La Ilaha,’
from feet, through belly to chest upon this experimental outbreath. And when all air is gone this walking continues to the sound of shag pile heart pump foot fall and fall until.
‘Illa Allah,’ suctions insistently in the next reviving breath. And on and on around the small front room that I call home until a calmness begins to meet spinning mind, this so called friend of mine who competes with the beating of hearts and heavens above, before ‘I’ have unravelled into this new start all senses scream towards the need for the thing called ‘me’ to take a rest, to know what is best, to become rationality. To re-take my seat within this well known reality.
questions, questions, questions fair and squarely root me to this understandably carpeted, man-made, sensibly constructed floor. This is floor that my small mind consistently calls home.
‘Are these unfamiliar intonations correct? Am I understanding their meaning to the fullest? Can indeed anyone dissect and find trueness and taste spiritual fullness? Or am I just going around and around in mimicking Sufi circles of none sense? Am I merely as adrift as it seems,? Am I mad or bad or just merely leaning too much to the left?
My fingers re-scan Dr Mir Valiuddin’s half digested disciplines, his olde english Sufi translations, and my neck hurts and my foot bottom tingles, my lower back grumbles and however hard it tries to think itself into blankness, my mind cannot switch off, cannot let this body relax.
‘Unless thou sweepest the path with the broomstick of None (La), Thou canst not reach the stage of ‘Save God, (Illa Allah).’
Such and such and so many words that can so easily be missed in the 1975 translated mist of mystical wisdom that sweeps broom-sticks of None upon the saving steps of God’s stage.
‘You see, there is the proof,’ I hear myself say. ‘Already your ego-mind is warping, embellishing, twisting and turning the travelling word.’ And yes, already this minds unknowing has thrown away mystical prizes by wriggling this ego from eyes behind eyes, has already imperceptibly shed skin to get, to get, to get……
‘Up! Up! Get up on your feet, and feel your soles,’
and this time, from some other bodily depth the outbreath lets out a longing rasping ‘Yaaaaaah,’ that continues until chest, yes this chest, this belly, this body flattens towards the very spine beyond any thinking sense of ‘me, me me.’
And as feet below re-meet and re-circle, inward breathing gently whispers beyond my name, to show the ‘Wey.’
And ‘Yah,’ to the outbreath and inwardly ‘Wey,’
And ‘Yah’ to the outbreath and inwardly ‘Wey,’
as this crocodile body re-fills with heat, as this mind shrivels and snakes and sheds more skin within the shadows of ‘but, but, but for the love of….’
city slowness 