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A nightingale sometimes flies from a garden to sing in the forest.
There is a light seed grain inside. You fill it with yourself, or it dies.
came from. This giving up is not a repenting. It is a deep honoring of yourself.
Suddenly, he wakes up, call it grace, whatever, something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.
You said, Who did you come with? This majestic imagination you gave me.
Where can you live safely? In surrender.
Imagining Is Like Imagining is like feeling around in a dark lane, or washing your eyes with blood. You are the truth from foot to brow. Now, what else would you like to know?
Be silent as we absorb the spring.
Praise God for these two insomnias. And the difference between them.
How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river. How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.
If you start doing something against your health, your intelligence will eventually scold you.
Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Do not claim them. Feel the artistry moving through, and be silent.
You have heard of the ocean of nonexistence. Try continually to give yourself to that ocean.
Dervishes gamble everything. They lose and win the other, the emptiness which animates this.
And keep working. Laziness and disdain are not devotions. Your effort will bring a result.
whatever I was looking for was always you.
The moon won’t use the door, only the window.
The news we hear is full of grief for that future, but the real news inside here is there’s no news at all.
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness. Then one swoop, one swing of the arm, that work is over. Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope, free of mountainous wanting.
These words I am saying so much begin to lose meaning.
I am part of the load not rightly balanced.
Knowing that conscious decisions and personal memory are much too small a place to live, every human being streams at night into the loving nowhere, or during the day, in some absorbing work.
A Tender Agony of Parting A craftsman pulled a reed from the reedbed, cut holes in it, and called it a human being. Since then, it has been wailing a tender agony of parting, never mentioning the skill that gave it life as a flute.
The lame and dreamy goat brings up the rear. There are worried faces about that one, but now they’re laughing, because look, as they return, that one is leading. There are many different ways of knowing. The lame goat’s kind is a branch that traces back to the roots of presence.
To praise is to praise how one surrenders to the emptiness.
Why should we grieve that we have been sleeping? It does not matter how long we’ve been unconscious. We are groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness around you, the bouyancy.
You say, How long will you beg from others, when there are things born of you that emperors want?
Why waste time in meanness? Who else can say what you say to me?
Before the body, they lived many lifetimes.
Before materiality, they knew what it was like to be trapped inside matter.
In fana, the state where all object dissolve, they recognize objects.
Throw off your tiredness. Let me show you one tiny spot of the beauty that cannot be spoken.
The taste of today is not that of yesterday.
I answer the nightwatchman, You will have to assign meanings for these ominous events.
I have been set free from the hunt, the catching and the being caught, to rest in these dregs of flood residue, pure and empty.
When a man makes up a story for his child, he becomes a father and a child together, listening.
There is a tradition that the wine of nonexistence makes us God-drunk. Intoxicated that way, we are purified. There is a kind of poet whose poetry pours that wine, and there is another poet who makes us want the red wine and the white. The two poets may even have the same name.
Look inside form. Read with your soul this Masnavi.
Spring is Christ, raising martyred plants from their shrouds.
This wind is the Holy Spirit.
The trees are Mary.
Your old life was a frantic running from silence. The speechless full moon comes out now.
A spring wind moves to dance any branch that isn’t dead.
appear. The hyacinth speaks formally to the jasmine. Peace be with you. And peace to you, lad. Come walk with me in the meadow.
Many things must be left unsaid because it is late, but whatever conversation we have not had tonight, we will have tomorrow.
At dawn I walked along with a monk on his way to the monastery. We do the same work, I told him. We suffer the same. He gave me a bowl, and I saw. The soul has this shape.
If you do not come, these do not matter. If you do come, these do not matter.
You are song, a wished-for song. Go through the ear to the center, where sky is, where wind, where silent knowing.
Those of you whose work it is to wake the dead, get up. This is a work day.
