Here is a beautiful, inspiring poem for you:

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadow 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 heart.

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 fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

Hafiz – 14th century Sufi mystic and poet


I really love this poem. My favorite part is the line that says "greet yourself in your thousand other forms as you mount the hidden tide and travel back home." I like to think of reincarnation as the idea that we, as humans, are more than we think we are; we come in thousands of forms and have so many dimensions deep within us and the potential for so many realizations that we aren't even aware of, so many different levels of consciousness. In The Power of Myth Joseph Campbell talks about the metaphor of people being reborn in different forms and conditions in order to have the experiences necessary for their minds to release attachments to the field of time. This doesn't mean that a person will be reborn as a rattlesnake; they will be reborn within in another dimension of the inner being, a dimension with less attachments, a form of themselves already within.

I feel that I am reborn as a different animal every day. Sometimes, this animal is vicious and fierce and can stand on its own without any help, and sometimes I hibernate within and don't come out of my cave all day because I choose to allow my fears to overtake my enthusiasm and passion for life. Some days I choose to ignore the sacred life force energy pulsing through me and remain in torpor for days at a time. These are the times when I seek comfort in the idea that this isn't my real life; it's temporary, and I don't need to be happy about it because it's going to end, and this isn't my home, and no one really knows much about me here, etc. Excuses to remain unhappy for no solid reason. But it's not about expecting more from my situation in life; it's about expecting more from myself. It's easy to blame shortcomings on my current location because I can put off the choice of whether I want to live and risk disappointment or put off living until my "real life" begins, even though this is real life.

I am alive. No more denying it. This is happening, everything is happening for real. I am an animal fighting to survive in my own crowded, dangerous mind. And on the outside, people really do see me. They hear me, too. They speak to me, as if I am one of their kind.

And some days, I am.