“Haleh Liza Gafori’s ecstatic and piercing translation has lifted a veil, bringing Rumi closer into the quick of our present. Each poem is a divine invitation. Free your mind. Drown in love.” – V (formerly Eve Ensler) Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, vocalist, poet, and educator born in New York City of Iranian descent. Her latest work, is a translation of Rumi poems entitled Gold. I first heard one of her translations of Rumi sitting around a campfire on a Sunday morning in Patagonia, Arizona. I was bit by the passion and this conversation does not disappoint. Haleh and …
Tag: contemplation
James Finley on the Healing Path
“The beauty and illumination of Jim’s language, whether he is writing about trauma or God’s presence, open the heart. To read this book is to be changed forever.” — Bonnie Badenoch(Author of The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships) I was overly giddy, strangely nervous, but above all grateful to be in conversation with Jim about his breathtaking new book, The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation. Each page is a thousand pages deep, that is how Jim walks about the world, drawing from the depths and teaching with winsome grace, poetics, and …
Sitting on the Present Moment
“The gift of becoming aware of the simple, astonishing beauty of anything, even as we recognize that it, and we along with it, will one day be no more. This moment of awareness holds everything.” – Douglas Christie I want to muse about the line “this moment of awareness holds everything” and how it spun me round in relationship between my sitting practice and the fierce reality of the present moment. I think the present moment gets shortchanged by lazy quips and sophomoric slogans – YOLO and all the rest. And sitting practice can be misunderstood just as easily… it …