Featured Artist
Rumi

"Rumi-nations"
Collage by Amena

The Sufi saint Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) is considered "the supreme genius of Islamic mysticism," and has been called, "the greatest mystical poet of any age." As a young boy he showed all the signs of saintliness and his father called him Maulana, "Our Master." By age twenty-four he was an acknowledged Master of Arabic grammar, Islamic law, Koranic commentary, astronomy, and Suli lore. But it wasn't until he met his Master, Shams-I Tabriz, at the age of thirty-seven, that he came to experience the highest truth. Many legends surround this meeting, and they all tell of the dramatic destruction of Rumi's books by Shams, and Rumi's recognition that book-knowledge could not lead him to the highest truth. Rumi's son wrote: "After meeting Shams, my father danced all day and sang all night. He had been a scholar-he became a poet. He had been an ascetic-he became drunk with love." But the ecstatic unity with his Master soon ended. Two years after meeting Shams-whom Rumi described as "the Beloved clothed in human form"--his Master suddenly disappeared, and was never seen again. Rumi was left with an unspeakable emptiness, and a grief that he tried to fill with singing and dancing. It was at this time of longing that an endless cascade of poetry began to pour from Rumi's lips. Thousands of verses flowed out as he called and called to his lost Beloved. In the end, Rumi found that he was calling to himself, that the Beloved he longed for was with him all the time. In one of his quatrains Rumi writes: 'All my talk was madness, filled with dos and don'ts. For ages I knocked on a door-when it opened I found that I was knocking from the inside!"

Source : Jonathan Star, The Inner Treasure

The poems are from The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks, with John Moyne, published by Harper Collins:

Quietness

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

Love Is the Funeral Pyre

Love is
The funeral pyre
Where I have laid my living body.

All the false notions of myself
That once caused fear, pain,

Have turned to ash
As I neared God.

What has risen
From the tangled web of thought and sinew

Now shines with jubilation
Through the eyes of angels

And screams from the guts of
Infinite existence
Itself.

Love is the funeral pyre
Where the heart must lay
Its body

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!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Birds Nesting Near the Coast

Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about shame
and dignity.  You are God's lover,
yet you worry what people are saying.

The rope belt the early Christians
wore to show who they were, throw
it away!  Inside, you are sweet
beyond telling, and the cathedral
there, so deeply tall.  Evening now,
more your desire than a woman's hair.

And not knowledge: walk with those
innocent of that: faces inside fire,
birds nesting near the coast, earning
their beauty, servants to the ocean.

There is a sun within every person,
the you we call companion.

Craftsmanship and Emptiness

I've said before that every craftsman
searches for what's not there
to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole
where the roof caved in. A water carrier
picks the empty pot. A carpenter
stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint
of emptiness, which they then
start to fill. Their hope, though,
is for emptiness, so don't think
you must avoid it. It contains
what you need!

Dear soul, if you were not friends
with the vast nothing inside,
why would you always be casting your net
into it, and waiting so patiently?

This invisible ocean has given you such abundance,
but still you call it "death,"
that which provides you sustenance and work.

God has allowed some magical reversal to occur,
so that you see the scorpion pit
as an object of desire,
and all the beautiful expanse around it
as dangerous and swarming with snakes.

This is how strange your fear of death
and emptiness is, and how perverse
the attachment to what you want.

Now that you've heard me
on your misapprehensions, dear friend,
listen to Attar's story on the same subject.

He strung the pearls of this
about King Mahmud, how among the spoils
of his Indian campaign there was a Hindu boy,
whom he adopted as a son. He educated
and provided royally for the boy
and later made him vice-regent, seated
on a gold throne beside himself.

One day he found the young man weeping.
"Why are you crying? You're the companion
of an emperor! The entire nation is ranged out
before you like stars that you can command!"

The young man replied, "I am remembering
my mother and my father, and how they
scared me as a child with threats of you!
'Uh-oh he's headed for King Mahmud's court!
Nothing could be more hellish!' Where are they now
when they should see me sitting here?"

This incident is about your fear of changing.
You are the Hindu boy. Mahmud, which means,
Praise to the End, is the spirit's poverty, or emptiness.

The mother and father are your attachment
to beliefs and bloodties
and desires and comforting habits.

Don't listen to them!
They seem to protect,
but they imprison.

They are your worst enemies.
They make you afraid
of living in emptiness.

Some day you'll weep tears of delight in the court,
remembering your mistaken parents!
Know that you body nurtures the spirit,
helps it grow, and then gives it wrong advice.

The body becomes, eventually, like a vest
of chainmail in peaceful years,
too hot in summer and too cold in winter.

But the body's desires, in another way, are like
an unpredictable associate, whom you must be
patient with. And that companion is helpful,
because patience expands your capacity
to love and feel peace.

The patience of a rose close to a thorn
keeps it fragrant. It's patience that gives milk
to the male camel still nursing in its third year,
and patience is what the prophets show to us.

The beauty of careful sewing on a shirt
is the patience it contains.

Friendship and loyalty have patience
as the strength of their connections.

Feeling lonely and ignoble indicates
that you haven't been patient.

Be with those who mix with God
as honey blends with milk, and say,

"Anything that comes and goes,
rises and sets,
is not what I love."

Live in the one who created the prophets,
else you'll be like a caravan fire left

The Lame Goat

You’ve seen a herd of goats
Going down to the water.

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 goat is leading!

There are many different kinds of knowing.
The lame goat’s kind is a branch
That traces back to the roots of presence.

Learn from the lame goat,
And lead the herd home.