Saturday, April 19, 2014

Looking for your Face



From the beginning of my life I have been looking for your face, but today I have seen it.  Today I have seen the charm, the beauty, the unfathomable grace of the face I was looking for.  Today I have found you, and those who laughed and scorned me yesterday are sorry that they were not looking as I did.  I am bewildered by the magnificence of your beauty, and wish to see you with a hundred eyes.  My heart has burned with passion and has searched forever for this wondrous beauty that I now behold.  I ashamed to call this love human and afraid of God to call it divine.  Your fragrant breath, like the morning breeze, has come to the stillness of the garden.  You have breathed new life into me.  I have become your sunshine, and also your shadow.  My soul is screaming in ecstasy.  Every fiber of my being is in love with you.  Your effulgence has lit a fire in my heart, and you have made radiant for me the earth and sky.  My arrow of love has arrived at the target.  I am in the house of mercy, and my heart is a place of prayer. 
          --Rumi

Photo Courtesy of Clean Plate Pictures

Thursday, April 17, 2014

From "The World"


A man from a town of Negua, on the east coast of Colombia, could climb into the sky.  On his return, he described his trip.  He told how he had contemplated human life from on high.  He said we are a sea of tiny flames.  Each person shines with his or her own light.  No two flames are alike.  There are big flames and little flames, flames of every color.  Some people’s flames are so still they don’t even flicker in the wind while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks.  Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but blaze with life so fiercely that you can’t look at them without blinking and if you approach, you shine in fire.

          --Eduardo Galeano, translated by Cedric Belfrage

Photo courtesy of Ira Lippke

Since Feeling is First



since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers.  Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
  
          --e.e. cummings