I live my Life in Widening Circles

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I've been circling for thousands of years

and I still don't know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?

~ Ranier Maria Rilke ~

God's Kite

Today I had a vision of our souls connected to a colorful kite in God's possession.

God was happy with us and decided to take us out to the beach. 

He ran with the kite laughing, as we swirled and swayed in the wind.

We rose high and dipped towards the water in a spiraling dance in the sky.  

We received many lovely kisses from the sun 

and winks of knowing from the seagulls. 

They too have been a part of this ritual with God for eons. 

We shared in this Joy and our souls formed a rainbow of colors on the kite's sail.

God was so pleased, He showered us with his adoration.

I said to God, You are so generous and kind.

What can I offer You for this glorious day at the beach ?

and He said, just remember Me and smile.

Everything is Now

"Everything is Now.

As there are billions of stars 

There are billions of steps. 

As there are billions of souls, 

There are billions of ways to grow.

Don’t mind the destination, 

Don’t mind the end. 

Don’t mind the good or bad

or right and wrong.

Grow from the past,

But grab hold of now. 

Now is always evolving."

--Rumi

Tell Me, O Love

Tell me, O Love,
Who is more elegant,
You or this vast garden of yours?

Shine, O moon,

You are an inspiration
to all who look upon the night sky.

You place doors in the sky.
You place wings on the human heart.
You enchant every mind
and bewilder both worlds.

O Beloved,
yours is the pleasure of this world
and the way to the next.

~ Rumi

Stay Close My Heart

STAY CLOSE, MY HEART

Rumi

Stay close, my heart, to the one who knows your ways;

Come into the shade of the tree that always has fresh flowers.

Don't stroll idly through the bazaar of the perfume-markers:

Stay in the shop of the sugar-seller.

If you don't find true balance, anyone can deceive you;

Anyone can trick out of a thing of straw,

And make you take it for gold

Don't squat with a bowl before every boiling pot;

In each pot on the fire you find very different things.

Not all sugarcanes have sugar, not all abysses a peak;

Not all eyes possess vision, not every sea is full of pearls.

O nightingale, with your voice of dark honey! Go on lamenting!

Only your drunken ecstasy can pierce the rock's hard heart!

Surrender yourself, and if you cannot be welcomed by the Friend,

Know that you are rebelling inwardly like a thread

That doesn't want to go through the needle's eye!

The awakened heart is a lamp; protect it by the hem of your robe!

Hurry and get out of this wind, for the weather is bad.

And when you've left this storm, you will come to a fountain;

You'll find a Friend there who will always nourish your soul.

And with your soul always green, you'll grow into a tall tree

Flowering always with sweet light-fruit, whose growth is interior.

Path of Love III

"Even when one truly loves humanity, one longs to give one's all for its happiness. When one truly loves one's country, there is the longing to sacrifice one's very life without seeking reward and without the least thought of having loved and served. When one truly loves one's friends, there is the longing to help them without making them feel under the least obligation. When truly loving one's enemies, one longs to make them friends. True love for one's parents or family makes one long to give them every comfort at the cost of one's own. Thought of self is always absent in the different longings connected with the various stages of pure, real love; a single thought of self would be an adulteration.

Divine Love is qualitatively different from human love. Human love is for the many in the one and Divine Love is for the One in the many. Human love leads to innumerable complications and tangles; but Divine Love leads to integration and freedom. Human love in its personal and impersonal aspects is limited; but Divine Love, with its fusion of the personal and the impersonal aspects, is Infinite in being and expression. Divine Love makes us be true to ourselves and to others and makes us live truly and honestly. Thus, it is the solution to all our difficulties and problems; it frees us from every kind of binding; purifies our hearts and glorifies our being.

To those whose hearts are pure and simple, true love comes as a gift through the activating grace of a Perfect Master, and this Divine Love will perform the supreme miracle of bringing God into the hearts of men. All the same, human love should not be despised, even when it is fraught with limitations. It is bound to break through all these limitations and initiate an aspirant in the eternal life in the Truth.

God does not listen to the language of the tongue which constitutes Japs (mental repetitions), Mantras (verbal repetitions), Zikra (either kind of repetition), and devotional songs. He does not listen to the language of the mind which constitutes meditation, concentration and thoughts about God. He listens only to the language of the heart, which constitutes love. The most practical way for the common man to express this language of the heart, whilst attending to daily-life duties, is to speak lovingly, think lovingly, and act lovingly towards all mankind, irrespective of caste, creed and position, taking God to be present in each and every one.

To realize God, we must love Him, losing ourselves in His Infinite Self. We can love God by surrendering to the Perfect Master who is God's personal Manifestation. We can also love God by loving our fellow-beings, by giving them happiness at the cost of our own happiness, by rendering them service at sacrifice of our interests and by dedicating our lives at the altar of selfless work. When we love God intensely through any of these channels, we finally know Him to be our own Self.

The beginning of real love is obedience, and the highest aspect of this love which surpasses that of love itself is the aspect which culminates into the perfect obedience or supreme resignation to the Will and Wish of the Beloved. In this love are embodied all Yogas known to saints and seekers." Meher Baba

Path of Love II

"Love for God, love for fellow-beings, love for service and love of sacrifices; in short, love in any shape and form is the finest "give and take" in the world. Ultimately, it is love that will bring about the much-desired universal leveling of human beings all over the world, without necessarily disturbing the inherent diversities of details about mankind.

All the same, in order to burst out in a mighty big spirit to serve as a beacon for those who may yet be groping in the darkness of selfishness, love needs to be kindled and rekindled in the abysmal darkness of selfish thoughts, selfish words and selfish deeds.

The light of love is not free from its fire of sacrifice. Like heat and light, love and sacrifice go hand in hand. The true spirit of sacrifice that springs spontaneously does not and cannot reserve itself for particular objects and special occasions. Love and coercion can never go together. Love has to spring spontaneously from within. It is in no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force and it cannot be forced upon anybody, yet it can be awakened in one through love itself.

Love cannot be born of mere determination; through exercise of will, one can at best be dutiful. One may, through struggle and effort, succeed in securing that his external action is in conformity with his conception of what is right; but such action is spiritually barren because it lacks the inward beauty of spontaneous love.

Like every great virtue, love, the mainspring of all life, can also be misapplied. It may lead to the height of God-intoxication or to the depths of despair. No better example can be given of the two polarities of love and their effects than that of Mary Magdalene before and after meeting Jesus.

Between these two extremes are many kinds of love. On the one hand, love does exist in all the phases of human life; but here it is latent or is limited and poisoned by personal ambitions, racial pride, narrow loyalties and rivalries and by attachment to sex, nationality, sect, caste, or religion. On the other hand, pure and real love has also its stages, the highest being the gift of God to love Him. When one truly loves God, one longs for union with Him, and this supreme longing is based on the desire of giving up one's whole being to the beloved.

True love is very different from an evanescent outburst of indulgent emotionalism or the enervating stupor of a slumbering heart. It can never come to those whose heart is darkened by selfish cravings or weakened by constant reliance upon the lures and stimulations of the passing objects of sense. " Meher Baba

Path of Love I

LOVE AND GOD-LOVE

From Teachings of Meher Baba

Of all the forces that can best overcome all difficulties, the greatest is the force of love, because the greatest Law of God is Love, which holds the key to all problems. This mighty force not only enables one to put the ideal of selfless service into practice, but also transforms one into God. It has been possible through love for man to become God; and when God becomes man, it is also due to His Love for His beings.

Love is dynamic in action and contagious in effect. Pure love is matchless in majesty; it has no parallel in power and there is no darkness it cannot dispel. It is the undying flame that has set life aglow. The lasting emancipation of man depends upon his love for God and upon God's love for one and all.

Where there is love, there is Oneness and, in complete Oneness, the Infinite is realized completely at all times and in every sphere of life, be it science, art, religion, or beauty. The spirit of true love and sacrifice is beyond all ledgers and needs no measures. A constant wish to love and be loving and a non-calculating will to sacrifice in every walk of life, high and low, big and small, between home and office, streets and cities, countries and continents are the best anti- selfish measures that man can take in order to be really self-ful and joyful.

Love also means suffering and pain for oneself and happiness for others. To the giver, it is suffering without malice or hatred. To the receiver, it is a blessing without obligation. Love alone knows how to give without necessarily bargaining for a return. There is nothing that love cannot achieve and there is nothing that love cannot sacrifice.

Light Will Split You Open

Light will someday split you open
Even if your life is now a cage,

For a divine seed, the crown of destiny,
Is hidden and sown on an ancient fertile plain
You hold the title to. 

Love will surely bust you wide open
Into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy

Even if your mind is now
A spoiled mule.

A life giving radiance will come,
The Friend's gratuity will come -

O look again within yourself,
For I know you were once the elegant host
To all the marvels in creation.

From a sacred crevice in your body
A bow rises each night
And shoots your soul into God.

Behold the Beautiful Drunk Singing One
From the lunar vantage point of love.

He is conducting the affairs
Of the whole universe

While throwing wild parties
In a tree house - on a limb
In your heart.

Hafiz 

I Give Myself

"Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, it provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then? To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle. Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. 
We convince by our presence. Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself. "

Walt Whitman

Love Is

"Love is essentially self-communicative : those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. 

Those who receive love from others cannot be its recipients without giving a response, which, in itself, is the nature of Love. 

True Love is unconquerable and irresistible. It goes on gathering power and spreading itself until eventually it transforms everyone it touches."

~Meher Baba

A Bird of Paradise

With extreme joy I tear and shred my earthly garment.

    By casting of my clothes, into the glory of my soul I’ve grown.

I wear this earthly corps for what use, to what avail?

    I am not a cawing crow, of heavenly birds is my tone.

I am a bird of Paradise, I am not of the earthy realm.

For a few days imprisoned in my cage of flesh and bone.

My soul is my guide, for my soul is of that abode.

I will not speak of the earthly, I am of the unknown.

The fragrant morning breeze brings news of union. 

With joy and with song I’ll leave this cage, this earthly throne.

RUMI

Song of Songs

There is one who sings the song of his soul, discovering in his soul everything - utter fulfillment.

There is one who sings the song of his people. Emerging from the private circle of his soul - not expansive enough, not yet tranquil - he strives for fierce heights, clinging to the entire community of Israel in tender love. Together with her, he sings her song, feels her anguish, delights in her hopes. He conceives profound insights into her past and her future deftly probing, the inwardness of her spirit with the wisdom of love.

Then there is one whose soul expands until it extends beyond the border of Israel, singing the song of humanity. In the glory of the entire human race, in the glory of the human form, his spirit spreads, aspiring to the goal of humankind, envisioning his consummation. From the spring of life, he draws all his deepest reflections, his searching, striving and vision.

Then there is one who expands even further until he unties with all of existence, with all creatures, with all worlds singing a song with them all.

There is one who ascends with all these songs in unison-the song of the soul, the song of the nation, the song of humanity, the song of the cosmos-resounding together, blending in harmony, circulating the sap of life, the sound of holy joy. 

From Song of Songs King Solomon

Forgive the Dream

All your images of winter
I see against your sky.
I understand the wounds
That have not healed in you.
they exist
Because God and love
Have yet to become real enough
to allow you to forgive
The dream.
You still listen to an old alley song
That brings your body pain;
Now chain your ears
To His pacing drum and flute.
Fix your eyes upon
The magnificent arch of His brow
That supports
And allows this universe to expand.
Your hands, feet, and heart are wise
And want to know the warmth
Of a Perfect One's circle.
A true saint
Is an earth in eternal spring.

Inside the veins of a petal
on a blooming redbud tree... 

When you Can Endure

When the words stop

And you can endure the silence

That reveals your heart's pain

of emptiness

Or that great wrenching-sweet longing,

That is the time to try and listen

To what the Beloved's

Eyes

Most want

To

Say.

Hafiz

Heart and Mind

"Do not listen to the voice of the mind. Listen to the voice of the heart. The mind wavers, the heart does not. The mind fears, the heart is undaunted. The mind is the home of doubts, reasonings and theories. The heart when purified becomes the dwelling of the Beloved. Rid your heart off low desires, malice, selfishness and God will manifest in you as your true Self."

--Meher Baba

Nothing Can Be Compared

O God,
Whenever I listen to the voice
of anything You have made
The rustling of the trees

The trickling of water
The cries of birds

The flickering of shadow
The roar of the wind
The song of the thunder,

I hear it saying:
God is One!

Nothing can be compared with God!

~ Rabia

The King of Love

All the world praises you,
"But where did this "you" come from?
All the universe is born of Love
But where did this Love come from?

O Beloved,
you are the owner of the land of life
the light of my heart;
Even the King of Love
knows no love
that is not yours."


~ Rumi

When the Wind is Perfect

On a day
when the wind is perfect,
the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty.
Today is such a 
day.

 

My eyes are like the sun that makes promises;
the promise of life
that it always
keeps each morning.

 

The living heart gives to us as does that luminous sphere,
both caress the earth with great
tenderness.

 

This is a breeze that can enter the soul.
This love I know plays a drum.  Arms move around me;
who can contain their self before my beauty?

 

Peace is wonderful,
but ecstatic dance is more fun, and less narcissistic;
gregarious He makes our lips.

 

On a day when the wind is perfect,
the sail just needs to open
and the love starts.

 

Today is such
a day.

 

~ Rumi ~

 

Expands His Being

All beings
are words of God,
His music, His
art.

Sacred books we are, for the infinite camps
 in our
 souls.

Every act reveals God and expands His being.
I know that may be hard
to comprehend.

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enough talk for the night.
He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent
for a while,

worlds are forming
in my heart.

Meister Eckhart

The Angels Know you Well

 

 

You have fathered a child with me.

 

You had your night of fun.

 

If You no longer want the love my beautiful body can yield,

 

At least rake care of that Holy infant my heart has become.

 

God, You sired an heir with me when You gave birth to my soul.

 

I thought of complaining to all the angels Last night

 

About Your treatment of this, "Homeless child,"

 

But then I remembered they too Have a list of love-complaints

 

Because They also know You so well.

 

 

~ Hafiz

Liberation

"The individual soul is entangled in the world of forms and does not know itself as one with the being of God. This ignorance constitutes the bondage of the soul, and spiritual sadhana must aim at securing emancipation from this bondage. Ex

ternal renunciation of the things of this world is therefore often counted among the sadhanas that lead to Liberation. Though such external renunciation may have its own value, it is not absolutely necessary. What is needed is internal renunciation of craving for the things of this world. When craving is given up, it matters little whether the soul has or has not externally renounced the things of this world, because the soul has internally disentangled itself from the illusory world of forms and has prepared itself for the state of Mukti, or Liberation. Detachment is an important part of the sadhana of knowledge."

--Meher Baba

Die to Yourself

Unless you give up the breath of your desires and die to yourself, 
you cannot have the breath of real life and live forever.

You can own a world as long as you do not allow yourself to be owned 
by any part of it through attachment.

Renunciation of desires does not mean asceticism or a negative attitude of life. Without avoiding contact with the different aspects of life, maintain complete detachment in the midst of intense activity.

--Meher Baba

Love Demands a Mystic Silence

"From each, Love demands a mystic silence. 

What do all seek so earnestly? Tis Love. 

Love is the subject of their inmost thoughts, 

In Love no longer "Thou" and "I" exist, 

For self has passed away in the Beloved. 

Now will I draw aside the veil from Love, 

And in the temple of mine inmost soul 

Behold the Friend, Incomparable Love. 

He who would know the secret of both worlds

Will find that the secret of them both is Love."

-- Attar

What Happens

What happens when your soul
Begins to awaken
Your eyes
And your heart
And the cells of your body
To the great Journey of Love?

First there is wonderful laughter
And probably precious tears

And a hundred sweet promises
And those heroic vows
No one can ever keep.

But still God is delighted and amused
You once tried to be a saint.

What happens when your soul
Begins to awake in this world

To our deep need to love
And serve the Friend?

O the Beloved
Will send you
One of His wonderful, wild companions -

Like Hafiz.

The One Master

"Love is the One who masters all things; 

I am mastered totally by Love. 


By my passion of love for Love 

I have ground sweet as sugar.

O furious Wind, I am only a straw before you;

How could I know where I will be blown next?

Whoever claims to have made a pact with Destiny

Reveals himself a liar and a fool;

What is any of us but a straw in a storm?

How could anyone make a pact with a hurricane?

God is working everywhere his massive Resurrection;

How can we pretend to act on our own?

In the hand of Love I am like a cat in a sack;

Sometimes Love hoists me into the air,

Sometimes Love flings me into the air,

Love swings me round and round His head;

I have no peace, in this world or any other.

The lovers of God have fallen in a furious river;

They have surrendered themselves to Love's commands.

Like mill wheels they turn, day and night, day and night,

Constantly turning and turning, and crying out."

Rumi