July 31, 2025

 

July 30, 2025

We are guilty of many errors and many faults, But our worst crime is abandoning the children, Neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, His blood is being made, And his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer 'Tomorrow.' His name is 'Today.'

Gabriela Mistral

     There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word "occupation" is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.

Refaat Alareer, 

 5 Then the king will reply, “I tell you this: You did not help people who are my friends. They were not important people. But when you did not help them, you also did not help me.”

...I am the final goal of every race;
I am the storm-tossed spirit's resting place:
The messenger of sure and swift relief,
Welcomed with wailings and reproachful grief;
The friend of those that have no friend but me,
I break all chains, and set all captives free.
I am the cloud that, when Earth's day is done,
An instant veils an unextinguished sun;
I am the brooding hush that follows strife,
The waking from a dream that Man calls—Life!

~Florence Earle Coates, 

"Death," in Current Literature, 1889

Come, come, whoever you are.  Wanderer, idolator, worshipper of fire, come even though

you have broken your vows a thousand times,

Come, and come yet again. Ours is not a caravan of despair.

~ Jalal ad-Dīn Muhammad Rumi


The lines above are inscribed
on Rumi's shrine in Konya, Turkey.
Followers of Rumi call the day he passed away,
December 17, 1273,
his "Wedding Night"
because he was united with the Beloved.

This epitaph is also there,
and again are his words:

When we are dead,
seek not our tomb in the earth,
but find it in the hearts of men.

July 29, 2025

 If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially in ourselves. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble, “little,” and earnest will find it! 

A “perfect” person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than the ones who think they are totally above and beyond imperfection. It becomes rather obvious once we say it out loud. [4] 

Thérèse of Lisieux

Man craves winter in summer, and when winter comes, he likes it not, For he is never content with any state [of things], neither with poverty not with a life of plenty. May man be killed! How ungrateful he is! Whenever he obtains guidance, he spurns it.a

Jalaluddin Rumi

July 28, 2025

The Art of Suffering ~ Etty Hillesum 

Most of us in the West don't understand the art of suffering
and experience a thousand fears instead.  Man suffers most
through the idea of suffering, and through his fear of suffering.
We cease to be alive, being full of fear, bitterness, hatred and
despair.  Don't we live an entire life each one of our days,
and does it really matter if we live a few days more or less?
There is room for everything in a single life.

When I say I have come to terms with life, I don't mean I
have lost hope.  It is a question of living life from minute to
minute and taking suffering into the bargain.  But does it
matter if it is the Inquisition that causes people to suffer in
one century, and war and pogroms in another?

Suffering has always been with us, does it really matter in
what form it comes?  All that matters is how we bear it
and how we fit it into our lives.

I can sit for hours and know everything and bear everything
and grow stronger in the bearing of it.  And at the same time
feel sure life is beautiful and meaningful.  Despite everything.
But that does not mean that I am always filled with joy and
exaltation [about life and its circumstances].  I am often dog-
tired after standing in queues, but I know that this too is part
of life, and I know something inside me will never desert me...

We carry everything within us. God and Heaven and Hell and
Earth and Life and Death and all of history.  The externals are
simply so many props; everything we need is within us.  And
we have to take everything that comes; the bad with the good,
which does not mean we cannot devote our life to curing the
bad.  But we must know what motives inspire our struggle
[against] and we must begin with ourselves.

Living and dying, sorrow and joy, the blisters on my feet and
the jasmine behind the house, the persecution, the unspeakable
horrors - it is all as one in me, and I accept it all as one mighty
whole and begin to grasp it better, if only for myself, without
being able to explain to anyone else how it all hangs together.

If you destroy the ideas behind [suffering] which life lies
imprisoned within, you liberate your true life - and then you
will have the strength to bear real suffering...

Etty Hillesum
Jewish Mystic of the Holocaust
from: An Interrupted Life

~

July 27, 2025

       And when your soul, the flame, the spark, meets with the divine fuel that is so pure and so strong, it results in immense enlightenment: the enlightenment of God. Light upon light.

Noorun Alaa Noor

Zain Hashmi

("Noorun Alaa Noor" means "Light upon Light". 

It refers to a verse in the Quran, Surah An-Noor (24:35), which describes Allah as the Light of the heavens and the earth. This phrase symbolizes a profound spiritual enlightenment and continuous unfolding of divine knowledge and wisdom.)

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.” 

Melody Beattie

July 26, 2025

 “The whole universe is sum up in the Human Being. Devil is not a monster waiting to trap us, He is a voice inside. Look for Your Devil in Yourself, not in the Others.

Don’t forget that the one who knows his Devil, knows his God.”

Shams of Tabriz 

July 25 2025

 “I have learned to accept my responsibility and to forgive myself first, then to apologize to anyone injured by my misreckoning.

Maya Angelou

July 24, 2025

 Grace, in its essence, is a gift, an undeserved favor, and a source of hope and forgiveness. It's often associated with divine kindness and the ability to overcome life's challenges with strength and resilience. Grace can be found in moments of darkness, offering solace and a path towards wholeness. It's a transformative power that allows us to experience love and acceptance despite our imperfections.

Love is reckless; not reason. Reason seeks a profit. Loves comes on strong, consuming herself unabashed. Yet in the midst of suffering love proceeds like a millstone, hard surfaced and straight forward. Having died to self interest, she risks everything and asks for nothing. Love gambles away every gift God bestows. Without cause God gave us Being; without cause give it back again. Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion. Religion seeks grace and favor, but those who gamble these away are God's favorites, for they neither put God to the test nor knock at the door of gain and loss.

Rumi

It is unearned love–the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.
― Anne Lamott

Grace does not work like a penny in a slot machine. Grace will move you only when you want it to move you, and only when you let it move you. The supernatural order supposes the freedom of the natural order, but it does not destroy it.
― Fulton J. Sheen

July 23, 2025

"The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found... of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: erfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought. "

Authur Rimbaud

 

The Drunken Boat Authur Rimbaud

A Healing Rage

Valarie Kaur describes how the Sikh faith teaches the difference between rage stirred from personal frustration and rage that fights against injustice:  

In the Sikh tradition, rage, or krodh, is one of the five thieves, a destructive impulse that can hijack who we want to be. Krodh is often paired with the word kaam, which refers to unhealthy desire. Kaam krodh suggests that vengeful wrath is tied to desire: When the world denies what we want, rage rises in us. Guru Nanak calls it a corrosive salt that destroys the gold in us. At the same time, Guru Nanak spoke in fiery language against injustice. Rage, when consciously harnessed, is a force that connects us with our power to fight for others, and for ourselves. [1] 

July 22, 2025

 

July 21, 2025

July 20, 2025

 Love of God

One day, she was seen running through the streets of Basra carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When asked what she was doing, she said:

“I want to put out the fires of Hell, and burn down the rewards of Paradise. They block the way to God. I do not want to worship from fear of punishment or for the promise of reward, but simply for the love of God.”

Rabia al-Adawiyya (Rabia of Basra)

July 19, 2025

 John Donne

Darkness and Light

 John Donne

Darkness and Light

(John Milne Donald, Autumn Leaves: Glasgow Museums Resource Centre)

‘Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us.’[1]

The leaves are falling faster now, perhaps mostly fallen. Our clocks have gone back an hour and we are on Greenwich Mean Time. The polymath Edward Heron-Allen wrote in his journal on 22 May 1916, ‘The notable feature of the month is the establishment by law on the 20th of “summer time” which Willett, the originator of the idea, never lived to see introduced. At midnight on the 20th we all had to put our clocks on one hour, and in this way an hour of daylight is “added” to the day.’ And, five months later, he noted: ‘I do not think I have recorded that on 30 September we put our clocks back an hour and returned to Greenwich time.’[2]

William Willett, whose 1907 pamphlet, The Waste of Daylight, marked a crucial point in the advance towards ‘summer time’, had died from influenza on 4 March 1915, at the early age of 58, and is buried in St Nicholas churchyard in Chislehurst (as is his second wife.) The 1916 emergency law was passed to change the clocks twice a year as a measure to reduce energy and increase war production. It became a permanent feature when the Summertime Act was passed in 1925.

Leaves falling, darker days, the year in some ways closing down – but all these are in the natural order of things, as—or so we hope—the political covulsions, atrocities in Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere, are not. At least, as Jake Barnes says, at the close of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’

(John Berryman via The Paris Review)

‘Now there is further a difficulty with the light’, John Berryman wrote:

I am obliged to perform in complete darkness

operations of great delicacy

on my self.[3]

Currently those operations feature slow and sometimes painful analyses of my bafflement and confusion, not always helped by the Librarian’s daily bulletins from the battlefield that is the American election, often delivered in tones of appalled astonishment, while the phrase ‘batshit crazy!’ tends to recur.

What, in some senses, seems self-evident (one candidate sane, the other rather less so) is dwarfed by complexities and nuances almost invisible to us – we’re here and they’re. . . over there. I grasp, more or less, the fact that America is so divided a country now that neither side can—perhaps has no wish to—hear the other. But there is that other complication. While I can see that the appalling and spineless response of the Biden government to the conflict in the Middle East must repel a good many voters, it baffles me that those voters should think that withholding their vote from Harris (and thereby potentially contributing to her defeat) could somehow help the Palestinian people. Surely the precise opposite?

Well, we’ll know soon enough. People, eh? I think of Katherine Rundell writing that, ‘amid all Donne’s reinventions, there was a constant running though his life and work: he remained steadfast in his belief that we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle.’ And: ‘He thought often of sin, and miserable failure, and suicide. He believed us unique in our capacity to ruin ourselves. “Nothing but man, of all envenomed things,/Doth work upon itself with inborn sting”. He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute.’[4]

7/18/2025

 Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.

Aberjhani

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

Billy Graham

July 17,2025

Musings of a Soul 

  As I look around there's an eerie complacency of a inevitable (yet horrific) plan in motion to neutralize Hamas, through the systematic destruction, displacement and genocide against those inhabitants of Gaza, known as Palestinians.Campaign of brutality aren't new or unfortunately rare, take the following example from our own history.

The U.S. war in the Philippines lasted over three years. The total loss of life is unknown: at least 50,000 Filipino soldiers died and another 250,000 Filipinos died from famine or disease caused by the war. Over 4,200 American soldiers died as well. The U.S. also practiced forms of torture in this war, such as the “water cure.” This form of torture is now known as “water boarding.”

But the actions of our country as a complicit (seemingly) morally bankrupt supporter of these reprehensible actions by our so-called allies..

If as we say "The Universe is a Loving, Supportive Energy that Longs for Human growth, into a Benevolent Caretaker role inclusive of All Creation, (Sentient or Nonsentient)

For me, Grieving for All Victims affected by these acts of inhumanity by the Children of Earth against their Brothers and Sisters, is my act of pennance 

I'm certain the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, along with the Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu and every other Face of Truth are Weeping ~ Not Just for All Victims but especially for those unmoved and hard hearted, Those aware of, but unmoved by empathy charity and love.

July 16, 2025

Today has arrived, bringing a calm invitation to

experience all the verities and possibilities  present in each & Every moment. Eternity or Nirvana or Heaven can be realized, only in the Now.

PLEASE 

Take a Moment and Visit Home 

“The time is now, the place is here. Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for.”

Dan Millman 

           From The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

Alice Herz-Sommer

When we’re cracked open, we’re shown the tender fact that we’re all in this together. In that naked moment, we’re humbled and awed by the forces of grace that are always present, waiting to heal our heart.
Mark Nepo