Orchida Ahmed

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“I've come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call "The Physics of The Quest" — a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: "If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself... then truth will not be withheld from you." Or so I've come to believe.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“ON THE DAY I DIE

On the day I die, when I'm being carried
toward the grave, don't weep. Don't say,

He's gone! He's gone. Death has nothing to do with going away. The sun sets and

the moon sets, but they're not gone.
Death is a coming together. The tomb

looks like a prison, but it's really
release into union. The human seed goes

down in the ground like a bucket into
the well where Joseph is. It grows and

comes up full of some unimagined beauty.
Your mouth closes here, and immediately

opens with a shout of joy there.

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One who does what the Friend wants done
will never need a friend.

There's a bankruptcy that's pure gain.
The moon stays bright when it
doesn't avoid the night.

A rose's rarest essence
lives in the thorn.

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Childhood, youth, and maturity,
and now old age.

Every guest agrees to stay
three days, no more.

Master, you told me to
remind you. Time to go.

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The angel of death arrives,
and I spring joyfully up.

No one knows what comes over me
when I and that messenger speak!

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When you come back inside my chest no matter how far I've wandered off,
I look around and see the way.

At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come then, I'll sit up and sing.

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Last night things flowed between us
that cannot now be said or written.

Only as I'm being carried out
and down the road, as the folds of my shroud open in the wind,

will anyone be able to read, as on
the petal-pages of a turning bud,
what passed through us last night.

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I placed one foot on the wide plain
of death, and some grand
immensity sounded on the emptiness.

I have felt nothing ever
like the wild wonder of that moment.

Longing is the core of mystery.
Longing itself brings the cure.
The only rule is, Suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
and what you want to happen
in time, sacrificed.”
― Rumi, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems – Coleman Barks's Sublime Renderings of the 13th-Century Sufi Mystic's Insights into Divine Love and the Human Heart

“You'll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”
― John C. Maxwell