“True art evolves us- opens our arms and weakens our prejudices so that the ever-present seeds of healing and renewal can take root in our soul” – Daniel Ladinsky
The words of Hafiz have the ability to soothe as well as to enrapture. They summon up an intoxicated, radical desire to break away, to wake anew and see beyond the world of forms. To confront the world with all the raw compassion that can be mobilized. The poems lead us to a secret door, behind which lies the quiet, inviting mystery that lingers softly behind all phenomena. Hafiz speaks to the eternal, infinite void behind the curtain and judges the void benevolent, radiant, and utterly teeming with life.
Hafiz was born in Shiraz, Persia in 1315 and was perhaps one of the most luminous, authoritative voices to come out of the Sufi tradition within Persian culture and spirituality. He approaches life with a reverence that strikes the modern reader as radical, uncompromising. We must not mistake his mysticism with naivete, however. Hafiz was an ardent critic of the religious hypocrisy that he saw around him and he was no apologist for human weakness or conformity. He urges us to embrace the challenge of living authentically and encourages us to approach our lives with a sincere generosity of spirit.
In The Gift, translator and critic Daniel Ladinsky has rendered the words lyrical, weightless and his adroit hand makes the work refreshingly approachable. This is a selection of quotes and fragments lovingly borrowed from Ladinsky’s The Gift, an original and spirited reimagining of Hafiz’s eternal wisdom and humor.
I have selected some of the fragments and musings that resonated with me and categorized them. They speak to a lyrical adulation of the earthly cycles, of lunar and solar influences, and the wonderment of forces unseen. His work is imbued with a decisive animism, resulting in poetry populated with whimsical animal spirits and dazzlingly symbolic birds.
Deep Musings
Run my dear from anything that may not strengthen your precious budding wings. Run like hell my dear, from anyone likely to put a sharp knife into the sacred, tender vision of your beautiful heart. For we have not come here to take prisoners or to confine our wondrous spirits
Time, space, and boredom are just passing fads. All your pain, worry, sorrow will someday apologize and confess they were a great lie
And the nightingale’s perfect lyric of happiness all become an equal cause to dance
For this bizarre and spectacular existence
Go running through the streets creating divine chaos
Is your caravan lost? It is, if you no longer weep for gratitude or happiness or weep from being cut deep with the awareness of the extraordinary beauty that emanates from the most simple act and common object
There are different wells within us, some fill with each good rain, others are far, far too deep for that…
Our life dance is only for a few magic seconds
Few things are stronger than the mind’s need for diverse experience
Your spirit needs to leave the bed of fear
Don’t die again with that holy ruby mine inside, still unclaimed
Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly, let it cut more deep
What we speak becomes the house we live in
From beating wildly in our hearts – Wayfarer, now is no time to sit still
Luminous & Lyrical: Assorted Beautiful Fragments of Text
Let’s hold hands and get drunk near the sun
When the violin can forgive the past
You have stumbled enough in the earth’s sweet dance
Lanterns hang from the night sky/So that your eye might draw one more image of love upon your silk canvas before sleep
Alone again in God’s valley after that magnificent storm of your presence just passed
Don’t worry – I will not let sadness possess you
When ages ago every cell in your soul capsized forever into this infinite golden sea
They were stunned in glimpsing the reality of the thousand miraculous components of each moment and step
All of your ideas of space and time are…shadows
I have chained my every dancing atom
Cultivate your mind and heart to that depth that it can give you everything a warm body can
All that you think is rain is not
The earth has disappeared beneath my feet, illusion from all my ecstasy
It seems they have all built a shrine to the past
There is a private chamber in the soul that knows a great secret of which no tongue can speak
The million candles in the sky are lit and singing / Every particle of existence is a dancing altar that some mysterious force worships
They, with words, magnetism /Can coax Venus from her primal orbit / And steal from her mouth that one drop of miraculous dew she has been collecting in her veins since time said “I am”
I will always hold a lantern with galaxies blooming inside
I swallow deserts and clouds and chew on mountains knowing they are sweet bones
I will be holding forests upside down
The way we live opens windows and calls in a secret voice to anything still missing
This world is the lunatic’s sphere
Evict all the mind’s ghosts
Musings on the Sun, Moon, Stars
The sun’s eyes are painting fields again
We live on the sun’s playground
And carry your heart through this world like a life-giving sun
Sovereign of my illuminated heart is the indivisible knowledge in the gaze of my spirit’s wings / Climbing to such a sublime height that they each become the sun itself
For the sky knows its prized fixtures / The sun, moon and planets could all wind up rolling so wild on the floor
The day candle (sun) has forgotten the hour; the whole world has gone joyously mad
Tying gold sacks of gratuity / To the dangling feet of moons / Planets, ecstatic midair dervishes and singing birds
I don’t have the strength to wring out another drop of sun
Out of 10,000 people who say they can read the fine print on a star
The sun won a beauty contest and became a jewel set upon God’s right hand
The moon once put a price upon my head
One makes a thousand moons go mad with love
The sun and all light have forever fixed themselves into my heart and upon my skin
Tie yourself to spawning stars in a game of tag with the moon
The stars got poured into the sky out of a magician’s hat last night / And all of them have fallen into my hair / Some have even tangled my eyelashes into luminous, playful knots
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying / With that sweet moon language…
Luminous, or Light in Other Words
A great palette of light has embraced this earth
There are some who can visit that luminous sphere that reveals this life never was
Somewhere where the mind cradles light
I see you have the luminous afflictions from visiting his oasis of light
I weave light into words so that when your mind holds them / Your eyes will relinquish their sadness
Love was not born to consume the luminous realms
Only that illuminated one who keeps seducing the formless into form had the charm to win my heart
Is it true that our destiny is to turn into light itself?
When the nameless one debuts again / Ten thousand facets of my being unfurl wings and reveal such a radiance inside i enter a realm divine / I too begin to so sweetly cast light, like a lamp
Independent of space and times novice dance/ Across a single lute string of the infinite
Don’t get lost in them, it has not rained light there for days
Magical Musings on Birds
I once asked a bird “how is it that you fly in this gravity of darkness?”
The nightingale and the rose
A lone beautiful bird
Huma: the mythological bird of paradise that never touches ground
Birds intially had no desire to fly. What really happened with this: God once sat close to them playing music. When he left they missed him so much their great longing sprouted wings, Needing to search the sky
When I have so many other beautiful animals and brightly colored birds inside/ That are all longing to say something wonderful and exciting to your heart
This sky where we live is no place to lose your wings
Let’s turn out loose golden falcons/ So that they can meet in the sky /Where our spirits belong
Falcons and butterflies, and playful gangs of young angels mounted on emerald spears
A small bird decorated with orange patches of light
A bird comes and sits on a crystal rim and from my forest cave I hear singing / So i run to the edge of existence and join my soul in love
An emerald bird rises from inside me and now sits upon the beloved’s glass
I know the ecstasy of the falcon’s wings when they make love against the sky
When the call from the golden nightingale lifts and pours my being throughout the sky
Tonight there is a jeweled falcon singing in a blessed pain
Musings on Roses, Jewels, Feathers
How did the rose ever open its heart and give to this world all its beauty? / It felt the encouragement of light against its being… / Otherwise we all remain too frightened
Of the infinite number of petals that are the soul
Inside the veins of a petal
The jewel in the eye starts to dance
I must have inhaled a strange feather
I have cried great streams of emerald crystals on my scarred knees / Begging love
The jeweled vision in the heart
Tonight my heart is an unset ruby / Offered bowed and weeping to the sky
The blind turn over their gold and lives to caged feathers
There is no one in this world who is not upon his jeweled dance floor
Musings on Beauty
The heart is like that: Blessed and ruined once it has known divine beauty. Then it becomes a restless sky hunter
Yet a mysterious wind comes by and moves the invisible / I enter your soul / Your beauty, dear pilgrim, startles me, causes my spirit’s foot to slip
Your beauty still causes me madness
The body will again become restless / Until your soul paints all its beauty upon the sky
