Life
LADDER OF LIFE
Poor copies out of Heaven's original,
Pale earthly pictures mouldering to decay,
What care although your beauties break and fall,
When that which gave them life endures for aye?
Oh, never vex thine heart with idle woes:
All high discourse enchanting the rapt ear,
All gilded landscapes and brave glistering shows
Fade - perish, but it is not as we fear.
Whilst far away the living fountains ply,
Each petty brook goes brimful to the main.
Since brook nor fountain can forever die,
Thy fears how foolish, thy lament how vain!
What is this fountain, wouldst thou rightly know?
The Soul whence issue all created things.
Doubtless the rivers shall not cease to flow
Till silenced are the everlasting springs.
Farewell to sorrow, and with quiet mind
Drink long and deep: let others fondly deem
The channel empty they perchance may find,
Or fathom that unfathomable stream.
The moment thou to this low world wast given,
A ladder stood whereby thou mightst aspire;
And first thy steps, which upward still have striven,
From mineral mounted to the plant; then higher
To animal existence; next, the Man
With knowledge, reason, faith. O wondrous goal!
This body, which a crumb of dust began -
How fairly fashioned the consummate whole!
Yet stay not here thy journey: thou shalt grow
An angel bright and have thine home in Heaven.
Plod on, plunge last in the great Sea, that so
Thy little drop make oceans seven times seven.
JALALUDDIN RUMI
THE DIVINE LIFE
The centre of life is neither in thought nor in feeling nor in
will, nor even in consciousness, so far as it thinks, feels, or
wishes. For moral truth may have been penetrated and possessed in all
these ways, and escape us still. Deeper even than consciousness,
there is our being itself, our very substance, our nature. Only those
truths which have entered into this last region, which have become
ourselves, become spontaneous and involuntary, instinctive and
unconscious, are really our life - that is to say, something more
than our property. So long as we are able to distinguish any space
whatever between the truth and us, we remain outside it. The thought,
the feeling, the desire, the consciousness of life, are not yet quite
life. But peace and repose can nowhere be found except in life and
in eternal life, and the eternal life is the Divine life. To become
Divine is, then, the aim of life: then only can truth be said to be
ours beyond the possibility of loss, because it is no longer outside
of us, nor even in us, but we are it, and it is we; we ourselves are
a truth, a will, a work of God.
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
