This afternoon I went for a short walk
in Highfield Park. The sun was about an hour from setting, and the
wind was still strong after the recent storm. That perfect soft light
you get in mid-winter lit up the tops of a bank of birches in colours
reminiscent of a Klimt painting: golds, browns, reds. I made a point
of wandering through the little copses, comparing the sound of wind
made in different trees, and being astonished by how loud a noise one tree can make. The birds were mostly quiet, presumably
cutting their losses and sitting huddled in the thickets.
To my surprise I found my eyes filling
with tears.
Perhaps I had spent too long before
going out pondering the pros and cons of getting a dog, as people do
when they fear they can't have children or, in my case, fear that
they will always be alone.
Perhaps it was an awareness of the
people I know and love who are worrying about what the next year will
bring, who suspect it will consist of worsening health, or new ways
to fail.
Perhaps it was the sense of an old year
sliding away, turning recent experience into fallible memory.
Perhaps it was the knowledge of the
apparent fragility of my faith, immersed in a world which views it as
an anachronism that can be allowed to die, surrounded by honourable
atheists.
Perhaps it was none of these things
(and all of them)...
Love Dogs
(by the Sufi mystic Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks)
One night a man was crying,
Allah!
Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
'So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten
any response?'
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a
confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr*, the guide of
souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
'Why did you stop praising?'
'Because I've never heard anything
back.'
'This longing
you express is the return
message'
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its
master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.
(*Khidr lit. “the green one”. Barks
describing him as existing 'on the edge between the seen and the
unseen', and as being 'the personification of the revealing function
of the metaphysical intellect, the '”prophetic soul”', and
suggests that 'he may be a partial source, along with Druidic lore,
for the enigmatic Green Knight in the Middle English poem “Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight”'. He has also been identified with the
Green Man of European mythology.)
