Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 19
I am not saying these things to appear visionary and spiritual.
I have seen this happen in ways I cannot express.
Always test a high-sounding remark.
If someone claims, I have left all that,
see if his shirt is torn in the back.
Tell the word-men to quit talking
and listen to the grief a lover feels.
Be relentless in your looking,
because you are the one you seek.
WANDERING WILDERNESS
We have come to that knee of seacoast
no ocean can reach.
Tie together all human intellects.
They will not stretch to here.
The sky bares its neck so beautifully, but gets no kiss.
Only a taste. This is the food that everyone wants,
wandering the wilderness.
Please give us your manna and quail.
We are here with the beloved again.
This air, a shout. These meadowsounds,
an astonishing myth.
We have come into the presence of the one
who was never apart from us.
When the water bag is filling,
you know that the water-carrier is here.
The bag leans lovingly against your shoulder.
Without you I have no knowledge,
no way to touch anyone.
When someone chews sugarcane,
he is wanting this sweetness.
Inside this globe the soul roars like thunder.
Now silence, my strict tutor.
I will not try to talk about Shams.
Language cannot touch that presence.
COME BACK, MY FRIEND
What was in that candle’s light
that opened and consumed me so quickly?
Come back, my friend.
The form of our love is not a created form.
Nothing can help me but that beauty.
There was a dawn I remember
when my soul heard something from your soul.
I drank water from your spring
and felt the current take me.
I AM MORE THE WAY YOU ARE
The one who loses patience with us
is the one who stays and protects.
You are the iris and the rose
and the fall that ruins flowers.
Sing the spring and admit that you are also thorn.
Everything that exists is talking and not talking at once.
Everything looks at and with and through you.
The nightingale bestows a definite desire.
There is the ocean and there is a bridge.
There are these two or three numbered days.
I am none of those.
I am more the way you are,
flowers opening and the soul in silence,
but something in you will not let me keep quiet.
I try to hide like a clever quarry,
but you hunt the hunter and the prey.
You purify by staying apart.
The fragrance of everyone’s laughter
is your work and your gift to us,
as well as the weeping.
A CLOSED JAR
You wreck my mind with your foolishness.
I am the closed jar you ferment inside.
Beginning and end, outer and essential,
you are king and prince, doorkeeper, nightwatch,
bad manners, good, pleasure, discomfort.
You are tender, green, and fresh,
fascinating like an earring of intelligence.
Remote and close as kin.
Past and future, you are the friend who turns malicious.
You hurt and soothe like poison dissolved in sherbet.
An ecstatic, God-surrendered bunch is bumbling along the road.
You ambush and rob them.
The caravan then becomes a shape for your beauty.
Some days I argue and make noise.
Other days, more absorbed in you, I stay quiet.
ALMOST IN SIGHT
We cannot help being thirsty,
moving toward the voice of water.
Milk-drinkers draw close to the mother.
Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus,
shamans, everyone hears the intelligent sound
and moves, with thirst, to meet it.
Clean your ears.
Do not listen for something you have heard before.
Invisible camel bells, slight footfalls in sand.
Almost in sight.
The first word they call out
will be the last word of our last poem.
Chapter 16
Dissolving the Concept of “God”
A Navajo prayer song says, “I walk in beauty.” I have always felt the truth of that. We live within something like a presence, a beauty. Rumi sometimes calls it the “rose.” Sometimes “absence” or “nothing.” Simply to be is an act of praise. We are part of what is carrying us along. However we experience and participate in that is religion. The word “God” has become almost unusable for me. Whatever the sacred is, it is a flowing. Evolving qualities in consciousness. Music, changing light. That does not mean that what the word “God” tries to point to—the mystical layers, the mysterious source, the depths of love inside consciousness, inner-outer synchronicities, the ocean of energy and intelligence that animates everything—are not real. They are, it is, the great reality. But the word and the concept are so freighted with doctrine and violence for me, that I mostly leave them alone, though not always.
I do not necessarily recommend this as a way for others. I have to admit that I do like to hear others give it a try, the attempt to describe the mystery we inhabit, that inhabits us. Carl Jung says, “The Self (God) is a circle whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.” Heraclitus says, “The soul is undiscovered, though explored forever to a depth beyond report.” And Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (who certainly does not shrink from using the word) says, “God has no form. God is a treasure without form or self-image, a treasure that can give peace and tranquility to human life. Just as there exists a point on the tongue that perceives taste and a point of light within the eye that can see, God exists as a point in the wisdom of life, a point within faith, a power. God is a power, and that power can be seen within you.” Many would call that point, that power that comes through the human form especially, grace.
A QUESTION
We fall in love constantly
as we admire and closely watch our own faces.
There is a question about who is happier,
the onlookers or the soul?
Does the wine glass ever get tipsy?
There is wine, the soul, the heart, and this assortment of friends.
Where does the work take place?
Love is the religion, yet we are the blasphemy too,
belief and unbelief singing the same song.
You cannot grow knowledgeable enough to understand this,
and you cannot remain ignorant enough to understand this.
THE TASTE OF MORNING
Time’s knife slides from the sheath,
as a fish from where it swims.
Being closer and closer is the desire of the body.
Do not wish for union.
There is a closeness beyond that.
Why would God want a second God?
Fall in love in such a way
that it frees you from any connecting.
Love is the soul’s light, the taste of morning,
no me, no we, no claim of being.
These words are the smoke the fire gives off
as it absolves its defects,
as eyes in silence, tears, face.
Love cannot be said.
YOU ARE AS YOU ARE
Yesterday, you made a promise.
Today, you broke it. Yesterday, Bestami’s dance.
Today, dregs thrown out.
In pieces, and at the same time,
a perfect glass filled with sunlight.
Give up on figuring the appearances,
the dressing in green like a Sufi.
You do not resemble anyone.
You are not the bride or the groom.
You do not fit in a house with a family.
You have left the closed-in corner where you lived.
Domestic animals get ridden to work.
Not you. You are as you are,
an indescribable message coming on the air.
Every word you say is medicine.
But not yet: Stay quiet and still.
THORN WITNESS
Apparent shapes and meanings change.
Creature hunts down creature.
Bales get unloaded and weighed to determine price.
None of this pertains to the unseen fire
we call the beloved. That presence has no form
and cannot be understood or measured.
Take your hands away from your face.
If a wall of dust moves across the plain,
there is usually an army advancing under it.
When you look for the friend,
the friend is looking for you.
Carried by a strong current, you and the others with you
seem to be making decisions, but you are not.
I weave coarse wool. I decide to talk less.
But my actions cause nothing.
A thorn grows next to the rose as its witness.
I am that thorn for whom simply to be
is an act of praise. Near the rose, no shame.
THE SELF WE SHARE
Thirst is angry at water. Hunger, bitter with bread.
The cave wants nothing to do with the sun.
This is dumb, the self-defeating way we have been.
A gold mine is calling us into its temple.
Instead, we bend and keep picking up rocks from the ground.
Every thing has a shine like gold,
but we should turn to the source.
The origin is what we truly are.
I add a little vinegar to the honey I give.
The bite of scolding makes the ecstasy more familiar.
But look, fish, you are already in the ocean.
Just swimming there makes you friends with glory.
What are these grudges about? You are Benjamin.
Joseph has put a gold cup in your grain sack
and accused you of being a thief.
Now he draws you aside and says,
You are my brother. I am a prayer. You are the amen.
We move in eternal regions,
yet we worry about property here.
This is the prayer of each: You are the source of my life.
You separate essence from mud. You honor my soul.
You bring rivers from the mountain springs.
You brighten my eyes. The wine you offer
takes me out of my self into the self we share.
Doing that is religion.
STRANDED SOMEWHERE
If you are the body,
that one is the soul of the universe.
If you are soul,
that one is the soul within all souls.
Wherever you go, whatever you are,
listen for the voice that asks, Who will be sacrificed tonight?
Jump up and volunteer.
Accept this cup that is offered every second.
Love has written the thousand subtleties of this on my face.
Read. If you are bored and contemptuous,
love is a walk in a meadow.
If you are stranded somewhere and exhausted,
love is an Arabian horse.
The ocean feeds itself to its fish.
If you are an ocean fish,
why bother with bread the ground grows?
These jars of grief and trouble we call bodies,
throw stones and break them.
My cage is this longing for Shams.
Be my worst enemy. Shatter it.
LET THE SOUP SIMMER
As the air of April holds a rosebush,
I draw you to myself.
But why mention roses?
You are the whole, the soul,
the spirit, the speaker, and what follows Say,
the quarry and the bowstring pulled to the ear.
The lion turns to the deer,
Why are you running in my wake?
There are thousands of levels
from what lives in the soil to humanity,
but I have brought you along from town to town.
I will not leave you somewhere on the side of the road.
Let the soup simmer with the lid on.
Be quiet.
There is a lion cub hidden in the deer body.
You are the polo ball.
With my mallet I make you run.
Then I track you.
LIKE A FIG
Who turns bitterness to love?
Who changes the poisonous snake around your neck to pearls?
The kind king who makes a demon a sweetheart,
who changes funeral to feast,
and blindness from birth to world-beholding sight.
Who pulls the thorn from your palm
and puts a pillow of roses under your head.
For one, he kindles fire.
For another, the flames blossom
to eglantine around the head.
The same that lights the stars
helps those who cannot help anyone anymore.
What used to be thought of as sin
scatters off like December leaves
and disappears, completely forgiven.
Amen says who-is-it, the joy of inside and out.
Like a fig this presence is all tasty.
A rapture that is physical strength in the hand and foot,
and reality for the soul.
I send my love out now to ride the sunlight
and take this account of Shams
to those waiting faithfully in Tabriz.
WINTER OR SUMMER
The great river that turns the bend of the sky is here.
The mallet that when it strikes the ball
becomes ball, sky, and ground is here.
Noah, who built the ark with his carpenter’s discernment,
is here with us now.
He hands you a bite to eat.
You become a healer.
Do you love winter or summer more?
You may have whichever you like,
winter for you, summer for me.
Rose and thorn are equal here.
One contracts into itself with a wound.
One opens out and luxuriates.
One jumps in water that turns to fire.
One walks into fire, and it is sweet basil.
Doubt becomes proof.
A fallen angel, who did not see the human glory,
gets born as a person, and vice versa.
Khidr distributes living water.
Animals rise from the dead.
Philosophers call this the primal cause.
Now this blesses those philosophers with kindness.
The whole of existence is a mirror whose essence you are.
Breathe lightly, or it will cloud.
Belief and disbelief do not matter.
Be ignorant here.
Knowing and imagining are always after something,
like a blind man going door to door,
and not asking for salve to heal his own eyes.
These words would love to change your body to soul.
Fish do not worry where the shore begins.
Someone not in the water, not a fish, considers those boundaries.
Walk the lover’s road with truth and humility.
Those two will take your hand and sit you down by Shams.
WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN
Every moment is a taste of that beauty in our mouths,
another stashed in a pocket.
Impossible to say what: no cypress so handsome,
no sunlight, a lonely hiddenness.
Other pleasure gathers a crowd,
starts a fight, lots of noise there.
But soul beauty stays quiet.
Shams and his amazing whereabouts unknown
inside my heart.
DRAWN BY SOUP1
I try to imagine the most sumptuous meal.
Bugra Khan, general of the armies east of here,
has an autumn night banquet celebrating himself.
The archangel Gabriel arrives as Abraham’s guest,
fatted calf roasting.
Then the truly perfect setting, unimaginary,
your voice at dawn and the fragrance of soup.
I follow the simmering that pulls me
into a light-filled kitchen.
I ask the cook for a taste. This is not for human beings.
Please. You strike my head with a skimming spoon.
Mind drops away. True hospitality.
THE LAST OF YOUR WINE
I am sober now. Hand me my turban.
Fill the skin jug, or give it back empty, whichever.
