Tag: Rumi

Come

PRAYER

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention – the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here

among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.

~ Marie Howe, poet extraordinaire and winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry ~



For days I’ve felt compelled to write about Gaza.

About the thousands of children in Gaza maimed and killed by Israeli attacks.

About mothers and fathers in Gaza having to make the no-choice choice: stand in line for a meager ration of food to feed your family, and risk being killed while you do so.

About the genocide of Gaza.

To acknowledge with at least the same amount of moral outrage I’ve been feeling and writing about the current American president and his administration. An outrage drenched in horror and grief for Gaza and its people.

Last Sunday, the night I typically reserve to write Monday’s blog, I sat here and not a word emerged. Hoping to “prime the pump,” I looked over a first draft poem I’d written two years ago about searching for a middle way of compassionate understanding for my Jewish friends in bitter anguish for the October 2023 Hamas attacks and hostage-taking, and my Sufi friends reeling from those egregious acts. The poem is incomplete, my editor having suggested that neither it nor I were ready for its completion. There was no blog on Monday.

Completion? Is it even possible?

“The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?”

Today is the beginning of Eid ul-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, one of the most important festivals in the Muslim calendar.

Today I acknowledge my silent complicity in the face of sacrifice exacted from both the Jewish and Muslim peoples. Maybe there is no middle way. Maybe only the statement that what the Israeli administration is doing to the people of Gaza – to my way of thinking, an identification with the aggressor – is utterly wrong and as evil as I have said the current American president and his administration are. And, too, the actions of Hamas.

“Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.”

And in the words attributed to the Sufi poet, Rumi:

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come , come.”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. May we do better.

How is Your Haal (Heart)?

“In many Muslim cultures, when you want to ask them how they’re doing, you ask: in Arabic, Kayf haal-ik? or, in Persian, Haal-e shomaa chetoreh? How is your haal?

What is this haal that you inquire about? It is the transient state of one’s heart. In reality, we ask, ‘How is your heart doing at this very moment, at this breath?’ When I ask, ‘How are you?’ that is really what I want to know.

I am not asking how many items are on your to-do list, nor asking how many items are in your inbox. I want to know how your heart is doing, at this very moment. Tell me. Tell me your heart is joyous, tell me your heart is aching, tell me your heart is sad, tell me your heart craves a human touch. Examine your own heart, explore your soul, and then tell me something about your heart and your soul.

Tell me you remember you are still a human being, not just a human doing. Tell me you’re more than just a machine, checking off items from your to-do list. Have that conversation, that glance, that touch. Be a healing conversation, one filled with grace and presence.

Put your hand on my arm, look me in the eye, and connect with me for one second. Tell me something about your heart and awaken my heart. Help me remember that I, too, am a full and complete human being, a human being who also craves a human touch.”

— Omid Safi, from The Disease of Being Busy

heartful distractions on my writing desk

My friend Sally, who I met last year walking the Via di Francesco, shared this post from our mutual friend, Omid Safi. I first “met” Omid when he was one of a cadre of regular bloggers/columnists posting in an early iteration of On Being. It was in the aftermath of 9-11 when tensions, animosities, and cultural misunderstandings were high, particularly in the US. What always touched me was how Omid, who is a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, always wrote with an open-hearted clarity, generously giving space for multiple perspectives and opinions, all the while sharing his culture by way of story. In my experience of Omid, his writing and online presence are an embodiment of his love and reverence for his teacher, Rumi, founder of the Sufi order of whirling dervishes.

On a day when I read that over 40,000 lives have been lost to the conflict in Gaza, with thousands more unaccounted for, Omid’s message of heartful connection and healing conversation lands deep within my heart and soul.

Ours has been a virtual friendship. One day I hope to meet Omid in person, perhaps on one of his Illuminated Tours to Turkey or Morocco. One day I hope to put my hand on his arm, look him in the eye, tell him something about the state of my heart, and listen to him tell me about his. And together remember we are each and all human beings, craving human touch, connection, and peace.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

If You Are

from Facebook, December 22, 2023

If You Are
If you are angry, let your anger be fire
So it can warm someone chilly.
If you are grieving, let your grief be a river
So someone thirsty can drink.
If you are numb, let your numbness give you capacity
To walk in hard places and not feel hurt.
If you are broken, let your brokenness
Be what makes space for a new thing to enter.
If you are fearful, let your fear be a warning signal
That others may look up.
If you are lost, let your being lost
Make a new place and call it home.
However you are,
Keep going.
However you are,
Keep going.

– Laura Martin –

I’m partial to poems that invite us to hold it all…the bitter and the sweet. To see the light in our dark places. To have faith that there is a pony hidden in all the muck, and gold to be mined from the dross of our mistakes.

Like my perennial favourite, Rumi’s “The Guest House,” to welcome all that we’d prefer to turn away from and “be grateful for whoever comes/because each has been sent/as a guide from beyond.”

The power of alchemy where we take ourselves to the fires of our grief and numbness, our brokeness and fears, our uncertainties and feeling lost. To be burned away and hollowed out.

To talk about the condition of our hearts, instead of the weather.

To keep going.

Of all of this I need to be reminded. Again, and again.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Hallucinations of the Soul

HALLUCINATIONS OF THE SOUL
The longing for things that you could not have,
the yearning for places you were not destined to arrive.
Wistful memories of what was not ever meant to be.
Regret for not being who you thought you would become.
These hallucinations of the soul are agonizing prisoners
that must be pardoned and released.

Clear the room.
Open the door and let them leave.
And in this space, you’ll paint a glorious existence
of being here with presence and contentment
for what truly is a relevant and meaningful life.

– Susan Frybort, Open Passages –

Still in the first month, Frybort’s poem speaks to me of a tender way of approaching the new year. Not bound by resolution making, or even fixed on a word for the year (though comfort, grace and gratitude continue to accompany my focused breaths), the imagery of pardon and release, of allowing discontent an open door from which to leave, invite a softening and deepening into possibility. Evoked too for me, is a favourite from Rumi, The Guest House, as rendered by Coleman Barks.

It’s been a challenging month. I’m happy to be home to days that are ever so slightly growing longer, especially in the late afternoon, and to temperatures rising to comfortable from last week’s frigid depths. My family and I are relieved that my mother is home, regaining her strength.

Discerning “guides from beyond” from “agonizing prisoners,” balancing hospitable welcome with unabashed leave taking, giving gratitude its due, we all make our way.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

A Gift to Bring You

I’m at a loss as to what to write for tomorrow’s (today’s) post. I started something and put it in the draft drawer, my “kill the darlings” file. No traction…no energy. Maybe an idea whose time has not yet come, or too soon too tender to write about.

Even though it’s Monday, not my usual day for posting a poem and photo, in the spirit of the season, I’ll gift forward a quote from a friend who shares my love of Rumi. A friend who I met years ago at our first writers’ retreat. A friend who made and gifted me and others with clay rattles during our vision quest retreat. A friend who recently published her first book, Solo Passage, the seeds of which she planted in that circle. Thank you, GG.

“You have no idea how hard I’ve looked for a gift to bring you.
Nothing seemed right.
What’s the point of bringing gold to the gold mine, or water to the ocean.
Everything I came up with, was like taking spices to the Orient.
It’s no good giving my heart and my soul because you already have these.
So, I’ve brought you a mirror.” – Rumi

Look. See your reflection. Know you are loved.

And my annual Solstice blessing, originally written in 2017, timeless and ever relevant:

May this Holyday season bring time to cherish all that is good and true and beautiful.
May its dark days invite rest for reflection and renewal.
May Nature welcome you to its beauty, magic and wisdom.
May good health be your companion, relationships enliven and encourage,
work and pastimes fulfill and affirm.
May strength in body, mind and spirit allow you to embrace life’s uncertainties.
May patience, love and kindness – given and received – be yours in abundance.

With love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Wings I’ve Grown

Portuguese Coastal Camino
Stage 5: Castelo do Neiva to Viana do Castelo
(In lieu of Friday’s regular photo and poem feature.)

Viana do Castelo across the River Lima and Eiffel Bridge, with Santa Luzia Basilica on the hilltop

“…But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others.
Unfold your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
“We have opened you.”
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.”

Rumi, “Who?” in The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Prior to departure, I had indicated that while I’d not be posting stories nor photos on social media, nor blogging, I would select and schedule posting my weekly Friday photo and poem features during my walk. That I’d be curious once home and looking back at my choices to see what, if any, correspondence they had to my actual experience. Rumi’s “Who?”– excerpt above – coincided with the day before our shorter fifth stage, walked again in heat though now with humidity thanks to early morning rain. Coupled with a particularly intense climb on tarmac, giving us the first view of our next destination, Viana do Castelo, “heavy and tired legs” were a reality. But first, breakfast at Quinta do Montevedra…


Waking to steady showers and seeing heavy clouds rolling down the hills to the sea, we opted for a leisurely breakfast in another of the Quinta’s beautifully appointed spaces, hoping an hour or two would bring sunshine. Delicious hot coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice and other fruits, creamy scrambled eggs, an assortment of fine sausages – chorizo and Iberian ham – and cheeses – soft brie, aged sheep and fresh creamed – crusty bread, crispy croissants, flaky pain au chocolate, and soft Portuguese pastries. Yes, to linger enveloped in such sumptuousness…listening to music that evoked the memory of a recently passed friend who would have loved this walk, in this way…“we have opened you.”

The sun eventually broke through. Cozy warm and waterproof layers dispensed. The cab called to take us the few kilometers to the stage’s beginning. “Obrigadas” and gratitude gifts exchanged with our host, Fatima. And we set off. Through the forest, with the ocean in the distance to our left, on paths of glittering stone and mud; cobbled roads through villages and vineyards, to the 11th C Sao Romao de Neiva monastery where not a moment’s pause was given to consider climbing this 186 step stairway to heaven!

Once across another Eiffel Bridge – the first we had cruised under on Porto’s Douro River the week before – we passed the city’s cathedral en route to the what, in hindsight, would be an adequate, but least favourite hotel.

Since medieval times, Viana do Castelo has been a pilgrimage stop en route to Santiago. Rich with history, architecture, and culture, we took a “rest day” to more fully appreciate its credentials. The next morning, Sunday, after waking to the news of the race-related mass shooting in my birthplace, Buffalo NY, rain threatened to fall from heavy clouds as we rode the funicular up the hillside to the famous landmark towering over the city, Santa Luzia Basilica. Foreboding weather and gloomy vistas were an apt reflection of grief.

The city’s annual floral festival where gerbera blossoms festooned the riverside plaza, echoed the colors and designs in the embroidery and weaving of the region’s traditional clothing seen in the local museum.

Finding color on a dreary day was surprisingly easy wandering through the historic centre, past the floral embellished 16th C Praca da Republica Fountain to a children’s art gallery, and then onto a side street festive with suspended umbrellas which held the day’s delight. Waiting in line, a fellow “peregrino” from Colorado invited us to share a table with him and his sister and brother-in-law at a restaurant favoured by locals for their traditional Sunday lunch. Served family style, platters of grilled bachalau with braised carrots, cabbage and potatoes, and again, the beverage of choice – tinto verde. Being the only one game to accept the owner’s invitation to sample an after dinner brandy, he placed the snifter and bottle – Aguardente Velha – beside me while the others wished they’d said yes! Remedied, he brought them small glasses and another Portuguese liqueur – all his way of saying “obrigado” to us for eating at his restaurant. Flan to follow, sated, warmed, and smiling…I wrote later in my journal: “a true Camino experience of sharing a meal with others. I hope it is the first of more to come, being in community, on The Way.”

Bordering the journal pages of this day’s entry I wrote a quote, which like the scheduled poem, had been chosen many days before, and yet too, was on point: “There are times in your life you are flung into an undiscovered country of being, a place beyond time and tide and details, the full magical breath of you heaving with the joy of being, and you realize then, that parts of you exist in exile and completeness is journeying to bring them home.”

Such synchronicities become that “moment of feeling the wings I’ve grown lifting,” bringing me home.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Who?

Who gets up early
to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his lost son
and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up
a flowing prophet?
Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?
Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Solomon cuts open a fish, and there’s a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.
Now there’s a pearl.
A vagrant wanders empty ruins.
Suddenly he’s wealthy.
But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others.
Unfold your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
“We have opened you.”
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.

– Rumi –
(The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks)

On my long walk with and towards the metaphoric Shams, I anticipate days when my legs will get heavy and tired. I hope my feet remain blister free. I’ll welcome the moment(s) of feeling wings lifting me. And when I do, I’ll thank another of my guides, Rumi, and think of my friend Shawna and her wondrous latest novel, Everything Affects Everyone. I’ll whisper my gratitude to both on the winds.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

A Reverie of Sacred Dance

“Keep it simple, keep it kind” to grease and ease passage through resistance into the Dance of Sacred Yes and Sacred No. Known and named resistance for one so facile with words – spoken and written – knows Body Knows and will slipstream with Her own Wisdom, shape shift to Truth.

“By the sacred yes or the sacred no I mean that affirmation or negation that comes from a deep place of wisdom and courage, even if it creates conflict or disagreement.
The sacred yes is not willful or egocentric, but rather is willing and surrendered.
The sacred no is not rebellion or refusal, but always the necessary protecting of boundaries.”

Richard Rohr, in The Artist’s Rule by Christine Valters Paintner


The Deal struck – leave words and utterances behind for Body in its silence to teach, with music of shaman’s dream to guide.

Kneel before the altar. Candle lit. Head bowed.
Stilling, silencing, falling into the cave of the heart.
Listening to a beat older than time.
Imaginal images flutter through time and space.


SACRED YES sees ancient Sun Dancer, pierced with deer cord bound to Tree in Life Hoop’s center. Face to the sun, sweat and blood streaming. Is this not a Sacred Dance to the Sacred Yes of Life? 
Elephant Matriarch swinging her massive head and trunk, warning all to beware as she guides her family through danger.
Arms suspended as Seaweed floating on the ocean’s surf. Then outstretched seeking surfer’s balance as he rides the Wave.
Now bald Eagle silently soaring, high wide view of land and sky.
Hold hair tight like Kali, Durga.
Bounce and bound like Ape.
Silent belly rumble and laugh. Inhale deep. Exhale deeper like bellows.
Not a word. Not a sound.
Felt Sense Flashes.
All a truer expression of that commitment to Life through its ages, when all Bodies knew.
Then rest, dream of YES, slip into Dream Time to bring it through, to be it, to be with it.
No words needed. Body knows.
Space surrounding Body holds vibration and emanation of this Dance to SACRED YES.

SACRED NO awakens to Tibetan bells.
Flowing gentle melody instantly illumines Sacred No is always in service of Sacred Yes. In obedience bows to Life.
Bending forward to purge the false yes, compliance, making small, resentments and envies – all taken as truth those lifetimes of lies.
Rising up, strengthen arms and legs, back and front, shake head free of delusion, break free of an invisible bondage as concrete eggshell shatters.
Drum beat evokes fierce warrior. Strike and chop and kick and stomp. Claim and proclaim. Power and empower.
Swoon with sudden sick feeling as Ego slips in guised to taint and turn the Sacred against itself.
BIG MEDICINE here.
Stand still. Is not standing still on one’s ground like Mountain the Sacred Dance of the Sacred No?
Then sway and soften into Life, like Tree who knows to withstand Storm he must give and bend.
Be fluid, fluent like River flows.
Dance SACRED NO as betrothed partner to SACRED YES.
Shape shift through Ego’s seduction. Discern the step.
Quiet presence, fierce with fight.
When to be loud with silence, soft with strength.

“A thousand half-loves must be surrendered
to take a whole heart home.”

Rumi

In the Family of Things

Mid August has come and gone and with it, most of summer. I used to say that August felt like one long Sunday night, especially for those of us in education. That mix of anticipation, apprehension, excitement and trepidation with September and the start of a new school year. All the stuff that can keep one awake, tossing and turning on a Sunday night, wondering what the new week will bring.

For the first time, this isn’t my felt sense. Maybe enough years out and away from the day to day. Too, knowing my work with schools has ceased, at least for the time being. Not wanting to be insensitive, I admit it’s hardly a year I’d want to be returning given so much continued uncertainty and real apprehension about the safety and well-being of staff and students as COVID-19 numbers continue to rise here and around the world with school resuming.

Despite another run this week of hot, sunny weather and cloudless skies (only the second this summer!) there are signs of what’s to come. Sitting by the local pond late last week I wrote:

The change in weather weighed heavy today. Every bone in my body ached.
My jaw clenched as my third eye pulsed.
Indelible and subtle, this signaling of the season to come.
Tell-tale morning chill.
Golden haze on aspen, ash and farmers’ fields.
Sun that sets earlier, rises later.

Geese gathered on the cat-tail bordered pond, leisurely swim in the same V formation as they fly.
And for a moment I hear in my head the opening lines to a favourite Mary Oliver poem, Wild Geese.
Try to speak aloud from memory. Give up but remember its essence,
remember the world announcing my place in the family of things.

Look up into that blue sky, heavy with lead bottomed clouds.
Beseech the wind who is my guardian,
“Where is it I’m meant to be?”

Like a squirrel gathering nuts, the geese and crows gathering to migrate south, I’m beginning to prepare myself for fall. Like its predecessors, spring and summer of 2020, I imagine it, too, will be the likes of which none of us has ever experienced. More pronounced again have been those waves of grief as I realize all too soon the ease with which we’ve been able to safely see friends will pass as colder temperatures and shorter days become the norm. And still, though curiously more acute, the sur-reality of living in this pandemic, every day continuing to learn more and more its impacts. Something I felt in the spring, but was able to hold lightly, off to the side during summer.

“… it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief.
While despair traps us in the bog of despondency,
grief carries us into life.
Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty.
If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings,
and slip the poetry between our words.

Toko-pa Turner,
Facebook post, August 14, 2020

So thoroughly engaged in the first programs I took under their hosting this spring, in the pandemic’s novel, early days, I signed on to another self study with the Abbey of the Arts. Starting in September for twelve weeks, “Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist,” promises to be an equally deep, communal dive into creative expression. I’m lightly researching how and what I need to begin a project based on some mandala paintings I’ve made over the years, and today I signed on for a self-paced study in abstract creative painting. Lonely for community, I’ve decided to resume my weekly Saturday river valley walks with the local Camino group.

It’s a delicate balancing act, like the pattern I’ve noticed when I’ve been out and about a bit, around more people than usual. Without much conscious thought, I find myself laying low for the following several days, staying home, and only going out to walk Annie. I hear friends and family acknowledge their loneliness, while others live with the millstone of chronic illness and the deaths of their beloveds. My heart aches for my sister, recently moved to the States, where as the crow flies only fifteen minutes from her children, grandchildren and our parents, but with the border closed, now for another month, now an eternity away. I prudently expect more of our traditional celebrations – Thanksgiving, Hallowe’en, Christmas, New Year’s – will continue to be severely curtailed by Covid-19.

“Rumi says, ‘All medicine wants is pain to cure.’
And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude,
our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation
that medicine might reach through and towards us.”

Toko-pa Turner,
Facebook post, August 14, 2020

Sitting by the pond, in response to my question, the wind whispers:

Right here, dear daughter.
Resting in the still warm sun. Breathing in the fresh northern air.
Your hair like the green rushes, swaying, dipping and dancing
in rhythm to my silent song.
Right here. Right now. This.

With love and kindest regards, dear friends.

The Guest House

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

– Jelaluddin Rumi –
    translation by Coleman Barks