Actualiser Rumi _ the book of love _ poems of ecstasy and longing

Rumi _ the book of love _ poems of ecstasy and longing

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-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.