All the Hemispheres
Leave the familiar for awhile.
Let your senses and body stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting.
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
~Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)
Today is a beautiful day. Go lie down and stretch out your body on some slope or hill and think of this. If you live in the Western Hemisphere, somewhere in another hemisphere, someone else is stretching out their body or their senses on another hill.
There are many things we can change, simply by changing our thoughts. There are a thousand forms inside of us to explore. Welcome them all.
I think about these words of comfort: "All the hemispheres in existence lie beside an equator in your heart."
The equator of our heart must be quite big to hold all those hemispheres. So think about that power inside your body today. Perhaps our heart is bigger than we imagined and capable of great possibilities, including love.
Hafiz, (c. 1320 to 1389) was a beautiful, mystic, Sufi poet from Persia. He did not know the anatomy of the heart (Leonardo da Vinci would display his anatomical drawings about 1489). His description of our heart is not anatomic. Our hearts are as big as the universe. I will look at my heart differently now and see not just atria and ventricles separated by a septum, but an unseen equator. Like the tides, our heart has its own hidden rhythm.
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