One of the things I soooo love about Hafiz and Rumi is: you can clink wine cups, or maybe even whisky glasses, with (I think) Jesus and Buddha after hours in a bar. And that could be and should be life changing. Or it could be like sitting in some advanced meditation class, soooo advanced, a Zen master is sitting midair on a butterfly wing and scooting around the room high-fiving everyone or giving you a kick on your third eye with their cowboy boots. That could wake you up, so UP you never know sadness again, or speak an unkind word.

Thus in wanting to help you with any awakenings and, cultivation of mind and heart and becoming free of this whole crazy world as this poem mentions ... my agent and I are wanting to offer a prize of 100 dollars to the first person who can print this poem out, put it in a little frame, and hang it on their wall (and promise to keep it there at least a month), and take a selfie of you and it. Then send it to my agent at permissions@danielladinsky.com. All mail there goes to Melissa, my agent. And the first person who does that, I will send them a 100 bucks in cash, plus a signed copy of The Gift (my most popular Hafiz book), where you can find this poem on page 110. 

Being one of Santa's little helpers, I am glad to do that with his favorite day coming up. 

OOOO, sorry— but you have to be in the USA, as I am just too off the grid these days to manage any international mailings. And the only assistants I have in the states are my seven wild cats, and I am sure they wish they could help more, but afraid they really can’t. But that 100 you could, as said, count on. Melissa has been living in Bali and fell in love with a big handsome sea turtle one day while snorkeling, and may never come back; but still kindly manages this blog, and edits and posts all here for me. 

Yeah, a selfie: because I think that is part of the whole idea of the best of the Hafiz and Rumi poems—or any good poems & art— they are really a selfie. Once a Zen master midair on a butterfly wing has high-fived you (or the moon) enough, everything starts to appear as a selfie— as it really is! And you become super duper free like Hafiz, as the poem sings. 

And if the poem won't print out from this link, you could take a picture of it in the book, print it, and frame that. 

And here is a kiss from a line in the last poem in: The Subject Tonight Is Love. And when is loooove not our main gig? And it is so especially suited for the holidays. Sooooo:

Have fun, my dear; my dears have fun ...

—Hafiz

And here is another link with two short poems on it. Doing a selfie with that page (as mentioned above) would also work to score someone that 100. If you can frame that whole page (thus both poems), will send you two books! Why not? But ya have to be first. 

And this Hafiz poem (slightly rendered by me) has a very interesting scholarly history to it, and is connected to a very old Sufi Order; and is used as the epigraph poem— as it were— in The Subject Tonight Is Love, published in 1996. And I will go as far as to say: this Hafiz poem is in a real way— a true cornerstone of all of my Hafiz work. That one poem is really connected to all of my renderings of him, in unique, very creatively unique, maybe even in genius ways. I’ll bet Carl Jung & Buddha would agree!

One last thing: I thought I was finished with this blog, but just woke from a nap, and this Hafiz line from a long-ago rendering I wrote in the mid ‘90s, and never published (I still have some 4,000 unpublished Hafiz poems), became very much in mind for the first time in years. Guess Hafiz wanted the last word here. That line goes: 

All now in the choir of God.