Poetry Chaikhana Blog

Every word of every tongue
by Fakhruddin Iraqi

English version by Unknown

Every word of every tongue is
Love telling a story to her own ears.
Every thought in every mind,
She whispers a secret to her own Self.
Every vision in every eye,
She shows her beauty to her own sight.
Every smile on every face,
She reveals her own joy for herself to enjoy.

Love courses through everything,
No, Love is everything.
How can you say, there is no love,
when nothing but Love exists?
All that you see has appeared because of Love.
All shines from Love,
All pulses with Love,
All flows from Love–
No, once again, all IS Love!

/ Image by Edward Zulawski /

Every word of every tongue is
Love telling a story to her own ears.

I love this opening statement. It reminds me of an insight that completely overtook me during a period of intense spiritual practice several years ago. I summed it up this way–

Don’t take your joys and suffering personally.
We are — all of us — stories
      told by God
      to himself
      to illuminate himself.

We think we are… something. We imagine we exist as solid beings with supremely important events that happen to us. And, on one level, that is perfectly true. But if that’s the entire reality we imagine for ourselves, we’ve missed a deeper — and truer — reality, which is that we are an insubstantial play of awareness that flows through the universe. Not separate awareness-es, but a single flowing awareness that permeates everything. And that awareness expresses itself through movement and interaction that form what we might call stories. These stories contribute to universal self-illumination. Sometimes those stories are celebratory. Sometimes they are heartbreakingly tragic. But, when we stop identifying with the unfolding events, when we stop taking them personally but engage with a sense of presence and an open heart, we witness a surprising throughline of… joy, delight and, as Iraqi states, Love. Utter, all-embracing love.

(Notice that Iraqi refers to this Love as “she,” “her,” feminine language we too often miss out on in our descriptions of the divine — my own quote above, included. It should be obvious to all serious spiritual seekers that the Eternal is not defined by gender, but the limitations of language tend to require genderizing. When we restrict ourselves exclusively to male references to God, however, we have blinded ourselves to half of the divine reality. A part of the spirit becomes starved. On a societal level, suppression of women becomes conceivable, since men are seen as god-like while women are not. Qualities commonly associated with the feminine principle are repressed or regarded as useless, qualities like compassion, empathy, kindness, community, service. Not only do we need more prominent women spiritual leaders, we need to restore the feminine in our language of God. Iraqi’s meditation here is one of many contributions toward restoring that balance.)

Every thought in every mind,
She whispers a secret to her own Self.

Every vision in every eye,
She shows her beauty to her own sight.

Every smile on every face,
She reveals her own joy for herself to enjoy.

To the mystic in communion there is a sense of the universe as being comprised not of individuals engaged in individual actions, but of one Being engaged in internal interplay — but with an countless variety of individual points-of-view.

Love courses through everything,
No, Love is everything.

This, I think, is the heart of Iraqi’s insight. Too often we feel that the universe is loveless or that we ourselves struggle to feel love. But love in the sense that Iraqi uses, divine love, is not a feeling that comes and goes like an emotion. Love is not something we can be bereft of.

How can you say, there is no love,
when nothing but Love exists?

When we look deeply, we find that love is the foundational matter, the stuff we are all made of and exist in.

In our spiritual strivings we may cultivate a vision of a divine love that quietly touches everyone and everything. That is a basically true description, but if we want to be more precise, we can’t say that love touches or runs through everything, because that suggests that this divine essence is something separate and foreign. Everything is an expression of this divine Love presence. This love does not actually surround us or fill us. In the most real sense, it is us. We are it. Everything is.

Everything we think of as existence, all the seemingly separate beings and countless objects, is really a game of appearances upon the surface of this ocean of being that is love.

All that you see has appeared because of Love

Let me emphasize that this is not merely the conceptual theorizing of philosophers or theologians, it is directly perceived in the deepest states of communion. Love is. And it is the fundamental fact of existence. Mystics feel this love as a profound, joyful interconnection with all things. The immense compassion that results is actually a form of self-awareness, for we all exist within the same shared being. Love is perceived in every cell and by all the senses. The tongue tastes it as a heavenly sweetness. The eye sees it as a golden-white ocean of light (“All shines from Love”). And the heart blooms like a summer rose.

All flows from Love–
No, once again, all IS Love!

Have a beautiful day!

Recommended Books: Fakhruddin Iraqi

Poetry for the Spirit: Poems of Universal Wisdom and Beauty	The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry	Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (Classics of Western Spirituality)	Love’s Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition

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A fish cannot drown in water
by Mechthild of Magdeburg

English version by Jane Hirshfield

A fish cannot drown in water,
A bird does not fall in air.
In the fire of creation,
God doesn’t vanish:
The fire brightens.
Each creature God made
must live in its own true nature;
How could I resist my nature,
That lives for oneness with God?

— from The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, by Stephen Mitchell

/ Image by kopita /

I missed sending a poem last week. I have been especially busy with my day job. I am actively editing a new book which Poetry Chaikhana will publish soon (and thinking a lot about haiku and enlightened awareness). And there was even a question for several weeks as to whether we would be moving. Life has been full! But when I go for more than a week without connecting with the Poetry Chaikhana community I feel I am missing something essential. I refer to the Poetry Chaikhana as a community because that’s what you are to me — a community, my community. Collectively, you are my home. Is that an odd thing to say? I have had the most wonderful correspondence with several of you. With others we share the occasional short, friendly note sent back and forth. But it’s not entirely about communication on that level. Even with those of you who quietly receive my poem emails without direct correspondence, I feel a connection, a shared exchange. I find nourishment in my time with all of you. I feel something vital and meaningful, a special energy shared in all directions through these poem emails and blog posts. I hope you feel it too.

I didn’t want to wait until the end of the new week to reconnect, so here’s a Monday poem…

A fish cannot drown in water,
A bird does not fall in air.

Variations on this metaphor are used in every culture. It’s simple, but such an important reminder. We are inherently in our element. Notice how some part of our mind instinctively comes to rest and uncoils at this reminder?

In the fire of creation,
God doesn’t vanish:
The fire brightens.

We have a tendency to be overwhelmed by the intensity of life… the “fire of creation.” In that overwhelm we often have a self-protective psychic reflex to wall out the things and experiences we label as painful. We create a mental separation and tell ourselves, “This is me. And that out there is the pain.” That’s natural, right? In extreme cases, maybe it’s even necessary — in the moment.

The problem with that in the long term is that, over time, as we live and experience more, we wall off more and more until we inhabit a fragmented psychic landscape. And, in that fragmentation, we lose the vision of unity. This is how God seems to “vanish” in the fire of creation. This is how we lose our connection with the fundamental ground of being and forget our true nature.

BUT- through spiritual practice, through profound self-acceptance, through fearless observation, those psychic walls come tumbling down. And then, all at once, the vision comes, and we are filled with its light!

Like a fish in water and a bird in the air, the Eternal lives and moves through all of creation. Material reality is the medium of expression for the Immaterial. It is That, and nothing less, which is the all-pervading animating warmth and life of all things. When we rediscover it, all of creation shines.

How could I resist my nature,
That lives for oneness with God?

So often spiritual seekers struggle with the question of how to find God, how to get to heaven, how to attain salvation, or enlightenment, or union… What are they really? Do they even have value in ‘real life’? But Mechthild reminds us that it is our very nature to seek that unity. The real key is to simply stop resisting our nature. Seekers strive, but saints get out of the way.

Recommended Books: Mechthild of Magdeburg

Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women	Poetry for the Spirit: Poems of Universal Wisdom and Beauty	The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry	German Mystical Writings: Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, and others	The Mystic in Love: A Treasury of Mystical Poetry
More Books >>

Mechthild of Magdeburg Germany (1207 – 1297) Timeline Christian : Catholic

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Song for Nobody
by Thomas Merton

A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.

A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.

Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.

(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)

A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.

— from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton

/ Image by Jonathan Thorne /

Let us sing a song… for nobody.

A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.

I imagine Thomas Merton on a morning walk through a dawn-lit field where nothing much is happening. Just some damp grasses and a few bright flowers waking to the sun. Those flowers stand there unnoticed, unseen until now, yet they carry such bold life, bright yellow petals radiant in the morning sun. They are an embodiment of light and spirit.

All of life, all of existence sings — but for whom?

The world dances with a golden light. Who is the real audience for this performance?

Perhaps the intended audience is God. Perhaps the flowers array themselves for their own private delight. But Merton says this song of light and spirit is for nobody because it is clearly not for him. He is utterly inconsequential to the scene. The flowers don’t care about him. They don’t adjust themselves to his presence. In fact, he is the one who is unnoticed, not the flowers.

(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)

Enraptured by this moment of beauty, to which he is a non-entity, Merton disappears. Thought ceases, the mind quiets and brings to a halt its endless naming and categorizing. There is just stillness and the moment witnessed. That is when the ecstatic moment of awakening occurs — O, wide awake!

A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.

In this state of no-mind and no-self, we, along with Merton, are somehow profoundly alive! Awake, we see the world, perhaps for the first time, as it truly is — a golden heaven. And that heaven sings all around us, all the time! For whom? For no one in particular. Life sings to life. Spirit sings because it is spirit. The nature of being is song and light and life. When we quiet the busy mind and drop our own self-importance, we too join in that living symphony.

Have a beautiful day!

Recommended Books: Thomas Merton

Selected Poems of Thomas Merton	The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton	A Thomas Merton Reader	The Strange Islands: Poems by Thomas Merton	Thomas Merton Monk & Poet: A Critical Study

Thomas Merton US (1915 – 1968) Timeline Christian : Catholic

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Giving
by Kahlil Gibran

You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.”
The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.
They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.
Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights, is worthy of all else from you.
And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.
And what desert greater shall there be, than that which lies in the courage and the confidence, nay the charity, of receiving?
And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their wealth naked and their pride unabashed?
See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving.
For in truth it is life that gives unto life — while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.

— from The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran

/ Image by Cristian Bernal /

This week I have been thinking about the suffering and cruelty embodied by the immigrant detention camps along the southern US border. I found myself turning to this poem by Gibran, himself an immigrant to the the US…

Whom do we help? To whom do we give? Which people do we choose to care for and consider part of our community?

It seems a reasonable response to say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.” The problem with such a reasonable approach is that reason, for all its usefulness, is stuck in the head. The questions of giving and connection are questions for the heart, not the head. And the heart knows what the head does not:

They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.

We don’t give to help the deserving. Everyone is deserving. And, ultimately, we don’t give to help those in need. We give to help ourselves, because giving is essential to our nature, while non-giving is a form of death.

When we work deeply with service and giving as part of our spiritual path, we begin to understand that the alleviation of want and the sharing of resources is not enough. That surface approach is usually a sign of ego’s touch, a way to crown oneself as the giver. We haven’t yet discovered what it means to be worthy to give. Seen clearly, there is no personal merit in giving. It is not about “karma points” or buying our way into heaven. Giving is our nature. Giving is who we are. It is what we do when we are true to ourselves. Giving and caring and help are the natural flow of life, and we are part of that life. When we give we have simply ceased to constrict our own spirit… and then our hearts untighten and we can witness life flowing through us all.

For in truth it is life that gives unto life — while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.

We should daily ask ourselves, “What gift can I give?”

Recommended Books: Kahlil Gibran

The Prophet	The Beloved: Reflections on the Path of the Heart	Broken Wings	Jesus the Son of Man	Kahlil Gibran: His Life & World
More Books >>

Kahlil Gibran Lebanon/US (1883 – 1931) Timeline Christian Secular or Eclectic

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