G O W I T H M U D D Y F E E T
When you hear dirty story
wash your ears.
When you see ugly stuff
wash your eyes.
When you get bad thoughts
wash your mind.
and
Keep your feet muddy.7
—Nanao Sakaki
2
Excuse my wandering.
How can one be orderly with this?
It’s like counting leaves in a garden,
along with the song notes of partridges,
and crows. Sometimes organization
and computation become absurd.
F I V E T H I N G S
I have five things to say,
five fingers to give into your grace.
First, when I was apart from you,
this world did not exist, nor any other.
Second, whatever I was looking for
was always you.
Third, why did I ever learn to count to three?
Fourth, my cornfield is burning!
Fifth, this finger stands for Rabia,8
and this is for someone else.
Is there a difference?
3
Are these words or tears?
Is weeping speech?
What shall I do, my love?
So the lover speaks, and everyone around
begins to cry with him, laughing crazily,
moaning in the spreading union
of lover and beloved.
This is the true religion. All others
are thrown-away bandages beside it.
This is the sema9 of slavery and mastery
dancing together. This is not-being.
I know these dancers.
Day and night I sing their songs
in this phenomenal cage.
T H E M A N Y W I N E S
God has given us a dark wine so potent that,
drinking it, we leave the two worlds.
God has put into the form of hashish a power
to deliver the taster from self-consciousness.
God has made sleep
so that it erases every thought.
4
God made Majnun love Layla so much
that just her dog would cause confusion in him.10
There are thousands of wines
that can take over our minds.
Don’t think all ecstasies
are the same!
Jesus was lost in his love for God.
His donkey was drunk on barley.
Drink from the presence of saints,
not from those other jars.
Every object, every being,
is a jar full of delight.
Be a connoisseur,
and taste with caution.
Any wine will get you high.
Judge like a king, and choose the purest,
the ones unadulterated with fear,
or some urgency about “what’s needed.”
Drink the wine that moves you
as a camel moves when it’s been untied,
and is just ambling about.
5
C O O K E D H E A D S
I have been given a glass
that has the fountain of the sun inside,
a Friend in both worlds, like the fragrance
of amber inside the fragrance of musk.
My soul-parrot gets excited with sweetness.
Wingbeats, a door opening in the sun.
You’ve seen the market where they sell
cooked heads: that’s what this is,
a way of seeing beyond inner and outer.11
A donkey wanders the sign of Taurus.
Heroes do not stay lined up in ranks
for very long. I set out for Tabriz,
even though my boat is anchored here.
W H E R E Y O U L O V E Look inside and find where a person
loves from. That’s the reality,
not what they say.
F R O M
Hypocrites
6
give attention to form, the right
and wrong ways of professing belief.
Grow instead in universal light.
When that revealed itself, God gave it
a thousand different names, the least
of those sweet-breathing names being,
the one who is not in need of anyone.
You’ve so distracted me,
your absence fans my love.
Don’t ask how.
Then you come near.
“Do not . . .” I say, and
“Do not . . . ,” you answer.
Don’t ask why
this delights me.
In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.
7
Drumsound rises on the air,
its throb, my heart.
A voice inside the beat says,
“I know you’re tired,
but come, this is the way.”
Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
Why would you refuse to give
this love to anyone?
Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim the huge fluid freedom.
T H E R E ’ S N O T H I N G A H E A D
Lovers think they’re looking for each other,
but there’s only one search: wandering
this world is wandering that,
both inside one
transparent sky. In here there is
no dogma and no heresy.
The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said
or did about the future. Forget the future.
I’d worship someone who could do that.
8
On the way you may want to look back, or not.
But if you can say, There’s nothing ahead,
there will be nothing there.
Stretch your arms
and take hold the cloth of your clothes
with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both,
you don’t belong with us.
When one of us gets lost,
is not here, he must be inside us. There’s no
place like that anywhere in the world.
9
2. Sohbet: Who You Talking To?
For Rumi the appearance of formal beauty comes as a natu-
ral response to being spoken to. The rose opens because it
has heard something. The cypress grows strong and
straight because a love-secret is being whispered. Elegance
in language arrives in response. Before creation there was a
question, “Am I not your lord?”12 The simultaneous YES!
that came is why we are here at all in the midst of three
hundred billion galaxies.
I have a friend who, when she wants to know who I am
seeing, who I am in love with, asks, Who you talking to? The
exchange of deep friendship makes a fine entrance into
love and trust, into the mysterious action that moves
through the eyes, the voice, the heart.
Rumi wonders, Can you see these escapees, the ones who have
gotten free of their personalities and into the truer self? He celebrates
the freedom of those escapees, how their friendship dis-
solves into everything: what anybody says, whatever hap-
pens.
Emily Dickinson says, I dwell in possibility, a fairer house
than prose. That region where her poetry grew is sohbet.
10
I dwell in possibility,
A fairer house than prose,
More numerous of windows,
Superior for doors.
Of chambers as the cedars,
Impregnable of eye.
And for an everlasting roof
The gambrels of the sky.
Of visitors, the fairest.
For occupation, this:
The spreading wide my narrow hands
To gather paradise.13
She’s describing the opening air around Rumi and
Shams, their retreat house full of sky and breath, and
laughter with the fairest visitors. Love with no object, conver-
sation with no subject, seeing with no image, light on light,
pure possibility.
Rumi’s love poems are not in the realm we’re more
familiar with, the earthy and sexual transcendence cele-
brated in the poetry of Keats and Whitman, Rexroth,
Kinnell, Bly, Creeley, Jack Gilbert. Rumi’s love is beyond
the sexual pathway and, for that reason, maybe not so
beautiful, to us. Rumi is less tranced and less sensual than,
say, these lines from Rexroth’s late afternoon love poem,
“When We with Sappho”:
Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth.
Your grace is as beautiful as a sleep.
11
You move against me like a wave
That moves in sleep.
Your body spreads across my brain
Like a bird-filled summer;
Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
But like a nimbus that hovers
Over every other thing in all the world.14
Sufis say there are three ways of being with the mys-
tery: prayer, then a step up from that, meditation, and a
step up from that, conversation, the mystical exchange
they call sohbet.
R E S P O N S E T O Y O U R Q U E S T I O N
Why ask about behavior when you are soul-essence,
and a way of seeing into presence!
Plus you’re with us!
How could you worry?
You may as well free a few words from
your vocabulary.
Why and how and impossible. Open
the mouth-cage
and let those fly away.
We were all born by
accident, but still this wandering caravan
will make camp in perfection.
Forget the nonsense categories of there and here,
race, nation, religion,
starting point and destination.
12
You are soul, and you are love,
not a sprite or an angel or a human being!
Godman-womanGod-manGod-Godwoman!
You’re a
No more questions now
as to what it is we’re doing here.
If you want what visible reality can give,
you’re an employee.
If you want the unseen world,
you’re not living your truth.
Both wishes are foolish,
but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is
love’s confusing joy.
S P E C I A L P L A T E S
Notice how each particle moves.
Notice how everyone has just arrived here
from a journey. Notice how each wants
a different food. Notice how
the stars vanish as the sun comes up,
and how all streams stream toward the ocean.
13
Look at the chefs preparing special plates
for everyone according to what they need.
Look at this cup that can hold the ocean.
Look at those who see the face. Look
through Shams’s eyes into water
that is entirely jewels.
Y O U A R E N O T Y O U R E Y E S
Those who have reached their arms
into emptiness are no longer concerned
with lies and truth, with mind and soul,
or which side of the bed they rose from.
If you are still struggling to understand,
you are not there. You offer your soul
to one who says, “Take it to the other
side.” You’re on neither side, yet
those who love you see you on one side
or the other. You say Illa, “only God,”
then your hungry eyes see you’re in
“nothing,” La.15 You’re an artist
who paints both with existence and non.
Shams could help you see who you are,
but remember, You are not your eyes.
14
W H A T W A S S A I D T O T H E R O S E
What was said to the rose that made it open
was said to me here in my chest.
What was told the cypress that made it strong
and straight, what was whispered the jasmine
so it is what it is, whatever made sugarcane
sweet; whatever was said to the inhabitants
of the town of Chigil in Turkestan that makes
them so handsome, whatever lets the pomegranate
flower blush like a human face, that is being
said to me now. I blush. Whatever put eloquence
in language, that’s happening here. The great
warehouse doors open; I fill with gratitude,
chewing a piece of sugarcane, in love with
the one to whom every that belongs!
T H E M U S I C
For sixty years I have been forgetful,
every moment, but not for a second
has this flowing toward me slowed or stopped.
I deserve nothing. Today I recognize
that I am the guest the mystics talk about.
I play this living music for my host.
Everything today is for the host.
15
I M R A ’ U ‘ L - Q A Y S
Imra’u ‘l-Qays,16 king of the Arabs,
was very handsome and a poet full of love songs.
Women loved him desperately. Everyone loved him,
but there came one night an experience
that changed him completely.
He left his kingdom and his family.
He put on dervish robes and wandered
from one weather, one landscape, to another.
Love dissolved his king-self and led him to Tabuk,
where he worked for a time making bricks.
Someone told the king of Tabuk about Imra’u ‘l-Qays,
and that king came to visit him at night.
“King of the Arabs, handsome Joseph of this age,
ruler of two empires, one composed of territories,
and the other of the beauty of women,
if you would consent to stay with me,
I would be honored. You abandon kingdoms,
because you want more than kingdoms.”
The king of Tabuk went on like this, praising
Imra’u ‘l-Qays and talking theology and philosophy.
Imra’u ‘l-Qays kept silent.
Then suddenly he leaned and whispered something
in the second king’s ear, and that second
king became a wild wanderer too.
16
They walked out of town hand in hand,
no royal belts, no thrones.
This is what love does and continues to do.
It tastes like honey to adults and milk to children.
Love is the last thirty-pound bale.
When you load it on, the boat tips over.
So they wandered around China like birds
pecking at bits of grain. They rarely spoke
because of the dangerous seriousness
of the secret they knew.
That love-secret spoken pleasantly, or irritation,
severs a hundred thousand heads in one swing.
A love-lion grazes in the soul’s pasture,
while the scimitar of this secret approaches.
It’s a killing better than any living.
All that world-power wants, really,
is this weakness.
So these kings talk in low tones,
and carefully. Only God knows what they say.
They use unsayable words. Bird language.
But some people have imitated them, learned
a few birdcalls, and gotten prestigious.
17
3. The Superabundance of
Ordinary Being
Love is not love that doesn’t love the details of the beloved,
the minute particulars. Judith and I were in Pammukkalle,
Turkey, an ancient Roman bath with a museum, and around
the side, attached to it, is a shed called the Museum of
Small Findings. Shards of pottery, coins, fingers and toes of
statuary, just as the sign says. The guard at the door, the
host, is a smiling, genial man about four-feet two-inches
tall, no taller, and no pun intended. Wherever we go now
we do small findings, to make sure nothing goes unnoticed,
or gets left behind.
Love is the connection with spirit, and one way it flows
is through form. That’s the state of rapture Rumi praises,
the joy of being inside an intersection with the divine,
which is what this world is.
“Truly being here is glorious,” says Rilke in the Seventh
Duino Elegy, and in the Ninth,
Isn’t it the secret intent
of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,
that inside their boundless emotion all things may
shudder with joy?
18
This resonant trembling of the earth with lovers, is the
superabundance of being, a phrase from Rilke in Stephen
Mitchell’s translation.17
Rumi walks the granary amazed like an ant, small find-
ings the given.
Z U L E I K H A
Zuleikha18 let everything be the name of Joseph,
from celery seed to aloes wood. She loved him
so much she concealed his name in many phrases,
the inner meanings known only to her.
When she said,
The wax is softening near the fire, she meant,
My love is wanting me.
If she said, Look, the moon is up,
or The willow has new leaves, or The coriander seeds
have caught fire, or The king is in a good mood today,
or Isn’t that lucky, or The furniture needs dusting, or
The water carrier is here, or This bread needs more salt,
or The clouds seem to be moving against the wind,
or My head hurts, or My headache’s better,
anything she praises it’s Joseph’s touch she means.
Any complaint, it’s his being away.
When she’s hungry, it’s for him. Thirsty, his name
is a sherbet. Cold, he’s a fur. This is what
the Friend can do when one is in such love.
19
The miracle Jesus did by being the name of God,
Zuleikha felt in the name Joseph.
When one is united to the core of another,
to speak of that is to breathe the name Hu,
empty of self and filled with love.
P U T T H I S D E S I G N I N Y O U R C A R P E T
Spiritual experience is a modest woman
who looks lovingly at one man.
It’s a great river where ducks live
happily, and crows drown. The visible
bowl of form contains food that is both
nourishing and a source of heartburn.
There is an unseen presence we honor
that gives the gifts.
You’re water. We’re the millstone.
You’re wind. We’re dust blown up into shapes.
You’re spirit. We’re the opening and closing
of our hands. You’re the clarity.
We’re this language that tries to say it.
You’re joy. We’re all the different kinds
of laughing. Any movement or sound
is a profession of faith, as the millstone
20
grinding is explaining how it believes
in the river! No metaphor can say this,
but I can’t stop pointing to the beauty.
Every moment and place says,
“Put this design in your carpet!”
T H E R O A D H O M E
An ant hurries along a threshing floor
with its wheat grain, moving between huge stacks
of wheat, not knowing the abundance
all around. It thinks its one grain
is all there is to love.
So we choose a tiny seed to be devoted to.
This body, one path or one teacher.
Look wider and farther.
The essence of every human being can see,
and what that essence-eye takes in,
the being becomes. Saturn. Solomon!
The ocean pours through a jar,
and you might say it swims inside
the fish! This mystery gives peace to
your longing and makes the road home home.
21
T H I S I S E N O U G H
Aphrodite singing ghazals. A sky with
gold streaks across. A stick
that finds water in stone. Jesus
sitting quietly near the animals.
Night so peaceful. This is enough
was always true. We just haven’t
seen it. The hoopoe already wears
a tufted crown. Each ant is given
its elegant belt at birth. This love
we feel pours through us like a giveaway
song. The source of now is here!
U Z A Y R
Which reminds me of the sons of Uzayr,
who are out looking for their father.
They have grown old, and their father
has miraculously grown young!
They meet him and ask, “Pardon us, sir,
but have you seen Uzayr? We hear
that he’s supposed to be coming along
this road today.” “Yes,” says Uzayr,
22
“he’s right behind me.” One of his sons
replies, “That’s good news.” The other
falls on the ground. He has recognized
his father. “What do you mean news?
We’re already inside the sweetness
of his presence.” To the mind
there is such a thing as news, whereas
to inner knowing, it’s all in the middle
of its happening. To doubters, this is
a pain. To believers, it’s gospel.
To the lover and the visionary,
it’s life as it’s being lived.
Out of nowhere a horse
brought us here where we taste love
until we don’t exist again. This taste
is the wine we always mention.
A M A Z E D M O U T H
The soul: a wide listening sky
with thousands of candles.
When anything is sold, soul gets given
in the cash: people waiting at a door,
23
a ladder leaning on a roof, someone
climbing down. The market square bright
with understanding. Listening
opens its amazed mouth.
Birdsong, wind,
the water’s face.
Each flower, remembering the smell:
I know you’re close by.
B E G I N
This is now. Now is. Don’t postpone
till then. Spend the spark of iron
on stone. Sit at the head of the table.
Dip your spoon in the bowl. Seat yourself
next to your joy and have your awakened soul
pour wine. Branches in the spring wind,
easy dance of jasmine and cypress. Cloth
for green robes has been cut from pure
absence. You’re the tailor, settled
among his shop goods, quietly sewing.
24
4. Sudden Wholeness
In this love kingdom there’s a windy blowing open of win-
dows. Spring! Sounds of talking sprout. There’s a picnic by
the river. Identity is music, and poems are rough notations
of the melodies.
This station gives the lover glimpses of a spirit-whole-
ness running through the apparent chaos, a rightness that
weaves a pattern the lover sees in the dissonant and daily.
Here is the auspicious beginning. Kindness stands in the
door. You walk out together like the Zen master Basho mov-
ing around Kyoto, pining for Kyoto. The phenomenal and
the numinous grow identical. The world you see, together
with the poem, both are intensely alive inside each other
with revelation and suchness. That’s the feeling in this
region: continuous seasonal epiphany, grief, elation, whimsy.
Samurai talk —
tang
of horse radish.
You, the butterfly —
I, Chuang Tzu’s
dreaming heart.
Even in Kyoto —
hearing the cuckoo’s cry —
I long for Kyoto.19
25
T H I S M A R K E T
Can you find another market like this?
Where, with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?
Where, for one seed you get
a whole wilderness? For one weak
breath, the divine wind?
T H E M U S I C W E A R E
Did you hear that winter’s over?
The basil and the carnations
cannot control their laughter.
The nightingale, back from his wandering,
has been made singing master over
all the birds. The trees reach out
their congratulations. The soul
goes dancing through the king’s doorway.
Anemones blush because they have seen
the rose naked. Spring, the only fair
judge, walks in the courtroom, and
several December thieves steal away.
26
Last year’s miracles will soon be
forgotten. New creatures whirl in
from nonexistence, galaxies scattered
around their feet. Have you met them?
Do you hear the bud of Jesus crooning
in the cradle? A single narcissus
flower has been appointed Inspector
of Kingdoms. A feast is set. Listen.
The wind is pouring wine! Love
used to hide inside images. No more!
The orchard hangs out its lanterns.
The dead come stumbling by in shrouds.
Nothing can stay bound or be imprisoned.
You say, “End this poem here and
wait for what’s next.” I will. Poems
are rough notations for the music we are.
W A L N U T S
Philosophers have said that we love music
because it resembles the sphere-sounds
of union. We’ve been part of a harmony
before, so these moments of treble and bass
27
keep our remembering fresh. But how
does this happen within these dense bodies
full of forgetfulness and doubt and
grieving? It’s like water passing through us.
It becomes acidic and bitter, but still as
urine it retains watery qualities.
It will put out a fire! So there is this music
flowing through our bodies that can dowse
restlessness. Hearing the sound, we gather
strength. Love kindles with melody. Music
feeds a lover composure, and provides form
for the imagination. Music breathes
on personal fire and makes it keener.
The waterhole is deep. A thirsty man climbs
a walnut tree growing next to the pool
and drops walnuts one by one into
the beautiful place. He listens carefully
to the sound as they hit and watches
the bubbles. A more rational man gives advice,
“You’ll regret doing this. You’re so far
from the water that by the time you get down
to gather walnuts, the water will have
28
carried them away.” He replies, “I’m not
here for walnuts, I want the music
they make when they hit.”
You that come to birth and bring the mysteries,
your voice-thunder makes us very happy.
Roar, lion of the heart,
and tear me open!
N O B E T T E R G I F T
When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
marry, at once, quickly,
for God’s sake!
Don’t postpone it!
Existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching
will find this.
A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder,
and become yours.
29
This moment this love comes to rest in me,
many beings in one being.
In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.
Inside the needle’s eye, a turning night of stars.
The clear bead at the center changes everything.
There are no edges to my loving now.
You’ve heard it said there’s a window
that opens from one mind to another,
but if there’s no wall, there’s no need
for fitting the window, or the latch.
A thousand half-loves
must be forsaken to take
one whole heart home.
P A T T E R N
When love itself comes to kiss you,
don’t hold back! When the king goes hunting,
30
the forest smiles. Now the king has become
the place and all the players, prey,
bystander, bow, arrow, hand and release.
How does that feel? Last night’s dream
enters these open eyes. We sometimes make
spiderwebs of smoke and saliva, fragile
thought-packets. Leave thinking to the one
who gave intelligence. Stop weaving,
and watch how the pattern improves.
A U C T I O N
As elephants remember India
perfectly, as mind dissolves,
as song begins, as the glass
fills, wind rising, a roomful
of conversation, a sanctuary
of prostration, a bird lights
on my hand in this day born
of friends, an ocean covering
everything, all roads opening,
a person changing to kindness,
no one reasonable, religious
jargon forgotten, and Saladin
there raising his hand to bid
on the bedraggled boy Joseph!
31
5. Escaping into Silence
Close the language-door (the mouth). Open the love-win-
dow (the eyes). The moon (the reflected light of the
divine) won’t use the door, only the window. Moving into
silence with a friend, and with what comes through the
eyes and both presences then, we may become those
escapees Rumi calls those who associate in the heart.
Rumi celebrates this wild freedom, and as he does, he
may seem to be subverting scripture with his advocacy of
the nonverbal, but he’s actually trying to make the revela-
tion that comes in language more experiential. I recom-
mend we all try a day of silence with someone. Just one
day!
32
Q U I E T N E S S
Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an ax to the prison wall.
Escape. Walk out
like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You’re covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest
sign that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon comes out now.
S O M E K I S S W E There is some kiss we want
with our whole lives, the touch
of spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.
And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling!
W A N T
33
At night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its
face against mine.
Breathe into me. Close
the language-door and open the love-window.
The moon won’t use the door,
only the window.
T H E W A T E R W H E E L
Stay together, friends.
Don’t scatter and sleep.
Our friendship is made
of being awake.
The waterwheel accepts water
and turns and gives it away,
weeping.
That way it stays in the garden,
whereas another roundness rolls
through a dry riverbed looking
for what it thinks it wants.
Stay here, quivering with each moment
like a drop of mercury.
34
B L E S S I N G T H E M A R R I A G E
This marriage be wine with halvah,
honey dissolving in milk.
This marriage be the leaves and fruit
of a date tree. This marriage
be women laughing together for days
on end. This marriage, a sign
for us to study. This marriage,
beauty. This marriage, a moon
in a light blue sky. This marriage,
this silence, fully mixed with spirit.
T W O D A Y S O F S I L E N C E
After days of feasting, fast.
After days of sleeping, stay awake
one night. After these times of bitter
storytelling, joking, and serious
considerations, we should give ourselves
two days between layers of baklava
in the quiet seclusion where soul sweetens
and thrives more than with language.
35
I hear nothing in my ear but your voice.
Heart has plundered mind of its eloquence.
Love writes a transparent calligraphy, so on
the empty page my soul can read and recollect.
Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands,
or your own genuine solitude?
Freedom, or power over an entire nation?
A little while alone in your room
will prove more valuable than anything else
that could ever be given you.
36
P A S S A G E I N T O S I L E N C E
The essence of darkness is light,
as oil is the essence of this light.
You are the origin of all jasmine, narcissi,
and irises to come.
You are sunlight moving
through the houses, David’s hand
molding smooth chainmail,
September moon
over the unharvested crop. You set
the grain in the husk.
A rose torn open, my head
not worrying about debt, you,
soul and body
mortared together in bed,
you saying,
you are, you are,
then stopping to twist the strings
to sweeten the voice.
When I give this body
to the ground, you will find
another way.
These words are an alternate
existence. Hear the passage into
silence and be that.
37
6. A New Life
As one becomes a lover, duties change to inspirations. Prac-
tices become dance, poetry, creek music moving along.
Impossible natural images of transformation appear: candle
becomes moth; a dry, broken stick breaks into bud. A chick-
pea becomes its cook (not so impossible, the natural tast-
ing!). Something enters that spontaneously enjoys itself.
Finding a purpose for acting is no longer the problem. The
soul is here for its own joy. Eyes are meant to see things. It’s
by some grand shift of energy that we know love.
We have this great love-ache for the ocean and the
seabirds sewing the hem of her robe. That is the subject
here. We long for beauty, even as we swim within it.
Abdul Qadir Gilani describes this region of the heart as a
baby. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen also speaks of it this way. Some-
one asked Bawa once what it felt like to be him. He
answered by closing his eyes and making little kissing
noises like a baby nursing. In this new life a baby is born
in the heart. Purity comes and a playfulness, an ease, a
peace. Gilani says this new heart-baby sometimes talks to
the soul in dreams.20 Bawa says that this baby knows the lan-
guage of God. It understands every voice that floats on the
wind because it is in unity and compassion.21 This baby has
none of the exclusivity of loving, the limits we learn and
later, hopefully, unlearn from our families (the blood ties),
our culture, religion, tribe, and nation. Bawa says human-
38
ity is “God’s funny family.” That’s how the baby sees.
I saw this baby come into my father’s eyes in the last
weeks of his life in 1971. Everyone felt it. My mother died
(she was sixty-four, lung cancer) on May 8, 1971. My dad
died of a stroke on July 2, 1971, at seventy-two. In the time
between (fifty-five days), Dad lost all judgmental tenden-
cies. He met everyone with unconditional love. He would
go out on any excuse to walk around and talk with
strangers. He had unlimited time and attention and help-
fulness for everyone. So beautiful. I see that opening in
John Seawright’s mother and father too. To hear Rev. Ryan
Seawright pray outdoors in the wind at a June wedding, as
I did recently, is about as much as a heart can stand. Bawa
used to go out rounding, which meant riding in the passen-
ger’s seat of a car driving very slow and waving to people
walking on the sidewalk. Sometimes I’d go along. When
pedestrians would see his face, it was like they were struck
full-power with one of those old searchlights from Second
World War airfields. Then they’d recover and wave so ten-
derly, as to a baby.
The connecting extends to all living beings. My friend
Stephan Schwartz tells of an old farmhand who could
stand at the edge of a field and speak in a soft voice to a
particular cow a couple of hundred yards away, “Number
forty-seven.” That cow, who needed attention from a vet,
would detach from the herd and walk over. Pleasant (the
man’s name) would talk to the cow, looking in her face,
about what needed to be done, how it would hurt but that
it was for the best. The cow would then patiently endure
what needed to be done, and he’d say, “That’s good. Go on
back now.” Then he’d call another one, “Number twenty-
four.” Stephan swears that he was present many times when
this happened.
39
Bawa went into the jungles of Sri Lanka for fifty years
to watch the animals and learn about God. When your
heart dissolves in this love, books are beside the point. We
learn from the taste of life events. Jelaluddin Chelebi once
asked me what religion I was. I threw up my hands in the
who knows gesture. “Good,” he said. “Love is the religion,
and the universe is the book.”
40
E S C A P I N G T O T H E F O R E S T
Some souls have gotten free of their bodies.
Do you see them? Open your eyes for those
who escape to meet with other escapees,
whose hearts associate in a way they have
of leaving their false selves
to live in a truer self.
I don’t mind if my companions
wander away for a while.
They will come back like a smiling drunk.
The thirsty ones die of their thirst.
The nightingale sometimes flies from a garden
to sing in the forest.
Love comes sailing through and I scream.
Love sits beside me like a private supply of itself.
Love puts away the instruments
and takes off the silk robes. Our nakedness
together changes me completely.
41
A N Y C H A N C E M E E T I N G
In every gathering, in any chance meeting
on the street, there is a shine, an elegance
rising up. Today I recognized that that
jewel-like beauty is the presence, our loving
confusion, the glow in which watery clay gets
brighter than fire, the one we call the Friend.
N A S U H ’ S C H A N G I N G
At that moment his spirit grows wings and lifts.
His ego falls like a battered wall.
He unites with God, alive,
but emptied of Nasuh.
His ship sinks and in its place move the ocean waves.
His body’s disgrace, like a falcon’s loosened
binding, slips from the falcon’s foot.
His stones drink in water. His field shines like satin
with gold threads in it. Someone dead a hundred
years steps out strong and handsome.
A broken stick breaks into bud.22
If you love love,
look for yourself.
42
What I say makes me drunk.
Nightingale, iris, parrot, jasmine,
I speak those languages, along with
the idiom of my longing for Shamsi Tabriz.
T H E C I R C L E
Is there anything better than selling figs
to the fig seller?
That’s how this is.
Making a profit is not why we’re here,
nor pleasure, nor even joy.
When someone
is a goldsmith, wherever he goes, he asks
for the goldsmith.
The clouds build with
what we share.
Wheat stays wheat right
through the threshing.
How just do you
feel when you load a lame donkey?
The world has some share in this cup.
That’s how it turns green.
Let the lean
and wounded be revived in your garden.
43
How would the soul feel in the beloved’s
river?
Fish washed free and clean of fear.
You drive us away, but we return like pet
pigeons.
Ten nights becoming dawn flow
in us as a new kind of waking.
Shahabuddin
Osmond joins the circle! We will say
the poem again so he can play.
There is
no end to anything round.
44
7. Grief
The deeper the grief, the more radiant the love. We miss
our friend. Lovers’ tears are the true wealth. My friend John
Seawright used to say that the real tragedy is when you
don’t feel much of anything when someone dies. That lack
of grieving, the feel of not to feel it,23 is not heard much in
Rumi.
I recently saw Fierce Grace, about Ram Dass’s life and par-
ticularly the stroke. The movie focuses on the use of the
starkest tragedies, not just his, to open the heart and help us
find the vital core of consciousness, the soul. My favorite
part is Ram Dass near the end saying yumyumyumyumyum
when he hears a young woman tell her dream of her lover
who has been murdered in Colombia. Several months after
her lover’s death she has the first dream in which he has
appeared. She yells at him, “Where have you been!” He
says, Listen. The love we had was wonderful, but that is small peanuts
to what’s ahead for you, and when that love comes, I’ll be part of it.
Ram Dass ecstatically tastes the truth of what the dead
lover says. No sticky possessiveness, no hanging on to the
past. Grief opens us to more love, and the new love builds
with the former, and there’s miraculous expansion. It’s a rare
movie that gives off the fragrance of enlightened love. This
one does.
45
T H E D E A T H O F S A L A D I N
You left ground and sky weeping,24
mind and soul full of grief.
No one can take your place in existence
or in absence. Both mourn,
the angels, the prophets, and this sadness
I feel has taken from me the taste of language,
so that I can’t say the flavor
of my being apart. The roof
of the kingdom within has collapsed!
When I say the word you, I mean
a hundred universes.
Pouring grief of water, or secret dripping
in the heart, eyes in the head or eyes
of the soul, I saw yesterday
that all these flow out to find you
when you’re not here.
That bright fire bird Saladin
went like an arrow, and now the bow
trembles and sobs.
If you know how to weep for human beings,
weep for Saladin.
46
B I R D W I N G S
Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small
contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.
T H E S I L E N T A R T I C U L A T I O N O F A F A C E
Love comes with a knife, not some
shy question, and not with fears
for its reputation! I say
these things disinterestedly. Accept them
in kind. Love is a madman,
working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes,
running through the mountains, drinking poison,
and now quietly choosing annihilation.
47
A tiny spider tries to wrap an enormous wasp.
Think of the spiderweb woven across the cave
where Muhammad slept! There are love stories,
and there is obliteration into love.
You’ve been walking the ocean’s edge,
holding up your robes to keep them dry.
You must dive naked under and deeper under,
a thousand times deeper! Love flows down.
The ground submits to the sky and suffers
what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse
for giving in like that?
Don’t put blankets over the drum!
Open completely. Let your spirit-ear
listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur.
Let the cords of your robe be untied.
Shiver in this new love beyond all
above and below. The sun rises, but which way
does night go? I have no more words.
Let soul speak with the silent
articulation of a face.
48
T H E A L L U R E O F L O V E
Someone who does not run
toward the allure of love walks
a road where nothing lives.
But this dove here senses
the love-hawk floating above
and waits and will not be driven
or scared to safety.
S K Y- C I R C L E S
The way of love is not
a subtle argument.
The door there
is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn that?
They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.
49
I T H R O W I T A L L A W A Y
You play with the great globe of union,
you that see everyone so clearly
and cannot be seen. Even universal
intelligence gets blurry when it thinks
you may leave. You came here alone,
but you create hundreds of new worlds.
Spring is a peacock flirting with
revelation. The rose gardens flame.
Ocean enters the boat. I throw
it all away, except this love for Shams.
Y O U R F A C E
You may be planning departure, as a human soul
leaves the world taking almost all its sweetness
with it. You saddle your horse.
You must be going. Remember you have friends
here as faithful as grass and sky.
Have I failed you? Possibly you’re
angry. But remember our nights of conversation,
the well work, yellow roses by ocean,
the longing, the archangel Gabriel
saying So be it. Shamsi Tabriz, your face,
is what every religion tries to remember.
50
I’ve broken through to longing now,
filled with a grief I have felt before,
but never like this.
The center leads to love.
Soul opens the creation core.
Hold on to your particular pain.
That too can take you to God.
My work is to carry this love
as comfort for those who long for you,
to go everywhere you’ve walked
and gaze at the pressed-down dirt.
Pale sunlight,
pale the wall.
Love moves away.
The light changes.
I need more grace
than I thought.
51
T H E P U R P O S E O F E M O T I O N
A certain Sufi tore his robe in grief,
and the tearing brought such relief he gave the robe
the name faraji, which means ripped open,
or happiness, or one who brings the joy
of being opened. It comes from the stem faraj,
which also refers to the genitals, male and female.
His teacher understood the purity of the action,
while others just saw the ragged appearance.
If you want peace and purity, tear away
the coverings! This is the purpose of emotion,
to let a streaming beauty flow through you.
Call it spirit, elixir, or the original agreement
between yourself and God. Opening into that
gives peace, a song of being empty, pure silence.
The ground’s generosity takes in our compost
and grows beauty. Try to be more
like the ground.
Give back better, as rough clods return
an ear of corn, a tassel, a barley
awn, this sleek handful of oats.
52
8. Tavern Madness
There is an overwhelming contact with the divine called
drunkenness. The tavern is a place of shared mystical experi-
ence as opposed to the church with its tradition of received,
and sometimes unquestioned, belief (though churches can
sometimes turn into taverns). The tavern is an excited
region where one is out of one’s mind, with others. The
wine there is not an Australian merlot, but the shared sense
of presence flowing through. The top of one’s head blows.
Majnun, the mad lover, sees Layla’s dog and faints.
The tavern is no place one can live. Go to night
prayers, then home. It is a state of stunned surrender that
will eventually be left behind for the clarity of dawn. The
tavern mystic must go “beyond the drunkenness of God’s
overwhelming and come to the clarity of sobriety, where
contemplation is restored.”25 In the tavern one is absent and
present at the same time. Junnaiyd says there is a sobriety
that contains all drunkenness, but there is no drunkenness
that contains all sobriety. In this region there’s flailing
about, sudden insight, physical danger, and miscommuni-
cation. Move, make a mistake. Checkmate. And the veils
become fascinating here with their woven designs, the tap-
estries depicting long passionate stories about the hurt of
separation, the consuming intensity of desire, love in the
Western world.
Thich Nhat Hanh tells a wonderful story in his com-
53
mentaries on the Buddha’s Heart Sutra about how the
opposites of good and evil only seem to oppose each other.
He shows how they are actually great buddies who meet in
the heart’s tavern.
One day Buddha was in his cave, and Ananda, Buddha’s assis-
tant, was standing near the entrance. Suddenly he saw Mara,
the evil one, coming. Mara walked straight to Ananda and
told him to announce his visit to Buddha.
Ananda said, “Why have you come here? You were
defeated by Buddha under the Bodhi tree. Go away! You are
his enemy!”
Mara began to laugh. “Did you say that your teacher has
told you that he has enemies?” That made Ananda very
embarrassed. He went in to announce Mara to Buddha.
“Is it true? Is he really here?” Buddha went out in person
to greet Mara. He bowed and took his hands in the warmest
way. “How have you been? Is everything all right?”
After they sat down to tea, Mara said, “Things are not
going well at all. I am tired of being a Mara. You have to talk in
riddles, and if you do anything, you have to be tricky and look
evil. I’m tired of all that. But the worst part is my disciples.
Now they are talking about social justice, peace, equality, lib-
eration, nonduality, nonviolence, all that. It would be better if I
hand them all over to you. I want to be something else.”
Buddha listened with compassion. “Do you think it’s fun
being a Buddha? My disciples put words in my mouth that I
never said. They build garish temples. They package my
teachings as items for commerce. Mara, you don’t really want
to be a Buddha!”26
Ananda continued to be puzzled and amazed by their
conversation. The beautiful wholeness of it cannot be
accepted by the mind.
54
I am a glass of wine with dark sediment.
I pour it all in the river.
Love says to me, “Good, but you don’t see
your own beauty. I am the wind
that mixes in your fire, who stirs
and brightens, then makes you gutter out.”
S M O K E
Don’t listen to anything I say.
I must enter the center of the fire.
Fire is my child, but I must
be consumed and become fire.
Why is there crackling and smoke?
Because the firewood and the flames
are still talking about each other.
“You are too dense. Go away!”
“You are too wavering.
I have solid form.”
In the blackness those friends keep arguing.
Like a wanderer with no face.
Like the most powerful bird in existence
sitting on its perch, refusing to move.
55
I ’ M N O T S A Y I N G T H I S R I G H T
You bind me, and I tear away in a rage
to open out into air, a round
brightness, a candlepoint,
all reason, all love.
This confusing joy, your doing,
this hangover, your tender thorn.
You turn to look, I turn.
I’m not saying this right.
I am a jailed crazy who ties up spirit-women.
I am Solomon.
What goes comes back. Come back.
We never left each other.
A disbeliever hides disbelief,
but I will say his secret.
More and more awake, getting up at night,
spinning and falling in love with Shams.
W H O S A Y S W O R D S W I T H M Y Who looks out with my eyes? What is
the soul? I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
56
M O U T H ?
I didn’t come here of my own accord,
and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.
This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.
That’s fine with us. Every morning
we glow and in the evening we glow again.
They say there’s no future for us. They’re right.
Which is fine with us.
Real value comes with madness,
matzoob27 below, scientist above.
Whoever finds love
beneath hurt and grief
disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises.
57
A C A P T O W E A R I N B O T H W O R L D S
There is a passion in me that doesn’t
long for anything from another human being.
I was given something else, a cap to wear
in both worlds. It fell off. No matter.
One morning I went to a place beyond dawn.
A source of sweetness that flows
and is never less. I have been shown
a beauty that would confuse both worlds,
but I won’t cause that uproar. I am
nothing but a head set on the ground
as a gift for Shams.
Midnight, but your forehead
shines with dawn. You dance as
you come to me and curl by curl
undo the dark. Let jealousy end.
There’s a strange frenzy in my head,
of birds flying,
each particle circulating on its own.
Is the one I love everywhere?
58
F R I N G E
You wreck my shop and my house and now my heart,
but how can I run from what gives me life?
I’m weary of personal worrying, in love
with the art of madness! Tear open my shame
and show the mystery. How much longer
do I have to fret with self-restraint and fear?
Friends, this is how it is: we are fringe
sewn inside the lining of a robe. Soon
we’ll be loosened, the binding threads torn
out. The beloved is a lion. We’re
the lame deer in his paws. Consider
what choices we have!
Drunks fear the police,
but the police are drunk too.
People in this town, we love them
both like different chess pieces.
59
T H E A C H E A N D C O N F U S I O N
Near the end you saw rose and thorn together,
evening and morning light commingling.
You have broken many shapes and stirred
their colors into the mud.
Now you sit in a garden not doing a thing,
smiling. You have felt the ache
and confusion of a hangover, yet
you take again the wine that’s handed you.
Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the lover be.
W O N D E R W I T H O U T W I L L P O W E R
Love’s way becomes a pen sometimes
writing g-sounds like gold or r-sounds
like tomorrow in different calligraphy
styles sliding by, darkening the paper.
Now it’s held upside down, now beside
the head, now down and on to something
60
else, figuring. One sentence saves
an illustrious man from disaster, but
fame does not matter to the split tongue
of a pen. Hippocrates knows how the cure
must go. His pen does not. This one
I am calling pen, or sometimes flag,
has no mind. You, the pen, are most sanely
insane. You cannot be spoken of rationally.
Opposites are drawn into your presence but
not to be resolved. You are not whole
or ever complete. You are the wonder
without willpower going where you want.
61
9. Absence
Love as a way into God is wild and bewildering. Union!
Absence! What do these words mean? Attar says if you
want to learn the secrets of love that your soul can know,
“You will sacrifice everything. You will lose what you have
considered valuable, but eventually you’ll hear the voice
you’ve most wanted to hear saying, Yes. Come in.”
Another Sufi, Junnaiyd, recommends that we JUMP!
“Plunge headfirst into the ocean of your loving. Then look
around patiently for the pearl that is yours.”28 This heart-
region is a vast emptiness. Nevit Ergin calls it absence. Rumi
explores the images of a desert night, an empty pot, a
house with a broken door, the weaning of a child, the flute
before breath comes through. When his friend Saladin
dies, Rumi says, The roof of the kingdom within has collapsed, and I
can no longer taste the flavor of my being apart.
Lee Marvin in Paint Your Wagon: “I’m an ex-citizen of
nowhere, and sometimes I get homesick.” At the end of our
loving is a depth of absence that’s tremendously familiar. A
high desert plain. But really there is no end to love’s
unfolding, and no one can tell you how yours should or
will go. The troubadours and Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and
Cleopatra, Anna Karenina, Jude the Obscure, Lorca’s love poems,
Millay’s, they all have wisdom for the various stages of
love’s progress. Rumi, Hafez, and Emily Dickinson have
ideas and images for the annihilation of absence.
62
The Infinite a sudden Guest
Has been assumed to be
But how can that stupendous come
Which never went away?29
Some people entertain this guest in specific physical
form for a certain amount of time. Be grateful for such a
chance, but remember, everyone has in them the great love
that Rumi’s poetry comes out of. It is the given that never
goes away.
You are an ocean in a drop of dew,
all the universes in a thin sack
of blood! What are these pleasures
then, these joys, these worlds,
that you keep reaching for, hoping
they will make you more alive?30
63
L I K E L I G H T O V E R T H I S P L A I N
A moth flying into the flame says
with its wingfire, Try this.
The wick with its knotted neck broken
tells you the same. A candle as it diminishes
explains, Gathering more and more is not the way. Burn,
become light and heat and help. Melt.
The ocean sits in the sand letting its lap fill
with pearls and shells, then empty.
A bittersalt taste hums, This.
The phoenix gives up on good-and-bad, flies
to rest on Mount Qaf, no more burning and rising
from ash. It sends out one message.
The rose purifies its face, drops the soft petals,
shows its thorn, and points.
Wine abandons thousands of famous names,
the vintage years and delightful bouquets,
to run wild and anonymous through your brain.
The flute closes its eyes and gives its lips
to Hamza’s emptiness.
Everything begs with the silent rocks for you
to be flung out like light over this plain,
the presence of Shams.
64
C A N D L E L I G H T B E C O M E S M O T H
Inside a lover’s heart there’s another world,
and yet another.
Inside the Friend of this community
of lovers, an ear that interprets mystery,
a vein of silver in the ground, and another sky!
Intellect and compassion are ladders we climb,
and there are other ladders as we walk
the night hearing a voice that talks of forgiveness.
Inside Shams’s universe candlelight itself
becomes a moth to die in his candle.
T H E B A S K E T O F F R E S H B R E A D
If you want to learn theory,
talk with theoreticians. That way is oral.
When you learn a craft, practice it.
That learning comes through the hands.
If you want dervishhood, spiritual poverty
and emptiness, you must be friends with a teacher.
Talking about it, reading books, and doing practices
don’t help. Soul receives from soul that knowing.
65
The mystery of absence
may be living in your pilgrim heart,
and yet the knowing of it may not yet be yours.
Wait for the illuminated openness,
as though your chest were filling with light,
as when God said,
Did we not expand you? (Qur’an 57:4)
Don’t look for it outside yourself.
You are the source of milk. Don’t milk others!
There is a fountain inside you.
Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.
You have a channel into the ocean,
yet you ask for water from a little pool.
Beg for the love expansion. Meditate only
on THAT. The Qur’an says,
And he is with you. (57:4)
There is a basket of fresh bread on your head,
yet you go door to door asking for crusts.
Knock on the inner door, no other.
Sloshing knee-deep in fresh riverwater,
yet you keep asking for other people’s waterbags.
Water is everywhere around you, but you see
only barriers that keep you from water.
66
The horse is beneath the rider’s thighs,
and still you ask, “Where’s my horse?”
Right there,
under you!
Yes, this is a horse, but where’s the horse?
Can’t you see?
“Yes I can see, but whoever saw
such a horse?”
Mad with thirst, you can’t drink from the stream
running close by your face. You are like a pearl
on the deep bottom wondering inside the shell,
Where’s the ocean?
Those mental questionings
form the barrier.
Stay bewildered inside God,
and only that.
When you are with everyone but me,
you’re with no one.
When you are with no one but me,
you’re with everyone.
Instead of being so bound up with everyone,
be everyone.
When you become that many, you’re nothing.
Empty.
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T H I S T O R T U R E
Why should we tell you our love stories
when you spill them together like blood in the dirt?
Love is a pearl lost on the ocean floor,
or a fire we can’t see,
but how does saying that
push us through the top of the head into
the light above the head?
Love is not
an iron pot, so this boiling energy
won’t help.
Soul, heart, self.
Beyond and within those
is one saying,
How long before
I’m free of this torture!
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10. Animal Energies
Any love: earth-love, spirit, the way of a man with a maid,
the way of a dog with almost anybody, the way of a hawk
with the wind, of a swan with a pond, of grandparents with
grandchildren, of an ant with a grain of corn, of a lion with
a gazelle, all the natural drawings-together lead eventually
to annihilation. This is the mystery of the animal energies.
Rumi says, astonishingly, “God lives between a human
being and the object of his desire” (Discourse No. 44). This
is radical theology to this day, when major crises have
roots in sexual repression—the Catholic pedophile priesty
boys; the Muslim enraged-at-women, dismayed-by-West-
ern-ease-with-impurity vandals. We Americans have our
own deadly-to-life versions of denying the horny animal
energies. We lie a lot. We avoid the intimacy of truth. We
make nice, blind to our own rage. When we start bombing,
we overdo it and never consider the tremendous collateral
damage as another form of terrorism. Very different, but
still a terror.
I like to think of the first mystical poem as that figure
incised, and painted, into the farthest wall of the cave
called Les Trois Freres in southern France. The Animal.
Joseph Campbell called him “god of the cave.” He does the
dance of human and animal at once, owl, lion, horse, stag,
man. He incorporates them all visually and looks out at
you with your own menagerie, who have gone inward far
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enough to meet his gaze. Animals can live inside the land-
scape without our noisy self-consciousness. When we turn
and go with them as Whitman did, we enter a silence and a
transcendence. We perceive through their eyes with their
energies. This is a metaphor, a tremendously important
one, as well as an experience.
Hazrat Inayat Khan says that seekers should “accom-
plish their desires that they may thus be able to rise above
them to the eternal goal.”31 At the core of each person’s
nature are unique seeds of desiring, which flourish through
the development of personality, not through any suppres-
sion of it. We are not to become pale renunciate ciphers
with no wantings. The animals of desiring, the rooster of
lust, the duck of urgency, the horse of passion, the peacock
of wanting recognition, the crow of acquiring things, the
lion of majesty, the zebra of absence (I made that one up),
these are not to be thwarted but lived, transmuted, and
incorporated. This is the art of forming a personality. Only
when we live the animal powers do we learn that those satis-
factions are not what we truly wanted. There’s more, and
we are here to follow the mysteries of longing beyond
where they lead. The purpose of desire is to perfect the long-
ings, for at the core of longing is the Friend, Christ,
Krishna, the emptiness, wherever it was that Igjargajuk, the
Eskimo shaman, was when he came back from forty nights
on the ice floes with one sentence, “There is nothing to
fear in the universe.” The great love at the center of long-
ing has no fear in it.
There is a witness who watches the obstreperous play
of flame and eros and says, This is the dance of existence. A
great mutual embrace is always happening between the
eternal and what dies, between essence and accident. We
are all writing the book of love. Everything goes in. All the
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particles of the world are in love and looking for lovers.
Pieces of straw tremble in the presence of amber. Isn’t that
the deal? We’re here to love each other, to deepen and
unfold that capacity, to open the heart. And that means liv-
ing in the witness, I’m beginning to see.
Hearing Rumi’s poetry helps. He would say, though,
that poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry,
because it gives the illusion of having had the experience
without actually going through it. He would periodically
swear off the stuff. No more God poems, I want the pres-
ence. No more love poems, I want to be love.
This region of animal energies is where sexuality enters
love’s book most obviously, although eros, as Freud
showed, is a powerful ingredient in many motions that
draw us. Sex is as basic and nourishing to human beings as
baking bread. Rumi implies as much in the heroic simile of
the breadmaking poem. Lovemaking is going on every-
where among the forms, and in a startling variation of the
golden rule he says, Remember, the way you make love is the way
God will be with you.
Once in an informal moment (there were many) talking
to a young couple about their love life, my teacher spoke
to the young man, “You have seen the bull, how he goes
and licks the cow before he mounts her. This is good. We
can learn much from the animals.” With me he counseled
not cunnilingus so much as restraint. It always tickled him
that my name was Barks. “The dog of desire,” he would
begin, “we can learn from that one, but we must not let him
lead us all over town, pulling to sniff a piece of garbage, to
a place where another dog has urinated, then to roll on a
dead fish. He will drag us around like this if we let him; he
will take over our lives. We must discipline this dog and
sometimes tie him up in the backyard and give him only
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scraps.” He had my number. Do not neglect the licking, though,
is still my bullish theme.
Interesting in this regard are the names that Bawa
Muhaiyaddeen had for three illusion-making capacities of
human sexuality: Suran, the enjoyment of the images that
come to one’s mind at the moment of orgasm. Singhan, the
arrogance experienced in that same moment, associated
with karma and with the qualities of the lion. Tarahan, the
pathway of attraction that leads to the sexual act; it is asso-
ciated with the birth canal or vagina. The three powers are
thought of as sons of Maya. It is fascinating that there are
these ancient Tamil words for mental processes we have
barely noticed in the West, the first two, at least.
Note. The reference above to “priesty boys” and “Mus-
lim vandals” is very un-Bawa. Snide, divisive, pleased-with-
its-clever-self remarks will probably not help bring us into
one loving family.
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Think that you’re gliding out from the face of a cliff
like an eagle. Think you’re walking
like a tiger walks by himself in the forest.
You’re most handsome when you’re after food.
T H E P U B L I C B A T H
Imagine the phenomenal world as a furnace
heating water for the public bath.
Some people carry baskets of dung
to keep the furnace going. Call them
materialists, energetic, fire-stoking citizens.
One of those brags how he’s collected
and carried twenty dung baskets today,
while his friend has brought six!
They think the counting up at nightfall
is where truth lies. They love the smoke smell
of dried dung, and how it blazes up like gold!
If you give them musk or any fragrance
of soul intelligence, they find it unpleasant
and turn away. Others sit in the hot bathwater
and get clean. They use the world differently.
They love the feel of purity, and they have
dust marks on their foreheads from bowing down.
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They are separated by a wall from those
who feed the fires, busy in the boiler room
belittling each other. Sometimes, though,
one of those leaves the furnace,
takes off the burnt smelling rags,
and sits in the cleansing water.
The mystery is how the obsessions
of furnace stokers keep the bathwater
of the others simmering perfectly.
They seem opposed, but they’re necessary
to each other’s work: the proud piling up
of fire worship, the humble disrobing
and emptying out of purification.
As the sun dries wet dung to make it
ready to heat water, so dazzling
sparks fly from the burning filth.
M A S H A L L A H
There’s someone swaying by your side,
lips that say Mashallah, Mashallah.
Wonderful. God inside attraction.
A spring no one knew of wells up
on the valley floor.
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Lights inside a tent lovers move toward.
The refuse of Damascus gets turned over
in the sun. Be like that yourself.
Say mercy, mercy to the one who guides
your soul, who keeps time.
Move, make a mistake, look
up. Checkmate.
S P I R I T A N D B O DY
Don’t feed both sides of yourself equally.
The spirit and the body carry different loads
and require different attentions.
Too often
we put saddlebags on Jesus and let the donkey
run loose in the pasture.
Don’t make the body do
what the spirit does best, and don’t put a big load
on the spirit that the body could easily carry.
B R E A D M A K I N G
There was a feast. The king was in his cups.
He saw a learned scholar walking by.
“Bring him in and give him some of this fine wine.”
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Servants rushed out and brought the man
to the king’s table, but he was not receptive.
“I had rather drink poison! Take it away!”
He kept on with these loud refusals, disturbing
the atmosphere of the feast. This is how
it sometimes is at God’s table.
Someone who has heard
about ecstatic love, but never tasted it,
disrupts the banquet.
He’s all fire and no light,
all husk and no kernel. The king gave orders,
“Cupbearer, do what you must.”
This is how
your invisible guide acts, the chess champion
across from you that always wins.
He cuffed
the scholar’s head and said, “Taste!” and
“Again!”
The cup was drained, and the intellectual
started singing and telling ridiculous jokes.
He joined the garden, snapping his fingers
and swaying. Soon, of course, he had to pee.
He went out, and there near the latrine
was a beautiful woman, one of the king’s harem.
His mouth hung open. He wanted her! Right then,
he wanted her! And she was not unwilling.
They fell to, on the ground. You’ve seen a baker
rolling dough. He kneads it gently at first,
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then more roughly. He pounds it on the board.
It softly groans under his palms.
Now he spreads
it out and rolls it flat. Then he bunches it,
and rolls it all the way out again,
thin.
Now he adds water and mixes it well.
Now salt,
and a little more salt. Now he shapes it
delicately to its final shape and slides it
into the oven, which is already hot.
You remember breadmaking!
This is how your desire
tangles with a desired one.
And it’s not just
a metaphor for a man and a woman making love.
Warriors in battle do this too.
A great mutual embrace
is always happening between the eternal
and what dies, between essence and accident.
The sport has different rules in every case,
but it’s basically the same,
and remember, the way
you make love is the way God will be with you.
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S E X U A L U R G E N C Y A N D T R U E V I R I L I T Y
Someone offhand to the Caliph of Egypt,
“The King of Mosul
has a concubine like no other. She looks like this!”
He draws her likeness on paper.
The Caliph drops his cup.
He immediately sends his captain to Mosul with an army.
The siege goes on for weeks, many casualties,
the walls and towers unsteady as wax.
The King of Mosul sends an envoy, “Why this killing?
If you want the city, I will leave and you can have it!
If you want more wealth, that’s even easier!”
The Captain takes out the piece of paper. This.
The strong king is quick to reply,
“Lead her out. The idol belongs with
the idolater.”
When the Captain sees her,
he falls in love like the Caliph.
Don’t laugh at this.
Their loving is also part of infinite love, without which
the world does not evolve.
Objects move from inorganic
to vegetation, to selves endowed with spirit,
through the urgency of every love
that wants to consummate.
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The Captain thinks the soil looks fertile,
so he sows his seed. Sleeping,
he makes love to a dream image of the girl,
and his semen spurts out.
He wakes up,
“I am in love.”
His infatuation is a blackwater wave
carrying him away.
Something makes a phantom
appear in the darkness of a well,
and the phantom itself becomes strong enough
to throw actual lions
into the hole.
The Captain does not take the girl
straight to the Caliph. Instead, he camps
in a secluded meadow. Blazing,
he can’t tell ground from sky! His reason is lost
in a drumming sound,
worthless radish and son of a
radish,
this cultivator tears off the woman’s pants
and lies down between her legs,
his penis moving straight
to the mark.
Just then, there’s a rising cry of soldiers
outside the tent.
A black lion from a nearby swamp
has gotten in among the horses.
The Captain leaps up with bare bottom
shining, scimitar in hand.
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The lion is jumping twenty feet
in the air, tents billowing
like an ocean. The Captain splits the lion’s head
with one blow.
Now he’s running back to the woman.
When he stretches out the beauty
again, his penis
goes even more erect.
The engagement,
the coming together, is as with the lion.
His penis stays erect all
through and does not scatter semen feebly.
The beautiful one is amazed
at his virility. With great energy she joins
with his energy. Their two spirits
go out from them as one.
Whenever two are linked
in this way,
another comes from the unseen. It may be through birth,
if nothing prevents conception,
but a third does come when
two unite in love, or in hate.
The intense qualities
of such joining have consequences. Such
association bears progeny.
There are children to consider!
Children born of your sexual energy shared
with another are entities in the invisible world. They have
form and speech.
They are crying to you now.
You have forgotten us. Come back!
Be aware of this.
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A man and woman together always have a spirit-result.
The Captain was not so aware.
He fell and stuck like a gnat
in a pot of buttermilk, totally absorbed in his love affair.
Then just as suddenly, he’s uninterested.
“Don’t say a word of this to the Caliph.” He takes the girl
and presents her.
The Caliph is smitten.
She’s a hundred times more beautiful
than he imagined! He also has the idea of entering her
beauty and comes to do his wanting.
Memory raises his penis, straining in thought toward
the pushing down and lifting up
that makes it grow large with delight.
As he lies down
with her, though, there comes a tiny sound
like a mouse might make,
a suggestion from God that he lay off these voluptuous
doings. The penis droops
and desire slips away.
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The girl remembers the Captain running out to kill the lion
with his member
standing straight up, then the running back.
Long and loud
her laughter. Anything she thinks of
only increases it like the laughing of those who eat hashish.
Everything is funny.
When she gets hold of herself,
the girl tells all,
the Captain’s running about the camp hard as a rhino’s horn,
then the Caliph’s member shrinking
for one mouse-whisper.
The Caliph comes back
to his clarity,
“In the pride of my power I took this woman
from another, so of course someone came to knock
on my door.
The adulterer pimps for his own wife. When you cause
injury to someone, you draw the same injury
to yourself.
This lusting repetition must stop somewhere.
Here, in an act of mercy. I’ll send you back
to the Captain.
May you both enjoy the pleasure.”
This is the virility
of a prophet. The Caliph was sexually impotent,
but his manliness was powerful.
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The kernel of true manhood is
the ability to abandon sensual indulgence.
The intensity
of the Captain’s libido is less than a husk compared
to the Caliph’s nobility in ending the cycle
of sowing lust and reaping secrecy and meanness.
T W O W AY S O F R U N N I N G
A certain man had a jealous wife and a very
appealing maidservant.
The wife was careful not to leave
them alone, ever.
For six years they were never left
in a room together.
But then, one day at the public bath
the wife remembered she’d left
her silver basin at home.
“Please, go get the basin,”
she told her maid. The girl jumped to the task knowing she
would finally get to be alone with the master.
She ran joyfully. She flew. Desire took them both
so quickly they didn’t latch the door.
With great speed
they joined. When bodies blend in copulation,
spirits also merge.
Meanwhile, the wife back
at the bathhouse is washing her hair.
“What have I done!
I’ve set cotton wool on fire! I’ve put the ram in
with the ewe!”
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She washed the clay soap off and ran, fixing
her chador about her as she went.
The maid ran for love.
The wife ran out of jealousy and fear.
There is a great difference.
A mystic lover flies moment to moment. The fearful
ascetic drags along month to month.
The length of a day
for a lover may be fifty thousand years!
There’s no way to understand this
with your mind. You must burst open!
Love is a quality
of God. Fear is an attribute of those who think
they serve God,
but actually they’re preoccupied with penis
and vagina.
Rule-keepers run on foot along the surface.
Lovers move like lightning and wind.
No contest.
Theologians mumble, rumble-dumble, necessity and free
will, while lover and beloved
pull themselves into each other.
The worried wife
reaches the door and opens it.
The maid is
disheveled, flushed, unable to speak.
The husband begins his five-times
prayer. As though experimenting
with clothes, he holds up some flaps and edges. She sees
his testicles and penis so wet,
semen still dribbling out,
spurts of jism and vaginal juices
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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.
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11. Love’s Secret
Rumi makes preposterous claims. One of the most startling
is, “Our loving is the way God’s secret gets told!”32 Love is
an open secret, the most obvious thing in the world and the
most hidden, with no why to how it keeps its mystery. Sufis
say the genesis of lovers meeting is God’s sweetest secret.
A saying of Muhammad is, Human awareness is my secret
and I am its secret. The inner knowledge of spirit-essence is the secret
within the secret. I have placed this knowing within the heart of my
true servant, and no one can know his state but I. The knowing of
essence is love’s secret.
There is a truth that comes with following the ener-
gies, and there is a love, a truth-knowing essence, in the
innermost heart. Rumi tries to lead us into this region that
never fades and has no limits, that comes when we recog-
nize that everyone is as precious as our own children and
grandchildren. Bawa was clear with me that I needed to
move beyond blood ties. Having children opened my heart,
but he saw that I need to include everyone in my family. He
so beautifully saw every human being he came in contact
with as kin. My love you, my children, grandchildren, brothers, sis-
ters, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, great-grandchildren. Every dis-
course began and ended with a declaration of the family
connection.
Some may dismiss this as one-world, peacenik senti-
mentality. I’m not advocating we disband the armies yet, or
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even the churches, though that’s tempting to say. It’s good
to have sanctuaries and singing and silence and Wednes-
day night prayer. We need more sacred space outdoors,
though, fewer enclosed places, and please let’s quit killing
each other over books! Let’s move on to killing each other
over bluegrass and salad oil and circumcision and predesti-
nation and foreplay and whose uncle is the right line,
where the prepositions go, and what happens after we die.
Those are worth fighting for. The book thing is just getting
really old.
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen says,
Do not ever fight or argue, because for God there are no
fights and no arguments. For that One everything is love;
everything is in the form of love, compassion, and truth. May
God provide you with the blessings and grace to live in that
state.
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C L O S E TO B E I N G T R U E
How can we know the divine qualities
from within? If we know only
through metaphors, it’s like when
children ask what sex
feels like and you answer, “Like candy,
so sweet.” The suchness of sex
comes with being inside the pleasure.
Whatever you say about mysteries,
I know or I don’t know, both are close
to being true. Neither is quite a lie.
W H AT H U R T S T H E S O U L ?
We tremble, thinking we’re about to dissolve
into nonexistence, but nonexistence
fears even more that it might be given human form!
Loving God is the only pleasure. Other delights
turn bitter. What hurts the soul?
To live without tasting the water of its own essence.
People focus on death and this material earth.
They have doubts about soul water.
Those doubts can be reduced! Use night
to wake your clarity. Darkness and the living water
are lovers. Let them stay up together.
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When merchants eat their big meals
and sleep their dead sleep,
we night-thieves go to work.
Love is the way messengers
from the mystery tell us things.
Love is the mother. We are her children.
She shines inside us, visible-invisible,
as we lose trust or feel it start to grow again.
H I D D E N Hiding is the hidden purpose
of creation. Bury your seed
and wait. After you die, all
the thoughts you had will
throng around like children.
The heart is the secret inside
I N S I D E
the secret. Call the secret
language and never be sure
what you conceal. It’s unsure
people who get the blessing.
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Climbing jasmine, opening rose,
nightingale song, these are
inside the chill November
wind. They are its secret.
How did you discover mine?
Your laugh. Only the soul
knows what love is. This
moment in time and space is
an eggshell with an embryo
crumpled inside, soaked in
spirit-yolk, under the wing
of grace, until it breaks free
of mind to become the song
of birds and their breathing.
If everyone could see what love is,
each would set up a tentpole in the ocean.
The world’s population pitched and living
easily within the sea! What if inside
every lover’s tear you saw the face
of the Friend: Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha,
the impossible-possible philosopher,
the glass diamond one, Shams Tabriz?
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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.
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12. Love’s Discipline
Rumi says an ecstatic human being is a polished mirror that
cannot help reflecting. What we love, we are. As the heart
comes cleaner, we see the kingdom as it is. We become
reflected light. The polishing may be related to practices, a
devotion we do every day that is an emptying out. Or it
may be that when we live in the soul, everything can be
used for clarity. Muhammad once said, “People who insult
me are only polishing the mirror.” I can’t say precisely what
polishing the mirror of the heart means, but I feel it happening
slowly, and it does seem to be related to discipline, by
which I mean intentionally giving time to what Rumi calls
the jeweled inner life, which could be just the witness watching
the mind.
In another passage Rumi says the polishing is done by
the intensity of our longings. It is so difficult to remember
who we are and to act from there. Various remembrance
habits are helpful. Zikr, five-times prayer, a walk at sunset,
twenty minutes of meditation. Stonework, singing, poetry.
Find practices that are specifically yours. There comes then
a creativeness at the end of the polishing that Rumi calls
“looking into the creek.” It’s as though seeing becomes
lucid dreaming. We watch the play of soul creatures. The
gates of light swing open. We look in.
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W H O M A K E S Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
T H E S E C H A N G E S ?
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.
I should be suspicious
of what I want.
D R O W N I N G
What can I say to someone so curled up
with wanting, so constricted
in his love? Break your pitcher
against a rock. We don’t need any longer
to haul pieces of the ocean around.
We must drown, away from heroism,
and descriptions of heroism.
Like a pure spirit lying down, pulling
its body over it, like a bride her husband
for a cover to keep her warm.
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T H E D O G Now, what if a dog’s owner
were not able to control it?
P R O B L E M
A poor dervish might appear: the dog storms out.
The dervish says, “I take refuge with God
when the dog of arrogance attacks,”
and the dog’s owner has to say,
“So do I! I’m helpless
against this creature even in my own house!
Just as you can’t come close,
I can’t go out!”
This is how animal energy becomes monstrous
and ruins your life’s freshness and beauty.
Think of taking this dog
out to hunt! You’d be the quarry.
Z I K R
A naked man jumps in the river, hornets swarming
above him. The water is the zikr,
remembering, There is no reality but God.
There is only God.
The hornets are his sexual memories, this woman,
that, or if a woman, this man, that.
The head comes up. They sting.
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Breathe water. Become river head to foot.
Hornets leave you alone then.
Even if you’re far from the river,
they pay no attention.
No one looks for stars when the sun’s out.
A person blended into God does not disappear.
He or she is just completely soaked
in God’s qualities. Do you need a quote
from the Qur’an?
All shall be brought into our presence.
Join those travelers. The lamps we burn go out,
some quickly. Some last till daybreak.
Some are dim, some intense; all are fed
with fuel. If a light goes out in one house,
that doesn’t affect the next house.
This is the story of the animal soul,
not the divine soul. The sun shines on every house.
When it goes down, all houses get dark.
Light is the image of your teacher. Your enemies
love the dark. A spider weaves a web
over a light, out of herself makes a veil.
Don’t try to control a wild horse by grabbing its leg.
Take hold the neck. Use a bridle. Be sensible.
Then ride! There is a need for self-denial.
Don’t be contemptuous of old obediences. They help.
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T H E C O R E O F M A S C U L I N I T Y
The core of masculinity does not derive
from being male, nor friendliness
from those who console.
Your old grandmother says, “Maybe you shouldn’t
go to school. You look a little pale.”
Run when you hear that.
A father’s stern slaps are better.
Your bodily soul wants comforting.
The severe father wants spiritual clarity.
He scolds but eventually
leads you into the open.
Pray for a tough instructor
to hear and act and stay within you.
We have been busy accumulating solace.
Make us afraid of how we were.
C L E A R B E I N G
I honor those who try
to rid themselves of lying,
who empty the self
and have only clear being there.
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T H E S O U L’ S F R I E N D
Listen to your essential self, the Friend.
When you feel longing, be patient,
and also prudent, moderate with eating and drinking.
Be like a mountain in the wind.
Do you notice how it moves? There are sweet
illusions that arrive to lure you away.
Make some excuse to them, “I have indigestion,”
or “I need to meet my cousin.”
You fish, the baited hook may be fifty
or even sixty gold pieces, but is it really
worth your freedom in the ocean?
When traveling, stay close to your bag.
I am the bag that holds what you love.
You can be separated from me!
Live carefully in the joy of this friendship.
Don’t think, But those others love me so.
Some invitations sound like the fowler’s whistle
to the quail, friendly, but not quite
how you remember the call of your soul’s Friend.
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L O N G I N G
Longing is the core of mystery.
Longing itself brings the cure.
The only rule is, Suffer the pain.
Your desire must be disciplined,
and what you want to happen
in time, sacrificed.
The morning wind spreads its fresh smell.
We must get up to take that in,
that wind that lets us live.
Breathe, before it’s gone.
W H AT D R A W S YO U ?
There are two types on the path, those
who come against their will, the blindly religious,
and those who obey out of love.
The former have ulterior motives.
They want the midwife near because she gives them milk.
The others love the beauty of the nurse.
The former memorize the prooftexts of conformity
and repeat them. The latter disappear
into whatever draws them to God.
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Both are drawn from the source.
Any motion is from the mover.
Any love from the beloved.
F E A R
Everyone can see how they have polished the mirror
of the self, which is done with the longings
we’re given.
Not everyone wants to be king!
There are different roles and many choices
within each.
Troubles come. One person packs up
and leaves. Another stays and deepens in a love
for being human.
In battle, one runs fearing
for his life. Another, just as scared, turns
and fights more fiercely.
A T E A C H E R ’ S PAY
God has said Be moderate with eating and drinking,
but never, Be satisfied when taking in light.
God offers a teacher the treasures of the world,
and the teacher responds, “To be in love with God
and expect to be paid for it!” A servant wants
to be rewarded for what he does. A lover wants
only to be in love’s presence, that ocean
whose depth will never be known.
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L O O K I N G I N TO T H E C R E E K
The way the soul is with the senses and the intellect
is like a creek.
When desire weeds grow thick,
intelligence can’t flow,
and soul creatures stay hidden.
But sometimes the reasonable clarity
runs so strong
it sweeps the clogged stream open.
No longer weeping
and frustrated, your being grows as powerful
as your wantings were before,
more so. Laughing
and satisfied, the masterful flow lets
creatures of the soul appear.
You look down,
and it’s lucid dreaming.
The gates made of light
swing open.
You see in.
T H E P O L I S H E R
As everything changes overnight, I praise
the breaking of promises.
Whatever love wants,
it gets, not next year, now!
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I swear by the one who never says tomorrow,
as the circle of the moon refuses to sell
installments of light. It gives all it has.
How do fables conclude, and who will explain them?
Every story is us. That’s who we are,
from beginning to no-matter-how it ends.
Should I use the pronoun we? The Friend
walks by, and bricks in the wall feel
conscious. Infertile women give birth.
So beauty embodies itself.
Those who know the taste of a meal
are those who sit at the table and eat.
Lover and Friend are one being,
and separate beings too,
as the polisher melts
in the mirror’s face.
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13. Shift from Romance to Friendship
The story of the king, the handmaiden, and the doctor is of
the movement from the erotic love of romance to the love
of a meeting with the Friend, which is the mystery of this
region. Rumi says that however we try to explain this new
place, the explanation sounds embarrassing.
Some commentary clarifies, but with love
silence is clearer. A pen goes
scribbling along, but when it tries to write
love, it breaks! If you want to expound
on love, take your intellect out
and let it lie down in the mud.
As Shakespeare changed the verb to be forever, Rumi
changed the noun friend, dost in Farsi. A meeting takes place
that translates inner life into outer and outer to inner. The
sohbet of Friendship is “the way messengers from the mystery
talk to us.” Call it Holy Spirit, Khidr, Buddha-mind, Friend,
Beloved, or Lord, there’s a shift from the romantic ache, which
is a love dis-ease, to an encounter with “a person like the
dawn,” whose face loosens the knot of intellectual discourse.
This Friendship breaks through the stalled-limbo of desire
to become a reckoning (the astrolabe image) “that sights
into the mysteries of God.” Love changes from the exciting
synapse of relationship to a condition of being, the truest health.
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B U R N T K A B O B
Last year, I admired the wines. This,
I’m wandering inside the red world.
Last year, I gazed at the fire,
This year I’m burnt kabob.
Thirst drove me down to the water
where I drank the moon’s reflection.
Now I am a lion staring up, totally
lost in love with the thing itself.
Don’t ask questions about
longing. Look in my face.
Soul drunk, body ruined, these two
sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.
Neither knows how to fix it.
And my heart, I’d say it was more
like a donkey sunk in a mudhole,
struggling and miring deeper.
But listen to me: for one moment,
quit being sad. Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you. God.
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S I T T I N G I N T H E O R C H A R D
A man sits in an orchard, fruit trees full
and the vines plump. He has his head
on his knee; his eyes are closed.
His friend says, “Why stay sunk in mystical
meditation when the world is like this?
Such visible grace.”
He replies, “This outer is an elaboration
of the inner. I prefer the origin.”
Natural beauty is a tree limb reflected
in the water of a creek, quivering there, not
there. The growing that moves in the soul
is more real than tree limbs and reflections.
We laugh and feel happy or sad over all this.
Try instead to get a scent
of the true orchard. Taste the vineyard
within the vineyard.
T H E P R I N C E O F K A B U L
Here is a story of a young prince who suddenly sees
that the ambitious world is a big game
of king of the mountain, a boy scrambling up
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a pile of sand to call out, “I am king.”
Then another throws him off to make his momentary
claim, then another and so on.
World complications can sometimes become
very simple very quickly, and age
has no bearing on this realization.
Neither are words necessary to see into
mystery. Just be and it is. A king
dreams his young son has died. He falls
into such grief in the dream that the world
darkens, and his body grows inert.
Suddenly he wakes into a joy he’s never felt.
His son is alive! He thinks to himself,
Such sorrow causes such joy. It is a kind
of joke on human beings that we are pulled
between these two states as though with ropes
on the sides of a collar. Dream interpreters
say laughter in a dream foretells weeping
and regret; tears, some new delight. Now
the king has another thought, What occurs
in dream can actually happen any second!
If my son dies, I will need a keepsake.
When a candle goes out, you need another
lit candle. My son must give us offspring.
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He’s of marriageable age. I’ll find
him a bride. This is flawless reasoning,
dear reader. Open any medical text and look
at the table of contents: tumors, rashes,
fevers, there are a thousand ways to die!
Every step takes you into a scorpion pit.
He found a wife for the prince, not from
royal blood or from wealth, but from a poor,
honest worker’s family, with the greater riches
of an open heart. A beautiful young woman
clear as the morning sun. The women
in the court object vigorously, but the king
has decided. He knows the value of inner wealth
as opposed to the other: a long curving
file of moving camels, as against bits of hair
and dung. If you own the caravan, why bother
with refuse left behind? In a quirk of destiny,
as the marriage approaches, the old woman
of Kabul falls in love with the handsome,
generous-spirited prince. She enchants him
with Babylonian magic, so that he leaves
his bride at the wedding, and for a year
he kisses the sole of her Kabulian shoe.
Everyone weeps for him, while he laughs
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in his ignorance. His father the king prays
constantly, Lord! Lord, and because of that
surrendered calling out, a master comes
from the road to save the prince. “Go to
the graveyard before dawn,” says the master.
“Find the bleached-white tomb beside
the wall. Dig there in the direction
your prayer rug points. You’ll discover
how God works.” This story is long,
and you’re tired. I’ll get to the point.
The prince does as the master says and wakes.
He runs to his father carrying a sword
and a shroud, the signs his digging brought,
showing that he recognizes his mistake
and that he is ready for whatever
the consequences are. The king orders
that the entire city be decorated
to celebrate the new marriage. Such
an extravagant feast is prepared that sherbets
are set out for the street dogs! The prince
is so astonished by how the old woman
enthralled him, and by the return of his wisdom,
that he falls down in a swoon for three
days. Little by little with rosewater remedies
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he wakes again. A year passes in this new life.
Then the king begins to joke with his son,
“Do you remember that old friend of yours,
how it was in her bed?” “Don’t mention it!”
screams the son. “That was delusion.
I have found my real bride now.” This prince
is the soul of humanity, your essence.
The old woman of Kabul is the color and perfume
of the sensory world. Release from the spell
comes when you say, I take refuge with the lord
of daybreak. The woman has great power.
She can tie knots in your chest that only
God’s breathing loosens. Don’t take her appeal
lightly. The prince was in her net for one
year. You might stay there sixty. You say
you grow restless when you don’t drink the dark
world-drink, but if you could see a living one
for one moment, you would draw out that thorn
from your foot and walk with no limp. Let
the lamp of the Friend’s face show you where
to go. Selflessness is your true self, sword
and shroud. Whereas this is how
most people live: sleeping on the bank
of a freshwater stream, lips dry with thirst.
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In the dream you’re running toward a mirage.
As you run, you’re proud of being the one
who sees the oasis. You brag to your friends,
“I have the heart-vision. Follow me
to the water!” This love of spying far-off
satisfactions, this traveling, keeps you
from tasting the real water of where you are,
and who. Nearer than the big vein on your neck,
with waves lapping against you: here, here.
The way is who and where you already are,
sleeping in your very being: that which sleeps
and wakes and sleeps and dreams the sweet water
is the taste of God. Maybe another traveler
will come to help you see the stream,
like the man who laughs during a long drought
when everyone else is weeping. The crops
have dried up. The vineyard leaves are black.
People are gasping and dying like fish
thrown up on shore, but one man is always
smiling. A group comes to ask, “Have you no
compassion for this suffering?” He answers,
“To your eyes this is a drought. To me,
it’s a form of God’s joy. Everywhere
in this desert I see green corn growing
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waist-high, a sea-wilderness of young ears
greener than leeks. I reach to touch them.
How could I not! You and your friends
are like Pharaoh drowning in the Red Sea
of your body’s blood. Become friends
with Moses and see this other river water.”
When you think your father is guilty
of an injustice, his face looks cruel.
Joseph, to the envious brothers, seems
dangerous. When you make peace
with your father, he will look peaceful.
The whole world is a form for truth.
When someone does not feel grateful to that,
the forms appear to be as he feels.
They mirror his anger, his greed, his fear.
Make peace with the universe.
Take joy in it. It will turn to gold.
Resurrection will be now. Every moment
a new beauty, and never any boredom.
Instead, the pouring noise of many springs
in your ears. The tree limbs will move
like people dancing who suddenly know
the mystical life. The leaves snap
their fingers like they’re hearing music.
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They are! A sliver of mirror shines out
from under a felt covering. Think how
it will be when the whole thing is open
to the air and sunlight! There are
mysteries I’m not telling you.
T H E W R I S T
Who are you? The inner vision of consciousness?
The heart? A sacred half-light, are you that?
Do you grow gatherings? Are you a friend
of the sun, who comes and goes so quickly?
Do not forget your vertical passage,
the night of power,33
and don’t hide from the one
for whom all our secrets are down in the pillow under
his head, doctor of lovers, soul for
this thick world,
the one who spirals iron
like dough and makes the body lightedness.
No belief is necessary to enter this tent
where one love story changes to another.
I remember that with these words brought here
by a falcon from the wrist of Shams.
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T H E If the beloved is everywhere,
the lover is a veil,
but when living itself
becomes the Friend,
lovers disappear.
K I N G , T H E H A N D M A I D E N , A N D T H E D O C TO R
Do you know why your soul-mirror
does not reflect as clearly as it might?
Because rust has begun to cover it.
It needs to be cleaned.
Here’s a story about the inner state
that’s meant by soul-mirror.
In the old days there was a king
who was powerful in both kingdoms, the visible
as well as the spirit world.
One day as he was riding
on the hunt, he saw a girl and was greatly taken
with her beauty. As was the custom, he paid her family
handsomely and asked that she come to be a servant
at the palace. He was in love with her.
The feelings
trembled and flapped in his chest like a bird
newly put in a cage.
But as soon as she arrived, she fell ill.
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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.”
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They talked and ate a spirit-meal. Then the king
took the doctor to where the girl lay.
The secret
of her pain was opened to him, but he didn’t tell
the king. It was love, of course.
Love is the astrolabe
that sights into the mysteries of God. Earth-love,
spirit-love, any love looks into that yonder,
but whatever I try to say explaining love
is embarrassing!
A pen went scribbling along.
When it tried to write love, it broke.
If you want to
expound on love, take your intellect out and let it
lie down in the mud. It’s no help.
Nothing is so strange
in this world as the sun. The sun of the soul
even more so. You want proof that it exists,
so you stay up all night talking about it.
Finally you sleep
as the sun comes up. Look at it!
Word of that sun,
Shams, came, and everything hid. Husam touches my arm.
He wants me to say more about Shams.
Not now, Husam.
I don’t know how to make words make sense, or praise.
In the Friend-place nothing true can be said.
Let me just be here.
But Husam begs, “Feed me. Hurry!
Time is a sharp downstroke. A Sufi is supposed
to be a child of the moment! Don’t say tomorrow or later.”
I reply,
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“It’s better that the way of the Friend
be concealed in a story. Let the mystery come through
what people say around the lovers, not from what
lovers say to each other.”
“No! I want this as naked
and true as it can be. I don’t wear a shirt
when I lie down with my beloved.”
“Husam! If the Friend
came to you naked, your chest could not stand it.
Ask for what you want, but within some limits!”
This has no end.
Go back to the beginning,
the end of the story of the king and the lovesick
maiden and the holy doctor, who said,
“Leave me alone
with the girl.” He quietly began, “Where are you from?
Who are your relatives? Who else are you close to
in that region?”
He held her hand to feel the pulse.
She told many stories mentioning many names.
He would say the names again to test the response
of her pulse.
Finally he asked, “When you visit
other towns, where are you most likely to go?”
She mentioned one town and another, where she bought
bread and where salt,
until he happened to say Samarkand!
The dear city sweet as candy. She blushed. Her breath
caught. Oh, she loves a goldsmith in Samarkand!
She misses him so.
“Where exactly does he live?”
“At the head of the bridge on Ghatafar Street.”
“Now I can heal you.”
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The doctor went to the king
and told him only part of the story. “On some pretext
we must bring a certain goldsmith from Samarkand.”
The king’s messengers went and easily persuaded the man
to leave his town for a while. He arrived,
and the doctor said,
“Marry the girl to this man
and she will be completely cured.” It was done,
and for six months those two loved and made love
and completely satisfied themselves with each other.
The girl was restored to perfect health.
Then the physician gave the goldsmith a potion,
so that he began to sicken. His handsomeness faded.
He became sunken-cheeked and jaundiced and ugly.
The girl stopped loving him. Any love based on
physical beauty is not the deepest love. Choose
to love what does not die. The generous one
is not hard to find.
But what about the doctor’s
poisoning the poor goldsmith! It was not done
for his friend the king’s sake.
The reason is a mystery,
like Khidr’s cutting the boy’s throat. When someone
is killed by a doctor like this one, it’s a blessing,
even though it might not seem so.
Such a doctor
is part of a larger generosity. Don’t judge his actions.
You are not living so completely within the truth as he is.
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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.
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14. Union
The intensest, the most poignant cry comes from one who
has known the union and lost it. Rumi says, Give me his
longing!
I have seen one living in the state of union, at least
one. They may exist in various guises all around us. Bawa
Muhaiyaddeen34 was totally present in each moment and
so attentive to every detail, the tiniest bit of outer onion-
skin left on a chopped bit, and also he felt with each
breath the divine presence flowing through him. It was
exhilarating to be there where he sat on his bed in
Philadelphia, like breathing the ozone near a waterfall.
He answered questions and listened to stories of what
happened to people during their days. He laughed and
tended business matters. He supervised the cooking of
lunch, did the measuring and pouring in of spices.
Rumi says lovers are those who may seem to be judi-
ciously considering very troubling matters, the world situa-
tion, relationship difficulties, “but really they’re leaning
back riding in a wagon on the Bukhara road, soul beauty
their only expertise.” That’s the way it felt in Bawa’s room.
He was the most loving person I’ve ever met, and he had
much to say about the innermost heart, the qalb. He lived
there. He called it a house with ninety-nine windows (the
qualities of God), a sanctuary, a flowering plenitude, a
benevolence, a piece of flesh that does not die, the kaaba of
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the true pilgrimage, and source of the light that is the ruh,
the soul. He also held that human beings cannot, and must
not, judge one another’s innermost heart. Only divine wis-
dom can do that.
The heart cannot be talked about. We must experience
its depths in that mysterious osmosis of presence with pres-
ence. Hazrat Inayat Khan says that our purpose here is to
make God a reality, a daunting and a potentially unbalanc-
ing task. One can get too full in the ecstatic state. Rumi
warns that the roof is a dangerous place to drink wine. We
can die trying to make God a reality. If we don’t fall from
the roof, we wake with a hangover that weakens conscious-
ness. Hangover remorse can be helpful then. The work of
balancing love (enthusiasm) and discipline (practical help-
fulness) is beautifully addressed in the first poem of this
section, the drink of water that is “The Sunrise Ruby.”
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T H E S U N R I S E R U B Y
In the early morning hour,
just before dawn, lover and beloved wake
to take a drink of water.
She asks, “Do you love me or yourself more?
Really, tell the absolute truth.”
He says, “There’s nothing left of me.
I’m like a ruby held up to the sunrise.
Is it still a stone, or a world
made of redness? It has no
resistance to sunlight.”
The ruby and the sunrise are one.
Be courageous and discipline yourself.
Completely become hearing and ear,
and wear this sun-ruby as an earring.
Work. Keep digging your well.
Don’t think about getting off from work.
Water is there somewhere.
Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that
is a ring on the door.
Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.
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T H E G E N E R AT I O N S Yesterday the beauty of early dawn
came over me, and I wondered who
my heart would reach toward. Then
this morning again and you. Who
am I? Wind and fire and watery
ground move me mightily because
they’re pregnant with love, love
pregnant with God. These are the
early morning generations I praise.
I P R A I S E
O N E S W AY I N G Love is not condescension, never
that, nor books, nor any marking
on paper, nor what people say of
each other. Love is a tree with
B E I N G
branches reaching into eternity
and roots set deep in eternity,
and no trunk! Have you seen it?
The mind cannot. Your desiring
cannot. The longing you feel for
this love comes from inside you.
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When you become the Friend, your
longing will be as the man in
the ocean who holds to a piece of
wood. Eventually, wood, man, and
ocean become one swaying being,
Shams Tabriz, the secret of God.
Held like this, to draw in milk,
no will, tasting clouds of milk,
never so content.
H A N G O V E R R E M O R S E
Muhammad said, “Three kinds of people
are particularly pathetic. The powerful man
out of power, the rich man with no money,
and the learned man laughed at.”
Yet these are those who badly want change!
Some dogs sit satisfied in their kennels.
But one who last year drank ecstatic union,
the pre-eternity agreement, who this year
has a hangover from bad-desire wine,
the way he cries out for the majesty
he’s lost,
give me that longing!
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S O U L , H E A R T, A N D B O DY O N E M O R N I N G
There’s a morning where presence comes over you,
and you sing like a rooster in your earth-colored shape.
Your heart hears and, no longer frantic, begins
to dance. At that moment soul
reaches total emptiness. Your heart becomes Mary,
miraculously pregnant, and body, like a two-day-old
Jesus says wisdom words. Now the heart
turns to light, and the body picks up the tempo.
Where Shamsi Tabriz walks, the footprints
are musical notes and holes you fall through into space.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other,
doesn’t make any sense.
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15. Die Before You Die
Death is key to this drastic change described in the last
section. When we know in some deeply certain way that
we are going to die, we move toward surrender more
quickly. It is life’s huge riddle, that we must die before we
die, this dissolving into the heart. We shall certainly be
changed in death, if not before.
Judge a moth by the beauty of its candle.
Shams is invisible because he is inside sight.
He is the intelligent essence
of what is everywhere at once, seeing.
H U S A M
There is a way of passing away from the personal,
a dying that makes one plural.
A gnat lights in buttermilk to become nourishment
for many. Your soul is like that, Husam.35
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Hundreds of thousands of impressions
from the invisible are wanting to come through you!
I get dizzy with the abundance. When life
is this dear, it means the source is pulling us.
Freshness comes from there. We’re given the gift
of continuously dying and being resurrected.
The body’s death now to me is like going to sleep.
No fear of drowning. I’m in another water.
Stones don’t dissolve in rain. This is the end
of the Fifth Book of the Masnavi.
With constellations in the night sky, some look up
and point. Others can be guided by the arrangements:
the Sagittarian bow piercing enemies, the Water Jar
soaking fruit trees, the Bull plowing its truth,
the Lion tearing darkness open to red satin. Use
these words to change. Be kind and honest,
and harmful poisons will turn sweet inside you.
Lovers are alive to the extent
they can die. A great soul approaches
Shams. What are you doing here?
Answer: What is there to do?
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T H AT Q U I C K
A lover looks at creekwater and wants to be
that quick to fall, to kneel, then all
the way down in full prostration.
A lover wants to die of his love
like a man with dropsy
who knows that water will kill him,
but he can’t deny his thirst.
A lover loves death. Spill your jug
in the river! Your shame and fear
are like felt layers covering coldness.
Throw them off, and rush naked
into the joy of death.
E M P T Y B O AT
Some huge work goes on growing.
How could one person’s words matter?
Where you walk heads pop from the ground.
What is one seed head compared to you?
On my death day I’ll know the answer.
I have cleared this house, so that your work
can, when it comes, fill every room.
I slide like an empty boat
pulled over the water.
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In the slaughterhouse of love they kill only
the best, none of the weak or deformed.
Don’t run away from this dying.
Whoever’s not killed for love is dead meat.
I T R U S T YO U
The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody
and gross. Work on it with manual discipline,
and the bitter tanning acid of grief.
You’ll become lovely and very strong.
If you can’t do this work yourself, don’t worry.
You don’t have to make a decision, one way or another.
The Friend, who knows a lot more than you do,
will bring difficulties and grief and sickness,
as medicine, as happiness, as the moment
when you’re beaten, when you hear Checkmate,
and can finally say with Hallaj’s voice,
I trust you to kill me.
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I M A D U ’ L - M U L K
Remember the story of the king who is so enraged
with his close friend that he’s about to kill him!
A privileged intercessor, Imadu’l-Mulk, steps in
and saves the man, but then the king’s close friend,
who has just been saved, turns away and will not thank
the intercessor. A teacher comes and asks, “Why
do you act so strangely?” He answers, “I was in
the state Muhammad describes as No other has been
this way with God, this near. If the king wishes
to cut my head off, he may furnish me a new one,
or not. Pitchblack night in his presence is worth
a hundred festival days without him. Inside
the presence there’s no religion, no grace, no
unfaithfulness, no punishment, and no language can say
anything about it, except that it is hidden, hidden.
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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.
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16. Harsh Evidence
For Kharraqani and his wife love is conflict, necessary opposi-
tion. Two armies set the battle lines, a black flag here, a
white flag there, then something happens between them.
The Red Sea roars over both. Kharraqani’s bossy wife is
right for him. The heat of their being together gets a
spring unfrozen and flowing again.
In this region love is a courtroom where harsh evidence
must be brought in. Faithfulness must turn to betrayal and
betrayal into trust before any human being can become
part of the truth. Surely love is a big part of the truth we’re
here to live.
There’s an ordeal, some anguish and suffering, essential
to a soul’s growing into deeper love. Life must be lived.
One definition of Sufism is joy at sudden disappointment. The
Sufis know that precisely the right disaster comes at the
right moment to break us open to the helplessness that an
opening of the heart requires. This is harsh truth, but the
truth. Love grows near truthfulness, and fades when words
are tinged with lying. Love grows from the ruins of person-
ality. There are heart-regions that one does not enter will-
ingly, or knowingly, and that one actively tries to avoid
reentering. I don’t use it much, and know very little about
it, but the word karma may belong here, along with Auden’s
stanza,
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O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.36
W. H. Auden is one of the best-loved poets in English
for the very reason that he brings in the acerbic, the faith-
less, and the shadow within the deeply felt joy of his lov-
ing. There’s an impending danger. To leave that dimension
out of love poems is not to tell the full truth. Auden is gay,
too, in all senses, which adds more depths to his cultural
work.
131
K H A R R A Q A N I ’ S M A R R I A G E
The young seeker wonders, How could a teacher
lie with that woman! Can a guide agree
with a thief?
Suddenly Sheikh Kharraqani37 appears, riding a lion,
firewood stacked behind him. His whip,
a live serpent. Every master rides a fierce lion,
whether you see it or not. Know this
with your other eyes: There are thousands of lions
under your teacher’s thighs and all of them
stacked with wood!
Kharraqani knew the problem and immediately
began to answer, “Well, it’s not out of desire
that I put up with her! Don’t think that.
It’s not her perfume or bright-colored clothes.
Enduring her public disdain has made me strong
and patient. She is my practice.
Nothing can be clear without a polar opposite
present. Two banners, one black, one white,
and between them something gets settled.
Between Pharaoh and Moses,
the Red Sea.”
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H A R S H E V I D E N C E
What sort of person says that he or she wants
to be polished and pure, then complains
about being handled roughly?
Love is a lawsuit where harsh evidence
must be brought in. To settle the case,
the judge must see evidence.
You’ve heard that every buried treasure
has a snake guarding it.
Kiss the snake to discover the treasure!
Don’t run from those who scold,
and don’t turn away from cleansing conflict,
or you will remain weak.
T H E S T U P I D T H I N G S I ’ V E D O N E
Let your sunlight shine on this piece of dung,
and dry it out, so I can be used
for fuel to warm a bathhouse.
Look on the terrible things I’ve done,
and cause herbs and eglantine to grow out of them.
The sun does this with the ground.
Think what glories God can make
from the fertilizer of sinning!
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C A N D L E AT N O O N
A man is wandering the marketplace at noon
with a candle in his hand, totally ecstatic.
“Hey,” calls a shopkeeper, “is this a joke?
Who are you looking for?”
“Someone breathing Huuu, the divine breath.”
“Well, there are plenty to choose from.”
“But I want one who can be in anger and desire
and still be a true human being in the same moment.”
D E R V I S H E S
When school and mosque and minaret
get torn down, then dervishes can begin
their community. Not until faithfulness
turns to betrayal and betrayal into trust
can any human being become
part of the truth.
D O V E S
People want you to be happy.
Don’t keep serving them your pain!
134
If you could untie your wings
and free your soul of jealousy,
you and everyone around you
would fly up like doves.
W H E N W O R D S A R E T I N G E D W I T H Muhammad gave this indication of how to know
what’s real. “When you feel
a peaceful joy, you’re near the truth.
Unquiet and off center, jealous or greedy,
then what you do seems pretentious
and those around you insincere.
Speak the clearest truth you know,
and let the uneasiness heal.”
LY I N G
When words are tinged with lying,
they’re like water dripping into an oil lamp.
The wick won’t light, and the pleasure
of your love room will diminish.
135
T H E R E YO U A R E
You’re inside every kindness. When a sick
person feels better, you’re that,
and the onset of disease too. You’re sudden,
terrible screaming. Some problems require
we go for help. When we knock on a stranger’s
door, you sent us. Nobody answers. It’s
you! When work feels necessary, you
are the way workers move in rhythm.
You are what is: the field, the players,
the ball, those watching. Someone claims to
have evidence that you do not exist.
You’re the one who brings the evidence in,
and the evidence itself. You are inside
the soul’s great fear, every natural
pleasure, every vicious cruelty. Someone
loves something, someone else hates
the same. There you are. Whatever anyone
wants or not: political power, injustice,
material possessions, those are your script,
the handwriting we study. Body, soul,
136
shadow. Whether reckless or careful,
you are what we do. It’s absurd to ask
your pardon. You’re inside repentance,
and sin! The wonder of various jewels,
agate, emerald. How we are during a day,
then at night, you are those moods and
the pure compassion we feel for each
other. Every encampment has a tent
where the leader is, and also the wide
truth of your imperial tent overall.
A night full of talking that hurts,
my worst held-back secrets: everything
has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.
There’s a shredding that’s really a healing,
that makes you more alive!
A lion holds you in his arms.
Fingers rake the fretbridge for music.
137
Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.
All I know of spirit
is this love.
YO U R D E F E C T S
An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits,
when they are held up to each other,
that’s when the real making begins.
That’s what art and crafting are.
A tailor needs a torn garment to practice his expertise.
The trunks of trees must be cut and cut again
so they can be used for fine carpentry.
Your doctor must have a broken leg to doctor.
Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested.
138
17. Meditation Pavane
This was my dream of August 10, 2001. I am a book in
three parts. The first and last have generic, ineffable desig-
nations, the beginning-less beginning and the endless end. The
middle part where (who) I am has an odd name that I see
spelled out in capitals, MEDITATION PAVANE. Awake, I
record the dream and think I have seen the word pavane
before, though I don’t know what it means, some kind of
music? I look it up in the dictionary. “A grave and stately
dance performed by couples in elaborate clothing, of
Spanish and Italian origin, 15–16th century.” A Mediter-
ranean courtship dance, with a circle of elders observing.
The word derives from a colloquial name for Padua and is
related by folk etymology to the French pavaner, meaning
to strut like a peacock. So a meditation pavane mixes the
internal quiet of meditation with the social display of
courtship.
There is a rare English word pavonine, meaning peacock-
like or having the iridescence of their slender necks and the
wide-open eyes on the tail feathers. Street pigeons some-
times have pavonine rings around their necks. I go to the
Internet to search for pavane. The third item down has two
familiar names, Barry and Shelley Phillips, friends of a
friend, whom I will soon meet and do a bookstore Rumi
reading with in Santa Cruz (October 2001). They are
musicians specializing in Appalachian, Shaker, and Celtic
139
melodies. Shelley has a CD called Pavane. Gourd Music is
their label! I have published a volume of my own poetry,
Gourd Seed (1993). I used to grow gourds.
The connections are clear. I call them to arrange some
sound-studio time during my visit to Santa Cruz. That ses-
sion turns into a CD, which we call What Was Said to the
Rose, and also a concert in Santa Cruz (April 2002). The
dance of courtship energies moving with the inner motions
of meditation, let’s say that mystery is the station of love
explored in this section. The close-in irritation and excite-
ment of the erotic, stepping with the cleansing of going-in.
The way we are led by dreams has been extremely
important in my life. I have told the story elsewhere, sev-
eral times, how I met my teacher in a dream on May 2,
1977. I’ll tell it again: In my dream I am sleeping on the
bluff above the Tennessee River five miles north of Chat-
tanooga where I grew up. I wake up inside the dream,
though still asleep. A ball of light rises off Williams Island
and comes over me. It clarifies from the inside out and
reveals a man sitting cross-legged with a white shawl over
his head, which is bowed. He lifts his head and opens his
eyes. “I love you,” he says. “I love you too,” I answer. The
landscape, my first deep love, the curve of that river and
the island, feels soaked with love, which is also just the
ordinary dew forming in the night. I feel the process of the
dew as a mixing of love with world-matter. That was the
dream, and the only credential I have for working with
Rumi’s poetry. When I met the teacher in the dream, Bawa
Muhaiyaddeen, a year and a half later in September of
1978, he told me to continue the work on Rumi. “It has to
be done.” Bawa died on December 8, 1986. I used to visit
the Fellowship in Philadelphia several times a year for three
or four days, over those nine years. He never asked for
140
money in exchange for the wisdom he gave so generously.
The curry was free too. Food truly does taste better when
it’s made by an enlightened being.
So let’s have tea and look out at the cold sea. If you
want one of these CDs that Barry and Shelley Phillips and I
made (Irish, Appalachian, Shaker, and improvised music:
cello, English horn, Irish harp, flute, with myself speaking
Rumi poems, most of which are included in this volume),
I’ll send you one free. Call 800-682-8637. Leave your name
and address.
141
R U L E S A B O U T R E S T R A I N T
There is nourishment like bread
that feeds one part of your life
and nourishment like light for another.
There are many rules about restraint
with the former, but only one rule
for the latter, Never be satisfied.
Eat and drink the soul substance,
as a wick does with the oil it soaks
in. Give light to the company.
T H E C O M PA N Y O F L O V E R S
The rule that covers everything is:
How you are with others, expect that back.
If you want to know God, enjoy the company
of lovers. If you want to be thought a great
person, learn some subtle point and say it
with many variations as the answer
to every question. If you want to
live your soul, find a friend
like Shams and stay near.
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T H E L O O K T H AT O P E N S
We wait for inspiration and ask no fee,
the feel of sacred ambiance being enough.
So bring your malaise, your dullness,
your callous ingratitude.
As we meet you, the coming together itself
will be medicine. We are the cure,
the look that opens your looking.
S T R A W A N D G R A S S E S
There is no reality but God, says
the completely surrendered teacher,
who is an ocean for all beings.
The levels of creation are straws
in that ocean. The movement comes
from agitation in the water.
When the ocean wants the dry stems calm,
it sends them close to shore.
When it wants them back in the deep
surge, it does with them
as the wind does with grasses.
This never ends.
143
Friend, our closeness is this:
anywhere you put your foot, feel me
in the firmness under you.
How is it with this love,
I see your world and not you?
144
18. Love Dogs
The Sufis feel that dogs are our teachers with their faithful-
ness, their humility, and their bounding, unqualified wel-
come when we come home. The wordless intimacy of how
we are with those beings teaches us to give ourselves
wholeheartedly.
There’s a Saturday Night Live sketch with John Lithgow
as a Catholic priest hearing confession from actual dogs. A
voice off-camera speaks for the dogs, “Father, I have barked
at cats late at night. I have turned over a garbage can and
eaten chicken bones.” But Lithgow’s face is so close to their
faces and his intoning such, that the dogs begin to bark
with the fun of it. It’s hilarious, us forgiving them.
T H E O C E A N S U R G E
I want to be in such passionate adoration
that my tent gets pitched against the sky!
Let the beloved come and sit
like a guard dog in front of the tent.
When the ocean surges, don’t let me
just hear it. Let it splash inside my chest!
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L O V E D O G S
One night a man was crying Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with praising,
until a cynic said, “So!
I have heard you calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr,38 the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?” “Because
I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing you express
is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.
146
Inside water, a waterwheel turns.
A star circulates with the moon.
We live in this night ocean wondering,
What are these lights?
No better love than love with no object,
no more satisfying work than work with no purpose.
If you could give up tricks and cleverness,
that would be the cleverest trick!
A G R E AT W A G O N
When I see your face, the stones start spinning!
You appear; all studying wanders.
I lose my place.
Water turns pearly.
Fire dies down and doesn’t destroy.
In your presence I don’t want what I thought
I wanted, those three little hanging lamps.
Inside your face the ancient manuscripts
seem like rusty mirrors.
147
You breathe; new shapes appear,
and the music of a desire as widespread
as spring begins to move
like a great wagon.
Drive slowly. Some of us
walking alongside are lame.
B L A S P H E M Y A N D T H E My soul keeps whispering, “Quickly,
be a wandering dervish, a salamander
sitting in its homefire. Walk about
watching the burning turn to roses.
As this love-secret we are both
blasphemy and the core of Islam.
Don’t wait! The open plain is better
than any closing door. Ravens love
ruins and cemetery trees. They
can’t help but fly there. For us
this day is friends sitting together
with silence shining in our faces.”
C O R E
148
You’re song,
a wished-for song.
Go through the ear to the center
where sky is, where wind,
where silent knowing.
Put seeds and cover them.
Blades will sprout
where you do your work.
Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within,
but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
149
19. One Stroke Down
We sense an impending danger in ecstatic love, that the
experience will change us radically. And it’s true. The
love-thief steals the keys to our favorite rooms, steals our
half-loves. Ayaz crushes the pearl. There is a destructive
downstroke when soul-love enters. The physical pearl and
its value disintegrate to powder in the presence of the
king. Tremendous courage and abandon come with Ayaz’s
act. The courtiers feel it and prostrate themselves, hoping
for grace.
The progress in a story of Rumi’s is toward a moment
when consciousness breaks open and the Friendship is felt
here and now. The ocean of wisdom becomes this weather we
walk. Something like a jump occurs (though it may not be
anything we do), and life is wildly different. You’re naked
and cold. Hallaj39 says to dive in the river and get the fur
coat that is floating by. You plunge in, and it’s a live bear!
There’s the moment, a gamble one doesn’t know or care
how it will turn out. This bear is going to wear you home.
150
Lightning, your presence
from ground to sky.
No one knows what becomes of me,
when you take me so quickly.
I can break off from anyone,
except the presence within.
Anyone can bring gifts.
Give me someone who takes away.
The Friend comes into my body
looking for the center, unable
to find it, draws a blade,
strikes anywhere.
151
W O O D E N C A G E S
I may be clapping my hands,
but I don’t belong to a crowd of clappers.
Neither this nor that, I’m not part
of a group that loves flute music
or one that loves gambling or drinking wine.
Those who live in time, descended
from Adam, made of earth and water,
I’m not part of that.
Don’t listen to what I say,
as though these words came from an inside
and went to an outside.
Your faces are very beautiful,
but they are wooden cages.
You had better run from me.
My words are fire.
I have nothing to do with being famous,
or making grand judgments, or feeling
full of shame. I borrow nothing.
I don’t want anything from anybody.
I flow through human beings.
Love is my only companion.
152
M O R E R A N G E
We’re friends with one who kills us,
who gives us to the ocean waves.
We love this death. Only ignorance
says, Put it off awhile, day after
tomorrow. Don’t avoid the knife.
This friend only seems fierce, bringing
your soul more range, perching your
falcon on a cliff of the wind. Jesus
on his cross, Hallaj on his. Those
absurd executions hold a secret.
Cautious cynics claim they know what
they’re doing every moment and why.
Submit to love without thinking, as
the sun rose this morning recklessly
extinguishing our star-candle minds.
AYA Z A N D T H E K I N G ’ S One day the king assembled his courtiers,
He handed the minister a glowing pearl.
“What would you say this is worth?”
than a hundred donkeys could carry.”
P E A R L
“More gold
153
“Break it!”
“Sir, how could I waste your resources like that?”
The king presented him with a robe of honor
and took back the pearl.
Then he put the pearl
in his chamberlain’s hand. “What would it sell for?”
“Half a kingdom, God preserve it!”
“Break it!”
“My hand could not move to do such a thing.”
The king presented him with a robe of honor
and an increase in his salary. So it went
with each of the sixty courtiers. One by one
they imitated the minister and the chamberlain
and received their reward of new wealth.
The pearl was given to Ayaz. “Can you say
how splendid this is?”
“It’s more than I can say.”
“Then break it, this second, into tiny pieces.”
Ayaz had had a dream about this, and he had hidden
two stones in his sleeve. He crushed the pearl
to powder between them.
As Joseph at the bottom
of the well listened to the end of his story,
so such listeners understand success and failure
as one thing.
Don’t worry about forms. If someone
wants your horse, let him have it. Horses are for
hurrying ahead of others.
154
The court assembly
screamed at the recklessness of Ayaz. “How could you
do that?”
“What the king says is worth more than
any pearl. I honor the king, not some colored stone.”
The courtiers immediately fell on their knees and put
their foreheads on the ground. Their sighs went up
like smoke asking forgiveness. The king gestured
to his executioner as though to say, “Take out
this trash.”
Ayaz sprang forward, “Your mercy
makes them bow like this. Give them their lives!
Raise their faces into yours. Let them wash
in your cool washing place.”
Ayaz in his speech
to the king gets to this point and then the pen
breaks.
“You picked me to crush the pearl.
Don’t punish the others for my drunken obedience.
Punish them when I’m sober because I’ll never be
sober again!
Whoever bows down like they are bowing
will not rise up in his old self. Like a gnat
in buttermilk, they have become your buttermilk.
The mountains are trembling. The map and compass
are the lines in your palm.”
Husam, a hundred
thousand impressions from spirit are wanting to come
through here.
I feel stunned in this abundance,
crushed and dead.
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H A L L A J
Hallaj said what he said and went to the origin
through the hole in the scaffold.
I cut a cap’s worth of cloth from his robe,
and it swamped over me head to foot.
Years ago I broke a branch of roses
from the top of his wall. A thorn from that
is still in my palm, working deeper.
From Hallaj, I learned to hunt lions,
but I became something hungrier than a lion.
I was a frisky colt. He broke me
with a quiet hand on the side of my head.
A person comes to him naked. It’s cold.
There’s a fur coat floating in the river.
“Jump in and get it,” he says.
You dive in. You reach for the coat.
It reaches for you.
It’s a live bear that has fallen in upstream,
drifting with the current.
“How long does it take!” Hallaj yells from the bank.
“Don’t wait,” you answer. “This coat
has decided to wear me home!”
A little part of a story, a hint.
Do you need long sermons on Hallaj?
156
20. Love’s Excess
Someone asked once, “What is love?”
“Be lost in me,” I said. “You’ll know love when that happens.”
Love has no calculating in it. That’s why it’s said to be a qual-
ity of God and not of human beings. God loves you is the
only possible sentence. The subject becomes the object so
totally that it can’t be turned around. Who will the you pro-
noun stand for if you say, “You love God”?
Prose Preface to Book II of the Masnavi
I, you, he, she, we,
in the garden of mystic lovers,
these are not true
distinctions.
SHAMS TABRIZ
The extravagant perspective of Rumi’s life and work is that
there is a core of understanding and that that core is love,
the heart. Saint Augustine talks about “the supersensual
eye of the soul.” The eighteenth-century mystic Emanuel
Swedenborg says there is a light that illuminates the mind
that is different from sunlight, and that is what the word
enlightenment refers to. Those who experience these other
sights and other hearings are often in a state of untranslat-
able joy that almost dissolves them with its delight.
157
It would be strange if poetry written from such know-
ing were not excessive. Being in the spirit is not a casual
thing. Each ant is given its elegant belt at birth. This love we feel
pours through us like giveaway song.
It’s not true, though, to say that Rumi’s poetry always
comes from a trance state. An enlightened being is most
often very focused, present in the moment, and fiercely
practical, even when saying the most mystical things. “You
have to understand the form of the body in order to under-
stand the meaning of the light form within it.”40
And Rumi’s knowing, like his father Bahauddin’s,41 has
many valences, which certainly includes the hulul, or mysti-
cal trance.
158
T H E S O U R C E O F J OY
No one knows what makes the soul wake up
so happy! Maybe a dawn breeze
has blown the veil from the face of God.
A thousand new moons appear. Roses
open laughing. Hearts become perfect
rubies like those from Badakshan.
The body turns entirely spirit.
Leaves become branches in this wind.
Why is it now so easy to surrender,
even for those already surrendered?
There’s no answer to any of this.
No one knows the source of joy.
A poet breathes into a reed flute,
and the tip of every hair makes music.
Shams sails down clods of dirt
from the roof, and we take jobs
as doorkeepers for him.
159
R O S E S U N D E R F O OT
The sound of salaams rising as waves
diminish down in prayer,
hoping for some trace of the one
whose trace does not appear.
If anyone asks you to say who you are,
say without hesitation, soul
within soul within soul.
There’s a pearl diver who does not know
how to swim! No matter.
Pearls are handed him on the beach.
We lovers laugh to hear, “This should be
more that and that more this,”
coming from people sitting in a wagon
tilted in a ditch.
Going in search of the heart, I found
a huge rose, and roses under all our feet!
How to say this to someone who denies it?
The robe we wear is the sky’s cloth.
Everything is soul and flowering.
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P O E T R Y
I open and fill with love
and what is not love evaporates.
All the learning in books stays put
on the shelf. Poetry, the dear
words and images of song, comes down
over me like mountain water.
B I R D S O N G F R O M I N S I D E T H E Sometimes a lover of God may faint
in the presence. Then the beloved bends
and whispers in his ear, “Beggar,
spread out your robe. I’ll fill it with gold.
E G G
I’ve come to protect your consciousness.
Where has it gone? Come back!”
This fainting is because lovers want so much.
A chicken invites a camel into her henhouse,
and the whole structure is demolished.
A rabbit nestles down with its eyes closed
in the arms of a lion. There is an excess in
spiritual searching that is profound ignorance.
Let that ignorance be our teacher!
The Friend breathes into one who has no breath.
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A deep silence revives the listening
of those two who meet on the riverbank.
Like the ground turning green in a spring wind,
like birdsong beginning inside the egg,
like this universe coming into existence,
the lover wakes and whirls in a dancing joy,
then kneels down in praise.
E A S T E R N M Y S T E R Y
I ask for the laughing, unconventional ones,
even them, to be broken,
for blood and sky to become one thing,
for revelation as startling as an ocean
that is neither wet nor dry.
I ask that lovers no longer be shy or concerned
with right and wrong, with reputation
or recognition. I have seen
the universal intelligence offer its neck
to the blade. I have asked why
and been told,
Look around this gathering
and find those who resemble Shams,
who made Tabriz a source
of Eastern mystery like China.
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N O F L A G
I used to want buyers for my words.
Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.
I’ve made a lot of charmingly profound images,
scenes with Abraham and his father Azar,
who was famous for icons.
I’m so tired of what I’ve been doing.
Then one image without form came,
and I quit.
Look for someone else to tend the shop.
I’m out of the image-making business.
Finally I know the freedom
of madness.
A random image arrives. I scream,
“Get out!” It disintegrates.
Only love.
Only the holder the flag fits into,
no flag.
163
21. Love’s Bewilderment
Love loves flowing, a beyond-containment of blood and
semen, wine and riverwater, amniotic fluid and the round
bead of dew forming.
Flowering. Love cannot be held long within categories,
likewise the poetry celebrating love. You might say that
love loves confusion and not be far wrong. Love is meta-
morphosis, rapid and radical, agile, full of vigor and levity.
Love is the continuous alchemy of regions overlapping:
animal, angelic, human, and the luminosity of the true
human beings, their compassion and their cooking. None
of this is sayable. It can only be lived. Rumi says, Stay bewil-
dered in God, and only that. But the mind keeps questioning,
turning away, I don’t think so. There is strong resistance and
fear and academic distancing in the rational precincts,
which tend to mistrust any boundary-dissolving, beauty-
relishing, ecstatic honesty.
164
God only knows, I don’t,
what keeps me laughing.
The stem of a flower
moves when the air moves.
I reach for a piece of wood. It turns into a lute.
I do some meanness. It turns out helpful.
I say one must not travel during the holy month.
Then I start out, and wonderful things happen.
In complete control, pretending control,
with dignified authority, we are charlatans.
Or maybe just a goat’s-hair brush in a painter’s hand.
We have no idea what we are.
165
M O S E S A N D T H E S H E P H E R D
Moses heard a shepherd on the road praying,
“God,
where are you? I want to help you, to fix your shoes
and comb your hair. I want to wash your clothes
and pick the lice off. I want to bring you milk
and kiss your little hands and feet when it’s time
for you to go to bed. I want to sweep your room
and keep it neat. God, my sheep and goats are yours.
All I can say remembering you is aaayyyyyy
and aaahhhhhhhhhhhh.”
Moses could stand it no longer.
“Who are you talking to?”
“The one who made us and made
the earth and made the sky.”
“Don’t talk about shoes
and socks with God! And what’s this with your little
hands? Such blasphemous familiarity sounds like
you’re chatting with your uncles. Only something
that grows needs milk. Only someone with feet
needs shoes. Not God!”
The shepherd repented
and tore his clothes and wandered out into
the desert. A sudden revelation came then to Moses:
You have separated me from one of my own.
Did you come as a prophet to unite or to sever?
I have given each being a separate and unique way
of seeing and knowing and saying that knowledge.
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What seems wrong to you is right for him.
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
these mean nothing to me. I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better
or worse. Hindus do Hindu things. The Dravidian
Muslims in India do what they do. It’s all praise,
and it’s all right. I am not glorified in acts
of worship. It’s the worshipers! I don’t hear
the words they say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the reality. Forget
phraseology! I want burning, burning. Be friends
with your burning. Those who pay attention to ways
of behaving and speaking are one sort. Lovers who
burn are another. Don’t impose a property tax
on a burned-out village. Don’t scold the lover.
The “wrong” way he talks is better than a hundred
“right” ways of others.
Inside the Kaaba
it doesn’t matter which way you point
your prayer rug!
The ocean diver doesn’t need snowshoes!
The love-religion has no code or doctrine.
Only God.
So the ruby has nothing engraved on it!
It doesn’t need markings.
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God began speaking
deeper mysteries to Moses, vision and words,
which cannot be recorded here. Moses left himself
and came back. He went to eternity and came
back here. Many times this happened.
It’s foolish of me
to try and say this. If I did say it,
it would uproot human intelligence.
Moses ran after the shepherd, following the bewildered
footprints,
in one place moving like a castle
across a chessboard. In another, sideways,
like a bishop.
Now surging like a wave cresting,
now sliding down like a fish,
with always his feet
making geomancy symbols in the sand,
recording his
wandering state.
Moses finally caught up with him.
“I was wrong. God has revealed to me that there are
no rules for worship. Say whatever and however
your loving tells you to.
Your sweetest blasphemy
is the truest devotion. Through you a whole world
is freed.
Loosen your tongue and don’t worry
what comes out. It’s all the light of the spirit.”
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The shepherd replied, “Moses, Moses,
I’ve gone beyond even that.
You applied the whip,
and my horse shied and jumped out of itself.
The divine nature and my human nature came together.
Bless your scolding hand.
I can’t say what has happened.
What I’m saying now is not my real condition.
It can’t be said.”
The shepherd grew quiet.
When you look in a mirror, you see yourself,
not the state of the mirror.
The flute player
gives breath into a flute, and who makes the music?
The flute player!
Whenever you speak praise
or thanksgiving to God, it’s always like
this dear shepherd’s simplicity.
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.
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M O R N I N G W I N D
Wine so bitter all bitterness sweetens,
a beautiful face growing old.
The taste of
Khidr’s spring, words that plant olive trees.
A man like the dawn
with a small suggestion,
You should visit a few times.
A prayer
at the graveside that resurrects the dead,
silence telling half a secret, unspoken wish.
Morning wind,
we’ll stay quiet. Whatever
you have understood of us, go and tell that
to the living,
what we’ve been hiding from them.
T H E O C E A N ’ S M OT I O N
Love is an ocean. This wide sky,
a bit of foam on that.
Restless as Zuleikha
in her desire for Joseph,
sky-changes move across
day and night. If there were no love,
everything would freeze and be
still. Instead,
inorganic grains are entering
plants. Plants enter animals;
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animals enter
spirit, and spirit sacrifices itself
for one breath
of that which made Mary with child. Each
sapling lifts, and the universe
winds like a locust swarm its wingrush
toward perfection,
each particle purified
in a song of praise for motion.
I G N O R A N C E
I didn’t know love would make me this
crazy, with my eyes
like the river Ceyhun
carrying me in its rapids
out to sea,
where every bit
of shattered boat
sinks to the bottom.
An alligator lifts its head and swallows
the ocean, then the ocean
floor becomes
a desert covering
the alligator in
sand drifts.
Changes do
happen. I do not know how,
or what remains of what
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has disappeared
into the absolute.
I hear so many stories
and explanations, but I keep quiet,
because I don’t know anything,
and because something I swallowed
in the ocean
has made me completely content
with ignorance.
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22. Lord of the Heart
Love is our aloneness with the lord of such beauty and
depth that we’re not lonely. The empty space of the guest
house, not the guests moving through, the host and theater
where mind and desire play out their myriad motions. As
say Shakespeare is the great globe itself, not the players, nor
the drowned book, not the jealous lover or the eloquently
introspective athlete or the rugged king, who calls himself
“old and foolish,” rather the space those inhabit and the
source. This love-region called lord is not imagination. This
emptiness so dazzlingly full of emanation is what gnostics
call the pleroma. Niffari calls it Ignorance. Someone else, the
cloud of unknowing.
Words do not approach it hence the edge of self-satire
that word-mystics barely keep in check. This is the one we
know early on in life and come back to late. Riverlord, direc-
tor of dreams, the company that most nourishes our soul,
this is the great love we’re given and feel bearing us along.
It’s not fair to speak as though this were everyone’s
experience, because it isn’t, and I do honor the pained
vision, the bitter childhoods, the broken trust. Rumi
focuses not so much on the nobility of suffering or its
heartbreaking howl as on the ultimate expansion into mys-
tery that this poetry tries to say. It began with the Friend-
ship with Shams Tabriz. It is still unfolding, and as many of
the poems imply, the unfolding is intimately woven in with
seeing. John Ruskin says,
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The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to
see something and tell what he saw in a plain way. To see
clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.42
Bawa says something very similar.
Everything you see tells the story of God. Look at it. God is
out spread, filling the entire universe. So look. You exist in a
form. God is without form. You are the visible example, the
sun. God is the light within the sun.43
I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things.
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E Y E S
What is it that sees when vision is clear?
The core that has no story, has that ever seen anything?
Surely vision has loyalties.
Someone buying eye medicine does not see well,
but well enough, at least, to choose the cure.
Beyond day and night one watches
as your eyes close and open and close, as night
turning day turns night, as eyes
like particles float
in the light that is your face,
that is the sun.
Without you our eyes might be a danger
to the soul, but with you they become the same
as the soul. When that happens,
the heart is seeing!
You can say that the eyes see God, but it is God
who sees, as in the Qur’an when the desert mountain
looks at God, and eyes appear on every stone.
I am filled with you.
Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul.
There’s no room for lack of trust, or trust.
Nothing in this existence but that existence.
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When you feel your lips becoming infinite
and sweet, like a moon in a sky,
when you feel that spaciousness inside,
Shams of Tabriz will be there too.
T H E G R A N A R Y
Sufi masters are those whose spirits existed
before the world. Before the body,
they lived many lifetimes. Before seeds
went into the ground, they harvested wheat.
Before there was an ocean, they strung pearls.
While the great meeting was going on
about bringing human beings into existence,
they stood up to their chins in wisdom-water.
When some of the angels opposed creation,
the Sufi masters laughed and clapped
among themselves. Before materiality,
they knew what it was like to be trapped
inside matter. Before there was a night sky,
they saw Saturn. Before wheat grains,
they tasted bread. With no mind, they thought.
Immediate intuition to them is the simplest act,
what to others would be epiphany. Much
of our thought is of the past or the future.
They’re free of those. Before a mine is dug,
they judge coins. Before vineyards, they know
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the excitements to come. In July they feel
December. In unbroken sunlight, they find
shade. In fana, the state where objects
dissolve, they recognize things and comment
rationally. The open sky drinks from their
circling cup. The sun wears the gold of their
generosity. When two of them meet, they
are no longer two. They are one and six
hundred thousand. The ocean waves are their
closest likeness, when wind makes from unity
the numerous. This happened to the sun and it
broke into rays through the window, into bodies.
The disc of the sun does exist, but if you see
only the ray-bodies, you may have doubts.
The human-divine combinations are a oneness.
Plurality, the apparent separation into rays.
Friend, we’re traveling together. Throw off
your tiredness. Let me show you one tiny spot
of the beauty that can’t be spoken. I’m like
an ant that’s gotten into the granary,
ludicrously happy, and trying to lug out
a grain that’s way too big.
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T H E G A Z I N G - H O U S E
On the night when you cross the street
from your shop and your house to the cemetery,
you’ll hear me hailing you from inside
the open grave, and you’ll realize
how we’ve always been together.
I am the clear consciousness core
of your being, the same in ecstasy
as in self-hating fatigue.
That night, when you escape the fear of snakebite
and all irritation with the ants, you’ll hear
my familiar voice, see the candle being lit,
smell the incense and the surprise meal fixed
by the lover inside all your other lovers.
This heart tumult is my signal to you igniting
in the tomb, so don’t fuss with the shroud
and the graveyard road dust. Those get ripped
open and washed away in the music of our meeting.
And don’t look for me in a human shape!
I am inside your looking. No room for form
with love this strong.
Beat the drum and let
the poets speak. This is a day of purification
for those who are already mature and initiated
into what love is.
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No need to wait until we die!
There’s more to want here than money and being
famous and bites of roasted meat.
Now, what
shall we call this new kind of gazing-house
that has opened in our town where people
sit quietly and pour out their glancing
like light, like answering?
T H E G U E S T H O U S E
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture, still,
treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing
and invite them in.
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Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Always check your inner state
with the lord of your heart.
Copper doesn’t know it’s copper,
until it’s changing to gold.
Your loving doesn’t know majesty,
until it knows its helplessness.
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T H E O N E T H I N G YO U M U S T D O
There is one thing in this world you must never
forget to do. If you forget everything else and not
this, there’s nothing to worry about, but if you
remember everything else and forget this, then you
will have done nothing in your life.
It’s as if a king has sent you to some country to do
a task, and you perform a hundred other services,
but not the one he sent you to do. So human
beings come to this world to do particular work.
That work is the purpose, and each is specific to
the person. If you don’t do it, it’s as though a price-
less Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat.
It’s a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when
one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suit-
able pots. It’s like a knife of the finest tempering
nailed into a wall to hang things on.
You say, “But look, I’m using it. It’s not lying idle.”
Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds? For a
penny an iron nail could be bought. You say, “But I
spend my energies on lofty projects. I study philoso-
phy and jurisprudence, logic, astronomy, and medi-
cine.” But consider why you do those things. They
are all branches of yourself and your impressiveness.
Remember the deep root of your being, the pres-
ence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who
already owns your breath and your moments. If
you don’t, you’ll be like the man who takes a cere-
monial dagger and hammers it into a post for a peg
to hold his dipper gourd. You’ll be wasting valuable
keenness and forgetting your dignity and purpose.
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T H I S W E H A V E N O W
This we have now
is not imagination.
This is not grief,
or joy, not a judging state,
or an elation, or a sadness.
Those come and go.
This is the presence
that doesn’t.
It’s dawn, Husam,
here in the splendor of coral,
inside the Friend, in the simple truth
of what Hallaj said.
What else could human beings want?
When grapes turn to wine,
they’re wanting this.
When the night sky pours by,
it’s really a crowd of beggars,
and they all want some of this.
This we are now
created the body, cell by cell,
like bees building a honeycomb.
The human body and the universe
grew from this, not this
from the universe and the human body