Michael Bee

“XXXII Oh how wasting wicked age With ample awe and cold embrace will swell And cover all As Frost at harvest slowly climbs & Silver shines in every fold and cleft So Enshrined at last In fun house glass the helpless mummy youth”
― Michael Bee, Leaves on the Wind

“118 On the day of death, when my bier is on the move, do not suppose that I have any pain at leaving this world. Do not weep for me, say not “Alas, alas!” You will fall into the devil’s snare—that would indeed be alas! When you see my hearse, say not “Parting, parting!” That time there will be for me union and encounter. When you commit me to the grave, say not “Farewell, farewell!” For the grave is a veil over the reunion of paradise. Having seen the going-down, look upon the coming-up; how should setting impair the sun and the moon? To you it appears as setting, but it is a rising; the tomb appears as a prison, but it is release for the soul. What seed ever went down into the earth which did not grow? Why do you doubt so regarding the human seed? What bucket ever went down and came not out full? Why this complaining of the well by the Joseph of the spirit? When you have closed your mouth on this side, open it on that, for your shout of triumph will echo in the placeless air.”
― Rumi, Mystical Poems of Rumi

“LOVE God is love, and there are blessed moments when even to unregenerate human beings it is granted to know Him as love. But it is only in the saints that this knowledge becomes secure and continuous. By those in the earlier stages of the spiritual life God is apprehended predominantly as law. It is through obedience to God the Law-Giver that we come at last to know God the loving Father. The law which we must obey, if we would know God as love, is itself a law of love. “Thou shalt love God with all thy soul, and with all thy heart, with all thy mind and with all thy strength. And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” We cannot love God as we should, unless we love our neighbors as we should. We cannot love our neighbors as we should, unless we love God as we should. And, finally, we cannot realize God as the active, all-pervading principle of love, until we ourselves have learned to love Him and our fellow creatures. Idolatry consists in loving a creature more than we love God. There are many kinds of idolatry, but all have one thing in common: namely, self-love. The presence of self-love is obvious in the grosser forms of sensual indulgence, or the pursuit of wealth and power and praise. Less manifestly, but none the less fatally, it is present in our inordinate affections for individuals, persons, places, things, and institutions. And even in men’s most heroic sacrifices to high causes and noble ideals, self-love has its tragic place. For when we sacrifice ourselves to any cause or ideal that is lower than the highest, less than God Himself, we are merely sacrificing one part of our unregenerate being to another part which we and other people regard as more creditable. Self-love still persists, still prevents us from obeying perfectly the first of the two great commandments. God can be loved perfectly only by those who have killed out the subtlest, the most nobly sublimated forms of self-love. When this happens, when we love God as we should and therefore know God as love, the tormenting problem of evil ceases to be a problem, the world of time is seen to be an aspect of eternity, and in some inexpressible way, but no less really and certainly, the struggling, chaotic multiplicity of life is reconciled in the unity of the all-embracing divine charity.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“115 The month of fasting has come, the emperor’s banner has arrived; withhold your hand from food, the spirit’s table has arrived. The soul has escaped from separation and bound nature’s hands; the heart of error is defeated, the army of faith has arrived. The army of the snorting chargers has put its hand to plunder, from the fire of the strikers of fire the soul is brought to lamentation. The Cow was goodly, Moses son of ‘Imrān appeared; through him the dead became living when it was sacrificed. Fasting is as our sacrifice, it is the life of our soul; let us sacrifice all our body, since the soul has arrived as guest. Fortitude is as a sweet cloud, wisdom rains from it, because it was in such a month of fortitude that the Koran arrived. When the carnal soul is in need, the spirit goes into Ascension; when the gate of the prison is broken, the soul reaches the Beloved. The heart has rent the curtain of darkness and winged up to the sky; the heart, being of the angels, has again arrived at them. Quickly clutch the rope out of this body’s well; at the top of the well of water cry, “Joseph of Canaan has arrived.” When Jesus escaped from the ass his prayers became accepted; wash your hands, for the Table has arrived from heaven. Wash your hands and your mouth, neither eat nor speak; seek that speech and that morsel which has come to the silent ones.”
― Rumi, Mystical Poems of Rumi