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I was 18 when love opened my eyes with its enchanted rays and touched my heart for the first time with its blazing fingertips.
Salma Karama was the Eve of this heart, filled with mysteries and wonders, and she was the one who made it understand the essence of this existence, who made it stand like a mirror before these apparitions.
Love freed my tongue so that it spoke, separated my eyelids so that they wept, and opened up my throat so that it sighed and complained.
But if blind ignorance dwells in the vicinity of a vital emotional life, it is crueler than hell and more bitter than death.
Grief is a pair of hands that are soft to the touch, yet sinewy and powerful, which seize hearts and bedevil them by uniting them.
Beauty is a mystery that our spirits comprehend, in which they rejoice, and under the influence of which they grow.
Every great and beautiful thing in this world is generated by a single thought or feeling within a human being.
True love is the daughter of a spiritual understanding, and if that understanding is not achieved in a single moment, it will never be attained—not in a year, not in a whole century.
Were we speedily soaring toward the stars when our wings tired and cast us into the abyss? Did we surprise love in its sleep, so that it awoke, furious and intent on punishing us; or did our breaths stir up the night breezes, transforming them into a raging cyclone that ripped us to shreds and swept us away like dust into the chasm?
If this life has slain us, that death will resurrect us.
Should we consider love a guest, a stranger brought by the night and evicted by the morning? Should we reckon this soulful feeling a dream, brought on by sleep and banished by wakefulness?
“I want you to love me. I want you to love me till the end of my days. I want you to love me the way the poet loves his tenderest thoughts. I want you to remember me the way a traveler remembers a placid pool, in which he saw the image of his face before he drank from its waters.
I’ll make my spirit a cloak for your spirit, my heart a home for your beauty, my breast a grave for your travails. I’ll love you the way fields love the spring, and live in you the way flowers live in the heat of the sun. I’ll hum your name the way the valley echoes pealing bells reverberating above the village churches. I’ll listen to the conversation of your soul the way the shore listens to the tales of the waves.
At dawn, love will awaken me from my slumber and lead me to the distant, open country. At noon it will conduct me to the shade of trees, that I might lie down with the sparrows who are protected from the heat of the sun. In the evening it will cause me to stand before the sunset and will fill my ears with the melodies of nature’s farewell to the light. It will show me the apparitions of stillness soaring in the void. At night it will embrace me and I will sleep, dreaming of celestial worlds where the spirits of lovers and poets reside.
In the days of youth love will be my mentor; in middle age it will be my support; and in old age it will be my companion. Love will stay with me, Salma, till the end of my life, until death comes, until God’s grasp unites me with you.“
You create her with love, how can you destroy her with love?
The melody that had embraced the voices of all created beings and rendered them a celestial hymn had dissolved at that hour into a cacophony more bone-chilling than the roar of a lion, issuing from depths lower even than hell.
My mind alternated between a frightening wakefulness and a troubled sleep, while my spirit repeated in both states Salma’s words: “Have mercy, Lord, and lend strength to all broken wings.”
Take comfort, child, that I lived to see you a grown woman and rejoice, because through you I will live on after my death.
The sweetest thing human lips can say is the word “Mother,” and the most beautiful of calls is “O Mother.”
The mother of all things in existence is the Universal Spirit, which is immortal and everlasting, and filled with beauty and love.
