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The design of this book is meant to confuse scholars who would divide Rumi’s poetry into the accepted categories: the quatrains (rubaiyat) and odes (ghazals) of the Divan, the six books of the Mathnawi, the discourses, the letters, and the almost unknown Six Sermons. The mind wants categories, but Rumi’s creativity was a continuous fountaining from beyond forms and the mind,
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.
Ignorance is God’s prison. Knowing is God’s palace. We sleep in God’s unconsciousness. We wake in God’s open hand. We weep God’s rain. We laugh God’s lightning. Fighting and peacefulness both take place within God.
How can anyone say what happens, even if each of us dips a pen a hundred million times into ink?
Rain makes every molecule pregnant with a mystery.
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired. Then comes a moment of feeling the wings you’ve grown, lifting.
The rest of this poem is too blurry for them to read.
We will drink all this wine tonight because it’s Spring. It is. It’s a growing sea. We’re clouds over the sea, or flecks of matter in the ocean when the ocean seems lit from within. I know I’m drunk when I start this ocean talk.
The same wind that uproots trees makes the grasses shine. The lordly wind loves the weakness and the lowness of grasses. Never brag of being strong.
Who turns the sky wheel? The universal intelligence.
He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child’s play.”
It’s not always a blind man who falls in a pit. Sometimes it’s one who can see.
Who am I, standing in the midst of this thought-traffic?
What draws friends together does not conform to laws of nature. Form doesn’t know about spiritual closeness.
This moment is all there is.
Narrowness is pain, and the cause of narrowness is manyness.
Your name is Spring. Your name is wine. Your name is the nausea that comes from wine!
Who sees inside from outside? Who finds hundreds of mysteries even where minds are deranged?
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It’s a drum and arms waving. It’s a bonfire at midnight on the top edge of a hill, this meeting again with you.
His imagination, and he himself, would vanish, with all his knowledge, obliterated into a new birth, a perfectly clear view, a voice that says, I am God.
Most people guard against going into the fire, and so end up in it.
I saw you last night in the gathering, but could not take you openly in my arms, so I put my lips next to your cheek, pretending to talk privately.
Listen to presences inside poems, Let them take you where they will. Follow those private hints, and never leave the premises.
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In the early morning hour, just before dawn, lover and beloved wake and take a drink of water.
Like a fresh idea in an artist’s mind, you fashion things before they come into being.
Advice doesn’t help lovers! They’re not the kind of mountain stream you can build a dam across. An intellectual doesn’t know what the drunk is feeling!
Don’t try to figure what those lost inside love will do next!
Go up on the roof at night in this city of the soul. Let everyone climb on their roofs and sing their notes! Sing loud!
Love is the reality, and poetry is the drum
Love has taken away my practices and filled me with poetry.
I had to clap and sing. I used to be respectable and chaste and stable, but who can stand in this strong wind and remember those things?
The sky is blue. The world is a blind man squatting on the road. But whoever sees your emptiness sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.
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.
Watch the dust grains moving in the light near the window.
When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep. Praise God for these two insomnias! And the difference between them.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up, while the real work is done outside by someone digging in the ground.
The saffron spice of connecting, laughter. The onion smell of separation, crying.
THE GUEST HOUSE This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all!
Inner work is not all ecstatic surrender. Don’t listen too often, Rumi advises, to the comforting part of the self that gives you what you want. Pray instead for a tough instructor.
WHO MAKES THESE CHANGES? Who makes these changes? I shoot an arrow right. It lands left. I ride after a deer and find myself chased by a hog. I plot to get what I want and end up in prison. I dig pits to trap others and fall in. I should be suspicious of what I want.
No one looks for stars when the sun’s out. A person blended into God does not disappear. He, or she, is just completely soaked in God’s qualities. Do you need a quote from the Qur’an? All shall be brought into our Presence.
Don’t try to control a wild horse by grabbing its leg. Take hold the neck. Use a bridle. Be sensible. Then ride! There is a need for self-denial.
Pray for a tough instructor to hear and act and stay within you. We have been busy accumulating solace. Make us afraid of how we were.
I honor those who try to rid themselves of any lying, who empty the self and have only clear being there.
Some sufis have seen the beauties of art as something that can slow down soul growth. Art gives a teasing taste of surrender without the full experience.
Ways of worshiping are not to be ranked as better or worse than one another. Hindus do Hindu things. The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do. It’s all praise, and it’s all right. It’s not me that’s glorified in acts of worship. It’s the worshipers! I don’t hear the words they say. I look inside at the humility.
Attributed to God.
Water, stories, the body, all the things we do, are mediums that hide and show what’s hidden. Study them, and enjoy this being washed with a secret we sometimes know, and then not.
When something goes wrong, accuse yourself first. Even the wisdom of Plato or Solomon can wobble and go blind. Listen when your crown reminds you of what makes you cold toward others, as you pamper the greedy energy inside.
