The Pathway Home

Hummingbirds are missing and leaves tumble bronzed. The beautiful woodland sunflowers soon will depart, petal by swirling petal. Signs of the soul’s journey. How do we find our way home?

   Yearning has been noted as a highway marker and Sufis have a somewhat similar term, himma. While wonderfully, fascinatingly, helpful, these signposts blur in ways that demand new readings, redirections, perhaps like a treasure map that has a hidden cipher. This pathway home has never been traveled before because it’s unique for each soul. The lore of stories, scriptures, and guides point the way – thanks for these. And yet no one navigates his or her way home except the one listening to the heart throbbing. Amid the multitude of meanings given to yearning and to himma, the straight path follows the purifying heart.

   My heart overflows with gratitude today for this space called retirement. Opportunities to travel, to sightsee, to take up a new hobby, for more writing, reading, photography, and riding, of course: all these sound interesting, but the heart wants stillness, quiet standing, and moving with more perfect integrity. Intimacy with the soul.

the heart is the organ which produces true knowledge, comprehensive intuition, the gnosis of God and the divine mysteries. . . It is a notion to which the utmost importance has been attached by the mystics of all times and countries. . . In its unveiled state, the heart of the gnostic is like a mirror in which the microcosmic form of the Divine Being is reflected. [Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone, pp. 221-222.]

   In the conversation between Rumi and Shams, a wonderful account of this is told:

Whoever is more learned is further from the goal. The more abstruse is his thinking, the further he is. This is the work of the heart, not the forehead.   That’s the story of the one who found directions to a treasure. “Go out to such-and-such a gate. There’s a dome. Put your back to the dome, your face toward the kiblah, and let an arrow go. Wherever the arrow falls, there is the treasure.”   He went and let fly. No matter how much he tried, he didn’t find it. Then the news reached the king. The master archers let fly and of course no trace appeared.   When he referred back to God, he received an inspiration: “We did not say that you should pull the bow.” He came, placed the arrow in the bow, and it fell in front of him. When solicitude comes, Two strides and he arrived. . .   Which is that stride? He who knows his soul knows his Lord … 

William C. Chittick, Me and Rumi, pp. 46-47.