Month: May 2018

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Don’t unstring the bow.

I am your four-feathered arrow

that has not been used yet.

I am a strong knifeblade word,

not some if or maybe, dissolving in air.

I am sunlight slicing the dark.

Who made this night?

A forge deep in the earth-mud.

---

What  is the body? Endurance.

What is love? Gratitude.

What is hidden in our chests? Laughter.

What else? Compassion.

---

Let the beloved be a hat pulled down firmly on my head.

Or drawstrings pulled and tied around my chest.

Someone asks, How does love have hands and feet?

Love is the sprouting bed for hands and feet!

---

Your father and mother were playing love games.

They came together, and you appeared!

Don’t ask what love can make or do!

Look at the colors of the world.

The riverwater moving in all rivers at once.

The truth that lives in Shams’ face.

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A certain person came to the Friend’s door and knocked.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me.”

The Friend answered,

“Go away. There’s no place for raw meat at this table.”

The individual went wandering for a year.

Nothing but the fire of separation can change hypocrisy and ego.

The person returned completely cooked,

walked up and down in front of the Friend’s house,

gently knocked.

“Who is it?”

“You.”

“Please come in, my self,

there’s no place in this house for two.

The doubled end of the thread is not what goes through the eye of the needle.

It’s a single-pointed, fined-down, thread end,

not a big ego-beast with baggage.”

But how can a camel be thinned to a thread?

With the shears of practices, with doing things.

And with help from the one who brings impossibilities to pass,

who quiets willfulness, who gives sight to one blind from birth.

Every day that one does something.

Take that as your text.

Every day God sends forth three powerful energies:

One, from the sperm of the father into the mother, so growth may begin.

Two, a birth from the womb of the ground, so male and female may spring into existence.

Three, there’s a surge up from the surface into what is beyond dying, that the real beauty of creating can be recognized.

There’s no way to ever say this.

Let’s return to the two friends whose thread became single,

who spell with their two letters the original word,

B and E tighten around subjects and objects that one knot may hold them.

Two scissor blades make one cut.

And watch two men washing clothes.

One makes dry clothes wet.

The other makes wet clothes dry.

They seem to be thwarting each other,

but their work is a perfect harmony

Every holy person seems to have a different doctrine and practice,

but there’s really only one work.

Someone listening to a millstone falls asleep.

No matter. The stone keeps turning.

Water from the mountain far above the mill keeps flowing down.

The sleepers will get their bread.

Underground it moves, without sound, and without repetition.

Show us where that source of speech is that has no alphabet.

That spaciousness.

Where we are now is a narrow fantasy that comes from there,

and the actual, outside world is even narrower.

Narrowness is pain, and the cause of narrowness is manyness.

Creation was spoken with one sound, BE.

The two letters, B and E,

to record it, came after.

The meaning of the sound and its resonance are one.

There’s no way to ever say this,

in so many words!

And no place to stop saying it.

Meanwhile, a lion and a wolf were fighting

 

Translation from https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Rumi-New-Expanded/dp/0062509594

 

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 Your grief for what you’ve lost

lifts a mirror up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look,

and instead,

here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.

If it were always a fist or always stretched open,

you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting

and expanding,

the two as beautifully balanced

and coordinated as birdwings.