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@ -153,19 +153,7 @@ Of visitors, the fairest.
For occupation, this:
The spreading wide my narrow hands
To gather paradise.
She’s describing the opening air around Rumi and
Shams, their retreat house full of sky and breath, and
laughter with the fairest visitors. Love with no object, conver-
sation with no subject, seeing with no image, light on light,
pure possibility.
Rumi’s love poems are not in the realm we’re more
familiar with, the earthy and sexual transcendence cele-
brated in the poetry of Keats and Whitman, Rexroth,
Kinnell, Bly, Creeley, Jack Gilbert. Rumi’s love is beyond
the sexual pathway and, for that reason, maybe not so
beautiful, to us. Rumi is less tranced and less sensual than,
say, these lines from Rexroth’s late afternoon love poem,
“When We with Sappho”:
Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth.
Your grace is as beautiful as a sleep.
@ -312,33 +300,7 @@ and carefully. Only God knows what they say.
They use unsayable words. Bird language.
But some people have imitated them, learned
a few birdcalls, and gotten prestigious.
The Superabundance of
Ordinary Being
Love is not love that doesn’t love the details of the beloved,
the minute particulars. Judith and I were in Pammukkalle,
Turkey, an ancient Roman bath with a museum, and around
the side, attached to it, is a shed called the Museum of
Small Findings. Shards of pottery, coins, fingers and toes of
statuary, just as the sign says. The guard at the door, the
host, is a smiling, genial man about four-feet two-inches
tall, no taller, and no pun intended. Wherever we go now
we do small findings, to make sure nothing goes unnoticed,
or gets left behind.
Love is the connection with spirit, and one way it flows
is through form. That’s the state of rapture Rumi praises,
the joy of being inside an intersection with the divine,
which is what this world is.
“Truly being here is glorious,” says Rilke in the Seventh
Duino Elegy, and in the Ninth,
Isn’t it the secret intent
of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,
that inside their boundless emotion all things may
shudder with joy?
This resonant trembling of the earth with lovers, is the
superabundance of being, a phrase from Rilke in Stephen
Mitchell’s translation.
Rumi walks the granary amazed like an ant, small find-
ings the given.
ZULEIKHA
Zuleikha let everything be the name of Joseph,
from celery seed to aloes wood. She loved him
@ -617,19 +579,6 @@ no one reasonable, religious
jargon forgotten, and Saladin
there raising his hand to bid
on the bedraggled boy Joseph!
Escaping into Silence
Close the language-door (the mouth). Open the love-win-
dow (the eyes). The moon (the reflected light of the
divine) won’t use the door, only the window. Moving into
silence with a friend, and with what comes through the
eyes and both presences then, we may become those
escapees Rumi calls those who associate in the heart.
Rumi celebrates this wild freedom, and as he does, he
may seem to be subverting scripture with his advocacy of
the nonverbal, but he’s actually trying to make the revela-
tion that comes in language more experiential. I recom-
mend we all try a day of silence with someone. Just one
day!
Q U I E T N E S S
Inside this new love, die.
@ -879,31 +828,6 @@ the poem again so he can play.
There is
no end to anything round.
. Grief
The deeper the grief, the more radiant the love. We miss
our friend. Lovers’ tears are the true wealth. My friend John
Seawright used to say that the real tragedy is when you
don’t feel much of anything when someone dies. That lack
of grieving, the feel of not to feel it, is not heard much in
Rumi.
I recently saw Fierce Grace, about Ram Dass’s life and par-
ticularly the stroke. The movie focuses on the use of the
starkest tragedies, not just his, to open the heart and help us
find the vital core of consciousness, the soul. My favorite
part is Ram Dass near the end saying yumyumyumyumyum
when he hears a young woman tell her dream of her lover
who has been murdered in Colombia. Several months after
her lover’s death she has the first dream in which he has
appeared. She yells at him, “Where have you been!” He
says, Listen. The love we had was wonderful, but that is small peanuts
to what’s ahead for you, and when that love comes, I’ll be part of it.
Ram Dass ecstatically tastes the truth of what the dead
lover says. No sticky possessiveness, no hanging on to the
past. Grief opens us to more love, and the new love builds
with the former, and there’s miraculous expansion. It’s a rare
movie that gives off the fragrance of enlightened love. This
one does.
T H E D E A T H O F S A L A D I N
You left ground and sky weeping,
mind and soul full of grief.
@ -1250,49 +1174,6 @@ not to be resolved. You are not whole
or ever complete. You are the wonder
without willpower going where you want.
. Absence
Love as a way into God is wild and bewildering. Union!
Absence! What do these words mean? Attar says if you
want to learn the secrets of love that your soul can know,
“You will sacrifice everything. You will lose what you have
considered valuable, but eventually you’ll hear the voice
you’ve most wanted to hear saying, Yes. Come in.”
Another Sufi, Junnaiyd, recommends that we JUMP!
“Plunge headfirst into the ocean of your loving. Then look
around patiently for the pearl that is yours.” This heart-
region is a vast emptiness. Nevit Ergin calls it absence. Rumi
explores the images of a desert night, an empty pot, a
house with a broken door, the weaning of a child, the flute
before breath comes through. When his friend Saladin
dies, Rumi says, The roof of the kingdom within has collapsed, and I
can no longer taste the flavor of my being apart.
Lee Marvin in Paint Your Wagon: “I’m an ex-citizen of
nowhere, and sometimes I get homesick.” At the end of our
loving is a depth of absence that’s tremendously familiar. A
high desert plain. But really there is no end to love’s
unfolding, and no one can tell you how yours should or
will go. The troubadours and Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and
Cleopatra, Anna Karenina, Jude the Obscure, Lorca’s love poems,
Millay’s, they all have wisdom for the various stages of
love’s progress. Rumi, Hafez, and Emily Dickinson have
ideas and images for the annihilation of absence.
The Infinite a sudden Guest
Has been assumed to be
But how can that stupendous come
Which never went away?
Some people entertain this guest in specific physical
form for a certain amount of time. Be grateful for such a
chance, but remember, everyone has in them the great love
that Rumi’s poetry comes out of. It is the given that never
goes away.
You are an ocean in a drop of dew,
all the universes in a thin sack
of blood! What are these pleasures
then, these joys, these worlds,
that you keep reaching for, hoping
they will make you more alive?
L I K E L I G H T O V E R T H I S P L A I N
A moth flying into the flame says
with its wingfire, Try this.
@ -1404,119 +1285,6 @@ is one saying,
How long before
I’m free of this torture!
. Animal Energies
Any love: earth-love, spirit, the way of a man with a maid,
the way of a dog with almost anybody, the way of a hawk
with the wind, of a swan with a pond, of grandparents with
grandchildren, of an ant with a grain of corn, of a lion with
a gazelle, all the natural drawings-together lead eventually
to annihilation. This is the mystery of the animal energies.
Rumi says, astonishingly, “God lives between a human
being and the object of his desire” (Discourse No. ). This
is radical theology to this day, when major crises have
roots in sexual repression—the Catholic pedophile priesty
boys; the Muslim enraged-at-women, dismayed-by-West-
ern-ease-with-impurity vandals. We Americans have our
own deadly-to-life versions of denying the horny animal
energies. We lie a lot. We avoid the intimacy of truth. We
make nice, blind to our own rage. When we start bombing,
we overdo it and never consider the tremendous collateral
damage as another form of terrorism. Very different, but
still a terror.
I like to think of the first mystical poem as that figure
incised, and painted, into the farthest wall of the cave
called Les Trois Freres in southern France. The Animal.
Joseph Campbell called him “god of the cave.” He does the
dance of human and animal at once, owl, lion, horse, stag,
man. He incorporates them all visually and looks out at
you with your own menagerie, who have gone inward far
enough to meet his gaze. Animals can live inside the land-
scape without our noisy self-consciousness. When we turn
and go with them as Whitman did, we enter a silence and a
transcendence. We perceive through their eyes with their
energies. This is a metaphor, a tremendously important
one, as well as an experience.
Hazrat Inayat Khan says that seekers should “accom-
plish their desires that they may thus be able to rise above
them to the eternal goal.” At the core of each person’s
nature are unique seeds of desiring, which flourish through
the development of personality, not through any suppres-
sion of it. We are not to become pale renunciate ciphers
with no wantings. The animals of desiring, the rooster of
lust, the duck of urgency, the horse of passion, the peacock
of wanting recognition, the crow of acquiring things, the
lion of majesty, the zebra of absence (I made that one up),
these are not to be thwarted but lived, transmuted, and
incorporated. This is the art of forming a personality. Only
when we live the animal powers do we learn that those satis-
factions are not what we truly wanted. There’s more, and
we are here to follow the mysteries of longing beyond
where they lead. The purpose of desire is to perfect the long-
ings, for at the core of longing is the Friend, Christ,
Krishna, the emptiness, wherever it was that Igjargajuk, the
Eskimo shaman, was when he came back from forty nights
on the ice floes with one sentence, “There is nothing to
fear in the universe.” The great love at the center of long-
ing has no fear in it.
There is a witness who watches the obstreperous play
of flame and eros and says, This is the dance of existence. A
great mutual embrace is always happening between the
eternal and what dies, between essence and accident. We
are all writing the book of love. Everything goes in. All the
particles of the world are in love and looking for lovers.
Pieces of straw tremble in the presence of amber. Isn’t that
the deal? We’re here to love each other, to deepen and
unfold that capacity, to open the heart. And that means liv-
ing in the witness, I’m beginning to see.
Hearing Rumi’s poetry helps. He would say, though,
that poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry,
because it gives the illusion of having had the experience
without actually going through it. He would periodically
swear off the stuff. No more God poems, I want the pres-
ence. No more love poems, I want to be love.
This region of animal energies is where sexuality enters
love’s book most obviously, although eros, as Freud
showed, is a powerful ingredient in many motions that
draw us. Sex is as basic and nourishing to human beings as
baking bread. Rumi implies as much in the heroic simile of
the breadmaking poem. Lovemaking is going on every-
where among the forms, and in a startling variation of the
golden rule he says, Remember, the way you make love is the way
God will be with you.
Once in an informal moment (there were many) talking
to a young couple about their love life, my teacher spoke
to the young man, “You have seen the bull, how he goes
and licks the cow before he mounts her. This is good. We
can learn much from the animals.” With me he counseled
not cunnilingus so much as restraint. It always tickled him
that my name was Barks. “The dog of desire,” he would
begin, “we can learn from that one, but we must not let him
lead us all over town, pulling to sniff a piece of garbage, to
a place where another dog has urinated, then to roll on a
dead fish. He will drag us around like this if we let him; he
will take over our lives. We must discipline this dog and
sometimes tie him up in the backyard and give him only
scraps.” He had my number. Do not neglect the licking, though,
is still my bullish theme.
Interesting in this regard are the names that Bawa
Muhaiyaddeen had for three illusion-making capacities of
human sexuality: Suran, the enjoyment of the images that
come to one’s mind at the moment of orgasm. Singhan, the
arrogance experienced in that same moment, associated
with karma and with the qualities of the lion. Tarahan, the
pathway of attraction that leads to the sexual act; it is asso-
ciated with the birth canal or vagina. The three powers are
thought of as sons of Maya. It is fascinating that there are
these ancient Tamil words for mental processes we have
barely noticed in the West, the first two, at least.
Note. The reference above to “priesty boys” and “Mus-
lim vandals” is very un-Bawa. Snide, divisive, pleased-with-
its-clever-self remarks will probably not help bring us into
one loving family.
Think that you’re gliding out from the face of a cliff
like an eagle. Think you’re walking
like a tiger walks by himself in the forest.
@ -1855,50 +1623,6 @@ People who repress desires
often turn, suddenly,
into hypocrites.
. Love’s Secret
Rumi makes preposterous claims. One of the most startling
is, “Our loving is the way God’s secret gets told!” Love is
an open secret, the most obvious thing in the world and the
most hidden, with no why to how it keeps its mystery. Sufis
say the genesis of lovers meeting is God’s sweetest secret.
A saying of Muhammad is, Human awareness is my secret
and I am its secret. The inner knowledge of spirit-essence is the secret
within the secret. I have placed this knowing within the heart of my
true servant, and no one can know his state but I. The knowing of
essence is love’s secret.
There is a truth that comes with following the ener-
gies, and there is a love, a truth-knowing essence, in the
innermost heart. Rumi tries to lead us into this region that
never fades and has no limits, that comes when we recog-
nize that everyone is as precious as our own children and
grandchildren. Bawa was clear with me that I needed to
move beyond blood ties. Having children opened my heart,
but he saw that I need to include everyone in my family. He
so beautifully saw every human being he came in contact
with as kin. My love you, my children, grandchildren, brothers, sis-
ters, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, great-grandchildren. Every dis-
course began and ended with a declaration of the family
connection.
Some may dismiss this as one-world, peacenik senti-
mentality. I’m not advocating we disband the armies yet, or
even the churches, though that’s tempting to say. It’s good
to have sanctuaries and singing and silence and Wednes-
day night prayer. We need more sacred space outdoors,
though, fewer enclosed places, and please let’s quit killing
each other over books! Let’s move on to killing each other
over bluegrass and salad oil and circumcision and predesti-
nation and foreplay and whose uncle is the right line,
where the prepositions go, and what happens after we die.
Those are worth fighting for. The book thing is just getting
really old.
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen says,
Do not ever fight or argue, because for God there are no
fights and no arguments. For that One everything is love;
everything is in the form of love, compassion, and truth. May
God provide you with the blessings and grace to live in that
state.
C L O S E TO B E I N G T R U E
How can we know the divine qualities
from within? If we know only
@ -1978,31 +1702,6 @@ in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
. Love’s Discipline
Rumi says an ecstatic human being is a polished mirror that
cannot help reflecting. What we love, we are. As the heart
comes cleaner, we see the kingdom as it is. We become
reflected light. The polishing may be related to practices, a
devotion we do every day that is an emptying out. Or it
may be that when we live in the soul, everything can be
used for clarity. Muhammad once said, “People who insult
me are only polishing the mirror.” I can’t say precisely what
polishing the mirror of the heart means, but I feel it happening
slowly, and it does seem to be related to discipline, by
which I mean intentionally giving time to what Rumi calls
the jeweled inner life, which could be just the witness watching
the mind.
In another passage Rumi says the polishing is done by
the intensity of our longings. It is so difficult to remember
who we are and to act from there. Various remembrance
habits are helpful. Zikr, five-times prayer, a walk at sunset,
twenty minutes of meditation. Stonework, singing, poetry.
Find practices that are specifically yours. There comes then
a creativeness at the end of the polishing that Rumi calls
“looking into the creek.” It’s as though seeing becomes
lucid dreaming. We watch the play of soul creatures. The
gates of light swing open. We look in.
W H O M A K E S Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
@ -2211,31 +1910,6 @@ and separate beings too,
as the polisher melts
in the mirror’s face.
. Shift from Romance to Friendship
The story of the king, the handmaiden, and the doctor is of
the movement from the erotic love of romance to the love
of a meeting with the Friend, which is the mystery of this
region. Rumi says that however we try to explain this new
place, the explanation sounds embarrassing.
Some commentary clarifies, but with love
silence is clearer. A pen goes
scribbling along, but when it tries to write
love, it breaks! If you want to expound
on love, take your intellect out
and let it lie down in the mud.
As Shakespeare changed the verb to be forever, Rumi
changed the noun friend, dost in Farsi. A meeting takes place
that translates inner life into outer and outer to inner. The
sohbet of Friendship is “the way messengers from the mystery
talk to us.” Call it Holy Spirit, Khidr, Buddha-mind, Friend,
Beloved, or Lord, there’s a shift from the romantic ache, which
is a love dis-ease, to an encounter with “a person like the
dawn,” whose face loosens the knot of intellectual discourse.
This Friendship breaks through the stalled-limbo of desire
to become a reckoning (the astrolabe image) “that sights
into the mysteries of God.” Love changes from the exciting
synapse of relationship to a condition of being, the truest health.
B U R N T K A B O B
Last year, I admired the wines. This,
I’m wandering inside the red world.
@ -2614,51 +2288,7 @@ If you want
to be more alive, love
is the truest health.
. Union
The intensest, the most poignant cry comes from one who
has known the union and lost it. Rumi says, Give me his
longing!
I have seen one living in the state of union, at least
one. They may exist in various guises all around us. Bawa
Muhaiyaddeen was totally present in each moment and
so attentive to every detail, the tiniest bit of outer onion-
skin left on a chopped bit, and also he felt with each
breath the divine presence flowing through him. It was
exhilarating to be there where he sat on his bed in
Philadelphia, like breathing the ozone near a waterfall.
He answered questions and listened to stories of what
happened to people during their days. He laughed and
tended business matters. He supervised the cooking of
lunch, did the measuring and pouring in of spices.
Rumi says lovers are those who may seem to be judi-
ciously considering very troubling matters, the world situa-
tion, relationship difficulties, “but really they’re leaning
back riding in a wagon on the Bukhara road, soul beauty
their only expertise.” That’s the way it felt in Bawa’s room.
He was the most loving person I’ve ever met, and he had
much to say about the innermost heart, the qalb. He lived
there. He called it a house with ninety-nine windows (the
qualities of God), a sanctuary, a flowering plenitude, a
benevolence, a piece of flesh that does not die, the kaaba of
the true pilgrimage, and source of the light that is the ruh,
the soul. He also held that human beings cannot, and must
not, judge one another’s innermost heart. Only divine wis-
dom can do that.
The heart cannot be talked about. We must experience
its depths in that mysterious osmosis of presence with pres-
ence. Hazrat Inayat Khan says that our purpose here is to
make God a reality, a daunting and a potentially unbalanc-
ing task. One can get too full in the ecstatic state. Rumi
warns that the roof is a dangerous place to drink wine. We
can die trying to make God a reality. If we don’t fall from
the roof, we wake with a hangover that weakens conscious-
ness. Hangover remorse can be helpful then. The work of
balancing love (enthusiasm) and discipline (practical help-
fulness) is beautifully addressed in the first poem of this
section, the drink of water that is “The Sunrise Ruby.”
T H E S U N R I S E R U B Y
THE SUNRISE RUBY
In the early morning hour,
just before dawn, lover and beloved wake
to take a drink of water.
@ -3033,7 +2663,7 @@ Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.
All I know of spirit
is this love.
YO U R D E F E C T S
YOUR DEFECTS
An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits,
when they are held up to each other,
that’s when the real making begins.
@ -3043,80 +2673,8 @@ The trunks of trees must be cut and cut again
so they can be used for fine carpentry.
Your doctor must have a broken leg to doctor.
Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested.
. Meditation Pavane
This was my dream of August , . I am a book in
three parts. The first and last have generic, ineffable desig-
nations, the beginning-less beginning and the endless end. The
middle part where (who) I am has an odd name that I see
spelled out in capitals, MEDITATION PAVANE. Awake, I
record the dream and think I have seen the word pavane
before, though I don’t know what it means, some kind of
music? I look it up in the dictionary. “A grave and stately
dance performed by couples in elaborate clothing, of
Spanish and Italian origin, – th century.” A Mediter-
ranean courtship dance, with a circle of elders observing.
The word derives from a colloquial name for Padua and is
related by folk etymology to the French pavaner, meaning
to strut like a peacock. So a meditation pavane mixes the
internal quiet of meditation with the social display of
courtship.
There is a rare English word pavonine, meaning peacock-
like or having the iridescence of their slender necks and the
wide-open eyes on the tail feathers. Street pigeons some-
times have pavonine rings around their necks. I go to the
Internet to search for pavane. The third item down has two
familiar names, Barry and Shelley Phillips, friends of a
friend, whom I will soon meet and do a bookstore Rumi
reading with in Santa Cruz (October ). They are
musicians specializing in Appalachian, Shaker, and Celtic
melodies. Shelley has a CD called Pavane. Gourd Music is
their label! I have published a volume of my own poetry,
Gourd Seed ( ). I used to grow gourds.
The connections are clear. I call them to arrange some
sound-studio time during my visit to Santa Cruz. That ses-
sion turns into a CD, which we call What Was Said to the
Rose, and also a concert in Santa Cruz (April ). The
dance of courtship energies moving with the inner motions
of meditation, let’s say that mystery is the station of love
explored in this section. The close-in irritation and excite-
ment of the erotic, stepping with the cleansing of going-in.
The way we are led by dreams has been extremely
important in my life. I have told the story elsewhere, sev-
eral times, how I met my teacher in a dream on May ,
. I’ll tell it again: In my dream I am sleeping on the
bluff above the Tennessee River five miles north of Chat-
tanooga where I grew up. I wake up inside the dream,
though still asleep. A ball of light rises off Williams Island
and comes over me. It clarifies from the inside out and
reveals a man sitting cross-legged with a white shawl over
his head, which is bowed. He lifts his head and opens his
eyes. “I love you,” he says. “I love you too,” I answer. The
landscape, my first deep love, the curve of that river and
the island, feels soaked with love, which is also just the
ordinary dew forming in the night. I feel the process of the
dew as a mixing of love with world-matter. That was the
dream, and the only credential I have for working with
Rumi’s poetry. When I met the teacher in the dream, Bawa
Muhaiyaddeen, a year and a half later in September of
, he told me to continue the work on Rumi. “It has to
be done.” Bawa died on December , . I used to visit
the Fellowship in Philadelphia several times a year for three
or four days, over those nine years. He never asked for
money in exchange for the wisdom he gave so generously.
The curry was free too. Food truly does taste better when
it’s made by an enlightened being.
So let’s have tea and look out at the cold sea. If you
want one of these CDs that Barry and Shelley Phillips and I
made (Irish, Appalachian, Shaker, and improvised music:
cello, English horn, Irish harp, flute, with myself speaking
Rumi poems, most of which are included in this volume),
I’ll send you one free. Call - - . Leave your name
and address.
R U L E S A B O U T R E S T R A I N T
RULES ABOUT RESTRAINT
There is nourishment like bread
that feeds one part of your life
and nourishment like light for another.
@ -3126,7 +2684,7 @@ for the latter, Never be satisfied.
Eat and drink the soul substance,
as a wick does with the oil it soaks
in. Give light to the company.
T H E C O M PA N Y O F L O V E R S
THE COMPANY OF LOVERS
The rule that covers everything is:
How you are with others, expect that back.
If you want to know God, enjoy the company
@ -3264,26 +2822,6 @@ Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within,
but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
. One Stroke Down
We sense an impending danger in ecstatic love, that the
experience will change us radically. And it’s true. The
love-thief steals the keys to our favorite rooms, steals our
half-loves. Ayaz crushes the pearl. There is a destructive
downstroke when soul-love enters. The physical pearl and
its value disintegrate to powder in the presence of the
king. Tremendous courage and abandon come with Ayaz’s
act. The courtiers feel it and prostrate themselves, hoping
for grace.
The progress in a story of Rumi’s is toward a moment
when consciousness breaks open and the Friendship is felt
here and now. The ocean of wisdom becomes this weather we
walk. Something like a jump occurs (though it may not be
anything we do), and life is wildly different. You’re naked
and cold. Hallaj says to dive in the river and get the fur
coat that is floating by. You plunge in, and it’s a live bear!
There’s the moment, a gamble one doesn’t know or care
how it will turn out. This bear is going to wear you home.
Lightning, your presence
from ground to sky.
No one knows what becomes of me,
@ -3429,44 +2967,6 @@ has decided to wear me home!”
A little part of a story, a hint.
Do you need long sermons on Hallaj?
. Love’s Excess
Someone asked once, “What is love?”
“Be lost in me,” I said. “You’ll know love when that happens.”
Love has no calculating in it. That’s why it’s said to be a qual-
ity of God and not of human beings. God loves you is the
only possible sentence. The subject becomes the object so
totally that it can’t be turned around. Who will the you pro-
noun stand for if you say, “You love God”?
Prose Preface to Book II of the Masnavi
I, you, he, she, we,
in the garden of mystic lovers,
these are not true
distinctions.
SHAMS TABRIZ
The extravagant perspective of Rumi’s life and work is that
there is a core of understanding and that that core is love,
the heart. Saint Augustine talks about “the supersensual
eye of the soul.” The eighteenth-century mystic Emanuel
Swedenborg says there is a light that illuminates the mind
that is different from sunlight, and that is what the word
enlightenment refers to. Those who experience these other
sights and other hearings are often in a state of untranslat-
able joy that almost dissolves them with its delight.
It would be strange if poetry written from such know-
ing were not excessive. Being in the spirit is not a casual
thing. Each ant is given its elegant belt at birth. This love we feel
pours through us like giveaway song.
It’s not true, though, to say that Rumi’s poetry always
comes from a trance state. An enlightened being is most
often very focused, present in the moment, and fiercely
practical, even when saying the most mystical things. “You
have to understand the form of the body in order to under-
stand the meaning of the light form within it.”
And Rumi’s knowing, like his father Bahauddin’s, has
many valences, which certainly includes the hulul, or mysti-
cal trance.
T H E S O U R C E O F J OY
No one knows what makes the soul wake up
so happy! Maybe a dawn breeze
@ -3573,24 +3073,6 @@ Only love.
Only the holder the flag fits into,
no flag.
. Love’s Bewilderment
Love loves flowing, a beyond-containment of blood and
semen, wine and riverwater, amniotic fluid and the round
bead of dew forming.
Flowering. Love cannot be held long within categories,
likewise the poetry celebrating love. You might say that
love loves confusion and not be far wrong. Love is meta-
morphosis, rapid and radical, agile, full of vigor and levity.
Love is the continuous alchemy of regions overlapping:
animal, angelic, human, and the luminosity of the true
human beings, their compassion and their cooking. None
of this is sayable. It can only be lived. Rumi says, Stay bewil-
dered in God, and only that. But the mind keeps questioning,
turning away, I don’t think so. There is strong resistance and
fear and academic distancing in the rational precincts,
which tend to mistrust any boundary-dissolving, beauty-
relishing, ecstatic honesty.
God only knows, I don’t,
what keeps me laughing.
The stem of a flower
@ -3778,48 +3260,7 @@ and because something I swallowed
in the ocean
has made me completely content
with ignorance.
. Lord of the Heart
Love is our aloneness with the lord of such beauty and
depth that we’re not lonely. The empty space of the guest
house, not the guests moving through, the host and theater
where mind and desire play out their myriad motions. As
say Shakespeare is the great globe itself, not the players, nor
the drowned book, not the jealous lover or the eloquently
introspective athlete or the rugged king, who calls himself
“old and foolish,” rather the space those inhabit and the
source. This love-region called lord is not imagination. This
emptiness so dazzlingly full of emanation is what gnostics
call the pleroma. Niffari calls it Ignorance. Someone else, the
cloud of unknowing.
Words do not approach it hence the edge of self-satire
that word-mystics barely keep in check. This is the one we
know early on in life and come back to late. Riverlord, direc-
tor of dreams, the company that most nourishes our soul,
this is the great love we’re given and feel bearing us along.
It’s not fair to speak as though this were everyone’s
experience, because it isn’t, and I do honor the pained
vision, the bitter childhoods, the broken trust. Rumi
focuses not so much on the nobility of suffering or its
heartbreaking howl as on the ultimate expansion into mys-
tery that this poetry tries to say. It began with the Friend-
ship with Shams Tabriz. It is still unfolding, and as many of
the poems imply, the unfolding is intimately woven in with
seeing. John Ruskin says,
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to
see something and tell what he saw in a plain way. To see
clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.
Bawa says something very similar.
Everything you see tells the story of God. Look at it. God is
out spread, filling the entire universe. So look. You exist in a
form. God is without form. You are the visible example, the
sun. God is the light within the sun.
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.
E Y E S
What is it that sees when vision is clear?
The core that has no story, has that ever seen anything?