Mar 20 | Days for Roses and Jasmines (Radical Love Journal #4)

We are:

Drunk

head-whirling

rogue

love-glance playing

Who in this whole town isn’t like us

like this?

Hafez:

Don’t sit for a moment

without wine

and a beloved for the ages

These are the days for roses

and jasmines

Holy days

-Hafez

These days? These days of terror and social-distancing and hoarding and racism and pain?

Somehow, despite so much, my stubbornness in faith has always continued. I call it stubbornness because I don’t see it as a virtue. A virtue is something intentionally picked up and carried like a joyful burden. My faith is a joyful burden, but only because I seem incapable of letting it go. On the most hopeless days of my life, when I felt the most alone and solitary on the face of the earth, I still had at least some energy for annoyance: Where are you? Why aren’t you with me like you promised? Do you even exist?

It’s not that having the thoughts is anathema to me. I’ve never been particularly concerned with talking “appropriately” to God, because I think God’s quite far beyond the odd little social conventions we have among one another. It’s more a deep inner struggle, one that refuses to let go, that refuses to accept silence as the end.

You promised love. You promised strength. You promised and I shall wrestle you until you bless me. Jacob ain’t got nothing on me.

I refuse to sit without wine and my beloved.

The last few days have been a roller coaster of emotion. Sometimes there have been tears, sometimes a love and a gratitude so strong I thought it would rip me in half. Praying with colleagues over Zoom. Listening to my Hinenites, the women of the intentional community where I serve as director, talk with relief about how glad they are to be together. Catching up with old friends all over the world. And sometimes, despair.

But this is all as one expects.

Look:

love mingles with lovers

See:

spirit mingling with body

How long will you see life

as “this”

and “that”?

“Good”

and “bad”?

Look at how this

and that

are mingled

How long will you speak of

“this world”

and “that world”?

See this world

and that world

mingling

Rumi

Today, with that same sense of defiance, I tidied my balcony. I swept and threw away yard waste and debris. I arranged several pots. I prepared others to receive new seeds. I gave some a chance to burst forth secret life.

It helped a little.

But what helped ever more deeply was a sudden nighttime call from beautiful Eda, Masa, and Seemi, walking together on the beach – and the required 2 metres apart no less!

“Tomorrow is the Persian New Year!” Masa said. “AND Mother’s Day, AND World Poetry Day!”

“Oh!” I cried, full of delight. “Then let me read you some!”

“Yes!” they said. And then Seemi added, “Wait, don’t pick one. First, you say Bismillāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm, then let the book fall open.”

I did remember this from the previous year, and I did so. My fingers found Kharaqani.

Choose wholehearted surrender to God

and your journey home

will be

short

The first time I read it, and indeed when I read it for them, I found the words a bit chilling.

But that’s far too literal a reading, and indeed, even if it were, could returning home to my beloved, hidden in a garden with enough wine to last eternity, be such a frightful thing?

No, the mystic does not live a life of seeking Paradise by walking off cliffs or running into oceans — again, at least, not literally. The mystic does not live in “this world” and “that world.”

There is only the Presence which surrounds us, now as ever.

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