Apparently nominations opened a week ago so please nominate your favorite blogs, posts & writers.
So many great blogs have stopped publishing in the last year that I’d be interested to know what people are reading these days.
I often think about those who say that “Islam means peace” and expect that to be the end of the story. And yet each year it seems that anger grows everywhere and in everyone, regardless of religion or a lack thereof.
Peace is one of those words that is bandied about but the reality of which is so difficult to hold in one’s heart. It’s one thing to feel peaceful when one is surrounded by nature or in retreat from the world, it’s quite another to hold it in one’s thoughts, actions and words when confronted by challenging situations and people.
That’s why I like the quote below, it captures the necessity of peace as an active and lifelong pursuit, a planting of its roots deep in one’s heart and soul, like a kelp forest which gently sways when buffeted by waves, but never breaks.
A dear friend of mine who has been battling infertility for two years, wrote a hopeful and moving piece about her thoughts and feelings about turning 30 tomorrow.
She is an amazing woman who has taught me so much about deep empathy and love, and I wrote a letter to her in response, which I’ve posted with amendments below.
—
Sweet Friend,
Your piece reminds me of the poet Mary Oliver and her question:
‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?’
The turning of years and, particularly, decades is hard. But, it is also a gift.
We snap out of the daily treadmill to reassess our lives, our selves, our relationships and make commitments to being better at all three. To being, as you said, more conscious of and present to watching the seasons change, as they do more swiftly every year.
I remember being overwhelmed at the thought of turning 30, and yet it has been my happiest decade thus far, even though I spent years of it paralyzed or blinded by or recovering from my medical condition, and being told that we would never be able to have a biological child.
My 30s taught me, to quote Mary Oliver again (from her poem “The Uses of Sorrow”):
‘Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.’
It’s difficult to imagine while in the tunnel of challenging times, but hardship holds the possibility of many unexpected and wonderful gifts. I have developed deep roots and a more solid foundation because of the dark times. Those times have also brought me closer to God, my husband, and family. I have experienced a joy with them that I never thought possible in my 20s, when I was estranged from both God and family, and had given up hope on finding my soulmate.
In my 30s, I have found myself caring less about what other people think my life should be like, and becoming more interested in building a life that I am proud of, with the cards I have been dealt. None of us have been given a full deck, but – as any gambler or mystic will tell you – what matters is what we do with what we’ve been given.
As I approach 40, the spiritual mid-point of life, I find myself thinking about my life thus far. I have fallen short in so many, many ways, yet without this pause for reflection and questions I would not be able to change going forward.
As the seasons turn again, as they must, does the good I have done with my life outweigh the bad? How can I become a more compassionate and giving person? How have I benefited or harmed people and the world around me?
I think about the countless blessings I’ve been given, and remember “to whom much is given, much is expected” (Luke 12:48). How do I give back even more to those whom I love and to those whom I don’t know but who have a right upon me by virtue of being neighbors, community members, or, simply, fellow human beings?
How do I become the best daughter, sister, wife, mother (God willing), and person that I can be? What qualities do I need to cultivate within myself to remain grateful, patient, and optimistic in good times and bad?
As my parents grow older and the shadow of mortality lies more clearly upon them, they too, like yours, are more easily moved to tears and emotion. Their voices catch just looking at us or at their grandchildren. They weep, filled with love, in prayer and long prostration. How do I love, serve, and honor them with all my heart and soul before the parting that is sure to come to each of us, sooner or later?
The change of a decade is difficult, but it is also gift, if we choose to see it as such. A reminder that this life is precious – so very, very precious – but that it can slip through our fingers if we are heedless. A reminder that a well-lived and -loved life is one spent in conscious discovery of and in service to something greater than ourselves.
May the road ahead be made easy for you, and may you too realize the hidden but universal truth: that within distress resides comfort, and beside darkness, an always greater light.
May your 30s be filled with great love, light, joy, & peace for you, your husband, your little ones to come, God willing, and your families and friends.
May you build a life and soul so vast and beautiful that it fills all those around you with radiant love and peace.
Happy birthday, my dear friend!
Love you,
Baraka
—
If you feel so moved, please share your wisdom and experiences on turning a year’s or decade’s corner too.
I was at a wonderful spiritual retreat this weekend with about 30 other people and four speakers. The theme included joy, an aspect of Islam that is too rarely spoken of. Shaykh Kabir Helminski addressed the topic directly in our last session of the day, with his wife Camille reciting the beautiful poem below.
God is beautiful & loves beauty, and the Prophet was always laughing, smiling and full of love. We need to remember and cultivate those aspects more deeply within ourselves and in service to all.
You are Joy!
Oh my God, our intoxicated eyes
Have blurred our vision
Our burdens have been made heavy,
Forgive us.
You are hidden and yet
From east to west you have filled the world with Your radiance
Your Light is more magnificent
Than sunrise or sunset
And you are the inmost ground of consciousness
Revealing the secrets we hold.
You are an explosive force
causing our dammed up rivers to burst forth.
You whose essence is hidden
While Your gifts are manifest
You are like water
and we are like millstones
You are like wind and we are like dust;
The wind is hidden while the dust is plainly seen.
You are the invisible spring
and we are your lush garden
You are the spirit of life,
And we are like hand and foot;
Spirit causes the hand to close and open.
You are intelligence,
And we are your voice
Your intelligence causes this tongue to speak.
You are joy and we are laughter,
For we are the result
of the blessing of Your joy
All our movement is really
A continual profession of faith
Bearing witness to Your eternal power
Just as the powerful turning of the millstone
professes faith in the river’s existence.
Dust settles upon my head and upon my metaphors
For You are beyond anything we could ever think or say
And yet this servant cannot stop trying
to express Your beauty.
In every moment,
let my soul be Your carpet.
- Mevlana Jalal-ud-Din Rumi, Mathnawi V:3307-3319
Translated by Kabir and Camille Helminski
An Introduction
You who break the dark all night, whisper and shout,
who travel in and out of all the rooms,
who come with pill or needle, vial or chart,
with bedding, mop and bucket, tray of food;
who turn, clean, pull, read, record, pat, and go;
who see her hair matted by the pillow, greasy white
wild short hair that will shock
anyone from home who hasn’t seen her for a while—
shocking like her bones, showing now;
like the plumcolored bruises on her arms; like her face
when she first comes to and what it says; like her mouth
and the anything it says: Call the dogs, or
I’ve got to go to school, or Tonight y’all roll
that wagon wheel all the way to Mexico; you
who have seen three children—unbelieving, unresigned—
in all these rooms, full of anger and of prayer;
you who change her diaper, empty pans
of green and gold bile she has puked up; you
who cannot help breathing her decay,
I would like to introduce you to our mother,
who was beautiful, her eyes like nightshade,
her wavy brown hair with a trace of gold; Myrtle,
whose alto flowed through the smooth
baritone our father used to sing;
our mother, who would make us cut a switch,
but who rocked us and who held us and who kissed us;
Myrtle, wizard typist, sharp with figures,
masterful with roses and with roast beef;
who worked for the New Deal Seed Loan Program,
for the school, local paper, county agent, and the church;
who cared long years for her own failing mother
(whom she worries for now; you may have heard her);
who was tender to a fault, maybe gullible,
as the truly good and trusting often are; and even so,
who could move beyond fools, though foolishness itself
delighted her—a doubletake, words turned around,
a silly dance—and when our mother laughed
(I tell you this because you haven’t heard it),
the world could change, as though the sun could shine
inside our very bones.
And where it’s written in Isaiah
that the brier won’t rise, but the myrtle tree,
there’s a promise unfulfilled:
she will not go out with joy.
Still, if you had known her, you yourselves,
like Isaiah’s hills, would sing. You’d understand
why it says that all the trees
of the field shall clap their hands.
By Judson Mitcham
[HT: Shabana]
I’ve always loved the ways pelicans dive,
as if each silver fish they see
were the goddamned most important
thing they’ve ever wanted on this earth—
and just tonight I learned sometimes
they go blind doing it,
that straight-down dive like someone jumping
from a rooftop, only happier,
plummeting like Icarus, but more triumphant—
……there is the undulating fish,
……the gleaming sea,
there is the chance to taste again
the kind of joy that can be eaten whole,
and this is how they know to reach it,
head-first, high-speed, risking everything,
…………..and some of the time they come back up
as if it were nothing, they bob on the water,
silver fish like stogies angled
rakishly in their wide beaks,
—the enormous
………………..stretching of the throat,
then the slow unfolding
……………………..of the great wings,
as if it were nothing, sometimes they do this
a hundred times or more a day,
as long as they can see, they rise
……back into they sky
to begin again—
………..and when they can’t?
We know, of course, what happens,
they starve to death, not a metaphor, not a poem in it;
this goes on every day of our lives,
and the man whose melting wings
spatter like a hundred dripping candles
…………………over everything,
and the suicide who glimpses, in that final
seconds of her fall,
……all the other lives she might have lived,
…………..The ending doesn’t have to be happy.
…………..The hunger itself is the thing.
by Ruth L. Schwartz
“It’s as if no time has passed” is the phrase we use to describe the closeness we feel upon reuniting with loved ones. We pick up the threads of conversation as if we have just left the room a few minutes ago instead of the months or sometimes years that have ensued in between.
Basil and I moved to San Francisco in late 2002 and returned to the East Coast up to three times a year to visit our friends and his family. But, the first fissures appeared six years later in 2008 when, instead of the home I remembered, Boston became strange enough that I needed to carry a map to remember routes I had once known by heart.
In March we visited again and this time Boston had morphed from merely unfamiliar into a graveyard filled with the bodies of past lovers, old dreams, and the person I might have been had I chosen to stay. I stood at the Harvard Square crosswalk chilled by something that had nothing to do with the weather.
“When you’re here, do you ever feel like you might bump into your alternate self – the one who stayed?” I whispered to Basil.
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