Wooden Enemies
The birch woods are full of them – a carpet of Wood Anenomes sparkling in marvellous spring sunshine. The first birch leaves are almost out, giving the bronze winter birches a coppery effect.
“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 the next,
did not descend from Adam or 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 ‘The Essential Rumi translations’
by Coleman Barks