represents the resounding silence and brilliance of the infinite “supreme.” When we read or listen to poetry of the spirit, we come to see with a certain clarity the one thing that has always been facing us, yet seems invisible to us.

    In this poetry, the supreme comes to life through sound, syllable, word, rhythm, and pause. Poetry expresses the peaceful language of the divine heart. An unseen, sacred thread unites our hearts with those of the poets. Like stars in the nighttime sky, a heart that longs to commune with the divine shines alongside the luminous heart of pure being. In a profound moment during the great Sufi poet Rumi’s illumined life he noted that “going in search of the heart I found a rose under my feet.” So simple was his realization. Throughout years of endless searching, there had been many places and countless roads. Only when the distances disappeared did the search end. That elusive mystery that Rumi

sought was there, teasingly, in the form of a rose. Short yet filled with endless wisdom, the poems in this collection are like Rumi’s rose, subtle signposts of the most sacred.

    The sequencing of the poems is inspired by an ancient map of our spiritual body. There are said to be seven wheels, or energetic centers, called chakras, along our inner spine. Each chakra correlates with a state of consciousness, ranging from day-to-day awareness to pure consciousness and true knowing. In the center of the chest, next to our physical heart, is our heart chakra (Ana¯hata-chakra), where there is an arising and subsiding flow of the unending, energetic life force. The sequence of chakras loosely represents our path of awakening from intense longing to pure understanding of the supreme. At the core of this collection is the illumined heart.

    The number of poems is 108. This number symbolizes the divine and sacred connections in our