# In This Room, In This Spell There is a room. I do not remember entering it. Perhaps I have always been here, or perhaps I arrived in a moment so quiet that even my own consciousness failed to register the crossing. The walls are neither near nor far—they exist in that uncertain distance of familiar things we have stopped truly seeing. The light, if it can be called light, comes from no particular source. It is as though the air itself has learned to glow with a faint, exhausted luminescence. Not the light of day, nor of any lamp. Rather, the light that accumulates when a space has held too many silences, too many solitudes. There are objects here. A chair. A table. Perhaps a window, though I cannot determine whether it looks inward or outward, whether it shows me the world or a reflection of this very room. The objects do not demand attention; they simply persist, the way the past persists—neither gone nor fully present, but obstinately there. I am sitting. Or perhaps I am standing. The distinction has become unclear, as distinctions tend to do when one has been in a place long enough. My hands rest somewhere—on my lap, at my sides—but I cannot recall deciding to place them there. They have simply assumed their position, as things do, the way dust settles. Time moves differently here. Hours may have passed, or seconds stretched thin as silk. There is no clock, but there is a rhythm nonetheless—a rhythm of breath, of thought circling back upon itself, of the slow accumulation of small, invisible weights upon the chest. This is not unhappiness, exactly. It is something closer to a condition—the way one might describe the weather when it is neither rain nor sun but something in between, something without a name. The spell of the room, perhaps. The enchantment of enclosure. I wonder sometimes if others sit in rooms like this, in this same geography of stillness. Or if this room is singular—my own private currency of confinement. There is a certain comfort in not knowing. The not-knowing itself becomes a kind of company. The walls remain. The light persists. I remain. And the room holds us both, asks nothing, promises nothing, simply continues in this gentle, implacable way—the way all rooms do, even when we have forgotten we were ever anywhere else.

1. These fears, these desires, these thoughts, these beliefs:
Cast them all aside; they are yours, not mine.

In complete surrender, arrogance awakens, falsehood extends its invitation—
I hold on between two things: myself and all that is mine.

2. In that moment, the very moment when a song seizes all my thinking, and I wait with fierce intensity for another like it,
you come to me then;
you come and sit awhile beside me, remind me so thoroughly of your existence that I pause the melody, turn all my attention and gaze toward you, and tell myself with utmost clarity: here there is no one but you.

3. When you are the thought of my thinking, my source and my end,
when every thing, every person, every happening reminds me only of you,
what else is left for me to do but think of you?!

4. This morning, waking, I saw a bird or two outside the window taking flight…
What joy! What happiness seized me!
I could only think: how beautiful he must be…
He who, beyond all bounds of space and time,
created you with such beauty!

5. When fear settles in the chest,
when restlessness, doubt, uncertainty persist year after year,
you alone are shelter…even in the midst of all unknown paths,
even if the whole world slips away from my side…

6. A question stirs in the mind…
If its answer comes, death comes with it.
And at the moment of death, someone's empty vessel fills with life.

7. In thinking, I became enslaved to my own fancies,
in thinking, I kept trying to arrange my tasks alone,
when on the throne of thorns, you were the sole force driving all my movements.

8. Kill me. Purify me.
Free me from this false selfhood of mine.
In me there is room for no one but you.
Though we have only just met,
still, again and again I feel: how long since I have seen you…
how long since we have spoken…

9. Tell me then, on the path of joy, in the gathering of happiness…
how can I hear the words of all these others,
when having you alone is enough for my life to pass beautifully?!

10. Say yes to faith.
Say yes to knowledge dancing within the mind.
Say yes to truth flowing through the arteries.
Say yes to love.
Refuse nothing that is beautiful, that comes from the sculpture of thought,
even by mistake.

11. And, fleeing from sorrow,
I have sought shelter in you many, many times.
Each time…I? Or you?...caught between this question,
each time I have sought shelter in that you…to escape from myself!

12. How can this world, this mortal world, become an object of desire,
when in you, beyond you, in your very youness…that heart burns endlessly in fire?

13. What you think is hell, is not hell.
What you do not think is heaven, is not anything happier than heaven.

14. You touch me, and right then…what a tremor!
Ah! All my breaths together could not hold as much consciousness
as your touch upon my body or your presence in my awareness has held.

15. One who burns oneself constantly in your warmth,
how can such a one drown in solitude?!

16. When the harvest ripens,
only one farmer knows
that the seed he planted in the earth
was planted first in his heart.

When the foundation of a building is laid,
only one architect knows
that unless he lost himself entirely,
his inner world would never stand revealed before his eyes.

17. In the mere exchange of words, some carry within their lips and eyes the dwelling place of countless stories!
Only one who loves understands how much truth plays and dances within the folds and creases of a lie.

18. At day’s end, it is surrender alone that measures the distance between day and night.
Trampling all illusions, one truth alone shows the way to the very end.

19. Whoever remains,
in the name of religion,
enslaved to the discipline of his own mind—
he is neither Hindu nor Muslim,
he is merely a blind man,
or a conspirator,
who with his blindness or his conspiracy
wishes to murder each and every one of them,
those who still see with their eyes,
those who still love mankind.