More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Part of the love-mystery explored in Rumi’s poetry is how presences flow together, evolve, and create in tandem. The heart is a river, and I felt the motion of it in their friendship.
His poems help us feel what living in the ruins is like, in the blank state of knowing nothing, of loving one we do not know and have never met, yet who is deeply familiar. Heartbroken, wandering, wordless, lost, and ecstatic for no reason. It’s the psychic space his poems inhabit.
I say that the exclusivity of most of the organized religions does insult the soul. We must be open enough to assimilate the insights of indigenous cultures as well as those of the Abrahamic religions, to glory in the clarity of Rinzai and Bodhidharma as well as that of the dreamtime drawings.
He was finally able to answer that Muhammad was greater, because Bestami had taken one gulp of the divine and stopped there, whereas for Muhammad the way was always unfolding.
Why should I seek? I am the same as he. His essence speaks through me. I have been looking for myself!
poet of interest
beautiful - value & discern
Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight. Be a connoisseur, and taste with caution. Any wine will get you high. Judge like a king, and choose the purest, the ones unadulterated with fear, or some urgency about “what’s needed.” Drink the wine that moves you as a camel moves when it’s been untied, and is just ambling about.
But you run back and forth listening for unusual events, peering into the faces of travelers. “Why are you looking at me like a madman?” I have lost a friend. Please forgive me. Searching like that does not fail. There will come a rider who holds you close.
Water washes over a beached fish, the water of those signs I just mentioned. Excuse my wandering. How can one be orderly with this? It’s like counting leaves in a garden, along with the song-notes of partridges, and crows. Sometimes organization and computation become absurd.
Imagery - chaotic search of beloved, like an ocean lapping over the beached fish...
it's right in front of you if you look
Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.
Wash yourself of yourself.
The body is a device to calculate the astronomy of the spirit.
Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it. Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing, where something might be planted, a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.
lost
Friendship and loyalty have patience as the strength of their connections. Feeling lonely and ignoble indicates that you haven’t been patient.
Friendship and loyalty have patience as the strength of their connections. Feeling lonely and ignoble indicates that you haven’t been patient.
Whoever acts with respect will get respect. Whoever brings sweetness will be served almond cake. Good women are drawn to be with good men. Honor your friend. Or treat him rudely, and see what happens!
Finally I know the freedom of madness.
Finally I know the freedom of madness.
Lovers have nothing to do with existence. They collect the interest without the capital.
Lovers have nothing to do with existence. They collect the interest without the capital.
Even if what is being said is trivial and wrong, the listener hears the source. One breeze comes from across a garden. Another from across the ash-heap.
Even if what is being said is trivial and wrong, the listener hears the source. One breeze comes from across a garden. Another from across the ash-heap.
“What if a man cannot be made to say anything? How do you learn his hidden nature?” “I sit in front of him in silence, and set up a ladder made of patience, and if in his presence a language from beyond joy and beyond grief begins to pour from my chest, I know that his soul is as deep and bright as the star Canopus rising over Yemen. And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm of words sweeping down, I know him from what I say, and how I say it, because there’s a window open between us, mixing the night air of our beings.”
“What if a man cannot be made to say anything? How do you learn his hidden nature?” “I sit in front of him in silence, and set up a ladder made of patience, and if in his presence a language from beyond joy and beyond grief begins to pour from my chest, I know that his soul is as deep and bright as the star Canopus rising over Yemen. And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm of words sweeping down, I know him from what I say, and how I say it, because there’s a window open between us, mixing the night air of our beings.”
Springtime—when ecstasy seems the natural way to be and any other out of tune with the season of soul growth.
Springtime—when ecstasy seems the natural way to be and any other out of tune with the season of soul growth.
Many things must be left unsaid, because it’s late, but whatever conversation we haven’t had tonight, we’ll have tomorrow.
Many things must be left unsaid, because it’s late, but whatever conversation we haven’t had tonight, we’ll have tomorrow.
But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth, without complicated explanation, so everyone will understand the passage, We have opened you. Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired. Then comes a moment of feeling the wings you’ve grown, lifting.
But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth, without complicated explanation, so everyone will understand the passage, We have opened you. Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired. Then comes a moment of feeling the wings you’ve grown, lifting.
Around the lip of the cup we share, these words, My Life Is Not Mine.
Around the lip of the cup we share, these words, My Life Is Not Mine.
He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child’s play.”
“The people here want to put me in charge. They want me to be judge, magistrate, and interpreter of all the texts. The knowing I have doesn’t want that. It wants to enjoy itself. I am a plantation of sugarcane, and at the same time I’m eating the sweetness.” Knowledge that is acquired is not like this. Those who have it worry if audiences like it or not. It’s a bait for popularity. Disputational knowing wants customers. It has no soul. Robust and energetic before a responsive crowd, it slumps when no one is there. The only real customer is God.
let the lover be
Longing becomes more poignant if in the distance you can’t tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.
Longing becomes more poignant if in the distance you can’t tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.
send to mom
Look as long as you can at the friend you love, no matter whether that friend is moving away from you or coming back toward you.
Look as long as you can at the friend you love, no matter whether that friend is moving away from you or coming back toward you.
When you do things from your soul, the river itself moves through you. Freshness and a deep joy are signs of the current.
When you do things from your soul, the river itself moves through you. Freshness and a deep joy are signs of the current.
The kernel of true manhood is the ability to abandon sensual indulgences.
The kernel of true manhood is the ability to abandon sensual indulgences.
Brother, stand the pain. Escape the poison of your impulses. The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do. Learn to light the candle. Rise with the sun. Turn away from the cave of your sleeping. That way a thorn expands to a rose. A particular glows with the universal.
Fire is my child but I must be consumed and become fire. Why is there crackling and smoke? Because the firewood and the flames are still talking: “You are too dense. Go away!” “You are too wavering. I have solid form.” In the blackness those two friends keep arguing. Like a wanderer with no face. Like the most powerful bird in existence sitting on its perch, refusing to move.
Fire is my child but I must be consumed and become fire. Why is there crackling and smoke? Because the firewood and the flames are still talking: “You are too dense. Go away!” “You are too wavering. I have solid form.” In the blackness those two friends keep arguing. Like a wanderer with no face. Like the most powerful bird in existence sitting on its perch, refusing to move.
Until you’ve kept your eyes and your wanting still for fifty years, you don’t begin to cross over from confusion.
Until you’ve kept your eyes and your wanting still for fifty years, you don’t begin to cross over from confusion.
What the sayer of praise is really praising is himself, by saying implicitly, “My eyes are clear.” Likewise, someone who criticizes is criticizing himself, saying implicitly, “I can’t see very well with my eyes so inflamed.”
Just because you can’t drink all that falls doesn’t mean you give up taking sips of rainwater. If the nut of the mystery can’t be held, at least let me touch the shell.
The rooster of lust, the peacock of wanting to be famous, the crow of ownership, and the duck of urgency, kill them and revive them in another form, changed and harmless.
Many actions which seem cruel are from a deep friendship. Many demolitions are actually renovations.
The cloud weeps, and then the garden sprouts. The baby cries, and the mother’s milk flows. The nurse of creation has said, Let them cry a lot.
Let body needs dwindle and soul decisions increase. Diminish what you give your physical self. Your spiritual eye will begin to open.
Stay with friends who support you in these. Talk with them about sacred texts, and how you’re doing, and how they’re doing, and keep your practices together.
There are such vicious and empty flatterers in your life. Do the careful, donkey-tending work. Don’t trust that to anyone else. There are hypocrites who will praise you, but who do not care about the health of your heart-donkey. Be concentrated and leonine in the hunt for what is your true nourishment. Don’t be distracted by blandishment-noises, of any sort.
Spend less time with nightingales and peacocks. One is just a voice, the other just a color.
Lovers pray constantly.
Lovers pray constantly.
body and soul
The froglike soul often escapes from the body and soars in the happy water. Then the mouse body pulls on the string, and the soul thinks, Damn. I have to go back on the riverbank and talk with that scatterbrained mouse!
It’s not always a blind man who falls in a pit. Sometimes it’s one who can see.
Be generous. Be grateful. Confess when you’re not.
