“All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.”
~ Andre Breton
In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Anger 
“In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.”
- Lee Iacocca
“Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.”
- Maya Angelou
“He who angers you conquers you.”
- Elizabeth Kenny
“Man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.”
- Mohandas Gandhi
“You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.”
- Buddha
“Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy.”
- Aristotle
“Anger repressed can poison a relationship as surely as the cruelest words.”
- Dr. Joyce Brothers
Beauty
“Beauty, without expression, tires.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
- Leo Tolstoy
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
- Margaret Hungerford
“I’m tired of all the nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want – an adorable pancreas?”
- Jean Kerr
“Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
- Confucius
“Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty – they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.”
- Martin Buxbaum
“It is not beauty that endears; it’s love that makes us see beauty.”
- Leo Tolstoy
“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.”
- Dorothy Parker
“You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”
- Chuck Palahniuk
“Beauty is whatever gives joy.”
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Change
“The only thing constant in life is change.”
- Francois de la Rochefoucauld
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
- Gandhi
“The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.”
- William James
“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.”
- Harold Wilson
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
- George Bernard Shaw
“Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.”
- Jacob M. Braude
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
- Charles Darwin
“Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.”
- Confucius
“Change the changeable, accept the unchangeable, and remove yourself from the unacceptable.”
- Denis Waitley
Children
“Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up ’cause they’re looking for ideas.”
- Paula Poundstone
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
- James Baldwin
“Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.”
- Robert A. Heinlein
“There’s nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child.”
- Frank A. Clark
“Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.”
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
“We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.”
- Stacia Tauscher
“We cannot always build the future of our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.”
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“Children are our most valuable resource.”
- Herbert Hoover
“Never underestimate a child’s ability to get into more trouble.”
- Martin Mull
“Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.”
- Phyllis Diller
Courage
“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”
- E.E. Cummings
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
- Winston Churchill
“Courage is grace under pressure.”
- Ernest Hemingway
“Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.”
- John Wayne
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”
- Mark Twain
“Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”
- Ambrose Redmoon
“Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.”
- Bruce Lee
“Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”
- John Wooden
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says ‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’”
- Mary Anne Radmacher
“Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage.”
- Confucius
Death
“Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.”
- Buddha
“Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.”
- Albert Einstein
“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
- Mark Twain
“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”
- Leonardo da Vinci
“The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
- Edgar Allan Poe
“Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
- Mark Twain
“No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”
- Plato
Education / Wisdom
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
- Aristotle
“Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don’t.”
- Pete Seeger
“The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.”
- Socrates
“To repeat what others have said requires education. To challenge it requires brains.”
- Marry Pettibone Poole
“It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.”
- Alec Bourne
“Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself.”
- Bill Gates
“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.”
- Albert Einstein
“Education is like a double-edged sword. It may be turned to dangerous uses if it is not properly handled.”
- Wu Ting-Fang
“Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.”
- Plato
“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”
- Malcolm Forbes
Family
“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”
- George Burns
“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.”
- George Bernard Shaw
“You know the only people who are always sure about the proper way to raise children? Those who’ve never had any.”
- Bill Cosby
“Family isn’t about whose blood you have. It’s about who you care about.”
- Trey Parker and Matt Stone
“All happy families resemble one another. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
- Leo Tolstoy
“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”
- Jane Howard
“You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.”
- Desmond Tutu
“As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”
- Pope John Paul II
“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
- George Bernard Shaw
Friendship
“Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend.”
- Albert Camus
“Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.”
- Aristotle
“Your friend is the man who knows all about you and still likes you.”
- Elbert Hubbard
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
- Dale Carnegie
“True friends stab you in the front.”
- Oscar Wilde
“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.”
- Helen Keller
“I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.”
- Abraham Lincoln
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value. Rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”
- C. S. Lewis
“There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.”
- William Butler Yeats
“Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.”
- George Eliot
Happiness
“Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
- Abraham Lincoln
“Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer somebody else up.”
- Mark Twain
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.”
- Dalai Lama
“Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.”
- Robert Frost
“Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
“Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.”
- Storm Jameson
“The U.S. Constitution doesn’t guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.”
- Benjamin Franklin
“Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”
- Albert Schweitzer
Humor
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
- Oscar Wilde
“There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?”
- Dick Cavett
“Never be afraid to laugh at yourself. After all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.”
- Dame Edna Everage
“That is the saving grace of humor. If you fail no one is laughing at you.”
- A. Whitney Brown
“Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.”
- Christopher Morely
“Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.”
- Salma Hayek
“The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”
- E.B. White
“You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.”
- W. Somerset Maugham
“I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it.”
- Frank Howard Clark
Love
“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”
- Aristotle
“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
- Robert Heinlein
“Love is friendship, set on fire.”
- Jeremy Taylor
“Love doesn’t make the world go round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.”
- Elizabeth Browning
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“Love is, above all else, the gift of oneself.”
- Jean Anouilh
“Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.”
- Amy Bloom
“Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”
- Mark Twain
“Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship.”
- Lord Byron
“Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.”
- Maya Angelou
Men and Women
“Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.”
- Albert Einstein
“A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.”
- Robert Frost
“Men are what their mothers made them.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”
- Margaret Fuller
“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”
- Plato
“For most of history, ‘Anonymous’ was a woman.”
- Virginia Woolf
“Women are made to be loved, not understood.”
- Oscar Wilde
“There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”
- Will Rogers
“Women don’t want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think – in a deeper voice.”
- Bill Cosby
“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”
- Timothy Leary
Music
“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.”
- Ed Gardner
“Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.”
- Robert Fripp
“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”
- Plato
“Life is one grand, sweet song so start the music.”
- Ronald Reagan
“Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.”
- Bill Cosby
“Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.”
- Samuel Johnson
“Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.”
- Lao Tzu
“I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.”
- Elvis Presley
“Music is a safe kind of high.”
- Jimi Hendrix
“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
- Victor Hugo
Peace
“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.”
- John Lennon
“Peace begins with a smile.”
- Mother Teresa
“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
- Albert Einstein
“Peace is its own reward.”
- Mohandas Gandhi
“If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”
- Moshe Dayan
“The only alternative to coexistence is codestruction.”
- Jawaharlal Nehru
“Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.”
- George Carlin
“Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.”
- Dalai Lama
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.”
- Buddha
“It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Politics
“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
- Plato
“Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.”
- Charles De Gaulle
“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.”
- Eugene McCarthy
“Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.”
- Winston Churchill
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
- H.L. Mencken
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
- John Adams
“Politics have no relation to morals.”
- Niccolo Machiavelli
“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith
“It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”
- Ronald Reagan
Science
“Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.”
- Bertrand Russell
“Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.”
- George Bernard Shaw
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
- Charles Darwin
“There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.”
- Hippocrates
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
- Isaac Asimov
“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.”
- Sir William Bragg
“New discoveries in science will continue to create a thousand new frontiers for those who still would adventure.”
- Herbert Hoover
“However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.”
- Lewis Mumford
“I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.”
- Marie Curie
“Science is simply common sense at its best. That is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.”
- Thomas Huxley
Success
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
- Henry Ford
“Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
- Winston Churchill
“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
- Bill Cosby
“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
- Woody Allen
“Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.”
- Benjamin Franklin
“You can do anything, but not everything.”
- David Allen
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.”
- Aristotle
“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.”
- Sven Goran Eriksson
“Opportunity is missed by most people, because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
- Thomas Edison
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
- Maya Angelou
Other Quotes
“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”
- Friedrich Nietzche
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”
- Henry Ford
“If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems.”
- Frank Wilczek
“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”
- Benjamin Franklin
“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
- William Arthur Ward
“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
- Thomas Edison
“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
- Voltaire
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time. But you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
- Abraham Lincoln
It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
You can’t pull the skin from a snake-anon
You can’t make a kettle boil faster by watching it-anon
Rumi Odes & Quatrains
O D E S
Love Said to Me
I worship the moon.
Tell me of the soft glow of a
candle light
and the sweetness of my moon.
Don’t talk about sorrow,
tell me of that treasure,
hidden if it is to you,
then just remain silent.
Last night
I lost my grip on reality
and welcomed insanity.
Love
saw me and said,
I showed up.
Wipe you tears
and be silent.
I said, O Love
I am frightened,
but it’s not you.
Love said to me,
there is nothing that is not me.
be silent.
I will whisper secrets in your ear
just nod yes
and be silent.
A soul moon
appeared in the path of my heart.
How precious is this journey.
I said, O Love
what kind of moon is this?
Love said to me,
this is not for you to question.
be silent.
I said, O Love
what kind of face is this,
angelic, or human?
Love said to me,
this is beyond anything that you know.
Be silent.
I said, please reveal this to me
I am dying in anticipation.
Love said to me,
that is where I want you:
Always on the edge,
be silent.
You dwell in this hall of
images and illusions,
leave this house now
and be silent.
I said, O Love,
tell me this:
Does the Lord know you are
treating me this way?
Love said to me,
yes He does,
just be totally…
totally… silent
Lover Me
Lover me, cave me,
the sweet burn of Love me.
Lover you, cave you,
Shams protect me.
Noah you, soul you,
conqueror and the conquered you
the awakened heart you.
Why hold me at that gate of your secret?
Light you, celebration you,
the victorious land you
the bird of Mount Sinai you.
You carry me on your tired beak.
Drop you, ocean you,
compassion and rage you,
sugar you, poison you.
Please don’t continue to hurt me.
The orb of the Sun you,
the house of Venus you,
the sliver of hope you.
Open up the way for me.
Day you, night you,
fasting and the crumbs of a beggar you,
water and a pitcher you.
Quench my thirst, Beloved.
Bait you, trap you,
wine you, cup you,
baked and raw you.
Please don’t let me be unbaked.
If you don’t run my body too hard,
if you don’t cut my way too much,
if you try to help rather than make my life more difficult.
Oh, all these words of mine.
I Saw Goodness Getting Drunk
I am gone,
lost any sense of wanting the wine
of the nowhereness ask me,
I don’t know where I am.
At times I plunge
to the bottom of the sea,
at times, rise up
like the Sun.
At times, the universe is pregnant by me,
at times I give birth to it.
The milestone in my life
is the nowhereness,
I don’t fit anywhere else.
This is me:
a rogue and a drunkard,
easy to spot
in the tavern of Lovers.
I am the one shouting hey ha.
They ask me why I don’t
behave myself.
I say, when you
reveal your true nature,
then I will act my age.
Last night, I saw Goodness getting drunk.
He growled and said,
I am a nuisance, a nuisance.
A hundred souls cried out, but
we are yours, we are yours, we are yours.
You are the light
that spoke to Moses and said
I am God, I am God, I am God.
I said Shams-e Tabrizi, who are you?
He said, I am you, I am you, I am you.
You Worry Too Much
Oh soul,
you worry too much.
You say,
I make you feel dizzy.
Of a little headache then,
why do you worry?
You say, I am your moon-faced beauty.
Of the cycles of the moon and
passing of the years,
why do you worry?
You say, I am your source of passion,
I excite you.
Of playing into the Devils hand,
why do you worry?
Oh soul,
you worry too much.
Look at yourself,
what you have become.
You are now a field of sugar canes,
why show that sour face to me?
You say that I keep you warm inside.
Then why this cold sigh?
You have gone to the roof of heavens.
Of this world of dust, why do you worry?
Oh soul,
you worry too much.
Your arms are heavy
with treasures of all kinds.
About poverty,
why do you worry?
You are Joseph,
beautiful, strong,
steadfast in your belief,
all of Egypt has become drunk
because of you.
Of those who are blind to your beauty,
and deaf to your songs,
why do you worry?
Oh soul,
you worry too much.
You have seen your own strength.
You have seen your own beauty.
You have seen your golden wings.
Of anything less,
why do you worry?
You are in truth
the soul, of the soul, of the soul.
You are the security,
the shelter of the spirit of Lovers.
Oh the sultan of sultans,
of any other king,
why do you worry?
Be silent, like a fish,
and go into that pleasant sea.
You are in deep waters now,
of life’s blazing fire.
Why do you worry?
A Time for Madness
Once more,
Love is pouring down my ceiling
and my walls.
Once more, it’s the night of the full moon,
it is time for madness.
All my immense knowledge
cannot help me now.
Once more,
Insomnia took my patience.
Rain washed away my intellect.
The Lover made me lose my profession.
What good is my work anyway?
Once more, rise, rise, rise,
Like the way a garden burns
in a hundred shades of orange in the fall,
a Lover’s heart shrivels for a sense of the Beloved’s touch.
Now the face of that charred garden
is my field of flowers.
Look, two hundred Jupiters
are dancing around my moon.
My Love business is booming,
but don’t credit the consultants.
I am done with the consultants
and the pundits,
they call you Jafar the imposter.
Little do they know,
that you are my Shams the Flyer.
Go Back to Sleep
Go back,
go back to sleep.
Yes, you are allowed.
You who have no Love in your heart,
you can go back to sleep.
The power of Love
is exclusive to us,
you can go back to sleep.
I have been burnt
by the fire of Love.
You who have no such yearning in your heart,
go back to sleep.
The path of Love,
has seventy-two folds and countless facets.
Your love and religion
is all about deceit, control and hypocrisy,
go back to sleep.
I have torn to pieces my robe of speech,
and have let go of the desire to converse.
You who are not naked yet,
you can go back to sleep.
Didn’t I Tell You
Didn’t I tell you
not to go to that place?
It is me, who is your intimate friend.
In this imaginary plain of non-existence,
I am your spring of eternal life.
Even if you lose yourself in wrath
for a hundred thousand years,
at the end you will discover,
it is me, who is the culmination of your dreams.
Didn’t I tell you
not to be satisfied with the veil of this world?
I am the master illusionist,
it is me, who is the welcoming banner at the gate of your contentment.
Didn’t I tell you?
I am an ocean, you are a fish;
do not go to the dry land,
it is me, who is your comforting body of water.
Didn’t I tell you
not to fall in this trap like a blind bird?
I am your wings, I am the strength in your wings,
I am the wind keeping you in flight.
Didn’t I tell you
that they will kidnap you from the path?
They will steal your warmth,
and take your devotion away.
I am your fire, I am your heartbeat,
I am the life in your breath.
Didn’t I tell you?
They will accuse you of all the wrongdoings,
they will call you ugly names,
they will make you forget
it is me, who is the source of your happiness.
Didn’t I tell you?
Wonder not, how your life will turn out,
how you will ever get your world in order,
it is me, who is your omnipresent creator.
If your are a guiding torch of the heart,
know the path to that house.
If you are a person of God, know this,
It is me, who is the chief of the village of your life.
I’ve Got You Now
My face free of sorrow,
my mouth full of wine,
my clothes torn off my body.
Look what you’ve done to me now.
He says, That’s what I do.
I tear away the layers.
I melt the shame.
I reveal the unrevealed.
He moves too fast.
One breath, he is outside the window.
Next breath, he is inside my shirt.
I can’t think clear,
my mind is not here,
he is all I see.
NOW!
There is new life in me.
The seven heavens cannot contain him,
but he is here,
moving up my shirt.
Pop, one button here.
Pop, one button there.
This lion of God
watches over me,
I sing as he roars.
He says, I’ve got you now.
I gave you life,
I created you,
I do what I want now.
I am your harp,
play me easy,
play me hard, or
don’t touch my strings at all.
You know!
I think,
I’ve got YOU now.
Before I met you,
I had only one heart,
I had only one body,
I was only being.
But look at me now,
I’ve got you now.
All Rights Reserved
Above poems are from Shahram Shiva’s book
Hush Don’t Say Anything to God: Passionate Poems of Rumi
(Jain Publishing)
© Copyright Shahram Shiva. All rights reserved. Do not duplicate without permission.
Simple sharing on social networking sites or personal blogs are OK with proper source credit.
Be Guiltless
(this is a poem by Shahram Shiva and not a Rumi translation)
Listen,
my love,
they can’t hurt you.
They can’t hurt you at all,
Your soul is ever intact.
Don’t mind the destination,
Don’t mind the end.
Don’t mind the good or bad
or right and wrong.
Grow from the past,
But grab hold of now.
Now is always evolving.
The end is eternal
It’s ever reaching.
Last night,
Under the roof of all nations
A woman in red
spoke of self-realization.
She said proudly,
He is fully illuminated.
Listen my love,
Illumination is eternal,
It can never be full.
Evolution is eternal.
Now is always evolving.
As there are billions of stars
There are billions of steps.
As there are billions of souls,
There are billions of ways to grow.
Don’t mind the destination,
Don’t mind the end.
Don’t mind the good or bad
or right and wrong.
Grow from the past,
But grab hold of now.
Now is always evolving.
Listen my love,
As you walk this eternal path,
Show courage
by remaining guiltless
in the midst of an ever-reaching end.
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