Wait.

A TRACE

You that give new life to this planet,

you that transcend logic, come.

I am only an arrow.

Fill your bow with me and let fly.

Because of this love for you

my bowl has fallen from the roof.

Put down the ladder and collect the pieces, please.

People ask, but which roof is your roof?

I answer, Wherever the soul came from,

and wherever it goes at night, my roof is in that direction.

From wherever spring arrives to heal the ground,

from wherever searching rises in a human being.

The looking itself is a trace of what we are looking for,

but we have been more like the man who sat on his donkey

and asked the donkey where to go.

Be quiet now and wait.

It may be that the ocean one,

that we desire so to move into and become,

desires us out here on land a little longer

going our sundry roads to the shore.

Rumi

Rest in Peace, Coleman Barks

I just discovered that poet and Rumi scholar Coleman Barks passed in February.

The student reads The Master ...

Your hymnal.

Imagine.

Chenoweth, Untitled, 1972

Imagine the time the particle you are

returns where it came from!

The family darling comes home.   Wine

without being contained in cups,

is handed around.

A red glint appears in a granite outcrop,

and suddenly the whole cliff turns to ruby.

Rumi

Go.

Spear, Sunrise Water Nymphs, 1920

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

Rumi

Widening.

There is a community of the spirit.

Join it, and feel the delight

of walking in the noisy street

and being the noise.

Drink all your passion,

and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes

to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,

if you want to be held.

Sit down in the circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel

the shepherd’s love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.

Don’t accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.

Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.

You moan, “She left me.” “He left me.”

Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.

Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison

when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.

Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always

widening rings of being.

Rumi

Listen.

There is a voice that doesn’t use words — listen!

Rumi

Happy Birthday, Rumi

The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you

Don't go back to sleep!

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep!

People are going back and forth

across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,

The door is round and open

Don't go back to sleep!

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, thought to have been born on this day in 1207

Inside.

Thinking gives off smoke to prove the existence of fire. 

A mystic sits inside the burning. 

There are wonderful shapes in rising smoke that imagination loves to watch. 

But it's a mistake to leave the fire for that filmy sight. 

Stay here at the flame's core. 

Rumi

Prepares.

Sorrow prepares you for joy. 

It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. 

It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. 

It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. 

Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.

Rumi

Ambling.

Unknown, Library Study Nook, Old Chapel, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1920

God has given us a dark wine so potent that,

drinking it, we leave the two worlds.

God has put into the form of hashish a power

to deliver the taster from self-consciousness.

God has made sleep

so that it erases every thought.

God made Majnun love Layla so much

that just her dog would cause confusion in him.

There are thousands of wines

that can take over our minds.

Don't think all ecstasies 

are the same!

Jesus was lost in his love for God.

His donkey was drunk on barley.

Drink from the presence of saints,

not from those other jars.

Every object, every being,

is a jar full of delight.

Be a connoisseur,

and taste with caution.

Any wine will get you high.

Judge like a king, and choose the purest,

and ones unadulterated with fear,

or some urgency about "what's needed."

Drink the wine that moves you

as a camel moves when it's been untied,

and is just ambling about.

Rumi

Today.

On a day

when the wind is perfect,

the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty.

Today is such a

day.

My eyes are like the sun that makes promises;

the promise of life

that it always

keeps

each morning.

The living heart gives to us as does that luminous sphere,

both caress the earth with great

tenderness.

This is a breeze that can enter the soul.

This love I know plays a drum. Arms move around me;

who can contain their self before my beauty?

Peace is wonderful,

but ecstatic dance is more fun, and less narcissistic;

gregarious He makes our lips.

On a day when the wind is perfect,

the sail just needs to open

and the love starts.

Today is such

a day.

Rumi 

Ambling.

Velasquez, Tavern Scene with Two Men and a Girl (detail), 1619

The MANY WINES

God has given us a dark wine so potent that,

drinking it, we leave the two worlds.

God has put into the form of hashish a power

to deliver the taster from self-consciousness.

God has made sleep so that

it erases every thought.

God made Majnun love Layla so much that

just her dog would cause confusion in him.

There are thousands of wines

that can take over our minds.

Don't think all ecstasies

are the same!

Jesus was lost in his love for God.

His donkey was drunk with barley.

Drink from the presence of saints,

not from those other jars.

Every object, every being,

is a jar full of delight.

Be a connoisseur,

and taste with caution.

Any wine will get you high.

Judge like a king, and choose the purest,

the ones unadulterated with fear,

or some urgency about "what's needed."

Drink the wine that moves you

as a camel moves when it's been untied,

and is just ambling about.

Rumi

Silence.

A wealth you cannot imagine

flows through you.

Do not consider what strangers say.

Be secluded in your secret heart-house,

that bowl of silence.

Talking, no matter how humble-seeming,

is really a kind of bragging.

Let silence be the art 

you practice.

Rumi

Fill.

Wake up with the morning breeze and ask for a change.

Open and fill yourself with the wine that is your life.

Pass it around

Pass it to me first.

Rumi

Beauty.

On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty.

Rumi 

Polishes.

Criticism polishes my mirror.

Rumi

Art.

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood. 

Jean Cocteau

Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In your light I learn how to love. 

In your beauty, how to make poems. 

You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, 

But sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. 

Rumi

Home.

Do you think I know what I'm doing?

That for one breath or half a breath I belong to myself?

As much as a pen knows what it is writing

It may be the satisfaction I need depends on my going away

So that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home.

Rumi

Become.

I see my beauty in you.
I become a mirror that cannot close its eyes
to your longing.
My eyes wet with yours in the early light.
My mind every moment giving birth,
always conceiving,
always in the ninth month,
always the come-point.

How do I stand this?
We become these words we say,
a wailing sound moving
out into the air.

These thousands of worlds that rise from nowhere,
how does your face contain them?
I’m a fly in your honey,
then closer, a moth caught in flame’s allure,
then empty sky stretched out in homage.

Rumi

Secrets.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

Rumi