“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
– Rumi
Dave Says: This wisdom from 13th century poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, otherwise known as Rumi, is often hard-to-swallow. An ailing heart might to find little solace in the idea of love entering him or her from a state of heartbreak, trial, confusion and pain.
But its those terrible, heart-wrenching trials in love and loss that serve to teach us the only thing that matters: love.
And in this quote, I like to think that Rumi is saying that from pain, love certainly will enter — but we must allow it, accept and receive it.
“Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dave Says: Had I come across this quote from Emerson even a year or two ago, I’m sure I would misunderstand it. I might say, “how could someone ever think that love, an emotion, acts like an algebraic equation?”
But now I see the wisdom of Emerson’s words: where love is given it is received; where your love is offered you will find more of it.
The equation is this: give to receive, and receive to give. If you have one without the other, the entire equation is broken.
“It used to be
That when I would wake in the morning
I could with confidence say,
‘What am ‘I’ going to
Do?’
That was before the seed
Cracked open.
Now Hafiz is certain:
There are two of us housed
In this body,Doing the shopping together in the market and
Tickling each other
While fixing the evening’s food.
Now when I awake
All the internal instruments play the same music:
‘God, what love-mischief can ‘We’ do
For the world
Today?’
– Hafiz
Dave Says: Ah, Hafiz, my poetic soulmate. The 14th century Sufi poet exposes in these words the breaking of one thing and the opening of another.
For Hafiz, he refers to the breaking happening to his “seed.”
When I first read this poem, I wondered if his seed was his ego — his thoughts, his ideas of “what is and what isn’t” — but perhaps the seed is those things and his heart, too. His love cracking open and letting God in, and out — for the world to be better for it.
What a remarkably liberating thing to think of your seed breaking — not into anything less than wholeness, but so that you may finally be whole, one, with God and with love, for the first time.
What are you favorite quotes on heart-opening?
I’d love to know. Tweet me or share with me on Facebook.
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