Reclaim Your Heart

A R
EFLECTION ON
 L
OVE
All of this love. Every piece. Every part of all the love in
this world. The love they make poems with. The love of
spellbinding novels. The love in songs. The love they tried
to capture in a movie. The love of a mother for her child,
of a child for her father. The love that liberates. The love
that enslaves. The love you win. The love you lose. The
love you chase. The love you live for. The love you know
you’d die for. The love that makes men bleed. The love
that swords have killed for. The love of fairytales and
tragedy.
It is all just a reflection.
An echo. Of one single Source. Of a single love that you
know, and I know, because we knew it before we could
know. We were loved before we could love. You were
given before you could give or know what it was to give.
It is the love that your heart was created to know. It is the
love that creates and sustains all love. It is the love that
was before—and will remain after all else has passed
away.
It is the love that was before…and will remain after all
echoes have passed away.

---

I P
RAYED FOR
 P
EACE
 T
ODAY
I found myself praying for peace today.
I’ve been in and out of my mind a thousand times
I know You heard me.
I know I wasn’t alone in that room,
shaking with the fear of fear,
the harrowing loneliness.
I cried out to You on my hands. On my knees.
With my face pushed down against the ground.
If I could have gotten lower, I swear I would.
Because that is helplessness, the truest kind…
The kind that knows nothing, not one leaf, or tear, or smile
can be
without Him.
I learned something today.
Again.
This is dunya. Dunya. Not a place of ease. Only glitter.
The place where you have to feel cold and hungry.
The place where you have to worry and feel scared.
The place where it gets cold.

---

So cold, sometimes.
The place where you have to leave the people you love.
Where you can’t get attached, because even if you do, it
doesn’t make it stay, it just makes it hurt when it doesn’t.
The place where happiness and sadness are only players,
waiting for their next line in a play…
Competing for their place on stage.
The place where gravity makes you fall and frailty makes
you bleed.
The place where sadness exists, because it must.
And tears fall to remind you of a place where they don’t.
Where they just don’t.
And isn’t that just it? Isn’t jennah that place after all?
That place that Allah describes over and over and over in
2 ways?:
On them shall be no fear…nor shall they grieve.
But I’m still here, aren’t I?
The scar on my flesh reminds me of that.
The burn on my arm left a scar that I love.

---

I love it because it reminds me how weak I am.
How human.
That I burn. That I bleed. That I break. That I scar.
Yes. It is here that I am. Here that I fall. Here that I cry.
Here, just the same, that You filled that room, and lifted
me to humbleness, and an acute knowledge of my own
powerlessness and excruciating need for You.
And then you took care of it.
Of course You did.
Of course.
Like Younus, and Musa, and his mother. You took care of
it.
You are the Peace of the peaceful.
The Strength of the strong.
The lighthouse of Truth in this storm of lies.
So, I found myself praying for peace today.

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