Where is the gamble?

Where is the gamble?                                                                                  

Certitude is not required to start down this path,

just the lifelong lack of a workable alternative.

What’s at stake here?  A few more years

of inadequacy, fraught with dread and sorrow?

Garbed in the world, I become its infinitesimal center.

I’m not cut out to be a Qutub! –

the ill-shaped cogs and wheels, bolts and gears

screech and grind, sparking in their turn.

Not certitude but a verification comes

in the quiet fluidity of my daily practice.

When I wrap myself in the Beloved’s sadra,

I begin to disappear in His eternal Presence

as does also this tainted world to which

I do not (and never once did) belong.

O child of God, if the Beloved does it all

and does it with love, where is the gamble?