Editors’ Note
In a time when attachment to the world and its wealth seems to many to be out of reasonable control, Winter Issue #88 SUFI explores the many facets of the act of
Tag: Love
Archives 88 – Detachment
by Alireza Nurbakhsh
Having worldly possessions and comforts is not incompatible with the state of detachment in Sufism. It is not the possessions that obscure our vision.
Everything That I Love Is Free
Caring for Others: Sufism and Altruism
“If we are to survive as a species on this planet, we need to embrace views or belief systems that are inclusive of others.”
By Alireza Nurbakhsh
The Enormity Club
By Jan Shoemaker
Gazing out at the deep, glacial lake,carved out of the earth’s surface over a million years earlier, where kids were shrieking and jumping from rafts, I pushed my feet into the cool sand beneath the hot surface and squinted back at my own history. I traced it familiarly through the cottages and lakes of my childhood, then back more philosophically along a timeline that began with my mother and led all the way through the glacial days and the molten days, back to the big bang itself – the one event that links us all, our single family reunion. And, sighing over what had been feeling like the great weight of care-giving, I considered the obligations of daughters to mothers and wondered where they left off, unable or perhaps unwilling to see beyond the makeshift and unnatural borders I had thrown up: her and me.
In “The Enormity Club,” essayist Jan Shoemaker reflects on the philosophical reverberations brought about by caring for her elderly mother. Studying her own feelings of resistance to the disappearance of things she loves, she uses ready humor and stringent thinking to consider that perhaps the things that separate us really are a lie.
(Photo of Ron Mueck sculpture © Mike Bruce Gate Studios, www.gatestudios.com)
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Silence
THE BREATH IS PRECIOUS
It was written in beautiful Persian calligraphy and was placed above the door of the old Tehran khaniqah. I first noticed it when I was a child: sokout dam ghanimat ast, “silence: the breath is precious.”
Featured Poet: Roger Loff
ROGER LOFF studied Journalism and Politics at New York University and now lives in Oakdale California. He works as a mental health clinician in the Stanislaus County Juvenile Hall. His poetry appears in Issue 82 of SUFI.
Turning to Hafez
THE ART OF FIGURAL CALLIGRAPHY
by Jila Peacock
I was born in Tehran to an English mother and Iranian father, and, although English was my mother tongue, my first written language was Persian, which I studied from the age of seven at my Iranian primary school. I remember being introduced at that time to snippets of Ferdousi in my first textbooks, to Sa‘di, my father’s favorite poet, and Edward Fitzgerald’s translations of Khayyam, which my mother would always recite by heart. My introduction to Hafiz came much later in life.