Actualiser 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 isnt. 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 Rumis poetry is a model for the souls 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.” Hes 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 Im
sixty-five. Things change; nothing wrong with that. Whats
truly alive is always changing.
Gay lovers hear Rumis poetry as gay. I dont agree,
though Im certainly guilty of previously loading Rumis
poetry with erotic fruit. I dont do that now. Rumi is way
happier than sex and orgasms, his wandering more con-
scious and free. See “Imrau 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.