In Faith

 One plants for the future. One plants in faith.

When I took a photo of our garden to compare with one taken when we first moved in- two years ago- I was expecting it to show huge changes- and it didn't. Yes, we have planted a lot of shrubs and trees- but, no, they make very little impression because they're all still babies. 

And now we're planting again. Ailz has bought a bunch of things and they're arriving by courier in dribs and drabs. Yesterday I put in a clematis...

One of theses days, inshallah, it will be enormous....

Spring Equinox

 The Spring Equinox passed me by again. It was probably raining. 

But today, today, today, the sun is shining- and I've remembered...

As Wiccans, at this season of the year, we used to enact- in symbolic form- the courting ritual of the Goddess and God. 





The priestess in the picture is performing the great rite- with athame (ritual knife) and chalice. She will plunge the knife into the chalice- which contains wine (of course) and say...

"As  the athame is to the male so the cup is to the female and conjoined they do bring forth blessedness"

All The Rumis In The World

 I read a piece about Rumi on the Al-Jazeera website. It was called something like "A Tale of two Rumis."

And when I'd finished it I thought, "What! Only two?"

The two  in question are the Rumi of conservative Islam- who is a venerated saint- and the Rumi who has been taken to the heart of millions of Westerners- who is a non-sectarian guru.

The Islamic scholars say the poems in modern English translation have been sieved of all traces of medieval Islam- and I've no doubt this is the case. What the groovy Westerners say in response is nothing very much because they are mostly unaware of the criticism.

But once a writer dies- or indeed as soon as the ink dries on the paper- their words cease to belong to them and become the property of whoever reads them and takes them to heart.

So now there as many Rumis as he has readers- and none of them are "wrong"

W,H, Auden put it succinctly in his poem about the death of W.B. Yeats.

Firstly, " He became his admirers"

And secondly, "The words of a dead man/ Are modified in the guts of the living."