Master Rumi's timeless words

Poems from another time...

Welcome difficulty.
Learn the alchemy true human beings know.
The moment you accept what troubles you've been given,
the door opens.
Welcome difficulty as a familiar comrade.
Joke with torment brought by the friend.
Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets
that serve to cover and then are taken off.
That undressing, and the beautiful naked body underneath,
is the sweetness that comes after grief.




This being human is a guest house.
Every morning, a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness
comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and attend them all,
even if they're a crowd of sorrows
who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture!
Still treat each guest honorably.
It may be clearing you out for some new delights.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

Team Spirit

Pictures of the end of season game, All-Stars games begin this Monday. The boys had such fun this year! And how 'bout that Serenity with the cotton candy, eh? A girl's gotta have a little fun too! Yum!

The Soul's voice

Sometimes the soul DIRECTLY challenges the structure of our personal life.

Below is a poem included in Rodger Housden's book Ten Poems to Set You Free.

THE LAYERS

I have walked through many lives
some of them my own,
And I am not who I was
though some principle of being abides,
from which I struggle not to stray

When I look behind
as I am compelled to look
Before I can gather
strength to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned campsites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections
and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the the way
bitterly stings my face
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go
and every stone on the road
precious to me

In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers
not in the Litter"

Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.