Rumi
I’m not saying this right
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You bind me,
and I tear away in a rage
to open out into air,
a round brightness,
a candlepoint,
all reason, all love.
This confusing joy, your doing,
this hangover, your tender thorn.
You turn to look, I turn.
I’m not saying this right.
I am a jailed crazy who ties up spirit-women.
I am Solomon.
What goes comes back. Come back.
We never left each other.
A disbeliever hides disbelief,
but I will say his secret.
More and more awake,
getting up at night,
spinning and falling with love
for Shams.
Ali in battle
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Learn from Ali how to fight
without your ego participating.
God’s Lion did nothing
that didn’t originate from his deep center.
Once in battle
he got the best of a certain knight
and quickly drew his sword.
The man, helpless on the ground,
spat in Ali’s face.
Ali dropped his sword, relaxed,
and helped the man to his feet.
“Why have you spared me?
How has lightning contracted back into its cloud?
Speak, my prince,
so that my soul can begin to stir in me
like an embryo.”
Ali was quiet and then finally answered,
“I am God’s Lion, not the lion of passion.
The sun is my lord.
I have no longing except for the One.
When a wind of personal reaction comes,
I do not go along with it.
There are many winds full of anger,
and lust and greed.
They move the rubbish around,
but the solid mountain of our true nature
stays where it’s always been.
There’s nothing now except the divine qualities.
Come through the opening into me.
Your impudence was better
than any reverence,
because in this moment.
I am you and you are me.
I give you this opened heart
as God gives gifts:
the poison of your spit
has become the honey of friendship.
Dying, laughing
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A lover was telling his beloved
how much he loved her,
how faithful he had been,
how self-sacrificing,
getting up at dawn every morning,
fasting, giving up wealth and strength and fame,
all for her.
There was a fire in him.
He didn’t know where it came from,
but it made him weep and melt like a candle.
“You’ve done well,” she said,
“but listen to me.
All this is the decor of love,
the branches and leaves and blossoms.
You must live at the root to be a true lover.”
“Where is that! Tell me!”
“You’ve done the outward acts,
but you haven’t died.
You must die.”
When he heard that,
he lay back on the ground laughing,
and died.
He opened like a rose
that drops to the ground and died laughing.
That laughter was his freedom,
and his gift to the eternal.
As moonlight shines back at the sun,
he heard the call to come home, and went.
When light returns to its source,
it takes nothing of what it has illuminated.
It may have shone on a garbage dump,
or a garden, or in the center of a human eye.
No matter. It goes,
and when it does,
the open plain becomes passionately desolate,
wanting it back.
There’s nothing ahead
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Lovers think they’re looking for each other,
but there’s only one search:
wandering this world is wandering that,
both inside one transparent sky.
In here there is no dogma and no heresy.
The miracle of Jesus is himself,
not what he said or did about the future.
Forget the future.
I’d worship someone who could do that.
On the way you may want to look back, or not,
but if you can say
There’s nothing ahead,
there will be nothing there.
Stretch your arms
and take hold the cloth of your clothes
with both hands.
The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed.
If you don’t have both,
you don’t belong with us.
When one of us gets lost,
is not here, he must be inside us.
There’s no place like that anywhere in the world.
What Jesus runs away from
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The son of Mary, Jesus,
hurries up a slope
as though a wild animal were chasing him.
Someone following him asks,
“Where are you going?
No one is after you.”
Jesus keeps on, saying nothing,
across two more fields.
“Are you the one who says words
over a dead person, so that he wakes up?”
I am.
“Did you not make the clay birds fly?”
Yes.
“Who then could possibly cause you to run like this?”
Jesus slows his pace.
I say the Great Name over the deaf and the blind,
they are healed.
Over a stony mountainside,
and it tears its mantle down to the navel.
Over non-existence,
it comes into existence.
But when I speak lovingly for hours, for days,
with those who take human warmth and mock it,
when I say the Name to them,
nothing happens.
They remain rock, or turn to sand,
where no plants can grow.
Other diseases are ways
for mercy to enter,
but this non-responding breeds violence
and coldness toward God.
I am fleeing from that.
As little by little air steals water,
so praise dries up and evaporates
with foolish people who refuse to change.
Like cold stone you sit on a cynic steals body heat.
He doesn’t feel the sun.
Jesus wasn’t running from actual people.
He was teaching in a new way.
Christ is the population of the world,
and every object as well.
There is no room for hypocrisy.
Why use bitter soup for healing
when sweet water is everywhere?
The gift of water
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Someone who doesn’t know the Tigris River exists
brings the caliph who lives near the river
a jar of fresh water.
The caliph accepts, thanks him,
and gives in return a jar filled with gold coins.
“Since this man has come through the desert,
he should return by water.”
Taken out by another door,
the man steps into a waiting boat
and sees the wide freshwater of the Tigris.
He bows his head,
“What wonderful kindness that he took my gift.”
Every object and being in the universe
is a jar overfilled with wisdom and beauty,
a drop of the Tigris
that cannot be contained by any skin.
Every jarful spills and makes the earth more shining,
as though covered in satin.
If the man had seen even a tributary of the great river,
he wouldn’t have brought the innocence of his gift.
Those that stay and live by the Tigris
grow so ecstatic that they throw rocks at the jugs,
and the jugs become perfect!
They shatter.
The pieces dance, and water …
Do you see?
Neither jar, nor water, nor stone,nothing.
You knock at the door of reality,
shake your thought-wings,
loosen your shoulders,
and open.
The core of masculinity
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The core of masculinity
does not derive from being male,
nor friendliness from those who console.
Your old grandmother says,
“Maybe you shouldn’t go to school.
You look a little pale.”
Run when you hear that.
A father’s stern slaps are better.
Your bodily soul wants comforting.
The severe father wants spiritual clarity.
He scolds but eventually leads you into the open.
Pray for a tough instructor to hear and act
and stay within you.
We have been busy accumulating solace.
Make us afraid of how we were.
I honor those who try to rid themselves
of any lying,
who empty the self and
have only clear being there.
Music masters
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You that love lovers,
this is your home.
Welcome!
In the midst of making form,
love made this form that melts form,
with love for the door, soul the vestibule.
Watch the dust grains moving
in the light near the window.
Their dance is our dance.
We rarely hear the inward music,
but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless,
directed by the one who teaches us,
the pure joy of the sun,
our music master.
When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep
Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you,
not knowing how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.
We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity.
We are pain and what cures pain, both.
We are the sweet cold water
and the jar that pours.
I want to hold you close like a lute,
so we can cry out with loving.
You would rather throw stones at a mirror?
I am your mirror, and here are the stones.
A babbling child
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