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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.
+When you see ugly stuff
+wash your eyes.
+When you get bad thoughts
+wash your mind.
+and
+Keep your feet muddy.7
+—Nanao Sakaki
+2
+Excuse my wandering.
+How can one be orderly with this?
+It’s like counting leaves in a garden,
+along with the song notes of partridges,
+and crows. Sometimes organization
+and computation become absurd.
+F I V E T H I N G S
+I have five things to say,
+five fingers to give into your grace.
+First, when I was apart from you,
+this world did not exist, nor any other.
+Second, whatever I was looking for
+was always you.
+Third, why did I ever learn to count to three?
+Fourth, my cornfield is burning!
+Fifth, this finger stands for Rabia,8
+and this is for someone else.
+Is there a difference?
+3
+Are these words or tears?
+Is weeping speech?
+What shall I do, my love?
+So the lover speaks, and everyone around
+begins to cry with him, laughing crazily,
+moaning in the spreading union
+of lover and beloved.
+This is the true religion. All others
+are thrown-away bandages beside it.
+This is the sema9 of slavery and mastery
+dancing together. This is not-being.
+I know these dancers.
+Day and night I sing their songs
+in this phenomenal cage.
+T H E M A N Y W I N E S
+God has given us a dark wine so potent that,
+drinking it, we leave the two worlds.
+God has put into the form of hashish a power
+to deliver the taster from self-consciousness.
+God has made sleep
+so that it erases every thought.
+4
+God made Majnun love Layla so much
+that just her dog would cause confusion in him.10
+There are thousands of wines
+that can take over our minds.
+Don’t think all ecstasies
+are the same!
+Jesus was lost in his love for God.
+His donkey was drunk on barley.
+Drink from the presence of saints,
+not from those other jars.
+Every object, every being,
+is a jar full of delight.
+Be a connoisseur,
+and taste with caution.
+Any wine will get you high.
+Judge like a king, and choose the purest,
+the ones unadulterated with fear,
+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.
+5
+C O O K E D H E A D S
+I have been given a glass
+that has the fountain of the sun inside,
+a Friend in both worlds, like the fragrance
+of amber inside the fragrance of musk.
+My soul-parrot gets excited with sweetness.
+Wingbeats, a door opening in the sun.
+You’ve seen the market where they sell
+cooked heads: that’s what this is,
+a way of seeing beyond inner and outer.11
+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.
+W H E R E Y O U L O V E Look inside and find where a person
+loves from. That’s the reality,
+not what they say.
+F R O M
+Hypocrites
+6
+give attention to form, the right
+and wrong ways of professing belief.
+Grow instead in universal light.
+When that revealed itself, God gave it
+a thousand different names, the least
+of those sweet-breathing names being,
+the one who is not in need of anyone.
+You’ve so distracted me,
+your absence fans my love.
+Don’t ask how.
+Then you come near.
+“Do not . . .” I say, and
+“Do not . . . ,” you answer.
+Don’t ask why
+this delights me.
+In your light I learn how to love.
+In your beauty, how to make poems.
+You dance inside my chest
+where no one sees you,
+but sometimes I do,
+and that sight becomes this art.
+7
+Drumsound rises on the air,
+its throb, my heart.
+A voice inside the beat says,
+“I know you’re tired,
+but come, this is the way.”
+Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
+Why would you refuse to give
+this love to anyone?
+Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups!
+They swim the huge fluid freedom.
+T H E R E ’ S N O T H I N G A H E A D
+Lovers think they’re looking for each other,
+but there’s only one search: wandering
+this world is wandering that,
+both inside one
+transparent sky. In here there is
+no dogma and no heresy.
+The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said
+or did about the future. Forget the future.
+I’d worship someone who could do that.
+8
+On the way you may want to look back, or not.
+But if you can say, There’s nothing ahead,
+there will be nothing there.
+Stretch your arms
+and take hold the cloth of your clothes
+with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain.
+Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both,
+you don’t belong with us.
+When one of us gets lost,
+is not here, he must be inside us. There’s no
+place like that anywhere in the world.
+9
+2. Sohbet: Who You Talking To?
+For Rumi the appearance of formal beauty comes as a natu-
+ral response to being spoken to. The rose opens because it
+has heard something. The cypress grows strong and
+straight because a love-secret is being whispered. Elegance
+in language arrives in response. Before creation there was a
+question, “Am I not your lord?”12 The simultaneous YES!
+that came is why we are here at all in the midst of three
+hundred billion galaxies.
+I have a friend who, when she wants to know who I am
+seeing, who I am in love with, asks, Who you talking to? The
+exchange of deep friendship makes a fine entrance into
+love and trust, into the mysterious action that moves
+through the eyes, the voice, the heart.
+Rumi wonders, Can you see these escapees, the ones who have
+gotten free of their personalities and into the truer self? He celebrates
+the freedom of those escapees, how their friendship dis-
+solves into everything: what anybody says, whatever hap-
+pens.
+Emily Dickinson says, I dwell in possibility, a fairer house
+than prose. That region where her poetry grew is sohbet.
+10
+I dwell in possibility,
+A fairer house than prose,
+More numerous of windows,
+Superior for doors.
+Of chambers as the cedars,
+Impregnable of eye.
+And for an everlasting roof
+The gambrels of the sky.
+Of visitors, the fairest.
+For occupation, this:
+The spreading wide my narrow hands
+To gather paradise.13
+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.
+11
+You move against me like a wave
+That moves in sleep.
+Your body spreads across my brain
+Like a bird-filled summer;
+Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
+But like a nimbus that hovers
+Over every other thing in all the world.14
+Sufis say there are three ways of being with the mys-
+tery: prayer, then a step up from that, meditation, and a
+step up from that, conversation, the mystical exchange
+they call sohbet.
+R E S P O N S E T O Y O U R Q U E S T I O N
+Why ask about behavior when you are soul-essence,
+and a way of seeing into presence!
+Plus you’re with us!
+How could you worry?
+You may as well free a few words from
+your vocabulary.
+Why and how and impossible. Open
+the mouth-cage
+and let those fly away.
+We were all born by
+accident, but still this wandering caravan
+will make camp in perfection.
+Forget the nonsense categories of there and here,
+race, nation, religion,
+starting point and destination.
+12
+You are soul, and you are love,
+not a sprite or an angel or a human being!
+Godman-womanGod-manGod-Godwoman!
+You’re a
+No more questions now
+as to what it is we’re doing here.
+If you want what visible reality can give,
+you’re an employee.
+If you want the unseen world,
+you’re not living your truth.
+Both wishes are foolish,
+but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting
+that what you really want is
+love’s confusing joy.
+S P E C I A L P L A T E S
+Notice how each particle moves.
+Notice how everyone has just arrived here
+from a journey. Notice how each wants
+a different food. Notice how
+the stars vanish as the sun comes up,
+and how all streams stream toward the ocean.
+13
+Look at the chefs preparing special plates
+for everyone according to what they need.
+Look at this cup that can hold the ocean.
+Look at those who see the face. Look
+through Shams’s eyes into water
+that is entirely jewels.
+Y O U A R E N O T Y O U R E Y E S
+Those who have reached their arms
+into emptiness are no longer concerned
+with lies and truth, with mind and soul,
+or which side of the bed they rose from.
+If you are still struggling to understand,
+you are not there. You offer your soul
+to one who says, “Take it to the other
+side.” You’re on neither side, yet
+those who love you see you on one side
+or the other. You say Illa, “only God,”
+then your hungry eyes see you’re in
+“nothing,” La.15 You’re an artist
+who paints both with existence and non.
+Shams could help you see who you are,
+but remember, You are not your eyes.
+14
+W H A T W A S S A I D T O T H E R O S E
+What was said to the rose that made it open
+was said to me here in my chest.
+What was told the cypress that made it strong
+and straight, what was whispered the jasmine
+so it is what it is, whatever made sugarcane
+sweet; whatever was said to the inhabitants
+of the town of Chigil in Turkestan that makes
+them so handsome, whatever lets the pomegranate
+flower blush like a human face, that is being
+said to me now. I blush. Whatever put eloquence
+in language, that’s happening here. The great
+warehouse doors open; I fill with gratitude,
+chewing a piece of sugarcane, in love with
+the one to whom every that belongs!
+T H E M U S I C
+For sixty years I have been forgetful,
+every moment, but not for a second
+has this flowing toward me slowed or stopped.
+I deserve nothing. Today I recognize
+that I am the guest the mystics talk about.
+I play this living music for my host.
+Everything today is for the host.
+15
+I M R A ’ U ‘ L - Q A Y S
+Imra’u ‘l-Qays,16 king of the Arabs,
+was very handsome and a poet full of love songs.
+Women loved him desperately. Everyone loved him,
+but there came one night an experience
+that changed him completely.
+He left his kingdom and his family.
+He put on dervish robes and wandered
+from one weather, one landscape, to another.
+Love dissolved his king-self and led him to Tabuk,
+where he worked for a time making bricks.
+Someone told the king of Tabuk about Imra’u ‘l-Qays,
+and that king came to visit him at night.
+“King of the Arabs, handsome Joseph of this age,
+ruler of two empires, one composed of territories,
+and the other of the beauty of women,
+if you would consent to stay with me,
+I would be honored. You abandon kingdoms,
+because you want more than kingdoms.”
+The king of Tabuk went on like this, praising
+Imra’u ‘l-Qays and talking theology and philosophy.
+Imra’u ‘l-Qays kept silent.
+Then suddenly he leaned and whispered something
+in the second king’s ear, and that second
+king became a wild wanderer too.
+16
+They walked out of town hand in hand,
+no royal belts, no thrones.
+This is what love does and continues to do.
+It tastes like honey to adults and milk to children.
+Love is the last thirty-pound bale.
+When you load it on, the boat tips over.
+So they wandered around China like birds
+pecking at bits of grain. They rarely spoke
+because of the dangerous seriousness
+of the secret they knew.
+That love-secret spoken pleasantly, or irritation,
+severs a hundred thousand heads in one swing.
+A love-lion grazes in the soul’s pasture,
+while the scimitar of this secret approaches.
+It’s a killing better than any living.
+All that world-power wants, really,
+is this weakness.
+So these kings talk in low tones,
+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.
+17
+3. 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?
+18
+This resonant trembling of the earth with lovers, is the
+superabundance of being, a phrase from Rilke in Stephen
+Mitchell’s translation.17
+Rumi walks the granary amazed like an ant, small find-
+ings the given.
+Z U L E I K H A
+Zuleikha18 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.
+When she said,
+The wax is softening near the fire, she meant,
+My love is wanting me.
+If she said, Look, the moon is up,
+or The willow has new leaves, or The coriander seeds
+have caught fire, or The king is in a good mood today,
+or Isn’t that lucky, or The furniture needs dusting, or
+The water carrier is here, or This bread needs more salt,
+or The clouds seem to be moving against the wind,
+or My head hurts, or My headache’s better,
+anything she praises it’s Joseph’s touch she means.
+Any complaint, it’s his being away.
+When she’s hungry, it’s for him. Thirsty, his name
+is a sherbet. Cold, he’s a fur. This is what
+the Friend can do when one is in such love.
+19
+The miracle Jesus did by being the name of God,
+Zuleikha felt in the name Joseph.
+When one is united to the core of another,
+to speak of that is to breathe the name Hu,
+empty of self and filled with love.
+P U T T H I S D E S I G N I N Y O U R C A R P E T
+Spiritual experience is a modest woman
+who looks lovingly at one man.
+It’s a great river where ducks live
+happily, and crows drown. The visible
+bowl of form contains food that is both
+nourishing and a source of heartburn.
+There is an unseen presence we honor
+that gives the gifts.
+You’re water. We’re the millstone.
+You’re wind. We’re dust blown up into shapes.
+You’re spirit. We’re the opening and closing
+of our hands. You’re the clarity.
+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
+20
+grinding is explaining how it believes
+in the river! No metaphor can say this,
+but I can’t stop pointing to the beauty.
+Every moment and place says,
+“Put this design in your carpet!”
+T H E R O A D H O M E
+An ant hurries along a threshing floor
+with its wheat grain, moving between huge stacks
+of wheat, not knowing the abundance
+all around. It thinks its one grain
+is all there is to love.
+So we choose a tiny seed to be devoted to.
+This body, one path or one teacher.
+Look wider and farther.
+The essence of every human being can see,
+and what that essence-eye takes in,
+the being becomes. Saturn. Solomon!
+The ocean pours through a jar,
+and you might say it swims inside
+the fish! This mystery gives peace to
+your longing and makes the road home home.
+21
+T H I S I S E N O U G H
+Aphrodite singing ghazals. A sky with
+gold streaks across. A stick
+that finds water in stone. Jesus
+sitting quietly near the animals.
+Night so peaceful. This is enough
+was always true. We just haven’t
+seen it. The hoopoe already wears
+a tufted crown. Each ant is given
+its elegant belt at birth. This love
+we feel pours through us like a giveaway
+song. The source of now is here!
+U Z A Y R
+Which reminds me of the sons of Uzayr,
+who are out looking for their father.
+They have grown old, and their father
+has miraculously grown young!
+They meet him and ask, “Pardon us, sir,
+but have you seen Uzayr? We hear
+that he’s supposed to be coming along
+this road today.” “Yes,” says Uzayr,
+22
+“he’s right behind me.” One of his sons
+replies, “That’s good news.” The other
+falls on the ground. He has recognized
+his father. “What do you mean news?
+We’re already inside the sweetness
+of his presence.” To the mind
+there is such a thing as news, whereas
+to inner knowing, it’s all in the middle
+of its happening. To doubters, this is
+a pain. To believers, it’s gospel.
+To the lover and the visionary,
+it’s life as it’s being lived.
+Out of nowhere a horse
+brought us here where we taste love
+until we don’t exist again. This taste
+is the wine we always mention.
+A M A Z E D M O U T H
+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,
+23
+a ladder leaning on a roof, someone
+climbing down. The market square bright
+with understanding. Listening
+opens its amazed mouth.
+Birdsong, wind,
+the water’s face.
+Each flower, remembering the smell:
+I know you’re close by.
+B E G I N
+This is now. Now is. Don’t postpone
+till then. Spend the spark of iron
+on stone. Sit at the head of the table.
+Dip your spoon in the bowl. Seat yourself
+next to your joy and have your awakened soul
+pour wine. Branches in the spring wind,
+easy dance of jasmine and cypress. Cloth
+for green robes has been cut from pure
+absence. You’re the tailor, settled
+among his shop goods, quietly sewing.
+24
+4. 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
+of the melodies.
+This station gives the lover glimpses of a spirit-whole-
+ness running through the apparent chaos, a rightness that
+weaves a pattern the lover sees in the dissonant and daily.
+Here is the auspicious beginning. Kindness stands in the
+door. You walk out together like the Zen master Basho mov-
+ing around Kyoto, pining for Kyoto. The phenomenal and
+the numinous grow identical. The world you see, together
+with the poem, both are intensely alive inside each other
+with revelation and suchness. That’s the feeling in this
+region: continuous seasonal epiphany, grief, elation, whimsy.
+Samurai talk —
+tang
+of horse radish.
+You, the butterfly —
+I, Chuang Tzu’s
+dreaming heart.
+Even in Kyoto —
+hearing the cuckoo’s cry —
+I long for Kyoto.19
+25
+T H I S M A R K E T
+Can you find another market like this?
+Where, with your one rose
+you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?
+Where, for one seed you get
+a whole wilderness? For one weak
+breath, the divine wind?
+T H E M U S I C W E A R E
+Did you hear that winter’s over?
+The basil and the carnations
+cannot control their laughter.
+The nightingale, back from his wandering,
+has been made singing master over
+all the birds. The trees reach out
+their congratulations. The soul
+goes dancing through the king’s doorway.
+Anemones blush because they have seen
+the rose naked. Spring, the only fair
+judge, walks in the courtroom, and
+several December thieves steal away.
+26
+Last year’s miracles will soon be
+forgotten. New creatures whirl in
+from nonexistence, galaxies scattered
+around their feet. Have you met them?
+Do you hear the bud of Jesus crooning
+in the cradle? A single narcissus
+flower has been appointed Inspector
+of Kingdoms. A feast is set. Listen.
+The wind is pouring wine! Love
+used to hide inside images. No more!
+The orchard hangs out its lanterns.
+The dead come stumbling by in shrouds.
+Nothing can stay bound or be imprisoned.
+You say, “End this poem here and
+wait for what’s next.” I will. Poems
+are rough notations for the music we are.
+W A L N U T S
+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
+27
+keep our remembering fresh. But how
+does this happen within these dense bodies
+full of forgetfulness and doubt and
+grieving? It’s like water passing through us.
+It becomes acidic and bitter, but still as
+urine it retains watery qualities.
+It will put out a fire! So there is this music
+flowing through our bodies that can dowse
+restlessness. Hearing the sound, we gather
+strength. Love kindles with melody. Music
+feeds a lover composure, and provides form
+for the imagination. Music breathes
+on personal fire and makes it keener.
+The waterhole is deep. A thirsty man climbs
+a walnut tree growing next to the pool
+and drops walnuts one by one into
+the beautiful place. He listens carefully
+to the sound as they hit and watches
+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
+28
+carried them away.” He replies, “I’m not
+here for walnuts, I want the music
+they make when they hit.”
+You that come to birth and bring the mysteries,
+your voice-thunder makes us very happy.
+Roar, lion of the heart,
+and tear me open!
+N O B E T T E R G I F T
+When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
+marry, at once, quickly,
+for God’s sake!
+Don’t postpone it!
+Existence has no better gift.
+No amount of searching
+will find this.
+A perfect falcon, for no reason,
+has landed on your shoulder,
+and become yours.
+29
+This moment this love comes to rest in me,
+many beings in one being.
+In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
+Inside the needle’s eye, a turning night of stars.
+The clear bead at the center changes everything.
+There are no edges to my loving now.
+You’ve heard it said there’s a window
+that opens from one mind to another,
+but if there’s no wall, there’s no need
+for fitting the window, or the latch.
+A thousand half-loves
+must be forsaken to take
+one whole heart home.
+P A T T E R N
+When love itself comes to kiss you,
+don’t hold back! When the king goes hunting,
+30
+the forest smiles. Now the king has become
+the place and all the players, prey,
+bystander, bow, arrow, hand and release.
+How does that feel? Last night’s dream
+enters these open eyes. We sometimes make
+spiderwebs of smoke and saliva, fragile
+thought-packets. Leave thinking to the one
+who gave intelligence. Stop weaving,
+and watch how the pattern improves.
+A U C T I O N
+As elephants remember India
+perfectly, as mind dissolves,
+as song begins, as the glass
+fills, wind rising, a roomful
+of conversation, a sanctuary
+of prostration, a bird lights
+on my hand in this day born
+of friends, an ocean covering
+everything, all roads opening,
+a person changing to kindness,
+no one reasonable, religious
+jargon forgotten, and Saladin
+there raising his hand to bid
+on the bedraggled boy Joseph!
+31
+5. 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!
+32
+Q U I E T N E S S
+Inside this new love, die.
+Your way begins on the other side.
+Become the sky.
+Take an ax to the prison wall.
+Escape. Walk out
+like someone suddenly born into color.
+Do it now.
+You’re covered with thick cloud.
+Slide out the side. Die,
+and be quiet. Quietness is the surest
+sign that you’ve died.
+Your old life was a frantic running
+from silence.
+The speechless full moon comes out now.
+S O M E K I S S W E There is some kiss we want
+with our whole lives, the touch
+of spirit on the body. Seawater
+begs the pearl to break its shell.
+And the lily, how passionately
+it needs some wild darling!
+W A N T
+33
+At night, I open the window and ask
+the moon to come and press its
+face against mine.
+Breathe into me. Close
+the language-door and open the love-window.
+The moon won’t use the door,
+only the window.
+T H E W A T E R W H E E L
+Stay together, friends.
+Don’t scatter and sleep.
+Our friendship is made
+of being awake.
+The waterwheel accepts water
+and turns and gives it away,
+weeping.
+That way it stays in the garden,
+whereas another roundness rolls
+through a dry riverbed looking
+for what it thinks it wants.
+Stay here, quivering with each moment
+like a drop of mercury.
+34
+B L E S S I N G T H E M A R R I A G E
+This marriage be wine with halvah,
+honey dissolving in milk.
+This marriage be the leaves and fruit
+of a date tree. This marriage
+be women laughing together for days
+on end. This marriage, a sign
+for us to study. This marriage,
+beauty. This marriage, a moon
+in a light blue sky. This marriage,
+this silence, fully mixed with spirit.
+T W O D A Y S O F S I L E N C E
+After days of feasting, fast.
+After days of sleeping, stay awake
+one night. After these times of bitter
+storytelling, joking, and serious
+considerations, we should give ourselves
+two days between layers of baklava
+in the quiet seclusion where soul sweetens
+and thrives more than with language.
+35
+I hear nothing in my ear but your voice.
+Heart has plundered mind of its eloquence.
+Love writes a transparent calligraphy, so on
+the empty page my soul can read and recollect.
+Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands,
+or your own genuine solitude?
+Freedom, or power over an entire nation?
+A little while alone in your room
+will prove more valuable than anything else
+that could ever be given you.
+36
+P A S S A G E I N T O S I L E N C E
+The essence of darkness is light,
+as oil is the essence of this light.
+You are the origin of all jasmine, narcissi,
+and irises to come.
+You are sunlight moving
+through the houses, David’s hand
+molding smooth chainmail,
+September moon
+over the unharvested crop. You set
+the grain in the husk.
+A rose torn open, my head
+not worrying about debt, you,
+soul and body
+mortared together in bed,
+you saying,
+you are, you are,
+then stopping to twist the strings
+to sweeten the voice.
+When I give this body
+to the ground, you will find
+another way.
+These words are an alternate
+existence. Hear the passage into
+silence and be that.
+37
+6. 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.20 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.21 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 human-
+38
+ity 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 1971. Everyone felt it. My mother died
+(she was sixty-four, lung cancer) on May 8, 1971. My dad
+died of a stroke on July 2, 1971, 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.
+39
+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.”
+40
+E S C A P I N G T O T H E F O R E S T
+Some souls have gotten free of their bodies.
+Do you see them? Open your eyes for those
+who escape to meet with other escapees,
+whose hearts associate in a way they have
+of leaving their false selves
+to live in a truer self.
+I don’t mind if my companions
+wander away for a while.
+They will come back like a smiling drunk.
+The thirsty ones die of their thirst.
+The nightingale sometimes flies from a garden
+to sing in the forest.
+Love comes sailing through and I scream.
+Love sits beside me like a private supply of itself.
+Love puts away the instruments
+and takes off the silk robes. Our nakedness
+together changes me completely.
+41
+A N Y C H A N C E M E E T I N G
+In every gathering, in any chance meeting
+on the street, there is a shine, an elegance
+rising up. Today I recognized that that
+jewel-like beauty is the presence, our loving
+confusion, the glow in which watery clay gets
+brighter than fire, the one we call the Friend.
+N A S U H ’ S C H A N G I N G
+At that moment his spirit grows wings and lifts.
+His ego falls like a battered wall.
+He unites with God, alive,
+but emptied of Nasuh.
+His ship sinks and in its place move the ocean waves.
+His body’s disgrace, like a falcon’s loosened
+binding, slips from the falcon’s foot.
+His stones drink in water. His field shines like satin
+with gold threads in it. Someone dead a hundred
+years steps out strong and handsome.
+A broken stick breaks into bud.22
+If you love love,
+look for yourself.
+42
+What I say makes me drunk.
+Nightingale, iris, parrot, jasmine,
+I speak those languages, along with
+the idiom of my longing for Shamsi Tabriz.
+T H E C I R C L E
+Is there anything better than selling figs
+to the fig seller?
+That’s how this is.
+Making a profit is not why we’re here,
+nor pleasure, nor even joy.
+When someone
+is a goldsmith, wherever he goes, he asks
+for the goldsmith.
+The clouds build with
+what we share.
+Wheat stays wheat right
+through the threshing.
+How just do you
+feel when you load a lame donkey?
+The world has some share in this cup.
+That’s how it turns green.
+Let the lean
+and wounded be revived in your garden.
+43
+How would the soul feel in the beloved’s
+river?
+Fish washed free and clean of fear.
+You drive us away, but we return like pet
+pigeons.
+Ten nights becoming dawn flow
+in us as a new kind of waking.
+Shahabuddin
+Osmond joins the circle! We will say
+the poem again so he can play.
+There is
+no end to anything round.
+44
+7. 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,23 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.
+45
+T H E D E A T H O F S A L A D I N
+You left ground and sky weeping,24
+mind and soul full of grief.
+No one can take your place in existence
+or in absence. Both mourn,
+the angels, the prophets, and this sadness
+I feel has taken from me the taste of language,
+so that I can’t say the flavor
+of my being apart. The roof
+of the kingdom within has collapsed!
+When I say the word you, I mean
+a hundred universes.
+Pouring grief of water, or secret dripping
+in the heart, eyes in the head or eyes
+of the soul, I saw yesterday
+that all these flow out to find you
+when you’re not here.
+That bright fire bird Saladin
+went like an arrow, and now the bow
+trembles and sobs.
+If you know how to weep for human beings,
+weep for Saladin.
+46
+B I R D W I N G S
+Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
+up to where you’re bravely working.
+Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
+here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
+Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
+If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
+you would be paralyzed.
+Your deepest presence is in every small
+contracting and expanding,
+the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
+as birdwings.
+T H E S I L E N T A R T I C U L A T I O N O F A F A C E
+Love comes with a knife, not some
+shy question, and not with fears
+for its reputation! I say
+these things disinterestedly. Accept them
+in kind. Love is a madman,
+working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes,
+running through the mountains, drinking poison,
+and now quietly choosing annihilation.
+47
+A tiny spider tries to wrap an enormous wasp.
+Think of the spiderweb woven across the cave
+where Muhammad slept! There are love stories,
+and there is obliteration into love.
+You’ve been walking the ocean’s edge,
+holding up your robes to keep them dry.
+You must dive naked under and deeper under,
+a thousand times deeper! Love flows down.
+The ground submits to the sky and suffers
+what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse
+for giving in like that?
+Don’t put blankets over the drum!
+Open completely. Let your spirit-ear
+listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur.
+Let the cords of your robe be untied.
+Shiver in this new love beyond all
+above and below. The sun rises, but which way
+does night go? I have no more words.
+Let soul speak with the silent
+articulation of a face.
+48
+T H E A L L U R E O F L O V E
+Someone who does not run
+toward the allure of love walks
+a road where nothing lives.
+But this dove here senses
+the love-hawk floating above
+and waits and will not be driven
+or scared to safety.
+S K Y- C I R C L E S
+The way of love is not
+a subtle argument.
+The door there
+is devastation.
+Birds make great sky-circles
+of their freedom.
+How do they learn that?
+They fall, and falling,
+they’re given wings.
+49
+I T H R O W I T A L L A W A Y
+You play with the great globe of union,
+you that see everyone so clearly
+and cannot be seen. Even universal
+intelligence gets blurry when it thinks
+you may leave. You came here alone,
+but you create hundreds of new worlds.
+Spring is a peacock flirting with
+revelation. The rose gardens flame.
+Ocean enters the boat. I throw
+it all away, except this love for Shams.
+Y O U R F A C E
+You may be planning departure, as a human soul
+leaves the world taking almost all its sweetness
+with it. You saddle your horse.
+You must be going. Remember you have friends
+here as faithful as grass and sky.
+Have I failed you? Possibly you’re
+angry. But remember our nights of conversation,
+the well work, yellow roses by ocean,
+the longing, the archangel Gabriel
+saying So be it. Shamsi Tabriz, your face,
+is what every religion tries to remember.
+50
+I’ve broken through to longing now,
+filled with a grief I have felt before,
+but never like this.
+The center leads to love.
+Soul opens the creation core.
+Hold on to your particular pain.
+That too can take you to God.
+My work is to carry this love
+as comfort for those who long for you,
+to go everywhere you’ve walked
+and gaze at the pressed-down dirt.
+Pale sunlight,
+pale the wall.
+Love moves away.
+The light changes.
+I need more grace
+than I thought.
+51
+T H E P U R P O S E O F E M O T I O N
+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,
+or happiness, or one who brings the joy
+of being opened. It comes from the stem faraj,
+which also refers to the genitals, male and female.
+His teacher understood the purity of the action,
+while others just saw the ragged appearance.
+If you want peace and purity, tear away
+the coverings! This is the purpose of emotion,
+to let a streaming beauty flow through you.
+Call it spirit, elixir, or the original agreement
+between yourself and God. Opening into that
+gives peace, a song of being empty, pure silence.
+The ground’s generosity takes in our compost
+and grows beauty. Try to be more
+like the ground.
+Give back better, as rough clods return
+an ear of corn, a tassel, a barley
+awn, this sleek handful of oats.
+52
+8. 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.”25 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-
+53
+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!”26
+Ananda continued to be puzzled and amazed by their
+conversation. The beautiful wholeness of it cannot be
+accepted by the mind.
+54
+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
+your own beauty. I am the wind
+that mixes in your fire, who stirs
+and brightens, then makes you gutter out.”
+S M O K E
+Don’t listen to anything I say.
+I must enter the center of the fire.
+Fire is my child, but I must
+be consumed and become fire.
+Why is there crackling and smoke?
+Because the firewood and the flames
+are still talking about each other.
+“You are too dense. Go away!”
+“You are too wavering.
+I have solid form.”
+In the blackness those friends keep arguing.
+Like a wanderer with no face.
+Like the most powerful bird in existence
+sitting on its perch, refusing to move.
+55
+I ’ M N O T S A Y I N G T H I S R I G H T
+You bind me, and I tear away in a rage
+to open out into air, a round
+brightness, a candlepoint,
+all reason, all love.
+This confusing joy, your doing,
+this hangover, your tender thorn.
+You turn to look, I turn.
+I’m not saying this right.
+I am a jailed crazy who ties up spirit-women.
+I am Solomon.
+What goes comes back. Come back.
+We never left each other.
+A disbeliever hides disbelief,
+but I will say his secret.
+More and more awake, getting up at night,
+spinning and falling in love with Shams.
+W H O S A Y S W O R D S W I T H M Y Who looks out with my eyes? What is
+the soul? I cannot stop asking.
+If I could taste one sip of an answer,
+I could break out of this prison for drunks.
+56
+M O U T H ?
+I didn’t come here of my own accord,
+and I can’t leave that way.
+Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.
+This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
+I don’t plan it.
+When I’m outside the saying of it,
+I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
+We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.
+That’s fine with us. Every morning
+we glow and in the evening we glow again.
+They say there’s no future for us. They’re right.
+Which is fine with us.
+Real value comes with madness,
+matzoob27 below, scientist above.
+Whoever finds love
+beneath hurt and grief
+disappears into emptiness
+with a thousand new disguises.
+57
+A C A P T O W E A R I N B O T H W O R L D S
+There is a passion in me that doesn’t
+long for anything from another human being.
+I was given something else, a cap to wear
+in both worlds. It fell off. No matter.
+One morning I went to a place beyond dawn.
+A source of sweetness that flows
+and is never less. I have been shown
+a beauty that would confuse both worlds,
+but I won’t cause that uproar. I am
+nothing but a head set on the ground
+as a gift for Shams.
+Midnight, but your forehead
+shines with dawn. You dance as
+you come to me and curl by curl
+undo the dark. Let jealousy end.
+There’s a strange frenzy in my head,
+of birds flying,
+each particle circulating on its own.
+Is the one I love everywhere?
+58
+F R I N G E
+You wreck my shop and my house and now my heart,
+but how can I run from what gives me life?
+I’m weary of personal worrying, in love
+with the art of madness! Tear open my shame
+and show the mystery. How much longer
+do I have to fret with self-restraint and fear?
+Friends, this is how it is: we are fringe
+sewn inside the lining of a robe. Soon
+we’ll be loosened, the binding threads torn
+out. The beloved is a lion. We’re
+the lame deer in his paws. Consider
+what choices we have!
+Drunks fear the police,
+but the police are drunk too.
+People in this town, we love them
+both like different chess pieces.
+59
+T H E A C H E A N D C O N F U S I O N
+Near the end you saw rose and thorn together,
+evening and morning light commingling.
+You have broken many shapes and stirred
+their colors into the mud.
+Now you sit in a garden not doing a thing,
+smiling. You have felt the ache
+and confusion of a hangover, yet
+you take again the wine that’s handed you.
+Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
+absentminded. Someone sober
+will worry about things going badly.
+Let the lover be.
+W O N D E R W I T H O U T W I L L P O W E R
+Love’s way becomes a pen sometimes
+writing g-sounds like gold or r-sounds
+like tomorrow in different calligraphy
+styles sliding by, darkening the paper.
+Now it’s held upside down, now beside
+the head, now down and on to something
+60
+else, figuring. One sentence saves
+an illustrious man from disaster, but
+fame does not matter to the split tongue
+of a pen. Hippocrates knows how the cure
+must go. His pen does not. This one
+I am calling pen, or sometimes flag,
+has no mind. You, the pen, are most sanely
+insane. You cannot be spoken of rationally.
+Opposites are drawn into your presence but
+not to be resolved. You are not whole
+or ever complete. You are the wonder
+without willpower going where you want.
+61
+9. 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.”28 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.
+62
+The Infinite a sudden Guest
+Has been assumed to be
+But how can that stupendous come
+Which never went away?29
+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?30
+63
+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.
+The wick with its knotted neck broken
+tells you the same. A candle as it diminishes
+explains, Gathering more and more is not the way. Burn,
+become light and heat and help. Melt.
+The ocean sits in the sand letting its lap fill
+with pearls and shells, then empty.
+A bittersalt taste hums, This.
+The phoenix gives up on good-and-bad, flies
+to rest on Mount Qaf, no more burning and rising
+from ash. It sends out one message.
+The rose purifies its face, drops the soft petals,
+shows its thorn, and points.
+Wine abandons thousands of famous names,
+the vintage years and delightful bouquets,
+to run wild and anonymous through your brain.
+The flute closes its eyes and gives its lips
+to Hamza’s emptiness.
+Everything begs with the silent rocks for you
+to be flung out like light over this plain,
+the presence of Shams.
+64
+C A N D L E L I G H T B E C O M E S M O T H
+Inside a lover’s heart there’s another world,
+and yet another.
+Inside the Friend of this community
+of lovers, an ear that interprets mystery,
+a vein of silver in the ground, and another sky!
+Intellect and compassion are ladders we climb,
+and there are other ladders as we walk
+the night hearing a voice that talks of forgiveness.
+Inside Shams’s universe candlelight itself
+becomes a moth to die in his candle.
+T H E B A S K E T O F F R E S H B R E A D
+If you want to learn theory,
+talk with theoreticians. That way is oral.
+When you learn a craft, practice it.
+That learning comes through the hands.
+If you want dervishhood, spiritual poverty
+and emptiness, you must be friends with a teacher.
+Talking about it, reading books, and doing practices
+don’t help. Soul receives from soul that knowing.
+65
+The mystery of absence
+may be living in your pilgrim heart,
+and yet the knowing of it may not yet be yours.
+Wait for the illuminated openness,
+as though your chest were filling with light,
+as when God said,
+Did we not expand you? (Qur’an 57:4)
+Don’t look for it outside yourself.
+You are the source of milk. Don’t milk others!
+There is a fountain inside you.
+Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.
+You have a channel into the ocean,
+yet you ask for water from a little pool.
+Beg for the love expansion. Meditate only
+on THAT. The Qur’an says,
+And he is with you. (57:4)
+There is a basket of fresh bread on your head,
+yet you go door to door asking for crusts.
+Knock on the inner door, no other.
+Sloshing knee-deep in fresh riverwater,
+yet you keep asking for other people’s waterbags.
+Water is everywhere around you, but you see
+only barriers that keep you from water.
+66
+The horse is beneath the rider’s thighs,
+and still you ask, “Where’s my horse?”
+Right there,
+under you!
+Yes, this is a horse, but where’s the horse?
+Can’t you see?
+“Yes I can see, but whoever saw
+such a horse?”
+Mad with thirst, you can’t drink from the stream
+running close by your face. You are like a pearl
+on the deep bottom wondering inside the shell,
+Where’s the ocean?
+Those mental questionings
+form the barrier.
+Stay bewildered inside God,
+and only that.
+When you are with everyone but me,
+you’re with no one.
+When you are with no one but me,
+you’re with everyone.
+Instead of being so bound up with everyone,
+be everyone.
+When you become that many, you’re nothing.
+Empty.
+67
+T H I S T O R T U R E
+Why should we tell you our love stories
+when you spill them together like blood in the dirt?
+Love is a pearl lost on the ocean floor,
+or a fire we can’t see,
+but how does saying that
+push us through the top of the head into
+the light above the head?
+Love is not
+an iron pot, so this boiling energy
+won’t help.
+Soul, heart, self.
+Beyond and within those
+is one saying,
+How long before
+I’m free of this torture!
+68
+10. 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. 44). 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
+69
+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.”31 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
+70
+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
+71
+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.
+72
+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.
+You’re most handsome when you’re after food.
+T H E P U B L I C B A T H
+Imagine the phenomenal world as a furnace
+heating water for the public bath.
+Some people carry baskets of dung
+to keep the furnace going. Call them
+materialists, energetic, fire-stoking citizens.
+One of those brags how he’s collected
+and carried twenty dung baskets today,
+while his friend has brought six!
+They think the counting up at nightfall
+is where truth lies. They love the smoke smell
+of dried dung, and how it blazes up like gold!
+If you give them musk or any fragrance
+of soul intelligence, they find it unpleasant
+and turn away. Others sit in the hot bathwater
+and get clean. They use the world differently.
+They love the feel of purity, and they have
+dust marks on their foreheads from bowing down.
+73
+They are separated by a wall from those
+who feed the fires, busy in the boiler room
+belittling each other. Sometimes, though,
+one of those leaves the furnace,
+takes off the burnt smelling rags,
+and sits in the cleansing water.
+The mystery is how the obsessions
+of furnace stokers keep the bathwater
+of the others simmering perfectly.
+They seem opposed, but they’re necessary
+to each other’s work: the proud piling up
+of fire worship, the humble disrobing
+and emptying out of purification.
+As the sun dries wet dung to make it
+ready to heat water, so dazzling
+sparks fly from the burning filth.
+M A S H A L L A H
+There’s someone swaying by your side,
+lips that say Mashallah, Mashallah.
+Wonderful. God inside attraction.
+A spring no one knew of wells up
+on the valley floor.
+74
+Lights inside a tent lovers move toward.
+The refuse of Damascus gets turned over
+in the sun. Be like that yourself.
+Say mercy, mercy to the one who guides
+your soul, who keeps time.
+Move, make a mistake, look
+up. Checkmate.
+S P I R I T A N D B O DY
+Don’t feed both sides of yourself equally.
+The spirit and the body carry different loads
+and require different attentions.
+Too often
+we put saddlebags on Jesus and let the donkey
+run loose in the pasture.
+Don’t make the body do
+what the spirit does best, and don’t put a big load
+on the spirit that the body could easily carry.
+B R E A D M A K I N G
+There was a feast. The king was in his cups.
+He saw a learned scholar walking by.
+“Bring him in and give him some of this fine wine.”
+75
+Servants rushed out and brought the man
+to the king’s table, but he was not receptive.
+“I had rather drink poison! Take it away!”
+He kept on with these loud refusals, disturbing
+the atmosphere of the feast. This is how
+it sometimes is at God’s table.
+Someone who has heard
+about ecstatic love, but never tasted it,
+disrupts the banquet.
+He’s all fire and no light,
+all husk and no kernel. The king gave orders,
+“Cupbearer, do what you must.”
+This is how
+your invisible guide acts, the chess champion
+across from you that always wins.
+He cuffed
+the scholar’s head and said, “Taste!” and
+“Again!”
+The cup was drained, and the intellectual
+started singing and telling ridiculous jokes.
+He joined the garden, snapping his fingers
+and swaying. Soon, of course, he had to pee.
+He went out, and there near the latrine
+was a beautiful woman, one of the king’s harem.
+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,
+76
+then more roughly. He pounds it on the board.
+It softly groans under his palms.
+Now he spreads
+it out and rolls it flat. Then he bunches it,
+and rolls it all the way out again,
+thin.
+Now he adds water and mixes it well.
+Now salt,
+and a little more salt. Now he shapes it
+delicately to its final shape and slides it
+into the oven, which is already hot.
+You remember breadmaking!
+This is how your desire
+tangles with a desired one.
+And it’s not just
+a metaphor for a man and a woman making love.
+Warriors in battle do this too.
+A great mutual embrace
+is always happening between the eternal
+and what dies, between essence and accident.
+The sport has different rules in every case,
+but it’s basically the same,
+and remember, the way
+you make love is the way God will be with you.
+77
+S E X U A L U R G E N C Y A N D T R U E V I R I L I T Y
+Someone offhand to the Caliph of Egypt,
+“The King of Mosul
+has a concubine like no other. She looks like this!”
+He draws her likeness on paper.
+The Caliph drops his cup.
+He immediately sends his captain to Mosul with an army.
+The siege goes on for weeks, many casualties,
+the walls and towers unsteady as wax.
+The King of Mosul sends an envoy, “Why this killing?
+If you want the city, I will leave and you can have it!
+If you want more wealth, that’s even easier!”
+The Captain takes out the piece of paper. This.
+The strong king is quick to reply,
+“Lead her out. The idol belongs with
+the idolater.”
+When the Captain sees her,
+he falls in love like the Caliph.
+Don’t laugh at this.
+Their loving is also part of infinite love, without which
+the world does not evolve.
+Objects move from inorganic
+to vegetation, to selves endowed with spirit,
+through the urgency of every love
+that wants to consummate.
+78
+The Captain thinks the soil looks fertile,
+so he sows his seed. Sleeping,
+he makes love to a dream image of the girl,
+and his semen spurts out.
+He wakes up,
+“I am in love.”
+His infatuation is a blackwater wave
+carrying him away.
+Something makes a phantom
+appear in the darkness of a well,
+and the phantom itself becomes strong enough
+to throw actual lions
+into the hole.
+The Captain does not take the girl
+straight to the Caliph. Instead, he camps
+in a secluded meadow. Blazing,
+he can’t tell ground from sky! His reason is lost
+in a drumming sound,
+worthless radish and son of a
+radish,
+this cultivator tears off the woman’s pants
+and lies down between her legs,
+his penis moving straight
+to the mark.
+Just then, there’s a rising cry of soldiers
+outside the tent.
+A black lion from a nearby swamp
+has gotten in among the horses.
+The Captain leaps up with bare bottom
+shining, scimitar in hand.
+79
+The lion is jumping twenty feet
+in the air, tents billowing
+like an ocean. The Captain splits the lion’s head
+with one blow.
+Now he’s running back to the woman.
+When he stretches out the beauty
+again, his penis
+goes even more erect.
+The engagement,
+the coming together, is as with the lion.
+His penis stays erect all
+through and does not scatter semen feebly.
+The beautiful one is amazed
+at his virility. With great energy she joins
+with his energy. Their two spirits
+go out from them as one.
+Whenever two are linked
+in this way,
+another comes from the unseen. It may be through birth,
+if nothing prevents conception,
+but a third does come when
+two unite in love, or in hate.
+The intense qualities
+of such joining have consequences. Such
+association bears progeny.
+There are children to consider!
+Children born of your sexual energy shared
+with another are entities in the invisible world. They have
+form and speech.
+They are crying to you now.
+You have forgotten us. Come back!
+Be aware of this.
+80
+A man and woman together always have a spirit-result.
+The Captain was not so aware.
+He fell and stuck like a gnat
+in a pot of buttermilk, totally absorbed in his love affair.
+Then just as suddenly, he’s uninterested.
+“Don’t say a word of this to the Caliph.” He takes the girl
+and presents her.
+The Caliph is smitten.
+She’s a hundred times more beautiful
+than he imagined! He also has the idea of entering her
+beauty and comes to do his wanting.
+Memory raises his penis, straining in thought toward
+the pushing down and lifting up
+that makes it grow large with delight.
+As he lies down
+with her, though, there comes a tiny sound
+like a mouse might make,
+a suggestion from God that he lay off these voluptuous
+doings. The penis droops
+and desire slips away.
+81
+The girl remembers the Captain running out to kill the lion
+with his member
+standing straight up, then the running back.
+Long and loud
+her laughter. Anything she thinks of
+only increases it like the laughing of those who eat hashish.
+Everything is funny.
+When she gets hold of herself,
+the girl tells all,
+the Captain’s running about the camp hard as a rhino’s horn,
+then the Caliph’s member shrinking
+for one mouse-whisper.
+The Caliph comes back
+to his clarity,
+“In the pride of my power I took this woman
+from another, so of course someone came to knock
+on my door.
+The adulterer pimps for his own wife. When you cause
+injury to someone, you draw the same injury
+to yourself.
+This lusting repetition must stop somewhere.
+Here, in an act of mercy. I’ll send you back
+to the Captain.
+May you both enjoy the pleasure.”
+This is the virility
+of a prophet. The Caliph was sexually impotent,
+but his manliness was powerful.
+82
+The kernel of true manhood is
+the ability to abandon sensual indulgence.
+The intensity
+of the Captain’s libido is less than a husk compared
+to the Caliph’s nobility in ending the cycle
+of sowing lust and reaping secrecy and meanness.
+T W O W AY S O F R U N N I N G
+A certain man had a jealous wife and a very
+appealing maidservant.
+The wife was careful not to leave
+them alone, ever.
+For six years they were never left
+in a room together.
+But then, one day at the public bath
+the wife remembered she’d left
+her silver basin at home.
+“Please, go get the basin,”
+she told her maid. The girl jumped to the task knowing she
+would finally get to be alone with the master.
+She ran joyfully. She flew. Desire took them both
+so quickly they didn’t latch the door.
+With great speed
+they joined. When bodies blend in copulation,
+spirits also merge.
+Meanwhile, the wife back
+at the bathhouse is washing her hair.
+“What have I done!
+I’ve set cotton wool on fire! I’ve put the ram in
+with the ewe!”
+83
+She washed the clay soap off and ran, fixing
+her chador about her as she went.
+The maid ran for love.
+The wife ran out of jealousy and fear.
+There is a great difference.
+A mystic lover flies moment to moment. The fearful
+ascetic drags along month to month.
+The length of a day
+for a lover may be fifty thousand years!
+There’s no way to understand this
+with your mind. You must burst open!
+Love is a quality
+of God. Fear is an attribute of those who think
+they serve God,
+but actually they’re preoccupied with penis
+and vagina.
+Rule-keepers run on foot along the surface.
+Lovers move like lightning and wind.
+No contest.
+Theologians mumble, rumble-dumble, necessity and free
+will, while lover and beloved
+pull themselves into each other.
+The worried wife
+reaches the door and opens it.
+The maid is
+disheveled, flushed, unable to speak.
+The husband begins his five-times
+prayer. As though experimenting
+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
+84
+drenching the thighs
+of the maid.
+The wife slaps him
+on the side of the head,
+“Is this the way a man prays,
+with his balls? Does your penis
+long for union like this?
+Is that why her legs are so covered
+with this stuff?”
+These are good questions.
+People who repress desires
+often turn, suddenly,
+into hypocrites.
+85
+11. Love’s Secret
+Rumi makes preposterous claims. One of the most startling
+is, “Our loving is the way God’s secret gets told!”32 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
+86
+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.
+87
+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
+through metaphors, it’s like when
+children ask what sex
+feels like and you answer, “Like candy,
+so sweet.” The suchness of sex
+comes with being inside the pleasure.
+Whatever you say about mysteries,
+I know or I don’t know, both are close
+to being true. Neither is quite a lie.
+W H AT H U R T S T H E S O U L ?
+We tremble, thinking we’re about to dissolve
+into nonexistence, but nonexistence
+fears even more that it might be given human form!
+Loving God is the only pleasure. Other delights
+turn bitter. What hurts the soul?
+To live without tasting the water of its own essence.
+People focus on death and this material earth.
+They have doubts about soul water.
+Those doubts can be reduced! Use night
+to wake your clarity. Darkness and the living water
+are lovers. Let them stay up together.
+88
+When merchants eat their big meals
+and sleep their dead sleep,
+we night-thieves go to work.
+Love is the way messengers
+from the mystery tell us things.
+Love is the mother. We are her children.
+She shines inside us, visible-invisible,
+as we lose trust or feel it start to grow again.
+H I D D E N Hiding is the hidden purpose
+of creation. Bury your seed
+and wait. After you die, all
+the thoughts you had will
+throng around like children.
+The heart is the secret inside
+I N S I D E
+the secret. Call the secret
+language and never be sure
+what you conceal. It’s unsure
+people who get the blessing.
+89
+Climbing jasmine, opening rose,
+nightingale song, these are
+inside the chill November
+wind. They are its secret.
+How did you discover mine?
+Your laugh. Only the soul
+knows what love is. This
+moment in time and space is
+an eggshell with an embryo
+crumpled inside, soaked in
+spirit-yolk, under the wing
+of grace, until it breaks free
+of mind to become the song
+of birds and their breathing.
+If everyone could see what love is,
+each would set up a tentpole in the ocean.
+The world’s population pitched and living
+easily within the sea! What if inside
+every lover’s tear you saw the face
+of the Friend: Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha,
+the impossible-possible philosopher,
+the glass diamond one, Shams Tabriz?
+90
+They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual?
+They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.
+In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul
+and you are that.
+But we have ways within each other
+that will never be said by anyone.
+Come to the orchard in spring.
+There is light and wine and sweethearts
+in the pomegranate flowers.
+If you do not come, these do not matter.
+If you do come, these do not matter.
+91
+12. 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.
+92
+W H O M A K E S Who makes these changes?
+I shoot an arrow right.
+It lands left.
+T H E S E C H A N G E S ?
+I ride after a deer and find myself
+chased by a hog.
+I plot to get what I want
+and end up in prison.
+I dig pits to trap others
+and fall in.
+I should be suspicious
+of what I want.
+D R O W N I N G
+What can I say to someone so curled up
+with wanting, so constricted
+in his love? Break your pitcher
+against a rock. We don’t need any longer
+to haul pieces of the ocean around.
+We must drown, away from heroism,
+and descriptions of heroism.
+Like a pure spirit lying down, pulling
+its body over it, like a bride her husband
+for a cover to keep her warm.
+93
+T H E D O G Now, what if a dog’s owner
+were not able to control it?
+P R O B L E M
+A poor dervish might appear: the dog storms out.
+The dervish says, “I take refuge with God
+when the dog of arrogance attacks,”
+and the dog’s owner has to say,
+“So do I! I’m helpless
+against this creature even in my own house!
+Just as you can’t come close,
+I can’t go out!”
+This is how animal energy becomes monstrous
+and ruins your life’s freshness and beauty.
+Think of taking this dog
+out to hunt! You’d be the quarry.
+Z I K R
+A naked man jumps in the river, hornets swarming
+above him. The water is the zikr,
+remembering, There is no reality but God.
+There is only God.
+The hornets are his sexual memories, this woman,
+that, or if a woman, this man, that.
+The head comes up. They sting.
+94
+Breathe water. Become river head to foot.
+Hornets leave you alone then.
+Even if you’re far from the river,
+they pay no attention.
+No one looks for stars when the sun’s out.
+A person blended into God does not disappear.
+He or she is just completely soaked
+in God’s qualities. Do you need a quote
+from the Qur’an?
+All shall be brought into our presence.
+Join those travelers. The lamps we burn go out,
+some quickly. Some last till daybreak.
+Some are dim, some intense; all are fed
+with fuel. If a light goes out in one house,
+that doesn’t affect the next house.
+This is the story of the animal soul,
+not the divine soul. The sun shines on every house.
+When it goes down, all houses get dark.
+Light is the image of your teacher. Your enemies
+love the dark. A spider weaves a web
+over a light, out of herself makes a veil.
+Don’t try to control a wild horse by grabbing its leg.
+Take hold the neck. Use a bridle. Be sensible.
+Then ride! There is a need for self-denial.
+Don’t be contemptuous of old obediences. They help.
+95
+T H E C O R E O F M A S C U L I N I T Y
+The core of masculinity does not derive
+from being male, nor friendliness
+from those who console.
+Your old grandmother says, “Maybe you shouldn’t
+go to school. You look a little pale.”
+Run when you hear that.
+A father’s stern slaps are better.
+Your bodily soul wants comforting.
+The severe father wants spiritual clarity.
+He scolds but eventually
+leads you into the open.
+Pray for a tough instructor
+to hear and act and stay within you.
+We have been busy accumulating solace.
+Make us afraid of how we were.
+C L E A R B E I N G
+I honor those who try
+to rid themselves of lying,
+who empty the self
+and have only clear being there.
+96
+T H E S O U L’ S F R I E N D
+Listen to your essential self, the Friend.
+When you feel longing, be patient,
+and also prudent, moderate with eating and drinking.
+Be like a mountain in the wind.
+Do you notice how it moves? There are sweet
+illusions that arrive to lure you away.
+Make some excuse to them, “I have indigestion,”
+or “I need to meet my cousin.”
+You fish, the baited hook may be fifty
+or even sixty gold pieces, but is it really
+worth your freedom in the ocean?
+When traveling, stay close to your bag.
+I am the bag that holds what you love.
+You can be separated from me!
+Live carefully in the joy of this friendship.
+Don’t think, But those others love me so.
+Some invitations sound like the fowler’s whistle
+to the quail, friendly, but not quite
+how you remember the call of your soul’s Friend.
+97
+L O N G I N G
+Longing is the core of mystery.
+Longing itself brings the cure.
+The only rule is, Suffer the pain.
+Your desire must be disciplined,
+and what you want to happen
+in time, sacrificed.
+The morning wind spreads its fresh smell.
+We must get up to take that in,
+that wind that lets us live.
+Breathe, before it’s gone.
+W H AT D R A W S YO U ?
+There are two types on the path, those
+who come against their will, the blindly religious,
+and those who obey out of love.
+The former have ulterior motives.
+They want the midwife near because she gives them milk.
+The others love the beauty of the nurse.
+The former memorize the prooftexts of conformity
+and repeat them. The latter disappear
+into whatever draws them to God.
+98
+Both are drawn from the source.
+Any motion is from the mover.
+Any love from the beloved.
+F E A R
+Everyone can see how they have polished the mirror
+of the self, which is done with the longings
+we’re given.
+Not everyone wants to be king!
+There are different roles and many choices
+within each.
+Troubles come. One person packs up
+and leaves. Another stays and deepens in a love
+for being human.
+In battle, one runs fearing
+for his life. Another, just as scared, turns
+and fights more fiercely.
+A T E A C H E R ’ S PAY
+God has said Be moderate with eating and drinking,
+but never, Be satisfied when taking in light.
+God offers a teacher the treasures of the world,
+and the teacher responds, “To be in love with God
+and expect to be paid for it!” A servant wants
+to be rewarded for what he does. A lover wants
+only to be in love’s presence, that ocean
+whose depth will never be known.
+99
+L O O K I N G I N TO T H E C R E E K
+The way the soul is with the senses and the intellect
+is like a creek.
+When desire weeds grow thick,
+intelligence can’t flow,
+and soul creatures stay hidden.
+But sometimes the reasonable clarity
+runs so strong
+it sweeps the clogged stream open.
+No longer weeping
+and frustrated, your being grows as powerful
+as your wantings were before,
+more so. Laughing
+and satisfied, the masterful flow lets
+creatures of the soul appear.
+You look down,
+and it’s lucid dreaming.
+The gates made of light
+swing open.
+You see in.
+T H E P O L I S H E R
+As everything changes overnight, I praise
+the breaking of promises.
+Whatever love wants,
+it gets, not next year, now!
+100
+I swear by the one who never says tomorrow,
+as the circle of the moon refuses to sell
+installments of light. It gives all it has.
+How do fables conclude, and who will explain them?
+Every story is us. That’s who we are,
+from beginning to no-matter-how it ends.
+Should I use the pronoun we? The Friend
+walks by, and bricks in the wall feel
+conscious. Infertile women give birth.
+So beauty embodies itself.
+Those who know the taste of a meal
+are those who sit at the table and eat.
+Lover and Friend are one being,
+and separate beings too,
+as the polisher melts
+in the mirror’s face.
+101
+13. 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.
+102
+B U R N T K A B O B
+Last year, I admired the wines. This,
+I’m wandering inside the red world.
+Last year, I gazed at the fire,
+This year I’m burnt kabob.
+Thirst drove me down to the water
+where I drank the moon’s reflection.
+Now I am a lion staring up, totally
+lost in love with the thing itself.
+Don’t ask questions about
+longing. Look in my face.
+Soul drunk, body ruined, these two
+sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.
+Neither knows how to fix it.
+And my heart, I’d say it was more
+like a donkey sunk in a mudhole,
+struggling and miring deeper.
+But listen to me: for one moment,
+quit being sad. Hear blessings
+dropping their blossoms
+around you. God.
+103
+S I T T I N G I N T H E O R C H A R D
+A man sits in an orchard, fruit trees full
+and the vines plump. He has his head
+on his knee; his eyes are closed.
+His friend says, “Why stay sunk in mystical
+meditation when the world is like this?
+Such visible grace.”
+He replies, “This outer is an elaboration
+of the inner. I prefer the origin.”
+Natural beauty is a tree limb reflected
+in the water of a creek, quivering there, not
+there. The growing that moves in the soul
+is more real than tree limbs and reflections.
+We laugh and feel happy or sad over all this.
+Try instead to get a scent
+of the true orchard. Taste the vineyard
+within the vineyard.
+T H E P R I N C E O F K A B U L
+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
+104
+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.
+World complications can sometimes become
+very simple very quickly, and age
+has no bearing on this realization.
+Neither are words necessary to see into
+mystery. Just be and it is. A king
+dreams his young son has died. He falls
+into such grief in the dream that the world
+darkens, and his body grows inert.
+Suddenly he wakes into a joy he’s never felt.
+His son is alive! He thinks to himself,
+Such sorrow causes such joy. It is a kind
+of joke on human beings that we are pulled
+between these two states as though with ropes
+on the sides of a collar. Dream interpreters
+say laughter in a dream foretells weeping
+and regret; tears, some new delight. Now
+the king has another thought, What occurs
+in dream can actually happen any second!
+If my son dies, I will need a keepsake.
+When a candle goes out, you need another
+lit candle. My son must give us offspring.
+105
+He’s of marriageable age. I’ll find
+him a bride. This is flawless reasoning,
+dear reader. Open any medical text and look
+at the table of contents: tumors, rashes,
+fevers, there are a thousand ways to die!
+Every step takes you into a scorpion pit.
+He found a wife for the prince, not from
+royal blood or from wealth, but from a poor,
+honest worker’s family, with the greater riches
+of an open heart. A beautiful young woman
+clear as the morning sun. The women
+in the court object vigorously, but the king
+has decided. He knows the value of inner wealth
+as opposed to the other: a long curving
+file of moving camels, as against bits of hair
+and dung. If you own the caravan, why bother
+with refuse left behind? In a quirk of destiny,
+as the marriage approaches, the old woman
+of Kabul falls in love with the handsome,
+generous-spirited prince. She enchants him
+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
+106
+in his ignorance. His father the king prays
+constantly, Lord! Lord, and because of that
+surrendered calling out, a master comes
+from the road to save the prince. “Go to
+the graveyard before dawn,” says the master.
+“Find the bleached-white tomb beside
+the wall. Dig there in the direction
+your prayer rug points. You’ll discover
+how God works.” This story is long,
+and you’re tired. I’ll get to the point.
+The prince does as the master says and wakes.
+He runs to his father carrying a sword
+and a shroud, the signs his digging brought,
+showing that he recognizes his mistake
+and that he is ready for whatever
+the consequences are. The king orders
+that the entire city be decorated
+to celebrate the new marriage. Such
+an extravagant feast is prepared that sherbets
+are set out for the street dogs! The prince
+is so astonished by how the old woman
+enthralled him, and by the return of his wisdom,
+that he falls down in a swoon for three
+days. Little by little with rosewater remedies
+107
+he wakes again. A year passes in this new life.
+Then the king begins to joke with his son,
+“Do you remember that old friend of yours,
+how it was in her bed?” “Don’t mention it!”
+screams the son. “That was delusion.
+I have found my real bride now.” This prince
+is the soul of humanity, your essence.
+The old woman of Kabul is the color and perfume
+of the sensory world. Release from the spell
+comes when you say, I take refuge with the lord
+of daybreak. The woman has great power.
+She can tie knots in your chest that only
+God’s breathing loosens. Don’t take her appeal
+lightly. The prince was in her net for one
+year. You might stay there sixty. You say
+you grow restless when you don’t drink the dark
+world-drink, but if you could see a living one
+for one moment, you would draw out that thorn
+from your foot and walk with no limp. Let
+the lamp of the Friend’s face show you where
+to go. Selflessness is your true self, sword
+and shroud. Whereas this is how
+most people live: sleeping on the bank
+of a freshwater stream, lips dry with thirst.
+108
+In the dream you’re running toward a mirage.
+As you run, you’re proud of being the one
+who sees the oasis. You brag to your friends,
+“I have the heart-vision. Follow me
+to the water!” This love of spying far-off
+satisfactions, this traveling, keeps you
+from tasting the real water of where you are,
+and who. Nearer than the big vein on your neck,
+with waves lapping against you: here, here.
+The way is who and where you already are,
+sleeping in your very being: that which sleeps
+and wakes and sleeps and dreams the sweet water
+is the taste of God. Maybe another traveler
+will come to help you see the stream,
+like the man who laughs during a long drought
+when everyone else is weeping. The crops
+have dried up. The vineyard leaves are black.
+People are gasping and dying like fish
+thrown up on shore, but one man is always
+smiling. A group comes to ask, “Have you no
+compassion for this suffering?” He answers,
+“To your eyes this is a drought. To me,
+it’s a form of God’s joy. Everywhere
+in this desert I see green corn growing
+109
+waist-high, a sea-wilderness of young ears
+greener than leeks. I reach to touch them.
+How could I not! You and your friends
+are like Pharaoh drowning in the Red Sea
+of your body’s blood. Become friends
+with Moses and see this other river water.”
+When you think your father is guilty
+of an injustice, his face looks cruel.
+Joseph, to the envious brothers, seems
+dangerous. When you make peace
+with your father, he will look peaceful.
+The whole world is a form for truth.
+When someone does not feel grateful to that,
+the forms appear to be as he feels.
+They mirror his anger, his greed, his fear.
+Make peace with the universe.
+Take joy in it. It will turn to gold.
+Resurrection will be now. Every moment
+a new beauty, and never any boredom.
+Instead, the pouring noise of many springs
+in your ears. The tree limbs will move
+like people dancing who suddenly know
+the mystical life. The leaves snap
+their fingers like they’re hearing music.
+110
+They are! A sliver of mirror shines out
+from under a felt covering. Think how
+it will be when the whole thing is open
+to the air and sunlight! There are
+mysteries I’m not telling you.
+T H E W R I S T
+Who are you? The inner vision of consciousness?
+The heart? A sacred half-light, are you that?
+Do you grow gatherings? Are you a friend
+of the sun, who comes and goes so quickly?
+Do not forget your vertical passage,
+the night of power,33
+and don’t hide from the one
+for whom all our secrets are down in the pillow under
+his head, doctor of lovers, soul for
+this thick world,
+the one who spirals iron
+like dough and makes the body lightedness.
+No belief is necessary to enter this tent
+where one love story changes to another.
+I remember that with these words brought here
+by a falcon from the wrist of Shams.
+111
+T H E If the beloved is everywhere,
+the lover is a veil,
+but when living itself
+becomes the Friend,
+lovers disappear.
+K I N G , T H E H A N D M A I D E N , A N D T H E D O C TO R
+Do you know why your soul-mirror
+does not reflect as clearly as it might?
+Because rust has begun to cover it.
+It needs to be cleaned.
+Here’s a story about the inner state
+that’s meant by soul-mirror.
+In the old days there was a king
+who was powerful in both kingdoms, the visible
+as well as the spirit world.
+One day as he was riding
+on the hunt, he saw a girl and was greatly taken
+with her beauty. As was the custom, he paid her family
+handsomely and asked that she come to be a servant
+at the palace. He was in love with her.
+The feelings
+trembled and flapped in his chest like a bird
+newly put in a cage.
+But as soon as she arrived, she fell ill.
+112
+He brought doctors together. “You have both our lives
+in your hands. Her life is my life. Whoever heals her
+will receive the finest treasure I have, the coral inlaid
+with pearls, anything!”
+So the doctors began, but no matter
+what they did, the girl got worse.
+The king saw
+that his doctors were helpless. He ran barefooted
+to the mosque. He knelt on the prayer rug and soaked
+the point of it with his tears.
+He dissolved to an annihilated
+state. He cried out loud for help, and the ocean of grace
+surged over him. He slept on the prayer rug
+in the midst of his weeping.
+In his dream an old man
+appeared. “Good king, tomorrow a stranger will come.
+He is the physician you can trust. Listen to him.”
+As dawn rose,
+the king was sitting up in the belvedere on his roof.
+He saw someone coming, a person like the dawn.
+He ran
+to meet this guest. Like two swimmers who love the water,
+their souls knit together without being sewn, no seam.
+The king said, “You are my beloved,
+not the girl!” He opened
+his arms and held the saintly doctor to him. He kissed
+his hand and his forehead and asked how his journey
+had been. He led him to the head table.
+“At last,
+I have found what patience can bring, this one
+whose face answers any question, who simply by looking
+can loosen the knot of intellectual discussion.”
+113
+They talked and ate a spirit-meal. Then the king
+took the doctor to where the girl lay.
+The secret
+of her pain was opened to him, but he didn’t tell
+the king. It was love, of course.
+Love is the astrolabe
+that sights into the mysteries of God. Earth-love,
+spirit-love, any love looks into that yonder,
+but whatever I try to say explaining love
+is embarrassing!
+A pen went scribbling along.
+When it tried to write love, it broke.
+If you want to
+expound on love, take your intellect out and let it
+lie down in the mud. It’s no help.
+Nothing is so strange
+in this world as the sun. The sun of the soul
+even more so. You want proof that it exists,
+so you stay up all night talking about it.
+Finally you sleep
+as the sun comes up. Look at it!
+Word of that sun,
+Shams, came, and everything hid. Husam touches my arm.
+He wants me to say more about Shams.
+Not now, Husam.
+I don’t know how to make words make sense, or praise.
+In the Friend-place nothing true can be said.
+Let me just be here.
+But Husam begs, “Feed me. Hurry!
+Time is a sharp downstroke. A Sufi is supposed
+to be a child of the moment! Don’t say tomorrow or later.”
+I reply,
+114
+“It’s better that the way of the Friend
+be concealed in a story. Let the mystery come through
+what people say around the lovers, not from what
+lovers say to each other.”
+“No! I want this as naked
+and true as it can be. I don’t wear a shirt
+when I lie down with my beloved.”
+“Husam! If the Friend
+came to you naked, your chest could not stand it.
+Ask for what you want, but within some limits!”
+This has no end.
+Go back to the beginning,
+the end of the story of the king and the lovesick
+maiden and the holy doctor, who said,
+“Leave me alone
+with the girl.” He quietly began, “Where are you from?
+Who are your relatives? Who else are you close to
+in that region?”
+He held her hand to feel the pulse.
+She told many stories mentioning many names.
+He would say the names again to test the response
+of her pulse.
+Finally he asked, “When you visit
+other towns, where are you most likely to go?”
+She mentioned one town and another, where she bought
+bread and where salt,
+until he happened to say Samarkand!
+The dear city sweet as candy. She blushed. Her breath
+caught. Oh, she loves a goldsmith in Samarkand!
+She misses him so.
+“Where exactly does he live?”
+“At the head of the bridge on Ghatafar Street.”
+“Now I can heal you.”
+115
+The doctor went to the king
+and told him only part of the story. “On some pretext
+we must bring a certain goldsmith from Samarkand.”
+The king’s messengers went and easily persuaded the man
+to leave his town for a while. He arrived,
+and the doctor said,
+“Marry the girl to this man
+and she will be completely cured.” It was done,
+and for six months those two loved and made love
+and completely satisfied themselves with each other.
+The girl was restored to perfect health.
+Then the physician gave the goldsmith a potion,
+so that he began to sicken. His handsomeness faded.
+He became sunken-cheeked and jaundiced and ugly.
+The girl stopped loving him. Any love based on
+physical beauty is not the deepest love. Choose
+to love what does not die. The generous one
+is not hard to find.
+But what about the doctor’s
+poisoning the poor goldsmith! It was not done
+for his friend the king’s sake.
+The reason is a mystery,
+like Khidr’s cutting the boy’s throat. When someone
+is killed by a doctor like this one, it’s a blessing,
+even though it might not seem so.
+Such a doctor
+is part of a larger generosity. Don’t judge his actions.
+You are not living so completely within the truth as he is.
+116
+Reason has no way to say
+its love. Only love opens
+that secret.
+If you want
+to be more alive, love
+is the truest health.
+117
+14. Union
+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
+Muhaiyaddeen34 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
+118
+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.”
+119
+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.
+She asks, “Do you love me or yourself more?
+Really, tell the absolute truth.”
+He says, “There’s nothing left of me.
+I’m like a ruby held up to the sunrise.
+Is it still a stone, or a world
+made of redness? It has no
+resistance to sunlight.”
+The ruby and the sunrise are one.
+Be courageous and discipline yourself.
+Completely become hearing and ear,
+and wear this sun-ruby as an earring.
+Work. Keep digging your well.
+Don’t think about getting off from work.
+Water is there somewhere.
+Submit to a daily practice.
+Your loyalty to that
+is a ring on the door.
+Keep knocking, and the joy inside
+will eventually open a window
+and look out to see who’s there.
+120
+T H E G E N E R AT I O N S Yesterday the beauty of early dawn
+came over me, and I wondered who
+my heart would reach toward. Then
+this morning again and you. Who
+am I? Wind and fire and watery
+ground move me mightily because
+they’re pregnant with love, love
+pregnant with God. These are the
+early morning generations I praise.
+I P R A I S E
+O N E S W AY I N G 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
+B E I N G
+branches reaching into eternity
+and roots set deep in eternity,
+and no trunk! Have you seen it?
+The mind cannot. Your desiring
+cannot. The longing you feel for
+this love comes from inside you.
+121
+When you become the Friend, your
+longing will be as the man in
+the ocean who holds to a piece of
+wood. Eventually, wood, man, and
+ocean become one swaying being,
+Shams Tabriz, the secret of God.
+Held like this, to draw in milk,
+no will, tasting clouds of milk,
+never so content.
+H A N G O V E R R E M O R S E
+Muhammad said, “Three kinds of people
+are particularly pathetic. The powerful man
+out of power, the rich man with no money,
+and the learned man laughed at.”
+Yet these are those who badly want change!
+Some dogs sit satisfied in their kennels.
+But one who last year drank ecstatic union,
+the pre-eternity agreement, who this year
+has a hangover from bad-desire wine,
+the way he cries out for the majesty
+he’s lost,
+give me that longing!
+122
+S O U L , H E A R T, A N D B O DY O N E M O R N I N G
+There’s a morning where presence comes over you,
+and you sing like a rooster in your earth-colored shape.
+Your heart hears and, no longer frantic, begins
+to dance. At that moment soul
+reaches total emptiness. Your heart becomes Mary,
+miraculously pregnant, and body, like a two-day-old
+Jesus says wisdom words. Now the heart
+turns to light, and the body picks up the tempo.
+Where Shamsi Tabriz walks, the footprints
+are musical notes and holes you fall through into space.
+Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
+and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
+and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
+Let the beauty we love be what we do.
+There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
+Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
+there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
+When the soul lies down in that grass,
+the world is too full to talk about.
+Ideas, language, even the phrase each other,
+doesn’t make any sense.
+123
+15. 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
+of what is everywhere at once, seeing.
+H U S A M
+There is a way of passing away from the personal,
+a dying that makes one plural.
+A gnat lights in buttermilk to become nourishment
+for many. Your soul is like that, Husam.35
+124
+Hundreds of thousands of impressions
+from the invisible are wanting to come through you!
+I get dizzy with the abundance. When life
+is this dear, it means the source is pulling us.
+Freshness comes from there. We’re given the gift
+of continuously dying and being resurrected.
+The body’s death now to me is like going to sleep.
+No fear of drowning. I’m in another water.
+Stones don’t dissolve in rain. This is the end
+of the Fifth Book of the Masnavi.
+With constellations in the night sky, some look up
+and point. Others can be guided by the arrangements:
+the Sagittarian bow piercing enemies, the Water Jar
+soaking fruit trees, the Bull plowing its truth,
+the Lion tearing darkness open to red satin. Use
+these words to change. Be kind and honest,
+and harmful poisons will turn sweet inside you.
+Lovers are alive to the extent
+they can die. A great soul approaches
+Shams. What are you doing here?
+Answer: What is there to do?
+125
+T H AT Q U I C K
+A lover looks at creekwater and wants to be
+that quick to fall, to kneel, then all
+the way down in full prostration.
+A lover wants to die of his love
+like a man with dropsy
+who knows that water will kill him,
+but he can’t deny his thirst.
+A lover loves death. Spill your jug
+in the river! Your shame and fear
+are like felt layers covering coldness.
+Throw them off, and rush naked
+into the joy of death.
+E M P T Y B O AT
+Some huge work goes on growing.
+How could one person’s words matter?
+Where you walk heads pop from the ground.
+What is one seed head compared to you?
+On my death day I’ll know the answer.
+I have cleared this house, so that your work
+can, when it comes, fill every room.
+I slide like an empty boat
+pulled over the water.
+126
+In the slaughterhouse of love they kill only
+the best, none of the weak or deformed.
+Don’t run away from this dying.
+Whoever’s not killed for love is dead meat.
+I T R U S T YO U
+The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody
+and gross. Work on it with manual discipline,
+and the bitter tanning acid of grief.
+You’ll become lovely and very strong.
+If you can’t do this work yourself, don’t worry.
+You don’t have to make a decision, one way or another.
+The Friend, who knows a lot more than you do,
+will bring difficulties and grief and sickness,
+as medicine, as happiness, as the moment
+when you’re beaten, when you hear Checkmate,
+and can finally say with Hallaj’s voice,
+I trust you to kill me.
+127
+I M A D U ’ L - M U L K
+Remember the story of the king who is so enraged
+with his close friend that he’s about to kill him!
+A privileged intercessor, Imadu’l-Mulk, steps in
+and saves the man, but then the king’s close friend,
+who has just been saved, turns away and will not thank
+the intercessor. A teacher comes and asks, “Why
+do you act so strangely?” He answers, “I was in
+the state Muhammad describes as No other has been
+this way with God, this near. If the king wishes
+to cut my head off, he may furnish me a new one,
+or not. Pitchblack night in his presence is worth
+a hundred festival days without him. Inside
+the presence there’s no religion, no grace, no
+unfaithfulness, no punishment, and no language can say
+anything about it, except that it is hidden, hidden.
+128
+You have said what you are.
+I am what I am.
+Your actions in my head,
+my head here in my hands
+with something circling inside.
+I have no name
+for what circles
+so perfectly.
+Some nights stay up till dawn,
+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.
+129
+16. 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,
+130
+O stand, stand at the window
+As the tears scald and start;
+You shall love your crooked neighbor
+With your crooked heart.36
+W. H. Auden is one of the best-loved poets in English
+for the very reason that he brings in the acerbic, the faith-
+less, and the shadow within the deeply felt joy of his lov-
+ing. There’s an impending danger. To leave that dimension
+out of love poems is not to tell the full truth. Auden is gay,
+too, in all senses, which adds more depths to his cultural
+work.
+131
+K H A R R A Q A N I ’ S M A R R I A G E
+The young seeker wonders, How could a teacher
+lie with that woman! Can a guide agree
+with a thief?
+Suddenly Sheikh Kharraqani37 appears, riding a lion,
+firewood stacked behind him. His whip,
+a live serpent. Every master rides a fierce lion,
+whether you see it or not. Know this
+with your other eyes: There are thousands of lions
+under your teacher’s thighs and all of them
+stacked with wood!
+Kharraqani knew the problem and immediately
+began to answer, “Well, it’s not out of desire
+that I put up with her! Don’t think that.
+It’s not her perfume or bright-colored clothes.
+Enduring her public disdain has made me strong
+and patient. She is my practice.
+Nothing can be clear without a polar opposite
+present. Two banners, one black, one white,
+and between them something gets settled.
+Between Pharaoh and Moses,
+the Red Sea.”
+132
+H A R S H E V I D E N C E
+What sort of person says that he or she wants
+to be polished and pure, then complains
+about being handled roughly?
+Love is a lawsuit where harsh evidence
+must be brought in. To settle the case,
+the judge must see evidence.
+You’ve heard that every buried treasure
+has a snake guarding it.
+Kiss the snake to discover the treasure!
+Don’t run from those who scold,
+and don’t turn away from cleansing conflict,
+or you will remain weak.
+T H E S T U P I D T H I N G S I ’ V E D O N E
+Let your sunlight shine on this piece of dung,
+and dry it out, so I can be used
+for fuel to warm a bathhouse.
+Look on the terrible things I’ve done,
+and cause herbs and eglantine to grow out of them.
+The sun does this with the ground.
+Think what glories God can make
+from the fertilizer of sinning!
+133
+C A N D L E AT N O O N
+A man is wandering the marketplace at noon
+with a candle in his hand, totally ecstatic.
+“Hey,” calls a shopkeeper, “is this a joke?
+Who are you looking for?”
+“Someone breathing Huuu, the divine breath.”
+“Well, there are plenty to choose from.”
+“But I want one who can be in anger and desire
+and still be a true human being in the same moment.”
+D E R V I S H E S
+When school and mosque and minaret
+get torn down, then dervishes can begin
+their community. Not until faithfulness
+turns to betrayal and betrayal into trust
+can any human being become
+part of the truth.
+D O V E S
+People want you to be happy.
+Don’t keep serving them your pain!
+134
+If you could untie your wings
+and free your soul of jealousy,
+you and everyone around you
+would fly up like doves.
+W H E N W O R D S A R E T I N G E D W I T H Muhammad gave this indication of how to know
+what’s real. “When you feel
+a peaceful joy, you’re near the truth.
+Unquiet and off center, jealous or greedy,
+then what you do seems pretentious
+and those around you insincere.
+Speak the clearest truth you know,
+and let the uneasiness heal.”
+LY I N G
+When words are tinged with lying,
+they’re like water dripping into an oil lamp.
+The wick won’t light, and the pleasure
+of your love room will diminish.
+135
+T H E R E YO U A R E
+You’re inside every kindness. When a sick
+person feels better, you’re that,
+and the onset of disease too. You’re sudden,
+terrible screaming. Some problems require
+we go for help. When we knock on a stranger’s
+door, you sent us. Nobody answers. It’s
+you! When work feels necessary, you
+are the way workers move in rhythm.
+You are what is: the field, the players,
+the ball, those watching. Someone claims to
+have evidence that you do not exist.
+You’re the one who brings the evidence in,
+and the evidence itself. You are inside
+the soul’s great fear, every natural
+pleasure, every vicious cruelty. Someone
+loves something, someone else hates
+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,
+136
+shadow. Whether reckless or careful,
+you are what we do. It’s absurd to ask
+your pardon. You’re inside repentance,
+and sin! The wonder of various jewels,
+agate, emerald. How we are during a day,
+then at night, you are those moods and
+the pure compassion we feel for each
+other. Every encampment has a tent
+where the leader is, and also the wide
+truth of your imperial tent overall.
+A night full of talking that hurts,
+my worst held-back secrets: everything
+has to do with loving and not loving.
+This night will pass.
+Then we have work to do.
+There’s a shredding that’s really a healing,
+that makes you more alive!
+A lion holds you in his arms.
+Fingers rake the fretbridge for music.
+137
+Dance, when you’re broken open.
+Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
+Dance in the middle of the fighting.
+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
+An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits,
+when they are held up to each other,
+that’s when the real making begins.
+That’s what art and crafting are.
+A tailor needs a torn garment to practice his expertise.
+The trunks of trees must be cut and cut again
+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.
+138
+17. Meditation Pavane
+This was my dream of August 10, 2001. 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, 15–16th 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 2001). They are
+musicians specializing in Appalachian, Shaker, and Celtic
+139
+melodies. Shelley has a CD called Pavane. Gourd Music is
+their label! I have published a volume of my own poetry,
+Gourd Seed (1993). 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 2002). 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 2,
+1977. 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
+1978, he told me to continue the work on Rumi. “It has to
+be done.” Bawa died on December 8, 1986. 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
+140
+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 800-682-8637. Leave your name
+and address.
+141
+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.
+There are many rules about restraint
+with the former, but only one rule
+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 rule that covers everything is:
+How you are with others, expect that back.
+If you want to know God, enjoy the company
+of lovers. If you want to be thought a great
+person, learn some subtle point and say it
+with many variations as the answer
+to every question. If you want to
+live your soul, find a friend
+like Shams and stay near.
+142
+T H E L O O K T H AT O P E N S
+We wait for inspiration and ask no fee,
+the feel of sacred ambiance being enough.
+So bring your malaise, your dullness,
+your callous ingratitude.
+As we meet you, the coming together itself
+will be medicine. We are the cure,
+the look that opens your looking.
+S T R A W A N D G R A S S E S
+There is no reality but God, says
+the completely surrendered teacher,
+who is an ocean for all beings.
+The levels of creation are straws
+in that ocean. The movement comes
+from agitation in the water.
+When the ocean wants the dry stems calm,
+it sends them close to shore.
+When it wants them back in the deep
+surge, it does with them
+as the wind does with grasses.
+This never ends.
+143
+Friend, our closeness is this:
+anywhere you put your foot, feel me
+in the firmness under you.
+How is it with this love,
+I see your world and not you?
+144
+18. 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.
+T H E O C E A N S U R G E
+I want to be in such passionate adoration
+that my tent gets pitched against the sky!
+Let the beloved come and sit
+like a guard dog in front of the tent.
+When the ocean surges, don’t let me
+just hear it. Let it splash inside my chest!
+145
+L O V E D O G S
+One night a man was crying Allah! Allah!
+His lips grew sweet with praising,
+until a cynic said, “So!
+I have heard you calling out, but have you ever
+gotten any response?”
+The man had no answer to that.
+He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
+He dreamed he saw Khidr,38 the guide of souls,
+in a thick, green foliage.
+“Why did you stop praising?” “Because
+I’ve never heard anything back.”
+“This longing you express
+is the return message.”
+The grief you cry out from
+draws you toward union.
+Your pure sadness
+that wants help
+is the secret cup.
+Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
+That whining is the connection.
+There are love dogs
+no one knows the names of.
+Give your life
+to be one of them.
+146
+Inside water, a waterwheel turns.
+A star circulates with the moon.
+We live in this night ocean wondering,
+What are these lights?
+No better love than love with no object,
+no more satisfying work than work with no purpose.
+If you could give up tricks and cleverness,
+that would be the cleverest trick!
+A G R E AT W A G O N
+When I see your face, the stones start spinning!
+You appear; all studying wanders.
+I lose my place.
+Water turns pearly.
+Fire dies down and doesn’t destroy.
+In your presence I don’t want what I thought
+I wanted, those three little hanging lamps.
+Inside your face the ancient manuscripts
+seem like rusty mirrors.
+147
+You breathe; new shapes appear,
+and the music of a desire as widespread
+as spring begins to move
+like a great wagon.
+Drive slowly. Some of us
+walking alongside are lame.
+B L A S P H E M Y A N D T H E My soul keeps whispering, “Quickly,
+be a wandering dervish, a salamander
+sitting in its homefire. Walk about
+watching the burning turn to roses.
+As this love-secret we are both
+blasphemy and the core of Islam.
+Don’t wait! The open plain is better
+than any closing door. Ravens love
+ruins and cemetery trees. They
+can’t help but fly there. For us
+this day is friends sitting together
+with silence shining in our faces.”
+C O R E
+148
+You’re song,
+a wished-for song.
+Go through the ear to the center
+where sky is, where wind,
+where silent knowing.
+Put seeds and cover them.
+Blades will sprout
+where you do your work.
+Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
+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.
+149
+19. 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. Hallaj39 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.
+150
+Lightning, your presence
+from ground to sky.
+No one knows what becomes of me,
+when you take me so quickly.
+I can break off from anyone,
+except the presence within.
+Anyone can bring gifts.
+Give me someone who takes away.
+The Friend comes into my body
+looking for the center, unable
+to find it, draws a blade,
+strikes anywhere.
+151
+W O O D E N C A G E S
+I may be clapping my hands,
+but I don’t belong to a crowd of clappers.
+Neither this nor that, I’m not part
+of a group that loves flute music
+or one that loves gambling or drinking wine.
+Those who live in time, descended
+from Adam, made of earth and water,
+I’m not part of that.
+Don’t listen to what I say,
+as though these words came from an inside
+and went to an outside.
+Your faces are very beautiful,
+but they are wooden cages.
+You had better run from me.
+My words are fire.
+I have nothing to do with being famous,
+or making grand judgments, or feeling
+full of shame. I borrow nothing.
+I don’t want anything from anybody.
+I flow through human beings.
+Love is my only companion.
+152
+M O R E R A N G E
+We’re friends with one who kills us,
+who gives us to the ocean waves.
+We love this death. Only ignorance
+says, Put it off awhile, day after
+tomorrow. Don’t avoid the knife.
+This friend only seems fierce, bringing
+your soul more range, perching your
+falcon on a cliff of the wind. Jesus
+on his cross, Hallaj on his. Those
+absurd executions hold a secret.
+Cautious cynics claim they know what
+they’re doing every moment and why.
+Submit to love without thinking, as
+the sun rose this morning recklessly
+extinguishing our star-candle minds.
+AYA Z A N D T H E K I N G ’ S One day the king assembled his courtiers,
+He handed the minister a glowing pearl.
+“What would you say this is worth?”
+than a hundred donkeys could carry.”
+P E A R L
+“More gold
+153
+“Break it!”
+“Sir, how could I waste your resources like that?”
+The king presented him with a robe of honor
+and took back the pearl.
+Then he put the pearl
+in his chamberlain’s hand. “What would it sell for?”
+“Half a kingdom, God preserve it!”
+“Break it!”
+“My hand could not move to do such a thing.”
+The king presented him with a robe of honor
+and an increase in his salary. So it went
+with each of the sixty courtiers. One by one
+they imitated the minister and the chamberlain
+and received their reward of new wealth.
+The pearl was given to Ayaz. “Can you say
+how splendid this is?”
+“It’s more than I can say.”
+“Then break it, this second, into tiny pieces.”
+Ayaz had had a dream about this, and he had hidden
+two stones in his sleeve. He crushed the pearl
+to powder between them.
+As Joseph at the bottom
+of the well listened to the end of his story,
+so such listeners understand success and failure
+as one thing.
+Don’t worry about forms. If someone
+wants your horse, let him have it. Horses are for
+hurrying ahead of others.
+154
+The court assembly
+screamed at the recklessness of Ayaz. “How could you
+do that?”
+“What the king says is worth more than
+any pearl. I honor the king, not some colored stone.”
+The courtiers immediately fell on their knees and put
+their foreheads on the ground. Their sighs went up
+like smoke asking forgiveness. The king gestured
+to his executioner as though to say, “Take out
+this trash.”
+Ayaz sprang forward, “Your mercy
+makes them bow like this. Give them their lives!
+Raise their faces into yours. Let them wash
+in your cool washing place.”
+Ayaz in his speech
+to the king gets to this point and then the pen
+breaks.
+“You picked me to crush the pearl.
+Don’t punish the others for my drunken obedience.
+Punish them when I’m sober because I’ll never be
+sober again!
+Whoever bows down like they are bowing
+will not rise up in his old self. Like a gnat
+in buttermilk, they have become your buttermilk.
+The mountains are trembling. The map and compass
+are the lines in your palm.”
+Husam, a hundred
+thousand impressions from spirit are wanting to come
+through here.
+I feel stunned in this abundance,
+crushed and dead.
+155
+H A L L A J
+Hallaj said what he said and went to the origin
+through the hole in the scaffold.
+I cut a cap’s worth of cloth from his robe,
+and it swamped over me head to foot.
+Years ago I broke a branch of roses
+from the top of his wall. A thorn from that
+is still in my palm, working deeper.
+From Hallaj, I learned to hunt lions,
+but I became something hungrier than a lion.
+I was a frisky colt. He broke me
+with a quiet hand on the side of my head.
+A person comes to him naked. It’s cold.
+There’s a fur coat floating in the river.
+“Jump in and get it,” he says.
+You dive in. You reach for the coat.
+It reaches for you.
+It’s a live bear that has fallen in upstream,
+drifting with the current.
+“How long does it take!” Hallaj yells from the bank.
+“Don’t wait,” you answer. “This coat
+has decided to wear me home!”
+A little part of a story, a hint.
+Do you need long sermons on Hallaj?
+156
+20. 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.
+157
+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.”40
+And Rumi’s knowing, like his father Bahauddin’s,41 has
+many valences, which certainly includes the hulul, or mysti-
+cal trance.
+158
+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
+has blown the veil from the face of God.
+A thousand new moons appear. Roses
+open laughing. Hearts become perfect
+rubies like those from Badakshan.
+The body turns entirely spirit.
+Leaves become branches in this wind.
+Why is it now so easy to surrender,
+even for those already surrendered?
+There’s no answer to any of this.
+No one knows the source of joy.
+A poet breathes into a reed flute,
+and the tip of every hair makes music.
+Shams sails down clods of dirt
+from the roof, and we take jobs
+as doorkeepers for him.
+159
+R O S E S U N D E R F O OT
+The sound of salaams rising as waves
+diminish down in prayer,
+hoping for some trace of the one
+whose trace does not appear.
+If anyone asks you to say who you are,
+say without hesitation, soul
+within soul within soul.
+There’s a pearl diver who does not know
+how to swim! No matter.
+Pearls are handed him on the beach.
+We lovers laugh to hear, “This should be
+more that and that more this,”
+coming from people sitting in a wagon
+tilted in a ditch.
+Going in search of the heart, I found
+a huge rose, and roses under all our feet!
+How to say this to someone who denies it?
+The robe we wear is the sky’s cloth.
+Everything is soul and flowering.
+160
+P O E T R Y
+I open and fill with love
+and what is not love evaporates.
+All the learning in books stays put
+on the shelf. Poetry, the dear
+words and images of song, comes down
+over me like mountain water.
+B I R D S O N G F R O M I N S I D E T H E Sometimes a lover of God may faint
+in the presence. Then the beloved bends
+and whispers in his ear, “Beggar,
+spread out your robe. I’ll fill it with gold.
+E G G
+I’ve come to protect your consciousness.
+Where has it gone? Come back!”
+This fainting is because lovers want so much.
+A chicken invites a camel into her henhouse,
+and the whole structure is demolished.
+A rabbit nestles down with its eyes closed
+in the arms of a lion. There is an excess in
+spiritual searching that is profound ignorance.
+Let that ignorance be our teacher!
+The Friend breathes into one who has no breath.
+161
+A deep silence revives the listening
+of those two who meet on the riverbank.
+Like the ground turning green in a spring wind,
+like birdsong beginning inside the egg,
+like this universe coming into existence,
+the lover wakes and whirls in a dancing joy,
+then kneels down in praise.
+E A S T E R N M Y S T E R Y
+I ask for the laughing, unconventional ones,
+even them, to be broken,
+for blood and sky to become one thing,
+for revelation as startling as an ocean
+that is neither wet nor dry.
+I ask that lovers no longer be shy or concerned
+with right and wrong, with reputation
+or recognition. I have seen
+the universal intelligence offer its neck
+to the blade. I have asked why
+and been told,
+Look around this gathering
+and find those who resemble Shams,
+who made Tabriz a source
+of Eastern mystery like China.
+162
+N O F L A G
+I used to want buyers for my words.
+Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.
+I’ve made a lot of charmingly profound images,
+scenes with Abraham and his father Azar,
+who was famous for icons.
+I’m so tired of what I’ve been doing.
+Then one image without form came,
+and I quit.
+Look for someone else to tend the shop.
+I’m out of the image-making business.
+Finally I know the freedom
+of madness.
+A random image arrives. I scream,
+“Get out!” It disintegrates.
+Only love.
+Only the holder the flag fits into,
+no flag.
+163
+21. 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.
+164
+God only knows, I don’t,
+what keeps me laughing.
+The stem of a flower
+moves when the air moves.
+I reach for a piece of wood. It turns into a lute.
+I do some meanness. It turns out helpful.
+I say one must not travel during the holy month.
+Then I start out, and wonderful things happen.
+In complete control, pretending control,
+with dignified authority, we are charlatans.
+Or maybe just a goat’s-hair brush in a painter’s hand.
+We have no idea what we are.
+165
+M O S E S A N D T H E S H E P H E R D
+Moses heard a shepherd on the road praying,
+“God,
+where are you? I want to help you, to fix your shoes
+and comb your hair. I want to wash your clothes
+and pick the lice off. I want to bring you milk
+and kiss your little hands and feet when it’s time
+for you to go to bed. I want to sweep your room
+and keep it neat. God, my sheep and goats are yours.
+All I can say remembering you is aaayyyyyy
+and aaahhhhhhhhhhhh.”
+Moses could stand it no longer.
+“Who are you talking to?”
+“The one who made us and made
+the earth and made the sky.”
+“Don’t talk about shoes
+and socks with God! And what’s this with your little
+hands? Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like
+you’re chatting with your uncles. Only something
+that grows needs milk. Only someone with feet
+needs shoes. Not God!”
+The shepherd repented
+and tore his clothes and wandered out into
+the desert. A sudden revelation came then to Moses:
+You have separated me from one of my own.
+Did you come as a prophet to unite or to sever?
+I have given each being a separate and unique way
+of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
+166
+What seems wrong to you is right for him.
+What is poison to one is honey to someone else.
+Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
+these mean nothing to me. I am apart from all that.
+Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better
+or worse. Hindus do Hindu things. The Dravidian
+Muslims in India do what they do. It’s all praise,
+and it’s all right. I am not glorified in acts
+of worship. It’s the worshipers! I don’t hear
+the words they say. I look inside at the humility.
+That broken-open lowliness is the reality. Forget
+phraseology! I want burning, burning. Be friends
+with your burning. Those who pay attention to ways
+of behaving and speaking are one sort. Lovers who
+burn are another. Don’t impose a property tax
+on a burned-out village. Don’t scold the lover.
+The “wrong” way he talks is better than a hundred
+“right” ways of others.
+Inside the Kaaba
+it doesn’t matter which way you point
+your prayer rug!
+The ocean diver doesn’t need snowshoes!
+The love-religion has no code or doctrine.
+Only God.
+So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!
+It doesn’t need markings.
+167
+God began speaking
+deeper mysteries to Moses, vision and words,
+which cannot be recorded here. Moses left himself
+and came back. He went to eternity and came
+back here. Many times this happened.
+It’s foolish of me
+to try and say this. If I did say it,
+it would uproot human intelligence.
+Moses ran after the shepherd, following the bewildered
+footprints,
+in one place moving like a castle
+across a chessboard. In another, sideways,
+like a bishop.
+Now surging like a wave cresting,
+now sliding down like a fish,
+with always his feet
+making geomancy symbols in the sand,
+recording his
+wandering state.
+Moses finally caught up with him.
+“I was wrong. God has revealed to me that there are
+no rules for worship. Say whatever and however
+your loving tells you to.
+Your sweetest blasphemy
+is the truest devotion. Through you a whole world
+is freed.
+Loosen your tongue and don’t worry
+what comes out. It’s all the light of the spirit.”
+168
+The shepherd replied, “Moses, Moses,
+I’ve gone beyond even that.
+You applied the whip,
+and my horse shied and jumped out of itself.
+The divine nature and my human nature came together.
+Bless your scolding hand.
+I can’t say what has happened.
+What I’m saying now is not my real condition.
+It can’t be said.”
+The shepherd grew quiet.
+When you look in a mirror, you see yourself,
+not the state of the mirror.
+The flute player
+gives breath into a flute, and who makes the music?
+The flute player!
+Whenever you speak praise
+or thanksgiving to God, it’s always like
+this dear shepherd’s simplicity.
+The minute I heard my first love story
+I started looking for you, not knowing
+how blind that was.
+Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
+They’re in each other all along.
+169
+M O R N I N G W I N D
+Wine so bitter all bitterness sweetens,
+a beautiful face growing old.
+The taste of
+Khidr’s spring, words that plant olive trees.
+A man like the dawn
+with a small suggestion,
+You should visit a few times.
+A prayer
+at the graveside that resurrects the dead,
+silence telling half a secret, unspoken wish.
+Morning wind,
+we’ll stay quiet. Whatever
+you have understood of us, go and tell that
+to the living,
+what we’ve been hiding from them.
+T H E O C E A N ’ S M OT I O N
+Love is an ocean. This wide sky,
+a bit of foam on that.
+Restless as Zuleikha
+in her desire for Joseph,
+sky-changes move across
+day and night. If there were no love,
+everything would freeze and be
+still. Instead,
+inorganic grains are entering
+plants. Plants enter animals;
+170
+animals enter
+spirit, and spirit sacrifices itself
+for one breath
+of that which made Mary with child. Each
+sapling lifts, and the universe
+winds like a locust swarm its wingrush
+toward perfection,
+each particle purified
+in a song of praise for motion.
+I G N O R A N C E
+I didn’t know love would make me this
+crazy, with my eyes
+like the river Ceyhun
+carrying me in its rapids
+out to sea,
+where every bit
+of shattered boat
+sinks to the bottom.
+An alligator lifts its head and swallows
+the ocean, then the ocean
+floor becomes
+a desert covering
+the alligator in
+sand drifts.
+Changes do
+happen. I do not know how,
+or what remains of what
+171
+has disappeared
+into the absolute.
+I hear so many stories
+and explanations, but I keep quiet,
+because I don’t know anything,
+and because something I swallowed
+in the ocean
+has made me completely content
+with ignorance.
+172
+22. 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,
+173
+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.42
+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.43
+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.
+174
+E Y E S
+What is it that sees when vision is clear?
+The core that has no story, has that ever seen anything?
+Surely vision has loyalties.
+Someone buying eye medicine does not see well,
+but well enough, at least, to choose the cure.
+Beyond day and night one watches
+as your eyes close and open and close, as night
+turning day turns night, as eyes
+like particles float
+in the light that is your face,
+that is the sun.
+Without you our eyes might be a danger
+to the soul, but with you they become the same
+as the soul. When that happens,
+the heart is seeing!
+You can say that the eyes see God, but it is God
+who sees, as in the Qur’an when the desert mountain
+looks at God, and eyes appear on every stone.
+I am filled with you.
+Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul.
+There’s no room for lack of trust, or trust.
+Nothing in this existence but that existence.
+175
+When you feel your lips becoming infinite
+and sweet, like a moon in a sky,
+when you feel that spaciousness inside,
+Shams of Tabriz will be there too.
+T H E G R A N A R Y
+Sufi masters are those whose spirits existed
+before the world. Before the body,
+they lived many lifetimes. Before seeds
+went into the ground, they harvested wheat.
+Before there was an ocean, they strung pearls.
+While the great meeting was going on
+about bringing human beings into existence,
+they stood up to their chins in wisdom-water.
+When some of the angels opposed creation,
+the Sufi masters laughed and clapped
+among themselves. Before materiality,
+they knew what it was like to be trapped
+inside matter. Before there was a night sky,
+they saw Saturn. Before wheat grains,
+they tasted bread. With no mind, they thought.
+Immediate intuition to them is the simplest act,
+what to others would be epiphany. Much
+of our thought is of the past or the future.
+They’re free of those. Before a mine is dug,
+they judge coins. Before vineyards, they know
+176
+the excitements to come. In July they feel
+December. In unbroken sunlight, they find
+shade. In fana, the state where objects
+dissolve, they recognize things and comment
+rationally. The open sky drinks from their
+circling cup. The sun wears the gold of their
+generosity. When two of them meet, they
+are no longer two. They are one and six
+hundred thousand. The ocean waves are their
+closest likeness, when wind makes from unity
+the numerous. This happened to the sun and it
+broke into rays through the window, into bodies.
+The disc of the sun does exist, but if you see
+only the ray-bodies, you may have doubts.
+The human-divine combinations are a oneness.
+Plurality, the apparent separation into rays.
+Friend, we’re traveling together. Throw off
+your tiredness. Let me show you one tiny spot
+of the beauty that can’t be spoken. I’m like
+an ant that’s gotten into the granary,
+ludicrously happy, and trying to lug out
+a grain that’s way too big.
+177
+T H E G A Z I N G - H O U S E
+On the night when you cross the street
+from your shop and your house to the cemetery,
+you’ll hear me hailing you from inside
+the open grave, and you’ll realize
+how we’ve always been together.
+I am the clear consciousness core
+of your being, the same in ecstasy
+as in self-hating fatigue.
+That night, when you escape the fear of snakebite
+and all irritation with the ants, you’ll hear
+my familiar voice, see the candle being lit,
+smell the incense and the surprise meal fixed
+by the lover inside all your other lovers.
+This heart tumult is my signal to you igniting
+in the tomb, so don’t fuss with the shroud
+and the graveyard road dust. Those get ripped
+open and washed away in the music of our meeting.
+And don’t look for me in a human shape!
+I am inside your looking. No room for form
+with love this strong.
+Beat the drum and let
+the poets speak. This is a day of purification
+for those who are already mature and initiated
+into what love is.
+178
+No need to wait until we die!
+There’s more to want here than money and being
+famous and bites of roasted meat.
+Now, what
+shall we call this new kind of gazing-house
+that has opened in our town where people
+sit quietly and pour out their glancing
+like light, like answering?
+T H E G U E S T H O U S E
+This being human is a guest house.
+Every morning a new arrival.
+A joy, a depression, a meanness,
+some momentary awareness comes
+as an unexpected visitor.
+Welcome and entertain them all!
+Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
+who violently sweep your house
+empty of its furniture, still,
+treat each guest honorably.
+He may be clearing you out
+for some new delight.
+The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
+meet them at the door laughing
+and invite them in.
+179
+Be grateful for whoever comes,
+because each has been sent
+as a guide from beyond.
+Always check your inner state
+with the lord of your heart.
+Copper doesn’t know it’s copper,
+until it’s changing to gold.
+Your loving doesn’t know majesty,
+until it knows its helplessness.
+180
+T H E O N E T H I N G YO U M U S T D O
+There is one thing in this world you must never
+forget to do. If you forget everything else and not
+this, there’s nothing to worry about, but if you
+remember everything else and forget this, then you
+will have done nothing in your life.
+It’s as if a king has sent you to some country to do
+a task, and you perform a hundred other services,
+but not the one he sent you to do. So human
+beings come to this world to do particular work.
+That work is the purpose, and each is specific to
+the person. If you don’t do it, it’s as though a price-
+less Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat.
+It’s a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when
+one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suit-
+able pots. It’s like a knife of the finest tempering
+nailed into a wall to hang things on.
+You say, “But look, I’m using it. It’s not lying idle.”
+Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds? For a
+penny an iron nail could be bought. You say, “But I
+spend my energies on lofty projects. I study philoso-
+phy and jurisprudence, logic, astronomy, and medi-
+cine.” But consider why you do those things. They
+are all branches of yourself and your impressiveness.
+Remember the deep root of your being, the pres-
+ence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who
+already owns your breath and your moments. If
+you don’t, you’ll be like the man who takes a cere-
+monial dagger and hammers it into a post for a peg
+to hold his dipper gourd. You’ll be wasting valuable
+keenness and forgetting your dignity and purpose.
+181
+T H I S W E H A V E N O W
+This we have now
+is not imagination.
+This is not grief,
+or joy, not a judging state,
+or an elation, or a sadness.
+Those come and go.
+This is the presence
+that doesn’t.
+It’s dawn, Husam,
+here in the splendor of coral,
+inside the Friend, in the simple truth
+of what Hallaj said.
+What else could human beings want?
+When grapes turn to wine,
+they’re wanting this.
+When the night sky pours by,
+it’s really a crowd of beggars,
+and they all want some of this.
+This we are now
+created the body, cell by cell,
+like bees building a honeycomb.
+The human body and the universe
+grew from this, not this
+from the universe and the human body
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