Author: admin

Dear friends,

Please enjoy this beautiful Irish music and photos celebrating the longest night of the year in our Northern hemisphere.

In harmony and beauty,

Wakil David

From Richard Rohr’s blog on the Center for Action and Contemplation site.

Mirabai Starr writes in her book God of Love [One of my favorite books in the world – Wakil]:

The unifying theme in [Judaism, Christianity, and Islam] is that God loves us unconditionally. . . . A hadith [saying] of the Prophet Muhammad expresses the unconditional love of God: Allah says, “Take one step towards me, I will take ten steps towards you. Walk towards me, I will run towards you” (Hadith Qudsi).

The great Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan [1882–1927] placed special emphasis on the sacred phrase Ishq Allah Ma’bud Allah, which he translated as “God is Love, Lover, and Beloved.” [1] In Love, Human and Divine, Inayat Khan writes, “The Sufis say that the reason of the whole creation is that the perfect Being wished to know Himself, and did so by awakening the love of His nature and creating out of it His object of love, which is beauty.”. . .

This love dance is not some rarified state reserved for long-dead saints and the occasional living master. We do not have to go insane with longing. Few of us will relinquish the last traces of ego and walk away from our life in the world. [But] we can feed the fire of divine love by cultivating simple practices that expand our hearts and raise our consciousness, such as meditation and chanting, reciting ancient prayers or conversing with the Beloved, in silence or in lifting up our voices, in solitude or in community. “There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” says Rumi. [2]

Avideh Shashaani describes prayer within Islam as “a state of presence where the soul is in communion with God. ”Ablutions—ceremonial washing—are ways to open heart, mind, and body to God’s love:

By washing the face with water we put aside the five senses that are engaged with the world; the washing of the hands signifies giving to the world what belongs to the world; wetting the head means putting all thoughts aside, and wetting the feet means redirecting our steps from the world to God. It is after we have cleansed ourselves of our interactions with the world that we are able to stand before God and declare our intention to enter the heart and walk on the straight path that leads to the Divine presence. [3]

[1] Inayat Khan, A Sufi Message of Spiritual Liberty (London: The Theosophical Publishing Society, 1914), 29.

[2] Mirabai Starr, God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Monkfish Book Publishing: 2012), 60-61,136-137.

[3] Avideh Shashaani, “An Islamic Perspective onTransgression: Oneness,” “Transgression,” Oneing, vol. 2, no. 1 (CAC Publications: 2014), 25.

I find myself more and more often sitting with my brothers and sisters who are sinking into despair and who ask me why they should continue to care, continue to hope, continue to even get up each morning.

I understand this place, and I honor it and believe we have to be willing to feel that grief.

Yet there is indeed hope.

Today I wanted to share a song from Charlie Murphy with Jami Sieber and the Pat Wright Total Experience Gospel Choir as a reminder that “no one can hold back the dawn…”

And to give us all something to grab onto and to which we can lend our hearts and hands and voices to be the light in the world, and to help usher in the new world here is an inspiring piece by Naomi Klein on the Green New Deal.

Dear brothers and sisters – let’s make this happen!

Beloved friends,

Perhaps the hardest practice in these distracting times is to simply breathe and remember presence. There is much work to be done, yet we need to be willing to accept where we stand and forgive ourselves when we fall or feel we may have fallen short.

We distract ourselves in our pain. We distract ourselves because we just can’t hear another story of injustice, fear, and horror. We use our toys, our media, our mind-numbing day to day routines, drugs, alcohol, or just not managing to get up in the morning. It is easy to understand why. 

In the end the solution lies in the courageous parting of the veils; the willingness to engage despite the pain; the conviction that although the work we do can seem futile and not nearly enough, it is like the intrinsic hope of the seeds floating on the autumn winds, the salmon fighting up the stream to die, the pieces of onion, garlic, and potato we push into the cold, wet soil. If we can allow ourselves space to simply be with whatever is present in this moment, we may step into the next moment a little lighter and with a bit more grace and compassion for ourselves and the rest of creation.

Here are some poems that speak well to this idea:

Forget about enlightenment.
Sit down wherever you are
And listen to the wind singing in your veins.
Feel the love, the longing, the fear in your bones.
Open your heart to who you are, right now,
Not who you would like to be,
Not the saint you are striving to become,
But the being right here before you, inside you, around you.
All of you is holy.
You are already more and less
Than whatever you can know.
Breathe out,
Touch in,
Let go.

By John Welwood

This World

I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is a dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(Why I Wake Early)