The Beloved

Blossoms raining over me

My hands form a tulip

My shoulders are covered in a soft invisible mantle 

Caressing my skin and filling 

me tenderly with warmth 

It means, the Beloved is playing with you, she said. 

On being happy alone

Happiness is strange thing. 
It is elusive like a wild bird, and it comes to me, catches me unawares, like a butterfly landing on my shoulder. 
I used to think that I need a trigger to be happy. Like, a man who I love would make me happy. If I could just find the right man who I could love enough, who would love me enough, then....
Or if I could just have the right circumstances and live in them, then...
These days it is the opposite. I catch myself being happy. Serene, carefree, filled with a gentle, quiet happiness, based on gratitude for being able to survive, for being safe, being able to eat, live, pray, move, be healthy and keep going... Then I tell myself:"But you should be worried about this, or that, why are you happy, don't you fear this could happen, don't you worry about the future? What reason do you have to be happy like this?" And my heart listens and responds:"You are right, I don't have any reasonable reason to feel so serene but I am! Yes, I should worry more but I can't be bothered! The future? It is not here yet and the sky has not fallen down. "

Simple pleasures I enjoy. The green of the trees, the glowing vibrant colors of the flowers. The fragrance wafting on the air and entering my nostrils. The whiff of jasmine coming across the fence when I come home on a warm moonlit night. 
Sometimes I feel that plants are the sexiest things on earth. Only secondary to fruits...

                                             

No need for an otherness in my life. Just me and nature. 
A faint memory the days of words of another replayed in my mind,  I am my own mistress and my self unfolds and stretches leisurely under the gentleness of the way I treat myself. 
The excitement of going on a date? It happens when I pray....

Sacred silence upon the sand

This wonderful book arrived in the mail today. Alessandro Pronzato , Meditations on the sand. 

For one like me who is in total awe of the desert , who is fascinated by Bedouins , and feels a curious sense of coming home in strange places, this is  a book that vibrates with me. 

And the author answered my question about how to respond to well meaning friends who hope to see me turn into a Muslim completely . 

He says:" I approve of the alpinists who remove the nails from the mountain face after them so that those who come later will not be able to take advantage. It is not selfishness. It is respect for the creativity of others. The same should be true about prayer."

The book had a small bookmarker in it. A folded receipt from a fast food shop in Newcastle, Scotland, dated 1995. 

And the former reader had underlined this very passage. 

I have already lost his bookmarker. And got my own, a Segafredo receipt dated 2016. 

God bless Abe bookstore for finding rare used books out of print in the oddest places.