diff --git a/Rumi _ the book of love _ poems of ecstasy and longing b/Rumi _ the book of love _ poems of ecstasy and longing index 24ede5e..8ec67a9 100644 --- a/Rumi _ the book of love _ poems of ecstasy and longing +++ b/Rumi _ the book of love _ poems of ecstasy and longing @@ -1,43 +1,3 @@ -1. Spontaneous Wandering -I take down my King James to look up the passage about -love (charity) in 1 Corinthians 13. There is a tiny red ant -living in Corinth. It walks to the top and along the gold -edges. Spontaneous wandering is a favorite region of the -heart. It may look like mindless drift, but it isn’t. More the -good Don and Sancho out for their inspired adventures, -quixotic and panzaic.5 The ant is my teacher. -We see through a glass darkly, then face-to-face. A -more polished mirror shows us who we truly are. The wan- -dering of Rumi’s poetry is a model for the soul’s lovely -motions. When thirst begins to look for water, water has -already started out with a canteen, looking for thirst. Love -feels like sliding along the eddies and currents of the tao. -Pir Vilayat Khan6 recently commented to me, “Your -first Rumi volumes seemed very sexual.” He’s right. There is -too much of that energy in the first work with Rumi I did, -especially in some of the quatrains. I was very wet with -such water at the time myself. I was thirty-nine. Now I’m -sixty-five. Things change; nothing wrong with that. What’s -truly alive is always changing. -Gay lovers hear Rumi’s poetry as gay. I don’t agree, -though I’m certainly guilty of previously loading Rumi’s -poetry with erotic fruit. I don’t do that now. Rumi is way -happier than sex and orgasms, his wandering more con- -scious and free. See “Imra’u ‘l-Qays” in the next section. -Rumi and Shams wander in that country. -1 -Perhaps the purest wanderer of our time is Nanao, like -Basho in his. Gary Snyder says about him, -This subtropical East China Sea carpenter and spear fisherman -finds himself equally at home in the desert. So much so that -on one occasion when an eminent traditional Buddhist priest -boasted of his lineage, Nanao responded, “I need no lineage. I -am desert rat.” But for all his independence Nanao Sakaki car- -ries the karma of Chungtzu, En-no-gyoja, Saigyo, Ikkyu, -Basho, and Issa in his bindle. His work or play in the world is -to pull out nails, free seized nuts, break loose the rusted, open -up the shutters. You can put these poems in your shoes and -walk a thousand miles. G O W I T H M U D D Y F E E T When you hear dirty story wash your ears.