Geography Lessons

This place where you are right now
God circled on a map for you.

Wherever your eyes and arms and heart can move

Against the earth and the sky,

The Beloved has bowed there -

Our beloved has bowed there knowing

You were coming.

I could tell you a priceless secret about

Your real worth, dear pilgrim,

But any unkindness to yourself,

Any confusion about others,

Will keep one

From accepting the grace, the love,

The sublime freedom

Divine knowledge always offers to you.

Never mind, Hafiz, about

The great requirements this path demands           

Of the wayfarers,

For your soul is too full of wine tonight

To withhold the wondrous Truth from this world.

But because I am so clever and generous,

I have already clearly woven a resplendent lock

Of his tresses

As a remarkable truth and gift

In this poem for you.

(Hafiz, as translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

For these past many months, I’ve had the clear sense that my life is profoundly changing in the most fundamental ways.  After what seems an eternity in transitional living arrangements, without my earthly belongings of creature comfort, where could I call home?  As my job and its environment change dramatically, where and how is my soul meant to be expressed through work?  As fairytale dreams of love came crashing to the ground, and relationships die, fade, and shift in unexpected ways, who are my people, where is my tribe?

What I am so grateful to find – indeed, the remarkable truth and gift of this time – is that no matter the uncharted territory ahead, I now intimately know and trust the solid ground of my own interior landscape, my place of belonging so wholly to myself, to Life, to God. 

I sit at this moment in the sweet home I have now made my own.  A home with a wondrous garden, my beloved pups, and the collected personal treasures that are an outer reflection of the inner me.  I have found my way Home, both inside and out.  

As other, primary geographies of my life still lie in a vast unknown, and in the moments I allow fears to cause me suffering, I remember this small faith:  if I pray, if I listen to my deepest self, if I wait even in discomfort until I feel what is right and true for me...


 I will always have the grace, the love, the sublime freedom of Home.