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This is the force of Friendship. What draws friends together does not conform to laws of nature. Form doesn’t know about spiritual closeness.
The day is for work. The night for love. Don’t let someone bewitch you. Some people sleep at night. But not lovers. They sit in the dark and talk to God, who told David, Those who sleep all night every night and claim to be connected to us, they lie.
The day is for work. The night for love. Don’t let someone bewitch you. Some people sleep at night. But not lovers. They sit in the dark and talk to God, who told David, Those who sleep all night every night and claim to be connected to us, they lie.
Lovers can’t sleep when they feel the privacy of the beloved all around them. Someone who’s thirsty may sleep for a little while, but he or she will dream of water, a full jar beside a creek, or the spiritual water you get from another person. All night, listen to the conversation. Stay up. This moment is all there is.
Nothing but the fire of separation can change hypocrisy and ego. The person returned completely cooked, walked up and down in front of the Friend’s house, gently knocked. “Who is it?” “You.”
BE. B and E tighten around subjects and objects that one knot may hold them. Two scissor blades make one cut. And watch two men washing clothes. One makes dry clothes wet. The other makes wet clothes dry. They seem to be thwarting each other, but their work is a perfect harmony.
BE. B and E tighten around subjects and objects that one knot may hold them. Two scissor blades make one cut. And watch two men washing clothes. One makes dry clothes wet. The other makes wet clothes dry. They seem to be thwarting each other, but their work is a perfect harmony.
Where we are now is a narrow fantasy that comes from there, and the actual, outside world is even narrower. Narrowness is pain, and the cause of narrowness is manyness.
The ocean will not allow its fish out of itself. Nor does it let land animals in where the subtle and delicate fish move.
Forget your figuring. Forget your self. Listen to your Friend. When you become totally obedient to that one, you’ll be free.
Love dissolved his king-self
You abandon kingdoms, because you want more than kingdoms.”
Don’t ask what love can make or do! Look at the colors of the world.
Can I get there? Where the deer pounces on the lion, where the one I’m after’s after me?
Did you hear that? It’s the man who was looking for treasure. He wants me to finish his story. You didn’t hear him? Then he must be inside me yelling, “Over here! Come over here!” Don’t think of him as a seeker, though. Whatever he’s looking for, he is that himself. How can a lover be anything but the beloved?
Did you hear that?
Every second he’s bowing into a mirror. If he could see for just a second one molecule of what’s there without fantasizing about it, he’d explode. 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. That same voice told the angels to bow to Adam, because they were identical with Adam.
The moth sees light and goes into fire. You should see fire and go toward light. Fire is what of God is world-consuming. Water, world-protecting. Somehow each gives the appearance of the other. To these eyes you have now, what looks like water burns. What looks like fire is a great relief to be inside.
The fire and water themselves: accidental, done with mirrors.
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.
The continents blasted, cities and little towns, everything become a scorched, blackened ball. The news we hear is full of grief for that future, but the real news inside here is there’s no news at all.
Rumi suggests in another poem that being human is a guest house where travelers are welcomed and entertained. The work is to be a good host at the caravanserai.
When you brush a form clean, it becomes what it truly is.
Advice doesn’t help lovers! They’re not the kind of mountain stream you can build a dam across.
The stars come up spinning every night, bewildered in love. They’d grow tired with that revolving, if they weren’t. They’d say, “How long do we have to do this!”
God picks up the reed-flute world and blows. Each note is a need coming through one of us, a passion, a longing-pain.
You are granite. I am an empty wineglass. You know what happens when we touch! You laugh like the sun coming up laughs at a star that disappears into it.
love
This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up, while the real work is done outside by someone digging in the ground.
This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up, while the real work is done outside by someone digging in the ground.
The pot drips what is in it.
The pot drips what is in it.
The saffron spice of connecting, laughter. The onion smell of separation, crying. Others have many things and people they love. This is not the way of Friend and friend.
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. Nothing less than the radical disassembling of what we’ve wanted and gotten, and what we still wish for, allows us to discover the value of true being that lies underneath.
I should be suspicious of what I want.
All the mean laughing, all the quick, sexual wanting, those torn coats of Joseph, they change into powerful wolves that you must face.
Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.
The buried wealth is your pay for doing the demolition, the pick and shovel work. If you wait and just let it happen, you’d bite your hand and say, “I didn’t do as I knew I should have.” This is a rented house. You don’t own the deed.
What does the patch-sewing mean, you ask. Eating and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body is always getting torn. You patch it with food, and other restless ego-satisfactions. Rip up one board from the shop floor and look into the basement. You’ll see two glints in the dirt.
There is a need for self-denial. Don’t be contemptuous of old obediences. They help.
Your bodily soul wants comforting. The severe father wants spiritual clarity. He scolds but eventually leads you into the open.
clean yourself
Beautiful poetry can keep one on the verge of the oceanic annihilation in God. Rumi says, we’ve been walking in the surf holding our robes up, when we should be diving naked under, and deeper under.
When someone is counting out gold for you, don’t look at your hands, or the gold. Look at the giver.
There is a chase where a falcon dives into the forest and doesn’t come back up. Every moment, the sunlight is totally empty and totally full.
The Greek art is the sufi way. They don’t study books of philosophical thought. They make their loving clearer and clearer. No wantings, no anger. In that purity they receive and reflect the images of every moment, from here, from the stars, from the void. They take them in as though they were seeing with the lighted clarity that sees them.
What is it to praise? Be particles.
During a night of tornadic wind and lightning-everywhere weather in north Georgia, a friend murmured, “Where do hummingbirds go in this?” The next morning the hummingbirds, the same ones, were back fussing at the feeder. They know a hiding trick the gnats don’t. I think sometimes that poems can be places to hide, opisthodamal robe closets simulating the experiences they celebrate.
Don’t worry about forms. If someone wants your horse, let him have it. Horses are for hurrying ahead of the others.
“Your mercy makes them bow like this. Give them their lives! Let them keep hoping for union with you. They see their forgetfulness now, as the drunken man did when he said, ‘I didn’t know what I was doing,’ and then someone pointed out, ‘But you invited that forgetfulness into you. You drank it. There was a choice!’
When the ocean surges, don’t let me just hear it. Let it splash inside my chest!
I am filled with you. Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul. There’s no room for lack of trust, or trust. Nothing in this existence but that existence.
I am filled with you. Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul. There’s no room for lack of trust, or trust. Nothing in this existence but that existence.
“Don’t you try to jump out. You think I’m torturing you. I’m giving you flavor, so you can mix with spices and rice and be the lovely vitality of a human being. Remember when you drank rain in the garden. That was for this.”
The cook says, “I was once like you, fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time, and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings. My animal soul grew powerful. I controlled it with practices, and boiled some more, and boiled once beyond that, and became your teacher.” I
I am a naked man standing inside a mine of rubies, clothed in red silk. I absorb the shining and now I see the ocean, billions of simultaneous motions moving in me. A circle of lovely, quiet people becomes the ring on my finger.
I am a naked man standing inside a mine of rubies, clothed in red silk. I absorb the shining and now I see the ocean, billions of simultaneous motions moving in me. A circle of lovely, quiet people becomes the ring on my finger.
