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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Rumi acknowledges Shams as the source of the big red book of ghazals (odes) and rubai (quatrains) he calls The Works of Shams of Tabriz. Some refer to it simply as The Shams.
Emptiness is where his sama leads us, sama being the deep listening to poetry and its surround of music and movement.
The Hebrew word, makom, refers to the sacred as a location. One can live in the heart. Rumi’s odes speak from there and invite us in as though to a galactic residence of inferiority.
I say that the exclusivity of most of the organized religions does insult the soul.
The name Rumi means “from Roman Anatolia.” He was not known by that name, of course, until after his family, fleeing the threat of the invading Mongol armies, emigrated to Konya, Turkey, sometime between 1215 and 1220.
That stranger was the wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, who had traveled throughout the Middle East searching and praying for someone who could “endure my company.”
Rumi’s individual poems in Persian have no titles. His collection of quatrains and odes is called The Works of Shams of Tabriz (Divani Shamsi Tabriz).
