REFLECTIONS
Love Is a Fire: The Sufi’s Mystical Journey Home
My intention with reading this book is to gain a deeper understanding of the Sufi tradition, its teachings, some of the Sufi Mystics, and practices in order to support my own development in immersing myself into God.
I found that not only the book allows me to study Sufism but it also support me in various personal discoveries so, I created various writings along the reading process.
These are rather self-reflection type of writings. I, nevertheless, included them in my study works because they reflect stages of my development as I am taking the ministerial study course.
24-30 June, 2016
The weirdo
“Often on the path we feel the pain of this ‘aloneness’. Even in the company of fellow wayfarers we experience a quality of solitariness that is deeper than loneliness because it does not belong to the personality or the ego. As we travel a path that takes us away from the comfort of the collective and its patterns of codependency, we feel the ‘aloneness’ of the soul. …
…. We are an outcast from the collective patterns that offer a sense of security and belonging to so many.
… The poet E. E. Cummings describes the strange wonder of this transition, and how we find a deeper connection to a love that is beyond ourself and yet is our own essence:
losing through you what seemed myself, I find
selves unimaginably mine; beyond
sorrow’s own joys and hoping’s very fears
yours is the light by which my spirit’s born:
yours is the darkness of my soul’s return
—you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.”
My biggest mistake is that I keep on trying to prove that I am not a weirdo, you don’t need be afraid of me, you don’t even have to understand me, just accept me for who I am.
I frequently find myself in the shoes of the weirdo, the misunderstood and detested wayfarer who scares the hell out of her environment. When I see the look of shock or misunderstanding on their faces, I suddenly feel ashamed. I did it again. I should have kept my mouth shut. I should have just withdrawn into quiet desperation and let it slip. I haven’t though. Then, all hell break loose; arguments, defenses and profanity arise, hurt feelings bleed all over the floor, tears drop silently, stomach stirs then hardens, fists clench. Finally, tensed silence moves in as a permanent shelter seeker.
I always feel in the wrong. So, I keep on explaining and excusing myself for pushing others against their will. There is this aura of ‘difference’ about me that nobody seems to appreciate that most people experience as a push into the unknown they do not wish to discover but they feel they have to when they are with me.
As a result, I keep running away, run from place to place in search for a new environment that would embrace my weirdness and I would, finally, fee at home.
However, I notice that I am running away from something that only exists inside of me. The pursuer is a part of me who cannot accept me for who I truly am and cannot see the immense value in my weirdness. The pursuer is, in some way, scared of the madness of the weirdo, the ‘incomprehensibleness’ and intangibility of the tangled mind, the essence that slips through the fingers. The pursuer wants to make sure that life is structured and predictable whereas the true nature is like a small child wondrous and untamed.
There is nothing I can do but embrace the unstructured and the untamed. I close my eyes and let go of that part of me that finds comfort in the collective patterns of my upbringing.
And I allow myself to fly.
Quotes: Love is a fire, Llewellyn Vaugham-Lee p365