Respect for the Dance

[Guest guest]

Respect for the Dance

 

 

Last Sunday we went to San Francisco.

Specifically, we went to Golden Gate Park and walked through

The Arboretum and sat at the amphitheatre watching people dance.

These beautiful beings were dancing to swing music and swinging

Along on the arm of God. It brings to mind the poem by Hafiz called

"The Tethered Falcon." Here is the thing -

 

A Tethered Falcon

 

My heart sits on the Arm of God

Like a tethered falcon

Suddenly unhooded.

 

I am now blessedly crazed

Because my Master's Astounding Effulgence

Is in constant view.

 

My piercing eyes,

Which have searched every world

For Tenderness and Love,

Now lock on the Royal Target -

The Wild Holy One

Whose Beauty Illuminates Existence.

 

My soul endures a magnificent longing.

 

I am a tethered falcon

With great wings and sharp talons poised,

Every sinew taut, like a Sacred Bow,

Quivering at the edge of my Self

And Eternal Freedom,

 

Though still held in check

By a miraculous

Divine Golden Cord.

 

Beloved,

I am waiting for You to free me

Into Your Mind

And Infinite Being.

I am pleading in absolute helplessness

To hear, finally, your Words of Grace:

Fly! Fly into Me!

 

Hafiz,

Who can understand

Your sublime Nearness and Separation?

 

 

 

Later in the day when we returned to this pavillion of Dancers there

was a band playing sublime music, so sublimely entrancing to the

Heart that the pigeons had gathered about and were jostling for the

best position to hear and watch these dear music-makers, these Darling

Beloveds with little red hats on and their Hearts bursting with Joy

and pride to be playing for the Beloved.

Being moved and making the move to move on in our Sunday adventure,

we wandered over to Spreckles lake where Robert had played as a young

boy with his best friend Eric. (Eric was killed later in the Viet Nam

war.) So we sat beside the lake locked in one another's eyes and arms

and the day was blossomed open with a piercing Fragrance of the

Beloved One caressing our Hearts as we touched and kissed and

communed with That One through each other and the lake

and the ducks and the geese and the sweet children gathered all about

with the families everywhere.

This thing about God's Fragrance – It's a real thing to me. Some gift

of Grace has given me the ability to smell scents from beyond, from

the elsewhere and everywhere at once. These scents have no name and

they do not exist in this material world and I have never been able

to identify them. Ahhhh. The Unidentifiable One presents again…and

the identity of who i am baffles me.

 

After eating peanuts from blue bags, from one another's hands, from

the hand of the One Who Holds a Tethered Falcon on His Arm, we went

to our little traveling caravansarai, our Kaaba, and we were driven

and drove over to the Palace of the Veterans, or some name similar to

that.

We stood beneath the statue by Rodin called "The Thinker" and thought

of how blessed our life is together. How utterly blessed our life is

together. We searched a long time to find one another again, you

know. Perhaps you understand this thing and perhaps you might not

quite fathom the immense and unbelievable grace that would take two

needles from some Cosmic haystack called earth and put them together

again. We were always Beloveds and we belong to one another

and we belong to the Beloved, the Beloved Beautiful One alone. From

six billion tiny beings being as tiny ants crawling across

time and space we found each other again. Such is the Mercy of the

Merciful One. Who can fathom such a One Who would give us back to the

Heart, to our OneHeart and OneMind we promised to Emancipate together

before existence, in some pre-existence we were together as, as, well

as Pre-Existence Particulars! As Dear Hafiz has said – "God can do

things like that." And He can. And He does. And He did.

 

Outside of the veteran's palace is a memorial dedicated to the

victims of the Holocaust of WWII. Robert and I went to this memorial

that overlooks one of the most stunningly beautiful views

in the world. The bay and the bridge and the sky just open up there

and swallow any Heart that has even the slightest opening. And I

guess one might say that my Mashuq and I have a bit of a Crack in the

Heart that wants to taste God and Life and Light and one another. So

we walked down the steps that lead to the actual sculptures that are

portrayed as the lifeless bodies of the children and fathers

and mothers and friends – all lying down and done in white and each

one touching the other in some tender way. It was so beautiful and

serene of a vision of these lifeless beings lying about in Blissful

Forgetfulness of any attachment to any religion or any timeframe. One

lone man, one white statue stands frozen in front of a barbed wire

fence standing forever gazing out at the Ocean and the Golden

Gate Bridge. And the Vastness. The complete Bliss that overtook my

Darling and I at this tableau before us, the bodies in white, the

enormous view of everything and Nothing, the Eternal Heartbeat

Of OneHeart just broke inside of us simultaneously. Being swept into

this, This Moment of complete harmony and submission to Love and

whatever Is that Is and was presenting as This Moment Now,

we embraced, we fell into one another's arms and suddenly we found

ourselves Dancing. We were The Dance Waltzing in It's Own Joyfulness

and Playfulness and we became lost in That Joy which came over us and

into us and there was no Holocaust, and there were no victims, and

there was no us, and there was no reason to ever fear anything or

cling to anything or be dictated to by anything from the past that

was appearing as this tribute, this memorial for the slain. We were

the waking dead waking up to what is.

We were waltzing waking wonderful OneHeart oblivious to anything but

that Love, that Love. The Love.

 

Somehow I imagine that there are those who did not and do not

understand how we could Dance at a memorial for the Holocaust

victims. We did not. We were done and we were Danced by the Beloved,

The Beautiful Beloved One. We did nothing but surrender to That

Moment and It took us and It Danced us. Doubt not that we have the

utmost respect for the families of the Holocaust victims, and the

Jewish folks everywhere, and the episode of the WWII Mystery that

allowed this to happen. But Darling Friends, we have another kind of

Respect – Respect for the Dance.

What are you gonna do?

So we Danced.

 

 

LoveAlways,

 

Mazie