Mysticism and Spirituality Circle

[With gratitude to dear Sufi sister Tarana who posted the stories below recently on her Facebook feed]

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A most poignant and important message in these challenging times is to remember to notice the many teachers we are gifted with in each moment. It is said that the Hindu elephant god Ganesh, as well as being a clearer of obstacles may also choose to gift us with the obstacles and trials that will enhance our understanding of our place and work in this precious life.

Dear sister Tarana shared the following that I pass on to you as a perfect example of this profound truth.

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One of the great Sufi Masters, Junaid, was asked this when he was dying. His chief disciple came close to him and asked, Master, you are leaving us. One question has always been in our minds butwe could never gather courage enough to ask you. Who was your Master? This has been a great curiosity among your disciples because we have never heard you talk about your Master.

Junaid opened his eyes and said, It will be very difficult for me to answer because I have learned from almost everybody. The whole existence has been my Master. I have learned from every event that has happened in my life. And I am grateful to all that has happened, because out of all that learning I have arrived.

Junaid said, Just to satisfy your curiosity I will give you three instances.

Dog and the Begging Bowl

Once, I was very thirsty and I was going towards the river carrying my begging bowl, the only possession I had. When I reached the river a dog rushed, jumped into the river, started drinking.

I watched for a moment and threw away my begging bowl, because it is useless. A dog can do without it. I also jumped into the river, drank as much water as I wanted. My whole body was cool because I had jumped into the river. I sat in the river for a few moments, thanked the dog, touched his feet with deep reverence because he had taught me a lesson.

I had dropped everything, all possessions, but there was a certain clinging to my begging bowl. It was a beautiful bowl, very beautifully carved, and I was always aware that somebody might steal it. Even in the night I used to put it under my head as a pillow so nobody could snatch it away. That was my last clinging-the dog helped. It was so clear: if a dog can manage without a begging bowl, I am a man, why can’t I manage? That dog was one of my Masters.

The Patient Thief

Secondly, he continued, I lost my way in a forest and by the time I reached the nearest village that I could find, it was midnight. Everybody was fast asleep. I wandered all over the town to see if I could find somebody awake to give me shelter for the night, until finally I found one man. I asked him, It seems only two persons are awake in the town, you and I. Can you give me shelter for the night?

The man said, I can see from your gown that you are a Sufi monk. [The word Sufi comes from the word ‘suf’ which means wool, a woolen garment. The Sufis have used the woolen garment for centuries; hence they are called Sufis because of their garment.] The man said, I can see you are a Sufi and I feel a little embarrassed to take you to my home. I am perfectly willing, but I must tell you who I am. I am a thief. Would you like to be a guest of a thief?

For a moment, I hesitated. The thief said, Look, it is better I told you. You seem hesitant. The thief is willing but the mystic seems to be hesitant to enter into the house of a thief, as if the mystic is weaker than the thief. In fact, I should be afraid of you. You may change me, You may transform my whole life! Inviting you means danger, but I am not afraid. You are welcome. Come to my home. Eat, drink, go to sleep, and stay as long as you want, because I live alone and my earning is enough. I can manage for two persons. And it will be really beautiful to chit-chat with you of great things. But you seem to be hesitant?

And then I became aware that it was true. I asked to be forgiven. I touched the feet of the thief and said, Yes, my rootedness in my own being is yet very weak. You are really a strong man and I would like to come to your home. And I would like to stay a little longer, not only for this night. I want to be stronger myself!

The thief said, Come on! He fed the Sufi, gave him something to drink, helped him to prepare for sleep and he said, Now I will go. I have to do my own thing. I will come back early in the morning. Early in the morning the thief came back. Junnaid asked, Have you been successful?The thief said, No, not today, but I will see tomorrow.

And this happened continuously, for thirty days: every night the thief went out, and every morning he came back empty-handed. But he was never sad, never frustrated–no sign of failure on his face, always happy –and he would say, It doesn’t matter. I tried my best. I could not find anything today again, but tomorrow I will try. And, God willing, it can happen tomorrow if it has not happened today.

After one month I left, and for years I tried to realize the ultimate, and it was always a failure. But each time I decided to drop the whole project I remembered the thief, his smiling face and his saying, God willing, what has not happened today may happen tomorrow.

Junaid said, I remembered the thief as one of my greatest Masters. Without him I would not be what I am.

The Lit Candle

And third, he said, I entered into a small village. A little boy was carrying a lit candle, obviously going to the small temple of the town to put the candle there for the night.

And Junaid asked, Can you tell me from where the light comes? You have lighted the candle yourself so you must have seen. What is the source of light?

The boy laughed and he said, Wait! And he blew out the candle in front of Junaid. And he said, You have seen the light go. Can you tell me where it has gone? If you can tell me where it has gone I will tell you from where it has come, because it has gone to the same place. It has returned to the source.

And Junaid said, I had met great philosophers but nobody had made such a beautiful statement: It has gone to its very source.

Everything returns to its source finally.

Moreover, the child made me aware of my own ignorance. I was trying to joke with the child, but the joke was on me. He showed me that asking foolish questions like from where has the light come is not intelligent. It comes from nowhere, from nothingness, and it goes back to nowhere, to nothingness.

Junaid said, I touched the feet of the child. The child was puzzled. He said, Why you are touching my feet? And I told him, You are my Master–you have shown me something. You have given me a great lesson, a great insight.
Since that time, Junaid said, I have been meditating on nothingness and slowly, slowly I have entered into nothingness. And now the final moment has come when the candle will go out, the light will go out. And I know where I am going – to the same source. I remember that child with gratefulness. I can still see him standing before me, blowing out the candle.

No situation is without a lesson, no situation at all.

In our hemisphere and our culture, the new year has begun. You, like me, might feel a mixture of trepidation and even despair, along with the hope and faith that is taught to us by the only true scripture, the scripture of nature (from the 3rd of the ten Sufi thoughts by Hazrat Inayat Khan – “There is One Holy Book, the sacred manuscript of nature, the only scripture which can enlighten the reader.”).

As ordinary mystics, as Mirabai Starr teaches us in her new book, we hold that balance, acknowledging both the sorrow and the joy. And we remember that we live in mystery where the future is unknown, and the past is gone. We breathe gratitude, hope, and our willingness to serve with every new inhalation and breathe out our fears, giving them to the earth that will hold, heal, compost, and recycle them as medicine and sustenance. Inshallah.

The following poem comes from one of the ascended ones of our time, Sophie Strand. Her poetry reminds us again to stay soft and open and to be in radical acceptance and surrender. May it be so.

I wanted to share this magnificent piece written by Sabura, the widow of Wali Ali, one of the first students of Murshid Samuel Lewis (aka Sufi Sam), the founder of the Ruhaniat Sufi order. It was shared this week on our Sufi teachers mailing list. It is said that Sam’s favorite hymn for this time of year was “Oh Holy Night.”

Here are the lyrics – https://www.letras.com/christmas-carols/834504/ – and here’s a beautiful rendition by the Pentatonics on YouTube of the hymn – https://youtu.be/ReJAU2mXm8w?si=QY7GQ-uHLxA5pHlC

Here is Sabura’s message:

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It is quiet on this Christmas Eve. The sky is night-ringed, scattered with stars and the light of a cold, waning moon. I’m thinking of Christmases past, of how Wali loved to sing along, unapologetically off tune, to all the Christmas carols, his joy and heart the real music. He often shared stories of caroling around the neighborhood at the Mentorgarten with Murshid Sam and the gladness in it. ‘O Holy Night’ was a carol he particularly liked for the lines,

Fall on your knees
Hear the angel voices.

Putting the potency of his deep voice and body into the music, he’d stand in our kitchen here at 410 and sing out those two lines when the time came for them, a la Murshid Sam who, he said, indicated that one should heed the imperative and actually fall on one’s knees. I have a remarkable image etched in memory of my large and lovely husband falling heavily to his knees in the kitchen doorway, face upturned, arms outstretched, half-joking, half-serious, as the music played. For the merest of moments the walls receded and we were all gazing through the mystery of an angelic, heart-strewn sky.

I have often thought back to this somatic directive. The pliable, bending knee as sacred portal, ancient meniscal doorway ushering us into intimate contact with the receiving earth, its textures and radiance, its damp, fragrant, life-giving support, meeting us halfway, as we fall, as we fall into the sublime humus of our own being.

“Fall” and “hear” in their simultaneity invite the beautiful implication that surrender is not an act of will, not something ‘we’ do but rather the Beloved’s response to the grace of who we are. We precede ourselves.

Those of us navigating our own private winters know this. And the body as cathedral in which one imagines that the sob or sigh that issues forth in falling to one’s knees…as the angel voices themselves, their incandescence and beauty no less than the humble recognition of our own holy pathos. That moment our deepest suffering makes contact with God’s deepest nature and knowing the two as one hints at the terrible, tangible magnificence that is the Beloved.

Fall on your knees
Hear the angel voices

May the receiving earth find its numinous way to each one of us this season and beyond.

Love, Sabura

In this spinning, hectic life it is sometimes hard to even imagine slowing down enough to experience anything like stillness.

And yet, nearly all spiritual paths teach about the importance of precious moments in contemplation.

In fact, until we allow ourselves to quiet the mind and settle into the silence, it can be nearly impossible to listen to and learn from that still small voice of the Divine.

And it is from that guidance that we can learn faith, patience and hope.

“Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.”

– Pablo Neruda

Let’s stop for one second,’ wrote Pablo Neruda in his poem A Callarse, which is translated as Keeping Quiet or Keeping Still. The poem is a manifesto for the very personal and very political act of doing nothing. In it, he imagined a world that stops to catch its breath for a moment, in the way that much of the planet is currently on hiatus from the hum of its usual activity, and he pondered the ‘sudden strangeness’ that would emerge. A beautiful and touching poem about the sadness of ‘never understanding ourselves’ and how simply stopping and listening to the silence might bring us together with a new kind of wisdom.

Keeping Quiet

And now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth
let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas,
wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about,
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve,
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

It seems these days that the most compelling and front-and-center lessons are all about radical acceptance and surrender. That has certainly shown up more often in this blog over the last few weeks and months.

I’ve experienced times when the world seems to have flipped over or isn’t recognizable.

The day my mother died, I remember standing in the airport after rushing home from a conference on the news that she was dying. I had just learned that she passed while I was flying home. I stood there in the Arrival pick up, weeping uncontrollably. Attracting some stares and one person who asked if she could help.

As I looked at all the traffic and all the people, I couldn’t believe they were still going about their lives as usual. How did they not recognize that the world had just disintegrated and been pieced back together in strange, unfamiliar ways?

I have had similar experiences after other great losses. The most recent one was on the morning of November 6th, when I woke up to hear that a majority of my fellow citizens had decided we needed an autocratic felon and disruptor to be our next president.

That event has undoubtedly led to this ongoing need to consider surrender and radical acceptance.

So, when I was sent this video of a speech by the remarkable and wise Brene Brown, I decided I wanted to share it here.

Let It End, Let It Hurt, Let It Heal, Let It Go: Embrace the Power of Moving On BRENE BROWN SPEECH

This week, I watched a memorial for a dear friend who recently moved on to fly to new places.

I watched as the golden sun moved on further to the south and left us in the cold darkness.

I’ve witnessed the leaves letting go to move on and make soil and room for new sprouts.

I’ve heard precious stories on our End of Life Conversations podcast of so many compassionate beloveds who share about their caring for, loving, and holding humans and more than humans who move on.

This poem spoke deeply to me in this time of reflection on all that moves on but is still with us and remembering the promise of resurrection.

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I’m Right Here by John Roedel

“I miss you.”
“I’m right here next to you”
“But I can’t see you.”
“Then close your eyes and feel me.”
“Oh. Oh. Oh. There you are.”

“Here I am, my love. I am here.”

your beloved
~ they aren’t gone

~ they are right here

it’s just that they have changed forms

it’s just that they were the lake that eventually became the rolling thunderhead

it’s just that they were the seed that eventually became the lush apple tree

it’s just that they were the fistful of wet clay that eventually became the cup of eternity

your beloved
~they aren’t gone

~ they are right here

and they’re holding you as you tremble

and they’re dancing in the swirling galaxies of tears that are forming in your eyes

and they’re whispering your name softly between the silent gaps of your thumping heartbeat

and they’re gently blowing on the hairs that are rising on your arms right now

your beloved
~they aren’t gone

~ they are right here

and they know that you love them still and forever

because love is an endless string of warm sunlit
memories tied between two people

because love is a circle drawn on the wall of time
in permanent red marker

because love is the act of holding hands with
another person and counting to infinity by twos

your beloved
~they aren’t gone

~ they are right here

and they are leaving love notes for you everywhere

that over and over and
in a hundred million different ways
say the exact same thing:

“we have not been separated
we have not been separated
we have not been separated”

your beloved
~they aren’t gone

~ they are right here

and they want me to tell you something:

they are
so proud
of you

~ john roedel

This week I’ve been reflecting on what it means to truly surrender. As we look at the suffering planet and our suffering siblings, human and more than human, how do we say, “OK, I accept that?”

I heard an interview with my friend and teacher to many, Mirabai Starr, where she was discussing this. I think what she said was right on, and I’ll paraphrase what particularly resonated.

On our mystic path (that she believes all of us are on, whether we know it or acknowledge it or not), we truly only have this moment. The past is only memories, and the future is forever unknown. And so, we can choose to accept everything that is real in this moment, including the danger, the fear, the despair, and the pain. Also included in equal measure are love, joy, new births, laughter, and community.

But being in that state of surrender and radical acceptance doesn’t imply we just sit back and give up. Our work does not change. There is still injustice that we must address. There are still people hurting that we must succor. There is still a planet suffering that we must care for. There are still leaves falling so that new life can arise.

I love the lyrics from a song by Carrie Newcomer:
“Cause leaves don’t drop they just let go
And make a space for seeds to grow
And every season brings a change
A tree is what a seed contains
To die and live is life’s refrain”

So, while I choose to live in the moment in radical acceptance and surrender, I also wake up each morning asking for guidance toward the work I can do to benefit life on this gorgeous planet.

Here are two poems that say this well. The first is a poem I wrote as my first effort to create poetry in Espanol. The second is from the wonderful poet, David Whyte.

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Entrego todo (I surrender all)

El arroyo no puede volver
No quiere volver
No necesita volver

The creek can’t go back
Doesn’t want to go back
Doesn’t need to go back

Sólo es
Fluye
Limpia
Pop
It only is
It flows
It cleans

Belleza casi dolorosa
Exquisito, profundo, misterioso
Ahogando todos mis sentidos

Beauty nearly painful
Exquisite, profound, mysterious
Drowning all my senses

Creo que
Yo no puedo volver
No quiero volver
No necesito volver

I think
I cannot go back
Don’t want to go back
Don’t need to go back

Yo solo soy.
Entrego todo.

I only am.
I surrender all.

~ By Rev Wakil David Matthews

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SOMETIMES

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come
to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.

‘Sometimes’ From ‘Everything Is Waiting for You’
and ‘River Flow: New and Selected Poems’
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Not long ago an illuminated soul left us for the other side of the veil. Her name was Barbara Holmes and this week’s Center for Action and Contemplation newsletter was a tribute to her wisdom.

All week, in one of those states of awareness when the synchronicities and connections rise like luminescent bubbles to decorate the swirling pond of my heart, I’ve encountered one after another conversation, essay, steam of thought; all reminding me to notice that we are not separate beings.

Thomas Moore notes, “The earth is not a platform for human life. It’s a living being. We’re not on it but part of it. It’s health is our health.”

In a poignant and timely reprint of a piece she wrote the last time the orange one rose to power, my dear friend Kathleen Basheera Ritchie in her I Lean Liminal blog said, “We may, through this means, discern the intimate omniscience of Nature—how everything is happening all at once, everywhere, in one all-encompassing, harmonious symphony. This realization effectively undermines belief in a hierarchy of Nature, especially one that positions ourselves at the top—even, somehow, above Nature. Adherence to such a system only exposes our ignorance.”

With all that wisdom echoing and splashing in my soul, the following from the CAC newsletter and Barbara Holmes, speaking to ways we can practice resetting our priorites to find the work that must be done to bring about that connected and sustainable works. It seemed important to share.

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We can contemplate and consider together. We can expand our spiritual and cosmic vocabulary and allow the mysteries of life to permeate every cell. We have waited long enough. It’s time to take the transcendent leap forward in hopes of personal and communal healing as well as a shared cosmic future. 
—Barbara Holmes

What Are Our Priorities?

Dr. Barbara Holmes and Rev. Donny Bryant hosted The Cosmic We podcast together for five seasons. They considered our cosmic relatedness as the organizing principle of the universe and interviewed guests in the overlapping fields of science, mysticism, spirituality, and the creative arts. In this episode, “Dr. B” shares the call she heard to shift her priorities in the latter half of her life.  

The journey of life is absolutely a sacred journey, but we don’t know that when we’re younger. We don’t want to think about life in terms of a sacred journey, because we don’t know for certain where we came from, and we don’t know for certain where we’re going…. 

In the everyday maelstrom of life, people don’t want to think about any of that. They just want to get through their day…. But when we get to the halfway point in our lives, we begin to realize that all the things that we have accumulated don’t mean a whole lot. We can’t take them with us when we die. As we age, we begin to take into account what really matters in life: family, relationships, love, commitment, service to others, all that matters…. It warms your heart to work with others. It changes who you are to lead with love….

I’m on the other side of fifty now, and all of my priorities have shifted. The ambition and all of the things that I was striving for don’t make a lot of sense at this point. The fulfillment comes in doing what you are led to do. In the Christian tradition, the Holy Spirit is supposed to lead you into all truth. I see the Holy Spirit as a guiding light—we’re walking by the path and there’s a lamp unto our feet that helps us to know what to do, how to do it, and to be still.   

This is where contemplation comes in. It is impossible to shift priorities if we are in a constant, busy, frenetic lifestyle. There has to be that pause, that breath, that waiting, that willingness to be still until we know. Be still and know—but the stillness doesn’t immediately lead to knowing. At first, we have to be still, and then we have to be patient until the knowing comes about. 

Read this meditation on cac.org.

After the horrible shock of the election last week, one thing I am thinking about is the intense need for us to find a way to reconnect with our siblings of all stripes. To do so, we have to remember the indigenous way of thinking where there is no separation between our souls and the energy and essence of everything we can sense.

Hazrat Inayat Khan, the great Sufi teacher says, “In man’s search for truth, the first lesson and the last is love. There must be no separation, no “I am” and “thou art not”. Until man has arrived at that selfless consciousness, he cannot know life and truth.”

And Richard Rohr in this week’s Daily Meditations, says “The greatest dis-ease facing us right now is our profound and painful sense of disconnection. Yet many are discovering that the Infinite Flow of the Trinity—and our practical, felt experience of this gift—offers the utterly grounded reconnection with God, with self, with others, and with our world.”

And he adds, “The whole gospel message is radical union with God, with neighbor, and even with ourselves. I think that’s why so many people are drawn to church each week—to receive communion and eventually, hopefully, realize that we are in communion.”

Randy and Edith Woodley are also quoted this week saying, “Traditional Native Americans feel a sense of interconnectedness at a deep level. In Indigenous thinking, there is no such thing as separation of one part of our life from another. ”

And I love this practice from James Finley that they offered this week:

Loving with the Mind of Christ

He will answer, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” —Matthew 25: 45

James Finley suggests that to put on the “mind of Christ” is to experience our connection to God and others, and to act accordingly:   

To enter the mind of Christ is to realize our oneness with the faces we see on television in the evening news. It is to realize we are one with that homeless person we saw going through the trash receptacle. The woman at the local market, the man who comes to check our gas meter, and all who have hurt us, abandoned us, and have otherwise wronged us, along with all the women and men we have never met—we are to realize that we are equally, fully one with every blessed one of them. We are to give witness to this awareness … and we are to put this love into action by the ways in which we treat others, and by what we are willing to do for them as expressions of our love for them.  

What comes through in the Gospels is that Jesus was someone to reckon with. There was a no-nonsense, straight-from-the-shoulder truthfulness about the way he related to others. He was not always necessarily nice. Jesus never said, “Blessed are the nice.” But Jesus was always loving to the core, and in being so he gave witness to our lifelong journey of learning to be loving to the core as well ….  

Entering the mind of Christ is not a premature, proclaimed love that merely clamps a lid on unacknowledged anger and hurt. It is not writing everyone a blank check of boundless love that pretends we are something we are not. It is rather learning day by day to be transformed in all that love is asking of us in learning to be a truly awake, Christlike human being…. A lifetime of recognizing and yielding to a Christlike love for all [people] … as children of God enlarges the heart to divine proportions.  

Read this meditation on cac.org.

This has been an exceptionally difficult week for many of us. There are so many responses out there that I won’t add my own, except to note that I am resting in practice, prayer, community, and “fierce unrelenting hope” (quote from Melanie Demore).

Instead, I will share this prose/poem that has been arising:

Tuesday night I prayed to the ancestors to save our country
Instead we received a possibly terminal diagnosis

Wednesday morning I woke up angry, depressed, and anxious
And cursed the ancestors for abandoning us.

Thursday morning I woke up passionate and dedicated to the fight
And asked the ancestors to forgive me.

Friday morning I woke up afraid for my children and my marginalized siblings
And I prayed for support and guidance and began the work.

Each day for the foreseeable future I will wake up facing this grief and fear
And, inshallah, I will remember my connection to the All and stand up again.