Rumi the big red book, p.21
Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 21
A dawn wind blows through the rose garden.
Love left, because of one thing I did wrong.
Now it returns.
Compassion curves back here,
and lightheartedness.
A blind man throws away his cane.
A baby begins to eat from the plate.
A falcon lifts toward the king’s drum.
Now silence unweaves the shroud of words we have woven.
HOMETOWN STREETS1
Sleep dissolves your mind,
but how do the insane sleep?
What do the love-crazed know
of night-and-day differences?
God-lovers, mostly in another world,
read another book with another eye.
Try changing to a bird or a fish.
Be lost on some road inside the beloved.
You will not know what a matzoob feels
until you are one of them.
Shams sets these new lights adrift
through our hometown streets, the universe.
PICTURES OF THE SOUL
My soul, there is an image of you
on each side of the six-sided mirror cube
that we call the universe,
but mirrors can only reveal according to their capacity.
They cannot picture the stages of the soul’s growing.
The sun asks the inner sun, How can I see you?
When you set, I rise, comes the answer.
Intellect wants to restrain the soul
like a camel with its feet tied,
and love longs to hold the soul’s seven levels,
but neither intention is possible.
Sometimes in a harvest circle
a single piece of grain in the cloud of chaff and stems
seems to have legs and wings.
That is the size and effect of mind in the region of soul.
In the ocean once you saw what the soul is.
Since then awe has flooded you.
When the soul asks questions,
the pleasure of gold earrings comes to everyone’s ears.
Personality is a small dog trying to get the soul to play.
I hear you call, and I am out walking the road
without legs or feet.
What could we do that resembles what you do?
Days, nights? We are shade under your tree.
Adam left the spirit world because you are here.
Love is an ocean storm moving for your touch.
To have your words in this, I must stop speaking.
BORDER STATIONS2
We make heads into feet, we enter and cross the river.
We sic armies into a fight, then jump out of the world.
We sit on love’s horse and fly. We break through form,
human definitions scattered behind us on the road.
The first stage, a blood swamp, our red feet slogging,
then the border station where Majnun and Layla live.
Horses nervous. Then the self with its legendary wealth.
That left, we are walking a beach
crunching pearls with every step.
Now the soul is flying straight like a moth to the candleflame
of Shams Tabriz. We were always heading there.
NO MORE THE PRESENCE
No more meanings.
My pleasure now is with the inner sun, the inner moon.
No longer two worlds signaling each other.
Shapes do not come to mind.
This giving up has nothing to do with exhaustion.
I walk from one garden to another,
waves against my boat, ocean flames refining,
as fresh as flowers and fish calligraphy.
Let us see what they are writing.
Green itself begs me dive in this that Shams has given.
GIVENS
The drums beating now inside us,
we will hear them tomorrow too.
We have such fear of what comes next,
fear of death.
These loves are like pieces of cotton.
Throw them in the fire.
Death will be a meeting like that flaring up,
a presence you have always wanted to be with.
This body and this universe keep us from freedom.
Those of you decorating your cells so beautifully,
do you think they will not be torn down?
Fire-change and the demolishing of prisons
are givens here.
Trust that they will come to you.
I KEEP USING TWO PRONOUNS
The universe swings again into your orbit.
Am I looking for you, or you for me?
The question is all wrong.
As long as I keep using two pronouns,
I am this inbetween, two-headed thing with no name.
Some of the water in my stream flows quickly by.
Some stays frozen in an ice ledge against the bank.
Sun says to stone, Let me shine inside you
and change your stoniness to a jewel.
The sun of infinite love comes into your love,
and you are given more and more humble work.
Then you are given mastery.
The sun says to an unripe grape, There is a kitchen inside you,
where you can make vinegar, or if I help, sweet juice.
The king says to the falcon, I cover your eyes with a hood,
so that you will break with your kind and see only my face.
The falcon replies, Only you.
The rose says to the garden, I display these robes,
so that you will let the other flowers go
and be a one-rose garden.
Imagine a man who sells a donkey in order to be with Jesus.
Now imagine him selling Jesus to get a donkey.
This does happen.
Jesus can transform a drunkard into gold.
If the drunk is already golden, he can be changed to pure diamond.
If already that, then the circling planets,
Jupiter, Venus, the moon.
Never think that you are worthless.
God has already bought you for an enormous amount.
Gifts keep arriving.
Dates from a withered branch.
Wisdom, the same that came to Jesus in the cradle.
My face now makes the world’s bathhouse hot.
Do not look at the wet paintings on the wall.
Look here.
There is a light in us that has nothing to do with night and day.
There are grapes that never saw a vineyard.
These gifts are yours now, if you can see.
We Are All Returning.
says the text. Enjoy Shams.
Or if not that, at least listen
to what honest people tell you.
YOUR OLD AUNT AND UNCLE
My mother was destiny. My father, grace.
I am the prince of synchronicity and serendipity.
If I meet a wolf, he turns into a kind friend.
If I am lowered into a well, it becomes a garden.
A stony miser comes to me and starts giving his wealth away.
Do not offer me money.
I have a teacher whose fragrance brings statues to life.
If his face appears,
your old aunt will leave your uncle and never return.
I ask, Will you finish this story
and give the explanation?
You say, Yes.
THIS PRAISING SOUND
There is a tradition that God can be seen in the color red.
In the lights that come from red hair.
They draw you, don’t they?
The unknowable spirit has eyebrows and eyes and skin.
Muhammad in a living form.
He looked at people!
Hundreds of doors swung open.
His form went away,
and now this praising sound floods the world.
WHEN COMPLETELY NAKED
If my words are not saying what you would say,
slap my face.
Discipline me as a loving mother does
a babbling child caught up in nonsense.
A thirsty man runs into the sea,
and the sea holds a sword to his throat.
A lily looks at a bank of roses,
wilts, and says nothing.
I am a tambourine.
Do not put me aside until the fast-dancing starts.
Play me some all along.
Help me with these little sounds.
Joseph is most beautiful when he is completely naked,
but his shirt gives you an idea,
as the body lets you glimpse the glitter
on the water of the soul.
Even if the corpse washer binds my jaw shut,
you will still hear this song
coming out of my dead silence.
FRIENDS WITH SUNLIGHT
Play no music but the soul’s,
that friend who sometimes takes a form like Joseph,
a handsomeness that tears coverings,
beauty that says secrets and gets bewildered.
As dogs lap blood, we drink life.
This is how we are with love’s melody,
a taste of springwater, birdsound near.
Wherever Jesus walks in time and space,
there is a robe. This is it.
The sun was born from the friend,
not out of an east-west convergence.
We move as particles.
That motion is all we need do.
Shams became our friend,
so we are friends with sunlight.
I’M NOT SAYING THIS RIGHT
You bind me, and I tear away in a rage to open out
into air, a round brightness, a candlepoint,
all reason, all love.
This confusing joy, your doing,
this hangover, your tender thorn.
You turn to look, I turn.
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 with love for Shams.
THE STEAMBATH
Steam fills the bath, and frozen figures on the wall
open their eyes, wet and round,
Narcissus eyes that see enormous distances.
And new ears that love the details of any story.
The figures dance like friends diving into red wine,
coming up and diving again.
Steam spills into the courtyard. It is the sound of resurrection.
They move from one corner laughing across to the other corner.
No one notices how steam opens the rose of each mind,
fills each beggar’s cup solid with coins. Hold out a basket.
It fills up so well that emptiness becomes what you want.
The judge and the accused forget the sentencing.
Someone stands up to speak,
and the wood of the table becomes holy.
The tavern in that second is actually made of wine.
The dead drink it in. Then the steam evaporates.
The figures sink back into the wall, eyes blank, ears just lines.
Now it is happening again, outside.
The garden fills with bird and leaf sounds.
We stand in the wake of this chattering and grow airy.
How can anyone say what happens, even if each of us
dips a pen a hundred million times into ink?
Chapter 18
Shams Tabriz: The Friend
Now all distinctions run together. There is a being who is your whole life, who does not exist, a tenderness, a ruin, rain, one with wonderful friends. Avalanche. There is a sun within you that nurtures the fruit trees of your invisible being. Shams is the name of that sun. Shams Tabriz, your face, is what every religion tries to remember. Rumi’s son Sultan Velad describes what it felt like to be with Shams: “When he spoke the Qur’an and the sayings of Muhammad, he sowed new love in my soul. He revealed secrets. He made me fly without wings and reach the ocean with no boundaries, where I found peace and, like a bird freed from a trap, felt safe from all dangers” (Veladnama).
Here is a story from Shams’s Maqalat. A great caravan arrives at a place where there is no habitation and no water. There is a deep well, but no bucket or rope. To test for freshwater, the caravaners tie a kettle to a rope of their own and let it down. It strikes something, and they pull, but the kettle breaks away. They send down another and lose it too. After that they lower a thirsty volunteer from the caravan, then another, and another, but they also disappear. A wise man says he will go down. He is nearly to the bottom, when a terrible dark creature appears.
“I can never escape from you,” says the man to the monster, “but I hope at least to stay aware, so I can see what is happening to me.”
“Don’t tell me long stories,” says the monster. “You are my prisoner. You will never leave unless you answer one question.”
“Ask it.”
“Where is the best place?”
The wise man reflects to himself, “I am totally helpless here. If I say Baghdad or some other beautiful place, it may be that I will insult his hometown by not mentioning it.” He replies, “The best place for someone to live is where he feels at home. If that is a hole in the middle of the earth, then that is his home. That is the best place.”
“Well said. You are a rare human being,” says the monster. “Because of your blessing, I will set the others in your care free and give you authority over the earth. I will take no more prisoners, and I will release the waters of this well.”
Shams in his wild wisdom advises us to bless the monster in his home, where he lives. I like what you have done with the place.
THE FRIEND
There is a being who is drunk without wine,
full without food, and buried in a ruin,
someone not made of earth, air, fire, or water,
a rain out of the clear blue,
hundreds of nightskies and suns,
one who is given wisdom directly,
not from books, one beyond any religion,
or right and wrong, one with wonderful friends,
one who does not exist,
a hidden glory like Shams.
There is no need to look anywhere for this one,
who is your whole life.
AN INVISIBLE BEE
Look how desire has changed in you,
how light and colorless it is,
with the world growing new marvels
because of your changing.
Your soul has become an invisible bee.
We don’t see it working,
but there’s the full honeycomb.
Your body’s height, six feet or so,
but your soul rises through nine levels of sky.
A barrel corked with earth and a raw wooden spile
keeps the oldest vineyard’s wine inside.
When I see you, it is not so much your physical form,
but the company of two riders,
your pure-fire devotion and your love
for the one who teaches you.
Then the sun and moon on foot behind those.
A GRAINY TASTE
Without a net, I catch a falcon and release it to the sky,
hunting God.
This wine I drink today was never held in a clay jar.
I love this world,
even as I hear the great wind of leaving it rising,
for there is a grainy taste I prefer
to every idea of heaven: human friendship.
THE MIRROR BETWEEN US
The mirror between us is breath-mist when I speak.
Your face in water. I reach. The work grows muddy.
Even friend and beloved are wrong words for this.
Even ahhhhhh retreats back into my mouth.
The same if the moon’s behind cloud or being released.
A pure silent look is better.
THE PLEIADES
In absence aloes wood burns fragrant.
The love we feel is smoke from that.
Existence gets painted with nonexistence, its source,
the fire behind a screen.
Smoke born of this fire hides the fire.
Pass through the smoke.
Soul is a moving river; body, the riverbed.
Soul can break the circle of fate and habit.
Take hold the hand of absence,
and let it draw you through the Pleiades,
giving up on wet and dry, hot and cold.
You become the confidante of Shams Tabriz.
You see clearly the glory of nothing
and stand, inexplicably, there.
PARINDA, THE ONE WHO FLIES AWAY
The one my soul is searching for is not here.
Where has he gone?
The one like a lit candle,
like a seat with roses growing around it.
Our eyes look for that one first,
but I do not see him today.
