A Year with Hafiz: November 20th

Seeing that I discovered Ladinsky's A Year with Hafiz (read my previous post) on November 20th, I'll start with his entry for that day (I've preserved the original spacing):

NOVEMBER 20

ALL THE HEMISPHERES

Leave the familiar for a while. Let your senses and bodies stretch out

like a welcomed season onto meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the roof. Make a new watermark on your excitement and love.

Like a blooming night flower, bestow your vital fragrance of happiness and giving upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day. All the hemispheres in existence lie beside an equator in your soul.

Greet yourself in your thousand other forms as you mount the hidden tide and travel back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven are sitting around a campfire chatting, while

stitching themselves together into the great circle inside of you.

I'm reminded of Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road" as I read this. The pivotal phrase for me is "equator in your soul' which is echoed in the last line as "the great circle inside of you", with "great circle" being place in italics for emphasis. A great circle is a circle on the surface of sphere which lies in a plane passing through the sphere's centre. An equator typically refers to a great circle whose plane is perpendicular to the axis of rotation of a spinning sphere. This is illustrated nicely in Figure 1 that shows an equator and meridian as special types of great circles and where the hemispheres that are created are emphasised a well.

Figure 1

For a spinning sphere, it only the two hemispheres created by an equator that have centres of gravity that lie on the rotational axis. If sliced as shown, the two hemispheres created by the equator would continue to spin as before whereas those created by a meridian or any other great circle would fly off on opposite trajectories. The only poise or balance is to found on the equator where the hemispheres still exist but they are perfectly balanced.

It is a great metaphor for a Perfect Master, especially in light of the fact that a Sufi term for such a God-realised being is a Qutub, meaning literally an axis. To quote from Wikipedia:

Qutb, Qutub, Kutb, Kutub or Kotb (Arabic: قطب‎), means 'axis', 'pivot' or 'pole'. Qutb can refer to celestial movements and used as an astronomical term or a spiritual symbol. In Sufism, a Qutub is the perfect human being, al-Insān al-Kāmil (The Universal Man), who leads the saintly hierarchy. The Qutub is the Sufi spiritual leader that has a divine connection with God and passes knowledge on which makes him central to, or the axis of, Sufism, but he is unknown to the world. There are five Qutubs per era and they are infallible and trusted spiritual leaders. They are only revealed to a select group of mystics because there is a "human need for direct knowledge of God".

On the other hand, the hemispheres created by great circles other than an equator typify our lives before Realisation: 

All the hemispheres in existence lie beside an equator in your soul. 

In all these lives (the thousand other forms) the opposites are not in balance. It seems to me that Hafiz is exhorting us to step off the current great circle we are on (leave the familiar for a while) and for a while at least be bigger than we imagine ourselves to be:

Let your senses and bodies stretch out like a welcomed season onto meadows and shores and hills. Open up to the roof. Make a new watermark on your excitement and love ... change rooms in your mind for a day

All that has happened, all that is happening and all that will ever happened exist in a configuration beyond time. We move on our great circles and that movement we interpret as time passing. Our attention is constantly shifting from one point on the circle to the next and that shift in attention registers as time passing. All the hemispheres that we have created as we travel along our great circles, life after life, exist simultaneously.

All the hemispheres in heaven are sitting around a campfire chatting, while stitching themselves together into the great circle inside of you.

These are just some of the thoughts that arose from the November 20th entry and it is in no way an exhaustive analysis but it has served its purpose of focusing my attention on spiritual matters. It is spiritual exercise to borrow a phrase used by Saint Ignatius Loyola.

Image taken from here