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.

The night sky over the Himalayas

During my flight to Qatar through the night I suddenly became aware of something outside my window. I looked out into the night and there were a million stars. First only large stars here and there, then the smaller ones became visible too. There were stars everywhere and I felt like we were almost level with them, flying past them.
I turned on the monitor to see where we were, and the map showed me, we just passed through the sky between Kabul and Islamabad...

The museum of lost objects- Bel temple, Palmyra

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35688943

Love threshes you and leaves you naked...

He who says, 'I love you but only so much, I love you and give you sixpence but I keep sixpence for myself, I love you but I stand at a distance and never come closer, we are separate beings'- his love is with his self. As long as that exists, love has not done its full work. Love accomplishes its work when it spreads its wings and veils man's self from his own eyes. That is the time when love is fulfilled, and so it is in the life of the holy ones who have not only loved God by professing or showing it, but who have loved God to the extent that they forgot themselves.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

I have seen....

Inayat Khan/Quotes
The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels.
Everything in life is speaking in spite of it's apparent silence.
I have seen all souls as my soul, and realized my soul as the soul of all.

There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.

― Hazrat Inayat Khan, Thinking Like The Universe: The Sufi Path Of Awakening