Update rumi.txt

rumi.txt

@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ When you get bad thoughts
 wash your mind.
 and
 Keep your feet muddy.
-—Nanao Sakaki
+
 Excuse my wandering.
 How can one be orderly with this?
 It’s like counting leaves in a garden,
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ or some urgency about “what’s needed.”
 Drink the wine that moves you
 as a camel moves when it’s been untied,
 and is just ambling about.
-C O O K E D H E A D S
+COOKED HEADS
 I have been given a glass
 that has the fountain of the sun inside,
 a Friend in both worlds, like the fragrance
@@ -82,10 +82,10 @@ A donkey wanders the sign of Taurus.
 Heroes do not stay lined up in ranks
 for very long. I set out for Tabriz,
 even though my boat is anchored here.
-WHERE YOU LOVE Look inside and find where a person
+WHERE YOU LOVE FROM
+Look inside and find where a person
 loves from. That’s the reality,
 not what they say.
-FROM
 Hypocrites
 give attention to form, the right
 and wrong ways of professing belief.
@@ -302,7 +302,7 @@ But some people have imitated them, learned
 a few birdcalls, and gotten prestigious.
 
 ZULEIKHA
-Zuleikha   let everything be the name of Joseph,
+Zuleikha let everything be the name of Joseph,
 from celery seed to aloes wood. She loved him
 so much she concealed his name in many phrases,
 the inner meanings known only to her.
@@ -343,7 +343,6 @@ We’re this language that tries to say it.
 You’re joy. We’re all the different kinds
 of laughing. Any movement or sound
 is a profession of faith, as the millstone
-  
 grinding is explaining how it believes
 in the river! No metaphor can say this,
 but I can’t stop pointing to the beauty.
@@ -408,7 +407,6 @@ The soul: a wide listening sky
 with thousands of candles.
 When anything is sold, soul gets given
 in the cash: people waiting at a door,
-  
 a ladder leaning on a roof, someone
 climbing down. The market square bright
 with understanding. Listening
@@ -429,7 +427,7 @@ for green robes has been cut from pure
 absence. You’re the tailor, settled
 among his shop goods, quietly sewing.
   
- . Sudden Wholeness
+Sudden Wholeness
 In this love kingdom there’s a windy blowing open of win-
 dows. Spring! Sounds of talking sprout. There’s a picnic by
 the river. Identity is music, and poems are rough notations
@@ -495,7 +493,6 @@ Philosophers have said that we love music
 because it resembles the sphere-sounds
 of union. We’ve been part of a harmony
 before, so these moments of treble and bass
-  
 keep our remembering fresh. But how
 does this happen within these dense bodies
 full of forgetfulness and doubt and
@@ -518,7 +515,6 @@ the bubbles. A more rational man gives advice,
 “You’ll regret doing this. You’re so far
 from the water that by the time you get down
 to gather walnuts, the water will have
-  
 carried them away.” He replies, “I’m not
 here for walnuts, I want the music
 they make when they hit.”
@@ -551,10 +547,10 @@ for fitting the window, or the latch.
 A thousand half-loves
 must be forsaken to take
 one whole heart home.
+
 PATTERN
 When love itself comes to kiss you,
 don’t hold back! When the king goes hunting,
-  
 the forest smiles. Now the king has become
 the place and all the players, prey,
 bystander, bow, arrow, hand and release.
@@ -682,73 +678,6 @@ These words are an alternate
 existence. Hear the passage into
 silence and be that.
   
-A New Life
-As one becomes a lover, duties change to inspirations. Prac-
-tices become dance, poetry, creek music moving along.
-Impossible natural images of transformation appear: candle
-becomes moth; a dry, broken stick breaks into bud. A chick-
-pea becomes its cook (not so impossible, the natural tast-
-ing!). Something enters that spontaneously enjoys itself.
-Finding a purpose for acting is no longer the problem. The
-soul is here for its own joy. Eyes are meant to see things. It’s
-by some grand shift of energy that we know love.
-We have this great love-ache for the ocean and the
-seabirds sewing the hem of her robe. That is the subject
-here. We long for beauty, even as we swim within it.
-Abdul Qadir Gilani describes this region of the heart as a
-baby. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen also speaks of it this way. Some-
-one asked Bawa once what it felt like to be him. He
-answered by closing his eyes and making little kissing
-noises like a baby nursing. In this new life a baby is born
-in the heart. Purity comes and a playfulness, an ease, a
-peace. Gilani says this new heart-baby sometimes talks to
-the soul in dreams. Bawa says that this baby knows the lan-
-guage of God. It understands every voice that floats on the
-wind because it is in unity and compassion. This baby has
-none of the exclusivity of loving, the limits we learn and
-later, hopefully, unlearn from our families (the blood ties),
-our culture, religion, tribe, and nation. Bawa says humanity is “God’s funny family.” That’s how the baby sees.
-I saw this baby come into my father’s eyes in the last
-weeks of his life in     . Everyone felt it. My mother died
-(she was sixty-four, lung cancer) on May  ,     . My dad
-died of a stroke on July  ,     , at seventy-two. In the time
-between (fifty-five days), Dad lost all judgmental tenden-
-cies. He met everyone with unconditional love. He would
-go out on any excuse to walk around and talk with
-strangers. He had unlimited time and attention and help-
-fulness for everyone. So beautiful. I see that opening in
-John Seawright’s mother and father too. To hear Rev. Ryan
-Seawright pray outdoors in the wind at a June wedding, as
-I did recently, is about as much as a heart can stand. Bawa
-used to go out rounding, which meant riding in the passen-
-ger’s seat of a car driving very slow and waving to people
-walking on the sidewalk. Sometimes I’d go along. When
-pedestrians would see his face, it was like they were struck
-full-power with one of those old searchlights from Second
-World War airfields. Then they’d recover and wave so ten-
-derly, as to a baby.
-The connecting extends to all living beings. My friend
-Stephan Schwartz tells of an old farmhand who could
-stand at the edge of a field and speak in a soft voice to a
-particular cow a couple of hundred yards away, “Number
-forty-seven.” That cow, who needed attention from a vet,
-would detach from the herd and walk over. Pleasant (the
-man’s name) would talk to the cow, looking in her face,
-about what needed to be done, how it would hurt but that
-it was for the best. The cow would then patiently endure
-what needed to be done, and he’d say, “That’s good. Go on
-back now.” Then he’d call another one, “Number twenty-
-four.” Stephan swears that he was present many times when
-this happened.
-  
-Bawa went into the jungles of Sri Lanka for fifty years
-to watch the animals and learn about God. When your
-heart dissolves in this love, books are beside the point. We
-learn from the taste of life events. Jelaluddin Chelebi once
-asked me what religion I was. I threw up my hands in the
-who knows gesture. “Good,” he said. “Love is the religion,
-and the universe is the book.”
-  
 ESCAPING TO THE FOREST 
 Some souls have gotten free of their bodies.
 Do you see them? Open your eyes for those
@@ -954,7 +883,7 @@ The light changes.
 I need more grace
 than I thought.
   
-T H E P U R P O S E O F E M O T I O N
+The purpose of emotion
 A certain Sufi tore his robe in grief,
 and the tearing brought such relief he gave the robe
 the name faraji, which means ripped open,
@@ -976,66 +905,6 @@ Give back better, as rough clods return
 an ear of corn, a tassel, a barley
 awn, this sleek handful of oats.
   
- . Tavern Madness
-There is an overwhelming contact with the divine called
-drunkenness. The tavern is a place of shared mystical experi-
-ence as opposed to the church with its tradition of received,
-and sometimes unquestioned, belief (though churches can
-sometimes turn into taverns). The tavern is an excited
-region where one is out of one’s mind, with others. The
-wine there is not an Australian merlot, but the shared sense
-of presence flowing through. The top of one’s head blows.
-Majnun, the mad lover, sees Layla’s dog and faints.
-The tavern is no place one can live. Go to night
-prayers, then home. It is a state of stunned surrender that
-will eventually be left behind for the clarity of dawn. The
-tavern mystic must go “beyond the drunkenness of God’s
-overwhelming and come to the clarity of sobriety, where
-contemplation is restored.”   In the tavern one is absent and
-present at the same time. Junnaiyd says there is a sobriety
-that contains all drunkenness, but there is no drunkenness
-that contains all sobriety. In this region there’s flailing
-about, sudden insight, physical danger, and miscommuni-
-cation. Move, make a mistake. Checkmate. And the veils
-become fascinating here with their woven designs, the tap-
-estries depicting long passionate stories about the hurt of
-separation, the consuming intensity of desire, love in the
-Western world.
-Thich Nhat Hanh tells a wonderful story in his com-
-  
-mentaries on the Buddha’s Heart Sutra about how the
-opposites of good and evil only seem to oppose each other.
-He shows how they are actually great buddies who meet in
-the heart’s tavern.
-One day Buddha was in his cave, and Ananda, Buddha’s assis-
-tant, was standing near the entrance. Suddenly he saw Mara,
-the evil one, coming. Mara walked straight to Ananda and
-told him to announce his visit to Buddha.
-Ananda said, “Why have you come here? You were
-defeated by Buddha under the Bodhi tree. Go away! You are
-his enemy!”
-Mara began to laugh. “Did you say that your teacher has
-told you that he has enemies?” That made Ananda very
-embarrassed. He went in to announce Mara to Buddha.
-“Is it true? Is he really here?” Buddha went out in person
-to greet Mara. He bowed and took his hands in the warmest
-way. “How have you been? Is everything all right?”
-After they sat down to tea, Mara said, “Things are not
-going well at all. I am tired of being a Mara. You have to talk in
-riddles, and if you do anything, you have to be tricky and look
-evil. I’m tired of all that. But the worst part is my disciples.
-Now they are talking about social justice, peace, equality, lib-
-eration, nonduality, nonviolence, all that. It would be better if I
-hand them all over to you. I want to be something else.”
-Buddha listened with compassion. “Do you think it’s fun
-being a Buddha? My disciples put words in my mouth that I
-never said. They build garish temples. They package my
-teachings as items for commerce. Mara, you don’t really want
-to be a Buddha!”  
-Ananda continued to be puzzled and amazed by their
-conversation. The beautiful wholeness of it cannot be
-accepted by the mind.
-  
 I am a glass of wine with dark sediment.
 I pour it all in the river.
 Love says to me, “Good, but you don’t see
@@ -1380,7 +1249,6 @@ His mouth hung open. He wanted her! Right then,
 he wanted her! And she was not unwilling.
 They fell to, on the ground. You’ve seen a baker
 rolling dough. He kneads it gently at first,
-  
 then more roughly. He pounds it on the board.
 It softly groans under his palms.
 Now he spreads
@@ -1607,7 +1475,6 @@ with clothes, he holds up some flaps and edges. She sees
 his testicles and penis so wet,
 semen still dribbling out,
 spurts of jism and vaginal juices
-  
 drenching the thighs
 of the maid.
 The wife slaps him
@@ -1726,10 +1593,9 @@ Like a pure spirit lying down, pulling
 its body over it, like a bride her husband
 for a cover to keep her warm.
   
-THE DOG
+THE DOG PROBLEM
 Now, what if a dog’s owner
 were not able to control it?
-PROBLEM
 A poor dervish might appear: the dog storms out.
 The dervish says, “I take refuge with God
 when the dog of arrogance attacks,”
@@ -1954,7 +1820,6 @@ THE PRINCE OF KABUL
 Here is a story of a young prince who suddenly sees
 that the ambitious world is a big game
 of king of the mountain, a boy scrambling up
-   
 a pile of sand to call out, “I am king.”
 Then another throws him off to make his momentary
 claim, then another and so on.
@@ -2004,7 +1869,6 @@ with Babylonian magic, so that he leaves
 his bride at the wedding, and for a year
 he kisses the sole of her Kabulian shoe.
 Everyone weeps for him, while he laughs
-   
 in his ignorance. His father the king prays
 constantly, Lord! Lord, and because of that
 surrendered calling out, a master comes
@@ -2132,6 +1996,7 @@ the lover is a veil,
 but when living itself
 becomes the Friend,
 lovers disappear.
+
 KING, THE HANDMAIDEN AND THE DOCTOR
 Do you know why your soul-mirror
 does not reflect as clearly as it might?
@@ -2313,7 +2178,7 @@ Keep knocking, and the joy inside
 will eventually open a window
 and look out to see who’s there.
    
-THE GENERATIONS 
+THE GENERATIONS I PRAISE
 Yesterday the beauty of early dawn
 came over me, and I wondered who
 my heart would reach toward. Then
@@ -2323,13 +2188,11 @@ ground move me mightily because
 they’re pregnant with love, love
 pregnant with God. These are the
 early morning generations I praise.
-I PRAISE
+ONE SWAYING BEING
-ONE SWAYING
 Love is not condescension, never
 that, nor books, nor any marking
 on paper, nor what people say of
 each other. Love is a tree with
-BEING
 branches reaching into eternity
 and roots set deep in eternity,
 and no trunk! Have you seen it?
@@ -2346,7 +2209,7 @@ Shams Tabriz, the secret of God.
 Held like this, to draw in milk,
 no will, tasting clouds of milk,
 never so content.
-HANGOVER MORSE 
+HANGOVER REMORSE 
 Muhammad said, “Three kinds of people
 are particularly pathetic. The powerful man
 out of power, the rich man with no money,
@@ -2383,13 +2246,7 @@ the world is too full to talk about.
 Ideas, language, even the phrase each other,
 doesn’t make any sense.
    
-  . Die Before You Die
+Die Before You Die
-Death is key to this drastic change described in the last
-section. When we know in some deeply certain way that
-we are going to die, we move toward surrender more
-quickly. It is life’s huge riddle, that we must die before we
-die, this dissolving into the heart. We shall certainly be
-changed in death, if not before.
 Judge a moth by the beauty of its candle.
 Shams is invisible because he is inside sight.
 He is the intelligent essence
@@ -2493,32 +2350,6 @@ as the moon sometimes does for the sun.
 Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
 of a well, then lifted out into light.
 
-  . Harsh Evidence
-For Kharraqani and his wife love is conflict, necessary opposi-
-tion. Two armies set the battle lines, a black flag here, a
-white flag there, then something happens between them.
-The Red Sea roars over both. Kharraqani’s bossy wife is
-right for him. The heat of their being together gets a
-spring unfrozen and flowing again.
-In this region love is a courtroom where harsh evidence
-must be brought in. Faithfulness must turn to betrayal and
-betrayal into trust before any human being can become
-part of the truth. Surely love is a big part of the truth we’re
-here to live.
-There’s an ordeal, some anguish and suffering, essential
-to a soul’s growing into deeper love. Life must be lived.
-One definition of Sufism is joy at sudden disappointment. The
-Sufis know that precisely the right disaster comes at the
-right moment to break us open to the helplessness that an
-opening of the heart requires. This is harsh truth, but the
-truth. Love grows near truthfulness, and fades when words
-are tinged with lying. Love grows from the ruins of person-
-ality. There are heart-regions that one does not enter will-
-ingly, or knowingly, and that one actively tries to avoid
-reentering. I don’t use it much, and know very little about
-it, but the word karma may belong here, along with Auden’s
-stanza,
-   
 O stand, stand at the window
 As the tears scald and start;
 You shall love your crooked neighbor
@@ -2600,7 +2431,7 @@ If you could untie your wings
 and free your soul of jealousy,
 you and everyone around you
 would fly up like doves.
-WHEN WORDS ARE TINGED WITH
+WHEN WORDS ARE TINGED WITH LYING
 Muhammad gave this indication of how to know
 what’s real. “When you feel
 a peaceful joy, you’re near the truth.
@@ -2609,7 +2440,6 @@ then what you do seems pretentious
 and those around you insincere.
 Speak the clearest truth you know,
 and let the uneasiness heal.”
-LYING
 When words are tinged with lying,
 they’re like water dripping into an oil lamp.
 The wick won’t light, and the pleasure
@@ -2636,7 +2466,6 @@ the same. There you are. Whatever anyone
 wants or not: political power, injustice,
 material possessions, those are your script,
 the handwriting we study. Body, soul,
-   
 shadow. Whether reckless or careful,
 you are what we do. It’s absurd to ask
 your pardon. You’re inside repentance,
@@ -2724,19 +2553,6 @@ in the firmness under you.
 How is it with this love,
 I see your world and not you?
 
-  . Love Dogs
-The Sufis feel that dogs are our teachers with their faithful-
-ness, their humility, and their bounding, unqualified wel-
-come when we come home. The wordless intimacy of how
-we are with those beings teaches us to give ourselves
-wholeheartedly.
-There’s a Saturday Night Live sketch with John Lithgow
-as a Catholic priest hearing confession from actual dogs. A
-voice off-camera speaks for the dogs, “Father, I have barked
-at cats late at night. I have turned over a garbage can and
-eaten chicken bones.” But Lithgow’s face is so close to their
-faces and his intoning such, that the dogs begin to bark
-with the fun of it. It’s hilarious, us forgiving them.
 THE OCEAN SURGE
 I want to be in such passionate adoration
 that my tent gets pitched against the sky!