Rumi the big red book, p.24
Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 24
The friend, Does a drop stay still in the ocean?
Move with the entirety
and with the tiniest particular.
Be the moisture in an oyster
that helps to form one pearl.
THIS OUT OF CONTROL
Of these two thousand I and We people,
which am I?
Do not try and keep me from asking.
Listen, when I am this out of control,
but do not put anything breakable in my way.
There is an original inside me.
What is here is a mirror for that, for you.
If you are joyful, I am.
If you grieve, or if you are bitter, or graceful,
I take on those qualities.
Like the shadow of a cypress tree in a meadow.
Like the shadow of a rose, I live close to the rose.
If I separated myself from you,
I would turn entirely thorn.
Every second, I drink another cup of my own blood-wine.
Every instant, I break an empty cup against your door.
I reach out, wanting you to tear me open.
Saladin’s generosity lights a candle in my chest.
Who am I then? His empty begging bowl.
WANDERING AND COMING BACK
I have gone to many cities,
but I have never found anyone like you.
Coming back, a strange joy fills me.
What can I say about this wandering with unlucky travelers?
I was dead. Now I live.
Is it that I have seen your face and heard your voice?
Allow the evidence to show.
Give me something.
Say, I have a gift for you, Joseph,
this bright-polished face.
STAY IN A LISTENING POSTURE
What is wrong with this handsome face?
Does it mirror your heart’s purity?
Before you crawl in a sack,
ask the sack owner what is in it.
Make him talk, then catch the fragrance.
Has he taken in roses and tulips and jasmine?
When he speaks of scripture,
do you feel the presence of David,
Noah, Jesus, and Moses, each with a distinct essence.
When he does evening prayer,
do you feel Muhammad coming near,
that cleansing desert nightwind?
If you want to know who someone is,
what is flowing through or not flowing,
stay in a listening posture.
Close your eyes inside your companion’s shadow.
But always remember, you have your own source.
Never leave that. Explore the inner foundation stone by stone.
Look at this three-stringed instrument,
and that piece of amber there,
and whatever is beside the amber, a drum.
The outer is only decor.
Do not become a scholar of straw.
Do not be the farmer who throws seed up
and tries to harvest a storm.
Chapter 20
As-Sabur, The Patient
I used to think I had too much patience, but it was stubbornness instead, and a fear of speaking. A morning wind in the leaves is making the branches move. What binds and releases us is different in every individual case. Discipline is needed, required to live inside presence with patience. In the actual sun, feeling the nearness of Shams Tabriz. There is a fierce courtesy to be learned, as grapes hurry inwardly toward their own sweetness. They ripen, holding a taste of light. Wait, and trust the waiting.
DISCIPLINES
Do not expect to be always happy on this way.
You have been caught by a lion, my dear.
The friend dumps plaster on your head.
Think of it as expensive perfume.
Inside you there is a monster
that must be tied up and whipped.
Watch the man beating a rug.
He is not mad at it.
He wants to loosen the layers of dirt.
Ego accumulations are not loosened with one swat.
Continual work is necessary, disciplines.
In dreams, and even awake,
you will hear the beloved screaming at you.
A carpenter saws and chisels a piece of wood,
because he knows how he wants to use it.
Curing a hide, the tanner
rubs in acid and all manner of filth.
This makes a beautiful soft leather.
What does the half-finished hide know?
Every hard thing that happens works on you like that.
Hurry, Shams. Come back like the sun comes back
every day with new and powerful secrets.
CONTINUOUSLY
Listening to the prophet David play psalms and music,
a strange excitement came, presence and patience.
Egyptian granaries full of grain and Joseph’s handsomeness.
Actual sun and nearness.
Sky, undecided; earth, silent.
In this precarious unknowing we live,
love does not want to say the name of Hu.
You stay concealed. A falcon lights.
How far away? Mt. Sinai under Moses.
The indications are that you are the one who appears,
not again, but continuously.
FIERCE COURTESY
The connection to the friend is secret
and very fragile. The image of that friendship
is in how you love, the grace and delicacy,
the subtle talking together in full prostration
outside of time. When you are there,
remember the fierce courtesy of the one with you.
WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DRINKING?
I am drifting off to sleep.
You wake me up wanting new musical words,
new language-like flute notes.
My hands and feet are dormant.
You pull my ear.
Tell the story again from the beginning.
Dark strands of evening cover the earth.
You beg for poems about the night’s hair,
how sweetness rises in the canebrake.
I finish one poem. You want another, another.
Imagine this. You are dead tired, ready for sleep.
Your assistant comes wanting to hear about ambergris.
What would you do?
What have you been drinking
that you want so many ecstatic poems?
These are not real questions. I am joking.
In your presence call me any name, Kaymaz, Sencer.
It is all the same, particle underfoot, floating dust mote.
LOOK AT A FOUNTAIN
Those with no energy have gone.
You that remain, do you know
who you are? How many?
Can you look at a fountain and become water?
Can you recognize the great self
and so enjoy your individual selves?
Do you run from joy?
Perhaps the lion should not flee the fox.
Let your loving and your soul
burn up in this candle. Let new life come.
The friend is at the door.
You are the lock his key fits.
You are a piece of candy,
the choice words of a poem,
the friend and the swallow
of silence here at the end.
SICK OF SCRIPTURE
My head turns around my feet,
one of which is fixed to the ground like a compass,
the other mad with the wandering moon
and the slow-burning of Mars.
Bored, ashamed, floating in a gold sky,
in deep ecstasy, all secrets told.
The son of a lion is out looking for heart-blood to drink.
You think I am sick, so you read the first sura,
but scripture is what I am sick of.
When Hallaj spoke his truth,
they crucified him for his words.
If Hallaj were here, he would point them to me.
Unlike this teacher here who will not bow,
I do not wash corpses or carve markings on stone.
The universe itself recognizes Shams Tabriz,
but not you.
I am tired of being around such blindness.
TWO HUMAN-SIZED WEDDING CANDLES
A message comes like honey to your heart.
Seven friends and a dog have slept three hundred and nine days
with God’s wind turning them to rest on one side,
then the other.
There is another way of sleeping I pray we avoid,
the kind that is running after joy with its grief shadow behind it,
or the other, persistently trailing grief,
meeting chance elation at the corner.
Help us to give up back-and-forth, matter-illusion alternating
with the mind’s calibration of what is good and bad,
wet and dry. Anything alligator swallows becomes alligator.
Two human-sized wedding candles walk toward fire.
A piece of paper covered with numbers and curving color streaks
drops in water, blurs, and flows away.
WE PRESCRIBE A FRIEND
We are wisdom and healing,
roasted meat and the star Canopus.
We are ground and the spilled wine sinking in.
When illness comes, we cure it.
For sadness, we prescribe a friend.
For death, a friend.
Run to meet us on the road.
We stay modest, and we bless.
We look like this, but this is a tree,
and we are morning wind in the leaves
that makes the branches move.
Silence turning now into this, now that.
WRETCHED, BUT LAUGHING
In this river the soul is a waterwheel
that no matter how it is facing,
water pours through, turning, returning to the river.
Even if you put your side or your back to the river,
water still comes through.
A shadow cannot ignore the sun
that all day creates and moves it.
The soul lives like a drop of mercury
in the palm of a palsied man.
Or say the soul is a moon,
that every thirty nights has two so empty, in union,
that it disappears.
The other twenty-eight nights
it endures stages of separation, wretched, but laughing.
Laughter is the way of lovers.
They live and die tickled, and always fresh-faced,
knowing the return that is coming.
Do not question this.
The answers and your questions in response
will cause your eyes to see wrongly.
Live the laughing silence.
I AM INSIDE YOUR THIRST
Do not run away.
Run inward,
as unripe grapes hurry toward their own sweetness.
Do not try to bite through this rope.
You are the bow. This is the bowstring.
You kick your hindlegs up,
thinking you are permanently through with work.
I have just put you out to pasture for the day.
I am deep inside your thirst and your hunger.
There is no escaping me.
That other wanting, that other rationality,
those are donkey’s milk, or worse.
Do not drink them.
There is no security, except for what you feel among lovers.
Crawl in with those.
Remember the ababil birds, who picked up little stones
and dropped them from a great height onto invading elephants.
The love in your chest is like an ababil bird,
searching the ground, listening, then flying higher and higher.
The rose opens.
A cauldron begins to boil.
The sun heats up,
but you must wait a long time. Wait.
Shams put a taste of light inside patience.
The bat flies back to his cave.
THE BOTTLE IS CORKED
The rock splits open as wings beat air, wanting.
The campfire gives in to rain,
but I cannot go to sleep, or be patient.
Part of me wants to eat the stones
and hold you back when you are leaving,
until your good laughter turns bitter and wrong.
I worry that I won’t have someone to talk to,
and breathe with. Don’t you understand
that I am some kind of food for you?
I am a place where you can work.
The bottle is corked and sitting on the table.
Someone comes in and sees me without you,
and puts his hand on my head like I am a child.
This is so difficult.
YOUR FIRST EYES
A lover has four streams inside,
of water, wine, honey, and milk.
Find those in yourself and pay no attention
what so-and-so says about such-and-such.
The rose does not care
if someone calls it a thorn, or a jasmine.
Ordinary eyes categorize human beings.
That one is a Zoroastrian. This one, Muslim.
Walk instead with the other vision given you,
your first eyes.
Do not squint, and do not stare blankly like a vulture.
Those who love fire fall in the fire.
A fly slips from the edge into the whey.
If you are in love with the infinite,
why grieve over the ground washing away in the rain?
Bow to the essence in a human being.
A desert drinks war-blood,
but if it knew this secret, springs would rise, rose gardens.
Do not be content with judging people good and bad.
Grow out of that. The great blessing is
that Shams has poured a strength into the ground
that lets us wait and trust the waiting.
YOU NEVER LEFT
The lord of beauty enters the soul
as a man walks into an orchard in spring.
Come into me that way again.
Light the lamp in the eye of Joseph.
Cure Jacob’s sadness.
Though you never left,
come and sit down here and ask,
Why are you so confused?
Like a fresh idea in an artist’s mind,
you fashion things before they come into being.
You sweep the floor
like the man who keeps the doorway.
When you brush a form clean,
it becomes what it truly is.
You guard your silence perfectly
like a waterbag that does not leak.
You live where Shams lives
because your heart-donkey
was strong enough to take you there.
WHO IS THE FRIEND?1
Circulate the cup.
Take me out of who I am and what I have done,
my name and my shame.
You who pour the wine, keep after me.
Trick me. When I have none of your joy,
I worry about everything. Lay your traps.
I should fast.
Someone who fasts visits the friend at night.
But more often I come in the front door,
and you fly through the roof.
Be more patient.
Muslims, what is there to do?
I am burning up and yet unsatisfied.
There is no cure
but the taste of what the saints pass around.
The story of lovers has no end,
so we will be happy with this, just this, Goodbye.
And the answer to Mutanabbi’s riddle is,
Someone whom no wine consoles.
MORNING TALK
Holiday over, people go back to work,
the clever ones to the bazaar, hunting new sources of capital.
Lovers move back inside presence,
which is their bazaar and their art.
They are bored with other kinds of making and trading,
those lovers who appear to be insane,
in a broken line, glazed and stumbling.
Now they open their wings and lift,
turning in circles over the high plain,
their way of worshiping the sun.
Inside you they grow more alive,
as those living outside you get sad and compulsive.
Soul becomes itself when it dies on a gallows like Hallaj.
Sometimes lovers take vows of silence.
Then a clear morning comes, and they talk all through it.
Listening to Shams is a fine way of deepening into soul.
THE GROUND CRIES OUT
I feel like the ground,
astonished at what the atmosphere has brought to it.
What I know is growing inside me.
