Is It True!

That would make a good book title. And holds up against the prerequisite, first-leg, fundamental definition and great value of art, which to me, is to: engage & give! 

That is: the average mind would gravitate to a response. One being enough to maybe read more about it for a minute and then maybe like high-fiving a possibility there. Or on the other side of the pole, maybe enjoy saying: “Get your ass away from me.”

But inherent in being engaged in something— in being truly present— is to no longer (during that engagement) suffer the tyranny of something in one's past, or some anxiety about some possible event in one's future; which seems so many of us can get caught in.

Inherent in being engaged in something is already to have received; already been given to; already to know, on a level of utility.

That phrase to: engage and give, first came to my mind in an article the BBC invited me to write about Hafiz, art & freedom, and the vital role poetry plays in that. Here is a link to that article, dated January 2017, in case you want to read it. The title to the article was the BBC's own doing. 

And then the word: Engagement! Now for the first time, strikes me in a different way. In that: aren’t we all engaged to God? Will marry God? And have already conceived the Holy? 

         We are all engaged to God; the wedding is certain. 

       We should be celebrating, rocking-n-rolling more! 

       And clinking glasses with the moon!

We should be like a young pregnant woman marveling at her own being, with a miraculous life inside. And we are all going to give birth to the perfect! To the perfect! From our awareness of God growing within! And seeing God in all things as the inner eye— awakens!

Hey! Is It True. Those three words and all here just surfaced (and I connected)— from reading a few lines in a friend’s poetry book, titled: Traveling Music, by Craig Ian Ruff. In the first eight lines (on one of his longer poems in that book that goes on for five pages, and begins on page 99), I saw where I could veer off and do some unique rendering-expounding— as I had so often done with Hafiz and Rumi; that is— seeing poems within poems! And came up with this:

            Is it true, that wherever we go God

            is waiting for us—

          To greet Her or Him, or some wondrous

          Existence, as all existence really is!

          To marvel at Her beauty— so we can be

          in love, in love!

           O how the wing so needs to adore, and

           caress the cheek of the Sun. It is true!

Daniel Ladinsky

Taos, New Mexico

December 2025