You are the Sun in drag

[pjthompson]

You are the Sun in drag.
You are God hiding from yourself.
Remove all the ‘mine’ – that is the veil.
Why ever worry about anything?
Listen to what your friend Hafiz
Knows for certain:
The appearance of this world
Is a Magi’s brilliant trick, though its affairs are
Nothing into nothing. You are a divine elephant with amnesia
Trying to live in an ant
Hole.
Sweetheart, O sweetheart
You are God in Drag!

—Hafiz
(translated by Daniel James Ladinsky, The Gift: Poems by the Great Sufi Master)*

*I have subsequently learned that this book is "fake" Hafiz. Ladinsky claims to be "channeling" Hafiz from his dreams. So take that for what it's worth.

Comments

[notasupervillain]

I love this, though I don't understand what I'm being asked to do

[pjthompson]

I don't usually like to interpret the quotes and things because I figure everyone needs to make their own peace with the quotes, but I can tell you what it means to me:

Enact the role you were given in this world with as much sincerity and integrity as you can manage and learn from it what you can—because that's why we were given these roles. But never take it TOO seriously, and never forget that everyone else is enacting a role, too. And everyone is an aspect of God (of whichever persuasion you choose)—good, bad, or indifferent. So keep that in mind, too. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to counter their evil or bullshit because they were given roles and chose to abuse them, but remember...

If you want to keep it strictly materialist, all matter is made from the same stuff taking different forms. A world of forms, all of it holy in its own way.

As the poet and biologist A. R. Ammons said:

The City Limits

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.