And why not love the whole world

Someone once said that in the city of Kharazm you can not fall in love because as soon as you begin to love a beauty a new idol appears before you who is more beautiful.  And when you fall in love with that one another one may appear who may be even more beautiful.  And so the story goes on and on and on.

A mystic heard this and said, “Why not love the whole city then?”

And this is how the Persian mytics like Rumi, Hafiz, Saadi and so many others have such cosmopolitan spirits.  Saadi says, “I love the whole world since the whole world is from him.”

Ali, counting hours for his spring to arrive

A separation

I rarely get to read my own blog much less writing for it.  I know how funny or even odd it may look,  but that is how it really is from here.

Eight hundred years ago, Rumi started Masnavi which the greatest mystical epic in the whole history of the Persian literature, with the following line:

“Listen to the Nei’s stories for it complains of separations.”

No wonder that today, an Iranian film by the name of “A Separation” sweeps the world with so many prestigious awards and even takes the coveted Oscar.  Iranians, even at the time when they ruled much of the then world, at the very peak of their power, respected the world and all the existing cultures, religions and customs in it.  We Persians have a heart for the whole world and our arms are so huge that we can hug the entire world at once.  And when it comes to separation and its pains no one moans more sadly or more beautifully than us.  From Rumi to Farhadi we desire union, love and connection to the whole world.  And how beautifully America listens to the true people of my country.  Rumi from our past and Farhadi from our present times have both been received warmly by the American people.

According to the Persian calendar the spring arrives at 8 a.m. on Tuesday.  For us it is the beginning of the New Year.  For the rest of the hemisphere it is the beginning of a whole new life for the flowers and the birds which will soon sing for them and wash the pains of separations from their hearts.

Spring greetings to you my friends.

 

 

A drink for the world

“When I had got without I asked for a drink, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to complete my survey of the premises; but there, alas! are shallows and quicksands, and rope broken withal, and bucket irrecoverable.”

Thoreau asked the Irishman for a drink. I believe it symbolizes what every man in the world asks others for or what each of the world’s inhabitants has to offer one another. With what we do, what we write and say, what we make and paint, what we invent and particularly with our modes of life, let us have a well which is not shallow, a rope which is not broken, and a bucket which is not irrecoverably damaged.

The Irishman’s life was a disaster. Not because he lived in a ramshackled cabin whose roof leaked. The “well” within the Irishman’s soul, the real well that Henry hoped to drink from, was too shallow. His life would continue to be a disaster even if he lived in a palace. Thoreau was a perpetual dissident, for even improved houses and palaces did not satisfy him. “While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.”

Each personal disaster is a universal disaster. How can we help a wayfarer with a drink if our wells, the wells that we ourselves drink from, are too shallow and our buckets and ropes broken? The wells that Rumi, Saadi and Thoreau left us are deep enough to reach the water of true life. What a shock! They may come back any moment asking us for a drink. Let us not be too shallow for them.

The piece was so shocking to me. Will he visit my cabin? Will he ask for a drink from me too?

Fishing in the Stream of Time, looking at Autumn through Julia Berkley’s eyes

Julia Berkley uses the medium that people use to cover themselves to reveal her art and her own beautiful soul along with the beauty that resides in every man’s soul. In this way, she dreams of saying that the people of the world have more to show than to hide from one another and that there is more beauty than ugliness.

She uses “cloth” and with her Midas touch turns it into invaluable art and uncovers nature in an unseen beauty. It’s been a long time I desired to put some of her works here to adorn my web log and she had generously agreed. The reason it took me so long was that I did not know what to say. Truly, what can one say about someone who has brushed words aside and uses excellent art to speak in silence for her?

Today, through her art, she has a friend in Iran, in Rumi’s land. After all, Rumi also believed that truth cannot be put into the words of the tongue. That is why he, as one of the most prolific poets in the world, called himself “the silent one” at the end of each of his thousands of sonnets.

Friendship with Julia is a huge honor for me, but it is also a living proof of how the peoples of the world, from any two countries, can use art as a bridge to connect.  Artists are the surgeons who stitch hearts together with each of their work.

It was with her art that she decided to talk to the world. And it was after witnessing her art that I found myself anxious to talk to her. How easily friendship can start when people choose beauty as a subject for discussions. For “beauty”, with all its various forms and definitions, is the ultimate truth. As Muslim mystics say, “Howal Jamil wa yohebbol jamal.” “He is beautiful and loves beauty.” Within my culture, “Beauty” is one of God’s names.

Let us stitch our hearts together with her works:

 

 Early Autumn Triptych©2011 Julia R. Berkley

 

Henry David Thoreau said, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”  I believe what Thoreau meant was that there are sometimes leaves for you to catch when you go a-fishing in the stream of time.  With these pictures I do not regret why I could not watch every single leaf which fell off the trees of this autumn.  Julia has captured some and perpetuated them in her pictures for us!

 

 

 

What a wonderful world!

“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”

All Walden is a beautiful reply to this fundamental question presented to us in Walden itself.

By moving to the forest, Thoreau denies and defies the way time and place are defined by the people in the town.  He reins in time and forces it to a standstill. He even seems to defy place, for the sun does not fall in horizon, but in Thoreau’s west window.

“in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.”

By going to Walden, he moved beyond time and place as we know them. “My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that “for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day.”

Hafez says, “I am not old as a result of days and months.” And another Persian mystic says, “The one who resides in your alley does not worry about days and nights, for in the paradise there are no such things as days and nights.”

He created his own whole universe and applied his own laws to it at Walden. The sun is not enough to define neither the beginning nor the end of Thoreau’s days: “such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” Just as Hafez said, “Of the hidden fire burning inside me, the sun is just a flame caught in the sky.”

Walden! What a wonderful world!  Even today let us move our wagons in a way not to disturb his innocent solitude.  Let his days continue beyond our minced lives!

Meeting the Friend

In the last illness of our Sheik, Abu Saeed Abol Kheir, they asked him, “Oh Sheik what would you like them to sing as they carry your body to the cemetry?” He said, “Tell them to sing these lines, ‘A friend went to the Friend.  Do you know of any sweeter end?’ “

From a book called “The Words and the Moods of Abu Saeed Abol Kheir”.  Writen by one of his disciples.

The Wintery Shrine

“it is worth the while to see the silver grain sparkle when you split this wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the Celtis occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown; some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the woods; and many others I could mention. These were the shrines I visited both summer and winter.”

Let us try for an instant to look at the paradise described above through the miracle that Thoreau himself taught us and see the world through Thoreau’s eyes for an instant!  It is a miracle that makes a whole life worth living.

To many people, these woods, with all their trees, branches and leaves are only beautiful in the spring.  To some others including poets, they continue to be beautiful in summer and fall.  There are few people who would see any beauty in these woods in “dead” winter – as it is sometimes described in English.   To Thoreau, however, not only does nature remain beautiful, but it is also a whorshiping shrine.

But what kind of a man could worship nature in cold, arid winters like this?  Certainly not a greedy one!  If there is a tinge of greed for the mundane world in our hearts we will not be among such pilgrims.  And we will not be able to look through Thoreau’s eyes even for an instant.  We should wash the greed off our hearts the way Henry did first!

The New Year starts with the first moment of springs in Iran.   This tradition is thousands of years old in my country.  This and the fact that Persian poets have always praised the spring in their divans for many centuries had made me a stranger to the winter shrine.  Today Thoreau changed me and reconciled me with the winter.  This is a sample of the moment of change that happens in me regularly as I explore Thoreau.

Within the Shiite culture, Imam Ali says, “Man is hiden behind his tongue.”  It is impossible for the one who talks to hide one’s true character for ever.  Sooner or later the world will discover us between the words and the lines that we speak and write.  In my constantly curious eyes, Henry was a forgiving, kind, generous, worshipful, ungreedy soul.  This is what I discover in the mirror of this apparantly small, but truly great sentence:  “These were the shrines I visited both summer and winter.” 

Warm greetings to my friends in Thoreau’s land from a very cold Fall in Tehran.

Angles with billions of feathers

I just put a literal, prose translation of this poem of the beloved Saadi on the site’s side bar:

“Having been made from a single gem in their creation, the children of Adam are all the limbs of a single body.  Whenever the vicissitudes of times pour pain in any of the limbs, all the other limbs turn restless. You who show no sadness for the suffereings of others, you do not deserve to be called a human being.”

It is written in such an easy, straight language in Persian that even a young child can comfortably understand it.  this is the characteristic of all Saadi’s poems: profound meaning mixed with eternal literary beauty!  There is not any Iranian who does not know this poem by heart.  And no Iranian can remember when it was exactly that he or she memorized this eternal poem.  My own guess is that when our mothers teach us the names of our limbs a few months after we are born, they continue the lesson by mentioning the names of the relatives and then the neighbors and then the neighbors of our neighbors and then they still continue the lesson by telling us the names of other nations in the world.  And in this way, every Iranian child sees himself as a bird with billions of feathers in his wings.  Just imagine how high you can fly with such a powerful wing.  History and the huge achievements of our fathers and mothers despite constant odds are our proof.

And the story does not end here.  Iranians have a heart full of love for every thing that occupies universe for the whole universe has been created by the Friend.  In one of Attar’s stories, there is the story of a mystic who bought some sheaves of wheat from a distant village.  After arriving home, the mystic noticed that there had been a tiny ant trapped inside the sheaves.  It was then that the mystic cried, picked up the ant and carried it back to the place where it belonged.

The actual result of the lessons that exist in such stories for us is that there are Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians who have been living here for thousands of years.   The place belongs to them in the same way that it belongs to us.  We are us!

In remembrance of the forbidden fruit

“where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red alderberry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste.”

Not that we do not deserve to taste these fruits as mortal souls. In my humble opinion, Thoreau’s hint is so sacred and subtle here. He is guiding us to a source of immortality that can be found even in a single tiny wild berry. He is implying that we have to taste our own immortality in these forbidden fruits. There is an immensely profound joy in these words for me. Most of the times I feel paralized by Thoreau’s magic.

Adam tasted the forbidden fruit, which has not yet been precisely found and remains almost nameless, and was banished from paradise. Here, there is also a immensely subtle point. Thoreau’s referrence to the “forbidden fruit” is following the thought expressed in the last sentence of the previous chapter: “Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.” Here by his admiration of the forbidden fruit he is disgracing the paradise and giving grace to his beloved Walden — our beloved Walden!

Henry’s preference of Walden over Paradise has another record. “Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them.”

Didn’t Adam and Eve taste the forbidden fruits to come to Walden?

I can’t believe that a book can be this profound. I can not believe that a man can reach such immortality!

A Persian tribute to American literature

I will never taste life in a true sense if I do not taste the literary and intellectual joys that Henry David Thoreau pours into my life.  In response to Thoreau’s comment on Saadi, I should say that Henry is not American, he is not classic either.  Saadi continued to live in Thoreau and Thoreau continues his life inside my heart.  The name Persian does not limit my world or my web log to myself and my own country and culture. 

Let me share with you just one of the huge literary joys that Henry David Thoreau pours into my life the way the morning sun pours its light into the world.

Thoreau says in Walden, “Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them;”

In my humble opinion, in the above sentence, we would have normally used “in” instead of the word “with” for light: “with wavy boughs, rippling ‘in’ light”.  Here, however, Thoreau uses the word “with” in such a way that one might think it is actually the “light” which is rippling the boughs instead of the winds.  The boughs are not rippling “in” the light. This is actually the light which is rippling them. 

Thoreau’s use of the word “with” indicates that Henry had something to add to Newton’s laws of mechanics – something that we might call Thoreau’s law of dream mechanics. In fact, in Thoreau’s mechanical world light had acquired the ability to fill the sails of his dream boats and move them forward like winds. 

The world was discovered and conquered by sailors who merely moved their ancient ships around with favorable winds.  Just imagine how far our ships would have gone and what other fantastic horizons we would have conquered had we learned to use light to move our boats around.  There is never a lack or shortage of light.  Even in the darkest of nights there is always a star which is shimmering in the most distant skies for us.  Great sailors not only use the stars to find their routes on oceans they also use the lights from those stars to move their ships around when there is a lack of winds or when the winds are not favorable — something that Thoreau did all his life.

 Ali