the meaning of leaving patience has become clear to you.
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Six: On Knowing the Station of Watchfulness
Be watchful over Him in every affair,
for He, glory be to Him, is watchful over you,
in presence and absence, for affairs.
Thus I have a share in every state.
When the time of being free comes,
I do not care: this is wondrous.
Watchfulness is a divine description in which we have a draught. He, exalted is He, said, “God is watchful over everything” [al-Ahzab 33:52]. It is His saying, “Preserving them does not weary Him” [al-Baqara 2:255], meaning the heavens, the higher world, and the earth, the lower world. There is only higher and lower. It has two divisions: a world subsisting in itself and a world not subsisting in itself.
What subsists in itself consists of substances and bodies. What does not subsist in itself consists of modes of being and colors, namely attributes and accidents. The worlds of bodies and substances persist only through accidents being brought into existence within them. If the accident is not brought into being within them—one through which they have continuance
Notes
Translator’s note TN4146-1: “Being free” renders farāgh in the poem. No further object of that freedom or cessation is supplied. The following prose describes perpetual divine creation and preservation. “Subsisting in itself” distinguishes substances and bodies from attributes and accidents while retaining the stated dependence upon God.