whomever to I said I loved you,
Turned to my foe, why my luck ravishes?
The valley of Love
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Love’s valley is the next, and here desire
Will plunge the pilgrim into seas of fire,
Until his very being is enflamed
And those whom fire rejects turn back ashamed.
The lover is a man who flares and bums,
Whose face is fevered, who in frenzy yearns,
Who knows no prudence, who will gladly send
A hundred worlds toward their blazing end,
Who knows of neither faith nor blasphemy,
Who has no time for doubt or certainty,
To whom both good and evil are the same,
And who is neither, but a living flame.
But you! Lukewarm in all you say or do,
Backsliding, weak –O, no, this is not you
True lovers give up everything they own
To steal one moment with the Friend alone –
They make no vague, procrastinating vow,
But risk their livelihood and risk it now.
Until their hearts are burnt, how can they flee
From their desire’s incessant misery?
They are the falcon when it flies distressed
In circles, searching for its absent nest –
They are the fish cast up upon the land
That seeks the sea and shudders on the sand.
Love here is fire; its thick smoke clouds the head –
When love has come the intellect has fled;
It cannot tutor love, and all its care
Supplies no remedy for love’s despair.
If you could seek the unseen you would find
Love’s home, which is not reason or the mind,
And love’s intoxication tumbles down
The world’s designs for glory and renown –
If you could penetrate their passing show
And see the world’s wild atoms, you would know
That reason’s eyes will never glimpse one spark
Of shining love to mitigate the dark.
Love leads whoever starts along our Way;
The noblest bow to love and must obey –
But you, unwilling both to love and tread
The pilgrim’s path, you might as well be dead!
The lover chafes, impatient to depart,
And longs to sacrifice his life and heart.
Tired of speaking sweetly
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Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.
If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved
His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.
God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes want
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.
Dying, laughing
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A lover was telling his beloved
how much he loved her,
how faithful he had been,
how self-sacrificing,
getting up at dawn every morning,
fasting, giving up wealth and strength and fame,
all for her.
There was a fire in him.
He didn’t know where it came from,
but it made him weep and melt like a candle.
“You’ve done well,” she said,
“but listen to me.
All this is the decor of love,
the branches and leaves and blossoms.
You must live at the root to be a true lover.”
“Where is that! Tell me!”
“You’ve done the outward acts,
but you haven’t died.
You must die.”
When he heard that,
he lay back on the ground laughing,
and died.
He opened like a rose
that drops to the ground and died laughing.
That laughter was his freedom,
and his gift to the eternal.
As moonlight shines back at the sun,
he heard the call to come home, and went.
When light returns to its source,
it takes nothing of what it has illuminated.
It may have shone on a garbage dump,
or a garden, or in the center of a human eye.
No matter. It goes,
and when it does,
the open plain becomes passionately desolate,
wanting it back.
The valley of the quest
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When you begin the Valley of the Quest
Misfortunes will deprive you of all rest,
Each moment some new trouble terrifies,
And parrots there are panic-stricken flies.
There years must vanish while you strive and grieve;
There is the heart of all you will achieve –
Renounce the world, your power and all you own,
And in your heart’s blood journey on alone.
When once your hands are empty,
then your heart
Must purify itself and move apart
From everything that is – when this is done,
The Lord’s light blazes brighter than the sun,
Your heart is bathed in splendour and the quest
Expands a thousandfold within your breast.
Though fire flares up across his path, and though
A hundred monsters peer out from its glow,
The pilgrim driven on by his desire
Will like a moth rush gladly on the fire.
When love inspires his heart he begs for wine,
One drop to be vouchsafed him as a sign –
And when he drinks this drop both worlds are gone;
Dry-lipped he founders in oblivion.
His zeal to know faith’s mysteries will make
Him fight with dragons for salvation’s sake –
Though blasphemy and curses crowd the gate,
Until it opens he will calmly wait,
And then where is this faith? this blasphemy?
Both vanish into strengthless vacancy.
The valley of the Quest
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