The Travel Ticket

The world's most truthful metaphor: Life's a journey... and we travel it even when we're in limbo. We often think that our worlds stop when we stop moving, but for as long as we are all thinking, our worlds are expanding to pave unchartered routes to understanding. It is a false perception that crossroads and dangerous bridges are the pausing places of a journey, when they are in fact opporunities for contemplation and implementing the wisdom we have gained. This is the real journey; the one that occurs in our minds and hearts, as we learn to think and feel more deeply about the same situations. Movement is like a trained camel - a vehicle for movement, and thoughts are their riders, steering them from oasis to danger and back.

And the true traveller is he whose thoughts unshackle him from his primitive being, causing him to soar across his mind's journey in search of that which we all seek - true knowledge for knowing, for being, in a temporary world.

This is my opinion, though others might disagree. I have included an old afrikaans song about travellers, some (or all) of whom you may find familiarity with.

Travellers

Oh, you that wisdom's glory claim,
I ask that you the drifter name:
The one that parts without good bye,
Or she that stays at home to cry?
Which one?

Oh, which the life of drifter leads,
The one that travels, or that reads?
The one that wanders far on foot?
The one that longs while staying put?
Which one?

And which the life of drifter seems,
The one on foot, the one in dreams?
The one that roams to distant shores,
Or he that looks through smoggy doors?
Which one?

Oh, you that wisdom's glory claim,
I ask that you the drifter name.
The one with packs who roams about?
Or he whose dreams are not lived out?
Which one?

*Not my own translation. I can't find the author's name and so i have included  a link to his rendition of it instead:   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/learn-afrikaans/message/2011?var=1

"Be in this life as if you were a stranger or a traveler on a path."

                                   -The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), Bukhari

راوية

The Garden Pot

 

In a rustic-looking corner-spot of the yard, there's a large garden pot of chilli trees weaving themselves through wild tomato plants and a lone carrot tree. It’s all a bit much to have in one pot, but for as long as it is all in there, I will remain grateful for its teaching ways. My garden reminds me that falling flowers can never diminish the magnificence of a tree – its death only makes way for something more grand. Indeed, every absence and flaw is not without a purpose.

“Verily, along with every hardship comes relief/  Verily, along with every hardship comes relief.” [94:5-6]

راوية

Growing Pains

I used to believe that growing pains disappeared at 13, until the day that they appeared perfectly transposed -  swapping  my legs for my heart as the preferred plaything of the season. 

I have come to learn (somewhat belatedly) that growing pains cease only momentarily, to resume once more in altering forms; the aches of bitter experiences, unrealised dreams, or those which grip a lonely and rejected heart. A heart given to the depths of feeling and dreaming, pain, happiness, hope and learning. That heart is a heart of mounting wisdom, born not from a natural excellence, but a burning and solidifying process. Praise be to God, Who gives us that for which we don't ask, but in His infinite knowledge understands best the things we first require in order to to be wise and beautiful.

Glory be to Him, The Greatest.

راوية