Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 36
nothing in this existence but that existence.
Do not forget the nut,
being so proud of the shell.
The body has its inward ways, the five senses.
They break open, and the friend is revealed.
Break open the friend,
you become the all-one, alone.
Keep walking, though there is no place to get to.
Do not try to see through the distances.
That is not for human beings.
Move within,
but do not move the way fear makes you move.
Walk to the well.
Turn as the earth and the moon turn,
circling what they love.
Whatever circles comes from the center.
The rose laughs at my long-looking,
my constantly wondering what a rose means,
and who owns the rose, whatever it means.
Two hands, two feet, two eyes, good,
as it should be, but no separation
between the friend and your loving.
Any dividing there makes other untrue distinctions
like Christian and Jew and Muslim.
Seeing you heals me.
Not seeing you, I feel the walls closing.
I would not wish for anyone else
such absence.
What keeps you alive without me?
How can you cry?
How can you know who you are?
How can you see?
Lost to one who seems not to care, I feel pain,
though even that is welcome from the Other,
who demands everything I am.
If I withhold it for now, as worthless,
the asking is precious.
Last night you left me and slept your own deep sleep.
Tonight you turn and turn.
I say, You and I will be together until the universe dissolves.
You mumble back
things you thought of when you were drunk.
There is no greater turbulence than unhappy love.
That is one we may never recover from.
It is not cured by hypocrisy, or courage.
A true love has nothing in it of power,
or of faithfulness.
The world is an open green in the middle of a garden.
Beings in various forms see their reflections and laugh,
love-messages flashing from every eye.
Chapter 36
Orion: The Hunter
Mythologies aside, look up and marvel scientifically at the stars in Orion’s belt, Mintaka, Alnilam, and Alnitak. Each is a supergiant, twenty times the mass of our own sun. Alnilam’s brightness is eighteen thousand times brighter than ours, and all three are about a thousand light-years away.
The Hunter is near his two companions, Big Dog and Little Dog. The game, the Hare, is at his feet.
My love hides on the path where the love-thief goes
and catches that one by the hair with my teeth.
Who are you? The love-thief asks,
but as I open my mouth to say,
he escapes into the desert.
I thought of you
and threw my glass of wine against the wall.
Now I am neither drunk nor sober,
jumping up and down, completely mad.
Our eyes do not see you,
but we have this excuse: Eyes see surface, not reality,
though we keep hoping, in this lovely place.
After being with me one whole night,
you ask how I live when you are not here.
Badly, frantically,
like a fish trying to breathe dry sand.
You weep and say, But you choose that.
There is a channel between voice and presence,
a way where information flows.
In disciplined silence the channel opens.
With wandering talk, it closes.
Day ferments. Eyes moisten with clouds.
Wind shakes trees, and they laugh,
just as the playful racket of children happens,
because mothers cry out, and fathers reach to touch.
You have said what you are.
I am what I am,
my head here in my hands
with something circling inside.
I have no name
for what circles,
so perfectly.
Why all this grief and turning pale?
Do not look at me.
Like any face reflecting other light,
the moon is a source of pain.
Someone who sees you and does not laugh out loud,
or fall silent, or explode into pieces,
is nothing more than the cement and stone
of his own prison.
Step barefooted on the ground and make it giddy,
pregnant with joking and buds.
A spring uproar rises into the stars.
The moon begins to wonder what’s going on.
Those of you in the nightsky above the moon,
try walking damp ground.
Ecstatic singers in sacred taverns,
get up at dawn. Try not sleeping.
A secret turning in us
makes the universe turn.
Head unaware of feet,
and feet head. Neither cares.
They keep turning.
So delicate yesterday,
the night-singing birds by the creek.
Their words were:
You may make a jewelry flower
out of gold and rubies and emeralds,
but it will have no fragrance.
If you have times when you do not ache with love,
you should not be here with us.
Try to stay pointed like a thorn,
so at your side there will always be roses.
The one who is your being and your nonbeing,
the essence inside joy and sadness,
your eyes must not see that one,
else you would be completely that.
Chapter 37
Leo: The Lion
Leo is a crouching lion. The recognizable sickle-shape of six stars form the lion’s jaw and neck. Pliny wrote that the Egyptians worshiped the stars of Leo, because the blessed annual inundation of the Nile (midsummer) coincided with the sun’s entrance into those stars. Nile temples were typically decorated with lions’ whisker bristles.
This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle’s eye, a turning night of stars.
Courage: a gazelle turns
to face a pack of lions.
A building that stands on bedrock stands.
Do you think my love will slump to the ground
when you leave?
Again, I am within my self.
I walked away, but here I come sailing back,
feet in the air, upsidedown,
as saint when he opens his eyes from prayer.
Now. The room, the tablecloth, familiar faces.
Listen, if you can stand to.
Union with the friend
means not being who you have been,
being instead silence, a place,
a view where language is inside seeing.
In the slaughterhouse of love, they kill only the best,
none of the weak or deformed.
Do not run away from this dying.
Whoever is not killed for love is dead meat.
Being is not what it seems,
nor nonbeing.
The world’s existence
is not in the world.
When your love reaches the core,
earth-heavals and bright irruptions spew in the air.
The universe becomes one spirit thing,
that simple, love mixing with spirit.
Who ever saw such drunkards?
Barrels broken open, the ground and starry ceiling soaked.
And look. This full glass in my hand.
No intellect denies that you are,
but no one gives in completely to that.
This is not a place where you are not,
yet not a place either where you are seen.
One day you will take me completely out of myself.
I will do what the angels cannot do.
Your eyelash will write on my cheek
the poem that has not been thought of.
Inside water, a waterwheel turns.
A star circulates with the moon.
We live in this night ocean wondering,
What are these lights?
From the wet source
someone cuts a reed to make a flute.
The reed sips breath like wine,
sips more, practicing. Now drunk,
it starts the high clear notes.
I come to you, aching for you.
You say, You are drunk. Go away.
I say, I am not drunk. Please open the door.
You say, You are. You are . . .
Go away.
We do not have to follow the pressure-flow of wanting.
We can be led by the guide.
Wishes may or may not come true
in this house of disappointment.
Let’s push the door open together
and leave.
There is a path from me to you
that I am constantly looking for,
so I try to keep clear and still
as water does with the moon.
Your love kills Turk and Arab.
I am slave to a martyr.
Your love keeps saying, No one escapes me.
You are right, my heart replies.
You that trade the pearl of your essence for a loaf,
you that find your heart in a crust of barley bread,
Nimrod also made such a mistake,
rejecting friendship with Abraham.
Later he fell in love with a mosquito.
My essence is like the essence of a red wine.
My body is a cup that grieves because it is inside time.
Glass after glass of wine go into my head.
Finally, my head goes into the wine.
Chapter 38
The Milky Way: Our Home Address Seen from the Side
The disk-shaped spiral galaxy we live in is 100,000 light-years across and 10,000 light-years thick. It contains about 400 billion stars. Our solar system is in an outer edge of one of the spiraling arms. This galaxy was named by the Romans, who saw it as a Milky Road (via) across the sky. It is fitting that Chaucer’s road from the Southwark tavern toward Canterbury was known to the common people as the Milky Way. We are all Canterbury pilgrims.
At first, I sang and recited poems,
keeping the neighbors awake.
Now more intense, quieter.
When fire flames up, smoke vanishes.
When you confine, I am free.
If you rebuke, I am honored.
Your dividing blade is love.
Your moaning, song.
Listen to the presences inside poems.
Let them take you where they will.
Follow those private hints,
and never leave the premises.
Drunks fear the police,
but the police are drunk too.
People in this town love them both
like different chess pieces.
Night goes back to where it was.
Everyone returns home sometime.
Night, when you get there,
tell them how I love you.
Night comes so people can sleep like fish
in black water. Then day.
Some people pick up their tools.
Others become the making itself.
A voice inside both of us sings out,1
a few lines from Khusraw, a stanza from Shirin.
At times a calm voice excites us.
Other times excited words make us quiet.
The morning wind spreads its fresh smell.
We must get up to take that in,
that wind that lets us live.
Breathe, before it’s gone.
I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things.
Where is a foot worthy to walk a garden
or an eye that deserves to look at trees?
Show me a man
willing to be thrown in the fire.
You speak and I start laughing.
Corpses come to life.
I am trying not to talk gibberish today,
though totally lost and wandering.
No one is ever depressed with you.
Those receiving light give out light.
Secrets cannot be kept
from a confidante.
I went to the doctor.
I feel lost, blind with love.
What should I do?
Give up owning things and being somebody.
Quit existing.
Longing is the core of the mystery.
Longing itself brings the cure.
The only rule is, Suffer the pain.
Your desire must be disciplined,
and what you want to happen in time, sacrificed.
Do not let your heart get rusty with grief,
and do not stay long with those
who are not in the presence.
A piece of dry bread and some watercress are enough.
Do not swagger yourself out in public
like the awn does, the spike tip at the top of a wheat stalk.
In the night when union comes,
a lover is lost inside what leaves no trace.
In that night the lover sees the stars from the inside out,
as the lightpoints in his eyes, her eyes.
Dust mote in sunlight,
fear giving in to peaceful breathing,
that is how I am with you,
flying without wings,
drawn like straw to amber.
Colorless words come from red lips,
coral being covered with playful life,
bright places in the flame of a torch.
We cannot talk as he talked.
Who cares what we call this thing that is hurting us,
this grief on the ground like a walnut?
Empty, we crush it. We are the heart.
I have tested my friend.
No spring-melt flood can make that river
other than it is, clear, majestic.
Only one day, I saw him frown.
I love him when he is alive. I love him dead.
Moses had a strange shepherd’s staff.
When he threw it down, it separated out from the flock
those who live by aggression and those who hope for wealth.
The remnant went on with him through the wilderness.
Very few will understand this.
Have you heard the old advice?
For the two or three days before you die,
try hard for those days, to die.
It is probably good counsel,
the world being like an old woman
who has survived so many husbands,
more than you could ever imagine.
Do not waste your last days
talking to her.
Chapter 39
Bijou: The Black Hole
The black hole at the center of our galaxy has no name. I propose we call it Bijou, French for “jewel.” We have a dark jewel turning majestically at the center of our home.
The theory now is that every galaxy has a nucleus, a black hole, and that the astonishing gravitational pull of the condensed energy of the one in the Milky Way gives our galaxy its spiral shape. The most powerful black hole discovered so far is called QSU B0827.9+5255. It contains more energy than a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) of our suns and 63,000 of our galaxies. I love to hear scientists talk about black holes, the event horizon, and possible wormholes into other universes. A black hole is the most physically extreme object in the universe, a maelstrom of unbelievable density. Black-hole research is one of those edges over which science and mysticism gaze with the same awe.
