dealing with pain associated with causes and conditions in the past

 

~ Gabor Mate

a community of the spirit

 

There is a community of the spirit.

Join it, and feel the delight

of walking in the noisy street

and being the noise.

Drink all your passion,

and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes

to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,

if you want to be held.

Sit down in the circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel

the shepherd’s love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.

Don’t accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.

Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.

You moan, “She left me.” “He left me.”

Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.

Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison

when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.

Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always

widening rings of being.

~ Rumi

 from Selected Poems 

Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

the river of silence

 

You would know the secret of death.

 But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

 The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day 

cannot unveil the mystery of light. 

If you would indeed behold the spirit of death,

open your heart wide unto the body of life.

 For life and death are one, 

even as the river and the sea are one.

In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond; 

And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.

 Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity. 

Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd 

when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.

 Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, 

that he shall wear the mark of the king?

Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? 

And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath

 from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand

 and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. 

And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. 

And when the earth shall claim your limbs,

 then shall you truly dance.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet