This “I” this “I am better” this “I am worse” this “I am worth more” this “I am not enough” this “I” is a veil between you and Love. You cannot be right and in the love at the same time. There are no sides when you come inside. Can you go inside and see me sitting at all your sides, like concentric circles facing the Kaaba outside of time? Can you feel us disappear in time, but when we awake we are not separate this time.
Love is about unity, it’s seeing you in me, and seeing me in you until everything passes away, but the face of Truth. What is sound when words have no space to travel through? Who is the one speaking when the speaker and listener are one? Who is receiving and who is giving when two hands become a single drum? When the sun and the seed are spun into one, you will know that it has begun...
Come with me to the place where the dead fish comes to life and jumps back into the sea, this place where death and life meet, this place between states where we lose our “I’s” and identity dies, and your spirit comes to life as the breath between words, as the space between worlds, as the silence that gives meaning to words. Can you hear the revelations between the shapes of ink that cannot be heard?
There is a silent scripture hidden in plain sight, for those who can read without their eyes. Vision cannot capture God, but He perceives all vision, the heart knows unity even if the eyes see division. His light gently weaves through you through hidden cracks. Everywhere you look, it is only God who is staring back. A single thread of breath strings through every bead, this “Be and it is” braids through all that exists until it ends with a knot, a perfect circle of prayer in orbit of God. Don’t you see, what looks like an end, is just a curve on the path back to Him.
Verses of Inspiration
“To Allah belong the East and the West; wherever you turn, there is the Face of Allah.”
— Qur’an 2:115
“All that is on earth will perish. But the Face of your Lord, full of Majesty and Honor, will remain.”
— Qur’an 55:26–27
“When I have fashioned him and breathed My spirit into him, bow down before him.”
— Qur’an 15:29
“Indeed we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we will return.”
— Qur’an 2:156
“Vision perceives Him not, but He perceives all vision; and He is the Subtle, the All-Aware.”
— Qur’an 6:103
“But when they ˹finally˺ reached the point where the seas met, they forgot their ˹salted˺ fish, and it made its way into the sea, slipping away ˹wondrously˺.”
— Qur’an 18:61
In prayers of light upon light,
A. Helwa
