In God Makes the Rivers to Flow; An Anthology of the World’s Sacred Poetry & Prose, Eknath Easwaran includes a selection from Mahmud Shabestari entitled “The Mirror of This World.”  I’ve written the following poem-like reflections inspired by this selection.

Magnificence

In the wing of a fly, an ocean of wonder;
In the pupil of the eye, an endless heaven.
Though the inner chamber of the heart is small,
            the Lord of both worlds
            gladly makes his home there.
—Mahmud Shabestari

You don’t have to like flies to be amazed by them: so much buzz from something so small, so many secrets behind those bold eyes, such delicacy in their webbed wings.

The whole delicate web of life throbs through those bodies we could so easily crush with one hand.

So many units of perception around each holy cell, a conglomeration of consciousness we cannot comprehend.

Proof that even God can be a pest.

And you only need to gaze into a loved one’s eyes for a moment to sink into an ocean so deep it could be a cosmic ocean, an ocean like the space between galaxies but somehow deeper, darker, more sacred.

Heaven is beyond imagination, a brilliant darkness, like the pupil of an eye, pulsing with intelligence.

If God is the universe and everything beyond the universe, if God is the multiverse, if God is infinite dimensions, then our hearts are infinite squared.

It is an old cliché—God dwells in our hearts.  And yet, where else would we rather search?

God does more than dwell in the small chamber of our hearts; God dwells in the chamber of each cell, in every atom of our being, every proton, neutron, and electron.

To be conscious of God, we must expand our mind to hold the infinite and the infinitely small.

To be conscious of God, we must comprehend our own magnificence.

And, along the way, it wouldn’t hurt to look at a fly and be amazed.