soul

The Lady With The Horse

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She arrives just in time to save me from a ferocious wild dog on my lone trek and seeing I am shaken, she offers me tea.
I accept and she leads me through a low labyrinth of trees, working their way to her house. She steps in and commands her husband seated quietly in a corner,
“Go Make her some tea!”
He looks reluctant and his reluctance arrives in heap fulls of sugar in my syrupy black tea.
I realise the only word we have in common is “chai” (tea) and we don’t speak the same language.
She asks about my life or I think this is what she asks me and I tell her for ten or fifteen long minutes.
She nods patiently, endearingly and at the end of it laughs uproariously and says she hasn’t understood a word.
I catch one word “thumbi” and say yes I have a brother. I point to the image of Mother Mary in her room and say that I love her too.
She understands this and squeezes my hand affectionately.
Then she gives me fruits from her garden for my walk ahead and a flower for my hair.
She has only one request in return, that I take a picture of her horse before I leave,
her most prized possession.

by Shenaz Wahid

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The Beauty Of Being Open To The “Other”

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We are sitting around a table.
A man is convinced he has found the philosophy which is the elixir to life.
He may be right, for the idea he speaks of is a beautiful one, but then he insists it isn’t just an idea, it is the idea.
The only one.
There is only one right philosophy and he knows it.

A palpable tension begins to travel around the table. A few people shift uncomfortably in their seats.
He asks, “What do you do when you are thirsty?”
Someone answers, “You drink water.”
“Yes there is only one thing to do when you are thirsty. This philosophy is that water,” he says.

Silence.
I want to join the uneasy silence, but I can’t help but disrupt it with a thought that is burning within me, “Yes, when you are thirsty, you must drink water, but water can be drunk in many ways, from a waterfall, a river, a crystal jar, an earthen pot, a glass cup, water harvested from the rain, water transformed from the sea, water from melted snow, water from a tap, a stream and a well. It seems there are many ways to drink the same water and quench one’s thirst. Aren’t there?”

Read the whole story at : The Huffington Post

Summer-Hose

In The Land Without Words

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You and I,
we meet better,
in the land without words.
Where love stirs and shakes,
the inner chambers,
of our human soul.

By SHENAZ WAHID

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Sometimes, a human being can have an incredible impact on us without knowing.
This poem is about sweet moments, shared in unworded silent longing and love.

I silently honor my soul

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To only accept that which is born of love and that which is loving,
is a way to honor yourself.

A well must be full to be able to give of its water,
How can you give water or love if you don’t have its source within you?
and while the well within is always full,
it is quite the journey to recognize that it is.
I step away firmly from that which is not born of love, and accept only that which is,
and in this way, I silently honor my soul.

by Shenaz Wahid

What would you do if you had no boundaries?

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“What would you do if you had no boundaries?” asks Mia the blue-eyed girl sitting in front of me.
It is one of the most important questions any one has ever asked me.
She means to ask, What would you do if you had no boundaries from your mother, father, lover, friends, brother, sister, neighbor, from the boundaries you impose on yourself and the ones imposed on you. What would you do?

We are talking about choices and I am sitting there contemplating which path I should choose to tread upon, what is right and wrong, what I should and shouldn’t do, when Mia looks me in the eye and asks me that one simple question,
“What would you do if you had no boundaries?”

It suddenly became easy to answer what had puzzled me. I start answering her with excited little heart of a child speaking withou care.
I think of my dreams and what I would do with life, if the only thing that steered me was the mast of my soul.
The answers that came was the naked voice of my heart, stripped bare of anything superficial, of what another thinks I should be and who I wish to be in front of another and who I’m supposed to be for another.
The voice that answered was my own. It was me being me.

Where would I go? What would I do? What would I say to another and to myself? Who do I love?

What would you do if you had no boundaries?
Who makes these boundaries but us, for ourselves and for each other?
Any one who truly listens to his own soul, could never go wrong because our souls are the throne of God, where his voice guides our feet.
If you listened to that voice, would you choose a new dream? Where would you travel and who would you meet? Perhaps you would meet yourself on a foreign street. Who would you say the deepest words of your soul to? Which friends would you hold onto for ever and who would you let go of? What would you want to see and what would you to do to go there, just to glimpse at yourself.

“What would you do if you had no boundaries?” If you listen to that answer, you will hear your heart speak.

by SHENAZ WAHID

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.”
Rumi

The flame of love

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I know them as boys who love to party, the adventure daredevils and renegades,
but tonight in the mountain, they show another side.

We sit by the fire on the moonlit terrace. Every one is perfectly silent watching the flame dance.
“What do you see?”, I ask.
“I can’t quite explain nor describe it.” says Pat who is most entranced by the flame and gleaming like a child to himself.
Z : “I see a woman dancing.”
Me : “It’s like love, ever- shifting, ever-changing, never the same.”
Gor puts in a few more twigs.
Z : “She’s right, it’s like love, you need to feed it to keep it alive.”
Gor : “The spark needs to be there in the first place, to keep it alive.
Without that initial spark, nothing can keep it alive.”

Every one and everything falls back into silence.
In the silence, I think it is the divine that ignites the spark between two souls, that indescribable thing called Love, no money can buy it, no person can dowse it & when it is found between two such people,
they become tenders to the sacred flame of Love;
that God first sparked.

Not a word is said. Everything is in the flow. The river beside us, the wine in our veins and we ourselves,
as the full moon watches.

by SHENAZWAHID

Love makes us warriors

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Love makes us warriors.
Perhaps a warrior of Love is far more than a warrior of war.
For in war, you wield your sword and if you use it right,
you can conquer with your power and might.
But to love takes maddening courage,
to stand naked, no shield or sword,
and offer up your blood and everything that you are, willingly.
Not knowing what the other might give,
nor does it matter.

You love, because you must love.
Because you can’t imagine it any other way.
You love, because you are love.
And you offer this bravely,
A warrior of the soul.

And what love brings is always a mystery.
Sometimes a sword piercing right through,
but if love is wielding this sword,
then painful as its thrust, Love is exactly what pierces through,
deeper to a place, we haven’t yet been.

There are times your heart beaming golden,
dances in love’s all consuming fire.
And the one to whom you offer this, turns his face away,
leaving you confused in his shadow.
But if it is love that makes him turn,
then she knows a dancer better suited,
to dance her ecstasy in harmony with yours.

Sometimes you walk her road alone,
And although it seems she has abandoned you, she never does.
She leaves you there alone, to learn what she has to teach,
to share when another arrives.
To teach what is so hard to learn,
that even though you may seek her in everything and everyone,
she lives in you and if you find her there,
you will everywhere.

If love is your true pursuit,
you will find it in the eyes of another,
On the corner of the street where you least expect it,
You will find it love warrior.

by SHENAZ WAHID

To God

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God,
Thank you for giving me birth in a world full of beauty and full of agony.
One that only you understand, why you made it so.

Thank you for Love, and for the pain of hatred that teaches me Love’s worth.
Thank you for the sweetness of solitude, for the joy of company and for the aching loneliness that allows me to treasure both.

Thank you for the butterflies, mountains, fishes, oceans and trees.
Thank you for the friends I lost, ones I found and for those who stay through it all.
Thank you for the love I lost. Thank you for the love I found.
Thank you for those who come from nowhere, light a fire in my soul and change me forever in ways I couldn’t have done without them.
Thank you for those who make my heart cry without tears.

Thank you for my Angels and thank you for keeping me safe from the devils in my own mind.
Thank you for the moments of magic that turned into despair, and for the moments of despair that turned into magic.

Thank you for music and dance and for the deliciousness of silence. Thank you for the silence even when its loud.
Thank you for the joyous laughter. Thank you for the bitter tears.
Thank you for the sun and the moon. Thank you for the dark sky.
Thank you for light and thank you for the darkness, that gives the stars and moon a place to show themself.

Thank you for the moments I know myself, for those where I feel lost, and have a chance to find and be found.
Thank you for remembering me and thank you for forgetting all that I too must forget.

Thank you for those who understand who I am, for those who misunderstand and for those who couldn’t care less.
Thank you for all that I understand, and all that is far beyond me
in beauteous mystery’s womb.

Thank you for wisdom and insight and for my mistakes and folly.
Thank you for the nights of peace, and thank you for the restless sleepless nights.
Thank you for the mountains triumph. Thank you for failures abyss.
Thank you for the blessings, and for all that my foolish heart deemed as a curse.

Thank you for all that’s deep and for all that’s shallow in me, that needs digging.
Thank you for a mind that wants to turn moments into a story,
sometimes beautiful, sometimes frightful.
Thank you for words, without which I couldn’t tell any story.

Oh Thank you Dear God for the Dreams in my soul, for putting them there and thank you for all that is good and bad
that I will have to encounter along my journey’s length.
Thank you for what I know, for what I don’t, for what I will and for what I won’t.

Oh Thank you for People, both happy and sad as they make me. The ones who amaze and inspire, and the ones who hurt and confuse.
Thank you for keeping me company even when I don’t ask you to, and for never forsaking me even when I have myself
Thank you for all that has gone past me by, for now and for all that will be.

Thank you for magic and mystery, for revealing and hiding.
For all the funny contradictions of Life, the ecstasy and agony
one without which I wouldn’t know the other.

Thank you above all for LOVE
Thank you being a God of Love.

Thank you for it ALL.
Yours,
Shenaz

by SHENAZ WAHID

Lyra’s voice

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Often what Lyra thought was Love, was just an excuse for the word.
Love as time went by, she found was far more than the definitions she had given it in her unknowing youth.

It was more than the romance of candlelight.
Yes that too was an expression of love, but it was also his shadow that fell upon her, on the night she was unwell.
It was the days of laughter and journeying into the beauty of the mountains.
Yes it was walking down the streets with joy upon their lips,
but it was also the days of confusion, pain and solitude where he stood by her silently, as she searched her own soul.

It was the days of celebration, drunken in love with wine laced lips,
of song and dance and love-making.
but it was also the days doing things completely wrong,
to find his forgiving arms embrace her at night.

It was the days spent learning all the good they had to offer each other,
dreaming dreams and igniting a fire in the soul of the other,
simply because of the courage love gave them,
but it was also the days of having hope together, when dreams seemed far away.

It was looking into each other eyes, seeing only what they could see, feeling only what they could feel.
It was kisses and fingers running through each other’s skin and hair.
But it was also the nights when the dark weakness in their soul prevailed,
and even though it hurt to find it,
it was the nights when he held Lyra’s hand to say a prayer to the God,
that had blessed them with this Love.

It was the blissful days spent by the window with the setting sun upon their gleaming eyes, her head on his chest beside the moon drenched waves,
time spent tasting love’s sweetness,
but it was also the nights of agony when Love seemed so confusing.
And yet he was always near.

by SHENAZ WAHID