Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 15
These rock and earth forms
were originally sun-warmed water, were they not?
Then the planet cooled and settled to what we are now.
The blood in our bodies carries a living luminous flow,
but watch when it spills out and soaks into the ground.
That is how speech does,
overflowing from silence.
Silk on one side,
cheap, striped canvas on the other.
THE DANCE OF YOUR HIDDEN LIFE
Move your hair in the light.
Let it scatter amber,
as the souls of Sufis begin a dance,
sun, moon, and stars in a circle.
We are dancing their dance.
A slight melody enters the great wheel
and helps it turn.
A spring breeze makes everyone laugh.
Autumn wakes from his dead sleep.
Rose and thorn pair up.
Many people are dancing with snakes.
The orchard king from his secret center says,
Welcome to your hidden life.
They move together,
the cypress and the bud of the lily,
the willow and the flowering judas.
Ladders have been set up around the garden,
so that everyone’s eyes lift.
A songbird sits on a branch
like the kind man who guards the treasury,
and has just been paid from it.
Shoots emerge from a dark core.
The new leaves are tongues.
The fruit, our growing, collective heart.
As they begin to form,
these apples, peaches, pears, and plums,
we understand what our tongues have been doing.
HUNT MUSIC
Musk and amber remind us of the air of sunrise,
when any small motion seems part of one elaborate making.
The body’s harp gets handed to the soul to play.
The strings are rage, love, and jealousy.
All the wantings mix their energy-music.
Who tuned this instrument where wind is one string,
and Shams’s eyes another,
in which a gazelle turns to stalk the hunting lioness?
AN OINTMENT MIXED WITH EARTH
I was a thorn rushing to be with a rose,
vinegar blending with honey,
a pot of poison turning to healing salve,
pasty wine dregs thrown in the millrace.
I was a diseased eye reaching for Jesus’ robe,
raw meat cooking in the fire.
Then I found some earth to make an ointment with
that would honor my soul, and in mixing that,
I found poetry. Love says, You are right.
But do not claim credit for those changes.
Remember. I am wind.
You are the ember I ignite.
IF YOU WANT TO LIVE IN YOUR SOUL
The soul within our individual souls
loves the one who runs and falls down
more than the one who sits and watches.
The soul within soul lives in a lover.
Consider this metaphor. How you love is the open sky.
These personal selves are the separate roofs of a town.
Your tongue, the guttering where words flow.
If the roof is not clean, the words get thick and murky.
Some people have elaborate systems that drain water
from other roofs. This is not wise.
There is a false eloquence to it.
A lover is one who waters a garden from a rain barrel
that fills under his own roof.
Roses that grow from that have tears in them.
Sometimes the scale pans may weigh correctly,
but the balancer is off.
A sweet doctor may give bitter medicine.
A foot finds the right shoe in the dark.
Love moves on its way through the pleasure it feels.
Even though the time you live in is violent
and frightening, you are safe in Noah’s boat.
If you want to know who someone is,
hang around with those close by. They know.
The rule that covers everything is,
How you are with others, expect that back.
If you want to know God,
enjoy the company of lovers.
If you want to be thought a great person,
learn some subtle point and say it with many variations
as the answer to every question.
If you want to live in your soul,
find a friend like Shams and stay near.
SPRING
Again, the violet bows to the lily.
Again, the rose is tearing off her gown.
The green ones have come from the other world,
tipsy, like the breeze up to some new foolishness.
Again, near the top of the mountain
the anemone’s sweet features appear.
The hyacinth speaks formally to the jasmine,
Peace be with you.
And peace to you, lad.
Come walk with me in this meadow.
Again, there are Sufis everywhere.
The bud is shy, but the wind removes her veil
suddenly, My friend.
The friend is here like water in the stream,
like a lotus on the water.
The narcissus winks at the wisteria, Whenever you say.
And the clove to the willow, You are the one I hope for.
The willow replies, Consider these chambers of mine yours.
Welcome.
The apple, Orange, why the frown?
So that those who mean harm will not see my beauty.
The ringdove comes asking, Where? Where is the friend?
With one note the nightingale indicates the rose.
Again, the season of spring has come,
and a spring-source rises under everything,
a moon sliding from the shadows.
Many things must be left unsaid because it is late,
and whatever conversation we have not had tonight,
we will have tomorrow.
LOST CAMEL
I have heard that a certain man lost his camel.
He goes everywhere, not finding that camel.
He falls asleep in the desert by the side of the road,
tired and thinking now he is through looking.
Late in the night he wakes up full of that loss.
The moon comes rolling out like a white ball
on the huge, empty polo field of the sky. By that light
he sees his camel standing in the middle of the road.
His tears come easily like a quick rain.
He turns his face up, wet and shining.
How can I say what you are with your light?
Let this be a night like that one.
Each second the moon tells us, Be more passionate.
We should shine back and tell it the same thing.
It makes us restless. It grieves for us.
Take it inside you, that one whose presence is water.
We are the stream, searching along.
That one is musk. We are the way musk smells.
Why not spray ourselves?
GOLDSMITHING1
By Saladin’s shop suddenly I hear the music
of gold being hammered, gold and God.
As gold thins out,
the presence becomes a sheer, gold-leaf light
on this goldbeater’s face, in his eyes as he works.
As the love-secret of Jacob becomes Joseph’s smile,
as lovers leave what keeps them confined,
as Job’s patience dissolves to nothing,
you are the friend coming toward this touching.
You are the soul,
and when you hear yourself in some hypocrisy,
cut free. Quickly, cut.
THE NIGHTWATCHMAN
I sit by the side of one who watches
like the stars at night without sleeping watch.
My friend sits on the roof at night.
I attend that watching.
During the day I help with the gardening.
He is both a tender of flowers and flowering trees.
It is no shame to be in this friendship,
or if it is, it is.
I was on my way elsewhere
when I saw the nightwatchman
sitting on the sky’s roof like a guard.
Like a king, like a gardener in his garden,
rain-wet stones, like the body’s hand-me-down.
The nightwatchman knows the way from body to soul,
how soul moves in stomach bile, in blood and semen, in saliva.
Soul works inside those fluids
to keep the body fresh and full of energy.
So the stars and the planets and this world are moving
to bring grace here through the cold night-clarity.
Events like battle arrows crisscross from every direction.
There is only one archer.
The skill of the sheepdog comes from the shepherd.
A city has a collective intelligence,
and each person there has a unique knowing.
Sometimes random bits pretend to be a caravan,
but it was a good messenger
who brought us the order out on the road
to Come back. Come back.
STRANGE BUSINESS
If you do not have a woman who lives with you,
why are you not looking?
If you have one, why are you not satisfied?
You have no resistance to your friend.
Why don’t you become the friend?
If the flute is too quiet to say,
teach it manners.
Someone is holding you back. Break off.
You sit here for days saying, This is strange business.
You are the strange business.
You have the energy of the sun in you,
but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine.
You are some weird kind of gold
that wants to stay melted in the furnace,
so you won’t have to be coins.
Say ONE in your lonesome house.
Loving two is hiding inside yourself.
You have gotten drunk on so many kinds of wine.
Taste this. It will not make you wild.
It is fire. Give up,
if you do not understand by this time
that your living is firewood.
This wave of talking builds.
Better we should not speak it,
but let it grow within.
PHRASE YOUR QUESTION
Why doesn’t a soul fly when it hears the call?
Fish on the beach always move toward wave sound.
A falcon hears the drum and brings the quarry home.
Why is not every dervish dancing in the sun?
You have escaped the cage.
Your wings are stretched out.
Now, fly.
You have slept in sheds and outbuildings
so long that you think you live there.
How many years, like children,
do we have to collect sticks and pieces of broken pottery
and pretend that they are valuable?
Leave childhood. Go to the banquet of true human beings.
Split open the cultural mold.
Put your head up out of the sack.
Hold this book in the air with your right hand.
Are you old enough to know right from left?
A voice says to your clarity, Walk.
Move into the moment of your death.
Learn some discipline there.
To the soul, Move into the invisible,
and take what’s given. You are the king.
Phrase your question and expect an answer.
LIES FROM EACH OTHER
The way of lovers is different.
To them, lies from each other
are better than truth from others.
Impossibilities occur.
Synagogue becomes Kaaba.
Bitter is sweet and exhaustion, love.
The moment the friend waves you away,
water comes from Khidr’s spring.
No is a thousand yeses
in the code of emptiness.
Criminality fills with forgiveness.
There is no describing the windings of this road.
I have talked enough.
When dear Lord Shams pours himself,
everything I say tastes like the presence.
I AM THE GROUND
I am the slave who frees the master.
I teach the teacher.
I am essence born freshly every day.
I built the ancient civilizations.
I brush medicine on fading eyesight.
I relight intelligence.
In grief, I am pitchblack darkness.
On a feast day, I am the children’s excitement.
I am the ground who fills the sky’s brain
with fiery lightning-love, air, and wind.
You could not sleep last night,
too happy with how I was remembering you.
No one is to blame that sometimes I am a scandal,
or obviously unfair.
The surface is rusting over. I had better go into silence.
I am breathing too close to this mirror’s face.
WE ARE THREE
My love wanders the rooms,
melodious flute notes, plucked wires,
full of a wine the Magi drank on the way to Bethlehem.
We are three.
The moon comes from its quiet corner,
puts a pitcher of water down in the center.
The circle of surface flames.
One of us kneels to kiss the threshold.
One drinks, with wine-flames playing over his face.
One watches the gathering,
and says to any cold onlookers,
This dance is the joy of existence.
Chapter 13
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
I was especially lucky with this name of God. I got to be in his presence. I sat in his room and sometimes helped with the food preparations. He taught me how to cut an onion. Now every time I do that, I remember how it was in his presence. Bawa was asked one day what it was like for him to be alive. “It is like driving a car,” he said. “You are making certain decisions, going here and there, and yet you are the landscape you are driving through. You are a separate being and yet you are everything too.”
I cannot say that I know what he is talking about. I have not had that experience, not that I am conscious of. But I have been so blessed to be able to sit in the same room with one of these names for Mystery off and on for nine years (1977–86). I met Bawa Muhaiyaddeen in a dream on May 2, 1977, a year and a half before I met him in this visible reality. He talked about many things with me. But his real influence was in the radiance and compassion, the depth and humor of his presence. Sufis would visit and say, “The light of God is on him.” It was true. That is how it felt to be in his room. I just wanted to be there. Questions gradually fell away.
He liked to paint the Beautiful Names of Allah as a rosebush with ninety-nine roses of various shades of red, yellow, orange. He once told me that the cosmos, the tangible, apparent universe, was very tiny, a dot. One can go anywhere in it as fast as a thought. The great world is the world of awareness, the inner, which is somehow also the outer.
A TRANSPARENT TREE
I have traded my soul for the universe.
Don’t speak.
The jeweler who thought he was buying gold
to work with now owns the mine.
But commerce metaphors are wrong.
What has happened in me is more profound,
like a fish underwater beginning to say words.
A transparent tree grows in the nightsky orchard
where I have found a little corner to be in,
as when two planets intersect.
I have met Shams.
SILKWORMS
The hurt you embrace becomes joy.
Call it to your arms where it can change.
A silkworm eating leaves makes a cocoon.
Each of us weaves a chamber of leaves and sticks.
Silkworms begin to truly exist
as they disappear inside that room.
Without legs, we fly.
When I stop speaking, this poem will close,
and open its silent wings. . . .
A VOICE THROUGH THE DOOR
Sometimes you hear a voice through the door calling you,
as fish out of water hear the waves,
or a hunting falcon hears the drum’s Come back. Come back.
This turning toward what you deeply love saves you.
Children fill their shirts with rocks and carry them around.
We are not children anymore.
Read the book of your life which has been given you.
A voice comes to your soul saying,
Lift your foot, cross over, move into the emptiness
of question and answer and question.
