I Am So Glad

Start seeing everything as God

But keep it a secret.

Become like a man who is awestruck

and nourished,listening to a golden nightingale

sing in a beautiful foreign language

while God nests invisibly upon its tongue.

Hafiz, who can you tell in this world 

That when a dog runs up to you

wagging it's ecstatic tail,

you bend down and whisper in it's ear, 

"Beloved, I am so glad that you are happy to see me!

Beloved, I am so glad, so very glad, that you have come."

.......

This wonderful poem, by Hafiz, invites us to see God in everything and everyone.  I love his telling of how he sees God, the Beloved, in his dog. What if we too could see with such single eyes?  What a world it would be, all alive with God!

I have a friend who, when he was a little boy, suddenly had his inner eye opened, and he could see the life stream flowing through a tree.  It was, he says, as if he saw into the tree, where the sap was flowing through every leaf, every branch, the trunk, down to the roots and back again.  It was alive with the light of life.

Jesus says, "If your eye is single, your whole body will be lightsome."  Contemplation gives us that single eye, that good eye that allows us to see into the inner suchness of all things. Hafiz is showing us just how this is done.

I called through your door,

"The mystics are gathering in the street.  

Come out!"

"Leave me alone.  I'm sick."

"I don't care if you're dead!  

Jesus is here, and he wants 

to resurrect somebody!"

-Rumi

Out beyond ideas

of wrongdoing and  rightdoing,

there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase,

each other doesn't make any sense.

-Rumi

A pilgrim was walking a long road one day

when he passed by what seemed to be a monk 

sitting in a field.  Nearby men were working 

on a stone building.

"You look like a monk," the pilgrim said.

"I am that," said the monk.

"Who is that working on the abbey?"

"My monks," he said, "I am the abbot."

"It is good to see a monastery going up these days," said the pilgrim.

"As a matter of fact, they're tearing it down," said the abbot.

"Whatever for?" asked the pilgrim.

"So that we can see the sun rise at dawn," said the abbot