Savor

These Standings Bring Me Peace
Savor—in Sanskrit, rasa—is a capacity we must develop or reclaim. It seems difficult to do amidst the panic of self creation. And it is difficult to do during these grim days of climate woes and political angst. Miseries float in our electric ether, poisoners sidling into our dreams, turning them to nightmares. Some react with action, others with escape, but none of us are immune. Civilization stitches the hem of a very dark storm. Perhaps this is why I am drawn to the rock rim of an empty canyon or the winter beach. A borderland is a place of savor before entering emptiness. Of course, nothing is really empty, but as I stand on the mineral ground beside deathly flight or icy swim, such standings bring me peace. I savor sips of peace living in the in-between, murmuring throughout the subtle forest of self like mushrooms growing underground. Savoring feeds peace, coaxes it forth, and peace swallows worry. In bitter times, more than survival this is how we can thrive.

Subtle & Savor
Latif—the Subtle—is a potent word in Arabic, so potent that it is an attribute or quality or name or, most importantly, a pulsing substance of the Omnipresent All-encompassing One. A mystic might pluck this word from the air, cast it into a poem to net the shimmering, impossibly unspeakable worlds which Latif most deeply means. Poetry is a favored way to celebrate and savor on the page but when words tighten or ramble the wrong direction, a mystic moves into space and time, and Latif, the Subtle, chanted by one voice or many voices curls in the tongue, balloons in a breath, taps the mouth roof, froths along the lips, rumbling the throat and bones. No longer a significance, nor finger pointing, the word is a song and a savor. It hums and churns and lays the mystic down to rest in its wake, and wake in its wake. All subtle passages moving from here to there are a way of traveling within incandescence like sun caught in a pink petal.

I am delighted that you are with me and appreciate your sharing these writings friends. Thank you!

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