how near is this ocean of love, that a pang of separation has the power to send its waters rushing out from your eyes?
We are followers of that great Tradition which boasts only one dogma: Water is the Earth's ether.
With it, the multiplicity of life raises its limbs toward the cosmos, sustaining us invisibly.
Without it, life itself is unmasked – a fragile charlatan stripped naked, a temporary charade.
Before markets were invented, we understood thirst.
What were we without water? Only the thirsty may grasp at that secret.
We wayfarers of the well do not remember a time – from conception to the great recycling – that life itself was not woven in the fabric of water.
To be sure, the mania of the markets, and the elaborate hoax of commodity has rendered us alien to ourselves, introspecting as it were from the outside in. We make efforts to conserve water, to protect water, to honour water, as though these were not homonyms for life itself.
Who has time for such verbose games?
We were the thirsty bedouins long before Descartes. Thoughtless we wandered, uttering that mantra of obeisance: Water is, therefore I am.
Slowly, we have fallen victim to this duality, this alienation from our very insides. Language is dangerous scribe, objectifying us from ourselves, rendering that which is inside and all around us to the outside.
Once we were in the womb, and now we are here – living water sculptures, animate matter tiptoeing in a sacred dance held in orbit by those primordial cousins: water, air. Woe that we have lost sight, and are losing our thirst.
Thirst is our teacher, guiding us in the remembrance of our origin. He asked:
'How was I to know that this boundless ocean was this?
Its depths constitute the earth, its vapours become the sky.'
One meniscus – a surfaced mirror staring back at me as I grasp to resolve that mystery. Maulana Rumi was a very literal man.
Shame that we do not take him at his word.
- AMIR AZIZ / TRANSMISSIONS FROM THE TEMPLE