Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 6
The inside of an egg, the outside of a date.
What about your inside and outside?
The same way a branch draws water up many feet,
God is pulling your soul along.
Wind carries pollen from blossom to ground.
Wings and Arabian stallions gallop toward the warmth of spring.
They visit. They sing and tell what they think they know.
So-and-so will travel to such-and-such.
The hoopoe carries a letter to Solomon.
The wise stork says lek-lek. Please translate.
It is time to go to the high plain, to leave the winter house.
Be your own watchman as birds are.
Let the remembering beads encircle you.
I make promises to myself and break them.
Words are coins. The veins of ore and the mineshaft,
what they speak of. Now consider the sun.
It is neither oriental nor occidental.
Only the soul knows what love is.
This moment in time and space is an eggshell
with an embryo crumpled inside, soaked in belief-yolk,
under the wing of grace, until it breaks free of mind
to become the song of an actual bird, and God.
YOU SO HIDDEN
You so subtle that you enter silently our souls,
how would it be if you for a time were here on earth?
You so hidden you are hidden from hidden things,
when you enter me, my hiddenness shines like a lantern.
You Solomon, who understands bird language,
and can speak it, what will you say through me?
King whose bow no one can draw,
use me for an arrow.
Shams, you are the way I know God.
Walk into this copper mine and turn it to gold.
THE TENT
Outside, the freezing desert night.
This other night grows warm, kindling.
Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
We have a soft garden in here.
The continents blasted, cities and little towns,
everything become a scorched blacked ball.
The news we hear is full of grief for that future,
but the real news inside here is
there is no news at all.
PRIVACY
Who is this standing in my house?
He signals with his hand,
What do you want from me?
Nourishment, and the privacy of one truth.
There are so many deceptive people
pretending to be faithful.
Do not sit among them,
eyes shut like a bud, mouth open like a rose.
The world is a mirror, an imaging of love’s perfection.
No man has ever seen a part greater than the whole.
Go on foot through this garden like the grass does.
Only the rose is riding, all the rest on foot.
Rose, both sword and swordsman.
Reason in the abstract, and reasoning in each of us.
Generous Saladin, let your hand be
a constant necklace on my neck.
THIS SPLASHING AROUND
There are people with rooms full of gold.
You can see how rich they are,
but how is it when mystical wealth shows in the face?
A lover moans for the friend,
and a rosebush leaps from the ground
to see what is happening.
Take off your clothes and jump in the pool.
Escape the forehead pressure of mind.
We used to think this splashing around was foolish.
Then came a wink, and we were done for.
How long do you stay jealous and angry?
Let two or three sad songs rise from your chest.
Or just keep doing as you are now.
Maybe in your loud confusion
the world will disappear and the curtain will lift.
Passion breaks loose. Now silence.
The love-king says, It takes courage to keep the deep self quiet.
DRUM
In this drumbeat moment of red flowers opening
and grapes being crushed,
the soul and luminous clarity sit together.
All desire wants is a taste of you, this moment
that is like two small mountain villages
where everyone longs for presence.
We start to step up. A step appears.
You say, I am more compassionate than your father and mother.
I make medicine out of your pain.
From your chimney smoke I shape new constellations.
I tell everything, but I do not say it,
because, my friend,
it is better that your secret be spoken by you.
WHEREVER HE IS MOVING
Lovers turn to fire and a circulating star.
The sun rises. Stars disappear.
We cannot see the sun’s face today.
Wandering, not worth much,
every morning we hear a call and go toward that,
divided into thirty parts,
drowned in our own embryo blood,
ground fine in the mill of experience.
There are no rules in this valley,
no mind but madness within madness,
with all of it inside Shams-love,
wherever he is moving.
THIS SOUP
You have that quality that God has,
when you enter a house at night,
it glows with many lamps being lit.
When you come into a human being, the same thing.
You have the quality of wine.
The assembly kindles as you are being passed around.
And when passion is gone,
the first excited flush over,
you are there carrying water quietly
to the grasses and the rosebush.
When the visible world freezes,
you open the other.
You give urgency to longing.
How else would the dark ground ever meet the sky radiance
that serves it by bringing water and by constantly sifting,
but not as prospectors sift for metals.
You are the mine and the touchstone.
We point our prayer rugs toward you.
Why do you worship us?
It is no wonder when a beggar visits a king,
but this is the king begging the beggar,
so that the beggar thinks he is king.
Sky, why are you night and day
constantly attending this lowliness?
The sky answers, All motion has a reason.
I am being drawn.
This poetry nourishes the angels.
When I am silent, they come hungry to me,
Speak. Feed us, please.
But you are not an angel.
Why are you listening?
Is this your food too?
Would you like some chives with it?
How could you possibly want this soup
that the mystery keeps simmering all day
in the kitchen of my brain, chopping and adding things to it.
Shams, turn your face here.
No. I have said that wrong.
The sun is all face,
always facing everywhere.
There is no back
of the head to Shams.
WHAT THE SUN SAYS RISING4
A love for what is unseen has taken my mind away.
That horse has carried me here, but where am I?
I come to an archway
through which I see a world with no sun and no moon.
Let me rest a minute,
to let my mind come back and help me describe it to you.
Listen carefully,
for I shall speak of the soul,
and you are the soul.
Come closer.
Put your ear against my mouth.
The most secret mystery is this love.
And the next is how lamps of vision are lit through the ear.
Khidr the guide goes with you to the clear spring,
so that like water you too may scatter light.
Zuleikha grew young in her love for Joseph.
The old world gets energy from this star.
Taste for a moment a piece of the whole
and understand who you are.
You have fallen into mouths.
People are chewing you.
You are delicious well-baked bread.
Dance, when light takes your hand.
Do not stay cold and heavy like wet sand.
The sun comes up saying,
You are not a goat standing on its hindlegs
about to butt a rival.
You are the shepherd of lions.
Light the candles of your five senses
from the fire that is in your heart.
Those senses are the five players you control.
Your love is a deeply memorized verse,
something you will never forget.
In every dawn a voice comes that says,
Let the road dust settle.
Now, be led.
Do not be afraid of the horse,
like someone who does not want to go anywhere.
Sweetness says,
Open your mouth.
Do not stay shut.
Enjoy the taste.
Do not just talk about joy,
as you tell other people’s stories.
Worship the sun in this friendship with Shams,
who is a master of spirit science,
and the sun within the light of daylit places.
Chapter 4
Al-Khabir, The Aware, The Knowing
The names of God are qualities that live in the core of our being. Khabir is the aspect that knows we will live through death, the part that burns and becomes fragrance for a while, then disappears into absence. Dying gives the soul more range, allows it to perch on a cliff of the wind with an awareness that is deeper than love. Shams Tabriz carries this in his presence. A profound gladness fills the human psyche when it knows the part of the self that does not die. A moth builds with its surrender a house to live in made of candlelight. Education and custom dissolve to a piece of a rosy shell.
THE KNOTS UNTIE
Fire is whispering a secret in smoke’s ear,
This aloes wood loves me,
because I help it live out its purpose.
With me it becomes fragrance,
and then disappears altogether.
The knots untie and open into absence,
as you do with me, my friend,
eaten by flame and smoked out into the sky.
This is most fortunate. What is unlucky
is not to change and disappear.
The black soil must crumble to give itself to plants.
Think how sperm and egg become a smiling face.
Bread must dissolve to turn into thought.
Gold and silver in their raw forms are not worth much.
This way leads through humiliation and contempt.
We have tried the fullness of presence.
Now it is time for desolation.
Love is pulling us out by the ears to school.
Love wants us clean of resentment
and those impulses that misguide our souls.
We are asleep, but Khidr keeps sprinkling water
on our faces. Love will tell us the rest
of what we need to know soon.
Then we will be deeply asleep and profoundly awake
simultaneously like the cave companions.
SOLOMON ANT
This feverish desiring does not calm down,
because God does not want it to.
Wishes and wantings come from there.
When my shirt is wet, blame the sea.
We soul-fish swim among the fishing lines
of what we want, unable to imagine
the beauty of the fisherpeople jiggling the hooks.
God was here before the universe.
What desire brought us into being?
I do not know. It is enough that we go straight
for what and whom we are drawn to.
No. There is no crooked or straight with this,
though we persist in judging actions and their source:
Bad, bad, good, bad, good.
Think of an ant that wants to fly. Wonderful.
He digs at the palace wall. He claims to be Solomon.
He demands a crown. This is how we are.
We are not what we are wanting,
and yet somehow the longings are not apart from us.
Shams, will you untie this knot?
WATER FROM THE WELL OF THE SOUL
This world-river has no water in it.
Come back, spring.
Bring water more fresh than Khidr or Elijah knew,
from the fountain that pulses in the well of the soul.
Where water is, there bread arrives.
But not the reverse.
Water never comes from loaves.
You are the honored guest.
Do not weep like a beggar for pieces of the world.
The river vanishes because of that desiring.
Swim out of your pond.
Go where all the fish are Khidrs,
where there are no secondary causes.
That water rises in the date tree,
and in the roses in your cheek.
When it flows toward you,
you will feel deep contentment.
The nightwatchman shakes his rattle
as part of his fear.
You will not need him anymore.
Water itself guards the fish that are in it.
TALKING TO THE LUCK-BIRD
Your jasmine body shrugs a signal to me.
My soul flies against the constraining cage.
Now the luck-bird’s shadow is overhead.
I shout, Go away. You are not part of this.
Oh really? Says the bird of good and bad circumstances.
You refuse happiness? You anticipate no troubles?
These wittering worries and wishes
keep human beings apart from the friend.
I want the face itself.
As I say that, the luck-bird goes wild for jasmine.
Now the fortune-teller and the enlightened teacher,
the body and the soul, are as crazed as I am.
A BEAUTIFUL WALK INSIDE YOU
Through this blood veil the lover sees a beautiful walk.
Reason says, There are only six directions.
North, east, south, west, up, and down.
There is no way out of those limits.
Love says, But I have many times escaped.
Reason comes to a marketplace and begins haggling prices.
Love wanders away with other business to transact,
something to do with incomparable beauty.
There are secret things happening.
Hallaj listens to whispers
and walks off the speaker’s platform onto a scaffold.
Dreg-drinkers have love perceptions
that reasonable men fiercely deny.
They say, We cannot go barefooted in that courtyard.
There is nothing but thorns through there.
Love answers, The thorns are inside you.
Be silent, and pull what hurts out of your loving’s foot.
Then you will see gardens and secluded rose bowers,
and they will all be inside you.
Shams is the sun obscured by this cloud of words.
Maybe he will burn the overcast off
and let love clear and brighten.
MORE RANGE
We are friends with the one who kills us,
who gives us to the ocean waves.
We love this death. Only ignorance would say,
Put it off a while, day after tomorrow.
Do not avoid the knife.
This friend only seems fierce,
bringing your soul more range,
perching your falcon on a cliff of the wind.
Jesus on his cross, Hallaj on his—
those absurd killings hold a secret.
Cautious cynics know what they are doing
every moment and why.
Submit to love without thinking,
as the sun this morning rose recklessly
extinguishing our star-candle minds.
KNOWLEDGE BEYOND LOVE
Shams has knowledge beyond love,
an emptiness like air.
This saddens and confuses me.
Wandering bits of wood in ocean water.
There is a change that lets Jesus be born every breath.
Mention Shams and your talking and writing
will be lit from within.
You believe that this I say and write is blood
and must not be spilled, a lonely circulation.
My intellect lies in the hallway listening to language
as if there were a group playing music outside.
I do not say that my mind ignores my soul,
What about your inside and outside?
The same way a branch draws water up many feet,
God is pulling your soul along.
Wind carries pollen from blossom to ground.
Wings and Arabian stallions gallop toward the warmth of spring.
They visit. They sing and tell what they think they know.
So-and-so will travel to such-and-such.
The hoopoe carries a letter to Solomon.
The wise stork says lek-lek. Please translate.
It is time to go to the high plain, to leave the winter house.
Be your own watchman as birds are.
Let the remembering beads encircle you.
I make promises to myself and break them.
Words are coins. The veins of ore and the mineshaft,
what they speak of. Now consider the sun.
It is neither oriental nor occidental.
Only the soul knows what love is.
This moment in time and space is an eggshell
with an embryo crumpled inside, soaked in belief-yolk,
under the wing of grace, until it breaks free of mind
to become the song of an actual bird, and God.
YOU SO HIDDEN
You so subtle that you enter silently our souls,
how would it be if you for a time were here on earth?
You so hidden you are hidden from hidden things,
when you enter me, my hiddenness shines like a lantern.
You Solomon, who understands bird language,
and can speak it, what will you say through me?
King whose bow no one can draw,
use me for an arrow.
Shams, you are the way I know God.
Walk into this copper mine and turn it to gold.
THE TENT
Outside, the freezing desert night.
This other night grows warm, kindling.
Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
We have a soft garden in here.
The continents blasted, cities and little towns,
everything become a scorched blacked ball.
The news we hear is full of grief for that future,
but the real news inside here is
there is no news at all.
PRIVACY
Who is this standing in my house?
He signals with his hand,
What do you want from me?
Nourishment, and the privacy of one truth.
There are so many deceptive people
pretending to be faithful.
Do not sit among them,
eyes shut like a bud, mouth open like a rose.
The world is a mirror, an imaging of love’s perfection.
No man has ever seen a part greater than the whole.
Go on foot through this garden like the grass does.
Only the rose is riding, all the rest on foot.
Rose, both sword and swordsman.
Reason in the abstract, and reasoning in each of us.
Generous Saladin, let your hand be
a constant necklace on my neck.
THIS SPLASHING AROUND
There are people with rooms full of gold.
You can see how rich they are,
but how is it when mystical wealth shows in the face?
A lover moans for the friend,
and a rosebush leaps from the ground
to see what is happening.
Take off your clothes and jump in the pool.
Escape the forehead pressure of mind.
We used to think this splashing around was foolish.
Then came a wink, and we were done for.
How long do you stay jealous and angry?
Let two or three sad songs rise from your chest.
Or just keep doing as you are now.
Maybe in your loud confusion
the world will disappear and the curtain will lift.
Passion breaks loose. Now silence.
The love-king says, It takes courage to keep the deep self quiet.
DRUM
In this drumbeat moment of red flowers opening
and grapes being crushed,
the soul and luminous clarity sit together.
All desire wants is a taste of you, this moment
that is like two small mountain villages
where everyone longs for presence.
We start to step up. A step appears.
You say, I am more compassionate than your father and mother.
I make medicine out of your pain.
From your chimney smoke I shape new constellations.
I tell everything, but I do not say it,
because, my friend,
it is better that your secret be spoken by you.
WHEREVER HE IS MOVING
Lovers turn to fire and a circulating star.
The sun rises. Stars disappear.
We cannot see the sun’s face today.
Wandering, not worth much,
every morning we hear a call and go toward that,
divided into thirty parts,
drowned in our own embryo blood,
ground fine in the mill of experience.
There are no rules in this valley,
no mind but madness within madness,
with all of it inside Shams-love,
wherever he is moving.
THIS SOUP
You have that quality that God has,
when you enter a house at night,
it glows with many lamps being lit.
When you come into a human being, the same thing.
You have the quality of wine.
The assembly kindles as you are being passed around.
And when passion is gone,
the first excited flush over,
you are there carrying water quietly
to the grasses and the rosebush.
When the visible world freezes,
you open the other.
You give urgency to longing.
How else would the dark ground ever meet the sky radiance
that serves it by bringing water and by constantly sifting,
but not as prospectors sift for metals.
You are the mine and the touchstone.
We point our prayer rugs toward you.
Why do you worship us?
It is no wonder when a beggar visits a king,
but this is the king begging the beggar,
so that the beggar thinks he is king.
Sky, why are you night and day
constantly attending this lowliness?
The sky answers, All motion has a reason.
I am being drawn.
This poetry nourishes the angels.
When I am silent, they come hungry to me,
Speak. Feed us, please.
But you are not an angel.
Why are you listening?
Is this your food too?
Would you like some chives with it?
How could you possibly want this soup
that the mystery keeps simmering all day
in the kitchen of my brain, chopping and adding things to it.
Shams, turn your face here.
No. I have said that wrong.
The sun is all face,
always facing everywhere.
There is no back
of the head to Shams.
WHAT THE SUN SAYS RISING4
A love for what is unseen has taken my mind away.
That horse has carried me here, but where am I?
I come to an archway
through which I see a world with no sun and no moon.
Let me rest a minute,
to let my mind come back and help me describe it to you.
Listen carefully,
for I shall speak of the soul,
and you are the soul.
Come closer.
Put your ear against my mouth.
The most secret mystery is this love.
And the next is how lamps of vision are lit through the ear.
Khidr the guide goes with you to the clear spring,
so that like water you too may scatter light.
Zuleikha grew young in her love for Joseph.
The old world gets energy from this star.
Taste for a moment a piece of the whole
and understand who you are.
You have fallen into mouths.
People are chewing you.
You are delicious well-baked bread.
Dance, when light takes your hand.
Do not stay cold and heavy like wet sand.
The sun comes up saying,
You are not a goat standing on its hindlegs
about to butt a rival.
You are the shepherd of lions.
Light the candles of your five senses
from the fire that is in your heart.
Those senses are the five players you control.
Your love is a deeply memorized verse,
something you will never forget.
In every dawn a voice comes that says,
Let the road dust settle.
Now, be led.
Do not be afraid of the horse,
like someone who does not want to go anywhere.
Sweetness says,
Open your mouth.
Do not stay shut.
Enjoy the taste.
Do not just talk about joy,
as you tell other people’s stories.
Worship the sun in this friendship with Shams,
who is a master of spirit science,
and the sun within the light of daylit places.
Chapter 4
Al-Khabir, The Aware, The Knowing
The names of God are qualities that live in the core of our being. Khabir is the aspect that knows we will live through death, the part that burns and becomes fragrance for a while, then disappears into absence. Dying gives the soul more range, allows it to perch on a cliff of the wind with an awareness that is deeper than love. Shams Tabriz carries this in his presence. A profound gladness fills the human psyche when it knows the part of the self that does not die. A moth builds with its surrender a house to live in made of candlelight. Education and custom dissolve to a piece of a rosy shell.
THE KNOTS UNTIE
Fire is whispering a secret in smoke’s ear,
This aloes wood loves me,
because I help it live out its purpose.
With me it becomes fragrance,
and then disappears altogether.
The knots untie and open into absence,
as you do with me, my friend,
eaten by flame and smoked out into the sky.
This is most fortunate. What is unlucky
is not to change and disappear.
The black soil must crumble to give itself to plants.
Think how sperm and egg become a smiling face.
Bread must dissolve to turn into thought.
Gold and silver in their raw forms are not worth much.
This way leads through humiliation and contempt.
We have tried the fullness of presence.
Now it is time for desolation.
Love is pulling us out by the ears to school.
Love wants us clean of resentment
and those impulses that misguide our souls.
We are asleep, but Khidr keeps sprinkling water
on our faces. Love will tell us the rest
of what we need to know soon.
Then we will be deeply asleep and profoundly awake
simultaneously like the cave companions.
SOLOMON ANT
This feverish desiring does not calm down,
because God does not want it to.
Wishes and wantings come from there.
When my shirt is wet, blame the sea.
We soul-fish swim among the fishing lines
of what we want, unable to imagine
the beauty of the fisherpeople jiggling the hooks.
God was here before the universe.
What desire brought us into being?
I do not know. It is enough that we go straight
for what and whom we are drawn to.
No. There is no crooked or straight with this,
though we persist in judging actions and their source:
Bad, bad, good, bad, good.
Think of an ant that wants to fly. Wonderful.
He digs at the palace wall. He claims to be Solomon.
He demands a crown. This is how we are.
We are not what we are wanting,
and yet somehow the longings are not apart from us.
Shams, will you untie this knot?
WATER FROM THE WELL OF THE SOUL
This world-river has no water in it.
Come back, spring.
Bring water more fresh than Khidr or Elijah knew,
from the fountain that pulses in the well of the soul.
Where water is, there bread arrives.
But not the reverse.
Water never comes from loaves.
You are the honored guest.
Do not weep like a beggar for pieces of the world.
The river vanishes because of that desiring.
Swim out of your pond.
Go where all the fish are Khidrs,
where there are no secondary causes.
That water rises in the date tree,
and in the roses in your cheek.
When it flows toward you,
you will feel deep contentment.
The nightwatchman shakes his rattle
as part of his fear.
You will not need him anymore.
Water itself guards the fish that are in it.
TALKING TO THE LUCK-BIRD
Your jasmine body shrugs a signal to me.
My soul flies against the constraining cage.
Now the luck-bird’s shadow is overhead.
I shout, Go away. You are not part of this.
Oh really? Says the bird of good and bad circumstances.
You refuse happiness? You anticipate no troubles?
These wittering worries and wishes
keep human beings apart from the friend.
I want the face itself.
As I say that, the luck-bird goes wild for jasmine.
Now the fortune-teller and the enlightened teacher,
the body and the soul, are as crazed as I am.
A BEAUTIFUL WALK INSIDE YOU
Through this blood veil the lover sees a beautiful walk.
Reason says, There are only six directions.
North, east, south, west, up, and down.
There is no way out of those limits.
Love says, But I have many times escaped.
Reason comes to a marketplace and begins haggling prices.
Love wanders away with other business to transact,
something to do with incomparable beauty.
There are secret things happening.
Hallaj listens to whispers
and walks off the speaker’s platform onto a scaffold.
Dreg-drinkers have love perceptions
that reasonable men fiercely deny.
They say, We cannot go barefooted in that courtyard.
There is nothing but thorns through there.
Love answers, The thorns are inside you.
Be silent, and pull what hurts out of your loving’s foot.
Then you will see gardens and secluded rose bowers,
and they will all be inside you.
Shams is the sun obscured by this cloud of words.
Maybe he will burn the overcast off
and let love clear and brighten.
MORE RANGE
We are friends with the one who kills us,
who gives us to the ocean waves.
We love this death. Only ignorance would say,
Put it off a while, day after tomorrow.
Do not avoid the knife.
This friend only seems fierce,
bringing your soul more range,
perching your falcon on a cliff of the wind.
Jesus on his cross, Hallaj on his—
those absurd killings hold a secret.
Cautious cynics know what they are doing
every moment and why.
Submit to love without thinking,
as the sun this morning rose recklessly
extinguishing our star-candle minds.
KNOWLEDGE BEYOND LOVE
Shams has knowledge beyond love,
an emptiness like air.
This saddens and confuses me.
Wandering bits of wood in ocean water.
There is a change that lets Jesus be born every breath.
Mention Shams and your talking and writing
will be lit from within.
You believe that this I say and write is blood
and must not be spilled, a lonely circulation.
My intellect lies in the hallway listening to language
as if there were a group playing music outside.
I do not say that my mind ignores my soul,
