How To be A Dervish
You can never “try” to be “Sufi.”
You must know how to say this name
so that it cracks open the heart
while your lips are sealed.
It is a journey for strangers
that are too strange to be
anything but always alone,
and so they never are.
The dervish walks his life
as if he had a Love-knife
piercing each eye.
He is a thought on the breath
until he is the breath of Love only.
Sufis are not crazy to be seen,
and so are visible only to lovers.
They know how to disappear
in front of the merely curious.
They work silently
pulling their belief-mountains down
stone by stone,
to feed hungry ghosts with that dust,
until they eat themselves to be new earth
in which to grow fresh flowers.
A Sufi gives away his very breath
to be Love’s pick-ax,
and makes a ruin of his house,
until only a roof remains,
a canopy of sky
where his love songs can be heard
by the wind of this worlds soul.
He has a hundred names for God,
but listens, to be a silent conversation
that is Love’s language of remembrance.
He seems to woo God in every form,
but secretly destroys every shape
in the fire of his passion.
He prays to be the kindling of longing,
so that the slow smolder of his self,
can be a light for his own pyre.
Yet he denies not his body’s desire,
but takes the hand of duality
and dances at his own wedding.
His death is always imminent
for he dies each moment to live,
and so he is the light of life itself.
A life he does not claim,
and so he is free to be the gleam
of the eye of God.
He is change,
he cannot be pinned down by any hat.
He is a hare twitching for the trace
of the hawk of transition.
His nature is to be a lion also,
yet he will only hunt that self
that is fearful of being consumed.
His work is to be empty
in order to be occupied
with a wild Beauty.
He swims his soul
as if that craft were real
but he knows how to drown
when the ocean finds him.
Oh yes, he is the very paradox of his love.
The Beloved is his mystery,
and he lives to be Her love bed.
There is no complication in him,
he is his own simple birthing
and accepts without question
that God is continually making love
to be the answer of this ecstasy.
He begs at his own court,
that he may never wear any crown,
but the one forged in his own alchemy,
and he throws that away to be Love’s slave again
at the slightest scent of the Beloved’s presence.
There are no robes noble enough to clothe him,
and so he travels incognito
covering his naked flame with any garments
to conceal the ash of his burning self.
But do not think he is a religion or any gender,
or saint, or sinner,
or any form of being that you know.
He is neither good nor bad,
nor compassed by any morality but Love.
He is the fulcrum of polarity,
and abides as the pole star of any direction,
and so he is always the perfect balance.
He is his own way yet utterly pathless.
An expression arriving as an original song
that holds within it a singer born from the unseen.
He has become the dance and the dancer,
and he lives a life
as if he had never been.
—author unknown