A Full Year of Rumi Readings

Was there a beginning to this journey? Is there an end?

I began to post daily readings here from the book A Year with Rumi on March 11, 2010. Odd, I know, to start in the third month of the year, but what can I say, I'm a late bloomer. I have now completed a full year of posts. Rumi said:

Do not grieve. Anything you lose
comes round in another form. 

As ever, I will continue at my main blog, the eclectic synch-ro-ni-zing, where I express my own deeply felt connections with the world, as well as at the blog that the artful and soulful Lorenzo of The Alchemist's Pillow and I co-host, A Year with Rilke, where the readings of poems and prose excerpts by Rainer Maria Rilke and commenter discussions are as spiritually resonant as anything I've found in Rumi. I heartily invite you to these blogs where you will be most welcome to read quietly or add to the discussions.

I have loved the quiet meditation of typing up Rumi's words via Coleman Barks' earthy and sublimely unpretentious translations, and I will miss the practice. But now, I can come and read them again, meeting them like new friends.

You can still read daily. You can enter a date in the search box on the sidebar to find the reading for a given day of the year.  I have formatted the archives daily, so you can click on 2010, then October, then October 11, for example. This way, you can continue to read Rumi daily if you wish. Search poem titles, words and phrases in the "Search the Archives" box on the sidebar. Unfortunately, you can't search dates, since they are not in the text of the posts, and therefore dates such as "October 11" are not searchable.

I feel obliged to plug the book these readings are from. Click on the book on the sidebar to go to the publisher's page. The book is available online and on land in local bookstores.

Thank you for riding with me here in this caravan of rubies and sunrises, in which we stop off each evening in a different caravanserai . . .

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, idolator, worshipper of fire, come even though
you have broken your vows a thousand times,
Come, and come yet again. Ours is not a caravan of despair.

~ Jalal ad-Dīn Muhammad Rumi


The lines above are inscribed
on Rumi's shrine in Konya, Turkey.
Followers of Rumi call the day he passed away,
December 17, 1273,
his "Wedding Night"
because he was united with the Beloved.

This epitaph is also there,
and again are his words:

When we are dead,
seek not our tomb in the earth,
but find it in the hearts of men.

Buoyancy

 I saw you and became empty.

This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,

it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,

existence thrives and creates more existence.

To praise is to praise

how one surrenders to the emptiness.

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.

Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.

So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where?

Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck

we could have. It is a total waking-up.

Why should we grieve that we have been sleeping?

It does not matter how long we've been unconscious.

We are groggy, but let the guilt go.

Feel the motions of tenderness

around you, the bouyancy.

The You Pronoun

Someone asked once, What is love?

Be lost in me, I said. You will know love when that happens.

Love has no calculating in it. That is why it is said to be a quality 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 pronoun stand for if you say, You love God?

The Lame Goat

Goat sculpture from found objects, by Picasso

You have seen a herd of goats

going down to the water.

The lame and dreamy goat

brings up the rear.

There are worried faces about that one,

but now they're laughing,

because look, as they return,

that one is leading.

There are many different ways of knowing.

The lame goat's kind is a branch

that traces back to the roots of presence.

Learn from the lame goat,

and lead the herd home.

A Tender Agony of Parting

A craftsman pulled a reed from the reedbed,

cut holes in it, and called it a human being.

Since then, it has been wailing

a tender agony of parting,

never mentioning the skill

that gave it life as a flute.

The Milk of Millenia

I am part of the load

not rightly balanced.

I drop off in the grass

like the old cave-sleepers, to browse

wherever I fall.

For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dustgrains

floating and flying in the will of the air,

often forgetting ever being

in that state, but in sleep

I migrate back. I spring loose

from the four-branched, time-and-space cross,

this waiting room.

I walk out into a huge pasture.

I nurse the milk of millenia.

Everyone does this in different ways.

Knowing that conscious decisions

and personal memory

are much too small a place to live,

every human being streams at night

into the loving nowhere, or during the day,

in some absorbing work.

Strange Frenzy

There is a strange frenzy in my head,

of birds flying,

each particle circulating on its own.

Is the one I love everywhere?

This World Which is Made of Our Love for Emptiness

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence.

Existence: this place made from our love

for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,

this existence goes.

Praise to that happening over and over.

For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.

Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,

that work is over.

Free of who I was, free of presence, free

of dangerous fear, hope, free

of mountainous wanting.

These words I am saying so much begin to lose meaning.

Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw.

Words and what they try to say,

swept out the window, down the slant of the roof.

The Tent

Outside, the freezing desert night.

This other night inside grows warm, kindling.

Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.

We have a soft garden in here.

The continents blasted,

cities and little towns, everything

become a scorched, blackened ball.

The news we hear is full of grief for that future,

but the real news inside here

is there's no news at all.

There is Some Kiss We Want

There is some kiss we want

with our whole lives,

the touch of spirit on the body.

Seawater begs the pearl

to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately

it needs some wild darling.

At night, I open the window

and ask the moon to come

and press its face against mine.

Breathe into me.

Close the language-door

and open the love-window.

The moon won't use the door,

only the window.

I Have Five Things to Say

I have five things to say,

five fingers to give into your grace.

First, when I was apart from you,

this world did not exist, nor any other.

Second, whatever I was looking for was always you.

Third, why did I ever learn to count to three?

Fourth, my cornfield is burning!

Fifth, this finger stands for Rabia, and this

is for someone else. Is there a difference?

Are these words or tears?

Is weeping speech? What shall I do, my love?

So he speaks, and everyone around

begins to cry with him, laughing crazily,

moaning in the spreading union of lover and beloved.

This is the true religion. All others

are thrown-away bandages beside it.

This is the sema of slavery and mastery

dancing together. This is not-being.

I know these dancers. Day and night

I sing their songs in this phenomenal cage.

Body Intelligence (2)

Elephant and Rider, Indian, circa 1640
Metropolitan Museum of Art

There are guides

who can show you the way.

Use them.

But they will not satisfy your longing.

Keep wanting the connection with presence

with all your pulsing energy.

The throbbing vein

will take you further

than any thinking.

Muhammed said, Do not theorize

about essence. All speculations

are just more layers of covering.

Human beings love coverings.

They think the designs on the curtains

are what is being concealed.

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.

Do not claim them. Feel the artistry

moving through, and be silent.

Body Intelligence (1)

Three Capetian French scholars

consulting an astrolabe, ca. AD 1200

Your intelligence is always with you,

overseeing your body, even though

you may not be aware of its work.

If you start doing something

against your health, your intelligence

will eventually scold you.

If it had not been so lovingly close by,

and so constantly monitoring,

how could it rebuke?

You and your body's intelligence

are like the beauty and precision

of an astrolabe.

Together, you calculate how near

existence is to the sun.

Your intelligence is marvelously intimate.

It is not in front of you or behind,

or to the left or the right.

Now, my friend, try to describe how near

is the creator of your intelligence.

Red

Red with shyness, the red

that became all the rosegarden reds.

The red distance,

red of the stove boiling water,

red of the mountain turning bloodred,

a mountain holding rubies secretly inside.

Do I love more you

or your modesty?

My Worst Habit

My worst habit is I get so tired of winter

I become a torture to those I'm with.

If you are not here, nothing grows.

I lack clarity. My words

tangle and knot up.

How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.

How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,

dig a way out through the bottom

to the ocean. There is a secret medicine

given only to those who hurt so hard

they can't hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,

no matter whether that friend is moving away from you

or coming back toward you.

Red Shirt

 

 Portrait of the Boy Eutyches

Egyptian, A.D. 100-150

Has anyone seen the boy who used to come here?

Round-faced troublemaker, quick to find a joke, slow

to be serious. Red shirt,

perfect coordination, sly,

strong muscles, with things always in his pocket.

Reed flute, ivory pick, polished

and ready for his talent.

You know that one.

Have you heard stories about him?

Pharoah and the whole Egyptian world

collapsed for such a Joseph.

I would gladly spend years getting word

of him, even third- or fourth-hand.

* * * 

This reading is poignant for me today,

partly because of the recent triumphs in Egypt.

Today is also the 15th anniversary of the day

my redheaded (not redshirted) brother passed away at age 47;
except for the flute, every word of the first stanza is true of him!

He visited the pyramids at Giza in 1969
and took some beautiful photographs of them and the Sphinx.
I wish I had one here to scan and show you.


Bennett Williams Hart
b. June 28, 1948 d. February 24, 1996 

When I Am with You

 The Moonrise, Mamaroneck, by Edward J. Steichen

When I am with you, we stay up all night.

When you are not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias.

And the difference between them.

The Grasses

The same wind that uproots trees

makes the grasses shine.

The lordly wind loves the weakness

and the lowness of grasses.

The axe doesn't worry how thick the branches are.

It cuts them to pieces. But not the leaves.

It leaves the leaves alone.

The motion of the body, the inhaling-exhaling,

comes from the spirit, now angry, now peaceful.

Wind destroys, and wind protects.

There is no reality but God,

says the completely surrendered sheikh,

who is an ocean for all beings.

The levels of creation are straws in that ocean.

The movement of the straws comes from an agitation

in the water. When the ocean wants the straws 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 the grasses.

Dark Sweetness

The ground turns green. A drum begins.

Commentaries on the heart arrive in seven volumes.

The pen puts its head down

to give a dark sweetness to the page.

Planets go wherever they want.

Venus sways near the North Star.

The moon holds on to Leo.

The host who has no self is here.

We look into each other's eyes.

A child is still a child

even after it has learned the alphabet.

Solomon lifts his morning cup to the mountains.

Sit down in this pavilion,

and don't listen to religious bickering.

Be silent as we absorb the spring.

Imagining Is Like

Imagining is like feeling around

in a dark lane, or washing

your eyes with blood.

You are the truth

from foot to brow. Now,

what else would you like to know?

Talking through the Door (2)

Sala de los Secretos, The Alhambra Palace
(Whispering Chamber)
Granada, Spain
Photo from Wiki Commons

Then you asked, Where have you been most comfortable?

In the palace.

What did you see there?

Amazing things.

Then why is it so desolate?

Because all that can be taken away in a second.

Who can do that?

This clear discernment.

Where can you live safely?

In surrender.

Is there no threat of disaster?

Only what comes in your street,

inside your love.

Now silence. If I tell you more of this conversation,

those listening would leave themselves.

There would be no more door,

no roof or windows either.

Talking through the Door (1)

Patio de los Arrayanes, The Alhambra
Granada, Spain
Photo from Wiki Commons


You said, Who's at the door?

I said, Your slave.

You said, What do you want?

To see you and bow.

We talked through the door. I claimed

a great love and that I had given up

what the world gives to be in that love.

You said, Such claims require a witness.

I said, This longing, these tears.

You said, Discredited witnesses.

I said, Surely not.

You said, Who did you come with?

This majestic imagination you gave me,

Why did you come?

The musk of your wine was in the air.

What is your intention?

Friendship.

The Worm's Waking

This is how a human being can change.

There is a worm

addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly, he wakes up,

call it grace, whatever, something

wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.

He is the entire vineyard,

and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,

a growing wisdom and joy

that does not need to devour.

The Seed Market

Can you find another market like this?

Where, with your one rose

you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?

Where, for one seed you get a whole wilderness?

For one weak breath, the divine wind?

You have been fearful of being absorbed

in the ground, or drawn up by the air.

Now your waterbead lets go

and drops into the ocean, where it came from.

This giving up is not a repenting.

It is a deep honoring of yourself.

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.

Whoever's Calm and Sensible

There is a light seed grain inside.

You fill it with yourself, or it dies.

I'm caught in this curling energy. Your hair.

Whoever's calm and sensible is insane.

Love's Confusing Joy

If you want what visible reality

can give, you are an employee.

If you want the unseen world,

you are not living with your truth.

Both wishes are foolish,

but you'll be forgiven for forgetting

that what you really want is

love's confusing joy.

Happy Valentine's Day

Escaping to the Forest

The Dream, by Henri Rousseau

 

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.

Thirsty ones die of their thirst.

A nightingale sometimes

flies from a garden

to sing in the forest.

Evolutionary Intelligence

This groggy time we live, this is what it is like:

A man goes to sleep in the town

where he has always lived, and he dreams

he is living in another town.

He believes the reality of the dream town.

The world is that kind of sleep.

The dust of many crumbled cities

settles over us like a forgetful doze,

but we are older than those cities.

We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life

and into the animal state. Then into being human,

and always we have forgotten our former states,

except in early spring when we almost

remember being green again.

Humankind is being led along an evolving course,

through this migration of intelligences,

and though we seem to be sleeping,

there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream.

It will eventually startle us back

to the truth of who we are.

The Water You Want

Someone may be clairvoyant, able to see

the future, and yet have very little wisdom.

Like the man who saw water in his dream,

and began leading everyone toward the mirage.

I am the one with heart-vision.

I have torn open the veil.

So they set out with him inside the dream,

while he is actually sleeping

beside a river of pure water.

Any search moves away from the spot

where the object of the quest is.

Sleep deeply wherever you are on the way.

Maybe some traveler will wake you.

Give up subtle thinking, the twofold, threefold

multiplication of mistakes.

Listen to the sound of waves within you.

You are dreaming your thirst,

when the water you want

is inside the big vein on your neck.

Water and the Moon

There is a path from me to you

that I am constantly looking for

so I try to keep clear and still

as water does with the moon.

The One Thing You Must Do

There is one thing in this world which you must never forget to do.

If you forget everything else and not this, there is nothing to worry

about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you

will have done nothing in your life.

It is 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 knife of the finest tempering were nailed into a

wall to hang things on. For a penny an iron nail could be bought to

serve for that.

Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord.

Give your life to the one who already owns your breath and your

moments. If you don't, you will be like the one who takes a precious

dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his

dipper gourd. You will be wasting valuable keenness and foolishly

ignoring your dignity and your purpose.

A Pilgrimage to a Person

When you are not with close friends,

you are not in the presence.

It is sad to leave the people you travel with.

How much moreso those who remind you of God.

Hurry back to the ones protecting you.

On every trip, have only one objective,

to meet those who are friends

inside the presence.

If you stay home, keep the same purpose,

to meet the innermost presence

as it lives in people.

Be a pilgrim to the kaaba inside a human being,

and Mecca will rise into view on its own.

I Honor Those

I honor those who try

to rid themselves of any lying,

who empty the self

and have only clear being there.

Unfold Your Own Myth

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?

Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age,

smells the shirt of his lost son

and can see again?

Who lets a bucket down and brings up

a flowing prophet? Or like Moses goes for fire

and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,

and opens a door to the other world.

Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.

Omar storms in to kill the prophet

and leaves with blessings.

But don't be satisfied with stories, how things

have gone with others. Unfold

your own myth, so everyone will understand

the passage, We have opened you.

Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy

and tired. Then comes a moment of feeling

the wings you've grown, lifting.

Throat-Song

The Nightingale, by Grace Ndirtu, 32-second video here

Let your throat-song

be clear and strong enough

to make an emperor fall full-length,

suppliant, at the door.

Someone Digging in the Ground

May Picture, by Paul Klee

An eye is meant to see things.

The soul is here for its own joy.

A head has one use: for loving a true love.

Legs: to run after.

Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,

for learning what men have done and tried to do.

Mysteries are not to be solved. The eye goes blind

when it only wants to see why.

A lover is always accused of something.

But when he finds his love, whatever was lost

in the looking comes back completely changed.

On the way to Mecca, many dangers: thieves,

the blowing sand, only camel's milk to drink.

Still, each pilgrim kisses the black stone there

with pure longing, feeling in the surface

the taste of the lips he wants.

This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up,

while the real work is being done outside

by someone digging in the ground.

The Freshness

When it's cold and raining,

you are more beautiful.

And the snow brings me

even closer to your lips.

The inner secret, that which was never born,

you are that freshness, and I am with you now.

I can't explain the goings,

or the comings. You enter suddenly,

and I am nowhere again.

Inside the majesty.

Lightning

Lovers Walking in the Snow (Crow and Heron)

Suzuki Harunobu (Japanese, 1725–1770)

This is no ordinary friendship.

I attend your banquet as wine attends.

Like lightning, I am an expert at dying.

Like lightning, this beauty has no language.

It makes no difference

whether I win or lose.

You sit with us in a congregation of the dead,

where one handful of dirt says,

I was once a head of hair.

Another, I was a backbone.

You say nothing.

Love comes in, I can deliver you

from yourself in this moment.

Now lover and beloved grow quiet.

My mouth is burning with sweetness.

As Much as a Pen Knows

Do you think that I know what I'm doing?

That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?

As much as a pen knows what it's writing,

or the ball can guess where it's going next.

Two Kinds of Intelligence

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,

as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts

from books and from what the teacher says,

collecting information from the traditional sciences

as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.

You get ranked ahead or behind others

in regard to your competence in retaining

information. You stroll with this intelligence

in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always

more marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one

already completed and preserved inside you.

A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness

in the center of the chest. This other intelligence

does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,

and it does not move from outside to inside

through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead

from within you, moving out.

A Dumb Experiment

Break open your personal self

to taste the story of the nutmeat soul.

These voices come from that rattling

against the outer shell.

The nut and the oil inside

have voices that can only be heard

with another kind of listening.

If it weren't for the sweetness of the nut,

the inner talking, who would ever shake a walnut?

We listen to words

so we can silently

reach into the other.

Let the ear and mouth get quiet,

so this taste can come to the lip.

Too long we have been saying poetry,

talking discourses, explaining the mystery outloud.

Let us try a dumb experiment.

Uthman's Silence

The story is told of Uthman, who when he became caliph

mounted quickly the steps of Muhammad's pulpit,

where Abu Bakr, out of respect for the prophet,

seated himself on the second step.

There were three steps. Omar sat on the third step.

Uthman climbed to the top. When asked why, he replied,

If I sat on the third step, people would say

I was like Omar. If on the second step,

He's like Abu Bakr.

But up here where the chosen one sat, no one will think

to compare me with that king of the spirit.

And sometimes when he had climbed

to the preaching place, that sweet one Uthman,

would not say anything. He stayed silent

until midafternoon. No one asked him

for a sermon, and no one left the mosque.

In the silence many began to see with Uthman's light.

This is how a living master opens the inner eye.

The Many Wines

Glowing Night, by Oscar Bluemner

God has given us a dark wine so potent

that, we leave the two worlds.

God made Majnun love Layla so much

that just her dog would cause confusion in him.

There are thousands of wines

that can take over our minds.

Don't think all ecstasies are the same.

Jesus was lost in his love for God.

His donkey was drunk with barley.

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,

not the ones adulterated 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.

The Visions of Daquqi (4)

Old Cities, Msyir Mohammed


One of the seven answers, Names, sometimes

the names slip away,

but it is not forgetfulness.

It is our being so absorbed.

Then they all say to me,

Would you lead us in prayer?

Yes. But wait awhile.

I am still in some temporal confusion

that will be solved by companionship with you.

Through companionship with the ground

a grapevine grows. It opens

into the earth's darkness and flies.

It becomes selfless in the presence

of its origin and learns what it really is.

They nod, as though to say, Whenever you are ready.

That nodding was a flame in my heart.

I was freed from hourly time,

from sequence and relation.

The Visions of Daquqi (3)

Lanes, Ahmed Nussaif


The caravans had no food, yet food was dropping

all about them. If someone had said,

Look, over here, they would have thought him insane.

How can this happen. Am I dreaming?

I walk up to the trees. I eat the fruit.

I may as well believe.

Then the seven trees become one and then seven again.

At every second they are both one and seven.

Then they are seven men seated in meditation

for the sake of the one reality.

I come close and wave. They call,

O Daquqi, the glory and the crown.

How do they know my name?

They have never seen me until now.

Immediately they know my thought

and smile at each other.

Honored one, is this still hidden from you?

How can anything be hidden from one so dissolved in God?

I think inwardly, If this is the spirit-reality,

how is it we are speaking words and saying names?

The Visions of Daquqi (2)

Kliem of the South, Ahmed Nussaif


What are those candles that no one seems to see?

In the presence of such lights

people were looking for lamps to buy.

Then the seven became one,

in the middle of the sky's rim.

Then that fanned out to seven again.

There were connections between candles

that cannot be said. I saw, but I cannot say.

They became seven men and then seven trees,

so dense with leaves and fruit no limbs were visible.

Flashes of light

spurted from each fruit like juice.

And most marvelous of all was that hundreds

of thousands of people were passing beside the trees,

risking their lives, sacrificing everything,

to find some scrap of shade. No one saw

the trees with their tremendous shade.

The Visions of Daquqi (1)

Husam, tell about the visions of Daquqi,

who said, I have traveled east and west

not knowing which way I was going,

following the moon, lost inside God.

Someone asked, Why do you go barefooted

over the stones and thorns.

What, he answered. What.

A bewildered lover does not walk on feet.

He or she walks on love. There are no "long"

or "short" trips for those. No time.

The body learned from spirit how to travel.

A saint's body moves in the unconditioned way,

though it seems to be in conditionedness.

Daquqi said, One day I was going along

looking to see in people the shining of the Friend.

I came to the shore at twilight and saw

seven candles. I hurried along the beach

toward them. I was amazed. My amazement was amazed.

Waves of bewilderment broke over my head.