I hear it all the time from my patients and clients:
“I pray, but I don’t know who I am praying to.”
“I want to pray, but I’m not sure anyone is listening.”
There is something profoundly human in these words.
They seem to me like signs of longing… a soul reaching beyond the boundaries of what it can see and touch, sensing that there is something, Someone, beyond itself and beyond this material world. A spark of Divine light within the heart that refuses to believe that what meets the eye is all there is.
Much of our modern education has painted for us a world closed upon material existence. A world of things that can be measured, weighed, quantified, analyzed, and explained.
And yet something within us refuses to be imprisoned there.
Something keeps longing.
The Cry of the Reed
This longing is ancient.
Rumi captured it brilliantly in the opening of the Masnavi, where he asks us to listen to the reed flute and the story it tells:
“Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale,
complaining of separations,
saying, “Ever since I was torn from the reedbed,
my lament has caused man and woman to moan.”
The reed cries because it remembers.
It remembers the reedbed from which it was cut.
Its cry is born from separation and from the longing to return to its source.
Perhaps this is why the image has endured for centuries. The reed’s longing mirrors our own.
We, too, have a vague memory of home. Not necessarily a memory we can articulate. Not a place we can point to on a map. More like an ache. A sense that there is something we have forgotten about. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?
A soul striving to remember herself.
There is another beautiful image I learned through the teachings of Ibn ʿArabi in Dr. Ali Hussein classes, it is about allowing ourselves to become like the reed flute, open enough for the Divine breath to move through us, clearing the obstructions so that our lives become instruments through which a music greater than ourselves can be heard.
But so much of modern life blocks this tune:
Too many distractions.
Too many attractions.
Too many fears, wounds, insecurities, ambitions, and cravings.
We run and rush, often without knowing what exactly we are chasing.
Until something stops us:
The Knock.
I have sat at the bedside of hundreds of patients through some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives… through illness, suffering, fear, and dying. And I can tell you that in those moments, I have never heard someone regret not doing another PhD or accepting that job or working a few more hours. Rather, the regrets I hear are about missed connections, missed opportunities to live, to love and to allow themselves to be loved. They regret choices that caused pain to themselves or to others. Words left unsaid. A loved one who was never told, clearly enough or often enough, I love you.
It is as though, in these vulnerable moments, something shifts.
A veil becomes thinner.
And for a brief moment, we catch a glimpse of What is Real.
Suffering can sometimes become a knock on the door of our carefully constructed lives.
A knock asking us to wake up.
Everyone hears the knock. Few listen. Fewer still respond.
Of course, the knock does not only come through suffering.
Sometimes it comes through beauty:
A line of poetry that refuses to leave us.
A dream.
A stranger.
A tree.
A coincidence that feels like more than a coincidence.
A story that unsettles something we thought we knew.
A question that suddenly becomes impossible to ignore.
Or even an ad that the algorithms “randomly” choose to throw on our feed.
Life is constantly knocking.
The question is whether we are listening.
Mirrors.
With every patient I meet, I hope to become, even briefly, a mirror… one clear enough to reflect something they may need to see or hear for themselves.
And they, in turn, become mirrors for me.
Every person I encounter shows me something about my own soul.
Sometimes something beautiful.
Sometimes something I would rather not see.
A fear.
An old hurt.
Pride.
Anger.
A craving.
A part of myself tucked into some dark crevice of the heart, safely away from view.
And perhaps these hidden places are precisely what obstruct the music.
They are the knots that block the reed flute.
The places where the Divine breath cannot flow freely through the instrument of our lives.
What is Real?
I wrote my novel, What Is Real?, for myself before I wrote it for anyone else.
I wrote it to explore a lifelong question and to enter a lifelong bewilderment:
What is Real?
What remains when the noise subsides?
What remains when the identities, accomplishments, fears, ambitions, and stories through which I have learned to define myself begin to crumble?
What remains when the mask I wear to hide myself from the world falls away?
Who am I beneath it all?
And what prevents me from facing this “I” beneath the mask?
Writing the novel became one way of facing what Rumi calls the Four Birds: Those unruly unresolved dispositions hidden within the folds of our heart, each pulling us toward something: achievement, control, recognition, distractions, attachments, or cravings…
Each capable of becoming a veil between us and What is Real.
And perhaps that is why the question What is Real? cannot be answered by logical explanation or reasoning.
The answer has to be lived. Tasted.
Maybe the work of a lifetime is to step out of our own way, slowly loosening the knots that obstruct the Divine breath, and allowing its music to flow through the reed flute of our lives…each of us sounding the unique note our soul was created to carry.
And, little by little, to remember the reed bed from which we came.
If you’d like to journey with the Four Birds and further explore What Is Real?, you can find the novel here.
amazon.com kindle
https://www.amazon.com/What-Real-Remembers-Silence-Speaks-ebook/dp/B0GHKFNQDR/
amazon.com Paperback
https://www.amazon.com/What-Real-Remembers-Silence-Speaks/dp/1067352007/
Universal Link
https://books2read.com/u/bzYvjj
“I pray, but I don’t know who I am praying to.”
“I want to pray, but I’m not sure anyone is listening.”
There is something profoundly human in these words.
They seem to me like signs of longing… a soul reaching beyond the boundaries of what it can see and touch, sensing that there is something, Someone, beyond itself and beyond this material world. A spark of Divine light within the heart that refuses to believe that what meets the eye is all there is.
Much of our modern education has painted for us a world closed upon material existence. A world of things that can be measured, weighed, quantified, analyzed, and explained.
And yet something within us refuses to be imprisoned there.
Something keeps longing.
The Cry of the Reed
This longing is ancient.
Rumi captured it brilliantly in the opening of the Masnavi, where he asks us to listen to the reed flute and the story it tells:
“Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale,
complaining of separations,
saying, “Ever since I was torn from the reedbed,
my lament has caused man and woman to moan.”
The reed cries because it remembers.
It remembers the reedbed from which it was cut.
Its cry is born from separation and from the longing to return to its source.
Perhaps this is why the image has endured for centuries. The reed’s longing mirrors our own.
We, too, have a vague memory of home. Not necessarily a memory we can articulate. Not a place we can point to on a map. More like an ache. A sense that there is something we have forgotten about. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?
A soul striving to remember herself.
There is another beautiful image I learned through the teachings of Ibn ʿArabi in Dr. Ali Hussein classes, it is about allowing ourselves to become like the reed flute, open enough for the Divine breath to move through us, clearing the obstructions so that our lives become instruments through which a music greater than ourselves can be heard.
But so much of modern life blocks this tune:
Too many distractions.
Too many attractions.
Too many fears, wounds, insecurities, ambitions, and cravings.
We run and rush, often without knowing what exactly we are chasing.
Until something stops us:
The Knock.
I have sat at the bedside of hundreds of patients through some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives… through illness, suffering, fear, and dying. And I can tell you that in those moments, I have never heard someone regret not doing another PhD or accepting that job or working a few more hours. Rather, the regrets I hear are about missed connections, missed opportunities to live, to love and to allow themselves to be loved. They regret choices that caused pain to themselves or to others. Words left unsaid. A loved one who was never told, clearly enough or often enough, I love you.
It is as though, in these vulnerable moments, something shifts.
A veil becomes thinner.
And for a brief moment, we catch a glimpse of What is Real.
Suffering can sometimes become a knock on the door of our carefully constructed lives.
A knock asking us to wake up.
Everyone hears the knock. Few listen. Fewer still respond.
Of course, the knock does not only come through suffering.
Sometimes it comes through beauty:
A line of poetry that refuses to leave us.
A dream.
A stranger.
A tree.
A coincidence that feels like more than a coincidence.
A story that unsettles something we thought we knew.
A question that suddenly becomes impossible to ignore.
Or even an ad that the algorithms “randomly” choose to throw on our feed.
Life is constantly knocking.
The question is whether we are listening.
Mirrors.
With every patient I meet, I hope to become, even briefly, a mirror… one clear enough to reflect something they may need to see or hear for themselves.
And they, in turn, become mirrors for me.
Every person I encounter shows me something about my own soul.
Sometimes something beautiful.
Sometimes something I would rather not see.
A fear.
An old hurt.
Pride.
Anger.
A craving.
A part of myself tucked into some dark crevice of the heart, safely away from view.
And perhaps these hidden places are precisely what obstruct the music.
They are the knots that block the reed flute.
The places where the Divine breath cannot flow freely through the instrument of our lives.
What is Real?
I wrote my novel, What Is Real?, for myself before I wrote it for anyone else.
I wrote it to explore a lifelong question and to enter a lifelong bewilderment:
What is Real?
What remains when the noise subsides?
What remains when the identities, accomplishments, fears, ambitions, and stories through which I have learned to define myself begin to crumble?
What remains when the mask I wear to hide myself from the world falls away?
Who am I beneath it all?
And what prevents me from facing this “I” beneath the mask?
Writing the novel became one way of facing what Rumi calls the Four Birds: Those unruly unresolved dispositions hidden within the folds of our heart, each pulling us toward something: achievement, control, recognition, distractions, attachments, or cravings…
Each capable of becoming a veil between us and What is Real.
And perhaps that is why the question What is Real? cannot be answered by logical explanation or reasoning.
The answer has to be lived. Tasted.
Maybe the work of a lifetime is to step out of our own way, slowly loosening the knots that obstruct the Divine breath, and allowing its music to flow through the reed flute of our lives…each of us sounding the unique note our soul was created to carry.
And, little by little, to remember the reed bed from which we came.
If you’d like to journey with the Four Birds and further explore What Is Real?, you can find the novel here.
amazon.com kindle
https://www.amazon.com/What-Real-Remembers-Silence-Speaks-ebook/dp/B0GHKFNQDR/
amazon.com Paperback
https://www.amazon.com/What-Real-Remembers-Silence-Speaks/dp/1067352007/
Universal Link
https://books2read.com/u/bzYvjj
RSS Feed
