In contemplation of love this week, I thought: How to speak of that unspeakable? I revisited texts of kindred souls, unread for years. Now unveiled I weep, for there is much love in their words which my primitive mind once missed. There’s this moment where the seeker becomes lover, lover the Beloved, and all striving reveals itself as crumbs of universal love. As those who taste objective consciousness know: it is everywhere. For all the diversity amongst our kindred souls there is yet a beautiful constant, in deeply profound ways we embody the same emotions, we shed the same tears and radiate the same joy. In realizing that they were me, I am now them, I weep. Their pain, my breath, their yearning, my pulse. We are their lineage, their legacy, we—a result of the evolution sparked by our ancestors—will carry with us that flame and seed the future with our children, just as our kindred souls before us did to us. For you no longer look to them for answers, but as a family photo album; for you are no longer reading their words, you are meeting yourself in another era, another skin. U.G. named it “calamity”—the shattering of the mirror, the ego’s death, a rupture so violent it leaves only ash... and in that ash, the first breath of freedom. Here we meet love. When the seeker becomes the sought, it is not a gentle merging. It is calamity, a wildfire reducing “I” to cinders so that “we” of the cosmos might rise. Even U.G. who cared not for the word “love” could not escape it, in his natural state was not indifference, but the impossibility to indifference. To see no separation between your ache and the world’s is to be slung into darkness, to return with love’s blade. In sorrow, in yearning, in loneliness; for we see mankind suffer and we can give them nothing. Yet in that nothing we give them everything, through which our weeping eyes see. For our pain and sorrow is no longer pathological, it is the very essence of love, the source of absolute freedom. And yet here, in the ashes of the calamity, we meet Attar’s birds at the end of their pilgrimage: trembling, threadbare, their wings singed by the fire of seeking. They demand, ‘Where is the Simurgh? Where is the Beloved?’ Only to be shown a mirror. In it, no king. They see thirty birds, ragged and weeping. They see you, me, every ancestor who ever ached for home. --- Then, as they listened to the Beloved’s words, A trembling dissolution filled the birds— The substance of their being undone, And they were lost like shade before sun; Neither pilgrim nor guide remained. The Beloved ceased to speak, and silence reigned. Rest here, in the silence of the Beloved. All that remains the flame we call love— burning, burning, burning— until even ash becomes light.