Always, Always Beautiful

Several weeks ago, I read a piece in Shambala Sun, a Buddhist magazine, about the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz.  The author, Daniel Ladinsky, quoted and wrote about the following poem by Hafiz:

Know the true nature of your Beloved

In His loving eyes, our every thought, word

and movement is always, always beautiful.

These words, wrote Ladinsky, "help us to realize our own sacredness and to stumble upon the kingdom of heaven within, and thus know a far greater sovereignty."

How did the rose ever open its heart 

and give to this world all its beauty?

It felt encouragement of light against its being,

otherwise we all remain too frightened.

Quoting the above poem by Hafiz, Ladinsky continues, "Here is the tremendous value of someone recognizing our worth - our extraordinariness.  We humans need someone looking at us now and then with real love and appreciation in their eyes, for that caring is like a precious rain that we required or die.  Hafiz and all the great poets help us ring the temple bell.  And that ring can summon the Beloved's presence, given us an awakening poke in the ribs, and impart that taste - if only for a blessed moment- of the sumbline ground of conscious nothing where the sun ever blooms."

I am so very grateful for those who have looked at me with real love and appreciation, particularly my beloved, who every day helps me "ring the temple bell."

"Paradise," Ladinsky concludes, "draws itself from a well in every object, creature and atom.  Seeing that, knowing the true nature of existence, who could ever again suffer want or loss?  Beyond any limiting dogma, in the luminous refuge of perfect nonbeing that results in fantastic awareness, you have never been more alive and always, always beautiful."