liberty /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

Be thou not haunted by the soul’s fantasies;

Be not subdued by idle moods,

But keep thy liberty; unshakable,

Leave folly to the outer world.

Just as the eagle, circle in the heights —

Has thine intelligence not told thee that?

Thou bearest in thy soul a holy land —

Go there, when dreams torment thy mind.

Under the clouds it may be dark;

But above them there is sunshine.

Tell me: what is the sickness of the soul?

Something is lacking: it is gratitude of the heart!

-Thank you my friend Ahmed Mouneimene

Rabi'a on resignation /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

In what appears to have been her last illness, Rabi‘a was said to have been visited by three of her friends, Hasan of Basra, Malik Dinar and Shaqiq Balkhi, and they, like the friends of Job, endeavoured to teach her the duty of resignation.

Hasan said, "He is not sincere in his claim (to be a true servant of God), who is not patient under the chastisement of his Lord". Rabi‘a said, "I smell egotism in this speech". So Shaiq took up the thread and said, "He is not sincere in his claim who is not thankful for the chastisement of his Lord".

Rabi‘a said, "Something better than this is needed". Then Malik Dinar tried, "He is not sincere in his claim who does not delight in the chastisement of his Lord". Rabi‘a said, "Even this is not good enough". They said, "Do thou speak", and she shewed her idea of the true resignation in her reply, "He is not sincere in his claim who does not forget the chastisement in the contemplation of his Lord".

- Rabi'a Basri: the mystic and her fellow saints, p. 43.

Sacred Heart 2 (A Fragment–) /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

Geography comes to an end,
Compass has lost all earthly north,
Horizons have no meaning
Nor roads an explanation:
I cannot even hope for any special borealis
To rouse my darkness with a brief “Hurray”!
O flaming Heart,
Unseen and unimagined in this wilderness,
You, You alone are real, and here I’ve found You.
Here will I love and praise You in a tongueless death,
Until my white devoted bones,
Long bleached and polished by the winds of this Sahara,
Relive at Your command,
Rise and unfold the flowers of their everlasting spring.

–By Thomas Merton, from “The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton”

"Tribute" - Yasiin Bey /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

The new Blackstar song produced by Madlib featured in Dave Chappelle's Netflix special 'The Closer'.

[Verse: Yasiin Bey]

This is for my favorite band of human beings

The faithful, the graceful, the tragic, the classic

The evidence of things unseen, the book of life

The mansions of the moon, the bones of Firuan

Recently discovered and everything but note

The doubter's doubts about it never made unsure, life!

The gift, peace out the pressure

Can't remember how you came

Or win a bet on how you'll exit

From the start, the only thing certain is the end

Promise to all and none, knowing not when

Heartbreak from yesterday a fret for tomorrow

I leave you now filled with anxiety and hollow

If you pray don't worry, if you worry don't pray

My homie told it to me just the other day

From the tall castle walls to the mean teeth streets

I hope you get what you are

And that you are what you need

Ameen...

Written by Talib Kweli Greene, Otis Lee Jackson, Yasiin Bey

Performed by Talib Kweli & Yasiin Bey

Courtesy of Talib Kweli & Yasiin Bey

miscellanea /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

Laziness is a kind of sadness - Thomas Aquinas

When transcendence, truth and symbolism are removed from the cosmos, we are left with a utilitarian universe containing little more than the useful and the useless, the pleasant and the unpleasant. - Joseph Lumbard

"We can now recognize that the fate of the soul is the fate of the social order; that if the spirit within us withers, so too will all the world we build about us. Literally so. 1/2

"What, after all, is the ecological crisis that now captures so much belated attention but the inevitable extroversion of a blighted psyche?" 2/2 - Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends

Postmodern/CT folks refuse to *ever* explain how, if language/ reason/ knowledge is produced by power, how *their* language/knowledge/reason somehow escapes that determinism. - Caner Dagli

“Wait guys, if the human subject is itself constructed by power relationships, doesn’t that mean *your* ideas are constructed by power relationships too, making them just as suspect?” - Caner Dagli

The Master said: At fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven. At sixty, I heard them with docile ear. At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart, without overstepping the boundaries of right. - Confucius

Also from Prof. Dagli:

“We teach people that they are accidents, and we spend *zero* time in the public sphere talking about how this cradle-to-grave indoctrination of purposeless mechanistic biology might just make it impossible for people to take morality and truth seriously at a deep level.

We cannot teach generations of human beings that each and every one of us is a random pattern of molecules, and then be surprised when large numbers of us decide that it makes little sense to care if people they don’t know and will never meet will live, die, or suffer.

The critics of so-called social Darwinism have the same exact account of human nature as those they deplore. What arguments can they offer as to *why* they shouldn't act as if other people were meaningless cosmic accidents, which "smart" people are required to believe anyway?”

a symbol /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

"One must not confuse a symbol with a mere allegory, nor try to see in it the expression of some misty and irrational collective instinct. True symbolism depends on the fact that things, which may differ from one another in space, material nature, and many other limitative characteristics, can possess and exhibit the same essential quality. They thus appear as diverse reflections, manifestations, or productions of the same reality — which in itself is independent of time and space. It is thus not quite right to say that gold represents the sun, and silver the moon; rather is it the case that the two noble metals and the two luminaries are both symbols of the same two cosmic or divine realities."

- Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy, p.11

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In Silence by Thomas Merton /  by Mustafa Gouverneur 

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”

Children’s books top 25 (collated) for ages 8-12+ (read to or read by). /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

Children’s books top 25 (collated with friends):

  • 1. The Hobbit

    2. Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien (not written specifically for children but powerful if they can engage)

    3. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George (“an accessible and completely unsentimental survival guide disguised as an adventure narrative wrapped in an ode to nature.”)

    4. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen

    5. The Birchbark House series by Louise Erdrich. ("These books follow the lives and adventures of an Ojibwe family (with strong female protagonist, Omakayas) as they're pushed west by white settlers. Beyond the compelling plot and perspectives that challenge the Little House books of my youth, a reader might come away with new and useful land-based knowledge/skills.")

    6. The Silver Chair; Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia) by C.S. Lewis

    7. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

    8. The Wizard of Oz full series

    9. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

    10. Ghazali's Book of Knowledge for Children by Fons Vitae

    11. The Secret Garden 

    12. The Life of the Prophet by Gouverneur & Azzam

    13. Ottoline series by Chris Riddell

    14. Charlotte’s Web

    15. A Carpet of Flowers, by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño

    16. The Jungle Book

    17. The Borrowers

    18. Pippi Longstocking series

    19. Black Beauty

    20 Little Women & Pride and Prejudice (children's versions)

    21. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

    22. Wisdom Tales books e.g. Amir 'Abd al-Qadir & some of Demi's books

    23. Conference of the Birds by Alexis Lumbard

    24. The Iliad and The Odyssey- good graphic novel adaptations

    25. Where the Mountain meets the Moon by Grace Lin

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On ‘Moderns’, Epistemology and First Principles /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

“The special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it. It says, in mockery of old devotees, that they believed without knowing why they believed. But the moderns believe without knowing what they believe - and without even knowing that they do believe it. Their freedom consists in first freely assuming a creed, and then freely forgetting that they are assuming it. In short, they always have an unconscious dogma; and an unconscious dogma is the definition of a prejudice. They are the dullest and deadest of ritualists who merely recite their creed in their subconsciousness, as if they repeated their creed in their sleep. A man who is awake should know what he is saying, and why he is saying it – that is, he should have a fixed creed and relate it to a first principle. This is what most moderns will never consent to do. Their thoughts will work out to most interesting conclusions; but they can never tell you anything about their beginnings. They have always taken away the number they first thought of. They have always forgotten the very fact or fancy on which their whole theory depends.”

- G. K. Chesterton

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