Doctor Grandma

One of my poems got a couple of comments recently. The following one is the only other one inspired by a small book by Baha’u’llah, “The Seven Valleys”. The 7 valleys are the journey a soul takes, on its way to the Creator. Moving to higher and higher levels of understanding, through pain and love, the soul in the end, gives up the self entirely, voluntarily.

I WOULD LIKE TO OFFER TO SEND ANYONE WHO WANTS ONE, A FREE COPY OF THE LITTLE BOOK, SEVEN VALLEYS, by Baha’u’llah. If you would like a copy, send me your address on my e-mail, ladybahai2@gmail.com 

The last valley is called “True poverty and Absolute nothingness.” Each person can interpret that however they want. For me, personally, I do not think it is that we enter a realm of nothingness in the sense of void, empty, nothing, kind of like the “nothing” that approaches creatures in the film, “Never Ending Story” and absorbs them into an empty void. (In that film, people were losing the ability to dream, to imagine, hence “the nothing” was erasing the dimension of imagination and dreams.)

The 7th valley, to me, is a voluntary giving up of all the importance of one’s own desires, and rather, giving that over to the Ancient One, the Creator.

Baha’u’llah was writing this for the Sufi’s, a mystical branch of Islam. Famous Sufi poets include Ru’mi. (My favorite line by Ru’mi: “Thinkest thyself a puny form, when within thee the universe is folded?”) I was very attracted to the Sufi mystical way, and studied them for awhile. They reject the laws of Islam, and Muslims consider them to be heretics. They describe themselves as those who are delirious with the love of God and care about nothing else. (Some there are who worship the pools of water left on the beach. A Sufi is one who dives headfirst into the waves, drowning himself in the sea.)

So here is the little poem that came to me for “The Seven Valleys”:

Seven Valleys

Let us SEARCH for the good in all things,

Letting LOVE for the truth bind our souls,

Let KNOWLEDGE protect us from ignorance,

and UNITY be our goal,

Let CONTENTMENT rise up from the heart

filled with WONDER at nearing its quest,

To give up the self, to understand

TRUE POVERTY, ABSOLUTE NOTHINGNESS.

This entry was posted on February 12, 2010 at 1:17 pm and is filed under poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.