Rumi

Learn to surrender to the Divine Will

So you will understand quickly

And have a mind fragrant with love of God

When disaster falls on you suddenly.

While others whiten with terror

In the hour of gain or loss,

Laugh like the rose, for the rose –

Even if you tear petal after petal from it –

Never stops laughing and never grows cast down.

“Why,” says the rose, “should a thorn sadden me,

When I grew this laugh because of a thorn?”

A man asked, “What is Sufism?” The sheikh replied,

“To feel joy in the heart when anguish comes.”

Think of His punishment as like the eagle

That whisked away the Prophet’s sandal

To save him from the black snake in it.

God says, “Never despair.

At losing what leaves you.”

If a wolf comes and destroys your sheep

This misery averts worse misery,

This loss far more terrible loss. Rumi

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.

Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.

These two spring from the same source, but differ in name; this appears as darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gate to all mystery. Tao Te Ching

The grapes of my body can only become wine

After the winemaker tramples me.

I surrender my spirit like grapes to his trampling

So my innermost heart can blaze and dance with joy.

Although the grapes go on weeping blood and sobbing,

“I cannot bear any more anguish, any more cruelty!”

The trampler stuffs cotton in his ears: “I am not

working in ignorance.

You can deny me if you want, you have every excuse,

But it is I who am the Master of this Work.

And when through my Passion you reach Perfection,

You will never be done praising my name.” Rumi

The path to God is littered with the bones of those who did not remember Who they were looking for, and how great beyond all concepts and imagining God always is. Rumi

Jesus said to John, “You must have become very forgetful of God’s graces and tendernesses to weep so much.”

If you live according to the Tao, nothing can harm you. Realizing this, there is nothing to fear. There is only constant monitoring of self to ensure that one stays on the path. Tao Te Ching.