Fresh Rain
A Quarterly e-Journal of the Open Path / Sufi Way
To view the archive of all past issues of Fresh Rain, click here.
Autumn 2026
Dear friends,
Welcome to this Autumn Fresh Rain. The equinox is a hinge: light and dark for a moment in equal measure, then the year tips toward the long night. The pieces that arrived kept circling birth — not only the first cry, but the quieter ones: a heart made new, a quality loved in another taking root, a slowing down until the one who entered the day is not quite the one who began it. Love, in these pages, is not an ornament. It is what remakes the lover.
You will find Gurprit Bhambra’s A heart made new; Umtul Valeton-Kiekens’ Rebirth and Delayed Birth, and her painting Everything is connected in light; Pir Elias Amidon’s Four Flashes; Jeanne Rana’s Lament of the Newborn; Angus Landman’s Everywhere that shimmers She Is; Felice Rhiannon’s aliveness and dawn mother; David Chapman’s watercolour; and Warda’s I Am.
A lamp, a bowl
We do not know yet whether there will be a winter Fresh Rain. The circle has grown smaller this year. That is the truth of it.
Still, we set two things on the table. A bowl, empty on purpose — not as a lack, but as a place. And a lamp, the old kind, a flame no larger than a thumbnail. The lamp is so the dark is not entire. The bowl is so there is somewhere for what comes. If a poem, a fragment, a letter, or an image wishes to sit there, send it. If this is a season of silence, the empty bowl is also an answer. We light the wick anyway.
Thank you to everyone who sent work, and to you, reader. May something here touch the place in you that is still being born.
With love,
Warda
Editor, Fresh Rain
In This Issue
A heart made new
Gurprit Bhambra
Delayed Birth
Umtul Valeton-Kiekens
Four Flashes
Pir Elias
I Am
Warda
Everywhere that shimmers She Is
Angus Landman
aliveness
Felice Rhiannon
Lament of the Newborn
Jeanne Rana
Rebirth
Umtul Valeton-Kiekens
Everything is connected in light
Umtul Valeton-Kiekens
dawn mother
Felice Rhiannon
Watercolour
David Chapman
A heart made new
By Gurprit Bhambra
“Ranjha ranjha kardi hun main aape Ranjha hoyi,
Saddo mainu “Dhedo Ranjha”, Heer na aakho koi.”
Ranjha, Ranjha, I keep repeating, until I myself have become Ranjha.
Call me Dhedo Ranjha now; let no one call me Heer.
“Ranjha main vich, main Ranjhe vich, hor khayal na koi,
Main naheen oh aap hai, apni aap kare diljoi.”
Ranjha is within me, and I am within Ranjha; no other thought remains.
I am no more; he himself is, finding his delight within himself.
“Jo koi saade andar vasse, zaat assadi soi,
Jis de naal main neonh lagaya, oho jehi hi hoyi.”
The one who dwells within us becomes our very being.
I have become like the one with whom I joined my heart in love.
— Bulleh Shah, Ranjha Ranjha Kardi
Freely translated from the Punjabi Sufi Kafi
In this poem, Sufi poet Bulleh Shah speaks through Heer, whose love for Ranjha lies at the heart of one of Punjab’s great tragic romances. Through the constant remembrance of his name, the boundary between lover and beloved dissolves, until she can finally say, main nahin, oh ap hai — “I am no more; he himself is.”
On the surface, the poem reads as a declaration of Heer’s overwhelming love for Ranjha, but the batin reveals something far more profound: love transforms the lover.
It is a beautiful poetic expression of Wahdat al-Wujud.
There is an echo of this truth in a famous hadith. When a man asked the Prophet about the Day of Judgment, the Prophet asked what he had prepared for it. The man replied that he had little beyond his love for Allah and His Messenger. The Prophet told him, “You will be with those whom you love.” Traditionally, these words are understood as a promise that sincere love draws us into the company of those we love in the Hereafter.
Yet the words also carry an intimacy that can be felt in this life.
The people we love and adore shape us through the qualities we recognise in them. We may be inspired by a friend’s courage and find ourselves taking action, be moved by the kindness of a relative and meet others more compassionately, or learn generosity from a partner who gives freely.
In this way, their love lives within us, becoming part of who we are.
But the attributes we cherish in people are much more than personality traits. In Sikh teachings, they are described as rabbi gunn — Divine virtues of the Creator. Maybe they touch us so deeply because, in praising and loving what is beautiful in another, we are already turning towards the Beloved.
For Ibn Arabi, every human heart is a mirror for the 99 Names of Allah, capable of catching and reflecting something of the Divine. We often recognise rabbi gunn in the spiritual teachers we love and respect: mercy in the Prophet
Muhammad, unconditional love in Jesus,
compassion in the Buddha, joyful devotion in Krishna, and in Guru Nanak, Oneness.
Rumi offers a profound perspective on the power of praise in the Masnavi. Writing of Husamuddin, his beloved disciple, he describes praise as the drawing back of a curtain, revealing a light that was already there. As that curtain parts, the qualities we recognise in another start to awaken within us too.
This gives another layer of depth to remembrance practices such as salawat, where the heart returns again and again to the Prophet in love and devotion. Little by little, the mirror of the heart is polished, until the qualities we cherish in him start to shine through us.
And this brings us back to Bulleh Shah’s poem and the transformational power of love. Heer is the aashiq, the lover, and Ranjha the mashuq, the beloved. What starts as longing and remembrance deepens into fana, where the sense of separateness dissolves and the human beloved becomes a doorway to the One who was being sought all along.
Guru Nanak expresses this inner transformation through rang rata — being dyed, imbued in the colour of Divine love. What we first recognise and love in another takes root in us, until the One we saw in them starts to colour the one who is looking.
There is something almost ethereal in that image.
It’s as if the polished heart becomes like stained glass; the light of the Divine pouring through it in vivid colour, until the whole world seems touched by that radiance and we are no longer simply looking at life, but seeing and experiencing it through the gaze of the Beloved.
As these Divine qualities enter the way we live, choose, speak and move through the world, each moment becomes a rebirth — the same life, now seen and lived through a heart made new.
And perhaps this is where Bulleh Shah has been leading us from the beginning. The lover turns inward and finds:
main nahin, oh ap hai
“I am no more; he himself is.”
Delayed Birth
By Umtul Valeton-Kiekens
It was a sweltering August on the island, the kind of heat that clings to your skin and refuses to let go. An intense dream jolted her awake, and she sat up abruptly, her heart pounding. She found herself perched on the edge of a small bed, where a delightful little girl sat, perhaps one and a half year young, with golden curls that seemed to dance in the air and eyes of hazel that sparkled like the sea under the sun. Their gazes locked, a silent understanding passing between them.
She herself was engrossed in playing with piles of coins on the bed’s edge, the toddler watching with wide-eyed fascination. A few days later, the ominous sign came—a loss of blood, a harbinger of what was to come. Hours later, the contractions began, and after a long, agonizing afternoon in that oppressive August heat, she lost the fruit of their love.
“What about that dream?” she pondered, her mind haunted by the image of the little girl, so vibrant and real. The loss left her in a state of profound misery, and with her daughter suffering from an eye ailment, she resolved to journey north to consult an eye specialist. The island’s doctor had tried drops, but to no avail.
A sense of finality gripped her; there would be no return to the island. She packed her small, aging car with whatever it could hold. Early one morning, she, her two children, and the cat embarked on the long road north. On the highest mountain in the heart of France, the car faltered and had to be taken to a local garage. The following day, they resumed their journey. By now, her daughter’s pain was severe, her eyes unable to bear the light. She lay on the back seat; her eyes shrouded in a cloth. With 950 kilometres to their destination, she drove on, undeterred, her son proving an invaluable guide in the days before digital navigation.
Her daughter was admitted to a hospital, where the doctors declared it was a close call; she might have lost her eye. She continued her journey with her son to her sister’s home in Amsterdam, where they were welcomed with open arms.
After a lengthy correspondence with her beloved, still on the island, it was decided he would join them in Amsterdam. She rented a couple of rooms on one of the city’s picturesque canals. The transition from the island’s tranquillity to the bustling heart of the city was stark, yet they found joy in the beauty of Amsterdam, which, in those days, was not yet overrun by tourists. Only backpackers could be seen resting at Dam Square or in the Vondelpark.
In time, she noticed changes in her body and suspected another pregnancy. They moved to a larger apartment, where she gave birth to her second daughter. This time, the baby was unplanned, arriving despite the contraceptive pill. When the child was about one and and a half year young, she looked uncannily like the girl from the dream.
Four Flashes
By Pir Elias
The children:
Before I die I’d like to tell my children there’s no need to worry or be sad and they’d believe me except of course for the sadness we can’t bear anyway the sadness of appearing and disappearing like this so dear with none of us able to adequately honor the precious moment of love we love.
The river:
If all the desire of the world could join in one great river, the desire of the seed to rise toward the light, the desire of the fish to circle its pool, the desire of the lion to stretch and yawn, the desire of lovers in their embrace, if all this desire could join in one great river and that river was given a tongue, what would it say? Nearer, nearer, Beloved, nearer.
The story:
We don’t have much time left to finish all our transactions. When these bodies lie down will we care about yesterday’s plans? Come, tell me a story instead, the one about the lover and his mystic beloved, how every time he embraced her she disappeared. How does it end?
The sparkle:
The unspeakable joy of creation without end, the spontaneous exuberance of atoms humming everywhere, it is in this and as this that we appear in human form and then vanish — momentary sparkles of infinite love.
I Am
By Warda
Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginningless, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change… It is the common matrix of every experience.
— from The Open Path: Recognizing Nondual Awareness by Pir Elias Amidon
I am. So easily said.
As I have always been and will always be, how can I really talk on this subject of birth?
I am stardust, continuously replenished. I am an intertwining strand of DNA, self-forming through the eons. I am the stories I heard. I am the stories I tell.
So what is this birth thing then, anyway?
Like the starting point of a new day after sleep. A change of thought bringing a new perspective. Just an adjustment into the next comfortable position — until this, too, begins to feel like a change again.
It is a lot to remember. Especially at high velocity. Knocking through life, paying no heed to what I knock into, the focus always ahead, or else a running from the past.
Standing still shows soon enough the spinning world I have been sidestepping. All there is to do then is slow down and remember.
Remember what shows up in this moment I am made to believe.
I don’t know sounds in my head, and an occasional why. It is like the echo of moving. By slowing down I kind of get used to it. I begin to appreciate this noisy world of mine.
As I slow down I recognise the gift I gave to myself — to this universe — in the past, receiving now.
As I slow down, the need to fix, to change, just dissipates. And I slow down more, without even the need to stand still.
Everywhere that shimmers She Is
Slow time down
let go of the outrage
everywhere that shimmers She Is.
You’ve got so used to seeing what’s real
you’ve forgotten the question
you came here with,
or you’ve settled
for an answer
with a pseudo promise
that seems reasonable,
for a while.
But the love light teases
and unsettles,
answers are not available here
this side.
Everywhere that shimmers She Is
A contemplation in the unknowing dust.
When you dissolve yourself
you’re left as a handful of crystals,
maybe even diamonds,
that do nothing in the darkness
but abide,
not waiting even but knowing
somewhere deep,
the moment will come to them.
Everywhere that shimmers She Is
— Angus Landman
aliveness
calling to that
which cannot be named
it is called Al-Hayy
living itself
life’s force of being
feel your pulse
heart beating
in essential rhythms
that is Al-Hayy
laugh your gladness
that is Al-Hayy too
and for good measure
so are your terrors
and keening
your doubtfulness
and yearning
each a diamond
in the web of life
where strands
intersect and join
each without equal
in the matrix of Al-Hayy
in the womb of One
— felice rhiannon
This Trembling Drop
It begins in the dark
before words form,
This searching—
Waking to not-knowing is
the hardest part
At first,
Immersed in the undifferentiated
Betweenness that touches all
but names nothing—
Then the vastness
of Something Else
opens Openness itself—
And You are there, timeless,
Pulsing and alive but
still as deepest silence
I know You only by your traces,
Your embrace a wingbeat flitting just
At the edge of my heart’s eye
And your hidden Waters
I imbibe through unseen roots
Bind me with Everything
Beyond the pathless gate
nothing of me remains
but the starlight of Your Aloneness
What is this—
To be here with You,
But also the aching beauty,
This trembling drop
of a vanishing world?
— Ihsan Chris Covey
DIVINE COLOUR
The Knowing that came,
that was always present,
is like a blue
that cannot fit into words.
It speaks as silence
without edge or shape,
releasing the wound of longing
from my opened heart.
My Beloved is here,
and the light of its presence
shines through the seam of my skin.
— Heath Thompson
KNOWING YOU
Knowing You
is the irrelevance of distances.
Love is not here or there,
it is the stillness a forest is filled with,
the browning of November in a turning leaf,
or the depth of wind released
from the burden of shape.
Knowing You
is the long eyes of a child leaving home.
It is the shafts of light extending
through the blue voice of sky,
endless yet faint, like the river’s memory of stone
as it reaches the sea.
Knowing You
is to recall a forgetting.
It is to sit here in wonder,
until there is nothing left of me
but silence.
— Heath Thompson
PRESENCE
I was lost but did not know it.
I was a stone that thirsts after the passing weather,
or a crossing wind that does not feel the cold of the open moors.
Yet, You were always here,
always seeing.
And although I missed You,
Your Presence pulled at me
like how the weight of the moon
slowly draws back the darkness of its waves,
until Love was revealed.
I glanced at its light,
as half of my face turned to silver.
– Heath Thompson
Excavation
This that we speak of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.
— Al Bastami, born 804 CE
This phrase haunted,
lived inside my chest
For two years
I snugged it close,
reckoned
with the felt meaning
sensing it held truth,
but couldn’t say why
A patient excavation,
I breathed it, pondered,
but not with thought
Lobbed it
into the big field
Light splintered
the kernel inside
The tight bud flowered
releasing perfume
an aching aroma of love
— Amrita Skye Blaine
Fissures
Look for it—
a fracture where
the light of love pours in
Light that warms
the bones
the heart, clarifies
the mind
Love that is needed
like lentil soup
needs seeded bread
on a savage day
— Amrita Skye Blaine
that one
who tells the truth
without wavering
spacious love
flooding the room
finds us in the forest
of misunderstanding
dresses in the question
takes our hand
as we walk
out of the woods
together
— Amrita Skye Blaine
my people
no ownership involved
only recognition
feel their hearts
malleable, open—
embodied vessels
of light-bright love
seeing through chaos
to something reliable
something still
— Amrita Skye Blaine
Share YOUR Creativity!
If these poems and images have stirred something in you, why not share your own voice? Join our creators’ mailing list to receive gentle reminders about submission deadlines, early thoughts on upcoming themes, and occasional sparks of inspiration. Write to us at warda@sufiway.org with
“Creators List” in the subject line.
We can’t wait to see what you create!
