Michael Bee

“XXX THE QUALITY OF MERCY The sound of your pain begins like fingernails on glass (my heart the glass). I am inside your cold & loss. When will this sad piece stop? Perhaps I am a baffle? Perhaps I slo it down a bit? My heart's blood may warm yours. I can't crush the pain out of you but will hold you until you can breath again...”
― Michael Bee, Leaves on the Wind

“The sign of being in love’s an aching heart; there is no suffering like the suffering heart. 110 The lover’s suffering’s like no other suffering: love is the astrolabe of God’s own mysteries. No matter whether love is of this world or of the next, it steals us to that world. Whatever words I say to explain this love, when I arrive at love, I am ashamed. Though language gives a clear account of love, yet love beyond all language is the clearer. The pen had gone at breakneck speed in writing, but when it came to love it split in two. 115 The explaining mind sleeps like an ass in mud, for love alone explains love and the lover.”
― Rumi, مثنوی معنوی

“LOVE God is love, and there are blessed moments when even to unregenerate human beings it is granted to know Him as love. But it is only in the saints that this knowledge becomes secure and continuous. By those in the earlier stages of the spiritual life God is apprehended predominantly as law. It is through obedience to God the Law-Giver that we come at last to know God the loving Father. The law which we must obey, if we would know God as love, is itself a law of love. “Thou shalt love God with all thy soul, and with all thy heart, with all thy mind and with all thy strength. And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” We cannot love God as we should, unless we love our neighbors as we should. We cannot love our neighbors as we should, unless we love God as we should. And, finally, we cannot realize God as the active, all-pervading principle of love, until we ourselves have learned to love Him and our fellow creatures. Idolatry consists in loving a creature more than we love God. There are many kinds of idolatry, but all have one thing in common: namely, self-love. The presence of self-love is obvious in the grosser forms of sensual indulgence, or the pursuit of wealth and power and praise. Less manifestly, but none the less fatally, it is present in our inordinate affections for individuals, persons, places, things, and institutions. And even in men’s most heroic sacrifices to high causes and noble ideals, self-love has its tragic place. For when we sacrifice ourselves to any cause or ideal that is lower than the highest, less than God Himself, we are merely sacrificing one part of our unregenerate being to another part which we and other people regard as more creditable. Self-love still persists, still prevents us from obeying perfectly the first of the two great commandments. God can be loved perfectly only by those who have killed out the subtlest, the most nobly sublimated forms of self-love. When this happens, when we love God as we should and therefore know God as love, the tormenting problem of evil ceases to be a problem, the world of time is seen to be an aspect of eternity, and in some inexpressible way, but no less really and certainly, the struggling, chaotic multiplicity of life is reconciled in the unity of the all-embracing divine charity.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“118 On the day of death, when my bier is on the move, do not suppose that I have any pain at leaving this world. Do not weep for me, say not “Alas, alas!” You will fall into the devil’s snare—that would indeed be alas! When you see my hearse, say not “Parting, parting!” That time there will be for me union and encounter. When you commit me to the grave, say not “Farewell, farewell!” For the grave is a veil over the reunion of paradise. Having seen the going-down, look upon the coming-up; how should setting impair the sun and the moon? To you it appears as setting, but it is a rising; the tomb appears as a prison, but it is release for the soul. What seed ever went down into the earth which did not grow? Why do you doubt so regarding the human seed? What bucket ever went down and came not out full? Why this complaining of the well by the Joseph of the spirit? When you have closed your mouth on this side, open it on that, for your shout of triumph will echo in the placeless air.”
― Rumi, Mystical Poems of Rumi