In the Abode of the Heart

Love is not about finding a soul mate. If it seems to be in the beginning, the feeling starts to dissipate the moment you and your soul mate discover how different your toothpaste habits are. Rather, love is about exploring vulnerability, about exploring degrees of acceptance of and resistance to each other. On the spiritual level, it is about continuously reaching for deeper and deeper levels of trust in God.

. . . Hazrat Inayat Khan writes, "Enter unhesitatingly, Beloved, for in this abode there is naught but my longing for Thee. Do I call Thee my soul? But Thou art my spirit. Can I call Thee my life? But Thou livest forever. May I call Thee my Beloved? But Thou art Love itself. Then what must I call Thee? I must call Thee myself."

– Phillip Gowins
Excerpted from Practical Sufism:
A Guide to the Spiritual Path
pp. 162-163

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Winged Heart
• Be Just In My Heart
• The Sacred Heart: "Mystical Symbol of Love"
• What We Mean By Love
• The Choice (and Risk) That Is Love
• Love as "Quest and Daring and Growth"
• To Know and Be Known
• The Gravity of Love
• The Soul of My Love
• To Be Held and to Hold
• Lovemaking: Pathway to Truth, Harmony and Wholeness
• To Be Alive Is to Love
• Meeting (and Embodying) the Lover God
• "There's Light in Love, You See"
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• "Joined at the Heart": Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism

Image: Artist unknown.