Digestion

    I have eaten a big meal and now ponder the matter of 
    how everyone's stomach is filled with different food
    and drink. Revelation comes: These vegetables and
    fruits, these pieces of meat, the colorful sherbets,
    the hard and soft-crusted breads, they are all *alive*
    inside of us singing praise.

    And just so, people and animals and the spirit beings
    that are here are food that is being tasted, chewed, 
    and digested into the mystery. As this process happens,
    gratitude gets released as energy.

    Stars rain down their omens and influences, and so the
    constellations become the air we breathe, nourishing 
    the plants, the animals, and us, the human beings, who
    have devised this language by which we exalt, pretend
    to be, and anger God.

    ~

    As I remember the rose gardens and other comforts, I
    notice dark blotches on the back of my hand.  No 
    surprises there.  Trees begin as limber saplings; then
    they stiffen with a thick covering of bark. The same
    has happened to my hands.

    Out of my praying dark-eyed women arrive to distract
    me.  This is also natural.  There are *so many* forms
    of desire.  Then children come, and new ways of loving,
    new sweethearts.  It's hilarious how wanting change
    even as they produce progeny, with some infinite laughter
    behind it all.

    Remember God in everything that you do.

    For example, looking for a taste of lovemaking, remember
    that that sharp pleasure and the drawing-together
    toward it came as gifts from your Lord.  Even inside a
    seizure or a stroke, recall, if you can, that the 
    presence living within earthquakes and tremors is the
    same that's trembling inside you.

    I have observed nothing in this life more powerful than
    the deliciousness of Love.  Inside our most profound
    senses of glory, surrender, and humility there runs the
    thread of wanting to love and make love.  The other
    qualities grow *out of that*.

    They spawn inside the God-pulsing delight.

    - Baha'ud'din Sheikh Al-Shaheed Al-Muslemeen 
        Maarif ("The Drowned Book") - 2:115-115