A walk down memory lane...

Moments out of the past year.... (oldest entry at the bottom)

June, 2005
** One of my favorites by Ibn al-Arabi***

" On our way, I found a man living in a marsh in a place covered with rushes. I learned that he had lived there for thirty years in seclusion. I stayed with him for three days. He prayed day and night and did strange things. Every morning he went fishing and caught three fish, One he would let go, one was his meal for the whole day, and one he gave to the poor.
As I was about to leave. he asked me where I was going. I told him, "To Egypt." Tears came to his eyes. "Oh!" he said, "My beloved master, my Shaikh, is in Egypt. Please go to him and give him my respects and greetings. Ask him to advise me what to do with myself in this world."
I was amazed. That man had abandoned this world and the worldly. It seemed to me that he did not need any advice about it.
When I went to Egypt, I found this Shaikh living in a palace in complete luxury and wealth. He appeared to be nothing more than a man of the world. When I told him the request of his dervish in Tunis he said, "Go and tell him that he should take the love of this world out of his heart." This also amazed me, coming from him.
On my return to Tunis I found the secluded fisherman and told him what his master had said. He shed tears of blood. "Woe is me! For thirty years I have separated myself from the world and spent my time in worship, but my heart still belongs to the world! While my master lives within the riches of this world, he hasn't a drop of it in his heart, neither its love nor its worries. O Muhyiddun, that is the difference between him and me!"
What the Seeker Needs
Ibn al-Arabi

Beautifully demonstrates a striking human weakness. Something we love to resort to whenever we are unable to get rid of something either outside or within ourselves. We try to forbid ourselves from it, demonize it without ever truly understanding it, we try to distance ourselves from it to an unhealthy extreme. This, with the mocking result of never moving on at all. In fact, being more rooted in the same predicament than ever before. A trivial example. Let us say that I struggle with stage fright. Whenever I go on stage I end up making the same mistakes, I either speak too fast or the wrong words come out of my mouth and I aggravate an otherwise normal situation. Finally, I quit drama altogether and move on to the Sciences. I've convinced myself that there's actually something wrong with acting itself, because it always elicits such reactions from me! Surely, acting itself must be flawed. A fallacy in causation. I feel as though I have overcome my weakness, but the idea of not ever being good at drama continues to bother me. Instead of practicing and perhaps approaching drama as something other-than-an-enemy, something not to be afraid of or demonized, I approach it with this very mindset once again and sure enough, fall into the same trap. My emotions were never tamed, my mindset never sought to reconsider its outlooks. It's a viscious cycle and only I am to blame.

***

May, 2005
I am sick of superficiality, the finite - fleeting, Flood of the Ephemeral that we all seem to be drowning in. I need the natural, the truth, the beautiful Truth. I need those walks alone with the trees and the grass. Those are two things I love. The life of their greenery gives life to my vision. That fades away around mechanical interactions of any given day otherwise. Human relationships are almost sacred, they have this divine beauty that one can either choose to desecrate or consecrate. Embrace or decry. Nature is just great. The idea is to burrow through the smog of the artificial, to use that lemon juice to wipe away the rust. Beneath the rust is the natural in us all. That natural, shining beauty that is suffering, groaning under the smoke. Under that dark - charmingly dark - velvet.