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Several realms of gratitude

Alhamdulillah, alhmadulillah, alhamdulillah, Subhahanallahi wabihamdihi, la ilaha illallah!

Now half this beautiful blessing of a month has flown by. How swiftly it goes. These precious hours, each more gracious than the one past, oh they come to us one after the other and leave us breathless. They raise us higher and higher as we go closer and closer to the divine. This training of the body, opens up vistas of the mind and soul, cleans the heart and purifies the ego. Oh, what a wise blessing this obligatory fast is. Praise be to God, praise be to God, praise be to God, there is no God but God and God is the most pure, sublime, worthy of all praise, to whom is due all thanks.

 

Everynight now, after a long day of heat, we are blessed with a sip of cool water to drink…and as the prophet (Allah bless and elevate him) said;

ذَهَبَ الظَّمَأُ وَابْتَلَّتِ الْعُرُوقُ وَثَبَتَ الأَجْرُ إِنْ شَاءَ اللهُ

Dhahab az zamaa’u wab tallatil urooqu wa thabat al-ajru Insha-Allah

The thirst has vanished, the veins have been wetted and the reward is established – Insha-Allah. [Abu Dawud]

indeed, the veins are refreshed by this. But oh, so many in the world are in an involuntary fast, and have no means of breaking it. Water is such a precious precious gift. Such a miracle. How easily we waste it. A few days ago I was hurrying to a meeting, having parked my car along a residential street. This was in the middle of a hot day and mashaAllah I was feeling the blessing of water, being thirsty with the fast. I noticed a water-sprinkler in full swing on someone’s lawn. It is a silly time to water one’s lawn, as in the mid-day heat, the water evaporates sooner than it can be absorbed and therefore it is not good etiquette to water one’s lawn at this time, rather it is better to water the garden/lawn early in the day or in the evening. So I was thinking of all this at the back of my mind while hurrying, and then forgot all about it. But it was very sad, for an hour and a half later, returning after the meeting…I saw the same sprinkler still working. This was very sad indeed! What a waste of a precious resource and so many in the world suffer so without water to drink. God forgive us all for the way we squander the resources of this precious earth. Now writing this out, I get to thinking about this wisdom I learned back home on what time is best to water the garden. It was always done either early after dawn or just before sunset. Since my home country is poor, it was always done by a person who doubtless did not want to toil in the hot sun watering the garden, so there was more than one benefit. I wonder though, had my country been rich and there was an automatic water sprinkling system…would the ancient wisdom of ‘do not waste’ have prevailed?

 

God knows best the condition of the human and our weaknesses. And indeed we are forgetful creatures. I know there is a thousand things I do that are wasteful now, that I did not do before when I had less. So Allah forgive me for my countless sins and mistakes and forgetfulnesses. Indeed, our real sin is that we forget. Even the great prophet Moses (may God bless and elevate him) forgot as is mentioned in the beautiful and profound story of his encounter with Khidr-

قَالَ لَا تُؤَاخِذْنِي بِمَا نَسِيتُ وَلَا تُرْهِقْنِي مِنْ أَمْرِي عُسْرًا
Sahih International translation

[Moses] said, “Do not blame me for what I forgot and do not cover me in my matter with difficulty.” (Quran 18:73).

 
But look at the etiquette of Moses (peace be upon him) who stated his deficiency and asked for leniency with dignity and sincerity. This is a lesson to us. There is no way we will not be forgetful, there is no way we will not sin. Indeed if that were the case, we would be angels or we would be in heaven! So do not despair of the loving kind protection of your Lord and that you have someone, always there, for you to turn back to. Indeed the beauty of the sin, if I may call it that, is that it brings us back to our Lord. And that we all need. So there is a wisdom in everything created. And God alone is the only true reality.
 
Remember His name…you inhale and exhale it with every breadth, your heart beats to the rhythm of Allah, of expansion and constriction…this is your Lord, everywhere Manifest and everywhere Hidden. Glory to Allah, the most Beautiful, the most Majestic, the One, Everlasting.
 
I began this post really to document the great blessing of water and also to acnowledge with humble thanks, the ‘lovely blog’ award that my beautiful sister, Rosa Noor, bestowed upon me sometime ago. I was trully bowled over by it and super happy 🙂 MashaAllahu ta’ala! And I praise and thank my gracious Lord that this blog began so many months ago, has been able to reach out in such a way to my larger family. As we Muslims believe, if there is any good in it, it comes from God and God alone. InshaAllah, I will soon be able to aknowledge the award as it should be and complete the post. But now it is late and there is much to do and learn these precious Ramadan nights so please Sr. Noor (what a lovely name you have!), forgive me for the delay. Please do check out her amazing blog, ‘Greetings from England’.    MashaAllah such an active blog and here I am scarcely able to pen an entry in a fortnight! 🙂 Truly, God distributes His blessing in the best way.
 
To end, today was a blessed day of being on the water kayaking (one of my favourite things to do)…and since I began with water here’s a picture of a favourite lake where I was blessed to kayak with my God daughter when she was here (how I miss her). Do make du’a for her and all the children in the world who suffer and bear so much. Allah, help us all!
 
 
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Welcoming the month of months…Ramadan Mubarak!

Assalamu alaikum wa rahma Allah wa barakatuh!

O my dear brothers and sisters fortunate enough to witness another Ramadan, I greet you with joy and hope and pray that the light of Allah shines upon you and your loved ones this blessed month.

This is an image of the moon of sha’ban 2012. May the new moon of Ramadan be as beautiful and may we get to see it. Remember to make the prayer our beloved messenger did when he beheld the moon; ‘O moon, as thou dost worship my Lord, so do I’! – I love this du’a 🙂

I have been meaning to write a long while, first to share all the beautiful events that I was a part of since my last posting. Not all pleasant mind you, but full of the teaching of Allah, as I journeyed through hurdle upon hurdle and learned much along the way. It is not easy to summarize and indeed I began this post to share some of the joy and pleasure of knowing it is once more, ramadan. But shortly put, as we continued upon our journey through the countryside of Sri Lanka, we came across many interesting and diverse scenes that spoke to much. A sad visit through what used to be a pristine mountain village by a famous waterfall now full of a type of tourism that unnerved me much…it was tourism for drugs it looked like. All these people in the middle of nowhere looking drugged and senseless…the local women staying off the streets and simple village men now stoned and with blood-shot eyes. It was telling, this never existed a few years ago. I guess when the war was on, this type of tourists did not visit the island. Now we hear, coccaine is grown in the jungles and it has become a hotspot. Or so the driver of our vehicle informed us later on as he reported being solicited by locals to bring more of the ‘right type’ of people through. Thankfully we were not the right type, and we were pretty quick to exit the place. There were other things that happened to us along the way, including a rather bizarre and incredibly memorable encounter with a wild elephant! MashaAllah Sri Lanka really is an incredible country.

Then that night we were staying a small guesthouse, with rooms by a paddy-field…mashaallah it was very pretty, when we heard that my beloved grandmother had suffered a bad fall. Alhamdulillah for the salah and the comfort of putting one’s trust in God. May it always be so for all of us! So then in the morning we rushed back to the city and it took us the day to get there. Thereafter began some good work, as that was the main reason I was in the island. MashaAllah we visited many a social service organization and medical center and learned a lot about what is needed and what needs to be done. Allah bless the brave and tireless people working to help all who need help. I have forgotten much about service, now living in this affluent western world removed from the constant reminder of need. I miss this, for in it there is a great healing and great blessing. There is a reason for suffering and want…I believe it brings us closer to being good people and open our hearts to be merciful…this when one is a sincere seeker or truth or a humble human being. These are some brief thoughts I am sharing, there is of course much more to be said. I pray that these experiences stay cemented in me and I am able to contribute in whatever way God wills. Please include me in your prayers too.

Then it was about leave-taking and coming back home again. Then about settling in and preparing for the month of months just around the corner, and now so swiftly upon us all. I am wordlessly happy! I will end with sharing a lovely youtube time-lapse video featuring one of my favourite anasheed, and this du’a

‘O Allah, please remove oppression from all those oppresed in the world and ensure a peace based on justice and mercy to everyone in the world. Bless us, forgive us and increase us in your light upon light. And bless and elevate our beloved Muhammed, the chosen one’

Early morning, MashaAllah in good health

Life is a strange thing, we plan and work and strive and strain, and life just happens. Muslims will say this is simple to explain; ‘you are working and God is working above you’. Or as my Mum always says, ‘Man proposes, God disposes’.

Glory be to God then, and there is no God but He. The giver of life, the Sustainer, Nourisher, Cherisher, Able to do all things, Clement, Everlasting, The First and the Last, the Eternal, the One. With whom there is no partner and from whom we came and to whom we will return.

Glory for the morning!

How beautiful it is to sit in meditation after the pre-dawn prayer, to sit after those prostrations and quiet recitations, to sit reading the Quran and contemplating the vastness of this universe. How humbling to recognize my own insignificance in this vastness of the time-space continuum. There is a well known hadith (a tradition related from the prophet Muhammed, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. The Quran together with the hadith literature make up the core body of the Muslim spiritual ethos. However unlike the Quran, the hadith is not preserved in it’s original form and there is much debate/difference among the various volumes of hadith. There is actually a hadith science, which deals with establishing the authencity of the thousands of sayings/narrations of the blessed prophet, that have been related. It is important Muslims know this, and know how to distinguish a ‘sound and good hadith’ from a ‘weak’ one. Sadly as many Muslims nowadays do not know the rudiments of this system, they can be and are easily lead astray by those parriahs profiteering from religion, I do not need to give examples of who they are, I think we all know them well enough. But sorry about the long tangent, it’s an important point though. I found this useful website describing the hadith science a bit, but I must admit I just came across it and have not checked it out), a hadith related by Tirmidhi, that says ‘the world does not equal a mosquito’s wing in the sight of God’. What this means is that all of creation as we know it is infinitely less compared to all of creation as it is or all of the Creator. I love this hadith, for whenever things become too much to bear, thinking of it, it is easy to brush away one’s worries and laugh…putting one’s trust in Allah. Similarly whenever one gets puffed up with pride and a sense of arrogant achievement, one is quietened and humbled, back to being as we Muslims say, ‘but a grateful slave’

 

There is much more I wanted to share. Alhamdulillah (thanks and praise to Allah), I am about to take another journey. One with not only much to see, but much to do and in terms of long term and short term goals. So I am humbled to be going and grateful for all the many blessings God almighty has heaped upon me. But please keep me in your du’a and pray for my safe and satisfactory journey.

 

BTW I wanted to share, that when writing of the many blessings to be grateful for, I was reminded about the tradition Muslims believe about Nuh (peace be upon him). This is the prophet Noah (the arabic for Noah is Nuh, and we ask Allah to bless all the prophets when mentioning their blessed names). It is said Nuh (peace be upon him) lived close to a thousand years and during all that time, whenever he exited the washroom he would thank God for the blessing of being able to relieve himself. It is a blessing we seldom are cognizant of. How terrible to live without being able to do so! I guess we all know how awful it is to be constipated (!) and how jesting aside, it can be a real source of pain and trouble for the very young and very elderly. We have all seen patients with kidney failure needing to carry their urine in a bag…Allah help them and us all to help each other more. For this is a humbling experience. On that note, I recently heard Sh. Hamza (a well known and erudite modern scholar) mention a story about Firoun (the Pharoah who ruled in the time of Moses), I do not know how true the story is though. Apparently as Firoun believed himself to be a god, he disliked it that he needed to use the washroom. So he asked his physicians to cure him of this need. They prescribed a certain diet to him…I think it was to eat nothing but bananas…well, he did this and after so many days, well he had a big problem! 😉  Yeah, so this is a good reminder too about our own lacunae, and humbling. So I like the prayer the prophet (peace and blessing of Allah be on him) used to make when exiting the washroom. It is one to be memorized and made by us all, a humbling and wise reminder

غُفْرَانَكَ اَلْحَمْدُ لِللَّهِ الَّذِيْ أَذْهَبَ عَنِّيْ الأَذّىَ وَ عَافَانِيْ

O Allah. I seek your forgiveness. All praises are due to Allah who has taken away from me the discomfort and granted me comfort.

(this prayer is from a hadith narrated in ‘Bukhari’)

 

This has been a rather colloquial ramble, so thank you for indulging me. May God bless and protect you and grant you light upon light.

 

 

 

Many thoughts of gratitude

Assalamu alaikum, peace be unto you,

 

Alhamdulillah (thanks and praise to God), I’ve had a lovely few day. First due to an amazing camping trip to a small island off the coast of Vancouver. I was touched and deeply humbled by the concern of my non-Muslim camping buddies that I keep my prayer on time…and I must say, there is no feeling as beautiful as standing under the trees on the grass close to the ocean in the state of ‘salat’ (the Muslim ritual worship, it is a physical ritual with meditative quranic recitation and repetitive praise of God made by the tongue or in the heart). Alhamdulillah! a deep peace and glimpse of utter serenity. Especially to wake up with the first light at about 4 am (impossible to sleep with sunlight streaming through a tent!) and be fully woken taking the ‘wudhu’ (ritual purification with water, the best translation of the word in to English is ‘lumination’, from the greek ‘lumos’, meaning to make light) with freezing cold crystal clear water and then to stand on a rock by the ocean and enter the salah. Mashaallah (by God’s grace) the weather was amazing, and the sunrise a beautiful pink and red. I wish I had taken pictures, but I did not want to wake my sleeping camping buddies…and perhaps it is that some images are better preserved in the heart. Having said that, I thank you my dear reader, for listening as I type out this verbal imagery, for indeed it stamps the memory on my heart and for that I am grateful.

 

There is much more I want to write and share, but enough of words from me for now. Let me leave you with a ‘du’a’ (this is more like what the English word ‘prayer’ means, it is supplication made to God) that was found some days ago recorded on the back page of an old notebook I had used when learning sacred knowledge. I do not know where it is from, but it is beautiful, wise, and universal. So I hope you benefit from it.

 

I will inshaAllah post some of the camping trips photos below for your pleasure 🙂

 

Du’a

O Lord, please help me to say the truth in front of those who have authority. And please help me not to say that which is false in order to gain advantage. And please help me to see the other side of reality. And please protect me from bearing false witness due to difference of opinion. O Lord if you give me money, do not take my money. If you give me health please don’t take my sanity. If you give me success don’t take my humility. If you give me humility don’t take my dignity. O Lord, please teach me to love others as I love myself. And teach me to question myself as I question others. And please teach me how to forgive. Because the ability to forgive is the greatest of qualities. And because revenge is a major sign of weakness and regression. Please O Lord, protect me from arrogance upon my success. And protect me from despair upon my failure. O Lord, please remind me that failure preceeds success. O Lord if you do not give me success, please leave me determination to overcome failure. O Lord if you do not give me health, leave me my faith. O Lord, if I hurt others please give me the ability to apologize and if others hurt me, give me the ability to forgive. O Lord, if I forget Thee, don’t forget me as You are the Forgiving (al-Ghafur), the Clement (al-Halim), the Great (al-Kabir), Dominant and Able to do all things (al-Qadir).

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– Deer everywhere on the island…I was very happy with that!

 

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– Campsite 🙂

 

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– a precious moment as Otter arrive shortly after the dawn prayer (‘fajr), it was quite and still and I was thrilled by the sighting

 

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-pretty island farmhouse. Idyllic and the best part is it is a functioning farm. The family that owns it, gifted much land to make a park for Canada!

 

 

Image– golden sunset on my way home. MashaAllahu ta’ala!!

 

Sunset over the Pacific

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I gaze upon this unsurpassable beauty
And take picture upon picture.
Yet I know no camera can capture it.
Then I think of my eye-camera
And thank God for it’s continuous capture.
And yet all this beauty so beautifully captured by my eye
Is limited to seven spectra
How then all the beauty of vision unlimited
How then the beauty of The All-seeing!

Seeker’s Guidance

Seeker’s Guidance

MashaAllah I just joined and looking forward to my first class. Please do check them out,

http://seekers.nationbuilder.com/

As promised and some reflections

Assalamu alaikum, peace be unto you,

I promised sometime ago to share some photos from Sydney, so I’ll attach them here. Since I went to Sydney mashaAllahu ta’la I’ve traveled through Colombo, Singapore, Tokyo and Minneapolis. Some of these places I only stayed in an airport and others I had time to visit a bit. But it is a great blessing to travel and see the differences in this massive earth. To be in airports and observe the great multitude of variation among peoples. To see the pious next to the ignorant next to the forgetful next to those obsessed with worry and care. It is a great blessing to stop in these places to pray and touch your forhead to the ground and hope that the earth will bear witness for you that you did so, on that day we must all face. It is a great blessing to know that it is Allah that is upholding this amazing world. To travel way above the earth, to be with the clouds, to race the rising sun as you traverse oceans and cross time-zones, to wonder at the might and completeness of Allah’s creation and plan. To recognize that I am just an insignificant jot, a mere instance in the passage of time. And yet, Allah loves me so much, He has given me intellect and sight and sound and travel and more than this, has given me my faith. That Allah has given me time and so much of reading and the wonder of knowing oneself and learnign of oneself. To think this is true for so many thousands of people, millions and billions of people, existing now and who have existed and who will exist inshaAllah. So Allah gives each of us a universer of care, and yet we are insignificant jots on this great plane of existence. Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds, the One, beyond time and place, beyond gender, beyond our human comprehension, the First and the Last and the Everlasting. Praise be to God, my Lord, and thanks and thanks and thanks be to God and God alone. God, please send your grace and salutation upon Muhammed, your beloved and my beloved, the last of the Messengers and a mercy to mankind.

Sunset from Mosque window in Colombo
Pelican in Colombo suburb, and the tower with satellites were not there a few years ago
Sunrise in Colombo
Sunrise in Colombo on a foggy morning...those brief few moments you can look at the sun!
From Australian National Museum, look at the diversity of skeletons
Skeletons of Marsupials, again from Australian National Museum
Frangipani! what a beautiful name for such a beautiful flower...Thanks to God!
Lotus flower 🙂 Praise to God
Ibis roosting on tree tops, Chinese garden in Sydney
The moon gate from the Chinese garden in Sydney...highlighting water and trees, praise be to God who created our appreciation for beauty and art in architecture
Look at this beautiful old man, walking slowly at the back of a procession marching for International Women's Day in downtown Sydney, asking for equal rights for women. A noble sight indeed and one I found deeply humbling
A young student in an old building, reading on the stairs of 'the strand' ( I think) which was a Victorian era construction, built to honor Queen Victoria. How then Allah knew the day the building went up, that this student would be sitting there a century or more later, reading, and I would be passing by, traveling all the way from Canada, to take this picture, later to post it up on the www, and you my dear reader viewing it now. Subhahanallah! Glory be to God!
When leaving Vancouver...a place I spent many years of my life below me. How the view changes when we are far above, so I glorify my Lord, who is the subtle and near ('Latif', an attribute of Allah in the Muslim theology) and the Great and Overarching, Manifest ('Zahir' another attribute of God in the Muslim theology)

I’m in Sydney, Alhamdulillah and a poem by Rumi, as a reminder to myself

Subhahanallah for travel and the wonder of time. That we can cross entire oceans in a few days and the body can adjust to these immense changes of circadian rhythm with a few hours of sleep. I am in Sydney, Australia for a conference mashaAllah and then on my way back hope to stop at my island home and see my beloved grandmother. I know it is a very long shot, but if any of you my beloved friends on wordpress are here, I’d love to see you!

I am here on work and there is much to do. But to remind myself of the why and wherefore that really matters, here is a poem from Rumi that I wanted to copy out. It is ‘A real gem‘ from the Mathnawi

 

Until the gem surrendered itself,

when did it ever become a jewel set into a ring?

 

To keep being stony,

and to say “I” is crazy-

it’s time for you to die to self; let go.

 

Pride always grasps after power and riches

because the bath furnace burns perfectly with dung.

 

These two nurses just plump up the skin-

they stuff it with fat and flesh and arrogance and pride.

 

They focus on the shell, thinking it’s the kernel;

and they don’t raise their eyes to the kernel of the kernel.

 

May Allah always be with us and guide us and help us to keep our focus on ‘the kernel of the kernel’. It is good to start this way, with an urgent reminder. A four day conference of scientists can be a pretty ego-full event! ;). But it is why we do the work that counts. As the prophet (peace and blessings of God be upon him) said in a sound hadith, and it is the this hadith that Imam Bukhari, Imam Muslim and Imam Nawawi (raheemahullah alai) chose to open their great collections of ahadith with… ‘Innamal amali- bi-niyaath’, ‘actions are but by intentions’. This hadith is considered half of the religion, or a third of it, by our scholars, testifying to it’s immense importance. So may God make my intention to be here and how I deport myself here pure and pleasing to him. And may He make my travel enlightening and rewarding. This prayer I make for myself and you all. May we all be here (this world) with purpose and a great peace!

 

InshaAllah I’ll post some pictures later on. That’s it for now from this mesmerized wanderer, the slave of the one God and your beloved sister.

 

Peace be with you all, Assalamu alaikum warahmatullah

Seagulls play with the ferry

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Assalamu alaikum, peace be with you all,

By God’s grace I am returning from a magical journey, a retreat you could say, to Vancouver Island. Being a girl who grew up on an island myself (even if it was half a world away!), there is always a special indescribable feeling I experience when I visit the island.
The journey has been magical for many reasons. InshaAllah I will share more of why soon. But since this is the first time I am blogging from my phone and more to the point since the ferry I am presently on is about ti dock(!), I will leave you with this picture taken of seagulls as they played catch with the ferry and danced with the wind. Brave and joyful souls! Birds remind me of the ayat in surah mulk

أَوَلَمْ يَرَوْا إِلَى الطَّيْرِ فَوْقَهُمْ صَافَّاتٍ وَيَقْبِضْنَ ۚ مَا يُمْسِكُهُنَّ إِلَّا الرَّحْمَٰنُ ۚ إِنَّهُ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ بَصِيرٌ
Transliteration
Awa lam yaraw ila attayrifawqahum saffatin wayaqbidna mayumsikuhunna illa arrahmanu innahubikulli shay-in baseer
Sahih International Translation
Do they not see the birds above them with wings outspread and [sometimes] folded in? None holds them [aloft] except the Most Merciful. Indeed He is, of all things, Seeing.
Quran (67:19)

On the death of a child

Assaalamu alaikum, peace to all

Tonight I heard from my sister of the death of a dear child, a beautiful little girl who lives down the street from us back home in Sri Lanka. Her family is not well to do, being fruit sellers…but are some of the most kind and giving people I know. Her grandfather in particular, went out of his way to look after my grandmother when she had a stroke…bodily lifting her up and carrying her out to the vehicle waiting to rush her to hospital. Being a manual laborer he had the strength to do it and being as fond of her as he is, often saying ‘she is like a mother to me’, he had the heart. I, stuck on the other side of the globe, and knowing it would take 48 hours to reach there, could only arrive to be by her hospital bedside. Thank God, she survived that attack and then this little child would visit her almost every day to keep her company as she recovered. She was an adorable bunch of mischief, naughty and full of smiles as she played one prank after another. Her name in Sinhala has no particular meaning I know but can be considered to mean ‘flower’ so I will call her that.

Well Flower has died. Of Dengue fever, a mosquito borne disease more deadly than Maleria in my Island home. The Doctors who examined her not being able to diagnose her correctly at first her treatment came too late. ‘Inna ilaihi wa inna lillaahi rajioon’, the beautiful and profound sentence we Muslims are taught to say on the passing of anyone… ‘From God we come and to God we return’. So then as we believe, another angelic soul reunited with the divine presence. Sinless, she will be in heaven, awaiting her parents and praying for them. So then there is peace.

I wonder about the beauty of children. How their presence gives us life. How we remember what is essential when we are with them. I think it is because they are so recently arrived from that divine presence, and unsullied by the world yet, they are able to communicate an angelic nature. Yes, even in their mischief, they are angelic! The prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) taught us never to hit a child. Glory be to God, what a source of mercy our beloved prophet is!

After the tsunami happened I saw so many children who had died. So many children. Indeed, it was as if my soul shaken to its depths could not feel anymore. Only in blindly going through day after day after day indulging in back breaking work was there solace. Trusting without a shadow of a doubt, that Allah’s help will come and He is the MOST MERCIFUL. And so Allah is indeed the most merciful. Some time after the tsunami, I moved to another country and then moved in to live with a family where there was a beautiful baby. It took 5 years of growing with that child to be healed. Five blissful years of peace playing with a child and the world was right again. So I wonder at my Lord’s way, taking things away but giving back more. All we have to do is be patient. And kind and giving ourselves. All we have to do is learn to trust and that trust softens our speech so that we learn to speak to one another with kindness and gentility. Not a superficial gentility but one that has permeated our very soul. Is this then the way of the Buddha? the way of Lao Tse, of Jesus (peace be upon him) and of our Master Muhammed (peace and blessing of Allah be upon him)?

One of my most beloved sayings of Rasullulah (the messenger of Allah, peace be upon him) is where he stated that the best means of persuasion is the gentle means…but I cannot find this reference and indeed I am also not sure if it is Quranic. Please forgive me for my lapse, but here is a hadith very close in meaning to that

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “Be gentle and calm. . .because God likes gentleness in all affairs.”
Sahih Al-Bukhari, Volume 8, Hadith 404

This gentleness children possess. It is there in every coo and gurgle and in every time they stretch their arms out to be hugged. It is there when they put their little hands in yours as you walk along. It is there when they sit in your lap and ask for a story to be read to them. And yes, even when those little eyes dance with mischief and they enjoy annoying you, it is there for they want you. They always want you.

Imagine then the angelic presence and to be united with that. Glory be to God. How much we have to learn to be better. And I say this first to myself and then to everyone else. Allah help me.
May the little ones be in an eternal and beautiful peace.

I wanted to share some other ahadith beloved to me in case it is of benefit to you. And indeed remembering our prophet is never anything but a strength and mercy;

Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 56, Number 759:

Narrated ‘Abdullah bin ‘Amr:

The Prophet never used bad language neither a “Fahish nor a Mutafahish. He used to say “The best amongst you are those who have the best manners and character.”

Malik Muwatta Book 47, Number 47.1.8:

Yahya related to me from Malik that he had heard that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, “I was sent to perfect good character.”

Sahih Muslim Book 032, Number 6264:

Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: Charity does not in any way decrease the wealth and the servant who forgives Allah adds to his respect, and the one who shows humility Allah elevates him in the estimation (of the people).

Sahih Bukhari Volume 1, Book 11, Number 677:

Narrated Anas bin Malik:

The Prophet said, “When I start the prayer I intend to prolong it, but on hearing the cries of a child, I cut short the prayer because I know that the cries of the child will incite its mother’s passions.”

May Allah forgive us all our countless sins, guide and strengthen us!

And may Allah the almighty, most beautiful, kind, generous, glorious and loving Lord, the Almighty, give rest and ease to every parent who has ever had to go through the torture of loosing a child.