My Holy Book

You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing there will be no result.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

One Star Fell and Another

One star fell and another as we walked.
Lifting his hand towards the west, he said—
—How prodigal that sky is of its stars!
They fall and fall, and still the sky is sky.
Two more have gone, but heaven is heaven still.

Then let us not be precious of our thought,
Nor of our words, nor hoard them up as though
We thought our minds a heaven which might change
And lose its virtue, when the word had fallen.
Let us be prodigal, as heaven is:
Lose what we lose, and give what we may give,—
Ourselves are still the same. Lost you a planet—?
Is Saturn gone? Then let him take his rings
Into the Limbo of forgotten things.

O little foplings of the pride of mind,
Who wrap the phrase in lavender, and keep it
In order to display it: and you, who save our loves
As if we had not worlds of love enough—!

Let us be reckless of our words and worlds,
And spend them freely as the tree his leaves;
And give them where the giving is most blest.
What should we save them for,—a night of frost? …
All lost for nothing, and ourselves a ghost.

The Prophet Muhammad said,
“There is no better companion
on this way than what you do. Your actions will be
your best friend, or if you’re cruel and selfish,
your actions will be a poisonous snake
that lives in your grave.”
But tell me,
can you do the good work without a teacher?
Can you even know what it is without the presence
of a Master? Notice how the lowest livelihood
requires some instruction.
First comes knowledge,
then the doing of the job. And much later,
perhaps after you’re dead, something grows
from what you’ve done.
Look for help and guidance
in whatever craft you’re learning. Look for a generous
teacher, one who has absorbed the tradition he’s in.

Look for pearls in oyster shells.
Learn technical skill from a craftsman.

Whenever you meet genuine spiritual teachers,
be gentle and polite and fair with them.
Ask them quetsions, and be eager
for answers. Never condescend.

If a master tanner wears an old, threadbare smock,
that doesn’t diminish his mastery.

If a find blacksmith works at the bellows
in a patched apron, it doesn’t affect
how he bends the iron.
Strip away your pride,
and put on humble clothes.
If you want to learn theory,
talk with theoreticians. That way is oral.

When you learn a craft, practice it.
That learning comes through the hands.

If you want dervishhood, spiritual poverty,
and emptiness, you must be friends with a sheikh.

Talking about it, reading books, and doing practices
don’t help. Soul receives from soul that knowing.

The mystery of spiritual emptiness
may be living in a pilgrim’s heart, and yet
the knowing of it may not yet be his.

Wait for the illuminating openness,
as though your chest were filling with light,
as when God said,
Did We not expand you?
(Qur’an 94:1)
Don’t look for it outside yourself.
You are the source of milk. Don’t milk others!

There is a milk fountain inside you.
Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.

You have a channel into the ocean, and yet
you ask for water from a little pool.

Beg for that love expansion. Meditate only
on THAT. The Qur’an says,
And He is with you
(57:4).
There is a basket of fresh bread on your head,
and yet you go door to door asking or crusts.

Knock on your inner door. No other.
Sloshing knee-deep in fresh riverwater, yet
you keep wanting a drink from other people’s waterbags.

Water is everywhere around you, but you see only
barriers that keep you from water.

The horse is beneath the rider’s thighs, and still
he asks, “Where’s my horse?”
Right there, under you?
“Yes, this is a horse, but where’s the horse?”
Can’t you see!
“Yes, I can see, but whoever saw such a horse?”

Mad with thirst, he can’t drink from the stream
running so close by his face. He’s like a pearl
on the deep bottom, wondering, inside his shell,
Where’s the ocean?
His mental questionings
form the barrier. His physical eyesight
bandages his knowing. Self-consciousness
plugs his ears.
Stay bewildered in God,
and only that.
Those of you who are scattered,
simplify your worrying lives. There is one
righteousness: Water the fruit trees,
and don’t water the thorns. Be generous
to what nurtures the spirit and God’s luminous
reason-light. Don’t honor what causes
dysentery and knotted-up tumors.

Don’t feed both sides of yourself equally.
The spirit and the body carry different loads
and require different attentions.
Too often
we put saddlebags on Jesus and let the donkey
run loose in the pasture.
Don’t make the body do
what the spirit does best, and don’t put a big load
on the spirit that the body could carry easily.

However, the reintegration of production and consumption in the popular mass media is a highly selective endeavor and remains largely confined to the realm of lifestyles and cooking fads. Its aim is to resist the saliency of consumer activism demanding ‘a return’ to pre-industrial food systems and threatening to re-expose meat’s symbolic ambiguities. These food culture elaborating efforts thus contribute to the fetishism of consumption and reproduce the distance between today’s food consumers and the most marginalized food producers.

The cooking-show viewer would be hard-pressed to spot even the slightest glimpse of an industrial farm of tens of thousands of acres, equipped with massive machinery run by computers and satellites. Nor will she or he see the 30,000-strong pig confining facilities from where their high quality tenderloin originates, let alone images of immigrants working in dangerous and unglamourously tedious jobs in the fields or inside meatpacking plants. The food or produce that the overwhelming majority of us buy at the local supermarket, the fruits and vegetables dosed with chemicals and shipped a thousand miles before we buy them, remain largely hidden. No attempt is made to personalize the cooking show hosts’ relationship with IBP (now Tyson), the world’s most important butcher.

Framing food and cooking as a lifestyle converts the reintegration of production and consumption into a matter of individual choice. Instead of asking how and under what conditions most of the food we consume is produced, ‘cooking as a lifestyle’ discourse frames the relationship of consumers with producers as a matter of aesthetics, as an extension of consumer freedom - freedom to choose. Large corporations with control over most of the food we eat hardly encourage us to develop personal relationships with our ‘own production crews’ at the strawberry field or our ‘white hat line workers’ at our local meat packing plant. On the contrary, massive efforts are devoted to get us to identify with, and develop long-term loyalty to, the ‘brand’. For this purpose complex and massive social technologies are deployed so that brand/image (i.e., ‘Lean Generation Pork’ by Smithfield corporation) becomes separated from its practice (concentrated animal confinement facilities, open lagoons of manure, immigrant workers denied bathroom breaks).

The coexistence of two seemingly contradictory trends – attempts to reify the consumption of meat produced within a highly industrialized meat subsector and the elaboration and mobilization of consumers to reconstitute production/consumption unity in food as a lifestyle movement – reveals the highly contested and unstable character of the divide between these two realms. This divide is produced by competing ethical and ideological claims (freedom to consume, freedom to choose and other consumer rights vis-à-vis workers’ rights or environmental impacts) as well as in struggles over social distinctions, power and profits (class, ethnicity, laws and regulations, institutions that formulate and implement agriculture and food policies, tax regimes, etc.).