Update rumi.txt

rumi.txt

@@ -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 SUNRISE RUBY
-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
 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.
@@ -3044,79 +2674,7 @@ 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
+RULES ABOUT RESTRAINT
-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
 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
@@ -3779,47 +3261,6 @@ 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?