The Rose Nectar

When Purity Bleeds Into Passion

On the Second Sacred Drink in the Journey of Divine Thirst

The Wound That Opens Everything

I thought I knew what transformation meant.

After years of purification rituals, of countless meditation retreats, fasting, prayer, the relentless scrubbing of my spiritual vessel I was raw and preening at my “purity”. I stood in my achieved whiteness like a trophy on a shelf.

Pristine. Untouchable. But Unequivocally…Dead.

Then came the piercing.

In the last article, I spoke about the White Nectar: “The white roses—the Nile permeates them, and their longing has grown intense, leading to spiritual bloodshed.” But I didn’t understand. How could I? I thought bleeding was what we were trying to avoid. I thought the goal was to remain unstained, untouched, pure.

I was wrong. So beautifully, devastatingly wrong.

The Rose Nectar doesn’t come to those who remain safely white. It can only be drunk by those who allow themselves to be pierced and unmade by divine longing. Those who let their achieved purity be stained crimson with the blood that flows from the pain of transformation. What I perceived to be a failure of my own will, the forced idea that I had to maintain this purity, was really and truly the beginning of everything real.

The Heart that Learns to Bleed

Spiritual achievement becomes obstacle, plain and simple. The very purity we’ve worked so hard to attain becomes the wall between us and what we truly seek. The heart knows this. It speaks of “crimson shame” that must be publicly revealed, of spiritual gifts that lead to both rising and falling.

I remember my own crimson moment.

Not as a specific moment in a distant history but as living wound, one that I still grapple with to this day. I had spent a decade building my spiritual résumé—the right practices, the right teachers, the right experiences. My heart was polished mirror-bright and alluring. People came to me for guidance, saw my discipline, my clarity, my sense of calmness, nay, my perceived calmness which simply hid the turmoil roiling just below the pristine surface.

Then love arrived.

Not the safe, sanitized love of universal compassion, but the devastating, particular, world-shattering love that breaks every container it enters. Suddenly, my white roses were bleeding everywhere. It reminds me of the scene in Alice in Wonderland, where they are painting the white roses red.

The image haunts me still—the playing cards frantically painting white roses red in Carroll’s wonderland, terrified of the Queen’s wrath, yet somehow enacting a profound spiritual metaphor. Sometimes the most unlikely teachers arrive dressed as children’s tales or Zen koans whispered through garden scenes. The cards thought they were covering a mistake, but weren’t they really revealing the truth?

That transformation isn’t about maintaining pristine surfaces but about allowing life to stain us with its terrible beauty. And doing so with grace.

The Quran speaks of hearts finding peace in remembrance (Ar-Ra’d 13:28),

ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ وَتَطْمَئِنُّ قُلُوبُهُم بِذِكْرِ ٱللَّهِ ۗ أَلَا بِذِكْرِ ٱللَّهِ تَطْمَئِنُّ ٱلْقُلُوبُ ٢٨

those who believe and whose hearts find comfort in the remembrance of Allah. Surely in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find comfort.

When the Quran promises that hearts find peace in remembrance—ala bidhikri Allahi tatma’innu al-qulub—perhaps it means this: real peace comes not from keeping our roses white but from surrendering to the divine paintbrush that colors them crimson.

The Zen masters knew this when they said that every art form is a dharma gate, even a Victorian fairy tale can crack open the heart’s deepest teaching. Those frantic cards weren’t just painting roses; they were showing us how we all eventually must choose: remain safely white and risk the greater wrath of an unlived life, or allow ourselves to be stained by experience, painted by passion, bloodied into a beauty we never planned.

But what about when remembrance itself becomes the sword? When every invocation cuts deeper, when each prostration breaks you more open, forcing you to face the truth that your roses you worked so hard to keep white are stained red again?

This is the secret teaching of Surah Al-Imran (3:154):

“Then after distress, He sent down upon you security—slumber overtaking a party of you, while another party worried about themselves.”

Some sleep in their purity. Others bleed into awakening.

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The Trial of Sacred Vulnerability

Do people think once they say, “We believe,” that they will be left without being put to the test? We certainly tested those before them. And ˹in this way˺ Allah will clearly distinguish between those who are truthful and those who are liars.

Al-Ankabut 29:2-3

The Rose Nectar is fundamentally about fitnah—trial, test, tribulation. But not the external trials we expect. This is the trial of allowing our achievements to be undone, our purity to be penetrated, our hearts to be broken open by divine passion.

In the mystical psychology of Ibn Arabi, the rose nectar represents the time when the polished mirror of the heart must be shattered to become the wine glass. The mirror can only reflect; the glass can contain. But first, it must be melted down, reformed, and made vulnerable to holding what it once only showed. The following flourish came to me while reading Arabi’s The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq.

For indeed, tears flowing from green grapes that have been picked—from these tears, a thousand souls are purified through the agency of one sincere soul.

What the heart describes are tears flowing from “green grapes”—unripe fruit forced to weep its transformation. This is us. We think we’re ready because we’re clean, but cleanliness isn’t ripeness. We must be crushed to release our essence.

Al-Hallaj knew this when he cried, “Kill me, my faithful friends, for in my being killed is my life!” He wasn’t seeking death but transformation—the kind that only comes through allowing our careful constructions to be demolished by divine love.

Arabi echoes what I am speaking of here, the messy truth of white roses that have started to bleed with passion.

My heart has become capable of every form: a pasture for gazelles, a convent for Christians, a temple for idols, the Ka’ba for pilgrims, the Torah and the Quran.

The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, by Ibn al-Arabi, tr. Reynold A. Nicholson, [1911]

On Passionate Surrender

Here’s what they don’t tell you about the “spiritual” path: after you’ve achieved purity, you must lose it. I speak not of losing it to “impurity”, but to something beyond the pure/impure duality. The Rose Nectar teaches us to transcend our own transcendence.

The practice changes here. No longer do we visualize white light cleaning us, that work is complete. We now purify through living. Now we invite the crimson tide, the blood of divine passion, to stain every carefully maintained boundary. We practice what we can call “spiritual bloodshed,” or the willing sacrifice of our spiritual ego on the altar of union.

I learned to pray differently: “Ya Allah, pierce my purity. Stain my achievements. Let my white roses bleed until they bloom as something unrecognizable, unnamed, unclaimed.”

I consider this living implementation of the divine name Al-Qahhar (The Subduer); not subduing our lower nature, but allowing our higher nature to be subdued by the Highest. Each invocation becomes an invitation to be overwhelmed, overtaken, dissolved.

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The Sacred Wounds of Love

Rumi wrote, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” But perhaps, if I may, he could have added: “the wound is also where your light escapes, mingles with the divine light, and returns as something neither human nor divine but gloriously both.

The Rose Nectar tastes of copper and honey, salt and wine.

It’s the taste of tears mixed with laughter, of pain indistinguishable from pleasure, of dying while living. The Sufis call this baqā’ ba’d al-fanā’, subsistence after annihilation, but even this makes it sound too neat, too sequential.

The truth is messier: you bleed and bloom simultaneously.

You die in one breath and resurrect in the next. The white rose doesn’t become red; it discovers it was always both, always bleeding light, always wounded into wholeness.

Why do we bleed? Because as we purify the ego, it punches back. Not some sense of external revenge but the ego’s attempt to revenge itself on the process—to reassert control, to re-establish purity, to stop the bleeding.

But the bleeding is the blessing. The wound is the doorway.

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The Practice of Sacred Bleeding

The Rose Nectar requires different practices, “dangerous” practices that our white-rose selves would have rejected:

The Practice of Divine Wounding: Sit with your hand on your heart, but instead of sending light, feel for the wound that’s already there. The place where divine love has already pierced you. Don’t try to heal it—let it throb, let it bleed, let it teach you its crimson wisdom. With each inhalation, breathe in divine passion—hot, red, overwhelming. With each exhalation, release your need for purity, control, and spiritual achievement. Breathe until you can’t distinguish between the burning in your chest and the fire of divine presence.

The Sacred Shame Practice: The manuscript speaks of “crimson shame” that must be revealed. Write down your spiritual pride, your secret sense of achievement, your subtle superiority. Then burn the paper and mix the ashes with rosewater. Anoint your forehead with this mixture while saying, “My purity is my shame, my achievement is my obstacle. Pierce me until I flow.”

The Prayer of Passionate Dissolution: “Ya Wadud (O Loving One), Ya Mudhil (O Abaser), Ya Mu’izz (O Honorer)—love me until I dissolve, abase my ‘achievements’ until they disappear, honor me only through my wounds, my bleeding, my beautiful destruction.”

The Rose Garden of Broken Hearts

I walk now in a different garden.

Not the pristine white garden of my earlier practice, but a wild rose garden where every bloom shows its thorns, where beauty and pain grow intertwined, where the ground is stained with the blood of a thousand transformations.

This is the community of the wounded, those who’ve allowed their purity to be pierced, their achievements to be shattered, their hearts to be broken open by divine love. We recognize each other not by our light but by our beautiful scars, our willingness to bleed, our refusal to return to the safety of mere whiteness.

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, “Allah has written for the son of Adam his share of zina (passion/desire).” But what if this isn’t a curse but a curriculum?

What if our Eros, our passion, rightly directed, becomes the very vehicle of our transformation?

The Transition to Honey

As I write this, I can taste the next transition approaching. The Rose Nectar eventually sweetens, the blood becomes honey, the wound becomes a doorway to an even deeper mystery. But we cannot skip stages. We cannot go from white to golden without passing through red.

When a gift or high resolve appears, there is both rising and falling. This is the way of the Rose; constantly dying and being reborn, bleeding and blooming, ascending and descending in the spiral dance of transformation.

A Crimson Rubaiyat for the Bleeding Ones

The white rose stood perfect in the morning light,
Until the Beloved’s sword made its first strike
Now crimson flows where purity once reigned,
And every drop reveals what God most likes.

I built a fortress from my prayers and fasts,
Each wall a virtue, every stone surpassed
Then love arrived and burned it to the ground,
And in those ashes, truth appeared at last.

They said, “Don’t stain your white with passion’s red,”
They warned of falling from the path I’d led
But how can roses bloom without their blood?
How can hearts live if they have never bled?

So drink the Rose Nectar, drink it deep,
Let passion wake what purity would keep asleep
For in this sacred bleeding lies the way,
From shallow peace to mystery’s darkest deep.

The Invitation to Bleed

Come, you who have achieved your whiteness. You who sit in your purity, wondering why you still feel empty. You who have cleaned and cleaned until there’s nothing left to clean.

Come and learn to bleed.

Not the bleeding of injury but of birth. Not the bleeding of weakness but of overwhelming strength that breaks its own containers. Not the bleeding of failure but of success too profound for staying white.

The Rose Nectar awaits, that sacred delectable drink that tastes of passion and pain, of love that destroys to create, of the terrible beautiful necessity of allowing our achievements to be undone by something greater than achievement.

For in the end, we discover what the manuscript knew: the white roses were never meant to stay white. They were always waiting for the crimson river, always preparing for the beautiful bloodshed that transforms purity into passion, passion into sweetness, sweetness into the wine of complete dissolution.

But that’s the next nectar’s story.

For now, bleed beautifully. Bleed willingly. Bleed until your white roses bloom red with the magnificence of divine devastation.

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Next: The Honey Nectar—When Wounds Become Sweet