Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 29
but I want to be home.
We have seen enough beautiful places
with signs on them saying, This Is God’s House.
That is seeing grain like the ants do,
without the work of harvesting.
Let’s leave grazing to cows
and go where we know what everyone really intends,
where we can walk around without clothes on.
AN EMPTY GARLIC
You miss the garden,
because you want a small fig from a random tree.
You do not meet the beautiful woman.
You are joking with an old crone.
It makes me want to cry how she detains you,
stinking-mouthed, with a hundred talons,
putting her head over the roof edge to call down,
tasteless fig, fold over fold, empty
as dry-rotten garlic.
She has you tight by the belt,
even though there is no flower and no milk in her body.
Death will open your eyes to what her face is.
Leather spine of a black lizard.
No more advice.
Let yourself be silently drawn
by the stronger pull of what you really love.
INSIDE SIGHT
You are the king’s son.
Why do you close yourself up?
Become a lover.
Do not aspire to be a general
or a minister of state.
One is a boredom for you,
the other a disgrace.
You have been a picture on a bathhouse wall long enough.
No one recognizes you here, do they?
God’s lion disguised as a human being.
I saw that and put down the book I was studying,
Hariri’s Maqamat.
There is no early and late for us.
The only way to measure a lover
is by the grandeur of the beloved.
Judge a moth by the beauty of its candle.
Shams is invisible because he is inside sight.
He is the intelligent essence
of what is everywhere at once, seeing.
NO ROOM FOR FORM
On the night when you cross the street
from your shop and your house to the cemetery,
you will hear me hailing you from inside the open grave,
and you will realize how we have always been together.
I am the clear consciousness-core of your being,
the same in ecstasy as in self-hating fatigue.
That night, when you escape the fear of snakebite
and all irritation with the ants,
you will hear my familiar voice,
see the candle being lit, smell the incense,
the surprise meal fixed
by the lover inside all your other lovers.
This heart-tumult is my signal to you
igniting in the tomb.
So don’t fuss with the shroud
and the graveyard road dust.
Those get ripped open and washed away
in the music of our finally meeting.
And don’t look for me in a human shape.
I am inside your looking.
No room for form with love this strong.
Beat the drum and let the poets speak.
This is a day of purification
for those who are already mature
and initiated into what love is.
No need to wait until we die.
There is more to want here than money
and being famous and bites of roasted meat.
Now, what shall we call this new sort of gazing-house
that has opened in our town
where people sit quietly and pour out their glancing
like light, like answering?
Chapter 25
Al-Wadud, The Loving
All of the qualities signified by the names of God infuse and inform the others, but this one, love, is especially pervasive. Love is the whole. It is more than human, more than imagination, more than relationship. It leads into nonexistence, absence. A flowering, a rose underfoot, roses under all our feet, the absurdity no image can contain. Candleflame become moth. The pearl diver does not know how to swim. Pearls are brought to him where he sits on the beach. The sun is completely generous with its light. The parts and the whole are equals.
MORE IS REQUIRED
You have disappeared into the way?
Leave even that behind.
Sit with the essence inside love.
In that Chinese mirror you will see hundreds
of sword blades. Do not be afraid to use them.
You have given up everything.
You must live in absence. More is required.
Mix an eye medicine with the ground.
Sweep the memory pictures clean.
Swing down and cut.
A voice comes in the broken place.
Pull the tree-wing up by its roots.
Love wants an arm and a leg.
WHAT IS THE HEART?
What is the heart?
It is not human and it is not imaginary.
I call it you.
Stately bird, who one moment combines with this world,
and the next, passes through the boundary to the unseen.
The soul cannot find you,
because you are the soul’s wings, how it moves.
Eyes cannot see you.
You are the source of sight.
You are the one thing that repentance will not repent,
nor news report.
Spring comes. One seed refuses to germinate
and start being a tree. One poor piece of wood
blackens but will not catch fire.
The alchemist wonders at a bit of copper
that resists turning to gold.
Who am I that I am with you
and still myself?
When the sun comes up,
the complicated nightmind of the constellations fades.
Snow-forms do not last through July.
The heart quality embodied by our master, Shams Tabriz,
will always dissolve the old quarrel between those
who believe in the dignity of a human being’s decisions
and those who claim that those are all illusion.
SECRET PLACES
Lovers find secret places inside this violent world
where they make transactions with beauty.
Reason says, Nonsense.
I have walked and measured the walls here.
There are no places like that.
Love says, There are.
Reason sets up a market and begins doing business.
Love has more hidden work.
Hallaj steps away from the pulpit
and climbs the stairs of the gallows.
Lovers feel a truth inside themselves
that rational people keep denying.
It is reasonable to say, Surrender is just an idea
that keeps people from living their lives.
Love responds, No.
This thinking is what is dangerous.
Using language obscures what Shams came to give.
Every day the sun rises
out of low word-clouds into burning silence.
NO EXPECTATIONS
A spirit that lives in this world
and does not wear the shirt of love,
such an existence is a deep disgrace.
Be foolishly in love,
because love is all there is.
There is no way into presence,
except through a love exchange.
If someone asks, But what is love?
Answer, Dissolving the will.
True freedom comes to those who have escaped
the questions of freewill and fate.
Love is an emperor.
The two worlds play across him.
He barely notices their tumbling game.
Love and lover live in eternity.
Other desires are substitutes for that way of being.
How long do you lay embracing a corpse?
Love rather the soul, which cannot be held.
Anything born in spring dies in fall,
but love is not seasonal.
With wine pressed from grapes,
expect a hangover.
But this path has no expectations.
You are uneasy riding the body?
Dismount. Travel lighter.
Wings will be given.
Be clear like a mirror reflecting nothing.
Be clean of pictures
and the worry that comes with images.
Gaze into what is not ashamed
or afraid of any truth.
Contain all human faces in your own
without any judgment of them.
Be pure emptiness.
What is inside that? you ask.
Silence is all I can say.
Lovers have some secrets that they keep.
GONE FOR GOOD
I have stumbled over buried treasure again.
What I thought came first comes last.
How shall we celebrate?
Do not expect your heart to return.
When it is dissolved in love,
it is gone for good.
Fire-messengers come running.
All troubles begin here.
There is no sleep left in me,
nor any eyesight.
It is possible my head is a pumpkin,
full of red wine.
I sit at table tasting bread and milk.
It is myself I taste.
I dip a jar in the ocean.
Filled containers become seawater.
At the evening prayer time I go to see a friend,
who looks out of an upstairs window and comes down.
We grow quiet.
Our souls become one another and Shams Tabriz.
I ROCKED MY OWN CHEST
Yesterday I sent a message
as clear and steady as a star.
You that turn stones to gold,
change me.
I showed you the longing
and rocked my own chest
like an infant to hush it from crying.
Undo your breast.
Take me back to love’s first place,
where we were in union.
How much longer do I have to wander apart?
I will be quiet now and patient,
waiting for you to turn and look.
MIDNIGHT AND SUNRISE
This midnight restlessness does not originate on earth.
No headache, no fever, no black bile, no dropsy,
but it seems epidemic, this love.
No advice helps, no cool restraint.
This intensity is invisible.
Have you seen this love? Or heard it?
There are no chants to chant. Keep silent.
No theatrical magic.
Shams Tabriz is the source
that can melt this diseased and frozen world,
as now his healing splendor rises.
WATCH A ONE-YEAR-OLD
Anger rises when you are proud of yourself.
Humble that. Use the contempt of others,
and your own self-regarding, to change,
like the cloud in folklore that became three snake shapes.
Or if you like the dog-barking lion wrath,
enjoy the hurt longer.
Watch a one-year-old, how he walks,
the slow wisdom there.
Sometimes a sweet taste makes you sour and mean.
Listen for the voice that says,
It was for you I created the universe.
Then kill and be killed in love.
You have been two dogs dozing long enough.
ROSES UNDERFOOT
The sound of salaams rising as waves diminish down in prayer,
hoping for some trace of the one whose trace does not appear.
If anyone asks you to say who you are,
say without hesitation, Soul within soul within soul.
There is a pearl diver who does not know how to swim.
No matter. Pearls are handed him on the beach.
We lovers laugh to hear, “This should be more that,
and that more this,” coming from people
sitting in a wagon tilted in a ditch.
Going in search of the heart, I found a huge rose
under my feet, and roses under all our feet.
How to say this to someone who denies it?
The robe we wear is the sky’s cloth.
Everything is soul and flowering.
WILDER THAN WE EVER
The one who pours is wilder than we ever become drinking,
wilder than wine, the one who fills to the brim
and leaves to live in absence with a toast,
Go home. There is nothing for you here.
A pearl in the shell does not touch the ocean.
Be a pearl without a shell, a mindful flooding,
candle turned moth, head become empty jar,
bird settling nest, love lived.
NOT HERE
There is courage involved if you want to become truth.
There is a broken-open place in a lover.
Where are those qualities of bravery and sharp compassion
in this group? What’s the use of old and frozen thought?
I want a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored. This is for copper.
We alchemists look for talent that can heat up and change.
Lukewarm won’t do. Half-hearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.
ONE SWAYING BEING
Love is not condescension, never that, nor books,
nor any marking on paper, nor what people say of each other.
Love is a tree with branches reaching into eternity,
and roots set deep in eternity, and no trunk.
Have you seen it? The mind cannot. Your desiring cannot.
The longing you feel for this love comes from inside you.
When you become the friend,
your longing will be as the man in the ocean
who holds to a piece of wood.
Eventually wood, man, and ocean
become one swaying being,
Shams Tabriz, the secret of God.
A TRACE
You that give new life to this planet,
you that transcend logic, come.
I am only an arrow.
Fill your bow with me and let fly.
Because of this love for you
my bowl has fallen from the roof.
Put down a ladder and collect the pieces, please.
People ask, But which roof is your roof?
I answer, Wherever the soul came from,
and wherever it goes at night, my roof is in that direction.
From wherever spring arrives to heal the ground,
from wherever searching rises in a human being.
The looking itself is a trace of what we are looking for,
but we have been more like the man who sat on his donkey
and asked the donkey where to go.
Be quiet now and wait.
It may be that the ocean one,
that we desire so to move into and become,
desires us out here on land a little longer
going our sundry roads to the shore.
NO OCCUPATION
I have no occupation other than this love.
I do not need to smell every rose and touch every thorn.
You are seeing through my eyes and tasting with my tongue.
Now that I have had this honey,
why should I sell vinegar?
Why should I do anything?
After breakfast at the king’s table,
there is no appetite for lunch.
I do not complain, and I do not brag about ascetic practices.
I would explain this, but there are no words.
There is nothing to grieve about.
Those of you who have no trace of this madness,
tell me how you are.
I have forgotten how it is to say how I am.
Since Shams has shone on me, I have no interest
in describing the moon as it rises over the dormitory roof.
FRESH ROOTS
Be with those who help your being.
Do not sit with indifferent people,
whose breath comes cold out of their mouths.
Not these visible forms.
Your work is deeper.
A chunk of dirt thrown in the air breaks to pieces.
If you do not try to fly, and so break yourself apart,
you will be broken open by death,
when it is too late for all you could become.
Leaves get yellow.
The tree puts out fresh roots and makes new green.
Why are you so content with a love that turns you yellow?
A CONSTANT CONVERSATION
I am here by the gate.
Maybe you will throw open a door and call.
I am drenched with being here.
Things dissolve around me,
but I am still sitting here.
