GO WITH MUDDY FEET 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. Excuse my wandering. How can one be orderly with this? Its like counting leaves in a garden, along with the song notes of partridges, and crows. Sometimes organization and computation become absurd. FIVE THINGS 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, and this is for someone else. Is there a difference? 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 sema 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. THE MANY WINES 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. God made Majnun love Layla so much that just her dog would cause confusion in him. There are thousands of wines that can take over our minds. Dont 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 “whats needed.” Drink the wine that moves you as a camel moves when its been untied, and is just ambling about. COOKED HEADS 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. Youve seen the market where they sell cooked heads: thats what this is, a way of seeing beyond inner and outer. A donkey wanders the sign of Taurus. Heroes do not stay lined up in ranks for very long. I set out for Tabriz, even though my boat is anchored here. WHERE YOU LOVE FROM Look inside and find where a person loves from. Thats the reality, not what they say. Hypocrites 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. Youve so distracted me, your absence fans my love. Dont ask how. Then you come near. “Do not . . .” I say, and “Do not . . . ,” you answer. Dont 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. Drumsound rises on the air, its throb, my heart. A voice inside the beat says, “I know youre tired, but come, this is the way.” Are you jealous of the oceans generosity? Why would you refuse to give this love to anyone? Fish dont hold the sacred liquid in cups! They swim the huge fluid freedom. THERES NOTHING AHEAD Lovers think theyre looking for each other, but theres 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. Id worship someone who could do that. On the way you may want to look back, or not. But if you can say, Theres 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 dont have both, you dont belong with us. When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us. Theres no place like that anywhere in the world. 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. Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth. Your grace is as beautiful as a sleep. 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. Sufis say there are three ways of being with the mystery: prayer, then a step up from that, meditation, and a step up from that, conversation, the mystical exchange they call sohbet. RESPONSE TO YOUR QUESTION Why ask about behavior when you are soul-essence, and a way of seeing into presence! Plus youre 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. You are soul, and you are love, not a sprite or an angel or a human being! Godman-womanGod-manGod-Godwoman! Youre a No more questions now as to what it is were doing here. If you want what visible reality can give, youre an employee. If you want the unseen world, youre not living your truth. Both wishes are foolish, but youll be forgiven for forgetting that what you really want is loves confusing joy. SPECIAL PLATES 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. 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 Shamss eyes into water that is entirely jewels. YOU ARE NOT YOUR EYES 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.” Youre 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 youre in “nothing,” La. Youre an artist who paints both with existence and non. Shams could help you see who you are, but remember, You are not your eyes. WHAT WAS SAID TO THE ROSE 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, thats 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! THE MUSIC 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. IMRAUL-QAYS Imraul-Qays, 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 Imrau 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 Imrau l-Qays and talking theology and philosophy. Imrau l-Qays kept silent. Then suddenly he leaned and whispered something in the second kings ear, and that second king became a wild wanderer too. 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 souls pasture, while the scimitar of this secret approaches. Its 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. ZULEIKHA Zuleikha let everything be the name of Joseph, from celery seed to aloes wood. She loved him so much she concealed his name in many phrases, the inner meanings known only to her. 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 Isnt 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 headaches better, anything she praises its Josephs touch she means. Any complaint, its his being away. When shes hungry, its for him. Thirsty, his name is a sherbet. Cold, hes a fur. This is what the Friend can do when one is in such love. 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. PUT THIS DESIGN IN YOUR CARPET Spiritual experience is a modest woman who looks lovingly at one man. Its 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. Youre water. Were the millstone. Youre wind. Were dust blown up into shapes. Youre spirit. Were the opening and closing of our hands. Youre the clarity. Were this language that tries to say it. Youre joy. Were all the different kinds of laughing. Any movement or sound is a profession of faith, as the millstone grinding is explaining how it believes in the river! No metaphor can say this, but I cant stop pointing to the beauty. Every moment and place says, “Put this design in your carpet!” THE ROAD HOME 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. THIS IS ENOUGH 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 havent 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! UZAYR 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 hes supposed to be coming along this road today.” “Yes,” says Uzayr, “hes right behind me.” One of his sons replies, “Thats good news.” The other falls on the ground. He has recognized his father. “What do you mean news? Were already inside the sweetness of his presence.” To the mind there is such a thing as news, whereas to inner knowing, its all in the middle of its happening. To doubters, this is a pain. To believers, its gospel. To the lover and the visionary, its life as its being lived. Out of nowhere a horse brought us here where we taste love until we dont exist again. This taste is the wine we always mention. AMAZED MOUTH The soul: a wide listening sky with thousands of candles. When anything is sold, soul gets given in the cash: people waiting at a door, a ladder leaning on a roof, someone climbing down. The market square bright with understanding. Listening opens its amazed mouth. Birdsong, wind, the waters face. Each flower, remembering the smell: I know youre close by. BEGIN This is now. Now is. Dont 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. Youre the tailor, settled among his shop goods, quietly sewing. Sudden Wholeness In this love kingdom theres a windy blowing open of windows. Spring! Sounds of talking sprout. Theres 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-wholeness 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 moving 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. Thats the feeling in this region: continuous seasonal epiphany, grief, elation, whimsy. Samurai talk — tang of horse radish. You, the butterfly — I, Chuang Tzus dreaming heart. Even in Kyoto — hearing the cuckoos cry — I long for Kyoto. THIS MARKET 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? THE MUSIC WE ARE Did you hear that winters 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 kings 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. Last years 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 whats next.” I will. Poems are rough notations for the music we are. WALNUTS Philosophers have said that we love music because it resembles the sphere-sounds of union. Weve been part of a harmony before, so these moments of treble and bass keep our remembering fresh. But how does this happen within these dense bodies full of forgetfulness and doubt and grieving? Its 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, “Youll regret doing this. Youre so far from the water that by the time you get down to gather walnuts, the water will have carried them away.” He replies, “Im 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! NO BETTER GIFT When the ocean comes to you as a lover, marry, at once, quickly, for Gods sake! Dont 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. This moment this love comes to rest in me, many beings in one being. In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks. Inside the needles eye, a turning night of stars. The clear bead at the center changes everything. There are no edges to my loving now. Youve heard it said theres a window that opens from one mind to another, but if theres no wall, theres no need for fitting the window, or the latch. A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home. PATTERN When love itself comes to kiss you, dont hold back! When the king goes hunting, the forest smiles. Now the king has become the place and all the players, prey, bystander, bow, arrow, hand and release. How does that feel? Last nights 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. AUCTION 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! QUIETNESS 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. Youre covered with thick cloud. Slide out the side. Die, and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that youve died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. The speechless full moon comes out now. SOME KISS WE WANT 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! 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 wont use the door, only the window. THE WATER WHEEL Stay together, friends. Dont 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. BLESSING THE MARRIAGE 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. TWO DAYS OF SILENCE 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. 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. PASSAGE INTO SILENCE 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, Davids 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. ESCAPING TO THE FOREST 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 dont 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. ANY CHANCE MEETING 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. NASUHS CHANGING 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 bodys disgrace, like a falcons loosened binding, slips from the falcons 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. If you love love, look for yourself. What I say makes me drunk. Nightingale, iris, parrot, jasmine, I speak those languages, along with the idiom of my longing for Shamsi Tabriz. THE CIRCLE Is there anything better than selling figs to the fig seller? Thats how this is. Making a profit is not why were 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. Thats how it turns green. Let the lean and wounded be revived in your garden. How would the soul feel in the beloveds 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. THE DEATH OF ALADIN You left ground and sky weeping, 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 cant 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 youre 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. BIRD WINGS Your grief for what youve lost lifts a mirror up to where youre bravely working. Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, heres the joyful face youve 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. THE SILENT ARTICULATION OF A FACE 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. 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. Youve been walking the oceans 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? Dont put blankets over the drum! Open completely. Let your spirit-ear listen to the green domes 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. THE ALLURE OF LOVE 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. SKY-CIRCLES 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, theyre given wings. I THROW IT ALL 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. YOUR FACE 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 youre 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. Ive 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 youve 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. The purpose of emotion A certain Sufi tore his robe in grief, and the tearing brought such relief he gave the robe the name faraji, which means ripped open, 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 grounds 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. I am a glass of wine with dark sediment. I pour it all in the river. Love says to me, “Good, but you dont see your own beauty. I am the wind that mixes in your fire, who stirs and brightens, then makes you gutter out.” SMOKE Dont 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. IM NOT SAYING THIS RIGHT 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. Im 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. WHO SAYS WORDS WITH MY 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. MOUTH? I didnt come here of my own accord, and I cant leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home. This poetry. I never know what Im going to say. I dont plan it. When Im outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all. We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups. Thats fine with us. Every morning we glow and in the evening we glow again. They say theres no future for us. Theyre right. Which is fine with us. Real value comes with madness, matzoob below, scientist above. Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief disappears into emptiness with a thousand new disguises. A CAP TO WEAR IN BOTH WORLDS There is a passion in me that doesnt 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 wont 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. Theres a strange frenzy in my head, of birds flying, each particle circulating on its own. Is the one I love everywhere? FRINGE You wreck my shop and my house and now my heart, but how can I run from what gives me life? Im 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 well be loosened, the binding threads torn out. The beloved is a lion. Were 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. THE ACHE AND CONFUSION 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 thats handed you. Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about things going badly. Let the lover be. WONDER WITHOUT WILLPOWER Loves 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 its held upside down, now beside the head, now down and on to something 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. LIKE LIGHT OVER THIS PLAIN 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 Hamzas emptiness. Everything begs with the silent rocks for you to be flung out like light over this plain, the presence of Shams. CANDLE LIGHT BECOMES MOTH Inside a lovers heart theres 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 Shamss universe candlelight itself becomes a moth to die in his candle. THE BASKET OF FRESH BREAD 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 dont help. Soul receives from soul that knowing. 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? (Quran : ) Dont look for it outside yourself. You are the source of milk. Dont milk others! There is a fountain inside you. Dont 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 Quran says, And he is with you. ( : ) 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 peoples waterbags. Water is everywhere around you, but you see only barriers that keep you from water. The horse is beneath the riders thighs, and still you ask, “Wheres my horse?” Right there, under you! Yes, this is a horse, but wheres the horse? Cant you see? “Yes I can see, but whoever saw such a horse?” Mad with thirst, you cant drink from the stream running close by your face. You are like a pearl on the deep bottom wondering inside the shell, Wheres the ocean? Those mental questionings form the barrier. Stay bewildered inside God, and only that. When you are with everyone but me, youre with no one. When you are with no one but me, youre with everyone. Instead of being so bound up with everyone, be everyone. When you become that many, youre nothing. Empty. THIS TORTURE 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 cant 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 wont help. Soul, heart, self. Beyond and within those is one saying, How long before Im free of this torture! Think that youre gliding out from the face of a cliff like an eagle. Think youre walking like a tiger walks by himself in the forest. Youre most handsome when youre after food. THE PUBLIC BATH 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 hes 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. 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 theyre necessary to each others 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. MASHALLAH Theres 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. 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. SPIRIT AND BODY Dont 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. Dont make the body do what the spirit does best, and dont put a big load on the spirit that the body could easily carry. BREADMAKING 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.” Servants rushed out and brought the man to the kings 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 Gods table. Someone who has heard about ecstatic love, but never tasted it, disrupts the banquet. Hes 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 scholars 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 kings harem. His mouth hung open. He wanted her! Right then, he wanted her! And she was not unwilling. They fell to, on the ground. Youve seen a baker rolling dough. He kneads it gently at first, then more roughly. He pounds it on the board. It softly groans under his palms. Now he spreads 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 its 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 its basically the same, and remember, the way you make love is the way God will be with you. SEXUAL URGENCY AND TRUE VIRILITY 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, thats 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. Dont 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. 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 cant tell ground from sky! His reason is lost in a drumming sound, worthless radish and son of a radish, this cultivator tears off the womans pants and lies down between her legs, his penis moving straight to the mark. Just then, theres 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. The lion is jumping twenty feet in the air, tents billowing like an ocean. The Captain splits the lions head with one blow. Now hes 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. 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, hes uninterested. “Dont say a word of this to the Caliph.” He takes the girl and presents her. The Caliph is smitten. Shes 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. 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 Captains running about the camp hard as a rhinos horn, then the Caliphs 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. Ill 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. The kernel of true manhood is the ability to abandon sensual indulgence. The intensity of the Captains libido is less than a husk compared to the Caliphs nobility in ending the cycle of sowing lust and reaping secrecy and meanness. TWO WAYS OF RUNNING 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 shed 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 didnt 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! Ive set cotton wool on fire! Ive put the ram in with the ewe!” 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! Theres 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 theyre 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 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. CLOSE TO BEING TRUE How can we know the divine qualities from within? If we know only through metaphors, its 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 dont know, both are close to being true. Neither is quite a lie. WHAT HURTS THE SOUL We tremble, thinking were 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. 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. HIDDEN 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 INSIDE the secret. Call the secret language and never be sure what you conceal. Its unsure people who get the blessing. 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 worlds population pitched and living easily within the sea! What if inside every lovers tear you saw the face of the Friend: Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, the impossible-possible philosopher, the glass diamond one, Shams Tabriz? 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. WHO MAKES Who makes these changes? I shoot an arrow right. It lands left. 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. DROWNING What can I say to someone so curled up with wanting, so constricted in his love? Break your pitcher against a rock. We dont 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. THE DOG PROBLEM Now, what if a dogs owner were not able to control it? 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 dogs owner has to say, “So do I! Im helpless against this creature even in my own house! Just as you cant come close, I cant go out!” This is how animal energy becomes monstrous and ruins your lifes freshness and beauty. Think of taking this dog out to hunt! Youd be the quarry. ZIKR 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. Breathe water. Become river head to foot. Hornets leave you alone then. Even if youre far from the river, they pay no attention. No one looks for stars when the suns out. A person blended into God does not disappear. He or she is just completely soaked in Gods qualities. Do you need a quote from the Quran? 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 doesnt 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. Dont 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. Dont be contemptuous of old obediences. They help. THE CORE OF MASCULINITY The core of masculinity does not derive from being male, nor friendliness from those who console. Your old grandmother says, “Maybe you shouldnt go to school. You look a little pale.” Run when you hear that. A fathers 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. CLEAR BEING I honor those who try to rid themselves of lying, who empty the self and have only clear being there. THE SOULS FRIEND 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. Dont think, But those others love me so. Some invitations sound like the fowlers whistle to the quail, friendly, but not quite how you remember the call of your souls Friend. LONGING 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 its gone. WHAT DRAWS YOU? 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. Both are drawn from the source. Any motion is from the mover. Any love from the beloved. FEAR Everyone can see how they have polished the mirror of the self, which is done with the longings were 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 TEACHERS 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 loves presence, that ocean whose depth will never be known. LOOKING INTO THE CREEK The way the soul is with the senses and the intellect is like a creek. When desire weeds grow thick, intelligence cant 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 its lucid dreaming. The gates made of light swing open. You see in. THE POLISHER As everything changes overnight, I praise the breaking of promises. Whatever love wants, it gets, not next year, now! 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. Thats 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 mirrors face. BURNT KABOB Last year, I admired the wines. This, Im wandering inside the red world. Last year, I gazed at the fire, This year Im burnt kabob. Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moons reflection. Now I am a lion staring up, totally lost in love with the thing itself. Dont 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, Id 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. SITTING IN THE ORCHARD 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. THE PRINCE OF KABUL Here is a story of a young prince who suddenly sees that the ambitious world is a big game of king of the mountain, a boy scrambling up a pile of sand to call out, “I am king.” Then another throws him off to make his momentary claim, then another and so on. 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 hes 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. Hes of marriageable age. Ill 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 workers 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 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. Youll discover how God works.” This story is long, and youre tired. Ill 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 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?” “Dont 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 Gods breathing loosens. Dont 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 dont 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 Friends 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. In the dream youre running toward a mirage. As you run, youre 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, its a form of Gods joy. Everywhere in this desert I see green corn growing 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 bodys 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 theyre hearing music. 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 Im not telling you. THE WRIST 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, and dont 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. If the beloved is everywhere, the lover is a veil, but when living itself becomes the Friend, lovers disappear. KING, THE HANDMAIDEN AND THE DOCTOR Do you know why your soul-mirror does not reflect as clearly as it might? Because rust has begun to cover it. It needs to be cleaned. Heres a story about the inner state thats 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. 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.” 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 didnt 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. Its 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 dont 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! Dont say tomorrow or later.” I reply, “Its 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 dont 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.” 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 kings 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 doctors poisoning the poor goldsmith! It was not done for his friend the kings sake. The reason is a mystery, like Khidrs cutting the boys throat. When someone is killed by a doctor like this one, its a blessing, even though it might not seem so. Such a doctor is part of a larger generosity. Dont judge his actions. You are not living so completely within the truth as he is. 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. THE SUNRISE RUBY 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, “Theres nothing left of me. Im 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. Dont 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 whos there. THE GENERATIONS I PRAISE 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 theyre pregnant with love, love pregnant with God. These are the early morning generations I praise. ONE SWAYING BEING 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 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. 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. HANGOVER REMORSE 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 hes lost, give me that longing! SOUL, HEART AND BODY ONE MORNING Theres 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. Dont 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. Ill 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, doesnt make any sense. Die Before You Die 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. HUSAM 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. 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. Were given the gift of continuously dying and being resurrected. The bodys death now to me is like going to sleep. No fear of drowning. Im in another water. Stones dont 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? THAT QUICK 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 cant 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. EMPTY BOAT Some huge work goes on growing. How could one persons words matter? Where you walk heads pop from the ground. What is one seed head compared to you? On my death day Ill 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. In the slaughterhouse of love they kill only the best, none of the weak or deformed. Dont run away from this dying. Whoevers not killed for love is dead meat. I TRUST YOU The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody and gross. Work on it with manual discipline, and the bitter tanning acid of grief. Youll become lovely and very strong. If you cant do this work yourself, dont worry. You dont 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 youre beaten, when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say with Hallajs voice, I trust you to kill me. Remember the story of the king who is so enraged with his close friend that hes about to kill him! A privileged intercessor, Imadul-Mulk, steps in and saves the man, but then the kings 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 theres no religion, no grace, no unfaithfulness, no punishment, and no language can say anything about it, except that it is hidden, hidden. 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. O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbor With your crooked heart. The young seeker wonders, How could a teacher lie with that woman! Can a guide agree with a thief? Suddenly Sheikh Kharraqani 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 teachers thighs and all of them stacked with wood! Kharraqani knew the problem and immediately began to answer, “Well, its not out of desire that I put up with her! Dont think that. Its 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.” HARSH EVIDENCE 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. Youve heard that every buried treasure has a snake guarding it. Kiss the snake to discover the treasure! Dont run from those who scold, and dont turn away from cleansing conflict, or you will remain weak. THE STUPID THINGS IVE DONE 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 Ive 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! CANDLE AT NOON 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.” DERVISHES 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. DOVES People want you to be happy. Dont keep serving them your pain! If you could untie your wings and free your soul of jealousy, you and everyone around you would fly up like doves. WHEN WORDS ARE TINGED WITH LYING Muhammad gave this indication of how to know whats real. “When you feel a peaceful joy, youre 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.” When words are tinged with lying, theyre like water dripping into an oil lamp. The wick wont light, and the pleasure of your love room will diminish. THERE YOU ARE Youre inside every kindness. When a sick person feels better, youre that, and the onset of disease too. Youre sudden, terrible screaming. Some problems require we go for help. When we knock on a strangers door, you sent us. Nobody answers. Its 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. Youre the one who brings the evidence in, and the evidence itself. You are inside the souls 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, shadow. Whether reckless or careful, you are what we do. Its absurd to ask your pardon. Youre 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. Theres a shredding thats really a healing, that makes you more alive! A lion holds you in his arms. Fingers rake the fretbridge for music. Dance, when youre broken open. Dance, if youve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance, when youre perfectly free. All I know of spirit is this love. YOUR DEFECTS An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits, when they are held up to each other, thats when the real making begins. Thats 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. RULES ABOUT RESTRAINT 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. THE COMPANY OF LOVERS 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. THE LOOK THAT OPENS 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. STRAW AND GRASSES 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. 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? THE OCEAN SURGE 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, dont let me just hear it. Let it splash inside my chest! LOVE DOGS 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, the guide of souls, in a thick, green foliage. “Why did you stop praising?” “Because Ive 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. 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! 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 doesnt destroy. In your presence I dont want what I thought I wanted, those three little hanging lamps. Inside your face the ancient manuscripts seem like rusty mirrors. 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. BLASPHEMY AND THE 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. Dont wait! The open plain is better than any closing door. Ravens love ruins and cemetery trees. They cant help but fly there. For us this day is friends sitting together with silence shining in our faces.” CORE Youre 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 theres no place to get to. Dont try to see through the distances. Thats not for human beings. Move within, but dont move the way fear makes you move. 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. WOODEN CAGES I may be clapping my hands, but I dont belong to a crowd of clappers. Neither this nor that, Im 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, Im not part of that. Dont 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 dont want anything from anybody. I flow through human beings. Love is my only companion. MORE RANGE Were 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. Dont 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 theyre doing every moment and why. Submit to love without thinking, as the sun rose this morning recklessly extinguishing our star-candle minds. AYAZ AND THE KINGS 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.” PEARL “More gold “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 chamberlains 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?” “Its 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. Dont worry about forms. If someone wants your horse, let him have it. Horses are for hurrying ahead of others. 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. Dont punish the others for my drunken obedience. Punish them when Im sober because Ill 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. HALLAJ Hallaj said what he said and went to the origin through the hole in the scaffold. I cut a caps 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. Its cold. Theres 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. Its a live bear that has fallen in upstream, drifting with the current. “How long does it take!” Hallaj yells from the bank. “Dont 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? THE SOURCE OF JOY 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? Theres 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. ROSE UNDER FOOT 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. Theres 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 skys cloth. Everything is soul and flowering. POETRY 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. BIRD SONGS FROM INSIDE Sometimes a lover of God may faint in the presence. Then the beloved bends and whispers in his ear, “Beggar, spread out your robe. Ill fill it with gold. EGG Ive 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. 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. EASTERN MYSTERY 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. NO FLAG I used to want buyers for my words. Now I wish someone would buy me away from words. Ive made a lot of charmingly profound images, scenes with Abraham and his father Azar, who was famous for icons. Im so tired of what Ive been doing. Then one image without form came, and I quit. Look for someone else to tend the shop. Im 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. God only knows, I dont, 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 goats-hair brush in a painters hand. We have no idea what we are. MOSES AND THE SHEPERD 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 its 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.” “Dont talk about shoes and socks with God! And whats this with your little hands? Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like youre 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. 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. Its all praise, and its all right. I am not glorified in acts of worship. Its the worshipers! I dont 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. Dont impose a property tax on a burned-out village. Dont scold the lover. The “wrong” way he talks is better than a hundred “right” ways of others. Inside the Kaaba it doesnt matter which way you point your prayer rug! The ocean diver doesnt need snowshoes! The love-religion has no code or doctrine. Only God. So the ruby has nothing engraved on it! It doesnt need markings. 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. Its 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 dont worry what comes out. Its all the light of the spirit.” The shepherd replied, “Moses, Moses, Ive 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 cant say what has happened. What Im saying now is not my real condition. It cant 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, its always like this dear shepherds simplicity. The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers dont finally meet somewhere. Theyre in each other all along. MORNING WIND Wine so bitter all bitterness sweetens, a beautiful face growing old. The taste of Khidrs 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, well stay quiet. Whatever you have understood of us, go and tell that to the living, what weve been hiding from them. THE OCEANS MOTION 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; 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. IGNORANCE I didnt 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 has disappeared into the absolute. I hear so many stories and explanations, but I keep quiet, because I dont know anything, and because something I swallowed in the ocean has made me completely content with ignorance. EYES 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 Quran when the desert mountain looks at God, and eyes appear on every stone. I am filled with you. Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul. Theres no room for lack of trust, or trust. Nothing in this existence but that existence. 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. THE GRANARY 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. Theyre free of those. Before a mine is dug, they judge coins. Before vineyards, they know 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, were traveling together. Throw off your tiredness. Let me show you one tiny spot of the beauty that cant be spoken. Im like an ant thats gotten into the granary, ludicrously happy, and trying to lug out a grain thats way too big. THE GAZING-HOUSE On the night when you cross the street from your shop and your house to the cemetery, youll hear me hailing you from inside the open grave, and youll realize how weve 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, youll 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 dont fuss with the shroud and the graveyard road dust. Those get ripped open and washed away in the music of our meeting. And dont 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. No need to wait until we die! Theres 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? THE GUEST HOUSE 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 theyre 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. 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 doesnt know its copper, until its changing to gold. Your loving doesnt know majesty, until it knows its helplessness. THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, theres nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life. Its 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 dont do it, its as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. Its a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. Its like a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on. You say, “But look, Im using it. Its 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 philosophy and jurisprudence, logic, astronomy, and medicine.” But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself and your impressiveness. Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you dont, youll be like the man who takes a ceremonial dagger and hammers it into a post for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. Youll be wasting valuable keenness and forgetting your dignity and purpose. THIS WE HAVE NOW 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 doesnt. Its 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, theyre wanting this. When the night sky pours by, its 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