Perfume of the Desert – Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom

By Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut.

170 Pages | First Quest Edition 1999 | Softcover | Quest Books, U.S.A. | ISBN: 0835607674.

'Before any garden or grape or wine existed, our Soul was drunk on eternal wine'.  - Rumi.

Intoxicate your Soul with Harvey's & Hanut's favourite Sufi teaching stories, sayings and ecstatic poetry, featuring new translations of Rumi. In the hope of awakening the sacred heart in all of us and infusing its passion into all the choices of life, this anthology has been created. Only those poems, stories or philosophical fragments are included, that have directly inspired the authors. They wanted each section to 'smell of the desert' and to inebriate with its fragrance. Sufi talk or instruction is never linear; Sufi poets and sheikhs will try almost anything to shock their listeners awake, will swerve from the highest philosophy to the fragment of a great ode of Hafiz or Rumi, to a story in yesterday's newspaper, to a joke from Nasrudin.

From Chapter 'The Inner Secret'; (p. 64):

THE SWING

" Between the posts of 'conscious' and 'unconscious'

The mind has strung a swing:

On it bang all beings, all worlds

And it never stops swaying.

Millions of beings sit on it

And the sun and the moon also.

Millions of eras come and go

But the swing remains.

Everything swings!

Sky and earth, air and water

And the Beloved Himself

As He comes into form - 

Seeing this

Has made Kabir a servant. "

- Kabir.