⭐ Inayatiyya Fall Appeal 2024 – The Nightingale 🌹🎶

We have raised $140,164.54 (87.6%) so far toward our fall appeal! We’re so close to finishing the year strong! Thank you to everyone who has generously given this year. If you are still planning to make a donation, we hope to raise another $19,835.46 by the end of 2024. You can easily donate through our website. No contribution is too small.

With much gratitude!

In the garden where so many roses abound,
to pick even one is to learn where the thorn grows. – Hafez

28 December 2024

As we arrive in the center of the forest, we chance upon a garden encircled by the crowns of towering trees. Like an inattentive gardener pricked by a rose, we are taken by surprise and instantly struck speechless. A garden in the forest? On the branch which is spiked with thorns but blooming with fragrant blossoms, the Nightingale sings its song of pain, remembrance, and glorification. It is intimacy beyond words.

Here, standing before unmoving waves of perfume and petals, we discover the place where opposites meet and irreconcilables reconcile. The Nightingale is simultaneously veiled by its drab plumage and unveiled by its entrancingly sweet and tearful song. In Greek and Latin traditions, the Nightingale’s song has been the quintessential symbol of poetry, so much so that Virgil compares the mourning of Orpheus to the “lament of the nightingale.” As Pir Zia notes, “Its song is pain and joy at the same time […] bewildered, dazzled, yet sober with the sobriety that comes after inebriation, the sobriety of ocean upon ocean of wine.” It is inebriated with the wine of direct experience and spiritual perception.

As Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry:

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

This may be so. Yet there is something about this figure of an unseen musician, shrouded in darkness and mystery. From where does the Nightingale-poet’s song come, and why does it pierce us so? Let us leave these as living questions for each of us to reflect on.

We should return to the garden now. Why would we be surprised to find a garden at the end of our journey? In some sense, each of us already has a garden within us; with practice, you might occasionally catch its fragrance. Just as the Nightingale’s song is behind every lucid verse, there is a garden behind everything that exists under the sun.

A garden is at the same time artificial and natural, artfully planned and wondrously unstudied; it is a theater of life and death, a place of sensuous beauty and encounter, as well as a place to withdraw in reverie or contemplation. In short, it’s a place where opposites meet, where innocence and experience are married.

Similarly, as the organizational vehicle of the Inayatiyya and the form through which the teachings are concretely expressed and transmitted today, the various identities, attitudes, beliefs, and life experiences of our individual lives meet in one community. Our sacred task as an organization is to “raise us above the distinctions and differences which divide us,” (emphasis ours) helping us to hear the Nightingale’s song veiled within ourselves and each other.

As a living lineage of spiritual teachings and an organizational form, the metaphor of a Nightingale in a garden feels especially appropriate.

Together, we are the garden, we are the nightingale. This realization is both the culmination of the Forest of Memory practice and the ultimate purpose of the Inayatiyya. While we’ve reached the end of our practice, we will send one more email on our theme to weave it all together and close out our Fall Appeal.

In the meantime, there is still time to make a contribution to our Fall Appeal. Your financial support is greatly appreciated, and is essential to the maintenance and cultivation of our garden. Help us care for the roses that so many Nightingales call home!

With love,
Josh & Tajalli for the Inayatiyya Fall Appeal 2024 Campaign Committee
Noor Amina Peterson, Board Chair, Ambreen Coombs, Treasurer, Nilufar Hasnaa, Board Member, Jennifer Alia Wittman, Executive Director, Tajalli Roselli, Astana Staff, & Josh Octaviani, Astana Staff

PS—Interested in exploring the symbolism of the nightingale within the Forest of Memory practice further? As our gift to you, here is the link to Bawa’s teaching:

The Nightingale Meditation Recording

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The Inayatiyya is a non-profit 501c3 organization, Tax ID #23-7159641. Your donation may be fully deductible for tax purposes per United States IRS guidelines. Please note that donations made by check must be received by Friday, December 27th to be considered as within 2024. If you would like to make a donation by mail, please send it to Inayatiyya, 112 E Cary Street, Richmond, VA 23219. Thank you!