Does Your Silence Weep Or Smile?

When the crowds leave,
you to yourself.
And the music has dimmed,
it’s celebratory sounds.
Does your silence weep,
or does it smile?

by Shenaz Wahid

5
While nature and prayer, carry a deliciously sweet silence, the silence I speak of in this poem, is the one we meet at the day’s end, the one that is revealing.
My silence has both smiled and wept, when life has willed.

Why We Dance

We dance to play music with our bodies,
We dance to feel the freedom we know is rightfully ours.
We dance to surrender wounds to the strumming of guitar.
We dance to hear the song within ourselves.
We dance to give movement to the love we feel.
We dance because the earth is always singing.

by Shenaz Wahid

The boy with the guitar

I had been there before 2yrs ago in search of Agape, thinking that if I was away from all that was known and familiar, she would show me her face of grace.
In what was just a glimpse, as I sat in my favorite café, the ordinary world around me turned extraordinary. As the music played in the café, the rain and people walking past by on the street, everything danced in tune and perfect harmony. I sat there alone, listening to the couple laughing beside me, the conversations of friends buzzing and I was whole. Without needing reason, it was simply there. For that moment, Agape soared in my soul showing me she was real.

2years later as I am walking out of my favorite café, now..
I saw a boy sitting beside it and he seemed to have a magnetism to him. I smiled and he smiled acknowledging me, and then because I had nothing to say to this stranger, I walked on and explored what the hours held.
While walking to the waterfall, I had to pass my favorite café and all of a sudden, the music that poured into the street took me back to that profound moment from 2yrs ago. Agape!
I stood still, thinking it was more magic music being played from my magic café , but I looked up to find that same boy with a magnetism, strumming his guitar.

This time I didn’t hesitate nor pause momentarily. As I sat down to listen, for the first time, I noticed that he was so beautiful, with clear eyes the blue of an ocean and wind-swept brown hair.
But it was easy to see that his beauty pierced deeper and his eyes held a million stories.
When he began to sing, I sat there speechless at the ways through which God speaks to us, for the words of his song held the things I needed to hear in that moment of time.
The things I couldn’t get myself to listen, being sung out to me.

When I played that song to my loved ones, his voice & words pierced them too and it sang to each one differently. To a friend, it was about the “time to let go” an obsessive love relationship. A loved one said, she needed to get her whole family to listen in, because for her, it meant the “time to let go” of the past and respect the closed doors.

Did that music know from 2yrs ago, that I would find his music in the same place?
I thank that boy with the blue eyes of the ocean.
I thank him for being a river of beauty that flows deep inside and bringing it forth, like the river that rises to be a wild cloud after its wild journeys and pours forth as sweet rain from his mouth. As his voice breathed into the air, it filled with a haunting beauty that drifting days did not erase from the womb of time.
It was both a place I didn’t know enough of, and one I was revisiting.

I think all those around him can see he is already a gleaming star, from the beautiful Goddess women to his friends. To me he is the boy that taught me so much, in such a short time :
All you need is music to feel Agape, and the world is yours.

by Shenaz Wahid

http://parkerainsworth.bandcamp.com/track/time-to-let-go
“Oh let go of what has been,
there’s nothing there for you my friend.”