Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 26
To praise is to praise
how one surrenders to the emptiness.
To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.
So the sea journey goes on,
and no one knows where.
Just to be held by the ocean
is the best luck we could have.
It is a total waking up.
Why should we grieve that we have been sleeping?
It does not matter how long we have been unconscious.
We are groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness around you.
the buoyancy.
BLACK TULIP
If someone claims to know my friend,
bring him or her close and let me look in the eyes.
I can recognize presence there.
You were so kind to us last night
that I felt your hand scratching behind my ears until dawn.
You are a clever pickpocket, but I have stolen more from you.
Now I hear there is an even better thief.
I leave the profession. Things are missing.
Birds fly with wings. I fly without.
I break my cup against a stone.
I tear my shirt and dig for roots. I rain.
A black tulip mocks my strangeness.
The one who teaches me is spring.
That show will open soon.
Outside, I grieve. Inside, pure laughter.
RAMADAN SILENCE1
When the Ramadan banner flies, soul restrains nature,
so it can taste its own food.
The strength of horses and the intensity of fire,
these are the powers of sacrifice.
Fasting, we honor the guest.
Clouds of courage give rain,
because it was in this month that the Qur’an rained down,
light through an opening.
Grab the rope.
Be lifted out of the body’s pit.
Announce to Egypt, Joseph of Canaan has come.
Jesus dismounts the donkey,
and the sacramental table descends.
Wash your hands. Wash your face.
Do not eat or speak as you normally do.
Other food and other words will come in the silence.
Chapter 22
Al-Mutakabbir, The Majesty
There is a quality of kingliness that does not do anything, but simply is:
When the king goes hunting, the forest smiles.
Now the king has become the place, and all the players,
prey, bystanders, bow, arrow, hand and release.
A sovereign inclusiveness who, when silent, becomes eloquent. When the king stops weaving, the pattern improves. The quality is an intuitive grandeur expressed in great works of art—King Lear, Bach’s Suite for the Cello in D minor, Qian Xuan’s thirteenth-century insect screen, Early Autumn, Machu Picchu. Majesty is that abundantly generous place in consciousness that one can sometimes speak from. Storytelling gets more vivid, and luck shifts to the one who needs it. In that moment, that region, Rumi says, you might meet Shams Tabriz.
God knows what orchard you will be walking then.
THIS DAY’S GREAT WOODEN BOWL
Still dizzy from last night’s wine?
Wait a while. Do not reach yet for this we serve.
You cannot really be on the ocean
with scenes of familiar creeks
and your loved home-river in your eyes.
Wait, if you are still caught in memory.
As those with business ideas
were driven from the temple courtyard,
so bitter, self-important people need to be excluded
from the mix being stirred in this day’s great wooden bowl.
In the room with the Chinese princess, popular songs fade.
Do not boil the hard unripened grapes,
and do not sell vinegar. This moment is the perfect grape
you crush to make your life-wine interesting.
You might, in such a moment,
meet someone as I met Shams.
God knows what orchard you will be walking then.
BIRDS NESTING NEAR THE COAST
Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about shame and dignity.
You are God’s lover,
yet you worry what people are saying.
The rope the early Christians wore
to show who they were, throw it away.
Inside, you are sweet beyond telling,
and the cathedral there, so deeply tall.
Evening now, more your desire
than a woman’s hair. And not knowledge.
Walk with those innocent of that.
Faces inside fire. Birds nesting near the coast,
earning their beauty, servants to the ocean.
There is a sun within every person,
the you we call companion.
THE BRIGHT CORE OF FAILURE
Sometimes you enter the heart.
Sometimes you are born from the soul.
Sometimes you weep a song of separation.
All the same glory.
You live in beautiful forms,
and you are the energy that breaks images.
All light, neither this nor that.
Human beings go places on foot.
Angels, with wings.
Even if they find nothing but ruins and failure,
you are the bright core of that.
When angels and humans are free of wings and feet,
they will understand that you are that lack, pure absence.
You are in my eyes
like a taste of wine that blocks my understanding.
That ignorance glorifies.
You talk and feel in the talking: kingdom, finances, fire,
smoke, the senses, incense, all are your favorites.
A ship, Noah, blessings, luck,
troubles that pull us unknowingly toward treasure.
Look. He is being dragged away from his friends.
No one will see him anymore.
This is your story.
I ask you, Should I talk to this one?
Is he being drawn to me?
Silence. That too.
What is desire? What is it?
Do not laugh, my soul.
Show me the way through this desiring.
All the world loves you,
but you are nowhere to be found,
hidden and completely obvious.
You are the soul.
You boil me down in a saucepan,
then ask why I am spilling out.
This writing, the record of being torn apart in your fire,
like aloes wood, becomes most itself when burning up.
Enough talk about burning.
Everything, even the end of this poem,
is a taste of your glory.
OUTDOORS AND THE PASSION OF THE GRASS
From now on the nightingales
will sing of us sitting here outdoors,
where wind lifts the hair of the willow
and starts her dancing.
God knows what they say to each other then.
The plane tree holds out its broad hands
in praise of the meadow,
understanding just a little of the passion of the grass.
I ask the rose, Where did you get such skin?
She laughs. How could she answer?
She is drunk, but not enough to say secrets,
not so dissolute as I am.
Wander with drunks if you want to know
what they have been hiding.
They will open the purse-mouth
and spend the lavishness.
There is a wine fermenting in the breast of a mystic,
and a voice there inviting you to a banquet.
A human breast can give milk, but also wine,
and also there is a flowing there that tells stories.
Listen, as you take in the milk,
and then the wine, and then the stories.
Lay down your cap and your cloak.
Start talking from the majesty itself.
And now be quiet. Very few will hear.
Most copper does not change to gold
for any philosopher’s stone.
Bring your words to Shams.
Let sunlight mix with language and be the world.
THE PATTERN IMPROVES
When love itself comes to kiss you,
do not hold back.
When the king goes hunting, the forest smiles.
Now the king has become the place, and all the players,
prey, bystanders, bow, arrow, hand and release.
How does that feel?
Last night’s dream enters these open eyes.
When we die and turn to dust,
each particle will be whole.
You hear a mote whirl taking form?
My music. Love, calm and patient.
The friend has waded down into existence,
gotten stuck, and will not be seen again outside of this.
We sometimes make spiderwebs of smoke and saliva,
fragile thought-packets.
Leave thinking to the one who gave intelligence.
In silence there is eloquence.
Stop weaving,
and watch how the pattern improves.
THIS IS ENOUGH
Sugar merchants, I have news.
Joseph has arrived from Egypt with the essence of sweetness.
A fruit cobbler that can save your soul. Spirit wine.
And if there is something else you want, that came too.
Khidr through an open window.
Aphrodite singing ghazals.
A sky with gold streaks across.
A stick that finds water in a stone.
Jesus sitting quietly near the animals, night so peaceful.
This is enough was always true.
We just have not seen it.
The hoopoe already wears a tufted crown.
Each ant is given its elegant belt at birth.
This love we feel pours through us like giveaway song.
The source of now is here.
REMEMBER EGYPT
You who worry with travel plans,
read again the place in the Qur’an
where Moses is taking the Jewish nation out of slavery.
You so frantic to have more money,
recall what they abandoned to wander in the wilderness.
You who feel hurt by some neglect,
remember the pavilions and houses they left behind.
You that lead the community through difficulties,
read about the abundant fountains
they walked away from to have freedom.
You who dress in clothes that appear to have elegant meaning,
you with so much charm,
remember how your face will decay to dirt.
You with lots of property, read again,
They left their gardens and the quietly running streams.
You who smile at funerals going by,
you that love language, measure the wind in stanzas,
and recall the exodus, the wandering forty-year sacrifice.
Remember Egypt.
LOVE DERVISHES
It takes the courage of inner majesty to stand in this doorway,
where there is no celebrating good fortune,
where talk of luck is embarrassing.
However your robe of patches fits is right.
If you are God’s light, keep moving east to west as you have been.
Do not pretend something other than the truth.
Measuring devices do not work in this room
where the love dervishes meet.
No tradition grows here, and no soup simmers.
We sit in pure absence without expectation.
SAY I AM YOU
I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.
To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.
I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.
Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.
I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.
The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark off a stone, a flickering in metal.
Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose and nightingale lost in the fragrance.
I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift and the falling away.
What is and what is not.
You who know Jelaluddin,
You the one in all, say who I am.
Say I am you.
INWARD SKY
You are the soul, the universe,
and what animates the universe.
I live and work inside you.
I speak with what was found in the ruins of a former self.
Concealed in your garden, I have become a ladder,
propped against and leading up into the sky-dome.
Why cry for what is closer than voice?
I ask to hear the wisdom that uncovers the soul.
These four come with their answers.
Fire: You have a saucepan to cook what is raw.
Wear it like a saddle on your back.
Water: You have a spring inside.
Soak the earth.
Jupiter in its good-luck aspect: Show your talent.
Do something outside time and space.
Jupiter in its bad mood: Be consumed with jealousy.
What else is there?
Prophets come and go for one reason,
to say:
Human beings, you have a great value inside your form, a seed.
Be led by the rose inside the rose.
Doubt is part of existence.
There is no proof of the soul.
So I ask in this talking with soul, this prayer, this kindness:
When the soul leaves my body, where will these poems be?
Answer: It was like that in the beginning, before you were born,
so what are you worrying about?
Love, finish this ghazal, please.
You know which words will last.
Shams, say the meaning of the names,
the inward sky that you are.
AS RIPENESS COMES
What souls desire arrives.
We are standing up to our necks in the sacred pool.
Majesty is here.
The grains of the earth
take in something they do not understand.
Where did this come from?
It comes from where your longing comes.
From which direction?
As ripeness comes to fruit.
This answer lights a candle
in the chest of anyone who hears.
Most people only look for the way when they hurt.
Pain is a fine path to the unknowable.
But today is different.
Today the quality we call splendor
puts on human clothes, walks through the door,
closes it behind, and sits down with us
in this companionship.
LIMB-SHADOWS
You have polished the mirror that now you shine within.
Any direction I look I see your engraving.
The sun asks the inward sun, When will I see you?
At sunset.
But why does reason keep me from drowning in your love?
What use is this being rational inside majesty?
As many earrings as are in the world,
that is how many answers you give that question.
You give the questions too.
Any piece of broken pot handed me from you is gold.
Every second the call comes.
Who considers meanness within such generosity?
During the day we slip in and out of your tree
like limb-shadows.
At night we wait for dawn.
Adam rushed to be punished
because punishment was a kind of reconnection.
There is an ocean inside surging with praise for you,
but I close my eyes, hoping you will talk.
A SPRINGLIKE NIGHT IN MID-DECEMBER
Candle, wine, and friends,
on a springlike night in mid-December.
This love I have for you makes everywhere I look blaze up.
The tip of every feather burns.
A deep sweetness comes through sugarcane,
into the cut reed,
and now it is in the empty notes of the flute.
Beheaded lovers do not complain.
how one surrenders to the emptiness.
To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.
So the sea journey goes on,
and no one knows where.
Just to be held by the ocean
is the best luck we could have.
It is a total waking up.
Why should we grieve that we have been sleeping?
It does not matter how long we have been unconscious.
We are groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness around you.
the buoyancy.
BLACK TULIP
If someone claims to know my friend,
bring him or her close and let me look in the eyes.
I can recognize presence there.
You were so kind to us last night
that I felt your hand scratching behind my ears until dawn.
You are a clever pickpocket, but I have stolen more from you.
Now I hear there is an even better thief.
I leave the profession. Things are missing.
Birds fly with wings. I fly without.
I break my cup against a stone.
I tear my shirt and dig for roots. I rain.
A black tulip mocks my strangeness.
The one who teaches me is spring.
That show will open soon.
Outside, I grieve. Inside, pure laughter.
RAMADAN SILENCE1
When the Ramadan banner flies, soul restrains nature,
so it can taste its own food.
The strength of horses and the intensity of fire,
these are the powers of sacrifice.
Fasting, we honor the guest.
Clouds of courage give rain,
because it was in this month that the Qur’an rained down,
light through an opening.
Grab the rope.
Be lifted out of the body’s pit.
Announce to Egypt, Joseph of Canaan has come.
Jesus dismounts the donkey,
and the sacramental table descends.
Wash your hands. Wash your face.
Do not eat or speak as you normally do.
Other food and other words will come in the silence.
Chapter 22
Al-Mutakabbir, The Majesty
There is a quality of kingliness that does not do anything, but simply is:
When the king goes hunting, the forest smiles.
Now the king has become the place, and all the players,
prey, bystanders, bow, arrow, hand and release.
A sovereign inclusiveness who, when silent, becomes eloquent. When the king stops weaving, the pattern improves. The quality is an intuitive grandeur expressed in great works of art—King Lear, Bach’s Suite for the Cello in D minor, Qian Xuan’s thirteenth-century insect screen, Early Autumn, Machu Picchu. Majesty is that abundantly generous place in consciousness that one can sometimes speak from. Storytelling gets more vivid, and luck shifts to the one who needs it. In that moment, that region, Rumi says, you might meet Shams Tabriz.
God knows what orchard you will be walking then.
THIS DAY’S GREAT WOODEN BOWL
Still dizzy from last night’s wine?
Wait a while. Do not reach yet for this we serve.
You cannot really be on the ocean
with scenes of familiar creeks
and your loved home-river in your eyes.
Wait, if you are still caught in memory.
As those with business ideas
were driven from the temple courtyard,
so bitter, self-important people need to be excluded
from the mix being stirred in this day’s great wooden bowl.
In the room with the Chinese princess, popular songs fade.
Do not boil the hard unripened grapes,
and do not sell vinegar. This moment is the perfect grape
you crush to make your life-wine interesting.
You might, in such a moment,
meet someone as I met Shams.
God knows what orchard you will be walking then.
BIRDS NESTING NEAR THE COAST
Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about shame and dignity.
You are God’s lover,
yet you worry what people are saying.
The rope the early Christians wore
to show who they were, throw it away.
Inside, you are sweet beyond telling,
and the cathedral there, so deeply tall.
Evening now, more your desire
than a woman’s hair. And not knowledge.
Walk with those innocent of that.
Faces inside fire. Birds nesting near the coast,
earning their beauty, servants to the ocean.
There is a sun within every person,
the you we call companion.
THE BRIGHT CORE OF FAILURE
Sometimes you enter the heart.
Sometimes you are born from the soul.
Sometimes you weep a song of separation.
All the same glory.
You live in beautiful forms,
and you are the energy that breaks images.
All light, neither this nor that.
Human beings go places on foot.
Angels, with wings.
Even if they find nothing but ruins and failure,
you are the bright core of that.
When angels and humans are free of wings and feet,
they will understand that you are that lack, pure absence.
You are in my eyes
like a taste of wine that blocks my understanding.
That ignorance glorifies.
You talk and feel in the talking: kingdom, finances, fire,
smoke, the senses, incense, all are your favorites.
A ship, Noah, blessings, luck,
troubles that pull us unknowingly toward treasure.
Look. He is being dragged away from his friends.
No one will see him anymore.
This is your story.
I ask you, Should I talk to this one?
Is he being drawn to me?
Silence. That too.
What is desire? What is it?
Do not laugh, my soul.
Show me the way through this desiring.
All the world loves you,
but you are nowhere to be found,
hidden and completely obvious.
You are the soul.
You boil me down in a saucepan,
then ask why I am spilling out.
This writing, the record of being torn apart in your fire,
like aloes wood, becomes most itself when burning up.
Enough talk about burning.
Everything, even the end of this poem,
is a taste of your glory.
OUTDOORS AND THE PASSION OF THE GRASS
From now on the nightingales
will sing of us sitting here outdoors,
where wind lifts the hair of the willow
and starts her dancing.
God knows what they say to each other then.
The plane tree holds out its broad hands
in praise of the meadow,
understanding just a little of the passion of the grass.
I ask the rose, Where did you get such skin?
She laughs. How could she answer?
She is drunk, but not enough to say secrets,
not so dissolute as I am.
Wander with drunks if you want to know
what they have been hiding.
They will open the purse-mouth
and spend the lavishness.
There is a wine fermenting in the breast of a mystic,
and a voice there inviting you to a banquet.
A human breast can give milk, but also wine,
and also there is a flowing there that tells stories.
Listen, as you take in the milk,
and then the wine, and then the stories.
Lay down your cap and your cloak.
Start talking from the majesty itself.
And now be quiet. Very few will hear.
Most copper does not change to gold
for any philosopher’s stone.
Bring your words to Shams.
Let sunlight mix with language and be the world.
THE PATTERN IMPROVES
When love itself comes to kiss you,
do not hold back.
When the king goes hunting, the forest smiles.
Now the king has become the place, and all the players,
prey, bystanders, bow, arrow, hand and release.
How does that feel?
Last night’s dream enters these open eyes.
When we die and turn to dust,
each particle will be whole.
You hear a mote whirl taking form?
My music. Love, calm and patient.
The friend has waded down into existence,
gotten stuck, and will not be seen again outside of this.
We sometimes make spiderwebs of smoke and saliva,
fragile thought-packets.
Leave thinking to the one who gave intelligence.
In silence there is eloquence.
Stop weaving,
and watch how the pattern improves.
THIS IS ENOUGH
Sugar merchants, I have news.
Joseph has arrived from Egypt with the essence of sweetness.
A fruit cobbler that can save your soul. Spirit wine.
And if there is something else you want, that came too.
Khidr through an open window.
Aphrodite singing ghazals.
A sky with gold streaks across.
A stick that finds water in a stone.
Jesus sitting quietly near the animals, night so peaceful.
This is enough was always true.
We just have not seen it.
The hoopoe already wears a tufted crown.
Each ant is given its elegant belt at birth.
This love we feel pours through us like giveaway song.
The source of now is here.
REMEMBER EGYPT
You who worry with travel plans,
read again the place in the Qur’an
where Moses is taking the Jewish nation out of slavery.
You so frantic to have more money,
recall what they abandoned to wander in the wilderness.
You who feel hurt by some neglect,
remember the pavilions and houses they left behind.
You that lead the community through difficulties,
read about the abundant fountains
they walked away from to have freedom.
You who dress in clothes that appear to have elegant meaning,
you with so much charm,
remember how your face will decay to dirt.
You with lots of property, read again,
They left their gardens and the quietly running streams.
You who smile at funerals going by,
you that love language, measure the wind in stanzas,
and recall the exodus, the wandering forty-year sacrifice.
Remember Egypt.
LOVE DERVISHES
It takes the courage of inner majesty to stand in this doorway,
where there is no celebrating good fortune,
where talk of luck is embarrassing.
However your robe of patches fits is right.
If you are God’s light, keep moving east to west as you have been.
Do not pretend something other than the truth.
Measuring devices do not work in this room
where the love dervishes meet.
No tradition grows here, and no soup simmers.
We sit in pure absence without expectation.
SAY I AM YOU
I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.
To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.
I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.
Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.
I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.
The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark off a stone, a flickering in metal.
Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose and nightingale lost in the fragrance.
I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift and the falling away.
What is and what is not.
You who know Jelaluddin,
You the one in all, say who I am.
Say I am you.
INWARD SKY
You are the soul, the universe,
and what animates the universe.
I live and work inside you.
I speak with what was found in the ruins of a former self.
Concealed in your garden, I have become a ladder,
propped against and leading up into the sky-dome.
Why cry for what is closer than voice?
I ask to hear the wisdom that uncovers the soul.
These four come with their answers.
Fire: You have a saucepan to cook what is raw.
Wear it like a saddle on your back.
Water: You have a spring inside.
Soak the earth.
Jupiter in its good-luck aspect: Show your talent.
Do something outside time and space.
Jupiter in its bad mood: Be consumed with jealousy.
What else is there?
Prophets come and go for one reason,
to say:
Human beings, you have a great value inside your form, a seed.
Be led by the rose inside the rose.
Doubt is part of existence.
There is no proof of the soul.
So I ask in this talking with soul, this prayer, this kindness:
When the soul leaves my body, where will these poems be?
Answer: It was like that in the beginning, before you were born,
so what are you worrying about?
Love, finish this ghazal, please.
You know which words will last.
Shams, say the meaning of the names,
the inward sky that you are.
AS RIPENESS COMES
What souls desire arrives.
We are standing up to our necks in the sacred pool.
Majesty is here.
The grains of the earth
take in something they do not understand.
Where did this come from?
It comes from where your longing comes.
From which direction?
As ripeness comes to fruit.
This answer lights a candle
in the chest of anyone who hears.
Most people only look for the way when they hurt.
Pain is a fine path to the unknowable.
But today is different.
Today the quality we call splendor
puts on human clothes, walks through the door,
closes it behind, and sits down with us
in this companionship.
LIMB-SHADOWS
You have polished the mirror that now you shine within.
Any direction I look I see your engraving.
The sun asks the inward sun, When will I see you?
At sunset.
But why does reason keep me from drowning in your love?
What use is this being rational inside majesty?
As many earrings as are in the world,
that is how many answers you give that question.
You give the questions too.
Any piece of broken pot handed me from you is gold.
Every second the call comes.
Who considers meanness within such generosity?
During the day we slip in and out of your tree
like limb-shadows.
At night we wait for dawn.
Adam rushed to be punished
because punishment was a kind of reconnection.
There is an ocean inside surging with praise for you,
but I close my eyes, hoping you will talk.
A SPRINGLIKE NIGHT IN MID-DECEMBER
Candle, wine, and friends,
on a springlike night in mid-December.
This love I have for you makes everywhere I look blaze up.
The tip of every feather burns.
A deep sweetness comes through sugarcane,
into the cut reed,
and now it is in the empty notes of the flute.
Beheaded lovers do not complain.
