Author Interview and Book Giveaway :)

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

Our Sister Saba of the Of Thoughts and Words blog, has graciously asked me to participate in an author interview about the writing of Master of the Jinn and the Sufi path.  Click HERE to read the interview, and be sure to enter your name and email in the contest at the end to win a FREE COPY of Master of the Jinn.

Ya Haqq!

The Knowing Heart

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

“The Sufis have been the educators of hearts for at least fourteen centuries. Their teaching and methods are based neither upon dogma nor conjecture, but upon a divine and objective foundation which is the primordial religion of humanity.

“Sufism does not offer salvation in the sense of a guarantee of heaven in the afterlife. Sufism offers a path to complete humanness, a state in which the spiritual and the human are unified, in which the world of spiritual qualities and material existence are seen as one.

“This education is empirical, practical, and integrated with daily life. At the same time it is attuned to the most transcendent Truth. This education is a unified whole, but it touches on so many areas of experience: individual psychology, relationships, marriage, family, community, livelihood, creativity, and worship.”

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.

We are drunk on this life of God.

We are both the pain and its cure.

We are the fresh, cool water

and the jar that pours.

-  Rumi (Quatrain 1652)

From The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path of Transformation by Kabir Helminski

Ya Haqq!

Sufi Comics – The Blind Astronomer

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

From Arif and Ali Vakil’s Sufi Comics blog. Reposted with permission.

Indeed,  within us is the greatest universe, a fountain of surprises :)

Ya Haqq!

Two Favorites for Poetry Monday

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

For the occasional Poetry Monday, here are two old favorites.

Atlas

i am used to the heft of it
sitting against my rib,
used to the ridges of forest,
used to the way my thumb
slips into the sea as i pull
it tight; something is sweet
in the thick odor of flesh
burning and sweating and bearing young.
i have learned to carry it
the way a poor man learns
to carry everything.

- Lucille Clifton

I have always known
that at last I would
take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today.

- Narihira (9th century Japan), translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Ya Haqq!

Prospective Immigrants

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

- Adrienne Rich (reposted from Sister Baraka’s Rickshaw Diaries blog).

Ya Haqq!

Note: This lovely and poignant poem also spoke to my heart of the real immigration from one state of awareness to another, the change of perception that comes with stepping onto the Sufi path, or any mystical path. Like the door, the path promises nothing, it is only a path.