Rumi: Only Breath

I was you
and never knew it.
  -- Rumi

Today's guidance from The Rumi Card Book:

Category: Ordeal ... From every direction, agonies have crowded you to drag you at last toward the directionless.  The meaning of all the losses you are sustaining is to turn you totally toward the Divine.

Category explanation from the book:  One of the glories of Rumi's work is its naked honesty about the necessity of ordeal--about what could be called "the alchemy of Agony."  The family of ordeal cards, then, deals with both sides of the nature of suffering in our lives:  that it is unavoidable and that, through understanding its inner purpose, it can be transmuted into the gold of Grace.

Only Breath

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

From Essential Rumi
by Coleman Barks