I'm recording some of the poetry of Hafiz and Rumi,
So I invite you to find a really comfortable position where you can deeply relax and let these words flow through your body,
Mind,
And spirit.
Hafiz writes,
Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don'ts,
Not the God who ever does anything weird,
But the God who knows only four words and keeps repeating them,
Saying,
Come dance with me,
Come dance.
And now Rumi offers his instructions in this poem,
Dance when you're broken open.
Dance when you're broken open.
Dance when you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance when you're perfectly free,
Struck.
The dancer hears a tambourine inside her,
Like a wave that crests into foam at the very top,
Begins.
Maybe you don't hear the tambourine or the tree leaves clapping time.
Close the ears on your head that listen mostly to lies and cynical jokes.
There are other things to see and hear,
Music,
Dance,
A brilliant city inside your soul.
And another Hafiz poem.
And still after all this time,
The sun never says to the earth,
You owe me.
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.
This Hafiz poem is called Created for Joy.
I sometimes forget that I was created for joy.
My mind is too busy.
My heart is too heavy for me to remember that I have been called to dance the sacred dance of life.
I was created to smile,
To love,
To be lifted up and to lift others up.
Oh,
Sacred one,
Untangle my feet from all that ensnares.
Free my soul that we might dance and that our dancing might be contagious.
Hafiz writes,
Now is the time.
Now is the time to know that all that you do is sacred.
Now,
Why not consider a lasting truce with yourself and God?
Now is the time to understand that all your ideas of right and wrong were just a child's training wheels to be laid aside when you finally live with veracity and love.
My dear,
Please tell me,
Why do you still throw sticks at your heart and God?
What is it in that sweet voice inside that incites you to fear?
Now is the time for the world to know that every thought and action is sacred.
This is the time for you to compute the impossibility that there is anything but grace.
Now is the season to know that everything you do is sacred.
Hafiz writes,
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out like a welcomed season onto the meadow and shores and hills.
Open up to the roof.
Make a new watermark on your excitement and love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness and giving upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence lie beside an equator in your heart.
Treat yourself in your thousand other forms as you mount the hidden tide and travel back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven are sitting around a fire,
Chatting while stitching themselves together into the great circle inside of you.
Rumi writes,
The root of the root of yourself.
Don't go away.
Come near.
Don't be faithless,
Be faithful.
Find the antidote in the venom.
Come to the root of the root of yourself,
Molded of clay yet kneaded from the substance of certainty.
A guard at the treasury of holy light,
Come,
Return to the root of the root of yourself.
How can you be happy?
Come,
Return to the root of yourself.
And Rumi writes,
I have come.
I have come to drag you out of yourself and take you in my heart.
I have come to bring out the beauty you never knew you had and lift you like a prayer to the sky.
Come,
Let's fall in love again.
Let's turn all dirt in this world in shiny gold.
Come,
Let's be a new spring,
A love reborn.
Find our aroma from the essence of all who emit heavenly fragrance like a fresh tree bloom and spread all the blessings right from the inside.
