August 2019 Message

Beloved Family,

Yesterday we harvested our Rainbow Corn from seeds given to us by Master Gardener Greg Schoen from the Southwest Sufi Community! Harvesting grapes will be next! See pics below!

Last weekend we stayed with Latifa Nur Brenda Crane in San Luis Obispo. "Shall I invite the local Sufi community over to my living room for an evening together?" she asked. We sang and shared with 35 people that night!

The next day we visited with Yarrow, one of the long-time dance leaders in the area and his wife Kara. Amazingly, Kara adopted a Red Tail Hawk that had been shot in one wing some twenty years ago, and now continues to nurture "Sunshine".

She shared with us that since Sunshine could only lay infertile eggs, that she tried an experiment of placing fertile chicken eggs in a nest that Sunshine had made. Would nature win out and the chicks become Sunshine's next meal or would nurture win out and Sunshine would mother them to maturity. She DID mother them to maturity and a year later did the same for some Red Shoulder Hawk eggs that had lost their mother.

Since my scheduled travel has changed, I amended the dates for the last four Zikr Circle meetings in 2019, so please check before heading out to Zikr. You can also join the Facebook page and get a reminder notice a few days before each Zikr Circle meeting.

I am about to begin lots of travel. Leave for Fazal Manzil, Hazrat Inayat Khan's home in Suresnes, France on Thursday for a Sufi Retreat and then a six-day retreat in Spain starting Aug 19th!

In September I lead a retreat in Chile, in October it's Florida! November has our annual Ruhaniat Leader's Retreat followed by a Peace Pledge Pilgrimage gathering at the International Peace Palace in the Hague!

December I'm off to lead a retreat on Maui and beginning the New Year with our 17th Annual Sufi Sesshin in Northern California.

Long range planning is likely needed if you plan to join us for our Pilgrimage to Hazrat Inayat Khans URS in February and Pilgrimage to Sacred Sights in Northern Morocco.

While I suggest you continue SubhanAllah, Alhamdulillah, Allaho Akbar for the rest of your life I will offer our next wazifa practice below.

Much love, Shabda

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Wazifa Practice

YA RA'UF YA RAHIM (yaa ra-ʻOOF) (yaa ra-ḤEEM)

Ya Ra'uf is a quiet, gentle in-dwelling love that nevertheless actively penetrates to the deepest and most profound place. It goes right to the essence of being human, and it helps to heal the crucial problem of our narcissistic self-identification with our perceived deficiencies and shortcomings.

Ya Rahim is the inner element of divine love, which penetrates into the depth of all beings and all things.

Ya Raʼuf is an invocation of quiet, gentle, profound love. One of the ways to understand ar- Raʼuf is to compare it to ar-Rahim, with which it is close in meaning. Nine of the 11 times that ar-Raʼuf occurs in the Qurʼan, it is paired with ar-Rahim to describe Allah. These divine
names are close in meaning, but the sound-code embedded in the Arabic language helps to distinguish them. The sound-code makes ar-Rahim omnipresent; it spreads into every particular thing without exception. It has a very immanent quality. The sound-code for ar- Raʼuf reveals it to be a kind of love that emphasizes a deep, deep penetration into the core of being, into essence.

So Ya Ra'uf touches the deepest wounds there are. It goes to the place within you where there are sensitive hurts and wounds that you have lived your whole life defending from being touched. But this simple love can reach it. It is so quiet that it can penetrate the armor. It is even subtler than what we generally understand by compassion. It is a gentle perfume.

Ya Rahim is an antidote for beings who feel abandoned by God and who badly need to feel the healing activity of divine love reaching them deeply within.

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TEXT and COMMENTARY to STUDY

This month we begin working with the text: Gatha-Pasi Anfas: Breath Series II withCommentary by Murshid Samuel L. Lewis(Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti). Read Numbers 4-6, pages 16-29 Click here to download the document.

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Rainbow Corn

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