Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 12
THE BUDDHIST SUFI
Last night my soul asked a question of existence,
Why are you upsidedown with flames in your belly?
Happy, unhappy, indigo-orange like the sky?
Why are you an off-balance wobbling millstone
like the Buddhist Sufi, Ibrahim Balkhi,
who was king, beggar, buddha, and dervish.
Existence answers,
all this was made by the one who hides inside you.
You are like a beautiful bride,
quick to anger, stubborn, hot, naked,
but still veiled.
Reason and patience like well-meaning uncles
come to rail about how difficult this world is.
Love helps you to see into the invisible.
Water washes your hands.
Earth sits quiet like a childhood friend.
Watch the ocean circling your body-ship.
Stare into the holy Zamzam well at Mecca.
Within it you will see more Meccas and more Kaabas.
The king breaks in,
Stay quiet now, and do not jump into that well,
unless you know how to make a bucket and a rope
from my severed arm-stumps.
UP TO THE NECK
I sat long enough in fire.
Now I am up to the neck in the water of union.
You say, Up to the neck is not enough.
Make your head your foot and descend into love.
There is no up-to-the-neck union.
I say, But for the sake of your garden
I sat up to my neck in blood.
You say, Yes, you escaped the alluring world,
but not yourself.
You are the magician caught in his own trickery.
Cut the breath of self and be silent.
Language cannot come from your throat
as you choke and go under.
OPEN YOUR MOUTH TO THIS WIND
Science and theology would be just whims of the wind,
if you knew full surrender.
These beautiful world-birds would seem like flies,
if that wing-shadow fell across you.
The famous drums would sound like tapping sticks.
If that dawn rose, you would be released
from whatever is holding you.
What you thought was ahead would be behind.
One word, one letter, from that book
and you would understand.
Your fire wavers with the thought of death,
but if it burned in eternity, it would not tremble.
Those you are traveling with keep you distracted.
Open your mouth to this wind,
and let a straw catch in your throat.
Choke and die
of the worthlessness you value.
Your childish intelligence got stuck at He frowned,
that part of the Qur’an where Muhammad’s revelations
are interrupted by a wandering blind man.
Muhammad frowns,
then turns to the man’s true intention.
After frowning, comes Blessed is he.
Reach through your worrying to that.
This silence. This moment. Every moment,
if it is genuinely inside you, brings what you need.
WETNESS AND WATER
How does a part of the world leave the world?
How can wetness leave water?
Do not try to put out a fire
by throwing on more fire.
Do not wash a wound with blood.
No matter how fast you run,
your shadow more than keeps up.
Sometimes it’s in front.
Only full, overhead sun
diminishes your shadow.
But that shadow has been serving you.
What hurts you blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
Your boundaries are your quest.
I can explain this,
but it would break the glass cover on your heart,
and there is no fixing that.
You must have shadow and light source both.
Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.
When from that tree, feathers and wings sprout on you,
be quieter than a dove.
Do not open your mouth for even a coooooooo.
When a frog slips into the water,
the snake cannot get it.
Then the frog climbs back out and croaks,
and the snake moves toward him again.
Even if the frog learns to hiss,
still the snake will hear through the hiss
the information he needs, the frog-voice underneath.
But if the frog could be completely silent,
then the snake would go back to sleeping,
and the frog could reach the barley.
The soul lives there in the silent breath.
And that grain of barley is such that,
when you put it in the ground, it grows.
Are these enough words,
or shall I squeeze more juice from this?
Who am I, my friend?
OUT OF THE IMAGE-MAKING BUSINESS2
I used to want buyers for my words.
Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.
I have made a lot of charmingly profound images,
scenes with Abraham and Abraham’s father, Azar,
who was also famous for icons.
I am so tired of what I have been doing.
Then one image without form came, and I quit.
Look for someone else to tend the shop.
I am out of the image-making business.
Finally I know the freedom of madness.
A random image arrives.
I scream, Get out! It disintegrates.
Only love.
Only the holder the flag fits into, and wind.
No flag.
FLUTES FOR DANCING
It is lucky to hear the flutes for dancing
coming down the road. The ground is glowing.
The table is set in the yard.
We will drink all this wine tonight
because it is spring. It is.
It is a growing sea. We are clouds over the sea,
or flecks of matter in the ocean
when the ocean seems lit from within.
I know I am drunk when I start this ocean talk.
Would you like to see the moon
split in half with one throw?
WAX
When I see you and how you are,
I close my eyes to the other.
For your Solomon’s seal I become wax throughout my body.
I wait to be light.
I give up opinions on all matters.
I become the reed flute for your breath.
You were inside my hand.
I kept reaching around for something.
I was inside your hand,
but I kept asking questions of those who know very little.
I must have been incredibly stupid or insane
to sneak into my own house and steal money,
to climb over the fence and steal my own vegetables.
But no more. I have gotten free of that ignorant fist
that was pinching and twisting my secret self.
The universe and the light of the stars come through me.
I am the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival.
THE MANY APPEALS OF THE COLOR RED
Red with shyness,
the red that became all the rose-garden reds.
The red distance.
Red of the stove and boiling water,
red of the mountain turning bloodred now.
Mountain holding rubies secretly inside,
should I love more you,
or your modesty?
Chapter 10
An-Nur, Light
The heart and the face are deeply connected. You can see the heart’s light in the face. Ligaments of light hold the world together. This is an ocean of light with walking flames inside each individual. Eventually the light of the soul and the light of actual sunlight become the same. The light of your childhood. I experienced this once. After a long flight to south India, I woke into the light of my childhood. As you start out on a journey, the passageways of the self keep changing. We hope to arrive where reason cannot go, where dry sticks are full of light. The stars truly are suns, and Shams Tabriz is everywhere. Let your face be open to the light and clearly here.
THE LIGHT INSIDE THE FACE
The soul gives off a light. You are that beauty.
How does the soul stand such light?
Great elegant-feathered, many-colored bird
inside whose stretching wing-shadow
even crows become stately messengers,
you grace this unforgivable place with kindness.
You help those who hurt, loosening their knotted hearts.
Oceans disappear and reappear
inside this pearl that you are.
I weep when we meet, asking,
How unfaithful have you been, my friend?
And I cry outloud when we leave each other,
Is this how you stay faithful?
Yet there is a joy in being apart,
pleasure even here.
When loving goes truly insane, you are the cause,
because you once lived there in the controlling mind,
and then you left and took all coherence away.
A face opens. You are the face
within the face, the light. Forgive me.
A WALKING FIRE
Today, now, this is when
we can meet the friend,
now, as the sun comes up.
The beloved, who yesterday was so distant,
today is kind and bringing food.
Someone who knows this one
and is not demolished and completely reborn,
that one is made of marble,
not blood and bone and brain and eyes and hair.
Gabriel knocks on the friend’s door.
Who is it? Your servant.
Who came with you? Your love.
Where? In my arms.
But the whole world is in love with me.
What you have brought is a common thing.
Go away.
Now Shams comes along,
a walking fire beyond anything I can say.
THE SHINE IN THE FIELDS
The shine in the fields and in the orchard
has become the light of your face.
No home now, no loved occupation,
no belongings, no figuring profit and loss.
When this love comes, it is impossible
to worry about honor or reputation,
what the community gives, the more and the less.
There is no longer any demarcation line
between the worlds. Hats fly off.
A pack of dogs snarl and bite each other
around a carcass. We are not those dogs.
Only God knows our secrets, and that is enough.
We have no more arguments over doctrine.
What is planted in each person’s soul will sprout.
We surrender to however that happens.
Companions used to be magnets that drew us
together to talk. No more. No more even the sun.
It has turned itself into the face
of Shams Tabriz, the sanctity and the praise.
MORE OF YOUR NAMES
To say more of your names.
You are the one who was with us in the beginning,
telling secrets in the first house.
We were afraid of fire, but then we found your flame.
You are also a wind that puts out the mind’s candle,
that city leveled.
With friends, friendship.
With enemies, the standing apart,
or right in the middle, resembling both.
Knowledgeable ones sigh their disdain,
Oh the stories lovers tell.
But you are those stories,
you that bring dawn to the end of night.
Beauty that originates,
the look and the presence inside the look,
majesty of Shamsuddin, praise,
and the light-connecting ligaments that hold this earth.
DARING ENOUGH TO FINISH
Face that lights my face,
you spin intelligence into these particles I am.
Your wind shivers my tree.
My mouth tastes sweet with your name in it.
You make my dance daring enough to finish.
No more timidity!
Let fruit fall
and wind turn my roots up in the air,
done with patient waiting.
INHALE AUTUMN, LONG FOR SPRING
Union is a watery way.
In an eye, a point of light.
In the chest, the soul.
The place where ecstatic lovers go is called the tavern,
where everyone gambles,
and whoever loses has to live there.
So, my love,
even if you are the pattern of time’s orderly passage,
do not go, or if you go, wear a disguise.
But do not cover your chest.
Stay open there.
Someone asks me, What is love?
Do not look for an explanation.
Dissolve into me,
and you will know when it calls.
Respond.
Walk out as a lion, as a rose.
Inhale autumn, long for spring.
You that change the dull field,
who give conversation to damaged ears,
make dying alive,
award guardianship to the wandering mind,
You who erase the five senses at night,
who give eyes allure and a blood clot wisdom,
who give the lover heroic strength,
you who hear what Sanai said,
Lose your life, if you seek eternity.
The master who teaches us is absolute light,
not this visibility.
OCEAN LIGHT
The moon at dawn stooped like a hawk
and took me and flew across the sky.
Traveling inside that light, so close,
my body turned to spirit.
I saw nothing but light.
The secret of revelation came clear
with my ship submerged in that.
As it moved, consciousness rose into being,
and the voice of consciousness
made every foam fleck a new bodying.
Matter receives a signal from the sea it floats in,
but without the sun,
without the majesty of Shams,
no one would see the moon,
or ever dissolve in ocean light.
SOUL LIGHT AND SUN THE SAME
If a lover is not continually burning,
he should sit and crack his knuckles with the old men.
A lover does not fit in groups very well, or with himself.
He rides away quickly from doubt and appearances.
A spring, a green branch, every day new,
the first time you feel held,
curved like a lute playing grief music.
Gazelle and lioness walking together,
soul light and sun the same.
THE GENERATIONS I PRAISE
Yesterday the beauty of early dawn came over me,
and I wondered who my heart would reach toward.
Then this morning again and you.
Who am I?
Wind and fire and watery ground move me mightily
because they are pregnant with love, love pregnant with God.
These are the early morning generations I praise.
SNEEZING OUT ANIMALS
I look for the light I used to see.
The key is hidden here somewhere.
I face toward India, then Turkestan.
I am the ground you walked on.
There is an old story about Noah’s ark,
when the garbage began piling up.
Yes. That scow was in trouble.
Noah scratched a pig’s back.
The pig sneezed out a rat, two rats.
The rats ate the garbage.
Then Noah scratched a lion,
who sneezed out cats, who ate the rats.
I was sneezed out by a lion and put in a bag,
where I heard, If you are a lion cub, tear the bag.
I did. Shams Tabriz lives beyond
the blue bag of the sky.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING OUT
If a tree could fly off, it would not suffer the saw.
The sun hurries all night to be back for morning.
Salty water rises in the air,
so the garden will be drenched with fresh rain.
A drop leaves home,
enters a certain shell, and becomes a pearl.
Joseph turns from his weeping father, toward Egypt.
Remember how that turned out.
Journeys bring power and love back into you.
