The Lover was working in the Garden which the Beloved had given to him. All around him the Garden shone with a glorious radiance of color, and sweet scents rose like incense. For the Lover had planted in the Garden beautiful flowers of every kind and fragrant herbs and all such plants as are fair to look upon or are beneficial to men. All this he planted for the pleasure of the Beloved, and he tended it for the love he bore the Beloved, and as he worked he sang the words of Solomon which he sang in his garden.
“Awake, O North wind, and come, thou South
Blow upon my garden that spices may flow out
Let my Beloved come into his garden
and eat of his precious fruits.”
While he thus sang and worked, there came into the Garden a young man dressed in rich clothes who wore at his side a gilded rapier, set with jewels, yet upon the handsome face of the man was an expression of sorrow and great yearning. He approached the Lover, who was clothed only in his coarse gardener’s robe, and bowing humbly before him said to him:
“Sir, I have heard that you are a master craftsman in the art of Love and I desire beyond all things to become proficient in this art. I wondered if perhaps of your charity, you would take as an apprentice one as ignorant and unskilled as myself. Whatever apprentice fee is due to you for this I will gladly pay it, for I am rich as men count wealth.”
The Lover ceased from the digging in which he was engaged and looked at the man long and searchingly, then since he was pleased with what he saw he answered, “Stranger, for myself I should desire nothing if you should become apprentice under me, for it is reward enough for me and more than enough that I should be able to perform any task which is pleasing to the Beloved or would make others love Him more. But to the Beloved you would have to pay a fee so high that almost all who seek this service are offended at it.”
“Then,” answered the stranger, “tell me, I beg you, what this great fee is, for so greatly do I desire to learn to love, that however high it is I will gladly pay it.”
“The fee,” replied thee Lover, “is no less than this, that you give everything that you have and everything that you are so that you have nothing left that is your own, but only hold all things for the sake of the Beloved, for if you hold back anything at all you can never truly know the love of the Beloved. Not that He will love you any the less, for He already loves you to the full, but because your perception will be so clouded by that which you possess that in your blindness you will never see the love of the Beloved.”
“If,” asked the stranger, “I pay this great price, tell me, I pray you, what I shall gain?”
Then answered the Lover, “When you have learned with much labor all the mysteries of the art of Love, then when you have suffered much, you will gain at last the knowledge of the love of the Beloved.”
Thereupon the stranger, for his soul greatly longed for the love of the Beloved, gladly paid the whole fee and stripped off the rich robes he was wearing which men call Knowledge and Pride and assumed the coarse gardener’s habit, Humility, such as the Lover himself wore, and he threw away the jeweled rapier which he was carrying which men call Learning, and took in its place a gardener’s spade the name of which is Seeking.
As he did this it seemed that the day which had been gray and cloudy became suddenly glorious and bright as though the sun had suddenly broken through the clouds.
So the Lover received the stranger and he became his disciple and he and the Lover worked to make the Garden beautiful for the sake of the Beloved.
