Ayazma Camii

 

 

Ayazma Camii, Ayasma Mosque, Üsküdar, İstanbul, Pentax K10d

Ayazma Camii

 

Ayazma Camii, Ayasma Mosque, Üsküdar, İstanbul, Pentax K10d

Ayazma Camii, Üsküdar

Pentax K10D, at Istanbul

Ayazma Camii

Pentax K10D, at Istanbul

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi

from Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks / Translated by John Moyne

window from Ayazma Mosque

Ayazma Camii, Üsküdar, İstanbul, pentax k10d

Seizing my life in your hands, you thrashed me clean

Seizing my life in your hands, you thrashed me clean
On savage rocks of eternal mind.
How its colors bled, until they grew white!
You smile and sit back: I dry in your sun.

The Sea boils with passion for you,
The clouds pour pearls at your feet
A lightning from your love has pierced the earth
This smoke curling to heaven is its child.

We were green: we ripened and grew golden.
The Sea terrified us: we learned how to drown.
Squat and earthbound, we unfolded huge wings.
We started sober: are love’s startled drunkards.

You hide me in your cloak of nothingness
Reflect my ghost in your glass of being
I am nothing, yet appear: transparent dream
Where your eternity briefly trembles.

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi

from The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi, by Andrew Harvey

Ayazma Camii

Ayazma camii, Ayazma mosque, Üsküdar, İstanbul, Pentax K10d

Inner Wakefulness

This place is a dream
only a sleeper considers it real
then death comes like dawn
and you wake up laughing
at what you thought
was your grief

A man goes to sleep in the town
where he has always lived
and he dreams
he’s living in another town
in the dream he doesn’t remember
the town he’s sleeping in his bed in
he believes the reality
of the dream town
the world is that kind of sleep

Humankind is being led
along an evolving course,
through this migration
of intelligences
and though we seem
to be sleeping
there is an inner wakefulness,
that directs the dream
and that will eventually
startle us back
to the truth of
who we are

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi

from The Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks

Ayazma Camii

Ayazma Camii, Ayazma Mosque, Üsküdar, İstanbul, Pentax K10d

bookshelf in Ayazma Camii

Ayazma Camii, Ayazma Mosque, Üsküdar, İstanbul, Pentax K10d

Ayazma Camii

 

 

Ayazma mosque, Ayazma Camii, Üsküdar, İstanbul, Pentax K10d

Ayazma Camii

 

Ayazma camii, Ayazma mosque, Üsküdar, İstanbul, Pentax K10d