a daylight dream

it’s been one year around the sun since we sat here, our hands in the dirt, digging a home for the most intimate brokenness.. and I sit here now, polarised to climbing mountains that were never meant for our kind of celestial, timeless light. falling to the grass midst the flowering weeds, I break into tears of surrendered grief. why am I falling apart like this? I don’t try to dry those tears. I’m not used to breaking like this, with so much unknowingness. I’m not used to letting go mountains I know these feet could climb. but just like that dream, I choose to trace my steps back to where I meet you, always home, in the light of a sacred life.. in your embrace, we walk in gentleness into the horizons and in the rain of gifts we never deserved.  I grieve losing the path of fear, my love. the sweetest loss.

استغفر   الله   العظيم   من   كل   تدبير   و   من   كل   ظن   استودعته   بلا   تسليم ..  و   من   كل   معرفة   عرفتها   إياك ..  و   من   كل   حب   بلا   اشتياق ..  "The gifts are not where to land. This is a spaceless journey. It is bewildering to live like this— infinitely traversing. As much as we may have desired our dreams, and now that they’re here, one may dwell in that desired space. But that’s not why we’re here.. Love sees beyond the gift. It touches essence itself until it sees nothing again." - may 2022 it felt like this five years ago. dizzying. swept in place, I went on with life. the ache of being emptied from all reasons tied to love, the ache of knowing but not knowing, the ache of dying in nothingness before the divine, sacred truth, the ache of longing laced in surrender.. the ache of knowing love again and again and again.. but out of this ache oozed the sweetest brokenness, the sweetness of an ethereal love that sees Him. again, every doing is taken away

  “what do you dream of?” “a home, with you.” — a september, sun-lit conversation. I come today with swelling gratitude, a heart that has surrendered the sacredness of an inscrutable journey. who would have known? what softens this pace is the truth that we never really knew. we never really chased the tides of this dream. it came flooding to the shore, one tiny ripple at a time. the water a mirror of a timeless path gifted for a soul that longs for humbling nothingness. I come today with so much that has shifted in place. I can barely recognise the remnants of my life, how a peaceful healing coats it now. I can barely recognise this softened heart, aglow in silence. I can barely recognise the smile that stretches to my father’s eyes, to this home’s once cold corners and all the broken imperfections longing to be held across the empty gardens and hills running down this place. I come today with a sacred vision I once doubted, now surrendered in faith. my gaze locked at the horizons of

  a moment of silence between us is one that begets the slowness needed for all doing to settle into clarity. the silence one needs to see the heart and long to  intend . my soul is basking in the grace of having time. each step we take towards this beginning unravels with so many questions—  how do we build this right? in stillness, I recall our intentions. I recall how we intend togetherness to be a gateway through which selfless humanness can shine through— a new reality not only our hearts are starved for. the intentions of our pillars— beyond the emptied transactions our time is stuffed with. I’m lost in possibilities of how to fill this time with clear intentions: how do we intend to allow God’s light to shine through this broken humanness? I look around and see how unfit I am for a life without meaning and purpose. how sickening it feels to work without a glimmer of love, to spend without connection, to consume without reciprocity..  and what is the purpose of togetherness if it

  أَفَرَأَيْتَ   مَنِ   اتَّخَذَ   إِلَهَهُ   هَوَاهُ   وَأَضَلَّهُ   اللَّهُ   عَلَى   عِلْمٍ   وَخَتَمَ   عَلَى   سَمْعِهِ   وَقَلْبِهِ   وَجَعَلَ   عَلَى   بَصَرِهِ   غِشَاوَةً   فَمَنْ   يَهْدِيهِ   مِنْ   بَعْدِ   اللَّهِ   أَفَلَا   تَذَكَّرُونَ this heart longs for silence— the stillness in between the waves. it surrenders to the knowing that afterwards comes the silence of one’s soul, the one that manifests before the enormity of love. the silence of melting into your beloved— a glimpse of home, the darkness around a speck of truth. I’m so broken, my Beloved. I’ve forgotten your words in me. how come I’ve seen myself all this time.. how come my compass was not pointed towards the truth. basking in forgiveness, your mercy divides in me— streams.  لا   إله   إلا   الله .. it is an invocation like never before. the forgiveness of a worship clouded by the dominion of illusory veils. and I love these veils for making it possible to see and hear You..  I melt into You. this self in m

  I was talking to my co-workers about what is to become of a life lived in reverence. I was inspired to mention how it is our responsibility to embody the values that we’ve forsaken, chasing the multiplying material structures. it was told to me that it’s a circle. this world is a circle, and all our attachments have become cobwebs we are tangled to. attempting to step away from the circle would make us disconnected from everything else— lonelier, emptied, estranged. isn’t this what we truly need? I believe that the pandemic was a beautiful gift, but it was difficult to commit to what it has taught us. it was difficult to keep honouring the people in our lives and balancing between work and our relationships to ourselves and what the work pours into. I believe reminders will keep coming.. the earthquakes, both real and metaphorical, shall keep shaking us to the core. in the midst of it all, I’m grateful to remember the vision planted in my heart. once I forget, this heart painfully lo

  dearest world, is it alright that I follow you like this? is it safe to follow your light and be the shadowed reflection of your whispers in my heart? is even the reckless mistake so beautifully right? I often close my eyes and follow the scintillating lights fall on the splintered echoes of piano chimes in my heart. I’m led to a knowing and I freefall into it, only to find I’m falling in  love . dear God, I forget my blessings to see clearly. I follow a home of unsymmetrical truth— traces only seen with faith. traces that transform into the most beautiful lines only when dearly believed in. emptying this vessel of all what can be touched, all I follow is a searing, flaming, sun-like longing. it becomes the sun that rises before dawn. a longing for traces of this Light and every day needed for it to seed, branch and sprout into blooming Life. when my eyes turn to sleep at night, I dearly pray for another day to love like this. to forget in the language of forgiveness, my vessel rever

  it’s been harsh this winter, and as I’ve collided into this quietness of soul beckoning its need to dominate my person, it’s been more of a life lived in inner dwelling. the frosty 5-degrees air made it a little harder to work feverishly on what I dream of— it’s been more of a struggle to maintain my motivation to be as loving and warm as a sun. I’m becoming more and more sensitive, I can see. my world is being pruned to grow towards becoming more and more observant instead of a player in the fields. it’s been hard to be like this, but winter is helping me surrender into it. it’s an unlived life of so much smallness, almost quite invisible to most eyes. a few months ago, I remember marvelling at how wondrous it felt doing work backstage at some event I had at work, almost receiving no recognition, just being there, invisibly navigating the process without having to put myself out there so energetically. I had a heart filled with intention, beating for the flourishing of the project,

  the sky tonight is an aquarium of all the fishes dancing in the waters. an aquarium of all what we waltzed through in the freedom of faith.  the first time I truly understood what it meant was when a sweetness erupted from the breaths I skipped being beside you. just like a dancer would forget to breathe through the swirling tempo of synchronicity. when all of a sudden, there was a weight lifted in all the ease in the currents of being. all there was.. was nothing at all. you and I, and all those dreams, in the aquarium. you’re painted blue against the pocketful of stars shimmering on that night. every now and then, a cloud of distance strolls by— we return to forgiveness. but I never knew how to dance, love. I would never let that guard down long enough to be the song. too afraid of it, too afraid of being in love like this. and so I dance myself to the aquarium each time a cloud strolls by. it’s dearer watching it from beneath.

  dewdrops stain my pillow instead of the patch of grass we sat on that spring morning. a translation of every moment’s invocation in your presence, my love, has filled my day. how longing sliced each beam of light into infinite fractals, subtle enough to strike this soulful unearthliness into a harmonious chord. but the morning after is filled with all the fractals you’ve left for me, humming the heartsong of two hearts enlivened with a gift from God, unravelling in a dream-like pace, shifting things in their place.  and so every particle in me is weighed under the enormity of it, and there’s pain. I will not tolerate the sun-up haunted by the memory of it, its secrets an outpouring, just like a gaze. and so this sunrise, this gaze has left me broken, dear heart. my brokenness the kind that breathes the polarities and loves past the breaking point.    I see myself and I’m not sure I recognise those wide eyes, their vessels expanding in the orbit around what it sees in your universe. e

  is it possible to commit myself to instill fairy-like magic in momentary living? I write this as I gaze at the dried roses hanging from my bulletin board, daintily caressing the tips of my calendar, touched by a glimpse of dear visions and dreams. I’m taking my time to watch the sky colours soften as February’s sun soothingly oozes its friendly beams. it’s a ritual, perhaps unnoticed, a splash of wonder that colours me for timeless moments throughout the day. time slows down and my attachments to the agendas my mind designs melt into softened grace, carrying me through the brokenness of living with the entirety of a supple heart. observantly, I gaze into masked beauty and envision an inscrutable kind of life— form enlaced in soulful presence, the most pristinely piercing kind of intimacy. With gratitude, I  smile .

A pocketful of sunbeams illuminate the late winter sky, as slowly as these eyes take to immerse themselves into the in-betweenness of dream-like waking.   It has taken me a thousand days to stop that frightful breath upon opening my eyes. Long before, I’d wake up from a dream of you and feel the pang of tears fill my face, the doubt of  it’s just a dream  filling my heart. You’d feel my hand fumbling towards yours every dawn just to make sure—  are you here, as real as a dream?  It took so long to quieten those fears. I meant it when I said I could finally rest into this life we’ve grown along. Rest into its spaces, imperfections, brokenness and invisible strings. Rest past the doubt of the foreordained, rest into the sweetness of receiving it. Your expansive, sky-like arms around me, an inscrutable gaze is kept locked into the brokenness of the morning moon rising in my soul. And now we can sleeplessly sleep into it— a little while of this lifetime more. - are you here? - 

it is stark now that so much a falling apart in our world. when I’m not as conscious as I’d like, the streams of bad news often gets at me, fills me with a powerless hopelessness that there is no way to go from here. yet, the more stillness I practise, I become steadily aware that what is currently happening, especially in my own society, is a major cleansing episode. all these pressures we are encountering in scopes of finance, security and development are but the collapse of old structures and ways of life. it is rather revolutionary to view it that way, and to come to remember this truth that I’ve always known, empowers me to advocate this awareness instead of resisting and fighting it, full force. take a moment with me here and visualise how it would be like to stand as a young adult midst all these constraints: the finances that never seem to swell appropriately, soaring prices, dysfunctional bureaucracies, inept educational qualifications and the lack of mature systems to embrace

at the precipice of the collapse of an old world, one free-falls in surrender to the daylight of faith in Him, trickling down to an unperturbed faith in all hearts that have fell in love. I walk towards you, light again. the weight of doubt has eased, let go in autumnal winds. my eyes filling in softened relief, receiving the dance of anything but the dream in equanimous acceptance.  it all leads to here. I see you, at last. a kaleidoscope of that very first gaze between strangers now deeply incandescent in divine geometry, between  lovers . I see you at last. it’s Him in the infinite between our gazing skies.

  here’s to some introspection.. this heart of mine swells in the in-betweenness of two worlds, which are equally enticing, enchanting and beautiful. one world, its hands laced in artful contemplations, slow waltzes across sensual journeys that relish and savour every moment into the essence of timelessness.  in this world, I walk through life as if I am strolling along the sidelines of summer orchards and meadows: every moment bathed in glorious gratitude, loved, revered and transformed into a meaningful memory. in this world, time becomes a painting so masterful. I don’t do much there but intend and craft visions, my face softened in the gentle light of receivership and grace. I loving being in this world, for I’ve caught glimpses of its colours and it has healed me in ways I never knew were possible. yet, here comes the part of me that doesn’t feel safe in surrendering it all like this in softness. there’s this other side that finds it toilsome to let go of control— in the end, this