In the quiet ebbs and flows of time, in the movements of our lives that range from steady to tumultuous, we wade our way through feelings of separation, longing, and union. We feel at times that we are far from IkOankar (the One), and at times that there is a thin and almost paper-like veil between us. We navigate this play, often enduring great pain and suffering in the ebbing, in the separation.

What if we understood that deep pain of separation as a reminder of our devotion? As proof of life?

We are drawn once again into the voice of Sheikh Farid, the 12th-century Sufi mystic whose words carry the ache of longing and the sweetness of surrender. His verses, preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib, are piercing, reflective, and urgent. Through them, we remember what is essential: to love fully, to live honestly, to stay close to the One.

Sheikh Farid reflects: Separation, separation is called bad, O separation! You are the sultan! This separation rules us. It permeates every aspect of our lives. It is caused by our own forgetting—a symptom of our entanglement in greed, lust, anger, attachment, and ego. Ruled by this separation, we feel powerless, and we suffer.

But Sheikh Farid continues with stark imagery: the body in which separation does not arise, consider that body a cremation ground.

When we do not feel this feeling, when we are not made tender by the pain of our forgetting, we are numb and desensitized, lifeless and desolate. When separation is alive or awakened within us, it is because there is deep love present within us.

When we are so in love, so devoted, so aware of our Beloved that we cannot bear to be apart, that is the separation Sheikh Farid reflects on. Without that awareness, without those pangs, so many of us come and go without a sense of how separated we truly are.

This feeling is painful. It can rule us. But it is also a sign of our awareness, of our very existence. Is the pang itself not a form of remembrance? Is the pain itself not a reminder of the Presence of the One, even if we cannot feel it in a moment?

In this separation, we endure pain.
We are drenched in love.
We are steeped in devotion.
We anticipate the sweetness of union.

May we feel this separation deeply.
May it move us.
May we find joy and comfort in the pangs.
May we be so in love that we cannot bear a moment of absence.

May the Wisdom-Guru guide us!