 |
| a wider view |
Does good stewardship include abandonment?
 |
| & more toward the inner |
I like looking, yet not sitting over-close, to the lichened slats; the admittance of decay intertwined with beauty emits musty whiffs of reassurance. Also, having never reveled in parties much larger than four, this worship of near silence more nearly bows. The whispers I want cross from the other world.
In Chapter 4, “Ibn ‘Arabi’s Garden among the Flames: The Heart Receptive of Every Form,” Michael Sells moves into the Ringstone of Noah and especially considers “mystic perplexity or bewilderment (hayra).” He translates Ibn “Arabi into blank verse (pp. 101-2, Mystical Languages of Unsaying), in this passage beginning with the prayer “Lord, increase me in bewilderment in you” as a paired companion/contrast with the more comfortable “Lord, increase me in knowledge”:
For the bewildered one has a round [dawr]
and a circular motion around the qutb [the pole or axis of reality]
which he never leaves
But the master of the long path
tends away from what he aims for
seeking what he is already in
A master of fantasies which are his goal
He has a ‘from’ and a ‘to’
and what is between them
But the master of the circular movement
has no starting point
that ‘from’ should take him over
and no goal
that he should be ruled by ‘to’
He has the more complete existence
And is given the totality of the words and wisdoms.
Sells brings this together in a note ending with “The highest understanding is the deepest awareness of mystery” (p. 257). A few lines later (p. 104), another passage focuses the way of the seeker:
“… in every breath, in every time, in every condition
he is the image of what that breath, time, or condition requires”
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