The springtide of lovers has come, that this dust bowl may become a garden; the proclamation of heaven has come, that the bird of the soul may rise in flight.
The sea becomes full of pearls, the salt marsh becomes sweet as Kauthar, the stone becomes a ruby from the mine, the body becomes wholly soul.
If the eyes and souls of lovers are raining a flood like a cloud, yet the heart within the body’s cloud is flashing like lightning.
Do you know why the lovers’ eyes have become like a cloud in Love? Because that moon generally is concealed in clouds.
Happy and laughing hour, when those clouds have begun to weep! Lord, what a blessed state, when those lightnings are laughing!
Of those hundreds of thousands of drops, not one drop falls upon the earth; for if it should fall upon the earth, the whole world would be laid in ruin.
Though the whole world be laid in ruin, yet every desolation through love becomes fellow-mariner with Noah, and so is intimate with the Flood.
Did the flood abate, the heavens would not go round; through that wave beyond direction these six directions keep in motion.
You who remain fast under these six directions, at once sorrow and do not sorrow, for those seeds beneath the ground will one day become a plantation of date-trees.
One day that root will raise its head from the dust, it will become a fresh green branch; what if two or three branches should wither, the rest of the tree will be pregnant with life;
And when that dry branch is set afire, the fire will be joyous like the soul; if that is not this, it will become this; if this is not that, it will become that.
Something has closed my mouth, as if to say, “What, drunk and on the edge of the roof? Whatever it may be that bewilders you, that thing is bewildered at Him.”