Rumi the big red book, p.16
Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 16
A GREAT ROSE TREE
This is the day and the year of the rose.
The whole garden is opening with laughter.
Iris whispering to cypress.
The rose is the joy of meeting someone.
The rose is a world imagination cannot imagine.
A messenger from the orchard where the soul lives.
A small seed that points to a great rose tree.
Hold its hand and walk like a child.
A rose is what grows from the work the prophets do.
Full moon, new moon.
Accept the invitation spring extends,
four birds flying toward a master.
A rose is all these,
and the silence that closes and sits in the shade, a bud.
A LIGHT WITHIN HIS LIGHT
I circled awhile with each of the intelligences,
the nine fathers that control the levels of spirit growth.
I revolved for years with the stars
through each astrological sign.
I disappeared into the kingdom of nearness.
I saw what I have seen,
receiving nourishment as a child does in the womb.
Personalities are born once.
A mystic many times.
Wearing the body-robe, I have been busy in the market,
weighing and arguing prices.
Sometimes I have torn the robe off
with my own hands and thrown it away.
I have spent long nights in monasteries,
and I have slept with those who claim to believe nothing
on the porches of pagodas, just traveling through.
When someone feels jealous,
I am inside the hurt and the need to possess.
When anyone is sick, I feel feverish and dizzy.
I am cloud and rain being released,
then the meadow as it soaks in.
I wash the grains of mortality
from the cloth around a dervish.
I am the rose of eternity, not made of water or fire,
not of the wandering wind, or even earth.
I play with those.
I am not Shams Tabriz,
but a light within his light.
If you see me, be careful.
Tell no one what you have seen.
PURE SILENCE
I have come this time to burn my thorns,
to purify my life,
to take up service again in the garden.
I come weeping to these waters
to rise free of passion and belief.
Look at my face.
These tears are traces of you.
I will shorten this poem,
because the rest of it is being said
in the world within our eyes.
Do you know this silence?
It is not the same as in your room
when you have no one to talk to.
This is pure silence,
not the kind that happens
when living dogs are eating a dead one.
A WAKING TOWN
The taste of this life comes from you,
soul moving like a mountain stream under a sky of flowers.
Seeing such beauty makes me expect the dregs tomorrow.
I call you moon, but that is not right.
Does anything resemble you?
The noise of a waking town fills my chest.
Shams is saying this.
WALKINGSTICK DRAGON
I want to dance here in this music,
not in spirit, where there is no time.
I circle the sun like shadow.
My head becomes my feet.
Covered with existence, Pharaoh.
Annihilated, I am Moses.
A pen between God-fingers, a walkingstick dragon,
my blind mind taps along its cane of thought.
Love does no thinking.
It waits with soul, with me, weeping in this corner.
We are strangers here where we never hear yes.
We must be from some other town.
LET THE WAY ITSELF ARRIVE
Desires come, my wishes and my longing.
I am tied up, knot on top of knot.
Then you that untie me come.
Enough talk of being on some “path.”
Let the way itself arrive.
You picked up a handful of earth.
I was in that handful.
I can say the difference between good and bad,
but not how I know your beauty.
Mind refuses to burn with love.
Saladin is central, yet hidden.
The Qutb, the pole of love,
reaches here, to this ground.
MOUNTED MAN
Look at this figure of a man on horseback,
his turban with gold thread, striking a gallant pose
and asking, Where is death? Show me.
He seems powerful, but he is a fake.
Death attacks from six sides. Hello, jackass.
Where is your magnetism now, the famous temperament?
The jokes you told, the carpets you gave relatives?
It is not enough to spend your life turning bread into dung.
We are pawing through manure to find pearls.
There are people with the light of God on them.
Serve those. Do not trivialize any suffering.
I say this to myself. I am that mounted man, his illusion.
How long shall I keep pointing to others?
Shams Tabriz is a fountain.
We wash in the water of his eyes.
CLOUDS
Every dustgrain shines in the sun.
I turn, remembering that.
Be finely ground in the love-mortar,
as pearls and coral are for medicine.
Beauty now is particulate, granular.
A light-spirit lives in you for your whole life.
When it leaves, it leaves completely.
You can call, but it will not come.
Only if your soul learns some spirit magic
will it choose to rest anywhere for a while.
Remember those arrogant angels, Harut and Marut,
who thought they were superior to Adam.
They were given lust and passion and sent down into the world,
where they tried to seduce a beautiful woman.
She resisted. She wanted to learn from them
the magic power-word
by which they could ascend back to the spirit world.
In their blind desire they told it to her,
and she immediately rose to become the planet Venus,
the evening star, while they, to show their passionate distraction,
and to be forgiven, chose to hang head down
in a pit in Babylon.
That well, the Babylonian angel prison,
was a momentary stopping place.
Now remember Tabriz,
the town that glows from within.
Even the clouds there are read for their astrological meanings.
LANGUAGE IS A TAILOR’S SHOP WHERE NOTHING FITS
The sun comes up out of the water.
Dust motes fill with music.
La’illaha il’Allah,
There is no reality but God.
Why mention flecks of dust?
When the sun of the soul’s intelligence arrives,
it wears no cloak and no hat.
Then the moon, the soul’s love, rises out of watery hills,
and the sun goes down, Joseph into his well.
Point your head out of the ground like an ant.
Walk onto the threshing floor with new information.
We have been so happy with rotten bits of grain,
because we did not know about these sweet green ears.
It is so simple to say, We have hands and feet.
We can walk out into the open.
Why mention ants?
Solomon himself tears his robe with wanting this
that we try to say with useless imagery.
Language is a tailor’s shop where nothing fits.
They have cut and sewn a gown to fit the figure of the buyer.
The gown is too long. The buyer is too short.
Bring a taller person.
The tape measure is a bowstring
as long as from here to the moon.
Bring someone that tall.
Now maybe I will be quiet
and let silence separate what is true from what are lies,
as threshing does.
ONLY ONE SUNRISE A DAY
You will not find another friend like me.
You spend your days in all directions.
No one accepts your money but me.
You are the dry ditch. I am rain.
You are the rubble of a building.
I am the architect.
There is only one sunrise a day.
In your sleep you see many shapes and people.
When you wake, you see nothing.
Close those eyes and open these eyes.
What you have been wanting is a donkey lying sick on the ground.
What you have been doing is the bit and halter on that donkey.
There is sweet syrup here where you have been buying vinegar,
and unripened fruit. Walk into the hospital.
There is no shame in going where everyone has to go.
Without that healing you are a body with no head.
Be a turban wound around the head.
The mirror is black and rusty.
Who is the lucky man doing business with?
Think of the one who gave you thought.
Walk toward whoever gave you feet.
Look for the one behind your seeing.
Sing and clap because the whole ocean is a bit of foam.
No accidents are happening here.
Listen within your ear.
Speak without forming words.
Language turns against itself and is likely to cause injury.
THAT MOMENT AGAIN
Light going dim. Is it my eyes or a cloud,
or the sun itself, or the window?
I cannot see the point of the needle,
or the other end of the thread.
I want that moment again
when I spread out like olive oil in the skillet.
The same heat makes iron steel.
Abraham, a bed of jasmine sitting quietly, or talking.
Unmanned, I am a true person,
or at least the ring knocker on the door where they live.
The prophet says, Fasting protects. Do that.
On dry land a fish needs to be wrapped in something.
In the ocean, as you see, it grows a coat of mail.
I HAVE SUCH A TEACHER
Last night my teacher taught me the lesson of poverty,
having nothing and wanting nothing.
I am a naked man standing inside a mine of rubies,
clothed in red silk.
I absorb the shining, and now I see the ocean,
billions of simultaneous motions moving in me.
A circle of lovely, quiet people
becomes the ring on my finger.
Then the wind and thunder of rain on the way.
I have such a teacher.
THE SNOW-WORLD MELTS
Think of the phoenix coming up out of the ashes,
but not flying off.
For a moment we have form. We cannot see.
How can we be conscious and you be conscious
at the same time and separate?
Copper when an alchemist works on it
loses its copper qualities.
Seeds in spring begin to be trees. No longer seed.
Brushwood put in the fire changes.
The snow-world melts.
You step in my footprint, and it is gone.
It is not that I have done anything
to deserve this attention from you.
Predestination and freewill, we can argue them,
but they are only ideas.
What is real is a presence, like Shams.
WIND THAT TASTES OF BREAD AND SALT
There is no more wine. My bowl is broken.
I am terribly sick, and only Shams can cure me.
Do you know Shams, the prince of seeing,
who lifts the utterly drowned up out of the ocean
and revives them, so that the shore
looks like multiple marriages are going on,
easy laughing, a formal toast, a procession with music.
Shams is a trumpet note of light that sets the atoms spinning,
a wind that comes at dawn tasting of bread and salt.
Move to the edge and over. Fly with the wings he gives,
and if you get tired, lie down, but keep opening inside your soul.
A THIRSTY FISH
I do not get tired of you.
Do not grow weary of being compassionate toward me.
All this thirst-equipment must surely be tired of me,
the waterjar and the water-carrier.
I have a thirsty fish in me
that can never find enough of what it is thirsty for.
Show me the way to the ocean.
Break these half measures, these small containers.
All this fantasy and grief.
Let my house be drowned in the wave that rose last night
out of the courtyard hidden in the center of my chest.
Joseph fell like a moon into my well.
The harvest I expected was washed away.
But no matter.
A fire has risen above my tombstone hat.
I do not want learning, or dignity, or respectability.
I want this music and this dawn
and the warmth of your cheek against mine.
The grief-armies assemble, but I am not going with them.
This is how it always is when I finish a poem.
A great silence overcomes me,
and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.
A WATERBIRD FLYING INTO THE SUN
What I want is to see your face,
in a tree, in the sun coming out, in the air.
What I want
is to hear the falcon drum
and light again on your forearm.
You say, Tell him I am not here.
The sound of that brusque dismissal becomes what I want.
To see in every palm your elegant silver coin-shavings,
to turn with the wheel of the rain,
to fall with the falling bread of every experience,
to swim like a huge fish in ocean water.
To be Jacob recognizing Joseph,
to be a desert mountain instead of a city.
I am tired of cowards.
I want to live with lions, with Moses.
Not whining teary people.
I want the ranting of drunkards.
I want to sing like birds sing,
not worrying who hears, or what they think.
Last night a great teacher went door to door with a lamp,
He who is not to be found is the one I am looking for.
Beyond wanting, beyond place, inside form, that one.
A flute says, I have no hope of finding that.
But love plays and is the music played.
Let that musician finish this poem.
Shams, I am a waterbird
flying into the sun.
Chapter 14
Osho
Osho was very generous with his genius. When I went to Poona in 1988, he answered a question of mine. “Rumi says, ‘I want burning, burning.’ What does this burning have to do with my own possible enlightenment?”
“You have asked a very dangerous question, Coleman. Burning has nothing to do with your enlightenment. This work you have done with Rumi is beautiful. It has to be, because it is coming out of Rumi’s love. But for you these poems can become ecstatic self-hypnosis.”
He pretty much nailed me to the floor with that one. Sufism is good, but end up with Zen. It was a fine hit he gave me. I am still drawn to the Sufi longing and love-madness, but clarity is coming up strong on the inside. I have not assimilated his wisdom yet, but I mean to. I am very grateful to him. But it is not wisdom for everyone. Osho crafted his words to suit the individual. Ecstatic self-hypnosis might be just the thing for someone else. He was showing me a daylight beyond any beloved darkness, an ecstatic sobriety beyond any drunkenness.
FRIDAY
For a dervish every day feels like Friday,
the beginning of a holiday,
a fresh setting out that will not find an end.
Dressed in the soul’s handsomeness,
you are a whole month of Fridays,
sweet outside, sweet in.
Your mind and your deep being walk together
as friends walk along inside their friendship.
Debris does not stay in place on a fast-running creek.
Let grudges wash out into the sea.
Your soul’s eye watches a spring-green branch moving,
while these other eyes love the old stories.
