Just a Quick One

It's NOT all dark and miserable, I promise!

The subtitle above doesn’t just refer to what I’ve been writing lately about Gaza; it refers to the whole deal, what Douglas Adams called Life, the Universe and Everything. The widest, deepest minds and hearts have found something more real than the endless misery we may witness on earth, and inshallah we’ll explore that.

Once as a new Muslim, I was sitting at a wooden picnic table with an African American sister—picture your perfect spring or summer day—and we were so peaceful and happy and I asked her, "What does it mean to be a Muslim?” and she said very simply, “This bench is Muslim. This table is Muslim. Because they are doing what they were made to do.”

So we just need to do what we were made to do. The instructions are encoded in the whole breathing world and in many religions and pathways. But humanity as a whole has pretty much lost the instructions. They can be rediscovered, though, and are rediscovered by people in every generation. They’re in the sun, the wind, the trees, the lightening. So we’ll be diving into that, inshallah.

Do you know that in all his voluminous writings, Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (whom I get pretty annoyed with at times because he is soooooo frickin’ popular), never mentioned the Mongol invasions, which were overwhelming in his time? He never mentioned them!

So hopefully we’re starting on a journey here. I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from the ahadith, the sayings and stories of Muhammad, peace be upon him. A rather loose translation off the top of my head:

“If the end of the world has come and you have a date palm shoot in your hand, plant it.”

And even if it’s not the end of the world, plant it.