Stephen Levine -There is a silence between breaths

There is a silence between breaths
when the heart becomes a sacred flame
and the belly uncoils which reminds me
how remarkable it is to wake
beside you another day.

Between deaths we dreamed together
between breaths, in that stillness,
which has joined us ever since.

In that first breath
we step onto the dance floor,
and waltz unnoticed through the void.
The sacred everywhere we turn
and turn again, as form so generously dissolves
and only the Beloved remains.

In this moment which lasts a lifetime
there is nowhere to stand
where you are not beside me
where you do not accompany me within.

 

Octavio Paz - Time

art Gun Legler

 Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language.
There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence:
East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. 

Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now
that is everywhere at once.

Aisha Salem, - End of the Road

If I Walked on A Road, Careless and Free
Pondering This LifeTime, Then what would it Be?!

Body of Ages, Years gone By
Joyous in Laughter, Surrendered in Cry

No Moment Wasted, Deep Love of Soul
Dancing in Grace, only Truth – No Goal

Skin worn Thin, Hands Touched Caressed
Feet gone Sore, Earth Walked Blessed

A Life Lived Fully, One of a Kind
A Dusty Trail, No Footsteps Behind

As Ocean Rolled In, Claiming The End
I’d Thank All that passed Me, Kindly Bent

 https://aishasalem.com/

 

Nicholas of Cusa - On Learned Ignorance

A Christian Allegory by Jan Provost

 

Next, the aspirants, persisting in more ardent surrender, are taken up into simple awareness itself, and leaping beyond all sensible things, they pass as if from sleep to wakefulness, from hearing to sight. And, there, those things that are seen cannot be revealed because they are beyond all hearing and beyond all instruction by voice. For there, incomprehensibly heard, as the end of all speech, is Love, blessed forever, the end of all understanding, because Love is truth, and the end of all sense, because Love is life, and the end, finally, of all being, because Love is being itself, and the perfection of every creature.

Such things are shown in stages to one who submits to Love by unshakeable trust at the heart. For if the trust is great, it unites the aspirant with Love, so that the aspirant transcends all that is not in union with Love Itself. Without Love, trust is not living but dead, and not trust at all. None of the wise of this world can grasp true happiness if they do not know Love. None can see anyone happy except with you, Love. For everyone of happy spirit subsists in your Spirit, as the vivified in the vivifier. And thus in you the finite is united to the infinite and to that which cannot be united, and the incomprehensible is seized by an eternal fruition, which is a most joyous and inexhaustible happiness.

 

source text

Marguerite Porete - Beguines say I err...

O my Lover, what will Beguines say
and religious types,
When they hear the excellence
of your divine song?
Beguines say I err,
priests, clerics, and Preachers,
Augustinians, Carmelites,
and the Friars Minor,
Because I wrote about the being
of the one purified by Love.
I do not make Reason safe for them,
who makes them say this to me....

I have said that I will love Him.
I lie, for I am not.
It is He alone who loves me:
He is, and I am not;
And nothing more is necessary to me
Than what He wills,
And that He is worthy.
He is fullness,
And by this I am impregnated,
This is the divine seed and Loyal Love.

 

Marguerite of Porete b. ca. 1250; d. Paris, 1310.

French mystic. Described as a beguine, she was living around Valencienne (Belgium) in the early 1300s, when her book, Le mirouer des simples ames aneanties [ca. 1300] (ed. Guarnieri 1986; tr. Colledge et al. 1999) was condemned and publicly burnt. Written in Old French, and extant in Latin translation as well, the book characterizes the final goal of human life as a single, simple unitive act of will with God. It was subsequently enlarged, clarified, and eventually approved by a commission of theologians, but her repeated refusal to submit to ecclesiastical authority led her to be condemned as an unrepentant heretic, and she was burned at the stake.