Love and the Gentle Heart

Love and the gentle heart are one thing,

just as the poet says in his verse,

each from the other one as well divorced

as reason from the mind’s reasoning.

Nature craves love, and then creates love king,

and makes the heart a palace where he’ll stay,

perhaps a shorter or a longer day,

breathing quietly, gently slumbering.

Then beauty in a virtuous woman’s face

makes the eyes yearn, and strikes the heart,

so that the eyes’ desire’s reborn again,

and often, rooting there with longing, stays,

Till love, at last, out of its dreaming starts.

Woman’s moved likewise by a virtuous man. 

Dante Alighieri

Long to Return

“Once you have tasted flight, 

you will forever walk the earth 

with your eyes turned skyward, 

for there you have been, 

and there you will always long to return.” 

― Leonardo da Vinci

I Believe in All

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

In the Orchard

In the orchard and rose garden
I long to see your face.
In the taste of Sweetness
I long to kiss your lips.
In the shadows of passion
I long for your love

You are the Essence of the Essence,
The intoxication of Love.
I long to sing your praises
but stand mute
with the agony of wishing in my heart.


RUMI

As The Heart Opens

As the heart opens, I  feel you close.
I hear your patient beckoning.
Join me, I will take you to a place
Where there is no mystery.
Where the stars are born and the whispers of millenniums merge.
In the quiet chambers of your heart, open the doors.
Let the light illuminate and pour love into your heart.
Fill up your heart so that you may serve.
There are many who left maps of their journeysYou too shall follow.
Be patient and have faith.
Create the space for this sacred communion.
For this meditative conversation.
Stay a while.
I am with you.

Loving Tenderness

Loving tenderness abounds for all
from the darkest
to the most eminent one beyond the stars,

Exquisitely loving all
she bequeaths the kiss of peace
upon the ultimate King.


Hildegard of Bingen

The Temple of Love

The Temple of Love

Rumi

The temple of love is not love itself;
True love is the treasure,
Not the walls about it.
Do not admire the decoration,
But involve yourself in the essence,
The perfume that invades and touches you-
The beginning and the end.
Discovered, this replaces all else,
The apparent and the unknowable.
Time and space are slaves to this presence.

God Would Kneel

GOD WOULD KNEEL DOWN

St Francis of Assisi

I think God might be a little prejudiced.

For once He asked me to join Him on a walk
through this world,

and we gazed into every heart on this earth,
and I noticed He lingered a bit longer
before any face that was
weeping,

and before any eyes that were
laughing.

And sometimes when we passed
a soul in worship

God too would kneel
down.

I have come to learn: God
adores His
creation.

All the Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.

Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season

Onto the meadow and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.

Make a new watermark on your excitement

And love.

Like a blooming night flower,

Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness

And giving

Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence

Lie beside an equator

In your heart.

Greet Yourself

In your thousand other forms

As you mount the hidden tide and travel

Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven

Are sitting around a fire

Chatting

While stitching themselves together

Into the Great Circle inside of

You.

Hafiz

Hafiz Ghazal 353

Love of the Beloved and this wine, I will not leave behind

Repented a hundred times, but no more myself will bind.

Garden of Eden, Tree of Knowledge, and nymphs of Paradise

Will not compare to the clay of the abode of the undefined.

The lessons and affirmations of the wise are but one sign

I understood the sign, and need not repeat in my mind.

I am never aware of the secrets and state of my soul

Until myself in the midst of the tavern I find.

The worldly wise advised me to leave love behind

I need not fight myself, why make my soul misaligned?

Though appraised and judged by the citizens of my town,

I will not sing and dance upon the pulpit to the blind.

Hafiz the old Masters, the old Magi are wise and kind

Prostrated, with this dust I find myself entwined.

Love is the Flame

"Love is the flame which, when it blazes,
consumes everything other than the Beloved.
The lover wields the sword of Nothingness
in order to dispatch all but God:
consider what remains after Nothing.
There remains but God: all the rest is gone.
Praise to you, O mighty Love,
destroyer of all other “gods.”


--Rumi

The Flute of the Infinite

‎"The flute of the Infinite is played without ceasing,
and its sound is Love:
When Love renounces all limits, it reaches Truth.
How widely the fragrance spreads!
It has no end, nothing stands in its way."

--Kabir

On the Soul

Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds.

As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins.

I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

There is deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us.

Every moment when the individual feels invaded by it is memorable.

It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whosoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur.

The soul's health consists in the fullness of its reception.

For ever and ever the influx of this better and more universal self is new and unsearchable.

Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.

When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.


Ralph Waldo Emerson