Today, no poetry of mine, but a piece by Hazrat Inayat Khan. I could not describe this any better…

“I have loved in life and I have
been loved.
I have drunk the bowl of
poison from the hands of love
as nectar,
And have been raised above
Life’s joy and sorrow.
My heart, aflame in love, set
afire every heart that came in
touch with it.
My heart has been rent and
joint again;
My heart has been broken and
Again made whole;
My heart has been wounded
And healed again;
A thousand deaths my heart
has died, and thanks be to
love, it lives yet.
I went through hell and saw
there love’s raging fire,
and I entered heaven
illumined with the light of love.
I wept in love and made all
weep with me;
I mourned in love and pierced
the hearts of men;
And when my fiery glance fell
On the rocks, the rocks burst forth as volcanoes.
The whole world sank in the
flood caused by my one tear;
With my deep sigh the earth
Trembled, and when I cried
Aloud the name of my Beloved,
I shook the throne of God in
Heaven.
I bowed my head low in
humility, and on my knees I
Begged of love,
“Disclose to me, I pray to Thee, O
Love, Thy secret.”
She took me gently by my
Arms and lifted me above the
Earth, and spoke softly in my
ear,
“My dear one, thou thyself art
Love, art lover,
and thyself art the Beloved
Whom thou hast adored.”


– Hazrat Inayat Khan

A day’s fatigue
Dresses me in black.
All whiteness gone
And madness descends.

Maybe it is in this madness
That one finds salvation,
In this madness
That cannot be controlled.

Is not God’s love
Madness?



Vanessa

“It was easy to love God in all that was beautiful. The lessons of deeper knowledge though, instructed me to embrace God in all things.”

– St. Francis of Assisi

Peace, no matter where we go, can be not only profound, but accessed at all times. It is not a matter of meditating hours on end, but to find in that turmoil that life can be. They are moments of peace. It is in finding that peace that we can access love. With this love, all hatred must die and acceptance of all that is can come out. It is easy to find peace in beautiful surroundings, but the question is whether we can access this peace wherever we are at?
Can you do that?

Sometimes my episodes of peace are so profound that I dare not to breathe for I become fearful that if I took yet another breath that it would end.
Coming back to the city from the mountains was extremely difficult to say the least. The turmoil of my surroundings and its inhabitants hit me and I know now why I become ill all the time. But is it no God that wants me here right now? Is it not amidst this madness that I am being taught to find peace?
It is the quiet voice of God that I must find within the chaos, the eye of the storm. I must become so peaceful and full of gaiety, even in the worst of circumstances that nothing can throw me off the path.
Recently I encountered someone who was talking about conspiracy theories, about governments being corrupt, about newspapers printing fake news, etc. I nearly vomited when I listened to this. Of course there is some extent of truth in this, I do agree. But I have seen that things are running just as they should be running. There is a divine plan behind this. I have seen this many times. We may not know why or how, but even in the most cruel of circumstances, unfortunately, there is a plan behind.

So now I am starting to see that I never go anywhere purely for myself, but rather for others. It is not me who moves somewhere, who becomes restless. There seems to be a larger force at hand.
Yesterday I went to learn portrait photography from someone and when I thought it was for myself, I was very much mistaken. While being there, I understood that this person who was teaching me, needed to wake up. That they must awaken to their divine plan and question life. I have encountered numerous people in my life who told me: “I do not want to awaken.” Little do they know that it is not up to them to decide this, much like I never decide on whom I meet or to awaken myself. I am being sent to places and to people, either for my own learning curve or for others to learn and to awaken to their truth. If they are too resistant I am moving on, still knowing that this energy will work its way through them. One day, like Mrs. Tweedie once said to someone, they will awaken and question their life. They will question why they have been wasting their time on silly pursuits. It can even happen a few times in life. But this I have no control over. They are being touched by Grace. It is up to them to listen to this call. I am merely the instrument, the (fallible human) mirror to show them who they really are. It is not easy, because there are our petty ego and mind who have become a driving force in our society. But there is something that tells me to go to places and see people. And it is always beyond miraculous. I can never describe this feeling. Some people help me, sometimes angels in human form appear (angels always appear in human form!), some I help myself. Or rather they are being helped through me. I never know what may happen at any given day. Sometimes I think: My goodness, nothing is happening, when in fact, a lot of things are happening right underneath the surface.
I was always under the impression that Kundalini Shakti needed to be very active and running all the time, but it is not so. She will run slightly in the background. The moment she is running heavily, it is up to me to ask: “What is Thy will?” It is up to me to say: “Let me be humble, with devotion and surrender to Thee.”
The surges indicate that one is moving in the wrong direction and needs to understand that one’s life is the one of service.

So yesterday, learning photography, there was such tiny movement that I hardly noticed it at all if I did not pay much attention to it. It must have been the right thing to “do”. At work she is running heavily and runs wild, so it must not be the right thing to do. This is my compass from now onwards: Crazy motions of Kundalini Shakti and it is not the right thing. Hardly any movement and it is the right thing to do.

My lesson now is to love all that is averse to beauty. With a deep sigh I must accept the thief, the cruel demeanor, even the tirades of some aggressive people. I must accept that God has a plan. Mrs. Tweedie’s Guru once said to her that when people are angry with him, one must learn to accept that God is angry with one. Then one must ask where one has gone wrong or maybe just accept that God can also have a wrathful form. The tightrope becomes thinner all the time I must say and one walks razor’s edge. One wrong word and one can fall rather deeply, being cut up by sharp rocks that do not brace our fall but accelerate it. It is through pain and suffering that we learn, not through beauty.
And so I must learn to surrender at all times, to love at all times, and to find peace underneath all that rubble that presents itself sometimes.

Have you embraced all things today?


Vanessa

“And I turned to see the voice that spoke to me. And as I turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks,
And in the midst of the seven candlesticks one resembling the Son of man, wearing a long vestment and girded round his breast with a golden girdle.”

– Revelation 2:12-13

Whenst you came from
Thus the angel spake
You shall return to
For you are free.

You are the pillar
That walketh in liberty
Let not your fears
Come in between.

Let this love
Guide you on your path of
Truth.
Let the rose bloom
And forget about your daily
Gloom.

Walk tall and free
For no one
Can imagine your life
But He.

Tears of joy rolling down my face,
I watched as the angel
Let fall her disguise.
I trembled in fright
For her light
Became so bright
That I felt blinded
By her sight.

Have you lost your faith or found it again?


Vanessa

“I am perplexed. How can an angel suffer?”

– Angel of the Desert, Paula Schlier

Is it not love that we must follow in all its colors and shades?
Is it not the absence of love that creates hell on earth?
It is the grayness of all that makes a human being suffer.
But if we choose to step over our fears and ideologies then we can experience perfect heaven while walking on earth.

Yesterday I had undergone a test and I do not think that I passed this very test:
While walking to work, I encountered a Lady who is living on the streets. In one year I have never met her, even though I am walking along those streets quite often. Others I have crossed many times, but not her. She asked me if I would take a poem off her for a hot chocolate. I said that I had to go to work but that I would give her some money for the poem. She gave me one for good luck. But instead of heading off very quickly, I listened to her. She told me about all the things she had learned in life and she was very educated. I was starting to wonder how an educated person could be living on the streets now. How was that possible? So I said to her: “Maybe you should ask the angels.” She answered that she was doing this all the time and that she was talking to God. So I responded that maybe they had a message for her. While we talked something seemed to change in her and I looked at her. I knew this was a test of a sort. Then she asked me if she could come home with her for a night on the couch.
In came all the things I had learned as a child: Don’t bring strangers home, she could take something,… But first and foremost it made me intensely uncomfortable. I was starting to wonder whether this was my uncomfortableness or hers. While she continued to talk she said: “I would love to hear more about the angels from you.”
I said that we would have to talk to the angels and find each others’ paths again- they would organize it.
But what weighs heavily on my soul today is the fact that I used a little white lie: I said to her that my apartment was rented (which it is) and that I could not have guests, which is not true. I should just have said to her that it made me feel uncomfortable that she asked me this.
I asked her if she did not have a public place to stay, but she explained that she had two bullies who usually took her money. It dawned on me that she also was undergoing a test of standing up for herself in front of the bullies. So we were both being tested at the same time. We agreed to use the help of the angels as our messengers.
But before we parted ways, her voice changed a bit and she had a very ancient mode of expression. She asked me first simply: “Do you have a totem animal?” I answered that I had two. She told me hers and then she said: “Also this she can do.” It was said without judgement or any form of suspicion, in a very neutral tone. Just a simple statement. Another person had used the exact same expression a few months earlier for my fable for Holy Scriptures. It was said in the exact tone and voice. It was an ancient phrase. Who would use such a phrase?

When we parted ways, I had carried away Ingrid’s burdens.

Today I was wondering what the lesson of this encounter was. The old adage of setting boundaries? Or maybe I realized that it is easy to give people money, but it does not change their set of behavioral patterns. It was maybe to load off my personal guilt. I also saw that this would be another possibility for me if I did not have a job, but it had no resonant frequency of fear anymore. I had been homeless twice over the last years and both times I was offered very comfortable shelter by friends! So that fear has disappeared and I feel that the karmic burden has lessened through that. I do not know, but in this moment I felt it was sincere to give her the money as she had given me a personal poem that she had written (which is very deep and meaningful by the way). I felt even happy about it. Partially I felt invaded by being asked. The second test was my lie- I did not pass. So it will come up again. The third lesson was that one can learn many things, have a million talents, but if one does not work with one’s talents then it is a waste of precious time and resources. But the last lesson of this encounter was that divinity is everywhere and that it was a message that we both received. It was that one sentence when I knew for sure that it was a message: “Also this she can do.”

Maybe I do not love enough yet to let someone come into my place, to offer them shelter for a night. Maybe I am still too weak. It felt as if something old left me that I had carried along the way.

I will discover with time what it meant. I need to meet Ingrid again.


Vanessa

“I am telling you, Tobias: Nothing is as much of a failure as success. All life is reinforced by exposure and not through strength. Through smallness, not through might the human being may win.”

– Angel of the Desert, Paula Schlier

In the darkest hours we come to terms with our own weaknesses. Those are the ones we must overcome. Neither through might nor through fight we can win. It is the art of compassion, of patience, and of unbeatable faith. One cannot waiver. One must remain steadfast. In the face of adversity all must go through the fires of purification.
We cannot expect to go through the process of life without trials for we would never become more understanding. We cannot expect to go through life without pain for it is that exact pain that makes us understand others. We cannot expect to go through life without experiencing ugliness for it is that exact ugliness that makes us recognize beauty. But that beauty is not an external thing- it is a beauty that resides within us and then transpires to our outer world. We must wander in darkness at times in order to recognize that the luminosity that we all carry is so much larger than this small portion of obscurity. But even when the obscuration may seem to overtake, we must hold on to that hope of light.
For how could we stand in that light for if it wasn’t for that challenge of darkness. Your hope, your love must become so strong that even the harshest of trials cannot push you off of your path. You must continue. It is not even a question of returning or changing.

Al you must do is to stay steadfast. You must return to how you were when you were a child. You must become innocent and beautiful, you must have full trust in life and all of its obstacles and obscurations. For only if you let yourself fall off of the cliff, you will be able to trust divine consciousness.

Can you do that?


Vanessa

Built on water I saw this great city standing in the morning sun. The roofs glistened
while birds flew over the clear blue skies. At Santa Maria della Salute, I tried to greet the face of the lagoon. Its sadness reflected in my retina, I cried her tears of long lost love.

The world had turned into a different way of being. Life had become fast paced, on the hunt for success. The city remembered its peak days and with it came melancholy. She sighed deeply and awaited the streams of tourists coming in before the first cafes opened. She remembered how it took part in the amorous endeavors of Casanova, his passion, his games of flirtation and love. She remembered the painters and writers, the forsaken, the young and old that had dwelled in her embrace, the lagoon softly swaying everyone to sleep. She had resonated with the exuberance of her inhabitants over millennia, even remembering the grueling parts of the pest. She was young, wanted and had welcomed visitors from the orient with their strange looking clothes and elegant merchandise. She remembered how she had been fatigued of the events that unfolded underneath her warm embrace. Now she had become sad and spying on the little love affairs that sometimes unfolded in her calles late at night. She watched over the lovers in the gondolas and wished for different times than those that she was experiencing now. She realized how old she had become, still proud of her facade, of her churches and palaces, but underneath she felt tired.
At night she liked to hum everyone into a comfortable sleep, something so brilliant and shining that no one realized that she was holding everyone in her loving arms. She sang to them her old love songs, her arias of unrequited love. She filled the sleepless with wonder so that they may become deep sleepers. Some resisted, but still knew that she was there for them. Forgetfulness started being her every day romance. She knew she was becoming a sleeping city. Where were the young ones, the ones that held her firmly in their embrace. The ones that still knew her heartbeat. Not many were left, but a new arrival had peaked her interest. Her name was Ezekiel and with her the city had been catapulted out of her slumber.