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Browse through the Newest Additions to the One Journey Living Book
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The body is a device to calculate
the astronomy of the spirit.
Look through that astrolabe
and become oceanic.
You’re water. We’re the millstone.
You’re wind. We’re dust blown up into shapes.
You’re spirit. We’re the opening and closing of our hands.
You’re the clarity. We’re this language that tries to say it.
You’re joy. We’re all the different kinds of laughing.
Language does not touch the one who lives in each of us.
You are not a prophet, but go humbly on the way of the prophets, and you can arrive where they are. Don’t try to steer the boat. Don’t open a shop by yourself. Listen. Keep silent. You are not God’s mouthpiece. Try to be an ear, and if you do speak, ask for explanations.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
Those that make you return, for whatever reason,
to God’s solitude, be grateful to them.
Worry about the others, who give you
delicious comforts that keep you from prayer.
Friends are enemies sometimes,
and enemies friends.
A little time alone in your own room will prove more valuable than anything else that could even be given to you.
To be nothing is the precondition of being.
Die before ye die!
And if He closes before you the ways and passes all, He’ll show a hidden pathway which nobody has known.
But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth, without complicated explanation, so everyone will understand the passage. We have opened you.
Lovers do not themselves seek and yearn. In all the world there is no one seeking but He!
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
If the Beloved is everywhere,
the lover is a veil,
but when living itself becomes
the Friend, lovers disappear.
Waves broke. Awareness rose again and sent out a voice. It always happens like this. Sea turns on itself and foams. With every foaming bit another body, another being takes form. And when the sea sends word, each foaming body melts immediately back to ocean breath.
When the ocean surges,
don’t let me just hear it.
Let it splash inside my chest!
One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked.
A voice asked, “Who is there?”
He answered, “It is I.”
The voice said, “There is no room for Me and Thee.”
The door was shut.
After a year of solitude and deprivation he returned and knocked.
A voice from within asked, “Who is there?”
The man said, “It is Thee.”
The door was opened for him.
And watch two men washing clothes, one makes dry clothes wet. The other makes wet clothes dry. They seem to be thwarting each other, but their work is a perfect harmony. Every holy person seems to have a different doctrine and practice, but there’s really only one work.
All the particles in the world
Are in love and looking for lovers.
Pieces of straw tremble
In the presence of amber.
Don’t unstring the bow,
I am your four-feathered arrow
that has not been used yet.
I am a strong knifeblade word,
not some if or maybe,
dissolving in air.
I am sunlight slicing the dark.
Who made this night?
A forge deep in the earth-mud.
What is the body?
Endurance.
What is love?
Gratitude.
What is hidden in our chests?
Laughter.
What else?
Compassion.
Let the beloved be a hat pulled down firmly on my head.
Or drawstrings pulled and tied around my chest.
Someone asks, “How does love have hands and feet?”
Love is the sprouting-bed for hands and feet!
Your father and mother were playing love games,
They came together, and you appeared!
Don’t ask what love can make or do!
Look at the colours of the world.
The riverwater moving in all rivers at once.
The truth that lives in Shams’ face.