Saturday, February 23, 2008

If I Adore You

If I adore You out of fear of Hell, burn me in Hell!
If I adore you out of desire for Paradise,
Lock me out of Paradise.
But if I adore you for Yourself alone,
Do not deny to me Your eternal beauty.

- Rabia al-Basri (8th century, sufi poet)

omg, I was moved to tears after reading this. How beautiful - and seriously, if we get our head out of the clouds (stop obsessing over little things especially) and focus solely on Allah swt I don't think we'd ever want to stop basking in his amazingness. So, I wrote a long letter to Him about how I'm going to clean up my act insh'Allah (for me, writing things out is the most effective outlet for emotion and so is talking to Allah, so I figured why not do both? double whammy).

new resolution: wake up 15 minutes earlier so I can read some Qur'an - and a plus will be the noticable noor on my face (i'A) and consequently I will no longer have to resort to my illuminating tinted moisturizer or "noor in a bottle" as I call it.

That last bit was meant to be funny.

salaam.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

greattt poem
"That last bit was meant to be funny."
haha wow, i think the fact that you said that made it funnier

Vanessa Fatima said...

thanks (: yeah super powerful poem. I know i use the word "powerful" too much but its so fitting.

Anonymous said...

i agree with my the post before me
that the fact that you mentioned your purpose made it more whimsical indeed


"noor in a bottle"
classic!!!