Now is the time to know
that all you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
a lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand
that all your ideas of right and wrong
were just a child's training wheels
to be laid aside
when you finally live
with veracity
and love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy
whom the Beloved
has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,
why do you still
throw sticks at your heart
and God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside
that incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know
that every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time for you to compute the impossibility
that there is anything
but Grace.

Now is the season to know
that everything you do
is sacred.

    -Hafiz, trans. by Daniel Ladinsky

I've been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by.  Or how strangers still say "bless you"
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague.  "Don't die," we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up.  Mostly, we don't want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it.  To smile
at them and for them to smile back.  For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now.  So far
from tribe and fire.  Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, "Here,
have my seat,"  "Go ahead--you first,"  "I like your hat."

​    - Danusha Lameris

somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

    - e e cummings

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees
that really gets to me.  When all the shock of white 
and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come.  Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.  Fine then,
I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.

​    - Ada Limon

I commend my Spirit unto the Grace of the Great Way
Whether consciously or not,
this has always been the doorway to liberation.

All you lovers of truth
And all you true lovers
I tell you, now is the time to be done with it
Wash your battle-scarred hands in this Presence among us

Cast off your warrior clothing, and slip into your night slippers
Untie your hair or cut it off
The Holy One is present
And doesn’t care where you’ve been
Or what you’ve done
Or what you are doing now

Commend all of yourself - body, mind and spirit - to this Grace
And then, slip out into the night air, into the
waiting
quivering
birth
of this Golden Heart

Lean down now, like wet green grass
and kiss the bottoms of your feet.

​    - Adyashanti

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

    - Naomi Shihab Nye
​