Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that
is a ring on the door.
Rumi

THE QUINTESSENCE OF LONELINESS
I am like a heroin addict
In my longing for the sublime state.

For that ground of Conscious Nothing
Where the Rose ever Blooms.

O, the Friend
has done me a great favor
And has so thoroughly ruined my life,

What else would you expect
Seeing God would do!

Out of the ashes of this broken frame
There is a noble rising son pining for death,
Because,

Since we first met, Beloved,
I have become a foreigner
To every world
Except that one
In which there is only You
Or - Me.

Now that the heart has held
That which can never be touched
My subsistence is a blessed
Desolation

And from that I cry for more loneliness.

I am lonely.
I am so lonely, dear Beloved,
For the quintessence of
Loneliness,

For what is more alone than God?

Hafiz,
What is more pure and alone,

Magnificently Sovereign,
Than God.

Hafiz

It doesn't matter that you've broken your vow
a thousand times. Still come,
and yet again, come.
Rumi

LONGING

Longing is the core of mystery.
Longing itself brings the cure.
The only rule is, Suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
and what you want to happen
in time, sacrificed.
Rumi

from Fidelity

Man and woman are like the earth, that brings forth flowers
in summer, and love, but underneath is rock.
Older than flowers, older than ferns, older than foraminiferae,
older than plasm altogether is the soul underneath.

And when, throughout all the wild chaos of love
slowly a gem forms, in the ancient, once-more-molten rocks
of two human hearts, two ancient rocks, a man's heart and a woman's,
that is the crystal of peace, the slow hard jewel of trust,
the sapphire of fidelity.
The gem of mutual peace emerging from the wild chaos of love.
D.H. Lawrence

MY EYES SO SOFT
Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you as few human
or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender,
My need of God absolutely clear.
Hafiz

WHO MAKES THESE CHANGES?

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and I fall in.

I should be suspicious
of what I want.
Rumi